DIY for Ironists
0 comments Tuesday 05 Aug 2008 | m. | Rants, Lovely Links
About this time, spinach bolts, sugar snap plants turn yellow, and tomatoes finally start to show promise. And luckily, even our shady plot is doing the same – a few things refused to come up, but for the most part it has kept my gardening needs and tastebuds fulfilled. It is pretty funny to find a new volunteer sunflower each week – I can only guess the last caretakers loved their sunflowers through the end of the season. They’re tenacious, and take no prisoners when it comes to battling for sunlight. That means most of them have ended up in the compost pile, though I left a couple just for the hell of it.
I should point out, that the cilantro planted at Sam’s request (I completely dislike cilantro) has gone to seed without being used. (Strike that for next year’s plot!) It’s a weird sort of power to be the primary gardener and meal determiner, without having to be the cook. However, I’ll harvest a little coriander (the seeds of the cilantro plant), as they wouldn’t hurt for the occasional recipe that uses the spice.
The tomatoes are starting to turn red, though all the fruits are much smaller than at other plots in the garden. While I am tempted to blame this solely on the lack of sun, neighbors with walls-of-water have tomato plants and fruits of tremendous size. That may need to be a change for next year – Colorado’s shorter growing season requires more gardener intervention of garden conditions.
The shade, however, dominates the plot – meaning that we are getting the most of (and most out of) the greens I planted in huge amounts. We still have plenty of collard greens, but most of the rainbow chard and all of the spinach was recently used in our Spanakopita:
Spanakopita
2 lbs. fresh spinach leaves
½ cup chopped fresh parsley
½ cup chopped fresh dill
2 cups finely chopped green onions
1 ½ tsp. fine grey sea salt
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
3 cups chopped onion
¼ tsp. coarse ground black pepper
½ lb. feta cheese, crumbled (traditionally made from sheeps milk, goat is also good)
14 filo leaves (usually sold frozen, thaw thoroughly!)
¾ cup clarified butter (ghee), melted
2 comments Thursday 24 Jul 2008 | m. | Crafty, Recipes
Through the magic of my clippers and my new left-handed scissors, I successfully turned
this…


into this:
Our visitor decided when I last saw him in April that he wanted a mohawk. Luckily, a drive out to see us gave us the chance to do so. I think he was pretty pleased with the results, as was I.
2 comments Thursday 10 Jul 2008 | m. | Announcements
If you’ve grown up in this state, you know exactly what I’m talking about. But it’s likely that your reaction is different, based on whether you first attended this venue as a child or a parent. Much like St. Louis’s favorite pizza, if you haven’t tried it by age 9, you won’t be impressed. But if you have…oh, the joys of this spot on east Colfax! I have many memories of exploring every nook with my brother, usually arriving after pleading with innocent family visitors to take us there (you know, those visitors who at the end of the trip say, “you’ve shown us such a lovely time, we’d like to take you out to dinner. Where would the children like to go?”). Everything about this place is magical: from the shrieking journey through Black Bart’s Cave, to the hilarious hourly shows featuring the gorilla, his idiot keeper, and the reporter who ALWAYS loses her wig and is pushed into the pool two stories below by the gorilla, to the mining area with sleeping miners, to the crazy helium balloon machine, to the mariachis, to the fire juggling divers to the hourly pinatas to the endless other places to run around while our parents sat at the table and embarrassedly apologized to whichever family visitor we had talked into treating us here, sight unseen.
This all being said, I know lots of people who grew up with this fantastical place and yet feel like it doesn’t hold up to a visit as an adult. I worried about this (as well as memories of the food – terrible – but acceptable to a non-discerning distracted child’s palate). But now we had visitors arriving, complete with a 9-year-old, and no way were we going to disappoint by denying him a visit. And I don’t think it disappointed him, either, since upon repeated questioning, he proudly stated it was the best part of his trip. And it definitely did hold up to an adult visit, mainly because it was almost. the. exact. same.
