Movin' On Up

Well, this humble blog that never got any love has gone the way of all flesh. Come see if I can manage more than ten posts in the course of three years over at Quixote States Mark Two. I've already got three up there -- four if you count the photo page. Anyway. This is not an ending, but a glorious new beginning of momentary enthusiasm followed by weeks, then months and eventually years of self-recrimination for not following through on what I start. Join me, won't you?

http://www.quixotestates.com

Leek and Potato Soup

What I like about cooking (as opposed to baking) is the looseness of it. It is very forgiving and allows you to make a lot of mistakes and still come up with something tasty. Or at least edible. This is, I think, the recipe that I have down the best. I have done it a bunch of times, and each time I do it just a bit differently, and I’ve discovered additions that improve it (add olive oil to the butter!) and didn’t (more carrots!). It’s a simple recipe, though. I don’t remember where I found the recipe that I based this one, though. It was somewhere on the internet, and frankly, they’re more or less all the same. It would be hard to reduce this recipe down further. That, for me, is its charm. Oh, and it tastes really good.

Leek and Potato Soup

Serves Four

4 large leeks, split and cleaned
1½ pounds of potatoes, cut into small cubes
4 large carrots, cut into small cubes
2 tablespoons of butter
2 tablespoons of olive oil
One package 32 ounces of chicken or vegetable stock, or about or four cups
A table spoon of fresh thyme, chopped fine
1 heavy pinch of salt
Salt and black pepper to taste

Cut off the roots and the dark green tops of the leeks, and split them until just before the roots. Pull them open slightly and rinse them under running water to wash out sand and dirt between the leaves. When the leeks are cleaned, split them completely and chop up into quarter inch sections.

Place a six-quart pot on medium heat and add the butter. When the butter is melted, add the leeks and thyme. Add a heavy pinch of salt to the leeks and sauté them in the butter for about twenty-five minutes until they’re soft.

When the leeks are soft, add the potatoes, the carrots and the stock. Bring to a boil, and then reduce the heat to a simmer. Let it simmer for an hour or so, or until the carrots and potatoes are soft.

You can place the soup into a blender and puree it, or leave it that way. Add salt and pepper to taste and enjoy your healthy soup. If you don’t want it to be as healthy as that, you can add some parmesan cheese or some crisped bacon, crumbled, as a garnish.

Writing and Cooking

I’ve been trying, for various reasons, to eat healthier and cook more. I’ve pretty much always enjoyed cooking, to a limited extent, I think I’m pretty good at it. I know some techniques, I’ve made some things that I was pretty proud of, and I know to have a good time with it. The downside of cooking, of course, is that can be a lot of work (usually having to do some sort of straightening up and cleaning before I start, and then some again afterwards can be a pain, especially with limited counter space and only one sink). When I get home from work, that’s often the last thing I want to do. But, self-improvement, et cetera. So, as I said, I’m trying to do it more often. I’ve made a couple of things that I was pretty pleased with, so I figured, since I started this blog to practice writing more, that I might as well put things up about that and see how it works out. Two forms of self-improvement: one stone.

I actually have been writing more than usual of late. I wrote part of a short story that was going pretty well before abandoning it, as I always do. I’ve been writing a lot for Ghettoblaster magazine: reviews, some interviews, and other things. I do semi-interesting things on a regular basis. I ought to just start throwing that stuff up here. I will make an effort to do so. It’s my promise to you, the non-existent reader. Anyways, this kind of naval-gazing nonsense is borning, so hopefully the food stuff will be more interesting.

A Thing that Annoys Me

I am no religious, but I know a bit about religion, so I tend to read articles about it when I come across them. Case in point, this Atlantic article that discusses the trouble a Christian author had in getting his Christian movie made. Block quote!

The point of Save Blue Like Jazz, then, is about more than just making a movie out of a popular book. It's a mission to prove there's a market for a different kind of film that explores the Christian faith: one that expresses doubt but falls eventually on the side of belief.

Well, so far so good. Not a whole lot to complain about. Sadly, however, the article then decides that Hollywood never makes movies that fall into that category -- although it notes at the end that Passion of the Christ is a Christian movies, as was Signs, M. Night Shyamalan's Mel Gibson movie, and a horror film I vaguely remember starring Laura Linney. But it bemoans that Hollywood insists on making movies like Saved and (apparently) Easy A.

And, well, whatever, Christians have few more favored hobbies than convincing themselves that they actually represent a persecuted minority. However, just off the top of my head, I, an unbeliever, can think of any number of films that present characters searching for or retaining their faith: Bad Lieutenant, Mean Streets, Last Temptation of Christ, the Passion of Joan of Arc, Jesus' Son.

