Posts categorized “Cooking”

I wanted to make something goooood for din-dins, so here’s what I made:

That’s (counter-clockwise from left) teriyaki salmon, sauteéd spinach with salami and onions, and cucumber sunomono. What’s sunomono, you ask, and how do I know how to make it? EXCELLENT QUESTION! I learned all about it from my good pal’s new Japanese food blog, Cooking Japan.

Here’s the recipe! It’s absurdly simple to make, and it tastes frikkin’ fantastic. It’s light and cool and crisp, perfect for a hot summer day, and it goes great with teriyaki.

I really wanna make the salmon miso-yaki and the salt-broiled salmon.

Here are some interesting things I’ve found around teh intarwebs in the past few weeks that never made it into my blog here… until now (I’m pretty sure most of ‘em made it onto Facebook or Twitter, though).

OCTOCAM

If you ever, ever want to know what an octopus is doing right this very second, Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center has installed a camera in the tank of their resident 40-pound Pacific octopus, Deriq.

It is for some reason very enjoyable and relaxing to watch Deriq meander around in his tank.

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME-TRAVELERS

Artist Alex Varanese has imagined what it would look like if someone from today went back in time and re-created today’s modern electronics—cell phone, laptop, hand-held video game system, mp3 player—using the design aesthetics of 1977.

The results are absolutely fan-frikkin’-tastic.

I was born in 1977, so I completely remember this style of design. Y’all have no idea how much I miss high technology that had a faux-woodgrain finish. Glorious.

EDWARD CULLEN TAMPON CASE

Etsy crafter and all-around awexome human being Taisha McGee made the one piece of merchandise that no Twilight fan should be without.

The product description speaks for itself:

Bella’s most useful accessory. Case is 5.5″ by 2″ and holds two average sized tampons. Edward’s face is sparkly. Tampons not included.

RIVER TAM AND THE FIREFLIES

Holy eff but that is so freakin’ adorable. This is an actual album sleeve that artist Joebot made for a gallery show (happens on July 9th).

But the really cool thing is that you can purchase a print of this picture at his Etsy shop as a gift to send to me! Joebot has some other really cool prints as well, like ones of the Nintendo princesses (and Samus).

AT-AT DAY AFTERNOON

An absolutely adorable short film with seamless special effects animation. Very well done.

THE WORLD’S ONLY NEWSPAPER

This is a fascinating collection of still frames and clips of people reading newspapers in dozens of films and television shows. The exact same newspaper each time. Going back decades. It looks like this:

It’s actually kind of astonishing how wide-spread this newspaper really is.

AQUATIC VIDEOS

Here are a couple of videos of aquatic awesomeness:

WATERMELON TURTLE

This extravagantly cute melon bowl is from my link-of-the month, Host-It Notes.

There are all sorts of other darling little foodstuffs at Host-It Notes, like sheep cupcakes, mushroom radishes, and frosting bees!

That’s about it for now.

So I’m only just now getting around to posting about what happened leading up to, during, and after Halloween. Why? On account o’ the busy-ness, and some unavoidable delays.

My wife caught a powerful sick that lasted the entire week leading up to H’ween, so I was busy taking care of her as well as doing everything around the house that needed to get done. I also had to drive out to me mum’s place a couple of times so that I could borrow her sewing machine, which I needed to create the body portion of my H’ween costume. I’m not a very good tailor, so it took a while, but it came out shockingly well. More details in moments.

The theme I decided on for my H’ween punkins this year was “fossils.” Probably because my friend Three Ninjas is so into them. So about a week and a half before H’ween I carved the first one: an ammonite fossil!

Then the day before H’ween my pal Leiapico had a punkin carving party! It was also a costume party but I didn’t have my costume completely finished yet. Anyhoo, I carved another punkin at the party. You should recognize it pretty easily:

Then during the day on H’ween I carved a trilobite fossil:

Then I had another punkin left over, so I carved a fossilized dinosaur thigh bone into it just for fun.

And here they all are!

