I don't like spicy Mexican food. I just like mole.
Aha! I make this "asian pesto" type stuff that I put on summer rolls and normally two or three jalapeños make it quite spicy (they're blended raw), but lately that has not been the case. I'd been attributing it to normal variation.
(Confidential to Moby: MOLE.)
Seriously, salsa sucks. MOLE is great.
Huh. It's like vanity sizing, sort of. I used to sort of enjoy hot food, but be cautious ordering because it wasn't that hard to exceed my tolerance. The last decade or so, I've gotten casual about it because I don't ever actually run into something too spicy for me in the restaurants I go to. I had thoughtlessly assumed I was toughening up as I aged, but it's probably just that everything in the world is blander.
This just opens up a market for artisanal jalapeno farmers selling overprices pretentious fiery peppers to the likes of us.
Seriously, salsa sucks.
You are dead to me.
It wouldn't be a problem if they'd just label the peppers appropriately at the grocery store or wherever. I have no problem with the existence of lame jalapenos, but they should be in a separate bin from the real ones.
"Just use serranos" seems like good advice to me. What's the problem?
Or Fresno chiles, or whatever. There are options. Jalapenos suck anyway.
9: That they're in the process of de-fanging serranos as well?
This doesn't really have anything to do with the subject of the article, but I feel like if you're going to write a post that's snobbish about Middle America you should manage a higher level of grammaticality than that.
And boy was that an unpleasant picture when I went to wikipedia to check my spelling of necrotizing.
According to the link:
He has also developed a Serrano Chile with 25% less heat, so that people can make Pico de Gallo without the "pico."
There are so many things that can be arrayed under the term "salsa" that to say "salsa sucks" bespeaks a serious mental condition.
Well, the DSM is on the way out, so there's no way to categorize the condition.
As a general rule, anything made with raw tomatoes isn't good and salsa, in the areas in which I have been, is most commonly made with raw tomatoes as the primary ingredient by volume.
scotch bonnets, innocuous sounding name.
seeking the red onions marinated in lava vinegar. They exist in Mexico, and at a handful of taco trucks.
I did always wonder how jalapeno poppers worked -- I figured there was some step in the cooking that took the heat out of them, because when I've had them in restaurants they aren't hot at all.
We grew jalepenos in the garden last year, along with some very nice Thai Dragons and Santa Fe Grandes, which were by far the hottest pepper (even over the Scotch Bonnets). The Santa Fe's were super-greasy and just short of murder-hot.
This year, I got my hands on a small packet of ghost pepper seeds. I'm looking forward to dying.
But, to the OP, the only peppers I buy at the store are the habeneros. Otherwise, during the off-season, I go through an insane amount of Sriracha.
22: I was always told that if you took the seeds and the interior walls out, most of the heat was gone from a jalapeno.
I have gotten weirdly, uselessly mild Habaneros at the store. It was very annoying.
Spiciness snobs are the absolute worst kind of food snobs. Actively dedicated to not tasting food.
25
I've gotten those, too. And I've also gotten blow-your-face-off ones that are way hotter than they should have been. Nature's fight against standardization, FTW.
Spiciness snobs are the absolute worst kind of food snobs. Actively dedicated to not tasting food.
Neither jalapeños or serranos are remotely spicy enough for that to be a sound criticism.
26
Guilty. Although, in really good Thai food, the spiciness is somehow distinct from the general flavor--so you can sweat away your sins and still taste the food.
I still fondly remember a Thai place near the firm I worked with Idealist at, that had a green curry precisely calibrated to the point where I'd whine and complain throughout eating it about it being too hot, but I couldn't make myself stop ordering it. It was really good.
I certainly know/know-of chilli-snobs who are basically just into mouth-burning one-up-manship, but as per 29, there are very spicy foods/cuisines where the chillies really do impart interesting/nice flavours.
My own taste is sort of middle-ground. I've had some thai food, and some food made with scotch bonnets that exceeded what I'd personally find pleasant.
Last summer I had 18 successful tomato plants in the garden, plus peppers and some cilantro. I ate a pint of fresh raw tomato salsa every day on into October. It was great.
That's not a humble brag. That's just a brag.
I used to have a flatmate who was a chef at a fish restaurant, and one time I went there for and had a thai fish curry which he cooked specifically for me (as he saw me ordering it). I think he thought he was being nice to me [we ate a fair bit of spicy food at home] but I found it almost inedible, but didn't have the heart to tell him.
NYC has strikingly bland food. I'm very happy to have moved somewhere that I can order the medium and have it be spicy enough instead of ordering extra hot and it being barely acceptable.
I think that's happened over the last couple of decades, as I said above. In high school, I watched for warnings that something would be too hot, because it wasn't unlikely that I would in, and now I never run into anything outside my tolerance.
Jalapenos suck anyway.
I eat really obscure peppers. You probably haven't heard of them.
When I was an undergrad a decade and change ago (...) the one restaurant-like rather than food-court-like foodservice outlet on campus had jalepeño poppers that they advertised as "Wildly Mild!", and I never understood why that was supposed to be appealing (The advertising, and presumably also the product, were very much from Sodexo-Mariott-Aramark Central Catering).
That said, I'm kind of a hot-spice wimp most of the time, and don't really mind having to use other peppers if I actually want more heat. (I have yet to figure out what to do with the homemade ghost pepper sauce I got for Christmas last year, labeled "The Ogre")
There's a place not far from me that does a lamb vindaloo which is right at the edge of tolerable in terms of heat but tastes absolutely great. The hotness is more or less orthogonal to the flavor. Slightly hotter and the flavor would get shunted aside in favor of screaming and wailing while gulping down vast quantities of water.
