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[17 Jul 2009|06:00pm] |
The past week has been physically and mentally exausting and stressful and I don't even know what. I do love the site. I will miss the site. I found a huge piece of bone from a ten thousand year old bison that hadn't even dried out. Permafrost is awesome.
Not awesome is dealing with Norm's mood swings, one of our members going from sweet to scary when he ran out of the meds he'd been abusing, and my minor breakdown when I got the final and saw that it was a third of our grade and an entire section was on a subject that has not been mentioned once in the past seven weeks. But since we had an actual professor visiting that I like and don't want to think I'm completely insane, I finished the test instead of grabbing my passport and hitchhiking to anyplace with an airport. It was close, though.
Now we are on our way to dawson, star of the gold rush. This means driving through areas where there are actual people and I can use my phone.
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| The Yogurt Diaries #13 |
[16 Jul 2009|11:21pm] |
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Okay! So, today I have The Greek Gods Greek (Style) Yogurt. It cost $1.69 at my local grocery store.
 The Greek Gods Vanilla Orange Cinnamon Yogurt The “Style” is in tiny letters not in the logo. Haha! Anyway, these yogurts are THEMED. Every yogurt has a different god on it. Vanilla, which is what we are trying, is not just vanilla, but vanilla cinnamon orange and apparently belongs to Aphrodite! It is the yogurt of LOVE!
The yogurt of love has a very short ingredient list– with no corn syrup– 170 calories (which is not bad) and 50 from fat which is a little high. The sugars are a little high, too, at 23 grams.
 The Greek Gods Vanilla Orange Cinnamon Yogurt Opened Opening the yogurt container, this yogurt has a very thick, solid consistency that looks a lot like Fage or some of the other Greek-style yogurts.
The flavor is almost bitingly sour, but you can definitely taste the orange and cinnamon in spite of that. It taste a bit like canoli filling, although it has a much more lactosey sourness to it. The consistency is very very smooth and creamy– this is solid and won’t fall off your spoon.
If you like dairy-sour yogurts, this is definitely one to try! I think it might be a little too sour for me, especially when it also has a lot of sugar, but it wasn’t unpleasant and the texture and unique flavor is worth a go.
The other one I have today is Redwood Hill Farm Vanilla Goat Milk Yogurt.
 Redwood Hill Farm Vanilla This was one of the more expensive yogurts, at $2.49. It has 140 calories and 45 calories from fat– so, not bad on calories but the fat content is a tad high. It has 14 grams of sugar, though, which is fairly good. It is sweetened with maple syrup.
 Redwood Hill Farm Vanilla Opened Opening it, it is almost the exact opposite of Greek Gods– in fact, it is rather soupy! The flavor is not sweet at all– just mildly sweet, and very strongly of maple, not vanilla. On the other hand, it has very little sourness to it. I really like the flavor of this yogurt. I generally don’t like the soupier yogurts, but this one has an excellent flavor that won me over. The maple is really strong but almost not sweet, which is very unique.
The Redwood Hill is definitely my favorite of these two, but I think it’s a little pricey for me to buy it too often.
Mirrored from Antagonia.net.
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| New Yorkie People! |
[16 Jul 2009|01:12pm] |
Tonight for movie!
My cousin's train gets in at like 5:25 or something so I will need to go to my apartment to be there when she gets in which should be @ six if all goes well.
Then food? ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) justatailor, cacophonesque, would you like to come meet up at my apartment? I will even mix you cocktails while we wait for danielle1973. f4l, if you want to drop in you may as well!
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| The Yogurt Diaries, #12 |
[15 Jul 2009|06:15pm] |
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And you thought they were done for good!
A few weeks of recovery later, and apparently no new thrush, and I’m going to try to finish out my yogurt reviews. Sadly, a few of the yogurts I had already bought seem to have gone bad in the meantime, so I feel a bit bad for wasting food, but I will replace those ones and try again! Maybe just…you know, not every day.
I have two more major store brands today.
The first is Stonyfield Farm, which cost $1.19 regular price. It’s an organic yogurt.
 Stonyfield Farm French Vanilla This one is French Vanilla and it has a very short list of ingredients, including pectin. It has 170 calories and 50 of those are from fat– not too bad on the calories, a little higher than normal…but the fat is pretty high. There are 22 grams of sugar– higher than a lot, but not the highest by any means.
 Stonyfield Farm French Vanilla Opened I opened it up and it looked prety solid, a lot like some of the Greek yogurts. Spooning into it, I discovered that it also had a very thick, rich cream top, a lot like the Brown cow, but a little bit lighter in texture.
