Wednesday, February 29, 2012

I heart rest days



Even though i got thoroughly drenched riding to downtown Portland, the food has been delicious. I was kind of amazed at how much I liked Deschutes' beer nuts: roasted Marcona almonds and cashews with brown sugar, porter molasses, and Hawaiian pink salt.

Bridgeport Brewing, Portland



Day for of the bike tour, and honesty, it's been rough. Snow, hail, sleet, and/or rain every day. Up and down hills. And an Achilles tendon injury, possibly partially avulsed.

Today is a winter storm.

But lunch and beer makes it all better. Bridgeport is amazingly vegan friendly.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Bike tour day one!



And new bike day, day two!

On the ferry from Seattle to Bremerton, and my brand spanking new Surly Cross Check is tied up down on the motor deck. Riding Bremerton to Olympia (actually Tumwater) today. Life is amazing!

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Retro GARDENING PORN!

Some classic Alaska gardening porn. Damn, I miss being able to garden in Alaska.
Cabbage in raised bed. The chunk in the trash can is because I had to thin out the bed.

 I mean, this is how stuff grew inside, for crying out loud.

The herb garden raised bed in the front yard.

Various stuff in another raised bed in the front yard, including lettuce, which

big dumb overgrown cows like this one sauntering along at the top of our driveway liked to snack on, which is why I built the hinged cage to protect it. Sure, they could pretty easily tear it off if they wanted, but they had pretty limited attention spans and didn't bother.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Painting project!

dangr-us thoughts World HQ Editorial Desk: Okay, enough already of the damn food porn!

me: Alright, fine! Why don't you just throw some paint at the screen if you don't like what's on it?


This was a project I did with my wonderful nephews and niece in Sacramento in January. They wanted a kid's table for the back yard. Why not throw some paint at it?

A cheap 4x4 piece of OSB. Nephew D and I cut it. The rudimentary compass (see the sharpie marker taped to a string, tied to a nail in the middle of the board?) did the trick of giving us an even circle to cut.


The battlefield: we primed the wood, and Lowe's had several "oops" mistinted sample sized paint, and I bought a couple more.


And the final result, much flung and smeared paint later.

Yeah, that's right:

Still more FOOD PORN!


Tempeh and onions!

 Zucchini and onions!

Thai red curry! 



Binging

Even though this post is about alcohol, the binge here seems to be my blog posting today: this is #4 and counting, and I'm still going through photos.

Yep, it's all feast or famine here at dangr-us thoughts World HQ.


New Years eve in San Francisco, outside Johnny Foley's. No, I didn't go in.


And this is about 9am on January 2, in the elevator down to the Civic Center BART station (hey, I had an enormous suitcase, okay?) No, that yellow liquid on the floor isn't Sierra Nevada Celebration. Stay classy, San Francisco.


Here's just a list...

Now here's just a list, of some stuff.

Actually, this is from going through and trying to clean up my January 2012 photos. I need to either do a better job of labeling/foldering them, or take fewer. It can take hours to go through and process them when you get behind the 8 ball.

We made Oaxacan chili chocolate cookies (as well as a couple other kinds of cookies) for all of our building staff at Xmas. These had a little heat to them that took a couple seconds to kick in, and were either loved or hated: the building manager loved them; the maintenance engineer had to get his kids to eat them. J and I both thought they were delicious.

I can't remember, or tell, from the image whether these were chives, or fresh basil. Either way it was tasty. 

J loves my flash fried brussels sprouts with garlic, so they are making a repeat appearance on this blog. (Just search for "brussels" in the search box. Even I was a little surprised at how many times brussels sprouts have shown up. Possibly second only to tofu and onions.) 

Sometimes I get a hair up my ass and do things like buy #10 cans of pinto beans and garbanzo beans. Then have to use them. Top portion, clockwise from left: pinto bean chipotle hummus, roasted red pepper hummus, UltraGarlic(tm) hummus; then in larger bottom container is a sushi tofu salad with a pinto bean patty on top.

This is a pretty classic food porn picture from my kitchen: onions, and tofu. Yum.

This is those same onions, fancified a little with fresh ginger.


Nothing too strange about wanting to get the last little bits of olive oil out of your container, is there? 

So why, then, would it be strange with shampoo, even if it requires duct tape? 

Stuffed mushrooms. 

A shockingly tasty vegan airplane breakfast on a Delta flight ATL-SFO. (Love the free upgrades on cross country flights!) 


Lemon zest is photogenic.

