La Comtesse d’Haussonville, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1843-44)

The Yankees’ first spring training game is this afternoon on YES.

Chat away, you lucky few who happen to be near a TV.

In a recent issue of Saveur, I saw this:

From the Lingham’s website:

The success of Lingham’s Chilli Sauce today can be partly linked to its continuing use of the original 1908 recipe. In those days there were no food preservatives as we find now, and so the sauce was and is still made from pure ingredients, fresh chillies, sugar, vinegar and salt. With the current use of colourings, flavourings, preservatives and all manner of other chemical additives in many of today’s sauces and condiments, Lingham’s sauce makes a pleasant change that consumers world wide appreciate. It is a natural, quality product, no chemicals, no bulking ingredients such as tomato added, and with a flavour that is popular in both the East and West. Incredibly Lingham’s now sells in over 25 countries, including UK, Finland, Switzerland, USA, Japan, Australia and Chile, well over 60% of production is destined for export. And being a pure product it meets with many international standards, Vegetarian Society approval, US FDA approval and it is of course halal certified. That is quite a success story for the company and also for Malaysia. Surely few other Malaysian products sell as widely as this sauce, a little bit of Malaysia on supermarket shelves in every continent bar Antarctica, and who knows I bet one could find the odd bottle there too, something to alleviate the icy cold!

The company now produces four other products alongside its original chilli sauce, and those are, chilli sauce with ginger, chilli sauce with garlic, chilli sauce with ginger and garlic, and Thai chilli sauce. Not to let the grass grow under their feet, the experts in the Lingham’s kitchens are working on new products as you read this, some still secret, but look out for 100% organic chilli sauce for one.

Everyone has their own preferred way to enjoy Lingham’s sauce, whether it be with noodles, nasi goring or chips. And now the company is compiling some alternative recipe ideas from Lingham’s fans world wide, look out for a chilli crab recipe from Asia, a gourmet beef burger recipe from the USA, not to mention recipes to make spicy new salad dressings, etc. using Lingham’s chilli sauces.

I love hot sauces and condiments of all kinds. I had a belated Christmas gift coming to me from my better half so I ordered a couple of bottles of this Lingham’s stuff from Amazon. They arrived Monday night. I eagerly unwrapped the package and tasted the bright red sauce. It was sweet, like chili sauce, and at first, I was disappointed. Sweeter than I thought. Good, a nice, clean and lasting kick, but it wasn’t love at first bite.

I tell you this because I cook all sort of healthiness for the wife–groats, flax seed, oat burgers, you name it. For Emily, food is primarily fuel–she is concerned with health, first and foremost. Her mother and her mother’s mother were health food nuts way before it became fashionable. They grew up eating tree bark, as Em likes to say. Taste, flavor, that stuff comes a distant second to nutrients.

Ninety percent of the time, I don’t eat what I make for her. But last night I was too tired to cook anything so I helped myself to a few spoonfuls of the lemon and dill brown rice, ricotta-feta, bell-pepper, olives and garlic casserole I made a few days ago (from the Fruitwood, er, Moosewood cookbook).

I got it down thanks to the Lingham’s hot sauce which was excellent in quantity and mixed with food. A little sweet at first but then not overwhelmingly sweet at all, with an appealing spicy aftertaste. Now, I wish I’d brought a bottle to work because all I can think about is that hot sauce. They also have garlic and ginger variations…

I could get into this stuff.

Tyler Kepner catches up with Hideki Matsui at Angels camp (sniff):

Matsui is already comfortable in the clubhouse. He played with Abreu and Juan Rivera on the Yankees and has known Torii Hunter since an all-star event in Japan in 2002. Matsui and Hunter have adjoining lockers.

“He’s got a really good sense of humor,” Hunter said. “It’s unbelievable. I’ve been bringing him up in our meetings at 9:30 every morning. It’s like a comedy show. He gets us warmed up, laughing, cracking up, sweating, and we go out on the field happy. He fits right in. He told me, ‘Man, I feel comfortable here.’ ”

And here’s another bit from Kepner:

“You hear about the professionalism, you hear about the talent level, you hear about how he prepares,” Angels Manager Mike Scioscia said. “When you see it first-hand, it just validates everything that’s said about him.”