Has sourdough really gotten less tangy, per the link? The few times I've had really great sourdough it's made me so happy. I assumed that it was just a non-SF thing that sourdough means basically white crusty bread.
I used to read Chowhound some and Sripraphai is ground zero of spiciness-oneupsmanship. I like spicy food but this was ridic. Everyone claiming that "Thai hot" wasn't hot enough for them. Argh.
34 is true. Good salsa here is really rare.
Has sourdough really gotten less tangy, per the link?
Surely the answer to this is "Depends where you get it".
37
1. Drink the Ogre
2. Post the video to YouTube
3. ?????
4. Profit!
a green curry precisely calibrated to the point where I'd whine and complain throughout eating it about it being too hot, but I couldn't make myself stop ordering it. It was really good.
One of my all-time favorite pizzas was scotch-bonnet, bacon & onion (made at home by a friend). I sweated and cried and savoured every bite.
Going to south asian restaurants with desi co-worker was an intense experience. She would insist on ACTUALLY hot food - too hot for me, really.
But here in Italy I've sat at a big table in an Indian restaurant where all the brits gathered at one end to say "we're not Italian we'd like actually hot food".
"Just use serranos" seems like good advice to me. What's the problem?
Jalapeños are sweeter and have a more heavily vegetal flavor. (You can substitute serranos for bird chiles in Thai dishes, for example, but jalapeños would taste strange.)
Lazy OT suggestion for a front page post: here's someone I really admire praising McCardle for some strange thing called "good journalism"* and "an excellent article"*. Might provoke amusing outrage, or maybe even informed statistical debate. Prob not, though.
*yes, I know I put quotes around these things and he didn't say them precisely. But it's what he meant. So stick it in yer eye.
42: are there people who've purchased tangy sourdough over the past 20 years and have observed a decline?
Peppers? You give a damn about peppers when people are suffering from (insert name of suffering) in (insert location)? Bunch of damned elitists! Up against the wall!
Incidentally, per 26, the problem with the Habaneros wasn't that the food I was cooking didn't turn out sear-your-face-off spicy, it's that it didn't turn out spicy at all and as it turns out the recipe was really quite dependent on the spiciness to be interesting.
Jalapeños are sweeter and have a more heavily vegetal flavor.
Like I said, just use serranos. Unless you're pickling them.
42: are there people who've purchased tangy sourdough over the past 20 years and have observed a decline?
Maybe, but what I meant was that "sourdough" is a variable thing, and how yer loaf tastes will depend on the bakery you got it from. It's also not really the name of a kind of bread anyway. The dark, chewy rye bread I get from the russian bakery in the sunset is a sourdough, but so is the not dark, not rye, not chewy bread I get from the hipster bakery on Divis.
Goddammit, why is it always Aunt Martha's fault? Aunt Martha thinks you're an asshole, Keith930.
46: I find Gelman's take on McArdle "sensible."
Goddammit, why is it always Aunt Martha's fault?
Quite. At least as much guilt should attach to Aunt Abby.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_and_Old_Lace_%28play%29
This is what drives people to the farmers' markets & seed exchanges. (None of my farmers' markets' farmers have been principally white or Anglophone since Ferry Plaza.)
Goddammit, why is it always Aunt Martha's fault?
From South Bend, Indiana, no less. This is some high-quality coastal elitism, right here.
Probably just somebody whose team lost to Notre Dame.
Yep. It's an impressively self-cancelling bit of elitism, especially since he's too busy frothing over perfidious Middle America to do the second part of his coastal elite journalistic duty, which is to figure out where spicy jalapeños can be found and direct our business there.
||
Everyone in SoCal ok? Are your artisanal peppers safe, etc.?
|>
Meanwhile, there in currently a wider variety of peppers and salsa styles available than at any time in human history. Some like it weak, some like it hot. How about a little respect for diversity?
57: No fires or smoke visible in WeHo yet.
I overheard some dude on the train who was talking about how he didn't like NBA and only liked the college game. Something something teamwork.
That's what happened! The jalapenos I grew from starts last year were entirely sweet. I thought I had confused them with the Fresnos on the way home or something. We keep adding more, hoping for heat, which is a hassle because I don't know if I'm on the verge of overdoing it or if it is still mild.
My boyfriend has planted a bunch of superhot varieties and I'm sure he'll enjoy making hot sauce. But I'd be happy for a reliable jalapeno.
Hey, should I (pay someone else to) paint my house red or purple?
Also, check out how bright the historical color palettes were. That catalog was 1916; my house was built in 1915.
I'm with Hick. And I like the trim color on the linked red picture as well.
Inorganic pigments offer much better UV resistance than organic ones. Purple is usually a quinacridone, chemically interesting but not that great with respect to UV. The red looks like red iron oxide, boring color but very stable.
lw, does that influence how much hotter the house might get if it is no longer white and reflecting as much?
Red. The red in that linked catalogue seems to be richer than the shade on the house. Which would be a good thing if so, and if you could get/afford it.
I too like them both. In general, I love tri-color house color choices.
Purple.
Incidentally, I recently had somebody recommend Farrow & Ball as an excellent high-end house paint. I am just amused to now know of a SWPL paint option.
The red is more like the color you'd see on a hot pepper.
76.2: "Dead Salmon" is an interesting name for a paint color.
Don't think so, basically the lighter the better for that, both materials would be UV opaque, but for the most part so is titanium dioxide. Sunlight's energy is mostly in visible wavelengths.
