Dinner tonight: Grilled pepper/lime juice marinated Mahi Mahi Steak with French cut green beans and an anchovy/Roma Tomato Salad with balsamic. Drinks: Grapefruit Negroni. [Grapefruit juice, seltzer, bombay sapphire gin, campari, lime.] Total cost: ~$6.00. Yes, you read that right. I was pretty excited today at King Soopers [yes, I shop the Colorado equivalent of shop and stop or safeway, I could go to Whole Foods or Ideal Market and pay twice as much for the same food, but prefer not to.] Amyways, they had FRESH, unfrozen Mahi Mahi and Yellowfin Tuna steaks at a great price, like really quite reasonable, so I stocked up on a few of each, dinner for the next week! The greens of course are cheap and available all year round in many varieties. so there you have it. just plan ahead a bit, don't be afraid to get creative with seasoning [as a rule of thumb, I try to group like flavors together, but everything else is open game.]. Seasoning for the fish is lime juice [1 lime, squeezed], dash of fresh-group pepper, a little pre-mixed lemon-pepper seasoning [any will do], and a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, marinate for 2 hours in fridge while I go to the climbing gym and, voila! sear in an open skillet on medium high 10-12 minutes or until medium-rare and there you go. The Negroni is very easy to make and is a classic Italian dinner drink, which can be modified with grapefruit or pomegranate juice quite easily to make a more robust cocktail. yum!!!
dinner last Friday night... Wild Salmon Chipotle burgers on Sourdough with dijon and mixed green, and a glass of Stumpjumper 2006 Chardonnay, a great inexpensive white wine that goes excellently with fish. You can buy the salmon burgers already-made at Whole Foods or Ideal Market, rather reasonably too I feel for the quality, roughly $6 for 2. Delish.
Stumbled on this fantastic little photo-article in the New York Times this morning. The premise is that Sweden, along with other European countries, has begun to label foods with the approximate Carbon footprint of a food item, using a government-monitored system to "carbon declare" foods, say, a an oatmeal box that reads ".87 Kg. of CO2 produced per kg. product." A fascinating and superb idea, and something I would love to see the U.S follow suite on!
On A similar note, here's another great link for local readers:
A new Tesla Motors dealership has just opened in Boulder; my roommate Alex was present for the opening fanfare this past Friday evening [which I'm sad I missed, not becuase I know much about cars but becuase it was catered by The Kitchen, one of Boulder's best resteraunts!]
Anyways, Tesla has actually been around for quite some time, dating back to famous electrical engineer and physicist Nikola Telsa, who , in addition to his revolutionary work on electromagnetism, is credited with being the first to point out to absurdity of the gasoline engine compared to the AC engine for motor vehicles. some hundred years later, the fruits of his ingenuity have finally blossomed in the form of these sleek, climate-conscious vehicles, which are the first serial-produced EV road-ready vehicles in the world.
I suppose if I wanted to be the cynical earth scientist that I am, I could point out the inherent flaws in the logic that electrical vehicles are vastly 'cleaner' than their gasonline-powered counterparts, given the uncertainly of the source of the electricity you draw off the grid when you plug-in your new Tesla Roadster, and the high probability it is coming from fossil fuel sources, such as coal or natural gas powered plants. It is, however, a definite step in the right direction. Just don't get too high and mighty with me bwefore you prove that the electricity your powering your swanky new EV with comes soly from solar or wind power. Or nuclear. Which is a seperate issue entirely. [and one I would love to argue the merits/pitfalls of some other time.]
For those with $100k to spend, I'd say an new roadster is a fine investment, though.
On a seperate and less optimistic note, it is really upsetting to still see headlines like this on a regular basis:
While the media focus in Obama's adminstration may have shifted to Afghanistan, Iraq is still very much an active war zone, and the insurgency, as the American militiary prescence choses to call them, has come to mean an ill-defined mix of religious extremists, former Hussein supporters, and everyday people who are fed up and angry at a forced occupation of their country that seems to be producing more bad than good.
Two resounding themes seem to be present in all this violence: religion and goodwill misplaced by greed. I suppose that's the story of most of the war in the history of the world, but it seems this situation is doubly-compounded the fact that while Iraqi's are fueling the religous issues, it is laregely the American presence that is catalyzing the outlash of insurgent violence, to the point that "insurgent" has just come to mean any Iraqi who doesn't agree with the American occupation and the puppet goverment we have installed.
Real peace will come to Iraq, first we have to respect and trust the Iraqi people, and allow them back their dignity which was been stripped by both Saddaam and a conflicted, uncertain war of the past 5 years.
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