Grace

 All the recent talk about organ meats inspired me to whip up some liver pate!
Here it is:
This delicious spread keeps for up to two weeks under the butter seal, so it makes a great gift – if you like giving organ meats as gifts ;)


You will need:



Chicken livers - about 20 oz
1 stick of unsalted butter, divided into 1/3rds
2 shallots, minced
2 garlic cloves, minced
a pinch of dried thyme leaves
1 tsp coarse black pepper
A pinch of kosher salt
1 cup red wine (a nice cabernet or even port work great here - but remember, if you wouldn't drink it, don't cook with it!)

Method:

1. Clean the livers from a small slivers of fat connected to them;
2. Heat 1/3 butter in a heavy-bottomed pan on a medium heat;
3. Add shallots and garlic, let them simmer until shallots are almost translucent;
4. Add the livers and cook them, stirring often, on a medium heat, until they’re still pink inside;
5. Add ½ cup of wine, thyme and pepper and simmer for another 5-7 minutes;
6. Take the livers out of the pan, add 1/3 butter in the pan and deglaze the pan with the ½ of red wine;
7. Once the livers cool, blend them well in a food processer;
8. Add the butter and wine mixture to the livers, mix well
9. Clarify the last 1/3 of butter, letting the white milk solids settle on the bottom of the pan
10. Pack the pate into a ramekin or a glass, decorate with a some bay leaf or black peppercorns, pour the clarified butter on top of the pate and put it in the fridge.

You’re done! Your pate will keep for up to two weeks in the fridge under the butter seal, and one week once the seal is broken. Enjoy with thinly sliced baguette or dark rye slices!

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/01/home-again-with-additional-dog-pictures.html

I'm home.

This is the weather the dog likes: crisp, cold, weather that puts him in mind of wolfish ancestors hunting on the steppes.

Me, I put on long underwear and dozens of layers over that, and top it off with the sheepskin Uigur hat I haggled for in Xinjiang, and trudge in the snow behind him. It's frozen on top, so you crunch and rock and hunt for ruts that already exist. While Cabal is happy in a world filled with sharp smells and frozen rivers.





Many years ago I discovered (via the Fabulist) Jason Webley. I posted this a link to this song, Eleven Saints, a song Jason Webley wrote and performed with Jay Thompson...



Jason was pleased, and wrote to me to say thanks, and then, a couple of years ago, introduced me in email to his friend Amanda Palmer, with whom he was working on a project, as they worked to bring the music of two conjoined twin sisters they had discovered on the internet to the world. There were two songs out on the internet by the mysterious pair for a long time, but a new song, " A Campaign of Shock and Awe", crept out today: http://www.myspace.com/evelynevelyn. Highly recommended, and not just because of the, y'know, family connections.

...

Right. I do not want to be disturbed tonight. Maddy and I will be beginning our New Year's catch-up by watching the first part of Doctor Who 'The End of Time'.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2026

In the lull between Christmas and New Year's Day, I read the droll news of a special parking lot for women in the city of Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, with spaces a meter wider than normal and is painted in pink and light purple "to appeal to female tastes."

Today, Nathan Hopson sent me an article from Le Monde that shows pictures of this wondrous parking lot, leaving me even more in awe of the lengths to which the proprietors have gone to satisfy their customers:

The overhead sign reads nü3xing4 ting2che1chang3 女性停車場 ("female / women's parking lot"), rendered in English as "Women Parking."

Beneath that sign is another which attempts to be even more elegant: nü3shi4 ting2che1chang3 女士停車場 ("ladies parking lot"), rendered in English as "Lady Parking."

This Lady Parking area is located in a glitzy shopping center called the "Wonder Mall". It is truly a lavish establishment, with all the right name brands, as can be seen from these descriptions.

The BBC reports that "Official Wang Zheng told AFP news agency the car park was meant to cater to women's 'strong sense of colour and different sense of distance'", where presumably "different sense of distance" is code for the Chinese version of the "woman driver" stereotype.  So it's only fair to counter with an American woman's joke, which asks "Why can't <insert your favorite nationality, region, or university> men parallel park?", and answers, holding up a thumb and forefinger about four inches apart, "because they think that this is eight inches".

