Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in The Reverend Spaced's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
1:17 pm	A random vegetable experiment Made this for the Tuesday group, worked rather well. The specific chanterelles I'd ended up with had a slightly bitter edge compared to most which worked well with the broccoli. Funghi Nel Bosco 4-6 heads (stalks? trees?) broccoli Chanterelles (see recipe body) half a head of garlic olive oil salt red pepper flakes Preheat the oven to 425F. Cut the broccoli and chanterelles into bite sized pieces; I ended up with half as many chanterelle pieces as broccoli pieces which seems a good balance. No idea to starting amount; it was what was left of a huge bag I'd been given. Chop the garlic finely. Toss the broccoli and mushrooms with some olive oil, the garlic, a couple good pinches of kosher salt, and a few good shakes of red pepper flake. Spread on a baking sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes or until the broccoli hits bright green/al dente status. Serve warm. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 18th, 2009
4:08 pm	Things to do in Heidelberg when you're Dead Spent a lovely few days visiting friends in Heidelberg (and Dublin; they decided they'd like a weekend trip :) ). I'd never been to Heidelberg before; while there were a plethora of great things going on, here are the three that really stand out in memory. Brauhaus Vetter. Right in the Altstadt, this has excellent food and bloody brilliant beer. I made my friend join me there thrice for lunch, wherein much housemade bratwurst, kaesespaetzle, leberwurst, and kraut were eaten and many liters of their house brewed Helles Lager were drunk. I'm not much of a lager fan usually (preferring darker ales and stouts), but this beer was tasty and good. Kurpfaelzisches Museum. A damn fine local museum with surprisingly extensive art holdings (including a couple of Titians as well as a host of Dutch and German artists). Their archaeology section is bloody brilliant, with well thought out explanatory posters (albeit in German, so puzzling them out was a challenge for me) and all kinds of neat stuff including giant Elk bones from the Ice Age, Roman era coins (including a great display with coins from the entire run of the Empire in the area in chronological order), Merovingian era tools, etc, etc. They uncovered a pillar to Jupiter Best and Greatest that included the metal lightening bolts still intact. It also has a really well thought out children's section, with activities, a wendy house, and all kinds of neat things. Throw in a nice little courtyard for drinks and a sweet suite of rooms from the 1700-1800s including Electoress Elizabeth Augusta's silver dinner service and it's more than worth the 3 euro entrance fee. the Heiligenberg, a really big hill on the North side of the Neckar. In addition to some rather nice wooded paths, it's got an excellent set of ruins at the top; one large monastery complex and one smaller abbey with a standing tower. It's also got an open air theatre built during the Nazi regime (and which reminds me a great deal of the large Greek theatre in Pompeii's ruins, in style terms) which is an interesting walk through. It is rather steep, and surprisingly muggier than the lower town (so much so that I sweat through my shirt on the ramble round), but worth it to see the top and for the leisurely stroll down. There used to be a biergarten at the top as well, but it looked permanently closed when we visited (alas!). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 10th, 2009
11:28 am	Walkabout A Catalogue of Items From Walkabout: Sun Bears engaged in a friendly tussle, 2 Tigers studiously ignoring each other, 2 Snow Leopard Cub excitedly exploring outdoors past opening hours, 1 Y HALO THAR Moment with Ocelot nesting just above window level, 1 Zookeepers cleaning drained otter pond, 3 Brown Bears swimming and bashing up against the window, 2 Cats wandering streets and/or sleeping in the sun, 23 Cats willing to come sniff/mark hand and say hi, 7 Cats who then yowled to for food in spite of being tagged and obviously well fed, 2 Extraordinarily steep path down to beach parking that wrong turning led to, 1 Genially bickering volleyball players, 4 Father teaching his ~3 year old daughter the Ancient and Honourable Art of skipping stones into the ocean, 1 Minutes spent wading in the Sound before it got too cold, 2 Excellent neighbourhood parks/playgrounds encountered, 2 Wonderfully ornate, multicoloured Wendy house on stilts, 1 Fun tiny business district centered around a street called Alonzo, 1 Minutes it took me to stop quoting the Doctor on repeat after encountering the street called Alonzo, 10 Totally (and somewhat surprisingly) awesome neighbourhood pub in spite of tourist trap Irish flag-waving decor, 1 (Molly Maguires on 65th NW) Actual Irish accents heard at pub, 3 Scots accents heard at pub, 3 Received Pronunciation accent at pub, 1 Wry Scottish commentary on Utilikilt, 1 Pints of Pike Place Kilt Lifter consumed, 1 Pints of Guinness consumed, 3 BattleStar Galactica boardgame players at FLGS, 5 Copies of Paranoia XP liberated for cheap, 1 Customarily perfect plate of bottom of the net sauce consumed, 1 (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
10:31 pm	A Custard for All Seasons Today was the last test of the relatively generic ice cream custard I've worked out that works best for my taste and ice cream churn. I've done Cinnamon, Vanilla, Mint, and Sage with this base, and it should adapt well to other flavours. ( All your base.... ) Current Music: Goth Girls - MC Frontalot (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
