My Hidden Room

This weekend I got a hankering to make one of my favorite dishes, Puerco Pibil.  It’s a delicious slow roasted pork dish from the Yucatan Peninsula.  It features tangy flavors, and moderate heat from the habenero pepper.  My recipe is pretty much the one that Robert Rodriguez outlines in his entertaining 10 Minute Cooking School video.  This weekend, I made a big batch, about 15 lbs of it.  It did this because the meat vendor I use, Cash’n'Carry, sells the pork butt in ~15 lb bags.  $1.48/lb was a sweet deal.

I get all my spices from World Spice, located behind the Pike Place Market.  They’re inexpensive and delicious, and can be shipped.

My recipe, as made this weekend:

• 15 lbs pork butt, cubed into ~2″ cubes (roughly, precision not important)
• Banana leaves (asian grocery! cheap!)
• 1/4 cup minced, de-veined, de-seeded habenero peppers (~16 habeneros)
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped garlic
• 1 cup orange juice, freshly squeezed
• 2 cups lemon juice, freshly squeezed
• 1.5 cups white vinegar
• 3/8 cups delicious reposado tequila
• 8 oz annatto seeds, ground finely (measured as whole annatto)
• 1 oz cumin
• 1.5 oz black peppercorns
• 24 allspice berries
• 1.5 tsp cloves

Set aside the banana leaves and cubed pork.

Take the rest of the ingredients.  Grind all the spices into dust, and combine with the garlic, habenero, juices, and vinegar.  This is your annatto paste, and is what the pork will marinate in.  In a large bowl, combine the pork with the annatto paste, mixing thoroughly.   I have a large (6 qt) food bucket that I use for marinating the pork.  Put the pork into a large container with a lid.  Put this into the refrigerator for at least four hours.  I try to marinate it overnight.

On cooking day, pre-heat the oven to 325F.  Line a large pan with banana leaves, leaving enough overhanging banana leaf to allow you to fold it over.  Fill the cavity with pork mix, making sure to put all the delicious marinade into the pan.  Fold the banana leaves over this, and cover with more banana leaves, tightly packing it.  Then cover with aluminum foil.  Or not, but I do.

Bake at 325F for four hours.  You will know it’s nearly done when your house smells delicious.

Enjoy on rice, or soft corn tortillas, or as tamale fill.  There are tons of ways to enjoy this versatile dish.

*** More pictures are here ***

Last year, around this time, I started building the Air Kraken Trike.  It’s a project I was inspired to create from the scenes of great big things like it at Burning Man.  This article is an overview of my process, challenges, costs, and thoughts.   I’ll describe how I came to the design, and various elements of building it.  I’ll provide a broad-strokes cost overview of what it took to make it, to take it to the Burn, and to store it.

Overview

So what’s an Air Kraken?   The Air Kraken is a fun idea from the steampunk community that has to do with an event in march, called Air Kraken Day, where folks take refuge in bars, and carry umbrellas to keep the sky kraken from descending to feast on folks.  It’s pretty hilarious, and I liked the name, so I went with it.    What else is an Air Kraken?  It’s also a ten foot long, six foot wide metal tricycle made out of new and used materials that has been to several events.

It’s made of steel, of drainage culvert, of bus parts, of old bicycles.  I’ve put more than a little blood, sweat, and tears into the construction and application of it.  It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve learned a lot. There have been frustrations and mis-steps.  But it’s been overall pretty awesome.

It has been a very time intensive project.  I put in a lot of nights and weekends into it.  For about four months, it was effectively my second job.  I’d get home from work around 6ish, eat food, and go out to the shop to work on it.  I’d throw 8-10 hours a day on the weekends into it.  I probably put 600-700 hours into it.  Definitely a lot more than that with the time I wasn’t actively working on it, and “merely” thinking about it.

Read more…

I feel very fortunate that I got to experience the Burning Man Festival before everything changed.

Wow. What a big statement to make, huh?  To claim that the festival has changed dramatically.  That things might be over.  That what had been isn’t what will be.  Very impertinent of me.  Very bold.  But it feels like it rings true to me.  I started going to the burn very recently, in 2008.  It was something I’d heard about for a long time, and always wanted to do.  I finally got things in gear, and went.  And it was world changing.

I went again every year since then, and if I can, I’ll go this year, too. There have been tons of cool experiences.  Loads of keen, interesting people that I’ve met, and some great friendships that I’ve spawned from the experience.  I’ve let go at the temple of things that held me back, of things that weighed on my heart.   I feel like the trip really meant a lot.

Like a ton of other burners I know, I lost the ticket lottery.  There’s lots of confusion about what’s going on.  Is it scalpers?  Are folks sitting on a bunch of tickets and not saying anything?  Did the community really grow to a hundred thousand in a year?

I think no one really knows what’s going on.  There’s a lot of fear and pain around it.  Fear of scalpers having taken a large portion of tickets to resell.  Pain at not knowing whether your theme camp will be able to go.  And doubt around what will happen.  The BMOrg is doing a lot to try to figure out how they went wrong, and what to do about the situation.  This is evolving, and what comes out of it, I don’t know.

But whatever happens, it won’t be the same.  Burning Man has grown very large.  It’s struggling against its own bonds of success.  As Halcyon said, this festival has perhaps grown too large to be contained by a playa.  So what does that mean?  What does it mean to have outgrown yourself?  To have gotten to a point where continued growth seems unsustainable and unlikely to be effective.  Where do we go from here?

I think one place that we can go is looking to our regional events as an outlet for all those things we wish for so hard in the experience of the dust.  I think that perhaps by looking again to our local communities, we can make local what we find remotely.  That we can bring the spirit and quality of the experience out at the dirt rave here.

Maybe it’s time that things split up.  That we have more events, spread out over more areas.  Freezing Man. Drowning Man. Soak.  Critical Massive.  Flipside.  All kinds of events, each with their own special character that leads us in new directions towards new dreams.

I don’t know where I’ll be this August.  I certainly hope on the playa, but it may not be in the cards. I know I’ll be at my regional.

Good luck.