Summer Reads

My goal every year is to average reading two books per month.  I think this is a reasonable goal but it is one that I have not met three out of the last four years. Looking back at my reads list for this year I see a lot of short books/booklets and graphic novels.

Starting about two years ago I started reading The Sandman by Neil Gaiman.  I finished the original series along with Endless Nights this summer.  In those eleven volumes there was rarely a story I'd call a dud.  Sometimes I felt the art was sketchy, but the stories--oh the stories!  There was a lot of good stuff here.  This year I've read Batman Earth One which is another telling of Batman's origin.  I enjoyed this one too.  The take on Alfred in this volume was new to me, and interesting.  I also picked up the Birds of Prey collection Of Like Minds.  It was interesting to read a comic written by a woman (Gail Simone) about women.  In one panel they are taking about their boy problems and two pages later they are kicking the snot out of some dude.  Nice!  Recently I picked up a copy of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (Volume 1) by Alan Moore.  I was vaguely familiar with this title from the movie that was released some years ago.  I thought it was a neat idea to bring the different characters of literature together this way.  With the exception of Alan Quatermain I have read the books and stories in which all the other characters in the Moore comic appear.

I wanted some treas so on Saturday night I made a batch of soda muffins (a copy of the recipe is here).  They were very tasty fresh from the oven and smeared with strawberry jam.  I warmed one in the microwave Sunday morning and wasn't impressed.  Warming them in the oven was a much better option.

At a loss for what else to make last weekend I settled on making green chile cheeseburgers.  When I was a wee lad in college we would make the trek from Socorro, NM to nearby San Antonio, NM to go to The Owl Bar.  I enjoyed the burgers there.  No pictures of my burgers though.  Sorry folks!

Summer Movies

So far this summer I have seen The Avengers (twice), Men in Black 3, Battleship, Prometheus, Brave, The Dark Knight Returns, Total Recall, and Snow White and the Huntsman. I paid the premium and saw MIB3 and Prometheus in IMAX 3D.  Mostly I think 3D movies are still gimmicky in the sense that the 3D effect is just to make you flinch when a sharp object flies out of the screen at you.  (This seems to be the entire premise of the next Resident Evil movie.)  For me Prometheus did not fall into this category.  I felt that this was the first 3D movie I've seen where the 3D effects were part of the story in the sense that it put me in the movie (to some extent).  I really liked that and am looking forward to The Hobbit already because I am hoping for more of the same.

Friday night before seeing Total Recall I pulled out an anthology and re-read We Can Remember it for you Wholesale by Phillip K. Dick.  After reading the story again I remembered how little the Schwarzenegger movie had in common with the story beyond the memory implant idea and the Secret Agent bit. I try as much as possible to avoid spoilers before seeing movies since I like to form my own opinion. There was a part of me that was wondering if the remake would be more like the original movie or maybe reflect more of the story. After seeing it I can say it was definitely more like original movie (thankfully).  There were several scenes lifted directly, but I felt there were enough differences to make the new Total Recall interesting. I certainly wasn't expecting The Great American Movie or anything and I did expect to walk out of the theatre saying the original was better.  Now I am not so sure.  Maybe it was just because the effects were better.

Back to the Anthology...I anticipated wanting to read the Dick story before seeing Total Recall so I went digging for it a week or so back. I may have multiple volumes with the story in it but I knew the story was printed in Reel Future edited by Forrest J Ackerman and Jean Stine.  On the anthology's cover it reads The Stories that Inspired 16 Classic Science Fiction Movies.  Paging through the anthology I thought what a great idea it was to collect a set of short stories that inspired movies (and remakes).  A few of the stories included were those that inspired The Thing, Death Race 2000, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and others.  Speaking of movies based on stories, I also pulled out The Hobbit to read latter this fall in anticipation of the movie.  Drool.

