I wish I could keep you, Google Chrome. I'm a fan of your browsing capabilities and all, and I understand how convienient you are with all of my other Google toys. But I just can't see us staying in this relationship.
I spent a good two days importing bookmarks to you. And I was using you as my primary browser for a nice long while. But your functionality is crappy. You shut down if I try to use Hulu.com or YouTube.com - and YouTube is your company's own damn site. Your Flash player support is shoddy, your bookmarking exportation is nonexistent.
I almost feel as if I'm going back to the old girlfriend, the one who knows that I like to hang out on the couch Friday evenings and eat bad Chinese food, the one who isn't afraid to keep herself from wearing makeup. I feel like I'm trading up the martini-swilling, svelte, smooth chick for the one who loves her sweatpants. Yes, I've gone back to Firefox. She's a bit chunkier and a little less streamlined around the middle, but she has all the thing I remember that I like.
I'm a little sad, though, because Google's Chrome browser was many of the things that I like in a browser. When it was fast, it was FAST. But when it was slow, it was pokier than an armadillo on the highway wearing tar booties. Well, lesson learned. This computer is about to be overhauled yet again - the components changed out and the old system put into the Media Center computer out in the living room, so I can't say that I'm terribly disgusted with it as a system, but it's still a bit irritating.
I do wonder how Hulu.com is going to work out for me with the new system. We'll have to wait and see.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
I went to the Hive Mind Halloween last night - dressed as one half of Waldorf and Statler from the Muppet Show. Hilariously, the other half who'd agreed to do it was a little exhausted from the previous night's activities, so I wound up doing half of the surly heckler act by myself.
Believe me, terrible jokes continue to be terrible even if you're funny. At any rate, I realized that I've got a strong group of people who I know and completely respect in this city that do things that aren't considered normal. I found that the sheer volume of things I do have somehow connected me to this city in a lot of ways, and not least of them is the parties that I help create.
I'm off in a few minutes, wearing stinky clothes and scruffy jeans to go clean up from the party's aftermath with the rest of them - all of them straggling in, slightly hungover and less-than-thrilled to be blinking the daystar out of their eyes. But it's still fun to have those experiences...
Believe me, terrible jokes continue to be terrible even if you're funny. At any rate, I realized that I've got a strong group of people who I know and completely respect in this city that do things that aren't considered normal. I found that the sheer volume of things I do have somehow connected me to this city in a lot of ways, and not least of them is the parties that I help create.
I'm off in a few minutes, wearing stinky clothes and scruffy jeans to go clean up from the party's aftermath with the rest of them - all of them straggling in, slightly hungover and less-than-thrilled to be blinking the daystar out of their eyes. But it's still fun to have those experiences...
Thursday, October 23, 2008
First Post - Limoncello
I will fully admit, I love the flavor of lemons and limes. Galileo had a passion for the citrus fruit, as well. His daughter, in a nunnery, made him candied citron fruit all the time - from the moments of his first theories to the incarceration and trial.
One of the things I loved most about California (aside from the Northwesterner's awe of being able to buy liquor at the grocery store - with a Club Card) was the fruit. Whenever I make a run to Goleta to visit my sister and her family, I almost always want to capture the scent of Goleta in the air, bottle it, and bring it home. The unfortunate part of this is that I can't, but I do manage to find ripe lemons nearby.
The lemon orchards outside of Goleta are what saved them from the fires over the summer, actually. It's amazing, how often we convert farmland into tract housing without thinking of the problems inherent in doing so. When you convert land that had been used for years to grow crops into tinder-rich houses with pools, wood frames, and plenty of natural gas, you're looking at unnatural disasters waiting to happen. It is sad to see beautiful lime, lemon, avocado and olive orchards that have lived for decades in the foothills vanish in flame - sadder still to see and smell the lack of flowers, hear the dying of the honeybee, and wonder what lime honey will taste like in the future years.
I think I could be happy in a place where I could have land and grow lemons, limes, and other citrus. Avocadoes, too. There's something about the flavors of all three that almost always make it into my guacomole. Two big, black Haas avocadoes, a lime, heavy shakes of salt and pepper with fresh garlic over cilantro and I can almost imagine the Seattle skies parting and the soft Santa Anas coming in over my head.
Of course, the reality is, my three-year old nephew "helps" me make the guacomole, so we usually need to roll four into the mix. By the time he and his Crazy Uncle Brian finish making it, we both have green fingers and telltale rings around the mouth. We're lucky anyone else gets any at all.