Scioscia added, “I think when a guy like Derek Jeter says he’s the most professional guy he’s played with in his career, that statement says it all.”

One last piece on Matsui, this one from Robert Whiting, author of the classic baseball book, You Gotta Have Wa.

Seated Nude, by Richard Diebenkorn (1966)

Guru, the vocal half of Gang Starr, suffered a heart attack over the weekend. I’ve heard that he is in a coma. Earlier today, DJ Premier tweeted that Guru had surgery and is doing okay. I don’t know any details but Guru’s monotoned delivery is legendary for Hip Hop fans of a certain vintage.

Here’s hoping he’s going to pull through.

I didn’t like fennel until I had a shaved fennel salad at Frank, an Italian jernt in the East Village about ten years ago. Since then, I’ve learned to love fennel, even if it isn’t shaved thin. Still, that’s my favorite way to prepare it: so fresh and so clean (clean).

Dig this yummy recipe from Pen and Fork, an excellent food blog.

When this tune came out there just wasn’t anything else that sounded like it. I remember listening to it on the bus as my high school baseball team drove to away games. Twenty years later, it stands as one of the great Hip Hop singles. Gotta love that 808 drum machine.

28 Going Back To Cali

Dig how Kid Koala flipped the horn intro into this classic turntablist routine:

It’s still cold here in New York City but the position of the sun changes each day, letting us know that the spring is near. The air is starting to smell different too. I haven’t had baseball or the Yankees on my mind too tough this winter; I’ve actively tried to keep my distance, if you can do such a thing updating a blog four, five times a day (even if a majority of those posts are not related to baseball).

I’m suffering from a case of information overload–from tweets and blogs and newspaper columns and hot stove shows on TV–and I’ve taken a step back so that I don’t become completely numb. I want to keep my senses sharp, which isn’t always easy after seven-and-a-half years of blogging about living in New York and rooting for the Yankees.

But this morning, I got excited for the season. What got me is a photograph of Mariano Rivera in a New York Times article by Ben Shpigel. It is the classic Rivera pose, his upper body perfectly aligned as he threw a pitch, his teeth showing.

We’ve talked about the need to appreciate Rivera’s greatness a lot over the years because we know isn’t going to last forever. We’re in bonus time with Rivera now–every performance is gravy. Looking at this picture reminded me how fortunate we are to root for him and the Yankees.

Oh, yeah. I’m ready.

Seated Woman, by Willem de Kooning (1940)

Yesterday, Pete Hamill reviewed the new Willie Mays biography for the New York Times Book Review. It is a sentimental piece that made me wince more than a few times. Today, I read a response to Hamill’s essay by Joe Posnanski. Good stuff by Pos.

[Painting by Will Johnson]

Albert Brooks meets Albert King…Who knew the blues could be this funny?

13 Englishman-German-Jew Blues

From Albert Brooks’ classic out-of-print comedy album, A Star is Bought.

Funny what words make you hungry. Like “nooks” for example. Remember the commercials for Thomas’ English Muffins always talked about “nooks and crannies“? It never occured to me that this was Madison Avenue at work. Who didn’t like a “nook” or a “cranny”?

My uncle Fred made me dinner a few times when I was a kid. He is a painter and a neat, orderly guy. Those were special occasions at his apartment. I felt so grown-up. His wife, my dad’s sister, Beice was out for some reason and it was just the two of us. He toasted english muffins the way they looked on TV, perfectly even–at my house, the edges always burned. Then, he spread a thin layer of mustard on both sides and folded few slices of Genoa Salami inbetween. Some peperoncini on the side.

We set our sandwiches on a tray and watched the Yankees on WPIX in his art studio. It’s a vague but savory and happy memory, and to this day I make salami sandwiches on english muffins and think of my uncle, whom I love very much.

