Mundane blogs

So there's a little note at the top of the blogger dashboard that I hadn't noticed before, and when I just glanced at it before hitting "new post" I thought it said Mundane blogs. My reaction was basically: "hey, I know it is, but do you have to rub it in?" Then I looked carefully and realized it says "Manage blogs." Ahem.

I just had to type in this passage from the book I'm reading (The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, at pp. 166-67). It's so, so, so perfect. Background: the protagonist, a Canadian schoolmaster, and a Jesuit priest are taking a train trip.

It was with this learned chatterbox that I set out to travel from Brussels to Vienna. I was early at the station, as he had commanded, and found him already in sole possession of a carriage. He beckoned me inside and went on with his task, which was to read aloud from breviary, keeping the window open the while, so that passersby would hear him.

“Give me a hand with a Paternoster,” he said and began to roar the Lord's Prayer in Latin as loud as he could. I joined in, equally loud, and we followed with a few rousing Aves and Agnus Deis. By dint of this pious uproar we kept the carriage for ourselves. People would come to the door, decide that they could not stand such company, and pass on, muttering.”

This should remind one reader of this blog of a flight back from Buenos Aires, and I think a few others have heard the story. It involves bare feet, which surely should pique the interest of some of my readers. Feel free to ask, but it's not getting posted publicly to the blog. A guy's gotta have a few secrets from the informationsuperinfobah, right?

I'm laughing out loud while reading this, with Nirvana's Unplugged in New York playing in the headphones, which provides a bizarre contrast. The music is about as raw, as throaty, as gut-wrenching as anything I've heard since Johnny Cash started putting out the American Recordings series late in his career. (And I also just heard an early cut of The Man Comes Around, a song which, despite its blatant proselytizing, I have always loved: it's amazingly raw, like a lot of stuff from those albums. The earlier cut wasn't as good.) The renditions of Come as You Are and All Apologies are amazingly intense, and give a whole new feel to those songs, and a cover of Lead Belly's arrangement of Where Did You Sleep Last Night is freaky it's so intense.

Where the hell was I when this album came out in 1997? Beats me.

Chipotle!

No, not the burrito chain that used to be majority owned by McDonald's. Though yesterday I was thinking about Chipotle as I was eating a mediocre burrito at Moe's Southwest Grill, since I actually would have preferred Chipotle. At Moe's they nickel and dime you for things like guacamole, resulting in your burrito costing almost $7, while at Chipotle guac is included with the vegetarian fajita burrito.

Okay, no, really: fast food burrito chains really aren't what this post is about. Rather, it's about the chipotle painted tofu I made from my recently purchased 1,000 Vegan Recipes by Robin Robertson . (Incidentally, a more interesting blog about the book called Cooking From 1,000 Vegan Recipes is available here, where six cooks are chugging their way through the recipes, with nice food porn pics to go with it.

I made the Chipotle-Painted Baked Tofu on page 288, and it was pretty delicious. I won't give the recipe, as I actually like the book enough that I think you should go out and buy it (or check it out from the library) but it basically involves making a sauce of chipotle, soy sauce, and oil, "painting" the tofu, and baking it. I did bake it on both sides, and applied more of the sauce than the recipe called for, both of which I'm happy about. When I make this again, I'd use an additional chipotle, or find two really big ones.

Enough of the blah blah blah, and on to the images:

Relax, little tofu: you'll be saved from your blandness soon enough!

The book has the helpful hint on what to do with the rest of those chipotles: wrap them up in portioned sizes, and freeze them for future use. A excellent idea, 'cause an entire can of chipotles in adobo will knock your damn block off, and most recipes call for just one or two chilis.

Here is the chiptole "paint" in the food processor. It's kinda swampy and not real attractive looking, but my picture of it isn't real good.

Here is the tofu mid-bake. The four on the right have been turned over and re-painted, while the four on the right have not yet been turned.

