The Boys of (Indian) Summer

CONTENT WARNING: THIS BLOG POSTING WILL BE OF INTEREST ONLY TO MY FELLOW BASEBALL FANS. IF YOU'RE THE SORT WHO JUST DOESN'T CARE THAT THIS YEAR THE CHICAGO CUBS MIGHT BE IN THEIR FIRST WORLD SERIES SINCE 1945, OR THAT YANKEE STADIUM JUST CLOSED AFTER 85 YEARS, OR THAT C.C. SABATHIA JUST MIGHT BE THE HOTTEST THING SINCE BOB FELLER, YOU'RE EXCUSED.

Well, here we are again. Today is September 22. Autumn officially begins at 11:44 this morning.

And not a moment too soon, if you ask me. My wife Valerie and I were out at Nationals Park here in Washington, D.C. yesterday watching two-thirds of the Three Stooges of baseball whack each other with custard pies. The hometown Washington Nationals and my hometown San Diego Padres were duking it out to see which team would be the first to board the bus for Palookaville.

The Padres won the game 6-2, actually sweeping the Nationals in a three-game series of Slapstick September Fun. Decision: the Friars get to hold the bus door while the Nats get settled in for the ride. But as soon as they've stowed their gear, they'll be next. Then it's off to Seattle to pick up the even-more pathetic Mariners, and Larry, Moe and Curly are off into the sunset for this year.

How yucko has it been? At the beginning of the game, the two teams had nearly identical win-loss records for the season: 58-97 for the Nats, 60-95 for the Padres. That's baseball's equivalent of driving past an open sewer. As of this bright, cool Monday morning when the hint of fall is just beginning to insinuate itself, the Nationals are 30 games out in the National League eastern division, in dead last place. The Padres are 20 games out in the National League western division, likewise in dead-last place.

This was like watching a war between Burkina Faso and Gabon, two countries that would probably have to float a loan to buy bullets.

The Nats and Padres will both be spending the winter trying to buy bullets, bet on it. But they'll be trying to get them cheap, which has been both teams' problem in recent seasons. The Padres need one thing more than any other: a reliable power hitter. They went shopping for one last winter, but decided all the power hitters were too expensive and acquired more pitching instead, which, with Jake Peavy, Chris Young and company, they already had plenty of. (Picture me pointing my index finger at my temple, a German gesture meaning "MORON(S).")

The result of such parsimony has been on display all season, and nowhere more than at Nationals Park yesterday. The Padres struck out no less than 15 times during the game, mostly against the excellent pitching of Washington's Odalis Perez, whom I was fortunate enough to see last week pitching seven innings of shutout ball against the New York Mets. I had two buddies from out of town, Doug Parker and Jay Arnold, visiting me last week, and we went to the ballpark to see that game. Doug, Jay and I, like all right-thinking people, hate all New York sports teams, and we cheered, if less than lustily, the Nats' 1-0 victory over the Mets. (The best part of watching either the Mets or the Yankees lose is not so much what you get to see as what you get to hear: their obnoxious, loudmouth-gorilla fans growing quieter and quieter as each inning goes by, until there's nothing left but slack jaws and blank, sheepish stares. You gotta love that.)

Yesterday's game put one in mind of two prizefighters trying to slug it out with the lights in the arena shut off. Kevin Kouzmanoff hit a two-run double in the first, then there was no offensive action on either side until Adrian Gonzales' solo homer in the sixth. Ryan Zimmerman, the only National with anything close to a dependable bat, replied with a solo shot of his own in the bottom of the sixth. The Padres scored three more runs in the eighth when Zimmerman committed an error, then Adrian Gonzales walked on a full count, sending Edgar Gonzales to second. There followed a flurry of hits that brought in both Gonzaleses and Kouzmanoff. Zimmerman struck again in the eighth with a single that scored Ryan Langerhans.

There was some grumbling among Nationals fans in our section when umpire Paul Emmel clearly blew a call, ruling Edgar Gonzales safe at first on a play when it was clear, even from where we were sitting along left field, that Aaron Boone had applied the tag before Gonzales stepped on first. But if you ask me, that's a little bit like the crew of the Titanic complaining that they weren't getting paid overtime. One blown call does not a game make, and in this case, on the 21st of September, with your team 30 games out of first place, well, let's just say that it doesn't make much difference whether you drown in 80 feet of water or 90 feet of water. Either way you've drowned. I was astonished two weeks ago to read that one of the Padres' players, I forget who, had told a sportswriter that he was a little disappointed now that the team had been numerically eliminated from postseason contention.

