Well… I was without internet at home for nearly a week. I’m deeply sad that I missed out on six days of things like this:
This video was an entry for a contest on one of my favorite blogs Cute Overload.
The leaves are falling, the air is crisp. Fall is right around the corner, and being back in the Midwest I feel a strong connection to the seasons. Summer has been a season to enjoy food, the company of friends, and the outdoors. Here are my three favorite recipes from this summer:
Truck-Stop Buttermilk Pancakes. Mark discovered this recipe when he was planning for our Memorial Day Pancake Breakfast. Now it is in our regular breakfast rotation. The secret to successful pancakes appears to be butter! and buttermilk! This one will get carried through to fall and winter, I’m sure.
Zucchini Fritters. I was inspired to seek out this recipe when thinking about how to make zucchini into a filling and satisfying meal. This recipe was perfect (I didn’t use scallions because we didn’t have them). Using olive oil to fry the fritters, rather than canola oil or something else, makes a huge difference. Also, salting the zucchini to get rid of the excess moisture makes them fry much better. I cooked some Indian-inspired chickpeas with onions to go with the fritters.
Plum and Peach Crisp. Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks is awesome. I had been wanting to try one of Heidi’s dessert recipes, and the perfect opportunity presented itself when I was searching for a good dessert to pair with a Mediterranean meal we were making for some friends. We had grilled vegetables, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, tabouli, Moroccan spiced rice, marinated feta, spiced almonds, olives, and plum and peach crisp with vanilla ice cream. I used brown sugar in the topping, used cornstarch for the arrowroot, and skipped the orange blossom water. I really liked the yogurt in the topping – this crisp was not too buttery or too sweet, and the fruit to crisp ratio was perfect.
Kara Andrade made a blog post yesterday with this cartoon from the Christian Science Monitor explaining HDTV. We recently got an HDTV after not having any TV for quite a while and I’m inclined to agree with the cartoon’s assessment.
When I was in middle school, my dad brought home a diskette of Commodore 64 video games from his German friend at Cincinnati Milacron. I should have known that I was a pretty big geek when I spent hours discovering the games, some of which were in German, without any instruction manuals. There were some really fun, interesting, and creative games that I found, including the classic M.U.L.E. Here’s a list of my favorite video games of all time.
10. Burgertime
Burger Time
9. Spy Hunter
8. Pokemon Snap
7. Bust A Move
6. Ms. Pac-Man
5. Circus
3. Sim City
2. M.U.L.E.
My friend Neima forwarded me this adorable clip of a 23 month old named Lily who is a real pro with geography. Enjoy.
The other night I was watching television and I saw this amazing, pro-high fructose corn syrup commercial. It was paid for by the Corn Refiners Association. The messaging of the commercial is fantastic. Basically they say “You are too stupid to quickly explain what’s wrong with eating tons of corn syrup, so you should just knock back a giant glass of nasty purple bug juice and shut up”. While the whole commercial is terrible on so many levels, I am really encouraged that there is such an increased awareness of healthy diets and processed foods that they even felt the need to run the ad.
…and here’s another one:
I’ve probably been off the syrup for about six years and the other day I accidentally picked up a jar of jam with the stuff in it. After you haven’t had it in a long time the unnatural flavor cuts through you palette like a knife.
So if you find yourself in a situation like those portrayed in the ads where a close friend pressures you to quickly explain your views on high fructose corn syrup, you should just cite some passages from Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma or you can just say that it makes you fat and is part of a government mind control conspiracy.
File this photo under “My dad is cooler than your dad”.
This site was starting to get a little crufty around the edges with neglect so we decided to relaunch it with a new design and back-end system (Wordpress). There’s probably a fair number of broken links and other strange things with the new site but we’ll work them out over time.