Cooking cycles

Cooking in my family skipped a generation. One reason I got into cooking was because i was tired of mom's casseroles and crock pot cooking. When I asked if I could cook something different, the answer was 'you make the mess, you clean it up'. That usually included all the serving dishes, eating utensils, and plates too. Which led to me doing some cooking, mostly during holidays. But it was only after I left the house that I really started having fun cooking and experimenting.

She (nani) wasn't taught much by her mom, who just wanted everyone out of the kitchen when she was cooking.

And grandmother had 2 boys who were not interested in the craft.

At the grandparent's houses I wasn't allowed to do much in the kitchen other than stir stuff, and basic prep (and then only for grandmother and not nani). I likely would have been a cook for a living if mom hadn't enforced the 'you make it, you clean it'. I have friends who think that if you are willing to do the shopping, put together the list, research the recipes and cook, then someone else should clean, or at the very least, help clean.

I'm waxing and waning these days, I really want to cook and bake, but get frustrated that I have to clean all the dishes, including the plates and utensils. We have no dishwasher. I'm it. My cycle is cook, clean, get frustrated, don't cook for a 7 days or more, break down and cook again. I'm in my downcycle now, after doing a chicken roasting workshop and Robbie Burns Dinner last weekend.

Saw Cloverfield - no spoilers

After being scared for that long, I'm totally primed to be jumpy and overly concerned about things under the bed. I'm glad I have someone to cling to tonight.

Devon had to peel my fingers off his arm several times during the movie. I'm not a fan of 'unsteady cam' and covered my eyes several times to ward off the nausea. It had a blair witchian feel.

It had more scary moments than Sunshine, but then, I hated the whole sun zombie thing in that movie. I made the mistake of going into Sunshine thinking it was sci fi, not horror. I don't do horror, except on rare occasion w/ drinking buddies, and even then it's cheesy, chainsaw, buckets of blood, b movie horror. The gratuitous special effects in Sunshine, like when the frozen astronaut goes floating into space and smashes into bits, burns itself into my memory and I hate that kind of visual. See, I'm trying to talk about another scary movie in the hopes that I will distract myself from Cloverfield. My jaw hung open several times during Cloverfield, and my mouth was dry afterwards. I guess that's as good a response as any to this kind of movie.

We saw it at a free Paramount screening, after some (always) excellent food at Crown of India. They make curries thar are lick-the-bowl good. I wanted a spatula when scrapping leftovers into my box, so I wouldn't miss any sauce. Yumness.

Thing a day

On the 21st, sign up opens for http://www.thing-a-day.com/

For 29 days starting on February 1st, participants are invited to create one thing every day and post it on the thing-a-day.com blog.

I think I can do that. It will certainly be good momentus to get my creativity going again. Since there is no way I can just cook every day. And all the knitting projects I have will take more than a day to complete.

Now they need to come up with a 'Thin a day'. Maybe I'll do that in March.

the last one

Who leave 1 single ibuprofen in the bottle? It's as bad as leaving 3 sheets of toilet paper on the roll, as if that somehow neutralized the obligation to replace the roll.

I don't take a lot of pharmaceuticals, but when I need ibuprofen, I need a lot of it.

Punch up and tweak chocolate chip cookies

The standard recipe for Nestles chocolate chip cookies (the one on the back of every bag) is too greasy, sweet and bland for me. I find I'm always trying to adjust it. I have a more European than American palate, which means more flavors and less overpowering fat and sugar. Most american candy is just too slap in the face sugary for me. I need caramelization, salt, citrus, nuts or something else in the mix.

Brown Sugar
I never use brown sugar. It's 3 times the cost of regular sugar, and all it is is white sugar with a few drops of molasses added to it. I'm not talking about the fancy 7x more expensive specialty brown sugars (which I think is equally ridiculous), just C&H. How can you check? Put a pinch of brown sugar in your palm and rub your finger against it. In a few seconds your palm will have molasses on it, and there will be plain white sugar crystals on top of it. Rip Off!

Just add a teaspoon or 2 to to a recipe that calls for 'light' or 'dark' brown sugar. Molasses keeps forever (as opposed to brown sugar which goes rock hard after a couple months), and can be used to liven up the flavor on myriad recipes from sweet to savory.

My newest cookie recipe tweak.

Carribean Coffee Chocolate Chip Cookies

cream:
1.5 sticks butter
1.5 cups sugar
2 T molasses

Add:
2 eggs - 1 at a time
1 t vanilla
2 T espresso or coffee concentrate (I always have some coffee toddy in the fridge)

Mix together, then stir into liquid in 3 parts:
1 t fine sea salt
1 t baking soda
1/2 c cocoa powder
1 c whole wheat flour
1 c white unbleached flour

Stir in:
1-2 c chocolate chips ( lately I like Guittards bittersweet, the large flat chips are a nice change in texture) depending on your chocolate craving.

