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Thursday, June 23, 2011

Useless Noise

Lately I've been annoyed by useless noise on the road, and when I say useless noise I mean honking. Don't get me wrong, honking has it's rightful place in driving, and I'm in full support of using it at the right time, but people here honk for stupid reasons.

You honk when someone is stopped in the middle of the road for no reason, you honk when the light turned green 30 seconds ago and the person in front of you is too busy talking on their cell phone to notice, you honk when someone cuts across six lanes and cuts right in front of you. Those make sense. What doesn't make sense is to honk while sitting in traffic that is obviously not moving for a reason that you can't see because you're 18 car behind the problem. Yet somehow people do this ALL the time. Everyone seems to honk in situations where nothing will be changed by honking. It's as if they think, oh, this whole lane of traffic isn't moving, maybe if I show that I'm annoyed then everyone else will decide to go too. No, actually, everyone else is just as annoyed as you, but they realized that nothing is going to change by honking.

I don't actually use my horn very often in general because I tend to verbally assault bad drivers from the privacy of my car, but I have used it more frequently here since people do stupid things. I'm not about to honk at traffic though, because I'm pretty sure it won't do anything. Maybe it's just some people's expression of rage, but to me it just seems pointless.

For me, honking can be dealt with like merging. You do it when you need to. If you're in a critical merging situation and your lane is ending, then yes, I will let you in. If you're just cutting over lanes randomly and not trying to exit, make a turn or merge on to a highway then I don't feel the need to be nice. The same thing with honking; if you are in a critical situation that requires action, then you honk, otherwise you just go about your business.

In closing, I present this picture that I found of a discreetly modified street sign in NYC. No need to say more.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Quiche Number Two and Grandma's Sauce


Somehow my quiche posts seem to coincide with pasta. Actually, I just haven't gotten around to the pasta post until now.

Last weekend I decided to finally make grandma's sauce. Every Italian family thinks they make the best sauce, but obviously mine is right. There's not a lot involved in the recipe but it does call for a 3 hour simmer, so I have been putting it off. I found a pretty neat Italian supermarket recently and so I had purchased a bit of chopped sirloin to make meatballs with. Unfortunately it sat in my fridge for a number of days so I had to toss some of it. The rest I made in to very makeshift meatballs. I forgot to buy breadcrumbs so I mixed up Parmesan cheese, parsley, egg and some bread that I toasted up in the pan quickly, together with the meat. It had a little trouble holding its shape, but it wasn't bad tasting. I fried them up in a pan and then put them aside to go into the sauce at the end. I was worried that the meat I had cooked also went bad but it turned out to be just fine. The sauce is pretty good, somehow not as good as grandma's, even though I fried up some garlic to put in it. It is nice to have some decent sauce now.

Today, quiche is the name of the game. I've had a crust in the freezer for quite a long time and finally decided it was time to use it. I also froze my excess collard greens from a few weeks ago and it seemed like a good experiment. Once again, I didn't quite have the right ingredients so instead of milk and/or yogurt I had milk and sour cream. Same principle though. The collards are a new twist as well.

I fried up some garlic and onions and just for fun I put in some fake bacon for more flavor. The fake bacon doesn't really get crispy, which is really the only issue, but it still adds a nice flavor. I guess it's sort of a twist on quiche Lorraine.

The big problem is still with the crust because it's not a very good crust. It got stuck and kinda broken and its a bit freezer burned maybe. Otherwise, it cooked well, the sour cream was a success, the quiche has a smokey sort of flavor, which is a bit of a change from my normal quiche. This is much more of a quiche win than last time!