Day 83:

The Menu

Green Salad
feta cheese, macerated red onion, garden fresh tomato

Roasted Cauliflower
duck-infused olive oil, paprika, garlic

Roasted Chicken Thigh
oven roasted tomato garlic wine sauce

Just a typical night at Chez Penguin!  J and MH graced me with their presence for a lovely little homecooked meal.  Good dinner, good friends, and, of course, delicious homemade sweet tea all 'round!  I live for nights like this, and you should, too.  Have your peeps over for a simple dinner!  It'll be awesome, and the memories of such evenings are unforgettable, without peer,  beyond price.

LOVES!!


Tomorrow, ADVEN--

Actually, hold on a second:

This blog is specifically about my adventures in California, and Wed - Sun, I'll be having adventures elsewhere.  I'm not planning on blogging about my visit with the fam, though I may if something particularly adventure-y comes up.  Day 85 will conclude my first leg of the CA adventure.  I beg your indulgence, and I'll be back with exciting adventures on the left coast in just a few days.

--TURE!! :)

Day 82: R, MH, 2-ey, CJ, and my noble self all gathered at ye olde farmer'se markete, and I think everyone bought at least one or two things.  I picked up some peppers, potatoes, basil, tomatoes, and some good red onions.  Loves.  Then we all adjourned to Queen Sheba's, for the very best in Ethiopian cuisine.

That's right, you heard me.

It was an interesting experience.  The dishes were all served on one big platter, with each dish given it's own little space around the edges: potatoes, green salad, collard greens, cabbage, lentils, spicy lentils, corn, lamb, beef, and fish, all surrounding a sea of chickpeas.  See, when I just plop that down in front of you like that, it sounds all disjointed and separate, but it was really not.  Yes, I would like a bite of potato with my beef, thank you.  Oh, my, it would be delicious to have a little potato with my lamb, yes, indeed.

And you eat with your fingers.  All five of us.  From the same dish.

We used little pieces of a special Ethiopian bread, injera, to pick up little pockets of food, effectively creating little one-bite tortillas, more or less.  As we neared the bottom, we discovered another layer of injera, which was full of the delicious flavors that had soaked into it.  Despite everyone having big appetites, (we were all getting a little cranky as the food took kind of a while to come out, and we hadn't eaten much yet... and I told the polar bear joke wrong, and it turns out that I managed to offend everybody, instead of getting a little laugh to lighten the mood.  Go me!)... um... where was I?  Oh, right.  DESPITE everyone having big appetites, we still didn't manage to clear the platter, and everyone wandered off to have a well-earned nap, full and happy.

It was a pretty busy weekend, but it was a lot of fun.  The only even vaguely stressful part was when 2-ey managed to get herself lost at the farmer's market; when I finally spotted her, I yelled, "Your mother and I have been worried sick!", which she thought was pretty funny. 

Tell you what, if you'd like to have an adventure of your own one day, you should try finding a tiny asian girl in the Sacramento Farmer's market one day.  It's like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles.  But find her we did. 

It was a weekend full of happy adventures, and I am supremely glad not only to have shared in the many and diverse happenings, but also that I can share them with you, gentle reader.

Tomorrow, ADVENTURE!!  :)

PS Emily, my rotator cuff got strained when I was rescuing drowning kittens from a burning building.  It is very much on the mend; thanks for asking!

PPS I meant, "playing racquetball".  Typo.

Day 81: A study in indulgence, decadence, friendship, and joy; I name thee Saturday!!  Behold:

- Hit the gym first thing, so that was out of the way.
- Picked up my cooled confit, headed to R's place.
- Cheered on YOOOOOUR UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS as they barely eked out a narrow win over powerhouse Missouri.  I think the final was 31-10.  Welcome to the SEC, punks!
- Consumed duck confit.  It was a bit... indifferent, and a little tough, frankly.  Huh.  We prepared another batch, which we had salted the night before, this time using duck fat and a little more heat.  We looked forward to noshing on this later in the day.
- Cheered on the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, our noble lady of suffering, as they squared off against Michigan.  Michigan had come back to win this matchup in the last 60 seconds for three consecutive meetings, so we kept our fingers and toes crossed that the Golden Domes could hold them off and rightfully claim mocking rights... which they did!  Welcome to the ACC, punks!  ...er... sort of.
- MH and a friend visiting from LA (we will, for the sake of this blog, refer to her as 2-ey), as well as CJ from Roseville, popped over to enjoy Rafi's wings, and we quickly crisped up the duck skin on the legs confit which had been cooking all day.  AND THEY WERE AWESOME.  Turns out that the duck fat is NOT, in fact, interchangeable with olive oil.  We have retained the duck fat, and will strain it to cook more duck.  Yum!  Everyone decided they were delicious.
- We all trooped over to watch the Anti-Cooperation League, our local improv troupe.  We laughed loud and long, and now I wanna PLAY....
- We stopped by a restaurant whose name eludes me so that the gals could indulge in a dessert crepe.  It was, by all accounts, delicious, so I wish I could recommend the place.
- We sauntered back to R's place, and finished off the evening playing a board game wherein you have to come up with words that fit categories.  It was not the world's greatest game, but I did manage to win, so it's pretty much the world's greatest game.

