Saturday, November 13, 2010

Fait a confit!

All I know is it smells very Italian in here. I thought this liter jar would be full and then some. I tasted one tomato and it seems good to me. Will put this stuff through its paces in the coming days.


Esteemed commenter JPG asks what the ingredients were. Here's how I made this confit which was a glorious salsa alternative on this morning's breakfast burrito:

1 quart yellow cherry tomatoes, cut in half, 1 pint red grape tomatoes, cut in half, 1 large shallot, thinly sliced, all of these tossed in a few Tb of olive oil

placed 2 Tb of olive oil on a baking sheet and sprinkled 2 Tb each of fresh, chopped basil, rosemary and flat italian parsely, along with thin slices of 2 cloves of garlic, and coarse salt and freshly cracked pepper. Next step was to array the tomatoes/shallots cut-side-down on the baking sheet, and then cover with yet more of the herbs and garlic. I placed this in the oven about 225 deg F for about 1.5 hours. I was watching for the tomatoes to lose their firmness but not get completely mushy. I left the pan on the stovetop and let it cool almost to room temperature. Then I picked out the garlic and bunged the rest into the sealing canister, and I topped the lot off with more olive oil to cover any tomatoes sticking up out of the liquid and popped it into the refrigerator.

The house smelled wonderful. This would have been glorious to spread hot on top of fresh garlic toast. From what I gather from many recipes I saw online, this should remain well preserved and edible in the fridge for a couple weeks. I doubt it will last that long. Nice way to winnow out the zest of summer, though, innit?

Yummy stuff.


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Yellow cherry tomato confit, stage 1

I'm just improvising based on a variety of recipes I looked at online. We'll see how it goes.


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Heaven on a plate.

Previous missive found me waxing euphoric on an omelette.

Okay, this was glorious beyond measure.

I confess a predisposal to affection for Sophie Dahl because she bears a striking resemblance to one of the most gorgeous creatures on earth, my lovely niece C. But this recipe for an omelette tribute to author Arnold Bennett was more than a bit enticing to me. She showcases this as a home alone-day-style indulgence, but I think this is the most glorious omelette ever, and may finally inspire me to invest in a proper omelette pan. I poked about the 'nets and found a bit about this omelette, but I do think the Miss Dahl's lemon zest definitely improves the entire affair, plus the association with her excessive adorability makes it all the more delectable, in my humble opinion.


Himself is working tonight, but I've asked him to bring a colleague for a properly decadent breakfast of this omelette after his shift in the morning. Lucky me if they say yes, for I shall have a second helping!

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Location:Home.

Friday, November 12, 2010

Good googly moogly.

This is so frelling glorious. I have to blog it. Naow.





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007's M [Dame Judi Dench] as you've never seen her...

I had no idea she played Sally Bowles in Cabaret in 1968




Funny to hear that brittle hoarseness of her voice was there 40 years ago, too. It's funny, though, because as brilliant an actress as she is, she's not quite guttersnipe enough for Sally Bowles in my mind. Still, it's cute to see her in something completely different.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

If I'm wrong, I wish someone would splain me, but...

I think the students protesting the student tuition fees in England are a right lot of tosspots. Same goes for the whiners in France protesting the retirement age going from 60 to 62.

What a spoiled, impudent, self-indulgent bunch of wankers. Yup. I said it: they're all assholes.

Guess what? You know that education all those people feel entitled to so they can command a higher salary than the folks who tucked their chins and put their noses to the grindstone after basic education? That costs someone something. No one owes you a melon-farming education, asshats, so suck it up and pay the ever-loving fees, take out student loans, borrow from a kindly relative-- whatever you have to do, but quit frelling whining. Education is something you should have the pride and moral fibre to flipping earn. No one owes you that.

And what about the things you've destroyed in your little shitfit, eh? Could the destructive attitude of trustafarians like yourself be a contributing factor to the rise of education costs, mebbe just a skoshy bit? Jerks.

