I am lazy. I found a binary.

iTunesFS.

and a menu

• stir fried kohlrabi, leaves, and yu choy – vegetarian sauce (grrrrr friends)
• radish masala parathas! and beef sukka
• mesclun salad with teriyaki tofu and timbale of coconut rice
• southern-style bacony mustard and radish greens; cornbread
• peanut-crusted trout over sautéed swiss chard from Jacques Pépin

CSA week 2

Clockwise from berries:

• ‘Early glow’ strawberries
• Curly mustard greens
• Baby lettuce (red romaine, oak leaf, green leaf, etc.)
• Baby mesclun (spinach, mizuna, bok choy, arugula, purple mustard, etc.)
• Two more cabbageturnips!
• Cilantro
• Swiss chard
• Tomatoes (bought separately, different farm)
• White radishes
• Orange and purple carrots

tamales de acelgas

This dish tamales de acelgas, wrapped in swiss chard, called out to me from the chapter on tamales in my primary mexican cookbook, Diana Kennedy’s Art of Mexican Cooking. The pork filling combines sweet, sour, salty, spicy, and umami in a marvelous balance that is definitely Mexican, but as she notes, hints of the middle east (raisins! almonds!) but I would say also of southeast asia (one can imagine adding lemongrass, some ginger and lime; switching the pasillas for bird chiles, and passing it off as Malaysian).

I had made the filling before, but we were impatient, and ended up filling masa balls and deep frying them (yum). This time, however, I blanched the swiss chard, spread it with the mixed dough (fresh masa, btw, from a Pilsen tortilla factory), and carefully rolled up the leaves around it and set them in the steamer for a very long time. I am certain that I spread it too thick and made them too large, but I only had 10 large leaves. Nevertheless, the tamales are marvelous – especially for lunch the next day(s) – but the filling is so good on its own, and so easy, in the future I will probably just make a pile of tortillas and serve it as tacos.

aha

Thanks to an astute reader, the mystery vegetable has been identified as a purple kohlrabi. I wasn't off in thinking it was turnip-like – its german name means “cabbageturnip.” I'm gonna call it that. We were not alone in being perplexed.

Now, what to do with it—

• Radish greens soup
• Either pad thai or chinese pork and garlic chives stir fry
• Lamb’s quarter pesto
• Stir-fried yu choy with black bean sauce or oyster sauce
• Arugula and roasted beet salad
• Mustard or beet greens au gratin
• Tamales de acelgas (swiss chard wrapped tamales)
• Mustard greens with spicy ginger - honey - miso sauce

It’s here! First CSA box

Clockwise from the back at about 11 o’clock:

• red romaine
• beets (with their greens)
• a mystery root vegetable cabbageturnip! (purple kohlrabi)
• radishes (with greens)
• a rainbow of chard – orange, white, red, yellow
• yu choy
• arugula
• cilantro
• purple mustard greens
• lamb’s quarter

lol

You cannot resist lolcats.

Our CSA starts Wednesday!

yay! Others have alleged that we won't be able to figure out what to do with an abundance of, say, beets. I'm up to the challenge (I also happen to really love beets).

MacFuse has changed my life

Spotlight, and metadata search in general (cf. WinFS, the iTunes library, iTunes for PDFs, the iPhoto library; even bibdesk) is still supposed to (read: hasn’t yet but just around the corner!) change the way we store, organize, and interact with our data. And certainly there is a place for metadata search. But files still have to be stored on disks, and regardless of how complicated you make your symlink structure, distinct servers remain distinct. File systems are not going away. They remain “familiar” according to MacFuse developer Amit Singh. His port of FUSE (Filesystems in USEr space) takes the familiarity of a folders-and-files to its extreme.

It has a sheerly practical side too though. It's really nice to mount ssh volumes of remote servers as if they are local. And, for people who have to deal with Windows hardware like external drives, it offers what Tiger left out, NTFS-3g read/write support. Here is Singh’s tech demo video, showing some other cool stuff, like a Picasa file system. (There is one for flickr as well.) The "albums and photos" is a direct analog of "folders and files" and there’s no reason we shouldn't be able to access it like any other volume. I have not yet tested the iPod file system – all filesystems are just plugins for the underlying kernel plugin – but it should be the easiest way to copy stuff from an iPod. Right now I'm mainly using it to work on various remote servers. As nice as cyberduck is, sshfs is the way things should be – and now, at last, are.

the only appropriate remembrance

of Falwell is on Slate, where Timothy Noah writes, “He was a bigot, a reactionary, a liar, and a fool. Herewith, a Falwell sampler.” …

On global warming: “I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We’ll be in global cooling by then, if the Lord hasn’t returned. I don't believe a moment of it. The whole thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability.”

