Random, some food

[magid]

The Coolidge Corner Theater has been having a series of opera movies this year. The ones that are still upcoming are Carmen Jones (a contemporary verion of the Bizet) March 11 (which sounds amazing but I won't be able to go), Tales of Hoffman May 20 (which I have vague memories of seeing, perhaps at the parents' friends' (the Posts?), and all I remember was it was strange, and I'd like to see it again), and Diva July 22 (one of my favorite movies :-).

Car freedom day! I finally got the car out of the space it's been occupying for the last week and a half, and went out to Russo's (the greens ganged up on me; I must stir fry soon) for the first time in ages.

Trader Joe's has hechshered vanilla paste, but I couldn't talk myself into getting any this close to Pesach. I did succumb to a grinder filled with pepper, lemon, and salt, though. (Reminder to self: Trader Joe's carries tofu, but it has only a K on it.)

The problem with not cooking for Shabbat* is the lack of leftovers later. So today I cooked a chicken with jasmine rice, onions, chickpeas, preserved lemon, lots of black pepper, and dried fruit (prunes, cherries, some apricots). It was good to be eating something I'd made, but it's not quite what I'd envisioned. It's not balanced; the pepper wasn't enough to counteract the sweetness of the fruit. Possible changes next time: make the rice separately so I can roast the chicken and fruit, caramelizing them. Add pistachios or sunflower seeds. Consider using some form of pomegranate. Add olives.

I finished China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. It's a great sweeping adventure story (and started to feel like it would've been a great role-playing campaign, actually, with all the different races and factions and such), and I thought the world and the problem very creative (also the solution). Two issues, one with the writing, one with the physical design. The first one: it's dirty. It's dusty, moldy, sewaged, dripping, and more. I get that. It's really a bit much to keep seeing that in every scene throughout the 600+ page book. And for the physical: whoever designed the paperback edition was apparently trying to keep it as short as possible, which meant not leaving a lot of white space around the page. I understand that. But it really makes a difference to leave sufficient space in the gutter, so the reader doesn't have to break the binding to get at the words. I figured out that I could manage to not break the binding if I held it with two hands, but it annoyed me.


* Going to the Tremont St. shul's group dinner, however, was definitely the right choice. It meant I got to see people, and I didn't have to fight the post-travel malaise to make something. It did, however, continue my four-day fish streak: I ended up eating fish almost every meal in Chicago (I ran out of lox before the third breakfast), ranging from lox to fried whitefish to homemade gefilte fish to fake seafood salad to raw salmon. Friday lunch I went to Milk St. and got.... fried fish and fish chowder. Dinner Friday night featured salmon (and some wonderful side dishes: roasted green beans, a yogurt salad with cucumber and pomegranate seeds that I didn't think I'd care for but was wonderful, cauliflower with chickpeas. Plus the ultimate veggie dessert: pumpkin pie. Mmmm.... pie.) I think I'm fish-ed out for now.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

Re Perdido Street Station: my impression regarding it being a good role playing game was more distracting and less of a good thing. And I agree regarding it being overly described as "dirty" all the time. I liked the book, but didn't love it.

mmmm...fish.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I ended up feeling like it's not a Great Book, but the author has potential. If another book by him is filled with all kinds grime and stench, though, I suspect that'll be it for me.

It was weird, though, how the role playing part slowly started making itself known about halfway through, after which I couldn't really turn that part off in my brain. I haven't had that reaction to a book before, so it surprised me.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Perdido Street Station is to blame for a recent week of sleep deprivation here. I want to read more of Mieville's books, but I think I had best put that off to a time when I am not in school (vacation, after graduation, something). The filth was a little overwhelming; I wonder if that was the point, though?

[magid.livejournal.com]

After a while, I started to wonder how the city didn't just fall over in all the filth. Every once in a while there was some snippet about a neighborhood that wasn't quite as decaying as the rest, and I wondered how those people's lives compared. (And doesn't anyone in the city care to keep some of it clean? Or do vermin and disease not travel by such vectors?)

Also, perhaps letting just a few pages go by without mentioning any kind of dirt would be ok? It felt like every page, every couple of paragraphs, included vivid dirt descriptions.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Then again, I suppose London was once like that, in many ways.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Sort of. I mean, the level of technology and magic seemed to be contrary to the cleanliness, somehow. Even though it's technically punch-card-driven constructs, they manage things that we've had in less complete forms for not so long (Roombas are sort of like the cleaning constructs, fr'instance, though not as impressive).

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, true, though it wasn't clear how well those constructs actually worked, though. And I htink I was assuming the social/political structure of the place was a large part of the reason for so much of it being poor and in squalor.

[magid.livejournal.com]

True enough about the constructs. Though it did sound like enough of them worked fairly well. And we never got anything nearly so complicated working on punch cards.

I assumed that the bigwigs were making money off the masses hand over fist, especially the junkies and all. But there have to be some people who weren't junkies, and poor doesn't necessarily mean squalor.

the car

[trainingmom.livejournal.com]

yeah on the car

Re: the car

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thanks.
I could still see the indents in the ice near the sidewalk that my wheels used to be in, even after a warmish day in sunlight...

Even though I don't use the car a lot, I'm definitely used to having the option.

[(Anonymous)]

Mazel tov on having freed the car.

The rice might not need to be cooked separately next time, though the caramelization is intriguing. Drawing inspiration from a chickpea salad I recently enjoyed, I'd suggest limiting the volume of dried fruit to be less than the volume of chickpeas, adding carrots along with the sunflower seeds and maybe the pistachios that you mentioned, using garlic and cumin as additional seasonings, and splashing in a bit of olive oil and cider vinegar. Olives don't sound quite right with this, but you might like a greater amount of your preserved lemon or at least additional salt. (It's the salt, not the pepper, that would counteract the sweet, I would think.) I'd save the pomegranate for something simpler so as to showcase it.

The side dishes from the group dinner sound refreshing. I never thought of pumpkin pie as a vegetable dessert. As for the fish, well, all that fish oil is supposed to be beneficial. (I like the way that sounds.)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Just in time to have to shovel it out :-).

The way I cook chicken and rice like this is baking it all together, covered, at a low heat for a couple of hours. It's good, but it turned out it's not what I wanted from the non-rice with the chicken. This time I was using up the end of a couple of bags of dried fruit, so not measured (but then, most of my cooking is seat-of-the-skirt). I thought about carrots later, but not in time to buy any. I debated garlic, too, but it somehow didn't appeal in the rice. Had it been cooked at a higher heat, it would've been more likely (I can't explain it better than that). I had a whole preserved lemon, which I thought would be salty enough in addition to the chicken; the pepper was to add some heat to balance the sweet. Now I'm wondering if some ginger would be right. Though not if I use cumin.

I have a friend who hadn't grown up with pumpkin pie, so served it as a side dish, rather than dessert. I always felt like I was getting away with something when she did that :-).

I was happily surprised at how nice the dinner veggies were; I've been to institutional meals that have the equivalent of kugel and overcooked green beans, so I wasn't expecting much, and it turned out to be an excellent meal.

(And I like fish, but I don't tend to want the same kind of thing that many days in a row no matter what it is.)

pumpkin pie as side dish

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big fan of pumpkin pie, but I totally feel like I am getting away with something when I fix sweet potatoes with dinner :) Mixing huge quantities of butter in with them undoubtedly helps with that feeling. Mmm.