Grilled Flank Steak, Onion, and Peppers

Photo by: Photo: Iain Bagwell; Styling: Randy Mon

Grilled Flank Steak, Onion, and Peppers

Steve Freidkin, the chef at Texaz Grill in Phoenix, shared this technique with us for instantly "marinating" meat. By making small slashes in a diamond pattern over both sides of the steak, the flavors of the lemon and spices sink right in.

Sunset JULY 2012

• Yield: Serves 4 to 6
• Total:30 Minutes

Ingredients

• 1 flank steak (1 1/2 lbs.)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt, divided
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon chili powder

• 4 tablespoons melted unsalted butter
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1 medium onion, sliced into thirds
• 1 red bell pepper, seeded and quartered
• 1 yellow bell pepper, seeded and quartered
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 garlic cloves, minced

Preparation

1. Heat a grill to high (450° to 550°). Using a sharp knife, score steak on a diagonal across the grain, making parallel lines about 1 in. apart. Turn steak and repeat to create a diamond pattern. Flip steak over and repeat scoring on the other side.
2. Combine 1 tsp. salt and the spices, then sprinkle all over steak. Drizzle meat with butter and lemon juice and rub flavorings into slits.
3. Grill steak, turning once, 8 minutes total for medium. Let rest. Mix onion and peppers with oil, garlic, and remaining 1/2 tsp. salt. Grill, turning often, until softened, 5 minutes. Cut vegetables into strips; serve with steak.

Nutritional Information

Amount per serving

• Calories: 295
• Calories from fat: 45%
• Protein: 33g
• Fat: 15g
• Saturated fat: 6.3g
• Carbohydrate: 6.7g
• Fiber: 1.4g
• Sodium: 319mg
• Cholesterol: 66mg

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Grilled Flank Steak, Onion, and Peppers recipe

Grilled Chicken Bánh Mì

Photo by: Photo: Annabelle Breakey; Styling: Karen Shinto

Grilled Chicken Bánh Mì

The classic Vietnamese sandwich has lots of variations, but our favorites, like this one inspired by the bánh mì at Lynda Sandwich in Westminster, California, combine a generous pile of fresh herbs and vegetables with a sauce that has plenty of personality.

Sunset JULY 2012

• Yield: Serves 4
• Total:45 Minutes

Ingredients

• 2 boned, skinned chicken breast halves (1 1/2 lbs. total)
• 4 tablespoons hoisin sauce, divided
• 1/2 teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder
• 1 tablespoon reduced-sodium soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
• 2 tablespoons lime juice
• 1 tablespoon Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce

• 4 sandwich rolls or 1 sweet baguette, cut into 4 equal lengths and split lengthwise
• 1/4 cup mayonnaise
• 1/2 English cucumber, cut into 2-in. matchsticks
• 1 medium carrot, cut into thin matchsticks
• 4 ounces jicama, cut into matchsticks
• 1 red Fresno or red jalapeño chile, halved lengthwise and sliced
• Cilantro, Thai basil, and mint leaves

Preparation

1. Heat a grill to medium (350° to 450°). With a sharp knife, halve chicken pieces horizontally almost all the way through, then open up like a book. Put chicken in a bowl and add 2 tbsp. hoisin, the five-spice, soy sauce, and 1 tbsp. oil, tossing to coat.
2. Grill chicken, turning once, until cooked through, about 10 minutes. Let rest 10 minutes, then slice diagonally into wide chunks.
3. Mix remaining 2 tbsp. hoisin and 1 tbsp. oil, the lime juice, and fish sauce in a small bowl; set aside.
4. Spread the bottom of the cut side of each roll with 1 tbsp. mayo. Fill sandwiches with chicken. Top each with cucumber, carrot, jicama, chile slices, and herbs. Drizzle each sandwich with some of the reserved lime dressing (you may have some left over).

Nutritional Information

Amount per serving

• Calories: 514
• Calories from fat: 36%
• Protein: 42g
• Fat: 21g
• Saturated fat: 3.3g
• Carbohydrate: 41g
• Fiber: 3.7g
• Sodium: 1382mg
• Cholesterol: 114mg

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Grilled Chicken Bánh Mì recipe

Make-or-Break Verbs By Constance Hale

Make-or-Break Verbs

By CONSTANCE HALE

This is the third in a series of writing lessons by the author.

A sentence can offer a moment of quiet, it can crackle with energy or it can just lie there, listless and uninteresting.

What makes the difference? The verb.

