This is the Yum

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Plum ice cream. Jen and I made some last night using this recipe from The Perfect Scoop by way of Not Derby Pie. It is fantastic. Jen's parents had given us a small mountain of plums and we were not making our way through them fast enough, so I was trying to think of a way to use them. I chose wisely.

The ice cream was sweet and tart simultaneously, and because I substituted almond flavoring for the kirsch, it had the glorious finish of almonds. It is difficult to leave that container of ice cream alone. We had a couple of scoops last night while watching Date Night, which is a pretty darn hilarious movie, and a nice departure from most of the cinematic cliches of a marriage in peril. It felt a little more real, even as Steve Carrell and Tina Fey's characters are spun into absurd situations. It's a shame this movie didn't get more promotion than it did. I went into it not knowing anything more than what the movie poster told me.

Another culinary find yesterday was some toasted herbed almonds from Sunset. It's super simple and awesomely addictive. I didn't have the rosemary the recipe called for so I substituted the thyme I had left over from my shallots dish, black pepper, and smoked paprika. It's a great reward for such a small effort, something that makes cooking so rewarding for me.

Yep.

This last weekend we watched Secretariat with Jen's family. It's a Disney movie of the old school: sentimental, full of pithy pearls of wisdom, and a bit bland. It was all right. We followed it up with some Thai food at Busaba. I'm always on the lookout for good Thai food, and Busaba is a solid purveyor of it. It's not as good as my Colorado favorite (Wild Ginger in Littleton), but it is nearly as good and much closer. If you're in our neck of the woods and hankering for some Thai, I recommend it.

I heartily recommend Euclid Hall. It sounds like a college building, but it is a great and creative restaurant. It's in downtown Denver and has a variety of creative foods. I'll skip every single detail, but I do have to highlight some items. The spaetzle and poutine I had was fantastic, but the grilled cabbage was incredible. I can say that it was unlike anything I've ever had. They boiled it in a bag with juniper and other exotic seasonings before throwing on a grill and topping it with a currant vinaigrette. So incredible! Also the sourdough waffle ice cream sandwich was incredible. It is a large slab of salted toffee ice cream between two crisp sourdough waffles. Incredible!

Okay, I've fulfilled my blogging obligations. I'm going to go salivate now.

You Should Read This

I've been thinking a bit about webcomics recently, and I feel I need to give props to my favorites; the ones I feel deserve more attention.

• Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell. This is my favorite webcomic. The story is great, and the writing is truly excellent. The tale is about a girl attending a mysterious school of technology across the river from a forest populated by Faerie. The art starts out a little odd, but morphs through the course of the story into a terrific style that mixes some very funny stylized emotions to gorgeously rendered pages with fantastic layout. On top of that, it's kid friendly and regularly updates 3 days a week.
• Lackadaisy by Tracy Butler. The story doesn't necessarily have any elements of the fantastic. It's a historical tale of speakeasies and bootleggers in the 1920's. Everything in it could happen, except all the characters are cats. Other than seeing emotions differently (bristling tails, pinned back ears), the characters could be humans. The writing is great, but what stands out the most is the art. Tracy Butler is an incredibly gifted artist; probably the best out there. One thing that comes to mind is that she has drawings of her characters as humans. They are instantly recognizable as counterparts to the feline characters. Simply delicious art. I just wish she updated more often, but given the beauty and intricacy of her drawings, I totally understand.
• Platinum Grit by Trudy Cooper and Danny Murphy. The writing and pacing of this story is awesome. It is cinematic. It captures the characters' emotions and quirkiness so well. Unfortunately, it is currently on hiatus, and it didn't update often anyway. It would go months between updates, but it would be an entire issue on each update. It is so worth the wait, though. It's at a rather climactic point too, so read at your own risk. It is a bizarre story about odd people being drawn into a weird skein of plotting by people doing something I don't understand, and it is quite addicting. I've reread the series a couple of times. Be warned: It has some very racy bits.
• Freak Angels by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield. I've come to this one recently. The art has a very different style that I've come to like a lot. The writing is quite good, though sometimes I feel like I'm missing bits. It tells the story of 12 powerful psychics linked together somehow. They live in a post-apocalyptic flooded Whitechapel, England, holding together a survivor society and trying to discover what they are and what has happened to world around them. Warning: there's nudity and profanity and gore.
• Questionable Content by Jeph Jaques. I'm sort of surprised that I am drawn in so well by a comic about self-centered, sex-obsessed indie music fans, but gosh darn it the characters are quite engaging and (other than the sassy robot) pretty realistic. It's like a soap opera for music nerds, and it is addictive. It's got enough of the fantastic/improbable to give it a good flavor. The art starts out sort of 'meh', but gets excellent as the comic moves on.

