Jim Willis

RedBankGreen » RED BANK: LAST OF THE GAGUTZ AND GARLIC

This sounds like a crazy-difficult recipe but it is really just an on-the-fly dish i put together last night that is the result of some sweet concurrent sales going on at Whole Foods and Foodtown right now and doesn’t take more than 20 minutes to make. This was really, really good and I’m just making a note of it here for my neighbors and so that I don’t forget about it.

Mangos are 3 for $2 at FT and FT always has conventional avocados on the cheap and both mangos and avocados are on the safe-side of the conventionally grown vs organic list –meaning they organic versions aren’t hugely better for you than the conventional.

At the Whole Foods you can get nice local (Farmingdale) corn and fresh mahi mahi. 

Shopping list

Whole Foods

• 1lb mahi
• 4 ears corn
• 1 jalapeño (or a scotch bonnet if you really want some heat)
• 2 bottles of 2011 or 2012 white bordeaux (1 for while you’re cooking, one for while you’re eating)

Foodtown

• 2 avocados
• mangos (you only need 1)
• 1 lime

grill

1. prep the corn (remove husk, wrap 4 ears and a dozen ice cubes tight in some foil) 
2. Put corn on grill over hot spot.
3. put some cayenne and salt on the mahi
4. put fish on the grill.

make the salsa

1. cube up a mango
2. cube up the avocado(s)
3. dice jalepeno
4. mix this upstuff and squeeze lime on it
5. (if you’ve got some bermuda onion hanging around, a tablespoon or so of that diced into the salsa is nice but not mandatory).

after about 8-10 mins on the grill;

1. flip the mahi
2. take the corn out of the foil and put it over direct heat to char it a bit all around
3. take 2 ears of corn and cut the kernels onto cutting board, let it cool a bit before you mix it into salsa.

Serve:

take the mahi off the grill, serve it with a ton of salsa on it. drink heavily. make your kids do the dishes.

Ever wonder which fruits and vegetables are definitely worth buying organic and which you could get by with conventional? Here’s a handy guide you can download from the Environmental Working Group.

Hey, if you live in Red Bank and have kids, print this out and put it on your fridge.

Just got turned on to Sarah Jarosz. This track sounds especially like a Nick Drake song for some reason. Her song writing, both lyrics and composition are really something. 

Citarella’s Market, a set on Flickr.

Additional photos from the Citarella’s Market piece on redbankgreen.com.

Why We Should Memorize Poetry : The New Yorker

I came across some excerpts from Downbeat’s Blindfold Listening sessions with Miles Davis the other day. The gist of the blindfold listening session is that a musician listens to several cuts from different albums and comments on them without the benefit of knowing who they’re listening to or which recording they’re hearing. 

The listener in me appreciates the quality of attention and precision that Davis brings to listening to other musicians’ work. The musician in me cowers at his decisive and resolute critiques of their performances.

Miles recognizes the musicians on the cuts he’s listening to with an amazing hit rate and identifies not only the soloists but in most cases the rhythm players, too. He is without forgiveness or tolerance for chops that are anything less than perfect. And that’s the rub. I mean, how the hell do you define perfection when it comes to chops?

Clearly Miles has some kind of hyper-sensitive internal measurement or gauge that he’s measuring with here and I am sure he was as critical of his own chops as he is of these other players’. I think that measuring device is just his sense of taste and you get a real sense in reading these in how refined and sensitive and calibrated his sense of taste was. In any case, enjoy these:

• 1st Blindfold Test, Sept. 1955 (early Miles, around the time of Walkin’)
• 2nd Blindfold Test, Aug, 1958 (around the time of the 1st quintet with Coltrane – Relaxin’/Cookin’)
• 3rd Blindfold Test, June, 1964 (just after Kind of Blue)
• 4th Blindfold Test, June 1968 (2nd quintet with Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams)

Looks like David Byrne and St. Vincent will be at the Count Basie this summer. You can get tix here. 

I haven’t posted a whole lot of stuff to the internets over the past few years but a few of the posts I put up were massively popular. Oddball stuff generated a crazy amount of visitors like: how to setup a Columbia Cougar Flats tent or how to lock down the iPad for kids to use or how to do a firmware rest on an Onkyo stereo receiver. In any case, with posterous (where I used to host jimwillis.org) shutting down, I’m going to try to migrate some of those more popular posts over to tumblr but posterous sure doesn’t make that easy!