Nope, no booze and King Cake plastic coin and beads, almost tiny toy baby-swallowing baccanal-fest follwed by a day of dirty forehead repentance for me, folks. I had a donut (okay, three), an extra cup of coffee and curled up with a few movies I needed to review plus a few games I’ve been meaning to finish up or start. Yeah, I’m boring as hell (sometimes), but that sort of reliable predictability is a specialty I’ve been working on for a while.
Anyway, yeah… I’ll be back on Wednesday with a few updates. You? You’ll be all bloated and guilty with some ashes on your forehead and promising not to do what you did again… until next year rolls around, right? I thought so. If I’m around, maybe I’ll hold your hair back with a two-foot long pair of tongs while you barf into something safe. But I won’t bail you out because you probably deserve a short spin in the can if you did what I heard you did. Amusingly enough, I don’t think I’ve ever had a slice of King Cake before, so I may need to at some point.
Yeah, I cook and you should as well. No matter haw daunted you are by the prospect of entering the kitchen to whip up something as simple as a boiled egg, the ability to prepare a meal is not only a necessary survival skill, it’s a series of victories as one overcomes fears and produces some very tasty results. Jeff Potter’s Cooking for Geeks ($24.99) is not only a fantastic read, it’s one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever read. A cornucopia of recipes, food and other science lessons, excellent interviews with far too many chefs and other food experts to list, the book is both a page-turning revelation and a go-to master class in all sorts of kitchen knowledge. Continue reading →
Despite its outrageous excess in nearly every scene, you may find yourself quite famished after watching Marco Ferreri’s disturbing comedy La Grand Bouffe. The potent stew of food, sex, madness and death the four principals undertake during the film’s 130 minutes isn’t for all tastes and in fact, might even be offensive to more sensitive eyeballs and stomachs. Of course, that’s exactly the intent of this 1973 endurance test.
Watching Marcello (Mastroianni), Michel (Piccoli), Ugo (Tonazzi), and Philippe (Noiret) eat themselves to death over the course of the film isn’t a pretty sight. But this is one of those absurd, perverse masterpieces that doesn’t need any pompous over-analysis. The four friends decide to meet their maker because each of their lives has reached a point of no return and they’re fed up enough to get fed up to the point they flee this mortal coil. So what are four wealthy and seemingly sane men to do but lock themselves away in a lovely mansion and order up a massive supply of food they then cook and eat of more than humanly possible?
If you said “have an orgy!”, give your self a pat on the back with a hand greasy from chicken fat and put this Arrow Video release on your want list. Yet again, it’s one of those great 2K restoration jobs stuffed to the gills with bonus features. Expensively prepared dishes, exploding toilets, a beautiful blue Bugatti and lots of exposed flesh all await your soon to be engorged eyeballs, is all I’ll say… Continue reading →
Fun Fact: I am not at all a fan of ranch dressing, but for some reason people keep giving me bottles of the stuff. I somehow ended up with six unopened bottles over the space of two months this year thanks to friends buying it for parties and almost no one touching it. At least it was organic ranch dressing of a certain brand that seemed to not have a ton of terrible stuff inside those bottles.
That said, what does one DO with all those bottles of something one doesn’t consume? I thought of putting them in a box and placing said box downstairs by the mailbox with the word FREE! written on it. That’s always good for some amusement. Not too long ago another neighbor in the building left out a box of assorted books and DVD’s and there were a few people circling that box like wary stray dogs surprised by someone putting out free food before they jumped in and took most of the good stuff. The only things left were a Jean Claude Van Damme flick I’d never heard about, some sticker books (Ed Hopper and Talouse-Latrec), and a couple of comedy books I nabbed after the dust settled.
Well, that FREE box of dressing was the plan until my brain sifted in “free range” with “free ranch” and I thought of doing something with chicken and some or all of that ranch dressing. “Like what?” you ask? Well, I may have taken a whole roasting chicken that I’d had in in a simple salt water brine for about 12 hours (because I’m crazy like that), drained that chicken, placed it in a gallon-size zip-top bag, added a bit of salt-free rub and poured about a cup of that dressing into that bag before sealing the bag and letting it sit for a few more hours in the fridge. Once that part was done, I may have peeled and sliced a few potatoes and placed them in the bottom of a glass baking dish on top of some foil, placed that ranchy chicken upside down atop those potatoes and popped that dish into a preheated 375 degree oven until I needed to flip the bird over and let it get nice and done.
Yeah, they call me the wrecking ball (er, in the kitchen, at least)…
I could have also sauteed some broccoli with sliced garlic and onions with a bit of red pepper flake in some olive oil and other stuff and served all that with plain ol’ white rice on the side because it takes the least time to make and my rice cooker is old but still works perfectly. Or maybe I didn’t because while that chicken turned out really tasty, I still don’t like ranch dressing. Well, on my salads at least. Oh, and I think some of those potatoes got diced into smaller bits and used in something eggy the next day. But that’s another tale for another time.
Okay, I haven’t done a food piece in a while and this isn’t really one at all, so that trend continues. Anyway, today I ended up having to do a favor for a very busy friend in the form of going downtown to pick up and deliver four rice cookers to be used by a certain Japanese retailer as part of an in-store celebration. I take it they’re cooking rice to go with something or perhaps someone will be making rice balls to pass out to the masses who show up.
That, by the way may not be a great idea, as a good rice ball will fill you up and make you want a nap just as soon as you take that last bite. I think the sight of a few hundred people laid out and snoozing all over a store isn’t the best publicity image, but someone’s mom will be really happy because her rice ball recipe was put to good use. I actually DO have a food story to tell that involves ranch dressing, a few chickens and eventually, rice. But I’m away from my camera with the pics I wan to run with that piece so it will have to wait.