The yogurt is sweet, but it kind of tasted more like honey sweet than sugar sweet, even though the ingredients say it has sugar, not honey. It did have a little bit of an off-flavor to it, though, kind of a ricotta cheese flavor that I wasn’t fond of. The texture is a bit goopy…it hangs in strings from the spoon and almost looks like it has raw egg in it, if you know what I mean.
It is too bad because I really liked the texture of the cream top, but the flavor overall is a little suspect.
Next up is Columbo “Classic” vanilla. My mom bought me this one so I’m afraid I can’t say what the price is.
 Columbo Classic Vanilla The Columbo yogurt is fat free and 130 calories. It has 21 grams of sugar. It does have high fructose corn syrup and modified corn starch in it, but other than that, the ingredient list is pretty short.
 Columbo Classic Vanilla Opened Opening it up, it looks like one of the more flan-like yogurts, with a little water on the top, but the texture is much softer. The Columbo yogurt is a bit sweet, but there is almost no sourness to it at all. It tastes a bit more like sugar than vanilla and the texture is very light– this actually tastes like a classier version of the Shop Rite store brand yogurt.
I like the Columbo, but I like it in the sense that if I were in a grocery store that only had typical store brands, I might choose this or Dannon, but I don’t think it would be in my top choices of yogurts ever.
Mirrored from Antagonia.net.
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| The Care & Feeding of a Bar, Part 2 |
[14 Jul 2009|11:54pm] |
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I promised to follow-up on the liquor post with ones about the various other “accessories” needed to keep a fabulous bar.
This one is a bit of a luxury, but it is a luxury that is achievable as long as you have a sunny window:
The Herb Garden
 Herb Garden The WHAT, you ask?
The HERB GARDEN, I say!
Fresh herbs can make a good drink wonderful, and if you’re going to invest in mixing a lot of drinks, growing your own is going to give you a better return than buying them every single time you want a cocktail. Plus, you won’t have to decide what you want in advance.
I grow about a dozen, several of which I’m not even going to list in this post, because they’re a bit more rare and not really staples (but I love them anyway). The ones here are the ones you should consider growing if you want to make fresh herbal concoctions! If you can’t grow herbs in a garden, you can still use this as a handy guide to what is yummy with what.
( delicious herbs behind the cut! )
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| Shampoo-Free Tea: Result! |
[13 Jul 2009|11:55pm] |
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I know, I know, I said you would get results after about a week, but there is a good reason why it has taken me so long to tell you how the whole shampoo-free thing is going!
It is called, I MADE A COMIC ABOUT IT.
 Shampoo-Free Tea Enjoy! This documents the process from start to end of the first day of shampoo-freeness. Click the image to read the comic!
It has been nearly three weeks and I have got to say, I do not feel like my hair is dirty, and I don’t miss shampoo at all! In fact, I am happy to report that when I went down to my grandmother’s house for the weekend, I brought down all my silicone-rich conditioners and all but one bottle of sulfate shampoo. I kept one bottle of shampoo in case I have an awful hair emergency. But other than that, my haircare regimen now consists of silicone-free conditioner, water, and castor oil or vegetable glycerin (I like to alternate what I put in my hair).
It was slightly greasy at about the two week mark, but other than that, all the warnings that it would make my hair look worse before it looked better? Lies! It has looked great from the first day on. I mean, I still have some bad hair days, but my hair is softer, shinier, and healthier overall. The softness is amazing– you can really tell that there are no products in my hair.
When it got greasy, I massaged my scalp with baking soda and then poured vinegar in– a recommendation I got from Destiny and several other sources. I was hoping it would make my head into a kiddie science project volcano, but it did not. Woe! It made my scalp feel a little dry for a few days, though, so I’m not sure if I will do that again.
But generally, I am very pleased with the results and I would happily recommend this alternative to icky chemicals to anyone and everyone– my mom picked it up already.
Mirrored from Antagonia.net.
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| NY People! |
[13 Jul 2009|10:50am] |
We have tickets for Half-Blood Prince for 7:30 pm Thursday.
I bought tickets for: cacophonesque, justatailor, danielle1973, and four tickets for f4l and friends.
Tickets are $12.50!
I will try to be at the theater by around 7. If people want to get food prior to movie we can do that too! Let me know.
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| True Crud |
[12 Jul 2009|11:59pm] |
This came from a conversation with gildedage about True Blood and how we wish it were more like The Vampire Odd Couple.
Original Post is Here. I messed up something with the mirroring to LJ.
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| A Bar Lesson: Simple Syrup. |
[11 Jul 2009|01:07pm] |
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When you start barkeeping, building up the staple ingredients you need can be difficult. A lot of them are expensive and for people in their 20s and 30s who are typically on a still-paying-back-student-loans or a paying-for-diapers-and-daycare or similarly constrained budget, there is just no way you can buy everything you need all at once on a whim. I’ve been doing this for about twelve years (let’s not count back and look at how old I was when I started) and I am jut now getting to the point where I am happy with the contents of my bar.