10:04 am	Mmmm, Genovese Got around to making an old-school Genovese last night for the Tuesday group. The name's one of those amusing bits of culinary strangeness where it's named for a city (Genova) which has no conception of the sauce; indeed, Neapolitans are the keepers of it as one of their trinity of sauces (basic tomato and the long cooked ragú being the others). Although most recipes call for chopping the onions/etc incredibly finely (Francesconi calls for passing the mix through a meat grinder), I ended up doing a coarser chop out of laziness. Still turned out rather well; here's the recipe I used (it's got the proportions I used for the Tuesday group, feel free to halve the ingredients. The original recipe called for a 1kg hunk o' beef): ( genovese ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
9:16 pm	Salumi pasta Made this on Tuesday, and it came out rather well. Based on a recipe by Nick Stellino Ingredients: 1 large red onion, diced .75 pounds salami, diced (I used Salumi's Agrumi) 1.5 pounts cremini mushrooms, stemmed and quartered 6-12 cloves garlic, thickly sliced 1/2 wineglass of dry white wine 1/2 cup chicken broth 1 cup cream 2 lbs rigatoni 1/2 tub grated pecorino romano salt Heat a pot of salted water to the boil. Meanwhile, in a frying pan over medium heat, cook the garlic, mushrooms, and onions with a pinch of salt until the onions are nice and translucent and the mushrooms have given up almost all of their water. Add the salumi, bump the heat to high, and fry for a couple of minutes. Add the wine (for flavour, there should still be enough liquid from the mushrooms/onions to make deglazing unlikely). Reduce to almost gone, then add the broth and cream. Turn heat down and simmer until a saucy consistency. Cook the rigatoni in the boiling water until al dente, drain, toss with the sauce, and then mix in the cheese. Serve with extra cheese and a good wine. Current Music: Arms Aloft - Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
10:00 am	Three is a magic number Since it's come up a couple times the past week, thought I'd post this up for the interested. This is what my family calls the #3 walk; it's a variation of a pretty well established ramble through the medieval districts of Rome. ( Oh yes it is, it's a magic number ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 30th, 2008
10:58 am	Kiss me once, kiss me twice, and kiss me once again Hey gang, remember that alphabet thing? Yeah, didn't think so, given how long it's being between entries. Anyway, Kissing. One of the little interesting bits about following both Buffy and Torchwood is noticing what a terrible kisser James Marsters is in the former especially once you've seen the TW episode Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. His kissing of John Barrowman is much more natural than the face chewing finale of Once More With Feeling, and as a result, more convincingly emotional and sensual. I wonder how much was direction/forced placement and how much was having a bad partner/off day. I suppose everyone has an off day; a similar comparison could be made between Casablanca and To Have and Have Not, where Bogart looks incredibly uncomfortable kissing Ingrid Bergman but perfectly at home with Lauren Bacall. And now, as I've been thinking about kisses, the idea of an entire kissing based school of magic/collection of spells for any of the rpgs I've been playing is coming forward. Hrm. It's In His Kiss, the Kiss of Death (or Kiss Me Deadly for that Lita Ford decadent feel, or maybe an explicit reference to Judas), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as a blast spell; must get on this. Current Mood: meditative Current Music: Erased - Vixy and Tony (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
2:40 pm	D is for Desert Island Discs A friend's answer to the Writer's Block for the 10th (personal all-time Top 10 album list) got me thinking about this again. I have trouble picking just ten "best" albums, but the similar question of which 10 albums I would take into exile with me (with the understanding that's what music will be available in this brave new world) seems easier. So, in no particular order: ( Desert Island Discs for spaced ) Current Music: Office noises, oddly enough (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 1st, 2008
4:30 pm	I I really need to get a shorter cycle time between entries. I've not forgotten the alphabet thing, more of those coming soon. For reals this time. But now, the letter no one asked for! ( I is for Italia ) Current Music: Super Smash Brothers Brawl from the game room (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
8:34 pm	the Mountain It's been a month, I guess it's time for an update. I haven't forgotten about the alphabet thing, it's just been a rather busy month or so :). Anyway, on a non-alphabet update, here's a memo to the Seattle Centre management: shutting down the Du Pen fountain down in the middle of our warmest weather is asshattery of epic proportions. Faugh. So then, Mountain. My chief resonance with the word is home, which is an odd thing for such a sea-dweller as myself. A key part of the idea of Home for me, though, is The Mountain, watching over the sea and city. The (not-news and possibly not-)interesting bit is that I have twin homes that both have this: Seattle and Napoli. I've never understood why Seattle isn't twinned with Napoli (the Seattleites choosing Perugia of all places instead). Both have their Mountains, watching over them and threatening always to firebird one day; both are known for their coffee, their excellent seafood, and interesting local music. The Gods of Napoli are the Dioscuri, the sacred twins, and even the Christian saint is Gennaro (Januarius), cognate with January and thus Janus (and with dual feast days, in April or September, depending on the Church). Seattle has Our Lady of Perpetual Help, flanked by twin angels, and its founding pairs of brothers (the Dennys and Terrys). I suppose Seattle twinning with Napoli would create some Powers/Hite bridge of insanity at this point; certainly they've twinned me in my homes though. I'm ready to leave the Mountain to go home to the Mountain again. Current Music: Persephone - Vixy and Tony (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 6th, 2008
