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Easter Pies

Skip — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 14:52:08 +0000

The local Amish community here in Sarasota have some wonderful pies on offer at this time of year.

Sign at a local Amish community restaurant
Copyright © 2014, Skip Lombardi

For a little insight into the way Italian-Americans make pies for Easter, have a look at our other blog Almost Italian.

You can find our recipe for Italian Easter Pie in our cookbook.

Buona Pasqua.

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Palm Sunday in Sarasota

Holly and Skip — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 22:56:05 +0000

While tourists may bemoan their luck whenever they encounter ever-greater aberrations in Florida weather, our neighbors and their landscapers surely rejoiced in the thunderstorms of the past week. It’s not every day we can watch a cargo of Dypsis decaryi, Triangle Palms, off-loaded at a private residence. And it’s a blessing when mature palms can be installed without someone leaving a hose running for several hours.

Along with the flowering Madagascar periwinkle, baobabs and the traveler’s, Bismark, and raffia palms, Dypsis decaryi are among the distinctive flora of Madagascar, where their habitats are seriously endangered by the island nation’s rampant deforestation. Thus, the Florida propagation of these striking exotics may help keep triangle palms from extinction.

New to our ‘hood: A quintet of triangle palms awaits installation
Copyright © 2013, Skip Lombardi

We’re delighted to welcome these stately, silvery palms to the neighborhood and wish them their share of April showers!

The post Palm Sunday in Sarasota first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

Remembering Dave Brubeck

Skip — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 23:23:20 +0000

I‘ve been a Dave Brubeck fan for more than 50 years. Although I knew him only through his concerts and recordings, the news of his death yesterday struck me like the loss of a dear, old friend.

Photo Credit: Richard Avedon

I had an uncle—an ardent Jazz fan—who always seemed to have a new recording with him each time he visited. By the time I first heard Dave Brubeck in 1954 or ’55, I was already familiar with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and the rest of the mostly black, New York-based, Hard Bop Jazz players. Even though I was only eight years old, I had, thanks to my uncle, developed a good basis for comparison of their different styles.

Dave Brubeck was considered to be a “West Coast” musician: a member of the “Cool School” of Jazz. And indeed, his music—particularly with Paul Desmond on alto saxophone—lacked the edge and drive that typified the “East Coast” be-bop of the day. But he and his quartet played with élan, facility, brilliant contrapuntal improvisation, and previously unheard harmonies.

My very first Dave Brubeck album was Jazz—Red Hot and Cool. Recorded live in New York City at a nightclub called Basin Street East, it captivated me.

The album included a number of tunes considered to be part of “The Great American Songbook.” Brought up-to-date with Brubeck’s unique sense of harmony and Paul Desmond’s wonderful lyricism, their arrangements swirled above the ambient nightclub clinking of cocktail glasses.

Photo Credit: Richard Avedon

Beyond the music, that album, whose cover featured Fifties supermodel Suzy Parker and Brubeck in a nightclub, eptomized for me the coolness of Jazz. Richard Avedon—one of the premier fashion photographers of the 20th century—clicked the shutter at the hungry i, then the hippest of San Francisco’s nightspots. What many Brubeck fans have forgotten is that both Helena Rubinstein cosmetics and Columbia Records shared the same Avedon photo for their joint promotion of both the record album and Jazz, a new lipstick and nail polish color launched by Mme.Rubenstein. That interesting cross-disciplinary use of art predated Mad Men by several decades.

But my most powerful recollection is a simple four-bar modulation in the last chorus of George Gershwin’s Love Walked In. As a child, I had yet to acquire the vocabulary to describe what I heard, but all these years and an undergraduate degree in music theory and harmony later, I can easily retrofit the experience.

With twelve bars left in the tune, the group spontaneously modulated, or changed, the key of the tune, up a whole step for four measures of the final phrase before returning to the original key for the last eight measures. I had never heard anything like it and couldn’t understand it, but I felt completely drawn into the music. I have been similarly amazed by Dave Brubeck countless times since.

While I mourn his passing, I can console myself with some wonderful musical discoveries and memories, and continue to enjoy the great legacy he’s left behind. Rest in peace.

