Laura Banana

I have recently become a fan of thepioneerwoman and her cooking site thepioneerwomancooks, which has really fabulous recipes that are documented with photographs so that you know exactly what each step (and the final product) looks like. See for example this fabulous cinnamon roll recipe that I believe was the one that first introduced me to the site (thanks stumbleupon).

So I thought I might try a little homage to the pioneer woman. Unfortunately, neither my camera, photography skills or recipes are as good as hers, but here is an attempt using my favorite recipe for pasta: penne al’ arrabiata. I have no idea how to spell that. I first started making it this way about 6 years ago when I was a student in Cambridge, England using a communal kitchen, and I have been making it ever since. It is one of those dishes that I make only for myself as a sort of guilty pleasure. It could be scaled up so that it serves more than one, and maybe I will try it sometime soon if my boyfriend is lucky.

Anyway, you start by boiling some water to cook the pasta. I use a handy gadget, found in nearly every English kitchen but almost no American kitchen, to do this. Then put some olive oil in a skillet (more is tastier, less is healthier, supposedly) with a bunch of garlic, like 6 good size cloves. You could make it with less if you aren’t such a fan of garlic, but I’m not sure what the point would be. Also throw in some chili flakes:

When the garlic is sizzling nicely, but before it browns, add about a half a can of diced tomatoes:

While the tomatoes are cooking down, measure out the perfect you-sized portion of pasta:

And put it in the water that should now be boiling. Continue cooking the tomato/garlic mixture, adding plenty of salt (this is important):

And marvel at the fabulous new cooktop that howard bought for me when I moved in with him. We don’t have gas fixtures upstairs, but this cooktop is almost as good as gas. And now I can bake things at temperatures other than 550 degrees F (woo hoo!). Anyway, cook the tomatoes until the look something like this:

When the pasta is done, drain it and toss it with the tomatoes:

It is really tasty as-is, but it doesn’t hurt to add some coarsely grated pecorino romano or parmesan:

It is so simple, it can hardly even be called a recipe. It is not much more complicated than opening a can, but it beats the pants off any tomato sauce from the store.

My lovely grandmother sent me some really yummy fruit for christmas. I have never been much of a pear person, but the pears in this box were really amazing. For Christmas dinner, I made this apple and pear crisp, which was really really delicious. I think the secret is probably the tremendous amounts of butter. I have tried making crisps in the past, and though they were good, they were not always very solid. The first thing Howard said when he scooped up some of this one was “it’s really crisp!”.

The rest of our Christmas dinner was composed of Tofurkey and stuffing. I’ve also never been much of a stuffing person, but I made the basic stuffing recipe from this book, which was amazing, also probably due to the immense quantity of butter required. Apparently I like bread stuffing more than cornbread stuffing. Maybe I’m turning into a yankee. The Horror! The Horror!

In other christmas news, my mom sent Oliver a stuffed racoon. When we gave it to him, Howard said “wow it’s a really good one — he hasn’t destroyed it in five minutes.” Sadly, a few hours later, it looked like this. Poor little racoon.

Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would definitely be a vast improvement over the current resident of the oval office. I’ll definitely vote for whoever is the democratic nominee in the general election, but in the New York State Primary coming up on February fifth, neither Obama or Clinton will be getting my vote. This is because of they are both officially opposed to gay marriage (though they both support civil unions).

I’ve never had any reason to oppose gay marriage, but I recently read a really awesome book by Dan Savage that made me sort of rabidly supportive of the concept. He makes a lot of strong arguments for gay marriage. One of the most powerful is made when he points out that there are basically no rules about the definition of a heterosexual marriage. Any man and any woman can go and get a marriage certificate and they will be entitled to all of the insurance, tax, survivorship, etc rights of married people, but what the marriage constitutes is entirely up to them. They don’t have to have children, be monagamous, have sex or even see each other ever again as far as the courts are concerned, but they will still be considered man and wife. When marriage is so ill defined for straight people, why do we think it is so clearly defined not to include homosexuals?

I think both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton know in their heart of hearts that opposing gay marriage amounts to nothing more than biggotry. But either they are too chicken to admit this to their constituents or they actually are biggots. Either way, I don’t think they deserve my vote. So I’ll be voting for Denis Kucinich, who is one of the few people running for president who is not afraid to say what he really believes on this and many other topics. On a mostly unrelated but amusing note, Kucinich himself recently got married to a smoking hot and apparently very awesome woman. Here is an account of their bizarre courtship.

My lovely mother sent me a package of Christmas gifts the other day. Most of them were wrapped so I put them under the tree. But there were a few unwrapped goodies available for immediate consumption including the best marshmallows in the world. I would say that they are the best vegetarian/vegan marshmallows in the world too (which is true), but it wouldn’t be doing them justice.