Seriously, my last visit was easily 16 years ago, and it still had the same look, smell, same sense of the impossible (how does that strip mall location fit seating for over 1,000 and a two-story waterfall all inside??), same cheesy skits, and same scary bits of Black Bart’s Cave. Oh, and same awful food. That being said, any visit by an adult should come requisite with the less-than-normal process of eating a meal an hour or so BEFORE going. Once there, you are required to buy a meal, but simply don’t eat it. Box it up for the pets or something, and only ingest the drinks and sopapillas. You’ll be much happier that way, and you are certain to find cheap, quality Mexican food in the surrounding neighborhood, so this is simpler than it sounds.
It’s amazing that a business that forces its waitstaff to respond with a quick trot to any table that has raised a tiny red flag has remained in business for over 30 years (Sam demonstrates in this picture),
but I suppose unlimited trays of sopapillas keep all involved happy. Strangely enough, those of us with strong memories noticed only two changes: the genie in the magic wishing well is far less scary (no, it’s not just that I’m grown up, they really did change it); and the waitstaff has dramatically shifted demographics. As a kid, I remember the staff being full adults, clearly frustrated and rushed, with dark stains under each arm. This time around, all the waitstaff we spoke with were young, hip teens – eager to put a more interesting job on their college applications. This strange shift meant that all of them seemed quite happy, like a self-selecting group of pleasant ironists. This made the biggest significant change easier to deal with: for the first time ever, I had to pay my own way.
3 comments Thursday 10 Jul 2008 | m. | Personal
Last week we got a solid 24 hours of rain, uncommon for this area. In the middle of the storm, I was putting up cages around the tomato plants (which unfortunately are being attacked by flea beetles – hopefully they survive the assault) when I noticed two medium mushrooms peeking out from the undergrowth near our plot. They looked promising enough that I consulted our Colorado mushroom book when I got home. I had it narrowed down to either Shaggy Parasols or Shaggy Manes by the time I told Sam about it, and suggested he stop by to pluck them if he felt reasonably sure we could eat them without a trip to the ER. (Regular disclaimers apply: mushroom hunting
is FULL of risks, you should only pick ones you are certain are edible, & consult professionals as needed!). Sunday, I find him sautéing up a couple slices of the one of the two now humongous mushrooms. Turns out they were indeed Shaggy Parasols – a good one for beginners, since it has some pretty good tests to ensure it is not the most similar poisonous mushroom. These guys, due to the rain and the rich soil we found them in; measured a good 15 cm across, and maybe 8 cm high. We took one to a friends’ BBQ, where it responded well to a mixture of soy sauce and red pepper flakes on the grill. The second one (minus the sample Sam took out, as seen in the picture) we used in one of our favorite dishes: a traditional risotto, based off the one used by Alton Brown. While it’s unlikely you’ll immediately have access to a shaggy parasol of this size, most mushrooms can be used in this recipe.
Shaggy Parasol & Asparagus Risotto
6 cups vegetable broth
1 cup dry white wine
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup finely chopped onion
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 cups Arborio rice
5 ounces Shaggy Parasols, sautéed and coarsely chopped, approximately 3/4 cup
7 ounces asparagus, cooked and cut into 1-inch pieces, approximately 1 1/2 cups
4 ounces cheese (we use a combination of parmesan, sheep’s gouda, and gruyere), approximately 1/2 cup
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest (if you have it)
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
This is a four pan dish, so clear the stove.
PAN #1:
In a medium saucepan with a lid, heat the vegetable broth just to simmering. Keep at a near boil.
PAN #2 (main pan):
In a large 3 to 4-quart heavy saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the onions and a pinch of salt and sweat until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the rice and stir. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes or until the grains are translucent around the edges. Be careful not to allow the grains or the onions to brown.
(Pans #3 & #4 are for sautéing the mushrooms and steaming the asparagus, respectively)
Reduce the heat to low. Add the wine and enough vegetable stock just to cover the top of the rice. Stir or move the pan often, until the liquid is completely absorbed into rice. Once absorbed, add another amount of liquid just to cover the rice and continue stirring or moving as before. There should be just enough liquid left to repeat 1 more time. It should take approximately 35 to 40 minutes for all of the liquid to be absorbed. After the last addition of liquid has been mostly absorbed, add the mushrooms and asparagus and stir until risotto is creamy and asparagus is heated through. Remove from the heat and stir in the cheese, lemon zest, and nutmeg. Taste and season, to taste, with salt and freshly ground black pepper.
