perfidy

Sez Patton, in the comments to this Buckethead post in which he offers an ancestral food-sacrament to all of us, "I read all the way down to the end presuming I'd see a Johno byline." Heh. Yeah, in the guns/butter debate, I'm a butter kinda guy. Given that I'm a man of hifalutin tastes who likes talking about food only slightly less than I like eating it, and that only slightly less than cooking it, it's a little wierd I have never thought to presume that anyone else in the world would give a crap about my recipes. Well, thanks to Patton and Buckethead, that's changing.

In keeping with my status as an at-home vegetarian, I specialize in recipes that don't include meat and that don't make you miss it. Some of them (Buffalo tofu) sound unspeakably gross but are actually bery, bery good, and some of them are legitimately tasty no matter how you look at it.

Recently, I've been making this soup every couple of weeks. It's spicy, rich, makes for a great quick meal with a grilled cheese, and best of all manages to come thisclose to tasting like real Indian food made by real people named Jagdish. Enjoy!

THE FILTHY IMPERIALIST’S CARROT SOUP

1 ½ pounds carrots, peeled and sliced
4 Tbsp butter
½ cup Basmati or Jasmine rice, rinsed
1 fresh thai red or cayenne pepper (or less; taste for spiciness), seeded and chopped, or 1/4-1/2 tsp red pepper flakes to taste
1 tsp dried thyme
2 tsp sugar
salt
pepper
1 Tbsp grated fresh ginger. Absolutely do not use powdered ginger.
1 tsp cumin seeds (or more), or, if you must, 1 1/2 tsp very fresh powdered cumin.
5 cups broth (I use vegetable stock, but unsalted chicken stock will do too, you filthy murtherer)
8 oz (1 cup) light coconut milk or 6 oz regular fatty coconut milk (more to taste)
Scant 1/4 cup finely chopped cilantro
optional- 1 tsp non-McCormick’s curry powder, pref. vindaloo.

Over medium-high heat, cook carrots, rice, peppers (if using fresh) and sugar in the butter, stirring often, until carrots begin to soften a bit, about 10 minutes. Avoid excessive browning. Add ginger, thyme, pepper flakes (if using) cumin seeds and salt and cook three minutes more. Add the stock, bring to a boil, and reduce heat to simmer for ½ hour. Remove soup from heat and let cool for five minutes. Puree by any means necessary: I like a stick blender and if doing a hifalutin meal would use the Foley’s food mill for the very height of smoothness, but your experience may vary. Strain if desired through a fine-mesh strainer. Return to pot. Add cilantro and coconut milk. If using optional curry powder, heat a little butter in a pan and cook curry for 30 seconds over low heat, stirring, then add to soup. Taste for salt, body, and subtil coconuttiness, and adjust seasonings.Serve with homemade (homemade!) croutons.

This would go very well as a soup course before a nice roast pork loin larded with garlic and rubbed with olive oil, dry mustard and rosemary, plus maybe some root veggies roasted with thyme, oil, sea salt and pepper, and steamed broccoli finished in a sauté pan with a sauce made with shallot, Dijon mustard and white wine with a squeeze of lemon juice and a little lemon zest and finished with a knob of butter.

[wik] Note: correction above-- original called for too much hot pepper. That has now been corrected. The soup should be spicy, piquant even, but not vicious. No "ring of fire" should ensue the next day.

You will notice that the blogroll to your left - no, your other left, and down a little bit - has been expanded. Over the last several weeks, my blog reading habits have undergone a slow but inexorable change. With the absence of Steven den Beste's truly incomparable weblog (in prolixity, if nothing else) I have found that I now have time to read many, many more blogs.

By and large, the blogs added are precisely those blogs that I am irritated that I have to dig into my bookmarks for, rather than just click to from the Perfidious homepage. This may seem a selfish motive, but I choose to view it as a heartfelt judgment and appreciation of the quality and irresistible appeal of these fine blogs. The following links each point to what I feel is a singularly fine example of what these blogs have to offer to you, the blogreading public.