Excuse me. Did I miss something here? I thought this team was out of contention back in May.

But I'm a fan. We fans regard the role of sore loser as an entitlement, and we tend to be bitter.

Anabasis -- Greek for "not quite at the bottom" and the title of Xenophon's inspiring story of the march of the lost patrol of 10,000 Greeks who had to get back to their own territory after an engagement with the Persians. Washington's Anabasis moment this offseason could be getting the No. 1 pick in next summer's draft, an honor baseball awards each season's stinkiest team as a consolation prize. But lo and behold, the Seattle Mariners, over in the other league, who are at this moment playing .368 ball to the Nat's .372 and are 39 games out in their division, just might beat out Washington even for the title of Miss Congeniality.

But there is poetry even in misfortune. Word is that if the Nationals DO get the first draft pick next summer, they might select Stephen Strasburg, a right-handed pitcher from my own alma mater: San Diego State. So the Padres managed to play just rotten enough ball this season to avoid getting to select a hot young prospect from their own backyard. Geeze.

Oh, well. As I said before, it's power hitting the Padres really need, not more pitching. That goes double when they're playing at home, since Petco Park in San Diego has an outfield roughly the size of Wyoming. So I'll be holding my breath during the days of the hot stove league this winter to see if someone manages to persuade Padre ownership to get out a crowbar and pry open its coin purse and try to acquire just one reliable bat.

How many more seasons in Zimmerman's contract, by the way?

It's times like this I wish I liked football.

The Stumbling Gourmet Returns

With all the bloggers in America screaming about Sarah Palin vs. Joe Biden, I have the following sage observation to add to all of this political flamethrowing:

I have just discovered that Tropicana Blueberry/Pomegranate juice makes a great mix with white rum. Next I'm going to try their Peach/Mango juice with a little Bacardi and see how that tastes.

Two weeks ago I learned through doing that you can actually make excellent lasagna in a slow cooker. That's correct. You can make good lasagna in your good old crockpot. And it's not that hard, either.

The recipe calls of course for spaghetti sauce, but I'm proud to say that in the lasagna I made, the sauce was made from tomatoes picked from my own garden. This summer just past I decided to follow in my Dad's footsteps and plant a summer crop of tomatoes, as he used to do every year. And I've gotten a bumper crop: since early August they've been coming in faster than I can eat them. I've already got a batch of spaghetti sauce in the freezer, and I've been passing out tomatoes to my friends and neighbors, as my father and I used to do during those glorious California summers of watching baseball in the living room and tending tomatoes out by the back fence. Truth to tell, the tomatoes have been a godsend this summer; they've helped keep my mind off the stinko year that my San Diego Padres have been having: dead-last place, 17 games out, playing .387 ball.

I have tickets to the Sept. 21 Padres-Nationals game here in Washington, D.C. It ought to be a real Perils-of-Pauline cliffhanger: the Friars and the Nats will be duking it out to see who gets to share the worst record in baseball with the Seattle Mariners over in the other league.

To rub salt in my wounds, every time I turn on MLB Extra Innings, I see ex-Padres all over the tube. Good players that San Diego brain-farted itself out of: Mark Kotsay is with the Boston Red Sox now; Mike Cameron and Ramon Hernandez are both playing for the Milwaukee Brewers; Mark Loretta plays in Houston and Xavier Nady just signed with the New York Yankees. I watched Nady hit the first grand slam of his career against Atlanta three seasons ago. Now he's in pinstripes and the Padres are in the toilet.

Pardon me while I program February 15, the beginning of spring training, into my Microsoft Office alerts, and prepare to hibernate for the winter.

End of digression. You want to know how to make excellent lasagna in your slow cooker, right?

