Fear, Fire, Foes! Rampaging Death & Plague Strike Boston.

Please note that there may be links in this piece that apparently are added automatically by WordPress via “text-enhance.com.” I’m trying to figure out how to undo them. It’s not my intent to link you to certain tablet sites or promote a specific company’s products. Understand that these links are appearing without the author’s knowledge. Thanks.

On March 13th, there was a transformer fire in downtown Boston. A portion of the city lost power. Not the whole city–just part. A section. Power was out for a couple of days. The fire was contained to one building.  No one died.

This lack of destruction, however, did not stop the ever-trusty media from turning it from a fire and a blackout to an End of Days scenario. Because, really, what’s the point of reporting the news if you’re not scaring the crap out of somebody?

A Boston Herald story noted that “…a three-alarm fire … sent thick, black smoke into the streets and shut down power across a vast swath of the city.”

“A vast swath.” Now, to me a “vast swath” is, let’s say, the Sahara Desert. Or Manhattan, whichever comes first. Several blocks in downtown Boston? Not a vast swath. Even boston.com’s Metro Desk column downgraded to it a “wide swath.”

A Boston Globe headline cried: “Life upended in Back Bay.” Here’s a Pro Tip from your host: If a day or two  without power “upends” your life, it’s time for one of those life reassessment things because apparently it doesn’t take much to set you off. Last year, long-time readers may recall, I went close to a week without power. At no point did I feel particularly “upended.” In fact, it was sort of relaxing after a while.

But then…I don’t write for the mass media. Let’s continue.

It wasn’t just the instance of the semi-nearly-almost cataclysmic lack of power that inspired local scribes to unleash screaming hordes of overblown adjectives upon an unsuspecting populace. Nay, the day after also lent itself to hyperbolic fervor. Here’s the lead from a story in the Herald: “The city was rife with tales from the dark side yesterday — from freezing-cold showers to exhausting climbs up high-rise steps — as the Hub grappled with the Back Bay’s mammoth blackout. Even Nstar [the area power company], left scrambling to return electricity to thousands in the darkened heart of the city, was shut out of its corporate headquarters in the powerless Prudential Tower. Everyone flipped on iPads and smartphones [editorial note: Really? "Everyone"? The homeless folks, too? "Everyone" in town has an iPad or a smartphone? "Everyone" was doing this? Try "People" or "Many."] and attempted to cope, a common theme yesterday.”  Here’s another bit of joy: “The Back Bay yesterday was crawling with cops directing traffic as generators buzzed and crews sweated to restore power. Usually bustling stores in the city’s prime shopping district — including the Apple Store and Prudential Mall — were eerily dark.”

Eerily dark…during the day. Okay, then. And let’s not ignore the crawling, buzzing, grappling, sweating and un-bustling there in the Conrad-esque darkened heart of the city. My favorite word in that swirling miasma of tripe, by the way, is “rife.” That’s one of the best fifty-cent “I’m a writer” words ever. And, he asked from an editorial standpoint, why are we calling out the Apple Store in specific? That’s two literary equivalents of a product shot for Apple in one story. This may anger the owner of Murray’s Bargain Used Toothbrush Depot, which happens to be next door.*

But wait, as they say in late-night knife-by-mail commercials, there’s more. Another great line from the Herald story. Apparently a woman visiting town “…kept the shades up in her Sheraton hotel room Tuesday night when she went to bed so she’d ‘have a clue when it was daylight.’” Here’s a clue, missy–it usually comes around the point when you wake up. Any doubt, you just pull back those pesky shades and voila! It’s like Christmas in March!

Before it appears that I’m unduly hammering away at one outlet and one writer, let’s turn our attention back to The Boston Globe and their heart-wrenching morning-after tale: “…the red, green, yellow of the changing traffic lights along Massachusetts Avenue and Boylston Street signaled a return to normalcy for most Back Bay residents who spent the past day and a half in darkness.” Ooh, a whole day and a half? How do you cope? And, technically speaking, some of the day and a half happened during the day, so only the parts that happened at night were in darkness.

And remember–it’s not a good news story unless you can follow it up with something else for people to worry about. As a Herald story from March 15 points out in its opening paragraph, “Massive transformers and power stations scattered throughout Boston — including dozens under public buildings, hotels and even sidewalks — are not inspected by the state or city, prompting calls from lawmakers for tighter oversight to prevent blackout-causing blazes, overloads or even worse catastrophes.”

Like, what? A new Lindsay Lohan movie? A bacon shortage?**

This is where we hit on the crux of what moved me to comment on all this. Although I have known for a long time that the foremost rule of reporting the news is If it bleeds, it leads, sometimes I just get overwhelmed by the lack of restraint the media show in trying to turn non-stories into stories by preying on worry. If you weren’t in downtown Boston on the 13th, and you only had the papers to go by, you’d think you narrowly avoided death. Like you were one of those people whose eerie premonition just before boarding a flight makes you stop and decide to not go–and although you miss Buddy and the Bopper, you’re glad you didn’t get on that plane.***

The internet has already taken away from us the relative mental safety of having some distance between us and a continuous flow of tragedy. Life has always been overloaded with awful crap happening everywhere, all the time, but never before has it been so immediate. There’s an assumption that we want to know when the latest office shooting, earthquake, kidnapping, tornado, hostage standoff, murder has happened or, more and more, is happening right now. It’s like having a morbid friend who sits next to you all day and talks about weird, bad stuff.

