Movies: Star Trek: Into Darkness

I got spoiled on this movie right after theatrical release… one of those “top ten” lists where fans complain caught me by surprise. So I knew the identity of Benedict Cumberbatch going in. Amazon had the digital version for sale a month before the DVD is available, so I took the plunge.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Overall, I thought I would hate the whole thing, knowing what I already knew. I actually liked it, right up until the ending with its blatant re-write of a classic “old trek” moment. That whole sequence was, frankly, unnecessary. In old trek, Spock’s death was a segue into the next movie… it was required for the plot. Here, they just threw it in for gratuitous fan-pandering. It wasn’t needed. Kirk was alive again before the credits even rolled. Why the hell was it in there? And throwing in the shuttle from “that Mudd incident last month” to take down to Kronos… what was that? More old fan pandering.

If you’re going to reboot, reboot FFS.

I thought knowing Cumberbatch was Khan would ruin it for me, but (as Sherlock shows us) he plays the mad genius very well. I enjoyed his performance.

What I did NOT enjoy was JJ Abrams’ abundant use of lens flares. I see now why people complain about this. It was obnoxious. I don’t think there was a SINGLE SCENE where there wasn’t a lens flare. There were flares in space. There were flares off the equipment on the bridge. At one point there was a FLARE OFF McCOY’S HAIR. WTF? Someone needs to hold an intervention. Seriously. And when they clear out all the software, make sure they take away the lens flare filter in photoshop too. Could cause a relapse.

I’m buying the DVD of course. There’s just so little good Sci-Fi out there, and this is better than most. I just wish it was better than itself.

Food and Cooking: Make-ahead Frenzy for Back-to-School

Way back in 1991 (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) I was in MOS training for the Army in Aurora, Colorado.  It was a mixed-branch class, with Army and Navy represented.  Every morning before instruction started, a young woman would show up with grocery bags full of breakfast burritos of various ingredient combinations.  Chorizo, italian sausage, ham, beef and cheese.  We cleverly named her the "burrito lady".  She charged a dollar apiece, and she never went home with anything but our cash (we were not the only class... there were eight others in various stages of training).


Apparently she was operating without a food service license, because in my sixth or seventh month, she disappeared, banned from selling on-base.  I never forgot how her burritos were damn near perfect every single time, and completely delicious.  No-one ever got sick, or found something disgusting in them... I think it's just another example of over-rigid thinking.

After spending a couple of days this past weekend making and wrapping my own attempts for the freezer, I think I should have happily paid two dollars, or even three.  It's darn hard work.

I'm using this book:  Fix, Freeze, Feast  I made twenty breakfast burritos with ham, and twenty beef and bean burritos.  The breakfast burritos, filled with a mixture of scrambled egg and potato, then moistened with sour cream, were hard to fill and roll properly.  Maybe I needed to cut the potatoes even smaller, or I was over-filling them.  I was already dubious about the sour cream, and they tended to unfold on the ends.  I should have warmed the tortillas slightly.  I was going nuts trying not to lick my fingers (don't worry, I washed my hands instead).  And worst of all, they would not all fit into my stacking container OR a one-gallon freezer bag.  I had to divide it between two.

If I hadn't already written on a one-gallon with a Sharpie, I would have gone for the two-gallon bag instead.  I managed to remember that for the beef and bean burritos, and the entire batch fit into one two-gallon bag.

I sampled one of each for lunch on the Monday after.  I baked from rock-solid frozen as per the instructions, and although the beef and bean burrito was completely done, the breakfast burrito was still cold in the middle.  I would increase the baking time by ten minutes if you decide to try these.

This was not the only thing I accomplished that weekend.  We got home from vacation at a quarter to four on Friday morning.  After sleeping in (yay!) I went to work and got the following done over our three-day weekend before school started:

1. Grocery shopping (the house was bare... I mean, really bare.  I thought I was moving up until a week before we left, plus I always clean the fridge before a vacation)
2. Ten quarts of red sauce (think Marinara for the freezer)
3. ten pounds pre-cooked ground beef, some bagged in quart bags as loose meat
4. two full-size lasagnes (again, from the book above using the red sauce.  I would check very, very carefully what size noodles you use though.  They use three noodles for every layer, and they did NOT cover the width of the size of pan they listed.  I filled in around the edges with rigatoni, as I only had enough noodles as required by the recipe, and did NOT want to have to go back to the store)
5. Saturday was ground beef day.  I pre-cooked a bit more loose meat, made a gigantic batch of meatballs and pre-cooked them, and divvied up the rest of the raw ground beef into one-pound portions in quart freezer bags, and pre-formed burger patties.
6. Sunday was burrito-palooza.  I did breakfast ones in the morning, took a long lunch break, and did the beef and bean in the afternoon.  I also managed to fit in one batch of orange-glazed chicken breasts (six pounds worth) for the freezer.  There is a raspberry-glazed recipe in the book, and I adapted it since I did NOT want to use my last jar of raspberry jam and have a dozen of orange marmalade.
7. And because I'm a masochist, I snuck in a batch of oven-roasted (paleo inspired) chicken breasts on Monday night.  I don't like when chicken is in my fridge for longer than that, so it had to be done.  For that, I used Well Fed: Paleo Recipes for People Who Love to Eat.  They do it with thighs, but have alternate instructions for b/s breasts, and it worked fine.

