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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Sunday, December 22, 2002

Generation II of the mushroom kit has a new attitude and new music to match. They have totally discarded The Philosophy Of Larry and are intent on ignoring history and learning by their own mistakes. A new mushroom Messiah, calling himself "Steve", has arisen to discredit all of Larry's work as charlatanism and the new crop eagerly accepts his off-the-cuff pronouncements as proven wisdom.  He presents himself as a spiritual leader, not a political leader. The tendrils of the new generation all point towards Steve, who wears a brown mottled cap in sharp distinction to any member of the first generation. Forgotten is the light-hearted doo-wop of Larry's minions, this new and larger crop sings only dirges and laments - like a rowing crew on an ancient vessel about to be consumed by Greek Fire. Between the depressing verses, they sometimes interject unison monotone liturgical praises to Steve who, esconced in a deep meditative trance, completely ignores them to focus on his concentrated attempt to communicate with his Master. That's me! I've answered Steve with the scan shown above, found on page 179 of Word Mysteries & Histories - From Quiche To Humble Pie, the same book in which I randomly found "career" last week. I'm into randomly opening books (or opening them to page 179) this week and I sincerely hope Steve and the New Crop understand that. If they don't, it doesn't really matter. I still plan to cook them all up for Christmas Dinner. Mushrooms always taste the same no matter what their philosophy! All I care about is consistency of flavor, not ideology. 7:30:22 PM    comment []

This is a CanScan™ from a tin of THE WORLD OF BEATRIX POTTER Authentic Earl Grey Tea. No wonder them Limeys have so much trouble selling their stuff in a free market, who can say that without taking a breath? (purchased at HomeGoods, that “Pier One ripoff” yesterday, $3.99 for 20 fragrant of bergamot teabags unencumbered by envelopes). 5:03:04 PM    comment []

Trouble With Truffles: Joy Of Cooking suggests using black truffles in Perigourdine Sauce. Fine, but Perigourdine requires foie gras and demi-glace. I can buy the foie gras, but I do have some turkey stock left over after I smoked turkey breasts last weekend, maybe that will substitute for the chicken stock, but I still have to buy beef bones for that half of the stock. Maybe A Southern Season has demi-glace concentrate. I dunno, all this stuff is just for the sauce and it has already cost more than all the birds in the turducken...and I haven't even thought about what it goes over, though Emeril has a good recipe. Here's where I found the demi-glace recipe, but for the small amounts usually required a concentrate such as this one might be more economical. 1:53:59 PM    comment []

Just hooked up the UPS. As always, a few minor glitches - the mouse didn't work on restart, but repluging fixed that. Then I read Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 314488, How To Modify the List of Programs that Run When You Start Windows XP. I added Radio.exe (view properties of the exe, right click target, copy, and paste into items to run at logon - saves typing, just backspace over the enclosing quotation marks). Now there should be no problems posting to the blog by email when I'm out of town. If the computer gets shut down by a power failure (the UPS buys me 70 minutes), assuming I'm out of town, I'll call or email Liz (she feeds the cats when I'm gone anyway) and ask her to power on the system and log on. Short of Global Thermonuclear War, sadly a finite possibilty, I should be able to keep the blog rollin'. 1:18:32 PM    comment []

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. The body of Yolanda Schlessinger, 77, was found Monday in her Beverly Hills condominium. Police would say only she had been dead for a long time. 8:01:09 AM    comment []

After typing out the coffee pot race, I opened my copy of Bruce Aidells' Complete Sausage Book. Without trying, I landed on page 179, where there is a recipe for Thai Sausage Roll with Mango Vinaigrette. It is quite complex. First you have to make Thai Chicken and Turkey sausage (page 100). The vinaigrette requires a mango, white wine vinegar, fresh mint, fresh ginger, and Sriracha Thai chili sauce, which few people have on hand. The sausage is wrapped in a tortilla and topped with the vinaigrette, green onions, sprigs of cilantro. Oh hurt me... 5:07:27 AM    comment []

Another boring dream. While I was making a poster with charcoal and blotting paper, two agreeable college-age gentlemen entered my living room. They had, they said, a very good coffee maker they would like to sell me. I helped them assemble it using the accompanying ring-bound manual. First you put the coffee into the concave ring near the edge of an aluminum disk, which was about 15 inches in diameter. A similar disk, without a concave ring, is fastened to the first using a wing nut in the center. That keeps the coffee inside. Then the "wheel" is suspended vertically from a gray enamel bracket whose shape resembles an elongated football goalpost. The water is poured into a glass container at the top, on the crossbar of the goalpost. You turn the manual to page 179 and fold it open inside-out to reveal a pop-up aluminum on/off switch. The notebook is then slid into a bracket on the right side of the goalpost, where it stands in a parallel plane to the coffee disk. Ready to go! Press the switch, a round button in the center of the rectangular pop-up, and the wheel starts spinning! The water gradually disappears from the container above. There is not enough room for it all in the disk, but soon the spinning disk is steaming and the pot is empty. Then, like an inverted vacuum coffee pot, freshly-brewed coffee begins arising in the pot. It was very good coffee, I had to agree, and quite a show, so I paid the gentlemen $80 and they left. As I read on in the manual, I discovered that you could race the coffee pot. There was a special dirt track where other owners gathered to test out their machines. It was a mostly rectangular track, with some gentle arcs, but somehow the coffee pot knew how to navigate the turns. At first it did anyway. Soon I discovered that my coffee pot would skid, spin out and stall on some of the more complex corners and surfaces. No one else was having this problem. An inspection revealed that the manual's pages closest to the ground had become frayed from the wear and tear of the road. The flimsy pop-up switch was dented. Then a friend named John told me how to remedy this problem. What you do is hold the manual between your two feet and jump up and down on a good flat bridge to tamp the pages. He used to race motorcycles, so he knew this to be a fact. I did that and it worked, but not nearly as good as the first spin on the track. Disgusted, I brought it home to just make coffee. Looking at the poster I was making before the salesmen came, I realized it was a horrible caricature of someone I knew, who would be greatly offended if they ever saw it. Rather than take it down from the wall, I scribbled over it with crayons. 4:58:42 AM    comment []