Restraint. It’s lacking. I know that the world can be a pretty awful place. I’m trying to bring up two kids in it. Awareness matters. I get that. Know what’s going on in the world around you. There is a difference, however, between making people aware and making them afraid. We can certainly self-filter. We can change our Yahoo settings or not click links or change the channel when the talking heads lead into commercial with “Up next, a tragic shooting in a downtown home has relatives asking ‘why?’” (And then, usually, “Plus, great weather for the Sox game tonight–Jim has all the details!”) But we don’t. We drive the fear-fueled media culture because more and more we are clamoring for this stuff. We’re not turning away, we’re tuning in. We’re forwarding links by e-mail and, what’s worse, force-feeding them to our friends on Facebook so that they have no choice but to see the story, at least peripherally. They get the headline, the lead, the video clip, the link, when they never asked to see it, and we put it there because since it troubled us, we need to trouble everyone. We are swallowing what the media are feeding us, ignoring the effects on our psyches, and not just asking for more, but spreading it for them. It’s like being an accomplice fear-monger.

So, yes, the overblown verbiage**** of the Herald story exists because it can’t not exist in today’s media. The simple truth of the blackout story goes like this: A transformer exploded. There was a fire, which gave off smoke that could have been toxic, but wasn’t. People were inconvenienced by a few days without electricity. Some of them got days off from work. In time, the power came back on, the fire damage was manageable, and everyone carried on with what they were doing. People were pretty much okay.

But then again, I don’t write the news.

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*It’s not. But you knew that. But the store name? You cringed. I know you did. I could hear it from here.

**Holy crap, I just scared myself writing that!

***Too soon?

****It doesn’t mean words, friends. It means too many of them. An excess. An overflow. As in verbose. Start correcting people on their misuse of “verbiage” today!

Forgive Me, Father, For I Have Sinned.

With a name like Shanahan, I understandably take my boiled dinners seriously. Although I have fallen over the years into that habit where I only do a good corned beef and cabbage around St. Patrick’s Day like the rest of the world, until this past week I had always followed certain rules regarding its making. These rules came from my father.

Dad was not a cook, really. The only things I can remember him making are fried dough, banana fritters, and this odd Christmastime concoction involving pimentos run through a grinder, mixed with  softened cheddar cheese. And although he was never the one making the corned beef and cabbage per se, he did expect it to be done just thus and so.

Rule One: Grey corned beef only. So iron-clad was this rule that for years–no, let’s call it decades–I was convinced there was something about red corned beef, something in its nature, its cut or its lineage, that made it a lesser chunk of meat. Irish corned beef, Dad would insist, was grey. Red? Jewish. Red was for the deli; grey was for St. Paddy’s. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the only difference is in the curing. Grey is cured only with salt. Red adds some spices.

The flavor I grew up with, though, was the flavor of the grey. The grey, which you soaked overnight to draw some of the salt out. It sat covered in water in the pot until it was time to start cooking, at which time you dumped out the old water and added new. Not all of the salt went with it, though, and what remained was still enough to bring a strong shot of the brine to the veggies that went in with it. Those veggies had plenty of time to soak up the saline because of Rule Two.

Rule Two: Everything at once. Some recipes would have you cook the corned beef for three hours or so, then add your potatoes, carrots and cabbage. That’s not how we did it, no. One pot, everything in, let it ride. This is the remnant, ingrained dictum of our Irish/New England combined work and cooking ethic. Weren’t nobody going to come in out of the field or home from the factory middle of the day to add the vegetables, no sir. There was work to be done, ay-yuh, and we could eat when the sun set. ‘Til then, let the meat and the veggies boil away nice and slow. So it would all go in and boil along for hours, and the salt would work its way into everything. Not quite enough to form a crust on your skin, but certainly enough to put a pucker on your lips. And that’s how I like it. That saltiness has preserved memories. It’s the flavor of the big table at my grandmother’s house on certain Sundays with all of the family around it. My chair next to my grandfather’s, and this is the only memory I have of him, he and I at the head of the table, me looking up at this smiling giant of a fellow who passed away when I was only six. The salt still tastes of the Sunday afternoons of my simple childhood.

Rule Three: Carrots, potatoes, cabbage, stop. Put whatever you like into your boiled dinner. At the Shanahans’ it’s the Big Three. Oh, sure, we’re familiar with turnips and their friends the parsnips and we like them just fine with a ham, maybe, but they’ve no place in our corned beef dinner. Why do you people need to be so fancy, anyway?

