gmonkey42

I'm switching my primary blogging from LJ to Dreamwidth! I'll keep the LJ account as long as LJ is around and I'll still participate in some LJ communities and read my LJ f-list.

I don't mind if you add me, you don't have to ask first, but I don't always add other people back. It depends on whether I already have a lot of reading on my f-list, whether we have enough in common that I think we'd get along, whether you post interesting stuff and above all what mood I happen to be in that day. So please don't take it personally if I don't add you back.

Leave a comment here if you want to contact me. Comments on this post are screened.

Man, I am on a roll! Here's delicious Creamy Garlic Soup. It's great. I just had a bowl and I'm about to get seconds. This is enough for about 4 servings. I think it would be good for a party, or for keeping away vampires.

Creamy Garlic Soup

Step 0: roast 3 garlic bulbs in the oven. Chop off the tops, rub olive oil over the exposed tops, wrap with foil and bake/roast at 350° for an hour. They can be kept in the fridge for a few days. Bonus: roast an extra one and keep it around to spread on toast.

Ingredients:
the above 3 roasted garlic bulbs
2 leeks, chopped up
4 Tbsp butter
3 Tbsp flour (it's for roux so Wondra is good)
2 cups veg or No-Chicken broth
a splash of white wine (like 2-3 Tbsp?)
a sprig of fresh rosemary
1/3 cup heavy cream
a tiny pinch each of cayenne and white pepper

1. Take a small frying pan and melt 2 Tbsp butter on med-lo. Add the flour and stir to make roux. Remove from heat.

2. Take a big stock pot and melt the rest of the butter. Add the leeks and sauté on med for 3-4 minutes. Add the roasted garlic, which should be all soft and spreadable, and continue stirring and cooking for about 3 min more.

3. Add the wine and broth. Add the roux and mix it in. Put in the whole rosemary sprig. Simmer covered on just below med for 20 minutes.

4. Turn heat to med-lo, remove rosemary and add cream and pepper. Simmer covered 10 minutes. Then serve.

I tasted it before adding the cream and it's pretty good without that too. You could make the soup vegan by using oil for the sauté step and leaving out the cream. It would still have a nice, creamy texture from the roasted garlic.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/806321.html

I'm not calling it a resolution because that will pretty much guarantee that I'll rebel and not do it. But I got an idea from my uncle, who went vegan about a year ago and is feeling much healthier and more energetic. I'm going to try having one day a week be vegan day. I don't think I'll ever go 100% vegan, because I love eggs, cheese and ice cream and I'd hate not ever being able to eat them. But there are a lot of vegan foods I like and one day a week will be fine. So if you have some good vegan recipes, I'd love to hear them!

My ideas so far are oatmeal or cereal with almond milk for breakfast (it tastes so much better than soy milk and is better in coffee too), peanut butter & banana sandwiches, Tasty Bite, my vegetable stews, rice & beans (...I usually like that with a bit of cheese on top but it'll probably be fine without that), homemade pad see ew. I'm pretty sure a lot of the Morningstar things are vegan too. A vegan labmate eats the chick'n patties with salad, that sounds good. Hummus is OK but they serve it at lab functions all the time for the vegans and I get a bit bored with it. I'm sure they do too. It won't be that much of an adjustment, I have oatmeal or cereal most mornings.

Also I'll be taking a Zumba class two mornings a week and I want to work out choreography for my own class so I can try to get teaching jobs.

That doesn't count as a resolution, I signed up for it a while ago, it's just in Spring semester.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/805801.html

I'm on a mushrooms kick. I made individual mushroom Wellingtons for dinner last night, along with some fancy sides and dessert.

( recipe! )

I did some fancy sides to go with it: lemony asparagus and fingerling potatoes.

( fancy sides! )

( Crepes suzette! kind of )

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/805276.html

Here's a recipe for mushroom gravy that I made for Xmas dinner and it turned out really well! My mum loved it and my meat-eating brother liked it too. I used butter but you can make it vegan by using vegan margarine instead.

