Jephnol

I recently acquired a Kitchen Aid food processor and I’m having fun. I put together a salsa that rocked.

Vine ripe tomatoes
Sweet onion
Jalapeño pepper
Serrano pepper
Red wine vinegar
Salt

Everything’s to taste.

My wife’s working crazy so I put together some eggs for breakfast the other day and we ate them with the salsa.

The eggs cooked like this:

Caramelize sweet onion in olive oil and butter with a modicum of salt.
Crush and dice a few cloves of garlic and then toss them into the onions along with some tequila splashed into the mix.
Thinly sliced sausage cooks with the onion. (I used a jalapeño spice turkey sausage).
Splash some milk into the scrambled eggs and toss in some dry grated Parmesan cheese.
Pour the eggs into a pan at a medium heat and toss in the fixings.
Pepper to taste when the eggs begin to firm up.
Flip the mess on the pan and toss on some Mozzarella cheese.
Treat the cheese with a propane torch because you forgot to warm up the oven.
Serve with wheat toast and a whole bunch of fresh salsa.

I love that food processor, man. And that fresh salsa was so good. I’m making a whole bunch for the Super Bowl. (Go Pats!)

Blogging stopped around the time I started deer hunting this season. I spent a lot of time in the woods to put two in the freezer—one with a bow and the other with a muzzle loader. I'll be putting some time in on the blog now .

My wife is trying to shake a cold, so I thought some salsa might help clear her sinuses. I used the same recipe I wrote about the other day, only I was making more of it so I thought I'd play with things a bit. All I did was add a Scotch Bonnet pepper into the mix. Well, I won't be doing that again anytime soon!

D—said it was a little too hot. Whodathunk. We do a lot of spicy food, especially vindaloo and curry, so I didn't see that coming. I guess next time I'll have to use a Habanera.

Vic Carucci looks for the anti-upset Patriots blowout, Patriots 42, Giants 10.

My friends and I have been predicting a tough Patriots win with the Pats edging out the Giants by a touch down.

Either way we're looking for a Pats’ win and an historic 19-0 season.

Go Pats!

The Giants played hard right from the start and they earned the title of Super Bowl Champions.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The first few pages of his Journey to the End of the Night were turned and I was reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Miller, and Joseph Heller. Céline influenced them all. His writing style was conversational and vulgar, approachable but coarse. His influence goes beyond those I've mentioned and for this reason alone he's worth reading. Be aware, he was a nihilistic, egotistical misanthrope, and the semi-autobiographical Journey to the End of the Night celebrates, rather than hides those qualities. His protagonist Bardamu is not a sympathetic character, and his world is colored by self-serving cynicism and stark observations of a harsh reality stripped of optimism.

Wikis:
Céline
Journey to the End of the Night

Ilford Delta 3200 rated at 800 iso w/ 2 stop push

He thought of her. He remembered how continually he had tormented her and wounded her heart. He remembered her pale and thin little face. But these recollections scarcely troubled him now; he knew with what infinite love he would now repay all her sufferings. And what were all, all the agonies of the past! Everything, even his crime, his sentence and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external, strange fact with which he had no concern. But he could not think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have analyzed anything consciously; he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.

Under his pillow lay the New Testament. He took it up mechanically. The book belonged to Sonia; it was the one from which she had read the raising of Lazarus to him. At first he was afraid that she would worry him about religion, would talk about the gospel and pester him with books. But to his great surprise she had not once approached the subject and had not even offered him the Testament. He had asked her for it himself not long before his illness and she brought him the book without a word. Till now he had not opened it.

He did not open it now, but one thought passed through his mind: "Can her convictions not be mine? Her feelings, her inspirations at least...."

She too had been greatly agitated that day, and at night she was taken ill again. But she was so happy--and so unexpectedly happy--that she was almost frightened of her happiness. Seven years, only seven years! At the beginning of their happiness at some moments they were both ready to look on those seven years as though they were seven days. He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.

But that is the beginning of a new story--the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.

Crime and Punishment
Epilogue, Chapter II
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968
- Heda Margolius Kovály

Kovály describes life in Czechoslovakia, first under the Nazis and then the Soviets. Suffering the cruelty of the concentration camps and then the privations of the Soviet era, she casts light on a history that should not be forgotten.

Under A Cruel Star is a quick, but unforgettable read. It brings to mind the film The Lives of Others—as art that pushes aside illusions and starkly illuminates a horrid time in world history. This is a book unquestionably worth reading.