My fabulous friend Karen Finlay sent me this super swell postcard:
Karen is the best. She's been a long time blog and Facebook pal and we used to be big Flickr buds as well until Flickr got all shitty and deleted my account that had over 1000 images on it.
My friend Keith, who I met through this blog, gave me this book today:
It's a creepy cool book about a small town in Wisconsin that had more than it's share of madness and odd events going down in the late 19th and early 2oth century. It's full of uber creepy black and white photos and the text that goes with them is at times hair raising. I love it.
Yay swag!
Today's episode: Spinach/ricotta balls and rigatoni in simple red sauce.
I saw a guy make this on TV the other night and it looked pretty good so I decided to try it. Here's how it went down:
I started out by grating a half a cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Next I blanched a 9 ounce bag of spinach plus about a third of a bag I had from before. Once all the spinach was blanched I drained it and I squeezed out as much water as I could out of it. I then chopped it up and added it to my cheese. Next I added some one quarter of a large onion and a couple of roughly chopped cloves of garlic that I had caramelized. Then I added one egg and a half a cup of bread crumbs and one container of lower fat ricotta and I mixed it all up.
Then I rolled it up into balls and I put them it in my big glass baking pan:
I tossed in some toasted chili pepper flakes and sage leaves, then I drizzled a bit of extra virgin olive oil in and I baked them for about 25 minutes at 350F.
While the balls baked, I diced up one large onion and about a third of a yellow and red bell pepper.
I sauteed all that in some olive oil. 
As that sauteed I opened up quart jar of tomatoes that I canned last summer and I put about 3/4 of that jar in the food processor and I pulsed it on high until all the tomatoes were chopped up. 
I tossed in my tomatoes in with the onions and peppers and I added a about 3/4 cup of diced pitted diced olives. I let it all simmer with the lid off the frying pan for a few minutes to let some of the water cook off. As it cooked I diced up three large cloves of garlic and then I tossed them in with the simple sauce and I covered it with a lid and took it off the heat.
I had been boiling up some rigatoni and when it got done I tossed it in the sauce. When I use a fresh pasta sauce like this I like a pasta like a rigatoni or a coniglio, both of which are pastas that can hold sauce. If you use spaghetti or other flat pastas, the sauce doesn't stay on or in the pasta like it does when you use a rigatoni or coniglio.
I mixed my pasta in with my sauce and let it sit for a bit while I took my balls out of the oven.
I served it all with some toasted slices of Sparky's homemade Cuban style bread:
And it was freakin' delicious.
Next time though I'll use more spinach, less ricotta, and I'll add another cup of bread crumbs. That should make the balls a little less susceptible to losing their shape and give them a bit more bite. But over all, holy hell they were really good and they tasted even better after they had sit for a awhile. The sauce was also super, it tasted so fresh, like the tomatoes were fresh picked. Next year I'm going to can about two to three times the amount I canned last summer.
A wall in my office here at Monkey Central:
The map I found inside a book I bought in a thrift store. I picked up the 1938 Liberty Magazine cover and matte at a sale at local art gallery. The little frame next to it contains a postcard I bought from a photographer at Bele Chere, which is a local street festival over in Asheville, NC, which is just across the mountain from me. The black S is a movie marquee letter that fell off the marquee at the Grandin Theatre in Roanoke, VA. The small framed fish is a watercolor and ink illustration I bought at a local festival and the bigger silver framed piece is an advertisement for a cruise ship company that I got out of a vintage travel magazine.
Teabagger darling Mike Lee, the junior Republican US Senator from Mormon Cuntry, says that if we tone down our overheated political rhetoric then the Tuscon shooter wins. Ummm, hang on, I thought that guy was just a lone deranged nut who had no political ideology, so what the fuck is it to him if we tone down the calls for people to be killed or maimed if they disagree with us politically? Hey Mr. Lee, he wins if people like Palin, Beck, Limbo, Malkin, and the rest of your hate radio pals on the right don't tone down their hateful screeds. The only thing that will come of continually calling the President, who is a die hard corporate conserva-Dem by the way, a Marxist who is hell bent on destroying our country is more violence and hatred.
... the Egyptian people are revolting.
The bad news is our government is on the side of the dictator Mubarak.
If we truly went to war to bring democracy to the Middle East then we should have invaded Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not Iraq and Afghanistan.
