Cooking: Mini-Review of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

I like to cook. I don’t make many actual recipes, but I do like to play with a few things.

Lately, my favorite kind of cooking starts with olive oil and spices in the frying pan. Eggs? Sauteed onions (and other available veggies) and herbs with eggs scrambled on top. Rice? Sauteed onions, garlic (and other available veggies), spices and rice. Delicious. Pasta? Sauteed onions, garlic, italian spices, other available veggies, then tomato paste/sauce on top… on top of pasta. Chicken breast? Sauteed onions, garlic, spices… and then in goes the chicken breast with vinegar and other interesting spices. Yes, and I do have sauteed onions, usually with sauteed mushrooms, all on their own as a topping or addition to things like potatoes, roasts and rotisserie chickens.

Basically, if you walk in when I am sauteeing something, you never know where its gonna go and I love starting things that way.

I have a wonderful cookbook called ‘Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” (Broadway Books, 9780767921220). I am nowhere near a vegetarian, but the tips and recipes offered in this cookbook are well worth the lack of meat. Actually, there are many recipes that either go extremely well with a meat dish or can be easily modified with meat. The best part of this book is how it is organized. The author chooses a vegetable type, tells you what it is, what it is good for, how to clean, store and cook with it, and then continues to give a range of recipes from basic to complex with each vegetable as a central feature. I have been introduced to a few exotic vegetables and given a load of information about veggies I thought I knew already. This book has taught me how to sautee well and how to make soups and dips and pancakes. In addition to veggies, there is also information about grains and pastas as well. The author offers tips and serving suggestions in the margins, as well as suggested substitutions. There are also beautiful full color photos of some entrees and sides as well.

My copy of the book is always out, I have a few bookmarks at favorite parts and it is starting to look well used. I used to follow a different recipe for pancakes, but once I tried the suggested recipe, I will never go to another. They are delicious as all get-out. When I have a random ingredient and I am wondering what to do with it, I will look it up in this book and more often than not get an inspiration from the preparation section if not an actual recipe I can use at the moment.

If you like cooking and don’t want to look through a hundred different books for tips, tricks and recipes, this book would be an excellent resource for cooking, cleaning, preparing, and storing fruits, vegetables, grains, breads, cereals and condiments of all makes and kinds. When they say Cooking for Everyone, I do believe they really mean it.

City Life: Sketches

If there is one guarantee about long trips in subway cars in the city, its that you will be sketched into the art book of one artist or another eventually.

I was waiting for a train to Brooklyn. Since I was at the terminal end, I could wait a while in the train before it actually leaves. It was late at night, it had been a long day at work so I had sat myself in a seat near a rail and so I can watch the time if I wanted and I just sat there. I was comfortable, holding onto my oversized backpack and leaning my head on the wall alternately watching the time and semi-snoozing. When they opened all the doors to admit people easier, I opened my eyes again and realised my neck was stiff, so I switched positions so my head was on the rail which gave me a perfect view of the artist boarding the train and sitting across from me.

How did I know the guy was an artist? He was carrying one of those over large black sketchbooks and a small box of writing implements. Just to verify, I peeked at his pages as he looked for the page he was looking for. Yes, full of art. Various kinds of images were hinted at but I would guess a slice of life super hero/villain kind of artist. But he IS the type of artist who sits on the train an quick sketches people. I didn’t look overlong, I was too tired to care. But I did catch the movements in my tired mostly closed eyes that are characteristic of all quick sketch artists I have run across. Sort of a bird-like glance up/look down/sketch/glance up again movement. There were a few people, I might not be the sketch he was making, but for some reason I have a feeling he was.

I was curious about what kind of quick sketch he was doing. While contemplating such thoughts I closed my eyes again and dozed until someone came to sit next to me and I had to change my admittedly slightly dramatic pose to one more normal. The thoughts came to me, he might be doing the guy down the row from me, he might be trying to get my sleeping face, he might be going for the bag, he might even have been going for the hands around the bags. I realised that a quick sketch didn’t have to be a profile or portrait. I never did see the actual image he sketched. A few times I glanced over and he was drawing some large creature or vehicle. Once, near the beginning of the ride, I saw him close the page he was working on as people entered the train and just contemplated two blank pages, but when I glanced up after the train was moving again, he was back to the quick sketch page. I saw a few vague shapes. It looked like it might’ve been three different sketches on the page, but one will never know. He left the train a few stops before mine.

I have seen quick sketch artists on the train before. Lately, they have been this kind where they surreptitious sketch other commuters, but in the past there have been the ones that pass out the sketches to the one they sketched. I ended up picking one up the first year I was here in the city. I have a scan of it laying around somewhere, perhaps I will upload it.

