Raise your hand if you would ever thought that the first quarterback to break Dan Marino’s single season yards record would be Drew Brees and not Tom Brady (Brady is about 200 yards from passing Marino also). Brady gets all the press because of the “pass always” offense the Pats run, but it is the high-octane offense in New Orleans that should probably be getting more attention. Heck, you hear about Wes Welker and Rob Gronkowski all the time – name any receiver on the Saints (I had to look them up).
The Saints are now 12-3, have scored 505 points (9 less than the Packers and 40 more than the Patriots) and unlike the Pats, have the best pass offense in the league and the 9th best run offense (the Pats are 19th). That is not really the point of this post.
The point of this post is that, to me at least, it seems like Brees/Brady could be the new Marino/Elway argument on who was better. From a statistical standpoint, they two are pretty close:
GP
YDS
TD
INT
Rating
Brees
153
40,353
276
145
93.6
Brady
160
39,641
297
114
96.3
The real edge that Brady has over Brees is Super Bowl wins – Brady has 4 and Brees 1. In the Marino/Elway battle, Elway had 2 and Marino failed to win the Super Bowl in his only appearance.
I know that the traditional who’s better argument in this century has been Manning/Brady, but I really do think that it should really be Brees/Brady.
A lot of homes in the Greater Seattle area lost power on Christmas Day, starting at about 11 am, right in the middle of prime turkey-cooking-time. I’m going to bet that there were some people really freaking out.
Fortunately, we had steaks as a backup. We had also arranged for a supermarket to make the side dishes. I had figured that way I could focus on a few other appetisers.
The idea of making appetisers was lost with the power.
64 ounces of semi-frozen turkey gravy went into a 10″ cast-iron skillet with a lid. The cast iron was scavenged from the camping equipment.
The (also semi-frozen) scalloped potatoes, stuffing, and mashed potatoes all went shoulder to shoulder to shoulder into a shallow roasting pan. The roasting pan got wrapped tightly in aluminum foil.
Everything went onto the grill. I babysat for 40 minutes, maintaining the temperature at 350F.
When the sides were lava hot I pulled them from the grill, turned turned the grill up high, and put the steaks on.
I have already expressed my righteous indignation over the entire BCS system here, and I read something recently in the Seattle Weekly about the entire bowl system that leads me to believe that it makes money for the people running the bowl and screws the schools over.
To make matters worse, this season, the #7 team in the country, Boise State, didn’t get to go to a BCS bowl because they are not in an AQ conference and did not win their conference title. Fine, except that #13 Michigan, a school with 2 losses (more than Boise), who didn’t win their conference, didn’t play in their conference championship game and didn’t even win their division within their conference, gets to go to a BCS bowl. On what planet does that make sense?
Boise State’s consolation prize, a 6-6 Arizona State team in the Las Vegas Bowl. I watched about 2 minutes of the game and it was obvious that Boise was making a statement that they were unhappy about their bowl placement – they essentially ran the Sun Devils out of the building. It would have been much uglier for Arizona St. if it weren’t for the Boise turnovers that did what the Sun Devil defense couldn’t – keep the Broncos offense out of the end zone.
Normally I love watching college football and the bowl games at the end of the season. Based on the stupidity of the system, I think I am going to pass this year. Luckily, thanks to the way the calendar falls, we have NFL games on Christmas and New Year’s weekends this year. I would much rather watch the riveting Colts-Jags game on New Year’s Day than any of the bowl games that are being played.
This Grissini recipe uses two formulas from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice — Pate Fermentee and French Bread. Really, it’s the same recipe twice. The Pate Fermentee is made 24 hours in advance then refrigerated. The exact same ingredients are used again and combined with the (warmed) refrigerated dough to make French Bread. Reinhart suggests a number of different potential bases for Grissini, I used the French Bread version because it’s only flour, water, salt, and yeast — all stuff I had on hand.
Grissini ready for the oven. They're about 1/2" wide
This is the first time I’ve done a recipe using weights instead of volumes. I did this for three reasons:
1. The Reinhart formulas inevitably call for volumes that are too much for one loaf. The French Bread winds up using 4-1/2 cups of flour, intended to make three baguettes. For reference, I use 1-1/2 cups for a large pizza. I definitely didn’t want to make three large pizzas worth of Grissini.
