I made this dish for dinner a couple of nights ago, using a recipe from a Christmas-themed cookbook by the Frugal Gourmet. I’d always wanted to make it, but I always forgot about the recipe when not in the Holiday season, because that’s the only time I tend to peruse this particular cookbook. (He gives the Straw and Hay recipe in honor of the donkey ridden by Mary to Bethlehem.) It’s called “Straw and Hay” (Paglia e Fieno in Italian) by virtue of the two colors of pasta involved. I served it with a crusty garlic bread from The Store, and we loved it, although The Wife and I agree that next time, I should add shrimp.
Since I’m sure this cookbook is long out print, here’s the recipe:
1/2 cup butter (1 stick) 1/4 cup olive oil 4 cloves minced garlic (or more, to taste — I used more) 1/2 pound spinach linguine 1/2 pound regular linguine 1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Salt, Pepper, and additional cheese to taste, when served
Cook the pasta according to directions. Drain (but do not rinse) and pour into large bowl.
While the pasta cooks: In a small frying pan, melt the butter, and then add in the olive oil. In this mixture saute the garlic for just a minute or so, until it’s barely browned and the mixture becomes deeply fragrant. Pour the garlic mixture over the pasta in the serving bowl and add the 1/3 cup grated Parmesan. Toss to combine, and serve hot.
I added a small pinch of kosher salt to my own serving, plus quite a lot of black pepper. Next time, I’ll add shrimp; what I suppose I’ll do is throw in some cooked shrimp to saute when I add the garlic, which should just bring the shrimp up to a serving temperature. Diced Italian sausage might also be a good addition to this.
What I loved most about the dish was how simple and easy it is. I usually take my time cooking recipes that are new to me, and even so, from the time I put the pot of water on the stove to boil to the time we sat down to eat, about twenty minutes elapsed. That rocks!
I’m officially declaring this Delurking Week here at Byzantium’s Shores. If you read but never comment (or rarely comment), go ahead and drop a line right here! I’d love to know who’s out there. I’ll be keeping this post at the top of the page for most of the week, so lurkers of the world, chime in!
According to AICN, Sony Pictures has failed to come to an agreement with the creative team behind the first three Spiderman movies on the making of a fourth, so the whole team is out and now they’re planning to reboot the franchise.
Yup, another reboot.
Look, some “reboots” are fine — Batman Begins and Casino Royale both brought fresh direction to their respective franchises. I suppose Star Trek did as well, although I’m less sold on that film than most. But geez, do we need to keep rebooting things? Rebooting seems to be less about creative direction now and more about marketing and money and so on. I know they don’t call it “show business” for nothing, but I’m tired of the whole “Keeping franchises alive by rebooting” craze.
For this flick, will we have to watch Peter Parker get bitten by the spider again? Watch him learn about his new powers again? Lose Uncle Ben again? From the look of things, Sony really really really wants a Spiderman flick in 2011 and will do whatever it takes to get one. Oh well.
I saw this quiz at SamuraiFrog‘s place. It’s a bit more explicit than the kind of thing I usually do, but…well, it’s a new year and all, so here goes.
1. You can press a button that will make any one person explode. Who would you blow up?
Rush Limbaugh. Preferably when he’s standing next to Sarah Palin and Joe Lieberman.
2. You can flip a switch that will wipe any band or musical artist out of existence. Which one will it be?
Wow, this isn’t nice. Ye Gods! I wouldn’t want to wipe anyone from existence, but there’s a guy who does parody songs for WGR, the local sports-talk station, whom everybody but me thinks is funny. I’d like to make him stop.
3. Who would you really like to just punch in the face?
Joe Lieberman.
4. What is your favorite cheese?
We just went from punching people and blowing people up to…cheese. Strange quiz, this.
And really, doesn’t the answer depend on what we’re doing with it? There are times when cheddar is called for, and others when anything other than mozzarella is an affront to God.
5. You can only have one kind of sandwich. Every sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your immediate disposal. What kind will you make?
Right now? Is this the last sandwich I’ll ever eat? OK, then: Cappicola on a toasted roll, with mayo, romaine lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and banana peppers.
If it’s just a sandwich right now, PB&J will be fine, please. With a big glass of milk.
6. You have the opportunity to sleep with the movie celebrity of your choice. We are talking no-strings-attached sex and it can only happen once. Who is the lucky celebrity of your choice?