Between movie watching and a baptism this weekend I didn't have much time for cooking.  Since it is tomato season I decided to make tomato and bread soup again.  It wasn't quite as good as last year's attempt. The tomatoes I bought lost their structural integrity so the soup was more liquidy than I was hoping for. It tasted fine and it was nothing that a little extra toasted bread in the bowl couldn't fix.  I also made a kale and green bean salad to go with it.  Summer vacation is rapidly closing so I hope to make good use of the next couple of weekends.

Alert! I spotted Hatch green chiles in the store this week.  I sense chile roasting in the not too distant future.

Eggplant 2012

Sadly, summer is winding down.  Soon it will be time to get back into the classroom so I had better make good use of the vacation time I have left.

I'm still reading a lot, which makes me happy.  It might be better if I read one thing at a time, but I currently have three things open.  As of today I am reading Foxes of the Desert which is the story of the Afrika Korps battles versus Britain told from the German perspective.  There are worse things to be consumed by but I just love reading Edgar Allan Poe.  Every so often I dig out a collection and read and read and.... I tend to like his mystery/horror stories best.  The third item I have opened is the September issue of Asimov's science fiction magazine.  Anyway that is the reading list, until the next new comic day.

Last week I decided I wanted to make another batch of eggplant.  The process was held up because I wanted to get a larger contained to use for the salting and soaking.  Honestly I am glad I did this.  The container I bought last week has a locking lid (so hopefully no spills when moving it around) and it has a grate.  The grate, a piece of plastic, was the best thing ever.  Putting this in the container while the eggplant was in the water/vinegar mixture with a small bowl on top kept everything submerged. The whole time!  Success!!

I packed up three jars this time.  Next weekend I will sample and see how it is.  After salting the eggplant over night I baked some of the slices (picture above) and marinated them with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, garlic, and some herbs.  This made a pretty tasty sandwich filling.

Not wanting the weekend to be dominated by the eggplant festival I made these scones but substituting chocolate chips for the dried fruit and because I had leftover heavy cream I made this stew. Good stuff.

Pureed what?

While on vacation in Wisconsin I ate brats made from locally raised pigs, corn on the cob, various homemade jams and pickles. My Texas hosts fed me ribeye steak and steak fajitas cooked over charcoal.  No surprises there, I think.  I pitched in with cooking some breakfasts.  One morning I fed the crew bacon, fried potatoes, and scrambled eggs.  I will note here that one of the hosts is a vegetarian and was kind enough to let us make her house smell like bacon.

While it is always nice to eat food prepared by other people while on vacation I was happy to cook for myself when I got home.  While looking through my freezer I saw a bag of roasted green chiles from last fall so I decided to make green chile stew.  Since it was barely 100 degrees here last weekend the stew really helped take the chill out of my bones.  (This is the type of joke you make to make it through an Arizona summer.)  I also decided to make something new.  After paging through my copy of the Italian Country Table I decided to make fava puree.  Yeah, you read that right.  Apparently you can take dried fava beans and over cook them (with potato slices) and mash them up so they look a lot like mashed potatoes.  No really!  I wasn't sure how this would turn out given that as the beans cooked and I stirred the pot, what I saw was just a pot of beige water.  Yum?  It looked bad and I nearly tossed the pot's contents to start over.  However once the potato slices disintegrated and most of the water cooked out, the whole thing came together.  It still looks little gross in the pan, but it looks better when plated and drizzled with olive oil and pepper.  I'm not sure what I was expecting this to taste like, but damn it is was good. My version was pretty lumpy as some of the beans didn't get mashed up.  Not a problem though.  Wonder how long I will wait before I make this again using the leftover dry favas?

Pickle update:  So far so good.  They are a bit sweeter than I'd like but they survived the pickling process and taste good. 

Pickles, Dill

It is strange to say that going on vacation gave me a pickle craving.  I acknowledge I am weird so let's move on.  I had homemade pickles made by my hosts in Wisconsin and one of their friends.  My hosts pickles were fairly standard dill pickles.  The other batch I sampled were provided at a potluck we went to.  As soon as I bit into the pickle I said, "Ooo the brine has cinnamon in it."  That was a new experience for me.  So when I came home I decided to make a batch of pickles.   I've made bread and butter pickles before, but I wanted to try dill pickles this time.  The restriction was that the recipe needed to be for refrigerator pickles.  Some day I will be brave enough to try canning.  If I ever live somewhere cool I may even take a crack at making pickles in a crock.