The post Remembering Dave Brubeck first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

Indian Potato Salad

Holly and Skip — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:02:01 +0000

It’s Independence Day weekend 2011 and your fridge is full. It’s 118° F. in Phoenix, in the 90’s in the mid-Atlantic states, and at least that hot in Florida, where thunderstorms will probably trip the breaker on your air-conditioner at least once during the holiday. You’re having people come over for a cook-out or taking food to a picnic, and you’ve already run twice to the bait shop or CVS for extra ice…

Well, here’s one dish that you can make ahead and that you don’t have to chill—Potato Salad.

“Potato salad!? Are you kidding?” you say, remembering decades of horror stories of mayo-dressed salads that sickened entire First Communion parties or sent picnicking beachcombers to the ER.

Yes, potato salad. But one made without mayonnaise.

Today’s recipe takes a cue from a democracy as raucous as our own—India, where millions of vegetarians don’t eat eggs, but where cooks have devised myriad ways to elevate spuds to nirvana. Speaking of elevation, during the British Raj, gardeners developed local varieties for their hill-stations, their cooler summer residences. Sixteenth-century Portuguese traders first introduced the potato to India, but local laborers and English colonizers were the ones who struggled through droughts and monsoons to establish the crop in the Subcontinent. The named Indian cultivars of Solanum tuberosum are the stuff of Masterpiece Theatre: Magnum Bonum, Royal Kidney, Great Scot, and (our favorite) Craig’s Defiance. The Brits were homesick for their chips and shepherd’s pies, but what the spice masters of India learned to do with this New World tuber took things to another level. As a vehicle for other flavors, nothing beats the potato.

The potato also gives us an opportunity to champion a once-common American kitchen fixture that Indians continue to use with ease and flair. Though most American cooks don’t think of it as a hot-weather heat-saver, the pressure cooker is a miserly consumer of BTU’s and, thus, easy on the cook as well as the planet. (Of all the freedoms Americans enjoy and celebrate this weekend, for most of us, liberation from the power-grid is not one of them.) Because it cooks foods so much faster than a typical, lidded pot, we use our pressure cooker throughout the hot weather, to cut down on kitchen heat.

In particular, we love ours because it cooks whole potatoes in their skins so quickly and evenly. Just the energy saved in making your summertime potato salads could justify getting one. We promise you’ll find the pressure cooker to be, as one of us likes to say when he is feeling stentorian, “a trusted and valuable member of the culinary armamentarium.” The fact is that today’s pressure cookers are simple, efficient, and safe. (So, now you can relegate any urban legends about exploding pressure-cookers to the trash, right along with those bad mayonnaise memories.)

We offer our fear-free Indian Potato Salad. Whether you make it with—or without—a pressure cooker, do so at least an hour (and up to 12 hours) ahead of serving and remember that the flavors need a little time to meld. The salad is best at room temperature. You can refrigerate any leftovers, but we rarely have any.

Indian Potato Salad

Ingredients:

2 lbs. Waxy potatoes (we like Klondike Rose & Yukon Gold)
2 tsp. Whole mustard seeds (brown or yellow)
1 Tbs. Canola or other neutral oil
1/4 tsp. Salt
1/2 tsp. Hot red pepper flakes (optional)
4 Tbs. Vinegar (we like white wine or cider vinegar)
1/2 Cup Fresh cilantro or spearmint leaves, snipped with scissors
Freshly ground black pepper & salt, to taste.

Fresh lime wedges for garnish

Preparation:

To cook the potatoes:

Boil whole, scrubbed potatoes in their skins. Cook them until there is slight resistance when you try to pierce one to the center with the point of a sharp knife. Turn off the burner and leave them, covered in the hot water, until you are ready to use them. They will continue to cook.

If you are using a pressure cooker, follow the product directions for whole potatoes, or save even more energy and do it our way:

Fill the cooker half-way with water and unpeeled potatoes. Seal the cooker and bring it up to pressure on high heat. When it begins to hiss, reduce heat to medium and let the potatoes cook for 5 minutes. Turn the burner off and let the cooker sit, undisturbed, for at least 30 minutes. (Longer is OK. The residual heat will not overcook the potatoes.) This formula will cook two or three pounds of potatoes (even if they are mixed sizes) to perfection.

When you are ready to make the salad, release any remaining pressure from the pot and open the pressure cooker.