OK: exploding people to food and now to sex? And why should I assume that of any random tryst with a celebrity of my choice, the celebrity is the one who’s lucky? I mean, my skills aren’t exactly…oh jeez, there’s just no way to finish this sentence well, is there? Zoe Saldana, then. (She’s on the brain because I watched Star Trek last week with the kid.)
7. You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. Who do you pick?
Natalie MacMaster, I guess. Wow, this is getting to be a creepy quiz.
8. Now that you’ve slept with two different people in a row, you seem to be having an excellent day because you just came across a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk. Holy shit, a hundred bucks! How are you gonna spend it?
These days, I probably go the boring route and use it to load up on some groceries in the freezer, or maybe I pick up a power tool of some sort that I don’t already have.
9. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go?
London.
10. Upon arrival to the aforementioned location, you get off the plane and discover another hundred-dollar bill. Shit! Now that you are in the new location, what are you gonna do?
Rent a car and drive around to see stuff. Eat some of that wonderful English food.
11. An angel appears out of Heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. It is…?
Captain Morgan.
12. Rufus appears out of nowhere with a time-traveling phone booth. You can go anytime in the PAST. What time are you traveling to and what are you going to do when you get there?
Dallas, November 22, 1963. Because I would just have to know.
13. You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place?
The Constitution of the United States.
14. You have been given the opportunity to create the half-hour TV show of your own design. What is it called and what’s the premise?
It’s called Stupid People Getting Kicked in the Ass by Nathan Fillion. The premise is inherent in the title.
15.What is your favorite curse word?
Dumbass!
16.One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren’t really doing anything, they’re just standing around your bed. What do you do?
I start screaming like a little girl. (As if you wouldn’t.)
17. Your house is on fire, holy shit! You have just enough time to run in there and grab ONE inanimate object. Don’t worry, your loved ones and pets have already made it out safely. So what’s the item?
My laptop bag, which will naturally contain the laptop, my external hard drive, and my Flash drives.
18. The Angel of Death has descended upon you. Fortunately, the Angel of Death is pretty cool and in a good mood, and it offers you a half-hour to do whatever you want before you bite it. Whatcha gonna do in that half-hour?
Kick Death in the junk because he’s been entirely too much of a pain in my ass the last five years.
19. You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What’s it gonna be?
Flight.
20. You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again?
Is anything different about the time? Do I get to change anything? Or just observe? I’d like to watch my own wedding again.
21.You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?
Telling The Daughter that her brother had died.
22. You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super-powers. But check out this cool shit… you can move to anywhere else in the world! Bitchin’! What country are you going to live in now?
Canada.
23. This question still counts, even for those of you who are under age. Check it out. You have been eternally banned from every single bar in the world except for ONE. Which one is it gonna be?
Hmmmm. I don’t get to bars much, and the ones I do go to have restaurants. I guess I’d want to be able to go to Danny’s for the soup.
24. Hopefully you didn’t mention this in the super-powers question…. If you did, then we’ll just expand on that. Check it out… Suddenly, you have gained the ability to FLOAT!!! Whose house are you going to float to first, and be like “Dude, check it out…I can FLOAT!”?
What’s the difference between “flight” and “floating”? Am I just bobbin’ away in the air? That sounds stupid.
25. The constant absorption of magical moonbeams mixed with the radioactive vegetables you consumed earlier has given you the ability to resurrect the dead famous-person of your choice. So which celebrity will you bring back to life?
Carl Sagan.
26. The Celestial Gates of Beyond have opened, much to your surprise because you didn’t think such a thing existed. Death appears. As it turns out, Death is actually a pretty cool entity, and happens to be in a fantastic mood. Death offers to return the friend/family-member/person, etc. of your choice to the living world. Who will you bring back?
This is so obvious, I won’t even say it.
27. What’s your theme song?
“We Have All the Time in the World”, Louis Armstrong.
Not sure about this quiz, to be honest. The questions seemed too weird for my tastes.
SamuraiFrog saw fit to bestow upon me a “Creative Blogger” award of some sort, regarding “Creative Blogging”. Hence the title. Wow, I can parse words! I is a reader!
