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Purple Potatoes

Rishel mentioned about purple potatoes. So I thought the next time I got some purple potatoes from our CSA, I’d blog them up. They taste pretty much the same as regular potatoes, although you can tell the difference between them and other varieties of potatoes. They tend to be more on the starchy side than the waxy side. I sliced these up into steak fries. The more you cook these potatoes, the more they lose their color. They tend to turn gray after prolonged cooking. All around good eats though. (more…)

I have a Dell PC that is my primary home PC. I’ve kept it running for seven years. I originally bought it as my first nice, new PC. I was done with slapdash homebuilt PC’s made of cheap and used parts. I just got a new job and I wanted to celebrate by getting a decent PC. I remember anguishing at the time about getting the Pentium III 866 for an extra $150 so that I could future proof the PC a little more. It originally shipped with Windows ME (which I promptly formatted over as soon as it came) and cost $1500.
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pupusa

Here’s the antithesis of what I’m talking about the new gourmet bland. This is a pupusa. It’s street food, comidas rápidas, at it’s best. It isn’t fancy food, but it’s more flavorful and appealing than what passes for lunch at most sit down restaurants. It was a cheap meal at less than $3 It’s essentially a savoury pancake that uses corn flour (masa) as the base instead of flour. Inside the pancake is any variety of vegetables, meat, and cheese. This one has zucchini and onions in it. It’s garnished by a slice of avocado, a chile, salsa, sour cream, and a side called curtido which is some sort of mysterious form of pickled cole slaw (but nothing like kimchee). Apparently pupusas are only native to El Salvador but appear elsewhere in central America. It’s a wonderful lunch and I’d love it if someone opened up a pupusaria around here. I think the Blanding of America could use more of this kind of find to spice things up.

Thanks to the Food Network and the rise of celebrity chefs, food has been getting better everywhere. McDonalds is now offering “premium” salads which are a vast improvement over their salad shakes which were milkshake cups filled with processed cheese, bacon bits, and iceberg lettuce. However, even though the quality has improved, we’ve achieved a new level of boring. We have merely replaced the iceberg lettuce house salads and meat and potatoes staples with a new limited range of equally uninspiring albeit higher quality food. E.g. a new “Irish” pub opened in town. It has all the trappings of a pub, the high stools, beers, and Guinness paraphernalia, but look at the menu. There’s no mutton, kidney pie, thick cut rashers, chips with curry sauce, and marmite sandwiches. Nothing that is remotely Irish or English. Instead it’s the new bland gourmet fare. Here’s what’s on the menu at this Irish pub:

• Mixed mesclun green house salad with some kind of fruited vinaigrette
• Wraps, IMHO the worst thing that ever happened to tortillas, Mesoamericans have had tortillas for centuries and never made anything as bland
• An “angus” burger
• Chicken caesar salads, making romaine the new iceburg lettuce
• A seared tuna steak rare in the middle
• A grilled salmon fillet with garlic mash potatoes
• A grilled chicken sandwich

I defy you not to find all of these menu items at any restaurant today. I could blindfold you and take you to any sit down restaurant in America and you’d be hard pressed to tell me anything about where you were, and what the regional cuisine is. I’m even noticing big cities and metropolitan areas have the same redundant menus, they just have more of them with fancier names and decorum. It’s the Ruby Tuesday-ing of America. I’m glad the US is getting a more sophisticated palate. However I wish we would get more adventurous as well and actually try and celebrate daring dining and regional cuisine. I’m not saying everything needs to be Nobu-like vanguard haute cuisine. Simple regional folk cuisine is fine. Why don’t we have more wonderful local dives with real flavor not faux sophistication? Food is becoming more superficial, all presentation but no character. Do your part and dine more adventurously. Standards for dining have gotten better, let’s just push the bar higher.

patchjob par excellence

So I was taking a lovely midsummer’s ride with some friends when suddenly a loud pop that sounded like a gunshot came from my bike. My rear tire flatted. Apparently I inflated the tire too high and the warm road heated up the tube until it popped. I had a pump and patch kit with me, but the pressure split the inner tube down the seam. We were truly stuffed. There was no good way to fix the tire, so we stuffed the tire with grass. I had done this trick once in my mountain biking days, and it worked well enough to get me home. I tried it again and it worked well enough to get me back to our starting point. The heat wilted the greens down to the point of uselessness when we got back, but the damage wasn’t too severe. I was able to control the bike until I got back (three miles or so).

Here are my caveats to this trick. Don’t do this to rims you love. I have nice thrifty Sun M13II rims. Durable and cheap. I wouldn’t try this on your Zipp 404 rims. You will destroy them. In some ways I’m glad my bike isn’t ultralight, it makes it more practical and fun. The second caveat is take out the grass immediately. I didn’t change my tire for a few days and the result was a moldy log of green that looked and smelled like goose poop.

In an age where we have to contrive adventure through “extreme” sports, it’s nice to have an old fashioned adventure of the unexpected. Sure this event reminded me to carry a spare tube, but I’m glad to have a small adventure of the Huckleberry kind.

I made a little throwdown comment at the last get together with Ghostwheel, Ben and Rishel, that I could outblog them 5 to 1 by the next time I saw them. I’m actually behind as they have updated their blogs quite well and I have not. I was going to put my own WWDC comments up, but frankly Ghostwheel did a much better job of it than I would so I’ll just linky to his article. Oh and Ben, “Under Construction” doesn’t count as any kind of entry.

I have a coworker who is taller than most tall people. I’ve worked with him for a while so I don’t even notice it anymore, but everytime I’m with him and we meet someone new, they all say the same thing… “Wow, do you play basketball?” Of course he grimaces and makes a polite comment as if he hasn’t heard that five million times before. So I’m going to make my plea to the world: Don’t ever ask a tall person if (s)he plays basketball. It goes beyond being lame and cliche. It’s just plain rude. I’m asian, but if you met me for the first time you wouldn’t say, “Wow, I bet you like Chinese food.” I’m not trying to be politically correct. I’m not advocating for some vertically-gifted anti-defamation league. It’s just about being polite and not pointing out someone’s differences the first time you meet them.

My kettle was royal blue *sniff*

I was doing some cleaning and I decided to finally throw out my ever faithful Morphy Richards Filtermaster 43231. The electronics still worked fine, but the kettle itself had developed a leak, and I couldn’t find the source of the leak to plug it up. I’m sure I caused the leak since I have dropped the kettle on many occasions. A shame, if I were a little more careful it would still be in fine working order. Perhaps if I were a more frugal earth-loving person, I would have taken the time to find the leak and fix it, but alas I never got around to it and we got another kettle as a gift (A Philips of some sort). So the Filtermaster just sat around neglected, collecting dust. This week I decided I needed the room more than I needed the kettle so Morphy went into the dustbin.

Two days later I couldn’t get to sleep (more…)