zonkered.net

I am a giant nerd, y’all.

A friend and I have spent all day today RPing Watchmen (Nite Owl/Ozymandias, to be specific.  This is my OTP.  Don’t look at me like that.) and the secondary character in this RP ended up being the food.  Specifically, homemade manicotti made in Dan’s kitchen.

Then we finished, and I wrote the recipe.

Dan Dreiberg’s Manicotti:

Sauce:

1-28 oz can crushed tomatoes
1-28 oz can diced tomatoes, drained
2 T tomato paste
1 C red wine
2 roasted garlic cloves, minced fine
1 C onion, minced fine
1 t oregano
1 t tarragon
1 t rosemary
1 t red pepper flakes
3 T extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper, to taste
1/4 C grated romano pecorino

Manicotti Filling:

1 lb ricotta cheese
2 C fresh shredded mozzarella
2 T fresh chopped parsley
1 egg

Plus:

Extra mozzarella, parmagiano reggiano, and romano pecorino to top
1 package manicotti shells, cooked al dente.

Preheat oven to 350F.  Saute onion in olive oil in a heavy bottomed pot.  When translucent, add roasted garlic and cook for about five minutes.  Deglaze pan with wine, and add tomatoes, paste, herbs, and salt and pepper.

Meanwhile combine ricotta, mozzarella, and parsley and egg in a bowl.  Stuff carefully into manicotti tubes.

Drizzle a thin layer of sauce in the bottom of a lightly oiled lasagna pan.  Layer in manicotti tubes, and top with the remaining sauce.  Sprinkle a mixture of mozzarella, parmagiano reggiano and romano pecorino on top and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until bubbly.

Nite Owl says eat the damn manicotti.

If there is one thing on the internet that annoys the crap out of me (in reality, there are MANY things on the internet that annoy the crap out of me, this is just winning today) it is the SPOILER SPOILER hysteria that seems to permeate any – ANY – discussion of popular culture.  Specifically television.  Specifically geeky/”good” tv.

1. It’s just a fucking tv show.  The world won’t end if you know what happened in Lost/Big Love/Heroes.  Really.  I swear.
2. Most blog posts recapping tv shows occur, you know, AFTER IT’S AIRED.  If you missed it, and are horrified by the very notion of spoilers, stay off the internet.
3. IT’S JUST A FUCKING TV SHOW.

God.  Seriously.

True story: despite the fact that I work in New York (and live 20 minutes via mass transit from Manhattan), I have not had a cupcake since I moved east.  Or for many years before.  This is only notable because New York is home to the cupcake trend that will never die, with many many bakeries devoted to them.

Many.

But anyway, this week I decided I wanted coconut cupcakes and spent half the week at work hunting down a recipe (Ina Garten’s was an automatic no – nearly 2 pounds of butter? FIVE eggs?) and finally settled on this one, which seriously is everything you could ever want in a coconut cake.  For the frosting though, I started with my mother’s cream cheese frosting and diverted pretty quickly when it called for 4 cups of powdered sugar.  Sorry, Mom.

1-8 oz brick light cream cheese

2 T butter

2 C powdered sugar

1 t vanilla

1 t almond extract

2 T milk

1/ C coconut flakes

Blend with a mixer.  Spread on cooled cupcakes and sprinkle with extra coconut, and commence with ruining your dinner.

It was a little more like icing consistancy than frosting, which was fine with me, but if you want something with more body, add more butter.  Or sugar.  Or coconut, possibly.

Brad Warner posted his latest article, Women, Evolution, and Buddhism, to Suicide Girls this morning, and while most of is interesting and affirms a major part of why I’ve left Christianity for Buddhism (besides, you know, the whole not really believing in God thing), there’s one part that makes me go hmm:

Historically Buddhism has been much better to women than any of the other major religions*. To be sure, there are examples of times when certain Buddhists have treated women just as badly as any other religion. But in doing so these Buddhists have gone against the explicit directions of the founder of their faith.

The part that makes me think is that I’m pretty sure Jesus Christ never declared women to be inferior to men.  Now after his death, it certainly went that way – even among some of he disciples (hi, Paul) – but I don;t think it was the intention.  But then again, I haven’t read the bible since I was 13.

The article is a well-worth reading, though, and I highly recommend it.

