From TaMara, Food Goddess:
Soooo, does everyone have their holiday shopping done yet? Me either. I’m still pining away for the beach, as one weekend of beach time was just not enough. But I’m settling in to winter, if not the holiday. I’m all Bah-Humbug when by now I’m usually all Holly and Ivy. Don’t know what’s up with that, but what I do know is there are many people expecting holiday baking treats, so I need to get down to doing that.
__
Tonight’s menu is pretty simple. Use the soup recipe as a starter and add whatever inspires you to supe it up (hee-hee, see what I did there?). I like the ease of frozen vegetables, but use fresh if you’re so inclined. Squash is a nice addition, put it in when you are simmering the meat, it will need the extra cooking time. Turnips, parsnips, maybe some barley. Go crazy.
__
On the board tonight:
__
1) Beef Vegetable Soup
__
2) Hearty Bread
__
3) Pumpkin Apple Butter
Recipes and shopping list at the link.
Joseph Nobles
Chris Hitchens has torn Glenn Beck a new one, if you’re into that kind of thing.
TaMara (BHF)
JeffW has added some garlic bread to the evening feast. Photo added to the post and the recipe links are in the comments over at my place. We try to be your full service menu service.
Also, if anyone has any holiday dessert requests, post them here or over there and I’ll check back and see if I can find you a good recipe.
Kryptik
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
I’m not sure if anyone’s seen this make the rounds, but…apparently, the new rationale against DADT repeal is ‘Wikileaks leaked national secrets. Leaker in army was a gay soldier. Therefore, gay soldiers are traitors and that’s why DADT needs to stay, to avoid another Wikileaks’.
I just…fucking what the fucking god damned motherfucking hell bullshit is this fucking shit.
Drouse
@Joseph Nobles: God the man is a disaster even when he thinks he’s doing good. Turns out that he was low church rather than the high church of conspiracy. The bread and breakfast and Somalia but not Vince Foster. Two Republicans make health care bipartisan! All that alcohol wasn’t good for the old brain cells I guess.
Dee Loralei
@Kryptik: “Gay sex is icky, wiki rhymes with icky, do YOU need it spelled out? DUH.
Drouse
@Drouse: That’s supposed to be Bed and Breakfast, edit doesn’t seem to work for me.
Dee Loralei
Tamara, about holiday desserts…..I was at a dinner party this past weekend and we were trying to think of something new and different, but sorta traditional. And I came up with a gingerbread trifle, with an eggnog cream, maybe some frosted cranberries and kumquats, or logan berries or maybe pomegranate. Everyone agreed it would be a great holiday treat, but we couldn’t decide on the liquors or the fruits. Any idead, or suggestions.
Violet
@Dee Loralei:
Rice pudding topped with lingonberries. You can get the lingonberries at your local Ikea. It’s a traditional Swedish Christmas dish. Hide an almond in it and whoever finds it gets a gift or good luck or something. It’s pretty easy to make, tolerated by anyone with gluten problems, and even kids seem to like it.
soonergrunt
The correct way to fight that is to point out all the actual traitors (people who sold secrets to the Russians and Chinese) who were straight.
There’s a fuckton of evidence against PFC Manning, most of it from his own words to Adrian Lamo and his own words to CID, and he is probably going to spend most of the rest of his life in prison, but there is absolutely no evidence that he did what he did because he is gay.
TaMara (BHF)
@Dee Loralei: Oh, this sounds wonderful. I’m partial to the frosted cranberry idea, but liqueur, that I’m not sure on. Maybe you’ll have to make a couple until you find the one you like – at least that is how I’d do it. ;-) And I’d love it, if you guest posted your experience on my blog. Way to put the yummy in holiday treats.
jurassicpork
Just got some really bad news a few hours ago and just in time for the holidays. What makes this especially galling is that at the same time this is happening to us, bloated fucks are poised to get their 6 figure tax breaks in Phase 3 of the billionaire bailout.
So much for Xmas shopping.
Bnut
Bernie Goldberg just proving the theory about good parody…
J. Michael Neal
I’m done with my Christmas shopping. Now it’s only a question of whether I get them all painted in time. Here’s a crappy picture of one I did for a friend.
I can’t manage to get a good picture of it. I don’t have any place in the house that really has good lighting for it. Everything is very yellow. So I’m relying on the flash. Unless I zoom, taking a large enough picture of a mini means that the camera is too close to the fig and the flash makes everything too bright.
When I zoom in, I initially see a good image of the fig in the view finder, and then the camera refocuses and everything goes blurry. I can’t find any way to get the camera to focus on the one thing I really want to take a picture of. I’ve got it against a blank white background, including better ones than what I got in the picture linked. What the hell else can the camera be focusing on? I’ve tried it in different modes. Nothing works.
Yutsano
@J. Michael Neal: ME. WANT!!
Shopping: not even started, I might do a huge Amazon blitz this weekend but not entirely sure yet.
Food: I’ve never gotten the wherewithal to do it, and I come from a family of picky eaters, but if anyone has any good recommendations for Christmas goose I’d be more than interested.
Bnut
@Yutsano: Only tip I know is to save that fat! Mmmmm, rendered goose fat.
J. Michael Neal
@Yutsano: I do damned fine work for someone who has a problem with his hands shaking. I just started using a bunch of new techniques, almost a whole new style, and it’s not yet working as well as I’d like. Hopefully it gets better with practice. I can’t get blending to work at all, but layering is producing some nice effects.
