Rice, Rice Baby

kl and I are fans of cooking and eating. Each weekend will usually feature some kind of grilled food or something we’ve concocted indoors. Most recently I’ve taken a liking to this rice pilaf dish. Your mileage may vary
Rice Pilaf
Required ingredients:

• 2-3 medium (yellow) onions.
• 1 large tomato.
• 12 oz garbanzo beans.
• 2 cups brown rice.
• 2/3-1 cup chicken stock (or veggie stock).
• 2/3-1 cup white wine (or water).
• 1tsp cayenne pepper (season to taste).
• 1tsp Kosher salt (season to taste).
• 3Tbsp Olive Oil.
• 2Tbsp unsalted butter.
• 1-2cups cold water, as necessary.

Instructions:

1. Dice onions fine.
2. Slice tomato and set aside.
3. Set burner to “medium”. Heat olive oil in no-stick pan until it bubbles. Do not allow oil to burn.
4. Cook onions, stirring regularly, until they start to brown.
5. Add salt and cayenne pepper. Stir for 2-3 minutes.
6. Decrease burner to low-medium heat.
7. Add whole tomato and cook until tomato begins to breakdown (5-10 minutes).
8. Add rice and stir. Allow rice to “tan slightly” for 2-3 minutes.
9. Add stock and white wine.
10. Turn up burner to high and bring to a rolling boil, stirring regularly.
11. Once mixture has reached a boil, turn burner down to low. Cover pan and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring regularly to avoid burning.
12. After 30 minutes, add garbonzo beans and stir.
13. Add butter and cover pan. Simmer for 40 minutes, stirring regularly.
14. Over the next 45 minutes, your rice should cook thoroughly, until it is soft. If you find that your mixture is drying out, add more water, 1/2 cup at a time. When you are done, the rice should be moist and soft, but you should see no evidence of liquid.

This Season on 24 -or- Why Do I Even Bother?

kl and I started watching “24″ while I was recovering from surgery back in January. You see, it all started out great: terrorists, missing gas cannisters, a conspiracy. Neat! Once kl realized the powers of Tivo, we started to record each episode and watch it at our leisure.

In retrospect, putting “24″ on Tivo and not rushing home for it was a superb idea. Why? Because every last second of “24″ sucks. Alright, so I understand plot and conflict and throwing in a couple of twists, but when you look at master works like “North by Northwest”, you know that paying careful attention to its storyline will lead you to a conclusion. Not so with “24″! “24″ has the undeniably awful habit of pulling its plot out of the air. How dare I slam such “riveting” television drama like “24″? It’s easy when you consider the following:

Wonder what happened to those gas cannisters? It was a conspiracy, and the president didn’t know.

Fine, so following the plot, it would seem like terrorists were to blame for the missing gas cannisters. So, six wasted hours later, the viewers learn that:

The president did know about the gas cannisters and that he’d murdered the previous president to ensure oil supplies for all Americans.

*Rolling eyes.*

This is not to say that I haven’t been paying close attention here. Simply, a casual viewing of “24″ should lead anybody to conclude that the show’s writers are making things up as they go along. I can picture a writer’s meeting for “24″ now:

Writer 1: Okay, so we tied the terrorists to the gas cannisters and Jack has saved Los Angeles by thwarting a terror attack. Problem? We only have enough material for 11 episodes, and we need material for 22 episodes.
Writer 2: So? Why not have the president be a conspirator?
Writer 1: How would that work? We already outed his chief of staff a few episodes ago.
Writer 2: I doubt anyone would even notice.
Writer 1: Whaaaat?!
Writer 2: If 400-pounders, mousey guys, and Chinamen can attain superstardom by performing their renditions of “Tears of a Clown” to a national audience, do you really think they’d notice if the president pulled a 50-foot garden hose out of his ass while engaged in a monologue about “oil supply” and “patriotism”?

Apparently, kl and I are suckers for this kind of divestment (of time and energy). So, each week, we watch 5-10 minutes of an episode on Tivo. We catch the “last week on 24″ introduction and the first couple minutes of the show. Then kl jumps on the “fast-forward” button and narrates:

“Okay, so Jack is chasing after someone, and there’s an explosion. The president is chatting with someone on his cell phone. He looks kind of maniacal. Jack is chasing the president. There are terrorists chasing the both of them. Oh, a commerical! I want to see that movie. Now, scenes from next week!”

I managed to avoid every last second of the first season of “American Idol”, but I wasted 5 months of my life on the second season — while I wrote a book with “Idol” in the background. I heard all of the hype about the first season of “24″ but avoided it completely. A bout of scrotal pain sucked me into the third season.

At least Fox understands its audience.

Of Bees and Dogs

I’ve often felt that my labrador retriever is like a bee, a yellowjacket. While he isn’t yellow, he does flit from place to place, he’s tried to “pollenate” (on a few unsuspecting victims), and he does like garbage. So? His nickname is “Bee”. He even answers to it!

Imagine my delight when kl pointed out a website that’s dedicated to bee costumes for dogs. Not to say that I’m going to buy one, but apparently my observation of my dog acting like a bee was more apt than I’d originally thought. And the website is a riot. Consider the following:

No Photoshop! Beedogs.com is about pictures of actual dogs wearing actual bee outfits. I’m not interested in pictures of dogs photoshopped to look like bees, nor do I want pictures of bee costumes photoshopped to look like they’re being worn by dogs.

Speaking of yellowjackets (or specifically of the color yellow), I have to take Bee to the vet’s today. While Bee is a pretty well-behaved creature and he’s housebroken, he has these bouts with UTI such that he becomes un-housebroken in the short-term. This is a bummer. This time around, the vet threw me off by asking for a urine sample.

How on earth does one get a urine sample from a 60-pound animal who flits around like a yellowjacket?

Is it akin to milking a cat? Time will tell. This afternoon, before 4pm, kl, Bee, and I will head to the backyard. I will be wearing rubber gloves, holding a plastic tub in my hands. kl will be controlling the leash. I can only imagine that I’ll be writing another entry about this one. Stay tuned.

I Rock (When I’m Not Shy)

Anne dropped by for some session work with her (now former) band last October. Joe and I did the engineering work for the sessions. We crammed three songs into two days’ worth of tracking and Joe quickly put together some rough mixes on the third day before the band hit the road.

When Anne left the band, she had some material that had been “orphaned” — which was to say that it had been left undone. Joe and I decided to create new instrumentation and mixes for Anne’s work. Last weekend, Joe engineered some sessions where I’d tracked bass for one of Anne’s songs. This song was of the interesting variety: kind of Motown-like, which meant that you had to play a precision performance on top of a bouncy beat. While I’ve been involved with music for a pretty long time, I’ve also played lots of music where precision isn’t really the object of the performance. This meant that our sessions weren’t without peril.

While we got an early start on Saturday morning, I was just not feeling the song and kept obsessing about a perfect performance, so things weren’t going very well. After a few hours of redo’s, Joe and I decided to take a break. He had a sandwich and I had a buffet of other stuff, like wasabi peas and hummus/pita. After our break, we started to track again, and during the course of this, Joe brought up a maddening tendency in my playing; I get shy.

When I’m confident with my performance, it’s loud and even. When I hit trouble spots (tough tempo or phrasing, etc), the performance practically cowers in a corner or hides beneath a bed. Horrible. Take after take I worked on evening out my rough spots. And then I started feeling the song. Takes were getting it easier. It clicked. I wasn’t as shy. We actually got a pretty decent performance… after 8 hours.