Actually, this day was quite draining and I didn’t eat much so I could actually use a big ol’ rice ball to put me under for the evening. Too lazy to look up and activate a recipe am I, so it’ll be something faster like a quick eggy thing with some of those onions and peppers I chopped up last night. Back tomorrow.
Hey! It’s National Coffee Day or whatever it’s called. If you imbibe that devilish brew, go find a place that’s giving away a cup and get yours. I settled for being lazy and not making mine this morning just so I could hoof it down to Dunkin’and see what was what. Amusingly enough, despite the sign on the door and eager but surprisingly small crowd in the spot I stepped into, a few people on the line knew nothing about that freebie and were paying for their coffee, some even after the busy staff sort of pointed out that they could have had a freebie. Ah well.
Anyway, there was one guy in that shop who was on his tablet noting that he was going to walk to a few different Dunkin’s in the area (there are three or four within about a twenty or so minute walk) and get a free cuppa Joe at each stop. Well, that’s nice that he’s not going to be sleeping tonight, I guess. Still, it’s a somewhat good idea if you have nothing else to do and want a big ass buzz that will keep you wide-eyed and jittering into the wee hours. Um, here’s a tree to ogle that incomplete. No reason for it being here other than I’m too busy to dig up a stock image of a cup of coffee.
Yeah, I could have snapped a pic of my cup and posted it instead. But maybe I’ll do that later. I think I need a second cup of coffee now…
Okay, it’s not that silly fake holiday at all (whenever it is). I was just craving a pie and as my older brother dropped off two pounds of blueberries on Friday, I decided to do something with them other than wonder what the heck I was going to do with all those blueberries.
I hadn’t baked a pie in what, ten years or more (eek), but it’s kind of like riding a bike, right? I can’t ride a bike, so that’s a bad example. Anyway, I bought a few apples, added some other stuff and put together a combo pie this evening. It’s still cooling so the taste test will have to wait. It should be alright as it certainly smelled tasty enough. The funny thing is right after I took it out of the oven my craving vanished. Oops. It’ll come back before a day has passed, but I’ll probably need to share this with a few people. Mmmmmm, Pi!
More not so hot pepper action today while I recuperate. Those sunny windows here come in handy for growing stuff and I like the size variations from the two plants producing these peppers. As with the last few I kept the simple recipe used: chop off the tops, remove the seeds and save them (More peppers? Sure!), add a filling of choice (crushed garlic and some spinach topped with mozzarella cheese) and bake for about 10 minutes or so in a preheated 350 degree oven.
Or something like that. I’ll try something different with the next few peppers as I’ve a few ideas floating in my head, a fresh bottle of vinegar and a ton of garlic and other stuff lying around of late.
Well, I’m supposed to be downtown peeking at some fine tech products and such as I type this. Instead, after spending most of today moving a LOT of stuff around I’m about to go up a ladder and spend some time strategically taping a drop cloth from the ceiling around a bunch of stuff so it’s not covered in dust early tomorrow morning.
Whee. But at least another segment of this long apartment nightmare is getting taken care of. Of course, my somewhat limited enthusiasm about this will only last until I see that they didn’t do everything that actually needed to get done (as usual). If that leaky drainpipe isn’t finally yanked out and replaced (something the last few maintenance guys have said needs to happen), all the work they’ll do tomorrow will be a temporary and useless outside of some temporary visual appeal. It’s certainly not a pretty sight now, that’s for damn sure:
Yuck. it actually looks worse in person and there’s another section of the wall with a series of cracks in it I can’t seem to get a good angle on to photograph. It’s supposed to be a two day job (not counting the repainting part), but we shall see. In better news, those windowsill-grown mild peppers have been doing quite well, thanks for asking. The garlic bulb is just for size comparison because that pepper turned out larger that I thought and there are a few more that size that haven’t yet ripened.
Alrighty, then. Back to work here. I do wish I were somewhere else a lot more fun, but this crap needs to get taken care of so I actually have a place to come back to that’s actually fun to live in.
Those peppers I’m growing on the sunny window are starting to ripen nicely as you can see above and below. I tried one of the smaller ones earlier this week to see if it was hot and it wasn’t at all, which means I can go about the short work of thinking up what to do with a few of the larger ones. That one in the pic above is about medium-sized, by the way. I think I’ll keep it simple for a few of the bigger peppers. Slice the tops off, remove the seeds and stuff them with chopped mushrooms, a bit of garlic and maybe some fresh tomato sauce and herbes de provence, pop a bit of mozzarella cheese on top of that before replacing the top and baking them for about ten minutes or so.
In other boring (but actually important) news, I got wind of some m-a-j-o-r changes coming to the area. As in all 38 businesses across the street and all the way around the entire square block needing to vacate by the end of the month (!!!) because the new landlord wants to tear everything down and replace it with one huge mega-building. Yikes. Although many of the shops are old, a handful of tenants seem to have been bought out last year (aha… that’s why the Chinese restaurant that’s been there for about 40 or so years shut so abruptly!). It’s certainly awful for the record shop that’s been here for 60 years, the wonderful family-run bakery around the corner and that T-shirt printer that’s been in the same spot since the late 70’s. Feh. It seems that time and greed marches onward and on top of the “little” people once again.
I’m going to shoot a few remembrance photos this week and maybe do a quick post on what’s leaving the area as the new owners seem to not even want to help get these people any sort of assistance in finding new locations. So much for small businesses getting a break in this big town. Boo.
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