Dollop onto parchment and bake at 350 for 10-12 min until slightly firm to the touch. They are not radically different, but they don't leave a greasy slick in your milk when you dip them, and they have a nice depth from the interaction of the molasses, cocoa and coffee.

I like to freeze the dough in a long roll and wrap it in plastic wrap. Then I can take it out, cut as many cookies off of it as I want, and bake a single sheet of them. Fresh cookies whenever I want, and only as many as I need.

How useful is a blog?

At Haliewa Joe's in HI.

I see more blogs that focused as tools for selling than journals about the authors life. Barely anyone I know uses them to about people in their lives. Sure they cover the big events like births and weddings, but I always thought a journal also contained your thoughts on other people, what you did or didn't like about them, your learning experiences about them. We're tribal, and before stuff and work comes how we socialize with others.

But the blogs I read are mostly about careers, art, crafts, tech, and 'big' social events. Do the same people who write those blogs write elsewhere about their lives,
their travails, the gossip? Or do they just talk about to their friends, and then its' gone, never to be read about by them or others, years later when they wish to retrieve that moment. Sure they knew what recipe they were experimenting with, or what shop they visited or cheese they ate or who's book was recently published back in June 2006, but who were they fucking, and was it good? Was it different than it is now, and what did they think about that person?

I certainly want to know about the recipes and cheese and books, which is why I subscribe to those blogs. But I wonder if they keep their other personal info on those blogs as well (as private entries), or write them in a private place and put it on a shelf (always nice to write by hand, but you can't do a fast search for a name or place by hitting ctrl +F, you have to skim shelves of pages of scribbles), or don't even put them to paper at all. Letting those moments that truly define their humanity slip away, to only be half-remembered decades later as a fuzzy recollection mixed in with the definite sharp knowledge of a cheese they discovered around the same time.

MTG - end of an era

I use to play MTG when it was BIG. It peaked just around the time the Ice Age expansion came out. MTG was the only card game out there, there was nothing like it, everyone I knew who collected comics or was into D&D also played. I collected until Urza's Saga came out, and the addition of yet more stupid annoying rules made me quit collecting and playing altogether. I should have sold my cards then. But I was hoping that either they would make a comeback, or I'd be able to play again w/ some regularity. So I kept them.

Not that I played a single game of magic in the last 10 years, but I've kept them close to my heart. Hoping some day that I could find people to play with, people who were not impatient impolite teens with $400 decks that had all the time in the world to study the new rules that come out every 3 months, and no time for old codgers like me who just wanted to play open, unlimited, for fun. I tried a few comic stores that had an extra room for Magic The Gathering back in the 90's, and had no luck finding the right vibe.

Today I sold them to a college student who supplements his income by reselling them. He paid cash, and I am now out 1 entire box of magic cards. A file box full that I didn't have to part out card by card, look up, research, package, and sell individually. Sure I could have gotten 5x what he paid, but it's out, gone, and it won't be looking at me with big 'MTG' in red ink every time I walk by the bookshelf. It won't taunt me any more with potential playability. I have too many other projects and art and things to do.

I dreamt about the cards all last night, of selling them or of keeping and selling them myself. That I'd make so much more if I focused on just selling them, time I don't have, and when I woke I knew that I was getting time back by getting rid of them. If I really wanted to put in the effort to sell them, I had a decade to do it, and didn't.

I did spent 2 hours last night taking one last loving look at the cards, remembering favorite decks, long hours playing with friends, the first few excited days of learning what the hell the game was all about with a friend who was equally lost, the days when I would eagerly await the next expansion, of saving for a handful of booster packs.

OK, I did keep 4 cards. I sold over 3000 of them, so it's not like I kept a whole card box. It was an odd 4, nothing rare, just because I loved the cards, not the art (otherwise I would have dug out all the Quinton Hoovers, and it would have been another couple weeks before I got around to posting the ad) and used them a lot.

Now I wish I could hand every box I have to a college student and he'd pay me that much. I'd much prefer the space than the stuff.

New Years Day

What did I do new years day? I spent it sleeping in, then putting away boxes of wrapping paper and holiday decorations. Then I played the last and best hours of Mass Effect, until 1:30am. I am not a big console gamer, but I am a sucker for a good choose-your-own-adventure game. That was tremendous fun. The last time I enjoyed a game that much was Planescape: Torment. Funny enough, it was made by the same people. Thank you to the entire studio for making a very entertaining, dramatic, and in depth game.

If only school could be as much fun as video games, I think our kids would be a lot smart and more involved in the learning process. I spent many hours reading the codex and planet informational blurbs in Mass Effect. Besides being entertaining, all of it completely useless for every day life. But like a good book, I could focus on nothing else.

And like Planescape: Torment, it has great replayability, you want to play the full Renegade character, then Paragon, chose different love interests, and different responses. But I'm done with it for a while, I didn't do much else all week and need some time away from the TV.

Now I have to scream through Something Wicked This Way Comes for the bookclub tomorrow.