Ingredients:

• 2 Large yellow onions
• 1 whole head of garlic (just cut each clove in half)
• 2 tsp black pepper
• 2 tsp adobo powder (without hot pepper)
• 1.5 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 bag (500g?) of black lentils
• Beef marrow bones
• Water to cover

Dice the onion, cut the garlic cloves in half and throw them in the pot. Add the marrow bones and the lentils. Throw the spices in and cover the whole affair with water. Put on low and leave overnight in the slow cooker. The top will become very dark as it cooks but that’s ok. It just means it’s time to stir. Taste about an hour before serving and adjust the seasoning as needed.

The most important part of what makes this recipe great is the marrow bones. Don’t try to substitute any other kind of bones like neck or something because it just isn’t the same. Besides, there is something very primally satisfying about sucking on the marrow bones after eating the lentils. If you can eat it quickly enough, the bones will still be rather warm and the flavor from the spices makes the marrow both smooth and satisfying.

Given how much we like to explore new foods, Sarah sent me a link to this great food blog called 101 Cookbooks which features some really awesome recipes. I made this rockin’ quinoa recipe for my mother and can’t wait to try these banana cookies with Sarah. Furthermore, the blog has numerous categories and even features a whole section on gluten-free dishes! Also of note, the garam masala tofu scramble and skinny omelletes.

While I have tried to be precise, please excuse my informal approximations for certain items. I figure if fancy cookbooks can say “a pinch of salt”, I can abstract this convention to suit my own needs. This recipe is highly scalable and may be doubled so long as proportions are preserved. That being said, discriminating and/or experienced cooks will most likely tweak according to taste.

Ingredients:

• 4 shoulder cuts of lamb with bones. Cut most of the meat off of the bone and trim the fat. I advise removing as much of the fat as possible and cutting the lamb into thumb sized pieces.
• 1 large onion – coarsely chopped
• 5 cloves of garlic – diced
• 1 large carrot – diced
• 2 stalks of celery – loosely chopped
• 1 medium tomato – cubed
• 2 bell peppers – chopped (yellow and red will look best)
• 1 can of chickpeas
• 2.5 cups of broth (you should have enough to cover the other ingredients. I used chicken broth)
• 3 tbsp tamari or extra dark soy sauce
• 2 tsp cilantro (coriander leaves in the UK)
• 2.5 tsp of curry powder
• 1 tsp of chili oil
• 10 cumin seeds
• 1 tsp of ground coriander
• 1 tsp salt (sea salt recommended)
• 1 handful of fresh basil
• 1.5 tsp of ground black pepper
• 1/3 cup nutritional yeast

Saute the onion and garlic in the bottom of a pot with some olive oil. When it begins to become translucent, add 2 tsp of the curry powder (keeping 0.5 tsp in reserve) and stir constantly for another minute. Add the carrot, celery and lamb pouring the tamari sauce over the ingredients and stirring to coat with the mixture. Season with the salt, black pepper, coriander and basil before adding enough chicken broth to cover everything. Increase heat to maximum, bring to a boil and add the cilantro, the tomato and cumin seeds. Stir and let simmer on low for 30 minutes stirring every 10 minutes. After 30 minutes, drain and add chickpeas with the remaining 0.5 tsp of curry powder and chili oil. Stir to combine and continue steeping for another 30-45 minutes before slowly stirring in the nutritional yeast to help thicken the mixture and improve the consistency of the broth. After another 5-10 minutes of simmering, remove from heat and serve over a darker starch like brown rice or quinoa. This is great with a cold, dark beer.

Having said that, imagine my shock when Wired Magazine‘s most recent Jargon Watch featured the term “Fatosphere”. I was caught off guard by the number of pro-fat blogs and websites which seem to be part of a developing fat acceptance movement. In addition to the links on the NAAFA website (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance), blogs like Fatosphere, Fat Fu and Big Fat Blog offer a fascinating glimpse into America’s underbelly as activists seek to combat what is perceived to be fat discrimination.

Does my shrinking paunch make me un-trendy?