No matter how you have boiled your potatoes, the directions are now the same:

Drain the potatoes and put them cut them into large (1 1/2-inch / 4 cm) chunks, leaving the skins on the pieces. Put the pieces in a large mixing bowl and set aside.

Place the mustard seeds, oil, and 1/4 tsp. salt in a very small sauce pan with a lid. (Because you will have it on very high heat, do not use a pan with a synthetic non-stick coating, like Teflon. However, anodized aluminum is okay.)

Stir the seeds to coat them with the oil and cover the pan. Heat a small burner to high. With the lid securely on, place the pan on the hot burner and reduce the heat to medium. You will soon begin to hear the mustard seeds pop in the hot oil. When the popping stops (in about one minute or less), turn off the burner. Keeping the lid on, remove the pan from the heat and set aside to cool slightly for 1 minute. Keep it covered as a few more seeds may pop.

After a minute has passed, and if you are using the hot pepper flakes, stir them into the hot oil and seeds.

Have the vinegar at hand.

With a spoon, scrape all the toasted seeds and oil from the pan into the potatoes. Carefully pour the vinegar into the sauce pan to rinse out any remaining seeds and oil and then pour that over the potatoes. With a large spatula or wooden spoon, gently stir the potatoes until the seeds are evenly distributed.

If the potatoes are still hot, wait 10 minutes until they have cooled slightly and then add the snipped cilantro or mint and freshly ground black pepper. Stir to distribute evenly. Taste for salt. You may add a little more vinegar, to taste; the potatoes will absorb it.

Serves 4 – 6, depending on your other side dishes

Feel free to vary the fresh herbs. For Indians, neither basil nor tarragon is a salad herb, but either is lovely with mustard seeds. To amplify the Indian aspect, we like to add freshly grated ginger and the rind of a grated lime. If you need more fireworks, judiciously add a few chopped chilies (fresh, pickled, or dried).

As our founding fathers demonstrated, the Fourth of July is an auspicious date for grand experiments!

The post Indian Potato Salad first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

Tracking Turkey

Holly Chase — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:29:30 +0000

“You first parents of the human race … who ruined yourselves for an
apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?”

— Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, French food writer.

In the late 18th century, shortly after the founding of the United States of America, the statesman Benjamin Franklin wrote to his daughter:

“I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the Representative of the Country; he is a Bird of bad moral Character, like those among Men who live by Sharping and Robbing, he is generally poor and often very lousy…The Turkey is a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America.” (1)

No stranger to the pleasures of the table, Ben Franklin was doubtless well acquainted with the wild turkey, a game bird indigenous to North and Central America.

In considering these birds, I would like, first of all, to deal with the English noun “turkey.” Unabashedly, I confess it to be my inspiration for this paper, which I first delivered in the country of the same name.

The most convincing etymological sources (2) speak of fowl known as “turkey cocks” in reference to large domesticated birds (provably of the genus Pavo). By mid-16th century “Guinea hens” were synonymous with “turkey-cocks” and referred to fowl of African origin. Some of these were supposed to have been brought from West Africa (Guinea) and others from Numidia via the Turkish dominions, hence the name “turkey.” Sixteenth century Spanish explorers in Mexico found that the Aztecs had domesticated a large fan-tailed bird, the huexolotl, which was prized for its meat and regularly offered as tribute to the Aztec monarch, Montezuma. The Spaniards introduced this bird to Europe, where the confusion over its name began.

For those of you who like to know the origins of words you eat, here is a brief summary of what happened to the feathered pride of the Aztecs:

The Spaniards called the new bird pavo, after the European fowls they knew.The French, considering the bird to be from the general Caribbean region called the creature poule d’Indes, or dinde, after the Caribbean islands Columbus had mistaken for India, and which we call the West Indies. Later, in provincial areas of France, the birds were sometimes known as jusites after Jesuit brothers who started a turkey farm near Bourges. (3)

Linnaeus, the great Swedish classifier, mistakenly gave the New World creature the Latin name that rightfully belonged to the Old World fowl, Meleagris gallopavo. Thus, something else (Numida meleagris) had to be concocted for the turkey-cock. (Meleagris means speckled.) (4)

The English called it turkey because it was closer in appearance to their turkey-cocks that to anything else they’d seen. The Turks, probably to agree with the French, or maybe because they thought it inappropriate to roast a creature named for their nation, chose to call the bird hindi, thus pushing matters farther east.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese preferred to go west. Sources mention that they wrongly supposed the bird to have come from Peru. To this day, Portuguese speakers from Brazil to Goa call the bird peru. And thanks to Portuguese trade with India, the Hindi name for turkey is piru.