But I digress. Limoncello, that Italian, sweet, lemony apertif drink served very cold, is what got me thinking. Actually, a handle of Everclear got me thinking "What the hell am I going to do with this?" I couldn't convert it into an alcohol lamp. I couldn't drink it (Everclear, for the uninitiated and those who weren't flaming idiots in college, is 95% pure ethanol). So what do you do?
Well, if your local produce shack has a sale on organic lemons, you buy thirty or so of them, find a jar that fills only 1/4 full when you dump your leftover vodka, Everclear, and flavored orange vodka in it, and settle down to watch Return of the King with a veggie peeler and a citrus juicer.
Limoncello is supposed to be drunk after fish or pizza, cold, with the bottle kept in the freezer. It's supposed to be an extremely cold, extremely fresh recipe. In theory, this is like the applejack of Italy, but I'm pretty sure the natural sweetness could be changed up from the cane sugar flavoring to lemon honey - if I could find fresh lemon honey up here. Unfortunately, the honeys I have access to (clover, fireweed, blueberry) don't lend themselves well to citrus flavors.
Here's the evening's recipe, done Irish-style*. I suppose I could try this with limes at some point, but using the limes, I'd need to double the number of fruit to get the same volume of peel.
25 large lemons, thick-skinned
1/3 750ml bottle Stolichinaya Orange, leftover from Burning Man
2/3 1.75L bottle Everclear, leftover from Burning Man
6 cups sugar
6 cups water
6 tbsp cane sugar syrup
2 one-gallon jars (approximate)
citrus juicer
very sharp veggie peeler
Carefully scrub and wash all the lemons in the sink, using a brush and hot water with a mild soapy rinse. Pour all the alcohol into a gallon jar with a lid. Using a very sharp veggie peeler, scrape the zest from the lemons into a large bowl. Put two-thirds of the zest** in with the alcohol in one of the jars, and one-third of the zest in the other.
In a largish pot, combine the sugar and the water and bring it to a boil. Keep it boiling for a good five minutes, then shove the whole thing into an ice bath in your sink to bring down the temperature. Pour the cooled mixture (it should still be fairly warm) into the jar with one-third of the zest in it. Cover, cool to room temperature, and seal.
Juice the lemons. Reserve most of the juice from the lemons in a pitcher. If you decided that making simple syrup was a good idea, now's a good time to pour two cups of the fresh lemon juice into a pitcher, add two cups of simple syrup, and top it off with six cups of water. Voila, you made lemonade. Adding whiskey to this concoction makes possibly the best whiskey lemonade I've had in a long time - and it's not bad when you're trying to get over a cold.
Irish-style refers to the way my great-grandmother made soda bread. She never measured any ingredients with spoons or cups - she just took handfuls of ingredients, mixed them together, and it usually came out all right. I mention this because I really don't have any idea how much everclear or vodka I put into the jar. My typical handling would measure it out precisely, but since neither peels nor booze are 100% accurate, I figure it's easier to just scrabble it down as "Fill the jar as full as you can with peels. Cover the zest with booze. Forget about it for a few months."
But the funny thing is, I did at one point get the measurements from my mother, who took each exact handful and measured it out from my great-grandmother. But the taste was simply not the same. There's an art to winging it, and my GG had it in the kitchen. I bring this up because according to every limoncello snob out in the world, I committed heresy and felonious assault upon the limoncello name - I added juice to the mulling jar.
Everyone said, "don't put the lemon juice in there". So I didn't. At first. And then my natural "don't waste it" inclination kicked in. Seriously? I'm not sure why everyone kvetches about pith and lemon juice and not using certain parts of the fruit. And the fact that I didn't have anywhere near enough liquid to cover the peels in the alcohol jar made the decision easier. I mean, most of the kahlua recipes I have tell me to use instant coffee and vanilla extract instead of ground beans and whole vanilla beans. Lemons are intensely sour because of the concentration of citric acid in their juice and the high vitamin C concentration in their peels. I love the flavor of pickled lemons - the uniquely Mediterranean flavoring where small lemons with thin peels are brined gently and then sliced thinly to give a completely different flavor. Since I don't have a canning setup and I also didn't particularly want to try naked lemon pickles (no zest) I went with Plan B for saving the lemon juice from the garbage - I juiced the whole lot and used it.
Again, if I'd had enough foresight I might have hunted down a recipe for lemon jelly or marmalade on the Internet - and if I had a canning setup for the same. I don't. So, now I have a large batch of premade lemonade concentrate in the fridge, complete with simple syrup added already, and a limoncello muddle jar with mostly peels and an intense amount of lemon juice added.
