Cruising around the neighborhood last week turned up all kinds of items of note. Here are a couple of freebies, a la the
November Toilet:
It amazes me how generous people are with their large appliances. Until I haul them home to discover they don't work and there's a fee associated with disposing of them. Pfft.
And here's the requisite old used condom, a la the
Courthouse Rubber of '07:
Scientific condom-carbon dating proves this to be a much older specimen, perhaps offering more clues to the origins of the species. Further examination by teams of condo-thropologists needed.
And, the pièce de résistance: some kind of fag-related graffiti:
I'll transcribe it for you, as it's hard to read: "GO FAGS." The message, although scrawled in emphatic caps lock, is unclear. Do they mean, "Go home fags"? Because that is precisely what I was doing when I saw this! Perhaps it's a message akin to "Go Blazers!", in which case, hey thanks! Although I didn't realize faggotry was a competitive sport. Perhaps it's meant to be read from bottom to top, as in "FAGS GO"? Which makes me wonder: Fags go where? Where are all the fags going, and why did no one tell me??
Yikes.
ReplyDeleteThat was odd, that drop-in-and-out from the I Kicked Karl guy. Well, it's a large and varied world, innit?
ReplyDeleteOn a much more cheerful note:
6 oz. butter at room temp
1 cup + 2 tablespoons sugar
4 egg yolks (save the whites for meringues or something)
1 cup milk
1 1/2 cups AP flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
8 oz. (by weight) hazelnuts, ground, not too fine, in the processor
1 oz. bittersweet chocolate
zest of 1 orange
Butter and dust with flour a 9-inch springform pan.
Cream butter and sugar together. Add egg yolks 1 at a time, beating on medium-high speed. On low speed, 1/3 of the the flour, baking powder and salt, then 1/3 of the the milk, repeat till they're gone; scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula.
Chop the chocolate into fairly small bits; fold it, the orange zest, and the ground nuts into the batter. Pour into the cake pan; bake at 350° F. for 35 minutes. test with a toothpick; if it comes out clean, the cake's done, if not, leave it in the oven another 5 minutes.
Insanely delicious. Even better if you use DuChilly hazelnuts from a place called Nuts Online. Enjoy.
Why yes, there ARE a lot of nuts online. I usually let 'em be, although ad hominem attacks don't win 'em any points. They get banned once they start making threats of violence. One would hope they'd have something better to do with a Saturday night.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, on a more cheerful note - does your cake come with frosting? Where did you get the recipe? Yum!
It's taken direct from "Lidia's Italy," by Lidia Bastianich, who's my current favorite cooking show host and cookbook author. I've never had a recipe of hers turn out disappointingly.
ReplyDeleteYou could frost the cake but she doesn't include a frosting wth this recipe, and I don't think it needs one. The cake is incredibly moist and fragrant--the orange, and the nuts themselves, particularly that DuChilly variety which are grown in Oregon--and keeps very well for a couple of days. It relies on some not-Spartan kitchen gadgets--a processor, a good mixer, a springform pan--but it's easy enough that even a pretty inexperienced cook should be able to make it successfully. (You don't need a brush to butter the pan--fingers do just fine--and a soupspoon will take the place of the rubber spatula in a pinch, though spatulas are pretty cheap and last a long time.)
I read that Pacquiao totally outclassed Mosley. My ambivalence about boxing continues unresolved, like my ambivalence about meat. Listen, if self-contradiction was OK with Whitman, I can live with it...
From commenter rootlesscosmo in "Bloody Sexy Paragraphs":
ReplyDelete"Boxing is a guilty pleasure with me. I watch it, I start getting into sharp fighters like (currently) Manny Pacquiao; then I can't help remembering that I'm probably watching people sustaining permanent brain damage."
I feel the same way, with some added class guilt. And watching Earthlings didn't even work for me - purposely inflicting emotional manipulation or whatever people want to call it on myself only served to make me feel horrible about eating meat, which I still do - go figure. I can buy ethically-raised humanely-slaughtered whatever all I like, it still doesn't solve the issues I have with the whole gamut as far as my personal eating habits are concerned.
Self-contradiction is one of many human flaws, probably among them enjoying bloodsport and delicious, delicious cakes. Which, by the way, I may make for my friend's birthday tomorrow - I have most everything, except a kitchen scale. We shall see! One great thing about Oregon is hazelnuts are easy to come by.
I'm really touched that you remembered my comment some months ago.
ReplyDeleteAnd just as there are guilt-free things to eat (I made a fava bean/garlic/olive oil puree yesterday and shmeared it on slices of baguette fried in olive oil--100% vegan plus sin of gluttony, what's not to like?) there are guilt-free competitive sports:
http://youtu.be/a-EjUvF5Lg0
Simple rule: cue ball must contact both other balls and at least three cushions before contacting the second. Any sequence--ball-cushion-cushion-cushion-ball, cushions first then both balls--and it doesn't matter which of the other balls you contact first; red ball is always an object ball, white and yellow are each player's cue ball. Phenomenally difficult--record high run at pool is in the 600's, record high run at this is in the 30's. (I once ran four, in large part through luck, but I treasure the memory.) If pool is checkers, this is chess, and this cat is Kasparov.
A-HA! I thought it might have been you, you wily screen-name changer! It's definitely hard to forget comments about snooker - one doesn't see that in these here parts much.
ReplyDeleteNot wily, just a little flummoxed--Google decided my user name was my email address and wouldn't let me log in as rootlesscosmo. But that's still my nom de blog at sites that aren't built on Blogger.
ReplyDeleteHere in the Bay area the produce is getting into high gear. we've got blueberries from Mendocino County to the North, incredible strawberries from around Santa Cruz, asparagus from the San Joaquin Delta, fava beans from Half Moon Bay just down the coast. There are a few peaches but they're still pretty sour--not enough hours of daylight yet--but we had a very wet winter so I'm hoping the stone fruit will be plentiful.
I suspect the intersection of the sets "cooking show viewers" and "pool tournament fans" is fairly small, but I call it home.
I am inspired to do a little urban prowling with my camera in the last couple of days I have in Seattle.
ReplyDeleteNicely observed!