Wacky Weather

I wish the Arizona weather would make up its mind. First it was cold, record overnight lows in many places. With the low temperatures I would like to thank my neighbors for blasting their heat and keeping my apartment at a fairly reasonable temperature that week. A week after this we broke record highs with temperatures making it in the low 80s.  I nearly had to turn the AC on!



With the cold leaves fell off many of the trees giving the area around where I live a fall feel. The picture with the bare trees and leaves piled up remind of September growing up.  While walking around someone shared that "It feels like Indian Summer back home." That it did.


Then the rains came. This is the pond near my office. It isn't supposed to be a pond.

 I played with the image a little by cropping it:

Then to be silly I rotated the image

 Then I cropped it some more

And I rotated it too. You can tell this is the reflection by the patch of grass visible at the upper left and the ripples in the upper right.

I've been pretty busy with classes and other administrative duties so I haven't been particularly creative in the kitchen lately. This weekend I did make tacos. There were plenty of leftovers so I will be able to properly celebrate Taco Tuesday this coming Tuesday. I usually make fairly dull tacos by browning ground beef and adding some kind of seasoning packet (Simply Organic's Southwest Taco this time). To make them less dull I pickled some sliced red onion and also added boiled cubed potatoes to the ground beef just before adding the seasoning packet.  The tacos turned out well. The melted cheese with seasoned ground beef and potatoes made for good eating. I ate my tacos with Amy's Traditional refried beans which I maintain are the best canned refried beans on the market.



While shopping I came across a can of beer that caught my attention. Ska Brewing Company (I'd add their link but it makes noise when it loads!) made a Mole' Stout as a seasonal release. The description sounded interesting so I bought a six pack to give it a try. Not bad as stouts go. I don't detect any chiles but I did taste the cocoa. Given that this stout is a little sweet and with the cocoa powder and the spices I have to say it tastes a lot like a cookie my mom makes at Christmas.  Yes a beer that reminds me of cookies! As long as they don't make a samoas beer I'll be okay.

The Year's Best

Since I am not that social or mainstream I don't have too many categories to name my favorites from the past year.

Most of my reading last year was various comic books, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and back issues of Physics Today. I didn't read many novels this year and there were no standouts that I will mention.  However there was a lot of graphic novel reading going on over here.  I am by no means a Comic Book Geek but a majority of what I read came from The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman and Birds of Prey written by Gail Simone.  Most of these volumes I found to be very well done.

Probably the best pickup of the year though was getting a copy of The Ship that Sailed to Mars. WOW! Thanks to Paul Di Filippo for writing a review of this book in a recent Asimov's (Jan. 2013) that made me want to pick up a copy. This is an illustrated children's book done by William Timlin and published in 1923. I thought the story could have used some help (you won't get any spoilers from me) but the art included is just amazing.  Did I mention how good the art is in the book? I am tempted to get a second copy of the book so that I can take it apart and the hang the illustrations on my walls. Thanks to the folks at Dover (their Calla imprint) for making this available.

For my favorite game pickup I liked We Must Tell the Emperor, part of the States of Siege series of solitaire games published by Victory Point Games, which allows you to run in an abstract way the Pacific Theatre during WWII from the Japanese perspective. The first part of the war is pretty easy going unless you have bad luck, but once the game takes you into the later periods of the war you get a sense of the hammering the Japanese took. Another game I liked was Onirim published by Z-Man Games in the USA.  Think of it as a type of solitaire. The object is to play a series of three cards of the same color but with different symbols on them to open a door. To win you need to open eight doors, two from each of the four different colored suits, to escape the labyrinth before the nightmares get you by depleting your draw pile. There is also two-player variant of the game. A good game but I'd like it a lot more if it weren't for all the card shuffling.

I didn't travel much this past year but I enjoyed walking through Cave of the Mounds and also Mission San Jose.

As much as I've cooked this past year I don't feel like I did enough.  At least I tried making some new things like dill pickles, purple cauliflower, and cranberry sauce to name a few.

Unless I've lost a ticket stub I saw 10 movies in the theatre this year. I saw nothing that was fantastic. Every movie I saw had some kind of flaw, but The Avengers was probably the most solid. I would have liked this movie a lot more if they deleted Bruce Banner and The Hulk from it. Puny human says Hulk bad. Prometheus seemed to be a flop but I liked it, probably more than I would have had I not saw it in 3D. It was cool to watch that way. I will say the same thing about The Hobbit. For some reason my eyes kept bugging out on me during the showing. I'll leave it to others to pick that movie apart. The movie that surprised me the most was Total Recall. I really was expecting to have two hours of my life wasted so I was surprised walking out of the theatre that I did not feel that way, probably because it wasn't exactly like the original. The effects were cooler too.

