Jacque @173 mentioned having made purple soup ...
My husband made a lovely-tasting and incredibly-disturbing-looking beet chowder* some time ago that I dubbed 'melted lipstick' and he called (on the label on the batch we put in the freezer) Pink Soup.
He has since made a squash-and-sweet-potato blended soup we have now dubbed Orange Soup.
Also, I am incredibly skilled at, as my dear, sweet, loving husband has put it, "making dinners that look like dog vomit but taste great."
* A chowder's technical definition being any cream-based soup that also contains potato. "Cream-of-potato-and-", as it were.
Carol Kimball @80 said: At Thanksgiving and other large family gatherings, the passing of dishes at the start of the meal was chaotic. They gravitated towards the hapless visitor, who ended up with both hands full, table space blocked, and a serving dish on their plate. Everyone else's attention had shifted the other direction. Fortunately, previous victims warned me.
In my dad's-side family, which has had epic Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter dinners involving every table and chair in the house pressed into service as a huge long unit and up to 50 people, it is basically high holy tradition that at the start of the meal, you serve yourself from whatever's set nearest you, then pass that dish whichever way seems good to you (for example, if the person two to your left asks for it, send it down that way). Then each dish continues in whatever direction it was started.
Attempts have been made to announce, frex, "All left, please," just after the prayer, but some contrary Weisenheimer chucks something 'the wrong way' on purpose and eventually we're back to the previous system. Luckily, once everyone's gotten their first plateful, refills are stochasic enough that it doesn't much matter which way things go, because only a couple dishes are in motion at once.
Attempts continue to be made at having geographically-restricted instances of the common stuff (butter, potatoes, gravy) that only circulate at one end of the table, but documentation -- and therefore compliance -- are spotty and they tend to drift at the ends in pairs and threes.
#52 ::: Jacque @52 replied to me: Elliott Mason @131/841: Ah, yes. The Boulder Kinetics Race is a fine old tradition around here, with the added constraint that the vehicles have to be amphibious.
The Ferndale ones are required/recommended to be amphibious, too; the course includes two water crossings.
(and later) Wow. Quite a lady. This is your mum, eh? Does she have any openings for new daughters?
She greatly enjoys taking on younger proteges. She and I, however, get along about 500% better since she moved 3000 miles away from me. I can't take her in large doses.
(even later, still Jacque) Like the first dip out of the peanut butter jar. (A hotly contested privilege in my house.)
Am I the only one who liked to carve a heart in it while taking out the first sandwich's-worth of pb?
Earl Cooley @151: the TV show in question concerns mainly vampires.
Lucy Kemnitzer @840: Around here*, what's most likely to be called 'wild carrot' is more often called 'Queen Anne's Lace,' [or Daucus carota if you're being fancy and Latinate] and is indeed in the carrot family and nonpoisonous ... but imported from Europe, not naturally North American. You can definitely eat it -- I have -- but it's mostly not worth the effort, being either tiny or really woody. However, like most of the 'pioneer foods'**, it does provide sustenance with enough processing for just the labor of finding it and bringing it home.
* Chicago and environs.
** Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) being another; its baby leaves CAN be eaten, if you boil them three times in lots of water and discard the water in between. I just like how alien-lifeformy the flowers are, and the local wildlife loves the berries. If my dogs brush against the ripe-and-frozen-to-bursting ones int he winter, they look like someone's been drawing on the white bits of their fur with a purple marker (yes, the berries are a dyestuff).
Jacque @827: I couldn't find online photos of much of her recent stuff, but here is some of her art-welding, and she's also deeply involved with the people who run this craziness, which lets you see why there's a connection to bikes (watch the video for samples).
She also goes to Burning Man every year, hence her specific interest in increasing bike cargo capacities. Here is a highly-illustrated con-report she did of the 2005, her first; also 2006, which is mostly pix. Last year, some of her stuff was exhibited in the Man.
Yeah, she makes me look totally square ...
abi @807: That's awesome, thanks. I wonder if anyone sells the huge-basketed cargo bikes (like this one) in the US ...
abi @800: can you share a link to a picture of same? My mother is an art welder, and always looking for new, ergonomically-proven ways to mod bikes.
