tofu breath and all...

so i have a deep affection with coagulated soybean curd.

perhaps, dear reader, you also share this devotion to the multi-faceted culinary swiss army knife. or perhaps your face contracts in a distasteful recoil from that bad experience you had in college experimenting with substituting tofu for chicken in a stirfry and it completely fell apart.

which brings us to the point. like aficionados of other delights in life, one must understand the subtle nuance of each nigari-laden cut off the block.

many of the bad tofu experiences can be chalked up to a misunderstanding of the "field meat"(as the japanese sometimes refer to it). that tofu that fell apart in your stir fry was most likely mori-nu soft tofu, which is available even in south dakota. you gotta seek out the goods in the refrigerator section of your local health food or asian grocery store. stick with the firm or extra firm, and leave the soft for your baking needs.

you can use it for tofu scrambles, in desserts, cookies, spaghetti sauce, smoothies, frozen and then thawed and marinated, baked, straight up, in soy "ice cream," dehydrated (tvp)--virtually anything, really.

i don't really have any favorite recipes, as my cooking style is very much ad lib. that said, i did adapt a ginger snap recipe not long ago that got some rave reviews from my vegan pal and fellow aficionado, sean.

a bit off subject, but has everyone read those chain letters about the neiman marcus $250 cookie recipe? i remember my dad receiving a photocopied version of the letter in the usps mail back in the 80s. that hoax has been around for awhile, eh?

science center sunday

yesterday, we went to the maryland science center with alexis and ankit.

ankit had free tickets, so we arranged to go. it was the first time that any of had been to a science center since our youth.

there were several interactive stations, all engineered for a younger audience, but it was fun to walk around for a few hours and play with some of the stations.

this picture taken by the hubble telescope is fodder for the curious thoughts of wonder that lie within.

darth tater

----->this is 'effin sweet!<-----

my stimulant of choice

coffee is one of the few simple pleasures that i imbue great passion therein. it has long been a love-hate relationship of addiction for me.

the dark, gritty pleasure of a rich robust cup of carefully-crafted beans. soon comes the stream-of-consciousness conversation and obligatory philosophical montage.

perhaps i am a coffee slut? i bounce around from venue to venue, drinking house swill for a buck, holding a captive audience with semi-entertaining banter with increasing fervor and use of facial acrobatics.

let me publicly apologize to you, my good friends, for dragging you (past, present, and future) to a neighborhood coffee house, heavily critiquing the brew and ambiance, and proceeding to commence in a logical-empiricist monologue. coffee, anyone?

a current ahair

what exactly happened to my hair? doesn't it know that i love it? why does it seem to have been slowly moving out over the past decade? it is as if it can't really deal with an abrupt break-up and feels the need to insecurely drag us both through a long drawn-out ordeal.
the really odd thing is, i have a theory that the hair that flees my head is so utterly co-dependant and unsure of itself that as gravity has its pull down a few stray hairs decide to grab onto my shoulders in a last feeble attempt to root itself. the male of the species is not, by any means, the most enticing, wouldn't you say? 

fire in hampden, hon

so amy and i were watching a film last night as it was approaching midnight. we had the sound playing through the stereo, and there was a scene in a park that was strangely interrupted by a loud siren.

for a brief moment, it seemed like the film was going to take an abrupt twist. in some ways the siren even fit with the context on the screen.

we quickly decided that it was reality that was beckoning our attention to the street outside. 2 fire trucks quickly unloaded their cargo, and helmeted men ran toward the rowhouse 3 doors down from ours.

we tumbled out onto the sidewalk and saw that black smoke was pouring out of our neighbor's house. another neighbor was standing in similar confusion and shock, her house directly next door to the one ablaze. she awoke to her fire detector and a bedroom thick with smoke.

the firefighter's scaled the house and smashed in the windows entering from the second floor. a total of 5 fire trucks arrived at the scene, along with 1 ambulance. 2 firehoses were strung out from the main engine, and it to the hydrant.

what was particularly curious about this whole event was the causal nature of the firefighters themselves. another day at the office was the expression amongst their countenances. perhaps it was also because this seemed to be a minor blaze, reported early and not yet out of control.
nonetheless, the firefighters worked on the fire until about 1:45a.m. when they wound up their gear and left.

we received quite a bit of smoke in our rowhouse, being 3 doors down i thought it a bit odd, but after all we are separated by only two-layers of brick.

it was a rough night trying to sleep. this morning both amy and i blew our noses and found soot. great for the old lungs, eh?

what was also unusual is that the firefighters threw out all the belongings in the house on the front lawn and hosed it all down, i guess to ensure it was out. incidentally, the owner of the home is apparently out of town. rough way to come back from vacation...

all-in-all, a very odd evening.

agriculture waste = biofuel

right on volkswagen.
perhaps there is a bright future ahead.

as long as we steer away from those nasty animal-human hybrids...

falafel joy فلاف ل, פלאפל, طعمية

patties of fava beans and cumin bring me great joy in life. it is my vegan steak.

i am particularly fond of falafel with a firm, yet moist and meaty consistency with light green hue. the ideal texture is one that is characterized by stereotypically hand-ground artifacts: pebble-sized bits of the raw ingredients, evidence of freshly chopped herbs peering at you so green, a lightly-kissed-by-the- fry-pan exterior for a satisfying crunch.

