(e:JBeatty), have you seen Pandan at any store in Buffalo city?


From this

I really want to make Pandan-flavoured milk but I don't know where to find it... Any ideas?

---

PS: Pandan smells like a rustic wonderful variant of natural vanilla. Vanilla essence just doesn't reach the subtlety that is Pandan.

Really? Is there a Wegmans on Prospect Avenue as Google Maps seems to think?



Why have I never seen it? This is the parking lot at the back of the Tops Building. Maybe Weggies has a storage unit there? Does anyone know?

Transicelated by Meryl Davis and Charlie White...


Eastern European Waltz
Tchaikovsky


Bollywood Medley
Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Gulzar
Ismail Darbar, Nusrat Badr


Western European Waltz
Strauss


East European Opera
Alexander Borodin


Western European Opera
Camille Saint-Saens, Ferdinand Lemaire


Broadway
Andrew Lloyd Webber

In love with the costumes, the dances and the music! :)

Went shopping with a friend recently (you know who you are and I know you are reading, heheh) and somehow this ended up in both of our groceries...



All I can say is. OH. MY. This thing is DELICIOUS! Gulped it down in two days flat. Needless to say, I won't be buying it any more because if I did I won't fit through my flat door in approximately a week or maybe less, who knows...

This is probably the fastest easiest recipe I have ever made and it was right there on top in terms of how mouth-wateringly tasty it was!

Total cooking time is around 6-7 minutes.


1. Heat some peanut oil in a pan. Meanwhile wash and chop a good amount of garlic into fine pieces.
2. Saute chopped garlic till it is light brown. Meanwhile wash and chop Brussel Sprouts into lengthwise quarters.
3. Add chopped Brussel Sprouts, a dash of salt and pepper powder.
4. Saute on medium-high heat till Brussel Sprouts are lightly caramelized (~3 min).
5. Eat immediately and float away into gastronomical heaven!

---

~

---

Where can I buy one of these??



Have you seen this kind of a formal satin/silk button-down no-crazy-ruffle-frill-attachments shirt anywhere? If yes, please rack your brains - and post a clue! All the satin/silk shirts I have seen seem to have some crazy tailoring quirk. I am looking for a plain button-down one in a preferably non-candy muted colour.

(e:imk2)'s mum hooked me on to the pear and butternut squash soup from the Wegmans recipe collection. I didn't have stock and I am not really okay with throwing away any vegetables after boiling them in water for making the stock - so I improvised on the recipe.

0. Chop. Chop. Set the rice cooker to cook some orange lentils.

Cumulative time to step 1: 4-5 minutes. (3-4 minutes if you are good at that game where you jab the knife between your fingers on the table really fast and try not to stab your hand. I figure if you are good at this, you will be good at chopping vegetables really really fast.)

1. Saute garlic, onions (preferably red), the hottest jalapenos you can find and ginger on low-medium heat in peanut/olive oil till the onions soften and become translucent. I guess you could caramelize the onions and increase their flavour but I don't have the patience to do this. The recipe is supposed to be ultra-quick and dirty.

Cumulative Time to step 2: 9 minutes

2. Add butternut squash or pumpkin or one of those typical fall squash vegetables, finely chopped celery - a whole bunch, carrots and tomatoes. Make sure you clean the celery well - no need for peeling. Add salt and a tablespoon of fresh or dried thyme. Fresh is better but dry works as well. Saute for a good 4-5 minutes - at the end of this step the squash should be almost tender but not quite.

Cumulative Time to step 3: 13-16 minutes

3. Take the cooked orange lentils out of the rice cooker and smash them. Add them to the mix. Add chopped pears and water to cover it all - bring to a rolling boil. Turn the heat up higher to make this step go faster.

Cumulative Time to step 4: 19 minutes

4. Pour everything into a blender and puree the hell out of it.

Cumulative Time to step 5: 24 minutes or forever (if your blender breaks down).

5. Pour into a bowl, dilute with water, add salt and pepper (rewarm if necessary), finely chop cilantro leaves/stems/roots and and mix it in. Mix in chopped red onions and chopped jalapenos if you want an extra kick.

Cumulative Time to step 6: 27 minutes or never (if you are just reading this. GET CHOPPING!)



6. Enjoy! Reach for seconds... :)


PS: This soup freezes really well. I portioned it out in those smaller hummus boxes so that I could just pop the contents of one box into a bowl, add water, microwave it for a couple minutes on high and vary the extra seasoning and garnish. They also make fabulous lunches - because (depending on your portion size) they contain at least 2 servings of vegetables, 1 serving of fruit, plenty of fibre, complex carbohydrates from the squashes, proteins from the lentils and are very balanced.

Chrome OS went opensource on Wednesday. I am excited but I also wonder if comfort in the knowledge of having most important things on your harddrive (if the internet were to crash and burn one day) would ever go away. I have a 1TB harddrive that I back-up things on - and I may potentially get another one. Why, then, is this concept of netbooking exciting?

I think people like me lead dual lives - a mobile, assimilate-and-let-go "info-now" life and a more static laid-back static "make-do-with-what-you-have" life. In the ancient past, I might have had a laptop for one life and a desktop for the other but now I have 2 laptops. My bigger older bulkier laptop serves as an emergency back-up for major disasters (which means it never gets used but its there all the same). The other smaller laptop is the one that I port around - almost inevitably to journal clubs and other venues that require me to review some written document.

I gave up printing more than a year back. All my docs are now online and backed up on my 1TB harddrive. I surf the web extensively and all my information gathering happens on this smaller laptop. Since I don't take my harddrive with me, whatever little data I have while on the go is on the tiny laptop. I depend on the net for the rest. So this could well be a netbook. I could get rid of the other laptop, retain my harddrive as a vestige of the ancient desktop and move ahead.

Some day, when I have a blazingly fast broadband satellite access to the net, I could ditch the harddrive as well. I just wonder if this day will coincide with the official release of Chrome OS. :)



I would love to see the owner of the voice in the video in action. I saw the video 3 times just because the presentation was so snappy, and so Google!

And if you are instinctively thinking of Windows when it comes to long boot up times, you would be wrong. The latest Ubuntu takes a WHOLE godawful minute to boot and you can't even mod it easily as you can mod Win XP. I am sick of the holier-than-thou attitude of linuxers when you ask if you could just cut out all the crap add-on software that Ubuntu ships with* - the answer is that its free so you shouldn't expect too much. I say, to hell with you and your snobbish attitude.

If you can't give civilized useful answers to genuine questions from new users, you are no better than the micro$*** folks who just keep making their operating system even more bloated with every revision. At least WinXP can be stripped down to a lean performance beast. Requests for user-friendly ways of slipstreaming and coring Ubuntu make it to the "innovative future ideas" board instead of being listed as priorities and answered - just goes to show how completely behind the times and user-unfriendly Ubuntu (and generally the linux community) really is.

---

• PS: YES. I have tried Puppy Linux and its no more user-friendly than an esoteric command line system with all the commands in a useless pretty GUI drawn on a puppy's back. :/

Does anyone have any experience with the Drycleaners at:

a) The corner of Linwood and North? You know, that shop next to the art gallery that sells clothes with the grammatically wrong tagline "Never to big... to be beautiful". Hmm... does that imply that the shop *actually* thinks that if you are too big, you could potentially be ugly?

b) That Drycleaning store near Delaware and Amherst - whose adverts scream that they dryclean EVERYthing at $2.95.

Who are your favourite Drycleaners around the downtown area? I have a particularly grimy but really expensive woollen blazer I want to have drycleaned and could really use some recommendations.

Thanks!