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vom_marloweSorry for the massive radio silence. My terminally ill relative is now in hospice and we're reaching the end. I'll spare everyone the grim details, but that is chiefly why. Apologies. It's been very hard.
I'm still writing the management notes, but uh, I keep saving the drafts on my work computer and then forgetting to post them. I suck. But I will get them done!eleventyone I promise.
In other news, I did move this past summer, so if you were planning to send me a card, you may have the wrongity address. If you need the new one, let me know and I will PM/Email you.
New Tricks
I have been not so much watching this as gulping it down in leaps and bounds. I've seen every episode I can get my hands on, up through season 8. For those who have not seen it.... It's a British modern police mystery show. It's about a female cop, Sandra Pullman (who is so fucking hot I cannot stand it--she's big, blond, tough, cynical, and beautiful) who gets put in charge of a new team made up of retired ex-coppers, all old men, who then solve old unsolved crimes. The premise of the show is that Sandra uses new cop methods (DNA, forensics, modern procedures) and the old geezers use old methods (trickery, bribery, the odd bit of blackmail). They learn from each other.
I loff it like a loving thing.
Most of the show, as with most good mysteries, is about character.
There's Sandra, who has given up her life to be a copper, a beautiful woman in a man's world where they expect her to serve the coffee and get patted on the butt. She's very alone. I love Sandra like burning. She is also a very dominant woman--in the pilot, there's a small brawl and you get to see Sandra punch several people out.
There's Gerry, who loves good food, gambling, and the pleasures of the earth. He has three ex-wives and many daughters--he's a bit of a chauvinist and most of the force assume he's bent as a corkscrew, but he has more morals than most people, even if he sometimes screws up. A bit Yohji-ish at times, if Yohji was paunchy and balding slightly. He's still friends with all his ex-wives and they all have dinner together, visit him in flocks at his bedside when he's in hospital, and generally make his life....interesting. When his loved ones get ill, he cooks at them. (I can totally relate to this, as I have a strong urge to make casseroles, pies, or soup at people.)
There's Brian Lane, who is neurotic as a shaved weasel and probably has more brainpower than the average building full of supercomputers. He reminds me a little of the Pookster, actually. He's twitchy and sensitive, very smart, and kind of crazy. But he is also the empathetic of them and has a way with witnesses that sometimes makes me cry. He's so gentle and kind, it's hard to watch. He can be tough, too, but he feels very deeply. He is a recovering alcoholic and is deeply devoted to his wife, Esther, who takes good care of him, and to his dogs, first Scruffy and then Scampi.
Finally, there's Jack Halford, who is Sandra's old boss. He's the hard hitting Sam Vimes-ish character. Brilliant at understanding how people work, he can get results when everyone else fails. He knows people from way back and he's quite tough. He worked in internal affairs, investigating bent coppers for a while. One his mottos from the pilot is: do you want to get results or do you want to look nice. Jack is also a drinker and is deeply devoted to his dead wife. He spends a certain amount of time sitting at her grave (in their back garden) drinking and talking to her. She (silently) often provides the insights he needs.
Each episode focuses a bit on an unsolved crime and then a bit about the lives of each of the characters. The acting is spectacular and they shoot at some great locations. I was thrilled to notice a bunch of the places I saw when I was in London. I squeak every now and again and go, I've been there! Hey, I've seen that pub! Hey, that's near the place we went for lunch! Hey, look, I've been to that tube station!
Friday Night Lights
I don't remember where I got the idea to watch this one. It may have been rec'd to me. In any case.
The show is about a football coach in a small Texas town. For anyone who has been exposed to Southern sports culture, you'll know that the coach is both the prince of the town and its scapegoat, all at once. Sports is king--whether the coach lives or dies depends on the team's actions that Friday night under the lights.
I found the show both engrossing and painful. The show did an excellent job capturing the strata of class, the difficulty of escaping a one-industry town, the powerlessness against many outside factors, the booze, the religion, the hard living, the scrabbling, the squabling, the pettiness of much of it, the sheer cost (to wives, mothers, best friends, everyone else) of making sports the focus of everything and the ephemeral nature of the football win.
Apparently, they did some neat things with the scripts--allowing actors to decide on their own lines and so on. The acting is spectacular. And the portrayal of the mania of sports-love was spot-on.
FNL is a bit more drama and heartache than I'm up for right now, but I enjoyed what I did watch.
Cooks' Illustrated Betrays Me
I got up early to make banoffee pie, the British dessert with caramel and bananas and espresso flavored whipped cream, to take to work's holiday potluck. I used a Cook's Illustrated recipe and the whole damn recipe sucked eggs. I am extremely pouty about it. How can you go wrong with caramel and whipping cream?!?! HOW??!!!
