Posts from December 2008

Nisha & Mataya were playing at my office today :-)

To celebrate the end of my first semester in law school, I invited A and Nisha up from Tioga County and @tinypliny over from the Mayflower and we made cookies and cholay! It was certainly a cross-cultural experience - @tinypliny got to lick the beaters for the first time ever and we got to saute cumin seeds in peanut oil! (@heidi is a dork!)


Cholay and pulao - mmmmm now I understand how to make a proper garam masala. My apartment smells like an Indian restaurant! :-)



We made my great-grandmother's molasses cookie recipe and made oodles of tiny cookies, perfect little bites of yummy goodness. A and @tinypliny rolled out the dough and cut out the cookies.




@tinypliny #47194 was horrified by the amount of butter and sugar involved in making cookies - this recipe calls for 1 cup butter, 1 cup white sugar, 1 cup brown sugar AND 1 cup molasses, then sprinkle sugar on top before baking. She requested that some cookies be left naked (see cows below).



We also made molasses crinkle cookies, someone else's great-grandmother's recipe, which uses very similar ingredients but has a very different result - a sharper cookie, less cakey. They get rolled into little balls of dough, then dipped in sugar before baking. Here @tinypliny becomes enthusiastic about butter and sugar :-) I've spent a little bit of time trying to figure out how to make these ones without butter and sugar - honey & applesauce seem like the best substitutes for the white sugar and butter - does anyone have any other suggestions?



(Nisha was pretty good and stayed on her turtle most of the time. @heidi #45816)

Here's China Cat checking us out from her temporary basement home (basement kitteh!)





Nisha considers any available lap an appropriate place to perch.

I'm so confused about the snow removal situation in Buffalo. Allen Street got plowed about once a day Friday to Monday. Most of the sidewalks did not get shoveled, or just to the top layer got taken off. Irving didn't get plowed at all. Is this typical? It seems awfully dangerous to me!

Until Friday I had been telling folks at home that the weather in Buffalo is pretty similar to Tioga County - it snows, it's cold, Buffalo is windier. Oh my! Windy!!! I took Nisha outside sometime Sunday evening and she almost blew away!

Since y'all were talking about crime in the downtown area @paul #47085

The last time there was a murder in Tioga County was about 1984, a love-triangle murder-suicide. Last gun-related homicide was in 1997. (Last homicide: a woman riding her new horse down Main Street in Blossburg got hit by a drunk driver, both woman and horse were killed.)

Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis
- Andrew Leonard

"You should interview Steven Chu," the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. "He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis."

That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.

I had been waiting all semester to get to Bowers v. Hardwick Lawrence v. Texas and Romer v. Evans they were scheduled for Thursday, an extra-long class, 8:30 - 11:50. I had even stayed up late to make sure I had read and thought about the opinions. (LvT reminded me of the Molly Ivins gem I posted Wed night. ) which I also posted as my facebook status so the law school kids would see it ;-) Got to class and the prof was speeding thru the decisions... and at 10:45 he says, okay, we're done, good luck on the exam! I was like WTF??? 10 min for Romer??? I feel totally ripped off. Someone told him we don't get out of class until 11:50 and he said, oh... do you want to come back and talk about it more? I was practically yelling from my perch at the top of the room Yes Yes Yes! and my classmates were glaring at me. We got back from break and we didn't even go back to the cases, we just talked about the exam. What a disappointment.

I'm planning to go to the Friday, Dec. 12 8pm show of Dreaming out of the Digital by the Stripteasers & Alt Performance Group... Tickets available at Wanna come with me? :-)

I'm leaning toward 12/5 at 8pm...