"Are you free, Mr Humphries?"

Alas, yes.

I think I've mentioned elsewhere that Z-Man is an aspiring vegetarian, or at least, wants more of it in his life.  Happily, he's dating me.  One of the cuter questions he's asked me is "What, exactly, do I do with tofu?"

Well.

Coming to me was certainly the right first thing to do, because in the kitchen, I have no fear.  No recepie is too exotic; no style is too unattainable.  I'll try nearly anything.  Sometimes, I even succeed.  So, I'm well aware of the versatility of tofu and the general suspiscion with which it is regarded by those coming late to its charm.  I figured I'd stick to something from a familiar angle, and looked up on Epicurious with the search words "spicy" and "tofu."

Jackpot!

Rainbow Grocery sells lemongrass stalks and has all of the ingredients mentioned in the recepie.  The only danger I had was in selecting from an unusually large number of long grain brown rices I'd never heard of.  Also, I read the three comments that had been left on the page by other chefs who've tried it.  It actually happened to be very, very sage advice. 

I've made it twice now, for Z-Man (who was blown away, as was I), and again this Sunday for RichieRich (and Z-Man got to have the encore as well).  The second time around, I made a few minor adjustments to the rice.  Even though I linked to the recepie, I'm going to reproduce it here with the alterations I've made, some of which were on my own initiative and a few from the other brilliant chefs who commented.  It's actually a very simple recepie to make and hard to get terribly wrong.  A few notes on the bottom.

Spicy Tofu and Lemongrass Stir Fry

14 oz firm or very firm tofu, diced¹
2 stalks lemongrass (outer leaves removed), trimmed and minced²
2 tbsp or more minced fresh ginger
2 tsp or more Thai red curry paste³
juice of three limes
1 tbsp rice wine (found in Asian section of grocery store, also called Mirin)
1/2 cup canned lowfat coconut milk
1/4 cup vegetable broth
1 tbsp low-sodium soy sauce†
1/2 tsp dark sesame oil
1/2 tsp hot chili sesame or other spicy chili oil‡
1 tsp canola oil
1 yellow bell pepper, cut into thin strips*
10 medium shiitake mushrooms, thinly sliced
1 cup fresh broccoli florets
3/4 cup diagonally sliced green onions

Rice
2 cup long-grain brown rice
4 cups vegetable broth
1 bay leaf
pinch cardamom seeds
pinch saffron threads
pinch crushed szechuan peppercorns

Mix lemongrass, ginger, chili paste, and rice wine.  Add tofu and toss, covering the tofu thoroughly (this is why firm tofus are better -- they can take a toss! Hur hur...). Cover and refrigerate 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, combine rice, 4 cups broth, bay leaf, cardamom, and peppercorns in saucepan and bring to a boil.  Then add pinch of saffron, cover, and simmer 25 to 30 minutes or until rice absorbs all liquid. Remove from heat. Depending on the rice, it may take a bit longer.  You can also reserve a little broth if the other preparations take some extra time past the cooking time of the rice.  It will help keep the rice from drying out and sticking to the pan.  Discard bay leaf before serving, of course!

Mix coconut milk, 1/4 cup broth, soy sauce, half of the lemon juice, sesame oil and spicy sesame (or other) oil in a bowl; set aside.

Coat a large sauté pan with canola oil and set over medium-high heat. Add coated tofu and sauté, stirring, for 2 or 3 minutes. Add yellow pepper, mushrooms, and broccoli and sauté, stirring, for another 2 or 3 minutes. Stir in coconut milk mixture and green onions and cook 5 minutes or until vegetables are tender.

Place equal portions of cooked brown rice on each plate and top with stir-fry.

¹ The recepie called for 8 oz.  Both times, I've made it with considerably more.  A single package of tofu is usually about 14 oz.  You can adjust the other portions if you like, but it's not needed.