Michael Roberts @759: something like 60% of under-30 Americans don't carry insurance. The 40% that do are generally either on their parents', or employed in a generous industry that gives good benefits even to fairly starting-level employees.
The most useful aspect of 'everyone buys' that I can see is making the risk-pools bigger -- and the point (I thought) of the new 'exchange' methods and the public option was to attempt to move the buying-individual-insurance people into a risk-pool the size of their state's buying-indiv-insurance population, which would DRASTICALLY lower the premiums, because you're amortizing over many more people, only some of whom are 'proven unhealthy'.
Mind, what I think the purposes of the changes are and what the legislators think the purpose is could easily be two wildly-divergent things, but there are an awful lot of young-and-healthy people going without insurance.
I would've been one of them, except that he who is now my husband got a civil-service job right out of college.
Summer Storms @516 said in re the Outlander books: I found it quite useful to have read the first book in order to really grasp and enjoy the second.
I actually read the second book first initially*, and having since gone back to read the first, I can see how I would have bounced off it hard. It's VERY romance-y, in ways I would have found distasteful, and takes about a third of the book to introduce any plot threads I cared about. I stuck with it purely because I'd liked books 2 and 3 (and there was no book 4 at that point).
I think book 2 is perfectly comprehensible read first to SF fen used to being thrown in the deep end to figure out alien cultures. Gabaldon inclues and flashbacks enough of book one that I had no trouble, at least.
* I read it out of order because I found just the second book in a big mixed box handed down from a friend. It didn't look appealing, but it was very thick, and I was stuck somewhere very, very boring for a long time, so I started it. And then devoured it. Took me nearly three years to find the other books in the series (pre-Internet), because I wasn't looking in Romance ...
Michael Roberts @440: If you like Bujold, steampunk, hard fantasy, and PG Wodehouse, you mustmust read Stevemer and Wrede's series that starts with Sorcery and Cecelia. If you like it, it may act as a gateway drug for you into non-magickal versions of the same basic period of history. Similarly, if you like the Temeraire books (starting with His Majesty's Dragon, I think) by Naomi Novik, that might act as a gateway drug into a whole realm of Napoleonic stuff.
Oh, and if you like steampunk, Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt is basically hard-fantasy alternate-world epic Napoleonic-era magickal steampunk. With airships. And seeekrit spy stuff. And worldquakes. And machine sentiences. I adore it to pieces; it's like nothing else I've read. Staggeringly original. Just wait till you see what happened to the not-British royalty under not-Cromwell in that world ... *shudder* Creepy and full of wonder.
Michael Roberts @425: In re romance for SF/hard-fantasy readers ... I can highly recommend Diana Gabaldon's 'Outlander' series, although I would recommend skipping the first book entirely, or reading it after you've read book 2 (Dragonfly in Amber). The first book is more 'romancey,' the second drops you right in the midst of an ongoing plot and is, to me, more engaging.
Back-of-the-book level plot summary: There is a set of standing stones in Scotland that, on the right nights of the year, you can use to cross through time. Our Protagonist does so in the first book by accident, and then returns to her own time (sort of) on purpose; in the second book she initiates the travel herself for reasons made clear in the first chapter of the book.
Why I liked them: time travel is tough to do really well, because authors tend to import anachronistic mindsets into their periods. Gabaldon gets this one VERY RIGHT, especially in the first book, which involves the 1960s and just-pre-Culloden "Bonnie Prince Charlie" Scotland. Her 1960s protagonist, a nurse, *does not know* the things she wouldn't know yet! That's so rare to find in 'mainstream' fiction, I think. The second book is I think early 1990s jumping back to post-Culloden Scotland (the standing stone timechannel seems fixed -- if you go back, live a year, then return, a year has passed in your 'home' time as well).
I liked books 2 and 3 of this series very much, books 1 and 4 less so but still enjoyed them; the rest of the books in the series focus on characters or situations I really don't like so well, but you might.
