One

So people have been blathering about the USDA's new dietary horoscope. I punched in my info and I'm a Grain with Beans Rising, with Mars in Vegetables and the Moon in Mac'n'Cheez. I must take care to eat extra grain-fed beef during the warm seasons to keep my Monsanto-ADM AgraVedic dosha from becoming aggravated. Since I was born in the Year of the Rooster, each week I will try to eat precisely three servings of purple-aura veggies (parsnips, swiss chard, eggplant, portobello mushrooms, seaweed).

I feel healthier already.

Two

Jeanne at Body and Soul has yet another post that hits you like a brick:

[I]n Joseph Ratzinger, standing by and watching people being herded into death camps without saying a word, I'm afraid I recognize myself. Very afraid. For me, it's essential to reiterate that this is wrong because I need to acknowledge that it would be as wrong for me as it was for Ratzinger. It's far more important, really, than my saying that it's wrong to take pleasure in other people's pain. That's a sin I have no inclination toward, so condemning it is more judgment of someone else's character than honesty about my own.

But this I also know about myself: If I had made the choice Ratzinger made, I would feel guilty about it for the rest of my life. I would ask myself over and over again how I could have done such a thing, and I would not accept easy answers. I would spend the rest of my life trying to atone for that. I know my conscience would not let me tell myself that everyone did the same thing and I had no real choice. It would be no comfort to me to know that other people had done worse things. And certainly if I later had the power to stop other people who were fighting oppression from doing so, I could not, in good conscience, use my power in that way.

For me to say that it's fine that Joseph Ratzinger co-operated with evil, because few did better and some did much worse, would be to grant myself dispensation, to say that as long as I don't personally torture anybody, for instance, I don't need to object when my country tortures people.

This was written in reference to discussion on an earlier post about the contrast between Joseph Ratzinger and Oscar Romero, which I also found resonant.

Many

My actual dietary guideline - "eat a fuckton of vegetables" - is working nicely now that I've discovered the yummiest salad dressing in the entire universe. If you've ever needed charts of domestic violence rates broken down by gender, Alas, A Blog is the place to go. Liberalism (with respect to domestic violence laws and funding) does indeed save lives.

Meanwhile back at Pharyngula, a discussion about ginormous trilobites probes the important issue of whether or not various extinct arthropods would've been delicious. To what extent can we generalize from yummy crustaceans? I was hoping for some professional insight on the matter, and maybe a cladogram color-coded for tastiness; alas, it looks like I'll have to pioneer the phylogenetics of tastiness all by my lonesome. If you've ever eaten weird bugs, you should go over there and add to the growing pool of anecdotes data. Also, trilobite cookies!

The most decadent food of all is the kind that (a) is dipped in butter and (b) leaves a huge pile of indigestible crap on the plate: shells, stems, peels, or in this case, stripped artichoke leaves. I never thought of artichokes as either decadent or very filling until tonight - the volume of discarded bits so far exceeds the volume of edible bits it's hard to imagine that you've eaten anything at all, and the more you eat, the less it seems you've eaten - but *burp*!

So I pretty much just ate four ounces of lemon butter. Yum.

This new Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper is exactly the sum of its parts. Which is disappointing; other flavored classic pops have managed to transcend themselves, at least a little. In particular, Cherry Coke and Diet Coke with Lime operate on a level above the mere addition of cherry-ness and coke-ness and lime-ness and artificial astringency. If you remember the brief error that was Diet Coke with Lemon, that also was not just the sum of its parts; it was considerably worse than either of its components.

And much as I love Vanilla Coke, or better yet Coke with vanilla extract thrown in, it's just the goodness of vanilla with the okayness of Coke, nothing more. This new Dr. Pepper is the same damn thing: the goodness of vanilla, the goodness of cherry, the okayness of Dr. Pepper. It's not noticeably different from the vague fruity sweetness that you get from pouring all the different kinds of pop at the fountain into your cup.

Sigh.

Peter sent a link last week to a picture of fractal broccoli and now all of a sudden the stuff is everywhere. For definitions of "everywhere" limited to the Pasadena farmer's market, the fridge until we ate it, and the Internet.

It's not all that yummy; it's really just normal broccoli tasting. But that's not the point. The point is, this was obviously created by a fairly simple mutation in some broccoli floret regulator. So why haven't they tracked it down and made fractal everything? Or at least all the possible varieties of fractal brassica?