Anyway, I tend to be awful about passing these kinds of things on, which I used to justify along the lines of “Crap, who has time for that?”, but which I’ve come to see a bit as “Hmmmm, it’s this kind of thing that used to make Blogistan really nifty, and maybe the passing of this kind of thing has helped make Blogistan a little less nifty.” I mean, Blogistan’s still cool and all, but it’s come in recent years to resemble a bit that favorite store of yours that was All Kinds of Awesome when it opened, but now that it’s been a few years, you still like to go in there, but maybe there’s a little more open floorspace where there used to be merchandise, and maybe there’s merchandise that doesn’t appeal to you so much since the store is trying to attract those young kids with all the money, and so on. Kind of like Old Navy. (Shut up. I loved Old Navy when it first showed up. They weren’t just Teeny Bopper heaven, they had stuff for people my size. And they had terrific overalls back in the day.)
Er…where was I? Oh yeah, the Creative Blogger award. I’m actually going to pass this one on, for once. You’re supposed to hand it off to seven bloggers, but before you do that, you’re supposed to reveal seven things about yourself. Of course, my problem with that last one is that after almost eight years of maintaining this blog, I’m almost out of stuff to “reveal” about myself, except for the stuff I have absolutely no intention of revealing. So I’m skipping that step.
But awarding to other bloggers? That, I can do!
:: Simple Tricks and Nonsense rocks because he and I are of pretty similar mind on an eerie degree of stuff, including our various pop culture remembrances. You gotta love a blogger who will put up a long post celebrating teevee shows like Tales of the Gold Monkey, that only lasted a single season twenty-eight years ago.
:: There are lots of comics-related blogs out there. Lots of ’em. Many are a lot of fun to read. Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep is one of my favorites. I love it when comics bloggers analyze entire issues of comics, sometimes panel by panel, illuminating the sheer goofiness of the whole thing.
:: Jayme Lynn Blaschke’s Gibberish is probably what my blog would read like if I were smarter. And into home-brewing. (And delusional enough to live in Texas.)
:: Lynn Sislo’s Violins and Starships has been a daily read of mine for…geez, I can’t even remember when she found me or vice versa. She’s curious about the world, smart, she likes SF, and she links all kinds of cool stuff.
:: Roger Green’s Ramblin’ with Roger is just that: a blog of rambling, and fine rambling it is, too. Lots of linkage and musing on life in this increasingly odd twenty-first century. And he posts every day!
:: Judith Heartsong has offered me a bunch of blogging awards over the years, more than a few of which I’ve failed to pass on, so here I return the favor. Her blog is almost entirely about being creative.
:: One of the most creative uses of a blog I’ve seen is my friend Robert Guttke’s blog devoted to Philip B. Dedrick, a teacher who made a deeply powerful impression upon him. Blogging-as-memorial is a wonderful thing. He’ll probably look askance at this type of award, but I do want to draw attention over there again.
Blogging and creativity should always walk together!
:: One of my favorite recurring memes in Calvin and Hobbes was the way Calvin would give voice to his dark imagination in the form of the construction of snowmen, often times snowmen acting in horrible, horrible ways. Some folks then build them in real life, These are hilarious.
Thanksgiving Day is a really nice day to go to a movie. We’ve seen both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace on T-giving in the last few years; this year, The Wife really wanted to see a movie, but there wasn’t anything playing that I was really jazzed about. (Couldn’t James Cameron have finished Avatar a few weeks earlier?) So, we settled on The Men Who Stare At Goats. It wasn’t a great movie, by any means; in fact, it was a little frustrating, because it’s fairly easy to see how they could have really elevated this material. But it’s a slick, well-made, well-acted, and pretty funny little film. We enjoyed it.
I don’t want to spoil too much about the story, but it interweaves flashbacks with “present day” stuff about a secret unit in the Army whose soldiers are trained in paranormal activities, like remote viewing, trying to pass through walls, and killing things simply by staring at them really intensely. (One of the test victims is a goat; hence the title.) Ewan McGregor is a reporter who gets turned on to this Army unit by a veteran; he files it away for future reference until he ends up in Kuwait in those hazy days post-Iraq War (or rather, during the War but post-“Mission Accomplished”), when he falls in with George Clooney, who is an actual member of the unit and who is on a mission to…well, that’s never really made clear, and frankly, it’s not that important anyway.
As McGregor journeys with Clooney across the Iraqi desert, Clooney fills him in on the history of the shadowy unit he serves. They call themselves “Jedi Knights”, which is an in-joke that goes all the way through the movie and really wears out its welcome. In all honesty, I have no idea why the writers decided to call them “Jedi”, because aside from that, there is no reference to Star Wars in the film, so the “Jedi” thing ends up being an odd kind of shorthand joke that we only laugh at because it sounds like we’re supposed to laugh at it. (It doesn’t really help the joke out to have Ewan McGregor say, “What’s a Jedi?”)