Spoilery speculative first-ep-of V geekery:
V'z pnyyvat qvof ba n cerqvpgvba gung gur tvabezbhf pvgl-ubirevat fcnprfuvcf ner onfvpnyyl fgntr-znantrq Cbgrzxva ivyyntrf: gurl'er znqr gb ybbx yvxr jung uhznaf jbhyq npprcg nf pvgl-ubirevat fcnprfuvcf, naq ner abg gur npghny fuvc(f) gung jrag sebz fgne gb fgne. Zl fhccbegvat rivqrapr vf gjbsbyq. Svefg, jub chgf onfvpnyyl pvgl/fhoqvivfvbaf vafvqr n fcnprfuvc vafgrnq bs qrpxf? Jul jnfgr gur phontr yvxr gung? Tneqraf, lrf, ohg rabezbhf bcra nvefcnprf? Frpbaq, gur jvaqbjf ba gubfr guvatf ner SENXXVAT GVAL sbe n phygher gung unf gur grpuabybtl gb cynl jvgu tenivgl gur jnl gurl (pynvz gurl) pna.
Nyfb, V'z ernyyl ybbxvat sbejneq gb frrvat gur svany haznfxrq-yvmneq perngher qrfvta, orpnhfr vs gurl qb vg JRYY naq ner PBAFVFGRAG (un un un un, ohg vg pbhyq unccra), vg unf gb or fznyy/yvgur rabhtu gb svg vafvqr na beqvanel uhzna funcr jvgu 0.5-1" bs 'pybarq' uhzna syrfu fgergpurq bire vg.
V qvq ernyyl yvxr gur qvssrerag qverpgvbaf gurl qebccrq oernqpehzof sbe va gur cvybg. Jul JBHYQA'G gur SOV vanqiregragyl pbzr npebff nyvra fyrrcre pryyf naq zvfgnxr gurz sbe uhzna greebevfg pryyf? Gurl npg fvzvyneyl.
Nyfb, sbe fhcre-nqinaprq fhcre-grpu nyvraf, gur fgevxr sbepr gung uvg gur vafhetrapl zrrgvat jnf, hz, irel ybj-grpu naq rira fbzrjung vapbzcrgrag. Ab mncthaf, naq abg rabhtu znacbjre gb ernyyl cerirag rfpncrrf (rira jvgu Oynpx Dhvfyvat Thl pbzvat va). Gurl jrer erylvat ba gurve vavgvny fclobzo naq gurve vaangr culfvpny fgeratgu naq fcrrq gb jva. Cyhf, gurl erirnyrq Nyna Ghqlx'f punenpgre'f nyvraarff va gur svefg rc, juvpu V thrff gur jevgref sryg gurl unq gb -- ohg ybbxvat ng vg Jngfbavnayl vafgrnq bs va n Qblyrna jnl, gur nyvraf ernyyl fubg gurzfryirf ba gung bar, orpnhfr abj SOV-zbz XABJF ure cnegare'f qvegl. Vs ur'q orra 'xabpxrq bhg naq gvrq hc' be fbzrguvat gurl'q fgvyy unir fbzrbar ba ure gung fur unf rirel ernfba gb gehfg vzcyvpvgyl ... vafgrnq, gurl guerj njnl n ybat-grez nqinagntr gb gel gb pyrna guvatf hc dhvpxyl.
Juvpu, vs vg'f abg fybccl jevgvat, zrnaf gur nyvraf guvax gurl'er nobhg gb jva nyy ng bapr va na ninynapur, naq frr ab ernfba gb yrnir gurzfryirf ybat-grez qrrc-pbire nffrgf gb svtug na vafhetrapl.
Gurfr yvmneql thlf ner qbvat n zhpu orggre wbo guna gur 80f irefvba bs tbvat fgenvtug sbe jung jbhyq znxr crbcyr dhrfgvba gurz yrnfg naq whzc evtug ba gur 'fhcre-cbjreshy oraribyrag fhcre-grpu nyvraf jnag gb uryyyyyc hhhhhhf' onaqjntba. Naq gurer'f n erpheevat 'fryy lbhe fbhy/pbzcebzvfr lbhe cevapvcyrf gb trg nurnq' gurzr va jung gurl'er bssrevat inevbhf vaqvivqhny uhznaf.
