Sure, our hero had been kidnapped, beaten, called nasty names, and left for dead in the snow. But he wasn't the type to hold a grudge. Especially when that had all been part of The Plan.
The Minnow Report:
Is it time? Maybe its time. I think it is getting close to time.
The Baby Report:
Such a cute little baby (toddler?). He's really developing an unstoppable engine though. Some days, we're just not ready to come inside. On Tuesday we went to Sears, and he wanted to run around the store. Ok...headache, but fine. Let's run around the store. The problem was, he didn't ever want to stop. So I ended up wrestling a small child into a car-seat. While he's crying. Sigh.
Of course, I also was able to successfully put him to bed (after making dinner for the next night) without any tears. I am a golden buddha!
Meat:
So I've gone so far away from my quasi-vegetarian mentality that it is hard to even see where I was. Does anyone remember how I didn't used to eat meat? I mean, at all? Yeah, what the hell was I eating?
The more I get into cooking, the more meat I cook. This isn't because I don't think you have to cook meat to be a good cook, far from it. Instead, I cook a lot with meat because I want to try a lot of different things. Also, being in Kansas, when you have conversations about food with people, you tend to talk about meat a lot. All this is made weird for me by my continued insistence to not eat beef. This is the last hold-out for me. The last vestige of me being an environmental vegetarian.
I told someone the other day that I act so weird that I'm approaching normal from the other side. This is a perfect example of that: First I was weird for not eating seafood, then I was weird for not eating meat, then I was weird for not eating meat because of environmental reasons (as opposed to ethical or health concerns), then I was weird for eating certain meats (chicken and turkey), but not others. Then, because I was dealing with such a limited diet, I started getting really interested in culinary science, which made me a weirdo male-in-the-kitchen in Oklahoma and Kansas. And now I'm weird because I'll pretty much eat anything except beef, provided you can tell me how you made it and its culinary history. I'm practically normal again.
Cooking (disasters edition):
Just a word of warning: No matter how good of an idea it seems like at the time, never put tomatoes and orange juice in the same dish. Especially if it is a breakfast casserole.
Cooking (anticipation edition):
My parents bought us an early christmas gift this week (THANKS!): A chest freezer. Why do I need a chest freezer? Well, hopefully next year's garden vegetables will be stored frozen (for starters), but also, I've got about 150 pounds of meat on the way (have I mentioned the meat yet?). That's a half a lamb and at least a quarter of a bison. I'm ridiculously excited about this: I've almost never cooked with lamb, and never cooked with lamb chops or leg of lamb. I've eaten plenty of ground bison, and I've tried a few roasts, but this is the first grass-fed animal I've had. I'm also excited because of aging. What's aging?
Well, after an animal is slaughtered, skinned, gutted and chopped into big chunks of meat, it is pratically inedible. That's not true, but it isn't far off. Especially with red meats, a critical step is letting the meat hang in a clean, cold, dark locker for awhile. According to the U. of Minnesota extension office, commercial cuts are aged 7 days on average, but according to everyone I know in Kansas, that is unlikely. According to some people I've talked to at the K-State Ag School, commercial operations often age their meat just 3-5 days. By comparisons, fine resturants purchase meat aged between 11 and 20 days.
I'm buying my lamb and bison from family farm operations, and they are/were butchered at local butchers. At this scale, meat gets aged a lot more (in both cases 10 days). The upshot is a much more tender cut of meat. This is especially true for bison, which are pretty much exclusively grown on grass (and therefore grow much slower than cattle). I'm hopeful that this will mean I will have more luck with my bison steaks than I've had in the past. We'll see.
Wisdom Teeth:
Despite my drug-induced optimism on full display elsewhere, it turned out to be a pretty crummy thanksgiving week. The pain felt minimal on Wednesday of last week, but by Thursday I was in agony again. Eventually I got back on the serious pain meds again, and they combined to make me 1) extremely hyperactive and 2) a very poor thinker. As you might imagine, that's a combination that makes for a very interesting week. Hopefully I didn't offend anyone. The best story I've heard from the wife is about my ridiculous excitment upon purchasing some pants. Yeah.
I mean, I need pants, and they are nice + cheap. But apparently I was really excited.
The NBA:
The more I watch the NBA (and I'm up to ~10 games a week), the more amazed I am that the Lakers and Celtics are doing so well. Talent-wise, there are a lot of really good teams in the NBA. The Memphis Grizzlies spring to mind as a perfect example of a team with loads of talent, but no cohesive plan for putting it together on the court. The Cleveland Cavs, by contrast, seem to have no significant talent after LeBron, but they definitely have a plan.
The Utah Jazz are a better example of this. There's no reason the Jazz shouldn't be the best team in the league when healthy. Obviously that hasn't been very often this year, but this should have been the case last year as well. They have excellent big men, an extremely good point guard, quality shooters all over the floor, the most versatile sixth man in the game, overachieving role players, and they've all been together for years. Yet the Jazz are often miserable to watch, can't control games at all, and never seem to be cohesive.
Is it coaching? Is that the problem? I think Jerry Sloan's a good coach, but maybe he's not? The Lakers under Phil Jackson always have had an identity. They've always had a plan. When they almost beat the Suns in the first round 3 years ago, it was because they had a plan. Turns out, it wasn't quite a perfect plan, but you could tell they were committed to it (until Kobe quit playing in Game 7). The teams I've seen this year that seem to have that plan are: the Lakers, the Celtics, the Knicks (on the court), the Heat, the Cavs, and the Spurs (the Blazers might be on this list, but they have two plans: 1 involving Greg Oden, and 1 involving just winning games). But that sure isn't every team with a good coach: The Bucks and Dallas seem to have good coaching, and I really think Terry Porter is a good coach in Phoenix (although not for the Nash-Bell-Amare-Diaw group).
I don't quite get it. The talent gap just isn't that great. The Bobcat's Richardson-Wallace-Okafor combination isn't that much worse in terms of pure talent than Allen-Pierce-Garnett. But the Bobcats play some of the stupidest basketball I have ever seen in my life, while the Celtics play as if they are all operated by a single brain.
Oh, and D.J. Augustine is the best guard on the Bobcats. I think he's bulked up since college.
AND:
That's all I've got to talk about.
