Zombie Lapdance

Here’s how things stand right now: The slush pile is getting consistently cleared, thanks to Elle’s hard work.

And the editorial board has even approved a few more of thes stories for publication, but we’re still far short of a full roster for the next issue.

Meanwhile, Sanjay2, the official Space Squid photocopier continues to give me trouble. I can only print off thirty copies at a time before it makes copies with ugly dark streaks. We’ve decided that this is the last time we print off an issue in my closet like a bunch of hoodlums. Two thousand copies? That takes a long time to run off.

It works well enough that the issue is getting out on the street. The current issue is now available at a number of drop points in the Austin area, including Quack’s Bakery, Monkeywrench Books, and Domy. More drop points will have issues as I get around to biking past them.

Here’s something I made this morning. It’s called a girdle scone, or if you’re speaking to someone non-Scottish and you wish to avoid confusion, just call it a griddle scone.

I ate this fresh off the pan, but I always thought it tasted better split down the middle and re-toasted with butter and jelly.

Girdle scones were one of four things I cooked while going to college (the other ones being spaghetti carbonara, stir-fried rice with tofu and habaneros, and crepes). I would grill up several pounds of scones, and my roommates and I would eat it with butter while watching Chow Yun-Fat movies and talking about how much we admired the ethereal beauty of Blossom’s friend Six.

They’re pretty simple to make, possibly the fastest and easiest way to consume flour. Most of the recipes online are from Scottish tourism sites, but they’re pretty much identical to the recipes I used.

2 cups flour
1/2 t soda
1/2 t of cream of tartar (what does the cream of tartar do? nobody knows)
1/2 t baking powder
2 cups Buttermilk (I almost never have buttermilk on hand, so I usually just add vinegar to regular milk to curdle it)
2 T butter (preferably melted)
1 T sugar or honey (although the Scots use "golden syrup" which just sounds naughty)

You mix it all up in that order and it should form a slightly sticky dough. Then you form it into thin patties and cook it on a griddle. You can either slightly grease or lightly flour the pan. I prefer the latter.

I spent my entire college career trying to find the perfect combination of scone thickness, griddle temperature, and cooking time, and it’s always eluded me. I think that if I had let the scones cool a little before slicing them open it would have turned out a lot better.

Sometimes a man just wants to sit in the sun and enjoy a bag of cheese rings, a can of macadamia-flavored canned coffee, and a Vietnamese desert cup.

The desert cup was a bit of a trip. The white fungus gave it a crunchy tripe-like texture, while the longan and Chinese apple gave it the taste of elementary school style canned fruit. And the seaweed, while vaguely resembling boiled apple peels, infused the concoction with a vaguely fishy scent.

And did I mention the gelatinous cubes of agar on the bottom?

Later in the day, unable to contain myself, I broke into the Chiz Curls.

It’s always good to see that Cheetos have a thousand cultural permutations.

Another desert cup thing that I found sitting out unrefrigerated at the MT Supermarket. It contained tapioca pudding, fruit and the obligatory seaweed.

Sweetened seaweed. Why isn’t that in more deserts?

La Mexicana, good for some breakfast tacos, followed by breakfast pastries.

Once you resign yourself to the fact that Mexican pastries will never be as sweet as their Northern counterparts, you appreciate them for being flaky and buttery.

I’m also resigning myself to beans as a desert food. Here’s some frozen bean mochi.

The tender and gooey rice dough hid a pocket of sweet beans, while the sesame seeds gave it a nutty crunch.

On impulse I bought a bag of brightly colored tapioca chips, only to find that they were completely inedible. The tapioca created a waxy, transparent film that was as hard and as unyielding as a plastic model of a P-51 Mustang. After some googling research, I tried dropping the tapioca chips in hot oil, and a magnificent transformation occurred.

What was once impervious, crackled, puffed, and swelled to become chips that were as crunchy as they were greasy.

I’ve been eating the tapioca chips with a small stash of ready-to-eat Indian meals. I’ve blogged about these before, they’re a complete traditional dish in a foil pack.

If I had a pantry full of these (which is actually within my financial means, they’re that cheap), civilization could collapse and I would be living in luxury while the zombies ate the rest of you fools.

That would give me the time to work on my budding betel nut addiction. I found a Bangladeshi market that sells pan leaves, the alchemical missing ingredient that turns betel-nut supari from menthol-tasting breath freshener into an exotic and unregulated stimulant.

The first time I chewed a pan and betel nut wad, my mouth filled with a gush of flavorful saliva, and then I worked for four hours straight and crashed into a dreamless sleep.

From a Korean market, some un-seasoned bacon.

There was no salt and no smoke flavor. Which is to say it tasted just like pork, but it looked like bacon.

I finally figured out how to make gorditas (which is Spanish for "little fatty").

You fry up some masa in patties that are two or three times as thick as a normal corn tortilla. You can add some oil to the masa and to the pan itself to give the gorditas a bit of a crunch.

Then you just slice open a pocket and add your favorite breakfast taco fillings. It’s the perfect blending of a sandwich, pita pocket, and taco!

I’ve just started exploring the possibilities of encasing LEDs in plastic resin. The downside is that the resin, until it sets, smells like the Houston suburb of hell. Plus it’s incredibly expensive, especially after you add in the costs of the necessary safety equipment.

But it’s pretty neat looking. This week I built a lighting base for a beam tree I happen to have around the house.

I said earlier that I could only find one really good folly house in the Austin area, but there’s also this one, down south near South First.

