Zaitsev the Sniper Joins the Boys!

Just received the latest addition to Bock's Misfit army: the sniper from Stalingrad, Vasily Zaitsev, made famous in the movie Enemy at the Gates with Jude Law in the sniper role.

This is an amazing piece of plastic. Those Chinese really know how to do things. If you look at the closeup, you can see reflections in the guy's irises, as well as the amazingly lifelike stubble. Sure is a far cry from your old-time GI Joe. (Click on pictures to enlarge).

You should see the wardrobe that came with him -- coats, boots, hats, belts, rucksacks, alternate hands etc. Totally worth the $90 or so I paid for him. Can't wait to get to page 2 of the adventure!

I Finally Outdid Myself

Am I crazy, making ten pizzas in an afternoon when only one person was coming over for dinner? Well, yes and no. Ten pizzas is slight overkill, but I've got it down to a science.

For instance, making your own dough is a no-no, unless you plan on devoting an entire day to it (it's not hard to do, but it's time-consuming, not to mention messy).

I get mine ready made from the pizza place at Atwater market. For $4.50, you get enough dough to make four large (14") pizzas or six small (12") pizzas. It's great dough, with lots of air inside to give you that puffy wood-fired crust look.

So the key here is to do all the prep the day beforehand. I bought three different kinds of salami (they sell them whole in paper in various flavours these days in most supermarkets), Tuscany ham, kalamata olives, 6-year-old cheddar, Jarlsberg and Mozzarella di Bufala and added the usual suspects: red onion, red pepper, goat cheese, and to my intense joy/regret, two $6 heads of Ail de Provence (garlic from Provence, France. Watch it, it's the most powerful garlic on the planet and will make your whole refrigerator smell like a garlic buffet).

The next day, you bring out the dough to get it to room temp and you clear the battlefield. You preheat the oven at 550º for an hour with the pizza stone within. I recently bought an oven thermometer, the kind that has a wire that goes into the oven with a digital readout outside, and was disappointed to see that the oven never went any hotter than 489º no matter how long I preheated it, and when I started cooking, frequently fell below 350º. That meant that the stone didn't get hot enough to give a char before the top was ready, but no matter -- these pizzas are designed to be frozen and then frypan-reheated, so I wasn't too worried about it.

Anyway, then you make your chart with ingredients for each pizza so you don't forget a step on one of them, in the order of ingredients (oil, sauce -- I made a homemade one with San Marzanos -- cheese, garlic, onions, peppers meats, more cheese, mushrooms, olives etc.) and then divide your dough into balls for each pizza, wrapping them all in plastic wrap so they don't dry out, then roll 'em out one at a time, putting the toppings on, shoving them into the oven for 8 minutes or so on broil, turning once halfway, then peeling them out and putting them on cooling racks.

That's it. One by one. Believe it or not, it only took about two hours to make ten pizzas, and nary a misstep.

Cleanup's a bit of a pain, but no sweat. Then you just cut all the pizzas you want to freeze in half and put them in plastic containers between wax paper and they'll stay good for at least three months. Reheat them in a nonstick skillet and they'll taste like they just came out of the oven.

Voilà. Pizza for three months. Next time you're all invited, if you all bring a bottle of wine each.

Ten Dollars an Inch? The Impossible Dream?

Six years ago, if you walked into, say, Costco, and saw a 42" plasma TV, you would have seen beside it a sign saying "$5500."

Well, today I walked into a Future Shop and saw a 42" plasma TV selling for $499. That's almost a 90% price drop.

I could afford three of them -- one for each room in the house, whereas six years ago I could have bought a car for the cost of three of them.

I also saw a Blu-Ray player at Walmart for $88. Two years ago, a Blu-Ray player would have run you $1,000 or more. Today I saw a color inkjet printer by HP for $18. The first inkjet printer I owned cost me $600.

But a question lingers . . . do you still use your VCR?

I know I do. In fact, I just bought five new blank tapes today.

Some things will never change.