Since no good recipe is complete with ONIONS!, I set the extra onions from my veggie stock prep to carmelizing.

Here is the final product, ready to assemble:

And here is the plated product, on a chili-lime tortilla with carmelized onions. It was delicious, and has me pretty excited about making more recipes in the book. Speaking of which, I also made roasted vegetable stock using the book, so another post is coming up quick.

Fog & rain

A few new panoramas from ATL's fog and rain, and then snow, last week:

ONIONS!

As many of you know, I LOVE onions. I mean, I really, really, really love them. I love them raw, sauteed, fried, carmelized, in rings, on sandwiches, red, white, yellow, green, sweet, hot, as a primary recipe component, for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner.

To demonstrate the depth of my love for onions, these are images just from 2010, and not even close to all of the pictures I have of onions:









It wasn't always this way. When I was seven or eight, I basically hated onions. My favorite thing about onions was when my mom would slice rings and put them out as a garnish for hamburgers, and I would poke them out, ring by ring. My mother had a, to my mind fairly irrational, dislike of this behavior (I dunno, maybe it was something about my putting my grubby little hands all over the family's raw onions.) So she told me that the next time I did it, I was going to have to eat every single onion I poked out. Then she made good on it. I poked out about half of a large onion into rings, and then, much to the immense amusement of my siblings, had to eat all of them with a large glass of water as my only accompaniment. I'm pretty sure I puked.

Well, that must have been something of a turning point. Sometime shortly thereafter, I began to absolutely love onions. We'd walk by the zoo, which had a snack bar with outside walk-up windows, and a condiments bar. I would go over, shovel a handful of raw onions into my hand, cover them with yellow mustard, and gobble it all down.

The end.

Back from DC

And happy to be sleeping in my own bed tonight. It was a good, fun trip, though I didn't get enough sleep. A very quick summary, and then I need to change out my bike tires back to road slicks to better take advantage of the great weather right now in Atlanta.

The Smithsonian Museum of American History was pretty great, especially the amazingly powerful Sing for Freedom at the Woolworth Lunch Counter. I found Julia Child's Kitchen entertaining, especially how it showed her "do as I say, not as I do" approach to things like knives (she was a self-proclaimed knife freak, and said she had to have every knife she laid eyes on, yet she preached that cooks only need three knives (a chef's knife, a bread knife, and a paring knife.) Incidentally, with my new Kyocera ceramic chef's knife. which is plenty sharp enough to slice crusty bread and tomatoes, I'm almost of the opinion that it's about the only knife I need. But I digress.

On the other hand, the Library of Congress was kind of mediocre: not that much to see, and lots of annoying people in a relatively small space.

The "sidewalks" of Falls Church, where we were staying (not my first choice, but I had hotel points, and W and I make a lot of noise when we're hanging out, so putting friends out wasn't a nice option), were largely unmaintained and treacherous as hell, though they were improving by today.

The beer selection at Birch and Barley was indeed pretty great, but quite expensive, and it filled up with a whole lotta douchery on Saturday evening, so it's not some place I'd likely go often if I lived in DC.

Now I'm just glad to be back home and able to cook for myself again. Speaking of, how 'bout a little FOOD PORN? Actually, I think I'll hold it for another post, since it warrants a fairly lengthy story. Stay tuned!

I expect more

From Mother Jones Magazine than this bizarre list of things in the February 2010 issue that that the 14 billion bailout could have been spent on. Aside from it being totally unclear what the math behind the numbers might possibly be, I really had to read it multiple times to see if the author intended to be satirical, or at least tongue in cheek. But given the article it appears at the end of, I don't think this is the case.

WHAT ELSE COULD $14 TRILLION BUY?

That's the real size of the bailout.

What else could it buy?

