Foto Friday: black beans can wait. 22 February 2008 8:27 pm
Posted by Tracy in : eating,meat,nepal,pictures,travel , 1 comment so farOn Monday I promised to write something about black beans in addition to fun with tofu, but then I got to wrangling my Nepal pictures and couldn’t bear to wait until next Foto Friday to post about them. So. Without further ado, another Nepal flashback.
The date: October 21, 2007. Our point of origin: Kharikola. The destination: Puiyun or Surke, where we weren’t sure we’d be able to find a place to stay, so Saila, the sherpa sometimes known as Britney, was sent sprinting ahead of our group in search of lodgings. The trek: um, kinda uphill. Yow. (more…)
Fun with tofu: two eye-candy recipes. 21 February 2008 10:57 am
Posted by Tracy in : cooking,Morning Glory,vegan,vegetarian , add a commentA long time ago when the world was young, I once spent an entire week’s worth of lunches teaching myself how to make fried tofu. I used it barely drained, straight from the package; I used it pressed, I used it frozen and thawed. Also I used a lot of oil, and I can’t remember whether or not I used a nonstick pan. Somehow, amidst all those permutations, I never tried the method by which I usually cook tofu these days: cut into the desired final size, and drained on paper towels, more or less à la Jack Bishop’s suggestions in A Year In a Vegetarian Kitchen. I don’t marinate it beforehand: raw (by which I mean straight from the package) or cooked, tofu is basically a sponge for other flavors, so as long as it eventually spends time in a hot pan with a sauce of some kind, it’ll absorb some deliciousness besides the crunchy goodness that is its fried form. I generally don’t pre-marinate baked tofu, either; in my experience it turns out fine as long as it goes in the oven with some sauce (although I should experiment with baking marinated tofu on the theory that it would require less sauce and therefore result in easier pan cleanup).
All of which is to say: hey everybody, I found some good-looking tofu recipes for you to check out! (more…)
Another Nepal flashback: October 20 was one delicious day. 20 February 2008 8:28 am
Posted by Tracy in : eating,nepal,pictures,potatoes,travel , add a commentSo yesterday I posted a bunch of Nepal pictures to my Flickr pages, and realized that I am now posting trip pictures more or less exactly four months after they were taken. That revelation, and the fact that a number of yesterday’s posted pictures were of particularly delicious meals, are all the reason I need to write another happy Nepal flashback, this time to October 20, 2007. If you’re feeling too lazy to follow that link, it’s okay — it was sort of a boring automagical post anyway. All I wrote was:
Another trekking day, but depending on whether we took a rest day on the 18th it might be day 5 or 6; I hereby officially quit trying to keep track ahead of time. Any which way, with a name like Bumsing Danda involved, it had better be good!
Little did I know what deliciousness lay in store! (more…)
In which I get all wonky about meat. 19 February 2008 10:48 am
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,eating,food safety,health,Marion Nestle,meat,Morning Glory,news,politics , add a commentSo yesterday I was too busy writing about or experiencing technical difficulties to comment on the really big food news of the day, namely largest ground beef recall in U.S. history by Hallmark/Westland, the meatpacking company whose horrific animal handling practices were exposed in a video by an undercover Humane Society activist on January 30. (Full confession: I’m not linking to the now-infamous video because I haven’t watched it yet, because I’m sort of a coward like that. On the other hand, I have seen Chris Cosentino’s photo essay about humane cow slaughter and still managed to eat beef afterwards, albeit not from a scary Cowschwitz like Hallmark/Westland).
So. Here’s the Tracy-take on the biggest ground beef recall in U.S. history: it’s a symbolic gesture, and not even a particularly good one. (more…)
My technical difficulties, let me show you them. 18 February 2008 7:42 pm
Posted by Tracy in : geekery,meta , add a commentHoly cats! I don’t know what I did to my stylesheets, but I’m doing my best to fix it. Eek! (Um, anybody out there know how long everything’s been screwy for? I just noticed it now.)
Update, 8:34 PM: Is it better now? I went for a very quick and dirty cutting and pasting of a clean copy of the broken stylesheet in question, and it looks okay again on my browser (Firefox) but if people using other stuff could chime in, that’d be great. Whee!
