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Dec. 4th, 2004 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI was going to have a post for you today about PennDOT, a sycamore tree that I drive past on the way to work, and what epicormic branching means for us all. Unfortunately, I didn't get the visual aid for that post because I was busy thinking about curried cauliflower and a rather thoughtful essay I read while killing time at work this morning. When I'd realized that the opportune moment for securing the visual aid had passed, I decided that it would be a not good idea to do a U-turn on a four-lane highway. Sorry.
Instead, you get this runner-up post, offered in the hopes that you'll find curried cauliflower and a thoughtful essay as interesting as I did.
Curried cauliflower:
Half a white onion, chopped fine
six big cloves garlic, sliced thin
about an inch fresh ginger root, peeled and minced
Sweat these ingredients with a knob of butter, over low-ish heat, until onions are translucent.
Add spices:
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon paprika
2 teaspoons turmeric
1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper*
eight green cardamom pods
Stir until fragrant, not terribly long.
Add 1 can (14 oz?) whole tomatoes with juice. Pour juice in pan, pick out each tomato, slice/chop it as you see fit.
Add some milk to make it properly runny, something over a cup, probably not more than two cups.
Add raw cauliflower florets until it looks good. This should be about a third of an average head of cauliflower.
Salt until you're happy with the level of saltiness.
Cook at a very low bubble until done.
Serve over rice unless you're doing the no-carb thing, you poor bastard.
*Red pepper is a time-delayed spice. It takes about ten minutes to get to full power. Do not add more until you're dead sure that this is not enough. This is a quite passable level of spice.
(Folks who also read afap will notice that the recipe has mutated again. My recipes tend to do that. This is what I made today. Other days, it might be different from this.)
The other thing that was taking up processing power on the drive home from work was this essay, which I thought interesting on several fronts.
The guy's got a point, first off, on how gay personal ads apply the phrase 'straight-acting'... and I absolutely rolled with laughter over his closing remarks on what constitutes 'gay-acting'. All of that is laid out nicely for your perusal, in quite tasty prose. In and of itself, that would be enough to merit a link... but wait, there's more!
It's a little-known fact that English teachers tend to go all oozy in their pants when students extend a reading and draw parallels to their own lives from it. That, they say, is the sign of effective writing and engaged reading. It impresses them even though they don't go around handing out gold stars to members of the general public who happen to be engaged in these sorts of activities. (I know this about English teachers because my mom was one until she retired last May.) Given sufficiently good material, I can be a pretty engaged reader. As it happens, this piece made the cut-off for 'sufficiently good' -- I kept turning it over and over in my head, trying to find the part about it that bothered me, until I did the extend-draw-parallel thing in the right direction and rung the cherries. Whoa. Yeah. Mote, meet beam. Fuck. FUCK. FUCK.
As that was pretty much the grande jeté of intuitive leaps, I realize that the studio audience may still be experiencing less-than-total-enlightenment. In the immortal words of Warner Wolf, Let's go to the videotape.
November 9, 2004, wherein I said...
How hard is it to make caramel sauce? It can't be that hard, can it?
Voice from the wings: You could BUY caramel sauce.
Not buying sauce. Weenies buy sauce. Real men make their sauce.
Voice from the wings: You're a girl.
And what does that have to do with my masculinity?
What it has to do with my masculinity is that I don't actually have any. No matter what I might think real men do, I am not one. Yes, there's some comedic purpose there... the premise is inherently funny and better comedians than I have given it a whirl ("Where's the fetus gonna gestate?"), but the underlying assumption, the underlying assumption that I appear to be holding is that guys do all the really nifty, cool stuff and that the stuff chicks do is less nifty and less cool. Hence the fuck-take above, there. A gold star isn't enough to pay me for this kind of shit.
He's got a point, though, our essayist does. "...[A]s far as I’m concerned, everything I do is gay. When I shop at Target, I’m spending my gay dollars in a gay way. When I fill up my car with gas I’m performing a gay act." So, y'know, extending that thar, everything I do is... feminine? Okay. That's good, right? It's gotta be at least as good as being manly, if there's any justice in the world.
So... I throw hay like a girl. I split firewood like a girl. I ride like a girl. Er. Bad examples. "... like a girl" has never been appended to any action in a way that indicated approval or admiration on the part of the speaker in my hearing. (Folks? Got some examples out there that would make me feel better about this? 'Cause I'm not feeling too damn skippy, here.) I don't do anything like a girl, damn it. I'm more competent than that. Do I wow people with my womanly grasp of BGP and cisco ACLs? No, wait, I drive my bulldozer in a feminine fashion... Ladylike? Chickly! (Is that even a word?)