2. Scaling the recipes down tends to make lots of weird measurements and oddball math. Halving the following formula below would mean halving 1-1/8 cups of each flour, which comes to 1/2 cup + 1 TBP. Halving the salt would be 3/8 teaspoon. That’s all assuming the scaling isn’t 1/6 of a recipe or something. “Makes 6 baguettes, 6 to 8 pizzas, or one 17 by 12-inch focaccia”.
3. Baker’s Percentages allow working in grams, and the metric system is waaayyy easier to scale than messing around with cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons.
The nice thing about Baker’s Percentages is that everything is weighed relative to the total weight of the flour. The “65” in the water column means that for every 100 grams of flour the formula uses 65 grams of water. It couldn’t be simpler. Especially with a calculator.
The table:
Reinhart (vol)
Reinhart (weight)
Reinhart (grams)
This One
Baker’s Percentage
AP Flour
1-1/8 cup
5 oz
140 g
75 g
50
Bread Flour
1-1/8 cup
5 oz
140 g
75 g
50
Water
3/4 cup
6-7 oz (6.5 oz)
182 g
98 g
65
Yeast
1/2 tsp
.055 oz
1.5 g
1 g (0.67%)
0.55
Salt
3/4 tsp
.19 oz
5.5 g
3 g (2%)
1.9
The 75 grams of each flour was pretty arbitrary — it was loosely half a recipe. Had I realized how close it was to a half recipe I might have gone with exactly half a recipe, though at the time I was more interested in the nice, round 150 grams of flour to use as a base for the rest of the math.
The recipe in short form:
1. Knead all of the ingredients, place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover, and let it rest in the refrigerator overnight.
2. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and let it warm up for an hour. Cut the dough into about 10 pieces and mix together with the “new” ingredients. Knead and let rise about 2 hours.
3. Roll out the dough and divide into strips. Let the strips rise, covered, on parchment lined baking sheets, about 60-90 minutes. (I used a pizza cutter to make the strips.)
[One difference between what Reinhart calls for and what I actually did: I rolled the dough out on semolina flour. I wanted some crunch on the outside of the breadstick.]
4. Reinhart simply says “To drive off the moisture for crisp breadsticks, bake them for a long time at low temperatures, 325F to 350F, until dry and crisp. For soft breadsticks, bake hotter, at 400F to 450F, until the sticks turn golden brown.”
I wanted not-super skinny grissini with a little bite and soft insides. Looking around the internet, I settled for 400F for 20 minutes. At the 20 minute mark there was no browning, so I gave them another 5 minutes, then gave up on brown.
Way hotter than they look.
In retrospect, a small amount of fat on the outside of the sticks, or a higher temperature, might have made for an appearance closer to what I’d visualized as a target.
Of course, I don’t own anything to use to serve or display the breadsticks, therefore it’s
The Concept: The Island Is Sinking! The players must work cooperatively to gather four treasures and escape the island before it completely sinks into the abyss! The island is composed of 24 tiles; as the game starts the tiles slowly begin to sink into the ocean. As the game progresses the tiles sink faster and faster. Each turn a player has the opportunity to move around the island, shore up sinking island tiles, and/or transfer a treasure card to other players. Treasures can be claimed when a player has four of the same treasure card and is standing on a tile that is named for that treasure. And each turn, the island sinks a little more…
The gray-blue tiles are "submerged". The missing tiles have sunk!
Why I Like It: It’s cooperative, which is a nice change of pace. It’s fairly easy to teach and learn. The game is well executed and features a very visceral concept. Each player has a unique ability, and each game the abilities are randomly assigned, so every game is different. Everyone needs to play with a good sense of urgency to avoid going down with the island. Players actually cheer when they win — Forbidden Island seems to make people more “excited” than about any other game we play, from the beginning all the way through to the end.
I see a headline on ESPN.com today that says “Hall of Famer Conlin accused of molestation”. It was a sad story about famed Philadelphia sports writer Bill Conlin being accused of molesting a couple of kids in the 1970’s. My problem is with the headline – winning the Spink Award or the Frick Award or the Buck O’Neil Award (o.k. maybe the O’Neil winners should be called Hall of Famers as the award has had 2 winners, one of which is they guy who the award is named after and SHOULD be in the real hall) does not make you a Hall of Famer. Yes, they get to make a pretty speech during the induction ceremony, but they aren’t being inducted into the Hall of Fame. The Baseball Hall of Fame website does not list winners of these awards in its Hall Of Famers section and they don’t have plaques in the Hall of Fame. Contrary to popular belief, there is no “Broadcasters Wing” of the Hall of Fame. The award winners for the Frick and Spink awards have a display in the section of the museum devoted to baseball in the media in a gallery called “Scribes and Mikemen.”
