Wednesday Ramblings

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I’ve been slammed packed busy. I feel like I’ve been assailed from every side. Fortunately the crescendo was reached yesterday and now things should start to subside as we head towards Thanksgiving. Boy-howdy, I can’t wait for Thanksgiving.

If I could have one Thanksgiving wish, it’s that I receive Rock Band before Thanksgiving. I currently have the game pre-ordered and its street date is next Tuesday. With luck I’ll have my copy Wednesday in time to rock out over Thanksgiving. If you’re unfamiliar with the video game Rock Band, but you are familiar with the game Guitar Hero, let me do you a service by giving you the long and short of it. Rock Band is the evolution of the music/rhythm game genre. All previous forays with music based games will seem cheap and superficial in comparison. That’s the story if any of the pre-release press about that game can be trusted.

If I could have one sartorial wish, it would be that all Crocs would transition from a solid to a liquid, scald their owners, and then disappear. I hate those ugly “shoes” and I feel their owners should be physically punished for purchasing them. Sloshing around in a puddle of garish napalm seems like a punishment that fits the crime. Speaking of things sartorial (nice transition huh) Project Runway AND America’s Next Top Model are both on tonight. It's a powerhouse of a fashion TV.

My ponies (Jenah and Heather) are doing very well in ANTM, which seems so strange. Usually the girls I pick are cut within the first 4 episodes. I’ve never backed a potential winner before. I guess the season is only half over so there is no cause for celebration yet.

Dawn caught a television show that looked pretty interesting on VH-1 this weekend. It was called The Shot or something like that. It was basically ANTM for photographers. It was kind of interesting for the discussion to be centered around how best to compose a photograph instead of how to best stretch out your neck. In the credits I noticed that the show was produced by Ken Mok, which the same producer as ANTM. (I assume everyone feels compelled to repeat “Mok Mok Mok Mok Mok” whenever they see his name at the end of ANTM like I do).

That’s all I have for today. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have an actual coherent theme to blog about.

Freaking dreams

I assume everyone suffers from a suspension of logical consequences when they dream. It really bothers me. I hate it that I am subjected to some strange set of rules that seems correct when I am dreaming…only to wake up and reflect on the dream and be at a loss. Why don’t real life rules apply to dreamland?

For instance, last night I dreamt that our next door neighbors put their house up for sale. [This is likely to happen in the next year.] They sold their house….but in dreamland that meant that Dawn and I had to move into their house and the people that bought their house had to move into ours… what the frick!?! In dreamland the buy-and-swap real estate market seemed to make perfect sense. It was normal and natural. Reflecting back on the dream while conscious I can only conclude that I’m a complete moron in my subconscious.

The dream wasn’t a good dream. Dawn and I weren’t happy in our neighbor’s house and were upset that we were forced to move there by virtue of their sell. Damn you crazy dreamland real estate social conventions. The plumbing was all messed up in the house and the shower was crappy. I distinctly remember be very unsatisfied with their wonky shower. In the dream the shower was operated with a giant lever that got stuck…it could only have been constructed by the Rube Goldberg school of plumbers.

What’s worse was what the new people were doing to the house that Dawn and I currently have. We’ve worked pretty hard fixing up our house in the last two years and the new people were systematically undoing all our hard work. They tore down the fence, put in garish wallpaper, and threw trash in the yard. The height of terror in my dream was when Dawn and I looked out the back window and saw that the new neighbors had constructed this horrendous playset for their kids. It was made out of all sorts of timber and metal and looked like a small building had collapsed….at the top was a red vinyl tent. I remember the red vinyl tent being the last straw…that was the point when social conventions couldn’t make me tolerate the house swap any longer. I was about to go into action.

I have no idea what I was going to do about the situation, thankfully I woke up. Looking back, the dream makes angry. How could I fall for such a stupid premise? Why didn’t I just reject it and move onto the next random dream thought. What can’t my dreams make more sense? That pisses me off even further. It was a dumb dream, but the fact that it angers me while awake seems to make it more powerful than any stupid nightmare. Those only affect you while you’re sleeping; they have no relevance while awake. I was angry in my dream and now I’m angry while I’m awake…. Stupid dream.

