Author: Philip Weiss

Chicken and Almond Soup

I made this soup last week when I was staying over at my grandparents’ place. Gramps is supposed to be on a cardiac diet, so most boxed meals and canned soups are out. But soup made from scratch can be prepared without salt frequently, so I brought over The Ultimate Soup Bible to pick through. Nothing too fancy, cause my grandparents aren’t fancy eaters. And with a small kitchen and old equipment, I wouldn’t be able to complete a lot of fancy steps.

Recipe is what I made, not what’s in the book.

  • 6 tablespoons margarine (I would have used butter, but that’s what they have)
  • 1 medium leek
  • ¾ teaspoon fresh ginger
  • ¾ cup unsweetened almond butter
  • 1 medium carrot
  • ½ cup frozen peas
  • 1½ cup frozen cooked chicken
  • 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
  • 1 cup cream
  1. Melt the margarine in a dutch oven kind of pan
  2. Chop the leek
  3. Chop the ginger
  4. Sauté the leek and ginger until it turns soft
  5. Lower heat
  6. Chop the carrot
  7. Add almond butter, carrot, peas, and chicken, and ½ cup of water
  8. Cook until everything is cooked/not frozen
  9. Remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes
  10. Transfer mixture to blender
  11. Add 1½ cups water
  12. Process for about 90 seconds
  13. Pour back into pan
  14. Bring to boil while stirring
  15. Lower heat
  16. Stir in cream
  17. Stir in chopped cilantro

This was super super tasty.

Easy as Pie Night!

With all the hullaballoo in my family, I haven’t gotten around to posting this to the blog yet. Most everyone will have seen it on Facebook, though. Next Pie Night will be Sunday, January 17th, nominally from 4 pm until 11 pm.

Picture of A Slice of Lemon Meringue Pie
A Slice of Lemon Meringue Pie

Do you like pie? Then come to pie night! Friends and enemies alike are welcome!

You can bring a pie, but you don’t have to. If you do bring a pie, please make/assemble it yourself; purchasing a pie at Whole Foods is verboten. Feel free to bring beverages, whipped cream, ice cream, or other pie accoutrements.

Where? 2301 Fairview Ave E in Seattle. Ring WEISS on the call board.

Please note in the comments here or add yourself to the Easy as Pie Night Facebook event if you plan to come, and if you plan to bring pie. I need to know approximately how many pies to make.

Any last minute questions or need of directions? Call 206-607-9177.

Image A Slice of Lemon Meringue Pie by Daniel Greene used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 2.0 License.

I Get So Emotional Baby

I’ve been known to cry in front of people before. Lots in fact. Any kind of public grief will have a decent chance of setting me off.

Last night, for the first time, I experienced nearly breaking down just because I was so overwhelmed. I’m good at soldiering through. I never once felt like I was going to lose it during mom’s illness. Tired, stressed, and very definitely broken. But soldiered through.

The last week and a half of Gramps being in the hospital has just been rough. Gram’s dementia is very serious, though she’s mostly lucid. But she can’t be left on her own, even though she thinks she’s capable of taking care of things.

The last two weeks I’ve been under a deadline for work. I was handed a broken project in a language I didn’t understand with no requirements and working with a service that has incorrect documentation. I had another project that possibly had to be done before the first of the year.

So I was driving Gram to and from the hospital. I talked with Gramps a lot. I worked from the visitor lounge on the cardiac ward. I’d work until 3 am as well.

I really wanted to go to Heather’s birthday party last night. But shepherding Gram through her medication took nearly an hour. I left their place around 10:15. Decided I was going up to the party anyway even though I knew the place closed at 10:30. On the way, I started losing it.

No vacation. Missing stuff I want to do. Work pressure. Laundry and cleaning undone. A best friend who stopped talking to me 9 months ago. Handling dad. Handling grandparents. Another night of working until 3 am.

It finally got to me.

I’m better now. Both projects aren’t needing me for a while. Gramps is home and my grandparents will be moving to assisted living hopefully within the week. My girlfriend Sharon, despite me being a Christmas grump, bought me an awesome Christmas present (pajamas that won’t get me arrested) and painted a card for me. Spent the day mostly on Gram and Gramps’ couch.

Last few years I’ve written a year in review kind of thing. I think this post about covers it.

Christmas 2010 at Swedish Medical Center

At 12:07 this morning I got a call from my grandfather. When he calls, I answer. He’d passed out in the hallway and had called paramedics. He assumed they would take him to Swedish like they normally do. There’s a “normal” course of events when Gramps has a heart attack. This is his 5th or 6th in 13 months and he has another 3 or 4 hospitalizations in addition during the same time frame.

