Starry Wisdom

It may snow, but probably won’t in San Francisco this weekend. Either way, I doubt there will be freakish rain like there was the other day to get water in the basement.

So the guy who didn’t make it out Saturday came out today and talked to my downstairs neighbor. My suspicious is likely correct, and it’s a caulk job that’s needed, something I am sure I can tackle, once it gets a bit drier out.

Mackenzie and I had Suki from [Super Duper Fantastic] and RV over for dinner. As has been my trend when having people over for dinner, I made Zuni Roast Chicken and Bread Salad. They actually brought the chicken over this weekend (hurray for the Whole Foods sale last week!), and brought a delicious side of broccoli and kale.

While there is a bit of plan-ahead on the recipe, and it’s sort of involved, it takes less than 90 minutes to prepare, so it is suitable for on occasional weeknight. Do you have any go-to recipes that you make when you have company over for dinner (particularly on a weeknight)?

The upshot of roasting two chickens in less than two weeks is that I have been able to finally, really get the hang of chicken carving.

This is a picture of an overnight ‘omelet’, an incredibly satisfying weekend brunch food, albeit one that requires a little bit of forethought to have. Basically you need to do all the prep work the night/afternoon before, and then spend an hour waiting for this savory bread pudding to bake, all the while smelling its deliciousness. Well it’s worth it.

Overnight Omelet, from America’s Test Kitchen Cooking for Two 2010

serves 2

1 tablespoon unsalted butter, softened
2 slices high-quality white sandwich bread
3 ounces cheddar cheese, shredded (about 3/4 cup)
3/4 cup milk (recipe says whole, lowfat works fine)
2 large eggs
1/4 cup grated onion
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1/8 teaspoon hot sauce

1. Grease a 3-cup baking dish (about 7 1/4 by 5 1/4 inches). Spread the butter on one side of each slice of bread, then cut the bread into 1-inch pieces. Scatter half onto the prepared dish and sprinkle with half the cheese. Repeat with the remaining bread, and then cheese.
2. Whisk the rest of the ingredients together in a bowl, then poor evenly over the bread. Gently press down on the bread to help it soak up the egg mixture. Cover tightly with plastic wrap an refrigerate for 8 least 8 and up to 24 hours.
3. When ready to bake, adjust and oven rack to the middle position and head oven to 350 degrees. Unwrap the dish and bake until golden brown and puffy, about 1 hour. Let cool 5 or so minutes before serving.

You can vary this basic recipe quite easily, varying cheese and adding additional dry ingredient, but be careful to not disturb the bread matrix too much.

Today is a federal holiday here in the United States, Presidents’ Day, née Washington’s Birthday (observed). It’s a very common holiday for workers outside of government to get off, but alas, my company does not give us the day off. Instead, we get a holiday on Martin Luther King day, since being PC is more important than being patriotic!

Anyway, the great part about working on this holiday is that there is almost no traffic. Today’s drive to work was approximately as fast as possible, taking speed limits into account. Hitting every green light might take it down from 14 minutes to 12 minutes, but the chances of hitting every green light has to be almost zero.

This all being said, my favorite winter holiday is Casmir Pulaski Day. Sufjan Stevens wrote a song about it, sort of, not really.

The contractor wasn’t able to make it. He won’t be able to make it until next saturday. I’m going to call a leak specialist tomorrow, in the meantime.

Doesn’t this sound like an Encyclopedia Brown mystery. Well, I bet the smartest boy in the world could solve this problem lickety split, but I’m currently waiting on the guy who did some ‘pest work’ when we bought this old house in July (rebuilt a side deck, capped the foundation to rise over grade in one corner, bolted rear of frame to foundation) to come take a look at a minor leak situation in the basement.

This happened once before in my tenure living here (but I was out of town, and only heard about it from the downstairs neighbor), but this time I can see from myself. There is a good half cup of water accumulated in the front of the basement, suspiciously close to where there are cutouts in the siding and where the electric boxes are. This second time there was also a second, smaller intrusion in the back part of the basement, also near some cutouts.

Hopefully it correlates to my suspicion and it’s a leak around a cutout, so it will be easy to fix. Hopefully…

That’s the weather. More on this later.

This week’s community, while no epic Dungeons and Dragons episode (oh yeah, RE a previous entry, Freaks and Geeks also had a D&D episode, although no cast member dressed as a Drow in it :(), featured everyone’s favorite blind engineer/book reader – Levar Burton.

And also on the subject of community, it turns out that Donald Glover (Troy) has an alter ego, the rapper Childish Gambino. Please use headphones to listen at work:

I recently read How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel by Charles Yu. I actually read it on my iPad, which I will discuss a bit more about below.

The book itself is a novel, loosely, in that it is fictional and has a story. However, it’s not a very traditional novel, even for science fiction. It’s pretty much an excuse to play around with the ‘what ifs’ that we’ve all thought about time travel. The sort of things that made Fry immune to the Brain Spawn on Futurama. But also what happens if you do something to your future self – that will also get done to you when you are that future self.

The point is, it’s a novel, but it’s more of a bunch of musings on time travel, encased in a novel and world that are crystalized enough to contain it. It’s a very funny book, and I enjoyed its humor almost as much as the philosophical musings.

As I mentioned above, I read this on my iPad, using the kindle reader application. This is the first time I used the iPad for that purpose, and I’ve found that its pretty great for reading in bed, and also for taking on a plane trip (save for the no reading until 10,000 feet and during landing). The version of the book for the iPad reader in particular had additional content (color pictures and a link to a pretty sweet youtube video about the apparent lack of free will).

Mackenzie and I have been watching the tv show “Freaks and Geeks” (1999-2000) on DVD via Netflix lately. I never saw the show in the first run, but when they reran it soon after I started watching, and enjoyed it a lot. The show has held up well over the past 10 years, and while it’s sad that it was cancelled so quickly, the good news is that it never got a chance to get less than awesome.

There are so many awesome guest stars on the show – Rashida Jones, Shia Labeouf, Jason Schwartzman – so many people that would later get much more notoriety. And of course, the Jason Siegel, Seth Rogan and James Franco all had their first appearances in this show.

If you’ve not had a chance to see the show, I recommend giving it a watch.