2:13 pm	Public Transportation The last time I did one of these, I made a comment about picking up the pace of posting. The very next day, work almost literally exploded. So, as a message to whoever's paying attention, I'll finish these at my own pace, thankyouverymuch. :) ( P is for Goddamn We Need A Tube System ) Current Mood: pensive Current Music: Honeysuckle Rose - Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong (Comment on this)
Friday, June 20th, 2008
2:27 pm	J is for Hats Wow, at this rate it'll be months before I finish the alphabet thing. I suppose I'd better get cracking. So, hats. Hats are a great good, and I really need to get a good breathable one for summer (I've got an excellent Seattle winter hat, keeps the rain off and such, but it doesn't breathe well making it awfully warm for summer wear). I'd like to see more hat wearing; I see a fair number of people in Seattle day to day, but it's still a rarity. A rarity, that is, if one is excluding baseball caps, and I am. Baseball caps, along with polo shirts, are sports item that made the leap to normal fashion and whose attraction eludes me now (I did go through a cap wearing period for about 2 months in University). They work reasonably well, but they're extraordinarily unattractive compared to other head toppers. Part of the unattractiveness, I think, is the need for people wearing them to cover them with advertising (and, yes, the logo of your favourite sports team is advertising). I'm having more and more trouble wearing advertising; I haven't replaced my current sets of shoes because I prefer the feel of sneakers and I haven't found a brand willing to forgo plastering the shoes with its sigil. I'm going to turn into Cayce Pollard if I'm not careful. Going back to baseball caps, though, the advertising on them and on t-shirts seems more egregious than that on feet, probably because of the average eye level of people going by. Why have we let ourselves become walking billboards of this sort? Most of the time, people even pay the company for the privilege of advertising for them, and it's beginning to really rankle. I need to working on my sewing so I can squeeze even more of this out of my life. I guess this really wasn't about hats, but the lids certainly started it. Current Music: office noise (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
5:00 pm	Would you like to buy an O? It's time for another one of these. As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm completely ignoring the rule about one post with all the entries; I'll be doing a letter a post. ( Obscurity ) Current Music: Coup d'Oeil dans le Metro - MC Solaar (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
1:58 pm	C is for Co^H er Chinese Zodiac, apparently Well, two different ideas sprang to mind when I saw this phrase, so let's look at both :). The first was the fact that I find it about as accurate at describing people as western astrology, which is to say not very. The completely vague (and sometimes self-contradictory) qualities/drawbacks that the various signs are supposed to have, combined with the oddity of deciding every single person born in a single minute will be exactly the same (let alone the people born in larger periods of time, as most people use these things) make this a baffling belief system for real world applications. As with anyone with a reasonable circle of friends, I have two friends born the same day of the solar year, and they have far less in common with each other than they have with their non-similarly signed partners. This Sheldon is an excellent take on it. That said, it's fun to play with in rpgs and literature, which brings me to the second major association with the Chinese signs. I'm not much of a consumer of manga or anime, but there are a couple that have really captured my interest. One is the manga Fruits Basket, which I highly recommend (I'm told the anime is good as well). I've not finished it, as I'm now waiting for the English translations to catch up to the end, but its portrayal of a family cursed to have avatars of the Zodiac is fascinating, especially the power dynamic of the "head of family" with the variously cursed people. Current Music: Portugal vs Turkey, Euro 2008 - ESPN2 commenters (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