Consider reflective mastic for the roof for optimal reflection. It goes on thick and is slow to dry, so you could plausibly do feathering or similar cappucino froth or pastry style decorations if plain silver seems ugly to you. Embed a coat hanger in a broomstick for the hook.
Oh man. Our dog loves dead salmon so much. It isn't a good association.
76. F&B is lovely if somebody else is doing the work, but it's a bastard to apply. We have a place that does totally accurate knockoffs of any F&B colour, so we don't feel too SWPL about it.
78: There is an Elizabethan-era color I read about somewhere called "Dead Spaniard."
81: I really love dead salmon also.
Do you estatically roll in it? Really dig your shoulders in? Get good and covered by clingly slime? If you don't, I bet my dog loves dead salmon even more than you do.
O.K. I'm not that enthused, but now I want some smoked salmon.
84: "Doncaster Kerfuffle" and "Verger's Egret" are more to my taste.
Why are US buildings so drab? Puritan self-denial? Fascination with bleached out Roman ruins? Red is the clear choice, Megan. Hick is right, despite his fish proclivities.
Hick lives in a house where every interior wall is painted in a shade of off-white called "Dover." My father and I did it. We both refused to use more than one color.
Other good paint names:
Churlish Green (not very attractive)
Borrowed Light
Off Black (not sure why that amuses me, but I hadn't heard that before. "More flattering to other adjacent paint colours than jet black.")
Borrowed Light
This one's practically a band name, too.
Valspar 6005-6a is Jalapeno Jelly
Signature ar1328, a pointless grey, is named blind date.
signature cl1110 is moist flesh.
So which of the following are just me:
1. Jalapenos are less spicy
2. Sourdough is less tangy
3. Comedies are less funny.
6. Sun is more hot. (...in CA than in WI, I suspect)
Houses are less spicy
A size 2 job fits more like a 6
Young people wear out faster
Sun is more expensive
Jalapeños have been stagnant for decades
T-shirts are hotter
Dresses are worse about thank-you notes
Skin is taggier.
Stockings are saggier.
Tails are waggier.
Used to be you could shit on somebody's face for a nickel in this town.
That worked better when the jalepeños were spicier.
99: Thorns are snaggier, the Internet is laggier, Baba Yaga is haggier, and baggies are baggier. (Frodo is bagginsier.)
OT: This afternoon I had to have a filling replaced for the second time and the general ache in my torqued and tormented jaw is driving me almost to the brink of using crude language on the Internet.
OOT: I know somebody who will be on stage in the string section during this concert tonight.
Just diced 3 jalapenos for Yum Tofu and there is no heat whatsoever. I guess I move to serranos.
I was inspired by this thread to order Mexican food for dinner, and it was bland.
My son, newly back from college, just told me that on the ISS, astronauts used packets of hot sauce as currency. The food is so bland, and they weren't allowed to bring much sauce.
108: Your son went to college in space?
He has also developed a Serrano Chile with 25% less heat, so that people can make Pico de Gallo without the "pico."
Oh, that's silly. The "pico" doesn't mean "hot". It's to do with the chopping/pecking at/mincing of the tomatoes in the preparation.
Maybe someone's already mentioned that.
Do I understand from the OP's linked article that one can still get non-mild jalapeno seeds? I feel as though the jalapenos my household grew from seed a few years ago were still hot enough to please. The plants didn't produce dildo-sized peppers.
On the OP, I agree with neb. There are plenty of other peppers, and jalapeños aren't that great anyway.
It's to do with the chopping/pecking at/mincing of the tomatoes in the preparation.
That seems like a labored interpretation.
"Pico" means, among other things, "beak". Without the beak = without the bite.
That's how I read it.
I understood "beak" (rooster's beak according to wikipedia, but I'd read chicken or hen's beak in some cookbook) to indicate the pecking motion chickens make at feed on the ground. Which is similar to what you do when you're chopping the tomatoes.
So the cookbook said, but I'm afraid I have no idea which book it was now.
Picante sauce is hot, and pico sounds like picante.
And when you're mincing the onions and the peppers! The whole project is one big pecking extravaganza!
109 -- No, but they're apparently teaching him all the important things.
115: Hm. Like piquant. I am now uncertain, but I really like the pecking interpretation, so I'm gonna stick with it unless it seems really important.
Thunderbird could be called Pico del Ernest and Julio Gallo.
How does the "beak" sense relate to "el sombrero de tres picos"? I had somehow thought "corner" or "cusp" or something.
Oh, and it can also mean "penis", so cuidado.
So "pico de gallo" is "penis of the cock". Gotcha.
I've just read that the Spanish verb picar means to chop or mince or peck. But also to sting. So we have a draw.
57: The Glendale fire was more or less in my part of town, but no risk to me or anyone I know.
I think it was explained to me at Middlebury that picar is one of those words that means a trillion different things. Actually this one time, at Spanish camp (i.e. Middlebury) me pico una abeja on the bottom of my foot. That means "a bee stung me." I got very good at saying it to explain my Von Waferian limping. You aren't allowed to speak anything but your target language at Middlebury but I briefly shouted some words of English after me pico una abeja and I think really anyone would have forgiven me.
Isn't "A Bee Stung Me" the name of an album or something?
Maybe not, but it's part of the name of a George Saunders collection.
Now that I have Joel McCrea and Sterling Hayden all straightened out, I will go back to confusing George Saunders and George Sanders.
|| We sold a $700 book! I think I actually did that, through my own specific, recent, efforts. |>
I found these amusing ponderings on pico de gallo earlier.
Fighting Cocks are calmed by their handlers by placing the rooster's head in the mouth. Darkness causes birds to immediately begin the sleep cycle. It was explained to me (by a great Restaurant ower in Acuna, Mex.)that often as soon as the handler put the bird's head in his mouth he would often be pecked on the tongue.
