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Here is a recipe for a spicy curryfied cous-cous that is really cheap to make, and very tasty, not to mention completely vegan. It reminds me of Nigerian food. Of course, because it uses new-world ingredients, its really a type of fusion food, but hey, I’m a fusion kind of guy.

It’s a simple recipe, and you are encouraged to change it around to your heart’s content. Like most of my recipies, it is not a finished product, but a work in progress.

Ingredients

• 1 cup dry cous cous
• 1 and 1/4 cup water
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 bell pepper (any color, but red would be best), finely chopped
• a few tablespoons curry paste (yellow or panang paste would be best, but feel free to experiment with other kinds. The curry pastes from Patak are available in most groceries, and work nicely)
• a little olive oil
• some paprika
• a tablespoon or so of grated fresh ginger

• a chipotle pepper, finely chopped

  Procedure

  First, make the cous cous (aka couscous). I boil one and a quarter cups of water, then add the cup of dry cous cous, cover, and remove from heat. In a few minutes, the cous cous will soak up the water and be ready to rock.

  While the cous cous is going, heat up a wok or large pan with a little olive oil in the bottom. When hot (hot enough to ‘surprise’ the food when it hits the bottom), toss the onion and pepper into the pan and stir it as it heats up. Add the ginger, curry paste and chopped up chipotle. Watch out for the fumes coming off that chipotle, it might sting your eyes a bit. Feel the burn, and keep cooking.

  When the onions begin to soften, you are almost done. Grab that pot of finished cous cous, and toss it into the big pan or wok. Stir it up real good with the onions and peppers. If the curry paste hasn’t begun to coat all the cous cous, add a little more. Once it is fully mixed, add some paprika for color and paprika-goodness, and you are ready to eat!

  Notes

  Almost any saute-able veggie will work well in this. I used a green pepper and an onion tonight, because thats what I had around. You might try bamboo shoots, other colors of bell pepper (red would be particularly good, I think), some squash, or even some diced tomato or peas. Whatever it is, cut it small, so it doesn’t overwhelm the tiny cous couses.

  With a single chipotle pepper, the cous cous was ‘not very spicy’ to me, and ‘a little too spicy’ to Madalene. Somewhere in the middle, you’ll find the truth. Start with less chipotle pepper, and if you need more spice, you can add another chopped up pepper after its done, but while its still in the pan. Taste often to get your spice balance right. Chipotle peppers are usually found in a can in the Mexican area of your local grocer-mart. They are smoked jalapenos packed in adobo sauce, and they are crazy delicious. I’ve raved about them in other recipes.

  The curry paste is a mixture of spices like cumin, cilantro, peppers, tomato paste, and other goodies packed in oil and mushed into a paste. You can get it in the ‘international’ (Indian or Thai) section of your grocer-mart, or you can make your own pastes. I don’t have any good recipes for curry paste right now (if you’ve got one, send it my way!), so I’ve been using Patak brand curry paste, which is pretty common in grocery stores. Any curry paste will be good though, just a slightly different flavor. Note for vegetarians/vegans, some curry pastes contain shrimp paste or diced anchovies or something, so check the ingredients.

  This is a very fast and cheap meal, and is likely to become a staple for me. I made it for a little potluck down the street, and the people got a real kick out of it. I hope you do too!

  

One of the most fabulous beverages known to man and woman-kinds alike is the sublime Vietnamese Iced Coffee, or Caf? Sua Da (or even, Ca Phe Sua Da, to further transliterate. If you are Vietnamese, please let me know how this would actually be written in Vietnam!). This coffee, a rich french dark roast with chicory, made in a special version of the press pot, and served with copious quantities of sweetened condensed milk and refreshingly cooled with ice, is the perfect complement to any dish, and any occasion. Just don’t drink it if you are hoping to sleep soon. It also makes a nice alternative to the Thai Iced Tea recipe I’ve got. They are both great on a hot day, or with spicy southeast asian foods (or anything at all, frankly). Read on for a picture-heavy, overly analyzed method of making the best coffee in town.