Nick's Rule # 23

Never go anywhere official on a Monday. No bank, no post office. No clinic, no hospital. No driver's license bureau, no doctor, no dentist, and yes, not even the grocery store. Unless you dearly love twiddling your thumbs.

In fact, just stay in bed and watch Bugs Bunny.

Salting Cucumbers

I know it seems counterintuitive to salt cucumbers; you really don't want these limp, salty bits of junk in your salad (or sandwich) but believe me, it works.


The point is to draw the water out of the cucumber so that it becomes crunchy, doesn't go limp in ten minutes, and generally makes for a better salad.


So what I did, according to the research I did on the Web, was to first clean and slice the cucumber (I use English cucumbers because they have far fewer seeds than regular) very thin, with a Japanese mandoline, then salt them in a bowl with about 1/2 to 1 teaspoon or regular salt, then put them in a colander above another bowl, and weight them down with a bowl of water (you can use a Ziploc bag -- I just didn't have any).


You wouldn't believe it -- a drop of water comes out of them practically every two seconds. I watched. I counted.


You leave them for an hour or so, then rinse them very briefly and they'll hold up for hours or even days without becoming limp and slimy.

Hard to see, but I have a plastic bowl full of water pressing down on the cucumbers, which are dripping water at a rate of about two drops every four seconds

 

 

Try it sometime if you like cucumbers.

Fock Caspar Gomez an' the Diaz Brothers! Fock 'em, all!

Say hello to my new li'l fre'n!

40 Followers

What? What's up with that? FORTY followers? You read my random crap day in, day out?

Sometimes I post about food but it's more usually some rant or rave about some non-sequitorial topic. NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH FOOD.

What are all you guys doing? DON'T YOU HAVE A LIFE?

You know I love each and every one of you.

YOU

ARE


MY 


FLOCK.

Let's All Move To Juarez!

Juarez! The new Côte d'Azur of Mexico.

Hey, you fucking thought Scarface with Al Pacino was an exaggeration, let's all vacation in Mexico. Have you ever seen a cockroach or ant-infested house? Things scuttling under cupboards when you turn on the lights?

Well, that's Mexico. The "administrators", and I say that with a laugh, are arm in arm with the murderers.

Cuba was annoying.. But sometimes dictators can prevent anarchy. And hey, I wouldn't be bookin' a vacation to Cancun any time soon.

Lessin' you want to be kidnapped and have your head cut off.

here

Steve Purcell

The other night my old friend Steve Purcell came to Montreal. I hadn't seen him for twenty years. We both went to CCAC (now called, pretentiously, CCA) and he went on to work with ILM, Marvel and now Pixar.

We went, Brigitte, Steve and I, to L'Express, because I could only think of that as the quintessential Montreal eatery. It was a great evening. Here are some of the pics. It's so bizarre that he had the same hat as me, just tan instead of black. But it was a blast.

Brigitte and Capo di tutti capi

Steve giving his "Forever" stare

We gon' hoit you

In another life, they coulda bin a couple

The Steve trademark "Sidelong glance"

Whaddya lookin' at?

The two muscleteers

Sometimes meeting old friends is a real drag, but Steve, the creator of Sam and Max, which happened to be his weekly strip in our college newspaper, of which I was the editor, turned into a phenomenon. And it wasn't a drag. You know how meeting old friends after many years can be awkward; you have nothing in common any more, just the old stories, but Steve isn't like that. He was a consummate communicator back then and he still is, even though he shirked his writing assignments for the paper and instead sent in these mad comics. That's called canny. You really owe it to yourself to get a copy of Sam and Max -- I had the privilege to watch him draw it. A lot of it will go over your heads, but that's Steve.

It's weird. I'm surrounded by people that I knew, sometimes very well, who went on to dynamic careers -- my old friend Mike Mignola, with whom Steve and I shared a friendship -- and who went on to make the Hellboy movies.

And here I remain, on shallow ground. But Flock, I bought some folding chairs for my next GI Joe vs. Gumby installment. You should be proud of me for that. Next episode: The Briefing. And the introduction of the evil Spymaster, Pokey. I may never make Pixar, but I'll sure get even with Gumby. I'll bend him into a green pretzel with bullet holes in it.