We sold a $700 book! I think I actually did that, through my own specific, recent, efforts.
Woo! Congrats.
In other happy news, I discovered today that my local liquor store has started carrying six-packs of Fat Tire. They've had it and some other New Belgium beers in 22 oz. bottles for a couple weeks now, so it's not that surprising, but still a welcome development.
OT
(and OTT)
I got to spend the night in a single four poster bed on Thursday. I didn't know these things existed. It was the Fellows' guest rooms at mag\dalen college. I sent myself to sleep reading the obituaries from WW2, which sample contained a surprising amount of non-combat deaths - two suicides, two flight training accidents and the one massively decorated hero died in a road accident as the war was ending. In the morning I photographed the gargoyle outside my window.
Something tells me that not all academic life is like this.
||>
re: 133
It's exactly like that, all the time. High table dinner, too?
Yes. HIgh table dinner and junior fellow taking the snuff round afterwards. I do think that snuff is the high point of Oxford colleges. Once every couple of years I get to take it and remember just what a wonder drug nicotine can be.
(I was seated next to an ancient but still dapper philosopher who I suspect seduced a friend of mine when he was his tutor (it may have been another tutor). That was rather Oxonian too)
To the OP, I understand the point of breeding the capsaicin out of Jalapenos for people who don't like them, but why all of them? Wouldn't you widen your market by selling both defanged chillies (labelled 'mild') and ones that taste of jalapeno (labelled 'traditional')? Consumer choice and yadda yadda...
And now I am trying to work out who the ancient dapper philosopher might be.
Aren't we all? It sounds like a Bowra story, but he was a historian and is long dead. The only ancient and dapper philosopher I can think of of at that college is R/a/l/p/h W/a/l/k/er, but I know nothing of his sexual history.
Belatedly quibbling with neb's assertion that sourdough is "not really the name of a kind of bread anyway." Sure it is, in (e.g.) a family of kinds that includes unleavened, beaten, saleratus, poolish, levain. Another family would name chemicals and/or yeasts and/or bacilli explicitly, in which case sourdough is several kinds of bread, since there are several lacto- and aceto-bacters including Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.
What bakeries do with their signs, I wot not of. I got into a thanksgiving-dinner type argument with someone who insisted that heirloom tomatoes must be a genetic strain because Whole Foods labeled them that way.
C\h\r\i\s \y\ has it right. It is not a Bowra story. But I may - as I say - be talking about the wrong man. An excellent and scrupulous debater, in any case.
What distinguishes levain from sourdough from poolish from the aforementioned dark rye? "Sourdough starter is likely the oldest, being reliant on organisms present in the grain and local environment. In general, these starters have fairly complex microbiological makeups, the most notable including wild yeasts, lactobacillus, and acetobacteria.[10][11] They are often maintained over long periods of time. … A roughly synonymous term in French baking is levain."
The first family is distinguished by what the baker does.
Faintly related; does anyone else remember a not-very-sour sourdough starter that went around the country in, oh, the late 80s, maybe called 'friendship bread', but the actual recipe was as sweet and unsubtle as bad zucchini bread? Beijerink's bane.
What's "first family"? The family that includes "unleavened, beaten, saleratus, poolish, levain"? Sourdough bread is in the same family of bread as matzoh? What does the baker do in common when making matzoh and making sourdough? Aren't all breads distinguished by what the baker does?
Given that there are such things as "sourdough rye" and "sourdough waffles", I don't see why I should accept that "sourdough" names a kind of bread. Maybe I also shouldn't accept that rye bread is a kind of bread. I dunno.
The first family is the one that categorizes breads among unleavened, beaten, saleratus, poolish, levain, etc; in this categorization sourdough is an alternative to matzoh, not identical to it. ('Family' like 'genus' grouping 'kinds'. Genus would have been better, since these kinds crossbreed.)
Rye is what you make it of, waffles what you cook it on. Orthogonal to the leavening technique.
I thought there was something special and regeneratingly yeasty about sourdough starter.
It's a bacillus (not a yeast) that makes a tasty acid that is easy to keep alive in pure-enough culture in the kitchen. May or may not be good for the people eating it or around it -- IIRC many of the sourdough lactobacilli are endemic to human breastmilk. The sour bread probably has good keeping (definitely better for humans than eating bad molds are).
Oh, and come to think of it, it seems to live well with the yeasts that are good rising agents, which is very useful if you don't want to eat a tasty damp brick.
"Rye is what you make of it" is entirely too gnomic for me to follow; and I still don't see why the leavening technique is the kind of bread. Here is a range of leavening & fermentation techniques you can employ to, as far as I can tell, make a further range of actual breads.
Rye is what you make it of, sorry.
Ingredients, process, baking; breads have each, and we use each and all to categorize breads. The list you link is a fine & finer categorization.
Wouldn't you widen your market by selling both defanged chillies (labelled 'mild') and ones that taste of jalapeno (labelled 'traditional')?
Or New Jalapenos and Jalapenos Classic?
143: quite so. I like to think that was really the alien/government conspiracy seeding the credulous population with mind-control bacteria.
"Rye is what you make of it" is entirely too gnomic for me to follow;
Now you know how we feel.
143: Yep; still circulating now (well, at least I've heard of it recently in the UK) -- in my part of the US, it was known as "Amish Friendship Bread," despite being from the Mennonite community.
To the OP, I understand the point of breeding the capsaicin out of Jalapenos for people who don't like them, but why all of them? Wouldn't you widen your market by selling both defanged chillies (labelled 'mild') and ones that taste of jalapeno (labelled 'traditional')?