Update: Sources for some of the equipment and ingredients are now listed at the bottom of the page, read on to see more. Continue Reading »

Tonight was “Third Friday” at the Third Degree Glass Factory here in St. Louis. Third Friday is an open-house event held on the third friday of each month where you can come see a little live music, check out some art on display, watch glassblowing demonstrations, and see Pandora’s Matchbox (thats us) spin and breath fire. Its a free event, and a nice thing to do on a friday evening.

Tonight we got some excellent spinning in, which was well received by the audience. I’ve been getting better at my fire breathing, and can now produce fairly consistent 10ft towers of fire from my mouth. My aspiration (pun intended) is to get more consistent fuel spray, better torch control, and longer burns. But its already looking quite nice. Chris and I did some tandem breathing where we both blew into one torch, producing mighty towers of flame that apparently looked quite cool. From my perspective, it was very large, and very hot.

We use pure lamp oil, which is basically liquid paraffin, for our breathing. It tastes a bit like chapstick, and has a weird texture. Its really not as bad as it sounds. Lamp oil is not a very volatile fuel, meaning it does not evaporate easily. Liquid fuels do not burn, its the vapors from the fuel that burns. Fuel that does not vaporize easily, like the paraffin, is perfect for fire breathing. As we spray the fuel out of our mouths, we aim to produce a consistent mist of fine particles. As these particles evaporate and hit the torch, they ignite. However, the fire does not travel back up the column of fuel (blow back) easily, because the fuel coming out of our mouths hasn’t begun to evaporate yet.

Some people who dabble in fire breathing use ethanol, something like Bacardi 151 or other high proof liquor. Despite the familiarity of the chemical, its actually far more dangerous to breath with ethanol, because it is so volatile. It evaporates very quickly, and the fire has a tendency to blow back, which can be very dangerous. If you do anything more than a quick blast with ethanol, it will blow back and can seriously burn you. You need a fuel like lamp oil to maintain a column of fire for more than just a little burst. Pictures should be forthcoming.

If you are in St. Louis, you should come down to one of these Third Friday events and come see us. Its a good time, and I promise I won’t set you on fire. (Promise valid at participating outlets only.)

I’ve been a part of a project for a while now that has gotten to the point where I feel the need to make a more public note about it.

The project is called Couch Surfing and it is a website that connects people who want to travel with people who have a couch for them to sleep on. Through the website’s contacts, you find people in the area you are going, ask them if they would share their couch, and then go there and sleep on their couch. Unlike a hotel room, staying with a local gives you the real experience of an area. They can suggest things to do around town, places to eat (the good hole in the wall places that you’d never find as a regular tourist), etc. Plus, its free!

In return, can choose to offer your couch up for travellers. There is no pressure to offer your couch, and you are free to politely deny couch surfing requests for any reason, but once people have had a chance to enjoy meeting someone new and being shown around their town, they usually seek to offer the same experience to someone else.

The network is built from the ground up, and only recently has begun allowing in ‘new’ members. Prior to that, membership was by referal only, you could only join if you were vouched for by an existing member. Hence, the core membership is very strongly tied, and there is a good system for identifying friendships, leaving feedback and referrals, and they even offer an optional verification system that uses your credit card information to verify that you are telling the truth about your address and name. They also have a vouching system that retains the tight-knit feel of the original network. The creator of the site was the first person to have the ability to vouch for others, but anyone he vouched for could begin to vouch as well. The idea is, if you stay with someone who has been vouched for, they will vouch for you (assuming the experience was good, of course), and if you are vouched for, and someone stays with you, you can vouch for them. Thus an internal network is created that connects everyone’s good experiences. Between all that, the process has become very safe, and reinforces my thought that 99.999% of all people on the internet are good, fun people just like you, and just because you meet someone online, doesn’t mean they are a wacko. In fact, if you meet them on a site like Couch Surfing then they are pretty interesting folk who you’d like to meet.

If anyone reading this signs up, feel free to message me, and if I know you, I’ll leave a referral. And maybe I’ll stay on your couch!