Verbs kick-start sentences: Without them, words would simply cluster together in suspended animation. We often call them action words, but verbs also can carry sentiments (love, fear, lust, disgust), hint at cognition (realize, know, recognize), bend ideas together (falsify, prove, hypothesize), assert possession (own, have) and conjure existence itself (is, are).

Fundamentally, verbs fall into two classes: static (to be, to seem, to become) and dynamic (to whistle, to waffle, to wonder). (These two classes are sometimes called “passive” and “active,” and the former are also known as “linking” or “copulative” verbs.) Static verbs stand back, politely allowing nouns and adjectives to take center stage. Dynamic verbs thunder in from the wings, announcing an event, producing a spark, adding drama to an assembled group.

Static Verbs

Static verbs themselves fall into several subgroups, starting with what I call existential verbs: all the forms of to be, whether the present (am, are, is), the past (was, were) or the other more vexing tenses (is being, had been, might have been). In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the Prince of Demark asks, “To be, or not to be?” when pondering life-and-death questions. An aging King Lear uses both is and am when he wonders about his very identity:

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

Jumping ahead a few hundred years, Henry Miller echoes Lear when, in his autobiographical novel “Tropic of Cancer,” he wanders in Dijon, France, reflecting upon his fate:

“Yet I am up and about, a walking ghost, a white man terrorized by the cold sanity of this slaughter-house geometry. Who am I? What am I doing here?”

Drawing inspiration from Miller, we might think of these verbs as ghostly verbs, almost invisible. They exist to call attention not to themselves, but to other words in the sentence.

Another subgroup is what I call wimp verbs (appear, seem, become). Most often, they allow a writer to hedge (on an observation, description or opinion) rather than commit to an idea: Lear appears confused. Miller seems lost.

Finally, there are the sensing verbs (feel, look, taste, smell and sound), which have dual identities: They are dynamic in some sentences and static in others. If Miller said I feel the wind through my coat, that’s dynamic. But if he said I feel blue, that’s static.

Static verbs establish a relationship of equals between the subject of a sentence and its complement. Think of those verbs as quiet equals signs, holding the subject and the predicate in delicate equilibrium. For example, I, in the subject, equals feel blue in the predicate.

Power Verbs

Dynamic verbs are the classic action words. They turn the subject of a sentence into a doer in some sort of drama. But there are dynamic verbs — and then there are dynamos. Verbs like has, does, goes, gets and puts are all dynamic, but they don’t let us envision the action. The dynamos, by contrast, give us an instant picture of a specific movement. Why have a character go when he could gambol, shamble, lumber, lurch, sway, swagger or sashay?

Picking pointed verbs also allows us to forgo adverbs. Many of these modifiers merely prop up a limp verb anyway. Strike speaks softly and insert whispers. Erase eats hungrily in favor of devours. And whatever you do, avoid adverbs that mindlessly repeat the sense of the verb, as in circle around, merge together or mentally recall.

This sentence from “Tinkers,” by Paul Harding, shows how taking time to find the right verb pays off:

“The forest had nearly wicked from me that tiny germ of heat allotted to each person….”

Wick is an evocative word that nicely gets across the essence of a more commonplace verb like sucked or drained.

Sportswriters and announcers must be masters of dynamic verbs, because they endlessly describe the same thing while trying to keep their readers and listeners riveted. We’re not just talking about a player who singles, doubles or homers. We’re talking about, as announcers described during the 2010 World Series, a batter who “spoils the pitch” (hits a foul ball), a first baseman who “digs it out of the dirt” (catches a bad throw) and a pitcher who “scatters three singles through six innings” (keeps the hits to a minimum).

Imagine the challenge of writers who cover races. How can you write about, say, all those horses hustling around a track in a way that makes a single one of them come alive? Here’s how Laura Hillenbrand, in “Seabiscuit,” described that horse’s winning sprint:

“Carrying 130 pounds, 22 more than Wedding Call and 16 more than Whichcee, Seabiscuit delivered a tremendous surge. He slashed into the hole, disappeared between his two larger opponents, then burst into the lead… Seabiscuit shook free and hurtled into the homestretch alone as the field fell away behind him.”

Even scenes that at first blush seem quiet can bristle with life. The best descriptive writers find a way to balance nouns and verbs, inertia and action, tranquillity and turbulence. Take Jo Ann Beard, who opens the short story “Cousins” with static verbs as quiet as a lake at dawn:

“Here is a scene. Two sisters are fishing together in a flat-bottomed boat on an olive green lake….”

