Hammer Girl does it again!

Emily Kim is a phenomenal Korean home cook, who has a knack for teaching. Better known by her web name "Maangchi" ("Hammer" in Korean). She never intended to become the Korean cooking sensation, but with guidance from children, she posted her first YouTube cooking video using her gaming name. This led to another them another. Now 9 years later, Maangchi has 288 videos posted and has more than 1,317,204 YouTube subscribers, more than Martha Stewart, Alton Brown, Ree Drummond and Ina Garten combined. She is widely loved by her fans. Her recipes really work. Tonight I made her Honey butter fried chicken. It was beautiful. . Not only are her recipes easy to understand, create and eat, but her organization is easy and light weight. When I made the chicken, it was so easy to keep every thing in one bowl and then clean as i went.

Culinarily Maangchi is the greatest thing that has happened to me in a long time. I have learned that it doesn't matter how young or old you are. Seize your dream! She is 59 now and doing so well she had to quit her job several years ago to do this full time. Obviously, i am not interested in YouTube being a centerpiece of my life, I only wish to use it as a tool for the big picture.

Monday's through Fridays are days of rest......compared to the weekend!

There are 2 things I like to do on the weekends. I like to create a great meal that inknow I could not find in a restaurant. I also like it if I can accomplish something around the house from my insanely colossal list of things to fix, remodel, refurbish or rehabilitate. Sometimes this involves automotive tasks. Today I put a front end in Donna's Jeep just about a year after putting a front end in Donna's Jeep. Yes,I have been stung by Autozone. Lifetime warranty parts are only a deal if you are not the poor sucker that has to put them in twice! So, control arms, tie rod ends and stabilizer links done again with NOT Autozone parts. I have not only done crazy amounts of car repair over the years, but I have done it under fire. I have crawled under a 79 Plymouth to fix the muffler in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, (took a break from it there and threw it in the back of the car and drove across Arkansas without a muffler). Put it back on in Texarkanna. Just in time for a new charging system issue to crop up. I have lost brakes many times. Twice on cross county trips, both of which I had less than $60 on me. Jacksonville, Florida in 88 and Kilgore, Texas in 89. I was stuck for hours on the Will Rogers Turnpikein Oklahoma for hours in October 1986 and had to figure things out on my own. Triple A existed, but back then, for me, "that's what old people have". Point is, I have paid my dues, I could tell a thousand stories. Getting down on the bold floor under a car (with RA mind you) is not my idea of fun. Yes the dilemma is, this job would have been hundreds in labor, so I am stuck. So here I am, in serious pain, it's 2:19 AM and I cannot sleep. I did not let this stop us from having a great meal though. I have not done Asian Dumplings in a long time. I made sure before I went out to work on the car, I first prepped the evening meal.

Donna and Noah did the honors of wrapping and cooking class he potstickers. I showed up in time to make a potsticker sauce for dipping. So all in all, I got the 2 things done that I wanted to. But I realize that I wonder if I am doing something wrong. Half of the people I know we're at Brewfest today, which I of course would not go to, only because I have not had any alcohol since September 9th 1989. But wouldn't it be nice to find a "Foodfest" or something like that? Then I can enjoy something great like my friends. I would totally love Brewfest if not for this pesky little thing known as addiction. But I can' t help but wonder, does my stuff break more than theirs? I work all weekend 16 times harder than I do during the week. I work pretty hard then too! Don't get me wrong, I am not really complaining and I would not change my life. It's more algebraic to me. I wonder if I am just doing the math wrong. I saw an example of that working on the car today. It took me 4 times longer to-do the right (first) side than the left. Why? Because I was SMARTER by the time I got to the left. I renamed this blog "We All Woke Up" for two reasons. There was a Yoko Ono song on the 1972 Sometime in new York City LP called "We're All Water" that was about racial equality. The song points out there may not be a difference between Chairman Mao and Richard Nixon, if we strip them naked. A great song, but if you can't do Yoko, better not go there. On a bootleg vinyl record I bought at Cheapskate Records in the early 80s, the song "We're all Water" was printed on the label as "We All Woke Up". I mostly beleive the person rweßposible WS probably one of the many notorious Yoko haters that blamed her for wrecking the Beatles. But the statement, we all woke up seemed so beautiful to me. That brings me to the Secord reason. I want to wake up. Mentally. I want to take all of my experience, my memories, my knowledge, connect those dots and guess what? I WANNA ROCK! I just want to do it all a little better. Be more thoughtful and caring. Just like the car, I want my missteps to make better steps. Let's wake the heck up man!

Asian Grocery, Best Buy, B.A.M, and "Going under is cool"

Today was a day we had been wanting to get to, or at least out of the way. Noah needed to have a biopsy on the bone near his right ankle. It has been swollen in a lump since last April. A summer of ultra sounds, x-rays and blood work have led to the need for a biopsy. This is the 4th time in Noah's 10 years we put him out for a procedure. Most of these in the last 3 years.