Mushroom gravy

about 1 cup shiitake mushrooms, chopped
1 small shallot, minced. A bit of onion would be fine too.
1/4 cup butter (total)
2 cups vegetable broth
1.5 tbsp soy sauce
1/4 cup flour
1 tsp poultry seasoning

In a large skillet, melt 1 Tbsp butter and add shallot and mushrooms. Sauté for a few minutes over medium heat.

Meanwhile, melt the rest of the butter in another pan and add the flour. Stir constantly while cooking on medium to make roux.

In the mushroom pan, add vegetable broth and soy sauce. Stir in roux. Bring to a low boil then reduce heat to med-low.

Stir in poultry seasoning and simmer for 8-10 minutes, stirring often, until gravy becomes somewhat thickened - it will thicken a bit more as it cools.

Serve with lovely holiday dinner.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/804442.html

Last week, I banged my leg on a post while hiking with my mum. There's still a bruise. Then today, I stubbed my toes on a brick. Barefoot. What the hell.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/803934.html

Woo! Mum and I went to Cost Plus and got some Tasty Bite (they only have two flavors at the supermarket) and some English Christmas foods - mini mince pies and a plum pudding with a can on Devon custard to go with it. Yay!

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/802383.html

I'm still using LJ as my primary blog but I still want to cross-post here too, for my friends who've moved here and aren't on LJ any more.

I'm actually going to the lab tomorrow. I haven't been there since the week before Thanksgiving break, since I went to Vegas the weekend before Thanksgiving. And was still in slacking-off mode for the two days between returning and being off again for Thanksgiving.

I've been doing housework instead, I did some organizing in the garage and I'm making progress on making the box storage room into an office. It's actually empty and painted now, the next step is to put up the curtains and start moving furniture in. Today I spent probably over an hour on masking then painting the metal grommets on the curtains so I could spraypaint them brown instead of the original silver. That's going to go a lot better with the mushroom-colored walls. I have a rubbed bronze (dark brown) curtain rod to match.

The next hurdle will be to get my former housemate's stuff into storage. I said he could store some stuff here since he's living & working on a boat for this year but it was a lot more than I expected and it's time for him to rent a storage locker for it, I can't store it here indefinitely. For now, I'll try to clear enough space in the garage that it can all go in one place there, then it will be easy to load it up and move it. It would require several car trips, we both have small cars. I wonder if storage places have cheap pickup truck rentals.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/799334.html

I got up late but I was all set to go to the lab! Then my car wouldn't start. I think it's the battery terminals again. I had the same problem before, where it goes ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh but won't turn over, and cleaning the battery terminals solved it that time. Except this time, I can't get the nut off one of them. It's really tight and it's a small space to get the crescent wrench into.

My dad recommended using a box wrench instead. I don't have one but there's an Ace Hardware down the street that I can walk to.

But I haven't done that yet, so far I've just said "screw it" and made pancakes and now I'm going to play some Minecraft.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/786952.html

I gave blood today. Then I did some work and ate a big sandwich. Now I'm tired.

Time to sit back and play some Minecraft! Except I'm reluctant to invest a lot of time mining since 1.9 and 1.10 (...is that how they usually do it? but 1.10 < 1.9) are going to have a lot of new blocks and things that spawn in new chunks (Nether ruins!) so I'll probably want to start a new world when the game is released. Aw, that's not until November, I'm not just going to wait until then! I'll just explore a bunch in my 1.8 world.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/785186.html

We did four shallow (<=25 feet) dives today at Lovers' Cove because two people in our lab needed to get more dives in before their scientific diving class that's starting the week after next. We did some practice stuff, which was good for me too, I hadn't reviewed that in a while. And for the last dive, we just had a look around and I saw a sea hare! It's like a giant slug, almost as long as my forearm. It was so cute.

Now it's nap time!

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/776057.html

Someone on memebase posted a video with stick figures in blackface. They were meant to be people in Madagascar and they were black with big red lips. I said it was racist. Someone called me stupid. I probably shouldn't have bothered.

