When I saw this scene from the movie “Russian Dolls” I knew right away I need to share it with my readers. I didn’t even bother to transfer the subtitles -- who cares what this guy is saying and untranslated French actually adds some charm to the clip.
Trivia: the scene is filmed in St.Petersburg on the Architect Rossi Street which is famous for its perfect dimensions (just like this girl): the height of the buildings on both sides is 22 meters which also equals the width of the street while the length of the street is exactly 10 times that, at 220 meters.
Celebrity death week went worldwide when the most famous Russian folk singer and the namesake of an asteroid -- Lyudmila Zykina died on July 1st, just weeks after her 80th birthday. Even when I was a kid, she seemed old, I was actually surprised that she was only 80, I thought she was eighty in 1976. It’s probably safe to say that there is no person who grew up in the USSR who doesn’t know who she was or couldn’t recognize her distinct voice. She was everywhere -- concerts, radio, TV and at that time not exactly someone my generation wanted to listen to, but in a system with 3 TV channels and a few radio stations we got our share of her singing. Seems pretty good now, not so much when I was 10.
Back in the day before vegetables were genetically modified to grow in winter and still retained their natural look, taste and smell, each produce had its own growing season. You couldn’t walk into a grocery store in December and expect to find a watermelon or a tomato* and it was OK, there was something to look forward to in the spring and summer. Even though it’s now available year round, I still don’t eat watermelon in winter, but it’s nice to know that I could if I wanted to. To overcome the fruit and vegetable shortage people invented many ways to preserve foods for the winter – canning, drying, pickling, etc. Many families including mine had a closet like you see on the left where we stored a variety of preserves my Mom and Dad cooked during the summer. Opening one of those jars always brought back the summer even if only for a few minutes. Today’s recipe is a simple to make throwback to these years.
Imagine one day you are browsing around Costco, mentally restraining yourself from buying another gargantuan item when you see these:
“Only two pounds, could be worse”, you think to yourself, putting the package into your cart. There are so many things you can do with peppers including just eating them raw. At home you can just wash the peppers in the sink.
Combine 1 cup of regular vinegar and 1 cup of vegetable oil (don’t waste olive oil):
By the way, if you use the term “EVOO” I don’t mind losing you as a reader of this blog, feel free to never come back.
Pour oil and vinegar into a medium sized pot, add half-a-cup of water,3/4 tablespoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of honey, a handful of whole peppercorns and a bay leaf if you have it (I do). Bring to boil and make sure it’s all incorporated. While that’s going on, cut off the tops and slice the peppers in strips. These are pretty small (and I know a small pepper when I see one), so I just quartered them.
Try the marinade, see if you like it, it should have a pleasant sweet and sour taste. I felt like I needed to add some more honey, which I did. Add sliced peppers to the boiling marinade (in batches if needed) and boil for 3-5 minutes. This recipe works best for heavier thicker peppers, these are pretty thin and you want them to retain texture, you are not making mashed peppers here.
Take the peppers out with a slotted spoon and place them in a jar, then cook another batch.
After all the peppers are cooked, pour the cooking liquid over them to cover completely. I had to add some boiled hot water to have all the peppers covered. Let them cool down.
These peppers are good with everything: salads, sandwiches, garnish, vodka, whatever you can think of. I am not sure how long they will keep in the refrigerator, but peppers this delicious will not last that long anyway.
I’d like to mention that my friend Donna recently tried my borscht recipe and not only liked it but is still in good health. That’s better than having a seal of approval.
Even though we now have everything available all year long, summer is still the best for cooking and eating vegetables. Enjoy!
*you were lucky to find cabbage and potatoes at the grocery store in December
**due to unforeseen circumstances I was using my old camera, so the picture quality is not the best.
While a certain long-faced family is showing off their surrogate twins, I’d like to share some photos of the Korean Taco Triplets now being offered at Yummo – Rob Dalzell’s testbed for the innovative (at least for Kansas City) culinary concepts and ideas.
I am not the first to report on this development, this honor goes to Bull.E.Vard who like a watchful gargoyle (not his actual likeness) perches on the nearby buildings ready to strike anything edible at any minute. I, on the other hand, am not within striking distance but to my advantage I do own a camera.