It used to be a church, but now it’s a castle-themed bed and breakfast or something along those lines. It even has a "moat" for swimming laps.

…if you recall my campaign to set myself up as the king of Innsmouth Free Press #2, I’ve been on the IFP listserve for a while, the upshot of which is that I was able to snag a promotional CD of Lovecraftian-inspired music.

Filled with scary Lovecraftian arcana.

The album is "Eldritch Musicks" by The Contrarians. All the descriptions of the band make reference to Blue Oyster Cult, which means that they play some reasonably trancy acoustic guitar while singing about the dweller on the threshold and the haunter in the dark.

I really like the first part of the opening track, a dissonant and eerie cacaphony.

Maybe you read my story, "Beneath the Red City," on Innsmouth Free Press a couple months ago. Maybe you didn’t. That’s not important.

What’s important is you want to vote for me, by going to the site and saying that it was your favorite story of the issue. They don’t even ask for your email, you just have to click on the survey form.

Showing your feelings for me has never been easier.

These pictures have been collecting in my harddrive. None is really worth a blog entry in of themselves, and they don’t really fit any particular themes. But I’m too cheap with my data to just file them away without doing anything with them, so I saved them for a rainy blog day like today.

I took this photo at one of the apartment complexes on Manor Rd. The building is a series of efficiencies inhabited almost exclusively by 20-something hipsters.

It’s interesting because every door has ten pounds of plastic-wrapped phonebook leaning against it, phonebooks that had already been sitting there for several days by the time I took the pictue. No one in complex has any particular use for the things. It’s been years since I’ve used a phonebook myself (or owned a phone serviced by a local phone company). I suspect we won’t be seeing sights like this for much longer.

Here’s Julia at the Larry Craig bathroom in the Minneapolis airport.

I used the stall immediately next to the one where Senator Larry Craig was arrested (which was occupied). I would have hung around for a while to see if the guy next door poked my feet, but I got cold feet (so to speak).

It was over a year that FEMA was renting out the old JC Penny at the Highland Mall, doing continued relief work or something related to hurricane Ike. They’re gone now, leaving an empty department store and a failing mall.

This is a backyard addition on the East Side.

When I lived out there I saw it go from an incongruous tower of cinder blocks to this somewhat neat pink thing. I was thinking of featuring it in an article about Austin folly houses, but I couldn’t find many other examples of preposterous architecture.

Walnut Creek is about twice as long as any other creek in the Austin area. It seems to have water flowing even in the peak of summer. And when it rains, the flood waters leave all the litter and crap of the East Side on trees next to the creek.

The Aquadome is a concrete hemisphere stuffed with tropical and marine fish.

In their back lot there’s a series of overgrown water features, filled with turtles, goldfish, and aquatic plants.

The Round Rock Outlet Mall. A place that I would never visit voluntarily. At night, its concrete avenues echo eerily with muzak and the distant screaming of children.

This donut shop sits in the shadow of an elevated highway.

Under a picnic table umbrella, men gather to play Chinese chess. At the counter inside you can see the regulars, four or more men sitting nursing their coffee and a fifty-cent donut. Each is of a different ethnicity and cultural background. At any one time there isn’t a single shared language across the group. But they are happy and converse together as equals. The one thing they have in common is they are all retired. This is why they lived. To spend their last days at the corner donut shop with their neighbors.

I often wish I was a regular there.

I’ve had this dream of one day becoming a loving and nurturing abuela. To that end I have radically improved my tortilla manufacturing capabilities.

Armed with a tortilla press and some instant masa flour, I realized that I was making tortillas that weren’t anywhere near as wet and greasy as I would expect a corn tortilla to be. So I got the wet masa in a bag.

Five pounds of fresh tortilla goop for only two bucks! Corn meal is one of those instances where the cost and content of human food approaches that of animal feed.

No two ways about it, you can’t press the tortilla straight onto the metal of the press. You need wax paper or plastic.

Step two of the authentic tacos at home project is to get some meat. As it turns out, the local guero supermarket actually sells barbacoa in a pre-cooked bag.

Let’s zoom in on the relevant part:

Que sabroso!

You want to spice up that barbacoa taco a bit? Maybe you should try some of Jay’s homemade habanero pickles.

Is it hot? Why would a jar of habanero slices, habanero seeds, and vinegar be hot? Feel free to heap it on.

Remember that dried lutefisk, or "stockfish," I dragged back from Cranfills Gap? Well, it was stinking up my room, even when wrapped in two layers of plastic bags, so I had to do something with it (not just hang it up on wall with ornaments).

As it happens, the Italians frequently cook with stockfish, and they don’t prepare it with lye. They prepare it by re-hydrating it, and then frying it in olive oil and adding tomato sauce.

You know, the way any reasonable human would try cooking it.

I don’t want to sound racist or anything, but I think the Italians might be intrinsically superior to my people.

This is what the stockfish looks like after several days of soaking in water and salt.

It’s swollen significantly. After the second water change most of the smell disappeared. I was supposed to pound it to break up the fibers before the re-hydration, but it still seemed very palatable.

It was not easy to peel off the skin.

Which was surprisingly tough.

I’ve saved it. I’m considering turning it into a purse or something.

Then came the dusting in flour and spices.

Then the frying.

In honor of the Tuscany people, I also made tomato sauce with pasta.

It was pretty crispy and still a little chewy, but it didn’t taste half bad. If I had a pantry with stacks of stockfish, I would eat this every week. If nothing else it looks a lot better than lutefisk.