Kali Postrech-Raszewski 1994-April 30, 2012

Good kitty.

Solution below the fold...

Uh oh! Hope it's friendly!

Fortunately, Dylan brokers a peace agreement and makes a new friend.

• 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into cubes
• ½ cup olive oil
• ¼ cup balsamic-flavored vinegar
• ½ tsp whole coriander seeds
• ¼ tsp white pepper
• ½ tsp fajiat seasoning (Note: Whatever google tells you, this is not a misspelling of "fajita")
• 1 medium onion, sliced thin
• 1 cup pine seeds
• 1 bunch asparagus (about 2 cups), bias-cut
• ¼ tsp ground coriander
• 1 cup finely chopped parsley
• ¼ tsp ground ginger
• ¼ tsp tandoori spice
• ¼ tsp garam masala
• ½ tsp garlic, minced
• 1 can garbanzo beans (ie chickpeas), drained
• 1 3/4 cup yogurt
• Salt
• 1 tbsp heavy cream

Mix balsamic and olive oil with coriander, pepper and fajiat and marinade for 2 hours.

Put the pine seeds in a large skillet over high heat. Once they start to get toasty, add the chicken complete with the marinade, then add the onions. Sautee for 3-5 minutes, then reduce heat to medium. Add asparagus, spices and parsley, then chickpeas. Cook, stirring, for 5 minutes, then stir in 1 cup of the yogurt. Reduce heat to medium-low and cover. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes. Add remaining yogurt and salt to taste. Remove from heat and stir in cream.

• 4 pieces of bacon, cooked and crumbled
• 2-4 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 small onion, diced
• 2 oz Baby Portabello mushrooms, diced
• 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into pieces
• 3 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp flour
• 6 oz queso dip
• ½ cup milk
• 2 oz cheddar cheese, shredded
• 2 cans whole kernel corn, with liquid
• 2 cups chicken broth
• ½ diced hot cherry peppers
• ¼ tsp dill weed
• ¼ tsp celery seed
• ¼ tsp cayenne pepper
• ½ paprika
• 2 Tbsp heavy cream

In oil, sautee, separately but in no particular order, the onion, mushroom, and chicken pieces, removing each and setting aside with the bacon. Retain any liquid that cooks out of anything.

Melt butter and whisk in the flour. Cook for about 3 minutes. I like to use an unbleached whole-wheat flour and a white truffle butter for this. The downside of unbleached flour is that it's harder to gauge the right amount of cooking for the roux.

Stir in the queso, milk, and any liquids you got while cooking the other ingredients and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium low and add cheese, a little at a time. You're going to reach your maximum thickness after this backs down from a boil, so keep that in mind as you add liquid later.

At this stage, I chucked everything in the fridge and waited until the next afternoon. I assume you can just push on. Add the corn, complete with the liquid, and stir it together. If, unlike me, you remember it, run one or both cans of corn through a food processor first. At this point, you can add all the ingredients I've been having you set aside (Bacon, chicken, mushrooms and onions). Add chicken broth until you reach the desired thickness. Bring to a simmer, stirring frequently.

Add the peppers, dill, celery seed, paprika, and cayenne and cook on low for at least an hour. Finish with some cream

1. It's the dead of winter, and not good barbecue weather
2. I don't own a smoker
3. Despite enjoying the magical texture of meats cooked low and slow, I do not especially like the sweet and smoky flavors of barbecue

• 2 lb bacon
• 1 lb Lean Ground Beef
• 2 cups bread crumbs (For a healthier choice, we used Original Flavor Fiber One cereal, pulverized in a food processor)
• 12 oz spaghetti sauce
• 1 Onion, minced
• 4 eggs
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 3 cups Ricotta Cheese
• 2 cups Mozzarella Cheese, shredded
• 1 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
• 1 lb bulk pork sausage
• 1/4 tsp basil
• 1/2 tsp oregano
• 1/2 cup milk or cream
• 1 cup Cremini ("Baby Portabello") mushrooms, sliced

Weave about a pound of uncooked bacon into a sheet. Depending on how your bacon is cut, this should be something on the order of 6-8 slices by 5-6 slices, making a bacon checkerboard pattern. A tight weave is best, but having done this, I can assure you that's not going to happen. If your bacon is cut like mine was, this will use up one pound of bacon plus two slices from the second pound. Fry the remaining bacon and set aside. Based on the cut of your bacon, it is probably safe for you to eat approximately 3 slices of the bacon while you are working, provided you wash your damned hands every time you touch raw meat.

