Avi

 Imogen Heap's new album, Ellipse, has been running on repeat for 3 days now. One song, Aha!, spent most of last evening on repeat by itself. I never listen to songs on repeat for that long! Whole albums at least, usually...

I love this album :D

I read a really scathing review this morning that showed no understanding of the music, which made me feel sad about the state of humanity. Reading the comments made me feel even worse... especially the idiot pretending to be Spider Jerusalem. If you're going to use that name, you'd damn better live up to it Q(-.-Q) Should sic some Warren Ellis fans on the bastard.

Mushroom Noodle Soup

Cooking time: ~5 minutes, plus 20 minutes beforehand to let the stock develop

Ingredients:

• ~6 dried shiitake mushrooms
• 1 dried noodle cake
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon cooking rice wine or mirin
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• optional: a few drops (to taste) hot sauce
• optional: ~4 wantons

Instructions:

1. Place the shiitake in a bowl, cover with hot water. Since they float, you can use a second bowl to push them down under the water level. Let them stand for at least 20 minutes.
2. Separate the shiitake from the stock. Put the stock in a soup bowl, and top up with water until the bowl is about half full.
3. Optional: prepare wantons.
4. Put stock, soy sauce, cooking wine, sesame oil and hot sauce in a small pot. Heat to boiling, add noodles.
5. While the noodles are cooking, slice the shiitake into thin strips. Add the shiitake (and wontons if you're using them) to the pot.
6. Cook until the noodles are soft.
7. Serve! Serves 1 as a meal, or 2 as entrees.

 On the bus home today, I was  thinking about a recently completed programming assignment in Java. We were writing a command-line application for a simple board game, and we designed the input poorly. Note to self: don't do this again. Our mistake was to have several input control methods, rather than just having one method that could take command lines and pass them to the relevant objects.

I had forgotten the joy of reading. I had also forgotten its tendency to keep one up at unholy hours when one really needs to sleep, but the world created by the author's words just keeps calling...

Sooo the guys I usually order my tea from had a clearance sale recently, so I ordered 100g organic sencha (煎茶) and 100g  ryokucha (緑茶). I'll mostly use the ryokucha to make cakes, and the sencha will replace my usual fukamushi sencha (which is a particularly delicate flavour, since the leaves are steamed for longer during production) for my ~3L daily green tea intake.

Since I buy tea from Aya every month or two, they've taken to sending me small gifts with most orders. Usually it's just a sample of a different type of tea, but this time they sent me an adorable teatowel :D

All you small specialty shops out there: this is how you keep customers! ^_^

This is just about the simplest pasta sauce I will ever be seen to use. It's also good as a dipping sauce, sandwich spread, barbeque sauce... you name it :D Now I just need to figure out if my virus-ridden throat is up to trying pasta, yet   x_x

Tomato Tachina Wondersauce

Cooking time: ~2 minutes

Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp organic tachina/tahini (pure sesame seed paste; non-organice can be used but it just doesn't taste the same)
• 2 tbsp tomato sauce (American: ketchup)
• a few drops of lemon juice
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• optional: zaatar

Instructions:

1. Mix the tachina with about an equal amount of water, preferably near-boiling. Cold water will work, but you'll be stirring for a while and cursing as you do.  It should come to the consistency of a creamy sauce. Too thin? Add more tachina. Too thick? Add more water! Remember to increase the other ingredients to match the rough final amount of tachina.
2. Add the tomato sauce, lemon juice, and garlic. Mix vigorously.
3. Optional: If you're feeling zesty, throw in a few pinches of zaatar, or just use it as a dusting over the top.

And that's it! Done! I tend to mix mine in with freshly cooked pasta for a simple meal when I can't be bothered with any elaborate cooking procedures. Boil pasta, mix tachina, eat ^_^

Leftover sauce can be stored in the fridge in a sealed container for a few days.

Okay so. I posted this up quiiiiiiiiiiite a while ago on the vegancooking community on lj. The recipe has evolved a bit since then, but I thought I'd put it up here anyway so I can keep track of it. I've also come up with a more Thai-style variation of the sauce, so I'll post that up soon :D

( Satay stir-fry )