Sarasota Soundings

Photograph courtesy of QuintanaRoo on Flickr

You’ve been nominated. Perhaps your family has issued a decree. Or maybe, it’s simply your turn. No matter what the reason, you’re hosting Thanksgiving dinner next week. This need not be a burden. In fact, given the right planning and organization, orchestrating Thanksgiving dinner can be a pleasure.

I’ve found that the key to the successful dinner is thinking backwards. Start your Thanksgiving planning by visualizing yourself surrounded by family and friends at the dinner table, then rewind your mental video to determine how you got there. Ask yourself which foods took the least amount of preparation, which took the most. Write these things down. Make a list.

Now, add a little detail to the list to remind yourself which dishes can be prepared the day (or evening) before. Which dishes need to be prepared Thanksgiving Day? Which must be prepared within an hour of dinner?

At this point, you will have at least a vague idea for your plan of attack. So now it’s time to further refine the list. In fact, it’s time to begin to create a schedule. For example, if you intend to serve dinner at 2:00 p.m., and have calculated that the turkey will take three hours to roast, and half hour to rest before carving, the bird needs to be in the oven at 10:00 a.m.

Why 10:00, and not 10:30? In addition to the three and a half hours for roasting and resting, I’ve factored in 15 minutes to pre-heat the oven, and 15 minutes to carve the bird and arrange it on a serving platter. Your schedule should reflect all of these variables.

By now, your initial list has probably become three or four lists as you prioritize the steps leading to that wonderful image of yourself sitting among family and friends at the table. The next stage in the process is to identify the tasks involved in readying the ingredients for individual dishes: the prep work.

How lovely to watch a rock star chef on Food TV blithely talking about adding a cup of chopped onions to a sauté pan, as her perfectly manicured hand reaches across an Italian granite counter to retrieve a cup of chopped onions. Of course, TV chefs have the benefit of having four sous-chefs backstage who keep them supplied with all the chopped, minced, pureed, ground, or marinated ingredients they’ll need to create a smooth-running half-hour television show. You, too, can enjoy having these things prepped in advance (although you probably can’t count on having the four sous-chefs backstage).

As part of your master schedule, allow plenty of time for prep work. This will greatly reduce any cooking anxieties. You do not want to be hunting for a clove of garlic in a refrigerator stuffed with food for twenty while you have a pan of hot oil waiting for you on the stove.

Now is also the time to think about how many of the recipes on your menu will require the same ingredients. If, for example, you have two dishes on your menu, each requiring a cup of chopped onions, be sure to chop two cups of onions to have on hand, pre-measured and ready to go when the time comes to cook. Try to think of other ingredients that can also be prepped early: have winter squash that can be peeled and cubed? Brussels sprouts to be trimmed and scored?

One task that you can check off now, days before Thanksgiving, is making sure your oven is properly calibrated. If you don’t already own one, get an inexpensive oven thermometer. Test to see if the temperature you set on your oven thermostat is indeed what is displayed on your thermometer. If your oven’s temperature does not match your control thermometer, you’ll know in advance that you’ll have to compensate, setting the oven temperature a little higher or lower. You don’t want burned pie crust or underdone potatoes.

In addition, it would be wise—again, if you don’t already have one—to get an instant-read meat thermometer for your turkey. Knowing that you’ve cooked your turkey to an internal temperature of 165 F. will give you a great deal of confidence and allow you to focus on the myriad last-minute details of getting the meal to the table.

One last comment about prep work that will make the entire Thanksgiving experience more enjoyable: give yourself a break when you’ve finished chopping vegetables, measuring ingredients, and generally assuring yourself that you have the situation in hand. Relax, perhaps with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine ,before you begin the actual cooking.

This break provides a peaceful interlude and helps you to mentally shift gears, to move from the self-supporting role of prep cook to the grander role chef de cuisine.

Of course, at some time before Thanksgiving, you’ll need to shop for ingredients. I’ve not spoken about shopping, because I feel there are too many variables. Factors such as your menu, proximity to a mega-store or specialized deli, your work schedule, etc. make it difficult to talk about provisioning in universal terms. Suffice it to say that if you can plan a menu and create a schedule, you’ll know what you need, and when.