I think the idea is that both do continue to exist (the breeding is just to create a non-hot strain), but in most areas where there isn't much demand for actually hot peppers the non-hot version would be the only one that ends up widely available.
That is, the upshot of all this seems to be that in areas outside the Southwest actually hot peppers would become somewhat rare and require some effort to find. Which... has pretty much always been the case.
That is, the upshot of all this seems to be that in areas outside the Southwest actually hot peppers would become somewhat rare and require some effort to find.
All Desi Americans live in the southwest?
re: 156
I'd guess Desi Americans and Thai Americans (and North African Americans, and Nigerian Americans, etc etc) have probably always had their own sources. Much like the UK, I suppose, where there are lots of ingredients that you can now get in supermarkets, but not that long ago you'd have had to go to 'ethnic' food shops.
One of the amusing things about the Polish influx into the UK, is how easy it is to get things like sauerkraut in corner shops these days.
And, my wife has been able to buy Kefir [like a buttermilky/yoghurty thing] which Eastern/Central Europeans use, but Brits don't.
Kefir is excellent. Hippie Americans use it, too. (Or at least, we grew up drinking it as a special treat.)
The corner Polish shops are amazing; the one down the street from me sells fantastic home-made pierogi, which I love to eat but probably don't have the patience to make. Also -- good deals on cured meat. We always ate a number of Polish things (kielbasa, etc) growing up (despite absolutely no Polish or other Eastern European heritage), but I never thought of them as particularly ethnic until I moved here and realised that you can't pick them up at the regular supermarket.
158: You can always find sauerkraut and kielbasa and stuff around here. And the MPLS Polish-American community, while not non-existant, was never really huge or dominant. But we have lots and lots of Germans, of course.
Query: Do you all have dreams wherein you specifically recall past dreams?* For example, a few nights ago, I found myself in a relatively boring, quotidian sort of dream -- I was thinking about going into London and wondering if I should try to organize an Unfogged meet-up, while doubting that anyone would really care to meet up specifically with me. Then! Dream self recalled that no, last year I had met up with members of the Boston and NYC crew when ttaM and his wife visited the East Coast (supposedly, I'd been at a conference in upstate NY and dropped in), and we'd all gotten along swimmingly, so of course a meet up was in order again. This dream occurred at least a year ago, and I hadn't thought about it since, although it was part of an unusually long and complex dream for me.
Such a layered dream structure isn't uncommon for me, and I'm curious if others experience it. I find it strange to think that there is a specific dream reality in my head that corresponds with past dreams as though they were true experiences.
*Caveat: I understand that talking about other people's dreams is considered boring, but hey. I like it.
158: Fermented foods have gotten hipster here, too. So now we have artisanally hand-stretched sauerkraut and kimchi etc. at places like Whole Foods. And I can think of at least two other Mineshafterians besides myself with a pickling crock.
The woman who gave me my kombucha starter had just recently started making kefir, and was finding it a lot more difficult than other fermented things she'd made.
Does anyone have any tips for Korean-style lightly pickled broccoli? All the internet recipes I've found just call for blanching in your regular vinegar-water-sugar brine and then storing in that. Easy enough, but I'm having a hard time believing that something so easy is going to turn plain broccoli, which I'm not wild about, into that stuff I can't stop munching on at the restaurant.
162: I'm pretty sure I've had dreams structured like that. Often more in the sense of realizing that I'm in a recurring pattern dream, but also more the way you are describing it. My dreams last night were very vivid and science fictional, with many cool special effects.
This seems appropriate for a question about dreams about dreams: after having watched about eight and a half hours of The Clock yesterday, when I woke up during the night occasionally last night (as I do almost every night), I found myself wondering what the people in The Clock were doing right then.
I have recurring dreams set during periods of my life *that never happened*. It often takes me a few minutes after waking up to work out conclusively that in fact that period of my life is not real. I have one set of dreams which are the events of the summer after my senior year but happening in the location I spent my other college summers. I have another set of dreams where I think the setting is that I broke up with my wife early on in our dating but then I want to get back together and she doesn't, but then eventually we do. Neither of these are real, but I've had enough dreams in each setting that when I have such a dream it feels like one about my life rather than an obviously fictional dream.
after having watched about eight and a half hours of The Clock yesterday
Rad.
167
... Neither of these are real, but I've had enough dreams in each setting that when I have such a dream it feels like one about my life rather than an obviously fictional dream.
Which is a bit disconcerting considering people are in prison largely based on testimony by one person about things that may (or may not) have happened long ago.
This seems like a good place to ask:
A friend is letting me use some space in his yard for a little vegetable garden. I'm definitely going to have hot peppers and okra, but am still flexible on the rest. It's a shorter growing season this year because of the late spring ice, but we should be frost-free into October. What would be fun to plant?
Tomatoes are good to plant, because they'll taste so much better than what you buy in the store. Also zucchini, so you can have zucchini blossoms.
Sugar snap peas because you can sit on the ground and just eat them all right there in the garden.
I just ordered a bunch of seeds from Seed Savers exchange, so it's all heirloom varietals. Probably should have gotten some lettuce; fresh lettuce is so nice.
I got opal basil, cilantro, wormwood, Chinese leek, painted lady runner beans, blue collards, burgundy okra, Martin's carrot peppers, watermelon radish, and Paul Robeson tomatoes.
In other happy news, I discovered today that my local liquor store has started carrying six-packs of Fat Tire.
Our local liquor store has just started to carry six-packs of Rodenbach, which I love and have never seen in the states in six-pack form. Advantages of the lower 48!