There is a video on their website that talks about the intriguing history of vegetarian marshmallows. The marshmallows available at supermarkets contain gelatin, which is derived bones and connective tissues of animals. If that isn’t gross, I don’t know what it. A Kosher products company used to sell a “vegetarian” gelatin that was used to make vegetarian marshmallows, but it turns out the Kosher company was lying — it wasn’t vegetarian! But Sweet and Sara, the company that made my yummy marshmallows has found a way to make marshmallows without meat gelatin.

And they are sooo much better than the styrofoam-esqe marshmallows you can get at the store. They are everything a marshmallow should be: a little dry on the outside, soft and squishy on the inside, sweet and creamy, without a trace of styrofoam or chemical additive aftertaste. My mom sent them to me because she knows I love rice crispy treats, but it sees a shame to mar them by adding uber-processed cereal. My boyfriend things marshmallows are meant only for hot cocoa, so I will try to restrain myself from gobbling the whole pack of marshmallows so that we can try that.

I’m on a number of mailing lists for members of a group of female Linux users. I’m sure I’ll sing the praises of Linux and other open source software in another post, but for the moment I’m going to write about a guy who recently infiltrated a women-only mailing list and posted a link to his blog. The blog contained a bunch of vile stuff like advocating the murder of feminists, including pointers on how to do this and not get caught, and assertions that rape doesn’t exist since it is every man’s right to have sex with any woman he wants.

The blog was hosted by google (I think), and it was clearly in violation of the terms of service the guy had to agree with when he signed up for the blog. So the women in the group swung into action and mounted a campaign to have his blog taken down, and they were soon successful. The blog was so crazy that I think it’s entirely possible it was posted as some sort of art piece or research study, but if it wasn’t, the guy was obviously total scum and I don’t have much sympathy for him.

The whole thing got me thinking though; when I tell people this story, the first general sentiment they express is that it is dubious business messing around with the right to free speech. When they hear that the blog was in violation of the host’s terms of service, that sentiment changes a lot. But everything we post on the internet is hosted by someone. Even if I were to move this blog from wordpress.com and host it on my own computer at home, I think I’m still bound by some terms of service with Time Warner, my ISP. The ACLU tells me the supreme court has ruled that the government can’t impinge my free speech on the internet, but it says nothing about the telecoms that control the internet — have they hijacked our right to free speech with their user agreements?

If this guy had just written this nonsense, he never would have gotten in trouble for it. It was only after he went around taunting the people it aimed to offend (almost certainly including people who work for the company whose terms of service he violated) that his blog was taken down. For now I think speech is basically free on the internet as long as you don’t act like a moron like this guy did, but it is still unsettling to think about how much censorship there could be if all of the ISPs and hosts started exercising all the clauses in their user agreements.

I recently adopted a dog, Oliver. He is an adorable mutt who was found underneath my friend Katy’s house. Your guess is as good as mine what breed he is. Anyway, Oliver loves loves loves to play with other dogs and has loads of energy. So he and I would often go for about a 1 mile run together to the local dog park, where he would run around with his doggie friends for an hour or so before we ran home again. I never realized before I got a dog how important it is for dogs, especially young dogs like Livers (as he is affectionately known), to get exercise. My boyfriend and I are fairly active people, but when we chase him around in the backyard, we tire long before Oliver does.

So life was good — Oliver and I were both getting great amounts of exercise and having fun while doing it. Enter the Ithaca Common Council. Apparently they have been trying (feebly) to start a permanent dog park in Ithaca for decades. In 2006, they legalized the one I use for a year, but it expired at the beginning of this month and the vote to extend it failed. So Oliver and I have been going a little stir-crazy for the last few weeks.

My boyfriend and I attended one common council meeting and watched another (5 hour!!!) one on television in order to see the votes involving the park, and I have to say we were not terribly impressed. Making any sort of minor decision required endless debate, whereas some decisions to spend millions of dollars were passed without debate. We were especially unimpressed with the two women who represent our ward, Maria Coles and Jennifer Dotson. Maria opposed the extension of the dog park; her stated reason was that the city should not have to pay for things that are used by non-city residents. Ithaca is the county seat and as far as I can tell the only place for miles around with anything of interest happening in it. People from outlying areas come to the city in hordes everyday to do a variety of things, including using many of our parks and paying a lot of sales tax. So her reasoning is so crazy, it makes me wonder what her true reasons are. Does she hate dogs? Is she being influenced by the (mostly out-of-town) boaters that are the main opponents to the park?