² This was a new ingredient to work with for me.  As another chef helpfully pointed out, you actually want to use the lower part of the stalk.  Don't know how you're supposed to work with it, but here's what I did: 
     1) lop off the very top grassy bits
     2) lop off the very bottom root bit (maybe 1 cm or less of stalk)
     3) cut the stalk, working your way up, into sections a couple of inches in length until it's more leaf than stalk
     4) remove the outer leafy layer of each section; you may have to incise the stalk, but it grows rather like a leek

³ The original recepie called for Vietnamese chili paste.  Couldn't find it, and haven't really researched it to see what's in it.  Ah, here it is (what a helpful site of Asian condiments!).  Supposedly it's hotter than Chinese chili paste.  I used a commercial Thai brand, and it's absolutely delicious and zesty.  It's not mouth-scorchingly hot, but very flavorful. 

† Okay, so soy sauces are amazingly varied.  Even within a single country of origin, there can be many different types.  For the purposes of this recepie, I wanted to avoid the very salty varieties.  Likewise, I avoided tamari, which I love the taste of, but which I didn't think would be a good "fit" for the recepie. I went with a lighter/sweeter variety, I think just a regular Chinese shengchou.  I'll have to check the bottle, but it worked very well.

‡ The original recepie called for 1 tsp dark sesame oil.  My roommate happens to also have a hot and spicy variety in the house, so I split the difference and used half of each.  DEFINITELY a good idea.   When I made it the second time at RichieRich's, he didn't have such a bunny, nor did the Albertsons he lives above (a.k.a. "The Pantry").  Instead, we just got a small bottle of hot Asian chili oil and used that in conjunction with the dark sesame oil.  Verdict:  delicious.

* The original recepie called for carrots, but a commenter suggested yellow pepper.  I concur.  If you're not allergic to capsicums, it's an excellent addition.  If you're like my dad and can't eat them, carrots are fine.

A Note About The Rice:  The original recepie was just a boring brown-rice-broth-bay-leaf.  And it wasn't enough, if you're a rice lover like me.  The dish is not overpowering enough to negate the saffron and cardamom, and it makes the rice deliciously aromatic and complements the stir-fry very well.

So, all in all, it was a tasty dish.  Wish I could have said the same for the two Israeli wines I'd purchased.  I saw two of them in the store, and remembered the Yarden brand from when I was in Israel.  They made a decent white zinfandel, I recalled (...I know, but I was 17, okay?).  The other brand was from the Golan Heights.  Sadly, the Golan chardonnay had turned and the bottle top had must on it, so it was undrinkable.  The Yarden champagne-style sparkling white was G-ddawful.  What I really wanted was a Gewurtzraminer, an Alsacian one for preference, but the only Gewrtzes they had were from Fetzer and Beringer, middle-of-the-road domestics I'm not partial to.  And The Pantry had exactly ONE contribution from the German contingent:  Blue Nun.  No, really! Of all the German wines -- the sticky sweet German wines I generally don't like but are reasonably popular in the USA -- Blue Nun was representin'.  Scary.

Going to have to pick up a bottle or two for keeping for later iterations of the dish.  It will be made again, possibly tonight.  Yum!

From one of my new favorite websites, the Comics Curmudgeon, with commentary:

"I’m just putting this up here as a helpful reminder so that if anyone ever asks you, 'Say, when did Dick Tracy stop being a reliably odd chestnut and start being a horrifying acid trip,' you can say, without hesitation, 'March 1, 2007.'"

(I think I may have to colorize this picture too.)

(P.S.  Dick Tracy has tiny hands.  Really tiny hands.  Poor guy.  No wonder he's got such a grudge against injustice in the world.)

Found this via Andrew Sullivan, but had to share it here.  Olive is 107 years old, lives near Sydney, NSW, and is keeping a blog (with some help, of course).  The guy who's helping her also made a movie once, Vincent and Me, which I actually vaguely remember hearing about.  It may have been in the context that, in that movie, the blog-helper/movie writer/director had cast Madame Jeanne Calment in the film, playing herself.  She was 114 years old at the time.  Jeanne lived to be 122 years old, the oldest on record still, and certainly the oldest actress.