To the media – PLEASE STOP CALLING WINNERS OF THE FRICK AND SPINK AWARD WINNERS HALL OF FAMERS! When you wrongfully call someone as perverted as Conlin a Hall of Famer, you are doing a disservice to the memory of all of the cheats, liars, racists, drug addicts, alcoholics and all-around assholes that are currently inducted into the actual Hall of Fame (not to mention the large number of guys who were inducted that were actually nice guys).
Post Script – After writing this and before posting it, ESPN changed the title to “Veteran writer…” from “Hall of Famer…” What do you want to bet ESPN got a nastygram from the Baseball Hall of Fame about the misuse of the term Hall of Famer.
“Tony Wroten” refers to Husky freshman guard Tony Wroten. He was a highly rated recruit, and some people are very high on him so far [ESPN Insider Link]:
A number of NBA scouts and GMs now feel like Washington’s Tony Wroten(Rank: 19) might be the best NBA point guard prospect in college basketball…
and
..But Wroten is the real deal. He’s tall, has eyes in the back of his head, can get to the basket at will and, when he’s focused, he can take over a game. His second-half performance against Duke on Saturday was, at times, special. He’s still wild and tries to do too much, but it’s rare to find a player with his size doing the things he does. Said one top NBA scout, “He’s the second coming of Gary Payton.”
Emphasis mine.
The last sentence is what really got my attention.. I watched the Duke and Missouri games, and I know Wroten came in highly regarded, but still, my eyes weren’t telling me THAT. He seems like a nice young guard who’s still figuring it out. I haven’t seen “future Hall of Famer”.
Think about what Payton was — a great defensive player with good size and court vision. He was also a marginal shooter coming out of college and his shot never really developed much beyond “solid”.
The Gary Payton comment prompted me to look around a little further, and here’s a second opinion by David Thorpe (also Insider), following the Missouri/UW game:
Wroten looked for the spectacular play almost every possession rather than the easy one…
He has a terrific feel for slithering to the rim for buckets. Wroten has no idea how to play basketball, but has a great idea how to score and see the floor. Once he learns to read and think the game, his talent can grow to enormous heights…
He was not inclined to do much on defense in this game and missed some opportunities to get back on defense. I would have liked to see him handle that better…
However, he is a poor free throw shooter thanks to rushing his way through the shot as if a defender is about to come guard him.
Does that sound like Gary Payton? I’d point the phrases “no idea how to play basketball” and “not inclined to do much on defense”… One thing about Gary is that he worked hard, all the time, especially on defense… He was also really savvy and had a high basketball IQ.
Wroten is even bigger than Payton was — Wroten is listed at 6’5″, 205 lbs. If he can get rid of the “reckless” then maybe he’s a point guard at the NBA level, otherwise he’ll be a tweener combo guard.
Which is useful, but it’s not Gary Payton.
At the college level though.. he could be *very* effective.
I went to North Sound Brewery in Mount Vernon yesterday to pick up beer and I ended up chatting with the bartender, Rachel there about cheese steaks. Rachel went to school in Philadelphia and despite never having been to Pat’s or Gino’s (the tragedy in that), understands the cheese steak dilemma here in the northwest.
What is the dilemma you might ask? You can’t get a great cheese steak outside of Philly. I have never figured out why – there are whopping 3 ingredients in a plain steak – bread, grilled meat and cheese. You can ask 100 people what the best steak is and get 100 different answers on places and toppings, but for me, the true indication of a great steak is the base model (bread, steak and cheese wiz – it has to be wiz on the steak), similar to the way that the best way to judge how good a pizza is would be to order one that is just dough, cheese and sauce. For some reason, once you get outside of Philly, people can’t seem to make them anywhere close to the same level as the ones you get in Philly.
In Seattle, there are really 5 contenders for the “best” cheese steak. I haven’t been to all of them, but my goal is to get to them and see if any can compare to the ones you get in Philly.
