Maebius Musing

An interesting pictoral randomness, I discovered over at “Bringing Up Salamanders“.

Here’s my mosaic, organized as you would read text, top left -> -> bottom right.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Type your answer to each question below, into Flickr Search

2. Using only the first page of results, pick one image.

3. Copy & paste each of the URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab’s Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers.

THE QUESTIONS:

1. What is your real christian/first name?

2. What is your favourite food - right now?

3. What school did you go to?

4. What is your favourite colour?

5. Who is your latest celebrity crush?

6. What is your favourite drink?

7. What is your dream vacation destination?

8. What is your favourite dessert?

9. What do you want to be when you grow up?

10. What do you love most in life?

11. What is one word that describes you now?

12. What is your Flickr/Blog name?

Here are the image credits:

1. Nathan Fillion @ the Flanvention, 2. frozen taco, 3. Non-Active, 4. Emerald Green Thigh Highs., 5. feliciaday, 6. innocent pure fruit smoothie 3, 7. Dolphin Bay Esperance, 8. Ice cream, 9. This is the forest primeval., 10. Tammy’s bowls of light., 11. a puckish whistle12. Not available

I tag, anyone who reads this… 

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testing, testing, testing… hoping Wordpress re-install works now, correctly notifies feed readers, and actually displays posts with some semblance of order….

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Two friends and I are engaged in a fun Iron Chef challenge, using Artichokes as our secret ingredient.

See my blogroll (Kwitchery, andalso Nettle’s Blog) for details and updates.

My own entries, are all cold dishes, making a subtle nod the Northern regions we live in (relatively speaking). Simple picnic fare mostly, representing the humble joy of country life, and it’s casual connection to nature, yet still holding within it’s myriad ingredients a mirroring of the complex web of life. Each dish is topped with a fresh violet, symbolizing the spring season, and offering a token of friendship towards this chef’s lovely challengers. (Sound sufficiently Asian/esoteric?!?!)

-=- Appetizer -=-

First, we have a Artichoke Pâté, served on a bed of fresh Romaine leaves, surrounded by various multi-grain crackers and pita slivers. Garnished with a fresh violet leaf and flower. Recipe was mostly followed, with some minor adjustments in terms of slightly less olives, slightly more garlic, and a touch of cilantro-sprout to bulk out a slightly insufficient quantity of Parsley.

* 15oz artichoke-hearts, drained
* 4oz low-fat cream cheese
* 1/3 cup grated parm cheese
* around 3 Tbls fat-free mayo
* 1.5 tsp minced garlic
* 1-2 tsp lemon juice
* 2 Tbls finely chopped parsley
* 2 Tbls finely chopped black olives
* 2 Tbls chopped, roasted red peppers
* Salt and Cayenne pepper, to taste
Process the heck out of all ingredients, then leave in fridge for a while to let flavors blend. (will it blend? Yes!) Serve with starchy/firm accoutrements like crackers, breads, or melba toasts.
The taste was pleasingly subtle, with the initial tartness of the peppers, lemon, garlic, and artichokes offset by the cooling firmness of the cream cheese.

-=- Main course -=-

Artichoke pasta salad with grilled chicken. Grilled chicken tenders, marinated in artichoke juice & minced garlic, rubbed prior to grilling with a mix of paprika, oregano, salt and pepper. Served on a nest of linguine pasta tossed with more artichokes, black olives, peppers, olive oil, and cider vinegar, plus the seasoning mix used on the chicken, atop a plate of fresh romaine lettuce leaves. Served cold, except for the chicken, which was added at the last moment steaming hot off the grill.

While using similar ingredients to the appetizer, this meal was quite tasty. More tangy and very full of marinated artichoke flavor. The kid loved this a lot, especially due to “slurpy noodle” potential.

-=- Dessert -=-

I had planned to make an artichoke-based ice-cream (since EVERY japanese recipe seems to involve some sort of frozen treat using almost any ingredient you can imagine), but ran out of time to prepare it again, as the initial attempt did not work right. More of a sorbet, I rinsed marinated artichoke hearts to remove most traces of the vinegar and oil, and pureed them until smooth. Then I added about a quarter cup of table-sugar and some more water (less sweetness than traditional European Sorbets, more like Asian “green tea ice-cream” in palate).

Unfortunately, the making of good sorbet requires a constant freeze/mix cycle that I was unable to work into our schedule properly, and am not submitting without a proper consistency and last-minute tweaks of recipe to ensure a quality entry. My initial result either froze solid and needed quite a lot of blending/refreezing, or started to separate a bit and freeze mostly sugar-water on the top of a denser artichoke-dust.

While this entry may sound rather off-putting, it was not too bad by my initial test. The artichokes, once rinsed, became more of a binding agent than a flavor, and added merely a slight subtle ‘greenish-bitter’ taste to the otherwise sweet frozen sensation. I think removal of a bit more vinegar, or using fresh artichokes blanched/boiled, then powdered, might work better. Still nothing earth-shatteringly well received, but a unique dessert which does compliment the other two dishes in flavor.

Summary, the initial sweeter appetizer, with crunchy crackers, followed by a more hearty and savory-salad made for a fairly well-rounded meal. While the desert course was initially unsuccessful, it was mostly due to time and technique rather than a failure of ingredients, and got a head-shaking (semi-sarcastic) bonus point for creativity and risk-taking.

Bon Appétit!

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Seems the Spring and summer faeries have visited my blog recently, as things were all strangely formatted and the last post (or two) is somehow missing. If you came here looking to comment on a posting made this week, I can’t find it……. Lets do the Time Warp Again!

/dances with a jump to the left, and then a step to the right….

Otherwise, Beltaine evening this year was one of the more subdued, and yet more fun ones from recent memory. We didn’t actually do anything specifically festival-related other than work outside to trim trees, gather wood for the up-coming bonfire, and make a mental list of things to pick up for the party.

However, we worked outside, cleaned up the garden, got ready to plant this weekend, and generally ENJOYED the evening. Lately, we’ve been too busy to really talk, but we chatted while piling branches. We smiled and flirted, we ate dinner and played “Super Mario Galaxy” as a family when it got dark outside. We had some serious FUN chasing our masked “Walken” around the house. We felt young, vibrant, and in love.
All in all, we did bring up spring topics, and gardening, and I received only a joking “The Look” when I mentioned the traditional Greening of the Fields.

The ritual might not have been there in any depth, but the spirit of the holiday was felt much more deeply. It’s now deep into the Springtime.

Happy Beltaine!

((Further updates on the festivities after the ‘official’ Beltaine party this weekend….Varulv’s even bringing a new friend for us to meet ))

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I found this little quiz through a new blog I’m reading, and thought I’d post the results.

As always, I encourage readers to view these statistics with a rather large bowl of salt (ie: a bunch of grains!) since many questions are phrased in a somewhat both/and way yet still require an Either/Or answer, so I had to pick one. A better more accurate representation of my thoughts would require essay-type questions and a real-life moderator picking through my results….even then it might be slanted due to moderator bias. *grin*

Here you go.

My Pagan Practice

Pagan Faith Practices Survey created by Otherworld Apothecary

I was actually somewhat surprised that the “New Age” correspondences scored slightly lower than my “Ceremonial” practices. I tend to think of myself as fairly distanced from Ceremonial types, which may have been due to some bad experiences in the past while still forming my proto-pagan spirituality. (Today, I could meet those types on much better footing.)

Still, the quiz was fun and gave me a chance to pause and reflect on a few things. I also got to look up and research my own musings on this topic.
(see here, or here.)

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