Braisin' Hussy

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Loyal readers! All... 180 of you? Holy crap, that's more than I thought read this. I am thinking about switching journalling services. I don't know if Blogger is so much my thing anymore.

First option, Vox. Interesting layouts. Pretty decent interface. Tags appear on the main page. My main problem with Vox is that you can't comment anywhere without a Vox account, and since account creation is still invite-only, that's annoying. (I have five invites, if anyone's interested.) Also, the comments aren't nested. There are ads, but they can be pretty easily blocked.

Then there's Livejournal. The layouts aren't as nice as Vox, but it's still got tags. Comments can be anonymous if I allow it. Comments are nested. Tags exist, but are showing up sporadically. They also only show up on the entry pages, not the main page (at least in the very basic way I have it set up right now). Would be kind of a pain, personally, for me.

Maybe I should just wait and see if Vox ever opens up registration or starts allowing anonymous commenting.

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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Sausage and Mushroom Strata

6-8 slices decent quality white bread, crusts removed (enough to make two layers in an 8x8 baking dish)
Butter
10 oz. chicken (or pork) breakfast sausage, casings removed
3 shallots, chopped
8 oz. button or cremini mushrooms, quartered
1/2 cup white wine
8 oz. monterey jack cheese, shredded
6 eggs
2 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
1 3/4 cup half-and-half
Salt and pepper, to taste

Dry the bread out by leaving it on the counter overnight or in a 200 oven for a half hour. Butter on one side.

Fry the sausage in a nonstick skillet over medium heat, breaking it apart with a spoon or spatula. Cook for about 4 minutes, or until the sausage has lost the raw color and begun to brown. Add the shallots and cook, stirring frequently, until softened and translucent, about 1 minute longer. Add mushrooms to skillet, and cook until mushrooms no longer release liquid, about 6 minutes. Scrape into a bowl and season to taste with salt and pepper. Add wine to skillet, increase heat to medium-high, and simmer until reduced to 1/3 cup, 2 to 3 minutes; set aside.

Butter 8-inch square baking dish. Arrange half the buttered bread slices, buttered-side up, in single layer in dish. Sprinkle half of sausage mixture, then half of the cheese over the bread slices. Arrange the remaining bread slices (in the opposite direction from the first layer) over cheese; sprinkle remaining sausage mixture and cheese over the bread. Whisk eggs and parsley together, then whisk in reduced wine, half-and-half, 1 teaspoon salt, and pepper to taste. Pour egg mixture evenly over bread layers. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Remove dish from refrigerator and let stand at room temperature 20 minutes. Heat oven to 325 degrees. Bake 50 to 55 minutes, or until both edges and center are puffed. Let rest/cool briefly and serve.

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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Avast, me hearties! Today be Talk Like a Pirate Day, if ye haven't already been accosted by an ARRRRRRRR.

Check out this wedding cake. I imagine Lydia wants one.

Finally, here's some news from Britain: Jamie Oliver tries to instate healthy food in school cafeterias. Mothers oppose this and bring fast-food to the schools, because they fear getting healthy food once a day will make the children "picky." Jamie gets mad.

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Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Kaya died.

The party got her reincarnated.

She came back as a HALF-ORC.

ARGH.

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Friday, September 08, 2006

Damn, I started writing a new post yesterday, and then my laptop switched off unexpectedly. And of course, since the Blogger auto-save function is a POS, I lost the post. Crapola.

I made guacamole again last night. Mark had a bunch of avocados that were heading into overripe territory. I think I may need to edit the recipe to specify white onions. I don't really know if there's much of a difference between white and yellow onions, but I use yellow (because they're cheaper), and my guac is very very onion-y. Jon uses white and his is less onion-tastic. Not sure if there's a correlation there, but maybe. Who knows.

I'm going over to Jon and Ryan's tonight to visit the li'l one. Last time I saw him (not that long ago, I swear), he was just starting to crawl. Now, after a trip to Michigan, he's pulling himself up onto things! Amazing! Must be something in the air up there. I need to sit Nathan down and have a talk with him about how he needs to keep crawling for a while and not immediately start walking. He doesn't want to end up like his Aunt Sarah who has no concept of left and right.

Yes, yes, neglecting the blog. Nope, haven't made anything new (or at all, I think) since the guac two weeks ago.

Rob moved the What's Open Now sites over to India so he could have these awesome URLs:
http://whatsopen.in/cupertino/
http://whatsopen.in/mountain_view/
I have a bunch of hours for the business district in Palo Alto, but I haven't typed them up yet.

Chicken feet are not for me. Or at least, not the way they prepare them at Canton Delights, the local dim sum place. I went there with Rob last weekend. We didn't order a ton, so it was pretty cheap. We spent $15 on five dishes. The sesame balls (really, what I wanted to go for) were tasty. The fried taro dumplings were very good. The vegetable dumplings were pretty mediocre (when I order something marked "vegetable," I expect more than mushrooms and tofu). The pork buns were satisfying. They had very good tea. I would go back there.

Let's see... the weekend before that, my friends Debbie and Marian came to visit. We went over to Cupertino Village (aka that big Asian shopping center with the 99 Ranch) and ate at the Korean Tofu House. It was a bit pricey, but good. Kind of 50/50 on whether I'd go back- I think I could find the same quality for cheaper nearby. I hear there are some really good places in Sunnyvale. I should eat more Korean food. I don't get it often, but every time I do, I'm happy.

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