I’ve had WordPress v. 2 installed now for a while, and haven’t yet tinkered with the file uploading capabilities. Thus, I thought I’d give it a whirl with this screenshot of me as a character from South Park:
When the jar says to combine the tandoori paste with yogurt, don’t just skip that step (because the plain soy yogurt you have is too sweet) and smear your tofu with several tablespoons of straight, undiluted paste into a kind of gooey crust. It will be delicious, but you won’t be able to taste it much because your entire mouth will be tingling and numb and burning. Well, it will be if you’ve got a bit of spice wimpiness like me, at least. In retrospect, I probably should’ve taken the time to blend some silken tofu into a yogurty consistency, and used that.
I’ve only just now gotten the feeling back in my lips. o.O
I have this brand-new jar of tandoori paste — yes, I know I should make my own from scratch, but I saw it and was suddenly gripped with a mad craving for tandoori tofu. These things just happen; it’s best not to ask why.
Unfortunately, to go with my tandoori tofu, I decided I wanted poppadoms as well.* While the tofu was draining, I did a few quick Googles, and . . . nothing. Does no one make poppadoms from scratch? I found a gazillion definitions for poppadoms, and quite a few recipes using premade ones as a component, but no guide for how to make them yourself came up in the first few pages, which is as far as I ever get before losing patience. I even tried all the variant spellings I know (pappadam, poppadam, poppadum) and all that Google could suggest. My favorite recipe sites all came up empty; a quick search of my cookbooks, both vegan and non, only came up with a recipe for chapatis, which is not the same thing.
There really must be a recipe out there somewhere (I’d happily veganize it myself, if necessary), and I’m just missing it. The thing is, I want poppadoms now, for my dinner tonight, and apparently I’m just not going to get any. ::sulk:: Guess I’ll have to make do with some frozen mini-samosas and a whole-wheat tortilla. Next time I’ll have to plan ahead, and give myself more than fifteen minutes to find a recipe that’s even slightly exotic.
Stupid no-easy-to-find-poppadom-recipe Web. Bleagh.
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*Can you tell I’ve been watching a lot of Red Dwarf DVDs lately?
I just upgraded to WordPress v. 2, and, at the moment at least, it seems to have gone off rather painlessly. I’m still waiting for it to go splat in some horrific fashion, of course, but other than a slightly weird interface on the admin end, it seems to be working okay. So far. If you notice anything wonky, please let me know.
Overall, I was pleased with the two new Doctor Who eps Friday night; I’m always deeply suspicious of remakes, revivals, original-cast reunions, etc., but “Rose” and “The End of the World” were, largely, engaging and interesting. I do have a few concerns, though:
Those points notwithstanding, I do like the new series pretty well. The casting is much better than I’d feared; Eccleston is actually pretty good in the role, and despite the chicken-neck dance bit in TEotW, is suitably quirky and likeable. Rose actually only got on my nerves a couple of times, and only mildly, in the way companions usually do — the failure to recognize the alien replacement for her boyfriend, for instance, and being shocked to realize that, now that she’s five billion years in the future or whatever, that means her mom has been dead for quite a while (apparently even companions can have blonde moments). When I’d heard that they had cast a former pop star, I’d expected her character to be far more annoying; instead, she’s not bad at all so far.
Just a reminder, now that my fingers are bendable again without pain: the SciFi channel will be showing the new series of Doctor Who, starting tonight at 9:00 EST . . . and 11:00, and again on Sunday evening. (If you want the whole series all at once, region 1 DVDs are available from Amazon Canada; they’re not yet released in the U.S., to my knowledge.)
Despite the fact that I haven’t seriously watched Doctor Who since high school, and despite my best intentions and attempts to be grown-up and nongeeky about it, I admit to being rather embarrassingly excited about this. From what I’ve heard, they’ve got a better special effects budget (i.e., they actually have a special effects budget), but they also shelled out for decent writing as well, which is far more important. I’d rather have well-written villains wearing the latest in Hefty-Bag couture than a show that only has special effects going for it, nothing else.
I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it’s decent. In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy coveting the remote-controlled Daleks at ThinkGeek.
Only yesterday, I was bemoaning the fact that I haven’t had much I could photograph of late. Then, this evening, I cracked open a bell pepper for a dinner stir-fry and found a little mini bell pepper lodged in one of the lobes. This, of course, was too good to pass up, and I spent the next few minutes snapping away from all angles and with various lighting, until I filled up the camera card.
In the meantime, though, the wok was still enthusiastically heating for the stir-fry. Still giddy from the discovery of new mutant vegetables, I dumped in some oil (too much, as it turned out) and then threw in the tofu chunks that had been draining.
Oops. V. much oops, in fact. I was too distracted by the mutant mini-pepper and quite-hot-indeed oil sloshed all over my hand, burning seven kinds of crap out of my two smallest fingers and one kind of crap out of my middle finger. I don’t think it’ll turn out to be second-degree burns, but first-degree burns around the nail bed and fingertips are quite enough to be going on with, thank you.
Sadly, pathetically, my second thought when this happened was, “Hey, I’ll finally get to put that first-aid section in The Garden of Vegan to good use!” (My first thought was, predictably, a rather rude word — several of them, in fact, and repeated rather more than was strictly necessary.)
If I have made any typos in this, please bear with me. The last three fingers on my right hand are sticking straight out because it hurts too much to bend them.
Still, the mutant mini bell pepper is pretty cool, though, huh?
