Two enthusiastic thumbs up

Thing 1. Janelle Monáe + Erykah Badu @ the Fox Theatre on June 9. :-O. WANT.

Thing A. This video makes me want so many things. New shoes. New pants. New moves. Janelle Monáe, I think I love you.

If you don't cook, you can't eat

I have vague but fond recollections of the things I used to eat and enjoy as a child. I didn't have an opportunity to learn how to cook at the time though, so for the most part all of those things are effectively lost and forgotten to me. There was one thing in particular that I liked enough to cobble together a passable meal about a year or so after I'd left home, but not being all that into cooking at the time it fell into disuse and I eventually forgot about it again. While shopping at the farmer's market a couple weeks ago I happened across some of the main ingredients and, on a whim, decided to bring some home and see what I could do with them. A quick search on the webternets turned up something that looked like a fairly close approximation, the name of which not only do I not recall, but neither does the author who wrote the recipe I found. I've made it a couple times now, and I've gotta say I'm kinda digging it. I would have one helping for dinner and another for dessert, it's so good. In fact that's kinda what happened the first go 'round, and the seemingly huge pot I'd made that I was sure would result in tasty leftovers was instead polished off in one sitting. Nom nom, recipe (original). It's a little different than I remember, and I've been further tweaking based on my own preferences and the things I happen to have on hand at the time... I guess I should jot some notes down for posterity.

Polish Sausage, Cabbage and Potato something or the other

Ingredients:
~1/4 cup onion, chopped
~1/2 cup bell pepper, chopped or sliced
~1 clove garlic, crushed (optional)
~1/2 cup water
~4 tablespoons butter or margarine
~1/2 ring polish sausage, sliced
~6 medium red potatoes, peeled and diced
~1/2 large cabbage, washed, cored, and coarsely shredded
~1 tsp seasoning salt
~1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
~1/4 tsp cumin
~1/4 tsp paprika (I think...)

I'm fudging on some of these numbers a bit; I didn't really measure things and kinda went more by sight / taste.

Instructions:
1. Saute onion, bell pepper and garlic in 2 tablespoons of the margarine or butter until tender.
2. Layer cabbage, sausage, and potatoes and balance of butter and margarine in the pan. Add seasoning salt, cayenne pepper, cumin, paprika and water.
3. Cover and simmer on low heat until cabbage is desired tenderness, stirring occasionally. This should only cook about 20 minutes or the time it takes to make the potatoes tender.

Hints & variations:
The second time around I chopped up most of the bell pepper and added as usual, but some I sliced and set aside to add after the potatoes, cabbage and sausage, maybe halfway through the cooking time. When it was all said and done, they were a little crisper and had a little more flavor since I'd left less time for it to be cooked out.

Cartoonize your life

Back when I used to spend more time reading the paper the Family Circus was not one of my favorite comics, but I did always like the strips where Billy would wander about leaving a dotted trail behind him. This week, my life resembled a cartoon in that I had a big red line showing everywhere I'd been, courtesy of mapmyride. Had myself a good week of cycling while the weather was nice, which turned into a not so good week for nutrition. It turns out suddenly revving up to roughly three times my weekly mileage makes my metabolism go buck wild and then I eat everything in sight because I am hungry all the time. Note to self: make sure you are well stocked on groceries before attempting any amazing feats of athleticism. Even with the near-disaster, riding is fuuun, and I love mapmyride. :-)

This just in...

Tryin' to keep up with the news more these days. Good to stay informed and whatnot. A brief rundown of stories of interest:

~1. A Japanese multinational conglomerate (headquarters pictured) investigates how some of its customers were accidentally sent back in time to the year 1999.
~2. The Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay evades authorities in St. Petersburg.
~3. The Russian Federation shrinks the country in time after a much-discussed Presidential decree.
~4. A member of the Rothschild banking family of England heads for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on a boat made from 12,000 plastic bottles.
~5. If you are reading this, the latest record-breaking experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider have not yet caused the end of the world as we know it.