So yesterday, March 14th, was Pi Day, as the truly geeky and/or pie lovers among us probably already knew.  One would think that given my penchant for baking some kind of dessert on the weekend and then eating it all weekend (this is why I don’t lose weight, seriously) I would be all over making some kind of awesome homemade pie.  But you would be wrong.

Pie crust terrifies me.  It’s sad but true.

So instead we made apple crisp.  I had accidently bought cooking apples (red romes, to be exact) instead of eating apples last week, and I still had four left.  Three went into this; I have one left and may make curried apples and couscous.  Or something.  I dunno.

This is my Mom’s recipe, much like most everything I bake, but I did make a couple of changes.  I used brown sugar instead of white granulated for the crisp part, and used a bit more cinnamon than was called for (probably a teaspoon and a half, rather than the teaspoon it called for)

Like most of Mom’s recipes, this one has a history:

Your grandmother, Granny, got this recipe from Mrs. John Vissering, Sr. The Visserings owned a grocery store in Minonk and also the store we always knew as Kurrles (sort of a department store). They were the first two stores as you rounded the corner to “downtown” from Granny’s house – about 2 block walk, though sometimes I went in the back door. I can remember Granny sending me to Visserings’, the store, before I was old enough to go to school. You would go in the store, all the floors were bare wood that had not been finished – you could see the sawdust they used for cleaning them – and you just told the clerk what you wanted and they got it for you. (You didn’t think I was that old, did you? LOL) Speaking of grocery stores, in the next block on “Main Street” was Chicago Butchers – Myrtle (Longman), who was like a Grandma to us, always shopped there. I remember that Ernie Moran or another of the butchers would always offer kids a hot dog. They were eaten cold – your mom was not a hot dog fan so I never took them up on the offer.

Place 4 cups sliced apples in casserole. Sprinkle with 1 tsp. cinnamon and add ½ cup of water.

Mix together 1 cup sugar, ¾ cup flour, and ½ cup butter. (I cut it like you do for a pie crust)

Sprinkle over apples and bake in a moderate oven (about 375F) until apples are tender (this was around 30 minutes, for me)

Serve with your favorite sauce or cream.

Yes, it’s pretty much the easiest recipe ever.

Apparently, some dude decided to be DEEPLY OFFENDED by the ubiquitous kosher salt, and so has produced Christian salt.  GAH.  I…I..I just have no words.  None.  Whatsoever.

Oh, wait, I found some.

First of all, IDIOT, salt is inherently kosher.  It just is, period.  Kosher salt could be more correctly called koshering salt, because it’s purpose is to aid in koshering meat.  Second, the reason it’s ubiquitous is because of it’s shape.  It has nothing to do with any approval from a rabbinical council.  Really.

And finally: did Christianity really need another idiot in the news? Really?

I don’t really consider myself a Christian anymore, though I have yet to make a complete break with the traditions I grew up with, and one of the reasons I’ve drifted away from it (besides it just not making sense to me anymore) is the proliferation of “Christians” like Joe Godlewski (truly an unfortunate surname if ever there was one).  It’s idiotic, offended-at-everything “Christians” like him that make it supremely unattractive to many.

Well.  That, and the militant, far right-wing, Christian contingent of the Republican party that’s been holding us all hostage for the last decade.

I have, like, five boxes of pasta that I haven’t used in 3 weeks because, well, I haven’t had enough cheese to make mac and cheese, I’m not in a pesto mood, and I had no spaghetti sauce – so obviously today’s project was a tomato sauce, made in the age-old method of tossing shit in a pot and cooking it together until it tastes good.  This was today’s version, and I’ll probably use the same stuff next time, maybe with some red wine if I have it in the house:

1 yellow onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

3 T (or so) olive oil

1-28 oz can crushed tomatoes

1-28 can diced tomatoes, drained

2 T tomato paste

1 t Penzey’s Pasta Sprinkle (or, barring that, the equivelant amount of oregano, basil, and thyme)

1/2 t hot red pepper flakes

2 bay leaves

1 T ground pepper

1/4 C grated romano pecorino cheese

Saute onion and garlic until soft and fragrant.  Stir in tomatoes, tomato paste, and all spices, and cook covered until at desired consistency.  Add cheese, and serve over hot pasta.

