Red Sox 5, Blue Jays 4... or Reasons I Don't Cook

I'm not the most domestic person in the world -- I'm much closer to being the least domestic. When I cook, it's usually macaroni and cheese, hotdish, or a frozen dinner. And normally, I would never desert a baseball game to make food. So today was very out of the ordinary for me... and I don't think it's going to become ordinary.

As I was pretty much out of food, I went to the grocery store after classes. As I was perusing the foreign cheeses, I noticed a collection of recipe cards with "International Dishes for International Cheeses." The Emmental and Ham Scalloped Sweet Potatoes (Swiss, apparently) looked the most intriguing, so I took the card, bought the ingredients, and headed home to make a real meal. I opened MLB radio to the Sox-Jays and got to work.

I did okay with reducing the cream. I did okay slicing the ham and sweet potatoes. And then came time to put it all in the baking dish. Here's an interesting observation: I need a bigger baking dish. My first folly of the night was having reduced cream and garlic spill all over the counter and floor. Nothing makes a kitchen smell stronger than minced garlic all over the place.

After a little clean-up, I stuffed as much of the sweet potatoes, ham, and cheese into the dish as I could, ate the remaining ham and cheese, and dumped the leftover cream-covered raw sweet potatoes into the garbage. I put the dish in the oven and it immediately spilled over and the cream started smoking... and smoking.

In the meantime, the Red Sox were down 4-1 and the Indians and Yankees were winning their respective games. This was no good all around.

I turned off the oven, waited for it to cool, cleaned up the burned crud, and tried again. As I was turning on every fan in the apartment to get rid of the smoke, I ceased listening to the game. Returning to my computer, I noted an IM from Harvey -- "Ortiz!!!!!!!!" Whatever I missed while clearing the kitchen had clearly been big. And oh, was it... an 8th inning homer by Big Papi to tie the game up. (Apparently I also missed Manny's homer in the 6th.) Thank god they didn't try the bunt tonight.

With the sweet potatoes safely not-smoking in the freshly cleaned oven, I sat down to hear the rest of the game while chatting with Harvey -- who is GOING TO THE GAME TOMORROW. I offered him $100 to go in full Yankee gear. He refused (thank goodness). The 9th inning proved exciting as Damon and stole second. Renteria walked, giving the man, the myth, the DH-MVP candidate* a chance to win the game for something like the 150th time. And he didn't disappoint.

And so, what started out as a rough evening has ended with a Red Sox victory and a tasty sweet potato casserole. Not that I am going to attempt to cook again for a long time.

* I think that under normal circumstances, I would be opposed to the DH winning the MVP. But under normal circumstances, I am also opposed to the wild card team winning the World Series. My values slip a little when it comes to David and the Sox.

Red Sox 2, Blue Jays 7

Since ESPN was kind enough to air it, I had the rare pleasure of watching the Red Sox game on TV tonight.

Or maybe I shouldn't call it a pleasure.

Now, I missed the first three innings while my roommate claimed the TV, so I apparently missed the homerun portion of the game. But I did get to see Ortiz's pitiful bunt bounce off the plate, right into the hands of Toronto's catcher. I'm not exactly sure what was going through Francona's head at that moment. "Hmm... we're down by five. Our hottest clutch hitter is up. I know, time for a squeeze play!" There's a brilliant scene in A League of Their Own all about why that's a bad managerial call.

And given that the Yankees squeaked by Baltimore tonight, the Red Sox are currently stuck being tied for the wild card spot instead of leading the AL East. If Detroit can step it up and beat Chicago tomorrow, that'll leave two weekend series to decide two division championships and the wild card spot -- Good Sox/Yankees in Boston and Bad Sox/Indians in Cleveland. I briefly toyed with driving down to Cleveland on Saturday to catch a Cleveland/Chicago game, but the only remaining tickets are the $95 seats, and I'm not that rich. Besides which, I'm not sure who I'd root for -- I'd like to see Cleveland overtake the Central Division, but not at the expense of costing the Red Sox a playoff berth if they can't overcome the Yankees in the East.