I knew I was in luck when I saw this sign:
Three tacos for $2 special, not two as was previously reported put a little spring in my step, it’s not every day when you get a 33% discount on the stuff that you thought was already cheap to start with. Beef, chicken and pork tacos are on the menu and I tried all three. The meats reminded me a little of the fillings for sandittos at the Souperman but overall the tacos were great: just the right amount of meats, toppings, crunch, just enough spice to give it a perfect kick – these tacos are now crowned (by me) the best cheapest meal in Kansas City and surroundings. I am sure at this price they are probably losing money considering the high costs of being at the P&L but I would suggest trying it out while it lasts. Keep in mind that the tacos are served Tuesday through Friday.
The only gripe I have is packaging. Apparently they are not counting on carryout because these flimsy cardboard containers did not have any lids. I had a hard time balancing a stack of three boxes on the way to my car and still have spots of sauce on my jeans to prove that it’s wasn’t easy.
However, at these prices I will be there every day with my own containers. Some days maybe even twice.
Imagine you are a coroner, crappy profession that it already is, your days are filled with horrible, bloody, disgustingly smelling, disfigured things that no one in the right state of mind would even want to be in the same building with, and instead of enjoying a nice sunny LA day you have to dissect a skeleton-looking, hairless, needle-ridden body of a weird celebrity. Not only do you have to chisel off the layers of plaster and artificial prosthetic parts, you for some ungodly reason have to cut his stomach open to see what he was eating before he croaked. It’s in the times like this that you must feel that you should’ve picked another specialty like a podiatrist or a proctologist, albeit their worldview is somewhat constricted.
That’s why I think every person should carry a card at all times with the contents of their stomach for the past 48 hours as a way to make the job of forensic pathologists just a little bit easier.
Let’s see, today my stomach contains:
a cup of coffee
cheese and turkey sandwich
a orange/apricot jelly (from Bermuda) and toast
cherries
persimmon
apple
some frozen yogurt from Yummo (mix of 3 flavors) because they don’t sell Korean tacos on Monday
chicken patty
a piece of dried banana
salad (Caesar dressing)
cheese quesadilla
corn
some lemonade
a piece of Tippins coconut-creme pie
I think that’s it. There maybe some leftovers of this cinnamon roll from Barb’s Kolache Bakery in Shawnee from a couple of days ago
and just a little bit of the cherry kolache ( I gave the other ones away)
but that’s just being too thorough.
See this is not so hard.
Maybe your coroner will be grateful for not having to dig through your rotting guts and will not “leak” embarrassing details of your autopsy to the media. In my book, that’s just paying it forward.
One of my favorite scenes from the movie Apollo 13 is when a bunch of engineers remap the spaceship’s trajectory with nothing but a pen, paper and a slide rule.
Note: this is not the exact scene but close enough.
This almost seems impossible in this day and age, when we delegate all of our calculations to a computer. I may be a part of a dying breed of people who can still figure things out without the calculator, but I can’t take credit for this -- in my day we just didn’t have calculators; I got my first one after the 8th grade. Trigonometric tables, slide rules, pen, paper or even a chalkboard were just as much a part of my education as computers in today’s schools. There is nothing wrong with using technology but it’s amazing what we can do without it.
This was a long and winded introduction to the old photos of the Severe Local Storm Warning Center (SELS) which was located in Kansas City from 1954 to 1997 (brief history of SELS could be found here). Long before the word meteorologist was associated with associated with clueless jokers on TV, these people were saving lives without 3-D motion maps, scary graphics and “one degree guarantees”. I don’t know how accurate these guys were but given what they had to work with our modern TV meteorologists wouldn’t know where to start. Apparently technology does not a meteorologist make.
This video from the semifinals of the Ukraine’s Got Talent was suggested by a commenter. It is pretty amazing both in content and performance. It’s about the war.
Another entry by the same performer Kseniya Simonova, this time in finals, is about family, life and death. If you make it to the end of the video, she writes “Don’t be late….”.
