Plaidophile

The taqueria a few doors down: ¡mucho excellente!

I think I am quite literally addicted to caffeine. I often go through phases of trying to not have any caffeine at all, and when I've been off caffeine for a while I get progressively more and more depressed. Last week I felt like I'd hit rock bottom. And then we got the new espresso machine at work and now life is good again. I think I may have a problem.

On the plus side, caffeine is fairly innocuous as far as highly-addictive substances go, and now that there's this espresso machine I always have ready access to a source of non-caloric caffeine (before this it was either terrible coffee or HFCS-laden soda) so I don't have to feel guilty and/or fat about drinking so much now.

(Of course I do need to find the right balance for intake vs. suicidal thoughts, since right now I have one hell of a buzzy headache.)

So I'd been doing pretty good about not having a lot of caffeine lately. Then they went and got an espresso machine at work.

I improvised this dish for Passover dinner tonight, and it came out very well. Which is good, because I'd never made anything with green beans before so I was basically flying blind.

• Two pounds of green beans, trimmed
• 2-3 tbsp Olive oil
• 1-2 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp black pepper, freshly ground
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• Sun-dried tomatoes, julienned
• One lemon
• Almond slivers, toasted

Preheat oven to 425°F. Place the green beans in a large roasting pan. Drizzle with olive oil and toss to coat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Add sun-dried tomatoes, and the zest of the lemon. Bake for 10 minutes.

Add the juice of the lemon and the garlic. Toss to mix, and bake for another 5 minutes or until beans are nearly tender but still a bit crisp. Top with almond slivers.

Not a traditional recipe by any means, and I've probably posted something like this before, but here we go:

1. In a saucepan, combine a quart of chicken stock and a handful or two of dried shiitake mushrooms [or, better yet, fresh shiitake, or dried mushrooms which have at least been soaking in hot water for a while]
2. Bring it to a gentle boil, stirring slowly until the mushrooms soften
3. Add one minced shallot, the juice of one lime, a tablespoon of sriracha or other chili paste (adjusting for taste), and a dash or two of white wine vinegar
4. Add soy sauce to season to taste
5. Reduce to a gentle simmer. Scramble one egg in a bowl, and drizzle a thin ribbon of egg into the soup
6. Finely chop a green onion on the bias and add to the soup
7. Serve and enjoy

So, I went and bought a French press for coffee. The smallest reasonably-priced one I could find was a 3-cup model, which I figured was overkill for me most of the time but, hey, I guess when I have people over I can make multiple cups, right?

Well, I got it today, and it's a pretty wee thing. On the directions it refers to "each 4-ounce cup." I know that for hot drinks, "cup" usually means "cup full" and not "English cup" but, wow, 4 ounces? So I guess this is the perfect size for me after all!

Except I just made coffee in it and even though I filled it up all the way, the resulting "pot" didn't even fill up one 8-ounce coffee cup halfway. What the hell. Now I'm feeling cheated.

I have a weird metabolism when it comes to alcohol. When I drink it, it takes a while to affect me, but once a little bit starts to affect me, ALL of what I've had affects me, and works its way through my system very quickly, like it's building momentum or something. Usually this isn't a problem since usually I'll have a beer or some wine and maybe a mixed drink. But last night at a party, I had something like 6 or 8 shots' worth of liquor, and suddenly I was all "ooh which way is up?" and then shortly after that "ugh I gotta go outside and get some fresh air." It's the most drunk I've ever been.

Thankfully I didn't have to puke (though I felt very close at times) and I was among friends who made sure I was okay, and as usual I sobered up really quickly, although I ended up missing both the last Caltrain so I stayed the night at a friend's place in Fremont and took BART home in the morning.

Of course right now I have an open bottle of a very nice Sousão in the fridge which is probably going to go bad since I can't apparently stomach even a small glass of wine right now.

So, the bike I bought a month ago? I finally had a chance to ride it a decent amount, to go to Pat's place. It handles quite nicely. Fortunately the roads are completely flat between SoMa and the Mission, but the gearing seems to have a very nice range and hills shouldn't be a problem (at least when my lungs are in better shape due to not being, you know, still sick). It was only a mile and a half each way, and a very easy ride. Fortunately the streets are fairly well-lit here, though, since my headlight is basically just good for letting other people see me (it doesn't light up the ground worth crap).

I also definitely appreciate the bike lanes around here. It'd be nice if the one on Harrison went all the way to my apartment though. (Fortunately, the one on Folsom goes all the way home, so the return trip was actually somewhat safer.)

Also: Last Supper Club is awesome. A little spendy but very top-notch. Apparently it's even better if you have a working sense of smell! I had the ricotta-stuffed cannelloni for dinner, and a Torta di Capri with vanilla gelato for dessert.

Bad flash photography adds 15 pounds. Which makes me look 30 pounds overweight. Yes, I could stand to lose 10-15 pounds, but that doesn't make me a morbidly obese fatass on the verge of diabetes or a heart attack. My blood sugar and cholesterol levels are both well within normal parameters. I eat well. I walk a lot. I just have trouble losing weight. Calorie starvation isn't the answer (all that does is make your metabolism slower) and stupid fad diets aren't the answer either. What works well is less stress and more regular meals.

