Ham Sandwich Nation

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While I disagree with the implication that even a reformed grand jury system is the way to deal with it, I otherwise agree with almost everything Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes in Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime.

As former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, Sol Wachtler, was famously quoted in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, "a grand jury would 'indict a ham sandwich,' if that's what you wanted.” (Notably, Wachtler said this before he was charged with extortion, racketeering, and blackmail.)

I especially agree with Reynolds on this:
"Our criminal justice system, as presently practiced, is basically a plea-bargain system with actual trials of guilt or innocence a bit of showy froth floating on top."
Check out the six page paper here at SSRN. 

Vegan and beer STL

And it's about 12 degrees outside. Eek!

Vegan hotel room dinner

It's 22 outside here in STL, and the walk to the store was bracing. So it's nice to sit inside, watch bad television, eat surprisingly tasty supermarket food, and go to sleep early.

Blast from the past: inauguration

On the eve of another inauguration, I thought I'd re-post this exciting blast from the past.

http://dangr.blogspot.com/2009/01/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad.html

I'm SO damn glad to not be there tomorrow.

Whaddya want? WE KNOW WHAT YOU WANT!

To be as responsive as possible to our readers, it's food porn all day here in the dangr.blogspot.com world headquarters!

Clockwise from bottom right: twice stuffed baked potato with Daiya, veganaise with chili-garlic sauce, fried marinated tofu on top. This was leftovers dinner. yay!

TOFU TOFU TOFU! Overnight marinated tofu on the left, same partially baked in our adorable but slow toaster oven. (Confidential to E&K: DON'T JUDGE. The lines were stronger before I turned the pieces over to put them back in the toaster oven. I swear.)

Overnight salt-soaked russet potatoes with garlic and rosemary. Not yet done: finished images MAY follow.

CRITICALLY IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS:
The food porn will continue until morale improves. That is all.

Facebook

I'm struggling. Most of you know I hate detest despise loathe Facebook. Many a time I've called it the downfall of modern society.

I'm now struggling with the fact that to best do some volunteer work for my beloved college, I might need it.

This is a partial transcript of my conversation with J last night (who, incidentally, does has the FB Word.)

Tofupalooza!

This is grilled tofu. Also have tofu roasting, and frying. Potluck tonight!

Good ol' fashioned FOOD PORN!

Alright, friends: I spent much of today working on stuff for my college (which as many of you know, I love) and don't have a ton of original stuff to post. So how about we do FOOD PORN?!?

Frying tofu and mushrooms on the left, tempeh bourguignon (from the delightful cookbook/graphic novel Dirt Candy Cookbook) on the right.  The bourguignon was amazing: deep, rich, flavorful. I couldn't resist messing with the recipe, of course, and substituted additional (cheap) wine whenever water was called for.

Grilled zucchini, "hot dogs" and "sausage", beer, a great book, bear-sized pepper spray. What more do you possibly need? 

Baking potatoes to make an extremely complicated, and very delicious, "Roasted Potato Soup", also from Dirt Candy.)

Two different iterations of vegetable stock from Dirt Candy, for the Roasted Potato Soup above. Oh, and approximately a metric shitton of garlic.

 LEFTOVERS! Yeah, that's right: this is at least half leftovers. Vegan hot dog, and an arugula salad with roasted portobello mushrooms with a kimchi dressing, and apples (pictured right).

Enough leftovers to make J's lunch! That's the bourguignon on brown rice on the left, and the above-mentioned arugula salad on the right with grilled broccolini.

I don't have any decent images of the appetizer I made for the party we went to last night, but here are the tags. It was... delicious.

A neat kickstarter

Many of you know my of interest in alternative and modular housing. This is a really cool Kickstarter page for a project called AbleNook which I recently backed.

More information and additional images available on the AbleNook website.

Brooklyn toilet repair

Yes, you're seeing that correctly: that's a shower curtain hook.

Sometimes you have to get creative.

It actually works perfectly, and has me thinking about all the cheap, crappy, failure-prone chains and plastic connections in the guts of toilets.

Blossom Cafe vegan BBQ cheeseburger

It was slightly spendy ($14) but fucking delicious. It was, in fairness, the West Village, so $14 with side greens isn't out of line with local prices.

About to go do an hour or so of meeting, then hopefully get the rest of the weekend off. We'll see.

Vegan Manhattan Mediterranean!

Close, easy, delicious.

Ohhhh, New York.

Oh Brooklyn. Oh Williamsburg. Oh Irony.

Our plane

J and I flying to NYC, in the Sky Club, with a nice view of the 738 we're about to board.

More about books

I realized that yesterday's post might make it seem like I have an immense amount of leisure time for reading. In part, I make time to read. But it's really keyed mostly to how much I travel: much (most?) of my reading time is on airplanes, in hotels, and on the occasional train.

Oh, and I did a similar post a few years back about my 2007 reading totals.

2011 and 2012 books, by the numbers. And a strong start.

Total books read in 2011: 11
Total pages read in 2011: 3758 (average of 7.55 pages per day)
2011 book I couldn't even finish: Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

Total books read in 2012: 16
Total pages read in 2012: 6,880 (average of 18.79 pages per day)

Total books read so far in 2013: 3
Total pages read in 2013: 1083 (average of 154.71 pages per day)

Best books read in 2012:
A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo
Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
(I wonder what it says about me that the two best I could find on my list are both about war?) 
 Worst books read in 2012:
Song of Susannah (Dark Tower VI), by Stephen King
(and another which I'm too nice to list here. You can email me to ask.)
 2012 longest book: Fall of Giants: Book One of the Century Triology, by Ken Follett (985 pages)
2012 shortest book: Down to Earth: People of Appalachia, by Kenneth Murray (125 pages)

2012 book I couldn't even finish:  House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods, by Alexander von Hoffman

Books on deck (as in, already on the to-be-read shelf):
Winter of the World, by Ken Follett
Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver
Green Building and Remodeling for Dummies, by Eric Freed
Life Under Glass: The Inside Story of Biosphere 2, by Abigail Alling & Mark Nelson
The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, by Jane Poynter
Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

JFK...

Complete with unhappy Delta staff sitting by gate 23. Nice dinner, but now a few hours to go. Might as well do some exploring!

Best vegan food in Queens?

No, of course not. But tragically, the airport vegan pesto noodles with tofu might be the best food I've had this week.

With love and appreciation to the very kind people at the Chinese/Tex-Mex restaurant at Beach 115 in the Rockaways, the steamed vegetables and plain steamed tofu gets old after having it five times in four days.

Sitting at JFK for what should be an ontime flight.