There are two steps in every recipe that almost everyone I know takes shortcuts through – and I think they are apt analogies for how we live our lives. And strangely, the two steps are the bookend steps to a recipe.
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Category: Meats (page 1 of 2)
Family reunion time, 7 adults and 6 kids. How to make “Welcome to Portland” meal? Ah the old standby of Porchetta – this time delivered via a massive 13 pound bone-in rib roast that includes 15+ pork chops in it, plus a bunch of tenderloins to boot. So big that the grill was the only option. And with such extravagance, I could finally justify the purchase of that $55 bag of fennel pollen I’ve been lusting after for two years. Sheridan’s even keeps it behind locked doors to enhance the mystique. Add in grilled asparagus, mini potatoes roasted in the drippings, some heirloom caprese salads.. Ah, a treat befitting to the company!
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The posts of late have been some heavy meals, reflecting the life cookbook I am currently reading – Sean Carroll’s “Big Picture” in which he lays out the case for a poetic version of naturalism. I’ll return to some more lighter fare in a few posts – particularly as I get to touch upon the many thoughts sparked during a 10 day trip rafting down the Grand Canyon.
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With a 4 year old at home, I’m quite conscious just how much we tend to her building of the concept of her identity – like farmers watering a field. Today I ponder the illusion behind that crop we call Identity, pulling in lessons from the two previous posts on probabilistic thought and the division between intelligence and intent. To get there, we must first Split a Chicken.
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I’ve been digesting some heavy food of late, so for those few readers of these missives, I beg your patience as I make my way through some heavy courses still coming out from the kitchen of my mind. So, again, let’s prep this course with a small appetizer of actual food before getting to thought. Tonight, I share with you Carnitas.
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My thoughts today are recursively battling themselves, and then stepping back to assess if there is a winner behind the carnage of the mental battlefield. Before getting to the bloodshed, though, let’s hit the food part first.
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One of my dearest of friends is a nomadic world traveler. The world truly is his oyster and home, with no particular place in x,y,z that defines his identity beyond today, and possibly tomorrow. Those of you who know me, know who I am talking about.
In thinking about him today, I realize just how much the mind uses location to anchor the identity of a person in the mind’s perception and organization of its social or mental network. I think of the well-known memorization technique that uses location clues to “hang” concepts onto, like hanging the numbers of Pi onto different bookshelves and countertops in a virtual representation of your house. So too does our minds orient people in a location-based mental map in order to organize our network of friends.
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School lunch for dinner day – remember days of old with Sloppy Joes made from Manwich sauce? Ah, simpler days…
To that end, I’m blessed to have children raised in the belief that an unexamined life is not worth living. So with our simple meal tonight we got to talk about Occam’s razor and the Gordian Knot. I was quite pleased when one daughter was able to guess the solution for the knot before being told. Ah, tonight was a father’s dream.
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Blueberry Sausage you ask? Really?
But first, I’m still stuck on examining the persistence of belief today, my wagon wheels rutted in my search for a new thought along the west coast of my mind.
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The concept of bias sure does get a bad rap, given its literary relation to prejudice. But bias touches on that instinctual assessment of people we all must do to separate those who bring food to a relationship – whether financial or metaphysical – and those who will only by a feeder of the bounty that you bring to the table. And bias is the accumulation of all those past interactions and scars so that you can optimize the time to find the most fruitful relationships. So in my mind, bias is critically important – not for a meaningful life – but rather for an efficiently meaningful life. And there is economically nothing more scarce in life than time, thus anything that allows optimization of it should be held on a high pedestal. So glory to bias, it is experience being coy under the understandable witch hunt for prejudice – it just occasionally needs to be questioned to make sure it has not run amok.
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