Ready to chill.

June 23, 2009

Good god, it’s hot. The last few days have been in the upper 90s, and there isn’t much relief in sight.

For dinner on Saturday night we made Chicken Jalfrezi using Patak’s simmer sauce:

Cube up some chicken, put it in a casserole dish with the sauce, bake for about 45 minutes and serve over rice. I love the cool yogurt sauce called riata that is served at Indian restaurants, so I made my own version with plain yogurt, shredded cucumber, minced garlic and salt. So delicious! If you love Indian food, and you love easy, you need to get some of this sauce pronto. There are other varieties, but we’ve yet to try any but the Jalfrezi, also called Sweet Peppers and Coconut sauce.

On Sunday, I braved the heat and went to the annual Father’s Day car show in Stanberry, Missouri with my dad, sister and ex-step-mom. One big happy family cruising around northwest Missouri in a Seabring convertible. My sister and I were in the back. I had forgotten how fun, and yet literally hair-raising it is to ride in the back of a convertible.

There were lots of classic cars at the car show. I liked this one:

Can I get a beep, beep?

My sister liked this pink one, because it looks like a Barbie car:

My sister, the Barbie.

We stayed in Stanberry for about an hour, and would have stayed longer if not for the heat. Did I mention it was hot? So hot that we put the top up for the return trip.

We liked our Saturday meal so much, that we made the same thing Sunday night. We accompanied our meal with a few episodes of The IT Crowd. If you are a computer nerd or work in a place who relies on an IT department, or both, give this show a watch. It originally aired in Britain for three seasons. We’re on season two, and it has an ever-growing Seinfeld vibe about it - a bunch of misfits get themselves into some ridiculous situations and end up looking like idiots. With jokes.

What else… what else… hmm… we’ve had some rather interesting back yard visitors recently. The groundhogs, Phil and Rita, had babies that are dubbed Brandon, Punky and Henry. They usually come out during the day to eat clover, but haven’t been around in the last few days due to the heat. They are also difficult to photograph. We’ve considered hooking up the camera to the telescope to get a shot, but that would involve moving the enormous telescope, something neither me nor Mr. Awesome are wont to do. We did get some pictures of some other visitors from last week:

Bambi passed through.

We thought this guy was lost, but a short time later we saw him with his mom.

Yet another reason to keep your cats indoors.

This coyote (Acme) hung out for a few hours the other day, sunning himself in the field.

Foxy.

This fox (Tod) and another one (Copper) played together for about half an hour last week, right in the middle of the day.

It’s not like we live in the sticks or anything. There’s a large field behind our house, and ours is the only house in our neighborhood that isn’t seperated from the field by a row of trees. So we get the pleasure of watching the critters play in peace. Increased construction of North Brighton has forced the area wildlife to relocate, and it appears many of them have chosen our back yard.

As if the furry creatures weren’t enough, we set up a couple of bird feeders in the last few weeks:

These goldfinches like the finch feeder… while the red guys like the mixed seed:

We’ve seen some bluebirds around our house, but have yet to catch them at the bird feeder. We were awoken last Saturday by a woodpecker who decided to mark his territory by pounding on our house, though. I had to shoo him away at 6:30 in the morning, and was not happy about it.

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Turkey talk.

June 18, 2009

Planet Sub has turkey subs for $2 the day after the Kansas City Royals win a game. To save you the hassle of having to track down a score, some friends set up this site a couple of years ago:

Is it a Royal Turkey Day?

There is a rumor that some nefarious types have recently set up their own version of this classic site, but ACCEPT NO IMITATIONS. Plus, the graphics on the original site are far superior.

/end endorsement

Now if the Royals could just win a game, I could save some money on lunch…

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June 18, 2009

We were out in the back yard the other evening, and Finnie decided to fly:

Apparently our human concept of gravity is of no consequence to her.

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Up close.

May 27, 2009

We’ve been taking more pictures lately. What’s more inspirational than springtime flowers? Here are some of my favorites. All but the first one were taken by Mr. Awesome.

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Pho to the oh.

May 14, 2009

As promised when I (sort of) posted the recipe, I got a picture of our Pho Ga from the other night. It was superdelicious.

Pho Ga is made from angel tears and puppy smiles.

While we’re on the subject of photos, I finally unloaded the pictures I took of the towel I made for my mom for Mother’s Day. She has a cart in her kitchen that’s covered contact paper with a colorful fruit pattern. Think Carmen Miranda. I thought this towel would go nicely with that theme:

Sometimes I make things with needles and thread. Sometimes they turn out purdy.

