Cool dinner, hot descent

July 10, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

This corn-tomato salsa is not only tasty, it's pretty.

Summertime always calls for some bitchin’ in the kitchen, ’cause this place with its six south-facing windows gets hot. Deciding what to prepare for dinner is something of a struggle — cranking up the oven for enchiladas, oven-fried chicken or baked salmon is only adding fuel to the fire. But being a man of some appetite (as in “great fat bastard”), I generally want something more than a simple salad.

Whenever I’m stumped I turn to Martha Rose Shulman’s “Recipes for Health” feature in The New York Times. She focuses on fairly simple, seasonal dishes — as she puts it, “food that is vibrant and light, full of nutrients but by no means ascetic, fun to cook and a pleasure to eat” — and when I checked in on her yesterday she had posted a recipe for soft tacos with chicken and tomato-corn salsa whose cooking demanded only a single saucepan for poaching the bird and a skillet for warming the tortillas. No sweat, to coin a phrase.

“These light, fresh tacos make a wonderful summer meal,” Shulman wrote, and she did not lie. Happily, we have enough leftovers for a repeat performance tonight.

Meanwhile, Le Tour hits its first real mountain today. Astana is running the bunch as if they had the yellow jersey, while the guy who actually does, Fabian Cancellara, double-flatted on a descent and had to chase back on at speeds approaching 60 mph. Dude went around the corners like he was on rails. I wasn’t scared at all, but somebody shit in my seat.

• Late update: Once again, Big Tex did not get the yellow jersey, and there is much chin music among my colleagues as to just how he feels about Alberto Contador hitting the afterburners on the final klicks of the climb to Arcalis. The two of them probably split a sixer of Shiner Bock in the Astana bus and cackled at the befuddled chamois-sniffers, professional and amateur alike.

Annnnnnd we’re off

July 4, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Chamois-sniffers worldwide are weeping into their FRS energy drink now that Lance Armstrong has failed to croak everyone in his first Tour time trial in four years. Still, the old man cranked out a strong early time, avoiding the sort of miscue that seems to dog Garmin’s David Millar, who nearly ate a barrier after overcooking a corner and was lucky to keep the rubber side down.

And as usual, it didn’t matter who was actually leading the race. At 10 a.m. Bibleburg time, with 100 riders through the first time check, that was Levi Leipheimer, who gets less love from the talking heads than a baby-seal sandwich at a PETA picnic. You can just see Levi slapping Odessa’s butt in the heat of passion, yelling, “Say my name! Say my name!”, and Odessa murmuring, “OK … um, what is it again?” Dude is the Rodney Dangerfield of pro cycling.

Fabian Cancellara finally shut everybody up by riding so fast that Carlos Sastre got off his bicycle to see what was the matter; the defending champ, who if anything is getting even less love than Leipheimer, wound up 21st at 1:06 back. Poor sod didn’t even have the chance to start in the yellow jersey nobody believes he earned.

Meanwhile, here in the Land of the Big PX it’s the Fourth of July, or July Fourth, depending upon whether you are a Red, White and Blue American or one of the mongrel hordes with all the oil and bottomless credit. Bibleburg is too broke to put on its annual fireworks display, but God is providing a little thunder and lightning for our amusement. Whether this is out of sympathy or a desire to barbecue a few barbecuers remains to be seen.

Sure wish He’d chuck a few bolts Sarah Palin’s way. I b’leeve the gal has done lost some of the Energizer in her bunny.

Off his feed

July 3, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

An old VeloNews 'toon by David Brintoni depicting Charles Pelkey at the VeloSwap flea market.

Well, the Tour hasn’t even started yet and Lance Armstrong has already dropped someone — VeloNews.com’s Charles Pelkey, from his Twitter feed.

No stranger to social media, Pelkey used Facebook to announce having been 86’d from Armstrong’s exclusive private club, which at last count had just 1,249,162 members. Noting that he had been blocked from the feed “at the request of the user,” Pelkey added, “I wonder if Dan Schorr felt like this when he made Nixon’s enemies’ list.”