Imagine being an iguana living in a Tokyo pet store when Godzilla attacked. You’d probably feel something like an ordinary kitchen appliance who’s just seen the Blendtec Total Blender. Basically, it’s this professional strength blender than seems able to reduce just about anything to slurry, powder and mush.

In an exceptionally entertaining example of viral marketing, Tom Dickson, the founder of Blendtec, opened this fantastic website called Will It Blend? which showcases videos of the Total Blender deconstructing various objects. There is some seriously Mr. Wizard-stlye feel good flavor to the videos as Tom conducts each demonstration with a vanilla charm and matching lab coat inside the Blendtec test kitchen. Appropriately enough, Tom has a genuinely-amused smile on his face as he destroys everything from whole cans of Coke to garden hoses and glow sticks.

Though the overwhelming majority of videos are in the “Don’t Try This @ Home” category, you can still find some neat (and safer) demos in the “Try This @ Home” category. The coolest part? You can even submit ideas and suggestions for what sort of things they should try blending in the future.

A quick bit of searching yields a few results including a two different howto documents (eHow and wikiHow), an article in the Hitchhiker’s Guide and an instructable indicating how to get the skin off in one piece.

In my own experiments, I have noticed that the faster I remove the skin, the less pith sticks to the fruit. I believe that a swifter separation minimizes the undesirable adhesion. Is such a theory logical? Has anyone tinkered with this? Might there be some tips out there?

However, it does seem logical that some of the negative connotation associated with sardines might in turn come from negative images like  “packed in like sardines” and other such idiom. Another reason may be that people are unfamiliar with sardines or confuse them with other small and (generally) canned fish such as the anchovy. Sardines are far less salty and often have a lighter and flakier presence on the palette.
Those who venture to try this shockingly satisfying fish may very well
find that the dark flesh and savory texture reminds one of the ever-popular herring.

While I prefer them in a sauce of mustard and dill, I would advise some other preparations for those who are interested…

• Seared in a pan with olive oil. Feel free to add black pepper, kosher salt, cumin, tarragon and basil)
• In salads of baby spinach and other leafy, green substance. Sardines packed in an oil can be drained and added to provide a good addition to a more acidic vinaigrette!
• On top of noodles like Soba or Korean-style tofu noodles.
• Plainly eaten with some crackers (cheese of your choice is optional but not always recommended)

Regardless of the reason, I would encourage people to give sardines a try. Besides, as a student, sardines are a cost-effective and seriously tasty way to enhance a dish or even just snack! Give it a shot. You might just be in for a pleasant surprise…

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At first glance, KDE 4 is visually gorgeous. The all-new Icon theme is called Oxygen and the matching window decorations only make it prettier. While the default theming is a mite dark compared to the brighter default look packaged in past KDE releases, the icon sets and window decorations still look sharp and crisp. Clean lines, an excellent default wallpaper and delightful SVG graphics on the desktop increase the aesthetic appeal even further.

Plasma, the new desktop and presentation layer, also packages a much-needed improvement to the aging SuperKaramba widget system. The new dashboard functionality allows for rich applets (affectionately called “Plasmoids”) to be added to the desktop layer. It’s an excellent start but many plasmoids are broken on their own or induce other display. I’ve had several of them completely crash Plasma and require a hard restart of graphics in order to get a usable desktop again. Even so, the future of Plasma looks bright with fun stuff on the horizon like a widget packaging system (Plasmagik) and multi-language scripting.

The visuals are not the only KDE4 features still developing. Under the hood, the 4.0 release is not yet the super-framework once promised. Fortunately, there is a whole lot of functionality there and the new hardware-management system called Solid is a perfect example. Opening up the Solid control panel shows a unified and intuitive way to control things like networking and Bluetooth. Furthermore, Solid deals with USB devices and other bits of your system in a straightforward fashion.

To be sure, the 4.0 release is not what I’ll be using as my primary desktop (for that, I have 3.5) but it does make one reconsider the ways in which we interact with our computers. While others agree that this release is buggy, I haven’t done much effort to determine if the issues I am having are a result of my particular configuration…