This is the website of the company that makes the miniatures I’m doing. My mother is getting the Mouse Witch. My father is getting the Guinea Pig with No Name. A cousin is getting the Guinea Pig Geisha. Everyone else is getting various members of the Frog Court (they did an entire medieval court of frogs): the Jester, the Bishop, the Prince and the Flycatcher.
You can see the owl done by a professional (and with a better camera) on that front page if you scroll down.
Yutsano
@Bnut: Saving the fat from any fowl is generally considered fine culinary currency. Except turkey, mostly because they don’t make very much.
@J. Michael Neal: That is rather nifty I must say. Your rendition/interpretation is quite good as well. And honestly more meaningful.
Bnut
@Yutsano: Yes, but goose fat is especially good. And “culinary currency” is a wonderful turn of phrase.
Jim, Once
@TaMara (BHF):
I’m embarrassed, kind of, to ask, but my kids LURV Jello recipes. I let them have one at Christmas. Got a good one?
Yutsano
@Bnut: I wishI could take credit for its origination, but that honor belongs to the right honorable Mr. Alton Brown. And I can credit him because he writes the vast majority of his scripts. Also known as what happens when you take a TV guy and send him to culinary school?
Bnut
@Yutsano: Alton Brown has to be the best celebrity chef/host on TV. He’s not pretentious, he’s witty, and he’s smart as hell. Fuck Paula Dean, Bobby Flay and all them.
Yutsano
@Bnut: Smartest thing Bobby Flay has ever done was marry Stephanie March. Otherwise I can’t stand his food or his personality. Paula has a great backstory but she’s degenerated in a bawdy old woman. I guess she’s allowed, but wow what a difference. I have to say, though, that if you don’t like Aida Mollenkamp, your heterosexuality might need a tune-up. :)
Bnut
@Yutsano: I did not know he married an ADA. Too bad he’s having Sam Waterston’s leavings. Aida is a cutie, and Giada Delaurentis recipes do it for me also. It’s not that I dislike Flay or Dean. It’s that I don’t find them worthy of a show. If I made everything with a pound of butter and pork fat or a handful of chilies and some wood chips, no shit my food would taste good. Show me something educational, new, fun!
Yutsano
@Bnut: Giada DiLaurentiis is a fascinating story in its own right. She essentially walked away from the family business (I watched TaiPan a while ago and about fell over when I saw one of the producers was Raffaella DiLaurentiis) and decided to become a chef. In a powerful Hollywood family like hers, that took some serious guts. But she comes from a long line of good Italian cooks, so the fact that she succeeded in a cooking show where her grandfather failed is like the circle finally coming back around. And her food has evolved from the traditional Italian famiglia dishes to her own spin on many cuisines of all types. Plus she’s about my age: if I had actually gone to UCLA I could have possibly met her.
matoko_chan
Aaron Bady strikes again.
Two Handed Engine.
it is 7k amazing words, and well worth the read.
i think it should be linked and excerpted everywhere.
jeffreyw
@J. Michael Neal: Interesting figures! About the camera settings and the flash problem? I don’t have a Polaroid like yours but my Panasonic has a couple of different focusing modes. I was stymied trying to get an in focus closeup of bugs one day and resorted to reading the manual more closely than is my usual wont.
Mine has a “macro zoom” mode that is quite useful when the focus point is set to a center point rather than an area matrix mode. No doubt Polaroid uses different terms for the same sort of settings.
The flash issue-too bright up close? Maybe something as easy as a bit of frosted scotch tape over the flash? Something similar should work.
matoko_chan
Oh and this one goes out to Mr. Burns, eemom and sooner.
Let a thousand trails of carnage bloom in the Pasture of the Cudlips.
:)
matoko_chan
Scientific American says you can’t stop the signal.
matoko_chan
@matoko_chan: plz note– in the SA article they refer to 507 mirrors.
approximately 20 per hour.
THE
@matoko:
Interesting that your US-centric article scarcely mentions the very important role of Australia in the whole East Timor situation.
That includes the Australian government’s shameful recognition of that incorporation, though to be sure they condemned it – regarding it as unavoidable – and the subsequent central role played by a later Australian government in helping to restore East Timor to independence.
e.g. Most visibly, we provided the bulk of the military that oversaw the transition to independence under the auspices of the UN.
Also the article mentions Jose Ramos Horta always had sanctuary here in Darwin for his independence movement.
What it doesn’t say is that numerous persons in Australia, on the left in particular, never really abandoned him.
There is so much more that could be said.
FWIW, my own opinion is, that the reality on the ground is that Timor Leste got independence as soon as we were reasonably able to arrange it.
The collapse of Portugal in the 1970s and the determined action by Indonesia pretty much left the world with a fait-accompli.
The later collapse of the Suharto regime and the transition to democracy, provided the opportunity for a more measured solution.
Not to mention the world’s disgust at the repressive way Indonesia had handled the occupation.
I don’t know if anything else could have been done really.
Given the political realities of the time.
Short of starting a war with Indonesia.
I could imagine that might have been infinitely worse for everyone.
Indonesia is a country of 200 million people.
Are you sure USA could have defeated it, if they weren’t in a mood to back down?
And they weren’t – is how I remember it.
TaMara (BHF)
@Jim, Once: Never be embarrassed…I used to love strawberry jello and bananas as a kid. Haven’t had it in years, but someone gave me a church cookbook (it was a fundraiser) let me look through it and see if there is a jello recipe there that meets my standards ;-) I’ll post it over on my blog if I find one.