Good Evening

Part clown. Part Hobo. Part Millionaire. Totally awesome. I believe that is the only way to describe a 1941 superhero who is a millionaire disguised as a hobo who appears to be a clown.

I never cared for comic books. I considered them a bit….what’s the word…stupid. I’m always at a loss whenever a comic book themed movie and/or video game is released. Dawn and all my friends begin speaking a lexicon that is completely lost on me. Strange characters with byzantine stories are like old friends to them. It smells of soap opera to me.

Perhaps I would have seen the appeal of comic books if I had known there was a character as cool as the Chauncey Throttlebottom III. That’s not his millionaire name. That’s his made up hobo secret identity name. How cool is that. He has a monocle. A freaking monocle!

I’d like to highlight the first sentence in the image below…because it is awesome. “The Vagabond, better known to himself as Chauncey Throttlebottom III…” I wish I had a name I was better known to myself by.

Not sure where to go from here. I guess I didn’t have a plan. There was a super hero who was a clown and a hobo and I thought you should know about it.

That is all.

The sushi that keeps on giving

After Saturday night you’d think we’d be too stuffed to eat anything on Sunday. You’d be wrong. Once everyone was awake and stirring the topic of breakfast came up. Dawn and Yvonne sprung into action figuring out how to fabricate a tasty breakfast from the previous feast’s leftovers.

The leftovers in question were a couple of rolls of the fried sushi Dawn and I had made the night before. We ended up making 4 burrito rolls and 4 duck rolls. We only used two and a half rolls of each for supper club. That’s a lot of leftover fried sushi.

Dawn and Yvonne came up with a plan; the reasoning was explained to me thusly. Normally sushi is considered healthy food. We’d already violated that preconception by stuffing it full of sausage and duck fat, then deep frying it. Where can you go from there? Answer: Go for broke baby! You can pan fry the leftover sushi in butter, top it with a fried egg, and serve it with a side of bacon. This is how double-fried sushi, with fried eggs and bacon was born.

Be they angles or enemies of the American Heart Association? I can’t decide. But I know one thing…Oh, how decadent are their wares. Why not wrap your sushi in bacon and dip it in a runny yolk? For a particular type of person, this is the stuff of fantasy. We called it breakfast.

And to think the night before we begged and pleaded for some of the leftover sushi to be delivered to David and Karen. We were told that our pleas were the mutterings of an ignoramus, that there was no way leftover fried sushi could hold sway over the appetite. It should be discarded and forgotten.

But oh how it rises and it soars.

Stuff until you’re gorged

Talk about an amazing weekend for the culinary arts; this last weekend was stupendous. Evan and Yvonne came up early on Friday night and we started the weekend out right with a trip to the local wine bar for snacks and wine. Saturday morning we started our eating tour-du-force in earnest with huevos rancheros (Bill style, naturally). Then we began prep work for Supper Club.

Dawn and I hosted Supper Club this month. For this month’s theme each couple drew a method of cooking out of a bag filled with cooking methods. The drawn cooking method had to be used to prepare a certain type of dish. The assignments ended up thusly: appetizers (Atlee and Amanda) drew searing, side dish (Evan and Yvonne) drew baking, main Dish (Dawn and I) drew frying, and dessert (Stacy and Jamey) drew microwave. Drinks (David and Karen) were drunk, well at least one of them, and didn’t make it. But Yvonne and Carolyn stepped up to the plate to fill the gap. Drinks were supposed to use the boiled cooking method so Yvonne prepared Thai iced teas for before/during dinner. Carolyn prepared apple-tini’s to go with dessert. Oh, but I’m a bit ahead of myself with listing the actual food courses.

For the appetizers Atlee and Amanda prepared sesame encrusted seared tuna paired with a spicy dipping sauce. I’d had all but given up on seared tuna after receiving several poor preparations in restaurants lately. Atlee and Amanda’s preparation was executed so perfectly that it has re-kindled my desire for seared tuna. The amount of sear and the texture of the tuna were superb. The spicy dipping sauce was an excellent accompaniment (for more than just tuna).

For the side dish Evan and Yvonne prepared a savory bread pudding containing roasted vegetables (red bell peppers and artichokes). Just because vegetables were involved doesn’t mean this bread pudding was healthy and boring, this dish was anything but. The bread pudding took on a soufflé like consistency and was fun to eat with chopsticks.

