Adventures in Budget Cooking: Episode 2

So sometimes I have to eat something. Most of the time, that involves dealing with being out of the ingredients for known cohesive meals, but luckily I plan ahead for these times and stock mass quantities of staples. These staples don't look like much to the naked eye, but with my skills--and my ability to bike down to the garden for veggies--it becomes a feast.

Episode 2: Tomato and Basil and Chicken Vinaigrette a la Megan left chicken at my house.
Eaten: August 19, 2008.

There is a fantastic show on NPR called The Splendid Table. It airs Sunday afternoons in Michigan. Naturally, I am on the mailing list, and recently they sent out a recipe for a baked vinaigrette something-or-other with bread crumbs. I sat down to make this delicious meal and realized I didn't have all the ingredients I needed. This was a job for Adventures in Budget Cooking!

I gathered ...some... of the same ingredients. I had spaghetti in my pantry, along with (lucky me) a white wine vinegar that Hilary left at some point (she pretends it's accidental, but she just wants me to eat well). I mixed the vinegar with some olive oil for the vinaigrette. The previous night, Megan left some chicken at my house, and of course I had to eat it before she asked for it back. I threw on a nice cocktail of spices, which I believe included oregano, cumin, salt, and pepper. There were more, but this was a week ago. Come on people.

Then came the most important ingredients--those from the garden. I grabbed some of this nice zesty variety of basil we have growing, along with a bucketful of the literally hundreds of grape tomatoes that took over our garden this year. I keep meaning to take pictures of it to post here, but (A) I keep forgetting to take my camera with me and (B) it isn't working well, and I can only get about 3 pictures at a time and 10 per pair of batteries. The red ones in the photo are nice and sweet, and the bright orange ones are probably the best tomatoes you'll ever taste in your life. We have some tomatoes that are even smaller. We call them the pea tomatoes. Little runts. Anyway, this dish was freaking delicious, and I felt like a freaking genius afterward until I realized I stole all the ingredients from my friends and the recipe from Lynn Rossetto Kasper.

I found this really interesting paper online.

Scanning tunneling microscopy study of the CeTe3 charge density wave

or straight to pdf:
Scanning tunneling....

Adventures in Budget Cooking: Episode 1

So sometimes I have to eat something. Most of the time, that involves dealing with being out of the ingredients for known cohesive meals, but luckily I plan ahead for these times and stock mass quantities of staples. These staples don't look like much to the naked eye, but with my skills--and my ability to bike down to the garden for veggies--it becomes a feast.

Episode 1: Couscous a la Spicy Black Bean Burger
August 12, 2008.

The key to this delicious feast was the subtle tones of dill from my failing herb garden. This way, I didn't need the burden of figuring out how much dill to add--I just took a pinch off the only living dill plants.

I prepared the couscous from a large bucket of the stuff I got last winter. When you do this at home, sprinkle bits of random spice to add the illusion of flavor (I prefer curry!). Luckily, Hilary and I have enough grape tomatoes in our garden to feed a small village. I threw some of those on there for flavor and beauty. The swiss chard and standard tomato slices also came from the garden. I prepared the Spicy Black Bean burger from Morningstar Farms in the skillet, sliced up a carrot from the grocery store, and topped it all off with some mustard. It's all in the presentation, folks. I mean look at that mustard. This was quite delicious.

UPDATE: Actually, my herb garden is doing quite nicely. My attempt at humor was admittedly disrespectful of the dill weed :) And for the record, plain couscous is still delicious, but curry makes it better.

News Flash: Politicians Lie.

Though the Annenberg Political Fact Check has gotten a little overzealous over the past year or two, they do still post good hard analysis of many false and overstated claims by both presidential candidates. I often hear people around town or people I speak with repeating false accusations about policy (hey--at least they're actually paying attention to policy and not who is the bigger celebrity and why that somehow matters). I wish more people new about this neutral website.

One of the most infuriating events of the campaign season has been John McCain's outright lies about Obama's proposed tax policy. The Fact Check has a good summary of this B.S. (Bogus Stuff) right here.

And just to follow the fairness doctrine for once, I'll include a link to one of their stories on an Obama overstatement. I hope this appeases my conservative friends. (Like how I used a McCainism, my friends?)

Today, we are all Georgians.

Kites could provide electricity generation

From Physorg.com:

The kites, tethered to generators on the ground, use wind power to produce electricity.

How to begin a campaign appearance

Some moron was so obsessed with his AOL email account that he decided to defend rationality from the illusion of the terrorist threat of non-jingoism.



...Which is interesting because this guy has no plans to object to the way McCain begins his campaign appearances, which also do not open with the Pledge of Allegience. Here is one example:



Hey remember how we were so excited that we were finally going to really debate policy in this election? Yeah, that was cute.

Anthrax suspect: John Waters?

Is it just me or is there an eerie resemblance?