(no subject)

Breakfast today was quite tasty... I combined equal parts olive oil and butter in a frying pan, added about four cloves of garlic, sliced thin, and then I fried up half (sliced in skinny wedges) of a leftover baked acorn squash until crispy on two sides and hot through the middle. It was really, solidly good.

In other news, I now have a gig of RAM in my laptop, which I installed myself. Ph33r my l33t skillz! Or something. I find it difficult to get all that wound up about processes that take two minutes and only involve one actual tool (a teeny weeny screwdriver, of which I have a selection in a nifty folding organizer case). The laptop is now much perkier at rendering video, and that's all to the good. Probably it would start Premiere without shitting quite so badly, too... I dunno, haven't tried that yet. Am very happy with my lame-ass linear editor.

I also bought an external dvd burner for the laptop. I have not yet installed it, but simply looking at the box it came in is enough to give me the warm fuzzies all over. DVDs. I can burn DVDs. I can take my twenty-odd CDs of PoT episodes (three or four episodes per diskie, depending on encoding, and I have episodes 55-150) and make them into... A LOT FEWER DISCS. Downside: Will take freaking forever to put 'em all back on the hard drive. Much effort. However, there will be DVDs at the end of it. Better for storage.

Right. Enough looking. I'm gonna put the wash in the dryer and go install the DVD burner.

(no subject)

It's at times like these that I consider illiterate monks in the dark ages, copying manuscripts by hand in flickering organic light, their errors a record of manuscript provenance through the ages. The amount of information one person could hold, copy, spindle, fold, and mutilate was pretty damn minimal back then... but these days we're living in the future. I can hold, copy, spindle, fold, mutilate, distribute, and otherwise fondle vast quantities of information. Not only that, I can do it cheaply, easily, and quickly in a sodomy-free environment if that's my desire. Hair shirts and flagellation are definitely optional these days.

As you've probably guessed by now, the DVD burner is installed and it works. That went flawlessly, as long as I am willing to overlook the horrible new skin on PowerDVD -- it is probably supposed to look postmodern and sleek and shit. They got the shit part right, anyway. *sigh*

I've burnt a data disk thing and it works in my CD-RW/DVD-R drive, so I'm a happy camper indeed. DVD authoring will have to wait until later -- that's not high on my list. Besides, Roy knows how to do that and I can always just shove data in his general direction and make puppy dog eyes at him until he gives in.

(no subject)

This evening I did the dinner idea I mentioned on Monday night, the hot-peanut-vaguely-asian sauce thing with nice noodles and kale. It came out better than you probably think. I know it came out better than I thought it would. The sauce was mostly Kikkoman with a dash of mirin, some merlot (I didn't have any white wine), a little water to thin, four cloves of box garlic sliced thin and a smallish handful of crushed peanuts, salt not washed off. Also two pointy knife tips of ground red pepper, which was plenty. Crush the peanuts by putting them in a ziplock and rolling over them gently with a rolling pin.

I used potato starch noodles -- they're white when dry and get clear and kind of chewy when they're cooked. I got mine at the Han Ah Reum near not_your_real's digs when I was helping Sector R with his garage problem. Presumably they are a brand but the packet is in Hangul (script for Korean) which I have no hope of reading. Anyway, I like these clear, flavorless, nameless noodles for use with heavy-duty sauces. Good thing, too. It was a large packet what I bought and I'd hate to not like them.

The kale, I washed and chiffonaded. It's frilly so it never looks as aesthetic as collards. It also doesn't roll as tight. I like collards better. Probably I only eat kale so that I can be happy that it's collard week again next week. If every week were collard week, I wouldn't get to have that. I also sliced and cooked some mushrooms with the kale.

Assembly: Cook sauce. Cook noodles. Cook greens and mushrooms. Drain noodles and veggies. In large bowl, toss everything together. Eat.

Damn. Damn that was good. I had two bowls. It is only with considerable effort that I am not currently eating a third bowl. I'm going to have the third bowl for breakfast tomorrow, possibly with a scrambled egg on the side.