It might just be an illusion I'm forging myself, but it seems like more and more over-hundreds are around these days.  Given that people are living longer as time moves on, that's not impossible. 

As a side note, Olive is calling it a "blob" instead of "blog."  Heh.

I've had a very busy February and actually got to slow down this past weekend.  Work deadlines and life balance were in focus. 

On the plus side, I got to see Persephone's Bees at the SFMOMA special member preview.  Z-Man's a member and got an invite.  The Bees were excellent and well-received.  The exhibit itself is a fascinating look at Picasso's influence on American Artists.  It documents the American art scene's first exposure to Picasso, around the time that he really took off with cubism.  There are several of his pieces on display alongside work by Pollack, Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Gorky, de Kooning, and others.   Picasso never set foot in the USA, but his influence was clearly felt.  Some of the comparisons are startling and fascinating, especially when seen side-by-side.

Also, my upstairs neighbors took me out for a thank you drink.  I'd shared some of the Valentine's dinner with them -- we had plenty -- and gave them a chunk of eggplant, the salad, and one of the mini-soufflées.  Well, they loved it and insisted on taking me out for a drink nearby, which I accepted.  We went to a little local wine and soju bar.  It was that outing that I realized that they were pregnant! I embarrassingly admitted that I noted that she'd put on some weight, but it was more obvious as we sat at Bar 821.  Dad-to-be mentioned that he'd done some research on the house's history.  Our house was built in 1868 -- much earlier than I'd realized! And also one of the oldest still around in the city.  It actually predated the Victorian Bay Window style commonly seen throughout the city.  It had been built by a trader with a sea-going shipping business.  It was owned by the family until the 1930s, with one member of the family being born and dying under the same roof.  Records are sparse after the 30s owing to census laws:  data isn't released for 70 years.  I knew that the house had been massively refurbished in the 1980s, and had actually been condemned until its restoration.  You'd never know it looking at it now.  But interesting history nonetheless.

My mother sent me an obituary this past week as well.  My very first boyfriend died of HIV complications.  He had been diagnosed in the 1980s before a lot of the successful drugs had really hit the market.  He lived much longer than he thought he would, at least twenty years since his diagnosis.  He probably would have lived longer if he'd taken better care of himself, but he never really did.  I was WAY young when we got together, and it was certainly an education.  He was nearly 10 years older than I was, and I learned a lot of things with him.  Mostly what I did NOT want to become:  queeny, needy, manipulative, HIV-positive and unhealthy.  The negative stuff tends to overshadow the positive stuff, even now.  But this is the guy who sort of outed me to my parents and decided to call me when he deliberately overdosed and tried to kill himself.  While living with my best friend, Dr Dan.  And while my other best friend, Slash JC, was visiting.  What a drama queen.  Some other friends of mine started calling him "The Angel of Death" back in the mid/late 90s.  They knew about him and knew my history with him, and had begun to be friendly with him, which was fine with me, and wouldn't matter if it wasn't.  They were taken in by his wit and charm, which he did possess.  But eventually, the manipulative side of him came out, and he often used his illness to get what he wanted.  Hence the name.

But apart from all that negativity -- and there was plenty of it -- I really bore him no ill will.  I was much too young to be very serious about relationship drama.  As I said, it was rather an education, and something of a passing of the torch.  I knew I wanted to be nothing like him, however much he wanted me to be, and that I would never be what he wanted or thought he needed.  And, did I mention I was a young (redundant) idiot? I went to so many funerals in the few years after I'd met him.   That tends to grow you up.  He opened my eyes, drove home the importance of safe sex (as living proof), and, while teaching me somethings not to do, did teach me some things that were right to do.  Rest in peace, SW.

