Goya with shrimp and black bean sauce, recipe from Saveur. I didn't follow the proportions exactly, but used all the components. My melon slices were still quite crunchy. Stir fry a bit longer to diminish the bitterness, or parboil the slices in boiling water for a minute and drain well before stir frying. The added step makes for a softer texture and less powerful bitter flavor.

"Peggy Olson: The Smuggest Bitch in the World. When a man like Stan Rizzo calls you that, you should go out and buy yourself something pretty as a reward." -- Tom and Lorenzo

Wish I'd heard this back when...

Or orange almond spongecake from Julia Child. My first cake! This is not half-eaten per usual, but rather, I had a hard time getting the cake out of the pan because I let it sit too long. The lag also made the cake a little soggier towards the bottom than I would like. I had no issues with the cake falling, nor did it dome excessively. Not sure exactly how "fluffy" a cake the batter should produce, but I'm guessing maybe just a tad higher than here? The recipe calls for a 1.5 in pan but the total rise was maybe just a tad above an inch in a 3 in pan. Since the flavors are so intense, a light butter cream with a touch of rum, or thin filling of apricot would be my choice for finishing. SO thinks fresh fruit might also be nice. The instructions Julia gives are exact. Follow them!

If there ever was too much information on how to make a perfect soft boiled egg...



And why this is important according to Tampopo.

From the owners of Santa Ramen, San Mateo. Firm egg noodles, fatty pork slices with caramelized garlic clove and pork broth at low volume, served regular spicy with quail egg and a side of bamboo. I prefer a good milky tonkotsu usually, but Dojo has a slightly bitter, dark broth which is certainly rich, deep and unique. I also definitely dig Dojo's "q-q" style, medium thick, straight noodle. I never get to eat any Santa Ramen pork so I can't compare, but Dojo's silky, melty, tender slices are more sumptious than Himawari. Perhaps, I will try the mild miso, my lunch buddy's favorite next time.

Rack of lamb with crust using leftover caper sauce mixed with mustard, pistachio and panko. Buttermilk mashed potatoes with blue cheese. Roasted french green beans. No recipe because this was a slightly repurposed meal and my first time cooking lamb like with the bones in. Next time with thicker piece of meat, I'm going to use a slightly lower oven, 425 degrees, and longer cooking time, maybe, 20 minutes.

From Tom's Hardware:

Graphics Card Heirarchy Chart

CPU Heirarchy Chart

Useful for determining Compy upgrades. Plus, basic pedantia, How To's, benchmarking, and tested builds.

Balanced Rig

Computing Power

Brown butter seared scallops with lightly salted quinoa and french green beans. Use the extra butter sauce to flavor the quinoa when plating. Either finely chop or blitz the dipping sauce and serve on the side.


Basil Caper Sauce

3 tbsp fresh basil, minced
3 tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, finely minced
2 tbsp capers, crushed
2 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp lemon zest, fine
salt
pepper

My first attempt at pie crust came out quite light, halfway between crumbly and flaky with an oiliness that put me off slightly. Recipe tips from Cook's Illustrated: The New Best Recipe, lead me to believe that I over heated my fats (working by hand here) and underworked my dough a bit, causing the pie to shrink back from the pan. The applesauce filling was cannibalized from various web sources.

3 tbsp butter
3/4 cup granulated or brown sugar
1 cup unsweetened applesauce 
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp cloves
2 eggs

2 tbsp all-purpose flour 
1/2 teaspoon salt

I will likely reduce the sugar slightly and add more flour, maybe 1/4 cup, and an extra egg next time. Subjectively, the heavy spice was ok with me, though some of the apple flavor gets lost. Alternatively, some recipes use flour, up to a cup, with leavening: 1 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda. Others call for milk, evaporated milk, or sour cream - like a custard. With the addition of lemon zest and juice, this turns out to be an Apple Chess Pie. A very, very sweet type of southern dessert, this type of pie can sometimes include a tbsp of vinegar to rectify the sugar overload. I'm guessing the consistency should be somewhere between a pecan and pumpkin pie, though the Food Timeline says "chess" may also refer to the texture of Cheese.