I Want a Rat.

I want a rat. Cage included. A young rat. Under $20, please.

("Where did he go. Where did he go")

What Will It Be

This is not a lyric for a song, just a poem I came up with.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

What will it be
When I am gone in a song
I won't hear your tears
But they will be long.

After I've gone
The trees will still grow.
The sun will still shine
And that you should know.

It's not me but you,
Who'll mourn my demise
And for that I have sorrow
For Hell has no fries.

Just beer after beer
But you will not know
That it's hot down the pit
But I'll enjoy it.

So don't waste your tears
Just save all the pain
And keep it inside
I'll see you again.

Christ, 155

I weighed myself today and I weighed only 155. At 5/9. This is impossible. I used to weigh 188 15 years ago.

I don't seem to do anything differently that I did 15 years ago, still eat the high-fat Caesar salads, pizzas, cheeses, carbs up the wazoo, steaks . . . what on Earth could be going on?

I don't work out. The most I do is go to Metro to buy food and beer. A ten-minute walk every day, maybe twice a day, maybe a little further some days.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

I'd say leukemic prostration with hyper-elevated triglycerides. Wouldn't you?

Prescription, please.

I Remember The Little Boy

I was basking in the Russian River in Northern California on a camping trip, and a little boy, maybe 9 years old, came to the shore. It was odd, because he was bald. There was no one with him. So I asked how he was doing, and he said "I have brain cancer."

At the time I didn't particularly like kids, but I felt like crying. He said it so matter-of-factly.

I never saw him again.

Another time, I took Tai-chan, who was about 3 at the time, to ER in Oakland, California because he was vomiting. He had Norovirus. But we stayed there only about seven hours. But during that time I saw a little boy in the corridor with his parents; he was screaming in pain, relentlessly, but there seemed to be nothing broken, as he could walk fine and wasn't holding, say, a broken arm.

I was horrified, because he wouldn't stop screaming.

I get so traumatised by kids in distress that I could never be a pediatrician.

But I remember that little boy at the river's edge. I wonder if he survived.

Boys With Toys

Oh, the boys like to play, don't they? Automatic rifles, IEDs, RPGs . . .

Well, my opinion is that the states of Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia should be bombed into smoking craters all at the same time. Oh, toss in North Korea for goodwill.

It would just take, say 20 bombers to do the job.

 

Bye Bye, terrorism

No more Al Qaeda. No more Jihadis. No more cockroaches scuttling on this good green Earth.

Yep, that would all assemble their twenty virgins at the same time. (How do the women suicide bombers get twenty virgins, anyway?)

Curry Dreams

I don't know what it is with me lately, but I don't eat much during the day. No breakfast at all, very rarely any kind of lunch, and usually a peck at any dinner, restaurant or otherwise.

God, that looks good

But at 6 a.m., the dreams come. Like my sushi dream (below) I had an intense curry dream tonight. I think it was a shrimp curry, but I was making up the recipe, step by step, thinking about just how I was going to do the rice, all the way to sprinkling on the cracked papadams, and as Brigitte says it, "Kusbarah" (Cilantro).

It was as real as if I were in the kitchen actually doing it.

So what did I do? Wake up and heat me up a slice of lousy pizza from the restaurant down the street that we'd ordered the night before.

Okay, formally on my to-do list:

Christ, I could use one now

A Caesar Salad, big, with ALL the trimmings. I might even consider sardines.

Curry, preferably shrimp, with fantastically prepared basmati rice and papadams and a nice sambal-cucumber salad.

Sushi, glorious sushi, the best in the city from god-knows-where.

Smoked salmon on a bagel with cream cheese and capers, as only Brigitte knows how to do it.

Pizza, done my way, not the loser mozzarella-laden-crap you get from the restaurant.

This is the stuff of 6 a.m. dreams. Learn, Flock, what dreams may come.

AND THEN ACT UPON THEM.