When the world of the lake starts to awaken, the verbs signal not just the stirring of life but crisp tension:

“A duck stands up, shakes out its feathers and peers above the still grass at the edge of the water. The skin of the lake twitches suddenly and a fish springs loose into the air, drops back down with a flat splash. Ripples move across the surface like radio waves. The sun hoists itself up and gets busy, laying a sparkling rug across the water, burning the beads of dew off the reeds, baking the tops of our mothers’ heads.”

Want to practice finding dynamic verbs? Go to a horse race, a baseball game or even walk-a-thon. Find someone to watch intently. Describe what you see. Or, if you’re in a quiet mood, sit on a park bench, in a pew or in a boat on a lake, and then open your senses. Write what you see, hear and feel. Consider whether to let your verbs jump into the scene or stand by patiently.

Verbs can make or break your writing, so consider them carefully in every sentence you write. Do you want to sit your subject down and hold a mirror to it? Go ahead, use is. Do you want to plunge your subject into a little drama? Go dynamic. Whichever you select, give your readers language that makes them eager for the next sentence.

Next from me: Pitfalls of passive construction.

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Constance Hale, a journalist based in San Francisco, is the author of “Sin and Syntax” and the forthcoming “Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch.” She covers writing and the writing life at sinandsyntax.com.

Music Lessons Benefit Babies, by Jef Akst

Music Lessons Benefit Babies

One year olds smile more and communicate better if they participate in interactive music classes with their parents.

By Jef Akst | May 11, 2012

Flickr, Dan Wheeler

 

Music heals the souls, and it can also affect the brain, especially when experienced at a very young age, according to a study published in Developmental Science. One-year-old babies, not yet able to walk or talk, showed positive response to interactive music classes, smiling more, communicating better, and showing altered brain responses to music.

“Many past studies of musical training have focused on older children,” Laurel Trainor, study author and director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, said in a press release. “Our results suggest that the infant brain might be particularly plastic with regard to musical exposure.”

The study placed babies into one of two groups—those that participated in an interactive music-making classes where they and their parents learned to play percussion instruments and sing lullabies, nursery rhymes, and songs with actions, and those that spent that time playing with toys while listening to recordings from the Baby Einstein series. After 6 months, babies who participated in the interactive classes “showed earlier sensitivity to the pitch structure in music,” Trainor said. That is, they preferred music that stayed in key. Babies who had been playing with toys did not show such preferences. “Even their brains responded to music differently,” Trainer said. “Infants from the interactive music classes showed larger and/or earlier brain responses to musical tones.”

The two groups of babies also showed differences in non-musical skills. Those that had participated in the interactive classes showed better communication skills, like pointing at objects and waving goodbye, and smiled more. They were also easier to calm and seemed less distressed in unfamiliar situations.

“There are many ways that parents can connect with their babies,” study coordinator Andrea Unrau said in a press release. “The great thing about music is, everyone loves it and everyone can learn simple interactive musical games together.”

Henri 2, Paw de Deux - We cannot escape ourselves

10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You, by Charles Wheelan

By CHARLES WHEELAN

Getty Images

Look to your left and then to your right. Is that pretty girl Phi Beta Kappa? Marry her.

Class of 2012,
 
I became sick of commencement speeches at about your age. My first job out of college was writing speeches for the governor of Maine. Every spring, I would offer extraordinary tidbits of wisdom to 22-year-olds—which was quite a feat given that I was 23 at the time. In the decades since, I've spent most of my career teaching economics and public policy. In particular, I've studied happiness and well-being, about which we now know a great deal. And I've found that the saccharine and over-optimistic words of the typical commencement address hold few of the lessons young people really need to hear about what lies ahead. Here, then, is what I wish someone had told the Class of 1988:

1. Your time in fraternity basements was well spent. The same goes for the time you spent playing intramural sports, working on the school newspaper or just hanging with friends. Research tells us that one of the most important causal factors associated with happiness and well-being is your meaningful connections with other human beings. Look around today. Certainly one benchmark of your postgraduation success should be how many of these people are still your close friends in 10 or 20 years.

2. Some of your worst days lie ahead. Graduation is a happy day. But my job is to tell you that if you are going to do anything worthwhile, you will face periods of grinding self-doubt and failure. Be prepared to work through them. I'll spare you my personal details, other than to say that one year after college graduation I had no job, less than $500 in assets, and I was living with an elderly retired couple. The only difference between when I graduated and today is that now no one can afford to retire.