On a recent evening Stace and I took our daughter and got some dinner out at an Irish bar in my town. Thursday night’s specials included boiled dinner and I hadn’t had any in a while,* so I ordered it. This is usually an error of judgement for me. The legacy of my grandmother’s and my mother’s boiled dinner not only has its thumb on the scale, it actually kicks other boiled dinners in the groin if they get too close. The cabbage was undercooked, and had part of the core hanging off it. The meat was cut too thick. It had dried a bit. The small, round white potatoes weren’t fork-tender. I got it down, but it only made me want to make my own all the more. St. Paddy’s Day was coming. Specials on the meat and the cabbage would hit the shelves. (Carrots never seem to get the same honor.) I decided to make one for dinner. Regarding the asterisk above, I decided I would make it for my mother when other people had plans that evening.

Now we come to the confessional part of our post. I knew I wasn’t going to get to it on Sunday because time was getting away and, well…look, I’ve always been curious about corned beef and…the slow cooker. I know people do it all the time, and I’ve made my endless love for the slow cooker quite clear. Looking in my copy of Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker, I saw the words that sealed the deal: on low for 10-12 hours. How I love that phrase. Forgive me, father, but the time had come to try it. Which is bad enough, but then I went ahead and compounded my indiscretion.

I bought red.

It was late in the day. I was tired. I had already decided not to make the wife try it again, and that evening’s plan had already shifted to burritos and then there was also a great sale on stew beef and she’d mentioned she’d like something like stew for lunches for the week and there was no grey corned beef right there even though I really wanted one, honestly I did, but there were two cuts of the red so I…I…

I can make all the excuses I like. In the end it’s this simple: I went red, dad. But give me credit–I stuck with the Big Three. Spent my Monday morning before work peeling and chopping taters and carrots, breaking down a little cabbage into wedges. I added water, trying not to concern myself that the recipe only called for a half cup. (You can’t boil in that little water!) I sealed the lid. I turned the cooker to low. And I went to toil in the fields of fashion copywriting for 10 hours.**

Click it for bigness.

I got home and popped the lid on the cooker. Things in there looked good–which is to say, the three-pound slab of red meat had shrunk by half and gone all grey like it was supposed to. The cabbage had taken on a nice beige-green hue. The potatoes had clearly grabbed most of the fat from the meat and were holding it inside themselves. I put the meat on a cutting board and brought the knife down. The meat sighed a little and basically fell open, revealing the perfect bit of redness you see in the photo. I had sinned, yes, but I had sinned quite well. The meat was tender and moist, the vegetables right at the point of perfect softness that comes just before they go soggy. In the words of my mother, who quite gladly accepted my dinner invite, “It’s just salty enough.”*** And it was. My only meh moment was a result of me deciding to cut open the spice packet in the morning and rub some of it onto the meat. Whatever was in there brought an odd clove-like aftertaste.**** But as far as red vs. grey or boiling vs. slow cooking, well…I can’t say I plan to repent for my sin, unless voraciously devouring the better part of a pound of really good corned beef is anything like saying four Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition. Sorry, dad, but I think even you would have approved. If anything, now I want to try a slab of grey in the slow cooker because that just might be the perfect combination.

And no, I won’t be waiting for next St. Patrick’s Day.

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*The last time I wrote about the things my wife doesn’t/can’t/won’t eat, I got called out for making her sound boring. So I won’t tell you that a couple of years ago I made her her first boiled dinner and she didn’t care for it. Despite this gaping religious and ideological chasm between us, we are somehow still married.

**I don’t work a 10-hour day. But departure to arrival is about 10. So count it.

***Moments later my daughter would declare that “the meat tasted funny” and, in essence, join her mother on the side of the Rebellion. I pray for their horribly lost and wayward souls.

***My bet is that it was clove.

Don’t Blink: A Post on Writing.

Today’s little chat is inspired by a recent post over at the Creative Something blog, which is rapidly becoming a go-to site for me. Before reading much further, you’ll want to go to this post,* watch at least one of the videos there (they’re only a minute long) and then come back.

So now you’re back and your head is filled with a blur of imagery, and chances are good that at least one or two of them really struck you. The black butterfly with the chipped wing? The kid in clownface with one tear smearing his makeup? The dudes jumping roof to roof over someone’s head? Which image(s) stuck with you?

And all it took was one second.

One of the biggest misconceptions I find among beginning writers (or those who identify as non-writers) is that inspiration arrives in a massive chunk of wow, a nuclear-blast-worthy flash of light from on high and a rush of the wind of creativity that leaves swaths of amazingness in its wake, just waiting for you to write about it.

Nope.

Inspiration arrives in a single moment, and the only ability it has is to catch your eye, take hold of your attention, or stop your breath–just for that moment. In this heartbeat-sized space  it tattoos itself on your writer’s psyche. Something about it has made an impression, whether because of its beauty, its ugliness, its gravity, its foolishness. The trick, then, is to do two things: freeze it and decide how to use it.

When I ran a writing class (something I’m pondering doing again), one of my points was that writers have carte blanche to seize moments in order to do whatever they please to them. Every visual element in a moment, every person involved, every word spoken, every action that occurs–they all belong to the writer the moment he or she takes note of them. Those not inclined to writing will take those moments and just remember them, maybe to relate over dinner later, scene for scene and word for word. Writers can do that, too, but the power and craft in writing comes from knowing that the moment is nothing but a template, and it’s infinitely malleable. The idea is not necessarily to capture the moment as is, but rather to examine it while we hold it, trying to see the what if that’s hiding within it. This can be the stepping off point for any direction. This is where the writing starts.