And then comes October...

Edit: Lest my father disowns me... the Twins beat the Royals tonight. But at 15+ games out of the division, it doesn't much matter. Except, um... go Twins.

People Disappoint Me

Tonight I put up the following away message:

We never did much talking anyway... don't think twice, it's all right.

There wasn't any particular meaning in it -- it's just a song I like that mentions not talking, which seems appropriate for an "Away" message. But then someone IMed me with the following: "Ironically enough, I'm listening to Vonda Shepard right now," which confused me a little, given that I had no idea Vonda Shepard covered that song. Ignoring the fact that she meant "coincidentally" not "ironically," what does it say about the world when someone credits Vonda Shepard with a Bob Dylan song? (As it turns out, she had no idea that it was even a cover.) This is almost worse than those people who think that "Across the Universe" was written by Fiona Apple.

There are three B's of classical music that every budding pianist learns about -- Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms. Well, I think people ought to learn the three B's of 20th century popular music as well -- The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and The Beach Boys. And don't credit their songs to sub-par cover artists -- at least not around me!

I'm looking over...

... a four-leaf clover.

No, really. I found one while walking back from class today. I'd post a picture of it, but my camera's batteries are busy recharging at the moment. The really unfortunate thing is that when I tried to sing "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover," the only words I could remember belonged to the spoof of the song that we used to sing at camp...

I'm looking over my dead dog rover,
That I over ran with the mower!
One leg is missing, the other is gone,
The third leg is scattered, all over the lawn.
No need explaining the one remaining,
The one on the kitchen door!
I'm looking over my dead dog rover,
That I over ran (I over ran) with the mower!

It's really an unfortunate song to have in your head.

Hotdish

If you're here from the Glee Club Scavenger Hunt, you really want to follow this link

Last night I made the most traditional of Minnesotan dishes -- a hotdish. My roommate was intrigued... but not enough to want to try it. I've had various reactions through the years: some people love it, some people hate it, some people think it sounds gross (despite having never tried it), some people think it looks like cat vomit, and once, a lifelong fan of A Prairie Home Companion offered me $3 to have some. (And, by the way, she loved it.)

The biggest misconception about hotdish is that all hotdishes are the same. But in reality, "hotdish" is just a class of many different dishes. So just because you don't like one particular hotdish, that doesn't mean you'll dislike them all. The basic ingredients are some kind of meat, some kind of vegetable, some kind of starch, a cream-based soup (often cream of mushroom), and optionally, cheese. If you cook often (which admittedly, I don't), leftovers are fair game as well. It's all thrown together in a casserole dish and baked in the oven for about 45 minutes. There are few constraint rules that may vary by chef. For example, if the meat is tuna, the starch is some kind of pasta. Other than that, it's pretty much a free-for-all.

I generally make two different kinds of hotdish: tuna and tater tot. Tuna hotdish generally consists of tuna, cream of mushroom soup, corn, egg noodles, and I'll often throw corn flakes (and once grape nuts) on top to give it a crunchy crust. Tater tot hotdish, which I made last night, consists of ground beef or ground turkey, a bag of mixed vegetables, cheddar cheese, cream of mushroom soup, and, of course, tater tots. Since you have to pre-prepare the meat, tater tot hotdish usually takes a little longer to make.

The magic of hotdish is two-fold. First, you've put all your food groups in one dish, so there's no need to also make a side dish, which also reduces the number of dishes you have to do. Second, it reheats surprisingly well, so as a single person cooking for one, I can make one hotdish on Monday night and have dinner for the rest of the week. Oh, and despite the naysayers, I happen to think it's delicious.

Forfeit

Well, I attempted to join a softball team tonight. Note the emphasis on attempted. CSEG (Computer Science and Engineering Graduate students organization... not to be confused with the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists... and no, I don't know why it's not CSEGSO) claims to have a team in the University of Michigan IM league. But only three people showed up tonight, including myself. And thus, we forfeited. The other team, at 15 strong, was kind enough to lend us some players and scrimmage, so at least I didn't completely waste my trip out there. I don't know if we'll manage to scrounge up enough players for future games to work out or not.

