Random Food Pics

paella with brown rice. good, not amazing

a Jamie O recipe. pasta with kale green sauce, red sauce and fresh ricotta on the side. i didn't follow his recipe all that closely, and used a food processor instead of a liquidizer (blender). the 'liquidizer' term threw me off... his pic looked amazing. definite potential.

fried rice with lightly steamed broccoli shoots. not from Tassajara Recipe Book... just a little freestylin'
mmmmm. oatmeal skon bread, toasted, with kale pesto. I'm loving kale pesto right now: pecans, no cheese, a little pimiento paste, garlic and kale, obviously.

quickie. wholewheat coucous, goat cheese, red sauce

some sort of dal i think, pimiento paste and green zhoug in the jars

Snow in the front range

Late season storm, pretty damn cold for SB. Rained friday night into saturday. Snow in the front range saturday night, showers off and on sunday, a light dusting sunday night. This is from monday morning.

Miso / Bittman - NYT

interesting ideas

Taming the Bicycle -- Mark Twain

A seller on ebay used a quote from Taming the Bicycle as his email signature, and I tracked down the full essay. It's great!

good Sheed article

man could he ever light up sportscenter highlights. good read.

a Wrinkle in Time / NPR

It was published 50 years ago. I need to read it again!

on Roald Dahl / NPR - On Point

quite lovely

Regulating Sugar / NPR - On Point

darn good show

Baja 2012

Only a few photos, there are alot on Picasa, from the older Olympus 1030Sw and the new Nikon D700. There's also a separate folder of everything I took while whale watching. They are pretty much in chronological order in this post.

Trip was me and Sara, my brother, and 2 botanist friends. We went to see the Bishop pines near Erendira, ate as many fish tacos as possible, hung out near Catavina, looked at the lichen growing on the boojums towards the Pacific coast, then finished up at Laguna Ojo de Liebre, the lagoon just south of Guerrero Negro where the grey whales come to give birth.

The whale watching setup at the lagoon is amazing. 5$/car to get in. The visitor's center is small but nice. The restaurant wasn't bad at all. Prices were a little inflated but considering you can watch whales spouting from your table... There are palapas at each campsite, the palapas with electric lighting are 5$/night, all others are free! At night when the wind stops you can hear the whales spouting, the whooosh sound to me sounded like gorillas calling to eachother in the jungle. Amazing. Whale watching was 40$/person in the panga boats. I touched a whale.

baby Bishop pine

lichen on boojum

love the colors from the D700!

boojum hillside

backlit ocotillo east of El Arco

vulture near our camp east of El Arco

hazy focus, but gotta show the camping quesadilla set up....

lettuce was a nice addition

sunset, Laguna Ojo de Liebre

sittin' on the dock of the bay

ballena gris

Lea Thompson / OnionAV

mighty fine reading

First Aid Kit

I'm finally going through all of the NPR I missed while in Baja. They did a short little story about First Aid Kit, a band consisting of 2 sisters from Sweden. Love it, cd ordered. OnionAV has a link to a video which I quite liked, too.

Cauliflower+Broccoli Stuffed Shells

A Jamie Oliver recipe, from Jamie at Home. Good, even though we really whacked back the cheese. Would be amazing with the right amount of cheese ;)

1 lb broccoli
1 lb cauliflower
7 cloves garlic
3 dried chilies
fresh thyme
1 tin anchovy fillets
3c milk, butter, flour
2c red sauce sauce
splash red wine vinegar
box of jumbo shells
2 cups fresh Parmesan - finely grated
8 oz provolone

Chop the broc/cauli florets and stems, put in boiling water for 6 min, drain, save water for cooking the shells
Boil shells for whatever it says on the box
Saute garlic, add chilies, anchovies w/ their oil, thyme.
Add drained broc/cauli, cook for 20min until really soft. Mash.
Make a bechamel sauce with the butter/flour/milk. I forget the proportions. It would be good to add some cheese to it.
Put red sauce and a little vinegar in a 13x9 pyrex
Stuff the shells with the mashed veggies, put on red sauce
Pour over bechamel and put on some provolone and parmesan (amounts in the recipe are what you are supposed to have used)
375, 30min uncovered

Random Food Pics

last night, thai green curry w/ delicata squash, purple potato, russet potato, cauliflower, a little ground beef

while ago, brussels sprouts and ground beef, vietnamese-style w/ nuoc cham on the side


boring looking, but tasty indian. green split peas as the dal, with eggplant chutney and cilantro chutney
dilla, with a brown rice GF tortilla, not bad at all, actually.