Another digression: recipe purists annoy the hell out of me precisely because a recipe purist will always be precise in their kitchen, but they'll never know the soul of a recipe because they're too afraid of fucking it up. It's like the guys who drive a Porsche back and forth to the grocery store without ever opening it up on a long stretch of highway and polish it with diapers every Sunday without fail. I try recipes using alcohol with experimentation because I know what alcohol does with fruit (and that amount of booze as well). It's the same way with people who can't stop poking at things.
The first lesson of winemaking and booze is to let the damn thing sit. You'll screw it up if you look at it before it's ready. Patience isn't the virtue per se - it's forgetfulness. Simply don't remember that you put the thing in the closet six months ago and you'll remember it the next time you need to hunt for your gloves - and about that time, you'll have to strain it and clear it to keep the aging process going.
So, there we go. It took me all the way through the final movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to peel, scrape, juice, clean, compost, and annihalate both the volume of lemons and the two giant bottles of booze I never touch and never would touch to convert them both into something I might actually drink as a summertime flavor and memory of California - handmade in the Seattle autumn.
Oh, sure, purists might complain about the lack of organic lemonyness from the tree, but the way I see it, I'd rather have two jars full of citrus, my apartment bathed in fresh lemon zest and the air reeking of that peeled citrus scent than have two giant bottles of booze that I still stare at every time I open up the bar and grumble.
Tomorrow, we're going to do the first task in getting the limoncello to drinkability - swirl it round in the jar for the first time, then leave it alone for a week.
One of the things I loved most about California (aside from the Northwesterner's awe of being able to buy liquor at the grocery store - with a Club Card) was the fruit. Whenever I make a run to Goleta to visit my sister and her family, I almost always want to capture the scent of Goleta in the air, bottle it, and bring it home. The unfortunate part of this is that I can't, but I do manage to find ripe lemons nearby.
The lemon orchards outside of Goleta are what saved them from the fires over the summer, actually. It's amazing, how often we convert farmland into tract housing without thinking of the problems inherent in doing so. When you convert land that had been used for years to grow crops into tinder-rich houses with pools, wood frames, and plenty of natural gas, you're looking at unnatural disasters waiting to happen. It is sad to see beautiful lime, lemon, avocado and olive orchards that have lived for decades in the foothills vanish in flame - sadder still to see and smell the lack of flowers, hear the dying of the honeybee, and wonder what lime honey will taste like in the future years.
I think I could be happy in a place where I could have land and grow lemons, limes, and other citrus. Avocadoes, too. There's something about the flavors of all three that almost always make it into my guacomole. Two big, black Haas avocadoes, a lime, heavy shakes of salt and pepper with fresh garlic over cilantro and I can almost imagine the Seattle skies parting and the soft Santa Anas coming in over my head.
Of course, the reality is, my three-year old nephew "helps" me make the guacomole, so we usually need to roll four into the mix. By the time he and his Crazy Uncle Brian finish making it, we both have green fingers and telltale rings around the mouth. We're lucky anyone else gets any at all.
But I digress. Limoncello, that Italian, sweet, lemony apertif drink served very cold, is what got me thinking. Actually, a handle of Everclear got me thinking "What the hell am I going to do with this?" I couldn't convert it into an alcohol lamp. I couldn't drink it (Everclear, for the uninitiated and those who weren't flaming idiots in college, is 95% pure ethanol). So what do you do?
Well, if your local produce shack has a sale on organic lemons, you buy thirty or so of them, find a jar that fills only 1/4 full when you dump your leftover vodka, Everclear, and flavored orange vodka in it, and settle down to watch Return of the King with a veggie peeler and a citrus juicer.
Limoncello is supposed to be drunk after fish or pizza, cold, with the bottle kept in the freezer. It's supposed to be an extremely cold, extremely fresh recipe. In theory, this is like the applejack of Italy, but I'm pretty sure the natural sweetness could be changed up from the cane sugar flavoring to lemon honey - if I could find fresh lemon honey up here. Unfortunately, the honeys I have access to (clover, fireweed, blueberry) don't lend themselves well to citrus flavors.
Here's the evening's recipe, done Irish-style*. I suppose I could try this with limes at some point, but using the limes, I'd need to double the number of fruit to get the same volume of peel.