—Marian Wang

10 years of vaccines for kids in 117 countries
$110 billion

10 years of $10,000 bonuses for all US public school teachers
$318 billion

Sending all 2009 US high school grads to private college
$347 billion

Doubling US spending on HIV/AIDS and cancer research for 20 years
$493 billion

10 years of CO2 offsets for all Americans
$559 billion

Meeting UN anti-poverty goals by 2015
$757 billion

20 years of universal preschool in US
$860 billion

Buying a house for every homeless American
$878 billion

10 years of helping developing countries deal with the effects of climate change
$2 trillion

Buying the world an iPhone 3GS
$2 trillion

10 years of private health insurance for uninsured Americans
$2.2 trillion

Paying off 1/3 of US home mortgages
$3.5 trillion

Total: $14 trillion

Some are just patently silly, like the iPhone thing. But many are causes that, as G pointed out, are classical liberal favorites, like paying teachers more. Why use the buzzword "bonus," though? How is "private" health insurance the goal, rather than universal, single payer medicine? Which 1/3 of mortgages? 1/3 of every mortgage, or a mortgage payoff lottery where 1/3 of entrants win? Why on earth is private college the goal, rather than properly funding state schools? (And I say this as a graduate of a private college and a private law school.)

Buying a house for every homeless American? What suburban shithole sprawl is going to accommodate all those single family houses? And does this mean the approximately 123,000 chronically homeless? (Which would mean that we'd have about 7.1 million each to spend on those houses.) Or the approximately 3 million Americans who are temporarily homeless, housing insecure, or chronically homeless in any given year? (Which would mean about 272k per house.)

While I appreciate the illustration of what a corporate welfare boondoggle most of the bailout was, can you see the problem with such sillyass "statistics"?

Things I like about the Atlanta airport

Since I usually bitch and moan and snark about the airport, I thought I'd list a few things that I actually like about the ATL airport:

1) MARTA rail goes directly to it.
2) The security checkpoints, especially the South security checkpoint, are rarely crowded.
3) The various employees are usually quite friendly.
4) You can walk from terminal to terminal in an underground tunnel and skip the air train.
5) When you walk in the tunnel in #4, there is interesting art and sculpture from Zimbabwe.
6) There are two good vegan/vegetarian options in the Terminal A food court (Great Wraps has a surprisingly good and inexpensive ($5.55 all in) hummus & falafel wrap, and the Chinese place next to it has spicy tofu, and vegetarian fried rice.)
7) When you sit at the bar-style seating in the Terminal A food court, there is great people watching as people go to and from the air train.
8) Most of the people in #7 look and wander like zombies, which will make for good material if I ever write a short story about the airport.

See? I can be positive!

Off to DC now for museums, hiking, and beer. Woo!

Fairly boring

I just downloaded a bunch of random images, so here are some, well, random images:

This is J's luggage for the deployment. Fortunately, our building has a bunch of (ostensibly stolen) shopping carts that you can check out from the concierge to move your heavy shit around. The total weight of her luggage was around 150 pounds.

Here is a picture of my most recent failed cooking experiment: fried taro root chips. They were bland and fiber-y, and even with a bunch of salt, not very good. The best of the junk was the very burnt one in the bottom right corner. Won't be bothering with this again.

And here is the rear wheel I mentioned in a previous post. I finally broke down and took it to the bike shop yesterday to have them true the wheel, replace a broken spoke, tune the rear derailleur, and fix the rear brake.

Okay: more boring photo processing to do, and maybe some more boring photos to be posted.

Walking

Back from an excellent guided walk on the Beltline's west side:

Angel was an amazing guide, and the walk through the snow, ice, and slush actually made me miss walking in Alaska.

Now to overhaul, or alternatively destroy, my rear disc brake. It's full of crap and grit and so not operating properly (it doesn't spring back after braking, so the cable doesn't stay taut. I already lubricated the cable housing.) I figure I don't have a lot to lose: worst case, I screw it up beyond my ability to put it back together, and I go into the LBS tomorrow or Monday and tell them I fucked it up.