These are my top favorites right now, but I'll also plug some other comics that are wonderful:

• Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew. Self-aware comic set in a D&D world. Funny, witty, and featuring delightful "stick art".
• xkcd by Randall Munroe. Extremely nerdy and the best, most expressive stick art (sans quotes) you'll see.
• Axe Cop by Ethan and Malachai Nicolle. Written largely by a 5-year-old and drawn by his 29-year-old brother, this comic vaults into the absurd. It is delightfully insane.
• Girl Genius by Kaja and Phil Foglio. Husband and wife team spin a long (and still ongoing) story of mad science and steampunk empires.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja by Chris Hastings. He's a doctor. He's a ninja. This comic uses some of the old pulp comic art style and is wonderfully absurd.
• Hark! A Vagrant! by Kate Beaton. Funny comics, usually historical. She's Canadian.

There's many more wonderful ones out there, and I'm afraid I won't be able to list them all here, so you should go to my links page and check out the ones I have listed there.

Orange and RED

Yesterday Jen and I carved pumpkins with Jen's sister Christine. We took Christine's car to the store, and on the way back I saw a little widget on the sun visor. It looked like a sun glasses holder, but I couldn't open it. I asked Christine, and she said it was. She pushed on the button I had tried earlier, and the holder popped open. I closed it and tried it again, but I couldn't open it. Christine reached over and easily opened it again to show me how. Consternated, I tried again, saying, "okay, I guess I wasn't pushing hard enough. I just didn't want to break it." No sooner had these words left my mouth that I pushed on the button hard and snapped it clean off. Yeeaah. Sorry about that.

Today we went with Christine to go see RED, which was a lot of fun. It's got a slew of great actors: Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Hellen Mirren, and John Malkovich. John Malkovich is great, doing what he does best: craaaaaaazy. Also, Mary Louise Parker plays the love interest in the movie, and I now have a small crush on her, in no small part that she doesn't play the dumb and screaming heroine. She's funny, resourceful, and strong. The movie isn't particularly mindblowing, but it is fun and well done. I can see owning this on DVD.

On the way back from the movie, I commented on the bright lights on a far away hill. Since last Christmas, I've noted while driving around our area, especially down 287, that there are these structures up on a hill in Broomfield that are really lit up. Since I first noticed them at Christmas, I assumed they were a Christmas display. However, I noticed that they stayed up long past Christmas. When I would drive in the daylight, I couldn't see anything that looked like it would have that kind of display. Finally I realized that the lights were coming from what looked like a couple of water towers, the large flat cylinder types. I didn't think they could possibly be water towers though, with that kind of lighting. I thought they might be fancy apartments or something to be so lit up at night. Maybe they were a church or offices? I've been wondering about this for a while.

Tonight, however, we seized the moment, and decided to go check them out. We wound our way through Broomfield and found our way to the structures ... which really were water towers. Unlike other water towers I've seen though, they had structures shaped sort of like the Star of Bethlehem attached at a distance to the outside. Those structures had lights on their insides facing the tanks. I'm not sure if this is an art installation or what. I didn't see anything on a quick Google search, so I may have to hit up Broomfield city government to find out.

While we were gawking, we also saw a red fox prowling the grounds. It was moving rather arthritically and seemed completely nonplussed by our presence or the giant light display next to it. It added one more note to a sort of surreal evening adventure.

On the food front, I made pesto this weekend. I had tried to transplant our basil last weekend so we could bring it in for the winter, but I only succeeded in killing it. Jen and I denuded the plant and I made a batch of super delicious pesto and put half of it away in the freezer for some winter day that needs a touch of summer.

We also went to lunch after church with Emmy Lou and David and some friends of theirs. We had some Lucky Pie pizza in Louisville, which was a pretty good Neapolitan-style pizza. We followed it up with Sweet Cow ice cream, which is literally next door. They have quite the selection of unusual flavors: honey maple grape nut, oatmeal cookie, popcorn, candy corn, and almond joy. They also have the standards, but I had to go with the candy corn, which was surprisingly delicious. The popcorn ice cream was not good, unless you like soggy popcorn. Jen told me some of her Midwest relatives would dunk their popcorn in milk, so I guess this would be the ice cream for them. So odd.

Now That's A Science Project

I don't normally just repost others' blog posts, but this is just so cool, inspirational and nifty that I have to. A father and son (with help from a few others) sent a video camera and an iPhone into outer space. Check it out here: http://www.gizmag.com/father-and-son-send-camera-to-outer-space/16650/.

I can hear Apple's ad now: "Space exploration? There's an app for that."

Should I Avoid Traffic?