The Arabs took their own word for cockerel, dik, and added the Arabic adjective pertaining to Turkey or Asia Minor, rumi, which referred back to the Byzantine Empire, of the Land of Rome. Thus, dik rumi, an Arab turkey, is really a Roman rooster.

But it is none other than the wild Meleagris gallopavo that American folklore has solidly established itself as one of the native foods enjoyed by the Puritan colonists of Massachusetts when they celebrated their first Thanksgiving in 1621. That feast was, by all accounts, a prayerful occasion during which the English pilgrims thanked their Savior for a safe flight from religious persecution in England and for the bounty of their first harvest in the New World.

To properly appreciate turkey’s place within the cuisine of the United States, one must look briefly at the development of our holiday commemorating the Pilgrims. As a feast-day, it was not an instant success. After that initial Pilgrim banquet, over two centuries would pass before Thanksgiving, the most “typically American” of celebrations, was officially decreed a national holiday.

Beginning in the 1820’s, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of an influential women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, carried on a patriotic crusade for the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday. She wrote hundreds of editorials and letters urging politicians, clergymen and the readers of her periodical to lobby for this cause. Finally, in 1863 in the midst of the American Civil War and shortly after the Northern Army’s victory at Gettysburg, the combination of Mrs. Hale’s annual exhortations and the Northern desire to celebrate its triumph prompted President Lincoln to proclaim the third Thursday in November as the national day of Thanksgiving. As early as 1857, Mrs. Hale filled the cookery pages of the November issue of Godey’s with recipes for roast turkey and other dishes to be served at the Thanksgiving meal. Despite myriad changes in food technology, taste, and society since then, American magazine and newspaper food editors still adhere to Mrs. Hale’s basic format.

Mrs. Hale and President Lincoln may have assured the seasonal demand for turkey, but so plentiful were the wild turkeys that turkey breeding for superior flesh did not attract significant commercial interest until the 20th century. Earlier American turkey breeders had concentrated on the production of large feathers deemed essential for Victorian womens’ hats and fans. (5)

While the fashion for turkey plumes may have subsided, the cooking of turkeys continued to be a subject of much discussion and divergent opinion. In “Statesmen’s Dishes and How to Cook Them” (1890), Mrs. Stephen J. Field suggested that “three days before [a turkey] is slaughtered, it should have an English walnut forced down its throat three times a day and a glass of sherry once a day. The meat will be deliciously tender and have a fine nutty flavor.” (6) An eighteenth century adventurer in the American Midwest extolled the merits of stewing a turkey in racoon fat. (7)

Currently, one highly successful processor of oven-ready turkeys advertises birds that are “self-basting.” Its raw turkeys are injected with corn oil to keep the meat from becoming too dry. Many of these turkeys are also equipped with heat-sensitive devices that indicate precisely when the bird is done to perfection.

Though its stuffings of bread-crumbs and herbs, nuts and dried fruits, sausage meat or oysters vary widely from kitchen to kitchen, a roast turkey is an essentially simple affair. It is no surprise that in the American idiom, “to talk turkey” means to speak plainly and directly, to deal with the basics. Hence one well-known firm’s “Turkey-Talk Line,” a toll-free telephone assistance service which operates from a few weeks before Thanksgiving through the Christmas-New Year holidays. Despite innovations such as birds with embedded thermometers, the firm receives thousands of calls from distraught, once-a-year turkey chefs who prove that “fool-proof” is a relative term. Panic frequently arises when a consumer has neglected to remove the bird’s plastic wrapping before placing it in the oven or has forgotten to turn the oven on until half an hour before dinner is to be served to a dozen guests.

Sentiments about Thanksgiving are strong. And since a superabundance of family members and food are what characterize the celebration for most Americans, it is not surprising that there is a collective attachment to family food traditions. This tends to discourage avant-garde experimentation. Turkeys stuffed with couscous or accompanied by a kiwi chutney do appear in magazines, but by and large, most Americans cooking for their families are unlikely to tamper with tradition at Thanksgiving. Though few would dispute the festiveness of a fine rack of lamb or a magnificent bouillabaisse, few Americans would seriously consider either suitable Thanksgiving fare. (8)

By virtue of its iconic role in the Thanksgiving dinner, turkey has become an American symbol—not so much to non-Americans, who may associate the United States with beef cattle, great grain fields, and fast food—but by Americans themselves.