Mass

No, not that kind (haven't done that in over twenty years.) Just back back from Courteous Mass, which was a little over an hour and a half of riding in snow, freezing rain, sleet, and slush, with minimal visibility, and any number of bemused and confused pedestrians and police looking on. It was awesome.

Bikes, and TUI: Totally Useless Information

I decided that in order to be sure I can ride Courteous Mass tonight with some semblance of safety, I should put on fat mountain tires, since 99% of the time, I use 1.5" touring slicks on my mountaincommuterbeatererrand bike:
Even for running errands:
HOT SECRET TIP: The more dangerous your rig looks, the farther away the cars stay!

Anyway, here's today Totally Useless Information: the rear wheel of my bike, with a 2.1" tire inflated to 70psi and a Mr. Tuffy installed, weighs 6 pounds 10 ounces. The front wheel, same details, weighs 5 pounds 4 ounces. That's a total for wheels and tires of just under 12 pounds.

My entire road bike:
weighs just under 17 pounds with 100psi in the tires.

And finally the snow is starting: what a perfect time to take the bike out onto the balcony and clean the chain, drivetrain, and brakes!

Snowzippa?

Unfortunately, all the cool snow disaster names seem to be taken this season: Snowpocalypse, Snowmageddon, Snowzilla, Snowapalooza, Snow... WAIT! SNOWAPALOOZA! I hereby claim that for the 1-3" Metro Atlanta is forecast to get today, leading to the winter storm warning currently in effect. I'm supposed to participate in a conference call today at noon: given recent ATL snow closings, I'm willing to predict the likelihood that it'll be postponed at around 50/50.

One of the more irritating parts about the storms are the asinine letters that NPR reads during All Things Considered. You know the genre: "I lived through the blizzard of 19**, blah blah blah, and this is nothing..." "Here in [Insert Midwestern State] you know what we call three feet? A dusting. Har har har..." "Waaaaaa, I *hate* New York City's law requiring me to clear the sidewalk in front of my property..."

And the story today on Morning Edition, with people feeling all virtuous about their snow clearing because it's a neighborhood competition? Whatever. Clear it because it's a nice thing to do for the people who live in your city/town/suburb, or leave it there, but clearing to keep up with the Joneses? Just keep out the gigantic fiberglass Santa and his light-outline reindeer all year, and save yourself the physical labor.

Even better is the occasion bringing out the climate-change-denial troglodytes, including Sean Hannity and James Inhofe. These guys are so breathtakingly stupid, you almost wonder if political satirists miss W anymore.

Now, since all the cool kids are doing it, here's my little snow reminiscence: In Anchorage, we regularly cleared our immense driveway for a couple hours, then went across the road to clear our nearest neighbor's driveway. This is when he didn't beat us out there: many, many mornings after a storm, our late-septuagenarian neighbor would be out there and half his driveway done when we woke up and looked out the window, his hand-knitted scarf flapping in the wind. He then had the time to come over and chat and bitch about the muni snowplows pushing up berms from the road into his newly cleared driveway. Ahhh, Alaska: how I don't miss clearing your snow.

Busy busy busy, and a rancid coconut in seven acts

Another whole random pile of updates:

1) J deployed to Haiti today, so we've spent much of the last few days packing and preparing. She has already e-mailed, and arrived safely. She's staying on the embassy grounds, so safety isn't a big issue, but her food life is likely to suck for the next week to three weeks. Her luggage (pictures to come) included about 50 pounds of food, which is good, since the MREs can be pretty vile, especially the very limited vegetarian options.

2) We walked a chunk of the Beltline on Saturday through Piedmont Park and up to the Armour Yards: it was a pretty great walk. Only a few places required some, uhh, trailblazing. Yesterday to meet J at the Sweetwater Breweing Company for happy hour, I walked another chunk from Peachtree Street back over to Piedmont Ave, which was interesting, more industrial, almost all on railroad tracks. I scouted out some more areas today and worked on maps. Pictures to come!