So, if you are in the city for a long while, observe those around you and try to spot yourself being sketched randomly. It’ll happen eventually.

Tags: artists, city life, drawing

Magic: Cards and Coins

When I was a child, one of my favorite things was magic tricks.

Now, I was never very good at performing the magic tricks, but I loved to explore them and learn what I could. A few of my successful performances included counting cards, a melting knot, and rope the went through my throat. All these are easy to set up and take little to perform.

All this trial and error helped me to appreciate well performed magic tricks and though I still try to see what is done, I am totally enthralled in each well played performance.

Lately, I have had a friend who does coin and card tricks. I started watching his fingers flow around a coin and though I knew how the trick was done I couldn’t imitate it until he gave me a pointer here and there. I still have quite a bit of practicing to do, but I can and have recently done a clumsy performance that is enough to fool those not in the know but not those with sharp eyes. It helped that I worked in concert with him once. We had been practicing mime, but we would need more practice now that I realised what we can do with mime and magic, but I happened to have a couple coins and we made it look like we were passing the coin back and forth through the air. Of course, I am bad at it, so it only went one way, but if you talked to those who watched… we did it both ways. Amusing.

Sometime after the coin tricks, he brought in cards and I watched the card dance in his hands. I was never able to pull off the card tricks. They require an angle and hand movements my fingers wouldn’t allow. I still can’t, but I do appreciate knowing how the tricks are done. He frowned at me the first time I asked. After I proved I knew how several tricks were done, he tiredly informed me that I had to carry cards around all the time. Well, I took him at his word. I carried the cards around. I didn’t PLAY with cards myself, but in moments of dull times, I would pull out the cards and pass them over to him to play with. He would amaze and astound anyone near us just for fun. He didn’t seem to be happy that I could see through his tricks.

Finally, it happened. The one trick I was unsure of. After he astounded our mutual friend over and over again by using a tactic I didn’t actually see, he not only showed me that tactic, but also showed me the one I had been asking after for nearly two years. AMAZING yet another trick that I have no skill at, but he is so skilled and energetic, it makes me want to practice.

As we were traveling together at one point, he illustrated with hand movements and energy how much he appreciated the masters. I informed him I thought he was amazing enough. Later, he told me that if I liked his performance, I would be astounded with the Grand Masters and he would send me links.

Ok, I know this sounds really weird for someone who proclaims to like magic tricks… but my response was:

If I wanted to see Grand Masters, I would pay for a show. I would rather see someone I know doing amazing things. Then it is more real.

Commentary on an Article on FastCompany.com: Fast Analysis: Data Consumption Surpasses Voice Calling by U.S. Cell Users

NOTE: This was supposed to post a while ago. For some reason it never uploaded so it may be a little aged.

There’s a subtle, but potentially hugely important, change happening in cell phone use in the U.S.: For 2009 figures, the amount of digital data sent over cell phone networks surpasses voice traffic for the first time. The future has arrived.

~ Fast Analysis: Data Consumption Surpasses Voice Calling by U.S. Cell Users by Kit Eaton

This thrills me beyond explanation. I have always had a hard time using phones because I have a hard time hearing. Finding out that many other people also use mostly data makes me feel justified when I insist that people text message me.

The U.S. has finally caught up with the SMS trend, many years after it exploded across Europe, and CTIA data shows that the number of text messages sent by the average U.S. user leaped 50% in 2009 from the previous year.

I never understood why text messaging of any sort took so long to take off in the US. From the minute I heard the term “SMS” from my friends in foreign countries, I wanted to be right on that train. It took until the age of Twitter to make it a reality here. How interesting.

And remember that by far the greater number of phones still in use on these networks aren’t the data-munching smartphones like iPhones or Android devices–they’re the old-style dumbphones, which may be capable of limited Net browsing and picture messaging, but which still serve the primary task of phone calling and SMSing.

Where I am at, I would not have believed this if I was told it vocally. I use a dumbphone and about half the people I talk to do so as well, but the other half is all smartphone. I personally use an ancient bar dumbphone that is pay-as-you-go everything. Nearly everyone in my office is moving to smartphones if they are the least tech savvy. I am going to follow that trend soon since I have begun texting and communicating more and more in the last few months. I am turning green with envy to get a smartphone with apps… but at the moment I will be content knowing that the dumbphones are being used just as much as I would hope they would be.

And when that happens, something odd will happen to the cellphone providers themselves–they’ll be relegated to merely being vanilla pipes over which your lovely smartphone data flows.

Aren’t they already? LOL thanks Kit Eaton, this was a fun article for me.