...and all of this was in ONE DAY.

I love these people.

Tomorrow, (even more) ADVENTURE!!  :)

Day 80: The confit, having been cooked all day in an extremely low temp oven, was put out on the counter to cool, and then transferred to the fridge just before I went to bed.  In lieu of duckfat, I actually used a bottle of cheap olive oil, as many sites on the internet suggested that this would be just fine.

R and I passed the evening watching six (or seven) episodes of the first season of Sons of Anarchy.

Don't judge me. 

That show is awesome.

Consequently, not much else got done today.  But tomorrow, holy hell, ADVENTURE!!  :)

Day 79: I purchased some duck legs, quite unsure what to do with them.  Upon investigation, the best way to prepare them is confit, which literally means to cook them submerged in duck fat.

...I often wonder who came up with this stuff originally.

Apparently, cooking the duck in the fat is a way to preserve it.  Tonight, to start the process, I mixed up some herbs, salt, and pepper, and spread that liberally over the legs.  I put them, skin-side up, in the fridge to cure overnight. 

Tomorrow, ADVENTURE!!  :)

Day 78: Tonight we all gathered at R's to celebrate the first of the Last Days of J.  MH, JudoMike, and GM, along with my own noble self, gathered at R's place, and spent the evening watching an incredibly kick-ass documentary, Woodstock (1970).  This was a tour-de-force, apparently consisting, originally, of over 120 MILES of film.  It was eventually edited down to 184 minutes, and it's well worth an evening, just to experience the joy, peace, and love that the music festival brought to upstate New York for three days in August of 1969.  The hippies were entirely unapologetic about being hippies, loving their youth and their bodies and their music, and really, deeply, fundamentally not caring about the almighty dollar. 

But - as LeVar told us many, many times - you don't have to take my word for it: the movie has an average rating of 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it number 41 on the list of top documentaries of all time (weirdly, it suffers from a lack of reviews, as the 1970 film review count can't compete with modern fare: Man on a Wire (2008), has the same exact score, but with more than three times as many reviews, all positive.  Because of this little oddment of time travel, Woodstock is the lowest ranked documentary ever that has an average score of 100%.  Still, it's pretty damn good!).

And Joe Cocker is about fourteen degrees of insane in his performance of "With a Little Help from Me Friends," as he put it.  It's worth the watching.

And it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

And it was edited by a young Martin Scorsese, of all people.

Our gathering represents (roughly) three distinct generations, and we all enjoyed it in our own way, and the romantic in me likes to think you will enjoy it in your own way, too.  Also, I have beautiful, amazing, wonderful friends, and that, much more than a fancy phone, makes me stupidly happy. 

Tomorrow,ADVENTURE!!  :)

Remember that you can comment on these, and though I will cheerfully delete spam or advertising, I will not delete comments that are simply offensive to me.  I want ChainsawPenguin to be full of youth and beauty and freedom, and that includes the freedom to say stuff I disagree with.

I also reserve the right to park in front.  

As long as I'm reserving stuff, I'm saying.

Day 77: My rotator cuff is on the mend, and R and I did an intense set of sprints.  Good times.

Also, and this is drifting onto the shores of Nerdvana, we're a week away from the new Warcraft expansion, so tonight they launched a new Scenario that I got to jump into with my guildies.  I am aware that it's not everybody's cup of tea, but my peeps are good-hearted (else they would not be my peeps!), and we always have fun.  It's nice to be able to jump into the high-end stuff whenever the fancy strikes me. 

Life is really pretty good, you know?

Anometimes you just got to love kicking back and enjoying a really good Monday Night Football game, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, and a big fluffy bed. 

Day 76: I joined my peeps for dinner at the Pour House in Sacramento, and we watched the football game with mixed emotions: some wanted the Falcons to win, and some wanted certain Falcons players to score, and others wanted Payton Manning to throw a lot of touchdowns but still lose, and still others were delighted with the burrata caprese salad, entirely unaware that football even exists.  Nearly every opinion was motivated by fantasy football.

For my noble self, I will say that I have been a life-long supporter of the (now local) San Francisco 49ers.  I've been following them faithfully, for, what, 11 days now?  I'm basically their biggest fan.

It's true that they're the local team, and I want to scream "Go NINERS!" in Candlestick Park, but it's also true that they're making it incredibly easy to be a new(ish) fan by winning. A lot.

A nice workout, good football, amazing friends... I gotta say, loudly and clearly, I am a lucky duck.

Oh, and one more thing: years ago, I was friends with Miss Rosie Molinary, who was our student body president from 7th grade onward.  Everyone was.  Rosie makes the world a better place, every day, and is exactly the kind of person you think she is.  Pure awesome.

Today, as she does many days, she appeared on "Charlotte Today".

I leave you the link, and the happiness that in engenders.  She's just about awesome.