The contenders are:
Calozzi’s on Occidental in Pioneer Square – haven’t been but I know a couple people who swear by their steaks.
Tat’s Deli on Yestler in Pioneer Square – see my post on places that I want to eat at. Tat’s is generally considered to be the best steak in Seattle.
The Original Philly’s on MLK – I don’t know a ton about this place except it has been around forever.
Philly Boys on 4th in Sodo – They are newcomers to the scene and the owners are from Philly. The streaks are decent by pricey and the place is difficult to find as it is tucked away in a gas station parking lot. They have the best steak I have eaten in Seattle, but I wouldn’t call it great.
Philly Ferve on 23rd in Madison Park – it has been years since I have been here, but I was told they had “authentic” steaks. They were terrible and based on the reviews; I don’t think it has gotten any better.
Before I start going to these places and reviewing them, anyone have any other suggestions for adding to the list?
To quote Leach – “You can win here and win big, I believe.”
Washington State football just got a lot more entertaining — I may actually make a point to watch a game or two next year. WSU will throw the ball all over the place, and historically that’s what they’ve done when they’ve been good. At the very least they’ll be fun to watch.
The Sounders get a new keeper:
The Sounders signed 6’5″ Austrian keeper Michael Gspurning. From the Seattle Times: “Gspurning’s size lends to a more aggressive approach in coming out to defend crosses, and he is also more comfortable having balls played back to him and using his feet”
The News Tribune has more information about Gspurning, including this YouTube clip of five of his saves:
I’m predisposed to like tall keepers — Kasey Keller would have had a hard time getting to Save #3 on the video, though Keller likely would have been playing another step or two to his left to cover that angle and would have stopped it anyway.
Gspuring is a 30 year-old veteran keeper. I have high hopes the Sounders won’t miss a beat.
Finally, the NBA is dead to me, but:
The Miami Heat signed Shane Battier. I think this is about as important as any signing in the league this year — Battier is absolutely the perfect fit to go with Wade and Lebron. Battier doesn’t need the ball in his hands to be productive, he’s a very good perimeter defender, he’s a good rebounder, a good passer, and he’s a good 3-point shooter. He may wind up being more valuable to the Heat than Chris Bosh. Really, the Heat are the “Big 2 +1” anyway, not a “Big 3”. As Battier approaches the late phase of his career he could basically be Robert Horry all over again. Mike Bibby just signed somewhere else, and if the Heat can get anything besides a corpse to play the point then they have to be heavy favorites to win it all this year. They don’t even need a traditional point guard, it could be a Steve Kerr equivalent and they’d be fine. (Any of the triangle offense non-traditional point guards would work — Kerr, Paxson, Harper, or Fisher. They just need long-range shooting and (ideally) someone to get in the way of quick little guards.)
I thought it might be fun and good eating to bring rosemary flatbread to the last beer event we attended. It’s basically the Smitten Kitchen pizza recipe, with modifications:
Smitten Pizza Recipe
This One
Flour
3 cup
3 cup
Water
1 cup
1 cup
Yeast
1.5 tsp
1 tsp
Salt
2 tsp
3 tsp
Olive Oil
2 TBP
2 TBP
Rosemary
none
2 TBP
I increased the salt, figuring we’d eat it with pretzels and use it to cut the beer. As it turned out there were a lot of stouts at the beer event, so the strong salt/rosemary combo worked out pretty well.
The dough was mixed, then got a four hour rise. At the end of four hours the dough was cut into six pieces.
The dough was then shaped into balls and allowed to rest for another hour. At this point the dough was very “pillowy”.
The dough was then rolled out, brushed liberally on both sides with extra virgin olive oil, and grilled. Olive oil was lightly applied after I took it off of the grill. Then it got a little sea salt.
Overall I think it came out pretty well — one thing I learned is that in the middle of winter, when the grill is cranky and damp, is that the grill needs to preheat for a while to heat up and to burn off whatever moisture is kicking around in there. I didn’t do that, and the bottoms came out with poor grill marks and darker than I would have liked. The light application of olive oil at the end is probably what salvaged it.
In any case, it didn’t last long around our table of seven people at the event — everyone was tearing off hunks of bread — it was a massacre!
FlatbreadGarden 