3. Don't make the world worse. I know that I'm supposed to tell you to aspire to great things. But I'm going to lower the bar here: Just don't use your prodigious talents to mess things up. Too many smart people are doing that already. And if you really want to cause social mayhem, it helps to have an Ivy League degree. You are smart and motivated and creative. Everyone will tell you that you can change the world. They are right, but remember that "changing the world" also can include things like skirting financial regulations and selling unhealthy foods to increasingly obese children. I am not asking you to cure cancer. I am just asking you not to spread it.

4. Marry someone smarter than you are. When I was getting a Ph.D., my wife Leah had a steady income. When she wanted to start a software company, I had a job with health benefits. (To clarify, having a "spouse with benefits" is different from having a "friend with benefits.") You will do better in life if you have a second economic oar in the water. I also want to alert you to the fact that commencement is like shooting smart fish in a barrel. The Phi Beta Kappa members will have pink-and-blue ribbons on their gowns. The summa cum laude graduates have their names printed in the program. Seize the opportunity!

5. Help stop the Little League arms race. Kids' sports are becoming ridiculously structured and competitive. What happened to playing baseball because it's fun? We are systematically creating races out of things that ought to be a journey. We know that success isn't about simply running faster than everyone else in some predetermined direction. Yet the message we are sending from birth is that if you don't make the traveling soccer team or get into the "right" school, then you will somehow finish life with fewer points than everyone else. That's not right. You'll never read the following obituary: "Bob Smith died yesterday at the age of 74. He finished life in 186th place."

6. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

7. Your parents don't want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn't always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices. Theodore Roosevelt—soldier, explorer, president—once remarked, "It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed." Great quote, but I am willing to bet that Teddy's mother wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer.

8. Don't model your life after a circus animal. Performing animals do tricks because their trainers throw them peanuts or small fish for doing so. You should aspire to do better. You will be a friend, a parent, a coach, an employee—and so on. But only in your job will you be explicitly evaluated and rewarded for your performance. Don't let your life decisions be distorted by the fact that your boss is the only one tossing you peanuts. If you leave a work task undone in order to meet a friend for dinner, then you are "shirking" your work. But it's also true that if you cancel dinner to finish your work, then you are shirking your friendship. That's just not how we usually think of it.

9. It's all borrowed time. You shouldn't take anything for granted, not even tomorrow. I offer you the "hit by a bus" rule. Would I regret spending my life this way if I were to get hit by a bus next week or next year? And the important corollary: Does this path lead to a life I will be happy with and proud of in 10 or 20 years if I don't get hit by a bus.

10. Don't try to be great. Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your control. The less you think about being great, the more likely it is to happen. And if it doesn't, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being solid.

Good luck and congratulations.

— Adapted from "10½ Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said," by Charles Wheelan. To be published May 7 by W.W. Norton & Co.

How to choose a turntable

Enjoying Turntables Without Obsessing

Clockwise from top left: the Oracle Audio Delphi MK VI, the VPI Industries Classic 3, the Audio Technica AT-LP120-USB Direct-Drive Professional and the Music Hall mmf-2.2le turntables.

By ROY FURCHGOTT

Published: April 18, 2012

Buying records is easy. You can find them by the milk crate at yard sales, for a few dollars apiece in used record stores, and there are new, special pressings by contemporary musicians like Shelby Lynne, whose “Just a Little Lovin’” album, at $30, is a top seller. But buying the instrument needed to listen to them, a turntable, is a different matter. 

“Young people didn’t grow up with turntables,” said Kenny Bowers, manager at Needle Doctor, a Minnesota store specializing in turntables. “It seems mysterious and complicated because you don’t just push a button and have it play for you.” 

There are advantages to old-fashioned analog music, according to some audiophiles. “There is a fuller sound to it, and more depth to the sound,” said Ryan Holiday, the New Orleans-based marketing director for American Apparel. He’s a new devotee of jazz and David Bowie, thanks to LPs. (For the youngsters, that stands for long playing, as in long-playing record; there were also small records called 45s). “I could hear hands going up and down the frets, and stuff that they probably didn’t want you to hear. Which is a nice little surprise,” he said. 

Mr. Holiday is not alone in his appreciation. Record sales have climbed for five years. Now turntable sales are growing. They were up 50 percent in January over January last year. 

Hi-fi elitists may debate competing technologies of moving coil versus moving magnet cartridges as if Middle East peace depended on the answer, but turntables are really simple machines. It doesn’t cost a great deal to get a good one, and today’s turntables give you more for your money than they did when vinyl ruled. The celebrated Thorens 125 MKII, with tonearm, cost about $500 in 1975. (That’s about $2,000 in today’s dollars.) A comparable one in performance today, like the Music Hall MMF-2.2 or the Pro-Ject Debut III Esprit, costs $300 to $500. 

