Ping Pong

From Christmas 08

Missing the shot

From Christmas 08

Not missing the shot!

Note: our basement is totally way dirtier than these photos make it look...but it has been about 10 years since there were no boxes of books on the ping pong table.

Things in my belly, Christmas edition

Exhibit A) Nemesis Chocolate Cake

From Christmas 08

Exhibit B) Mushroom velouté

From Christmas 08

Exhibit C) Standing rib roast and Yorkshire pudding

From Christmas 08

Exhibit D) The plaintiffs

From Christmas 08

Exhibit E) The plate

From Christmas 08

Free Pagemaker!

I totally just did my holiday newsletter using Scribus, an opensource desktop publishing application for Mac, PC and linux.

It's not perfect, but it's way better than Word!

Boss's daughter's boyfriend

is gonna buy my blue Peugeot fixie!

'Cept he's too timid to test ride it as a fixie, and wants to make it a singlespeed, to which I say, no problem! Casholeum on the barrelhead!

Long undies

Boy do I love me some REI silk long underwear. Walking to jury duty today was totally bearable. And they are not too hot indoors, neither.

It is like 17 degrees, people. Welcome, winter!

Making Mozz, Part III

I got the right milk this time. But I still was looking at Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. Blast. Which made us a little late for Wilco at the Lyric Opera House.

Acoustics were perfect. Seats were fantastic, center balcony. Band was having a pretty good time, and Tweedy forgot the words at one point in Jesus Etc, because "I was thinking about how I'm obsessed with The Wire, and I was wondering if Omar was here." Crowd goes wild!

Brief review over here at Muzzle of Bees, who also took the picture here.

Crystallized Ginger

Makes awesome tea. Pre-sweetened! From a man of many good ideas.

Ice Storms

Whoa. Part of a slideshow from the BBC.

New Orleans

Josh and I went down to New Orleans last week - I had the Trop Med conference for work. Conference was interesting and busy, but who cares - we were really there to eat!

And eat we did. Here's a wrap up:

Friday: dinner at Dick and Jenny's. Grilled Flounder with crawfish dynamite and grits (I think the best grits I've ever eaten), fried veal sweetbreads (texture of a scallop, which I liked, but then, it's hard not to like things that are deep fried. Josh decided he didn't like them after the waitress told us they might be part of the brain, because he is afraid of prions, like a sensible person), oven roasted salmon with something...lemony lentils and garlic confit.

Saturday: walked around the French Quarter in the morning (so quiet!). Did a very quick run through down Magazine Street and by Kara's old house. Things were really quiet. Very little traffic. But places were open and people were out on Magazine. Dinner at Liborio was pretty blah, our only misstep of the week.

From New Orleans 08

This jerkface goes around with gray paint, painting over graffiti all over town. People are grafitti'ing back.

From New Orleans 08

Sunday night we hit Upperline in Uptown, taking the street car. This was our most elaborate meal, with my 7 course New Orleans tasting menu, none of which I can remember except for the duck gumbo (or did I have the andouille?), and a leg of duck with peach-ginger compote, which was yum. Josh got the four course menu, with the other gumbo, some excellent fried oysters, a drum piquante with two kinds of peppers ("hot and hot" - no really!) and some corn bread, and then bread pudding and creme brulee. Everything was really good and we were So Full. Also the wine I chose was a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and it ruled. Citrusy.

(Amendment: I had a little "duo of soups" with turtle soup and andouille gumbo. Then the duck, fried green tomatoes with shrimp remoulade (a dish they created), and spicy shrimp with jalapeno cornbread and aioli. The turtle tasted and felt like ground veal, sort of mild and crumbly.)

Monday was Cochon - pork and turnips and cabbage for Josh, same for my boss, a roasted redfish for his wife, and I got a small plate of pork cheeks and beet rosti and a mushroom/parsley salad. Pork cheeks were total yum (the addition of a goat cheese sauce really brought out all the flavors) and the salad was ok, but I might should have gotten the headcheese instead. Boudin balls and alligator nuggets for appetizers, along with the satsuma (local fruit, like a tangerine) mojitos, were excellent as always. Great hit with the boss and our dinner guest, a Swiss guy. After we went out to Donna's, which was closed, so then headed for Frenchmen, where we ran into nice malaria people at the Spotted Cat, and heard the Jazz Vipers, who were fun, and inspired people to dance things that Josh didn't recognize, really, but that were related to lindy and swing.

