We had a really nice New Year's. mst3kforall and J came over for New Year's Eve, and let us feed them lentil soup, panettone, soba, and champagne. We hung out and shared stories all evening, then they slept over and gamely partook of our osechi ryori in the morning. Then the Mummers Parade was three blocks from our house, so we went and saw that, which was a ( Read more... )

Yesterday intended to be a lot more productive than it was. I was going to clean things, but our sink fell apart when I jiggled it to see why it was leaking, so I did a Home Depot trip and Western grocery run instead. Got most of the necessary Western groceries (e.g. cereal, basil, sundried tomatoes, cheeses), plus some kind of plastic washer thing ( Read more... )

While raw potatoes are not acutely poisonous, raw taro is. Raw potatoes sometimes taste kind of bitter, but you soldier on. Raw taro tastes like starchy not very much, with a severe aftertaste of pain, so you figure out pretty quickly that you were not supposed to eat it. Stuff like the Wikipedia entry on taro are surprisingly unhelpful about ( Read more... )

I've been doing this first sentences meme since 2005. This was last year's. ( This year's is behind a cut. )

( Read more... )

Whose idea was it for the Hallmark in Suburban Station to close at 5:45?

This entry has
( Read more... )

1. I have successfully produced a food product which you could call either slightly lumpy Burmese tofu or a sort of congealed split pea pudding block. Depending on how you feel about it. It tastes good and will probably be awesome fried.

2. Mochi melts in the microwave. Seriously? I didn't believe
( Read more... )

Through a not-as-complicated-as-it-sounds process of soaking, straining, draining, boiling, stirring, and recombining, I have now produced some kind of gelatinous turmeric-yellow paste that looks like butterscotch pudding and tastes like split pea gravy, with that gelatinous quality you usually associate with cold turkey stuffing. It is awesome. ( Read more... )

So we subscribed to The Atlantic because TNC told us to, and TNC is a wise man. And also because I was feeling passive-aggressive about the piles of The Economist accumulating in our house with their doomsday front pages and their well-intentioned misogyny. The first issue we got had Michael Bloomberg on the front cover and we worried it might not ( Read more... )

According to this Time article, people at NASA are trying to invent a warp drive. The pop science version of the article is too low-level for me to have any idea what the scientists are actually doing; the linked journal article is probably too high-level, and at any rate requires a subscription I don't have. I'd love it if someone with a deeper ( Read more... )