the pita must be made on-site, only 4 minutes prior to the construction of the pinnacle sandwich.

opened up like a clamshell, a slightly runny robustly garlic, yet tangy and lemony hummus is slathered on the bottom of the inside of the pita. romaine lettuce sliced in 1/8" strips is draped evenly on top of the hummus, covering it somewhat like cheese covers the tomato sauce of a pizza. then comes a freshly diced, in-season tomato salad which has been mixed in with parsley and cubed, peeled, and seeded cucumber.

where is the falafel? right here. i prefer three or four patties placed carefully inside of the pita atop of the condiments. the finishing touch is a light tahini sauce with a pronounced sesame aroma and flavor.

and the key element... all this for under $5. culinary bliss.

mailing labels

you'll never guess what came in the mail today. my very own personalized return mail labels! just exactly what i needed to make my life complete.

now, the environmental side of me decides that the damage is done and if i denied the letter and scrawled "refused. return to sender" on the front of the envelope, the labels would wind up in a dust bin somewhere. so i open up the letter, write a note of disapproval and request for removal from their mailing list and pop it into their postage-paid envelope and put the return address labels with my omnipresent collection of little cheapy stickers which await my next letter.

my questions are thus: does anyone ever purchase their own return address mailing labels?

aren't these just the type of thing that one receives enough of in solicitation letters that they don't need to seek out a printing company for?

and what is the data that suggests that sending a mass of people little sticky labels generates donations?

if you were to line up all the return address labels in the world in a row, how far would they stretch? to the moon? to the sun? does anyone know?

valentine's day

never really been a big fan of the 14th of February.
but in the past few years, with the induction of a wonderful partner to share life with, my perspective on the holiday has been taken anew.

last year, amy and i took the day off and took a hike in the woods on an unusually warm winter day. it was great fun and we said that we would take a day off every few months to spend playing hooky. although we didn't hold our word on that, we did take a personal day yesterday to enjoy each other's company.

we took the 1.5hr ride over to berkeley springs, west virginia. a place that shares a bit of american history and a bit of history with us as well. there is a natural hot spring located there that, as the picture shows, good ol' george washington had his own tub in. there are markers around town that note where different colonial forefathers had a home. it was sectioned off into tubs, similar to g.w.'s here, and set up as a cooperative land-share. amy took me here for my 30th birthday-- which was one of the best days of my life, incidentally.

so we spent the afternoon soaking in a private 750 gallon "roman bath" in the building to the 1785 building to the right. hot springs are something that we enjoy frequenting as much as possible. we used to go to them frequently in oregon, every few days when we lived in japan, we have scheduled travel around their locations, and now the semi-yearly trek to west virginia.

it is a cleansing and detoxifying process for the mind and the body.

the night finished with a pop-in to frederick, md for ethiopian food and a walk about the town. good times.

time...

a blanket commodity, time. perhaps the only consistent aspect of life.
something, arguably, we all have equal amounts of. a second for you is the very same second for me. the difference is in how we capitalize on the time.

what you do with it, and the emotions that attach to time, is merely situational perspective--
the actual ticking seconds didn't know any better when those brief and scattered
moments of lucid memory stick out.

time, in the absolute sense, is indifferent.
devoid of emotion, unknowing of its own progression,
it simply trudges on and on in its circular patterns, charted and cataloged
by we, the feeble humans who try to control and manipulate everything about this life.

all the while we are trying to catch it, to get to that moment where
everything will be clear, everything will be still, everything will be ours...
time is slipping away.

a mysterious undergrad english classmate, named jeremy nettleton, wrote a fantastical story for a fiction writing class at iowa state university back in 1996 that had such a brilliant observation that has stuck with me for all this time. In his story he said that time was invented when someone paid attention to their beating heart, and knew that at some point it would stop.

how do you spend your time?

entry 1.5

oh, and this is a picture of me from ragbrai this past summer. bohnsack and i plan on riding across iowa again this july with the droves of other cyclists. good times.

perhaps rossi and beef will join the fun this year, too. but if you shook the all-telling 8-ball, methinks all signs point to weaksauce!

weaksauce: noun. 1) your mother's poor excuse for gravy at thanksgiving. mom, what is this weaksauce? 2) a feeble attempt at achieving greatness. man, the way that you cooked that mac and cheese was weaksauce.

the latter definition, by default, will always be assumed for postings hereafter (unless otherwise noted).

first blog post

as the title so says, this is my first official blog post for my first official blog. how unique, yes. i suppose that every blogger posts a very similar message on their maiden voyage.

the identity of the blog then becomes a bit more organic; changing over time with the undulating interests of the blog keeper, and the unpredictable opinions of the contributors.

my reasoning for setting this up is mostly procrastinative. i am to be working on a school paper, but started fiddling with picasa and then it led me here within a few clicks. a blog has always been something that i have been curious to create, but never quite knowing how and where to start.

i suppose that it starts as does anything, with the first step--or entry in this case. well, dear reader, i welcome your ideas, your input, your creativity, your criticism, as i would like this experience to be beneficial for all who's eyes peruse these pages.

thank you for your time and interest, and welcome to the blog of
spenser villwock.