BUT! Some bar ingredients are easy to make yourself.
Simple syrup is called that for a reason: it is just easy as pie to make. Actually, it is easier than pie. And inexpensive, and will store for quite a long time. Simple syrup is a sugar syrup that is used to sweeten drinks and is a basic ingredient in drinks like mojitos and mint juleps. Because it’s a syrup, it mixes up well even in cold drinks and you don’t have that problem you have with mixing sugar into an iced coffee. In fact, if you drink a lot of iced tea or coffee, simple syrup works really well as a sweetener in those.
You can buy simple syrups in grocery and gourmet stores in a variety of flavors ranging from ordinary to exotic and some of them are quite delicious, but they are much cheaper to make at home. Here is a simple syrup base that can be used with other ingredients to make flavored syrups. I admit that I do buy some flavored syrups out of curiosity or inavailability of ingredients to make that kind myself, but for plain old sugar based simple syrups, you’ll be very happy with the results if you make it yourself.
Ingredients
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
Instructions
1) Put both ingredients in a small saucepan
2) Put pan over burner on high heat. Stir until sugar is dissolved.
3) Boil, stirring intermittently to keep the bubbles from boiling over, until the syrup thickens to the consistency of maple syrup. You will be able to tell if it is ready by looking at a spoonful of it.
 Homemade SImple Syrup with Mint You can also add fruit, juice or herbs while the syrup is boiling to flavor your simple syrup and then strain them out when you are done and the syrup has cooled to room temperature. And it is easy to double or halve the recipe– just always use the same amount of water as sugar and make sure you use a very tiny pan if you are making a tiny amount to keep it from burning.
You can also make quite a lot and store it for a very long time as long as it is well-strained if you added any ingredients. Keep ones with fruit juice in the fridge. Plain simple syrup can be stored at room temperature in an air-tight container. If it gets too thick or starts to crystallize, you can just put it back in the pan with a little water and stir it back down!
To sweeten drinks, you just want a teaspoon to a tablespoon of this stuff depending on the drink.
Mirrored from Antagonia.net.
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| More on the website |
[09 Jul 2009|11:11pm] |
So, I have a more focused idea of what I would like to use Tumbling-After.net for.
I would like to start with a limited set of things, and then branch out, rather than trying to do too much at once.
In this vein, here is what I would like to do.
1) Have a resource center for people who want to run freeform RPGS.
This would consist of:
a) Articles on:
World Creation
Character Creation/application
Rules Creation
Format/structure
Problem solving
Promotion
b) The Burning Dumpster Redux (run by koshkabegemot and sankuri: a keyword-tagged section for really bad roleplaying profiles
c) Blog posts on roleplaying issues, ideas and stories. koshkabegemot, if you and sankuri want blogs in this section, let me know, and we can set that up too. If anyone else on my list would like to contribute (I know there are a bunch of roleplayers who have lots of ideas), please let me know.
d) links to resources on other sites
2) Have a forum for discussion. Discussion topics would be:
Roleplaying
Writing
Art
Media (not created by members)
3) Blog posts of media reviews. (rattsu, I know you expressed interest in this)
3) Host 2-3 message-board based RPGs in addition to the one I host now. The idea here would be that people wanting to run games could apply to run games with a set premise, pitch, etc...and if they were accepted, I would design a website and host a message board for them and help them with launch promotions, etc. Games would get a 2-3 month period from launch to show activity; if they weren't successful they would get replaced.
Thoughts? Ideas?
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| Was it famine or scurvy, I fought it - I hurled my youth into a grave |
[05 Jul 2009|09:08pm] |
We had an interesting hike yesterday. Through swamps. You may think getting thousands of miles away from New Orleans might mean I would not have to deal with swamps quite so much, but it seems I have a special ability to find swamps in any climate. Anyway, the muskeg is not all that different then the bayou - different trees, less gators - but it's still rather hard to hike through. Especially when we're carrying our equipment and we actually have to dig things when we get to our prospective site and it's the first hot and sunny day we've had in a month and we all drastically underestimated the amount of water we needed to bring. So now we are all somewhat sore and dehydrated. But except for the part where I was wondering who would collapse first when we kind of got lost on the way back, it was rather fun.
Today I had moose sausage. I can now add this to my list of Things I Have Eaten For the First Time in The Yukon, which includes moose stirfry, moose stew, moose heart, moose guts, fried moose, moose burgers, and spam.