I suppose the author would say, "Sure, but most of those films are Catholic." Well, Jesus' Son isn't, but it's also only Christian as an undertone. The article was speaking specifically about evangelical Christians. And fine, whatever. But as the article notes, evangelicals don't seem to have a taste for nuanced displaces of faith in a real world setting. They want Hallmark Channel accounts of perfect people perfectly loving Jesus. And whatever floats your boat, I guess. It just annoys me to see the tired old argument about Hollywood, godless Sodom trotted out for the nth time.

Missed the Funeral

Anymore, when I start writing something, even if I have an idea of where I want to go with it, I'll get a page or so written up and then just not no where to go from there, and come to a full stop. Sometimes I'll walk away from it, thinking, "Well, I'll come back to this later." When I finally do, I'm as adrift as I was before. More often than not, I'll simply close the word processor and return to whatever useless nonsense that I was doing. That's the case with this. I had the idea of a long gone son returning to a dusty hometown for the reading of the will. Instead of closing it out, I thought, "I guess I'll put it up here." Not much to it, though.

The reading of the will was scheduled for two o’clock. Steven had gotten off of the bus at eleven fifteen and looked up and down the almost deserted mid-midmorning downtown. Needing some place to kill time, he bought a paper at a battered red newspaper dispenser and pushed against the door of a closed-seeming bar. It gave, and he slipped into the dusty twilight inside. A narrow shotgun bar from the pre-war era, a long silvered mirror and a wood bar ran against one wall into the interior. The left side of the room contained scalloped, blood red vinyl booths. There were two old men sitting at the far end of the bar, several stools apart. A woman in her early forties was tending the bar, standing a short distance from the two men. She leaned against the bar back, reading a battered paperback thriller. Steven sat on a stool halfway down the bar. The woman put her book facedown on the bar and walked over to him.

“Hey – can I get a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.” The woman moved over to the Bunn machine and poured a cup of coffee into a chipped white porcelain mug. She placed it on a napkin in front of him. She moved back to her book.

“Could I have some cream as well?” Steven asked. He tugged his tie loose a fraction.

The woman looked at him. “Sure.” She put her book facedown on the bar again, and moved towards the far end of the bar, bending over and reaching into the small refrigerator under the bar back. She came back to Steven with a paper carton of 2% milk and put it down in front of him.

~

Meanwhile, across town, Susan stood in front of the mirror, putting on makeup. Her two children ran screaming through the hallway just beyond the door, and with an effort of will, she managed to ignore them. They were not easy to ignore, and the effort was made more difficult in her distracted state. Since her father died, she’d had a terrible time sleeping – not that she’d slept that well before he’d died, either. With her mother out of town and Steven MIA, Susan had been the only one able to sit with him in the hospice during the final few days. Being a stay at home mother allowed people to assume she was available to take care of any odd job that happened to come up – never mind that it required her to find someplace to dump the kids for hours during the day, and trusting a fairly useless husband to take care of them and not burn the house down while she was gone. Did anyone concern themselves with the work she had to do? No, of course not. The clothes still needed to be washed, the meals still needed to be cooked (or, more often, bought) and the kids still needed to get to day care.

Power

This new video thing from Kanye West -- he's calling it a painting, and fair enough -- is pretty fantastic. Samples King Crimson, too, which can't hurt, but I really like the song.

Apples and Onions

Last December, when Apple bought Lala, I, like the rest of the nation, assumed that they would be using the technology as the basis for a new version of iTunes. Well, six months has come and gone without a further announcement of what, if anything, Apple intends to use it for. I’ve been pretty much come to the conclusion that Apple purchased Lala simply to shut it down, and incidentally (if at all) fold their tech into iTunes. It’s a frustrating situation, although it makes sense from Apple’s point of view – Lala had entirely supplanted my use of iTunes or even my iPod at work. Apple wants to be able to sell mp3s for a dollar a pop – they don’t want someone coming along and selling streaming songs for ten cents a piece, or allowing people to upload their CDs straight to a cloud-based web player.

What frustrates me about the situation is that we have often been promised a lot of things from the future, only to have it underwhelmingly underdeliver in the expected areas – even if it does deliver in unexpected ways. The ability to access your entire music collection, wherever you can find an internet connection, is what the future should be. It irritates me greatly that we’re going to lose that ability because the content distributors are frightened of the implications of this new technology. Flying cars and pills and silver uniforms are all practically impossible. But Lala already exists! And now, of course, it’s gone.