Daily Loaf

Routes Music is a documentary film acting as a roving music census, taking in the true musical passions (and disgusts) of the American people. We’re traveling all across the country, stopping along the way to interview local bands, take footage of live performances and chat with anyone and everyone. Learn more about the documentary here; check out all previous entries here.

“Where eeez yer pipe?”

A 6’4 security guard towered over me, glaring.

“Where eeez yer pipe?” he repeated in a thick Islands accent.

“What?” I replied, not sure he really just asked me what I think he just asked me.

“Where eeez yer pipe?” he asked again.

“My what?” I said again, still shocked.

“Yer pipe. Yer pipe.”

Now he was aggravated. I’m enjoying feigning ignorance.

“I don’t know what you’re saying, man.”

The guard switches tactics.

“Drugs?”

I smile.

“No, no drugs.”

“OK, go ahead.”

So began my very first experience at an extended-day music festival, and only my second time ever seeing the seminal jam band, Phish. Luckily, the rest of the three-day fest at the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, Calif. went smoother than my entry.

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“I’m from Tampa Bay area. I read your blog. For a couple of nights now I have been having a recurring dream. I keep seeing a line of cockroaches crawling on the floor and I kill them. What exactly does this means?” (sic)

If you think of the cockroach as a symbol you can begin to make some connections for yourself. Here’s one: I worked with a guy that dreamed of cockroaches all the time. He dreamed they were coming out of his pores. Well, when we began to look at connections he admitted to smoking pot.  For the unenlightened reader (and perhaps yourself) the very small end of a joint (marijuana cigarette) is called a roach. As we talked more about it he admitted he smoked a lot of pot. He smoked so much pot he had become a pothead. His dream was a warning get-a-clue dream.

Archetypally, a cockroach is a symbol of dirt and filth. It also represents the insect version of a rat and is tied to abandonment (i.e. rats leaving a sinking ship). It is believed that cockroaches and rats will inherit the earth; they are that indestructible as a species. Sometimes in dreams words need to be separated, so cockroach becomes cock and roach. Read the rest of this entry »

What do you get when you cross a t.v. actor, his actress wife, and a former beauty queen? Hollywood’s hottest new sex scandal!

The juicy new video** was first reported by Gawker.com. The “sex tape” “allegedly” shows Grey’s Anatomy actor Eric Dane getting naked n’ stoned with his wife, Rebecca Gayheart, and former Miss Teen USA, Kari Ann Peniche, who was stripped of her title after stripping her clothes for Playboy.

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What a steamy episode this was! I think the title says it all, but you’ll have to listen to our podcast to hear it for yourself.

The Quickfire Challenge this week was the infamous blindfolded taste test. Kelly Choi blinfolded each cheftestant and they had a variety of ingredients to taste and guess – hoisin sauce, ketchup, peanut butter, dashi, poppadum, etc. Surprisingly enough, Mr. Italian himself, Chiarello, took the win for this challenge. I especially enjoyed the blindfolding part, and apparently so did Keller.

Surprise! A bunch of old Top Chef has-beens enter the scene to team up with the chefs and help them cook a buffet spread for 200 “Hollywood insiders” (who or what they were inside, I had no clue). To my happy delight, we got Fabio (”This is not Top Scallop!”) and Jamie from the last season, Elia and Ilan from season 2, Richard, Spike and Antonia from season 3, and some other guys I only kind of remembered. Each chef picked their teams and got to work. But an even bigger surprise was in store for them (go figure) – they had to not only move their buffet outside (read: not good for a raw bar) but also lose a team member before service. Of course the show is going to try to screw everyone over by the final episode!

Highlights: Dale getting all up in Chiarello’s face while Chiarello tries to keep it together and not curb stomp this dude, Anita Lo cursing for what I think was the first time on TCM, the power duo of Bayless and Blais combining their powers to whip up a creamy avocado ice cream, Chiarello being a douchebag throughout most of the episode, Keller smoking out the night before the challenge, and Jay Rayner is badly in need of an extreme makeover. Drama! Action! Excitement! (And the podcast is even better.)

