I'd rather be cooking, trust me on this.
Aged Moroccan lemons. I don't need proof that God exists, but if I did, this would be a strong contender for Most Convincing.
When I lived in Fes, before marriage, before children, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and no one had mobile phones, one of the greatest things was cooking and the plethora of fresh market produce. And the bread. Oh, my God, the bread.
A couple of weeks ago, I bought a new tajine which is the name for the specially shaped cookware in which one makes various North African stews, also called tajine.
Couscous, potatoes, lamb, olives, more spices than a North American can name and preserved, aged lemons - all baked slowly to perfection. Just writing it brings me back to autumn evenings in the Old City, eating in my favorite outdoor cafe, people watching as time slowed to a crawl and the sun faded on the red walls of the King’s palace.
A tajine without preserved Moroccan lemons is like salmon without dill or tacos without lime juice - tasty, but leaving one with a lingering sense of loss and melancholy. So I set about the eight-week process of making preserved lemons.
Good lemons. Kosher salt. Time.
The last bit is the hardest.
Watching the lemons soften is agonizing and satisfying - a reminder that many of the best things in life cannot be rushed. Some day these beautiful yellow gold slices of goodness will be a glowing orange color and taste like nothing else on earth - sweet but with a lingering tart acidic aftertaste and a flavor which makes you come up with your own origin myths about olives and lemons married forever in Heaven.
There are many demands on my time - some of which I love and a few of which I loathe. Success often means doing both with the same amount of focused attention.
For example, I love working with the brilliant team building the Gajumaru blockchain, named after the baby tree in my cracked pot. It is Bitcoin 3.0 - the final and actually functional version of Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned and wrote about. This will become the fundamental economic layer of the Internet, as invisible to you as Hyper Text Transfer Protocol is now, and even more important.
Opening up economic opportunities to everyone on earth, with insanely low-cost transactions of the Internet of Economics will do as much again for human freedom as the original Internet of Information has already done, if not more.
On the unpleasant demands on my time, I do all I can to fight against the Islamist scum hellbent on ruining Western Civilization, along with their current Useful Idiots on the Left, who are by this point too befuddled to even know they have been indoctrinated with Marxist madness.
It is incredible to me that 90% of the people in the West look at me blankly when I comment that we’re in the midst of World War Three. Is this the first war in history many people don’t even know is happening?
I’d rather that we’d already won the war, so I could focus only on the productive, positive, humanity-enhancing side of the demands on my time.
Take away the negative side of my work and that would leave me far more time for preserving lemons, grafting mango saplings and trimming olive groves.
Yummy.
I agree!