Dawn and I had the main course and needed to fry it. After dismissing a lot of obvious fried main courses we settled upon fried sushi. Our fried sushi main dish consisted of three items. The first item was a roll of Dawn’s invention which was dubbed burrito-roll. This roll contained chorizo sausage, re-fried beans, chipotle mayo, and fried onion flakes. It was rolled inside-out so that the rice was on the outside of the nori (seaweed wrapper). The roll was dipped in tempura batter and coated with panko flakes then deep fried.

The second item was a roll of my invention dubbed duck roll. It contained chipotle-grilled duck breast, cooked sweet potato, ginger preserves, and wasabi mayo. It was rolled with the nori on the outside, dipped in tempura batter, coated in panko flakes and deep fried. The finished sushi pieces had a bead of pomegranate juice reduction squirted across them.

The third item was another one of Dawn’s inventions; it was a shrimp tempura hand roll. A piece of shrimp tempura was combined with mango and avocado in an easy to eat hand roll. Soy sauce was provided to dip the sushi in, but it turns out Atlee and Amanda’s spicy tuna dipping sauce was the preferred accompaniment. To complement our Asian theme a small glass of Japanese whiskey was paired with the main course.

Stacy and Jamey finished off the meal with a microwave dessert. They prepared a “baked” apple using the microwave instead of the traditional oven. Instead of taking 40-60 minutes to bake an apple it took a mere 5-7 minutes. Alton Brown should hand his head in shame for not figuring that out himself. To accompany the baked apple they also made mixed-nut peanut brittle…. using a microwave! I didn’t even know you could manage melting sugar for peanut brittle in the microwave, but the results were pretty darn convincing. People who spend time slaving over pots of molten sugar are suckers.

Carolyn and Don made an apple-tini to pair with the dessert course. It featured rum, apples juice, and a healthy helping of whole cloves which I heartily approved of. It was served with in a sugar rimmed aperitif glass with a stick of cinnamon in the center.

Phew, that’s quite a supper club recap. I’m sure I missed some details. Dawn and I had a wonderful time hosting supper club; I hope everyone else enjoyed it. I feel it bears mentioning that most of our guests were sipping scotch during the evening….I think it’s safe to say that on Saturday night our house was effectively the hippest, most happening, scotch bar in Huntsville.

I don’t trust the weather.

Earlier this week it felt chilly in my office, which was exactly the problem. I suspected that it only felt chilly. I suspected that it was not in fact really chilly, but my fallible human form was reading a false positive. I wished I had an objective way to determine if it was truly chilly in my office. I’m sure some of you might have been satisfied with your illusion of being cold, but I refuse to live the lie. It’s obvious that my office needs a thermometer.
I could have simply bought a thermometer to measure the temperature in my office….but why stop there when I can have a full fledge weather station in my office? This thing measures the inside temperature, the outside temperature, tracks inside/outside humidity, shows the phase of the moon, and has WWVB radio controlled time. I think it’s obviously why this is the superior solution.

Earlier this week I endeavored to set up my new weather station with visions of being superiorly informed about the state of the weather dancing in my head. Part of the weather station is a little sensor that sits outside and wireless transmits data back to the home station. The building outside my office is all concrete and metal…not exactly the easiest thing to mount the sensor to. There aren’t any protruding appendages to cable tie the sensor to either. Fortunately the sensor came with an adhesive sticky pad, so I stick the sensor to the metal frame of my window. A few minutes later I’m back in my office experiencing weather information bliss (so this is why the Weather Channel won an Ace award).

I knew my outdoor sensor would get some direct sun in the afternoon, so my afternoon readings would probably be skewed….I didn’t expect to look at the weather station and see that the outdoor temperature was 105 degrees…. Evidently it gets kind of toasty on the metal and concrete in the direct sun. After a day and a half of being broiled in the sun the adhesive pad called it quits and my outdoor senor fell to earth. I considered this a momentary set back and brought the sensor back inside while I considered secondary mounting options….that’s when my problems started.