8 comments Thursday 12 Jun 2008 | m. | Recipes, Personal
So let’s say you bought boots: nice Doc Martens, a few years ago. They were great boots – worn to the point that the soles were slick and the heels were cracked. But as good, well-used boots go, they are particularly useful in very dirty and heavily worked situations. So when you volunteer as a fire suppression team member at a bonfire-like event in a part of the country susceptible to wildfires, it’s not surprising that your duties include lugging heavy, water-filled hoses around, keeping the embers from landing on people; and using a pike to knock down too-tall parts of the burning structure. After several hours of this, the boots (and your clothing) are soaked – and aren’t done any favors by being wadded up in your luggage for a flight the next day. And if you’re particularly slow about unpacking all your things – a week in a plastic garbage bag tucked in your duffel won’t do these boots any favors. In fact, they might look like this:
Just a warning, kids: even good boots go bad. The mold won in this case, but Sam gave them a good life before they were consumed.
2 comments Friday 06 Jun 2008 | m. | Other
It’s true…two new mohawks, cut for Memorial Day on our vacation. I wish I had pictures – but alas, didn’t think of it. I’ll try to track some down from the two new mohawk club members. Suffice it to say; both enjoyed a greater self confidence and attractiveness to others following their sleek new haircuts.
Our vacation was really, really great. Saw old friends, made new ones, had my mind cranked open by some fantastic art and discussing it with the giddy but extremely modest artists, fabulous food, and lots of kind folks from south of here. Wish I hadn’t been bitten by fire ants all over, but hey, you can’t win them all.
One last mention – I found this article from Melbourne, Florida. The zoo there is opening a new Visayan warty pig exhibit in a week, and they are offering free admission to those who attend sporting a mohawk similar to the hairstyle of the pigs. Yet another benefit!
0 comments Tuesday 03 Jun 2008 | m. | Personal
After some cajoling, we both managed to get back to STL for a few days to see friends. Friends who turned out in force! It was a nice present to have friends who let us stay with them and borrow their vehicles (wow, how easy that made it), and of course many friends whom we saw, ate cheap, great food with (oh Mai Lee…how I miss you, and your #126), shopped with, and visited old neighborhoods with.
Perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects was that so many of our friends in this city think a great deal about what MAKES a good city, a good neighborhood, a good block. Sam and I are thinking a great deal about this too after reading the majority of a very dense but altogether sensible book called A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Sitting in at close to 1200 pages, I think we should be forgiven for jumping over a few pages, but by and large, this tome on design of all types and sizes of spaces written in the 1970s has a ton of good ideas that seem common sense but don’t automatically spring to mind. Like, what kinds of neighborhoods inspire the residents to walk instead of drive? Some say they want a jumbomart to get everything in one place, but large numbers of people find a corner grocery to be useful for most of their needs. How big should a town square be in order to be more inviting for a variety of people? How do you even design housing to encourage a diversity of ages, socio-economic class, and
family types to move in? These questions are thought about a lot when you don’t consider your own city to be ideal, and the residents of STL certainly are hard on theirs. But many of our friends are improving their city actively through day jobs or weekend projects: from working with local arts and youth organizations to renovating a house in a neighborhood that needs a lot of work, from building a rooftop garden at work to becoming a teacher or building a sculpture for a public event, we’re lucky to know so many people who think so much about how to make their city a better place to be. And stranger still, most of these people flow effortlessly between white collar and blue collar jobs – and mingle with a combination of both in their neighborhoods and friend groups. Few cities in the U.S. really achieve this.
That’s actually two concepts, but I still appreciate both. And it’s exciting for us to see all the things our friends have accomplished since we moved – even if it’s buying a ‘76 camper named a “scamp” or plotting hijinks for their upcoming wedding. In the meantime, we’ll try to improve the city we live in now, even if most of the residents here have a much higher opinion of their city and don’t believe it needs help, change or any more people in it. It takes time, naturally, to tap in to the improvement elements in a city.
