Consider the Lobster

I like good food and I had some fantastic food last Tuesday for dinner. RJ and I decided that for Valentine’s Day we would cook dinner, so when a deal came up from Goose The Market, we were sold. Goose The Market is a local gourmet grocery store here in Indy and it is awesome.

Inside of Goose the Market. Photo courtesy of The Butler Collegian

If you have not visited Goose it is located at 2503 N. Delaware Street. You should go and eat lunch there (get the Batali sandwich) and then you should eat some of their made from scratch gelato. You can also check out the Enoteca and drink some wine while enjoying some delicious snacks.

Enoteca. Photo courtesy of Goose The Market.

Anyway. Back to our dinner. The deal that Goose was running was $75 for

Fischer Farms dry-aged 16oz boneless ribeye
1 whole live lobster (1.5 – 2 lbs each) ready for the pot
2 servings housemade orange zest & cardamom bread pudding ready to heat & serve
1 bottle Cercius Cotes du Rhone Villages 2010 (85% Grenache, 15% Syrah; 93 pts, Robert Parker)

RJ went and picked the food up from Goose and in the process apparently formed some sort of bond with the lobster who was shuffling around, alive, in a plastic bag in the back of his car. He named him Pete.

Pete

Now I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the essay by David Foster Wallace entitled Consider the Lobster, but both RJ and I have read it and it raised some brief concerns about dumping poor old Pete into a vat of boiling water. However, our reservations were short lived and we were hungry, so Pete went into the pot.


Pete. Cooked.

During the cooking process, I uncorked the wine. It was really good wine, evidenced by the fact that we drank the entire bottle.

Delicious.

Finally our dinner was ready and it was worth the wait. I would personally like to thank Goose The Market for supplying one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten.

Monday Musings

I’m back!

This past week was a bit ridiculous with grading and my propensity to over schedule myself…but I think I have things well under control. I still have a mountain of papers to grade, but I feel a little less scattered.

My sister will be in town this week. She has a job interview at Butler, so we’re both hoping that goes well. It will be good to see her and hang out for a few days.

This weekend RJ and I volunteered at Camp Rover Romp for the Humane Society. It was a lot of fun. We ran the water relay and I think we were a hit. The weather was beautiful.
The baby pools were a big hit 🙂

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Mary Karr pays tribute to David Foster Wallace in the Washington Post.

The National Book Festival takes place this Saturday.

More than 70 authors will be in attendance including Salman Rushdie, Bob Schieffer, Michelle Singletary, R.L. Stine, Paul Theroux, Neil Gaiman, Philippa Gregory, Kimberly Dozier and more.

Robert Olin Butler waxes poetic in the Washington Post:

Every morning when I sit down at my desk to write, I feel I am called upon to try to give voice to something true about the human condition. From the place where I dream, I have learned that I must see this not as an act of judgment but as an exploration of our shared humanity. ·

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Your fall poem for this week:

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Robert Frost

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This hits home for me. Big time. This is very true:

The benefits have proved appealing enough to draw thousands of writers into the university fold, and while a couple of generations ago it might have been a surprise to find a writer who taught at a college, now it’s a surprise to find one who doesn’t.

Rainy Sunday

Thanks to Ike, the weather today has been gray and rainy. Luckily Kwe and I got in our two mile walk yesterday afternoon. Today, we’ve had to settle for short jaunts outside, while I try to keep the rain off my glasses and Kwe tries to keep the rain out of his ears.

Speaking of Ike, thankfully the damage was not as severe as it could have been. I lived in Denton, TX (45 minutes from Dallas) when I was attending UNT for grad school, so I have some friends who braved the weather this weekend in Houston.

A biker rides along a portion of the sea wall that had been cleared of debris from Hurricane Ike in Galveston, Texas, on Saturday.

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I consider myself and animal advocate, and I don’t really understand how you hire someone who is unfamiliar with animals to run Animal Control for the city of Indianapolis.
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Sadly, the literary community has suffered another devestating loss. David Foster Wallace killed himself September 12, 2008. I first became aware of Wallace when I took a seminar at MSU about the power of humor in non-fiction. The professor leading the class gave us Wallace’s essay, Consider the Lobster. His work is brilliant and difficult and I am sorry to hear of his death.

From Salon.com:

Every author wants to sell books, to please his or her publisher, to reap critical accolades and to bask in the admiration of colleagues, and Wallace did want those things, at the same time that he was more than a little embarrassed by such desires and acutely aware of the fact that none of it could make him happy. However, all great writers — and I have no doubt that he was one — have a preeminent purpose: to tell the truth. David Foster Wallace’s particular vocation was to allow us to see just how fraught and complicated, how difficult yet how necessary, that telling had become — not just for him, but for all of us. What will we do without him?

From the NY Times:

David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life.

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