Personal example: Years ago I was temping in the Hancock Tower in Boston. Every day I took the express elevator up to whatever floor I was on. It was way up there. Nice view. As the elevator went past the last floor before the express part of the ride, the floor display changed from a number to an X.

To pretty much everyone else–and to me for a while–that meant nothing. It’s a thing that happens.

Comes a morning, though, when that moment arrives, same as any other day, and in that moment I finally really notice it for the first time. I do what we writers do: I grabbed it. Froze it. Made the X my own. From there I mulled it over, eventually asking myself, “What if you press the ‘door open’ button when it says X?”

There are two ways to answer this question. One is the obvious, everyday, not-thinking-like-a-writer way, and the answer there is “You see the wall of the elevator shaft.” My answer, the one that comes from owning a moment or an image or a thing and working outward from there with a writer’s mindset, was “There would be nothing.” From that came a story called “Between Floors,” which was published in a (very) small press zine.**

Part of what I’m talking about here echoes a bit of the concept of mindfulness. While I admit that I haven’t read as much on the matter as I should, it’s a question of being singularly in the moment. Modern life is a shotgun blast of constant input; we rarely focus on the moment at hand. Mindfulness suggests that if we did, our experiences would be the richer for it because our senses hone in on that point in time, that activity, that thought. When you pare everything down to that singular moment, you see it and understand it more. It’s more available to you, and you can potentially do more with it. From a writer’s standpoint, trying to cultivate mindfulness means you’re likely to seize more moments, more points of inspiration.

Going back to my class: I asked a group if anyone there commuted into South Station in Boston. Several did. I asked them if they’d ever noticed the weights and pulleys. None did. I was surprised. They were a little hard to miss. As the Station’s web page notes, there were “25 fabricated steel spools and shapely cast bronze forms suspended from the station’s ceiling. Steel cables wind around each spool, extend to 90 feet across the ceiling’s span and thread through eyehooks to drop down at varying lengths.” They were pretty hard to miss, but people did. We don’t look up. We don’t look around. We are not as mindful as we should be, especially if we’re going to pretend to be writers, people whose entire craft depends on observing moments.

There are two things to take away from this post. The first is the writerly idea that the inspiration you need or the inspiration you’ve patiently been waiting for could come in the very next moment. It may not be what you expected, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth seizing. In fact, let’s throw together a little mental meme here to hang onto: Seize it, freeze it, save it for later. The world is made of an infinite number of moments, and those moments are yours to look at and use however you see fit. That’s what we do.

The second thing is, never underestimate the power that a single moment has to take your breath away, inspire your spirit, and remind you that simple beauty is everywhere. Take the time to grab those moments, even if you don’t end up writing about it.

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*Sorry to have to send you elsewhere to watch; I’m still too cheap to pony up for the ability to embed video while my weekly visit rate lingers under 20 views.

**Digest sized, home-printed, badly laid out and stapled in the middle. But unless I ‘fessed up to that, you’d still be figuring it was some far more impressive publication credit.

Technical Difficulties

Last week I noted that I had stalled in writing a column because of its “I know better than you” tone–or, at the very least, a tone I perceived as such. This week, I hit the same snag. I find myself once again standing in front of a wall that has plagued me for years: I believe I have nothing worth saying.

The first nixxed column focused on the fact that at 14, my son can barely keep a bowling ball on the alley. I opted to blame bumper bowling and the always-criticizable “tee ball generation” mentality. Then it occurred to me that the kid’s been bowling maybe half a dozen times in his life. When I was a little guy I had the benefit of an aunt who took me bowling every Sunday. So naturally I became a decent bowler. My son as a bowler is not a product of the tee ball generation; he is a product of a dad who didn’t take him bowling. So…dead column. Final leftover thought here: The point of raising the bar is not to let everyone walk safely under it.

The second nixxed column stepped off from the story about a lesbian who was denied communion at her mother’s funeral service. I inexplicably took this as my cue to expound on how I think religion shouldn’t come with a disclaimer. A love of the God you choose to believe in should over-ride things like sexuality. I started writing and found myself thinking, why do I care? I’m a straight guy who gave up religion years ago. I barely believe in myself, let alone some judgmental higher power and the necessity of following inconstant laws written two thousand years ago and freely reworked and redefined since then. Don’t get me wrong–this is a painfully ignorant and inhumane move on the part of the priest involved, and the only thing about the story that served to amplify my conviction of non-religiosity was the comments of the thumpers posted under the Yahoo story. My favorite was “Remember–God loves the sinner but hates the sin.” So hang on–God created me and loves me for who I am and I profess my love for Him too, but until I decide to stop doing that thing that makes him feel a little ooky, he’s told his drones that I can’t hang out in the clubhouse? That ain’t love, baby. HOWEVER, I recognize that in the broader sense my opinion on the matter counts for exactly nothing, affects nothing, sways no one, and if I had gone on at length as planned, it probably would have opened me up to haranguing conversations about God and religion which, since I wouldn’t engage in them in real life, would just piss me off anyway. The last thing I need is to thumb-wrestle with some chapter-and-verse believer over a news story that’s just going to go back to ashes before the weekend’s over and we find a new headline to obsess about. So…dead column. Final letover thought on that one: Believers seem to use God more to harm than to accept. The Bible makes an awesome shield, especially if you hide behind it rather than peering out from it.

