Sep 25 2008
Man, I want one of these Books for Obama things. It combines two spiffy favorite things of mine: politics and books. Apparently if you donate $250, you get this cool totebag and with ten signed books donated by various authors who support Obama.
Sep 25 2008
This picture is amazing – but hard to look at. I have it open now and I just keep on sneaking peeks at it as intense inspection would likely make my head explode: LATimes link.
Sep 24 2008
The lard I typically buy to make bortsuk, a Mongolian beignet-like (but not sweet) bread, is called “soolni toc” translating into “tail fat”. My counterpart told me today that that’s what they make from fat-tail (like there are any other kinds here) sheep’s behinds. When I asked about, say, cow-based lard/tallow, she seemed incredulous, saying that other animals are bony and don’t really have the right tails for that. Hmm.
I tried to explain how presumably beef rendering works (as in, trimming fat off cuts and heating it) but she seemed uninterested in the idea. Not sure if this is because it’s related to a totally foreign reality or because eating fat is tasty…
I also learned that “shar toc” (“yellow grease”) is the fat that separates from horse milk when you are churning it to make airag (that fizzy fermented milk drink). It’s that stuff here you’ll see in repurposed pickle jars that is added by the dollop to milk tea or other foods, like berees (I don’t even know how to explain that other than as a flour-fat mixture mixed with raisins(?) that’s sort of griddled to a roux consistency). Apparently while soolni toc can be used for either cooking or frying, shar toc is only for cooking.
In other news, I have a nagging stomach issue/ache that makes me not want to eat much. And I made bortsuk to bring to my boss, who is staying(?) at the hospital for the next 10 days or so. Hence the whole grease discussion playing out above.
Sep 23 2008
So, the Arabian Nights is still a work in progress as it’s a pretty technically complicated first project. I whipped through this Collected Stories in about 24 hours in comparison, and I believe there are a lot fewer text-transcription errors in it too. Still, it could do with a bit more formatting around the in-text “evidence” bits he uses, such as letters, interviews, etc. Regardless, here’s the Lovecraft’s Collected Works as well as the LaTeX package with the useful bits if you want to edit and recompile. If anyone actually felt like submitting corrections, I’m happy to take em, as I’ve found it’s hard to enjoy a book while wearing a serious editor hat. Especially for a book I prolly won’t read at night as it’s scary…
Props to Project Gutenberg for the initial digitization, too.
Sep 21 2008
As the harvest season is ending here, it means pretty cheap tomatoes of sometimes-dubious quality. In this case, we can now get em for 500 tugriks (about 50 cents) a kilo compared to 2000+ tugriks a month ago. Thus began the several-day project of me, Jen, and Amber deciding to dry some.
4 kilos and innumerable flies later, we now are the proud owner of…about two handfuls of dried tomatoes. By my estimation we lost about 75% of mass due to all the drying out. Ugh, as it took us several ours to peel and slice all those damn tomatoes.
About a half kilo were left over from the initial slicing (too squishy, too sketchy) and we saved them for cooking. Well, technically, I was holding em for Jen to take today, but I erm, instead cooked them all then fed some of them to her. With my leftover 1/3 of the wheat yogurt sourdough bread plus a few spices I tried a heavily modified version of a savory tomato bread pudding, and the remainder of the tomatoes went into a spaghetti sauce with the sort-of mutton loose sausage I made a few days ago.
I wish I had my camera (it’s stuck in UB due to weight limits; hope to see it in October), but suffice it to say the bread pudding was ok – maybe it’ll be better tomorrow – and the spaghetti was tasty. The dried tomatoes are also tasty, but I’m afraid to eat them until winter when there aren’t actually tomatoes here.
Another food side note: Andy’s boss Altaa’s mom has started a local yogurt-making business, which means cute glass milk bottles and foil caps. I hope this means yogurt year-round now – it’s not as good (aka sour and raunchy) as the stuff you get from the milk ladies in the courtyard, but it has a nice flavor that’s more like Russian yogurt here.
Finally, a random site where you can download recordings of classical music that have been released into the public domain: Musopen. Production and actual musicians’ quality varies wildly, as much of this is from high school/university orchestras and it shows, but it’s nice to get a little semblance of culture out here. I miss, oddly, when I used to go with my dad to his rehearsals in Irving and mostly ignore/fall asleep during it.
Double finally, I’m sleepy and disinclined to go to the showerhouse due to cat-pseudo-sitting Jen’s cat who enjoys knocking about around 6 in the morning. And there are loud people in a nearby apartment singing (I suspect some bottles are accomplices).