Unofficially, at least, the bird with the ugly head and the spectacular plumage eventually achieved some of the status Ben Franklin begrudged the eagle. During World War II, extraordinary measures were taken to ensure that American troops overseas, and even those fighting on the front lines, were given hot turkey dinners on Thanksgiving Day. (9) & (10)

Oddly, mass popularity has not diminished wealthy or fad-following Americans’ appetite for turkey. It continues to be a meat for feasts even as improved farming has made it plentiful and cheap enough to be used instead of beef or pork scraps in sausages and hot dogs. And lean, freshly ground turkey, sold alongside ground beef in supermarkets the year round, carries no message of either Pilgrim piety or holiday largesse. More often than not, it is simply labeled “low-cholesterol.”

Despite advertising’s transformation of turkey into an inexpensive “health food,” a browned, well-basted roast turkey is in no danger of being supplanted as the centerpiece of our holiday devoted to unabashed gluttony. But what irony that the turkey (albeit stripped of its flavorful, fattening skin) should also epitomize prudent restraint for body-conscious Americans today. What would the Pilgrims think?

— Holly Chase

Notes & Bibliography

(1) The American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American
Eating and Drinking, American Heritage Publishing Co., 1964; p. 482.
(2) The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition.
(3) Larousse Gastronomique (English edition), Crown Publishers, New
York, 1964.
(4) The Oxford English Dictionary.
(5) The Thansgiving Book, by Lucille Recht Penner (Hastings House, New
York, 1996), p. 115.
(6) See note 1, p. 483
(7) The Wild Turkey: Its History & Domestication, by A.W. Schorger
(University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Okla; 1966, pp. 370-1). An
entertaining blend of exhaustive research and superior writing– food
scholarship at its zenith.
(8) When “new” dishes enter the Thanksgiving repertoire, food writers tend to link them to earlier American traditions. And America, at least in the geographical sense, certainly includes Mexico, source of the turkey. Yet I know of no proposals to add two especially splendid Mexican turkey recipes to the Thanksgiving table.

The first Spaniards in Mexico wrote that the Aztecs ate turkey with a sauce based on bitter chocolate, the ancestor of today’s mole poblano, a seductive poultry sauce from the Mexican state of Puebla. And then there is pavo en escabeche, stewed turkey marinated in oil, vinegar, herbs and onions—a dish with obvious Mediterranean antecedents.

(9) Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History, by Diana Karter Applebaum (Facts on File Publications, New York and Bicester, England, 1985); pp. 249-250.

(10) The most typical “trimmings” would include a sage and bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, cranberry relish, creamed onions and fresh celery.

Paper adapted from a lecture given in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1990 at the Third International Food Congress (Ucuncu Milletlerarasi Yemek Kongresi).

The post Tracking Turkey first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

How To Get To Carnegie Hall

Skip — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:42:04 +0000

A few weeks ago I passed a pleasant afternoon watching the young Japanese golf pro, Ryo Ishikawa scoring one birdie after another in the President’s Cup matches. I couldn’t help thinking: “Hasn’t anyone told this kid that this game is hard?” Simultaneously, the friend with whom I was watching, said aloud “I imagine he’s done a fair amount of practicing.”

Photo courtesy Golf Digest

And of course, Ryo Ishikawa has. This young fellow was earning ten million dollars a year in endorsements during his senior year of high school.

Of course I couldn’t help thinking about my own golf game and how just a few months earlier I’d realized that I could do with a little practice myself. But that afternoon in front of the TV, I had a revelation and it was that I’ve probably forgotten more about practicing than whatever this eighteen year-old prodigy has had time to learn, even though our professional disciplines are fairways apart. As a former professional musician who’s played drums in a lot of orchestra pits on Broadway, I know a lot about practice.

Until I actually got started, though, what I hadn’t put together was that the practice regimen I’d learned over many years, most of it in cramped, poorly ventilated, sound-proof rooms, would serve me just as well under an open sky at the driving range. This summer I decided to consciously apply the principles I’d learned in music school to the re-learning of the golf swing.