Here’s a detail of the dancing chica:

Mr. Awesome likes her red undies.

My mom loved it. I don’t know what I’m going to make next. I have a few ideas, though. Of course, there will be pictures.

Posted in Epicurean, Miscellany 2 Comments »

This post is making me hungry.

May 12, 2009

One of my favorite meals of all time is Pho Ga, or Vietnamese chicken noodle soup. I’ve been meaning to post a recipe for a long time, but ever time I go to do it, I realize the “recipe” doesn’t really translate well to the standard recipe format. So instead of sweating over the format, I’m just going to tell you how we make it, since we’re having it for dinner tonight.

I was going to post a picture of our Pho, but I can’t find one. I can’t believe I don’t have one. Anyway, I did find a picture of the condiments required for exceptional Pho Ga. We will use all of these tonight except the mint, which we’ve decided isn’t really necessary:

I’ll take a picture of our finished product tonight so you can see how incredible it looks. Too bad we don’t have smell-o-vision yet.

Making Pho Ga is a multi-step process, but is really, really easy.

Step one - put a couple beef knuckle soup bones (the really cheap ones from Price Chopper are great) in a crock pot with a chunked-up onion, a packet of onion soup mix and a couple cups of water. We also threw in the carcass of an astronaut chicken (rotisserie chicken, for those not versed in Palahniuk) that was in the freezer. Set it to Low and let it go about 8 hours.

When you get home, your house will smell heavenly Heaven.

Step two - strain the whole crock-pot mess through a mesh strainer into a big soup pot. Add about 6-7 more cups of water, one bunch of green onions broken in to a few pieces, a couple of cinnamon sticks, a star anise pod, a chunk of ginger (peeled - use a teaspoon to peel it), two teaspoons of sugar, one or two chicken boullion cubes and two boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Sometimes, we throw them in frozen, but it turns out better if the breasts are thawed. We also sometimes throw in some dried shiitake mushrooms, but we’re out right now. Also, sometimes we don’t put any chicken in and instead get an austronaut chicken from Sam’s Club on the way home from work. We make the broth the exact same way, but put torn-up astrochicken in our soup instead. We then use the rest of the chicken in pasta or something, and freeze the carcass for use in Pho Ga - (it’s a delicious cycle of chickeny goodness, people). By the way, only use one boullion cube if you go the astrochicken route or it will be too salty.

Anywho, bring the whole thing to a boil, then turn it down to a simmer for about 40 minutes or so. If you want really tender chicken, keep the water temp at about 160 degrees or so. It’s fine if you don’t though - it’s all still good.

Step three - Remove the chicken breasts and set them aside. Strain the whole soup pot mess through a mesh strainer into another pot (we usually use the crock pot again so we don’t have to wash another pan) so you’re left with delicious, clear, aromatic broth. Then pour the broth back into the empty soup pot and bring that to a boil.

While the broth is boiling put your noodles on to boil. The best best best ones are the ones in the fridge section of the Chinatown market here in KC. They are in a pink package. We’ve tried other ones and these are by far the best. They are also sold at the 888 market on 87th street in Overland Park. Boil the water, then throw the noodles in for about 45 seconds or so.

Slice the chicken breasts into strips or chunks or whatever you like.

Divide the cooked noodles into bowls. Use big, deep bowls. Asian markets have good ones. Add the chicken, then ladle broth over the noodles and chicken.

Then, you have to add garnishes. These are not optional:
Juice from half a lime
some fresh cilantro, torn in bits
a drizzle of sriracha (hot) sauce
a few dashes of Vietnamese fish sauce
A couple globs of hoisin sauce
a little bit of soy sauce

Restaurants also serve fresh bean sprouts and sometimes basil or mint with their Pho. I like the mint and will use it occasionally, but keep the sprouts out of mine, please. I don’t like them in this soup at all.

Eat with a big spoon and chopsticks. Seriously. Something about eating noodle soup with chopsticks is very calming and enjoyable and zen. You’ll thank me if you save your chopsticks the next time you eat Chinese take-out.

This sounds like a lot of work and a lot of ingredients, but trust me - you will make this once and find it is so easy and satisfying and amazingly good that you will make it again and again and use all the ingredients eventually.

We make this once a week or so, and consider it an easy throw-together meal. God, I can’t wait to have it tonight with some wine and a (hopefully) clear evening on the deck.