Mix the beef, half the onion, 2 tbsp of the spaghetti sauce, the garlic powder, and 2 eggs, kneading thoroughly. Press the beef into a thin patty over top of the bacon. You should end up with a contiguous layer of beef that almost-but-not-quite covers the bacon. Keep it thin, but you need something with structural integrity.

Mix the 2 cups of the ricotta, mozzarella, 3/4 cup Parmesan, garlic, basil and oregano. Take 1/2 cup of the mixture and add milk or cream until it forms a thin, spreadable paste. Spread this thin onto the beef layer. Lay four strips of cooked bacon across this, oriented along the longer dimension. Set the rest of the cheese mixture aside for now.

Mix the sausage with the remaining bread crumbs and form a second patty atop the last layer. The sausage will have somewhat less mass than the beef, so keep that in mind when forming this layer. This one can be a bit smaller than the one below it and should be thin. Spread the remaining spaghetti sauce over the sausage, like saucing a pizza. Break up the remaining bacon and sprinkle the pieces over the top.

Add 1 egg, the remaining onions, and the mushrooms to the remaining cheese mixture. Spoon that onto the top layer toward the middle along the long dimension. Think "burrito filling".

Now comes the part that is going to blow your mind. VERY carefully, roll the whole thing up as if that beef and pork and bacon was all just a tortilla. If you can pull it off, leave the woven bacon behind as you roll the meat layers, then go back and roll the bacon weave in the opposite direction so that the seams aren't in the same place. But if your layer thicknesses came out like mine did, you're going to have a hard enough time just keeping the insides from falling out.

Roll this monstrosity into a large oven-safe pan. I was going to use the broiler pan, but that proved far too small, and I ended up using the lasagna pan instead.

Finally, take what's left of the ricotta, Parmesan and egg and mix them together. Add cream and milk until you have something of a sort of spackle consistency -- thicker than what we did for the inter-meat layer. Press this over the outside of the bacon log. Now, this step I'm not quite committed to. I think it was good in general, but it stopped the outer bacon layer from getting crispy. If it's not too much work, I'd try putting the log in the broiler for a while first, maybe turning it over after a few minutes. That would let the outer bacon crisp up before we sealed in all the meaty goodness with a layer of cheese.

Bake at 350°F until it reaches an internal temperature of 160°F. This took me somewhere between 2 and 3 hours. You may or may not want to baste the log as fat liquefies and drains out. Leah thought the meat was too dry, but on the other hand, I thought the the outer cheese coat browned up and gave it a nice texture. In any case, it's best to find some way to avoid letting it sit in a bath of its own fat for the entire cooking time. I doubt it would have held up if I'd put a rack underneath it, but maybe I could have devised something.

Extrapolating from our current usage rates, this should make somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-12 servings. Do not attempt to eat the whole thing in one sitting. Or you will die. Oh, this thing is like 4 pounds of meat and another two pounds of cheese, so for the love of God have some green vegetables with it.

for x in *.jpg; do convert -geometry 1280x1024 "$x" output/"$x"; done

Having a rich command line available to me lets me do operations on large sets of data in batches, and that's a good thing because that's what computers are good at.

But that's a bit of a tangent. When I am working in linux, I often find myself dealing with big numbers. File sizes. Free memory. Free disk space.

Because I rip all my DVDs to the hard drive, I'm very concerned about free disk space. So I'll run "df":

Filesystem	1K-blocks	Used	Available	Use%	Mounted on
torchwood:/mnt/store0	4326436544	3654545536	671891008	85%	/mnt/store0
saxon:/mnt/store1	2130562560	1073968640	1056593920	51%	/mnt/store1
saxon:/mnt/store2	2145245184	467011584	1678233600	22%	/mnt/store2
badwolf:/mnt/store3	5768575488	4445833216	1322742272	78%	/mnt/store3

But those numbers start to get blurry after a while. Fortunately, df has an option that makes its output "human readable", "-h":

Filesystem	1K-blocks	Used	Available	Use%	Mounted on
torchwood:/mnt/store0	4.1T	3.5T	641G	85%	/mnt/store0
saxon:/mnt/store1	2.0T	1.1T	1008G	51%	/mnt/store1
saxon:/mnt/store2	2.0T	446G	1.6T	22%	/mnt/store2
badwolf:/mnt/store3	5.4T	4.2T	1.3T	78%	/mnt/store3

A lot easier to read. Several of the standard linux commands have a "-h" option -- ls, du, free has a similar "-m" option.