Query: Do you all have dreams wherein you specifically recall past dreams?*
I don't remember enough of my dreams after waking, but I think most of my dreams organize into themes with lots of inter-relationships to past versions. E.g. the being-chased-by-mysterious-killers dreams make references back to previous being-chased dreams, the anxiety dreams to previous ones, and the discovering-a-vast-undiscovered-mountain-range/desert dreams (a genre I have not heard of other people having, but I have often) may also do so. At least, I do remember the feeling of familiarity in the dreams even if I can't completely recall details of them once I wake up.
Fermented foods have gotten hipster here, too.
food is fine, including fermented foods, but I find it very dispiriting that it is actually considered part of avant-garde or hip culture. There used to be art and philosophy and stuff in that cultural space.
There used to be art and philosophy and stuff in that cultural space.
I don't think food and microbrewing have replaced those; they're still there. But the current crop of uberhipsters need everything in their lives to be fashionable, where once it was only clothes and culture and they could relax and eat steaks and fries drink heap blended Scotch if they wanted to.
I had a dream in college that my brother had died. It took two days of serious mourning for me to figure out that I'd been wrong.
But the current crop of uberhipsters need everything in their lives to be fashionable
And that shit takes time, so I think it's hard to avoid displacement.
164: I'm surprised that you would blanch the broccoli to begin with--it seems like it would kill the lactobacillus you want as part of the pickling process. But I've just started making my own fermented stuff (mostly sauerkraut to date) and have no real understanding of the Korean tradition, so.
But the current crop of uberhipsters need everything in their lives to be fashionable
since the stereotype of contemporary hipsters is that they dress like slobs, not sure how true this is.
I thought the up-to-date stereotype of contemporary hipsters is that they dress in expensive japanese denim and expensive recreations of what used to be work clothes.
Also, PGD, fashion is not absolute; what's fashionable in one milieu might look slobbish to a member of another. Also, crop tops are cute.
173: It is way too late for tomatoes from seed.
Fashionable food isn't a hipster invention. Business wives and military wives attempted a sort of faint imitation of Delmonico's until, oh, the late 1960s, and then there was the Sunset magazine/slightly hippie/Alice Waters style in the 1970s, and then nearly everyone in the middle class had to commute and (hypothesis) *that's* when cooking styles died.
Perhaps hipster foodie habits are conspicuous consumption of time as well as substance. Adam Smith said there was a limit to the damage capital accumulation could do, as there a limit to what one man can eat, however rich; but human invention springs anew.
Neb misquoted me in his last rye quibble! Neb, are you well?
Hilarious that the bland starter is still going around. I wondered if it had died at some point and been replaced -- perhaps unknowingly -- by a plain flour paste. Which would, of course, eventually pick up something else. And some of the starters might be preferred, so it could be an interesting natural experiment, if the associated recipe didn't overwhelm anything in the starter.
If you quibble with a philosopher about rye, you can get ergo poisoning.
186: True. I don't think interest in food and cooking needs explanation because (a) yummy and (b) complicated, but which foods, and how people feeeeel about it, that's odd.
Have beaten biscuits come back? Leatherbritches beans? It's getting hard to stay ahead. Behind. Whichever.
re: 181
Current UK hipster wouldn't be slobbish looking. Tight fitting clothes, fairly sharp and slightly old fashioned.
157: Right, I was including "going to an ethnic food market" as part of the "some effort" required.
You don't have to talk any ethnic person, except to hear the total at the register, if you find that effortful.
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Speaking of hipsters, I just took a test ride on a singlespeed bicycle (after not having ridden in 10+ years) and it was sufficiently terrifying I'm rethinking the whole "buy a bike" thing.
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So not just like riding a bicycle, then?
Oh no, I totally remembered how to ride. It was the "holy shit I'm high up here and I'm not wearing any armor" thing that freaked me out.
Speaking of freaking out, for a class project my son just drew a whatever it is you call a swastika with the arms going the other way. It is contextually appropriate and I double checked that it was not an actual swastika. Should I email his teacher to point out that it is not a swastika?
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This whole argument about where the older Tsarnaev brother will be allowed to be buried makes me suspect that people really do think he's some kind of a supervillain.
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re: 198
It is a swastika. You get left and right facing versions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
200: the left-facing version is for Liberal Fascists
Swastikas as design elements crop up more or less everywhere. Just another thing the Nazis ruined.
Paul Robeson tomatoes are a Siberian varietal made for short growing seasons. I'll chance it!
202: They don't appear to be very common, either kind, in elementary schools.
195: probably you should give it a few more tries before you decide one way or the other. I imagine that's not a feeling that'll last.
After all your head is quite often several feet above the ground and you don't wear armor on a day-to-day basis.
Unless you do, in which 1. awesome and 2. rock that plate mail on the bike, dude.
Plate mail is what you get when you join the Bradford Exchange.
Hey, you know what kind of a bike would significantly lower the distance your head is from the ground? A recumbent!
Plait Male is where Willie Nelson gets his hair done.
Platte Mail is a letter to Grand Island.
Platemale is pronounced like guacamole.
Guac a MOLE is what you do if cocking it doesn't work.
Cock-a-mole is an old-timey carney game.
Clock-a-mole is a boring old-timey carnival game.
Glock-a-mole is Wayne la pierre's version.
Glaucoma-ole is only legal in states that permit medical marijuana.
Guadalacamole is worth remembering to any marines you know
Just by way of a data point. We had a pizza last night with jalapenos on it. They were pretty spicy.
We went with purple. There are too many other red bungalows around town and red would be a little too matchy with my interior colors.