My best food find last year was Luncha Libre. Their quesadillas are very good and creative. I've had several different kinds: mushroom and roasted potato (the pot head), roasted potato and green chile (papa verde), bulgogi (the koreadilla), and steak and mushroom. (Why no special name??) Their tea and fruit drinks are good too. Thanks to ASU for inviting local food trucks to a spot near campus on Wednesdays. The Wednesday lunch time routine is to stop at Luncha Libre and then visit the nearby Pop Culture Paradise to see what new Comic Book Day brings.

That was 2012, what's in store for 2013?

Happy New Year

I write this at the end of my first day back in the classroom.  Winter break was far too short this year so I was unable to catch up on the to-do list. Hopefully this doesn't keep me from posting here on a regular basis.




The week before this I cooked batches of brown rice and farro to use.  The farro I used two ways: one was tossing it with roasted onions, mushrooms, and kale and the other was using it in a batch of soup. Both of these dishes turned out very well. I am a big fan of farro.












One of the uses I had for the rice was making a batch of fried rice. Normally I would add a bit of beef but having none at hand I didn't sweat it. My fried rice is seasoned with soy sauce and sake. I didn't miss the beef serving the fried rice with baby broccoli and a mug of green tea .










I had some potatoes hanging around too so I decided to make a batch of fried potatoes. I've experimented over the years with this and the best results have come from boiling the potatoes first and then frying them in a mixture of olive oil and butter. Near the end of cooking I added some rosemary and thyme that got crispy, but not burned. I named these The Best Fried Potatoes Ever! I was happy with the results. I don't save mine (I probably should) but bacon fat makes for good fried potatoes too.





To go with the potatoes (and the bread) I made some beans and greens.  When thinking about making it I knew I wanted it to be "soupy" so I added some chicken broth to the pot and let it simmer for a little while. The best beans and greens comes from using swiss chard and I like to boil the swiss chard and the stems first before adding them to the oil, garlic, and beans. Oh and don't forget the red pepper flakes, it is the magic ingredient here, even if you use just a little to add some zing. This time I made it soupy, but sometimes I will make it "dry" using a little of the swiss chard's cooking liquid to moisten everything. I also prefer using ceci (garbanzo beans), white beans tend to be a little mushy. If I close my eyes I can remember the sitting in the basement of my uncle's house with my father snarfing the beans and greens my uncle made from fresh-picked swiss chard. Good stuff and good memories.

Merry Christmas

Okay so I am a little late with that.

Christmas just seemed to pop out of nowhere this year. I wasn't sure what to make for Christmas Eve dinner and said as much to my mother. Her reply was "fish." Settled that question. I made a fish stew and had some bread and green salad to go with it. One of the nice things about Christmas in Arizona is that I was able to have Christmas Eve lunch outside. You can see it's "cold" based on the amount of steam you can see rising from the bowl of soup.

Here are a couple of pictures from the church I go to decorated for Christmas.

 I didn't take a good look at the indoor nativity scene. There was a bit of a scandal a couple of years ago when a child snuck in a little red-nosed reindeer.

I did some Christmas baking again this year, making a batch of blueberry scones and a batch of ginger spice cookies.

The scones didn't turn out quite so well as have other batches I have baked. I am used to adding (dry) chocolate chips to the flour instead of frozen (wet) blueberries so the dough didn't hold together very well and was a bit harder to work with. Add to this all the candy and chocolate I was given and you can see why I was happy to have had a dental check-up the week before Christmas.

Being on my own I don't really have any Christmas traditions. Thinking about the last time I was home for Christmas and having dinner with relatives recalls the traditional (for us) Christmas Eve dishes of bacala cooked in tomato sauce served with boiled potatoes (helps cut the salt), angel hair pasta with anchovy sauce, sausage, salads, treats galore, and peperoni pizza.  Yeah, pepperoni pizza. Turns out the twenty-something kids in the family aren't really into the other stuff. I realize that not everyone likes anchovies and salted cod like I do so I am not passing judgement and certainly life is too short to eat food you are not interested in. Oh well, their loss.

What are your Christmas traditions?