0 comments Wednesday 07 May 2008 | m. | Crafty, Waxing Philosophical
My brother and I have a trivia team. We don’t play every week, but we try to keep up an appearance, especially because we find it to be fun, the bar it’s at is a good bar, with great food & drink specials that night, and the trivia is generally a good time. That’s not to say we’re good. In fact, we harass each other regularly to find more people for the team who can excel in these areas: sports, cable TV shows, movie Westerns, serial killers, and the other topics we just don’t have a lot of knowledge about. He can get the top grossing movie questions perfectly, and I can get the chemistry and literature questions just as well, but that doesn’t cover a lot of ground. This week, however, we not only convinced several people to join us, but several rounds went very well for us! You might not expect that I would rock rounds about rap songs as related to graphs (no I’m not kidding) & U.S. state trivia, or that my little brother would know so much about Chuck Norris. Good to know we both have marketable skills!
The other thing that makes trivia fun is that we have a waitress whom is really sweet and very cute, and would make a great gf for said brother. As far as I know, this hasn’t yet happened, but she has come up to him at his place of work, and chatted with him asking why she hadn’t seen him at the bar in a while. In fact, she smiles and grabs our shoulders when we walk in, which are all good signs! I’ve made it very clear he’s my brother, so he just needs to make a move. I’m willing to take the risk that things go sour, and we’re awkward at trivia forever after…but for now, I’ll just take advantage of the pub nachos and enjoy having a brother that can do the chug off when I get all the answers right and we tie with another team. That’s awfully handy.
0 comments Wednesday 23 Apr 2008 | m. | Personal
So there is good news and bad news about our new community garden plot. The good news: it is a nice-looking, friendly little garden, and we’ve already met two other gardeners who were extremely nice and seemed about the same level of experienced-amateur gardener that I might consider myself to be. Our garden leaders seem very nice, and should be holding some kind of group meeting soon, which I hope will allow me to really get to know the rest of the gardeners.
The bad news is a little more serious. Our 100 square foot plot sits next to two 30-feet tall blue spruces. That might be OK, except they sit immediately to the south. The. plot. is. shady. all. day.
If you’re not a gardener, you may at this point be saying, “So what? Clearly plants grow in shade, I see them all the time. Grow up!” In part, you’re right: I should grow up, but this is the second time in recent months I’ve had this problem: when we moved into our northwest-bottom-corner apartment and found I couldn’t raise much in pots on the windowsills. The garden was supposed to correct that problem, but as Sam considers, perhaps we are being “hazed” as new members of this exclusive locale. The pure shadiness of the plot means that more than half of the things I planned to grow must be crossed off. So, tomatoes, gladiolas, all peppers, basil, daisies and zinnias are out. LOTS of lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas, collards, and did I mention lettuce? are in. We’ll show them we know how to garden.
The tragedy that keeps me from accepting this and moving on is that I haven’t grown tomatoes for over a year now, and was desperately looking forward to raising the crop that has the most payoff: a freshly grown and plucked tomato, something I could rest assured would grow in Colorado with much the same requirements as in Missouri. While I could quietly slip my brother $50 cash (he’s a certified sawyer) and the trees would suddenly no longer block the sun, I have a feeling I’d be hunted down by an angry mob if I did, since no one else would stand to gain from the trees mysteriously being chopped down.
So, we’ve taken the first steps – meeting a few other gardeners, and amending the soil with high-quality compost and sheep manure while picking out the blue spruce pinecones. This week I’ll probably put down peas and a few kinds of lettuce and spinach. If things work out, we’ll get a lucrative trading system down, offering the rare mid-summer spinach and lettuce when everyone else is drowning in tomatoes and basil. Oh, and next year we’ll request a move to a sunny plot.
2 comments Thursday 20 Mar 2008 | m. | Rants, Announcements
In the last month or so, Sam and I have explored and embraced three unique new tastes. In my case, I discovered a love for coarse-ground mustard (especially on a soft pretzel) and that Kalamata olives are actually pretty similar to capers, which I already put on a surprising number of foods. Sam is pushing me to accept green and black olives into my heart, but let’s not go crazy here…black olives simply don’t impress me on pizza, which is where I usually encounter them. And as for green olives, well, this is sounding more and more like a plot to get me to join Sam in his petty crime of stealing one or two olives from grocery stores’ olive bars. Kalamatas, however,
I can incorporate into interesting dishes.