In case you’ve been wondering, there is a good reason I haven’t posted in a few days.

On Monday evening there was a mighty storm. We sat playing video games as the rain began to pour, and the lightning began to flash. After a few particularly windy moments, the power went out. Our game was put to an end, and we sat chatting in the darkness, hunting down candles for illumination. After a few minutes, power was restored. Thinking things were done, we continued with our business. After another 10 minutes or so, power went out again. But instead of coming back on, it stayed out.

This became problematic, because Dennis was moving to Colorado on Wednesday, and had been staying with us. Now he was faced with the task of moving all of his stuff out of our house, doing his laundry, etc, all without electrictity. We ate what we could of the perishable foods, sat around without shirts on to mitigate the heat, and we wondered when we’d have electricity.

On Wednesday morning, Dennis, Madalene and Barb all drove to Colorado, leaving me to fend for myself. I began to feel like a post-apocolyptic neanderthal, a trogolodyte who had stumbled upon the abandoned shell of a previous generation. Nothing worked, it was perpetual twilight, and all of my eating happened over a small backpacking stove in the yard. I squatted in the house, nervously peering over my shoulder while raiding the cabinets for bags of unspoiled food, haunted by the ghosts of forgotten memories. I didn’t really live there, I was just sleeping in someone elses abandoned home.

Finally on Thursday evening, power was restored. At first there was a bit of a culture shock as the building came alive. The tomb-like silence was broken by the whirr of computer fans, air conditioners and refridgerator compressors. It took into the next day before I was actually bothering to turn on lights, having gotten used to the darkness, and my first meal was a confused jumble of food that hadn’t spoiled in the heat, haphazardly cooked on a stove that I was surprised to find working.

Then I went camping for a few days. Granted, it was car camping, but it was a lot of fun, and I felt a bit like I had been camping already, so it was an easy transition. I got a bit of a sunburn, I spun quite a bit of fire, tried some fire breathing (very fun), and swam a lot.

At 9:36 PM Central Standard Time, the Cassini spacecraft began its final burn to enter orbit around Saturn. On its seven year journey it has travelled over 2.2 billion miles, and after several gravity assist accelerations around Venus (twice!), Earth and Jupiter, it reached Saturn at a Saturn-relative speed of over 54,270 miles per hour, after its 96 minute long burn, it was moving at a Saturn-relative speed of 68,293 miles per hour. Which is why I’m forced to say, “Fuck NASCAR, this is real speed.”

At 11:12 PM CST, the spacecraft had officially entered Saturn orbit after having safely passed through the ring plane, and the mission has now begun. From this point on, its all science, snapping pictures of moons, dropping its Huygens probe on Titan, and studying Saturn in detail.

Check out a few of these images in the JPL photo journal. If you have a fast connection, be sure to click on the full resolution links on the following pages to see incredibly detailed high resolution images.

• Ringworld Waiting – This picture is from the approach to Saturn, when the great gas giant had filled the camera’s field of view. In natural color, it is a peaceful and beautiful giant, never before seen in such detail.
• Phoebe Close-Up – On approach to Saturn, Cassini made a fly-by of Phoebe, a small dark moon of Saturn, one of the blackest objects in the solar system. Probably a captured comet, this icy rock is stark and looming in this detailed mosaic.

• A Guide to Saturn Orbit – This image is a diagram of the final burn and approach, which was just completed successfully about an hour ago.

  For more pictures, which should begin streaming in over the next few days, keep an eye on the Cassini Homepage. The front page has news, and you can click the Multimedia and Images links to see the latest images coming in from the robotic spacecraft. The next ‘cross your fingers’ moment will come on Dec. 25th, 2004, when the Huygens probe will separate from the Cassini spacecraft, and begin a 21 day trip to Titan. Early in the morning on Jan. 14th, 2005, the probe will penetrate the thick atmosphere of Titan, and begin studying the mysterious surface. For a more detailed timeline of the Cassini mission, including over 74 Saturn orbits, and close fly-bys of all the major moons (and most of the minor), visit the operations timeline.