What are you...

[CoffeeCat]

Watching: Bones.

And I'm freaking obsessed now. Igad! To the point of Fan Fic.

This is currently the only thing I watch.
I am obsessed to the point of wanting to make her a necklace. She wears great bead jewelry on screen - I wonder if she likes it in real life?

Me too.

And she does have such interesting jewelry. You should make her something and send it. Maybe she'll wear it in an episode. I'd be so amused if she did.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

... my new Koss headphones.

You have headphones named after Koss!?

[Entilzha]

http://www.koss.com/ I've heard only good things about this company's products. My model SB49 [url]http://www.koss.com/koss/kossweb.nsf/p?openform&pc^np^SB49[/url]

[Alelou]

spending your gorgeous Sunday afternoon doing?

Processing about 20 pounds of pesto and sofrito and baba ghanoush thanks to all the peppers and eggplants and tomatoes and basil I picked Thursday night in expectation of a frost ... that never came.

[Distracted]

Mmmmm. Can I come over and eat some?

[Alelou]

That would probably be a good thing about now ... of course Jaime used three of my sofrito jars in JUST ONE DISH tonight.

On the other hand, at least the man cooked. I need to just deal with it. There shalt be no conservation of sofrito. He never turns lights off either.

[Distracted]

So...exactly what is sofrito, anyway?

[Alelou]

Handmade SOFRITO. Okay, you throw the following into a food processor (or a blender):

1-2 big sweet onions (peeled)
3 or so green peppers (deseeded)
3 or so frying or banana peppers (ditto)
1 sweet bell pepper (ditto)
handful of aji dulce peppers (they're these kind of herby little tiny Puerto Rican peppers that I have to grow myself to get up here -- they look like habaneros but they're not particularly hot)
one big or a few smaller tomatoes, cored and seeded
a generous bunch of cilantro
a leaf or two of culantro, or even handful of cilantro since finding culantro is impossible and the stuff I grew died way too soon
Mix it all up and freeze it in batches. Thaw it as needed and throw it in the pot whenever you're frying up a batch of rice and beans or rice and whatever or making soup or making chicken or pork chops or chile or just about anything you want to have some nice Spanish flavor.

Goya makes it and sells it in the freezer section -- they call it recaito -- theirs is mostly green. Their sofrito is red because they put annato in it. Both are okay but they have MSG in it so I try to avoid it. They also sell jars of recaito and sofrito but that's fairly blah if you ask me.

[Distracted]

Sounds yummy. What's the difference between that and salsa?

[Linda]

To answer Elessar...nah, just a vampire story. She made me promise NOT to put any Trek in it. "No Vulcans" , she said. She is really into this series that starts with the book called "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer. So I have to read this 500 page book that she has read THREE times. She identifies with the main female character who is her age, 17. The character is a real klutz, can't do sports or even dance without falling over her own feet. Imie says she "so identifies with that". Imie is not really a klutz, but she doesn't see that she isn't.

I am part of a writers group that meets every other week now. I am working on non Trek stories for this, trying some poetry, maybe a little non fiction. It is hard to change direction, a little painful even, but necessary in order to build my writing skills. But Trek stories will probably still pop out now and then because they are irresistible.

[Alelou]

Handmade SOFRITO. Okay, you throw the following into a food processor (or a blender):

1-2 big sweet onions (peeled)
3 or so green peppers (deseeded)
3 or so frying or banana peppers (ditto)
1 sweet bell pepper (ditto)
handful of aji dulce peppers (they're these kind of herby little tiny Puerto Rican peppers that I have to grow myself to get up here -- they look like habaneros but they're not particularly hot)
one big or a few smaller tomatoes, cored and seeded
a generous bunch of cilantro
a leaf or two of culantro, or another handful of cilantro .

Ack! I forgot the 9-10 cloves of garlic. Mustn't forget to tell you THAT.