So, menu set, shopping and prep work done, what do you do on Thanksgiving morning? First of all–trust no one. People are rarely more giving of themselves than at Thanksgiving, and offers to assist in the kitchen will be impassioned and extravagant. Be wary, be very wary. Should you delegate the creamed spinach details to a close friend or relative, don’t be surprised if Macy’s parade or the NFL game distracts your well-meaning helper and leaves you with lumpy bèchamel for your spinach.

But it’s okay. You’ve factored that into your schedule, and, you, the unflappable you, can pick up the slack. When I say that you shouldn’t trust anyone, I mean that—as I’ve written elsewhere—90% of cooking is simply being there.

Finally, at times like Thanksgiving, I’m reminded of a piece of advice I got from a doctor friend: in case of an emergency, the first thing to do is take your own pulse. While things may not go entirely as planned, you need not panic. Wholly dependable or not, help will be at hand. An emergency in the kitchen is guaranteed to draw the most hardened NFL fan away from the game to lend support. Just stick to your schedule as best you can. Everything will be fine.

Thoughtful advance planning of your Thanksgiving meal will pay off at the dinner table; you’ll reap compliments and maybe even a round of applause from happy, thankful diners. As you dry the last of the pots and pans that served so well in preparing your feast, you can savor the ultimate satisfaction that comes from a job well done and the comforting knowledge that, next year, it will be someone else’s turn.

Three entertaining—and maybe useful resources:

The Butterball Hotline
Susan Stamberg’s Mother’s Cranberry Relish
Green Bean Casserole

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We don’t dine out often, but now that the summer crowd has left, we’ve treated ourselves to a few meals at local restaurants. My guests and I are all good cooks, and what we usually choose to prepare at home is different from the restaurant menu dishes that we sometimes crave. Perfectly battered, deep-fried seafood and stuffed squash blossoms are tricky at home, and we’re happy to patronize casual places that serve these delectations. Besides,once in a while, it’s nice to let someone else clear the table.

But the demeanor of our servers marred the experience of our two most recent restaurant meals. On both occasions the issue was one of etiquette. In each restaurant, I’d placed more than enough cash on the table to cover the register receipt for a meal we’d just enjoyed. And each time, as our server picked up the cash, she asked, “D’ you want change?” In both instances, I felt I’d just been deprived of a satisfying meal.

At one restaurant, the change due from our lunch tab would have topped thirty percent. At the other, the remainder would have been barely six percent. Of course, I have to ask myself if the servers’ expectations might also have been different. Perhaps our fellow luncheon patrons—many of whom sported hair-gel and gold chains—were lavish tippers. At the other, a burger-and-fries sports bar, our very young server (who might have just moved up from washing dishes) could have considered six percent to be just fine. We may never know.

Nevertheless, I’m thinking that in the future I might bring a little tent-sign to put on my table. It would say something like “Change is good.” or ” Caution: Tipping Point! ”

Several years ago while waiting for a European flight at JFK, I ordered a couple of beers for myself and my travelling companion at a bar in the passenger lounge. When our server presented our drinks, I handed her a ten-dollar bill for two three-dollar beers. Smirking, she said, “You don’t want change, do you?”

I was as appalled then as I am now, but back then we just chuckled and said, “Ahh, that’s why we love New York…” Back then, it made a good story. But now, it just seems coarse.

I hereby give notice to restaurateurs: We’ve passed the autumnal equinox, and it’s time for a little seasonal shape-up. The days are shorter, the nights crisper. Change is in the air.

Here in southeastern Connecticut where we spend our summers, Gambardella Seafood on the docks in Stonington nearly always has something good on offer when we drop in for a visit. But once in a while—as you can see below—we arrive to find them offloading a fishing boat that had just pulled up to their dock.

On this day, the catch was Whiting. Ordinarily not the most flavorful fish in the hold, we gave them a boost with lemon, olive oil, garlic, and red onion.

Following the marinade, we placed the fish on a bed of grape leaves and lemon balm and grilled them over hardwood charcoal. They completed their one-way trip from the Atlantic Ocean to our dinner table in slightly less than eight hours.

We don’t get to do that in Sarasota.

How much do most of us know about the tectonic rumblings in the publishing industry? We know that both independent booksellers and the big chains have been severely hurt by the recession. Yet, at this very time, readers are on a waiting-list to buy the latest version of an electronic device that weighs less than a pound and can store a small library.