Tuesday I had breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings - only dinner was memorable food-wise. We went to Herbsaint, and most everyone ordered pasta things (they make their own, but also do creole dishes). My guanciale carbonara was delicious but I was expecting more guanciale (like pancetta, but made from pork cheeks). The baby green salad with basil vinaigrette and pecan-crusted lardons was heavenly. The desserts were a little less awesome, but just a little. Apparently the gnocchi were fantastic. We went out afterwards to the Maple Leaf to hear Rebirth, which I think was the highlight of the week for Josh. Ran into more fun malaria people. Anna had made up a neglected tropical disease for Josh to talk about, Schuykilmeiesis, and we got a lot of mileage out of the one-pager she wrote up. Thanks Anna!

On our way back in the cab the cabbie talked a mile a minute about growing up in New Orleans in the French Quarter and working as a barback when he was 12 and serving cops when he was 15 (I was a big kid, I had a beard, I talked like a kid but they never asked) and his uncle Rocco who drove cab 474, who we passed on St. Charles in Uptown, which was surprising "because he never leaves the Quarter", and all the floors he mopped and tables he sanded and his ex-wife not wanting him to bartend so that's why he started driving the cab. A character.

Wednesday was my day off, so that we could go to as many Prospect.1 sites as we could. It's the New Orleans biennial, with international artists who'd visited the city making art about the city, scattered over a wide area, including the Lower Ninth Ward. We started at the Contemporary Arts Center, with a great installation on the Upstairs Lounge, a chandelier-ship, a short film called Baltimore starring Melvin van Peebles, the Walters Art Gallery, the Great Blacks in Wax Museum on North Ave, and some other fancy place in Baltimore that didn't look Baltimorean. Then we hit Mother's for po-boys. Josh pointed out a newspaper clipping he'd read the day before when he'd gone there for lunch, about a taxi driver who not only had driven around a ton of celebrities, but who also had some story about picking up a lady with a monkey on her way to get a new puppy, but the monkey didn't like the dog so the cabbie had to drive back separately with the monkey in his car....the langage of the guy sounded familiar, and I looked and his name was Rocco. Rocco, Rocco - what was the name of the guy's uncle from the night before? I scanned some more and found the number of his cab - 474. One and the same!

We went out to the Ninth Ward to see Noah's Ark, made of Katrina wreckage, and Diamond Gym, in the old Battleground Baptist Church. I will refer you to the New Yorker article for more information on the art. The first stop was at the L9 Center for the Arts, which had photos by local photographers, prints that had survived Katrina intact as well as several that had been pretty severely water damaged, in a section titled "What She Left Me". The last time I'd been down in the Ninth Ward it was six or seven months after Katrina, and only a few of the roads had been cleared at that point. Now, the young BFA driving us around keep saying "all this emptiness you see here, this was all houses. It wasn't just open land. There, you can see the concrete foundation, you can see the tree lined streets - these were all houses that got washed away." Brad Pitt's houses were loud and right next to the levee; people were laying concrete for a new foundation, other houses were going up, covered in Tyvek, but 80% of the houses in that section were gone altogether, and the little brick ones that remained didn't look like anyone was coming back to them anytime soon. It was cold and rainy but we hopped off the shuttle to spend some time at the Ark and at the Church. I was glad to be able to see this part of town with the excuse that I was there for the art.

From New Orleans 08

Diamond Gym

From New Orleans 08

From New Orleans 08

Noah's Ark.
We rode the Prospect.1 shuttle from there to the New Orleans Museum of Art, in City Park, which was ok - there were some great Fi Yi Yi costumes and an installation that used your own pulse to make ripples in tables of water, that then reflected light up onto the ceiling. I wasn't supposed to be taking any pictures but here you go.

From New Orleans 08

Fi Yi Yi were the first group of Mardi Gras Indians to use masks that hid the faces of the dancer, West African style.

From New Orleans 08

Placing your hands on the sensors makes little tubes jut into the water, causing ripples.