Despite what you may have heard from the incumbents in Washington DC last night, the state of our union is not strong. It's fractured and in peril.
We've let our politics be hijacked by reactionary conservatives who are nothing more than lackeys of the powerful multi national corporations. They seek to divide us along racial, economic, sexual, and age lines so that they can increase their influence and line their pockets with yet more cash. Their use of fear based tactics is unprecedented and has been unrelenting in the past two years since Obama has been elected.
I reject their lies and their attempts to run my country like it's a private bank account for obscenely rich wastrels and their flunkies. I reject the notion that we have to cower in fear of Muslims, gays, the poor, the working people, of anyone who is not rich, white, and entitled. I reject the corporate media narrative that we need to grow up and take drastic measures to make our economy the one that the corporations and the IMF wants.
I reject calls for cuts to entitlements. I reject calls for Social Security to be privatized and for Medicare to be scaled down. I reject those who refuse to cut defense spending. And I reject the notion that the wealthy and business needs to pay less taxes.
The fact is we need to pay more in taxes to keep our country running. We need to make those who have the most, pay the most. We need for businesses to pay more so that we the people can buy what they make, so long as what they make is economically and ecologically sustainable. We can't keep cutting taxes and expect things to pay for themselves. Taxes pay for the things we want, like roads, schools, parks, street lights, school lunches, etc. If we want better things in our country then we need to pay for them and we pay for them through taxes. One way to raise more tax revenue is to legalize marijuana for recreational and industrial use and to tax it. Doing that will fulfill two missions, it will finally put us on the path to winning the 'war on drugs' and it will raise billions of dollars for our national coffers. Another way to raise tax revenues is to tax all places of worship, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, all of them, it's time religions stopped dividing us and start helping us all.
We need to take the lead in getting everyone off fossil fuels and into sustainable energy. We need to stop kidding ourselves into thinking of coal and natural gas as 'clean.' They aren't. Wind and solar are clean but since they aren't a finite resource that can be monopolized by a few greedy corporations, the multi national corporations won't permit their wide spread use.
It's time we grew up as a nation and we put our long term goals back in front of the lust for short term profits. We need to reign in corporations, regulate this unrestrained capitalism we've been saddled with, we need to end the fiction that says corporations are people, and we need to stop allowing powerful interest groups like the NRA and the Koch brothers run things and set national policy. We need to get private money out of politics and get it back into out schools. We need to stop being greedy and treating the rest of the world like it's ours to plunder.
And finally we need to get religion out of the public sphere. It's ruining us and making us dumber. If you want to practice or believe in private, fine, go for it. But you should not be allowed to use your religion to make public policy, laws, or anything else to do with things that affect non believers. You're free to pick and choose whatever Bible or Talmud or Koran verse you like to justify your hatred of gays, women, or red headed step children but you have no right use it to make laws or policy that discriminates against those folks.
Our nation faces many grave dangers and if we keep facing them like we've been doing then I see nothing but decline and ruination for us. But if we act with vigilance and an eye to sustainability and what's best for everyone and not just for the rich white folks who run the corporations and our government, then we might have a fighting chance. When we care as much about the hungry kids in the projects as we do about the stock market, then we'll be getting closer to where we need to be as a nation and as a people.
So get off your asses people, and organize. Organize the workers, the poor, black folks, Latinos, young people, women, and gays, because the one thing those in power fear the most is a non violent popular uprising. Organize from the ground up because all lasting change and all great social movements in this country have started from the bottom of society and worked their way up.
Italian artist Antonio Rizzi (1869-1940) is responsible for this masterpiece.
Please, don't even think about talking about reigning in hand guns in the wake of the two latest shooting incidents in Detroit and Washington state. The NRA and the second amendment fetishists won't like any talk about how deaths from hand guns are spiraling out of control, so you just keep your mouth shut and don't point out that in those nations with more stringent hand gun laws this sort of thing almost never happens. Just keep your damn hippie liberal mouth shut about hand guns and the havoc they cause or you may just find yourself shot for your trouble.
And don't say a god damn thing about the firing of Keith Olbermann either or the corporate media will accuse you of left wing bias and they'll send Bill O'Rielly's attack dogs to your house to dry hump you until you take a loyalty oath to our corporate overlords.
Happy Monday America, just keep your mouth shut and accept the ass fuckings that the NRA and the corporate media are handing out.
