Note to Donald Norman:

Hello —

After reading your Good Design page, I just wanted to make a comment about Tygs. I made a Tyg in a pottery class a few months ago, and while I think it’s a nice idea, the reality is unwieldy and takes up too much space in the cabinet. One handle on a mug is bad enough, why have two? In fact, why have one? Consider the zero-handled mug.

Thermal issues aside, the sharing of a zero-handled mug with someone would be a more intimate, emotionally positive experience for both parties than a one or two-handled mug. The transfer would be simple, too. You might have to briefly touch the other person’s hand, though. You might have to get physically intimate with your friend, this person with whom you’ve been discussing gardening or the Super Bowl. You might even accidently share lip space with them, if you’re not careful.

Is that so bad? Maybe in the late 1700s it was, but today? Today we are frequent bathers. Today we have anti-bacterial soap, and it is good.

So I’m proposing that in the modern world, Tygs are not for sharing a hot drink with friends, they are for sharing a hot drink with enemies. People who you want to keep at mug plus arm’s length. People with communicable diseases. The Tyg is a social, physical, and emotional barrier, while the mug with zero handles is exactly the opposite. It builds intimacy and connection. And we need more of that in this cruel world.

Here’s a zero-handled mug I purchased last week, which I want to propose as a Tyg alternative for urban dwellers with small cabinets who don’t mind touching their friends on occasion:

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B0009WX41Q/

best, Carl

He wrote me back and said I had convinced him to buy the Bodum mugs.

First I laid out a few egg pasta recipes and examined their contents, then I claimed I finally understood how to make it. Now I have to take that back. I was only just beginning to learn. Making fresh pasta, with just 2 or 3 ingredients, is as “simple” as bread, which is to say it is very complicated. I got cocky, I thought I knew what I was doing. But I don’t. I am humbled.

Having said that, I just learned a few more things about fresh pasta from the book Heat by Bill Buford, and I think they will help answer my earlier confusion about it. Like bread, pasta will sing only when made with the best, freshest, most excellent ingredients you can get your paws on. And given the time commitment, I can’t see how it would be worth making any other way. In my post on pasta doughs, I’d wondered aloud why Jamie Oliver uses eight egg yolks plus 3 eggs in his dough, where all the other cookbooks used just 2 or 3 eggs. As it turns out, Mario Batali does the same thing at Babbo. Why? Well, first, the recipe calls for almost twice as much dough as the others. But more importantly, Jamie’s recipe freely admits something about the modern eggs we get from battery hens: they suck. The extra yolks are there to make up for the low-grade eggs that most of us use every day. Back when all chickens were grass-fed and life was great, you might’ve only needed 3 eggs. In parts of Italy, I’m sure that’s still the case. But if you don’t have fantastic eggs—grass-fed eggs with big, neon yellow-bordering-on-red yolks—you simply need more yolks to make up for it. Apparently Batali uses salt and oil, too, to further redress the egg quality issues.

FYI, here’s Batali’s pasta dough—made for American mass-produced eggs:

• 1 lb flour
• 3 eggs
• 8 egg yolks
• hint of salt
• drizzle of olive oil
• water as needed

Of course, all of these recipes assume you’re going to know by feel when the dough is perfectly hydrated, and when to add water. I’ve learned a little about this from breadmaking, but it’s not something that’s easy to explain in English. It’s kinesthetic. It’s about muscle memory, and when I read about it, I lament not working in a professional kitchen. Unless I’m making a ton of this stuff every day, kneading it out by hand, I don’t get a chance to teach my body the feel of perfect dough, just as I can’t easily teach my body how to poke and smell a steak and tell that it’s perfectly cooked. Anyway, the dough sould be tacky, but not sticky, while you knead it. After a few minutes of kneading, it should shine a little. So it won’t be dry, exactly, but it will be something you can knead easily.

Good luck.

Wow, yet another huge concession by the music industry. Music piracy is like a mass protest right now, and half the people participating don’t even recognize the significance of their actions.

So a company like Ruckus builds an app and gets to be a kind of middleman, “selling” college students’ attention to both labels and advertisers. What a great deal for Ruckus. They’re like YouTube, but rather than rely on user-generated content, they’ll rely on label-generated content.

But why do we need a separate company to do this? Does the music industry’s business model not give them room to seek attention directly, advertise to it, and cash in that way? MTV has lived off of advertising forever. So, given the fall of CDs, why aren’t we seeing labels transition into “media” companies?