Grandma Grace Memorial Service

I didn't go to this as it coincided with our long-planned Baja trip. Lame excuse. Luckily my cousin Breanna made a really nice video of it.

Pollan's Food Rules, Illustrated

"Food Rules" by Michael Pollan - RSA/Nominet Trust competition from Marija Jacimovic on Vimeo.

Green Bronx Machine

Questions of Science...

Bon Iver / SPIN

This is old, but came to my attention cause they did an interview with him after the Grammy's and linked to it. Good, and the video at the end about the house/studio he has was interesting.

Bon Iver + the Roots

good

Etta James

This story played right before we went to Baja. Sorry she's gone but the music is great.

Bon Joviver

epic

UCSB stuff

Cool little blurb about installing bike repair stands, I dig it.

Grandma Grace

My grandma died a couple of days ago. She was a neat person and had a big influence on me. She was a good cook, and when I was little I really looked forward to the box of homemade cookies, banana and/or zucchini breads, and fruitcake that she would send us. We would drive across the country from NY to Oregon/Washington every other summer and then we'd stock up on her jams and canned fruit & veggies. I especially liked the canned apricots and the canned cherries. Both of my grandmas did everything in their power to feed their grandkids well, I think it's the law for Lutheran grandmas to do so. In some ways when people visit my place I feel like a Lutheran grandmother doting on the house guests...

Love this, my cousin Jamie scanned it

Really love this, my cousin Breanna up in Kodiak took it

Kodachrome Away, Enter the D700

So kodachrome is done, as of a year ago. Many people miss it, including this guy, who got written up on CNN. He's buying old slides at garage sales and the like, scanning them, and putting them up. I like this one cause I always take thru-the-car-window shots on vacations.
Anyway. After shooting with little tiny digital cameras for a year I decided to upgrade to the Nikon D700. It's their cheaper digital body that can mount all of my old Nikkor lenses. Stoked. We're off to Baja in a couple of days, this trip is going to be pretty well photographed...

Modernist Cuisine at Home / NYT

Cool article about a dinner party using the Modernist Cuisine book from the microsoft dude.

Francis Ford Coppola / Onion AV Primer

good article

Organic, not local / NYT

Good article about the tomato farms in southern Baja.

Honey Lemon Curd

There is essentially one lemon curd made with honey instead of sugar recipe on the web, which seems to be copied over and over. Based on the date, I think this is the original. Sara made a bunch of macaroons, so we're drowning in egg yolks right now, and we're trying to reduce processed sugar, so gave it a go. 8 yolks, 2/3 c juice, zest from the 3 lemons used plus 1 extra, salt, 1/3 c honey plus 2T cause it wasn't sweet enough, ~4T coconut oil at the end. Pretty good!

Lattkes

chicken, cranberry sauce, some brussels sprouts from under the bird, and Sara's lattkes
I ate alot of them... not a big fan of sour cream, but good otherwise.

Kale in the Limelight

Nice story from npr, prompted by the Eat More Kale/Chic-fil-A thing.

West Camino Cielo. Chilly.

depth of field

Lichen!

Homemade Cheese Preserved in Oil

The hope was to produce feta cheese preserved in olive oil. I ran into some hitches, though. First problem was my candy thermometer starts measuring temperature at 100 degrees, but the recipe wanted me to heat the milk to 86. Doh! I generally followed this recipe. It ended up as a soft white cheese, cream cheese-like. I drained it using a weight to reduce the moisture content, but it was still a heck of alot closer to cream cheese than feta. I packed it all into a 1/2 gallon jar and put some oil on top. Taste was really not too exciting. A couple of months later, including some more microbial activity cause it bubbled over some in the fridge, I decided to use it to saute veggies. Basically heating the 'cheese' caused it to separate into tasty butter-like stuff and some milk solids. Made for some pretty tasty cheese+peppers tacos, though I think I might just stick to ricotta from now on....

empty jar

Cheater Fish Tacos

Sara came up with this and it's genius. There's a company called la tortilla factory that makes a corn tortilla with wheat gluten. She made a tuna salad and it it in said tortillas. A proper baja fish taco is a white fish fried with a batter, served with mayo in a corn tortilla. Tuna with mayo and celery, etc on a corn + wheat tortilla REALLY reminded me of a fish taco. Epic!