We had about 300 robins stop by our neighborhood the other day for a few hours. They ate a shitload of holly and nandina berries, shit all over our car, deck, and drive way, then they flew off to gawd knows where.
I guess it wasn't so bad though, it could have been worse. It could have been another fucking snow storm.
Fact: This is still the tallest building in North Dakota and corn is stored in most of it.
This is from a series of works on paper I'm working on now. I'm doing a series of fish, monkey heads, women, and a few male figures. I do the initial crude sketch, blow it up on a copier, then use either watercolors or acrylic or both, and fill in most of the body of the subject. I like working on paper because it's cheap and if I hate the work then I can toss it and make another copy of my original sketch and have a do over. The rest, as I get them done, are available for viewing via the Flicker badge on the sidebar to the left.
These are weird bad crazy times we live in and one of the missions of this blog is to help you get through life safely. Our crack staff has been preparing a list of useful illustrated safety tips for a few months now and they present their findings here:
If your Negro or Latino house maid has stolen and swallowed the few remaining pieces of jewelry that you haven't had to pawn off yet we advise you to grasp her under chin and to slide your thumb into her mouth. Taking care not to let her close her jaws on your thumb, you should press down on her tongue while stomping on her foot. Continue to do this until she shits out the jewelry in question, the police arrive, or until the members of her gang ride over and do a drive by shooting on you.
When molesting a woman you have just met, never look down. Instead, you should always
look straight ahead so that you can keep an eye peeled for anyone who might run to help her.
If you suspect that your baby may be gay, liberal, a Communist, a future Rotary Club member, an Amway salesperson, or a Unitarian, use gentle slaps to get those tendencies out of your child. You should have muzak versions of John Denver's greatest hits playing in the background while you do this.
If a caregiver, a nursery school teacher, a maiden aunt, or a Catholic priest tries to feel you up and you're not in the mood, then you are advised to break wind, piss your pants, and to act like you're choking. Once they let you go, turn quickly and punch them in their 'special place.' Then go hire a ghost writer to help you write a memoir about the experience.
If a loved one gets a tattoo of any character in the Twilight series, two dogs fucking, or Jesus riding a unicorn and they show it to you in a prideful manner, you are advised to grab an ice pack that has been kept at absolute zero, put the ice pack over the tattoo, and to hold on the offending area until the arm is frozen enough to smash with a hammer.
If you stumble across a hot chick at a party and she's passed out drunk and you want to take advantage of her. Don't.
If you are unlucky enough to have watched more than a few seconds of a movie starring any closeted Scientologist (Tom Cruise, John Travolta for example), then you are advised to wash your eyes out with a mild soap and water. We also recommend years of therapy to get past the trauma of having had to watch those aging gas bags in a motion picture.
If your elderly parent has become involved in any reactionary conservative political movement and they say things like, "That Rush Limbaugh makes some real good points!" or "I'd lick the chunky discharge off Sarah Palin's panties if it made them pointy headed liberals in Congress mad!," then you are advised to knock them to the ground and to bite their wind pipe until you draw blood. Don't stop until they have lost the power of speech.
After your local Catholic priest or protestant minister molests you, if you can't wash their stink off you, try rinsing!
Another Martin Luther King Jr. Day has come and gone and Glenn Beck is trying once again to claim King's mantle. But to do that is to pervert King's message. King was pro union, Beck anti union. King was pro social justice, Beck is anti social justice. King was anti war, Beck is pro war. King was for economic equality for all, Beck is for the rich ruling class. King was non violent, Beck is pro violence. It was a badge of honor among conservatives to hate King, especially after he came out against the Vietnam war, so for Beck to claim to be a conservative and to claim King's mantle is another of his delusions and a perversion of history.
Sob sister Sarah Palin, America's most wronged woman and our nation's most perpetually victimized female, once again made the Tuscon shootings all about her. She went on that Fox Noise show and she decried all her detractors. She cried that people were twisting her words in order to criticize her and to get her to sit down and shut up. She wailed that the shootings in Tuscon were the act of an insane person who was in no way influenced by political hate speech. She sobbed that those who politicized the shootings were morally despicable and then she turned around and said that the shooter was a left leaning activist. Once again Ms. Quitter perverts the truth and reality. No one wants her to shut up, in fact most of us wish she'd talk more, especially to some real news outlets like the New York Times, NBC, CNN, CBS, ABC, The Daily Show, This Week in NASCAR, anyone but those softball lobbing toast jockeys at Fox. It would be a huge win for her if she did talk to some other news outlet other than Fox because she can say what she likes then go on Fox and recant it all and claim that they perverted her words and the meaning behind them, she can be the victim yet again.
