Golden Moments: Martha Stewart

How was your day? Good? Great, mine was okay except for when…
MARTHA STEWART FUCKING SAID THAT I HAD THE BEST TWEET!

Martha Stewart Retweet

Now, to be honest I stumbled upon Fox News’ Neil Cavuto interviewing Martha. I wasn’t too sure how long the interview was going on, but judging that Neil was asking about the fairness of the rich paying taxes and the effectiveness of President Obama, I didn’t think it was going to last much longer. I am not going to assume the intentions of Fox News, but the line of questioning was challenging Martha Stewart the successful businesswoman and Martha Stewart the progenitor of good things.

A great diplomat, Martha dismissed the statistic of non-tax payers and made no apologies about the staggering economic divide between her and the people who consume her products. Shame on Fox News for trying to trap a former billionaire in a self-righteous sound byte, and bravo to Martha for not allowing anyone to bring her down.

She barely got to plug the products selling at Wal*Mart and her website!

Because ‘vegan’ doesn’t have to mean healthy

I unfortunately left my lunch of mujadra [link] at home before heading off to work this morning, so I had something to look forward to, when arriving home. Seeing that this isn’t wasn’t office and I had time before the dinner hour, I decided against just warming up the mujadra and instead turn it into something better.

Empanadas were the first thing to come to mind. I started poking around on my phone for “empanada dough” and recipes came up with the one ingredient that I didn’t have… eggs. I thought on this for a minute. Could I substitute eggs with some other protein? Tofu would serve as a protein, but wouldn’t give me leavening or elasticity. I thought substituting in glutinous rice flour, which would have given me the structure I needed but not necessarily yield a tender dough.

Forsaking latin cuisine, I thought samosas. Since I rarely see egg in Indian recipes, so I googled around for samosa dough. Like many Indian bread recipes, samosa dough is 10% ingredients and 90% technique. An aggregate of all the recipes are as follows:

  • 1 scoop [roughly a 1/3rd of a cup] of flour
  • 1 scoop of semolina flour
  • a heaping tablespoon of oil, butter, or shortening (yes Crisco is vegan)
  • water

The trick is to mash the fat into the flour then add enough water to make a slightly tacky ball.
Let the dough rest as you prepare the filling.

My samosa filling was the left over mujadra, frozen cauliflower and broccoli, and mushroom pieces; sauteed, then tossed with some madras curry powder and left to cool. I thought of frying up some turkey burger or throwing in pieces of tofu… but meh.

Divide the dough into four pieces. Roll each piece on floured surface to about 5-6 inch round. Place stuffing in the center of the circle and fold the edges to make a triangle: see a real Indian do it [link]

Bake at 400ºF for about 20 minutes.
Samosa

Porn Parody Names Write Themselves

The “modest” home featured in TLC’s “Jon & Kate Plus 8” is up for sale. Set as the backdrop for four seasons, we’ve seen so much activity go on in this five-bedroom home. Clearly, the Gosslin family celebrity nor the popularity of the show isn’t enough to send house buyers to their mortgage brokers, but I think a special kind of crazy will sell this house.

Think about it… this home would be a pornographer’s dream. It’s a familiar place, it’s been on TV – so it’s practically got a fan base, and you can parody the name.

Jon & Kate Host 8
Jon & 8 in Kate
Jon & 8 Kates

All the wholesome people who would protest the sale and videos would only add to the marketing cache. All I ask is 2% of the sales and a 75K consulting fee.

Read about the sale and see photos in Luxist [link]

It’s all in your head

I sat down to a meal with my family, and the inevitable topic of personal health came up.  With a vocal minority of health professionals, one has to take care around my family when bringing up any subject that could be remotely tied in with the medical field.  Charred foods evoke carcinogens in food, outsourcing IT jobs turns to the booming medical tourism in India, the cotton in my t-shirt ends up in a conversation about weight loss, and weight loss dovetails (without fail) into weight loss surgery.

Mom’s lot in life is working in an inner-city county hospital.  In recent years, she’s noticed a shrinking amount of heart-surgeries in favor for “preventative” gastric bypass or stomach banding procedures, and increased cases of strokes an brain aneurysms.

“Get your headaches checked out. If there’s a clot and they can’t *coil that, you don’t have long to live.” — Mom.

She says this as I stuff another piece of chinese roast pork belly in my mouth, increasing the cholesterol that latches onto the walls of my blood vessels, thereby creating a perfect net to catch a blood clot.  Mom then passed her hand over my head, just barely grazing my hair as if to show me where the deadly blood clot will burst in my brain. This disturbing move is just like the time when she gently traced my ear to show where cancer would form if you talked on a cell phone for hours on end.

“I’ve seen young kids… with cancer right along here.” –Mom

Just as I get over mom’s spooky prophecy:

  1. I developed a headache yesterday which continues today. [I’m writing this with the concern that I don’t keep aspirin in my desk as an emergency blood thinner that will sustain me in case I need to be rushed to the hospital]
  2. Someone forwarded me a chain e-mail of how to identify if someone is having a stroke.
  3. My iTunes playlist played a podcast interview with Jill Bolte Taylor about how she, as a brain scientist, experienced her stroke.

My take away: the universe is agreeing with my mom, and I’m going to have a stroke… or it’s all in my head.

* coil = coil embolization

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