I understand that it's probably a pain in the ass to cross the trait into brussel sprouts the old-fashioned way, but if God didn't make fractal-inducing development process cockups to be genetically engineered into super-durable funny-colored fractal supermarket produce, then what's the point in theism?

1. Why did they not have caramel apples coated in M&Ms and/or cookie crumbs and/or coconut when I was a kid? Is this a new innovation in candy, or a cultural problem with the Midwest, or what?
2. No one at Francis's is answering the question that obviously follows up a question like this:
   

   Have I also mentioned that, cussing aside, I've always been sentimental about yuletide, even when I was really too young to actually be sentimental about anything?

   So I'll bring it up here. Just how old is old enough to actually be sentimental?

3. The Posada was lovely; the incongruities of candlelight on busy stretches of Colorado Blvd. were more than balanced out by the gut-wrenching combination of Architecture! Music! Death! at the entrance to several churches. Thanks to all who donated; the organizers weren't completely on the internet ball and didn't send any notices of internet donations until Thursday evening-ish, but I know of at least $50 - way more than I was expecting! Anyone who gave and would like a cute thank-you postcard, send me your address.
4. I bought myself an album of Christmas music the other day. It claims to be chock full of authentic-esque Medieval and Renaissance yuletide hymns, and the cover features a guy in a doublet and sunglasses. Early music with the fashion sensibilities of a cheesy 80s movie! What's not to like about that, particularly when it's in the $1.99 bin?
   It doesn't quite live up to either the pre-Baroque or the 2020s, but at least the generic arrangements are of Gloucestershire Wassail rather than Here We Come A-Wassailing.
5. Happy Hanukkah, to those of you who don't remember; also to those of us who only remembered because it's on our office calendar, along with the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and Eddie Vedder's birthday.

This is a food entry. If all works out as planned, it'll be a long food entry, because if I don't handicap the verbiage, my Meyer lemon meringue pie (tasty as it was) will never compete with the pecan pie, 4 feet in diameter, shaped like a Koch snowflake.

Since it is now three days after I started writing the post, it obviously hasn't worked out as planned, and is short. But it has headings!
(more...)

Who, I earnestly enquire, could possibly resist bottles of wine for $1.20?

Don't answer that, I'm sure you all have quite good sense in your heads and realize that $1.20 wine will taste like, well, $1.20 wine. Nevertheless, I do not happen to be involved in La Resistance du Vin and so I bought three bottles.

"Good" is not particularly among the things one could say about the 2020 Tula Vista Cabernet Sauvignon. "Drinkable" is, possibly, if the set of things one could say is broadly construed to include both charitability and sarcasm. It has screaming notes of poison berry and vinegar, with a sour, tannic finish. However, if you are careful to avoid touching the tip or side of your tongue to the wine, and swallow quickly without thinking about what you're doing, it's a plausible excuse for a genuine Two-Buck Chuck.

I made soup out of my jack-o-lantern. Pumpkin, lentils, potato, lemongrass, nutmeg, cumin (just a little), mushrooms, rice, milk, and onion - very tasty and filling! But also very ugly.

I have this problem whereby cooking with mushrooms (admittedly not the freshest ones available, since I buy from the "reduced for quick sale" cart) results in a sludgy dark gray color. The taste is fine but I want my food to be pretty, too - any hints?

I'm eating a couple baked potatoes for lunch today. I brought along the small chunk of cheese remaining in the fridge, but decided to wing it for the rest of the condiments; the office fridge usually has a good selection, often including leftover pats of butter. But of course, past results are no guarantee of future performance, so my choices today were ketchup, mustard, various salad dressings, tahini, and mayonnaise.*

Yes, I ate ranch dressing on a baked potato. Ranch dressing is the new black! It wasn't as good as butter and chives, but it was okay. I feel horribly guilty, though, and hereby resolve to eat a plate full of ketchup for supper tonight.

* Hot sauce is not a legitimate choice.

The L.A. Times Food section attempts to turn a well-worn trope on its head by insisting that there's never too much zucchini. Though I normally enjoy any article focused on a single, seasonal ingredient, does rhapsodic praise of the goods at the Santa Monica farmer's market really never get old?

My own zucchini - the one I planted to ensure a yield of something from my garden - has output precisely one (1) zucchini and has a rather severe case of leaf mold. So this isn't, you know, jealousy speaking or anything.