Even this is more than I really want to say (it’s that damned Wordsworthian “spontaneous pouring forth” thing), and I edited it down yet again this morning before posting because I in looking it over I became uncomfortable with how much I’d gone on about it.

I have heard of a business philosophy called Kaizen. Kaizen focuses on making small changes to effect improvement. No big sweeping changes to processes, just a tweak here and there, then you look at what changed due to the tweak, and you follow that with another logical change. Thus, over time you improve a little at a time with a lower risk of failure.

One of the principles of Kaizen reads:

Of ten things you would say, leave off nine.

The Off-the-Cuff Column #2

The editor is stalking my cubicle, pacing past every two minutes like a hungry panther, but the “I clearly know better than you” tone of my column on the evils of bumper bowling has stalled me in my writerly tracks and I don’t have much by way of backup and I’m dealing with the extreme blahs that come with realizing I’m on my last day of vacation and tomorrow it’s back to trying to be clever and interesting about dresses and dodging the flying barbs of the editorial opinions of the non-editorial, but I have promised you few who regularly read that I would always feed your need on Sunday morn (and can we all please ignore for a moment what a massively masturbatory ego-stroke that little comment was?), so since the coffee’s fresh (second try, I screwed up the first) let’s fire up the iPod, put 20 minutes on the clock (it’s 9:20 am) and see how much babble-crap I can shovel out before the buzzer. Ready?

I cry myself to sleep at night because you don’t listen to my podcast. Sorry to dump that on you. I’ve been keeping it inside for a while, but…it’s true.

Okay, here’s the Brussels sprouts recipe from last week: Take a pound of fresh sprouts. Cut the end off, take off any yellowish leaves, and cut the sprouts in half the long way. Put them in a saucier, or  any fairly wide, shallow pan you have a lid for, along with a half-cup of water and a light dose of sea salt. (To taste.) Cover. Put the heat on high and let it ride for about 5 minutes. If your stove is electric, go for about 7 minutes. That’s it. They’ll be perfect. I usually throw in a tablespoon of butter and some panko bread crumbs just before serving.

This winter has been the best spring ever. While I live in fear of a March blizzard, we New Englanders have certainly gotten a bye, weather-wise, this year. My snow blower is still blocked in the shed by my lawn mower. Let’s hope it stays that way.

I cry myself to sleep at night because you’re not following me on Twitter. The link is right there to your right. I promise I’ll try to be funny. Er.

The audio production work I’ve been doing lately for side projects brings into sharp focus how much I don’t enjoy writing about fashion. Here, enjoy a commercial break. (Sorry, too cheap to pay to embed audio.)

Here’s a thought: I should stop publicly mentioning that bit about how I don’t like writing about fashion. I have a good job. It would better if we were writing about steak. Plus, the sample sales would hold more allure for me.

The upside of being a music reviewer: free music. The downside: free music that just ain’t good.

Having once posted the prologue to an unfinished fantasy novel here (no forward motion on that, by the way), perhaps sometime soon I’ll talk about the unfinished, long-stalled comic novel based on radio soap opera parody I wrote in the late 80s. But not now.

Lately I’ve been struggling with referring to myself as a “writer” when my creative output is really limited to this blog and music reviews. There are a lot of so-so books out there, and lots of mediocre stuff flooding the DIY/self-publishing route, but at least those people have put on their writer pants and written something.

Speaking of writers, you should be reading Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds blog.

Twenty minutes is up and it looks like I haven’t done much more than whine in true, self-absorbed bloggerly fashion. However, the editor has sent his carrier Rottweiler to my cube to drag me by the scruff of the neck into his office and turn over my work for “publishing.” And about the dog…it’s not my place to mention it, but this dog has the oddest sulfur-y smell about it. What’s up with that?

The Easiest Great Recipe I Ever Stole.

Last week I admonished men around the world (all of whom read my blog, if you must know) to get off their duffs and cook for their ladyfolk friends for Valentine’s Day. I even gave them a recipe for Chicken Piccatta. Having done so, I obviously had to make dinner for my own ladyfolk friend. Since I’d whipped up a piccata-esque dinner a few nights before*, I felt I couldn’t revisit it. But I got it in my head to try doing steak tips in the ever-miraculous slow cooker. I hit the interwebtubes to see if it could be done, and I came across a recipe that’s not only extremely tasty, but so easy it makes the piccatta recipe look like it was designed to be used only by people recovering from severe head trauma.

Take 3 pounds of steak tips–or sirlion strip cut into tips. Dredge them in seasoned flour. Put them in a slow cooker. Add a cup of sliced mushrooms and a half cup of chopped scallions. Add a palm-full of dried oregano.