The house painter is substantially cooler than us and now we want to be friends with him.
The Mauve Decade returns. Our Seattle house is purple -- lavender with white and indigo and caterpillar-green trim. Pricy, and horrified one of our neighbors, but I love it.
220.1: If that's what you really want, I guess I'll allow it.
Woo, Team Purple! (I don't actually have a purple house, but I aspire to one day.)
I never had a purple house,
I never hope to have one,
Bot I an tell you anyhows,
You can't make the last line rhyme in English.
205, 206: It's more that I'm used to motorcycle gear. (Also, the last time I was on a bike I had a mountain bike; road tires and wheels feel flimsy.) But yeah, I'm gonna take a few more test rides before I make any decisions.
Thanks, Moby!
I like the purple up front and suspect I'll like it even more over time.
I have lost my nerve and am scared about the purple. I don't have any other option I like better, but now I see why people go with bland options.
I am sticking with it, out of trusting the picture of that other bungalow. But feeling yucky about it.
(I do think we matched the colors pretty well. I'm not scared because the colors aren't what they should be; I'm scared by the prospect of having a bright exterior paint job.)
If it looks like that other pic you put up, the purple is great. Om shanti.
That purple's not an unreasonable choice, if it's like the one in the picture and is period, not bright purple. I don't think I've seen a whole Bungalow in that color but a neighborhood house has a similar purple as a trim and it looks great.
I've heard passersby mocking my house, but I still like it.
The purple is amazingly like that picture (I even held the screen up to the sample on the siding). It isn't veering off toward violet or lavender or anything. A nice dusky purple.
But I'm still nervous. Thanks for reassurance.
Oh, you know what, there is a house in my neighborhood in that color. It looks great, let me see if I can find a picture. No worries.
I have lost my nerve and am scared about the purple.
It will look good -- there's a purple house in my neighborhood which I like.
How close to the street is your house, and do you have any trees on the lot? Either a little bit of distance or plants offer a little bit of a buffer for bright colors -- making them less pushy, but I think it will be fine either way.
Lots and lots of foliage. I'd say it is the standard setback. Five feet from the sidewalk on the side, perhaps a dozen feet back on the front.
Lots and lots of foliage.
I think you're fine*. But post pictures when it's done.
* Obligatory disclaimer, my opinion about visual presentation shouldn't be given much weight.
I agree with everyone that the purple will be great. It comes off more as a rich color than a bright color.
Thanks, all.
You know, I've never cared what the neighborhood thought before. It is much harder to (potentially) defy public opinion if you actually care first.
I think you should plant more sulfur -yellow flowers & stems, with little jolts of magenta and some sky-blue for surprise.
I've got Mexican marigold in the front; that'll add yellow.
Flowers I planted two rentals ago have got their feet in and are multiplying very nicely. The aged rose I did two -- three? -- winters of rescue pruning on is having a spectacular season, but I think it's being neglected again, so that will tail off. In a decade or so.
We do purple-and-yellow flower combos in our front porch planters, so I'm another vote for that.
I'm excited right now because the irises from our old house I transplanted when we moved July two years ago have taken over the ugly patch between the back fence and the alley and are actually blooming like crazy this year, which is absolutely as beautiful as I'd hoped. I also drove by our old house to see that the hundreds of irises I'd planted along the side are thriving. The new owner has taken great care of the garden, but doesn't seem to have added any plants, which makes me proud!
We're going to be part of a garden tour the weekend after DC and I'm slightly terrified, especially now that I've realized the cicadas will be out. We're the garden that's noteworthy for being brand new and we'll be on again next year to show how we've improved it, so I keep telling myself that everyone else is supposed to have a better garden and I shouldn't worry, but I need to get everything planted and chill out.
We do purple-and-yellow flower combos in our front porch planters, so I'm another vote for that.
Oh. My. God. UKIP party colours!
Also Assyrian colours*, Thorn, you anti-Semite.
*at least if Byron is to be relied on.
I was thinking Mardi Gras, if you toss in the green from the surrounding natural Springtime-ness.
It's not EXCLUSIVELY purple and yellow, and in fact there's some blue and orange too and I don't even remember what color coleus was in there last year, but Mara chose the yellow-and-purple container contents and that was the best-looking one.
246: I'm waiting to see whether Stanley mentioned Mardi Gras to be able to make Cajun/Akkadian jokes. I'd put $5 on it.
248.last: I don't know enough about the Acadian people or Mesopotamia to make that joke. (Not that ignorance has stopped me from trying before, but I'm feeling reserved today)
in fact there's some blue and orange too
By 2018, everyone's flowerbeds will be entirely teal and orange.
UKIP colors are purple and gold? Are they also the absolute-monarchist party?
In a few years, the monarchist party should starting rallies using the theme song from "Charles in Charge."
252: he's going to be George VII, I believe, rather than Charles III. The first two Charleses were not great acts to follow.
253: It would be way more awesome if he picked Arthur.
Not all bad. Charles II had a great big bunch of mistresses.
Charles II had a great big bunch of mistresses.
So did most kings in the 17th century. They were more or less expected to.
256: I looked through the pictures on Wikipedia. He seemed to have more than was usual for the British.
For the British, yes. But bear in mind that his father was a small-"p" puritan who wore a hair shirt and his grandfather was bisexual and concentrated his extra-marital energies on George Villiers. So the British situation was a bit untypical.
The British situation is typical for the British.
Shouldn't they skip to the boy? He's the future of the franchise.
I think they should skip to the drunk, Nazi-dressing boy as he seems more entertaining.
