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I'm very good with pain
Most of today was exhaustion and laundry. (That sounds a lot like Boober. Remind me to rewatch Fraggle Rock.) I wrote a little about politics and worked some of my job and did not think I had the wherewithal to go anywhere. Then in the late afternoon I called ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks just as they were preparing to e-mail me and they came over with a car and the day got a lot better. The Michaels in Porter Square has, improbably, an excellent aisle of stuff for professional cake decorating. I bought a box of picture hangers from Tags and we went home to make gadon tahu (coriander-and-cumin-spiced tofu with coconut cream steamed in banana leaves) out of Andrea Nguyen's amazing Asian Tofu (2012). We had no kaffir lime leaves, but we chopped Quorn into the tofu mash for extra protein and results fed me, Rush, and gaudior more than satisfactorily. I keep calling Nguyen's recipes amazing, but I think that is really their proper epithet. We were dubious about the spice proportions as we were mixing them: too much coriander, too little cumin, too little pepper, too much salt. The garlic and the shallot seemed fine, but we'd have used more palm sugar. And then somehow it cooked out beautifully, not at all insipid and not overspiced. We used fresh ginger and a little cider vinegar to substitute for the brightness of the red chili we had to leave out and kept the sriracha on the table just in case. The banana leaves themselves are part of the flavor, tea-smelling without bitterness (or caffeine); I recognized it from sticky rice in dim sum restaurants. They turn a deep, translucent green when steamed. Honestly, thawing and cutting the leaves into the correct size for folding into little tamale-packets was the fiddliest part of the preparation. From start to finish, including the steaming, maybe forty-five minutes? I love Nguyen's book so much.
The rest of this post is a placeholder for me talking about Lexx (1997–2002). Rush showed me the first two episodes of the third season tonight. It came up in conversation; somebody thought to check Netflix. Before playing the first one, they warned me that I would hate it: that it takes a second viewing (sometimes of the same episode) for a person to develop any kind of taste for the show and their only explanation for this phenomenon is that in between the two experiences the brain must grow an extra lobe or something in order to process the indescribable weirdness that is any given episode of Lexx.
I loved the first episode I saw, but I also love Barbarella (1968) and M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract and there is nothing wrong at all with Nigel Bennett in a long black coat with a lip ring, I am just saying.
I loved the second episode, too.
rushthatspeaks just as they were preparing to e-mail me and they came over with a car and the day got a lot better. The Michaels in Porter Square has, improbably, an excellent aisle of stuff for professional cake decorating. I bought a box of picture hangers from Tags and we went home to make gadon tahu (coriander-and-cumin-spiced tofu with coconut cream steamed in banana leaves) out of Andrea Nguyen's amazing Asian Tofu (2012). We had no kaffir lime leaves, but we chopped Quorn into the tofu mash for extra protein and results fed me, Rush, and gaudior more than satisfactorily. I keep calling Nguyen's recipes amazing, but I think that is really their proper epithet. We were dubious about the spice proportions as we were mixing them: too much coriander, too little cumin, too little pepper, too much salt. The garlic and the shallot seemed fine, but we'd have used more palm sugar. And then somehow it cooked out beautifully, not at all insipid and not overspiced. We used fresh ginger and a little cider vinegar to substitute for the brightness of the red chili we had to leave out and kept the sriracha on the table just in case. The banana leaves themselves are part of the flavor, tea-smelling without bitterness (or caffeine); I recognized it from sticky rice in dim sum restaurants. They turn a deep, translucent green when steamed. Honestly, thawing and cutting the leaves into the correct size for folding into little tamale-packets was the fiddliest part of the preparation. From start to finish, including the steaming, maybe forty-five minutes? I love Nguyen's book so much.The rest of this post is a placeholder for me talking about Lexx (1997–2002). Rush showed me the first two episodes of the third season tonight. It came up in conversation; somebody thought to check Netflix. Before playing the first one, they warned me that I would hate it: that it takes a second viewing (sometimes of the same episode) for a person to develop any kind of taste for the show and their only explanation for this phenomenon is that in between the two experiences the brain must grow an extra lobe or something in order to process the indescribable weirdness that is any given episode of Lexx.
I loved the first episode I saw, but I also love Barbarella (1968) and M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract and there is nothing wrong at all with Nigel Bennett in a long black coat with a lip ring, I am just saying.
I loved the second episode, too.
no subject
I'm impressed by the worldbuilding and the character work after only two episodes, when reasonably I should be saying things like, "Giant bug spaceship. Moth breeders. Fire planet. Water planet. Atmospheric vortex what? THOSE GUYS ON THE CONVEYOR BELT WITH HOOKS IN THEIR HEADS." I used to see trailers for it on the Sci-Fi Channel (when it still was the Sci-Fi Channel) when I was watching Babylon 5 and it never looked interesting enough to be worth trying, much less completely batshit insane.
I might have been a wee bit obsessed with Kai and his song (and his voice, yum) when I first watched this show; the male choir version that serves as the opening theme is particularly awesome, but lots of different other versions turn up as the episodes proceed.
I like Kai immensely. I also like Xev and Stanley, which means this show is about three hundred percent ahead of most series in the protagonist department for me. (I don't like the robot head, but I don't think anyone is supposed to.) But the different shades of Kai's deadpan are a thing of beauty and the fact he doesn't look like a complete and utter twit with that hairstyle is possibly the most badass thing about him. And he's pretty much introduced in this season base-jumping from non-geosynchronous orbit, so he has a pretty high bar to live up to.