The New York Times has posted an article featuring 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less [via]. It’s not really a list of detailed recipes, because the meals are straight forward and common sense to cook, but it’s a nice prompt for quick ideas when you’re feeling like something different but don’t want to dig out a cookbook.
I didn’t want to go shopping tonight, so I made my own quick and easy meal.
Spaghetti with Crab and Parsley
Ingredients:
Spaghetti
Fresh parsley
Crab meat (I used canned, but fresh from the deli would obviously be a million times tastier)
Garlic
Extra virgin olive oil
Capers
Crushed red peppers
Pepper
Salt
Boil the spaghetti in salted water until al dente and scoop out into a bowl. Mince a clove of garlic and gently fry it in some olive oil. Mix the garlic oil with the crab meat, a tablespoon of capers, red chili pepper flakes, and ground pepper. Toss the mixture over the pasta, throw on a handful of chopped parsley, and toss it all together.
My cooking skills are fairly basic. I have a few staple dishes that I do over and over, and I don’t really branch out much from those. Maybe I’ll start posting recipes on here as a way to experiment a little. Who knows, maybe there are cooks as green as I am who will get something out of it.
I had to return to Kamloops to attend a close friend’s wedding last weekend (more on that later), and I needed to buy a couple of new all season tires to get me there in one piece. After having the tires installed and balanced, I learned that my entire braking system was trashed. Pads, rotors, capilars, and other stuff I don’t know anything about - everything needed to be replaced. I ended up spending 60% of my car’s worth on repairs.
Today I come home, and I have gutter water draining from a ceiling light fixture onto my new bed.
Some of my friends believe I spent a large part of my youth punching babies in the face, because that’s the only way to explain my horrendous karma. I’d just like to say for the record, and hopefully whatever karma-controlling being or energy that is out there is listening, those babies totally deserved it.
I hear a caw and turn to see three crows sitting on a branch just outside my window, staring in with their cold, blank eyes. A pigeon, just out of sight, coos loudly. Overhead a seagull swoops past at an alarming speed.
There was a time when I wasn’t bothered by birds. It feels like a lifetime ago, but I’ll even go as far to say I quite liked them. A little piece of nature within the confines of downtown. The closest most city-dwellers will get to spotting something wild. I remember seeing a pigeon on my balcony when I first moved into this apartment. I remember thinking how great it was, nature on my doorstep. What a fool I was.
These birds, these winged demons, have become the bane of my existence. They invade my home. They ruin my car’s gleam. They haunt my fleeting steps as I leave the apartment. I lay in bed at night, rocking back and forth in the fetal position, listening to their taunts until exhaustion takes hold and dreams overcome me. Even in the dreams, I cannot escape them.
It all started with a pigeon.
A single pigeon on the balcony, what harm could it do? Sure, it was a little noisy occasionally, but it wasn’t too bothersome. I left it there and was out of town for two weeks. Stepping onto my balcony after I returned, I knew I had been terribly wrong. It was as if the balcony had been abandoned for years. Six pigeons were now calling it their home. They were also calling it their toilet. The wall and floor were covered in droppings, and the herbs in my planter box had been stepped on and crushed. The noise was overwhelming. My balcony had become a cruising zone for wanton pigeons. They cooed and they cooed, looking for their next casual encounter.
The following morning, I was the victim of a senseless attack. Unbeknownst to me, I had a silent stalker in pursuit as I made my way to the car. Just before reaching the door, a crow dropkicked me in the back of the head. It then flew up to a telephone line and proceeded to laugh at me, each caw cutting into my very being.
Each day the agony continues. I’ve chicken wired the balcony. Does the wire keep them out or keep me in? It no longer matters. As I leave my apartment and walk down the dark street, I see a man pushing pigeons away from his ground-floor balcony with a broom. Our eyes meet, and I nod my head to him. He knows instantly that we suffer from the same pain. This pain, it changes men. We move inconspicuously through the crowds, our torment hidden from the populace, but this change is unmistakable to those who know, those who have faced the birds.
Occasionally I’ll be posting songs on here. I don’t have a hair of musical talent on me, but I listen to a fairly eclectic selection of music. I can find something I like in every genre, and I’m constantly searching for new and interesting musicians.
I’m going to post music that probably won’t be heard on most radio stations. I’m not doing this to score obscure indy music points; I just don’t see a reason to post something that everyone’s bound to have heard.
I realise that sharing music is frowned upon these days, but I’m giving the artist free publicity and not making any money from this website, so I feel fine doing it. Songs will be taken down if ever requested, but I don’t see this as a morally bad thing to do.
Anyway, here’s the first song. Tom Waits is my favourite singer-songwriter, but he’s a bit of an acquired taste. I’m really into sad, drunken songs for whatever reason, and this is a nice one for a lazy Sunday.
I love travel adventure books, so I was excited when I saw one written by a prominent author while I was wandering about a local bookstore. I bought it and started reading it immediately over lunch. I quickly realized that it’s a lot more than just a travelogue. It has essentially three main focuses: his training at medical school, his travels, and his spirituality.
The book begins with his medical school horror stories and then moves on to his quirky travel adventures. Both topics were fantastic to read about, but what really surprised me were the tales of his meddling with the supernatural. Whether you believe in any of it or not, it’s interesting to read such sincere and unapologetic accounts of spiritual experimentation from a well educated and well known man. He doesn’t hold anything back when he tells stories of trying to speak with his spiritual guide, a disfigured old cactus, or having an exorcism performed on himself.
He had an interest in psychic phenomenon at a young age, decided to investigate it further as a skeptic, and eventually became a believer. I think it takes guts to write this honestly about a topic that could very easily label you as a complete kook.
He manages to get himself into some great situations while traveling, and his excellent writing makes it easy to imagine yourself there alongside him. I haven’t read anything else by him, but I really enjoyed this book, so I may try some of his novels soon. I definitely recommend picking this up.
Besides, any non-fiction book that begins with “It is not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw” is worth a read.
This here’s my new weblog. It may be located on the same domain as my old weblog, and it may have the same name as my old weblog, but we’re going to pretend it’s new.
What old weblog, you ask? For the last ten years or so, I’ve had something on the web. It started with Geocities pages, complete with animated gifs and auto-play embedded midi files, and eventually progressed into a weblog on this very domain. Said weblog was going strong (well, it was going) up until September 2006. At that point I decided, as many webloggers do, to take a hiatus. And as many webloggers on hiatuses do, I never came back.
I originally took the hiatus because I was taking on a very heavy course load in university. Instead of slowing down the posting, I decided to just forget about it and focus on school. After the semester ended, I abandoned the weblog to devote the time I would normally spend on it into writing a novel that would indirectly solve all of the world’s problems with its cutting wit and embracing soul.
The Iraq War hasn’t ended, the Aids epidemic in Africa is still thriving, and people are starving around the world, so it’s obvious my book hasn’t yet been published. In fact, since discarding the weblog, I haven’t really written anything at all. It’s easy to fall from the habit of writing when you aren’t sitting down and typing something every day.
I don’t have a road map for where I’m going with this. I know the first thing they teach you in Weblogging 101 is to focus on a topic, but I have too sketchy a mind to pull off something like that. I’ll be focusing on delving deeper into my interests and personal projects, but there will most likely be an eclectic array of topics covered here.
As you may have noticed, I’m using a WordPress theme. It kills me to use a design I didn’t create myself, but I don’t have enough time to work on a new one, and I wanted to get on with it. I will eventually design my own, but this will work just fine until then.
So, I guess this weblog is officially open for business. Now where’s that champagne?
Lazy Cooking