4:28 pm	Wow, feel the enthusiasm (plus Unicorns!) So, a whole one person responded to the alphabet thingy I posted on Friday. Since I was intrigued by the idea of writing on 26 themes chosen for me, I think I'll just post on random topics, marking out letters on the original post as I use them. Perhaps my vanishingly small readership will enjoy :). Feel free to claim an unused letter at any point. Onto the unicorns! In spite of the weirdly interesting psychosexual nature of the unicorn myth, I've never really gotten into their myth for the simple fact that the usual portrayal is so very very twee. While growing up, all the unicorns I ran across were dewy eyed saccharine snots who would have fit right in with the Care Bears or My Little Ponies (side note: check out the current Something Positive storyline for My Little Pony amusement). It's for that reason that two of the three portrayals of unicorns I actually enjoy (that I can think of) are outright satires, taking the piss out of the airbrushed glitter crowd. One is the wonderfully silly Charlie the Unicorn, the other is Mike Resnick's short story Stalking the Unicorn with Gun and Camera[1] which mocks the manly adventure style of travel article while portraying unicorns as bloody-minded killers (in a nice twist with theories of how the unicorn myths got started, Resnick's unicorns behave much in the way a lot of people believe rhinos to behave). The last unicorns I enjoyed were the rather remote teleporting/time traveling beings in Madeleine L'Engle's Many Waters. A strange little novel about twins (Sandy and Dennys, for people who've read A Wrinkle in Time/etc) getting thrown back to right before the Deluge, it also includes an interesting take on the Nephilim/Seraphim. It's a great read, even if the Christian themes are a bit more in your face than her the rest of the quartet. On a tangent from that, I should try the Narnia books again. For some reason, the Christian themes in L'Engle's work didn't bug me growing up but I felt betrayed by C.S. Lewis when I realised what was going on in the Narnia books. And, while I'm at it, how would y'all rate The Last Unicorn? I learned of it at the height of the twee years, so I think I mentally filed it into the "not worth bothering with" bin and I've never gone and read it. Current Music: office noises (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 30th, 2008
12:47 pm	ooh, like this one from rm, numbered rules copied and pasted with no editing: 1. It begins with a list of all 26 letters of the alphabet. 2. Comment with something for me to talk about that starts with one of those letters. Make me babble about anything -- TV shows, actors, actresses, food, etc. Be creative. :D 3. One topic per letter -- it's like a claims list! I will cross off letters as topics appear. If you'd like to make more than one request (for different letters), go for it. Just don't steal all the letters. 4. I will post a new post talking about all 26 topics given to me! Please don't confine yourself to the popular culture example categories; history, philosophy, biology, cosmology, and other ologies are all fair game :). A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Current Music: Hum of office (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
1:37 pm	mmmm, Chicken Served finadene chicken last night and realised that I don't think I've ever posted the recipe. So, time to fix that: The Finadene Sauce/marinade: 1 small plastic jug Kikkoman soy sauce (the largest size found on normal grocery shelves) several glugs of white wine vinegar (yeah, I know, such a definitive measurement. The basic proportion should be about 1 part vinegar to 2-3 parts soy ) 1 head of garlic, minced 1 medium to large onion, minced 12-15 serrano chiles, minced (any small hot pepper can be used, and totals can be modified to taste) Mix all the ingredients in a bowl and let sit overnight (it ages well, although eventually the vinegar will overpower the other ingredients if left long enough. This is rarely a problem in my house :)). This makes a damn fine dipping sauce and rice accompaniment in addition to being an excellent marinade. The above totals make enough marinade for 24 chicken thighs; feel free to halve/quarter as necessary. To prepare the chicken, marinate in the finadene overnight. Heat your oven to 360F and bake for 45 minutes or until internal temp is at least 160F (preferably closer to 170-180F). Serve with rice and extra finadene, or with a good strongly flavoured pasta dish. Current Music: Hum of the office (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
11:57 pm	Since the reaction was amusing Let's call this dish Fraggle Rock: The Director's Cut. Start by making a batch of Sour Cream Ice cream as follows: 3 cups sour cream 1 cup sugar pinch of salt 1.5 cups milk 2 tbsp cornstarch Combine the sugar, salt, and cornstarch in a small saucepan. Whisk in the milk until smooth, then heat over medium heat until slightly thickened (about 1-2 minutes post bubbling). Meanwhile, put the sour cream in a bowl. Temper the cream with some of the hot milk mixture, then combine the mix with the cream and whisk until homogenous. Chill overnight, then freeze according to your ice cream machine's instructions. Place in freezer to store, but remove to fridge an hour or so before service to soften up. Now make a batch of Fraggle Rock: 2 pounds strawberries, hulled and sliced/quartered 2 tbsp sugar 3-4 tbsp balsamic vinegar Mix the ingredients in a bowl and let sit for at least one hour. Now take a scoop or two of the ice cream and top with a couple serving spoonsful of the Fraggle Rock. Enjoy. Current Mood: amused Current Music: Strip Club Daddy - Paul and Storm (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 10th, 2008
10:18 pm	As panther states, I majored in English Lit at University and many of the books I "had" to read for school were for classes I chose for the reading list. ( Book LJ thing ) Current Mood: amused Current Music: Cod Liver Oil - Great Big Sea (1 Comment |Comment on this)