Normally Carrie & I make Reuben sandwiches with potato/green bean/sauerkraut soup on H’ween evening and give out full-sized candy bars to the trick-or-treaters, but this was an unusual (and special) year in that Halloween was actually on a Saturday, so we actually performed our Fools Play Halloween format (Fools Play Trick or Treat) on Halloween night! As per usual, all the Fools dressed up in costume, so here’s a run-down of what was what:

Yeah! I designed it so that I could put the jellyfish “hood” down. I also made slits in the long tentacle sleeves about even with my hands. I then sewed strips of velcro on the slits so that I could cleanly close them when I was in full costume, but I could open them and stick my hands out when I was performing or interacting with grab-able things. I also put my purple shirt on over my jellyfish bottom for the duration of the show.

The Fools were not, of course, the only people dressed in costume. A huge percentage of the audience came in costume as well, which is what we want for our Halloween show. Some of my faves were Tia as a Starfleet Medical officer (with a costume she made herself), and her boyfriend James as Master Onion from Parappa the Rapper. There was also a very good Velma from Scooby-Doo.

Anyway, at the end of the show our apprentice Jamie, whose soul we’d manage to free from the influence of dark magic (long story; don’t want to bore you with the details) and who had overcome the brainwashing of Sir Ian McKellen (who wanted us dead for tearing a page out of his copy of the Forbidden Book of Improv Lore (but, again, I don’t want to bore you with the details)), managed to turn his soul completely around and became an official frikkin’ fool: Jamie Pederson the Ginger Fool!

Originally we were going to give him the Orange shirt seeing as how Nathan Geyer the Orange Fool hadn’t performed in about six years. But in a shocking turn of events, Nathan Geyer was actually in the audience that night, and jumped up in protest when we were about to give the Orange shirt to Jamie. He said he was back in town now, and so he was going to reclaim his Orange shirt and start performing again. So we had to scramble to find another shirt for Jamie and the best we could find was a shirt the color of crystallized ginger, so the Ginger Fool he became. So in one night we got a new Fool and saw the return of a long-lost Fool!

So, yeah, that was fun.

But because I was at Fools Play on Halloween, Carrie & I didn’t do our Reuben Sandwich Feast as per usual. We were gonna do it the day before, but she was still having the sick in her (which is why went to Leiapico’s punkin carving par-tay), so we delayed it until the Friday after. I made 12 Reuben Sandwiches. They were good.

Anyway, one of the reasons why this post is so late is that my digital camera broke back in September, so I didn’t have it with me at Fools Play to take pictures of everyone’s costumes! I had to wait for the person who took these pictures to get them off the camera and email them and then have them be sent to me, etc. Took a while. But there they are, baby.

OFFICER KANE

But there they are, baby. There they are.

CAMERA TRUCKS UPWARDS as OFFICER KANE puts his arm around CINDY. They turn and walk away down the alley in SLOW MOTION and are soon lost in the fog as the END CREDITS MUSIC begins playing.

FADE OUT.

THE END.

Hmm… I went somewhere weird at the end of this post. Oh, well.

Here’s what I did, see? I made a basic mirepoix, but then added a red bell pepper to it as well. I also cut the stuff up a bit chunkier than is usual for a mirepoix, ’cause I like that “rustic” feeling to my soups, and I’m too lazy to do any better. I sauteed all that up in a big pot for just a couple of minutes with a tiny bit of olive oil. But NO SALT! There will be plenty of salt in a bit.

Then I dumped in a bunch of sliced mushums, four enormous cloves of garlic chopped all chunky, and one entire kielbasa sliced into 1/4″ – 1/3″ slices. See, as it cooks the salt will leech out of the kielbasa, so at no point are you to add any extra, ’cause them kielbasas is salty enough for the lot o’ ya! I did add a bunch of freshly-cracked black pepper at this point, though.

Then after that has sauteed around for another couple of minutes, I poured in about a quarter cup of white wine (a Riesling) and some low-sodium vegetable stock, then added water until all of the ingredients were about an inch under the liquid.

Now I’m gonna simmer that for about an hour, so it should be ready exactly when Carrie gets home for dinner! I might grab some fresh flat-leaf parsley from the backyard and stir it in when I take the soup off the heat. I’m also considering adding a dollop of sour cream right before I serve it, but I’m not sure about that one. I’ll let Carrie decide on that. I am gonna bake up some crescent rolls to go with it, though!

