cahn

thistleingrey asked about food/recipes I liked!

I really, really like food. I also mostly see cooking as a means to getting yummy food, as opposed to D, who is exactly the opposite -- he enjoys baking for its own sake, but won't necessarily or particularly desire yummy dinner food (he is perfectly happy to eat sandwiches and pizza) -- and these days I tend to gravitate towards recipes that take very little time to put together.

My favorite cookbook in the world is A Flash in the Pan, which sadly is out of print. I love it because it features recipes that are a) relatively fast (although on a given weeknight I'm still likely to resort to pasta or something) and b) feature combinations of ingredients I wouldn't have thought to put together. (Maybe if I were more experienced with cooking I would think of it, but I'm not.) Here is a recipe from that book:

( Pear and Sage Pork Medallions )

One more. I adore lamb, and I adore sweet-savory recipes (as, uh, you can see). A long time ago, K sent me a really wonderful recipe for lamb (originally from the NYTimes). I haven't made this in a while. I need to.

( Lamb Tagine With Honey, Almonds and Apricots (Mrouzia) )

-lilypond, which is something like LaTeX for music writing. Like LaTeX, there is a distinct and rather annoying learning curve, and once you get past that you're like "wow this rocks like crazy!" It would take me a lot to get back to a GUI-based score program. (Is there a way for me to post pdf's in LJ so I can show off my shiny new SAA arrangement of "Lo how a rose"? Thing is, I get asked to do these things for church but I can't find any arrangements I want, and it turns out to be easier for me just to write my own darn arrangement...)

-Audacity, which I've been using for a while to record lessons but which I just used to record myself singing the three-part arrangement I made in lilypond to see whether it actually worked or not (I think it does).

-Trader Joe's truffle cheese and goat-cheese with honey. I so totally thought they were gimmicky, but since I had to get refreshments for a recital... Turns out they are both my Platonic Cheese! (How can I have two platonic cheeses? Shut up!)

Things I have loved madly recently:

-Pandora. A fairly good selection, actually, of Renaissance choral stuff (yay!), German art songs, and obscure Broadway; and a terrible selection of violin soloists.

-GIMP. Who needs Photoshop?

-Liquid Rescale for GIMP. Wow. Utter coolness.

-LaTeX. Given the necessary evil of proposal-writing, at least one can do it in a relatively painless way.

-Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. Really simple recipes that taste delicious-- see below; also, an incredibly wonderful sauce for salmon that involves lightly browning garlic in olive oil and adding dried tarragon and sherry vinegar to the warm garlicly olive oil (basically, to taste, but let's say 2 parts oil to 1 part vinegar... if anyone cares I'll try to look up the exact quantities tonight). I have no idea why this is so good-- it didn't sound that interesting, but it's spectacular!

-Frozen raw shrimp (also from Bittman). I have always been scared of cooking shrimp. Now I do not know why. Thaw 1 lb of Trader Joe raw shrimp (he recommends shelled, which I used) in the refrigerator overnight and fry it in a medium-size frying pan under medium heat with 1/8 cup olive oil, a tsp cumin, a tsp paprika, salt to taste, pepper, until pink (and the backs are clearly cooked), turning once, don't overcook too much (though you have some leeway). It is better than ANY restaurant shrimp I have EVER had (though to be fair I don't think I usually order shrimp at expensive restaurants).

-Courtesy of xkcd, Federal Reserve Skateboard: A Short Story. Complete with totally awesome surprise ending! The absolute best thing (perhaps only good thing) to come out of the current financial crisis.

-Sarah Rees Brennan's YA short story "An Old-Fashioned Unicorn's Guide to Courtship." It is no big secret that I read anything mistful writes. I'd probably read her laundry list if she decided to post it, because I have confidence that she'd make it hilarious. YMMV; my sense of humor lines up fairly precisely with what she writes.

"Courtship" has the familiar Brennan traits of general hilarity ("The Dowager Duchess Whyte had skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony and a nose as red as blood, probably because of the secret drinking."), the minor-character-stereotypes-taken-to-hysterical-absurdity, the fantasy romance that's actually kind of sort of based on something, and while I'm laughing and not quite paying attention, I feel an odd shiver and realize she has happily been cutting up my heart into pieces. This, being a short story, didn't really have time to cut it up very much... maybe just a couple of nicks. You couldn't make someone human and let them be hurt.

(Also, an accountant named Miles! Who likes making plans! Was that an intentional reference?)