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Thursday, February 19th, 2004

in search of curry, redux

Before the Web, there was Usenet. This was a long time ago, around 1992 when I was first online. I used to spend my lunch hours — wait, who am I kidding, I spent whole workdays cruising a handful of newsgroups, seeking knowledge, entertainment, power, love, and curry.

I printed out two recipes for Indian curry because they sounded too good to be true. I carefully put them into a binder, along with recipes passed from friends and clipped from the newspaper. I carried the binder from apartment to house to house, frequently flipping to the curry pages and then moving past them for any of a variety of reasons, such as “I just ran out of whole green cardamom pods” or “Eww, this recipe calls for yogurt.” I printed these recipes in 1992 but never actually made them.

Last week I noticed the recipes again and thought, “I could eat the hell out of a curry right now.” I dispatched my wife to the whole-spice store, and the yogurt store too. Thursday would be our Usenet Curry Experience.

“This is the real thing,” boasts the recipe. “Throw out your curry powder: you’ll never use it again once you’ve tried this recipe.” You can imagine why I kept it around for 12 years. “Chicken curry using the real spices cannot be beat!”

Eagerly I minced 10 cloves of garlic (!) and a lump of ginger. I counted out the peppercorns, the cloves, the cardamom. I split the star anise to expose the fragrant seeds inside. I diced a jalapeno, measured turmeric and chili powder. My Mise en Place looked like the set of Yan Can Cook; I just needed the angled mirror overhead.

Once in Germany, a long time ago but actually several years after my Usenet curry recipes had begun their exile in my recipe binder, we stayed with friends who prepared an authentic Indian curry. The chef haphazardly tossed some whole spices into a frypan, then topped them with onions and garlic and a melange of other stuff. The result, the cook’s offhand manner notwithstanding, was outrageously good. He had a knack.

He told us he’d cut back on the amount of chili peppers called for in a truly authentic curry. He said that in his salad days, when instead of salad he ate lots of curry, he once made the full-bore recipe. He lived to make curry again, but not with all those peppers. “I had to put the toilet paper in the refrigerator” was all he would say about the episode.

With visions of such nonchalant excellence, I tossed my whole spices into the frypan. I topped them with garlic, ginger, chilis. I added spinach, dried spices, and yoghurt. I added tofu (hey, I had to draw the line somewhere). I cooked and stirred and smiled at the great aromas coming up from the pan.

The recipe makes frequent references to “gravy.” This tipped me off that perhaps all was not well with my curry. There’s very little liquid in the recipe: just oil and a half-cup of yogurt. One half-cup of liquid does not make gravy. And the oil had long since soaked into the onions.

Nevertheless, I was steadfast in my faith. I continued to cook, looking forward to a big plate of killer curry.

Well, I’m still looking forward to it. This curry was bland. I don’t know what happened to all that garlic and ginger and cinnamon and cardamom and anise and etc. You’d never know it to taste this dish. It was practically flavorless. Wait, that’s not true — I could taste the rice.

The recipe says it can’t be beat, but in fact it can — by a $1.49 jar of Madras Curry sauce from TJ’s.


Tags:
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16

Wednesday, February 18th, 2004

wet ground

Three days of rain, and our back yard is soaked. It feels like a college kid on nickel-beer night, unstable and squishy.

fallen treeFor the third time in 13 months, we lost a tree. I don’t mean “lost” in the sense of “misplaced.” The tree is easy to find. The roots are poking out, six feet in the air. Hard to miss, in fact.

Like last time, this one fell across the fence line. It hit another tree, bent it about 30°, and the pair are resting atop one of the fence posts. Without that post, I think both trees would have hit the ground, and taken the fence down too. So I’m feeling lucky. I sound like it, right?

The potential energy stored in this construction — all that weight, cantilevered high in the air — must be huge.

I think the tree surgeon’s bill will be huge, too. It’s going to take someone two days to set up rigging and cut these trees down.


Tags:
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2004-02-25 19:10:36

Tuesday, February 17th, 2004

curse of plastic bottles

Last year, 3 million PET [plastic #1] bottles a day were being buried in state landfills and not recycled, according to a report by the California Department of Conservation. Only 16 percent of PET bottles used in California are recycled.

This is sad. Californians, by and large, are good at recycling. And yet 84% of plastic bottles go into the trashcan?

I think the problem with plastic bottles is that people don’t use them at home. People carry bottles in the car, or on foot, and then toss them in the nearest trash can when they’re empty. The alternatives — carrying the bottle to a recycling bin, or (even better), taking it home to wash and reuse — is apparently too great an effort.

I think I’d vote for a law requiring communities to put single-stream recycling containers in accessible locations. There are probably already laws about providing trash containers; we could amend that law to require one recycling bin for every two trash bins. Then all these well-hydrated but impatient bottle-carriers would have a more-sensible place to drop their empty bottles.

It would of course be better for all concerned if everybody reused their bottles. Do the math: if everyone reused each plastic bottle just one time, they’d cut the landfill problem in half. They’d cut their bottled-water costs in half. Discarding plastic bottles is a lot like throwing money away.


Tags:
posted to channel: Recycling
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16

Monday, February 16th, 2004

biohazard in the bathroom

Your shower curtain is awash with potentially harmful bacteria.

Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, believes the enormous population of bacteria on your shower curtain feed on organic matter shed from the bodies of the people who use the shower:

When you cough, belch or fart, you’re putting a lot of organic chemistry in there.

Is “fart” an accepted media word now? Just wondering.

On that topic, Dr. Karl of Great Moments in Science once analyzed the contents of flatus by having an 8-year-old test subject aim one at a blood agar plate. The resulting sample was incubated overnight, during which colonies of intestinal bacteria developed advanced civilazations and petitioned the Australian government for official diplomatic recognition.

Dr. Karl described his conclusions on his radio show: Don’t fart naked near food.


Tags:
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16

Sunday, February 15th, 2004

AOL’s pop-up ad

I opened AOL’s latest junkmail piece because for a change it contains a useful freebie. The freebie used to be the media; reformatted AOL floppies fed several Linux installs over the course of my career (“insert disk 17 of 30…”). Now, the freebie isn’t the media; it’s a neat CD/DVD case that I’ve named … wait for it … Steve.

AOL's analog pop-up ad proclaiming that they block pop-up adsInside the case appears a rather hostile advertisement. It’s a pop-up ad about pop-up ads.

When I opened the case, a small loose piece of paper flew up. Being colorful and mobile, it caught my eye. It claims AOL’s new software blocks pop-up ads.

Popup-blocking is a great feature in web-browsing software. Everybody hates pop-up ads; they’re the spam of the web. Blocking pop-up ads is a noble goal and it’s likely to gain AOL some customers.

But to advertise this feature, AOL has used what is essentially a pop-up ad! When I opened the case, this little ad flew up in the air. See this re-enactment. It’s an analog pop-up.


Tags:
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16

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