And yet.
It basically glued my teeth together into a fused mass.
(The traditional recipe calls for boiling a can of sweetened condensed milk for several hours. I am down with that, as it is a Traditional Food of My People, although we used to skip the boiling water and just stick the can on the gas and do it that way. Cook's Illustrated said that it wasn't safe, because sometimes the cans explode. Wimps. If you're not willing to deal with exploding food, should you really be in the kitchen say I. Well, OK. Maybe I just have been warped by my upbringing. Ahem.)
Anyway. They created a different method, or so they claimed. Softening Kraft caramels in water does not, in fact, make an acceptable substitute. It makes an easy to burn sticky hot dire concoction that seals teeth and/or nuclear devices, like a gentle brown liquid duct tape. 26 caramels, 1/4 cup water, heated. It's nothing like the smooth and creamy caramelized sweetened condensed milk.
And even though I used powdered Vivano for the instant coffee and Shatto best quality whipping cream, I barely had enough to cover my pie.
They also suggested putting vodka in the pie crust.
FREAKS.
Ahem.
I'll stomp off and be French elsewhere for a bit until I can calm down and talk without using REALLY APPROPRIATE CAPS NOW I THINK ABOUT IT WHO PUTS VODKA IN PIE CRUST AND IT WASN'T EVEN A POUND OF BUTTER WHAT ARE KIDS THESE DAYS DOING THIS IS THE FALL OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT.
Um.
Yes.
Anyway.
I guess I have views about pie crust.
In any case. Normally I like their thorough and scientific approach to cooking, but this time it failed. The pie was a mess from start to finish. The caramel was too sticky and so hard that the bananas sat on it like oil and water and got kind of weird. The whipping cream turned grayish from the coffee and didn't set up the way they said it would, despite me freezing it as suggested. (I don't know.) I didn't even bother with the vodka pie crust because seriously, no. I'm not putting vodka in my pie crust and then baking it, and you don't need to do all the smooth pebbles in the pie just to get it not to puff up either. Gently pricking with forks works better.
Ahem.
I'm still writing the management notes, but uh, I keep saving the drafts on my work computer and then forgetting to post them. I suck. But I will get them done!eleventyone I promise.
In other news, I did move this past summer, so if you were planning to send me a card, you may have the wrongity address. If you need the new one, let me know and I will PM/Email you.
New Tricks
I have been not so much watching this as gulping it down in leaps and bounds. I've seen every episode I can get my hands on, up through season 8. For those who have not seen it.... It's a British modern police mystery show. It's about a female cop, Sandra Pullman (who is so fucking hot I cannot stand it--she's big, blond, tough, cynical, and beautiful) who gets put in charge of a new team made up of retired ex-coppers, all old men, who then solve old unsolved crimes. The premise of the show is that Sandra uses new cop methods (DNA, forensics, modern procedures) and the old geezers use old methods (trickery, bribery, the odd bit of blackmail). They learn from each other.
I loff it like a loving thing.
Most of the show, as with most good mysteries, is about character.
There's Sandra, who has given up her life to be a copper, a beautiful woman in a man's world where they expect her to serve the coffee and get patted on the butt. She's very alone. I love Sandra like burning. She is also a very dominant woman--in the pilot, there's a small brawl and you get to see Sandra punch several people out.
There's Gerry, who loves good food, gambling, and the pleasures of the earth. He has three ex-wives and many daughters--he's a bit of a chauvinist and most of the force assume he's bent as a corkscrew, but he has more morals than most people, even if he sometimes screws up. A bit Yohji-ish at times, if Yohji was paunchy and balding slightly. He's still friends with all his ex-wives and they all have dinner together, visit him in flocks at his bedside when he's in hospital, and generally make his life....interesting. When his loved ones get ill, he cooks at them. (I can totally relate to this, as I have a strong urge to make casseroles, pies, or soup at people.)
There's Brian Lane, who is neurotic as a shaved weasel and probably has more brainpower than the average building full of supercomputers. He reminds me a little of the Pookster, actually. He's twitchy and sensitive, very smart, and kind of crazy. But he is also the empathetic of them and has a way with witnesses that sometimes makes me cry. He's so gentle and kind, it's hard to watch. He can be tough, too, but he feels very deeply. He is a recovering alcoholic and is deeply devoted to his wife, Esther, who takes good care of him, and to his dogs, first Scruffy and then Scampi.