Still with me? Okay: Whisk together a can of beef broth, five or six good, hardy shakes of Worcestershire sauce and two tablespoons of tomato paste. Pour it over everything else.

Turn the cooker on low and go find something interesting to do for 7-12 hours. This may be the most difficult part.

The recipe–which, by the by, I found at CDKitchen.com–calls for you to turn the heat to high for the last hour. Not sure why. I turned it up for about half that. In the meantime, you make a paste/roux from 1/4 cup of red wine and 3 tablespoons of flour to thicken the sauce. Well, you do this if you’re not married to my wife. She can’t do red wine. It gives her migraines. One hit of red wine and her skull collapses like  a Chilean mine. When I make a stew, I’ll typically make a roux from equal parts butter and flour. In this case, though, I just added enough water to the flour to get it pasty and stirred it into the sort-of-stew-like steak tips.

The star of our show, served with sweet potato oven fries and steamed broccoli. Click to enlarge and take it all in.

That’s what you end up with in the long run: fork-tender chunks of steak in a thick sauce. This dish is about a cup of liquid and three potatoes away from being beef stew. Great winter fare, even if you’re living in New England this year, where winter’s plane has apparently been delayed and spring decided to show up early.

Now: I don’t believe that you make a decent blog or blog post about cooking by just saying, “Ooh! Recipe I find! You make!” So let’s talk about my future plans for this dish–because, oh, do I have them.

First thing that comes to mind is chipotle. Much like bacon, chipotle has the ability to make just about anything better, especially if it’s made of beef. One chopped up pepper and perhaps an extra teaspoon or two of the adobo sauce, and these become muy fantastico Mexican-style tips.

Second: Less time. I liked how these came out, but I think that the 12 hours in the magic pot takes away some of the texture we might prefer in steak tips. Plus, in spots they were a little drier than I’d have liked. I think I’d shoot for the middle ground next time, checking them at the 8 hour mark and maybe letting them ride for 9. This should leave them a little more on the might-still-need-a-knife side without forsaking much of the tenderness.

Third: This recipe has rid me of my belief that when I make stew, I need to brown the meat first. For some of you, this may be a duh moment. Me, I’ve always browned the meat before putting it in the cooker, then deglazed that pan with Guinness. My onions go into the pan with the beer as all the good burned flour bits come up, and this is what I add to my stew last. However, I now know that I can do that early-morning prep with a bag of flour and a bunch of stew beef and I won’t be eating raw meat when I get home that night.

Speaking of beer, idea four is to go half-and-half on the broth, using Guinness for the other half. It brings such a rich, earthy flavor to my stew,*** I know it would give these slow tips a new dimension of goodness in their time together.

That’s about it, Hasheronis. If you can drop beef into flour, you can make this dish. Drastic head wound not required. And if you have any ideas on what you’d do to kick this yum-fest up a level or three, post them in the comments section.

Yeah, that’s me pandering for comments.

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*Sauteed chicken breast strips (not floured); deglazed pan with Sauvignon Blanc and butter; added capers (of course!). Served with a delicious side of steamed Brussels sprouts** and unadorned quinoa. Fabulous!

**I will provide this recipe, lifted from Alton Brown’s Good Eats show, in a later post.

***The wife doesn’t eat lamb, but let me tell you that I used to make an Irish lamb stew, with a Guinness base, that’s so good it makes you want to run out and kneecap someone.****

****Believe me, my first bit for that line was even more offensive. And I’m Irish.

Mr. Shanahan’s Helpful Guide to Not Being a Knee-jerk Romantic on Valentine’s Day.

Ah, Valentine’s Day. If ever there was a “holiday” that highlights the inequality of the male-female relationship, this is it.  On this day, men everywhere will pathetically demonstrate that money and pride are no object when it comes to trying to get laid, while women, patiently waiting on the other side of the equation, will make it unmistakably clear that they, at all times, are the ones driving the booty bus.

If you won’t believe me, then perhaps you’ll accept the word of this recent TV commercial from Teleflora. Now go see if you can find one where a guy insinuates that he’s not putting out unless his lady gives him something nice and preferably expensive. I’ll wait while you go look.

Nothing? Really? Go figure.

I’ve always had a problem with Valentine’s Day and it’s not just because my inherent cheapness makes my gorge rise in the face of inflated flower prices, inflated dinner prices, inflated wine prices and inflated expectations. It’s not even that it outs men as the weak-willed, vagina-fawning leg-humpers we really are. No, I dislike V-Day because at heart I am a romantic, and there is nothing that takes the romance out of romance quite like having to be told when it’s time to get romantic.

Gentlemen, have you ever been on the losing end of the argument that you’re not romantic and you never do anything romantic? Of course you have. If we could live up to the female standards of romance, we’d all have flowing manes, titanium-infused jawlines cut at artistic right angles and we’d never button our shirts, constantly leaving our granite-carved, nary-a-hair-to-be-seen pecs available for pawing.  If you’ve been in this argument, the word “spontaneous” probably flew across the room, and chances are it wasn’t preceded by “You’re so…” And yet, the author said in both bold and italics in order to over-emphasize his point, it’s okay for you to be romantic on the same singled-out day as every other guy on the planet.