Watch a Great Woman Be Genuinely Good

I love all of you, and hope that tomorrow, you, and I, and everyone we know, can find ADVENTURE!!  :)

Day 75: R and I spent the day watching ESPN's "REDZONE".  Now, if you're new to this blog, or even if you happen to be a happy veteran, there's no way this isn't going to sound like I'm shilling for these people.  For the record, they are not giving me a dime.  In fact, all that they are providing me is the best football coverage in the history of time.

And it's kind of hypnotic.

There are no commercials.

There are no timeouts.

There are no breaks, at all, in the football coverage.

This program just swings back and forth between games, showing you the highlights and the clutch plays, for hours and hours, with no pause at all.  The (one) guy who does it is kind of amazing, as he catches you up on what's happening with the Buccaneers, shows you that crucial third-down play, then switches instantly over to what's happening to the Cardinals. 

All.

Day.

Long.

You watch all of the games.  You see every important play.  "Oho, Chainsawpenguin," I hear you cry, "what if more than one great or important play is happening simultaneously?  What then, smart guy??" 

If that happens (and it does), they split the screen.  And comment on both.  SIMULTANEOUSLY.  They do this for up to four games at one go. 

It's like football mixed with crack.  Mixed with awesome.

And then Sunday was over.  I have no idea where my day went.

Tomorrow, ADVENTURE!!  :)

Day 74: The Gamecocks won handily today (49-6), but I missed most of the action, as MH and I took in Resident Evil 5 (it's actually titled Resident Evil Retribution, but there have been FIVE of these damn things already!).  If you haven't seen any of the RE movies, let me sum up quickly what to expect:

Scene 1:

Milla Jovovich, who married the director of the first Resident Evil movie, and who portrays a character who is not actually present in any of the video games on which the movies are based, wakes up.  Her face is presented vertically, and then it pans to demonstrate that she is actually lying down.  Seriously, this happens in all five movies.  Her character is named "Alice".  Then she does something awesome, as the Mary Sue she is.  She may be the most perfect Mary Sue in the history of popular film, as she was inserted by her creator to be more awesome than every single other character in the canon of the games. 

Scene 2: Alice explains everything that happened in every movie so far, just in case you haven't seen them (in fact, MH had not, so this was a big help, though I did try to explain a little of what happened before the film).  This voice-over is a montage of scenes from earlier films, and it gets longer and longer each time, predictably.

Scene 3-47: Alice does something awesome, generally involving wearing improbable clothing and killing zombies or monsters in the least practical of ways.  Also, not running, ever, despite every single movie working on a countdown, except that one time that she ran down the side of a building, when it would have been exactly as fast to, you know, just fall.

Scene 48: We pull back, realizing that now, NOW, our heroine is in REAL trouble.

I LOVE this series, but it's hard not to notice that at no point are any of them involved with actual story-telling, instead relying solely on "Rule of Cool".  But I love them, so I guess that works.  It's like the Matrix trilogy, but without the pretentiousness.  Or thoughtfulness.  Or anythingness.

It's just COOL.

It doesn't make any sense, but I enjoy all five movies.  They're my indulgence that I throw out for the people who adore Ben Stiller and Judd Apatow movies: fart jokes are not hilarious. It is only laughing at a biological function which, sadly, cannot always be controlled.  Sometimes you gotta fart, but it's not funny, it's just farting.  And by "farting" I mean "cursing" or "being pregnant" or "being a man-child" or whatever the current movie's equivalent to farting is, but it's all just shy of pooping.

In contrast, the Resident Evil series just focuses, successfully, on making its heroine just insanely awesome, albeit improbably successful.  

And frequently wearing entirely inappropriate clothing.

Ahem.

Real quick, we also did a little shrimp boil: 

-Brine shrimp in a quarter cup of salt, some creole spicing, and old bay for an hour in the fridge. 

-Pass the time with a cheese plate and a nice Greek salad. 

-Turn on the broiler, and get it nice and hot. 

-Boil a gallon of water on the stove, with a lemon, wedged in quarters, a quarter cup of salt, and a Zatarran's crab boil bag (mustard seed, coriander seed, salt, allspice...). 

-Drain the brined shrimp, and rinse. 

-Toss into the rolling boil for two minutes.

-Remove and drain.  Let cool in the drainer.  They'll be hot!!

-Halve and de-seed a couple of peppers (we used yellow and red). 

-Put the peppers on a baking sheet, covered with a thin glaze of oil.  Cook until the peppers start to smoke, which is about when the shrimp will be cool enough to eat.

-Remove pepper halves, and dice, making a nice relish.  Watch the fingers, as the peppers are VERY HOT.  Ignore advice from friends to use tongs, just tough it out.  You can take it, right?  RIGHT?

-Season shrimp and relish with a dash of olive oil, salt, and pepper.

-Put food in face.

-Send thank you letters* to:

1431 Q St #324
Sacramento, CA 95811

You're welcome.

Tomorrow, ADVENTURE!!  :)

*You know what?  I never get actual letters in the mail anymore.  You should send me one.  I promise I'll write you back!