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For My Lover, Returning To His Wife by Anne Sexton

May 12, 2009

Acquarello su carta, anno 2000 by Paolo Stenta

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.

She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.

Let’s face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.

She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,

has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter’s wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,

done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.

She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.

I give you back your heart.
I give you permission—

for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound—
for the burying of her small red wound alive—

for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother’s knee, for the stockings,
for the garter belt, for the call—

the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.

She is so naked and singular.
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.

As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

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Too much of a good thing, or not enough?

April 30, 2009

This morning, I sat in a meeting where the various flavors of Windows and Office were being discussed. Some users like Vista, some hate it, some like Office 2007, others hate it and want to stick with Office 2003. In about a year, we’ll get to add Office 14 and Windows 7 to that mix, which will present even more options to the world. Maybe too many.

*side note* I installed Windows 7 on my home laptop and work PC this week and absolutely love it. Where my laptop used to take two minutes to boot, it now comes up in 20 seconds. Windows 7 is much faster, is visually more pleasing and has some really great bells and whistles.

Last night, we watched two TED talks. The first was given by Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice. Schwartz made the point that sometimes, too many choices can hurt us, rather than help. He gives some examples. First, if you go into a supermarket to buy salad dressing, you are presented with over one hundred varieties of salad dressings. You pick one that looks appealing, but when you go home and use it on your salad, you continue to think of the other varieties. No matter how good the one you chose tastes, you are plagued by the notion that maybe, among the other 99 or so bottles you didn’t choose, there is a better variety. Therefore, your overall enjoyment of your salad has not gone up, it has gone down.

The second example he gave involved the purchase of blue jeans. Many years ago, Schwartz went to buy jeans and had one option. Today, he is presented with dozens and dozens of options - loose fit, easy fit, slim fit, acid-washed, distressed - the combinations and permutations are seemingly endless. Eventually he found a pair that he liked. In fact, they were the best-fitting jeans he had ever purchased. But - they weren’t perfect. A vast sea of choice holds the possibility of perfection, and when perfection is not achieved - no matter how much better the results are than they were previously - disappointment ensues.

The conclusion I gathered from this talk was that too much choice can be a bad thing.

Interestingly enough, the next random talk we decided to watch last night was on the exact opposite of this idea. Malcolm Gladwell used spaghetti sauce to illustrate that more choice is better than less - at least, when it comes to food products. Gladwell tells of Howard Moskowitz, a pioneer in the market research field. Once upon a time, market researchers brought a group of 100 people together, presented them with Spaghetti Sauce A, Spaghetti Sauce B and Spaghetti Sauce C, and asked the group which Item they liked best. If 40% of the group liked Spaghetti Sauce A, 35% liked B and 25% liked C, Spaghetti Sauce A was the winner. While that did represent the most popular vote, 60% of the group wasn’t satisfied. Tough luck for them. Moskowitz pioneered the idea that they didn’t need to develop a better spaghetti sauce to appeal to more than 40% of the population - they needed to develop better spaghetti sauces. More choices, not less, was the key to satisfying the wants of American consumers. Instead of presenting them with one thin version of sauce (think Ragu), present them with a thin version, a chunky version and a spicy version. This is why there are 36 varieties of Ragu on the shelves today instead of the one that my parents grew up with.

The conclusion I gathered from this talk was that more choices is a good thing.

Are these two talks necessarily contradictory? Not really. I don’t think Schwartz’s point is that we shouldn’t have choices at all, but there is something to be said for having too many. Especially if, in the vast array of choices, you are still limited. Before I got my iPhone, I wanted a cell phone that did nothing but send and receive calls. No camera, no texting, no calendar. Guess what? 1.8 billion cell phones on the market and not one of them is just a fucking phone. Or how about when I go to Mama’s on 39th Street. They have 80 omelettes on their menu. Do they have the one I want (ham, onions, mushrooms and cheese)? No. Peanut butter and jelly omelette, yes. To this I say, WTF? Where was I going with this?

Ah yes - We are a society (and workplace) inundated with choice. Some of that choice is great - count me as one who likes chunky spaghetti sauce. But some of that choice is overwhelming, frustrating and/or confusing Have you shopped for women’s clothes at a department store? I rest my case. Mr. Awesome feels the same way about MicroCenter (it’s still one of his favorite places on the planet, nonetheless). He’s gone there to purchase something - a hard drive, for example - and there are so many types and sizes and brands that he literally throws up his hands and walks away empty-handed. And he’s a tech-savvy guy.