Recognizing that I’d developed so many bad habits swinging a golf club that it would be too difficult to attack them one at a time, I knew I had to start from scratch. My swing needed a complete overhaul.

So I’ve drawn on my years of music study to rebuild my swing. Along the way, I’ve learned a few things:

• You cannot improve your game—even a little bit—if you don’t practice.

But the good news there is that you don’t need to spend hours—and money—at a driving range; you can practice by simply swinging a club at home. If you can find a large mirror, or a reflective sliding glass door in a safe location, you can watch yourself set up to an imaginary ball—you may be surprised at what you see—and you can swing a club endlessly on the proper swing path without ever reaching the bottom of a bucket of balls.

• You must never practice your mistakes.

How many times have you been at a driving range and watched someone beat the daylights out of fifty or a hundred balls, none of which went straight…and some of which never became airborne? You saw a pattern emerge: slice, hook, fat shot, thin shot…. The hapless duffer hadn’t swung the club the same way twice though he’d gone through an entire bucket.

Even Vladimir Horowitz didn’t get it right the first time he tried to play an unfamiliar piece of music, so how can we lesser mortals ever hope to reach a point of satisfaction? We can emulate Horowitz, who played the difficult passages at a slower tempo until he felt comfortable. You should…

• Practice your swing only as fast as you can do it correctly.

We’re way beyond the days when Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons was the definitive statement about the golf swing (and back then woods were indeed made from wood). Today the Internet is a treasure trove of golf education. If you want to address the ball properly, Tiger’s swing coach, Hank Haney, is online and will teach you—free of charge. Want to develop a wide back-swing like Davis Love III’s? David Ledbetter will show you how. You can spend hours watching Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, and Fred Couples hit them over the moon with what appears to be no effort at all, but eventually YOU need to put down the remote and get of the sofa to practice. And you must do it correctly.

So like Vladimir Horowitz when he had to tackle a difficult passage, you must slow down to the point at which you can get it right. And you must repeat the correct motions over and over until they are automatic, until you are no longer able to do it incorrectly. You didn’t acquire those bad habits overnight, and you may even have compensated for your slice or hook to be able to play reasonably well. But starting over and adhering to slow, methodical practice—in tempo and free of tension—will pay handsome rewards when you take it back to the golf course.

• Practice in tempo.

Even a musical speed-demon like Lang Lang needs to go slowly the first time he sight-reads a new piece of music. But he’ll do it in tempo and “work it up.” This is as applicable to golf as it is to the piano.

A good golf swing has a clear and distinct tempo. As you go about your practice routine, be mindful of your own rhythm. Again, Ernie Els and Fred Couples look positively lazy when they swing a golf club but each has his own clearly discernible tempo. Arnold Palmer and Lee Trevino used to yank the club back and lunge through the ball faster than the blink of an eye but they, too, did it in tempo.

Some instructors suggest counting, “one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three,” with “one” being the start of the backswing and “three” being the moment of impact. Some recommend humming throughout the swing, while others suggest inhaling deeply on the backswing and exhaling through the mouth on the downswing. Just remember, if at any point your breathing isn’t smooth, you’re slipping out of tempo.

• You must free your body of tension.

When Jack Nicklaus was taking the golf world by storm, a sportswriter clumsily declared that the golfer was a “Power Hitter.” Certainly Mr. Nicklaus was very fit and athletic, but power in the golf swing derives from the coordinated turning of the hips, torso, and shoulders to develop clubhead speed. Golf is not a game of power but, rather, of centrifugal force.

So if you’re gripping the club too tightly, or trying to hit the ball with the power of your arms, you’re creating tension and sacrificing clubhead speed.

One of the best drills I’ve found for taking a relaxed swing is called the “half swing,” or “nine to three” drill. (Dave Pelz extolls the virtue of the “nine o’clock swing” for wedge play, too.)

Assume your normal stance to address the ball. Then, turning your shoulders and maintaining a very light grip on the club, bring the club back so that your arms are parallel to the ground (9 on a clock face). Next, hinge your wrists upward so the club is perpendicular to the ground.