I'm getting to the point in my commuting life where I am occasionally burned out and frazzled by my commute. A large part of this has come from trying to avoid traffic jams. I'll check Google Maps to see what traffic is doing. If I see a jam, I'll take a route that gets around it. However, this may take longer than actually just driving through the jam, especially because I've noticed that sometimes those jams clear up while I'm driving. Recently I took a long route to work because there was supposedly a bad jam on 36. It looked really bad when I was at home. I checked again when I got to the intersection of 36 and 287, and it had cleared up some, but still looked bad. Way into my detour, I checked again and the jam was gone.

Of course, other times I have been told traffic is clear only to get into a traffic jam. That's even more frustrating. So either way, I'm frustrated because traffic doesn't do what I'm expecting and I lose time because of that.

I'm thinking I should just forget about it. Just drive. If I hit a jam, I can try to react to it then. If I have escape routes planned for the places where a bad jam might hit, then I don't have to try to find a route on my phone while in traffic. This would at least spare me the added frustration of finding the opposite of what I expected and losing time to trying to circumvent it.

The Weekend in Food

I guess I needed to have some catharsis from the week. We had a deadline at week and I had worked some early mornings to late nights. Strangely, for me lying around does not do the trick for relaxing. I need to have some sort of business that makes me feel productive and responsible, even if it is not necessary. So I cook and bake. It's this wonderful world where if you follow the rules, usually you are rewarded with tasty victuals at the end. It has enough challenge where it almost becomes a game. You can play within the rules without following the instructions to the letter and end up with something cool or original, and there's enough challenge that you can end up with a disaster if you are not careful or skilled.

So, this weekend, to shake off the stress of the week, I cooked. I turned on NPR, went to my cooking zone in my head, and worked through the day. I started off with caramel rolls and dinner rolls. They share the same dough. I used my mom's cinnamon roll recipe and combined it with the caramel sauce from a friend at church. The dinner rolls were pretty standard. I don't know what it is about that dough, but they are fantastic rolls, if I do say so myself.

I also did some meatloaf, throwing in some extra garlic and fresh thyme, which made it outstanding. While that was cooking, I tried out an odd recipe from my most recent Sunset magazine. It's from their upcoming cookbook, so it looks like it is not on their website. The recipe is caramelized shallots and walnuts. It's an unusual combo that I had to try out. It turned out to be good. It's not mindblowing, nor will it be a staple, but it is different enough and feels somewhat fancy that it will probably find itself on the table again. I don't think I've ever cooked with shallots. I'm not sure I've ever had them before. With this recipe, though, I am sure to have them again.

Those dishes and some green beans were the menu for dinner when Jen's parents came over. They brought some wine and ice cream and we had a great evening. Combine that with some other chores, and I felt nicely productive, yet relaxed. The task of shaking off the week was accomplished.

We also found this great wine as part of the ingredients for the shallots. It's a Bartenura 2007 moscato. It's almost completely clear and a little fizzy. It's really good; not cloyingly sweet, but not very dry. I wanted to drink the entire bottle immediately.

Today we ate the caramel rolls and this evening I baked some cookies for a coworker's birthday. It has been a full culinary weekend. It feels good.

Mass Effect 2

I used some of my birthday money to get Mass Effect 2 for the XBox 360. It's been fun getting into the highly detailed world of this game again. So far though, I haven't had a lot of time, so I've just barely scratched the surface.

My first impressions are that the game is well done, and I'm stoked to be able to bring my character and her decisions from the first game. However, I do have some gripes. One is that as soon as you complete the objective for a mission, you are whisked back to your home base. On one mission I was given an optional submission. I came to a fork in the paths I could take. I decided to go one way and then come back and finish whatever was left undone. The path I chose ended up being the path to complete the main mission. Once I finished it, I could no longer go back to the area and finish the other mission. This is highly lame. Now that I know it is the case, I will be more careful, but it shouldn't be the case.

Another complaint is the controls can be rather frustrating. I imagine this will fade with time as I become more proficient, but one firefight recently left me hopping mad, literally. My character would jump up on top of the item I was trying to hide behind. When behind cover, my character would spasmodically pop out of cover and back in when I tried to fire my weapon, but without ever firing a shot. In other attempts on this firefight (and there were many), the character would also take cover on the wrong side of a crate or column and be crouching right in enemy fire.

Also frustrating is that targeting of enemies, especially by members of your squad can lead to a lot of wasted effort. If an enemy is obscured from my vision, but in clear view of the other squad members, I can target the enemies with my squad's powers, but the squad members end up firing their attacks at the point in the wall my character was staring at, rather than the enemy behind it that I highlighted. It also took a while to learn that sometimes my character won't even directly attack enemies when I tell her to if the enemies are partially obscured. After some screaming and jumping up and down, I finally got through that firefight, though I may have partially traumatized Jen with my reactions to the frustration.

I think I'm suffering a bit from overhyping of the game. Everyone's told me it is so freaking awesome. So far it has not wowed me, mainly due to the aforementioned issues. The story is compelling, and I'm just at the beginning, but it still has to completely win me over.