So I did my normal course. Get dressed. Make coffee. Call Joe. Dawdle on the internet for 15 minutes. Then leave for the hospital. I got there 15 minutes before they did.

I am always fine when I get the call. Driving up Lynn is fine. I start to get worried this will be the last time I see him about the time I get on the freeway. By the James St exit I am a wreck and near bawling. But I pull it together while climbing James St. And I’m all business by the time I get to Swedish.

That is my “normal” progression.

My main concern is Gram. She has dementia and stress makes her worse. So this morning I walked to meet her at the ambulance and took charge of her while the paramedics wheeled Gramps into emergency. They thought I worked there and were surprised I couldn’t tell them the access code for the emergency doors.

Gramps was admitted overnight, though now it has stretched into 2. Gram cannot stay by herself though she thinks she is fine. So I am crashing on her couch for the second, hopefully less sleepless, night.

The docs who downloaded his pacemaker data confirmed a heart attack. Without the builtin defibrillator, he would have died. It’s the 3rd or 4th time it’s saved his life.

Snowpocalypse: setting the record straight

The neologism making the rounds this winter is snowpocalypse referring to the big snowstorm that hit the east coast. The Lede a blog at the New York Times, attempted to track down the origins of the word snowpocalypse. They tracked it back to Seattle last year, and a few other places in 2007 and 2006.

But they didn’t really find the origins.

Someone on the Seattle Livejournal Community wants that community given credit for Snowpocalypse. And they certainly have a case for popularizing it during last year’s snow storm, though the Stranger’s Slog and other popular local blogs had a lot to do with it. But the term goes further back than that.

DCist claims they first used it. In 2005.

But they are wrong. Searching even further back I found a post by sea_colleen at Seattle Metblogs that used the term Snowpocalypse a couple weeks before DCist did. I didn’t use Google to find that. I knew it where it was because the origins of the term have come up before, and I know the term had currency in one Seattle group before 2005.

Seattle Metblogs sea_colleen is Leenerella on Livejournal, and she was an active participant on the old Seattle Gothic message boards, hosted on ezboard. The word was used there a lot in the 2002 to 2004 time frame to refer to the local media’s hyperbolic coverage of various snow events. They’d imply that the city would shut down, but then we’d get ¼ inch of snow and life would go on. If we did get any snow, King 5 would send Danger Jim Forman outside to report from the most blustery location he could find.

I don’t know who first used the term on Seattle Gothic. I don’t know where they stole it from or if that person coined it herself. But the folks there have a better claim than the other pretenders.

Sadly, little remains of that message board. The moderators pruned message threads, particularly little content ones like Snowpocalypse!. Ezboard moved it from server to server, and lost oodles of discussion threads in various crashes. Versions of it were hosted by members both before and after it was on Ezboard. Ezboard became Yuku and some archives are there. The Wayback Machine has a few posts archived.

Edited to add: Found a couple other references from Sea-Gothers that pre-date DCist’s claim. Here’s Prince of Happiness, another Sea-Gother, using snowpocalypse in December 2005 as well. And a snapshot from the Wayback machine of forum topics on Seattle Gothic from January 2005, one of which is SNOWPOCALYPSE 2005!!1ONE!!!ELEVEN!1!!.

Acelmo’s Spanish Rice

In my quest to find more rice recipes (cause I have a giant bag of rice and it’s cheap), I tried this recipe for Spanish rice from Greg Atkinson’s West Coast Cooking. Really easy, fresh ingredients, pretty tasty.

  • 2 cups long grain white rice
  • 1 medium onion
  • 2 tablespoons minced garlic
  • 1 tablespoon dried oregano
  • 2 large tomatoes
  • 2 teaspoons sea salt
  • 1 bay leaf
  1. Rinse the rice several times in cold water
  2. Let rice drain in strainer
  3. Chop the onion
  4. Cut the tomato up
  5. Put tomato, onion, garlic and oregano in a blender
  6. Puree
  7. Remove mixture from blender when the blade just spins through the tomato chunks
  8. Put mixture in food processor and/or chop stuff by hand until the chunks are much smaller
  9. Put mixture back into blender
  10. Puree vegetables until they are liquefied
  11. Add water to make 4 cups total liquid
  12. Pour vegetable liquid into 3 quart saucepan
  13. Add salt and bay leaf
  14. Bring liquid to boil
  15. Add rice to saucepan
  16. Reduce heat to low and cover
  17. Simmer 20 to 30 minutes until liquid is absorbed
  18. Remove lid, stir, and let stand

Carmelized Onion Pie

I took this recipe for a carmelized onion tart from The Pie and Pastry Bible and modified it a bit to make it a bit easier. I don’t own a tart shell, so I just used a shallow pie plate. I also didn’t use any of the fancier pie crust recipes the author suggested. Just a plain old whole wheat pastry flour, unsalted butter, and chilled water pie crust. As always, recipe below is what I did, not exactly what’s in the cookbook.