Over the past decade, Amazon.com has changed the way readers shopped for books, and now they are changing the book itself. Customers in growing numbers are getting their print fixes from a digital reader—in particular from the Amazon Kindle ® and a competing device made by Sony.

Amazon threw down the gauntlet in the digital vs. paper book market with the introduction of their Kindle, and they have pushed publishers to offer their lists digitally in Amazon’s own proprietary Kindle format. With an opportunity to offer their backlists (including out-of-print titles) as well as new releases in dual media, the traditional dead-tree publishers have stepped into a new market. And everyone—authors, agents, publishers, geeks, and readers—is on a production, advertising and consumption roller coaster with parabolic learning curves.

Amazon’s digitized inventory is growing each day; right now they advertise over 285,000 titles available for download to Kindle. Everything from the latest John Grisham thriller to an Indian fusion cookbook is now appearing in both paper and digital formats. Meanwhile, Sony has responded with their own Sony Reader ®, capable of reading multiple formats for both uploading and downloading e-books.

Web-based publishers and authors with no bias toward either the Amazon or Sony format seem to like Lulu.com or Scribd.com, which also offer ever-growing catalogues of e-books that can be read on a computer or on the Sony Reader. But even a cursory look at the titles offered at each site makes it plain that the big names are on Amazon first, Sony second, and may not even bother with Lulu or Scribd.

In an effort to lure both traditional publishers and self-publishing authors to park their books with Scribd, the site boasts that anyone may download books and read them on either a computer screen OR the Sony Reader.

Scribd, an e-book-only website with over 500,000 titles that can be downloaded by anyone with a high-speed Internet connection, offered everything for free until a few weeks ago.

Does this remind anyone else of the VHS vs. Betamax matches of the 1980’s?

And while Goliath Amazon will pay a publisher (or self-publishing author) 35% of the sales price of a Kindle book, Scribd (the marketing David in this contest) says it will take a bite of only 20%…

The shake-out interests us, because we are both publishers and authors. Recently, we’d sold the last copies of my first book, La Cucina dei Poveri, The Cooking of the Poor, a cookbook and memoir of growing up in a Sicilian-American household.

While considering options for a second edition, we’d investigated the ever-morphing print-on-demand services. It should be no surprise that Amazon has also stepped into that realm.

So, even as we were still thinking only in terms of the kind of book with turnable pages, we followed a link for Kindle on the Amazon site. We read about it and did some research, reading what our fellow authors and small publishers were saying on their blogs. After a few days of this and application of our philosophy “If you throw enough vermicelli against the wall, eventually a strand is going to stick,” we decided to test Kindle. We prepared a second edition of the paper cookbook that would be an electronic version of the original. Ten days ago, that’s where our adventure began.,,

If you go to Amazon’s “Self-Publish With Us” link at the bottom right of their home page, you’ll be taken to all of their publishing options, including Kindle. From there, it’s just a couple of clicks to get to the Digital Text Platform (DTR) page. There, you’ll find a handy collection of “getting started” articles to help the fledgeling electronic publisher.

The first thing that caught my eye was Amazon’s preference that you submit your digital manuscript in HTML (Hyper-text Markup Language). They also seemed to know that the odds were good that your digital manuscript was a Word document, and they suggested you use Microsoft’s option to save your file as “filtered” HTML. This is not a great idea. My original manuscript grew from 250K (a quater of a megabyte) to 322K, primarily because of this sort of superfluous code:

<p class=MsoNormal><span style=’font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"’>&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style=’font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"’>&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style=’font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"’>&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style=’font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"’>&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style=’font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"’>&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style=’font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"’>&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style=’font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"’>&nbsp;</span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style=’text-align:center’><span
style=’font-size:26.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"’>La
Cucina dei Poveri</span></p>

Now, Amazon says they can translate this into their Kindle format, but my first attempt at uploading my converted manuscript didn’t look good at all in their Kindle simulator. They said they could also translate PDF files, but gave no guarantees, so I didn’t bother with that option. PDF is a format geared toward the printed page anyway, and I was learning very quickly that digital books represented a severe “paradigm shift.”

My next choice was to take my original manuscript and save it as a text file. Of course that didn’t gain me anything as far as getting Amazon to convert it to HTML goes, but it got me closer to doing the job myself. But it was then I remembered a piece of advice I’d given myself years ago:

And indeed, Google turned up a half-dozen self-published authors who described their travails with the Amazon conversion process.

