Fuck you reality

"Oh well, sushi should probably be one of those things you splurge on because cheap sushi makes for terrible nights."

RelaxBear

While I'm waiting for my work computer to stop sucking and start responding to actual input, I thought I'd get a jump on today's blaggification.

I saw this car yesterday at Ala Moana. I think that more things need to have Relax Bear on them. He is a bear who wears a bear suit.
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Vacation Over

Just dropped my parents off at the airport, so I guess my vacation is over. It didn't really seem like much of a vacation, given that I got up on average earlier than I would have had it just been another week. I think this weekend will require substantial laziness.

Thanksgiving

I realized today that I should start sitting down to think about a Thanksgiving menu. It's going to only be me, I think, so I have a decent degree of freedom. Unfortunately, that also means that I need to make everything myself. I'm probably going to go with a lazy traditional thing

• Turkey: most likely the AB brine version, as it's super delicious
• Stuffing: maybe I'll try some of the various sausages we have here, and see which one would work best.
• Green Bean Casserole: the cheesy version
• Mashed Potatoes: I kind of want to do something fancier than just adding roasted garlic, but I'm not sure what
• Rolls of some sort
• Punch and Pie

Probably doesn't hurt to start thinking about recipes now, so I can do some test runs.

Iolani Palace

Is the only royal palace on US soil. It was also the first major executive residence with electricity.

It is also moderately hard to find parking for. :(

Monday

Work day, since it was telecon day. Two hour telecon right after the hour-long group meeting.

Guh.

Turtle Bay Resort

Visited this with the parents as part of the North Shore Tour (the North Shore is crap if you don't surf). It's kind of like a safe, family-friendly, boring version of what a vacation hotel should be. I hate Waikiki, but that's because I hate people. It totally offers a far better atmosphere of drunken excess and commercialism that I believe people prefer in their vacation experience.

Tl;dr: Turtle Bay is like the Republican version of Hawaii.

In any case, we were only there for lunch, and lunch is something I'm generally willing to do anywhere, with anyone.

My choice was the "slider trio." Yes, sliders are totally played out, and yes, it's clear that the chef in charge of the restaurant (Ola @ Turtle Bay Resort) hasn't gotten that message yet. Still, given that I'm unlikely to visit more than once (maybe twice. If I was up on the NS again, it's probably the best place to do lunch), I figured it was the best way to sample the selection. The sliders are (color from menu):

1. "Kalua Pork: Oven Roasted and Smoked with a Guava Barbeque Sauce and Grilled Maui Onions." Other than my own pulled pork, this may be the best fucking pork sandwich I've ever had. This is delicious, and definitely something I'd recommend.
2. "North Shore Burger with Herb Cream Cheese (made from North Shore Cattle Company All-Natural Beef)." I would have liked to get the "Onions & Mushrooms" the standard version of this gets, but instead I got a slice of (probably) plum tomato (based on the size). I prefer cheese on my burgers, but this didn't need it. The flavor of the meat was remarkable. The tomato was ripe and fresh, and the herb cream cheese offered a nice counterpoint. The meat was a touch small for the bun (probably an ounce or so, pre-cooked, which works to be about a 1-inch diameter by 0.25 inch patty after cooking), which is another reason that "sliders" are terrible ideas to begin with. Why can't we just make cuts off of larger sandwiches (A: because that'd be prohibitively expensive for the restaurant)?
3. "Soft Shell Crap with Wasabi Soy Aioli." Um. Oh. Ok. Slight review change. I thought this had the lemongrass herb oil, but that was the grilled baby octopus entree I was thinking of having. Well, in any case, the problems with this one were:

• The crab was clearly over fried. As we've heard a thousand times from Alton Brown, Julia Child, The Pope: frying doesn't make something greasy, as long as the water in the thing you're frying is being extracted. Only after the water is gone is it replaced with the oil from the fryer. This crab was dry and greasy. That kind of ruins the fun of eating something that looks exactly like it did when it was running around.
• There was nothing to fix this in the sauce. "Wasabi Soy Aioli" apparently means "Pile of bean sprouts and something that has so little flavor you think it's the lemongrass herb oil." I'm fine with the bean sprouts. It adds some texture that helps the sandwich. The sauce, however, is basically a failure. My initial thought was that a lemon/basil aioli would fix this. Both offer a sharp flavor that could fix some significant overcooking of the crab itself. A wasabi/soy aioli that actually had flavor could do so as well. The spice and saltiness would easily do the same thing. Again: the sauce failed the sandwich, making me glad that I had two other very tasty things to enjoy.

Fries were there as well (duh, USA), which had a nice coating of kosher salt, making them a bit saltier than most fries, but salty in a more flavorful way.

I guess my conclusion is: TBR: Ola does most things well, but maybe you should just try that grilled baby octopus if you get a chance, because "Crab Luau Cream"? How can that not be delicious?

PS: This was supposed to post tomorrow, blogger believes that tomorrow is today (proof against: no flying cars), I don't care, because it solves the problem of coming up with stuff tomorrow.

Vacation checklist haiku

Pearl Harbor was first.
Arizona: Boat ride out.
Missouri: Repairs.

Di-a-mond Head next,
Stairs do not make hiking fun.
Stupid Day-star sucks.

Dole Pineapple Farm
(Plantation did not fit there):
Creative history!

North Shore has beaches;
Far too much traffic/bother:
Not worth the effort.

My worst nemesis:
Waikiki, oh Waikiki.
Tsunami come soon.

Apparently scheduling is wonky

I'M POSTING FROM TEH FUTURE!

This panda

loves recess.

This is Hello Kitty's

and she will shoot you in the back of your head if you don't come back with all the money. She didn't bring this from Columbia for you to fuck up.

