Intermezzo

(Top) Surprisingly, both the nasturtium and the clover on my windowsill have burst into flower.

(Bottom) Boo adores his clunky stuffed "Hamster Baby."

I need a tripod. Stat!

I've been poking at some of the multiple exposure photos I took in the Autumn with the intention of making HDR pictures from them. I did a few then, but I finally got around to compiling more the other day, so here are a couple. There are a few schools of thought re: HDR photos. Some people see them as a way to create hyper-realistic images, and scorn those that are a bit over the top, some people figure if they're doing a type of digital photo manipulation anyway, they may was well go crazy with the curves and levels, and some people (like me) especially like images that are just on the edge of realistic and fantastical. Some of the uber-crazy images, though fun to look at, are just a bit over the top, though I do really like things that look like they just might be from another world that's reeeeally similar to ours.



Another thing this reminded me of is the fact that I need to find a tripod of some sort--it was a challenge, balancing the camera on various things to try to get the identical picture multiple times. I've tried using the same photo, and changing the exposures in Photoshop, but it never gives quite the effect I wanted.

Sentimental Lentil

So many of the soups I muck about with don't have precise measurements, and are based only on the stuff I know ought to be in there.

I'm making a lentil soup today--that's the raw stuff in the picture. I just thought it was colorful and interesting to look at, so I snapped a photo.

I first became interested in trying a lentil soup after the Boy and I had an amazing batch of soup at a little Middle Eastern place near where we lived up north. It was incredibly fragrant--you could smell the nutmeg and cumin before you even took a bite. Sadly, I think that batch of soup was a mistake of some kind--maybe the lid had come off the nutmeg, and they'd dumped in more than they'd intended. We went back several times, but the soup was never as good.

The weekend we had the lentil soup at The Bronte Bistro (a novel idea!) attached to Joseph Beth Booksellers, and that reminded me I'd been wanting to try making it.

Into my trusty slow cooker, I threw the following:

Lots and lots of chicken stock, and a scoop of MSG-free chicken soup base for more flavor
about a pound (?) of red lentils, cumin, finely chopped ginger, about half a grated nutmeg (which would be maybe a little less than a teaspoon of powdered?) spring onions, chopped onion, chopped red potatoes, celery, sea salt... and that's it, I think. I may decide it needs something else later. Soups are fantastically easy in that they lend themselves so nicely to improvisation.

Auto-Butler!

It was a lovely, lazy Saturday morning this weekend. So lazy, in fact, that neither of us went downstairs to get breakfast. And yet... we both had a hot bowl of delicious, nutty oatmeal while lazing around. Mmm.

Those of you with a slow cooker may want to try this, for those mornings when it's cold outside and you just can't bear the thought of trudging to the kitchen and getting your feet cold while making brekkies. Or, for that matter, any morning you won't have time to make breakfast.

We ended up bringing the slow cooker, two bowls and spoons, and some brown sugar and raisins upstairs last night, and this morning it was perfectly done, and piping hot.

Make sure you use steel cut oats for this, or you'll have baked a little oatmeal puck overnight with the regular kind.

The Best Oatmeal Ever

• 1 cup of steel cut oats (seems like they're pretty easy to find at regular groceries these days)
• 4 cups water or milk (I always go at least halvsies in milk's favor. It's yummier)
• a dollop of vanilla extract
• few shakes cinnamon
• a shake of ground nutmeg, or grate about a half one fresh
  

Put all the above in your slow cooker, and turn on "low" before you go to bed. This recipe is pretty flexible--you can leave it 8 hours, or if you sleep in, it'll still be fine at 11 hours.

In the morning, drop in some raisins and/or other dried fruits, and stir to coat, and let soften while you're fiddling with bowls and such. I've tried putting raisins and dried cranberries in the night before, but the raisins tried to turn back into grapes--completely round and with a tanginess I wasn't sure I liked as well as the sweetness of the dried ones. You're welcome to try either way, of course!

Sprinkle with brown sugar, add a bit of totally optional milk (which I don't really think it needs), and lounge around enjoying the best oatmeal ever.

For a toothier, nuttier version, you can also make this recipe (with the same ingredients and measurements) on the stove. That also is amazingly yummy.

