Bread Soup

Also known as, “I made a big batch of bread that came out funny.  Now what shall I do?”  The answer, of course, is make a sweet & spicy stew with bread as thickener.

  • about half a loaf of brown bread
  • 2 onions
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 3 cups black beans
  • 2 sweet potatoes
  • probably about a quart of chicken stock
  • brown sugar, paprika, chili powder, and salt & pepper to taste

As usual with these crock-pot recipes, it’s dead easy.  Soak the beans in water overnight, throw in the pot.  Chop the onions, peel the garlic, peel & chop the sweet potato, throw in the pot.  Crumble bread & throw in the pot.  Throw everything else in the pot.  Add not quite enough chicken stock to cover everything.  Let it rip!

Result: success.

The Difference Engine

“A classic – something everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” – Mark Twain

And that’s about all I have to say about The Difference Engine. William Gibson was supposed to have almost single-handedly launched the steampunk genre with this book (though some people would make arguments about Morlock Night).  The Difference Engine is for steampunk what The Lord of the Rings is for high fantasy.

But while Tolkien is more awesome than any of his imitators, Gibson feels like he’s dealing in clichés, even if he did invent them.  There’s the plucky young woman who defies Victorian gender mores, for one.  And the hotshot computer engineer.  I quit around page 30 when I found out that in this alternate history – gasp! – Texas is its own country.

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Not going to be coming out with another review for a while.  I’m onto Anathem now, and if you know anything about Neal Stephenson … this is going to take me a long time.

Google is getting creepily good at doing its job

It started with the Google Instant.  Gone are the days when you actually have to hit “return” to go look at your search results; now Google will guess what you were trying to look for and give you your answer before you’ve even finished typing your query.  With an eerie degree of accuracy.  It’s only messed up a couple of times since Instant went online – usually it can tell what I want after three or four letters, even if I’ve misspelled the word.

Just check out this astonishing marvel of technology:

What?  What?  How does it know I want to look at the five-day weather forecast for St. Paul?  All I did was type “wea”!  And that sidebar there informs me that with a few simple keystrokes, I could have information access to “everything” or “more.”  What’s more than everything?

And I have just realized that I haven’t had to sift through pages of irrelevant results since 2005.

Screw the flying cars.  We live inside one of those SF movies I saw in the ’90s.

Iron Angel

Before turning novelist, Alan Campbell worked on developing Grand Theft: Auto for a living, and it shows.  Not that this is a bad thing; I quite liked Iron Angel.

Campbell’s debut Deepgate Codex trilogy (Iron Angel being the middle book) is punk something or other.  Steampunk?  Gothic punk?  Dieselpunk?  None of these categories quite fits.  It’s the story of a deep, richly imagined world where life sucks.  For some deific political reason that is not fully explained (yet), the goddess of Heaven has closed her gates on the world.  If you’re dead, you’re screwed, because everybody is going to Hell now.  If you’re alive, you’re screwed anyway, because Hell is planning to stage an invasion.  Iron Angel describes the movements of the ordinary and some not-so-ordinary people who have gotten caught in the crossfire.

Campbell’s descriptive power reminds one of the work of Mervyn Peake and Clive Barker.  And if you know who those two writers are, then you should be very, very afraid of this book.  Like the bit with Cinderbark Wood.  Good Lord.  There’s a lot of brutality and you might say that humanity is in a bit of a tight spot, but it’s not all doom and gloom.  Amidst all the villains, there are some characters who are quite definitely good people, and they know how to fight.  Recommended.

The Congee Incident

Back in August, I went out to a Chinese restaurant with a couple of old friends from Carleton.  I had just moved into the Twin Cities prior to starting grad school and I was living in this temporary housing thingie like a cross between a motel and a dorm room.  No money and no refrigerator space equals peanut butter and jelly and canned green beans.  Anyway, I figured I could scrounge together enough to go to this restaurant and see my friends.

I ordered congee.  It was mind-blowing.  In retrospect, this may have been because it was the most flavorful thing I had eaten in a couple of weeks.  It’s like this savory rice with chewy bits in it and flavored with ginger.  We were having a ball, I was slurping away, Wing was telling me all about how congee is like the chicken soup of the Chinese community – it’s what everyone eats when they’ve got the flu.  And ever since then it has been my mission to recreate this wonderful congee.

I knew from Wing that the basic principle is that you put some rice in more water than you usually use and then you boil it forever.  And I knew from the restaurant menu that there was pickled egg and ginger in it.  So I took some rice:

Kelp and pickled eggs from the Asian foods market near where I live:

I cut those up and threw them in the pot.

Can o’ mushrooms from the Rainbow Foods.  Also thrown into the pot.

Ginger, salt & pepper, chicken stock, garlic, teriyaki sauce.

I put it all in the Crock Pot and let it rip.  A few hours later, what do my wondering eyes behold?

OH GOD.  This dish is going to be legendary.  That was one of the most godawful disgusting things I have ever created.  This ranks up there with the Kohlrabi in the Soup Incident and the Chinese Five Spices Incident.  It smelled like low tide and the texture was like mucus.  After I threw it in the trash I had to take the trash out because it was stinking up the whole kitchen.

Next time, I am going to look up a recipe for congee before I begin.

 

***Update***

I went and looked up an actual recipe for congee.  Turns out you’re supposed to add one pickled duck’s egg, not the whole six-pack.  That may have had something to do with it.

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Extra Goodies

There’s not much recipe to this one; it’s just a modded version of the chocolate chip cookies on the back of the chocolate chip package.  I upped the amount of vanilla, added a bit of coconut and toffee bits because I had them on hand, added some allspice and clove, and replaced 1 cup of the flour with whole wheat flour.  Results of the experiment:

•  Turns out it’s okay to make cookie dough the day before and refrigerate it overnight.  I wasn’t sure about this since it the recipe involved baking soda.

•  You can’t taste the coconut.  It didn’t do any harm, but why waste your coconut?

•  The toffee bits melted, which tastes nice, but I wanted crunchy bits.  I won’t bother with these in the future, either.

•  The allspice and clove: yes, please!

•  The whole wheat flour: nice nutty flavor.