  • Single shell pie crust
  • 1 egg white
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
  • 6 medium sweet onions
  • ½ teaspoon sugar
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ¼ teaspoon black pepper
  • 3 teaspoons minced garlic
  • 2 teaspoons fresh thyme
  • ½ ounce Gruyère cheese
  • pitted Manzanilla olives
  1. Pre-bake the pie crust
  2. Lightly beat egg white
  3. While still warm, brush the crust with egg white
  4. Peel and thinly slice onions
  5. In skillet, heat the olive oil and butter over low heat
  6. Add onions
  7. Sprinkle onions with sugar, salt, and pepper
  8. Cover and cook without stirring on lowest possible heat 45 minutes
  9. Shred Gruyère cheese finely
  10. Preheat oven to 400°
  11. Raise heat on onions to medium
  12. Stir and cook onions until all liquid has evaporated and they are golden
  13. Turn heat to low
  14. Add garlic and thyme
  15. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes
  16. Fill pie shell with onion mixture
  17. Sprinkle with Gruyère cheese
  18. Place olives on top
  19. Bake for 20 minutes or so (until cheese is melted and top is brown)

The result was heavenly. Several folks told me it was the best of the 20 or so pies we had at the last Pie Night. It might become one of my staple pies. Easy to make and so very very tasty.



Visa auctions

So I’m reading Nariman Behravesh’s Spin-Free Economics (which isn’t). In particular, I’m reading the section on immigration. Behravesh is decidedly pro-immigration. I tend to be middle of the road here, neither falling in with the conservative camp railing against immigrants stealing jobs, nor with the liberal camp that bemoans the poor treatment we give illegal immigrants. Put it another way, I don’t have enough information really to come to any really good opinions about immigration.

I guess the way I’ve been trending in my political thought in the last few years is towards a sort of free-market liberalism. In other words, finding market based solutions for problems that the country faces. I still favor government intervention, but in such a way as to align that intervention with how people naturally behave. I don’t believe markets are magic. Any serious look at the economics of health insurance shows there’s a huge disincentive to that market working properly. But using the free market can have huge benefits. Carbon taxes or an auction based cap and trade system for reducing greenhouse gases, for instance.

Back to the immigration thing. Our current immigration policy essentially allows large numbers of low-skilled immigrants and very few high skilled immigrants. While there’s lots and lots of bloviating about illegal immigrants, there’s very little that’s done about it in comparison to the number of people that are illegally here, though what’s done is fairly harsh. Illegal immigration is largely composed of low skilled immigrants.

High skilled immigrants, like doctors and economists and journalists and programmers, is very limited. Illegal immigration for these kinds of people is much lower. Legal immigration is also limited. But if we put high skilled employees in direct competition with people who are willing to work for less, the benefits to the average American would be much greater than low skilled immigrants. Bringing in one doctor who is willing to work for 10% less than American doctors will help the average American far more than 10 additional minimum wage landscapers.

So how to do that? The thought that occurred to me as I was reading was an auction. Set the number of people allowed to enter the country legally at a fairly high, but limited number, say 250,000 or 300,000 per year. Then auction off those slots. Use the money to help fund job training for those displaced, and for additional safety net protections that conservatives complain about. I.e., they complain about immigrants using welfare. Well, use these visa auctions to fund welfare for immigrants.

The economics of it would favor high skilled immigration, but not cut off low skilled immigration if the number allowed in is set high enough.

At the same time, I would drastically reduce the paperwork necessary to immigrate this way.

Obviously, I can’t have been the first person to think of this. On returning home, a quick search brought up some academic papers relating to the idea. And something on the Becker-Posner Blog, which I generally avoid because Richard Posner is annoyingly a hack in areas outside his expertise. But nothing I could find that was written for a non-economist that discusses both pros and cons.

Hump 5

Yesterday, I went to Hump 5, The Stranger’s annual amateur porn festival. I missed the first year, but have gone every year since. This year was the awesomest! The best in terms of entries overall compared to other years. And also awesomest because because I took my girlfriend. Sharon’s awesome for going with me (and for lots of other reasons). But enough mushy stuff, porn!