Hear the steamy podcast after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »

Top row: Forest Service Law enforcement Officers Walt Bliss, Mike Casey. Bottom row: Ramon Polo, Chiwa, and Matt Knudson receive national award for marijuana eradication. In 2006 the team eradicated 405,399 marijuana plants from 55 illegal marijuana sites on the Mendocino National Forest.

February is the month when we reflect on Black History; we celebrate both the physical and metaphysical hearts; with spring break closing in the condom companies begin their public service to encourage those hedonist college hipsters to wrap that rascal.

February is also WEED month; POT month. It is my opinion that we really don’t need a whole month to consider Marijuana.  The stoners over at NORML consider marijuana every day at 4:20.  The research on Marijuana is based on smoking habits akin to cigarette smoking and so, like cigar smokers who inhale, pot smokers who smoke at the frequency used in these terror statistics, are in the minority.  What has always bothered me about the prohibition on pot is that when something is outlawed the law can not touch it.  We have not made a dent in the drug war on pot in thirty years.

I can speak with authority on the pot war as I was a participant.  I was very in to retiring smugglers.  I was on the crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Sagebrush when we arrived in Jacksonville with a prize ship named the Heidi.  In every compartment on the Heidi there was pot and after the GSA and Customs and the DEA got finished keeping each other honest, the published weight of the content was 137 tons.  That is the record for marijuana on the east coast of the USA.  The reason the record haul was way back in 1979 is that there is no reason to import bulk marijuana anymore.  North eastern Kentucky is to pot what the Napa valley is to wine.  Mexico imports truck loads of pot into the States – a benefit of NAFTA.

Photo Phil Cameron, US Coast Guard Cutter Sagebrush W399; 10 tons of pot

Most of the best pot on earth comes form the USA.  I know there are those who have toured the Middle East and were in Vietnam who will challenge me but I must say that great pot is grown in every state by the best science known to the world; and it is much stronger than even the legendary pot from Vietnam and Cambodia back during the war.  The coveted Colombian Gold of the early to mid ‘70s is rat-pot compared to the stuff being raised in grow-houses in quiet neighborhoods.  Now with so much surplus property sitting empty, grow houses are springing up with the added advantage of ganging their power demand among four vacant houses on a block and delivering the power to one address.  This makes it tougher to look for power spikes as evidence of a grow-house operation.

But the point of my reflection on pot is not to talk about the Yankee ingenuity used by pot heads to further their buzz lust; it is to consider how much money we have spent to irritate a market that could, if managed properly, deliver heavy taxes to the National Debt.  The subterranean economy of pot is expansive.  I debated this issue with the late Governor Lawton He-Coon Chiles as he was insistent that pot is an advent drug.  That is to say that people who shoot crystal methamphetamine were encouraged to it by hippies at Grateful Dead concerts who were selling balloons of nitrous oxide and joints (The interview was a long time ago).

Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead with a Blunt

We have spent a butt load of money on keeping pot out of the USA when it is in the USA that most of it is being produced.  We have spent money on something that should be protected under the first amendment like any other thing that might impress the Darwin theory into play.  Willie Nelson is the poster child for NORML.  He is old.  He is real old.  He’s still here, that’s all I’m saying.

I don’t think pot is good for a person but if we are so bent on being free that tobacco and alcohol are legal we should consider the profit in it, and stop considering the loss.  So what if your kid smokes pot?  Mine kid doesn’t so why should I be deprived of the tax profit as a result of your poor parenting?

Just some thoughts on Pot since, it’s February and all.

KCO’D

The rice cooker was a lifesaver when making sushi in culinary school (and that’s about the only time we were allowed to use a household appliance). I found it to be useful because cooking rice perfectly on the stove is not as easy as one would think (and I’m not talking about the boil-in-bag kind). Outside of class, those cookers are convenient if you eat rice frequently, but never suited my personal cooking needs, or piqued my interest. Until I was shown the way, at least.

I was scrolling through my Google feed — packed with various food blog posts — and stumbled upon an article about rice cookers from the New York Times. What’s this?! Not only can it cook perfect rice, but it can steam, bake, saute, braise, simmer, poach and more? Read the rest of this entry »