Oh, and PS...

Regarding the previous goi cuon post... if the flexible and sort of sticky texture of the uncooked fresh rolls doesn't suit your fancy, you can also use the same spring roll wrappers in cooked rolls--they crisp up beautifully to make those lovely crackly thin rolls restaurants serve.

You can stuff with items like bean sprouts, chicken or shrimp, and thinly sliced cabbage, or really, whatever you'd like. Then they can be deep fried, pan fried, or baked: pop into a 425 F degree oven for about 20 minutes, turning the rolls about halfway through.

I think that yummy sauce applies no matter what you're doing.

Goi Cuon!

"Bless you!" is one appropriate response when someone says, "Goi cuon!" Another appropriate response is, "Yum!"

Goi coun (pronounced "goy coon," I believe) is a Vietnamese summer roll, and while The Boy and I have enjoyed ordering them at restaurants for a while, we'd never imagined they could be so easy to make at home.

It's hardly surprising, really, since they're not cooked in any way. Recently I stumbled over a recipe for the transcendently delicious sauce that goes with the rolls, and we thought we'd give the whole shebang a try. Here's how you too, can enjoy these lovely little hand-salads.

You will need (and we found everything odd at our local Kroger, by the way):






1. Wraps, and a variety of stuffings--any or all of the following:

• Rice spring roll wrappers - we found ours in the flat round package linked
  
• rice noodles (rice vermicelli--they mostly come dried in like long very thin white tangles in bags)
• cucumber - long skinny pieces
  
• carrot - long minced skinny pieces again
• shrimp
• avocado (which I happened to have--that's the mushy green mass in there)
• fresh cilantro
  
• fresh mint
• lettuce (chopped thin)
• other meats like fish or chicken--I imagine any red meat would be just too heavy here, though you can try, if you want.

2. Articles for the luscious sauce

• Hoisin sauce, which you should be able to get in your local grocery in the Asian section. We found ours in Kroger.
• Chunky peanut butter
• garlic, crushed
• lime juice
• sriracha hot sauce if you so desire
• a bit of soy, to balance the sweetness of the hoisin and the heat of the hot sauce
• a bit of water, if it seems too thick
  
• a few drops of fish sauce, if you so desire
  

Really, the only cooking involved here is melding the ingredients for the sauce together. Put a large lump of peanut butter into a pot, and begin warming it while adding the rest of the ingredients, and allowing it to warm together and become smooth, aside from the peanut lumps. You can then pop the sauce into a bowl to cool to a reasonable temperature while you assemble your goi cuon.

This would be a perfectly lovely thing to do at a dinner party--set out the ingredients, and let everyone roll their own and eat as they go. In fact, these are best eaten fresh--the wrappers tend to get sticky if left for a while. Not that that detracts from the taste at all, but it can make handling them a little awkward.

The spring roll wrappers are like crackly paper, so set out a large flat bowl of hot/warm water along with your plate of stuffings and bowl of sauce. Place a wrapper into the water for a moment (or at least get the whole thing wet if the bowl's not big enough), and give it a few seconds until you feel the texture begin to change. Don't wait until it's floppy--it should still be a bit firm when you set it on your plate and add fillings to it. The wrappers will get floppier as the minutes go by, even out of the water, so you want to have something semi-firm to work with.

I wrapped ours like little burritos - place the fillings in a lump at the edge of closest side to you, roll them toward the middle once, then fold the two edges in, and continue rolling for a neat little package.

I admit, they look a little odd - the wrappers are flexible and practically see-though. And the texture is a bit out of the ordinary as well. They can be a bit floppy and sticky. But combined with the sauce, they're just fresh and delicious as anything.

The good stuff

RCRD LBL is an online record label (Surpise! Vowels!) that offers free MP3 downloads of its artists in true hipster fashion. In fact, here is one of my current favorite songs from Caribou. Here. He looks like a high school science teacher, but in fact, he makes lush and lovely music.