Not the most attractive picture, but we were hungry for our dinner so I took this on the fly.  This braising sauce is basically a mole fakery.

olive oil
4 long flanken cut beef short ribs
salt and pepper
1/2 onion, large
4 green onions, large, or leek
1 green bell pepper
1 jalapeno
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp black cumin
1/2 tsp oregano
1.5 tsp chili powders - ancho, arbol
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp tomato paste
1.5 cup tomato diced, seeded
1 cube unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped
2 cups strong black coffee
2 cup stock or water, plus extra

1 tbsp horseradish, shredded - or use prepared horseradish and omit vinegar
1 tsp vinegar
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 bunch of cilantro
fresh lime juice
salt

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Salt and pepper beef very liberally. In a hot dutch oven, brown in batches on all sides. Remove and turn down the heat. Saute onions and just tranclucent. Add bell pepper and jalapeno. When vegetables are softened, add garlic, cumin, and oregano till lightly toasted. Bloom chili powder and caramelize brown sugar in the pot with a little added olive oil. Do not let burn. Add tomato paste and turn up the heat, scraping the fond and adding the fresh tomato. As sauce is simmering, introduce the chocolate. When chocolate is almost melted, pour in the coffee and bring to a boil. Add stock and return meat to the pot with juices. Pour in more water or stock till meat is swimming 3/4 of the way. Cut a parchment circle for a cover and braise for 2.5 hours or when beef is fork tender. Regulate the heat so beef is at a bare simmer and turn several times during braising. In my oven this is really about 325, and gradually cooler over the last hour.

Meanwhile make the horseradish dressing. Peel and cut the horseradish into cubes. Add vinegar immediately and blend. Add cilantro and process. Introduce cream and whip till fluffy with a hand mixer. Salt to taste and chill.

To serve set aside meat on plates. Strain vegetables from sauce, chill and remove fat. Reduce on the stove if needed. Gently reheat meat and serve over ribs with dressing on the side.

My horseradish sauce was mild but overly bitter so I added extra vinegar and a touch of sugar (I greatly disliked the presence of the sugar). SO found the cream sauce heavy with the richness of the beef, so perhaps just a simpler wasabi cilantro sauce might have worked better. I like black cumin because it has a smokey, subtle flavor but mexican cumin works too and is probably brighter. I think this dish would be lovely with a very simple bean mash and grilled vegetables.

Followed this recipe from Better Homes and Gardens nearly faithfully except for substituting the lasagna noodle, which I didn't have on hand, and an added  leek that needed to be used. The quality of the ricotta is key in this dish, so choose wisely.

Recipe from Saveur.

Use two pie pans or a large baking sheet for a nice thin brown, crispy layer. Mine is a little too puffy and tall here. I would be more generous with the feta, almost like a pizza cheese layer. This a really simple recipe that can be whipped up as a side or snack fairly quickly and I imagine would be good with light toppings or just served with some luscious sliced tomatoes and Greek olives.

I felt compelled to muse given the renewed interest in vampires via the Twilight phenom, but to my now arguably matured and slightly more pop culture aware eyes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV show, represents, well, good TV. In a post HBO world, I believe Buffy holds up remarkably well despite the dated references and unique sensibility.

Typically the series was well written, and well paced, with long story arcs amidst lighter yet equally plot propulsive episodes, and always, easter eggs galore. Straddling action, drama, genre, comedy, fan service, you name it... Buffy nailed the cultural, and more often than not lambasted counter cultural angst and infatuations of a rather broad demographic while pandering shamelessly to the unique geeky logic of those worlds. "Once more with feeling" is really something of a miracle, as the characters sing and dance their emotional conflicts in what seems a cogent reflection on what songs in films do exactly and how characters are driven to use them as weapons of expression. Precisely because the show treats it own trashy nonsense as non-sacred, Buffy is something of an anomaly amongst the recent spate of relentlessly over dramatic and unfulfilling dramas re. Trueblood or Vampire Diaries (the Smallville of Transylvania.)

I'm hesitant to write any heavy duty Buffy critique because the scholarship has a long and rich tradition, documented much, much before my own, but the show absolutely invites it. Philosophical exercises on storytelling such "The Body" or indulging in the intellectual maudlin such as "Hush" circumvent the conventions of the show itself and the business of screenwriting in general to the effect of good drama as framed by Mamet, to show, don't tell. In "Hush", a group of scary bald-headed mimes make everyone mute. Without language, the character's are unable to connect to one another and have to find ways to express what they are thinking and feeling, scary in any context, but this frightening prospect of being unable to scream for help is structurally imposed on the audience for 44 minutes of almost total onscreen silence. It's an exacting kind of terror.


