sabrina - the everyday adventures of sabrina

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israeli couscous salad yum

10 February 2008 at 12:01 sabrina Comments off

so, there’s a foot of snow-slush-ice-goo on the ground, it’s exactly 2.7°F out with windchills of 20 to 30 below zero. (i’ve been trying to teach myself to think in metric and celsius as well, but frankly, celsius is just too depressing to contemplate at the moment.) our 40 mph gusts of wind might decrease to 30 mph in the afternoon, if we’re lucky.

this is not comforting weather.

that said, i decided to make something foodlike to remind me that someday, some fine day in the please-let-it-not-be-too-distant future, the temperatures will return to bearable. i’ve been wanting to try and make some Israeli couscous like i had at spertus a couple of months ago when some friends and i decided to pop by and discover if it was tasty or not. (it is reasonably tasty, and i have to believe that the view from the cafe is fabulous, if it’s not snowy and obnoxiously cold out.) so here we go, attempt #1.

1/2 sweet onion
1 T. olive oil
1 8.8 oz bag Israeli couscous
2 c. turkey broth
1/2 c. chopped dried cherries and raisins
1/2 c. pinenuts
1/3 c. chopped fresh parsley
1 cucumber, seeded and chopped into 4mm cubes just for the hell of it (HA HA MANDOLINE YOU ARE MY FAVORITE KITCHEN IMPLEMENT EVER)
dash lemon juice (maybe 1 t?)
1/4 t. dill weed

saute onion in olive oil until brown and yummy-looking. add couscous to pan and toast. after toasting couscous, add broth, and let simmer until the broth is mostly absorbed. soak dried fruit in hot water, drain. when liquid is mostly absorbed and couscous is mostly cooked, turn off heat, add fruit, and cover and let it absorb the remaining liquid. let cool off a little bit, then add pinenuts, parsley, dill weed, and cucumber. add lemon juice if it suits your whimsy. put in fridge until cool. eat. yum!

cooking, recipes none

a little political blathering on

4 February 2008 at 08:04 sabrina Comments off

i’m not certain what the deal is with all the republican furor over mccain potentially being the nominee. didn’t people used to like him? i mean, wasn’t the ‘maverick’ thing formerly cool? and, c’moonnnnn…. you can’t seriously be all that rah-rah mitt freaking romney. if you took away his max factor pancake makeup, the man would cry. and really, why are people calling mccain a socialist? i guess i missed the part where he got all buddy-buddy with hugo chavez.

although, in retrospect, maybe the “mccain is unacceptable!” factor only needs one datum in order to be understood — i find him not completely unacceptable, myself. if liberals like him (despite him being completely batshit insane, natch), then clearly he is EBIL!

(and, hey, dear ann coulter — very funny hannity & colmes segment (and y’all won’t hear me use that particular f-word as regards ann coulter often, so savor it) aside: nobody actually believes that you will campaign or vote for hillary. there are limits on the amounts of disbelief even big ole sci-fi dorks such as myself can suspend.)

but anyways. so, i think i’ve mentioned this, i’m voting obama on tuesday. (i decided against voting early. i could’ve done so, and lent that voice to early returns gossipping, but i decided i would really prefer to take part in SUPER DUPER ULTRA MEGA FANTASTIC! tuesday festivities. maybe this will be the time i am finally selected to take part in an exit poll, my lifelong ambition! (come on! you know that wicker park is going to be highly contested! COUNT THE HIPSTER VOTE, GALLUP!) … also, the early voting polling place was much farther away from my house than my regular polling place, and y’all, i am very lazy.) i’ve been a little bit conflicted about my choices. i liked bill richardson, but he dropped out (boo!). that pretty much left clinton and obama. (edwards is too shrill about THE MINERS!!!!!, and kucinich is too batshit crazy, and everybody else (who?) was too irrelevant (who???). so there you go. election by moderately short attention span.)