I received a hand blender (this one) for Christmas and of course had to try it out on some soup! I love it and will never go back to blending the 'old fashioned way'!!

I got this recipe from The Ultimate Soup Bible and made a few revisions of my own. It was a big hit with everyone for dinner last week!

Tomato and Gruyere Soup

-3 lbs. ripe tomatoes, peeled (optional - I didn't) and quartered
-2 garlic cloves, minced
-2 T olive oil
-1 leek, chopped
-1 medium carrot, chopped
-5 cups vegetable (or chicken) stock
-4 oz. Gruyere cheese, shredded or crumbled
-3 T whipping cream
-4-5 large fresh basil leaves, torn
-salt and pepper to taste

( instructions + photos under the cut )

Hello!

I looked over the tags, but didn't find anything. I love pound cake, and have never made a really good one. When i was a kid, we'd always have pound cake for dessert on Sundays and i really miss that wonderful, dense cake that's not uber-sweet.

So i would love your 'best' pound cake recipe. One thing, though - i don't own any shortening (like crisco), don't like it, and won't buy it, so if your recipe calls for shortening, either don't post it or tell me what i can substitute.

Thank you!

( Only three things today. )

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2025

The little bird..Tweets to its mate a tiny loving note (George Meredith, Pastorals, 1851, as cited in OED2)

In my last posting, I reported on Lake Superior State University's 2010 "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness" (for the year 2009), but reserving tweet (verb or noun) for separate treatment.

Objections to tweet are all over the place. Some people dislike the word because they think it sounds irretrievably silly (with its echo of "When my sugar walks down the street / All the little birdies go tweet, tweet, tweet"). I don't use Twitter myself, but I think that tweet is an inspired coinage, suggesting bright, brief, bursts of expression (like birdsong) and connecting both phonologically and semantically to twitter; I might have suggested chirp, but it lacks those connections.

There are, of course, people who object to Twitter as a name for this service, on the grounds that it is itself silly — infantile and trivializing. Well, the people who created the service in 2006 (Jack Dorsey and his associates; see the Wikipedia page) got to choose the name for it; the rest of us don't get to revise the label.

(Compare Wii, which tons of people despised as the name for a game console when it came out, but the console has flourished despite this griping about the name, which for many people has now become "just the name for" the console, without any strong association to we or any of the senses of wee. People cope easily with homophony, even monstrous amounts of it; context and background knowledge make all the difference. In fact, I think Twitter and tweet have pretty much gone this route, largely unmoored from the avian metaphors that lie behind them; they're "just names" now.)

Then there are people who object to Twitter-the-service (as opposed to Twitter-the name). Their objection seems to be to abbreviation in itself — though it's frankly comical to see people who in other contexts trumpet the virtues of brevity objecting to a form of communication that enforces brevity. (The objectors' error is in taking advice meant, whether reasonably or not, to regulate formal written standard English in certain special contexts to apply to all writng, or even speaking, in the language.)

Which brings me back to the LSSU list, where one commenter on tweet pronounces, "tweeting is ridiculous". You can't tell whether the objection is to the act of tweeting — associated in some people's minds with frivolous young people and vainly self-promoting celebrities, as if these were the only groups to use Twitter, so that using Twitter is viewed contemptuously, since these groups are viewed contemptuously — or to the word (verb or noun) tweet. I can't even tell whether the commenter distinguished the two; words and things are so closely linked, after all.

There are serious defenders of Twitter as a positive good (as opposed to those who merely defend other people's right to conduct their own affairs in their own way, in private or in public, so long as they aren't harming others — taking offense is not the same as being harmed, by the way). See, for example, the lead article in the January 3 NYT Week in Review: "Why Twitter Will Endure", by David Carr.

