I made brownies! I haven't tried them yet, but they're probably going to be good, since they contain all the items from the Heart Attack Checklist.
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Now playing: Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma
via FoxyTunes
Over the weekend I made some very wholesome food.
Slow Cooker Pork Ribs. I've used this recipe before. I follow it more or less exactly, except for the fact that James and I don't like to measure, so we just put in whatever amount of things we want; and we add most of an onion and a bottle of beer, mainly so we can refer to them as Beer Basted Boar Ribs. This is a great recipe and it's so easy to start, then you get the delicious slow-cookery smell in the house all day.
Yesterday I also made homemade chicken stock using this recipe from Get Rich Slowly. I don't buy those Safeway rotisserie chickens that often since the amount of oil they come soaked in suggests they're probably not great for you. But I did buy one on a whim a couple days before so after cutting off most of the meat I threw the bones into my largest pot with some veggies and herbs. Not only did I put several containers of stock in the freezer, but my house smelled even more delicious all day and into the evening, so it was a double-win. (I guess the closest WOW-analogue would be Steaming Chicken Soup?)
In addition to my housewifely achievements, I also:
Went to see Where the Wild Things Are. It was weird and quite wonderful! I liked those Wild Things a lot-- they were just the right mix of weird, scary and funny. I don't have that much to say about it, though. I need to watch it again.
Played a lot of WOW. Like, A LOT. I go through these phases where that is all I feel like doing. James and I decided to play through some of the old content (from the original game, a couple expansions ago) which we are now way overpowered for. We played through Scholomance and Stratholme (multiple times on each, because we needed the reputation [ps, go read that linked article, or at least the Socrates quote at the beginning of it]), both dungeons designed for 5 level-60 players. Either of us (at level 80) could probably have cleared them alone, but as a team it was even more fun-- we would run through a room grabbing all the monsters, then kill them all at once. We were taking on probably 30 or 40 or more guys at a time and still couldn't really cast spells because things were dying too fast. Very violent! This cancels out the wholesomeness of the chicken stock that was cooking while we were clearing trash mobs.
Anyway, the mini project we were working on-- getting to Exalted reputation with the Argent Dawn-- was accomplished and now we might go play through the rest of the old-world dungeons just for fun.
Sometimes I remind myself of everyone else in the world because I wish I could afford to not have a job so I could do these things-- playing Warcraft, cooking-- all day. Except I know I would get tired of that after 1 week.
I know I've said it a million times before, but I heart This American Life. I can only think of about four reasons I wish I was American, and one of them is so I could listen to public radio. So today, feeling Christmassy, I donated some money to them to help pay for the $150,000 bill they had for bandwidth last year--a result of the fact that you can listen to every episode online for free or subscribe to the free podcast on iTunes. I really like giving away money. It makes me feel like I am subverting capitalism. Like, yeah, I'll work for money, but then I'll just GIVE IT AWAY. Ha! Put that in your free-market pipe and smoke it!
I'm having some friends over for dinner tonight, and I'm cooking beer-basted boar ribs. For real. In my slow-cooker. I got up super-early and put all the "mats" into the slow-cooker, and hopefully when I get home dinner will be there, like a Christmas miracle. I found the recipe online, but I added a bottle of beer so I could say they were "beer-basted." An endless series of jokes about my cooking skill (330, baby!) and the "well fed" bonus will ensue. I'm looking forward to it. Studies suggest gamers like hanging out with other gamers--it makes them feel less awkward.
I've just discovered summize, a website that acts as a kind of meta-reviewer, consolidating reviews from across the blogipelago. So, for example, I type in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" (the new Barbara Kingsolver book about food that I bought in hardcover and I am saving to read over Christmas holidays) and it produces this handy little graphic:
That little colour graph suggests that this book is going to be as exciting and fabulous as I think it is! The only problem with this mode of evaluating potential entertainment products is that, based on my experience with all consuming, other people are not nearly critical enough for my tastes. The internet needs to raise the bar.
PS. I have a surprisingly large number of posts tagged capitalism.
From Steve, Don't Eat It!: prison wine. Make your own contraband booze with the barest of ingredients. "I really don't understand what could have gone wrong! I used moldy bread and socks, EXACTLY LIKE THE RECIPE SAID!" I can't believe how gross this is. AWESOME!
I just spent a silly amount of time playing this inexplicable Asian flash cooking game. It's fun. I don't know how to win, though. I got up to 76 delicious finished biscuits (pancakes? English muffins? hamburgers?) and the little man still berated me soundly.
Stupid interweb.