Also our friend came over yesterday and today and yesterday we made pie and today we made spaghetti.

And we ate spaghetti and caprese salad and sipped wine. At the yard sale. It was lovely.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/774317.html

My housemate and I had a yard sale this weekend and it went pretty well! We still have some toys and clothes and several boxes of books & VHS tapes left over but someone actually bought my VHS player! And my wardrobe, microwave, lamp and bike. I sold the bike to my neighbor's son. I didn't have the heart to tell him it's a ladies' bike. But he's about 11, surely he knows and just didn't care because hey, $5 bike! I hope that's the case.

Also a neighbor had a small TV and another microwave that he was going to take to the thrift store but he gave it to us instead and said we could keep the money if we sold them. We did! For $5 each.

AND right at the beginning, Saturday morning before we had even finished setting up, someone came and bought all my Legos and My Little Ponies for $125!

I made about $300 total. W00T! We're going to take the leftover stuff to the used book store and the thrift store.

And now I can take a break! Tomorrow it's all pizza and Minecraft. I'm going to the store tonight (need milk) and I'll get some snacks so I don't even have to leave the house tomorrow.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/774121.html

It's another one of these impromptu, throw-things-in-a-pan recipes that I'll probably never be able to duplicate exactly:

Stir Fried Snap Peas with Noodles
a handful of snap peas, harvested fresh from your garden
some cooking oil (vegetable, canola, something like that)
a smaller quantity of sesame oil
about 1/2 tsp of this amazing chili garlic sauce
a sprinkle of coriander because why not?
a lesser sprinkle each of salt & pepper
a pinch of sugar

Cook the above in a pan on med-lo. Decide it would go well with soba noodles. Boil some noodles. When both are done, add a little soy sauce (1Tbsp?) and a really little rice vinegar (1 tsp?) to the pan and mix it up then put everything in a bowl. Top with sesame seeds and chopped green onion, also from the garden.

It tastes SO GOOD.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/773123.html

( long story short, I'm most likely fine )

Anyway, I'll take some Ibuprofen and I should be fine. On to the fun part! I was doing my annual recertification with Reef Check CA with my housemate, H. Like most Reef Check dives, we got a free boat dive (well, they ask for a $20 donation to help cover the cost but that's way cheaper than a regular dive boat charter would cost). We were in wetsuits as usual. The water was about the usual temperature (~50°F) but it was cool and windy on the surface and that made it worse. H. got pretty cold. She finished her fish count and returned to the boat on the second dive. I was OK and did my fish count too (the instructor was with us, H. didn't abandon her buddy!) but we were both shivering when we were back on the boat.

One of the Reef Check instructors has two drysuits she's looking to sell so she gave us her card. That's cool. I keep thinking it's time to get a drysuit. And they're expensive so a decent used one would be great. On a warm day, a wetsuit is fine but it's hard on a day like this when you can't really recover your body heat between dives.

We saw a lot of critters. There was a cabezon that I missed :( They're easy to ID because they have the little eyebrow tuft things. I saw a lot of painted greenlings - they're not on the survey so I didn't have to count them. I also saw a few kelp greenlings on someone else's transect. There were also 2 decent sized schools of fish, one of blue rockfish and one of striped perch.

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/772328.html

I'm still reading & commenting. I guess I'm just spending a lot of my free time on Minecraft nowadays. Anyway, I saw I hadn't posted at all this month and I just wanted to put up a post to say "yup, I'm still here!"

Crossposts: http://gmonkey42.livejournal.com/771942.html

I still don't have much of anything to post, I've been reading but I've just been crazy busy with finals and work.

I turned in my final paper for Methods today and my final exams are this week. Then I'll have some breathing room.

In the meantime, I went to hula class and wolfed down a SubWay sandwich and now I'm going to have a nice, big glass of Tang n' EmergenC. Then it's sleepy time!

Snape is doing really well with my new housemate (oh yeah, I have a housemate! She's my friend from the lab). Snape let her pet her, even! She didn't scratch or anything! Maybe after seven years she's finally getting mellow.