I have such PTSD about this since a major hospitalization in 2009 in which he was under for 11 days allowing a machine to do his breathing for him and hospitalized for 21 days that time. But Noah informed me today, "going under is so cool." He takes all of this in stride, he is amazing. I am so proud of him.

He has been through so much,I would buy him a leer jet if he asked for one (and I could afford one). His request was B.A.M. (Books a Million). Unfortunately, they moved to a location half it's previous size. They somehow managed to not continue to carry all of the things Noah wants to go there for. Yes, I would buy the store and make them carry what he wants. He earned it.

We went to Liam's requested destination, Best Buy. There is a graphics card that Noah wants. I would love to get it for him, but it is $200, his computer really couldn't handle it either. I would need to buy him a computer too. It's a slippery slope. I hope some day Noah will know how much I admire his bravery and how proud I am of him.

One more stop before we left the upper valley, the Asian grocery. When we got home, he said he would love potstickers. I did not have everything I needed to make them, but I realized if I did have everything, I am really fried tonight. As Noah's father, I have stayed awake to see him through so many nights. I have read "Are You My Mother" a hundred times in 21 days. I am nothing though. Well, nothing but ever thankful to be his Dad.

A bunch of random particles spinning in the void...

I do not feel that I have really blogged. If you want to be respected as a blogger YOU MUST EARN IT! So I have failed. I need some gravitational core to cause all of the bits of me to pull together into a cohesive ball of blog wielding excellence. So what is it that I do? I play guitar, I can write music and lyrics ( at least last time I checked I could). I can cook, make soap, perform nearly every mechanical task on an automobile, carpentry, propane work, painting,flooring, propane installation and service work, drive big trucks, write books, sing, glaze windows, sheet rock, fell trees, camp, fish, hike perform many tasks in the technology field. What does one write about, when these are the things you can do? I just want it all to make sense. Tormented by this knowing a little about a lot makes me feel aimless at times. I have this magnificent long term memory. I always say that I can remember anything that does not make me money. Do I like working on cars? Absolutely not! I do that to save the load of money it would cost otherwise. I have held colossal pieces of junk together with p!umbers strap, sheet rock screws and my bare hands. I do have stories, and just maybe I can capture the age. Mine and the age of the world at the time and MAKE you feel it like a summer downpour. My abilities and my memories float like on a Sunbeam together, not knowing their proper place. Can I liberate them and allow the stories to be heard and the ability to be shared? Days Of Future Passed, the Moody Blues album was released in 1967 two months after my 2nd birthday. My parents loved it (the 8 track) and played it allot. Every note and word is etched into the fabric of who I am, like tying a rope around a tree limb that absorbs the rope as it grows. Nights in White Satin,the more famous of the composition, ends with a poetic and futile rant about the manipulation of our perceptions when it comes to night. The poem at the end of NiWS, actually called Late Lament reads, "Breathe deep the gathering gloom, Watch lights fade from every room. Bedsitter people look back and lament, Another day's useless energy spent. Impassioned lovers wrestle as one, Lonely man cries for love and has none. New mother picks up and suckles her son, Senior citizens wish they were young. Cold hearted orb that rules the night, Removes the colours from our sight. Red is grey and yellow white. But we decide which is right. And which is an illusion?" Friday night was the harvest moon. My family and I just pulled into Winhall Brook in South Londonderry Vermont. After setting up, Noah and I took a walk in the (forgive me) serious moonlight. Winhall is in a severe valley. The moon light lit everything to be seen, but, spectacularly in black and white, Just like the poem says. Never have I seen it so vividly. I kept pointing it out to Noah, and although I think he gets it at ten, I am sure that during some harvest moon many years from now, he will suddenly feel close to me, even if I am gone for a long time when he really sees it again. Of all that I am I can only promise this, that the way my brain works will confuse you sometimes and you will wonder how one thing can possibly relate to the other in my head. Sometimes I will be nice and explain the connection. Other times I will not. Again, a kindness, the reality being just too boring. They may be random particles, but they somehow compose me. I may have the smallest of hopes tonight of a chance to be blog-worthy. I promise though not to get too over confident, there is a very long way to go.

Well, yes, I have fallen for a few cooking "devices".

