Monkey Monday: long weekend edition 11 October 2011 9:07 am
Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,convenience,dessert,eating,events,monkeys,news,nyc,photos,pictures,politics,random,taste test , add a commentBear with me, readers: this post is late because our cable modem is on the fritz so I have been composing this post on my iPhone, no joke. (I started out literally thumb-typing in my phone’s web browser until I found the WordPress app, and now I’m still thumb- or index-finger-typing, but in a less cumbersome interface, so yay for that.) Which makes for a sort of clever transition to the first item I wanted to post today, which I had been considering as Monkey Monday fodder even before the passing of Steve Jobs (really!) So that’s one thing coming up. There’s also pictures: some in honor of World Egg Day, which was yesterday (again, I would’ve been on time except for ridiculous technical difficulties) and also to document the Tea and Biscuits of Triumph (which is more or less the Tracy analog of the Warren Ellis Cigarette of Victory). Here we go…
Monkey Monday: “Is this thing on?” 26 September 2011 10:22 am
Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,convenience,cooking,cross-posting,eating,economics,fast food,food snobbery,health,kitchen gear,photos,pictures,tea,time versus money , add a commentPretend I started out here with a hilarious bit about trying to remember how I used to do these posts — or don’t, if meta-self-referential cutesiness is sooo turn of the 00′s and hellooo we are well into the second decade of the 21st century now, dur-hurr… Also maybe read (or reread) that August 2011 New York Times Magazine piece about how David Foster Wallace maybe kinda sorta invented the language of the Internet but he was one of only a very few writers skilled enough to actually employ this style without being super-annoying, and now everybody does it, gah! But I digress.
Here are a few things from this past month that got my attention and couldn’t just be camera-phoned and summarized in a caption on Flickr. There’s a picture and a rant, but then there’s some short and sweet and funny stuff, I promise. (more…)
Foto Friday: belated documentation of birthday awesomeness 16 September 2011 9:20 am
Posted by Tracy in : convenience,dessert,family,fun,life,photos,pictures,recipes,summer , add a commentMy super-awesome 32nd birthday, let me show you it!
Firstly, you may have heard about the hurricane that was due in town that day? I know, it ended up getting downgraded to a tropical storm, but I think on the whole New York City did a good job of responding to this weather event, unlike during Snowpocalypse 2010 (Snowmageddon? I don’t remember what it was called). In any case, the impending storm doom that ended up flooding Vermont (?!) precluded a party, since everybody was supposed to be staying indoors all day (even if it did end up clear and actually kind of lovely). Meanwhile, there was the problem of avoiding caffeine withdrawal headaches in the event of power outages….
Cold-brew coffee to the rescue!
Yay cold brew! Also yay nifty double-walled glasses Peter got for his birthday (thanks Lois!)
If I had known how fun and easy cold-brewing coffee is, I would have started doing it years ago, so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t find out until last month because my caffeine addiction is bad enough already, thanks. Anyway, (more…)
Recipe from the vaults: Café au Moncef 5 January 2011 11:24 pm
Posted by Tracy in : convenience,cross-posting,food snobbery,friends,fun,milk,recipes,travel , add a commentOnce upon a time, when the world was young and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and I wrote regularly for a little website called Everything2, I started a writeup over there with the exciting announcement:
[Instant coffee] doesn’t have to [suck]!
The square brackets are an E2 notation thing which I’ve left in here just for that old skool flavor, but this post is brought to you in part by Mr. Victor Hanson-Smith, who talks to himself all over the intertwitfaceliciousplace (sometimes even in images, both moving and still) and in one such venue, recently complained that his travels in Chile had led him to a situation in which all the coffee was of the Nescafé variety. So Peter linked him to my old Everything2 post about one of the revelations from our adventures in Tunisia during the summer of 2002, and in honor of the successful caffeination that ensued, I am now mostly cutting and pasting the text of that old writeup here, because while I may not be posting much original content here these days, I can still archive stuff I don’t want to forget, oh yes. Anyway. This recipe is from one of the hosts of our Tunisian trip, Moncef—hence its name.
Moncef told us that this cappuccino-like concoction, which piqued our curiosity after seeing him drink it at breakfast for several days in a row, is something all Tunisian college students know how to make. After tasting a sample cup, we were so impressed that we asked for the recipe, which turned out to be almost embarrassingly simple. Turns out the entire secret to making a decent drink using instant coffee is: use hot milk instead of water. To get a little more fancy, try the following recipe:
Quick Hit: Point of Order! 3 March 2010 2:44 pm
Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,convenience,eating,economics,food snobbery,geekery,health,news,nutrition,politics , add a commentToday, several news sources I follow are all about a new study comparing the effects of “junk” food taxes and subsidies on healthier food which concluded that the former is better at encouraging people to buy more “healthy” stuff. If this story goes away in less than a week, I will be very surprised, so I’m going to be watching it if only to see how long it persists, and hey, look at me responding to news in a timely manner for a change, woo!
That said, my one-word response to this study story is: AUGH. (more…)