The film flashes by pretty quickly, and ultimately it’s a light and fluffy piece of entertainment. I do wish the script had pushed the material farther; there’s a lot of gold to be mined from the involvement of various world governments, including our own, in paranormal research and the attempted development of psi-weaponry during the Cold War era. The Men Who Stare at Goats is a perfectly fun little movie that seems to suggest, around its outlines, a much better movie to be made someday from similar material.
On New Year’s Eve, we decided to do something we’d never done before: we went to downtown Buffalo for the annual Ball Drop and the ringing in of the New Year. Now, we’ve watched the Ball Drop on teevee a lot over the years; here in Buffalo, Channel 7 (our ABC affiliate) airs split-screen coverage of Buffalo’s Ball Drop with the big one at Times Square, as part of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.
Now, I can’t lie — judging by what we’ve seen on teevee, I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about being downtown for our Ball Drop. For one thing, it involves being pack in with lots of people. For another, we’d been out very late the night before (for our TSO concert) and I’d then had to get up very early the next morning for a project at The Store, with the Ball Drop obviously keeping us up past midnight. But the biggest factor in my ambivalence was the fact that the teevee coverage always makes the Ball Drop look, well, lame. As in, “serving platter covered with Christmas lights being lowered out an office building window on a string and an extension cord” lame. So I figured I’d be freakishly tired while I froze my arse off standing around a huge crush of people waiting to watch a chintzy ball of lights come down a building before shoving my way through the crowds to get home. Luckily I was off the next day, but still.
Well, wouldn’t you know it — the Ball Drop was a terrific time.
Our parking strategy was a good starting point. Instead of trying to park close to the event, we decided to park in a lot down at the foot of Main Street, right outside the vacant-for-the-night HSBC Arena, and then ride the Metro Rail to the Ball Drop location. The Ball drops down the front face of the Electric Tower, a beautiful old building in downtown whose top tiers are always illuminated white except for the holiday season when they’re lit green, red, gold. This is what we saw as soon as we got off the Metro Rail train:
Swirling spotlights kept arcing over the building and into the air, sending those wonderful blue shafts of light into the winter sky. The snow was falling, but the flakes were big and fluffy, there was no breeze to speak of, and the temperature was just cold enough that we could stand there for a little over an hour without wanting to kill ourselves. (Still, a roving hot chocolate vendor or two wouldn’t have been a bad idea.)
Here’s the view from the vantage point we set up for ourselves:
The Ball itself was a lot nicer looking than what we see on teevee: a glittering globe, completely covered with lights that were swirling and spiraling and generally looking all, well, glittery. We got there at about 11:00, so we had to stand in one place for the remaining hour. But that hour went pretty quickly, because there was a lot of entertainment on the stage there, at the foot of the building: trivia contests, appearances by Buffalo Sabres, the Mayor receiving what I couldn’t discern to be either a cheer or a lusty boo, more trivia, lots of fun music, and then the final song of 2009. It was “Don’t Stop Believin'” by Journey, which is, frankly, a song I could live without hearing again for a good long time.
But anyway, the final minute of 2009 came at last, and during the last fifteen seconds of the year, the Ball began to descend:
And at last, we were into 2010!
More music, lots of cheering and kissing. The third song of 2010 the deejays of the night chose was “ABC” by the Jackson Five (at which every single black person around us started dancing). Then we followed some of the dispersing crowd out of the area, walking down Main Street until we got to the next Metro Rail station, where we caught the next train and rode it back down to our parking spot. It took us half as much time to get home from the Ball Drop as it had the night before from the TSO concert.
One final postscript. The Daughter loves stuff that either glows or lights up, so whenever we’re at a function that takes place at night, we’ll almost always have to go to one of the inevitable street vendors who are selling such wares — glow necklaces, glow sticks, light-up hats, et cetera — and get something. She chose this thing that was clearly a knock-off of a lightsaber, even though it’s incredibly chintzy and cheaply made, so much so that the guy could have hawked them for two bucks and made a profit. (Which is no doubt why he was hawking them for eight bucks each. I’m so easy.)
So The Kid came from from New Year’s with a toy lightsaber, whose siren call I managed to disregard for over a week. Yup, I made it a week.
Until last night, when I finally gave into the temptation.