In other "news," Rumsfeld is a trigger-happy douchebag. Gays are moving away from the Castro; memo to the city:  because it's fucking expensive.  Also, I didn't watch the Oscars. Hee. 

And the video has changed again.  See the sidebar for information on it.  I'm still laughing from it.

This modern celestial approves.  From Space.com.

This image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows the diverse collection of galaxies in the cluster Abell S0740 that is over 450 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Centaurus. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) .

Rather than go out and brave waits and restaurant staff who are a) single and grouchy or b) partnered and pissed at having to work VD, I opted to make a full-on romantic dinner for Z-man.  Here is your moment of food porn on the blog for the day.

Salad Course

Curly escarole and Belgian red endive lettuce
Shaved fennel bulb
Thin Bosc pear slices
Bleu d'Argent (a french blue similar to Roquefort)
Meyer lemon and Bergamia (bergamot) Olive Oil dressing

Main Course

Eggplant Monreale:  similar to eggplant parmesan.  Slices of eggplant are breaded and fried in a vegetable/olive oil fry, then layered in a casserole dish with fresh soft buffalo mozzerella and reggiano parmesean. The layers are then covered in a thick tomato sauce:  crushed whole tomatos, tomato paste, cup of dry white wine, onion, garlic, fresh rosemary (thank you, Richie!), fresh thyme, bay leaf, salt, pepper.  Dish is then baked for twenty or thirty minutes.

Dessert

Sharffen-Berger 77% bittersweet soufflée, in 10oz individual ramekins

Wine Pairing

Sobon estate Viognier (meh)
Laurent Marquel Viognier (highly recommended French Viognier and very reasonable)

Via a link from Ernie's Little. Yellow. Different. blog, a very clever and talented and obvious long-time user of the internet has labeled, illustrated, and defined various personalities found in forums, chats, and message boards.  It's insightful and amusing.  Check it out.

 I've been playing around with The Gimp, an image editing/synthesizing program similar to Photoshop and others.  I used to play such things back when I had free time.  I even entered a local artist's showing in Gainesville years ago with some collage images I'd composed with Photoshop and Painter 2.0.  I think I sold one work, and another one was stolen and never seen again, which is cool in a way.  The stolen one was weird but interesting.  It was called "Gemini" and I'd used, as the main part of the image, a sonogram of in utero siamese twins.

I'm no talent at painting -- I never was -- and the stuff I did for that show was mildly interesting, but it was for charity anyway, so I didn't have much personal stake in it.  I was happy to provide material for a good cause.

A dear friend of mine also had given me a Wacom tablet, a flat input device that you "draw" on with a stylus that moves the cursor around and allows much more fine control over your movements and strokes.  Most of the programs I'd used could even respond to the pressure sensitivity capability of the tablet, allowing for some amazingly lifelike brush strokes.

Well, I'd recently rediscovered my Wacom tablet and dusted it off and downloaded a copy of Gimpshop, which is the Gimp program made to interface like Photoshop, which I was at one time reasonably familiar with (not so much any more, but meh).  I had to find a new power adaptor (thank you Radio Shack), and I plugged it in, installed the drivers, and to my delight, it still works just fine! Woo!

I don't have any specific plans with it.  I enjoy using it, much as one might sketch in a quiet moment.  I enjoy learning and practicing some of the techniques the experienced used to achieve various effects on an image, and the things the talented can do with such software is mind boggling.  My latest fascination is colorizing black and white photographs.  It's surprisingly easy.  I practiced on an old Carol Channing photo I'd published once before.  Here's the original, the one where she's eating cake with Florence Henderson.

And here's the partially colorized version of same.

Pretty cool, huh? I think I'm going to leave the guy in black and white.  He obviously hasn't had any cake yet.  Cake gives you color, like orgasms apparently.

Update:  Yes, Flo hasn't had any cake yet either.  We obviously know what she's been doing.

The Bacon Martini.