 So Monday night we had spaghetti and meatballs, all from the freezer.  Last night we had chopped roasted chicken breasts over a bed of spring greens.  Tonight?  Not sure.  Perhaps one of the lasagnes if I'm feeling indulgent.

Food and Yarn: Stop Encouraging Them

I have to say something.  I've been watching my fellow crafters over the years... women who want to dye their own yarn or fiber, but are afraid of "real" dyes and bringing harsh chemicals into their homes... dyeing with Kool-Aid.  Ladies and gentlemen, you are not thinking this through.

Dyeing with Kool-Aid involves taking the powdered drink mix, applying it to the fiber after dissolving it in liquid, and fixing it with vinegar and heat.

Dyeing with an acid dye, such as Jacquard, involves taking the powder, applying it to the fiber after dissolving it in liquid, and fixing it with vinegar and heat.

There is no difference.  NONE.  The substances are exactly the same.  In fact, by purchasing Kool-Aid instead of acid dyes, you are encouraging Kool-Aid to keep creating their noxious drink powders that contain substances that CAN PERMANENTLY DYE FIBER and feeding it to our children.

Instead of being afraid of Jacquard acid fixed dyes, you should be afraid that a company is feeding it to our kids.  Please stop encouraging them.  Kool-Aid is NO SAFER than other protein-fiber colorant agents.  It just has additional ingredients for flavor.

Now, dyes for cotton and plant-based fibers are a whole other story, but I'll save that for another post.

Cooking: Meatless Monday, Lentil Salad

Trying hard to work in a "meatless Monday" every week.  It's cheaper, healthier, and reduces my neurotic worry over our cholesterol levels.  It's also higher in fiber when you include legumes, like this lentil salad.

I heavily modified a version I found in the "Forks Over Knives" cookbook.  While their version uses a lot of cilantro and mint, I wanted to create something a little more like a cross between three-bean salad and hummus.  Sort of.

My Roja garlic hadn't performed up to my expectations.  Only half of them came up, and I wanted the garden bed space for lettuces, so I picked most of them early.  I replaced the green onion and garlic cloves in the original recipe with two too-young garlic shoots.  I added a bit of cilantro, but omitted

Cooking: It's a Birthday all over again... only better.

Saturday was my birthday, and since we were phenomenally broke, I made a yellow cake from scratch from the "Homemade Pantry" cookbook (oy, what a pain with the separating eggs from yolks and such, and it ended up dry.  Delicious, but dry.)  And I frosted it with a tub of store-bought frosting that was probably way past its "Best if used by" date (okay, I won't lie... it was.  But that's a freshness date, not a "OMG you'll die if you eat this" date).

Since the cake was pretty dry, after the first half of it was gone, it wasn't moving very fast out of the fridge, even with a layer of my orange marmalade between the top and bottom layers.  Let me rephrase... a half a cup of orange marmalade mixed with a half a cup of apple juice, between two layers of yellow cake.  And it was still dry.

So here I am with a half a cake, broke, and unsure what to do with it.  I made it into a bread pudding, frosting and all.  Holy hannah!  It saved it for sure.  So here is my recipe for...

Cooking: Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza

Last night I was in the mood for a bacon cheeseburger pizza.  I had half a pound of thawed ground beef that I couldn't do anything with because it just wasn't enough for a family of three to have burgers.  I could have created a stir fry, but with several strips of bacon left over from BLTs earlier in the week, this was a natural solution.  Click through for the full post, including my recipe.

HtH: Garden is In?

Technically, the best bed of my garden has been in since November, when I planted my garlic for overwintering.  The outer leaves (?) died back a little in the winter cold, but now they're sending up multiple new shoots.  Each green leaf (?) equals another clove in the bulb, so I'm happy to see their new spring growth.

If you look down the middle of the garlic bed, you will see a brassica that also survived over winter.  To be honest, I don't know if it's a broccoli, or a brussel sprout, or a cabbage.  I tried to start several of them, and the sprouts just kept dying on me, until I spotted this little guy near the edge of the bed where the water had washed the seed, so I transplanted him.  We'll see what he turns into.  Click through to see the rest.