Alas... it was a good try.

On another note, more of my friends should be pilots. More specifically, more of my friends should be pilots who fly into Ann Arbor on short notice and have a few hours to kill when they land.

Things you don't want to hear...

... the cable guy say when he's fixing your mistakenly disconnected cable and internet:

• Oh man, I drank too much last night. Do you have some aspirin or something I could have?
• Well, shit. That doesn't make any sense.
• To his supervisor: Man, I never ground it. It's always worked fine before.
• Man, I totally shouldn't have drank so much last night. I feel so sick.

On the plus side, my cable and internet are back. And he left before he puked.

Stadium Rankings

Now that (I think) I'm done with my baseball stadium tour for the year, it's time to give my personal rankings of the six stadiums I visited. And just for fun, I gave "half-point" rankings to the two stadiums I've visited in previous seasons.

6. The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome; Minneapolis, MN (Minnesota Twins) -- Okay, I know this is the stadium I grew up visiting and I have fond memories of watching Kirby Puckett, Gary Gaetti, and Kent Hrbek win World Series here. Heck, I've even imitated Kirby in the outfield my self, leaping into the centerfield wall on a tour in fifth grade. I got to play with my high school's marching band here during a Gopher football game on "Band Day." I was there when the roof caved in in the early 80s. I can't deny the sentimental memories. But it's an awful baseball stadium. Period. This has nothing to do with my beloved Twins -- baseball was just never meant to be played indoors on plastic grass. Thankfully, my father had the sense to take us to Milwaukee every summer, just to be certain that we knew what we were missing.

5.5. Skydome (now Rogers Centre); Toronto, ON (Toronto Bluejays) -- I went to a game here in the summer of 1999 during my tour of potential colleges. I don't remember that much of it -- I think David Wells was pitching for the Jays. We were fortunate enough to go on a day in which it started to rain, which meant that we got to see the retractable roof first hand. Still, my aversion to indoor baseball still stands, even it's only for part of the game. Oh, and there's a Hard Rock Cafe in the outfield.

5. The Coliseum; Oakland, CA (Oakland Athletics) -- It was big and cavernous. And on the day I went, relatively empty. As the name implies, it's coliseum style and basically a big, high circle of seats around a baseball field. Mostly, it just lacked atmosphere and character. To it's credit, it was the cheapest game I went to all season. And it had no roof.

4. The Great American Ballpark; Cincinnati, OH (Cincinnati Reds) -- There's a big gap between the bottom three stadiums and the top five. This was a nice solid outdoor park, but nothing in particular stands out about it to bump it into the top four. Except for the fact that it's the only major league stadium where you can eat Skyline Chili dogs. Mmm... Skyline chili.

3. SBC Park; San Francisco, CA (SF Giants) -- This place gets bonus points for being full. There's something about a large crowd that makes a game that much better. Plus, I liked being able to look out at the boats in McCovey cove, just behind right field.

2. Comerica Park; Detroit, MI (Detroit Tigers) -- I like this stadium a lot. It's also the stadium I saw the most games at (3) this year. There's a lot of cool bas relief of Tigers around the outside and giant Tiger statues on top of the scoreboard. The bronze statues of legendary Tigers in the outfield gives you a better sense of the history of the team than the usual stickers with numbers on them. I have mixed feelings about the ferris wheel and carousel -- they're designed with baseball and Tigers in mind and add to the atmosphere, but I'm there to see a baseball game and I don't want to be distracted.

1.5. County Stadium (demolished in 2001); Milwaukee, WI (Milwaukee Brewers) -- This is the only stadium I've been to that's no longer around. Sentimentality is probably the reason I rank it so high. It was the stadium that taught me what a baseball game is supposed to feel like. We'd get there early and tailgate, grilling brats and hotdogs in the parking lot -- the only stadium I've ever done that at.* I watched the Twins beat the Brewers 15-1 while sitting 20 feet from third base. A friend and I stood up to the drunken Brewers fans who dared to jeer our beloved Kirby Puckett. (They only hated him because he got 11 hits in two consecutive games there, which I believe is still a major league record.) While it's the Brewers stadium, I don't think I ever saw a game there that wasn't against the Twins and thus, it became my adopted home stadium. Besides, how can you not a like a stadium where the mascot slides into a giant mug of beer everytime the home team hits a homer? Oh, and the great sausage race (done at the sausage's own risk).