We have a new Jessica, who came in Canada Day as a two-week volunteer. She has already decided she does not want to be an Anthropologist anymore. It is good to know these things before one goes to graduate school, I suppose. Heaven help me, I still actually want to do this as a career.
We also have two hitch-hikers we've met in the mini-mart who are apparently coming back to camp with us so we can take them over the border tomorrow.
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| 7/1/2009 |
[05 Jul 2009|09:14pm] |
I totally took this picture days ago? Anyway, it doesn't make any sense except to Shiver people, but:
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| Two Cocktails: As American & Reclamation Day |
[05 Jul 2009|05:19pm] |
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Two drinks for the price of one!
1) As American
 As American This is the drink I designed for the 4th of July. It is a little bit of a take off of a classic Mint Julep recipe and a cherry pie recipe and made with all American-made ingredients. It is sweet and tastes like a bourbon-cherry pie!
Ingredients for two drinks:
7 Oz Maker’s Mark or other Kentucky Bourbon
12 ripe cherries
1/2 cup chopped mint
2 tsps brown sugar
Instructions:
Add ice to 2 martini glasses
Set aside two pretty, whole cherries
Chop remaining 10 cherries into tiny pieces and put cherries in medium sized pitcher
Add brown sugar and mint, and muddle with wooden spoon
Add bourbon and stir
Leave to sit at least 20 minutes
Remove ice from glasses
Pour through metal strainer into glasses
Garnish with cherries and serve
If you like your drinks very sweet, replace the regular ripe cherries with Maraschino
2) Reclamation Day
 Reclamation Day This drink is very drinkable and tastes like a strong herby lemonade. This is a great one for a hot day; very refreshing. It is named for Rosie as, unlike yesterday’s drink, the base ingredient is British!
Ingredients for two drinks:
6 Oz Hendrick’s Gin**
1 lemon
1/2 small (Kirby) cucumber
10 sprigs Vietnamese Coriander
2 tsps ginger=flavored syrup
Instructions:
Add ice to shaker and two martini glasses
Reserve two sprigs coriander. Chop remaining coriander finely and add to shaker
Slice two thin slices of lemon and reserve; squeeze remaining lemon into shaker, discard lemon peel and pith
Add ginger syrup to shaker
Slice four thin slices of cucumber and reserve; chop remaining 1/2 cucumber finely and add to shaker
Muddle with wooden spoon
Add gin and shake
Remove ice from glasses and pour
Garnish with lemon and cucumber slices and coriander sprigs
**Hendrick’s is an English Gin made with cucumbers. If you can’t find it, this will be fine with a London Dry style gin or a citrusy gin. I would recommend using a heavily juniper flavored gin in this recipe.
Mirrored from Antagonia.net.
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| The Care & Feeding of a Bar |
[04 Jul 2009|11:36pm] |
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Cecille asked me if I would take a photo of my liquor cabinet/bar.
So, I thought that in addition to taking a photo of the whole thing, I would take photos of what is inside it so that those of you who would like to learn to mix drinks or who already enjoy mixing drinks can get a feel for what I do.
This is the contents of my bar!
 All the Liquor in My Bar But I’m going to go through it and explain to you what-all this is.
( All About Tea's Bar )
And here is what it looks like when it is all in the cabinet where it belongs. The only liquors that don’t go in the cabinet are the scotches, which are out in the living room, and the brandies, which are on top of the cabinet. Those ones are really my mom’s liquor, though, and she drinks them more as after-dinner sipping drinks.
 The Bar I will say that this is 1) an expensive hobby and 2) something I have been working on for a long time. Liquor lasts for a long time so specialty liquors don’t need to be purchased too often. The only ones you will be replacing frequently are the ones you like and mix the most often. Types of liquor range in price from $15-16 for a bottle of many liqueurs to $70 and sometimes even higher for a bottle of good scotch. My recommendation is to buy small bottles of staples to start, see which ones you like best, and then purchase those in the biggest bottles you can get, because it will be cheaper in the long run. Pretty much the entirety of my liquor collection comes in the form of gifts– this is what I get as Christmas and birthday presents! Don’t feel like you need to have as much liquor as I do to learn how to do this right– to start off, just having a bottle of gin, bourbon, rum, vodka, vermouth, bitters, and a couple of liqueurs or other things that look exciting to you is a good place to start. You should be able to get together a good bar to start experimenting for about $200. If you buy little bottles to start and see what you like the taste of, you can do it much more cheaply– many liquors come in taster bottles that cost under $10.
If anyone has questions about starting your own bar or about mixing drinks, I would be happy to answer them! I intend to follow this up with posts about some of the other items you should have if you want to get into bartending as a hobby– there are accessories, non-alcoholic mixers and ingredients, and glasses you will want to have as you progress!
Mirrored from Antagonia.net.
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