As is our tradition, we did “murph” today at crossfit south brooklyn. it’s a workout named after Michael Murphy, who was killed serving our country in Afghanistan.

The workout is as follows:
run 1 mile
100 pullups, 200 pushups, 300 squats
run 1 miles

The first time I did this was my first workout at crossfit south brooklyn, recently after I stopped boxing due to a hand injury. my time was 45:36. last year, my time was 44:10. this year, I managed to eek out 41:58, which I was pretty happy with, considering I am a year older, and haven’t crossfitted in 2 months as I’ve gone back to boxing.

it was a great day and really fun being back at crossfit south brooklyn, which is an awesome community of people. I’ve missed going to crossfit, but I really love boxing and I am sparring alot now and learning a ton so I’m going to stick with that for the time being, and drop by crossfit when I can.

memorial day reminds me of how lucky I am to live in such a great country, and thankful for the enormous sacrifices so many service people have made on our behalf.

I’m playing quite a bit over the next month with the Blue Saracens at Swing 46, a great swing dance club in midtown manhattan. If you are in the neighborhood, I’m playing next saturday the 26th, and am there every thursday night in June, from 8:30-11:30.

There is a free swing dance lesson, food and drinks, and atmosphere is great. Come on by!

I was going to include a picture, but a picture of a pot of lentils does not do justice to this dish.

Dice one spanish onion and the stems of a bunch of swiss chard, carmelize with 1 teaspoon of sugar and 2 tablespoons of neutral oil, such as grapeseed. After the onions and stems have browned, add one and a half cups lentils; I used half beluga and half split yellow lentils. Sweat the lentils for a few minutes, and add enough stock to cover, bring to a simmer. Add 2 teaspoons of salt, 1 box of frozen cooked winter squash and some tomato paste if desired.

While the lentils are cooking, heat a cast iron skillet and toast 1 tablespoon apiece of: yellow lentils, beluga lentils, cumin seed, coriander seed. add a teaspoon of yellow mustard seeds and a teaspoon of fenugreek seeds, 8 dried curry leaves, 4 dried red chiles and 2 bay leaves. toast the spices until almost black, then transfer to a spice grinder and add 1 teaspoon of turmeric. grind the spices, put 2 teaspoons into the lentils and save the rest to eat with eggs and sauteed vegetables.

I clean my spice grinder by grinding a small amount of white rice in it, I did this, and then added the ground rice to the lentils as well, to act as a thickener.

once the lentils are tender, about an hour, pour in a can of coconut milk, the leaves of the chard, and bring to a boil. simmer for 10 minutes or just take it off the heat and leave it covered for an hour.

eat them however you like, I had some with a fried egg and brown butter, and washed it down with a dogfish head brown ale.

my pedalboard

For the past 10 years, I haven’t used any effects save a rat distortion pedal when I was on the road with dem brooklyn bums. my amp doesn’t have reverb, and I always meant to get a reverb pedal, but I never pulled the trigger. A few years back, I got a looping pedal, which is one of the most useful practice tools I know of, and after needing overdrive on some gigs recently, I decided to spring for a pedalboard.

sonic research turbo tuner – ridiculously accurate tuner. I have shied away from using tuners in the past, preferring to tune to the piano or bass on a gig, but I’ve been doing more big band gigs recently and it’s really nice to be able to check tuning silently and quickly.

fulltone fulldrive 2 – I borrowed one of these from my friend Dan for a gig recently, and it’s the best sounding overdrive pedal I’ve tried for an archtop and solid state amp combo. I tried a few of the other fulltone models, but nothing sounded as good as this for my setup.

digitech rv-3 reverb – pretty standard reverb pedal, sounds great and I don’t have any complaints.

electro harmonix POG2 – I have always liked octave pedals and this really takes it to the next level. you can create some really cool, organ like sounds with this.

digitech jamman – standard looping pedal, really great for practicing. I frequently record a bassline with the POG2 and loop that.

The power supply is a voodoo labs pp2+. this was expensive, but really worth it, as it has an AC outlet, which the jamman needs, in addition to lots of other power slots for the other pedals. I questioned getting this at first, but I’m really glad I did.

the board itself is a pedaltrain board, which is designed to work with the voodoo labs power supply, in that it mounts comfortably underneath.