Here's what you do. Get:

A jar of spaghetti sauce (28 oz.)

half-a-dozen or so uncooked lasagna noodles

2 cups mozzarella cheese

15 oz. ricotta cheese

1/4 grated parmesan

1 lb. ground beef (optional)

Spread some of the sauce over the bottom of your crockpot. Bust up the lasagna noodles into 1-2 inch chunks and spread a layer over the sauce. Mix the three kinds of cheese up in a bowl. Sprinkle the cheese over the noodles, then cover with sauce, lay down another layer of busted-up noodles and do the same. If you want meat in your lasagna, brown the ground beef, season with salt, pepper and oregano and lay down a layer of beef between your second or third layer of sauce, noodles and cheese.
Cover your top layer with the last of your sauce and sprinkle with the last of your mozzarella. Cook on low 3-4 hours until cheese melts. When you're getting ready to serve, sprinkle parmesan over the top and cook for another 30 minutes.

I don't know where we all got the idea that Labor Day is the end of the grilling season, even here on the east coast. I walked into my local Safeway over in Hyattsville, MD on Monday, which was Labor Day, and all the charcoal was gone. The check-out cashier asked me, "Are you grilling today?" "I guess not." Labor Day does NOT signal the end of summer, I don't care what any kid moping around in anticipation of the first day of school says. Last year I had a contract job in a government office that required male employees to wear neckties. However they were given a break for the summer: as of Memorial Day you could take your necktie off, but you had to put it back on come Labor Day.

We guys discussed the absurdity of this. Here in Washington, when Labor Day comes around, you're still looking at three or four more weeks of 90-degree heat. We all agreed that Oct. 1 would be a more reasonable date for back-to-noose.

And so it was that last night, Sept. 4, I decided to grill outside. Safeway had replenished its charcoal supply by then. Back-to-School or no, it was 92 Fahrenheit, 33 Celsius here in Washington yesterday and I didn't feel like turning on the oven.

My neighbor Verna Williams, who when it comes to gardening makes me look like Oliver Douglas on Green Acres, gave me two big, beautiful red bell peppers from her garden. Trying to decide how to appropriately honor such a bounty, I decided to try my hand at a simple grilling treat I'd never made before. My Russian friends call it shashlik. We Americans tend to call it shish kebab.

Now, most shish kebab recipes call for beef sirloin tip. That's okay, but I'm kind of a traditionalist: Russian shashlik is made with lamb, not beef. Ideally, I would have found a 2-lb. lamb roast, but all Safeway had were lamb chops, so I bought four of them, trimmed the meat away from the bones and gave my doggies a lamb-bone treat, then diced up the lamb chops.

Another good thing to have handy when you're making shashlik is a box of Band-Aids for when you poke your fingers with those sharp little sticks on which you skewer your meat and vegetables.

But before you even get that far, you should marinate the meat of course. Here's the marinade I used. I can recommend it:

3/4 cup water
5 tbsp. soy sauce
3 tbsp. cooking oil
3 tbsp. vinegar
1 tsp. dry mustard
1 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
2 tbsp. brown sugar

Mix it all up in a bowl and toss in the meat for an hour or so.

The rest (after the meat):

Red bell pepper
Green bell pepper
sliced onion
Sliced large mushrooms


After that I skewered, alternately ("as great Malherbes alternates male and female rhymes,") lamb chunk, red bell pepper, onion, green bell pepper, big fat mushroom. Repeat until everything's gone. You ought to have about six shish kebabs when you're done, and two bandaged fingers. Season to taste with seasoned salt and pepper. Grill, turning regularly, about 20 minutes. Serve on a bed of rice.

Now...For those who missed my, and my friend Chris McDonald's, trip to Kansas City last June to attend the 13th semi-annual Ernest Hemingway conference, here once again is the recipe for Hemingway's famous daquiri known as a "Papa Doble" ("Made a run of 16 in here one night," Hemingway is said to have boasted to an interlocutor at the Floridita Bar in Havana):

2 jiggers (3 oz.) white rum
The juice of two limes
The juice of half a grapefruit
Six drops Grenadine (or cherry brandy)

Fill blender 1/4 with crushed ice. Pour the mixture over the ice and blend until it becomes pink and frothy. Serve in a margarita glass.

Made correctly, these have a fruity taste and are quite delicious. If you find that the grapefruit juice makes the drink a little too tart, you can add more grenadine to make it sweeter. My wife Valerie is a real alcohol wimp, so when I make one of these for her, I cut the rum portion in half. You might want to consider a similar mitigating factor for the alcohol wimps in your life.

I leave you with one of my favorite quotations from Francis Albert Sinatra (1915-1998):

"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."

Ring-a-ding-ding.