Here is a link to the dill pickle recipe I settled on.  Easy enough to make except for finding pickling spice.  Neither store I went to had it stocked with all the other spices.  I thought I was out of luck but then it dawned on me to check the bulk spice area of the second store.  Whew!  They had it in stock and oddly their pickling spice has pieces of cinnamon stick in it.  (Yes, I will be checking the bulk spice section of the first store I went to.)

It all got put together and packed in jars last Saturday so now the wait begins until they have pickled enough to try.

I finally went somewhere!

Yes it is funny to have "vacation" in the title of a blog that never mentions going anywhere.  This year I finally got myself to go visit friends in both Wisconsin and Texas.  Over about two weeks I took planes, trains, and automobiles to travel to Chicago, Monroe, WI, Tulsa, and the San Antonio area.

I spent the week July 4th in Wisconsin. Of course I had to pick one of the hottest weeks of all time to visit so hid indoors a lot. Some activities included:

• Sampling fudge for friends who are in the process of opening a candy store in Monroe, WI.
• Eating Braunschweiger and chili at Baumgartner's.

• Attending Sunday Mass at St. Victor's church where a friend's uncle was the pastor and is now honored by a statue in front of the church for work with the disabled (Apostolate to the Handicapped/Campion's Champions).

• Went to the Sky Vu drive-in to see Brave and The Avengers.
• Saw Fireworks!

• Went to Cave of the Mounds.

When the week finished I traveled by minivan with a friend and her two children aged nine and six from Wisconsin to San Antonio, spending the night in Tulsa.  Texas activities included:

• Sunday mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

• Visiting a snake farm/petting zoo.

Toured the San Jose mission instead of the more touristy Alamo.

I even helped to bottle a batch of beer.

It was a fun couple of weeks.  I have been to both places before but I had never traveled between them.  All the trees lining the highway through Oklahoma was unexpected, but all the rest of the terrain was pretty dull. Sorry Midwesterners.

Crown me

My last visit to the dentist revealed a filled tooth that showed some cracking.  The filling was rather large so the recommendation was to get a crown instead of filling the tooth again.  Having one crown already I wasn't too happy about needing a second one.  This crown was made by a different process than my previous one.  the dentist referred to this as a CEREC crown after the technology used to make it.  Of course it has a Wikipedia page.    I found the process very interesting and document some of it below.

The tooth was shaved and prepared in basically the same way as for my other crown.  After that was done several images were taken of the area around where the crown would be placed.  The photo below is a computer rendering of my lower right jaw.  The blue outline was drawn by the dentist to define the location of the crown.

Once this was done the computer chewed on the images and produced a first pass at the crown.  The dentist then manually adjusted the shape of the tooth by grabbing and dragging.  Some areas were smoothed over and others were built up.  In the image below you can see the final image of the crown as it sits in my jaw.  The blue areas indicate contact between the crown and the adjacent teeth.

Here you can see the crown by itself without the other teeth.

Once the final design was done the image was then positioned inside the block from which it was to be milled. 

Reminds me a bit of the artists who believe that there is a statue inside a block of marble and it is their job to chip away until they find it.  Once the file was sent over to the milling machine it took about ten minutes to finish the job.  The process pretty much resumed from here in fitting the crown and seating it properly.  The only extra thing here was the 20 minutes or so wait while the crown was baked to harden the material.  Being the nerd I am I wonder if I should have asked for the function that defined the surface of my new crown. 

In total the process took about two-and-a-half hours.  Probably a little bit longer than the other method of crowning a tooth but this only took one visit.  I enjoyed the design and milling processes and seeing the equipment, but still am not too thrilled about needing a crown.  Guess I need to more careful taking care of my teeth.