Dork Chow

Archive for November, 2008

[WP-CUMULUS]
This is a bit of geekery that should really be featured on my Hot Dorkage Geek blog Ironically it doesn’t work over there. Both blogs run out of the same install of WordPress. Even more ironically, on Hot Dorkage it works in preview mode but as soon as you publish the post it tells you you don’t have the right version of Flash. Well then gee how did it just work in PREVIEW MODE 3 seconds ago? It’s a beautiful blue cloud that exactly matches my theme. And this is a lovely green food cloud that doesn’t really match my theme here. Because I hope to change it soon.

A friend of mine, for whatever reason, is having a vegan Thanksgiving. She told me that traditionally, a longstanding girlhood friend of hers has celebrated Thanksgiving with her and her family, but when the friend heard it was going to be vegan, she decided to do something else. It wasn’t one of those “oh do you think maybe she’s mad at me?” sort of deals. This friend told her straight up, “OK if you are doing vegan you can count me out.”

What is up with that? First of all, I was always taught that it is rude to ask anyone who is offering to feed you what’s on the menu. It is even ruder to announce, “Oh brussell sprouts? No thanks I’ll go to McDonald’s.” If you have a food allergy or a religious practice that limits your dietary choices, it is OK to inform your host, as in, “I have gluten intolerance so I am unable to eat bread or pasta or any product containing wheat.” On the host side, I was always taught that if you are having someone for the first time, it is considered gracious to ask them if they have any dietary restrictions, and accommodate those. If your host knows about your restrictions and still serve you a meal consisting entirely of food that you will not be able to eat, that is rudeness on their part. Food comes in an amazing variety. Surely any host trying to create a balanced and satisfying dinner for guests will offer a number of choices of dish. People can then help themselves to the dishes that they both like and are able to eat. If there’s any uncertainty about what something is, the host might say something like, “those are bacon bits for the salad for those who want them,” to alert their Islamic guest not to eat it.

I’m forever astounded at the number of people who get hot under the collar and feel it’s perfectly OK to rant if asked to forgo meat for just ONE MEAL! If I were to spout off when invited to a hot dog barbecue about how toxic hot dogs are and how much I hate them and how terrible it is to eat them, I would be considered rude. So what do I do? If I like the people, I accept the invitation, and I just eat the potato salad and skip the hot dogs and don’t say anything.

Come on people! It’s not like vegans or vegetarians eat boiled lumps of charcoal or slimy seaweed or dogs. And there is no medical condition I’ve ever heard of that requires a person to eat exclusively large slabs of a dead animal three times a day. Most vegetarian/vegan fare prepared in USA would be familiar to the average USA citizen: grains and potatoes, beans and nuts, mushrooms, salads, vegetables that you’ve seen before, fruits, and a dizzying array of delicious desserts. Any vegetarian worth their salt knows how to use high protein ingredients such as tofu or seitan. Seitan in particular can pass for meat if that’s what the cook is trying to do. There are some vegetarian meals where you wouldn’t even realize they were vegetarian unless someone told you. And heavens to Betsy there might be some unfamiliar food, combination, or method of preparation, and what is more, you might actually LIKE it! And if you really HAVE to have meat, pack a turkey sandwich in a cooler in your car, make a pretext of going out to get something, and slip out and nosh on it.

Having a meal with others is about spending time together and sharing. It’s not really about the food.

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Tomato Apple Chutney

Made this recipe of almost all donated ingredients and sold …

See Tomato Apple Chutney on Key Ingredient.

<!– On 29 October about a dozen volunteers including yours truly prepared and canned 17 dozen pints of this delicious chutney to sell at a fundraiser to help low income residents get food at the farmers’ market. The one and only Intaba of Fireworks Restaurant headed the effort, procured the donated ingredients and fed the volunteers famous Fireworks pizza for lunch. If you don’t want to prepare 17 dozen pints of chutney, the recipe given above has been cut down to produce a mere 4 pints. I was in on the prep phase but I had a prior commitment in the afternoon so I had to leave before the actual canning started. Cooking is so much more fun when it is a group activity. I regret that I did not get the names of all the volunteers, so I won’t mention any of them. If you see yourself, let me know.

Folks, I have a confession to make.  I’m good at many things, but I absolutely and totally *SUCK*, (imagine 72 point type for emphasis) at promotion and marketing, particularly when it’s my own personal brand I’m trying to promote.    I’m dyed-in-the-wool old school.  I believe that the cream will naturally and organically rise to the top …. eventually….. and I still believe that.     But I’m competing with so many sell-in-your face splogs and shameless SEO gamers at the present, plus,  to be honest, a lot of other genuine good and popular content in the food niche.    Google, for all it’s greatness, still can’t always tell genuine excellence from a tricked-out and gamed-up splog-o-rama.   And only digital friends who actually buzz about you can help you out online.  Just being on the friends list doesn’t really do much.   I have plenty of RL friends, but, due to my own personal demographics,  most of my real life friends are not what you’d call “digital natives.” They are just catching on to email now, if you know what I mean.   I have plenty of social network “friends” as well, but I guess many of them just friend me to pump up their own numbers.  They only actually buzz about their digital friends who are already RL friends as well.