The well known fact that Joss Whedon has a preternatural ability to build character through the development of insightful motivation and write witty relevant dialogue, is superseded by his ability to control drama rather than deferring to exposition. He often exposes repressed fears indirectly and suspends clarity or easy resolution in favor of the expressive or unknown. Buffy's fumbling admonition not to move the dead body of her mother, in "The Body" stands in for all the words she cannot literally move. Watching her try to make sense of the situation by wrongly assuming that Glory had come to the house, and her stunned disbelief is filmed in harsh high contrast sunlight. The ensuing cold efficiency... heart-wrenching. The episode is purposely misleading and without scoring, but we feel her confusion and isolation.

Buffy, the show, is smart enough to acknowledge to an extent, the masochism of the horror genre and within the vampire narrative, a particular masochism towards its female characters. However, in eating the cake of personalized girl power, the show's notion of femininity speaks, I think, to turn of the century anxieties that are refreshingly dated in the age of post feminist feminism and the trend of sassy bling/booty style of sexual empowerment. Compare this to the to the highly ritualized fantasia of Twilight with it's serious undercurrent of hidden unhealthy. Meyer's novel equates idolization to love in a thoroughly underhanded way and absolutely nails (to her credit) the essence of hormonal desperation. Sunshine, predating Twilight's heavy fisted teen bodice ripper, is less immediately successful than my most beloved Robin McKinley novel, The Hero and the Crown, but illuminates what is possible in the genre given some creativity and nice prose. McKinley, routinely constructs strong unconventional heroines within the context of beloved fairytales or fantasy tropes. Her formula, and she is formulaic, relies on character rather than plot and reads slow, but always reacts from within the layer of anxiety inside the fantasy and not construct the fantasy itself. 

After watching so much digitized torture porn or avant death, where gore is used as an end rather than a means, it's easy to be distracted (or bored) by the shiny plot box (ahem, Lost, and Dan Brown. Really, you don't want me to get started...) and ultimately desensitized. Whedon is unafraid to go "there", into the fantasy, meaning to tap the real sentiment behind Bram Stoker's undead incubus and the original anxiety that such a rapist metaphorically cultivates. In Buffy's universe, blood and violence signifies actual pain and inspires real terror. Refer back to the violent culmination between Buffy and Spike of their abusive relationship, or the invasive seductions of Count Dracula. Even when there is no overt violence, the continuity of the metaphor always acts within the internalized logic of the Buffyverse. In "The Body", when a long term character suddenly and inexplicably passes away, images of the lifeless corpse shown in progressive states of decomposition are cut between reactions of grief. The juxtuposition highlights a basic fear of death, and the inability to face the prospect of a violated human consciousness. Bloodlessness, to paraphrase Spike, is Death.

In retrospect, the wierd spaghetti western of spacepunkyness that is Firefly, seems a culmination of lessons learned from Buffy; that sharp, come-to-a-standstill punchline delivery, dialect, cadences, the hearts and horrors of evolving complex character archetypes. Season Four's Riley, even foreshadows, albeit less cynically or interestingly, the character of Mal. I admit, I slept on Firefly at first, which looked from the marketing to be a bad Farscape clone (Farscape being kind of bad already), but I came around. Critics complained that Firefly wasn't connected to current events enough, a la BSG, but does everything have to be about 9/11? I disagree on the grounds that Whedon knows his soft sci-fi and always goes straight for those sentiments, humanity and all that. The ill fated lifespan of Firefly is perhaps a boon for the legacy, forever a capsule of Joss, the auteur, at his best and most consistent.
Thematic continuity is a lesson that the sloppy writers at the Heroes conference table failed to learn in their haste to make the action slap happy. The premise of a superhero stuck between the demands of real life and the supernatural? Done before and unfortunately for them, done better. Maybe I'm just out of touch and people don't have as much angst these days, but isn't Syler a little one dimensional despite his mom issues? I get the feeling these writers never actually experienced any issues at all and thought some secondhand psychological twists would explain things just well enough to get to the next CG effect. Nathan Fillion as a misogynistic evil priest, the sadistic bounty hunter Jubal Early, Chiwetel Ejiofor as an honorable self sacrificing Operative playing for the wrong team? More shades of the big bad please, Mr Whedon.