V yvxrq gur fubhg-bhg gb gur bevtvany va gung gurl pynvz gurl'er urer sbe 'jngre naq n pbzzba zvareny,' gubhtu V jbaqre jung gurl ernyyl qb jnag ... orfvqrf fynirf, bs pbhefr. Orpnhfr jngre naq zbfg zvarenyf ner ninvynoyr ng gur gbcf bs tenivgl jryyf cerggl pbzzbayl. Ner gurl fuvcjerpxrq naq fghpx jvgu jung gurl pna trg va bhe flfgrz, naq gura tbvat gur pbybavnyvfg/fynire ebhgr? Be qvq gurl pbzr urer sebz gur ortvaavat qryvorengryl vagraqvat gb gnxr hf?
Yvxr V fnvq, V'z qrsvavgryl va vg sbe nabgure rcvfbqr ng yrnfg. :->
Have just watched the first ep of V. I'm a huge fan of the original, and they've got me for at least one more ep of the new one on the basis of the quality of this first one.
Lots of quite good actors; no howlers in the writing YET. I rather like some of what they're doing with the 'aliens show up and do WE COME IN PEACE in a post-9-11 world, and yet all is not as it seems' concept. So far. :->
Not a grinning fanboy, but so far it's interesting, and I like it. Though they're very clearly fitting in visuals and structural elements intended to try to haul in the coveted 21-34 demographic ...
Oh, and Morena Baccarin (Inara) and Alan Tudyk (Wash) have large roles, which I appreciate. :->
Pendrift @ 134 said: Elliott Mason @111: Someone mentioned chicken feet? Oh yum. It's one of my favorite dim sum dishes, although friends and strangers alike look askance at my plate when I have some. People often ask what there is to eat in chicken feet, but it's got more edible parts than one would think at first glance.
I've been watching a lot of episodes of Iron Chef via YouTube, and compiling (for my own amusement) a list of Things I Have Learned About Japanese Culture* From Iron Chef.
One of them is that the cute-woman judges all seem to think that 'gelatin' tastes 'very healthy'. However, for American translation, I think what they call 'gelatin' can often be more accurately called 'stewed gristle'; they really liked being fed stewed duck feet in Battle Duck.
* In the related department of Things About Biology I Have Learned From Iron Chef, invertebrates have the following bodily parts (because no others are ever mentioned): 'filet' (the muscle tissue/meat), 'digestive tract,' 'roe' (all reproductive organs and products), skin, bones, brains, and liver. Vertebrates also have a bunch of other things, but molluscs and arthropods seem to be entirely composed of 'brains' and 'liver' on the inside, from the way the color commentators talk about it when the carcasses are being broken down for cooking.
In re several people from another thread on chicken feet:
albatross @64 asked: What's the situation in which being on a Navy ship would become dangerous?
If you're actually on the ship, it's pretty good in this particular wartime.
However, there are thousands of Navy ratings DRIVING TRUCKS in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, to free up Army and Marines to carry guns and otherwise etc etc. Not to mention things like medics, computer guys, and other 'provide services to a garrison' specialties ...
My little sister is currently in her second year at Annapolis. I'm very glad that her civilian major is a double history/Arabic; she's most likely to be stationed in a communications post on a carrier doing translations all day.
My baby sister (16), a gifted trombonist, is currently being scouted by the Marines with the promise that she'll only serve in the service's premier band. I am deeply, deeply suspicious of any such promise, because they can always change her mind, hand her a rifle, and send her anywhere they want during her term of enlistment. She believes them, and is currently highly motivated to sign her life away, since she views it as a cushy way to get paid well and have free room and board for playing music professionally.
Vicki @696 said: I feel a little sorry for all the people who are looking at good comfort food and thinking "sin." Folks, calories are a measurement of energy, not of virtue.
Or, as a commenter to the fat-acceptance blog Big Fat Deal put it, "It's pizza, not genocide."
Aha. I think a final upshot of this is 'slightly dull scissors cut paper far better than they do hair,' or, rather, the hair will notice dullness faster (the scalp attached to the hair will, at least), so people cutting just hair with their scissors need to be very careful about keeping them sharp.
TexAnne@79 said: hair dulls scissors faster than paper.
Really? Hair is chemically equivalent to wool (keratin strands); paper is fairly disorganised chunks of cellulose and lignin. I certainly never noticed that haircutting now and then (or cutting wool yardage) did anything to my scissors, but cut out one frakking paper snowflake and suddenly silk snagged on the blades.
This led to my ribbon policy; people who didn't know How To Treat My Scissors could use any pair without a ribbon. :->
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