Despite my bad memory some historic dates will probably stay with me for the rest of my life. On this day in 1941 the Nazis crossed the Soviet border as part of the operation Barbarossa and began what became known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War. I wroteabout the War many times before so I won’t repeat myself. Even the youngest veterans are 85-90 years today and there are fewer and fewer of the every year. The memory of the War was something my generation grew up with, hopefully it will not be forgotten by our children.
I literally heard this song thousands of times (translation slightly clumsy but will do).
Some time ago I decided that this blogging thing is becoming too much of a burden and not as much of a recreational activity I envisioned it to be, so I relied on Forrest Gump to convey my feelings on the subject and stopped. Surprisingly the Earth didn’t stand still, and, according to a humorless fellow Pitch commenter, everyone is probably better off without me “spouting some inane half literate garbage off the top of (my) head, without offering a single new fact, based on things (I) read courtesy of the hard work done by the good folks in the “dead tree media”" . In the meantime, I entertain myself trading one-liners on Twitter and mostly keep my opinions to myself. Once in a while I see a subject, an image, a story and just like in the old days I think: “This could make a good post”, too bad I don’t feel like writing it. In the past weeks for various reasons I thought about death and dying, love, P&L made-up controversy du jour, almost typed something up in defense of Nadia Pflaum, who I don’t even know and rarely read, almost wrote something about Obama, auto industry, weather, movies and pickling of a watermelon (that may still show up some day). I thought about writing about these things but I didn’t because no one really cares what I have to say and to prove that, my blog is still getting about the same number of clicks I used to get when I posted something every day.
I guess nothing prompts me to actually sit down and write something like a cattle-like public support for the Iranian opposition, complete with blogs, facebook messages, re-Tweets, green-tinted avatars, etc. Here is a video of the public racing to support the “democracy” in Iran.
For the record I don’t care who gets elected in Iran because in Iran “…Supreme Leader … has the final say in all matters”; Iran’s current president may be an angry Holocaust-denying degenerate with a potential access to nuclear weapons and no love for America but I can make a similar case for many other world leaders and, to some degree, for many people in the US congress and some former presidents. Let me make up some facts for you.
2. You think he is better than the current president because an angry demonstrator with a green mask on his face told you so.
3. You have no idea what his platform is and if he is planning to stick with it.
4. You found out from Twitter that there was election fraud.
5. You felt that the opposition needed your personal support.
6. You painted your avatar green and now it says “where is my/their vote”
7. Mission accomplished.
8. This doesn’t seem ridiculous to you at all.
I am sure after being beaten and sprayed with tear gas the Iranians come home and find satisfaction in the “sea of green” faces on Twitter. You played an important part in the supporting of democracy, give yourself a good pat on the back.
It’s no secret that the tactic of indiscriminately supporting pro-American opposition didn’t always work out in the long run. One doesn’t have to look back 30 or 50 years to find another failed example of a misguided American foreign intervention. Both the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia were enthusiastically supported, encouraged and financed by the United States but produced neither the expected results nor any significant political and economic improvements. Few years later the new opposition is clashing with yesterday’s revolutionaries demanding their removal from power. Today, Ukrainian and Georgian people resent the United States for interfering in their affairs and egging them on into hasty action.
That’s why President Obama should continue with the policy of leaving Iranian people to resolve their election problems for themselves, while making sure that their Twitter is in perfect working order. United States’ support of the Shah is in no small part responsible for the current situation in the country so if there is a time to stop interfering -- it is right now. It is painful to watch the beatings, bloody clashes and murders but there is no guarantee that if the opposition wins they will not kill and loot like their neighbors in Iraq. Who will you support then? So far the number of casualties is comparable to an average year in Kansas City, I don’t recall a huge wave of Twitter indignation for our local beatings and murders.
In the meantime all the clueless do-gooders can continue their self-gratifying support for the Iranian demonstrators and protesters, changing time zones for conspiracy and painting their faces green. Election fraud and stolen elections apparently happen to the best of democracies (just Google “2000 election stolen“), no reason to get hysterical about it. Especially if you live 7,000 miles away and it takes you 3 tries to point Iran on the map.