• Wizbang offers insightful political commentary, trenchant humor, and posts by Jay Tea. Also boobies! Wizbang has brought us the Carnival of the Vanities, an excellent caption contest, and just recently the neologism "wizbanging." I'd been reading Wizbang semi-regularly, but their coverage of the memogate hooforah roped me in. As an exemplar, here is this excellent takedown of the feared but nor dreaded parasite interwebus asshatus.
• Q and O is a relatively new blog that has become disgustingly successful. I hate them for their success, but I admire what they write. Questions and Observations regularly produces Belmont Club quality posts on a wide range of topics. Earlier, I linked to a post by contributor Dale Franks on Roe v. Wade, and here is another post by co-blogger McQ on rapprochement with France.
• So comrade, what sort of revanchist counterrevolutionary wrecking have you plotted today? If you are falling behind your five year plan's quotas, don't lie to the apparatchiki from the central committee, just steal from the Politburo Diktat. Clenched fist salute to der Commisar!
• Protein Wisdom doesn't just want you to vote, it tells you why. And also explains the Second World War. Now that's wisdom.
• "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." A wonderful quote from H. L. Mencken, and a reasonably apt description of Ace's blogging ethos. He once complimented us on our site design, but has rudely failed to link to us since. Here he slaps Chris Matthews around.
• The Command Post is simply a wonderful resource for breaking news, provided by some of your favorite bloggers. This was a terrible oversight, now corrected. No need to provide a specific link, just go and bask in the warm sunlight of countless bits of interweb goodness.

We have developed an ethos of exclusivity here at the Ministry, which for no other reason but laziness has compelled us to maintain a relatively small blogroll. Were we to throw hallowed tradition to the wind and start adding blogs willy-nilly, these fine blogs would no doubt be on that roll of honor. In no particular order:

• The Jawa Report ***Must Credit Rusty Shackleford!***
• BeldarBlog He's pretty good, for a lawyer.
• Captain's Quarters Excellent!
• The Llamabutchers I absolutely, absolutely love the name of this blog. Though I still don't get why they hate Tibetan Buddhists.
• The 'Dredge Report Now with a new name and a spiffy site redesign.
• Oldsmoblogger And yes, he apparently is slow and in the way.
• The Idea Shop Where the dismal science gets groovy.
• Naked Villainy The Maximum Leader stole our whole minister thingy, but I love him anyway
• Transterrestrial Musings Great space stuff, and good commentary on events of the day.

[wik] I wasn't kidding about laziness. Doing one of these posts is very time consuming.

[alsø wik] I'm also not kidding about the other blogs. If I didn't feel compelled to keep the blogroll relatively small, I'd have certainly added them. 

This is one of the more thoughtful bits on Roe v. Wade I've ever run across. This part amused me greatly:

For the record, I’m with Justice Ginsburg on this one: I think ROE was wrongly decided. Indeed, I’m not entirely convinced that the court was right in GRISWOLD. It’s one thing to say that laws against contraception or abortion are foolish and unwise. It’s quite another entirely to say they’re unconstitutional. I mean, look, the state of Texas has a law--and it is still enforced--that says owning 5 marital aids is perfectly legal, but owning 6 is a felony. Stupid? You bet. Constitutional? You bet. And, really, I’ve never come across any situations in which more than 4 were ever needed anyway.

And as an added bonus, this:

And just look what ROE’s done to the process of judicial nominations. It’s the 800 pound gorilla of the judiciary. Jeez, it’s getting to the point where selecting judges is gonna be have to done like picking jurors: You can only get a seat if you’ve never read ROE, never written a Law Review article on the right to privacy, never given a speech about it, never had any friends or family members who’ve eve had abortions, etc., etc. And that’s how you end up with David Souter on the court. If we got rid of ROE entirely we’d have to go back to picking judges on the basis of, I dunno, intellect or experience and stuff.

Thanks to Rocket Jones for the tip.

Or not really. Bush's cabinet has seen less turnover over his first term than any administration in recent memory. The only major shift was in Treasury a while back, when O'Neil was shown the door for not being on board with White House policy. So far, six cabinet secretaries have resigned, two more are expected, and two replacements have been named. Most notably, bete noire of the left John Ashcroft and darling of the left Colin Powell are leaving. In both cases, Bush has nominated White House insiders to fill those positions, and when Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge resigns, that will likely be the cases as well. Bush appears to be doing what anyone would have expected of him – nominating people of proven loyalty to important positions.

A couple things have interested me about the nominations we know about so far. In both cases, Bush is nominating minorities to high government positions – Gonzales for AG and Rice for state. Yet aside from scant reference to “first Hispanic AG” and “First Black Woman Secretary of State” I haven’t seen much cheering from the usual suspects about the significance of these appointments in regard to race/gender issues. Perhaps the fact that they are conservative Hispanics and Black Women negates the achievement.

Gonzales will face some flack for writing the memorandum defending the exclusion of detainees from the Geneva convention. While this position is legally defensible, I have in the past argued that it was a bad idea. Aside from that issue, I think that Gonzales should offer no more offense than any other Republican nominee. For one thing, he is not a fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian, a belief that seems to make all liberals quake in fear. Why this should be so is beyond my powers to comprehend. The religious right certainly differs from the left in their conception of the good society. But they are not engaged in some desperate conspiracy to strip all the freedoms the left holds dear and put hippies in camps. That’s me, not them. But in any event, Gonzales isn’t one, so that should make many people happy.

