I love risotto, so it's no surprise that I also love pasta cooked as if it were risotto.
And, so, this gemelli pasta cooked risotto-style with carrots is one of my favorite new pastas: the pasta ends up with a delicious chewy texture, and it's sweet from the carrots and salty from the cheese and, err, salt. I also usually toss in a bit of fresh thyme and some chile de arbol with the onions, because they give it some extra depth. It's really good! We love it.
Morrissey's Years Of Refusal
Morrissey seems extremely comfortable in his skin these days, often coming across on stage and in the excellent covers of his three most recent albums as though he has waited his entire life to be exactly as old as he is right now. He wears his age very well, and it provides him with a bit of gravitas that serves him well, particularly when he sings his most petulant lyrics. His sex appeal now is actually quite similar to that of 30 Rock-era Alec Baldwin. Both men have a handsome, bearish quality, with substantial yet lean bodies capable of surprising grace. They both have very strong presences, and when you look at them, it’s hard not to picture a younger, softer version of their face buried just beneath the heavy masculinity of their adult visage.
This being the most obvious evidence of his being pleased with self, of course:
Photo from Well Fed, one of my favorite Lucques-loving food blogs
This was another fantastic recipe from Sunday Suppers at Lucques
I have terrible college-food associations with carbonara: gluey, overcooked strands of pasta held together by half-cooked pieces of ham. This orecchiette carbonara is completely different, obviously, and it's absolutely delicious and fresh: it's spring, now, and we found fresh English shelling peas at the farmers market this morning. Combined with diced bacon and pancetta, and thyme, onions, and garlic, and eggs, &c., it's so delicious. And isn't Suzanne Goin charming talking about the dish?
And, of course, Penelope loves it.
I'm loving The-Dream's new album Love Vs Money
I've been burger crazy, lately.
It started last summer, when I made the grilled pork burgers recipe from the Lucques
Thus far, our favorite has been the Negimaki burgers, with the Picadillo burgers (which I made tonight) a close second. But the best part is perfecting the mixing, the timing, and the process of making the burger: I like to get better and better at things as I make them more often, and the benefit of burgers is that I can make many variations on the burger whilst still improving the basic techniques.
Incanto, one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants, recently posted "Shock & Foie", a long & thoughtful piece about why they'll continue to serve foie gras at the restaurant:
Working to ban something that 99% of people never eat is not an act requiring great moral or physical courage in the same vein as was, say, the fight for civil rights in the U.S. or the fight for self rule in India. By comparison, the anti-foie gras movement is – at best – founded upon a shrewd political calculation in which the professed indignation of a few is used to harness the indifference of the many to the inherent political cowardice of elected officials, in order to achieve a desired political outcome. In essence, it's a confidence game in which participating meat-eaters, by agreeing to condemn something that they don't care about, receive the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail card, i.e., the right to feel slightly less guilty as they bite into that factory-farmed McNugget.
And from Serious Eats, a photo of Incanto's corzetti with foie gras, trotters, dates, and pangrattato. Now, I'm hungry.
I was getting fully prepared to dislike the Scissor Sisters' cover of "Do the Strand", from the latest War Child compilation
But then, two things happened: one, I remembered how pleased I was hearing Scissor Sisters' cover of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb
Giant robot dinosaurs? Does that really seem like a good idea?
Tonight, I've been keeping an eye on the launch of the Kepler satellite, which is heading out in search of Earth-like planets. (Well, to be fair--I'm mostly just looking for pretty pictures, like the one below.)