Nevertheless, some turntables, like the Clearaudio Master Reference at $28,000, cost as much as a Toyota Camry hybrid. 

You are paying for two things, precision and craftsmanship. So here’s a guide to some of the costs. (It was just as confusing back in the 1960s, kids.) A turntable is basically three assemblies: the revolving platform the record sits on, called the platter, and the motor and drive; the tonearm, which moves across the record as it plays; and the cartridge and needle, which sit on the end of the tonearm and pick up the vibrations recorded in a record’s grooves. 

Turntables are machines that read vibrations, but they often can’t distinguish a good vibration from a Beach Boys album and a bad one from your stomping across the room. A good turntable is designed to isolate it from the real world. 

The motor needs to provide noiseless, consistent speed. A heavy platter helps to keep the speed from varying. But it’s an engineering game of Whac-A-Mole. Heavier platters need bigger motors, which may be noisier (and they cost more). Light platters can more easily transmit vibrations that can cause a ringing sound. The rule of thumb is make sure the table weighs at least 10 pounds. “If not, it’s made of plastic compound. It will sing along with music,” said Harry Weisfeld, the owner of the turntable maker VPI, based in Cliffwood, N.J. He advocates metal platters. 

You can also buy mats and special feet to isolate the turntable from outside vibrations. 

The kind of motor is even more hotly debated. One way the motor drives the platter is with a belt; the other is to mount the platter directly on the motor. Direct-drive mounting is preferred by some people because there is less chance the speed will vary. Rubber belts can stretch and loosen over time. But a direct-drive turntable is more likely to transmit noise, whereas rubber belts absorb motor vibrations. 

The crazy thing is that the least and most expensive turntables tend to be belt-driven. It’s really a personal preference. Trust your ears. The tonearm needs to keep the needle where it picks the most vibrations from the record without so much pressure that it damages the grooves. “The main thing is the weight,” said Scott Shaw, audio solutions specialist for Audio-Technica, an audio equipment maker. “Lighter tracking forces tend to provide better audio quality,” he said. 

With some exceptions, the better tonearms are machined in one piece of lightweight steel, not cast or pressed. There are more exotic tonearms of carbon fiber, composites, even wood, but you are going to find that only on turntables that cost more than $1,000, said Mr. Shaw. 

The cartridge is mounted on the end of the tonearm and holds the stylus, or needle. “The stylus is where everything happens,” said Michael Pettersen, director of applications engineering for Shure, which makes cartridges. “When you buy a $100 cartridge,” he said, “the needle is $90 of the cost.” 

Needles are either elliptical or spherical, with no significant price difference. Elliptical tends to be better at reproducing high-pitched sounds, said Mr. Pettersen. Spherical does a better job riding over flaws in vinyl, though, and may be better for 45s and worn records. (An even older form of record, the 78, require a special, larger stylus.) “If I have a very nasty record, I’ll use the spherical," Mr. Shaw said. 

There are also two kinds of cartridges, moving magnet and moving coil. Most cartridges are moving magnet. While they tend to be heavier than moving coil, you can change the stylus yourself, which you may want to do to adjust to the condition of your vinyl or change the sound you get. 

Moving coil is the type often favored by audiophiles because it has less weight, but changing a stylus requires a trip to the manufacturer. Both types typically wear out in 600 to 800 hours of use.

Although the sky is the limit on price, a very good cartridge costs $75 to $100, said Mr. Pettersen. 

Getting the most from a turntable requires careful setup, although maybe not as careful as people who sell calibration equipment would have you believe. “Setting up the turntable doesn’t have to be as complicated as they make it,” said Mr. Shaw. There can be leeway from the exact specifications, he said, adding, “Set it up fairly close, it will be fine. My point is, don’t obsess.” 

One additional piece of gear Mr. Shaw recommends is a stylus gauge to measure the weight the cartridge is putting on the record. “Don’t rely on the little numbers on the back of the tonearm,” he said. “They are very inaccurate.” Mr. Bowers of Needle Doctor recommends the Shure scale, the SFG-2, available online for $20 to $40. 

It may also be worthwhile to buy a tool to make sure the cartridge is lined up properly. Mr. Bowers recommended the Mobile Fidelity Geo-Disc, which is $50 to $80. 

Finally, you can check some of your work with a test record, like the Cardas Frequency Sweep and Burn-In Record ($15 to $30), which plays tones that help confirm that the setup is correct. 

You may find that what sounds best is not the recommended settings, or what the gauges and protractors dictate. In the end, it’s as much art as science. 

And isn’t that the beauty of analog?