We all on the same page here? Good. So women want romance, and they will get all up in arms about how we’re not romantic, but then confuse us by saying that all is forgiven if we just save it all up for the one day a year when the greeting card, chocolate, rose and restaurant industries all tell us it’s a go. And what do we typically get for our expectedly sizable investment? Yeah, that. Which is all well and good but if we weigh it out on a barter-style, goods-for-services kind of scale, we’re getting unpleasantly screwed.

Overall, though, I’m concerned about the quality of the romance that will onanistically spill out of us gents on Valentine’s Day, because it won’t really be quality romance. It will be, as the title suggests, knee-jerk, do-as-you’re-told, no-forethought romance. If you’ve never seen the look on the face of a condemned man, I direct you to the greeting card aisle of your local CVS or Walgreens five minutes to closing time on the night before Valentine’s Day.

I’m here to help, with three very simple ways to not be that guy who smacks his forehead on February 13 and goes, “Oh, yeah, romance day is tomorrow!” but instead be seen as a genuinely romantic guy. With a little forethought, you can stand out from the pack, gents. Trust me.

Caveat: The vast majority of women out there will probably not agree with me on this. Not because I’m wrong, but because if they admit that I’m right, there goes all the good stuff they get to expect once a year. However:

1. Don’t Do the Dozen.  This is officially my Rule One. A dozen roses is not just cliche, it’s downright overcompensation in its most flowery form. Worst of all, it’s average. Why do men all buy a dozen? Because they’ve been told it’s what you’re supposed to do. You know what a dozen roses do? Take up space while they die. Sure, she might think they’re impressive at first, if she’s impressed by knee-jerk reactions, but eventually she has to figure out where to put them. Too big for the middle of the coffee table, no room on the nightstand, the fridge starts to look good and finally, what the hell, she’s already thrown you the obligatory thank-you hump for the flowers since that’s the going exchange rate for standard-issue V-Day transactions, so the trash is as good a place as any. I’ve always been a fan of the three-rose concept, and I max out at six. Why? Because it’s thoughtful without being obvious or over-the-top. It shows that you understand that real beauty can be subtle. Three roses in a simple vase can augment a space or a moment instead of wrassling it to the ground under its own preponderance. I once gave three red roses and one white one; the red to say I love you and the white to say I always will.* Want to be really romantic? Find out what her favorite flower is. Get those instead.

2. Proposing on Valentine’s Day isn’t romantic. Let me talk to the ladies for a moment. Take it from a guy who proposed to his wife in front of an audience at a concert by a singer we both love, having arranged it by e-mail with said singer ahead of time and not on Valentine’s Day: the V-Day proposal Has. Been. Done. In fact, it’s going to be done several hundred thousand more times this coming Tuesday. Your heart should not be all a-flutter over this. You should be thinking, Oh my God, he’s incapable of original thought! Because he is, and the unoriginal thinkers around him are enabling this unfortunate behavior.

His mom: “When are you going to propose?”

Him: “Ready for this? Valentine’s Day!”

His mom: “Oh my Gaaaawd that’s so romantic!”

No, mom, it isn’t. He put more thought into lunch today than he did into when to propose. And ladies, that’s what you’re getting. A guy who wanted to make sure he can’t possibly forget when he proposed to you because it’s the only time he remembers to be romantic. Good luck with that.

One for the gents here, and take it from the guy who did it: if you’re proposing publicly, every guy in that place is silently begging her to say no because no good public proposal story ends with “She said yes.”** It’s just funnier that way. And please: not in the food and not in the champagne. Aside from a choking hazard or having to wait for her next bowel movement to get it back, IT’S. BEEN. DONE.

You want to make it romantic? Pick any other non-holiday. Go somewhere quiet, somewhere meaningful. Think about what you want to say. And say it. Ta-da.***

3. Cook, stupid. Restauranteurs plan expensive vacations around their V-Day take. Because they can charge pretty much whatever they like, kick their wine markups up by another 10 percent, give your woman a rose, tag it all with the words “Valentine’s Day Special” and turn a $15 meal into $50 of your pissed-away money. And, let us be clear here, this meal does not come with a guarantee that it will be good. So you’ve made a reservation like every other guy, crammed yourselves into a restaurant that’s more concerned with turning over tables than with whether or not you get to turn over your date, you’re out too much money and it might not even be that good. If you want to be a Valentine’s Day superstar, cook for her.