I happened upon this Landseer painting of the young Victoria and Albert. My one wish is for William and Kate to stage an exact recreation of this scene, complete with 1-year-old baby holding a dead kingfisher.
253: It would be way more awesome if he picked Arthur.
Or Crimson.
My one wish is for world peace. If I had two wishes, that would be my second.
263: I WONDER IF THEY STILL HAVE THAT CARPET
264: or Creole.
Calling Charles I a puritan, small P or not, is a bit misleading unless "puritan" is just the word we are using for "masochistic religious fanatic" which isn't a very good description of Charles I and isn't very fair to the Puritans either. I wasn't aware that he wore a hair shirt. Henry VI did.
Charles II had a great big bunch of mistresses.
But no legitimate son and heir, which is a massive #KINGFAIL. That's why he had to hand the crown over to his syphilitic, insane, crypto-catholic French puppet of a brother instead.
Charles II was not a Good Thing, but James VII and II was Even Worse.
You define success your way and I'll define it my way.
Charles II and James VII/II had their issues, but so those before and after them were far worse from the point of view of my ancestors.
If you define success as having your near-absolute monarch be a paid agent of a foreign superpower, I guess I do not think it means what you think it means.
It would be great if the weird celebrity baby name thing extended to the British royals. King Apple the First!
Charles II and James VII/II had their issues, but so those before and after them were far worse from the point of view of my ancestors.
Charles II: not that good for the Irish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Explanation_1665
James II: also not very good for the Irish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Derry
It would be great if the weird celebrity baby name thing extended to the British royals
They could always re-use some of the names of older British royals. Indulf. Aedwig. Sweyn Forkbeard. Harthacnut.
Rollo should be big now, with the VIKINGS tv show such a success.
274: If you're going to count Protestants, sure.
Which is why I like to judge British monarchs on universally acceptable standards, like mistresses.
275. The next one after F/Lt Cambridge is likely to be female, so I'm hoping for Alfgifu, or possibly Æthelflæd.
If you're going to count Protestants, sure
If you're not counting Protestants, good luck with a narrative that excludes Henry Grattan, Theobald Wolfe Tone, James Napper Tandy, Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet, Charles Stewart Parnell...
Or Gruoch!
(You know her as Lady Macbeth.)
280: Those guys were a generation or more down the road, after Catholicism was a near total barrier to political and economic power (which had not occurred until William).
Grattan and Emmet had places named after them in my area.
Also, William III wasn't just the paid agent of a foreign superpower, he was the king* of one. I mean don't get me wrong the glorious revolution was officially a Good Thing but it did involve invasion by a foreign power.
*sort of. 17th century Dutch politics, thy name is complexity.
284. I wasn't thinking about William III, I was thinking about James VII and II, who was totally paid for by Louis XIV, to the extent that on one occasion he felt obliged to apologise to the king of France for convening the English parliament without his permission.
It's all comparative anyway. William III brought in the Bill of Rights, which had stuff in it like "no cruel and unusual punishment" and "no taxation without Parliamentary assent" and "right to petition for a redress of grievances" and "separation of powers" that was objectively absolutely terrific for all his subjects, Protestant, Catholic or whatever. (Yes, yes, it also barred Catholics from the throne; but, realistically, how many Catholics did that actually inconvenience? Maybe two or three?)
But the point is that the Bill of Rights didn't help the Catholics at the Protestants' expense and therefore he was Bad For Catholics. Meanwhile you can butcher your subjects by the townful, and as long as you butcher slightly more Protestants than you do Catholics they will anoint you the Martyr King.
Right but if the standard of monarchic success is "don't be controlled by a foreign superpower" it seems weird that the goat is the guy who was paid by France and the hero is the guy who was actually* king of the Netherlands.
286: Catholics in Ireland were broadly banned from public office, the legal profession, buying land, serving in the armed forces, teaching, etc. Much of this also applied to Presbyterians, which I just learned.
What does "no taxation without Parliamentary assent" benefit people who are forbidden from voting?
guy who was actually* king of the Netherlands
But was also the grandson of Charles I and the son in law of James VII and II, which was why he was picked to do the honours of invading. Arguably, William's reign covered the period in which the Dutch Republic (he was Stadholder, not King, though that's perhaps a quibble) began to decline and England really got going. He didn't do anything to prevent that.
As near as I can tell the Bill of Rights didn't apply outside of England at the points. The applicable laws are the Penal Laws. Those got much worse with William.
Anyhow, I broadly subscribe to the (now unfashionable) view that English liberties et al were directly tied to Protestantism, so I think that Britain as a whole was well served by a Protestant king and William III turned out to be a pretty good one. It's a tough sell, though, that he was a net improvement over his predecessors if you were a Catholic in Ireland.
288. This was also the case in England and Scotland. Conversely, protestants were barred from most of these things if not all in France and Spain and all of Italy. Established churches meant something in the years after the Peace of Westphalia. The people who included the establishment clause in your constitution weren't just writing in a high sounding principle. They knew whereof they spoke
295 -- right. By the time of the Glorious Revolution, most Protestants had been kicked out of France.
You know who was, especially for his time period, remarkably uninfluenced by notions of established churches and in favor of relative religious liberty. Charles II.
In fact, William was installed specifically to prevent religious tolerance.
Yes, but there was a tradeoff at the time (in England) between relative religious tolerance and absolutist government. So, as I say, on the whole net benefit from Protestant rule for Britain, but net suckage for Catholics in Ireland.
Maybe William should have had more than one mistress.
Thought I suppose that is much harder when you are co-reigning with your wife.
Rollo should be big now, with the VIKINGS tv show such a success
I doubt it, given that the actual King Rollo TV programme didn't inspire any royals.