Shoot, ask him, Charles. He’s on Twitter, too — and the enemies list is one topic ol’ Dan is always delighted to discuss.

• Extra credit reading: Check out the Neiman Journalism Lab’s four-part series on the shifting world of sports journalism, wherein “the subjects of coverage are becoming the creators of coverage — and what implications those shifts have for the rest of the news business.”

Tour time (well, almost)

July 1, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

My Tour de France office circa 2005 ... today, I need the G4 tower, two large flat-panel monitors and the laptop to do business.

The clock is counting down toward the start of that little three-week bike race we all know and love, and a reader asks what the workload is like for Your Humble Narrator come Tour de France time.

Put simply, it was Death back in the bad old days, when Charles Pelkey was the lone web guy and I was a two-day-a-week free-lancer who was shanghaied for the duration during the three grand tours. Charles is an early riser, so he’d be cranking out the live updates at an hour when sane journos were still abed. I’d log in around 7 a.m. and we’d tag-team the editing and posting of words and pictures from John Wilcockson, Graham Watson, Andrew Hood, Casey Gibson and whoever else was across the pond.

Charles would usually fade out early, so I — who spent all those enjoyable years at newspapers working the night shift — would stick it out past dark-thirty just in case the dope cops decided to set riders to jumping out of hotel windows. Then we’d do it all again the next day. Repeat until the Champs-Élysées.

The rules were simple: Post like an ADHD baboon flinging dung against a primate-house wall and find an hour to ride. I added a third: Drink French wine. Come July we’d go through Côtes du Rhône like an alcoholic Panzer division.

Last year, things changed. Steve Frothingham joined VeloNews.com as the full-time web boss-fella, and this year, with him and Charles both on salary (read: no overtime), I’m told I’ll probably only have to cover my usual two days a week, which suits me just fine. I unplugged the cable after the Floyd Landis debacle in 2006, and I am seriously uninterested in watching Versus bury its monocular face in Lance Armstrong’s lap again. Plus the workload these days means I can’t camp on the back deck with a laptop anymore — I need two large monitors, the souped-up G4 tower and the laptop just to take care of business in the modern age.

So I’ll follow this Tour when I’m paid to do so, with the exception of a few stages: Saturday’s opening time trial; Tuesday’s team time trial; the stage-18 ITT; and of course, stage 20 to Mont Ventoux. I like time trials, and you have to watch Ventoux.

In between business and pleasure, I’ll ride my own damn’ bike, see if I can sweat a few pounds off, which seems unlikely. I still like my wine, and I’ll have more time to cook.

Happy trails

June 30, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady

This rose wasn't on the Kinnikinnick, but was in our back yard. The insanely wet June weather turned the joint into a tropical paradise.

Today not being a workday, I got out for a pleasant ride at a reasonable hour — my old Four Parks ride, which takes in Monument Valley, Goose Gossage, Pulpit Rock and Palmer Park. I wasn’t in any hurry to get home and spent a fair amount of time dicking around on the singletrack in Palmer Park, in the process discovering a trail that seemed entirely unfamiliar — the Kinnikinnick, just past the Council Grounds area.

I was on a ‘cross bike, my backup Steelman Eurocross, which was something like bringing a knife to a gunfight. There were some rocky bits I thought looked like the express lane to the ER, and June’s incessant rains had carved nasty V-shaped wheel-grabbers along a few loose descents. Everything was lined with flower-tipped cacti. Party time.

“Where the hell does this thing go?” I kept muttering to myself as I got on and off the bike.

And then I finally hit a junction I remembered. Hah. Comes the dawn. I’d ridden the Kinnikinnick before, but only on a mountain bike, and from the opposite direction. Duh. I will never be smart. I celebrated my sudden enlightenment by tearing off a quick piece of a trail I know backward and forward, the Grandview, and was rewarded with my favorite say-what stare from a couple of mountain bikers — “Is that dude on a road bike?”