now clinton, i’ve been saying for ages, since i was still pissed off about Bush v. Gore, that i looked forward to voting for her for president. however, i take it back. she’s really irritating the crap out of me, and i think she’s being somewhat unkind, and i think she expects women to vote for her as her due. which, just, no. also, bill is rapidly losing what respect and goodwill i had for him (and i still have my Clinton/Gore ’92 campaign buttons up on the wall behind me; i was an original signatory for MoveOn’s original purpose (long since abandoned and gotten shriekier and far more annoying; you all know it’s true); i happily voted for him in ’96 and loved him pretty much unquestioningly up until about six months ago.). what nastiness hillary refuses to emit, he takes care of. the “fairy tale” remark was just plain meanspirited — and for someone who campaigned to the music of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),” hypocritical. he’s behaving like a spoiled brat, and i don’t really much care for that. and if hillary and her handlers are refusing to rein him in now, i have no trust that he would remain in the East Wing… and i’m just not interested in flushing away the twenty-second amendment. so, sorry, hill, i guess i changed my mind, at least for now.

also, hillary, no one is buying the ’35 years of experience’ thing. 35 years of work experience, sure — 35 years of leading the free world, not so much. you kinda blew it with that one.

i was a little slow to get behind obama, too, though. i honestly still have not gotten over his saying, when elected to the senate, that he wouldn’t run for president in 2008. i’m still a little peeved about that. listen, we’ve just gotten hastert out of the house and people are betting on Das Oberfuehrer taking his seat (dude, don’t give me shit about hyperbolizing to make that joke either; he is such a fucking Nazi i can’t even buy his ice cream, and i am not a boycott-prone person); i don’t want to see illinois lose federal democratic representation, and if obama runs for president and resigns his seat or damages his chances for either his reelection, or replacing him with another democrat, before eventually losing the election, i am going to be omigodsopissed. (i mean, i liked peter fitzgerald; he disagreed with me on most everything, and every time i wrote him a letter asking him to do something he wrote me one back explaining why he’d done exactly the opposite, but at least he had some sort of, you know, integrity and sense of personal accountability, and weird stuff like that which is unusual in the united states congress, so that was nice. but anyways, i don’t expect to get another decent republican like him any time soon. seems the trend is towards shrill and shouty ones who pretty much want liberals to all die in a fire. dang… now i want to write fitzgerald fan mail.) anyhoo. i shall be very cranky if obama screws illinois over in a failed attempt to become president.

that said… i think he’d make a pretty good president. i really enjoy watching him speak; he’s very well-spoken and sort of human. (i was reading something recently where someone was off-put initially by his pausing during off-the-cuff responses, as opposed to hillary’s polished and immediate responses, but then he realized that obama was actually thinking out a response as he went rather than spouting a pre-planned statement, and changed his mind, saying he preferred obama’s method. i like it, too.) i don’t agree with everything on his platform — specifically and most significantly, his view that “civil unions are okay but gay marriages are not” (which is about as close to being a single-issue voter as i get; i intensely dislike the hypocrisy of the federal government allegedly not being in the business of enforcing religious standards and yet the only single bar to entry to a legal state marriage for otherwise-qualified adults is in effect a religious one), though that’s at least much more progressive than the right. (don’t even get me started on mike huckabee.) i think he’s pretty reasonable in most areas, though, and perhaps the most important distinction for me is even if i don’t necessarily agree (and, unlike a lot of people, apparently, i think it’s okay to vote for a person who isn’t 100% in line with me on everything) with his position, at least i’m reasonably sure he put some thought into it, personally, rather than just picking up some talking points memorandum and memorizing it. i can trust obama to think issues through, consider consequences, clearly communicate about them, and come to a conclusion that is more acceptable to me than other candidates. honestly, as sad as it makes me, i just don’t trust hillary to do that. and, on a personal note, i vastly prefer his high road approach to dealing with all the incessant attack bullshit; clinton’s campaign has flung so much shit and yet he remains, apart from the odd snark here and there, above the fray — in one-on-one interviews where the reporter tries to feed him lines to make him catty about clinton, which he uniformly dodges, but especially with regard to clinton’s “but she’s a GIIIIRRRRRRRL” and “OMG obama’s a cokehead drug dealer ‘cos he’s BLACK!” out-of-control campaign staff. seriously, hill, i don’t know which is worse, if you are doing this deliberately-and-yet-incompetently, or if you cannot control your people, but either way, i want none of it.