There’s a post on Jezebel today on college students with entitlement complexes, and as usual when it comes to posts on Jezebel, the subject has gone away from the subject at hand and onto the broader issues – in this case, the purpose of higher education in the United States.  Several people are postulating that education should, simply, be for self-actualization, for the pure pursuit of knowledge, be about learning what you love.  It’s not that I disagree with this, per se; it’s a nice idea.

Maybe I’m just cynical.  Maybe I’m a product of my midwestern middle class upbringing, where money was was tight – or at least tighter than my classmates – and when I went off to college, a major part of my major-choosing decision was based on the consideration of what would help me find employment in after graduation.  This was expected, even if it was for the most part unspoken (my brother quadruple majored in accounting, finance, and two other business fields whose names escape me, and my sister, like me, has a degree in economics); if I had majored in what I loved rather than in what I hoped would get me a job, I would have a degree in East Asian history, not one in financial economics.  For the most part I don’t regret my choice; it allows me to understand at least some of the economic disaster we’re in now, and its a great help at work, but let’s face it:  if the history department had been as diligent as the economics department in providing students with examples and contacts for post-graduation employment, it’s pretty damn likely I would have dropped econ like a hot potato.  But they didn’t, and this was unfortunately the way most of the humanities departments worked – they didn’t give the students or the prospective students much of an idea of what they could do with their degree once they finished it.

And while finding out what you love and enlightenment and self-actualization are all extremely important parts of education, so is employability.  And employability – especially for those who come from strained financial circumstances, or even those like me who just had to weather times that were more difficult than my classmates – this is a huge deal.  Huge.    It’s a major worry, and it’s not necessarily about doing what you’re “supposed” to do by getting a job and a house and a car and 2.5 kids.  It’s about being able to live comfortably.  And living comfortably is almost as big a deal for me as any sense of enlightenment is.

So if you want to reform society and education so that the education is more important than the end product, have at it.  I hate No Child Left Behind just as much as the next child of two teachers, and I think we’ll be far better off if more of an emphasis is placed on learning and less on testing.  But while we’re doing this, we can’t forget that what happens after college is still important.  And it still needs to be part of education too.

So I have a slightly disturbing and slightly inappropriate crush on Rahm Emanuel.  Yes, that would be the former congressman from Illinois, current chief of staff for the Obama White House, ballet-dancing, swearing and ever so slightly violent Rahm Emanuel.  Hey, I said it was disturbing and inappropriate.  I KNOW.  I just can’t help myself.  And it’s not like I’ll ever actually meet him.

Anyway, Kimberly, who I met through Jezebel, has created A Rahm A Day, and it is possibly the best thing ever.  If anyone else reading this also has a thing for screamy, snarky, ass-kicking Democrats from the Midwest, it’s definitely a must see.

Occasionally, especially when life is being less than thrilling, I think about opening a small bakery/sweet shop in New York.  Since there’s no such thing as a budget in fantasyland, it would be either in the Village or one of the hypertrendy areas of Brooklyn – Williamsburg or Greenpoint maybe – and would be a cute little hole in the wall with a steady stream of hip young professionals who come in for old-fashioned cookies and treats.  I’d make raspberry muffins, chocolate chip pecan cookies, thumbprint cookies,  blueberry torte, and my Hershey’s syrup brownies.

And I’d definitely make the Heath Bar Crunch blondies I made this afternoon, because they are awesome.

Of course, I don’t really want to open a bakery, because it would be an insane amount of work, and I’m pretty happy having semiregular hours and time to sleep.  But it’s fun to imagine.

Here’s the recipe.  I would normally put this on my food blog, but, well.  It’s not like I use it enough to bother using it:

Heath Bar Crunch Blondies

1 ½ cups sifted flour
1 tsp. salt
2 cups brown sugar firmly packed
2 eggs slightly beaten
1 cup Heath Bar Crunch bits
2 tsp baking powder
½ cup vegetable shortening or lard
2 tsp. vanilla

Sift flour with baking powder and salt. Melt shortening, add it and sugar to flour mixture. Add eggs and nuts.

Mix and spread in a well-greased pan (9X13). Bake in a 350° oven for about 25 minutes. Cool and cut.

I baked in a 9×9 pan instead, and when I checked on them after 20 minutes, they were nowhere near done, so I left them at least another ten.