(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.

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!

"Visiting with family" is definitely not equivalent to a "Vacation".

I was over the moon thinking about the vacation, was stressed out completely during the "vacation", but nevertheless didn't want to come back and felt devastated and depressed when I returned. Weird and totally expected at the same time. I miss my folks so much it actually aches. I think I now know why I avoided going back home for so long. :(

I think that's all I want to say about my "vacation".

Over the past few weeks or so, I have been finding out what size I am or rather the numerous sizes my clothes need to be to remotely "fit" me in some way.

In Delhi, I am an XL for some shirts or an 80-85 or some weird European size in some arbitrary scale that the dressmaker invented while getting sloshed. Here in Buffalo, I am apparently Petite. Okay, that sounds reasonable. But I am also:

-- 3/5 short for trousers in the juniors (teens) section
-- 3/5 short for jeans in the juniors section (I like jeans with a looser fit, -- 3-short somewhat fits me but would be uncomfortable over a day of wearing)
-- 2 for tops in the women's section (this is baggy and they don't go any smaller).
-- Petite-Small-Extra-Small (not Average or large) for tops in the petite-women section
-- 2/4 for shorts/trousers in the women's section
-- 2/4 for jeans in the women's section

And none of the busts or lengths on any of these tops or trousers ever fit me. If they do, they are in the "girls" section - but then my hips don't fit. To make things even more fun, sizing varies among brands and in-store lines. I don't fit petite trousers at all - they are 7-10 inches too tall for me. Worse fits are regular women's trousers/jeans -- they are sometimes a full feet (and maybe a half) longer than I am.

Does it mean that the average woman here is well over 5'7-5'10 and has a bust of around 55 inches? I don't see many such individuals on the street. Who are these people tailoring clothes for? I see tons of women who are around 5' to 5'4". Where do these women shop? Do they all have enough money for tailoring/alterations or own sewing machines - because I never see them rolling up their cuffs or trousers like I am forced to.

I am completely baffled by sizing and fatigued with shopping. I could easily wear the clothes I currently own for the rest of my life, had it not been for the fact that work requires me to dress-up from the rather hobo-like frayed faded ill-fitting clothes I have been wearing over the past four years. I could also easily have brought my wardrobe back to Buffalo but I am not sure the wild colours, embroidery and mirrors I used to wear would be street-safe here.

I think I unconsciously stare in horror and fascination at people who say they love clothes-shopping. How could anyone possibly enjoy shopping if they are not 6' tall and have a 55" bust or have an incredibly small hip size? Or maybe I am just an alien mutant.

EDIT: I scrutinized a lot more sizing charts and I think I am a 2 Petite and unusually short. Good to know I am a pygmy even among petite people. Dockers metro trousers in a 2-Petite-Short with an "ideal fit" or a "curvy fit" almost fit me - except that the waist is a bit larger. As for tops, I am almost a 4 petite extra-small to small. Even by this measure my bust and waist are a whole inch or two smaller but my hips are almost fine but not really. :/

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.

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• 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. :/