so, on super duper ultra uber fantastico amazing tuesday, i shall be standing in line to cast my vote for barack obama. i don’t think i’ll be alone.

election 2008, politics, us none

a sunday diversion

3 February 2008 at 15:13 sabrina Comments off

Sourdough Pretzels

1.5 c. proofed sourdough
1 c. hot water
2 T. butter
3 T. sugar
2 t. kosher salt + plenty more
5.5 c. flour
4 T. sodium bicarbonate

Have all ingredients at room temperature. Dissolve sugar, salt in hot water; add butter and let it melt, then cool to lukewarm. Add proofed batter to water slurry in large bowl. Add in flour, 1/2 c. at a time, to 4 c. Turn out onto floured board and knead in remaining 1-1/2 c. flour. Dough will be sticky and firm. Break off egg-sized chunks and roll to 18″ lengths, about 1/2″ thick; YMMV. Form into pretzel-appropriate shapes. Bring large pot of water to rolling boil with salt and sodium bicarb. Drop pretzels in a few at a time; when they rise to the top, let boil 30 seconds more. Remove to cookie sheet, sprinkle with more delicious, delicious salt while still wet. Bake in 425°F oven for 15 minutes or until brown and crisp. Serve warm.

Eat your heart out, Dorito-devouring superbowl fans.

chez niqui, cooking, recipes none

so i think i’m probably going to move

31 January 2008 at 21:54 sabrina Comments off

for the last few months, i’ve been noodling over whether or not to stay in this apartment. it’s not a bad place. i get great television reception (important for my no-comcast lifestyle). i’m half a mile from the blue line, and two blocks from the #72 and X9 busses and a block from the #9. i’m walking distance from a jewel, a staples, a k-mart, a decent supermercado, and a little bit further on, a home depot, a great fresh produce market, and my mechanic (which i love). my polling place is about 100 yards down the block. my new tiny local bank was chosen partly because it’s three blocks away from me. and, since it’s wicker park, there are innumerable bars and restaurants of every stripe all around. there’s free street parking, for a $35 resident sticker. my block is relatively quiet most of the time, and it’s pretty low crime (and most of what there is is, apparently, according to the CAPS web site, prostitution). as for the apartment itself — it’s probably about 850 square feet, which is a good size. it has a tiny office, so i can sequester my computer away. it’s a third-floor walk-up, with hardwood floors and a dishwasher, and laundry in the basement for when i don’t want to use the magic laundry fairies. i’ve got it all painted in colors i like, and i’m pretty happy with my commute. a couple weeks ago, i decided i’d stick it out for another year and decide then.

that said, i don’t think i care for the management that much. there’s been a couple of times lately i’ve had to call in for help, and they’re not very responsive. about two months ago, woke up on a saturday morning and it smelled like someone downstairs had burned toast. after a while, we realized that it no longer merely smelled like burned toast, but you could see smoke in the apartment — it was hazy and foglike in the apartment. i knocked on my downstairs neighbor’s door to ask if he had burned something, and he said he was just about to come upstairs to ask me the same thing. we knocked on the first-floor neighbor’s apartment, and got no answer. we tried calling the caretaker, but he didn’t want to come out — he encouraged us to simply call the fire department and have them start breaking down doors to investigate. we insisted he come over, and in the meantime, started investigating on our own. it turns out that the guy in the garden apartment had burned something — i mean, he put breakfast on and then went for a (cough) nap (cough). the smoke had simply made its way up through the first, second, and third floor apartments through the walls. he had no smoke detector. nice.