Sam, on the other hand, has a different new condiment love. It’d be an exaggeration to say he puts it on everything, but pizza, soup, pasta, bagels, chik patties, and maybe salads at least. It’s called Togarashi, or sometimes Shichimi Togarashi, or sometimes “Japanese 7 Spice”. In short, it’s a spicy powdered mixture that includes chiles, salt and seaweed. We discovered it through its requirement in a ramen-based soup, and since then, it’s dominated Sam’s foods. While it falls within my spice tolerance, I think most foods don’t have to have a delicate combination of chiles and seaweed to finish them off. Hey, to each their own.
3 comments Wednesday 12 Mar 2008 | m. | Personal, Other
Bananas are so tasty. From the time during my sophomore year when a group of friends and I decided to all eat bananas together at dinner to test a (weak) hypothesis that bananas cause weird dreams, I’ve seen them as one of the more interesting of fruits. So it follows that I jumped on the new book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel. It’s a little discomfiting to read about how the banana companies began by ruthlessly ruling Latin American countries, murdering their citizens and leaders and taking over large tracts of land in order to make the banana profitable to sell to Americans for less than an apple. Luckily, the companies are not nearly so ruthless anymore, but the damage is done. More interesting
to me than this part of bananas history, though, is the fact that we don’t eat the bananas our grandparents ate. In fact, through the 1950s, Americans ate a BETTER banana: the “Big Mike” or Gros Michel. This banana, by commercial standards, was bigger, sweeter, creamier, kept better, traveled better, and was so well-loved that yes, you WERE in danger of slipping on errant banana peels in big cities in the 1920s and 1930s.
However, bananas are not an evolutionarily favored plant, for all their benefits. They are clones – which explains the lack of any seeds, and the remarkable uniformity of the ones you see at the grocery store. But in the past, and now again, it means bananas fall easily to any fungus, disease, mite or bacteria that successfully attack a single plant of a banana cultivar. In the 1950s, Big Mike bananas started disappearing due to a fungus traveling easily between plantations. Big Mike bananas are not extinct, but they don’t work in big plantations anymore. How frustrating, then, that our bananas today aren’t as good as back in your grandma’s day. I’m tempted to ask someone of the era what exactly these dream bananas were like…but to be realistic, if someone asked you forty years from your last one what was so great about Pink Lady apples, could you really pin it down?
In the 1950s, the banana companies were forced to realize that they needed a banana replacement for the Big Mike, and they scornfully switched to the “inferior” Cavendish banana you see now. It is more fickle in travel, smaller, less creamy, and generally considered a
weak replacement (though consumers, apparently, didn’t mind or didn’t notice the difference slicing it into their cereal). But the Cavendish, as I write, is being attacked by a stronger strain of the same fungus that destroyed most of the Big Mike bananas. And we’re no better at solving the problem. Clones just don’t have the genetic strength of other breeding methods. The best hope currently for keeping our Banana Foster recipes for the next couple generations is to employ transgenic methods to produce a third commercial banana. Wild bananas generally aren’t very appealing, even if hardy, and most bananas eaten by the non-Western World are starchier, closer to a plantain (how many of us would switch happily to a plantain on your peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich?). And regular cross-breeding is next to impossible with seedless fruit. It’ll take a lot of trial plants to find something that we picky consumers barely notice is not a Cavendish, but doesn’t die from fungus or the other diseases currently decimating the crops.
Anyway, it was a really good book. If you don’t feel like reading it, you might want to instead check out the NPR Fresh Air interview the author did, complete with singing a banana jingle and a thoughtful explanation why transgenic bananas aren’t worrisome. The author had many opportunities to try bananas you’ll never see in the US, and confidently picks a favorite: the Lacatan. He claims it is sweet and extra creamy, and is beloved by the locals who have access to it. Again, no fair. I am being told that one of my favorite fruits isn’t even the best of it’s kind, with the two better varieties either gone from the market or only sold in and near the Phillipines. I’ll need to find someone to smuggle a Lacatan to me at some point, so I can tell kids years from now how amazing yet another banana they’ll probably never eat was.