25 large lemons, thick-skinned
1/3 750ml bottle Stolichinaya Orange, leftover from Burning Man
2/3 1.75L bottle Everclear, leftover from Burning Man
6 cups sugar
6 cups water
6 tbsp cane sugar syrup
2 one-gallon jars (approximate)
citrus juicer
very sharp veggie peeler
Carefully scrub and wash all the lemons in the sink, using a brush and hot water with a mild soapy rinse. Pour all the alcohol into a gallon jar with a lid. Using a very sharp veggie peeler, scrape the zest from the lemons into a large bowl. Put two-thirds of the zest** in with the alcohol in one of the jars, and one-third of the zest in the other.
In a largish pot, combine the sugar and the water and bring it to a boil. Keep it boiling for a good five minutes, then shove the whole thing into an ice bath in your sink to bring down the temperature. Pour the cooled mixture (it should still be fairly warm) into the jar with one-third of the zest in it. Cover, cool to room temperature, and seal.
Juice the lemons. Reserve most of the juice from the lemons in a pitcher. If you decided that making simple syrup was a good idea, now's a good time to pour two cups of the fresh lemon juice into a pitcher, add two cups of simple syrup, and top it off with six cups of water. Voila, you made lemonade. Adding whiskey to this concoction makes possibly the best whiskey lemonade I've had in a long time - and it's not bad when you're trying to get over a cold.
Irish-style refers to the way my great-grandmother made soda bread. She never measured any ingredients with spoons or cups - she just took handfuls of ingredients, mixed them together, and it usually came out all right. I mention this because I really don't have any idea how much everclear or vodka I put into the jar. My typical handling would measure it out precisely, but since neither peels nor booze are 100% accurate, I figure it's easier to just scrabble it down as "Fill the jar as full as you can with peels. Cover the zest with booze. Forget about it for a few months."
But the funny thing is, I did at one point get the measurements from my mother, who took each exact handful and measured it out from my great-grandmother. But the taste was simply not the same. There's an art to winging it, and my GG had it in the kitchen. I bring this up because according to every limoncello snob out in the world, I committed heresy and felonious assault upon the limoncello name - I added juice to the mulling jar.
Everyone said, "don't put the lemon juice in there". So I didn't. At first. And then my natural "don't waste it" inclination kicked in. Seriously? I'm not sure why everyone kvetches about pith and lemon juice and not using certain parts of the fruit. And the fact that I didn't have anywhere near enough liquid to cover the peels in the alcohol jar made the decision easier. I mean, most of the kahlua recipes I have tell me to use instant coffee and vanilla extract instead of ground beans and whole vanilla beans. Lemons are intensely sour because of the concentration of citric acid in their juice and the high vitamin C concentration in their peels. I love the flavor of pickled lemons - the uniquely Mediterranean flavoring where small lemons with thin peels are brined gently and then sliced thinly to give a completely different flavor. Since I don't have a canning setup and I also didn't particularly want to try naked lemon pickles (no zest) I went with Plan B for saving the lemon juice from the garbage - I juiced the whole lot and used it.
Again, if I'd had enough foresight I might have hunted down a recipe for lemon jelly or marmalade on the Internet - and if I had a canning setup for the same. I don't. So, now I have a large batch of premade lemonade concentrate in the fridge, complete with simple syrup added already, and a limoncello muddle jar with mostly peels and an intense amount of lemon juice added.
Another digression: recipe purists annoy the hell out of me precisely because a recipe purist will always be precise in their kitchen, but they'll never know the soul of a recipe because they're too afraid of fucking it up. It's like the guys who drive a Porsche back and forth to the grocery store without ever opening it up on a long stretch of highway and polish it with diapers every Sunday without fail. I try recipes using alcohol with experimentation because I know what alcohol does with fruit (and that amount of booze as well). It's the same way with people who can't stop poking at things.
The first lesson of winemaking and booze is to let the damn thing sit. You'll screw it up if you look at it before it's ready. Patience isn't the virtue per se - it's forgetfulness. Simply don't remember that you put the thing in the closet six months ago and you'll remember it the next time you need to hunt for your gloves - and about that time, you'll have to strain it and clear it to keep the aging process going.
So, there we go. It took me all the way through the final movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to peel, scrape, juice, clean, compost, and annihalate both the volume of lemons and the two giant bottles of booze I never touch and never would touch to convert them both into something I might actually drink as a summertime flavor and memory of California - handmade in the Seattle autumn.
Oh, sure, purists might complain about the lack of organic lemonyness from the tree, but the way I see it, I'd rather have two jars full of citrus, my apartment bathed in fresh lemon zest and the air reeking of that peeled citrus scent than have two giant bottles of booze that I still stare at every time I open up the bar and grumble.
Tomorrow, we're going to do the first task in getting the limoncello to drinkability - swirl it round in the jar for the first time, then leave it alone for a week.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)