Because I just can’t get me enough of Jeff Bridges, here’s some more on the favorite to win the Best Actor Oscar next weekend…from Manohla Dargis in the Sunday Times:

In the early and mid 1970s he played a wide-eyed boxer, a sly con artist, a moonshiner turned car racer, a squealer turned suicide, a thief and a cattle rustler, working with veterans like John Huston (“Fat City” in 1972) and newcomers like Michael Cimino, who, for his 1974 debut, directed Mr. Bridges alongside Clint Eastwood in the crime story “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.” The critics had started to pay attention. “Sometimes, just on his own,” Pauline Kael wrote of his performance as a stock-car racer in “The Last American Hero” (1973), “Jeff Bridges is enough to make a picture worth seeing.” Notably, she also compared him to Robert De Niro, who was about to set fire to screens in Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.”

“He probably can’t do the outrageous explosive scenes that Robert De Niro brings off in ‘Mean Streets,’ ” she wrote. “But De Niro — a real winner — is best when he’s coming on and showing off. Jeff Bridges just moves into a role and lives in it — so deep in it that the little things seem to come straight from the character’s soul.”

I worked as an assistant film editor on The Big Lebowski which was cut on film and not a computer. During the shoot, our main responsibility in the cutting room was to mark-up the sound track and the picture and synch the footage that was shot the day before–these are called “rushes” or “dailies”, which would be screened for the directors later that day. We’d check the synch by screening the footage on a Steenbeck.

Watching Bridges work was a revelation–he simply was the Dude. Some actors need a bunch of takes before they really hit their stride but Bridges was that character, and in each take he gave a subtle variation on a line reading or a physical gesture. You could tell that he had a background in TV and film and not the theater. His approach and rhythm was different from most everyone else in the movie. He was so natural and extremely intelligent, providing the directors with all the material they’d need to piece together a winning performance.

Back to Dargis now, writing about Lebowski:

Whether shuffling around in a bathrobe or dropping a lighted joint in his lap, Mr. Bridges’s timing is brilliant. But it’s his ability to convey a profound, seemingly limitless sense of empathy that elevate the Dude beyond the usual Coen caricature. By facing every assault — repeated beatings, a friend’s death, the theft of a rug — with little more than an exclamation (“Man!”) and a toke, he and the Dude affirmed that an American hero doesn’t need a punch, just a punch line, something that Judd Apatow’s merry band of potheads know well.

In some respects “The Big Lebowski” was Mr. Bridges’s “Raging Bull,” a defining movie. He never established a long working relationship with a director as Mr. De Niro did with Martin Scorsese. Mr. Bridges has worked with significant filmmakers, just not necessarily in their finest hour. He has made questionable choices, but he has had a breadth of roles that should be the envy of most, and a depth few achieve. And he has staying power. It takes nothing away from his work in “Crazy Heart” to note that the film’s success and profile probably owe something to “Iron Man,” the 2008 blockbuster in which he pulled a Lex Luthor to play the villain and which gave him his highest-profile role in years. He was hilarious, absurd, necessary, and to watch him in that movie as well as in “Crazy Heart” is to be reminded yet again of how he abides.

Dargis singles-out Cutter’s Way (pictured above) and that’s a movie worth watching if you’ve never seen it. Terrific-look. The only drag is watching John Heard chew-up the scenery, but otherwise, it’s a good movie.

Finally, my boy Joey La P, sent me a link to this interview with Bridges on KCRW.

Here’s something to get your day started right.

Otis…

27 Down In The Valley (Stereo)

[photo credit: Soule Mama]

There was slush on Thursday and snow on Friday, so much so that I got to leave work early. I walked through Central Park and the strangest thing happened. The grey-blue sky suddenly got light and yellow and the sun came out. Fat snow flakes continued to fall–a snow shower. I was close to Tavern on the Green and stopped walking to look in the sky.

I smiled. It is near now…

Then, on Saturday afternoon, the wife and I were on our way uptown on the 1 train. A group of four men sang an old Motown song for the car. They finished before we arrived at the next stop when one of the guys stepped forward and addressed the passengers, “May I have your attention, please. Don’t you worry, have no fear, Spring will soon be here.”

I don’t care how much is snows now. Baseball, she’s a-coming…

[photo credit: Dan Peters]

Speaking of drinking, here’s a scene from the cheeriest booze-soaked flick of them all:

I’m not a drinker but I’ve always liked the idea of a Bloody Mary.

Dig these cool variations…