Classy?

“These phones are aimed at classy users we haven’t been addressing,” said Motorola’s chief executive, Edward J. Zander, who has been guiding the company through a turbulent yearlong downturn….

The phones were introduced at a dance studio in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, and recorded video demonstrations included the singer Fergie, the soccer star David Beckham and the race car driver Danica Patrick.

São Paulo sans ads

IMG_6091 Originally uploaded by Tony de Marco.

I read about this a while ago, and finally found some cool pictures of it… the entire city has banned advertising in public space. From onthecommons:

As Brazilian journalist Robert Pompeu de Toledo wrote, the ad ban is “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash. For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost.”

The article also refers to a project called Delete! in Vienna, which covered ads and signage all in the same color wrapping.

foodlist

• baked blue potatoes with gruyère, (frozen) butternut squash soup
• pechuga de pollo al ajillo, mashed blue potato
• thai curry (soup) of some variety, with eggplant, carrots, basil, sticky rice, bean sprouts
• pasta with zucchini, red lentil, tomato sauce
• tacos of guacamole, chicken “andouille”, mushrooms, and new favorite salsa
• swiss chard & red lentil curry soup, with bread

meat for at least a month!

I bought meat at the Tower Grove market (Norris pork, Seven Thunder Bison, and Prairie Grass lamb) because it's really expensive at Green City here in chicago. So for my own memory, here is what's in the freezer (including what Scott had):

• 2lb ground lamb
• 1lb ground bison
• 4 jalapeño-cheese bison sausages
• 8 lamb-apple bratwurst
• 1lb bacon
• 1¼lb bison london broil
• ½ lb × 2 bison skirt steak
• 1lb beef stew meat
• ½ lb ground beef
• 3 chicken breasts
• 1 chicken “andouille”

next

Frozen Yogurt!

Image from 101cookbooks.

*drool*

The company’s whole way of being was on display. Five workers were slicing spring strawberries for sorbet, made only with San Bernardo mineral water from Piedmont. Mr. Martinetti was surrounded by boxes of high-grade Ecuadorean and Venezuelan chocolate, hazelnut paste from Piedmont and Madagascar vanilla.

Into a huge steel vat, workers had just poured several cases of $30-a-bottle Spanish sherry for one flavor, Málaga, otherwise made of milk, organic eggs and sugar. (Raisins would be added later.) Mr. Martinetti dunked a lowly plastic cup into the vat and poked his nose in as if it were a glass of his family’s Barolo.

New gelateria to open in Manhattan. (And why I make my own gelato… ain't none of that shit in St Louis, though of course a couple blocks away from us in Chicago is Canady le Chocolatier, who is an artisan in every way.)

It's been two days! WUSTL is still great!

That's the tone of nearly every article in the official mouthpiece of Washington University, the Record, which they dump in our email boxes twice a week. It's over-the-top self-congratulation. And whenever there is a new ranking of any kind published, I am surprised they don't have a special issue.

if/when i visit mariana

Most important, they run two of the best and most distinctive restaurants in Mexico City. Which is another way of saying they run two of the best and most distinctive Mexican restaurants in the world.

some british guy for slate on france and turkey

“Sarkozy is the first leading politician in any large European country to say loudly and clearly that Turkey will not join the European Union.” But I don't think Sarko is nearly the showman that de Gaulle was. (full transcript tr/en and orig fr in very cool site – check out cartoons!)

Email: “Silent corporate cancer”

”It eats away at people's time, a minute at a time. I call it bleeding to death from a thousand pinpricks.“ Not unlike, say, blog reading or writing ;)

technomagic!

I just set up Proximity on my Powerbook using this handy guide, and I love it. It's one of those nerdy things that ought to “just work” and sure enough it does! Unsure of the drain on battery for keeping bluetooth on (phone or computer). I just walk away, and within my polling interval, the screen saver activates and requires a password. And here I thought bluetooth was just for lesbian fashion accessories! (They really seem to love the handsfree devices – no other group have I seen wear them out to bars, clubs etc.)