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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.
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The absurdism reminded me, and the level of casual body horror (enacted or implied: the moth breeders), and a lot of the ways in which the science works without anyone really bothering to poke at it. The organic tech is disturbing and Stanley, who as far as I can tell doesn't . Fire and Water never seem to have developed conventional spaceflight because with that weird umbilicus of atmosphere they don't need it: just airships to send raiding parties from one world to the other. I just felt like you could stick Stanley and Ed Chianese in a bar somewhere and they would share a lot of the same wrongheaded philosophies about what went wrong with their lives. Xev with her splice of lizard DNA and sexual hard-coding could almost certainly find someone to talk to in Saudade.
Nigel Bennett is great as Prince.
I imprinted on him in Forever Knight. He's not erasing my memories of LaCroix here, but he's encouraging my belief that I should watch him do anything, including just talk.