3) I think I have finally given up up the laser printer: after spilling beverage into it, and despite multiple attempts at cleaning and trying a new toner cartridge, it just doesn't print right. This led me to try to resurrect the Epson CX5400 inkjet that hasn't printed for a long time, and which I've been using solely for the scanner. Much ink on my fingers and an hour or so later, I hereby declare it beyond help. I'll try freecycling it to see if someone wants it for just a scanner, but since I'll be replacing it with another multifunction, I won't need it.

4a) I bought a fresh coconut the other day at the utterly miserable Dekalb "Farmer's Market"*. Well, two coconuts, actually: I bought one fresh/mature coconut, and one Thai "young" coconut. We used the young coconut the other night in a recipe (photos may follow, if you're good) and this morning I noticed that the mature coconut had leaked a small drop of very sticky stuff out of one of the eyes. Rut-roh. Hoping to make the best of it, I found a couple recipes for fresh coconut, both of which would require a trip to the supermarket. So I decided to confirm first that the coconut was still good.

4b) *"Farmer's Market" is in quotes because it's not. It's a big warehouse like store that is almost always maddeningly, make you want to crap your pants crowded, and where Atlantans inability to identify acceptable flow of traffic patterns comes to a real head. Lest you think it's me being overly sensitive, just read some of the yelp reviews.

4c) And it's not even particularly cheap: notwithstanding the knuckleheads on yelp who don't actually know how to do price comparisons, any number of the produce items are the same or more expensive than at the average local supermarkets, Public and Kroger, and are only slightly less than similar items at Trader Joe's and Whole Paycheck. Seriously, with the exception of cheap spices, the ONLY reason to shop here is selection for obscure ingredients for ethnic cooking, especially Asian, since the nearest Asian markets are way the hell out in Doraville, Duluth, and Chamblee. To hell with that: as much as I love Asian cuisine, I'd sooner fly to Asia directly than drive out to those burbs regularly.

4d) Oh, and despite many people considering them one of the best Asian supermarkets in Atlanta, they don't sell sushi rice, pickled ginger, or real wasabi, and the nori is in a different place than the supermarket-grade fake wasabi. The nori, however, is the biggest cheapest damn package of organic nori ever. So that's something.

4e) But back to the damn coconut. So ANYWAAAAAY, I did some online research, which indicated that if there is a slight hiss when you pierce the soft eye, that's a good thing, since a little pressure should be built up. However, if there's a significant hiss, that's a bad thing, since it likely indicates a bacterial infection. What the web didn't cover is when you put your small screwdriver in the soft eye, it plunges right through, and rancid coconut water blasts you in the face like a malicious geyser, covering your glasses, face, and shirt, and spraying your 10' high ceilings.

4f) Friends, don't try this at home: if there's creepy sticky shit leaking out of your coconut, just trust me: assume it's rancid and turn it into either trash, or a party activity.

4g) BOO!, too, since I was going to try a Gin Coco, which is gin, coconut water, and ice. Sounded good. But somehow not worth scraping the rancid coconut water from the kitchen ceiling.

5) Upcoming travel: DC, Eugene, and the SF bay area. Woo hoo!

Thoughts on blogs

I've decided that there are already entirely enough food blogs out there, so I'm not going to bother starting another one. This is in part due to my realization (while cruising foodblogs) that the single most important attribute in a blog, in addition to liking the content, is how regularly it's updated. When I see a a great blog post, and consider adding it to my feed reader, I immediately look to see how recently it has been updated, and how often it gets updated. Anything that doesn't get at least a few posts a month doesn't get added, and it has to be pretty amazing if it's only getting a weekly post to get added. Bottom line is that I probably wouldn't be updating a blog which was food-only often enough to make it worthwhile.

I did come across a delicious food porn site which I'm pretty amazed I hadn't seen before, Photograzing. It was through going to many of the author blogs to find which were heavily or entirely vegetarian or vegan, though, that I realized that the food blog universe already has plenty of material.

