Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: December 2011
For once, I did not futz with the recipe
For tonight, I made Tyler Florence’s recipe for galumpkis (stuffed cabbage). And now that I think about it, I did futz with the recipe: I used a pound of lamb and a pound of pork, no beef. Otherwise, yeah, everything was the same.
Quite good, although the sauce came out watery. I suspect the only fix for that is to cook down the sauce (in the earliest stage of the recipe) until it’s like mud. The meat and cabbage give up too much liquid, so I suspect that’s the only way to deal with the problem.
Oh, and I’ve decided I like working with grape leaves far more than cabbage. Cabbage is a pain. On one of the comment threads (perhaps on someone else’s stuffed cabbage recipe), one person claimed that if you froze and thawed the head of cabbage, the leaves will come off perfectly. Hmm. I can tell you it was impossible to remove the leaves from a fresh head without a lot of tearing.
Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s hoping it will be better than 2011. At least up until that end of the world thingie.
D.
I am writing
Just very, very slowly.
Here, watch this:
Now, I really really like the way Bjork mispronounces English. It wouldn’t be Bjork if she spoke American (or even British) English. But that does lead to certain misunderstandings of the lyrics. For example, in Army of Me, I was sure she was saying,
and if you complain once more
you’ll meet her, Annie Oakley
Which is a pretty creepy way of saying, I’ll kill you dead. Except she’s saying,
and if you complain once more
you’ll meet an army of me
Which I suppose I should have figured out from the title. Oh, well.
D.
They don’t make Republicans like that anymore.
Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed . . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
And there are precious few Democrats who would be caught dead echoing this idea.
D.
For the Challah days
There’s two loaves there. Karen braided 1.5 loaves. I am a braiding dyslexic.
D.
Zeitgeist
This is not a funny story. I think it says something about human nature, but it doesn’t say anything particularly nice about human nature.
Once when Jake was young and we were still into traveling a lot by car, we were driving down the 101 to visit Karen’s parents, and we stopped for dinner at a hotel restaurant. It was someplace between Garberville and Santa Rosa . . . Ukiah perhaps. We were one of about six families there. The place had a window-wall overlooking the pool, and it was early enough and warm enough for there to be people at the pool.
The odd thing is, we — all of us, all six tables at the restaurant — noticed at the same time a woman wearing a bikini who really should not have worn a bikini. You know those tiny rubber bands we use to put jaw fracture patients into elastics? Well, maybe you don’t know. So imagine a rubber band, the loop of which has perhaps a 1 centimeter diameter. Now imagine a few of those rubber bands stretched around a marshmallow. Not an ordinary marshmallow, either, but one of those new and improved humongous marshmallows that comes eight to a package.
Every time she got up out of her lounge chair, there would be a collective over-dramatic gasp followed by laughter. We couldn’t have coordinated it better if there had been one of those live studio audience prompters telling us to LAUGH or GASP. It was really uncanny and really mean but many people there were near tears and it just kept going on and on, maybe for twenty minutes or longer before she finally went back to her hotel room.
We weren’t the only young family in that restaurant. We weren’t the only ones who had apparently forgotten our responsibility as example-setters. I’m quite sure that if you cornered any one of us and asked him if it was okay to laugh at a fat person, he would disagree strenuously. And yet there we were, laughing.
I think about this scene every now and then, and I still don’t quite understand it. I’m guessing that if we had seen this in a movie, very few of us would have laughed. If we had been out there past the window-wall, sitting pool-side with her, no closer nor farther than we were in that restaurant, we definitely would not have laughed. Something about the fact that it was real and we had that wall of glass between us. Something.
I’d compare it to the sleazy feeling you might get laughing along with an audience for a racist or misogynistic comedian, except I know (from experience) that I don’t laugh in such circumstances. Do we have a less well developed sense of political correctness regarding obesity? Or is obesity not the issue here — were we merely laughing at someone with poor taste in swimwear?
I like that last possibility, of course. But it seems overly generous.
D.
yeah, I’m still here
just have nothing to say.
Here’s a link to all the Bulwer-Lytton contest winners starting in 1983.
And here’s the 2010 winner:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
–Molly Ringle, Seattle, Washington (2010 Winner)
D.