The difference between this and salsa is that salsa is a tomato-based preparation, a lot more liquid, that only uses some pepper for added heat. That's a sauce you add to food afterwards (or dip chips into), and it's a lot better freshly-made and usually served raw. Sofrito is essentially a shortcut that saves you from having to chop up onions and peppers and garlic and stuff everytime you start to cook, and it's mostly pepper and onion. There's hardly any tomato -- that's just there to give it a hint of flavor, and some people don't even add it. You always cook sofrito.

[justTripn]

Reading: "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes.

OK, I know, sounds pretentious, and its from 1976, but it is FACINATING. (I will have to find that old human evolution thread and go on about this there too.)

The way I stumbled onto this was I was talking to a coworker and I said, "I don't get the Ilyad or the Odessy. People say you are supposed to get into it and be able to relate to it, and that it is a classic, but I just wonder if those people were just TRUELY different from us. If speech evolved say 12 to 16 thousand years ago, then going back like 3 or 4 thousand years is a fourth of the way back to the evolution of speech. Maybe those people were NOT LIKE US.

So this coworker goes! YOU MUST READ "The origins of Consciousness in the Break-Down o the Bicameral Mind."

This is dense science, evolutionary psychology and physiology, all about experiments and evidence and stuff, but this is how it begins:

O, What a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essenses, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musing, and mysteries, and infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kindgom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consiousness that is myself of selfs, that is everything, and yet noting at all--what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why?

So I am going. Cool. What poem is he quoting from? And I am looking for a citation and then I realize, no, that's the author! That's the opening paragraph!!!

Great writing and science and philosphy! You MUST SEE.

My dad who is an evolutionary pychologists claims this is a discredited theory, but . . . still . . . whoa! What a ride. I might post his scientific theis in that human evolution thread. It's BOLD, I'll give him that.

[Alelou]

Wow, you're biting off a big one there. I actually read that in college for a class called Science and Literature. I'm afraid I don't remember much more about it than the title, though. The Dancing Wu Li Masters made a much bigger impression. And The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. I think that was probably the most interesting literature class I had in all my six years of English majoring.

[Elessar]

Wow, you're biting off a big one there. I actually read that in college for a class called Science and Literature. I'm afraid I don't remember much more about it than the title, though. The Dancing Wu Li Masters made a much bigger impression. And The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. I think that was probably the most interesting literature class I had in all my six years of English majoring.

I have a feeling I read that somewhere... Kuhn sounds REALLY familiar...

[Distracted]

Handmade SOFRITO. Okay, you throw the following into a food processor (or a blender):

1-2 big sweet onions (peeled)
3 or so green peppers (deseeded)
3 or so frying or banana peppers (ditto)
1 sweet bell pepper (ditto)
handful of aji dulce peppers (they're these kind of herby little tiny Puerto Rican peppers that I have to grow myself to get up here -- they look like habaneros but they're not particularly hot)
one big or a few smaller tomatoes, cored and seeded
a generous bunch of cilantro
a leaf or two of culantro, or another handful of cilantro .

Ack! I forgot the 9-10 cloves of garlic. Mustn't forget to tell you THAT.

The difference between this and salsa is that salsa is a tomato-based preparation, a lot more liquid, that only uses some pepper for added heat. That's a sauce you add to food afterwards (or dip chips into), and it's a lot better freshly-made and usually served raw. Sofrito is essentially a shortcut that saves you from having to chop up onions and peppers and garlic and stuff everytime you start to cook, and it's mostly pepper and onion. There's hardly any tomato -- that's just there to give it a hint of flavor, and some people don't even add it. You always cook sofrito.

Ah. We do that for cajun food, too. Our recipe consists of onions and bell peppers and garlic and a little parsley. You can buy it down here under the name of "Creole seasoning", but I just call it seasoning vegetables. I always have a container of the stuff in the freezer. No cilantro or tomatoes, though. I use it for gumbo, soup, stew, spaghetti, whatever.