Maybe because they’re already pwned by bigger “media” companies?

This article really gets at the center of the issues around digital music distribution and why “encrypted” music, at least as it is today, serves no one but the hardware manufacturer whose line of music players you’re now locked into using.

Apple’s employment of DRM drives me crazy. The iTunes store was the first big digital music store, and I think their DRM is a relic of early deals with fearful record labels. It may not be very (legally) easy for them to shut off at this point. Apple is a lifestyle, so I understand why it’s important for them to control the horizontal and vertical, the hardware and software. But in my opinion, proprietary standards like FairPlay do not last. Sure, it has seen a lot of use because of the iPod’s popularity, but I think MP3 will win in the end because it is open.

I also think services like Rhapsody, where you can subscribe and stream any music you want for a fixed monthly fee, ala NetFlix, could win out in the end. It’s a funny psychological difference—between purchasing music and having a subscription to listen to music. It really depends on people’s feelings about music: do they want to “own” it or do they just want to listen? You never really own music, though. You own a license to play it, and you own some packaging material. So the idea of music ownership is really about the sentimentality felt by a collector about the packaging, and so far there is no replacement for that sentimentality in any digital service. The extreme music collector hardly even has a CD collection, because they know the only real emotion—the only true sentiment—is cut out of vinyl, not plastic.

I finally figured out fresh egg pasta. It only took about five attempts. I thought I understood three attempts ago, and that it was supposed to taste gummy. No wonder so many pasta machines collect dust in the corner.

1. Use the right flour Obviously, all-purpose will work, but lower-gluten flour is best for pasta. Last night I used some Marino Organic Wheat Flour Tipo “00” flour, which is pretty amazing and too expensive. But for “everyday” fresh pasta, if there is such a thing, you can use any pastry or cake flour. You can always mix in a bit of other flour (semolina, whole wheat).


2. Not too wet, not too dry Start with 10oz flour and 3 eggs. Whisk the eggs and mix them into the flour. Once formed into a ball, keep adding flour a bit at a time until the ball isn’t sticky anymore. Then knead it for a minute or two, wrap in plastic, and let it rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.


3. Get to “5” or “6” without tears Using a hunk of 1/6 of the dough ball at a time, keeping the rest of the dough wrapped while you work, feed the dough through the #1 setting on the machine. The sheet should be totally smooth when it comes through the machine. If there are ruts or tears in the dough, it needs more flour on the surface. Add a little, fold the piece in half, and run it through the machine again. When it comes out nice and smooth, move up to #2, and so on, until you reach 5 or 6. #5 will give you linguini thickness. #6 is more delicate, and I would use it to make ravioli or very delicate pasta.


4. Cook it properly. Fresh pasta cooks fast, but don’t take it out too early. It starts out firm and chewy, and when it’s done it becomes light and silky. It will never be “al dente”, as far as I can tell. It usually takes 3-4 minutes for linguini at the “5” thickness setting, but you really have to keep tasting it. Some fresh pastas will cook in as little as 1 minute.


5. Salt the water, not the dough (this one from Daisy) “salt tenses up the dough and makes it stronger, definitely not what you want when getting to those thin settings.” I dump a bunch of salt in my pasta water, at least a couple tablespoons for 6 quarts of water, to cook 1 pound of pasta.


6. Keep the sauce light A heavy bolognese is uncalled for. How about just pasta with butter, pepper, and really good quality parmesean? When you make that and it tastes delicious, you know you’ve made fresh pasta properly.

We made some “overnight waffles” for breakfast yesterday.

a bubbly batter after 8 hours

They were creamy and delicious, topped only with maple syrup. I kind of cobbled a recipe together from a few sources. The batter is yeasted and rises slowly the night before, so the flavors get to develop nicely. And there’s no baking soda. These waffles are no more work than usual; you just have to mix the batter before you go to bed! Kind of like making a very slow-cooking dinner in the morning.

Mix:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp instant yeast

Add:

• 2 cups whole milk
• 6 Tbsp butter, melted and cooled
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

Leave overnight, and just before ironing add 2 beaten eggs. Buttermilk might be a great substitute for whole milk. Or you might get away with using a tablespoon of buttermilk powder with the dry ingredients. Maybe next time.