so this past weekend, when i went to las vegas, i left my downstairs neighbor a note saying i was going out of town, and leaving my phone number, in case (ha ha) the garden apartment guy tried to burn the place down again, please tell the fire department to rescue my cat. fortunately, he did not, but there was another crisis instead — on monday morning, my cleaning service came by, and she called me to let me know that the carbon monoxide detector was going off, and though she tried to air it out a little, it was still going off. so i tried calling the caretaker again. i got his voice mail. then i tried calling the landlord and got a really snotty woman yelling at me that he was on vacation and i should call the caretaker. when i said i had, and it was an emergency, and i needed someone with keys, she reluctantly gave me another phone number — which led to another woman, who complained that she “certainly [couldn’t] go over” because she had to go to work. fast forward a couple of hours, i’m frantic in my hotel room imagining poor kiyoshi taking a nap from which he might not wake up, and finally the caretaker calls me back, saying he unplugged the CO detector and plugged it back in, and when it didn’t go off again, he left. i spent the entire morning alternately wishing i’d boarded both cats (i had only boarded tiger, because he has to have his shots, because of the expense, but i thought kiyoshi would be OK for a few days with someone to check in on him), and wishing i still lived in a high-rise with 24×7 staff on site. (sure, the wolin-levin idiots in printer’s square entered my apartment illegally one time over labor day weekend and locked my cats out of the closet where their litter box was, but at least that was not life-threatening.)

(by the way, D. went to heroic cat-rescue measures, and kiyoshi was just fine, if a little bit traumatized by the beeping and the parade of freaky strangers after having been all alone for two days.)

this on top of one time last fall or so when the caretaker went on vacation and left instructions to call the landlord only in an emergency — and a lockout was explicitly not an emergency. i found that a little obnoxious — i’m sorry, if i’m locked out of my house, i’m fucking calling someone about it, okay? much like the few times i’ve called the caretaker to have some problem fixed, and he’s complained to me about not being able to call me back (on my mobile, which i use as my only phone — i never answer my landline; i use it for ordering delivery) because he doesn’t have long-distance service on his phone so can’t call my 847 area-code mobile for free. this is the sort of issue that makes me automatically mentally respond, “as though that is even remotely my problem.”

anyways. the CO detector incident was just way too much stress. i could understand if i had to page the caretaker and wait for a response, but little old ladies chewing me out because the landlord is on vacation (LISTEN UP, LADY, SO WAS I) while i worried my poor terrified cat was asphyxiating, and then having nobody except one guy, who’s unreachable, who has keys … no, i guess i just don’t find that acceptable. what if it had been something like my furnace, and there was a gas leak or something? or say, WHAT IF MY CAT DIED. i mean, really. so i think i’ve changed my mind, and i’m going to move. the furnace noise and the extreme draftiness, i can cope with; the lack of central air was mitigated with window units; everything else was okay. but i have to know if i need someone because the building is on fire or something, someone’s gonna freaking be there.

i’m not thrilled about the prospect of moving. frankly, i wasn’t planning to budget for it — it’ll probably be at least a grand for movers, and another (or maybe more) for a security deposit. and packing is a pain in the ass. i really didn’t want to paint again. i am pretty comfy here. but, it’ll be worth it, if i can find another place where i know the owner gives a damn about his building, if not about me or my cats. at least i’m not tied to a lease; i’ve been month-to-month since my last lease expired, so i can pick up and go more or less whenever i please. i looked over my calendar, and i’m thinking i’ll shoot for june or july. it’ll be summer, which sucks, but at least it shouldn’t be rainy, and it’s many months to plan and apartment-hunt and save and pack. also, my tax refund this year should be a quite pleasant $2500, so although i did have other plans for that, at least i won’t be in the same financial position i was last time i moved (namely, charging my groceries so i could afford to pay the movers in cash).

damn, i really didn’t want to move, though!

chez niqui, postcards from insanityville, vacations from hell none