Palin and Beck, what a couple of perverted twits.
I'm making some simple figure studies using ink and watercolor on plain paper. This figure strikes me as ethereal and almost ghostly. I'm sending some of these out to the folks who signed up for the 'handmade pay it forward' meme on Facebook. This one is going to my friend Little Merry Sunshine.
Today's episode: Goan style pork vindaloo.
I watched my new celebrity Indian cook girlfriend Anjum Anand make this dish the other night and it looked so good I gave it a whirl.
I started out by making the spice rub which consists of 1 tsp of cumin, 1 tsp coriander seed, 3/4 tablespoon of crushed black pepper, 2 green cardamon pods, a pinch of cinnamon, a big pinch of sea salt, and a pinch of ground clove. I mixed everything up and I crushed it all together. Once crushed and mixed I removed the hulls of the cardamon pods.
Next I peeled 7 cloves of garlic, peeled one and a half inches of ginger, and I slit, deseeded, and de-ribbed three jalapenos, this recipe calls for three red chili peppers but I couldn't find any so I used the jalapenos. I put the garlic, peppers, ginger into my chopper, which is a mini food processor, then I added three tbl spoons of white wine vinegar and I pulsed it all together.
Next I chopped up my one and a half pound pork roast into a little bigger than bite sized cubes and I rubbed the spice mixture on the meat.
Then I added the ginger/garlic/peppers/vinegar mixture and I sloshed the meat around to make sure it was all coated. Then I popped it into the fridge for a hour to let it marinate a bit.
Right before I took the meat out I sauteed a small white onion in four tbl spoons of canola oil in our Dutch oven pan. When the onion stated to turn golden brown I took it out and I began browning the meat. Once I browned it all I poured the rest of the marinade in and I put the onions back in and I let it cook on lowish/medium heat on the stove for about 45 minutes. I added just a little bit of water, it turns out you're not supposed to put in a lot of water, about enough to go halfway up the meat chunks, because what makes this dish authentic is the spices, the vinegar, and cooking it all in mostly it's own juices.
After it all cooked for about 45 minutes, and it's always better to err on the side of cooking it longer rather than less because you always want your pork to be fully cooked, I took it off the burner and I added some chopped cilantro leaves and I stirred them in. If you don't like cilantro, don't add any.
I served the pork vindaloo over rice and I steamed a bit of broccoli to go with it. After I tasted the sauce, I made some raita to go with the main dish. Raita is a condiment/sauce that's made with plain yogurt and chopped up fresh vegetables, I used finely chopped green onions, grape tomatoes, and some cilantro leaves. I mixed it all in with 3/4 cup yogurt and added about a quarter cup of cold water and mixed it in as well to make it more sauce-like.
The verdict: holy hell, it tasted great. It's hot but the heat of the jalapeno peppers didn't drown out all the other flavors. The meat was cooked to perfection and I could have even cooked it longer to make it even more tender. The raita added a cooling counterpoint to the heat and the fresh grape tomatoes with the green onions gave it a nice kick. This dish is everything I love about Indian food, it's got a ton of flavor and since I used an almost fat free cut of meat, it was pretty low in animal fat as well. I'll definitely make this again and next time I might make it with chicken or a trim cut of beef. Yeah, this one is a keeper.
"I have returned to Haiti to help." He licked his lips, rubbed his hand together, and said, "I've come back to help myself to what I didn't steal the first time around. If you thought the poor had it bad now, holy shit, wait until I get done raping them this time! I invite all multi national corporations to my country to assist me in the plunder and pillage I'm about to commit."
Holy crap I hope the Jets can beat New England this week and then stomp the Steelers next week. Pittsburgh and New England have the most obnoxious fans in the NFL, aside from the hated Dallas Cowboys that is.
I'm hoping for a Packers/Jets Superbowl.
Go Pack! Go Jets!
Congrats on bringing down your corrupt government. Your next step should be to nationalize all important industries, like those in the energy sector, and to implement single payer national health insurance for your citizens. Make the western multi national corporations pay for it by raising their taxes.
The only way you're ever going to have peace and justice for all your citizens is to reign in capitalism and keep out our military. Good luck with that.