That night we ate at Jacques-Imo's, next to the Maple Leaf, which was SO MUCH FOOD I DIED. Seriously. You get there and you're likely to have been waiting for a while (except that we got there at 6:30, hungry from the day of arting), so they give you EACH two corn muffins that you are obliged to eat because they have garlic butter melted into the top. THEN, when Josh orders the fried chicken they are famous for, the water tells you that you MUST order an appetizer, since the fried chicken takes 40 minutes. Do not believe him! He is lying! It only takes 30 minutes, and in the meantime you will have gorged yourself on fried grits covered in crawfish etouffee and shredded chedder and some feta cheese, just for kicks. Let me tell you, this is a meal in and of itself - the triangle of fried grits was about two inches thick, and the hypoteneuse as long as the distance between my thumb and pinky finger, when my hand is stretched out. However, the Eating Machine took it all in stride, and even cleaned his fried chicken plate, while I struggled with my roast boneless quail stuffed with foie gras and wild mushrooms in a salty wine sauce. Friends, I suspect the poor animal being stuffed to produce a tasty liver was in fact myself.

It was now pouring down outside so our plans with Julia were once again foiled. We had a beer at the Maple Leaf (which has no reception, be warned) and headed home. In the morning we awoke to Snow.

From New Orleans 08

From New Orleans 08

Cafe du Monde was covered, the roofs were all covered, the palm trees were dusted in snow until about noon, when it all melted. This created various delays in air travel and we both got home to our respective cities around 10pm or 11.

I'm finally feeling less like a stuffed goose. And can't wait to go back.

Kima Update

Lots of things have happened since November 20, including:

Kima gets lit up by Shane at the dog park just after acting super-obedient near Mazzy.

Kima subsequently gets lit up by me several times when she reacts to other dogs.

Kima begins hiding behind me when other dogs get near, like a beagle sitting in front of Starbucks, which makes his owner chortle.

With Shane, Kima is within 3 feet of a roving mini French bulldog, whose owner is pretty clueless and wants to get a harlequin Great Dane, "because their markings are so pretty". Kima does not react even when said bulldog approaches. Instead, she sits, and quakes in fear.

Kima does not even notice a skinny shepherd mix tied to the lightpole outside of Eddie's grocery, so we do another pass, and then another, until she does. Shepherd mix is ultra blasé about the whole thing, and Kima is like "What, this is a cakewalk."

Kima freaks out at a spaniel mix who is Pulling His Owner down the street in order to sniff Kima.

Dude who lives behind us comes over with his adorable basset hound, George, and Kima freaks out as he asks if he can install a solar-powered security light on our garage so that it shines into his backyard.

And then yesterday, we go to the playground, and when we come back Kima's tail isn't wagging. Sunday it's still not wagging and she is more grumpy and slower than usual. I call the vet, who's closed, but since she can still run around and doesn't look otherwise in too much pain or limping, I google.

Getting a handle on Limber Tail

Chances are if you frequent the outdoors with your Labrador Retriever, you may already be familiar with a condition called "limber tail". After a vigorous day of hunting, you notice your dog's tail hanging limply as though it might be broken.

"The tail hangs down from the base of the tailor extends horizontally for three or four inches and then drops down," says Janet Steiss, DVM, Ph.D., PT., associate professor at Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine. "To the owner, it may appear to occur unexplainably. Usually the dogs recover in a few days."

"The tail is real important to balance and the flow of body movement," says Robert Gillette, DVM, director of the Sports Medicine Program at Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine. "The base of the tail is where the muscle mass of the tail is located and where you see limber tail."

Steiss and several colleagues at Auburn studied limber tail in English Pointers in the late 1990s. Their findings, published in the November/December 1999 issue of the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, showed that the condition is associated with damage to the tail muscles.

"It can happen after a heavy day of work involving a lot of tail action," Steiss says. "The typical case is where a young adult dog develops a tail that becomes so flaccid he is unable to raise it. The tail appears to be painful. It can be a problem for the athletic working dog and may require an owner to withdraw a dog from competition due to abnormal tail carriage."

Defining Limber Tail


Limber tail syndrome - also called cold water tail. limp tail, broken wag or broken tail - describes a relatively common condition in sporting dogs.