I think the key to happiness through choice is finding that sweet spot between not enough choice and too much. When it comes to my workplace computing environment, I think fear of change leads people to reject new technologies without giving them a chance. At some point we need to be able to eliminate the choice of holding on to the old in order to expose them to the new.

Maybe Howard Moskowitz can tackle that problem next.

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Rediscovering TED.

April 29, 2009

A couple of years ago, I spent a few days completely absorbed with TED Talks. I watched several of them and really enjoyed them, but for whatever reason (probably one involving my short attention span) I stopped watching and forgot they existed.

Last weekend, we bought an Apple TV unit. Besides letting us watch television and movies via iTunes, it lets us watch video podcasts. And that’s how I rediscovered TED Talks. We’ve been watching one or two before bed. They run about 18 minutes a piece, although some are slightly longer and others are significantly shorter. No matter the topic, be it the nature of humanity in the cosmos (David Deutsch, TEDGlobal 2005), a study of the trickster in culture (Emily Levine, TED 2002), or nerdcore comedy (Ze Frank, TED 2005), the talks are engaging, interesting and inspiring.

Last night we watched two talks. The first, from David Deutsch discussed how we as humans are both typical and not typical. How the primary function of our existance is the search for knowledge, and that all that is needed to create knowledge is, basically, matter, energy and evidence. Even in deepest space, he says, where it seems as nothing exists, is matter, energy and evidence. The only thing that keeps us as humans from being about to turn empty space into, say, a particle excelerator, is that we don’t know how to do it.

The second was a talk from Richard Dawkins about how the human size and experience limits our understanding of the universe. He discussed that we humans live in what he described as the “middle world” where we can’t comprehend things of very large or very small size. For example, even a dense rock is mostly empty space, but our perception of the particles is a solid mass. To something very small - say, the size of an atom, the rock would appear as mostly empty space. Our perception makes up our reality. He describes us has having “software” that builds the model of the world we live in - a monkey needs software that builds a model to help it climb and swing, while a bird needs software to model a world in which it can fly. He asks the question, is it possible for us to retrain our brains to see the empty spaces? Is it possible for us to intruduce children to the concept of the very small at a young age through the use of computer programs so that they can learn to see the world differently?

Fascinating stuff, really.

Over the weekend we watched a talk on SETI, which inspired me to install it on my computer and help in the search of extraterrestrial communication. On Monday, we watched the creator of Wikipedia describe how the online encyclopedia thrives because of, not in spite of, its “anyone can edit anything” existence.

There are dozens and dozens more talks to see, and more are given every year. The range and scope of TED is incredible, and is (and I know I am in peril of sounding too schmaltzy) a true gift to humanity.

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Meme Friday.

April 17, 2009

Who wants to be creative on Friday? Not me. That’s what memes are for - templates for “creativity.”

Four Food Questions:

1. How far would you be willing to travel to satisfy a food craving?
2. Have you ever eaten rabbit? If so, what did you think? If not, why not?
3. Have you ever made your own bread? If so, how?
4. Where do you usually spend Easter and what do you usually eat?

Answers:

1. I’d probably drive about 30-45 minutes for a good meal. for snack cravings, probably 20 minute drive, tops.
2. I’ve never eaten rabbit. The one time it was offered to me was on Easter when I was about 10. My uncle had made a rabbit stew and told us he caught the Easter Bunny breaking into his house. There was no way I was eating the Easter Bunny.
3. I’ve made bread in my bread machine. It turned out good. I haven’t made any in a while - maybe it’s time to break it out again.
4. Easter dinner is with my mom. We always have a leg of lamb with mint jelly, Mr. Awesome’s favorite curry rice casserole, my favorite 7-layer salad, some sort of veggie and rolls. This year, we didn’t do Easter dinner on Easter. Instead, we’re doing it next Sunday.

From Friday5.org:

1. When did you last sleep in a tent?
2. What comes to mind when you think about relieving yourself in the great outdoors?
3. Where’s the best place you ever went camping?
4. What’s your favorite camp food?
5. What’s your sleeping bag like?

I’m on a roll - one more set from Friday5.org:

1. What’s something you know how to draw?
2. Who’s someone you could get away with impersonating?
3. Where’s the stapler?
4. Why will this be a great weekend?
5. When are you going to make that phone call you’ve been putting off?

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