One of them talked about opening the text-only version of his manuscript in a WYSIWYG editor, then adding the appropriate formatting and text attributes. That struck me as an idea worth pursuing. Amazon has endorsed Nvu and KompoZer, which are open-source HTML editors from those zany guys who brought you Mozilla. I downloaded and installed KompoZer, pasted the text version of my manuscript into a new document and got the following code:

<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-style: bold;">La Cucina dei Poveri</span><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
&nbsp; <br>
&nbsp;<br>

Certainly an improvement over Microsoft, but hardly good HTML. It was here that I went back to my Internet sources where I learned that Amazon truly supports only HTML 1.0–our mother tongue (the current standard is HTML 4.0). They provide limited support for CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, virtually no support for margins, extremely little support for fonts (Times New Roman or Garamond only, please), or font sizes. Bold and Italic work, though, and some of my predecessors have indeed found workarounds for the margin issue. So at that point, I concluded that if I were going to get this up on Amazon, I’d need to format it myself. While I’ve had significant experience coding HTML 1.0 with Notepad, I was beginning to doubt whether my project was worthwhile.

Nevertheless, I saved an HTML version of the KompoZer-generated code and opened that in my standard editor, Macromedia Homesite+. I should point out that my original manuscript was 227 pages with 94 recipes that needed to conform to my style guide. This would not be a trivial task.

Some of the formatting issues, though, were easily remedied with global find and replace:

<span style="font-style: italic;"> became <em>– about 400 times–with one mouse click. Replacing the closing </span> tag with </em> wasn’t quite so fast, but not bad, even one at a time.

<span style="font-style: bold;"> posed some different challenges because KompoZer seems to arbitrarily insert an &nbsp;, non-breaking space, character between the style declaration and the text it modifies. So I needed to go along one-at-a-time, and manually delete the &nbsp; characters when I found them.

Paragraphs were thornier still.

For reasons perhaps known only to Mozilla software engineers, KompoZer interprets paragraph boundaries as two hard carraige returns–<br><br>. Again, it was a relatively simple matter to replace them globally with a closing paragraph tag, </p>. But every so often—with no discernable pattern—they threw in <br>&nbsp;<br>, so that meant searching and replacing one-at-a-time again.

Adding opening paragraph tags—<p>—was brute force gruntwork. It was just a matter of getting the cursor to the beginning of a paragraph and clicking the <p> button from the Homesite toolbar. And I wrote a lot of paragraphs.

I mentioned earlier that an electronic book represents a “paradigm shift” away from printed books, particularly regarding the notion of pages. I’m told that some reader software has a little animation to suggest that you’re turning pages as you read, but e-books are no more than very long files of text where a “page” represents the viewable area of the reader. Anticipating this issue, software engineers at Amazon developed some extentions to HTML to allow authors to insert page breaks in their text. So, for example, if I want a recipe to begin at the top of a “page,” I merely insert the following tag: <mbp:pagebreak /> just above the name of the recipe.

Amazon also had the foresight to allow authors and publishers to determine the place in a book that appears first when the Kindle is turned on. If, for example, I didn’t feel the reader needed to see my copyright notice, I could place the following declaration above, say, the introduction. Kindle then knows that it should display the Introduction first, even if it isn’t the top of the file: <div id="start">

So after more than several hours of slogging through HTML code I wouldn’t have written myself, deleting most, modifying what was left, I had an HTML manuscript that looked pretty good on Kindle. And the process of uploading the files (the manuscript, cover and one interior illustration) were anticlimactic. Amazon has a great interface for that part.

So now it’s just a matter of resisting the urge to look at my sales ranking several times per day. But I will say, if you think you have a book in you, and you can write HTML 1.0 in Notepad, publishing for Kindle is the way to go.

But that’s only until someone decides that you need to be able to read Robert Ludlum on the GPS screeen of your hybrid vehicle or to download Suze Orman in the first-class cabin when you’re at 35,000 feet. However we may be publishing now in the middle of 2009, you can be certain that something will soon change. There are bound to be shake-outs in the industry over digital rights management, software/hardware compatibility, and whether or not consumers will download books as readily as ring-tones.