Ifferjenn Independent

Admittedly, I took the recipe from here, though with a slight tweak.

I have 8 basil plants in my garden this year, hence, I have a LOT of basil. One great way I’ve found to use it is in making pesto. It’s dead simple, and completely delicious.

Ingredients:

2 cups basil
3 garlic cloves
1/3 cup nuts (I chose peanuts)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup grated cheese (I use a blend ’cause I can’t remember which my dad says I should use)
salt and pepper to taste

Assemble all the ingredients with your food processor, like so:

I went and sliced up the garlic a little. And, as you can see, 2 cups of basil is a heck of a lot of basil. In fact, it filled up my whole food processor bowl!

First, take the basil and peanuts and whir them together. They reduce surprisingly fast. Add the garlic and whir again. (I actually used 3.5 garlic cloves since I love garlic so much.) Once everything is mixed, keep the food processor going and add the oil in a continuous stream. Keep scraping the sides down while you work. I didn’t add all the oil at once, instead adding the cheese when I still had about 1/8th of a cup to go. Whir everything again until it’s mostly smooth, and looks like so:

I put it in a deli container, and it made over a cup of pesto. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but you don’t use a whole lot on your pasta, so this will certainly last us a while. Probably I will make another batch (or two) and freeze them for the winter. Also, this really doesn’t take long at all to make…I finished this batch before the water boiled for the gnocchi we had for dinner.

One thing I love about meeting new people or doing a show is that I always find some new word or turn of phrase that works its way into my language. With Taming of the Shrew, my new word is “crupper.”

For the context, here’s part of Grumio’s speech from Act IV, Scene I. I am taking it out of verse form, though really, I wish I could have our Grumio, John Macey, read it for you:

Her horse fell and she under her horse; she was bemoiled; he left her with the horse upon her; he beat me because her horse stumbled; she waded through the dirt to pluck him off me; he swore; she prayed; I cried; the horses ran away; her bridle was burst; I lost my crupper.

Now, whenever I have one of those days, I just want to stamp my feet and whine about my lost crupper. Like this morning: Ethan woke me up at 4:30 because he was creeped out by the sounds outside. He was asleep before I left his room, but it took me a little longer. Alarm went off at 6. I found one of the cats knocked over a full cup of water onto the floor. Another cat left a hairball in the living room. LiveJournal wasn’t working well on my phone. Puffy wanted to cuddle and claw up my lap. I need to wash some more laundry before I have clothes I want to wear again. I had to wrangle up all my stuff for the play, which was all over the house. On my way out I nearly forgot to get Ethan’s breakfast ready in the fridge. I left the house late, and started cramping hardcore halfway to the office.

It was really a crupper morning.

Just in case you’ve been missing me. Heck, I’ve been missing you!

• Tonight is my first night performing in Taming of the Shrew! We opened on Wednesday, and things have been going very well. You can get more information at our website. We also had a very good review in the Worcester Telegram today!
• John has also become our photographer, so I’ve started administering the WSC blog. Because I can’t get enough of Wordpress…
• But there’s more! I also have a picture hanging at the 119 Gallery in Lowell, as part of their Members’ Exhibit. Really hoping I’ll have time to get out to see it. Hmm…maybe Sunday?
• And, finally, John and I have been out at the Hotel Vernon’s Open Mic nights with our band, Reverend Reacharound. Not so much for the easily offended.

Tonight, I have another half-evening off of rehearsals, so before bedtime, Ethan and I are catching up on one of my favorite cartoons: Danger Mouse. I don’t think I’ve seen this for 20 years (which just makes me feel old saying it), but so much about me kind of makes sense. At the very least, I’ve figured out why I’m a huge Anglophile.

Which also makes me feel old…since I lived in London 13 years ago. :p

Even better, at the end of the Wikipedia article I linked to up there, there’s a link for all the cartoons that ran on Nickelodeon. Now to find some DVDs of The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Belle and Sebastian, and, of course, Count Duckula.

I’m a little behind here, I know. And I totally wrote 5 more posts, except they were in my head, which is where you never want to store ideas. I’ve kind of been cheating on you, Creative Endeavour. I’ve been acting. And oh my goodness, I missed it so.

You can see me starting July 21st either in the park, or August 21/22 in the Hanover Theatre. The play is Taming of the Shrew.

Ok, technically, I’ve been writing this post all day. The first one was an actual complaint…after that, I got a little silly. I know, shocking.