Random balcony panorama

I made this one on January 7, but don't think I ever got around to posting it. That's a storm rolling in from the southwest, but we only got around a quarter inch of rain that day.

FOOD PORN, Kentucky style!

No, we're not talking Kentucky Fried Chicken on a vegan food porn blog. 

And to be honest, the food itself wasn't particularly unique to Kentucky, aside from being limited to grocery stores so sparse they made Grocery Outlet look like Whole Foods.

I was cooking for between six and fifteen people hungry from walking all day, which partially explains the vast amounts of food being consumed.


L has a small farm in Lexington where he grows garlic. This didn't show up until midway through the walk, but we still got plenty of use out of it.


 Breakfast potatoes with peppers -- one of two batches cooked.


Raisin bread toast, made with freshly baked bread that JB brought from Cincinnati.


A slightly elaborate dinner salad, made with ingredients on hand: fresh lettuce that a walker brought from Lexington, tomatoes, black beans left over from a previous dinner, olives that a walker inadvertently took from a church kitchen thinking they were ours (oops!). And in the background right is a fresh jalapeño, garlic, and olive oil relish. C'mon: relish isn't just the cut up green pickle stuff you buy at the supermarket!


Eggs 'n taters. Here's where I out myself: while the walk was entirely ovo-lacto vegetarian, yes, I did occasionally cook non-vegan food for the walkers. No, I didn't taste or eat it, and got compliments for this: being able to cook good food without tasting it. Please don't call the vegan police. (And no need to call the health department, either: I cooked the eggs way more than shown above...)


 Much garlic bread was made, much garlic bread was consumed.

 
What would a food porn post be without a mostly gratuitous shot of ONIONS?


 Leftovers here of lentil stew, fresh coleslaw, etc.


This is how you make a lot of pasta for a lot of people. Those cans of cheapass pasta sauce forming the bottom of the food pyramid? $0.50 each. The only cheaper food we ate was the excellent produce we pulled out of a dumpster in Prestonsburg.


One of the church kitchens I cooked in was super small and had, literally, one station that could be used for prep. So piles of stuff had to go everywhere. This was prepping for pasta, and flash-fried collard greens with garlic.


A shot of the mostly unadulterated cheapass pasta sauce, and ONIONS!


A shot of the now much tastier pasta sauce, brimming with vegetables and kidney beans. 


My lunch one day on the walk: the delicious freshly baked bread, this one with anise (?) in it, a ton of peanut butter, and some dumpstered banana.


Doing prep the night before for breakfast: peppers and ONIONS!


I have no idea what I was prepping this for. Maybe the lentil stew?


More still not cooked egg. The caramelized onions and garlic were for potatoes.


I wanted to feed people festively for the Superbowl, and the grocery store didn't sell refried beans (or tortillas.) So I bought some pinto beans, and, well, refried them. This was for the six layer dip.


 This was nachos before baking them.


 And nachos after baking them, along with the six layer dip.


The six layer dip you've heard so much about: from bottom, refried pinto beans, cheese, raw onions, tomatoes, sour cream, and green onions. Yuckola. But people really liked it.

And this was the main dish for the Pooperbowl: stir fried brown rice with veggies. The rice was a leftover, gussied up with broccoli, cherry tomatoes, onions, garlic, and soy sauce.

I lost a dollar bet on the Pooperbowl, because I gave D the line of 3 and took the Patriots. I didn't really care about the game, but we were all going to watch it, so the bet at least made it interesting. Yet another reason to hate Tom Brady.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Kryptonite update

Alright, loogit: I'm not one to plug commercial companies. In the 688 posts in this blog to date, I'm not sure I've directly plugged any. (Sharp-eyed readers are welcome to correct this via comment, email, or writing it on the back of a $100 bill.)

But I gotta give it up to Kryptonite: they did right by their lifetime guarantee. As detailed in this lengthy post, I had some serious trouble with a Kryptonite combo U-lock. About three weeks ago I sent the broken down, 10+ year old lock back to them, with a print-out of the email response from the company website asking about warranty protection for a lock I had no receipt for. Today, poof: a brand new lock showed up in the mail (well, the UPS.)



Good on ya, Kryptonite. I'll buy from you in the future. No, I didn't get any additional incentive to post this, aside from the replacement lock.

I left part of the address unredacted for fun: I live on Peachtree St, not Beachtree St. But it got here all the same. Good thing there aren't any Beachtree Streets in Atlanta, unlike the 90+ streets that have some variant of "Peachtree" in their name.