Summer may finally be here. Here’s a few things that we’ve been enjoying as it starts to heat up.
Tom
If you’re anything like me, you probably think you should be eating more brown rice. But it’s hard when you’ve been eating white rice (glorious jasmine or Japanese white rice!) your entire life. Throw in the fact that cooking brown rice takes twice as long and is far more difficult to achieve a consistent grain that’s not overdone or tough, and, well, you have a recipe for a diet without much brown rice.
But thanks to a revelation in the July/August issue of Cook’s Illustrated, that may well change. In a larger piece on brown rice salads, they introduce a new method (new to me, at any rate) for cooking that is no only just as quick as white rice, but also produces a more consistent grain. Basically the idea is to cook brown rice like you would cook pasta: bring a huge pot of water to a boil, throw in salt and the rice, and cook uncovered for 22-25 minutes. When the grains taste done, strain the rice and let it dry on a baking sheet. Splash some lemon or lime juice on there and voila. That’s it. You can probably skip the drying and additional citrus, but after trying it twice last night (once at a dinner party and then again at home when I decided I needed to try it myself), the added steps seem worth it. So why does the big-pot boiling work? The high volume of water (their recipe calls for three quarts of water to one-and-a-half cups of rice) keeps the temperature in the pot higher than normal, which not only cooks the grains faster, but far more evenly than when the rice has to absorb all of the liquid. It’s quick, tasty, and may just make a brown-rice believer out of me.
Dave
I just stumbled onto the Onion’s AV Club’s “HateSong” page. It’s hilarious. Well, not all of the ones I’ve read are that funny, necessarily, but the idea of it is really great, and some artists know how to hate. Really, I think I’m only endorsing Dean Ween’s HateSong (4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?”) which had me laughing out loud a few times. Deaner’s actually pretty much always funny, biting, and mean spirited in print (and song). Perhaps I should just endorse Dean Ween interviews, but I’m too lazy to search for ‘em. This one is a good one tho–short, sweet, and mean (unless of course you like 4 Non Blondes, then you might wanna skip it).
Keith
About two months ago Ueli Steck and his climbing partners Simone Moro and Jonathan Griffith tried to summit Everest up an unusual and extremely difficult route. On the way, they encountered a group of Sherpas installing a fixed rope for some of the commercial expeditions that would go up the regular route. A confrontation ensued, words were exchanged, and someone may have kicked ice at or swung an axe at or rapelled down upon someone else – accounts differ. Later, a group of angry Sherpas attacked Steck, Moro, and Griffith, threatening to kill them and coming close at times.
Adam
I wanted to endorse a television segment now almost five years ago. It’s likely that the world no longer sees the blogosphere as entirely distinct from the mainstream media – is Glenn Greenwald, the guy who broke the phone records story, a blogger or a journalist? – but strong opinions in both worlds about the other nevertheless still exist. In particular, there is, in the discourse of both sports and politics, a disdain among the respectable media types towards the unwashed masses of bloggers who disdain both access and the “benefits” that access seem to bring: uncritical bias towards the elites, masquerading as objectivity. These issues continue to rage today. The integration of the Ezra Kleins and Bill Simmons into the mainstream has not changed the dynamic much, if at all.