1. Some days I love the 8-hour break called work. Then I feel bad for feeling good about leaving the whining. Fun! #motherhoodsuckssometimes
2. I find it a little disturbing how I can hear my skin sigh with relief when I put on moisturizer. #havingdryskinsuckssometimes
3. It’s so hard to lay out the plastic sheeting just right…there’s always that tell-tale leak. #beingaserialkillersuckssometimes
4. Craving s’mores… #beingavegetariansuckssometimes
5. Just found the bobby pin I was using as a stylus behind a pen. And I’ve been dating things 6/18 all day. #beingditzysuckssometimes
6. How does it feel? #sucksucksuck
7. FYI…If you don’t know me that well, I have a dark kind of humor. And sarcastic. And I’m listening to #NIN now.
8. I’ll spare you the story behind this one… #beingmaturesuuckssometimes
9. I was talking to those who might be concerned about my emo-sounding tweets today. Obviously not you @litdreamer.
10. Because secretly I want to be Queen of The Army of Sarcastic Bitches. #aspirationsiamnotthinkingthrough
11. #beingundeadsucks:RT @MikeWas -Go to http://www.newsweek.com Perform Konami code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Enter)
12. Last RT via @litdreamer – Even Ethan went AAAAHHH!! over it!

And if you don’t follow me on Twitter, you’re not really my friend. And if your friends don’t follow me on Twitter, they’re not really your friends. Or something like that.

One great thing about John is how he’s gotten me hooked on all kinds of delicious food I hadn’t eaten before. Falafel is one of them…mostly thanks to visits to The Falafel Palace in Central Square, Cambridge, MA. After a couple visits, we wanted our own falafel at home, so I got to learn to make it. It’s actually quite easy, particularly starting off with this recipe, which I’ve modified a little bit in the year or so since I’ve been making it.

Ingredients:

• 1 can chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained
• 1 small onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tsp. coriander
• 2 tsp. cumin
• 2 Tbsp. parsley
• at least 3 Tbsp. white flour

First quarter the onions and toss into a food processor. Give them a bit of a whirl to start mincing them, then add your garlic. Whir again to mix the two together. Add your spices and whirl until everything is mixed well. These measurements are for dried spices, which are easier for us to buy in bulk. If you are using fresh spices, you should only need about half. Add your chickpeas, then whir until everything is mixed fairly well.

Take everything out of the food processor and transfer to a  large bowl. This starts the trickiest part: getting the consistency just right. You’ll want to add flour until you get a moist dough you can roll into small balls. I’ll usually start with 2 heaping tablespoons of white flour, but will sometimes add 2 more, one at a time. With some experimentation, you’ll get the hang of it. Your goal will be to make about a dozed golf-ball sized dough balls, which you should squish down slightly so they’re like little patties.

In a big frying pan, pour about 1.5 inches of olive oil. Heat the oil, then add the falafel balls. Fry on one side for 4-5 minutes or until golden brown. Flip and fry on the other side for an additional 4 minutes. Drain on a paper lunch bag. Wrap in Syrian bread or a lavash rollup, or stuff inside a pita pocket with lettuce, tomato, hummus, pickles, onion, and feta cheese. Also makes great leftovers heated up and over a salad with hummus for dressing.

Now, I make the recipe with a food processor, because it is sooo much easier on me. Prior to using the food processor, however, we used an old school potato masher, which also helps to build up your arm muscles. If you’re doing it that way, you’ll want to make sure to finely mince your onions and garlic, as well as heating up (then cooling) your chickpeas to help them mash better. I’ve also experimented with wheat flour, which did not help to hold them together very well, and frying in peanut oil, which definitely gave them a different flavor. I also don’t make them more than once or twice a month, so I’ll usually double the recipe, as they do make very good leftovers.

This weekend’s weather forecast; take it away, Meteorologist Ethan:

Saturday: PM Showers, 58 – 71 (Mom, what does F mean?), 40 perhaps chance of rain.

Sunday: Scattered T-Storms, 40 perhaps chance of rain?!

Let’s skip to Spree Day on Friday – 81 and Sunny, 0 perhaps chance of rain, woo-hoo!!

Okay, so I was going to have a picture for today, but I’m just now getting them off the camera. Why? Well, I’ve turned into a full-fledged geek this weekend. Not only did I upgrade the memory on the Wii (then figured out the only reason it wasn’t saving the GameCube games was that that save cartridge was in backwards), but I took apart a laptop completely. Why would you do that? Well, if you want to replace the fan on a laptop, apparently you do so through the keyboard. Which means every single component has to be taken out.

Oy!

I’m most impressed, however, that despite a stripped screw that had to be drilled out, I got the whole thing apart. Even more impressive, I got the whole thing back together. With only seven screws left over! And, and, AND everything works!! Well, the hard drive needed to be replaced too, and after pounding the stuck screws with a hammer and screwdriver, that got changed, and windows was re-installed.

And all the little geeks lived happily ever after. The end.

Two things I found out with my last post:

1. If you leave Wordpress alone overnight it logs you out. But it doesn’t actually tell you that you’re logged out. You just get this on your screen:
   
   But note how they don’t say what you don’t have permission to do. So you can happily type out your blog entry and weep when you hit “Publish” and it sends you to the log in screen. Then you can write a worse blog entry. Which I’ll say happened, just in case you didn’t like my writing.
2. I learned how to screen capture on a Mac! Since there is the annoying lack of a “Print Screen” key.

I didn’t actually lose my entire entry because I didn’t log in. Just the paragraph after the quote due to HTML fail. Which somehow resolved itself. But trust me. The first time around, that paragraph was awesome.