On the other hand, Jennifer Dotson claims to support the park, but she failed to show up at the first vote and seemed to only grudgingly support it in the second vote. Although she voted for literally millions and millions of dollars in funding for various city projects, she doesn’t seem to think the city can afford a few thousand dollars for a dog park.

After the first vote that resulted in the closure of the park, the entire common council (including Maria Coles and Jennifer Dotson) voted a week later to extend the park for four months, but only after a $6000 temporary fence was put up around the park. A local volunteer group of dog owners put up the fence stakes last weekend, and the park will reopen whenever the city puts up the actual fencing. Regardless of when they get around to doing that, a good chunk of the 4 month extension will have already passed. It seems like a waste of $6000.

Not all of the Common Council was unimpressive. Alderperson Dan Cogan put a lot of effort into ensuring the success of the extension, for which I am very grateful. I was also really impressed with Michelle Berry. She was apparently the poet laureate of our county and is also a motivational speaker. The rest of the council are not uneducated yokels, but their speaking skills were certainly dwarfed by her eloquence. Unfortunately, her term ends this month, so her negotiating skills won’t be around when we have to go through this all again in 4 months.

David Gelinas was another alderperson who didn’t support the park on the first vote. He made a pretty valid point that the city should stop screwing around with temporary extensions and just make a permanent park, which might have happened faster without the extension. He voted for the park at the second vote, although he complained that he felt forced into it. He said he felt that people on both sides of the debate are being “fully irrational.” That may very well be true. Anyway who was spent much time indoors with a very bored dog knows how quickly rationality can fail you.

Neither my boyfriend nor I is religious, but since I was (kind of) raised as a southern baptist and he was raised as a Jew, we now celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas.  This year he gave me two fabulous cookbooks for Hanukkah, the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion and the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion.  I love baking cookies, and so far I have tried the Italian-Style Biscotti (really yummy), the American-Style Biscotti (also yummy but more like a biscotti shaped soft cookie than biscotti) and the chocolate chip shortbread.  All were much appreciated by my boyfriend and Oliver (except that Oliver was not allowed to eat the chocolate ones, much to his dismay).

I also tried the Easy Cinnamon Bread in the Baker’s Companion.  It is a hybrid of a quick bread and a yeast bread, which seems like a good idea in principle, but I think maybe my yeast wasn’t in very good shape, because mine turned out very dense.  But since it was a sweet, buttery cinnamon-y dense, it wasn’t such a bad thing.   Offering Oliver a bite is a good way to get him to do just about anything I ask.

All I know about the King Arthur Flour company is what they tell me, but based on that, it seems like a good company. It was a family company for over a hundred years before being recently sold to its employees.  I have been a fan of their flour for years — it seems to make better baked goods than other brands, but maybe I have just been brainwashed by their clever marketing.

I work in a particle physics laboratory; this information along with my email address is available on various public websites. This has led to me receiving a number of emails that I store in a folder named “crazy”. These are generally from people who think they have made a great breakthrough in physics comparable to the contributions of Einstein or Newton. The emails are incomprehensible to the point of insanity, and the breakthroughs sometimes involve astrology or the detection of some slight flaw in the theory of relativity (e.g. Einstein though you couldn’t go faster than the speed of light, c, but I think you can’t go faster than c/2).

The radio show This American Life did an interesting story on one of these people who thinks he’s disproved Einstein (you can listen to it here — the story I’m taking about it in Act 3). In the story they talk to a physicist who make the point that a key difference between these people and most scientists is that these people are looking for personal glory whereas scientists are generally okay with being one of the many people who tighten the screws on an accelerator that might make a major discovery.

It would be nice if this were true, but a lot of physicists also gun for personal glory. The world’s next big accelerator, the LHC, will turn on next year and it may very well lead to a nobel prize for somebody. But that person will not only be sitting on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of thousands of technicians, scientists, students and secretaries that helped build the machine.

One funny thing about these emails is that the authors all claim to be blacklisted by the scientific community because their new ideas are coming from outside the community. Advanced physics education definitely follows a fairly rigid framework, and we are all trained to think in more or less the same way. It is entirely possible that someone out there from a non-traditional background has ideas that could revolutionize physics. But partly because of our arrogance, and partly because we are accustomed to these letters from crazy people, we would probably delete those emails too.

I used to think that people with blogs were making unwarranted assumptions about how much other people care about the mundane details of their lives. I’ve recently come to two realizations that lead me to get a blog of my own. The first is that having a blog does not involve forcing anyone to read it — it is your silly decision to read this. The second is that I was missing a key opportunity to annoy people with obnoxiously cute pictures of my cats and dog:

So here is my blog. I hope that the mundane details of my life and the obnoxious cat pictures are more interesting than whatever work you are skiving off to read this.