2 comments Monday 25 Feb 2008 | m. | Rants, Lovely Links
No, I’m not moving. But one of the downsides of Boulder right now has been lack of access to a community garden, and that’s about to change. I got the call today that I have a bed in the Fortune Garden, one of the community gardens that I am told is difficult to get into. This is because it is located in one of the oldest, most esteemed and expensive neighborhoods of Boulder – and there is little turnover for both real estate and garden estate. I weighed the benefits of the two nearest gardens (this one’s closer, more intimate, and better protected from wildlife) for a couple months before requesting my top choice. I’m hopeful it’ll be as good as I expect.
It’s not the fairest thing to expect community, friendship, drinking buddies, outdoor activity, grassroots activism and oh yeah, fresh vegetables and herbs from a simple 100 square feet, but my last plot, at a meager 50 square feet did just that. I miss my fellow gardeners from the humble Clemens garden very much, and hope I’ll find interesting gardeners at this new location. It’s a little further away, but that’s all the more reason to become more comfortable on my bike and to prepare seeds for spring. It’s time to read up on what Colorado’s growing season will and won’t let me do (damn the desert climate), and figure out what seeds or seedlings to order.
The other benefit to Boulder’s community gardens set-up is that they have made the gardens part of city-owned land, protected from development. My last garden existed at the grace of two, not just one, private property owners, and came under threat of condo development during my time there. While it was inspiring to see how our garden group came together to argue for keeping the garden (successful so far), it’s a lot less stressful to know the city’s got your back. Plus, for a ludicrous sum, I could take a course this summer in bee-keeping, which is awfully cool. I just have to figure out whether it’s hundreds of dollars cool.
1 comment Thursday 21 Feb 2008 | m. | Announcements, Personal
It’s true. Two weeks ago, Berg finally agreed to do it! He had been thinking about it for quite a while, but needed some friendly and a little liquid encouragement (hey, being in engineering can make you more fashion-conservative). He’s quite pleased with the end result, though, as am I. And I get the impression he’s getting a great reaction out of his fellow students, too. Perhaps I will be giving other Aerospace Engineering students mohawks soon…
Berg’s hair is irrepressibly curly, which makes for a mohawk that practically stands up (or poofs up) on its own. Sam’s mohawk, while incredibly long (perhaps 6 inches at the apex now), is so straight that it takes 1/2 can of foul-smelling hair spray and an assistant to stand it up. Thus, he rarely stands his up, certainly not for his recent activities, which have included multiple TV appearances. It’s too bad…I think he would be an excellent speaker for his field, whether or not his hair pushes him to 6 feet tall. But he prefers to keep it down except for special occasions, which is why I haven’t posted any pictures of his mohawk on here. Encourage Sam to spike it, and you’ll see some then.
So how have things been? Same as usual, I suppose. I’m repainting my desert shoes – from green to red, and today I’m making root beer from scratch. The recipe will be posted if it’s successful, but there are days of steps before we’ll know. Root beer making is a very interesting project, however – requiring a variety of chipped barks, and created using a mixture of molasses and yeast that both carbonates the beverage and provides a low alcoholic content. Not enough to even qualify it as a wine cooler, but enough that modern companies don’t even try – as we all know, HFCS and compressed carbon dioxide are cheaper and more predictable.
I have a not-so-secret goal in this root beer project. A nearby local restaurant, better known for its well-loved alcoholic brewed products, makes the best root beer I’ve ever had. It’s not super-sweet, but full of flavor (and scent…not the best for a very pregnant friend newly sensitive to strange smells). It’s clear they’re doing something other root beer producers are not, as no bottled products (I’ve tried quite a few in the last couple months) have quite mimicked the combination of flavors. I have some ideas for how to figure out their recipe, but for now it’s the old-fashioned way: make my own, continue to drink theirs, and try to sort out which flavor compounds need tweaking in my own recipe. Failing that, I wonder what kind of offer would convince one of the hip employees to share the original recipe with me?
5 comments Saturday 09 Feb 2008 | m. | Announcements, Brewing
It’s weird to find a comic artist (author?) with such a similar sense of humor to me and Sam.

I advise you to check out his other work, found here. Also check out his group, “Bears in Ill-Fitting Hats”.
1 comment Wednesday 23 Jan 2008 | m. | Lovely Links