Okay–a lot of you just flinched. I heard it all the way over here. But come back and squat by the fire, you neanderfuck, and I’ll make it all all right. Listen: cooking for the lady shows that you’re a provider. And since 99 percent of us no longer possess the will or means to run across the veldt and spear-hunt the mighty gazelle for her pleasure, we can at least hit the supermarket and belly up to the stove for one night. Honestly, it’s not that hard. What do you get out of it? Well, outside of the obvious, you get her appreciation for your efforts. Trust me, if your meal sucks rocks she’s not going to call you out on it right there, shattering both the moment and your glass-menagerie male ego–and if she does, is this really the person you want to be with? I think not, chummo. If your meal is good–and in a moment we’ll get to a guaranteed winner–well, my friend, Mr. Shanahan’s advice has just handed you your all-access pass for the night. Backstage probably included. On top of all that, you get an intimate little restaurant with a table for two. Put on her favorite music, whether it’s light jazz or Norwegian death metal, and you, romantic son of a gun that you are, have made her night. Plus, there’s no drive home before the sex. There’s just the sex.

So what to make? Technically, as I said, you could make just about anything. It’s more the thoughtful effort than the dish itself. Two rules, though: nothing from a can, and no chicken parmesan. I am adamant about this, boys. Never, ever make chicken parmesan for a date–especially not if you or she have ever referred to it as “chicken parm.” Here’s an amazing fact: if you put a million monkeys in a million kitchens for a million years, all of them would make chicken parm. So you took a breaded chicken cutlet, threw some spaghetti sauce on it and a hunk of cheese. Wow. Way to go, Boy-Ar-Dee. My ONLY exception to this rule is if you’re one of those geniuses of love who make their own sauce and/or who know that the “parmesan” part doesn’t actually refer to the cheese.****

You, my romance-addled friend, are going to make Chicken Piccatta with a simple side of nicely dressed Capellini. It’s actually probably a little easier to make than parm, even for the most kitchen-phobic among you, but it just presents better. Plus, it’s lighter because the chicken’s not heavily breaded and walloped with acidic tomato sauce. You just can’t make sweet Barry-White-music-style-obligatory-Valentine’s-Day love on a heavy tummy. Here we go:

Two boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/4 cup of flour to which you’ve added 1 teaspoon each of salt & pepper
Capers (Ask the grocery store person. They’re probably over by the olives.)
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
1 tablespoon of butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
White wine, preferably a Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio

For your side dish you want:

Angel hair pasta
1 tomato, cut into small bits
2 tablespoons (max) freshly grated peccorino romano or parmesan. If you use shaker cheese in this recipe I will hunt you down and gut you like the godless Philistine you are.

Let’s get started:

Separate the chicken breasts, then cut them horizontally through the middle. This will give you four thinner pieces, which will cook faster.*****

Cut those pieces in half. Now you have eight thin pieces of chicken probably about the size of your palm. Use that as a guide. Pat all the pieces dry with a paper towel.

One at a time, drag the chicken pieces through the flour. Shake off the excess. Put them on a plate.

Heat the butter and olive oil in a frying pan. To test it, flick a little of the flour at it. If it sizzles, it’s hot enough.

Cook the chicken in the frying pan. Flip it once. These thin pieces will cook fairly quickly. If you have any doubt whether it’s done, cut into one. Hopefully, you know what cooked chicken looks like.

Remove the chicken from the pan. Pour in about a half cup of wine. It will sizzle like mad. This is good, and it looks impressive. With a wooden spoon (if you have one), scrape the bottom of the pan. There will be bits of chicken and flour there. It needs to come up to make your sauce.

Let the wine cook for a couple of minutes. You want it to start to thicken a bit. It’s makin’ flavor, baby.

Put the chicken back in the pan. Pour the lemon juice over it and add about a palm-full of the capers. (These add a nice sharp flavor and some texture.)

Shake the pan to get the sauce all over the chicken.

During all this, cook your pasta. Angel hair cooks in about a minute, so bring your water to a boil while you’re working on the chicken. While the wine sauce is cooking down, get the pasta in. Cook, drain, return to the pan. Drizzle it lightly with olive oil, then add 1 to 2 tablespoons of the cheese. Don’t overdo. Put your pasta on the plate; top with the tomatoes.

Chicken goes next to the pasta; drizzle a bit of that yummy piccatta sauce over the chicken. Make sure you get some capers on there. Can’t say enough about capers. Pour her wine first, light them candles and get romantic, mister.

Even if you have to be told when and how.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

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*It didn’t last. I have no idea where that woman is. Isn’t that romantic?

**Mine went very well, probably because I didn’t have to trust a waiter to help me pull it off. That’s a bad move no matter how much you tip him.

***This entire statement is hypocritical, I know. But I’m a writer and an actor. I’m a show-off. You don’t have to be. And unless you can ring in her favorite performer as an  accomplice, your public proposal will pale in comparison to mine. Boo-yah.

****Technically it’s parmagiana, meaning “in the style/tradition of Parma.” Parma, which is also where the best prosciutto comes from. (Psst…get a quarter-pound of prosciutto and a cantaloupe. Cut cantaloupe into slices about three inches long. Wrap them with the prosciutto. Plate and serve. Ta-da, you just made a fancy-ass appetizer. She should be suitably impressed by this.

*****Or you could put the pieces between two sheets of wax paper and pound them to with hammer to flatten them out. This is more the traditional way to do it, but if you’re not confident in the kitchen, don’t do it. If you do, however, please refrain from making “beating my meat” jokes. Not romantic in any way.