I have become better about it over the past few years. But there was a time where I really loved watching infomercials about interesting cooking gadgets. I think Alton Brown help me to get over it. The first one I ever bought was the Runco dehydrator and let's face it the dehydrator is a very useful device. I bought mine back in 1993. It was crude by today's standards but did the job. Because it the old dehydrator did not make any noise cuz there was no fan and then I had cats and they would knock it over and eat the beef jerky that I was making. I created a wooden plywood deck with eye hooks on it and which I would criss-cross bungee strap the dehydrator down so they couldn't knock it over. My next irresistible cooking gimmick was the brown and crisp bags of the late 1990s. The infomercials would show chef Tony and some ditzy brunette woman cooking gourmet meals in the little pouches that are paper on the outside and had soil residue on the inside. Tony would nuke up this amazingly delicious meal and the girl let's call her Barbara would go all gaga over it. T-bone steak, asparagus, pork chops, broccoli, mashed potatoes, whatever it was chef Tony would cook it and Barbara would act so surprised you would think she was eating canned raviolis all of her life prior to this day. What about the plastic tube pasta cooker built of a space age polymer that was virtually indestructible. Just place the pasta in the tube filled with hot water put on the live in in just a few short minutes drain the water out using the strainer of it and dump the pasta into a bowl or plate. Perfect pasta every time. I used it once but because I bought it I feel obligated to keep it in my cupboard for many years to come. And yes of course the NuWave Oven that I just could not resist it tortured me the things you can do with the new wave oven was amazing periods I think the most intriguing thing about the new wave oven was evidently you could cook food in much less time but even more amazing what you could cook food that was coming directly out of the freezer. It definitely had to be some sort of miracle device in order to do that. I will say that cooking food directly out of the freezer is crazy and you shouldn't do it because I cook the chicken for the better part of what seemed like two and a half weeks and I had to keep putting it back on to make sure that it was actually cooked. The new wave oven is not all bad it does serve a useful purpose sometimes such as when you want some roasted chicken that is not frozen. I would not say though that it is worth to say that it occupies. In reality the only great cooking gadgets are the tried and true ones that have been around forever the cast iron and stainless steel chopsticks but that's a whole other blog.

How DID I learn to cook? Part 1

How did I learn to cook? This is a question that I am frequently asked. Some even ask if I went to culinary school. First of all, I AM TOTALLY flattered about that question! If only my Father could have heard that one. I too am very disbelieving of how the kid who "hated everything except hot dogs and the skin off Kentucky Fried Chicken" (Joe Jackson's words) could have ended up knowing how to make all of this incredible food, let alone EAT IT! Anyone who knows me, knows that I am a person inspired by associative reference. You say something to me, it reminds me of something I know, heard, done or a place I have been, and then I tell you about that. Let me say up front that you are very kind for indulging me as sometimes my thought process stretches that connection far enough that I need to explain how I associate these subjects. Food is no exception. It means something to me and is part of my history. Not at first though. Growing up, I ate an average assortment of food served be a standard parent of the 60's and 70's. Or at least I refused to eat it. There were little glimpses of food inspiration. Simple things. My grandmother making the finest crab apple jelly ever, her icebox sliced cucumbers, her old fashioned knowledge of how things were made was amazing. Sadly, during the 1970's, there were so many people from that generation around that I did not realize the greatness I was witnessing. Little did I know, that within a decade, we would all notice that the generation that lived though the great depression and the second world war would begin disappearing so quickly and that in 20 years, even the next generation would have many meet with an untimely end and with them even the echos of the home grown resourcefulness of those earlier generations would be facing extinction. I thought I was doing great when at 20, when I lived in Port Aransas, Texas, I figured out how to make an Upside-down Spice Dome Cake. Well I did not have a cake pan so I cooked it in a stainless bowl. I thought I was a hero when I mastered a Durkee cooking bag for spare ribs. One late spring Saturday night, my Dad and I were sipping beers, throwing darts, went to the Family Center IGA. There they had a cast iron frying pan and shrink wrapped in it were a pound of bacon, dozen eggs and pound of butter, all for a good deal. It had a strange effect on me. I wanted this collage of cooking completeness. More so, I NEEDED the cast iron pan! It had stirred a primal need to make fire, smack some cast iron down on it, and just fry something! So we brought this back to his house and talked about the cast iron and how to treat them with the respect they deserved. We made the bacon and eggs. It is funny that I think about that now. There was an undercurrent there. At times there is a peice of ice floating in the water and others....we'll this was the tip of the Berg. My Dad was an amazing cook. I loved his creativity though. In the summer of 86, my Grandfather bought him a microwave. At the time, microwave's in Port Aransas were like phones; you knew some people that had one, but it was like 1 out of every 10 people you knew. Myy father stayed up till like 2 AM trying to cook many things in a microwave that back then just did happen. This would be me today, I had a similar experience when I was trapped by an infomercial to buy a Nu-wave Oven back on 07. Another 10 years would pass. Oh I would grill food like other pathetic American men who think they cook. But I had no instinct,no feel or taste. When my father died in 96, I found an index card of a recipe he cut off the back of a french fried onion can. It was called Turkey Stuffing Bake. He made it for us inSeptember of 1984 when we had just moved to Ave J in Port Aransas. My Diet consisted mostly of Whataburger at the time. I was amazed that I loved this dish because (as I quote my past self here) "it has peas in it." 12 years later, it was an intimate connection with Joe Jackson in the past. My Dad continued to surface in my maturity. With it, a gravitational pull towards what you can do with food.

I need to blend food, music, memory and creativity somehow....and I think I may have figured it out.

Winter IS for cooking