When you’ve reached 9 o’clock, turn your shoulders back, let your arms fall through and swing back so your arms are parallel to the ground on the opposite side of your body (3 on a clock face). Now, hinge the wrists again so the club is perpendicular to the ground. Note that most of your weight should now be on your outside foot.

It’s a lot to keep in mind, so if you feel any tension at any point in this exercise, slow down—but stay in tempo. Just relax and feel the centrifugal force of the clubhead.

As you continue to do this exercise you’ll discover some amazing things: Your body—without any coaching—begins to move exactly as it should, limbs and weight moving in exactly the proper sequence. On the backswing, you’ll feel your weight transfer naturally to your back foot. On the downswing, you’ll feel your shoulders turn just when they should, and you’ll arrive at the finish position in perfect balance with most of your weight on your outside foot. Remarkable. Do this exercise for about five minutes per day and you’ll experience some wonderful results.

If they’re anything like mine, you’ll discover that you’ve stopped hitting the ball fat or thin. You’ll derive a quiet satisfaction from hitting crisp iron shots. Your ball will be on the green (or at least in the same zipcode) in two or three shots—instead of five or six. With each round, your passion for the game will only increase.

Of course, there is that tawdry business about your short game, but take your successes as they come. One side benefit of practice is that you’ll develop an appreciation for the touring pros whose post-match assessments are reminiscent of Alan Greenspan’s statements on the economy. Even if you never understood Greenspeak, you’ll know what a golf pro means when he says, “My score didn’t reflect the quality of my shotmaking today”

But you will be a better golfer.

The post How To Get To Carnegie Hall first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

Happy Easter

Holly and Skip — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:37:11 +0000

At this time of year we never know what we’ll find at the Red Barn in Bradenton, but we know it will always be fresh and mostly local.

Best wishes for a glorious, happy Easter.

The post Happy Easter first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

Wal*Mart E-Mail Scam

Skip — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:04:08 +0000

As I wrote in the last post, I don’t ordinarily write about technical issues, but they’ve been cropping up more often lately. Today’s scam comes to us from a malicious Web site in Barcelona, Spain called http://formulacoches dot com. The domain name is registered to Jose Luis de las Heras Flores, but he would have you believe you’ve logged into the Wal*Mart site to participate in a survey.

Congratulations!

You’ve been selected to take part in our quick and easy 9 questions survey.
In return we will credit $90.00 to your account – Just for your time!

Please spare two minutes of your time and take part in our online survey so we can improve our services.
Don’t miss this chance to change something.

To access the form please click the link below :

http://www.walmart.com/survey.html

Of course, if you click the link above, the real Wal*Mart’s Web site will tell you it has no such page. But the actual link in the e-mail points to the following address (Which I’ve disabled… you really don’t want to see the Web site):
http://www.formulacoches.com/ WalMart/ Stores/ Inc/ online/ survey/ index.html

Anyway, if you do go there, you’ll get to a screen that looks just like the Wal*Mart Web site, and you’ll click a couple of yes-or-no questions and you’ll get a message that says, “Congratulations…etc.” Then you’ll be asked to tell those nice folks your Wal*Mart account info so they can “credit your account.” Don’t Do It!!!

This is the point at which those zany vandals at formulacoches dot com will record your Wal*Mart account number and password, and go off on a shopping spree with your good credit.

If you do get one of these messages, just delete it. If Wal*Mart really wanted your feedback, they’d give you a form to fill out at the store. And if they were going to reward you for your time, they’d do it at their customer service window.

The post Wal*Mart E-Mail Scam first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

You Can Get Anything Here

Skip — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:03:14 +0000

nd I thought I had seen it all when I saw the truck for the Shower Door Installation Service. They didn’t sell them…they simply installed them. And as nearly as I could tell, the folks who operate this business don’t sell clothes dryers either. Of course if I needed to have the vent on my clothes dryer cleaned, I would expect to have it done by a professional.

We truly seem to live in an age of specialization.

The post You Can Get Anything Here first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

If That Isn’t Love…

Skip — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:47:25 +0000

Marcella and Victor Hazan

nteresting article in today’s New York Times about a new memoir from the doyenne of La Cucina Italiana (and Long Boat Key resident), Marcella Hazan. You can read it here.

It reminds me of a lyric to an old Fats Waller tune: “If that isn’t love, it’ll have to do ’till the real thing comes along.”

The post If That Isn’t Love… first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.