Score: Ubuntu 1, me 1

I recently updated the version of Ubuntu i run on one of my laptops. (Don't ask me why i have two laptops. Okay, here's a hint: I suck.) But I digress: I moved from version 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

First impressions were very solid: it's a slightly cleaner interface, it's considerably faster (though not in bootup the way many others seem to have experienced, and seemed relatively stable.

That is, until I took the bold step of unplugging my laptop while it was turned on. Which caused it to suspend automatically, and need to be awoken.

Well, I endured this irritation for a week or so while I poked around on the InformationSuperInfoBahn for fixes, and basically just read and re-read that the new power management package in Karmic, well, sucks.

Finally today I found a post deep in a bug reporting forum (see post #47.)

So while I can now happily unplug the laptop while using it to move it around the condo (this laptop serves as a primary podcast playing device while I'm cooking and brewing) I'm still enduring the semi-regular freezeups, where everything stops working except that you can move the mouse around in a futile, sad attempt to make it work, and which require a hard-restart.

On balance, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have updated, but reverting to an older version is a big pain in the ass, so here I am. Fortunately, the ubuntu community is very, very good about patches and fixing things, so it shouldn't take long.

BEER

To make myself feel better after that last post, let's talk about BEER! I blew the keg of the Sherwood Forest the other day, and then shortly thereafter, the keg of Sam Winter blew, too. I blame this in part on the party for 20 we had, and in significant part on how damn good the Sherwood Forest was. Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but it was off the charts good. I actually considered bottling four to six bottles for competition, but didn't even want to part with that much.

Fortunately, Mittelschmerz is starting to drink quite nicely, and in a lovely surprise, the local liquor store had 1/6 barrels of Hennepin Farmhouse from Brewery Ommegang in stock. So I spent an hour or so doing kegerator maintenance, including cleaning all of the lines and faucets, and the Hennepin is tasting lovely.

Come visit us to get some! Special limited time offer: all visitors get unlimited Hennepin and Mittelschmerz, while supplies last. Cannot be combined with other offers. Cash value 1/20 of $0.01. Contact offeror for additional details, terms and conditions.

You know, you know, you know?

As many of you know, verbal tics and fillers make me a little crazy. This is when people cannot stop saying "umm," "uh," "ahh," "like," and similar words repeatedly while talking. With the possible exception of legitimate speech impediments, most people really can learn to stop doing this (many people just need someone to point it out, while some need to very consciously practice.) I've been known to sit in lectures, board meetings, and other public events and count the number of times someone says "umm." It can number in the dozens to hundreds.

Many of you also know that I really don't much care for the local NPR station in Atlanta, WABE, which plays classical music, with a particular love of baroque and pipe organ, between 9am and 3pm. So I'm in the habit of streaming live public radio from other (and yes, I do donate to the ones I use the most, anonymously, since I really detest being on mailing lists.)

Many of you are now wondering how I'm possibly going to tie this together. Okay: I just started listening to On Point on WBUR Boston. The host is interviewing Philip Hoare, author of The Whale. Within the first thirty seconds or so, Hoare literally said "you know" ten times. It was like hearing a million razor blades scraping on a million chalkboards for a million years.

Perhaps adding to my loathsome reaction to this is that many Americans expect Brits (which Hoare is) to be well spoken and articulate. (Although my friends haunting the hallowed ivory tower know what a treacherous expectation this can be.)

I scrambled to turn off the audio, before it scrambled my brain. I'm still pretty traumatized. It's like hearing Beyonce's Single Ladies pouring out of some overpriced frontend for a sweatshop clothing business in a mall and not being able to get it out of your head for an hour afterward. Pretty soon a self-lobotomy with a spork from KFC seems like an outstanding idea. (By the way, in case you're tempted, googling "self lobotomy" isn't a very useful activity.)