Ed Aycock, DVM, of Sanger, Texas, who practices at the Lewisville North Animal Clinic, has seen a number of cases of limber tail, including some in his own field trial retrievers. "We didn't have a specific name for limber tail until Dr. Stress' research. It wasn't something you learned about in veterinary school. Old timers called it cold water tail because episodes most often were associated with wet and cold weather."

"Generally, affected dogs may act as if they are in pain for the first 24 to 48 hours, and resent being touched at the base of the tail because its painful," Steiss says. "Sometimes, the owner notices that the hair around the base of the tail stands up - this is probably due to the swelling of the muscle tissue at the tail base."

The three most common causes for limber tail are climate changes, especially exposure to wet, cold weather, underconditioning or overexertion, and being confined in a crate for long periods of time," Steiss says. Veterinarians tend to see limber tail in sporting dogs during certain seasons. It commonly is seen in retrievers and pointers as they start back into heavier training in the fall or in young dogs out for the first time that come down with limber tail from overuse of the tail muscles."

Though limber tail is rare in the dog population as a whole, it is common in hard-training pointing and retrieving dogs and has been reported in Labrador, Golden and Flat-Coated Retrievers, English Setters, English Pointers, Beagles and Foxhounds.¹ Males as well as females are affected.

Poached Pears

J & I made this over the weekend with three pears we picked up.

Peel and core pears, poach in 1 cup white wine, 1 cup water and 1/2 cup sugar for 8 minutes.

Remove pears with slotted spoon and boil down your mixture till it is a syrup (another 8 minutes or more - don't get impatient!).

Chop up at least 4 oz of semisweet chocolate and whisk it into the syrup. Pour over pears and serve with vanilla ice cream and bliss out.

I should really be taking more pictures of the food I blog about.

Veggie Paella

I had Nick and Jojo, back from the Virginia GOTV trenches, and Rupali and Nathan over for dinner last night and duh it was super fun and also yummy. Both couples got married this year and Nick and Rupali are in PhD programs at the NerdCircus so lots of fun things to talk about. N&J brought "good" and "bad" lettuce (both yummy!) and R&N made a cinnamon-nutmeg-chocolate cake which I am scarfing down at lunch today.

Kima showed off her brand new black fleece sweater which is keeping her super cozy, and I made veggie paella, which is both dairy-free and vegetarian! Well except that I used chicken stock, but Rupali doesn't mind, fortunately :)

Veggie Paella from Bon Appetit
Ingredients:
* 2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
* 2 cups chopped onion
* 1 cup chopped red bell pepper
* 1 cup chopped green bell pepper
* 1 tablespoon chopped garlic
* 1 1/2 teaspoons paprika
* 2 cups canned vegetable broth
* 3 large plum tomatoes (about 10 ounces), seeded, coarsely chopped
* 1 cup frozen peas
* 1 cup drained canned garbanzo beans (chickpeas)
* 1/2 cup chopped peeled carrot
* 1/4 teaspoon crushed saffron threads
* 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper


* 1 1/2 cups (about 9 1/2 ounces) couscous
* 6 canned artichoke hearts, quartered
* Sliced red bell pepper rings
* 1 lemon, cut into 8 wedges
* Chopped fresh parsley

Preparation:
Heat oil in heavy large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion and chopped bell peppers; sauté until vegetables begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and paprika and sauté 1 minute. Stir in broth and next 6 ingredients. Bring to simmer. Reduce heat to medium-low. Cover and cook 5 minutes to blend flavors. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Mix couscous into vegetable mixture (I added more broth before this and I think it helped a lot!). Cover and simmer 1 minute. Remove pot from heat. Let stand covered 5 minutes. Fluff couscous with fork. Let paella stand covered 5 minutes longer; fluff with fork again. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Transfer to serving bowl. Arrange artichoke hearts, red bell pepper rings and lemon wedges atop paella. Sprinkle parsley over and serve.

Snugglehound

From Kima

Definition of snugglehound here. And "Clunk". Eleanor, you may want to pay close attention. :)

Keys to easy fun dinner party

1) Invite fun people. (duh)
2) Easy-ish food items that cook for an hour in the oven. This way you can hang out with guests while things finish up or 'rest' or cool a bit instead of frantically sauteing things at the last minute (that's the 'tricky fun dinner party').
3) Get Anna to make freakin-good pomegranate fruit salad!
4) dishwasher.