Things that were wrong with that commercial

1. She is holding a ukulele. It is never played, nor is it in the background music. If Chekhov had a gun, he would shoot the writer.
2. Her song has unwieldy octave jumps. I think they auto-tuned her to make it work.
3. There were digital snowflakes in the background. WTF? This is Hawaii.
4. The only way to get a copy of this new song is in the Christmas Pack of Hawaiian Host chocolates. That's a bizarrely specific marketing strategy.
5. Her closing statement that we should all support her is accompanied by some sort of weird head movements that don't so much say "pop music star" as "porn star."

Edit

Ok, blogger doesn't like animated gifs. Give me a moment...ok, no clue how to convert an animated gif to something reasonable. Here's how it goes down:

squirrel A walks up to the stuffed toy, and steals a peanut. He sits there on camera and eats it.

squirrel B flies into shot from the right, totally fucking up the stuffed toy's shit. He totally doesn't trust this stuffed impostor.

I'll try again later, once I've sorted out how to make it work.

Nablomopo?

Crap, we're doing magabogoblogomogonamamamramalamadingdonapo again this month, aren't we.

Fuck.

Um...

Here's a picture of a squirrel going absolutely batshit crazy over a stuffed animal. (It's late, and I didn't really do anything today. I had breakfast, it was tasty, I didn't take pictures.)

Um...what?

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Autumn food!

So A) I need to remember to not use my BB camera, and that good lighting never hurt anyone trying to take a picture.

But B) Since it's now October, I felt like making a nice warming beef stew to celebrate the season. I was not going to let the little facts like "I live in the tropics now," and "it never changes season here," and "it was like 75 degrees all damn day long" get in the way of culinary tastiness.

My recipe is largely cobbled together from a bunch of different places, based on my shepherd's pie filling. I have no lamb, and finding lamb in the tropics is apparently impossible. I assume this is due to the fact that tropical lambs would die with all that wool. The ingredients (roughly estimated, I don't really measure anything) are:

4 rashers of bacon, chopped small
1 lb stew meat
1 lb ground beef
1 yellow onion
1 lb white mushrooms
1/2 lb crimini
1-ish lb red potatoes
about half of a big chunky carrot that I broke in half
cup of beef broth
probably a cup of marsala
a cup and a half of merlot

Render the bacon, remove to bowl. Brown the stew meat, remove to the same bowl. Add chopped onion and ground beef (my beef was frozen, so I just let it rest on the pile of onions and defrost in the pot), and brown as well. Add reserved meats back along with some garlic, and raise heat. Add potatoes, carrots, and mushrooms, all chopped into bite size pieces (quarters for my buttons, halves and wholes for my tiny criminis, carrots into 1/52ths of the original chunky carrot chunk, potatoes into 1/8ths, generally).

Add the broth, and about a cup of the wine (maybe half and half), and then add maybe a cup of water to cover. Bring to a boil, stir around so everyone is mixed, and then cut the heat down to a nice simmer.

This is where the seasoning stage hits. I added thyme/rosemary/sage with a bit of basil. Salt & pepper. I also added a can of tomato paste, as that helps thicken more than simply adding a tomato or two would.

With everything in the pot, it's now time for the fun four hour wait while it simmers. I added the remaining wine somewhat randomly over this time, corrected seasonings, etc. You can't really skimp on this either, since stew meat is generally crappy chewy cuts that need the four hours of simmering to become tender. In order to promote thickening, I used a tea ball full of flour to sprinkle flour around everytime I stirred.

I attempted to make cottage pie, so my mash was made by baking a potato and three cloves of garlic for a few hours, mashing with some water and cream. Since I didn't boil the potato (baking is lazier and easier, and gives better garlic flavor), the mash was a bit dry, so I didn't smooth it over the stew, instead going for the island look that's vaguely visible in the picture above.

The end result was delicious, as you'd expect, since that's the end result of simmering just about anything in broth and wine.

My Kitchen

Looking towards the right from the doorway (the pink is caused by my camera being old and cranky).



Looking towards the door from in front of the oven.



Pretty much the only counter space I have to work with. For reference, a large object (such as a KitchenAid Stand Mixer) would occupy about the same amount of space as the dutch oven on the counter.

Oh, Guy de Maupassant

"Then, suddenly, I must, I must go to the bottom of my garden to pick some strawberries and eat them, and I go there. I pick the strawberries and eat them! Oh, my God! My God! Is there a God! If there be one, deliver me! Save me! Succour me! Pardon! Pity! Mercy! Save me! Oh, what sufferings! What torture! What horror!"

Dude, they're only strawberries. You don't have to make a big deal of it.

Today

The Man from Planet X

I love having TCM. They actually show movies properly, and show a wide variety of things. Today I saw "The Man from Planet X." It is exactly as bad of a 1950s sci-fi movie as you'd expect.

My main complaint about it (ignoring factual inaccuracies and crap dialogue. Those are what I expect) is that they "kill" TMfPX twice. The first one is so wonderfully brutal that I can't imagine why they felt they needed to blow him and his ship up (that's lame death number two).

The good death has TMfPX fighting hand to hand with The American Cool Guy Leading Around the Polite but Inept Scotch Village. They struggle for a bit, with TACGLAtPbISV knocking the mind control ray gun out of TMfPX's hand early on. TACGLAtPbISV gets the upper hand, and turns the handle on TMfPX's "space-air" supply. This turns off the space air, and TACGLAtPbISV holds TMfPX down while he suffocates.

Brutal.

That's the best "don't invade our planet" ad ever. "Go ahead. Fucking invade us. We will find your first invaders, and sit on their chest and watch them suffocate. I dare you."