It occurs to me now that the word “mirepoix” might not be common knowledge, so here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirepoix_(cuisine)

Carrie & I have been married for five years. No joke! That’s, like, some kinda special anniversary, ain’t it? Well, to celebrate we took some time off and went off on a little vacation along Hood Canal.

We stayed at a cabin near Tahuya. You know where Tahuya is, dontcha? C’mon, everybody knows where Tahuya is!

We stayed at a cute little place called Maggie Lake Cabin, which is near Lake Maggie of all places. The cabin was really nice. Small, but it was just the two of us so it was just fine. It had a nice kitchen, and a futon and a super-comfy recliner, and an enormous deck that looked off down a hill towards a little pond (it was dry, but it’s been a dry summer). The most notable thing about the cabin was that it had a loft bedroom that had a ladder leading up to it instead of stairs. Well, we took Suki with us, and at first she wasn’t having any of that ladder. We had to put her on the ladder, then move her front paws up a rung, then move her bottom paws up a rung, etc., all the way up the ladder one rung at a time.

To get her back down we had to put her front paws on our shoulder and carry her down like a big baby.

Eventually she figured out how to climb up in, and then she decided to climb down it. Bad idea! She made it about halfway before getting all tumbly and twisty and is kinda lucky she didn’t hurt herself. We carried her down every time after that.

One of the days we drove all the way around to the other side of Hood Canal and went to Hoodsport Winery, where we loaded up on berry and fruit wines—blackberry, raspberry, rhubarb, apple, pear, & cranberry. Don’t know if you know this about me, but I loves me the candy wines.

Since we were in the neighborhood already, we continued up the Olympic Mountains to Lake Cushman, which is frikkin’ gorgeous. It was a Monday in September, so there were basically no other people anywhere to be seen. We walked along the shoreline and I took many photos:

In one part there was a really nice tidepool type of pond, and there was a rock in it that for some reason fascinated Suki. She tried to bite it a couple of times:

Suki had a great time at the lake. She did a couple of things that we’d never been able to get her to do before: fetch a stick (she’s only ever gone after tennis balls before) and swim on purpose (she’s had to swim a couple of times when she fell off logs, but she’d never done it willingly before). I got ‘em both on video:

We (mostly Carrie) cooked a ton of great food during the vacation. We had enormous burgers stuffed with gorgonzola. We had fettuccini Alfredo with langostino. We had scallops wrapped with bacon accompanied by cheesy grits. We had li’l smokies wrapped in crescent rolls. We had cinnamon rolls with orange frosting. It was all good, but it was quite a lot of cholesterol.

We got home in time for Carrie to take Lawrence to his driver’s license test, which he passed (finally). And then that evening she played in her kickball league and they only lost by 1 point—and she scored a run!

I went back to work on Thursday, but Carrie had the rest of the week off. In fact, right now she’s at the Puyallup fair going to a James Taylor concert! Gotta love Sweet Baby James. I’m getting ready for Fools Play &Mdash; we’re doing Robot Repair Shop tonight, which is rather exciting because we haven’t done it in a couple of years. I should probably review it. Yeah, I’ll do that now.

I’ve been kinda craving Greek food for a while now, and I live much too far away from Taki’ s Mad Greek to make casual trips there for some good Greek cooking.  So last night I decided to cook my own Greek food, or at least fake it good enough. 

Y’know how to get stuff to taste Greek, right?  You need basically three ingredients: 

1. Olive oil (xtra virgin = best)
2. Lemon
3. Fresh Mediterranean Oregano 

So here’s what I did:

Ingredients:

• 3 chicken breasts
• a bunch of little white or gold potatoes
• lemons
• fresh Mediterranean oregano
• fresh rosemary FROM MY BACKYARD
• ¼ to ½ red onion
• ½ of a big cucumber
• bell pepper (any color)
• spinach or romaine lettuce
• cherry or grape tomatoes
• Feta cheese
• tahini in a jar
• cayenne pepper
• garlic cloves
• olive oil 
• soy sauce
• salt & pepper

Potatoes:
Take a bunch of little white or gold potatoes, cut them in half so there are enough to line the bottom of a corningware dish. Liberally apply olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and finely-chopped fresh oregano, and toss it all together so it’s all evenly distributed and all the potatoes are coated.  Take some garlic cloves, smash ‘em up and distribute them amongst the potatoes.  Put the potatoes in a 400-degree oven and cook ‘em until they’re done (about 30-40 minutes probably).  