Hopefully I'll be getting a decent daily routine again, and I can actually stick to a decent three-meal-a-day regimen, and I'll definitely be getting 4 miles of biking or walking daily once I move to Oakland. Those are both much more useful than being told "don't eat so much" while simultaneously being offered a larger portion of crap.

When I got the mover's estimate the other day, I asked about the transport of my wine. The mover said that unless I had a heck of a lot, he'd move it, but he wouldn't guarantee that it'd be any good afterwards, due to the lack of climate control on the trucks and in storage. So I will probably want to just take it in my car, which is starting to get rather a lot of "I'll just take it in my car" items clamoring for space.

Anyway, I decided to just go through my inventory to see what I have, since some of it is probably coming due to being drunk anyway.

I don't know why there's suddenly a critical mass of cilantro haters on the Internet, but I thought I should point out that just because it tastes like soap to you doesn't mean that cilantro sucks. You suck. To most people, cilantro tastes like a cross between parsley and mint. It is quite nice.

I keep forgetting how much I hate bok choi. Why do I keep putting it in stirfry?

Tonight's experiment: salmon sausage pizza.

Pretty simple; I diced half a tomato and spread it on a premade pizza crust, added basil, smoked mozzarella, fontina, salmon sausage, a chifonelle of Italian dry salami, green bell peppers, and sliced mushrooms. The lack of sauce makes it pretty good and the flavors all balance together pretty nicely.

Yesterday while grocery shopping I noticed that Trix were on sale so I got a box out of misplaced whimsy. Just now I noticed they're advertising the "new shape! same great taste!" and of course the "new" thing is that all of the cereal nuggets are little balls, like Kix, rather than having any association between color and some vague fruit shape. This means that Trix have finally dropped the last conceit that the flavors had anything to do with real fruits, and all that's left is the conceit that the different colors represent different flavors.

(I also presume that this "new" shape was solely to cut down on production costs, since now they only need to change out dyes, rather than dyes and molds, and they can probably reuse the molds from other cereals now too.)

Today at lunch, my coworkers and I had the opportunity to see what really happens when the Heimlich maneuver is performed on a choking person.

You know how in cartoons and TV shows and so on, the piece of food flies out like a cork from a champagne bottle?

That's not quite how it goes in reality.

First course: Take everyday vegetables and one exotic ingredient and sauté them together as a filling. Roast a vegetable, and stuff it with the filling. Toss some of the remaining ingredients into a bowl, put the stuffed vegetable on top of them exactly in the center, then ladle a pureed soup base (either pea or acorn squash) around it. For bonus points, drizzle heavy cream on top.

Interlude: Talk about the spirit of Jazz and how it applies to cooking, especially with how every instrument is equally important.

Second course: Take yesterday's stale bread, lovingly make fancy croutons out of them, then pulverize them into bread crumbs. Stir the crumbs into a vinaigrette. In another bowl, make a salad out of beans and expensive imported ham. Toss with olive oil and lemon juice. Add some microgreens and "beautifully caress" them. Arrange it on a plate in a "random" fashion (make sure the long pieces are sticking up just so). Add hard boiled quail eggs. Drizzle the vinaigrette on top and in patterns around the salad. Keep on fussily arranging every little bean and egg and sliver of radish and whatever until it looks perfect (especially the little bits which have "randomly" fallen around it).

Vacuum pumps work great. Just evacuate the bottle as much as you can and then store it in the refrigerator. I've had open bottles last for a month with these things. You can get them at any decent restaurant supply and even at some grocery stores (though grocery stores usually charge way too much for them).

Obviously they don't work for sparkling wines (the best thing to do with excess champagne is to turn it into vinegar, as champagne vinegar is a great addition to many recipes!), but for everything else they're great.

I used to have trouble with even small amounts of cheese going moldy or stale before I could use it all, but then I learned this technique, and haven't lost any cheese to spoilage in months:

Remove the cheese from all plastic wrap (which traps moisture in and makes it easy for mold to develop). Wrap it instead in wax paper, held loosely closed by a large rubber band, and then store that in a plastic zipper bag which has been "burped" (meaning, crack it open a little bit and then roll the contents up to squeeze the air out before sealing it all the way).

The wax paper keeps the moisture away from the cheese, and the plastic bag keeps the moisture in the bag, so now even large loaves last forever, or at least long enough for me to use the whole thing.

I was debating inviting people to dinner at my place on Sunday since Marcus was visiting but he wasn't sure he'd be able to stay for dinner tonight, and then finally he said he could so I invited a bunch of people over yesterday. Then later yesterday he backed out since he and his girlfriend wanted to get back to Idaho sooner (which is totally understandable). And of course because of the short notice on the invite, the only people who HAVE gotten back to me have said they couldn't make it or they'd try to but it was doubtful, and so everyone else is in this indeterminate state and so now I have a feeling I'm going to be eating leftover enchiladas and soup for the next two weeks. Hooray!

A nice mellow, somewhat dry red wine, with a green olive aftertaste. Rather nice.