Just because I am a failure at promoting myself and making money for myself DOES NOT mean I am a failure at blogging.  (In fact I believe almost the opposite.  Each human is allotted finite time.  Time spent in self promotion is time taken away from producing good stuff if you think about it.)   So that’s already a win for you, dear reader.  An added bonus is that I don’t overadvertise. Have you noticed that there are very few ads on this blog?  Do you appreciate that?  People always bitch and moan about ads,  but what do they do to encourage people who keep  them under control?  How about putting your money where your mouth is and stumbling your favorite Dork Chow post and/or subscribing and or just tweeting something you like to your personal network.    Take the plunge, make a new RL friend!   Thank you.  Yes you, you think somebody else is gonna do that for me?

Finally, Chuck Westbrook has launched  a grass roots effort to give more exposure to under-exposed blogs.   If you are a blogger you can enter your own underexposed blog.   If not, check it out and discover some exciting new blogs.  You can say I knew them when.  Don’t be just another follower, be a trend setter!

If you follow this blog you might have seen the Running the Numbers posting that uses plastic bags as the basis for art /social commentary, or the even more frightening Quest to the Plastic Bag Island. It’s sobering. I have been using reusable grocery bags most of the time for quite a while now, but those crinklies still seem to pile up in my “bag” bag, when members of my family forget. I reuse them as much as possible, (usually to put over vegetables in the fridge,) but they are only intended for single use and don’t make very good garbage bags. Recycling them is doable in some places, but it is neither easy, convenient, nor particularly cost effective. I recently discovered that when you recycle your plastic bags at our local Fred Meyer, sometimes a truck comes and actually recycles them, but if the bin gets too full, our friends at Freddie’s just throw all those carefully recycled bags away anyway. What’s more, a lot of people know it. It does nothing to encourage the public to recycle those bags.

Last June I stumbled on a blog called MyRecycledBags. Normally I am not a huge fan of crafts unless they are made from native materials and don’t leave a big carbon footprint. But we are surrounded by plastic deritus, so for the time being it definitely qualifies as a “native material.”

I know this is a drop in the bucket but I went out and spun some plastic yarn AKA “plarn” as per their directions. They have tons of projects you can make out of plarn, such as the dishcloth pictured here.

I hope they don’t mind me nicking the picture. I’m not a crocheter myself (yet!), but I have been known to knit in the distant past, so when I got a big enough ball of tan plarn (about 60 bags’ worth) I just started playing around with it. I ended up with this very flexible and serviceable shopping bag. I’m hoping that it will become a collector’s item when the USA finally bans these dreadful things.

Here are the directions to make one of your own:

• Make about 50-60 bags worth of plarn. If you don’t want a ball that big you can make smaller balls and add them as you go.
• Cast on 40 st using large bamboo needles size 14.
• K10, p 1, K29, then P29, K1, P10. (basically stockinette stitch with one rib.).
• Repeat these two rows until you have a piece as tall as you want your bag to be. Then, on a K row
• cast off 10 and purl the remainder of the row. Now on the return resume purl 1 row knit 1 row until the 30 st wide part is about the same length as 10 st.
• On a Knit row, purl it, then cast on 10 st at the end of it (on the other side as those you cast off). Continue in st. st. making a rib between the side and the main front/back. When the back is the same height as the front, cast off.

Your main piece should be shaped like the diagram below:

When you are finished with the main piece, stitch up and join the edges together as per the arrows.  For the handle, pick up about 8 st. in the middle of one side, and knit a strip to the desired length and cast off.    Join it to the middle of the opposite side.  Voila!

Your plarn bag piece should be shaped like this

Otis Cafe

As is my policy, I’ve published the official review of Otis Cafe in FoodBuzz.  I do this as a courtesy to the establishment so that they can be listed in Food Buzz’s structured international eatery database and benefit from the superior exposure.

….. great heaping helpings of old fashioned farm fare, hearty molasses bread, thick rich clam chowder, crispy real potatoes, pies like your grandma used to make…..  Read the full review.

The one line summary, is:  “Go on a cold rainy day, and go really hungry!”

At this writing one of my daughters is dating a very nice young man who happens to be a vegan and who also happens to love baking. He shared this recipe with us when he was here visiting. Everyone in our household, vegan or not, enjoyed this yummy dessert!

When I make gazpacho, I usually vary the ingredients and proportions depending what I have on hand. The one pictured is heavy on the cukes. We had a killer frost and I had to bring the rest of them in. I based it on someone else’s recipe just to make sure I didn’t forget anything critical.

I must have found over a dozen different mushrooms last Saturday.  I found   wolf farts but they were all passe.   The edible ones I found last week were pure white on the inside. Today’s catch were full of olive colored spores. (Yuck.) I found  darker brown ones that were still marshmallowy on the inside, but most of them had started to go kind of chartreuse.  Looked, but didn’t find anymore shaggymanes.  I got yellow fleshed boletes, which can be quite edible (gotta be super careful with those though!) but my specimens were too old to eat, and riddled with funny little bugs.  In the poisonous variety, we tentatively identified the clustered woodlover, naematoloma fasciculare, which can be mistaken for the smoky woodlover (n. capreoles). Also got a bunch of russula, but all were too old to eat, and were mostly the emetica variety,  which would make you throw up if you ate them. I think the ugly foul-smelling little fellows were deadly poison turnip bulb inocybes (inocybe napipes) and those guys shouldn’t even touch mushrooms that you’re going to eat. Also among the other junk I got was a slimy milky cap (dactarius mucidius) and not edible, as well as some agaricus augustus, which would have been edible had they been a bit younger and not contaminated. Oh well, as Thomas Edison once said, you learn as much from failure as you do from success.