Salad:
While those potatoes are cooking, dice up your cucumber, red onion, and bell pepper.  Slice your tomatoes in half.  Tear up your spinach or lettuce.  Toss it all together with some crumbled feta cheese.  

Dressing:
Scoop a big spoonful of tahini into a food processor and squeeze a bunch of lemon into it.  Pour in a gloop of olive oil. Add a dash or two of soy sauce and as much pepper as you want.  Smash up some garlic and toss it in, and add just a pinch of cayenne pepper.  Whirr it all up until it’s a nice, smooth consistency like salad dressing, which is exactly what it is.  You can adjust the thickness by adding more tahini (to thicken it up) or lemon juice or olive oil (to thin it down).  

Chicken:
When the potatoes are about 10 minutes from being done, take some chicken breasts and liberally apply olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, finely-chopped fresh rosemary, and finely-chopped fresh oregano, and toss it all together so it’s all evenly distributed and all the chicken is coated.  Heat a pan on med/high and sear the chicken in it until it starts to turn golden on the outside and is cooked all the way through, about 4-5 minutes per side depending on how thick your chicken is.  Squeeze more lemon juice all over those suckers during their last minute of cooking.  Squeeze lemon juice all over the potatoes as well and remove them from the oven.  

Plate the chicken and the potatoes and sprinkle some leftover fresh oregano over them.  Toss the salad with only enough dressing to lightly coat it.  The dressing also tastes excellent on the chicken and the potaotes.  Partake and enjoy.

I must admit that I didn’t make everything; Carrie concocted the dressing.  It all tasted quite excellent accompanied with wine and Animal Crossing.

While the Holiday Season™ always seems hectic, the 2008-2009 Holiday Season© seemed much more hectic than usual. That’s because it was more hectic than usual.

Basically, every day that either Carrie or I “had off” for the span of about two months turned out not to be a day off at all, but a family holiday, trade/craft show, or wedding event.

That’s right, this Holiday Season® had an extra holiday: The Duncan/Briggs wedding. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First was Krismuhs Eev. Because of the snow my family tried to cancel our traditional Crhistmas Eve Brunch, but my brother and I were all like, “Screw that!” and decided that even if the rest of the fambly didn’t wanna do it, we (with Carrie & Cassie) would do it anyway. And because of our obstinance everybody except for Pa, Jason, and Alexis had brunch at The Village Inn on Christmas Eve. Take THAT!

There was still snow on the ground on Christmas Day, making it only the 2nd or 3rd White Christmas™ of my entire life. Carrie & I went in the morning to drop Suki off at her folks’ house before continuing on to my folks’ place for the traditional Li’l Smokies, scrambled eggs, and orange rolls for breakfast. We then opened stockings & prezzies before going over to G’ma’s place (just up the slippery road) for more prezzy opening.

In the afternoon it was over to Carrie’s folks’ house where we mixed things up a li’l bit by opening prezzies before stockings! Gasp! I KNOW! This was because Christine came and joined us for the stocking opening portion of the day! Hooray! It was good to have her there. We got her cute stocking stuff (and a cute stocking).

Then there was a marvelous pork dinner, for which we were joined by the people who live across the street from Carrie’s folks, and eventually Carrie & I went back to our house.

It was an interesting Christmas, the first one in who-knows-how-many years that I didn’t get any video games! Instead I got a bunches of DVDs and a handfuls of books. Carrie got me the T-Mobile G1, which seriously kicks some major bottom. It came in the mail a week or so early, though, so I had it before Christmas. In addition to that she got us some Jonathan Coulton tickets for his show at the Moore Theater next Friday. Carrie also gotted mostly of DVDs and a few of books (one each from me), but I also gave her a pair of fantastic frog slippers.

New Year’s eve was (as always) only 6 days after Krismush, but in the meantime this time there were a couple of wedding events, including girls-only drunk bowling at Chalet Bowl in the Proctor district:

There was also some sorta bridal/wedding shower that weekend. Not to mention the usual Fools Play funtimes!

New Year’s Eve was another good time party, but New Year’s Day was unusual in that it was the first time in years that Carrie & I didn’t go out and see a movie. We just had been doing way too much and still had way too much to do for the upcoming wedding.