1. Fenway Park; Boston, MA (Boston Red Sox) -- This place smells like baseball. I can't really explain it. But somehow, when you walk through the doors, you can tell that it's a place where baseball has been played for over ninety years. It has history and character and charm. It's small size means that it's always sold out, always filled with fans. And it's only ever been baseball -- no football, no amusement park rides to remind you to have fun.

Now that I'm starting the school year, I don't think I have the time for more roadtrips. But next season... perhaps Cleveland, Toronto, Chicago, and maybe Milwaukee.

* Tailgating is also allowed at the Coliseum. But Anand was being adventurous enough by going in the first place and so I didn't want to push it. Not to mention that we took public transportation there.

Worth Following...

When I was in Cincinnati last week, I met (for the second time) Will Hawkins, a high school friend of Dave and Martine's who's now a computer science graduate student at UIUC. Because he has the time, Will has started volunteering down in the Houston area, setting up computers to be used to help Katrina victims. And he's blogging about it. I'd highly recommend checking it out. It almost makes me feel guilty for sitting in class and studying Turing Machines while he's down there putting his computer knowledge to good use.

Upsetting Computer Names

I've started to get settled in my office at Michigan and I've discovered something mildly disturbing... the two machines set up for use are named "yankees" and "cardinal." I'm guessing that somebody here doesn't like the Red Sox, or at least wasn't happy with the 2004 playoffs. One of my fellow grad students is going to bring another desktop and set it up and will likely be calling it "orioles" to continue the trend. (He's from Maryland, so I can't entirely blame him.)

Living the high life

This weekend was the annual Cincinnati fireworks and I decided to be in town to view them -- and what a view! Dave, Martine's very own Pilot of Love, is the personal pilot for a very wealthy man who owns three houses, one of which is on Watch Hill in Newport, KY, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky. (He also owns a bunch of McDonald's, hence the wealth.) As Dave and Martine's guest, I was invited along to the VIP party at the old Kentucky home.

One of the prominent features of the four story house is the roof deck, complete with hot tub. Although the hot tub wasn't in use, the party was there, complete with catered ribs, mini-quiches, an open bar, a fabulous dessert tray, and an excellent view of the Ohio River and Cincinnati skyline. Prior to the fireworks display, Pilot David gave us a tour of the rest of the house. My first observation was all of the cool little things that were tucked in corners that no one would ever see. In particular, a moving clock with little brass men that rocked back and forth as the seconds ticked was nearly hidden on a bookshelf in a cozy little reading nook off of one of the living rooms.

Martine and I stopped in the basement to play a bit of Taxi Driver Pinball on the pinball machine next to the big screen TV, 6 lounge chairs, pool table, and popcorn machine. We didn't stay down there for long -- there was schmoozing to be done on the roof deck. The highlight of the schmoozing was probably Dave's boss's mother-in-law telling Martine that she was the luckiest woman in the world, and that if she was a few years younger, she'd try to steal him.

But the highlight of the evening was the fireworks display. Similar to the Boston 4th of July celebration, the fireworks are shot off of barges in the Ohio River. One of the trademarks of the Cincinnati display that I haven't seen elsewhere is the "waterfall" effect created by fireworks being dumped over the two bridges that block in the barges. I didn't bring my camera, but I managed to find this picture of the effect. Two other features of the display were worth noting; the choreography with the music, highlighted by an extended symphonic version of the theme from The Simpsons, and the special fireworks that spelled out the letters "W-E-B-N" (the radio station sponsoring the event). I had never seen fireworks spell words before. (Okay, fine, WEBN isn't a word.)

I'm not sure that this tops watching fireworks from the Couchamaran, but it ranks a close (well, not that close) second.