I had a hankering to roast a chicken on Saturday night so I invited Rupes and C.N. and Anna and Katie over. The roast chicken you stuff with garlic and ginger and lemon slices and oil it all over with salt and pepper, and of course one must have potatoes, so to use up the rest of our local cream I made potato gratin, just layers of sliced potatoes with salt/pepper/gruyere in between, filled up with cream and baked for an hour. Josh made delicious roasted red and yellow beets and their beet greens that we picked up at the Mill Valley Center in the morning. Super duper yum. And Anna brought the fruit salad and wine was brought by guests and it was like, a super fun evening!

Of course now I have another dinner party coming up and can't just be a one trick pony so roast chicken and potatoes are out out out. I have been recently starring fun recipes in the food blogs I read so perhaps I will turn to them for inspiration...

Words I don't like, part 349

"Colorways".

Working from home

I had a dentist appointment this morning and a Kima-nails-cut appointment this afternoon and figured I may as well just take the day off um, work from home.

Of course it is Draft City in our living room thanks to the a/c unit in the dining room. So I shrink-filmed that sumbitch right up!

From Design

Can you spot the cord and remote control sealed in their winter tomb?

That helped a whole lot but there was still the front door to contend with. Fortunately, my new blogs had a solution, and there were even extremely detailed Flickr instructions on how to do it. Nonetheless, I totally sewed the first tube too small and had to start over. Good thing I have 9 million yards of Mali Family Planning cloth to work with.

From Design

But wait there's more!

From Design

Double tube action!

Now Kima and I are toasty. And yes actually I did get a lot of work done today!

Caramelized or Carbonized? And how to slice a pizza

I wasn't sure what to make for dinner last night - I had a little bit of broccoli that was slowly turning brown, some leftover mozzarella floating in water, and a lot of tomato sauce. Among other things. Some sort of pasta bake? Well, we're all out of non-spaghetti pasta. Maybe pizza?

The answer to Maybe pizza? is always yes.

I whipped up some dough and started caramelizing onions (part of random resolution #41, making something you've never made twice a week). Everything was looking good until I got off the phone with my parents. People! Do not call your parents, put your dog in a down stay, and then forget to check on your onions because you're too busy checking if your dog is still obeying you!

I left them about 2 minutes too long and there was much blackness, but not so much that I wasn't going to use them on my pizza. My other thought was, if I make myself eat these, I won't ever forget about onions again.

Of course if you have caramelized onions you do not need tomato sauce on your pizza, so there is still a large container of it in the fridge. The pizza, however, was delicious, with the onions and the steamed broccoli and a few tiny pieces of Philly's Best Pepperoni and some (ok, a little too much) red pepper flakes. And the mozz.

Back in my youth we used to get pizza from Timpone's, who were famous for their "campustown" pizza, thin crust, sliced in half and then into strips. This was an ingenious way to make pieces of pizza that are always 'mouth-width', and prevent a lot of the messiness of biting into a huge broccoli floret or mushroom or what have you, and it sliding off along with all of the cheese remaining on the slice. As I am partial to thin crust pizza myself, I think I'll start cutting up my pies like this all the time. I think they even taste better!

Doog

Kima is curled up in the recliner chair next to our dining room table, where I have spent much of the weekend watching Daily Shows and relearning how to use Mom's sewing machine (to make draft snakes and eventually potholders!). We went for a long hike today up at Jerusalem Mills where she was very well behaved, and now she is snoring softly, her face turned into the back corner of the comfy chair, like a little spotted pretzel.

Ding Dong

So this guy moved in next door to us last week - now we have neighbors on both sides. Cool! I haven't met him yet, but now twice, our doorbell has rung, and I answer the door, and NO ONE IS THERE.

But someone is standing at my new neighbor's door, presumably just having rung his doorbell. Are the wires crossed? Am I hearing things through the wall (no, it is super loud, in my house!) Is it possible that this is the fault of resonant frequency or some other physics-related phenomenon?

A mystery!

WaPo article on White House butler

You must read. As with many good things, it came via Atrios. And take his advice to read all the way through.