Condoleeza Rice will be officially nominated for Secretary of State early this afternoon. In many respects, she is an obvious choice for the President. She is loyal, agrees with him on foreign policy, and will likely act to reign in the careerist diplomats at State. She will be a competent representative of American interests – rather than the representative of foreign interests to the administration. Appointing Rice to State signals that there will be no real change in the thrust of American policy – not that anyone expected that there would be.

Some might argue that Rice is unsuitable because of the faulty intelligence that led Bush to move on Iraq. But I think that this really isn’t a criticism of Rice, but rather of the intelligence services themselves, which brings us to the CIA. Jon Henke of [url= QandO]http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=429]QandO[/url][/url] gathered up some reactions on the left to the craziness at CIA. And gently pointed out to them that the same thing has happened before. It’s been a long time since the CIA has been shaken up, and recent performance (for oh, say, the last four years) has been subpar at best. What was once admiringly called the Silent Service has since become a loudspeaker service, with every CIA agent with an ax to grind running to the Washington Post. Disagreeing with the president is one thing. Actively undermining a sitting president is unacceptable. Hopefully Porter Goss can begin the process of reforming the CIA, so that it can once more provide useful intelligence to the executive. (An important first step would be beefing up the operations side of the house – human intelligence efforts have been haphazard and pathetic ever since the Church commission gutted the CIA back in the seventies. Indications are that this will be on Goss’ agenda.)

All in all, nothing about Bush’s new nominees is earth-shattering, controversial or a sign of the apocalypse. I think Goss has the potential to be an outstanding DCI, and Rice may well be an excellent Secretary of State. Gonzales will do a decent job at Justice, but will not attract the hatred that Ashcroft did. We’ll have to see what other people are nominated, but I expect that there will be at least one democrat in the mix. So far, so good.

CBS has fired the producer guilty for interrupting CSI with news of Arafat's death. Apparently interrupting a hit show with (true) information is a far greater sin than, say, pushing a bogus story about the President's guard service. But at least we know they're serious about keeping the news department a tight ship.

Let the healing commence.

I think I'm going to try this. Of all the techniques I've ever heard of to deal with my "issue" - this is the best. Procrastinate yourself into productivity! Of course, blogging about it is probably not the best way to start. Maybe I'll clean my office so I can get a clean start.

The ACLU is suing Boston's Logan Airport over what it dubs "behavioral profiling." Basically, if the cops at Logan think you look crooked, they get to stop you.

In November 2002, [Logan] began the nation's first ''behavioral recognition program,'' in which police stop and question passengers with odd or suspicious behavior.

''This program is another unfortunate example of the extent to which we are being asked to surrender basic freedoms in the name of security,'' said John Reinstein, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. ''This allows the police to stop anyone, any time, for any reason.''

Is the ACLU out of its tree? The suit was brought on behalf of a guy who, though he was treated rudely, was let go without incident. Moreover, do we really want to prohibit our airport screener-people from stopping the sketchy?

... then again...

Let's be honest. Apart from the obvious shortcomings and frivolity of this suit, will searching the nervous gain us much? From what I understand, your average suicidal fanatic exhibits great calm as they commit mass slaughter. Just a thought.

What the hell, ACLU?

Jeremy Blachman of Crescat Sententia has done a horrible, wonderful thing: taken samplings of recent Lexis/Nexis headlines about the Boston Red Sox Base Ball Squadron and Palestinian Ghoul Yasser Arafat and swapped key words. To wit:

"Successors jostle for position as Red Sox cling to life"
"Red Sox alive but condition is 'very complex', say French"
"Arafat has little hope of returning to the Bronx"
"Red Sox death to be announced Tuesday"
"Arafat beats long odds; Mo's blown save gives him life"
"Israel says it is preparing for rise in violence after Red Sox death"
"Red Sox condition still a mystery as Palestinian leaders head to Paris"
"Arafat fans destined to suffer"
"Red Sox linger"
"Fenway to rescue; Arafat hopes old ballpark can save him"
"With Red Sox between life and death, minds turn to 'day after'"
"Arafat hopes to 'shock the world'"
"Rivals on Red Sox death watch"
"Not in danger -- Officials deny Red Sox are dying"
"Ortiz 12th inning homer keeps Arafat's hopes alive"
"Aides want Red Sox dead, wife says"
"Arafat hopes for 'monster' comeback"

Does it make me a bad person if I think this brings the funny?