At first it was all fun and games. I just stuck the sensor in my fridge (did I mention my office has its own fridge?)…. I got my jollies as I watched the weather station report the new much colder temperature. The weather station has a happy or sad face that it displays. The manual is silent as to how the weather station decides if it is happy or sad. I’m left to my own devices to guess at what makes it displays one or the other. It changes pretty often so I’ve decided my weather station suffers from mood swings. Having its sensor placed in the fridge definitely made it sad though.

After I got my fridge kicks I took the sensor out of the fridge and placed it right next to the weather station…..that’s when I noticed it. The inside and the outside temperatures didn’t agree. The two sensors were sitting right next to each other and yet there was a 5 degree disparity between the two readings. What sort of rouge climate could exist in such a small area? Which was correct? Could I believe anything the weather station told me? Now I am left doubting. Is my weather station really sad right now (it claims to be). Perhaps my weather station suffers from indecision as well as mood swings.

Halloween night means pumpkin carving!

This year’s pumpkin carving threw us a couple of curve balls. First off, Dawn’s pumpkin was not so good. It looked alright…the top was good….but once we got the top off and Dawn started to scoop out the innards we discovered something was rotten…the bottom half of her pumpkin. I’m glad I didn’t thrust my hand into that nasty gook…and the smell…. The smell was horrendous. Over all it was a very nasty Halloween trick. Pumpkin number one was a no go.

I offered Dawn one of the other two pumpkins…but after her reaching in to the fetid chamber of one pumpkin her enthusiasm for carving was diminished…if you had smelled what she smelled you wouldn’t blame her. The plan for my two pumpkins, or rather my pumpkin and gourd, was a zombie and a victim. The green gourd was to be the evil zombie and I wanted him to be actively eating the brains of my pumpkin victim.

I started to cut the top off my gourd and quickly realized that carving a gourd was not going to be as easy as carving a pumpkin. I had expected a bit of a difference…but the gourd skin was considerably tougher to cut than a pumpkin. Delicate cutting was out of the question, I was going to be lucky if I could make straight lines. This was a big disappointment for me. The plans for my zombie were way more intricate than I was going to be able to execute…instead I ended up with a pretty standard (ie bland) gourd-o-lantern. I’m actually pretty lucky I didn’t break any tools are cut myself during the course of trying to make the mediocre zombie. While attempting to carve it I said something along the lines of “egads this is one tough zombie, I hadn’t counted on the zombie’s skin being so tough.” Dawn replied that my random zombie comment was said with such conviction that Karen was probably smiling somewhere and not entirely sure why she was so happy.

After my disappointing zombie I started on the victim….the switch from gourd to pumpkin was astounding. Carving the pumpkin was like carving hot butter. I got carried away with the nostrils and they ended up being too large. I was very happy with my teeth. The photos don’t do a good job capturing it but they are more sculpted in 3D than just carved. I left the flesh really thick around the mouth so I could whittle away and create a set of teeth that ended up looking a bit like dentures (in person).

The innards of the victim pumpkin were a bit of a surprise too. The seeds were sprouting. I’d never seen that before. It was a bit of a bummer because normally Dawn and I like to roast the pumpkin seeds and sprinkle salt, cinnamon, chili powder, and cayenne pepper on them. This year the seeds were either rotten, or sprouting, or not pumpkin at all. Bah.

I was especially happy with the bite wound I carved into the side of the victim. I used a wood carving tool to create the wound. I wanted it to look like something with a lot of teeth and gnawed at the head. Next year I might even do a whole pumpkin with that tool…

I arranged some of the non-rotten pumpkin innards so that they were cascading out of the victim into a pile and then into the mouth of the zombie. The tableau was a bit grander in my head, but over all I was content with it. We moved the whole thing outside just about the time trick-or-treaters started to arrive.

It was interesting to hear some of the comments before they knocked on the door. Probably 50% of the people thought the green pumpkin had thrown up. The other half figured out that one pumpkin was suppose to be eating the other pumpkin.
It was especially rewarding to hear the small kids gasp when they figured it out. I wonder if any kids grasped the concept of cannibalism for the first time last night? My highest compliment was from a parent who was explaining it to someone else on the other side of the door. “That right thar is a murder’n pumpkin! That’s what’s going on.”

A murdering pumpkin. High praise indeed. That’ll do pumpkins, that’ll do.

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