While you are listening, why not read a book? I'm currently reading The Terror, by Dan Simmons. It tells the story of the 1845 Franklin Expedition to the Arctic to search for the Northwest passage using the two steamships, The HMS Erubus, and The HMS Terror. There is a lot of ice involved. So far, I have needed to curl up in very warm blankets in order to read it. It's vaguely a historical novel, however, I'm not sure whatever it is that is plaguing the two ships in their ill-fated voyage is entirely natural. The story so far is intelligent, interesting, and creepy.

The fortitude of the men traveling to the far reaches of the globe so long ago must have been incredible. Imagine voluntarily sailing off, knowing it would be years before you'd see home again, and knowing there was a strong possibility you'd be burying some of your friends and crewmates at sea, or chipping into the arctic ice in an effort to put their bodies to rest.

Now, (unless you're WomanNorth, and you didn't need to imagine the Arctic) stop imagining, and make yourself a nice cup of steaming hot cocoa.

My kitchen goes East.. or at least, it tries.

So I made those samosas, and then I found an interesting recipe for Indian chappati bread on a website called Show Me the Curry. The site was made by two Indian women who are busy moms, but wanted to show people how to cook authentic Indian food in simple ways. I particularly like the fact that they add videos for most of the recipes. The videos aren't super-professional, which I like. You can tell you're in someone's real kitchen, and that Anuja and Hetal are friends in real life. More power to them for making a website that's such a resource!

The two recipes I've tried and that have been great are the chappatis (plain flatbreads good with yogurt, or for dipping) and the aloo paratha (uses the chappati dough), which is a potato stuffed flatbread. Be sure not to miss the video down at the bottom of the page.

I'm glad there were videos for them both, as the parathas were a bit difficult for a first-timer to get right. The recipe involves patting out flat circles of dough, placing stuffing in the middle, sealing it like a dumpling, but then flouring it, and actually rolling it flat again with the filling inside. Don't let this daunt you, though! I recommend trying them--we ate our parathas with a lentil dish from Tasty Bite, and they were great. I think with a little practice, this would be a pretty quick meal. I fiddled with the seasonings a bit, and since I don't care for cilantro, I used celery leaves instead, and that worked really nicely.

The only thing I would add for those of us who haven't rolled stuffed dough before is to make sure the stuffing is pretty dry--just moist enough to squeeze into balls. Mine was a bit moister when I first started, and my first paratha exploded when I tried to roll it flat. :( I still got a few leaks on a couple other ones, but all in all, they turned out really delicious and hearty.

They were much less delicate than samosas (though those are delicious in their own right), and I bet the completed parathas freeze well, an would be perfect for lunches and such.

Such a very important update

Yeah...no. I lied. It's not important. I've just been thinking about things like Twitter, to which people voluntarily submit up-to-the-minute news reports about the mundane details of their days. These reports are sped over the interwebs directly to their friends, who can keep tabs on them at all times. It seems like knowing that so-n-so just ate a cookie or found their lost keys would be not only tedious, but an overload of information. Also, do we really want to voluntarily let people that far into our lives?

It makes me a bit worried about people in general. How can we continue to care about protecting our privacy when we're voluntarily allowing the whole world to spy on our every move?

Technology has made the world so much smaller. We're connected virtually to a vast crowd of people. It's made contacting someone a continent away as easy as popping next door. Things like MySpace and Facebook make it smaller still, where we can even know day to day what a friend has been doing. Twitter brings it an even more microscopic level--an up to the minute level. It's this last part I'm so very unsure about. Sometimes, especially in this day and age, I want the world to stop at the walls of my house, and not come inside.

I like being in contact with the people I care about. I enjoy knowing what folk are up to. I want my friends to know what I'm up to. However, I doubt I'll ever feel okay about serious twittering. I'm sure none of you are sad about that.

If I were to twitter, what sorts of things would I write?

I lost a red sweater. Then I found it.
I did work on the computer.
I thought about making goi cuon for dinner tomorrow.
I walked upstairs. I walked back downstairs.
Laundry. Cleaning.
Talked to my neighbor.
Soy candles smelled nice.
I worked on building a webcomic wiki.
I took off the red sweater that I found.
I lost the red sweater again.

Is anyone thrilled? Neh. I didn't think so.

Mesmerizing

Solar from flight404 on Vimeo.

People have been making lovely music visualizations using Processing 1.0. Here's one from a user called flight404 on Vimeo.