*sigh*
Sometimes I worry that I'm not very good at being a chick even though I'm doing a pretty damn good job of being me.
Instead, you get this runner-up post, offered in the hopes that you'll find curried cauliflower and a thoughtful essay as interesting as I did.
Curried cauliflower:
Half a white onion, chopped fine
six big cloves garlic, sliced thin
about an inch fresh ginger root, peeled and minced
Sweat these ingredients with a knob of butter, over low-ish heat, until onions are translucent.
Add spices:
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon paprika
2 teaspoons turmeric
1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper*
eight green cardamom pods
Stir until fragrant, not terribly long.
Add 1 can (14 oz?) whole tomatoes with juice. Pour juice in pan, pick out each tomato, slice/chop it as you see fit.
Add some milk to make it properly runny, something over a cup, probably not more than two cups.
Add raw cauliflower florets until it looks good. This should be about a third of an average head of cauliflower.
Salt until you're happy with the level of saltiness.
Cook at a very low bubble until done.
Serve over rice unless you're doing the no-carb thing, you poor bastard.
*Red pepper is a time-delayed spice. It takes about ten minutes to get to full power. Do not add more until you're dead sure that this is not enough. This is a quite passable level of spice.
(Folks who also read afap will notice that the recipe has mutated again. My recipes tend to do that. This is what I made today. Other days, it might be different from this.)
The other thing that was taking up processing power on the drive home from work was this essay, which I thought interesting on several fronts.
The guy's got a point, first off, on how gay personal ads apply the phrase 'straight-acting'... and I absolutely rolled with laughter over his closing remarks on what constitutes 'gay-acting'. All of that is laid out nicely for your perusal, in quite tasty prose. In and of itself, that would be enough to merit a link... but wait, there's more!
It's a little-known fact that English teachers tend to go all oozy in their pants when students extend a reading and draw parallels to their own lives from it. That, they say, is the sign of effective writing and engaged reading. It impresses them even though they don't go around handing out gold stars to members of the general public who happen to be engaged in these sorts of activities. (I know this about English teachers because my mom was one until she retired last May.) Given sufficiently good material, I can be a pretty engaged reader. As it happens, this piece made the cut-off for 'sufficiently good' -- I kept turning it over and over in my head, trying to find the part about it that bothered me, until I did the extend-draw-parallel thing in the right direction and rung the cherries. Whoa. Yeah. Mote, meet beam. Fuck. FUCK. FUCK.
As that was pretty much the grande jeté of intuitive leaps, I realize that the studio audience may still be experiencing less-than-total-enlightenment. In the immortal words of Warner Wolf, Let's go to the videotape.
November 9, 2004, wherein I said...
How hard is it to make caramel sauce? It can't be that hard, can it?
Voice from the wings: You could BUY caramel sauce.
Not buying sauce. Weenies buy sauce. Real men make their sauce.
Voice from the wings: You're a girl.
And what does that have to do with my masculinity?
What it has to do with my masculinity is that I don't actually have any. No matter what I might think real men do, I am not one. Yes, there's some comedic purpose there... the premise is inherently funny and better comedians than I have given it a whirl ("Where's the fetus gonna gestate?"), but the underlying assumption, the underlying assumption that I appear to be holding is that guys do all the really nifty, cool stuff and that the stuff chicks do is less nifty and less cool. Hence the fuck-take above, there. A gold star isn't enough to pay me for this kind of shit.
He's got a point, though, our essayist does. "...[A]s far as I’m concerned, everything I do is gay. When I shop at Target, I’m spending my gay dollars in a gay way. When I fill up my car with gas I’m performing a gay act." So, y'know, extending that thar, everything I do is... feminine? Okay. That's good, right? It's gotta be at least as good as being manly, if there's any justice in the world.
So... I throw hay like a girl. I split firewood like a girl. I ride like a girl. Er. Bad examples. "... like a girl" has never been appended to any action in a way that indicated approval or admiration on the part of the speaker in my hearing. (Folks? Got some examples out there that would make me feel better about this? 'Cause I'm not feeling too damn skippy, here.) I don't do anything like a girl, damn it. I'm more competent than that. Do I wow people with my womanly grasp of BGP and cisco ACLs? No, wait, I drive my bulldozer in a feminine fashion... Ladylike? Chickly! (Is that even a word?)
*sigh*
Sometimes I worry that I'm not very good at being a chick even though I'm doing a pretty damn good job of being me.