The very next day, in fact, was the rehearsal dinner. Carrie got a wedding-party gift: a walking cane with a concealed knife/sword. The head of the cane is a skull. A robot skull. It K’s all kinds of A. There was hanging out with Lawrence and some of his New Orleans friends at The Parkway afterwards. Good times.

The next evening there was a girl group getting together to make all the programs for the wedding (which were much more complicated than the programs at my wedding, which were printed-out pieces of shiny gold paper folded in half). I was on errand duty and drove people and things around for a while.

Then that Saturday was the actual wedding. The wedding started around 6:30. I got to the location around 1:30 to help with setup and bringing in box after box of hooch and putting up decorations and locating things and supplies and all that kind of thing. Carrie was one of Lawrence’s groomsmen, and while I wasn’t a bridesmaid I did have a role in the wedding: I got to escort Christine’s mum down the aisle. This meant I got to wear a nice suit. I clean up well:

Anyway, it was a very pretty wedding, which you would expect from Christine & Lawrence. Lotsa peacock feathers involved in the decorations and corsages and whatnot. Here’s all the peoples standing up there:

And here’s my favorite picture I took of Chrstine. She’s purdy:

Anyhoo, I took about 40 photos and uploaded them all (full sized) to this page in case yer interested.

After the wedding we hung around and helped clean up, then I drove Travis’s daughter back to her house. When we got off the freeway I heard sirens behind me and pulled over just as a cop car went flying past us. We continued on and went up a road to a T-intersection. I turned left and then when I looked in my rearview mirror I saw that if I had turned right I would have run into about 18 cop cars all arranged higgley-piggley all over the road, completely taking up about a one-block section. Whew! Didn’t want to get mixed up in that!

The next day I took Lawrence’s family to the airport so they could take their respective flights back home.

Oh! And mixed up in those past two weeks were also daily going and feeding a cat and lizard, and letting Boston Terriers out to pee in thier backyard. Almost forgot about those.

After that we were actually done. No more holidays. No more weddings. No more events. I had intended to get started on the new year that Monday (a week ago today), but honestly Carrie & I were just so exhausted that all we’ve been able to do for the past week was clean the house from the New Year’s Party and sleep. And play Animal Crossing: City Folk. And sleep.

Then today we went out to Safeway and bought food fixin’s, and cooked a wonderful, healthy meal of Mahi-Mahi salad with spinach, green beans, pecans, and parmesan cheese with a creamy lemon dressing that Carrie made from scratch. It tasted so very, very good. Carrie & I both agreed that today, Monday the 12th, was when the new year was finally able to start for both of us. So we drank a bottle of bubbly wine to celebrate with our om-nom-nummy dinner.

Now I’m just finishing up this post and then I’m going to start making many, many lists of all the things that I’d like to accomplish. Then I’ll start moving around the list items to that I know when to accomplish what pieces of each list. I’m using the fantastic backpackit website to do all of this. I absolutely lorve that website. Too bad it doesn’t have a good mobile version; if I wanna use it on my T-Mobile G1, then I have to navigate the browser to the full website (easier than it sounds; I just poke one icon and I”m there, but it does take longer to load than I’d like and isn’t really formatted for the small screen).

What kinds of things am I listing? Oh, let’s see. I’m in the process of teaching myself to use PHP with MySQL to create custom database-based shopping cart applications. I have a handful of movie reviews and articles that I’d like to write for THIS VERY WEBSITE (gasp). Carrie and I are working on a joint etsy site. I have a major writing project that I’m going to be diving into head-first in February, so I have to gear up for that. I’m transferring THIS VERY WEBSITE’s server and looking to switch over to WordPress. And there is one extremely major project that may seriously change a huge chunk of my life, but that for now will remain a secret. Except to those people who it involves, in which case you’ll be getting an email from me later this week.

Oh, and also a very fun and awexomely good-for-me project: Starting tonight (in about a half-hour) I’m beginning this program. I’ll be posting my progress here and on my twitter account, so that’s probably gonna be pretty boring for you, but it’s incredibly exciting for me, especially after the six weeks have passed (though for me it’s likely gonna be closer to eight weeks).

Whew! That’s about it for now I guess, but Happy New Year (finally) everyone!