Carr deprecates the name Twitter and the verb tweet:

In the pantheon of digital nomenclature — brands within a sector of the economy that grew so fast that all the sensible names were quickly taken — it would be hard to come up with a noun more trite [an odd choice of adjective; how is the name Twitter overused or lacking in originality?] than Twitter. It impugns itself, promising something slight and inconsequential, yet another way to make hours disappear and have nothing to show for it. And just in case the noun is not sufficiently indicting, the verb, "to tweet", is even more embarrassing.

But, despite his unhappiness over the vocabulary, Carr goes on to argue for the utility of Twitter, especially when you use various features it provides for managing the flow of tweets.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2024

It's the beginning of a new year, so Lake Superior State University has come out with its annual list of words (well, expressions) to be banished from English. (We've had brief Language Log postings on earlier LSSU lists — at least, here, here, and here.) Yes, it's a publicity stunt, and yes, it's a steaming pile of intemperate peeving (on the evidence of the comments selected for the entries on the site), and yes, the hyperbolic conceit of the site is that not only are the compilers declaring that they despise these expressions but they are proposing that everyone should be prohibited from ever using them (not that such opinions could have any real effect on what people do; the site is all show and no consequence.)

The villains are familiar: expressions that are, or are believed to be, recent innovations; especially those associated, rightly or wrongly, with young people (on chillaxin': "a made-up word used by annoying Gen-Yers") or journalistic writing or business talk; currently popular expressions, or expressions believed to be currently popular, labeled as "overused" or "buzzwords" (as if popularity was a curse in itself); portmanteaus (sexting, bromance, chillaxin', variations on Obama); and abbreviated expressions (app).

The substitutions commenters propose are often tin-eared or semantically deficient:

for the verb friend in social media: send a friend request or befriend;

for teachable moment: opportunity to make a point or lesson;

for czar: leader, coordinator, or director;

for toxic assets: bad stocks, debts, or loans;

for app: program.

I usually try to steer clear of sinks of peeving, because they are mostly just ill-informed recitations of contempt, but once a year I check in on the LSSU folks and their (fortunately brief) parade of bile (in part because their list comes out just before the American Dialect Society votes, in a light-hearted way, on the Words of the Year in various categories).

I'll post separately on objections to tweet (verb or noun), which made the LSSU Final Fifteen this year.

White Bean Dip:

- 1 can drained cannellini/butter beans
- the cloves from 1 head roasted garlic
- 1/4 cup fresh mint leaves
- 2 tbsp of both lemon juice and olive oil
- 1 tsp ground cumin + salt and pepper

Whizz everything up in a food processor. Serve with toasted cibatta/focaccia bread, in sandwiches or with roast vegetables.

From Donna Hay's flavours book.

I received the Taste of Mexico spice set from Penzeys for Christmas:
http://www.penzeys.com/scstore/giftboxes/new/tasteOfMexico.html

If the link doesn't work, it contains:
Epazote
Ground Ancho Chili Pepper
Ground Cumin
Mexican Oregano
Broken Leaf Cilantro
Chipotle Pepper Powder
Adobo Seasoning
Powdered Ceylon Cinnamon

I've got a few ideas on what to do with it - tacos, and such... But some of it, like the Epazote, I've never used, and don't really have any ideas for.

So, lovely cooking community, what are some awesome recipes that I could use these spices in? I'm open to dinner recipes, sides, lunch, whatever. Though please, no fish/seafood of any type, or mushrooms :)

Does anyone have any easy (and of course tasty) spaghetti recipes they'd like to share with me?

I love a good traditional spaghetti bolognese but mine takes quite a long time and requires ingredients I generally don't have on hand all the time (e.g chicken livers). Do you have a favourite spaghetti/pasta recipe? I LOVE, LOVE tomato based pastas and am always on the lookout for more!

I am planning on making a cake for my boyfriend's birthday and decorating it with fondant. It'll be my first time using fondant so I'm looking for some tips.

Should I make it myself or buy it from a store? What tools are really necessary? Stories? Advice?

Thank you. :)