Then there's the protestors in France-- from the photos, the people all looked really young. Frankly, they looked a lot like the young people in the British student videos-- soft, spoilt and useless as teats on a boar hog.

When you think of contemporary mob scenes, it's never with a warm knowledge that needed social statements were being made. It usually appears that thugs on the periphery are seizing an opportunity to act out whilst riding a wave of other people's acrimony.

I'd bet good money that none of those students goes hungry, that they get all the latest fashions and probably most of them are carrying a cellphone that costs as much as an average Joe makes in a week. The same sort of wankers walk around in Che Guevara tshirts, full of manufactured angst at imagined injustices when in fact Westerners live in a world our forbears engineered to shelter us from many of life's harshest realities and hopefully enable us to make the most out of life.

I've never seen anyone with smallpox. I've never seen a mother and her children dying of water-borne illness. I've never lived in a shack with no mod cons and I don't know anyone who has. I'm not saying people should shrug off real and pressing dangers or moral outrages in our world, and injustice should not be tolerated, but first we need to have a real discussion on what, in fact, constitutes injustice and moral outrage. Even destitute people in the West can find free food for themselves and their children. Medical care is available, food, housing. This is not third-world shit where your kids are sitting in filth with houseflies crawling across their eyeballs. We all need to have a sense of gravity and humility about the relative riches we have in our lives and how we need to use those riches as springboards to an even better existence for ourselves and all the little ones we hold dear.

Right now you're looking at a computer, whether your own or borrowed, and you are in a heated or cooled structure. You are comfortable most of the time. You have access to a staggering wealth of information through this box, you have a working brain and there is a world full of raw resources waiting to be tapped. You have the key to unraveling nearly any problem you ever could face, if you would but use it. But no one owes you. You really should have the dignity to earn it.

Only you can change the way you live.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

...stayed up late...

Tuesday night I meant to get in bed very early, but I saw a link to the videos of Matt Lauer's interview with George W Bush and stayed up an extra hour listening to him field questions-- often rather withering in nature-- from his interviewer.

I already knew I liked GWB. I already knew he was a decent person, and principled. He was sharper than his critics ever gave him credit for being. I remember how people accused him of being a puppet for Cheney and of being a colossal dimwit and in almost the same breath they'd say he knew all along that 9/11 was coming or-- more baffling still-- that he was in some way involved in its conception and execution. I don't know how some could reconcile calling him addle-witted and yet a sociopathic mastermind. Listening to him speak in an interview such as this one, not rising to the bait and yet standing his ground, I marvel that anyone would find him not likable.

The tone of Lauer's questions seemed quite contentious, and yet GWB fielded them with grace, candor and the genuine good nature I've always associated with him. I loved that his response to Lauer's mentions of high approval ratings and low ones at different points in the interview were met with essentially the same response of "so what?" He didn't take the job of President to win a popularity contest, and he had very clear and grave ideas of his responsibility in that role. He understood he could not afford the luxury of needing to be liked at all times. I'm thankful that when 9/11 happened, he was our President.

I didn't learn anything new from these video clips, but I did find reinforcement of two things of which I was already convinced: I like George W. Bush, and Matt Lauer is a tosser.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

from Ireland/monkey housin' syndrome

bog snorkeling.

Um, why???
*********************

There's a company my company deals with and they are doing a little introduction thing featuring me in their upcoming newsletter, for some reason. They asked me what was the strangest thing to happen during a transaction since I came on board with the company, and I had a really hard time coming up with something. Dealing with neurotic, unreasonable people is always strange because mentally ill people are tedious and sadly predictable in the most silly ways--but that's pretty much a given in about any service-related job.

I wanted to say that nothing at this job even touches the hem of the garment of strange in my book. Managing apartments once I had a resident give notice and I asked his permission to show his loft to a new prospective tenant the on the following day and he said sure. We walked into the space and at all times I tried to keep myself and my A-line skirt between the prospective new tenant and the bong and frisbee of weed on the coffee table. It was sort of a little two-step, but I managed to keep the prospect innocent of the offending articles and vowed to wait until he left the place to show his apartment again.

