Instead I’ll just honor the pagans who the Christians stole and called Easter. In fact the Easter Bunny, the spring chickens, the egg hunts etc. are all stolen directly from pagan celebrations.
I’ll be doing lemon chicken a la America’s Test Kitchen. Interestingly they’re in the Seaport district of Boston – I know where it is. I worked two buildings down from them.
It’s just chicken parts, salt, pepper, flour on the chicken and then for the sauce some chicken stock, lemon juice, and lemon zest. Normal recipe calls for 2 cups of lemon juice, this on only calls for 1/4 cup plus a tablespoon of lemon zest. I do love lemon chicken too. Add some capers and call it chicken picata.
In this episode they also did Chicken Marsala – now I would need to go back to the supermarket to get the gelatin, the porcini mushsrooms, the brown mushrooms and the Marsala wine.
But I’ll do the lemon chicken first – got all the ingredients for the one. And it’s special in it’s own way. It comes from Rao’s Restaurant in NYC. And it’s adapted for the common kitchen. Nice job to the folks at America’s Test Kitchen.
So as is the rule, I am prone to cracking a mug now and then. It’s inevitable.
So my custom mug with my amateur radio call sign and graphics on it cracked and is leaking very slowly. Damn it.
So I was thinking, I don’t have any other larger mugs. I do have a smaller one from a former employer so I tried that. And it works – just instead of 2 cups it’s 2.5 cups. Great! Works out to the same 22-24oz of coffee though. Gotta have it.
So be it known, I live on a one-way street. It’s easy to deal with and I know how to get around it and such. So I’m heading out today, coming up on the left hand side to take the left turn. Have my signal on and everything.
Idiot in a white car is heading the WRONG way right toward me. I don’t blink. I’m in a car with seat belt on, airbags, and a zillion safety features. Plus it’s fully insured and guess who’d be paying for the damage were he to hit the car. He dodged out of the way pretty quick.
Now I’ve seen this same nitwit comes down the street before. Next time I see I’m going to grab the license plate number and notify the local gendarmes and let them deal with it. Might even swear a statement for the cops. Video would be even better.
Hmm – I wonder – if they make an outdoor version of the cameras we have indoors. They have the ability to trigger alerts. Hmmmm.
Or at the very least, that the latest god doesn’t have the powers of omniscience and omnipotence. For it begins in Genesis 3.
Let’s break it down, when you think about it if the snake was the serpent was the devil let’s go back to who created the devil in the first place. It was God – so there goes omniscience. And God couldn’t stop Eve from being beguiled by the snake? There goes omnipotence.
My favorite verse is Genesis 3:22 “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:”
Now this is the Old Testament, there’s just God and the Holy Spirit. Is that the Us he’s referring to?
So in just this one little thought experiment we find this a puny god. It’s not omniscient and not omnipotent. So why call it a god at all?
So I posted this about Castlevania a few weeks ago. Doing much better now – gotten past the part with the presses punching you dead. You need to have the stopwatch to freeze them and run past them. Very interesting.
Gotten to Stage 7-8 now. Just keep pushing through.
See the monster in the upper left – haven’t gotten past that one yet. But I’ll keep trying.
So this evening I put together some Russian dressing for someones salad.
Here’s what was in it:
Two heaping tablespoons of mayonnaise.
A few tablespoons of ketchup
A tablespoon of sweet pickle relish.
Half a tablespoon of horseradish
1 Quarter of an onion, chopped fine.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Really easy to make – much better than the shit in the bottle from the supermarket. Consider no sweeteners added, no preservatives because honestly if it’s this simple to make you’re going to use all of it in one shot.
And the feline resident of approves too – she was observed to be licking the residue of the dressing out of the container that the salad had been in.
So now I have two dressings down – a Vinaigrette and Russian dressing. Ranch is sort of bland and not used in this house but if there’s a call for it, I’m going to make it.
I think we got away from making our own things because we figured we’d be lazy and just shake it out of a bottle. But the thing is, total time to make that Russian dressing and the Vinaigrette was less than 10 minutes. I’m sorry but 10 minutes doesn’t strike me as a reason to forego quality. That’s because what is in the supermarkets isn’t quality, but quantity.
So this evening we went to see A Wrinkle in Time – it should have been called We Took a Few Liberties with the Book.
Interesting movie with the protagonist being a young girl. At the very least they got that part right. And her ability to tame her demons to rescue her father who was, Lost in the Universe. Now one could go with distance or time on this one. But the evil in the movie was self doubt.
And I did say if you wanted to see true evil, you’d see Oprah first thing in the morning before she’s had coffee and been made up properly. Gads scary stuff.
Oh and the one who played Mrs. Whatsit – turning into Brassica and flying – dear non-existent deity a cabbage that could fly. Interesting.
Yeah yeah I know; it’s Saturday already. Gloriously. But last night I watched a few things.
First is this interview with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. What I find fascinating about Landrieu is that he served as Louisiana Lt. Gov. and then went back to being mayor of New Orleans.
First of all if he isn’t running for President I’m in the camp that says he probably should. He seams to be able to articulate arguments pretty well. And the Presidency is nothing but a huge bully pulpit.
One fact that Landrieu mentions, since 1980 (Which btw is pretty much when we can reliably track) there have been 630,000 deaths by gun in U.S. streets and homes. That to my reckoning is obscene. Because if you do the math it comes to an average of 16,579 deaths per year. Divide it further by 50 states and you get 331 per state per year. That’s fucking scary. And I realize I’m just being simplistic with the math – that these deaths, every one of them is a good case for real gun legislation.
With regard to the 2nd Amendment Landrieu makes some really good points. That the NRA has gone from agreeable to batshit insane to banning weapons of war. I hate to split hairs but an automatic weapon is in fact a weapon of war.
The other thing I watched was the movie Coco. Our protagonist is a little boy named Miguel. Now Mexicans do Halloween so much better – the color in this film is gorgeous. You see what we call Halloween and do a very half ass job of it, the Mexicans call it Dia Del Muerto. The setup for the movie has poor Miguel in a family of shoe makers – he wants to be a musician. But his family is dead set against music for some reason. So on the Day of the Dead (It’s more like Night of the Dead – which btw was sort of a series of movies in it’s own right.) Miguel is in need of a guitar. But his first effort ends with his abuela smashing the guitar to bits. And so the odyssey begins. He enters the world of the dead. You gotta watch to find out how it happens.
What I found interesting is the parallels I saw in that movie – the color number one is gorgeous, and it damned well should be as it’s a Disney/Pixar film. Number two elements of Dia Del Meurto lend itself to colorful displays. But the whole premise is, photos of the ancestors are put up in a little shrine. That’s how they can cross the bridge between living and dead. That right there is an interesting concept.
Oh go and find it and watch it. Take along kids, nieces, nephews. They’ll get a nice little jolt out the movie Coco.
It’s on Netflix and called Tabula Rasa. If you’re not familiar with the term it translates as Blank Slate aka to wipe the slate clean.
So it was shot in Belgium – and the language used is Dutch but the cool thing is, English is an offshoot of Dutch so some of it you don’t even need to read to understand it.
But I will say the following, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But justice is indeed served at the end of the series. I hollered – it was great. Definite mind fuck though. You see Thomas De Geest didn’t actually cause the accident, it was the woman scorned that did it. You’ll have to watch to see what I mean there.
Spewing Truth in the face of Lies 