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[which_chick]

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.

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[which-chick.livejournal.com]

The DVD burner freaking r0xx0rs. It's firewire, so transfer to and from the laptop is reasonably speedy. It burns a 4-Gig dvd in about seven minutes, which is better than the built-in CD burner does for audio CDs. I haven't (as mentioned previously) done any actual dvd authoring with it, just burning of data disks, but it's still very spiffy.

As I mentioned, I also bumped the laptop RAM up to a gig, and I gotta say, that was also worth every freaking penny.

These little upgrades do mean that I don't get to buy a smaller, cuter laptop for another two years at a minimum... *sigh* Smaller, cuter laptops call to me. Their voices are hard to resist. Quick, somebody tie me to the damn mast!