Then there was the elderly nudist who (still lives there-- My sister manages it now!) wore nothing but hot pants as he rode his bicycle around the property, twig and berries festooned in sadly withered swags oozing unctuously down the saddle-- so said others who live there.



*shudder*

Then there was the time the lady came to look at lofts and brought her pet Capuchin monkey who (ruined!) drank my iced tea, tore up someone's $1500 rent check, sat on my head and rearranged my hairdo and then flopped on its side looking up into my eyes intently, shoved its hand down its diaper and set to work doing something which could only be described as masturbatory, for reals. The lady kept asking if I'd seen her on the news, she having just won a custody battle in court against the SPCA for the little brute. A few days later talking on the phone to a fellow manager of lofts in the design district, I said it had been an odd week and he said "you have no idea: I had a monkey in my office on Tuesday." I said "you too?" Apparently she was making the rounds in attempt to get attention for herself and the monkey. Yes, here is an actual picture of the actual monkey. I can't see its hands, but I have my suspicion about what they were up to at the moment the photo was snapped. In fact, if someone hasn't throttled the little beggar by now, I'll bet it's interefering with itself at this very moment.



Oh, no. I haven't seen strangeness on the job in a long time.

And I don't miss it.

Monday, November 08, 2010

rest in peace, Shirley Verrett

An absolutely gorgeous soprano with effortlessly elegant and refined technique.

I think this is super-cute!





This is my track Wishery, comprising vocal syllables, musical chords and sound effects recorded from the 1937 Disney classic Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. Enjoy!

sweet! I love how they put it together and the video is cute! Just a little taste of Disney without over-serving.

Sunday, November 07, 2010

reason #million-and-something Why I Love Tam:

because she writes stuff like this:

But while I was eating lunch I watched the Brat Prince keep trying to strike his favorite chin-uplifted Mussolini pose, with its haughty "Who farted?" moue of confident disdain, but it wouldn't stick, and his facial expression kept drifting back to one that looked like a man chewing on a cat turd.


Tam, tucking into grub at a pub, day after election where the TV monitor was on mute

BWA HAW HAW HAW HAW!!! All this time I was trying to figure out what that expression represented. A man chewing on a cat turd. Yup-- it fits.

Sunday, Puppy Sunday: Sock Pup




Getting cold, I got out my fuzzy house socks, and found one of them is air-conditioned. Two guesses on how my sock got air-conditioned...
Oh well. I still have ossumly cute pups. :)

Saturday, November 06, 2010

Don't touch the remote- you don't know how it works!

A message from Dads about Daylight Savings TIme:



h/t to Bad Tempered Zombie

buttermaking


I had some heavy whipping cream left over in the fridge and I was baking a cake Wednesday night so I thought I'd do something with the cream and I left it out on the counter for an hour or so to warm up. I remembered Stingray's post on making butter, and always wanted to try that. My mom told me when she was a kid, they'd make butter in a quart jar, just tossing the jar from hand to hand. I couldn't find a clean jar with a lid I trusted, so I put the cream in a ziploc container (green with silver sparkles).


I sat at the computer and chased links and watched videos as I shook the container. Fairly quickly, it seemed to become whipped cream and just seemed thick and like there was barely movement in the container. After I'd been shaking it for about a dozen or so minutes, I noticed that it went back to liquid form and was super-sploshy. I kept shaking it for a few minutes before I realized I had butter in the bowl.


This butter is super-creamy and very smooth, very sweet. I took a poppy-seed cake to work Friday and the butter, too, and people oohed and aahed over it.


I'm just wondering about its efficacy in baking-- would it be better or not as good as the hyper-processed, regular product we get from stores? All I know is the next time I have a party, along with an array of stinky cheeses, there will be a sizeable bowl of fresh butter. Yum!