Finally, there's Jack Halford, who is Sandra's old boss. He's the hard hitting Sam Vimes-ish character. Brilliant at understanding how people work, he can get results when everyone else fails. He knows people from way back and he's quite tough. He worked in internal affairs, investigating bent coppers for a while. One his mottos from the pilot is: do you want to get results or do you want to look nice. Jack is also a drinker and is deeply devoted to his dead wife. He spends a certain amount of time sitting at her grave (in their back garden) drinking and talking to her. She (silently) often provides the insights he needs.
Each episode focuses a bit on an unsolved crime and then a bit about the lives of each of the characters. The acting is spectacular and they shoot at some great locations. I was thrilled to notice a bunch of the places I saw when I was in London. I squeak every now and again and go, I've been there! Hey, I've seen that pub! Hey, that's near the place we went for lunch! Hey, look, I've been to that tube station!
Friday Night Lights
I don't remember where I got the idea to watch this one. It may have been rec'd to me. In any case.
The show is about a football coach in a small Texas town. For anyone who has been exposed to Southern sports culture, you'll know that the coach is both the prince of the town and its scapegoat, all at once. Sports is king--whether the coach lives or dies depends on the team's actions that Friday night under the lights.
I found the show both engrossing and painful. The show did an excellent job capturing the strata of class, the difficulty of escaping a one-industry town, the powerlessness against many outside factors, the booze, the religion, the hard living, the scrabbling, the squabling, the pettiness of much of it, the sheer cost (to wives, mothers, best friends, everyone else) of making sports the focus of everything and the ephemeral nature of the football win.
Apparently, they did some neat things with the scripts--allowing actors to decide on their own lines and so on. The acting is spectacular. And the portrayal of the mania of sports-love was spot-on.
FNL is a bit more drama and heartache than I'm up for right now, but I enjoyed what I did watch.
Cooks' Illustrated Betrays Me
I got up early to make banoffee pie, the British dessert with caramel and bananas and espresso flavored whipped cream, to take to work's holiday potluck. I used a Cook's Illustrated recipe and the whole damn recipe sucked eggs. I am extremely pouty about it. How can you go wrong with caramel and whipping cream?!?! HOW??!!!
And yet.
It basically glued my teeth together into a fused mass.
(The traditional recipe calls for boiling a can of sweetened condensed milk for several hours. I am down with that, as it is a Traditional Food of My People, although we used to skip the boiling water and just stick the can on the gas and do it that way. Cook's Illustrated said that it wasn't safe, because sometimes the cans explode. Wimps. If you're not willing to deal with exploding food, should you really be in the kitchen say I. Well, OK. Maybe I just have been warped by my upbringing. Ahem.)
Anyway. They created a different method, or so they claimed. Softening Kraft caramels in water does not, in fact, make an acceptable substitute. It makes an easy to burn sticky hot dire concoction that seals teeth and/or nuclear devices, like a gentle brown liquid duct tape. 26 caramels, 1/4 cup water, heated. It's nothing like the smooth and creamy caramelized sweetened condensed milk.
And even though I used powdered Vivano for the instant coffee and Shatto best quality whipping cream, I barely had enough to cover my pie.
They also suggested putting vodka in the pie crust.
FREAKS.
Ahem.
I'll stomp off and be French elsewhere for a bit until I can calm down and talk without using REALLY APPROPRIATE CAPS NOW I THINK ABOUT IT WHO PUTS VODKA IN PIE CRUST AND IT WASN'T EVEN A POUND OF BUTTER WHAT ARE KIDS THESE DAYS DOING THIS IS THE FALL OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT.
Um.
Yes.
Anyway.
I guess I have views about pie crust.
In any case. Normally I like their thorough and scientific approach to cooking, but this time it failed. The pie was a mess from start to finish. The caramel was too sticky and so hard that the bananas sat on it like oil and water and got kind of weird. The whipping cream turned grayish from the coffee and didn't set up the way they said it would, despite me freezing it as suggested. (I don't know.) I didn't even bother with the vodka pie crust because seriously, no. I'm not putting vodka in my pie crust and then baking it, and you don't need to do all the smooth pebbles in the pie just to get it not to puff up either. Gently pricking with forks works better.
Ahem.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-16 06:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-16 06:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-16 06:50 pm (UTC)*hugs*
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-16 06:53 pm (UTC)I cannot vouch personally for the results, but the reasoning seems sound-ish.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-17 12:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-17 05:36 pm (UTC)My mom sometimes used to make pudding by cooking the can in boiling water. I salute your commitment to culinary explosions.