  • Dance Belt – Two very cute girls and one guy do a naked spoof of Beyonce’s Single Ladies. Awesome part was the naked guy running the camera was visible in the mirrors at the dance studio where they filmed it. I voted this one the funniest, but it was close.
  • Citizen Came – Total A for effort here. Documentary of a guy who attempts to masturbate 10 times in one 24 hour period. This is what happens when your girlfriend is in rehab for 28 days.
  • Full Swap – Fuzzy security cam action of a swinger apartment. Boring actually.
  • Boys Beware – After the success of Getting a Leg Up In Porn a few years ago, a couple of people this year did their own 50s style documentary porno. This one, about the dangers of homosexuals didn’t inspire me. To cliché
  • Read My Lips – You’d think porn and books would be an automatic winner for me, but this wasn’t the most inspired.
  • I’m Hard – Animation of a rapping dick. Dumb.
  • The Good Book – Very bad porn plot about a nun who reads the book of Mormon and gets punished by her priest. They were enthusiastic though.
  • How to Please Your Man – Larry King hosts a blow job expert on Larry King Live. With clips from Larry King artfully spliced in. Another A for effort.
  • Beyond Gay – Lynn Shelton’s entry, not starring Lynn Shelton. She’s the director who made Humpday, a documentary about two straight guys who made a gay porn for a previous Hump. Dan Savage challenged her to make an actual entry for Hump, and she did. The best dialog of all the entrants, but the decidedly unsexy topic of a lesbian and a fag trying and failing to get each other off but failing because they are not into each other.
  • Incubus – Every year there’s one of these types of entries, something that looks really good and really like someone’s film school project that they decided to enter into Hump. Maybe I just have a bias against entries that don’t look amateur enough for my view of an amateur porn festival.
  • Dumpster Humpster – Sex in a dumpster. Kind of a magical dumpster like the Narnia wardrobe, that’s bigger inside than outside. They overplayed loaves of bread in a faux-sexy way, and the bread dough was bad. A for creativity though!
  • Sex Moves 102 – I think the only entry this year that had both gay and straight sex. Just some made up sex moves with accompanying demonstrations. Really liked this one and up there for both funny and sexy categories.
  • Violet Uprising – Really really creepy puppet sex. Really well done, but since the categories were funny and sexy, and not creepy, I couldn’t in good conscious vote it for either.
  • Maximum Overload – Cliche plot. Surprising actually, since the porn in Hump is usually kinda creative in ways that real porn isn’t. Guy goes into virtual reality to have sex with V.R. girl. Roommate bumps the power cord, and the girl comes out of V.R. and the guy is stuck inside it. Cute participants. Pretty well put together.
  • Trolley Tryst – Dan Savage’s short version: Sluts ride the SLUT. It’s exactly what you’d think it is. Someone had the guts to have sex on the SLUT, with several helpful people to film (at least one on the streetcar and one in a vehicle alongside). Those streetcars aren’t that big. You can’t go to the back of the train to do this and hide, though the streetcar did appear empty except for the driver. Gutsiest entry this year. Top 3 for sexiest.
  • Guess Who’s Cumming to Dinner – Eh. Delivery boy. I need say no more.
  • The Password – Tell me the password or I will torture you with S&M. With lines even more wooden than actual porn. I had to look away when the needles made an appearance.
  • The Modern Housewife – The second 50s style documentary this year. Susie goes next door to borrow some Saran Wrap while her husband is away. Lots of creative uses of Dow Chemical products. Totally hot lesbians. Really pretty funny.
  • I Went To a Party and Had a Dream – Guy falls asleep on the couch at a party while multiple other couples have sex on the other end of the couch. Kinda boring except the last scene, which was an outtake of the girl on the other end of the couch projectile cumming on the pretend asleep guy (and thus had his eyes closed so he didn’t see it coming).
  • Our Ruinous Love – Clips of various things I would never ever try. Kitchen implements. Traffic cones. Anal hook. Saran wrap. Here’s the thing, either you got to turn me on, or you really need to show how turned on you are. This did neither.
  • Fuck – The absolute worst entry this year. Only entry that I thought nothing positive of. At least all the others had something going for them, funny, creative, gutsy, sexy, etc. These guys took a creative idea and made it bad. Evil nemesis poisons two cops johnsons so that if they lose their erections they die. No one gets naked. No style to the dialogue. Hated this so much.
  • Cyclust – Sorta stop motion photography style. Two cyclists meet riding and then go have sex. I love the pictures where the two were just smiling at each other, totally into each other. Voted this one for Sexiest just for that. I love seeing two people into each other.
  • ET2: Dark Territory – Animation. ET returns. Elliot’s all grown up. Shocking. And diabolical.