The disadvantage to using the human readable numbers flag is sorting. The standard command for sorting output, sort, has a flag (-n) that will make it handle numbers correctly. But if the numbers have been mangled into ugly human-readable form, this breaks, and suddenly 1G sorts below 10k.

So I wrote this quick-and-dirty little perl script which sorts the lines in a document, properly ordering numbers which have been converted into "human readable" format in the style done by df and du.

In case anyone finds it handy, This is hsort.

Two nights in a row last week, I made a simple casserole by layering left-over baked Macaroni and Cheese with chicken patties, spaghetti sauce, and shredded mozzarella (On night 1, I added meat balls and sun-dried tomatoes. Neither of us cared for the flavor of the tomatoes, though I liked the mouthfeel, and the meat balls didn't really mesh with the other ingredients). On the second night, I decided we needed a green vegetable dish as well, so I made this. Leah loved it, requesting all the leftovers over the next couple of days.

I started on this while giving my son a tour of the kitchen ("This is where food comes from. It's basically like a breast for grownups."), as you only need one hand for the first few steps if you've got the onion diced ahead of time ("If you're ever cooking, son, and you don't know what to make, start by dicing up an onion and sauteeing it in a skillet with some butter. Doesn't really matter what you end up making, some sauteed onions never go amiss.")

• 1 tbsp butter (I used a white truffle butter, but anything's fine)
• 1 onion, diced
• 8 oz sliced green and red bell peppers (Half a bag frozen)
• 2 oz balsamic vinegar (Use the cheap stuff, or mix a teaspoon of the good stuff with red wine vinegar)
• 1 lb spinach, drained (I used half a bag of frozen plus a can because it was what I had on hand)
4 oz artichoke hearts (As per usual, I got a jar of marinated ones from Costco and rinsed them)
• 3 oz goat cheese (This came in 300g packages and I used a bit less than a third)
• 3 tbsp heavy cream
• 1 tbsp hummus (Optional. I happened to have a little bit of leftover hummus that I wanted to use before it went bad)
• 2 oz sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
• 3 tbsp milk

Melt the butter in a large skillet. Cook onions to translucency then add peppers. Deglaze the pan with vinegar. Mix in the spinach and artichokes. In a separate vessel, mix the cream and goat cheese -- your goal here is just to keep the goat cheese from all staying together in a big lump. Add this to the skillet and stir in. Add the hummus and cheese. At this point, between the cheese and the hummus and the solids, you'll be close to having a solid unworkable mess in the skillet. Add milk (and maybe a bit more cream if you like) until you get a thick and creamy but workable consistency. If you taste it now, it will be pretty sour. Cover and cook on low heat for 20-30 minutes. The peppers will release a lot of sweetness that should balance out the flavors. If it's still too sour, stir in some (real) balsamic or madiera.

Special thanks to my mother-in-law, who despite the normal tensions that exist in a mother-in-law/son-in-law relationship, has a pretty solid knack for getting me a Christmas present I really enjoy every year.

This DVD set is pretty top-notch for the price range. The transfer is good but not perfect -- in particular, the title sequence is a little fuzzy, and there is a bit of choppiness in the high-action sequences. The visual quality isn't quite as good as, say, the remastered Doctor Who classic series DVDs, but those run about as much for one six-part serial as this entire season box set. It's still quite good in the less action-heavy sequences, and Soaron cleaned up so nice that I'm half-convinced they just went back in and re-rendered all his models using someone's laptop in their spare time. There are no subtitles or captions, which is unfortunate. Again, easy to forgive under the circumstances, but it's a shame that the hearing-impaired are going to miss out. And, of course, for my own selfish reasons, it would have been helpful to have a transcript I could look at to verify some of the dialog.

The commentary and interviews are great. It's a shame they couldn't get in a few more commentaries, but I can't imagine it's easy to come up with 22 minutes worth of things to say about a show you were involved in a quarter century ago for each of twenty episodes.

Conspicuous by their absence are the direct-to-video animated "Training Videos". I can only guess that the distribution rights for those were different, having been made by Armtic, a now-defunct anime studio. They don't add much to the experience, but it means I'll be toting those three ancient VHS tapes along with me until the day I die. A real collector's edition might have also benefited from something like a commercials gallery, though the quality of the clips they show in the documentary suggests that those may no longer exist in decent quality recordings.

The documentary is a real treat, providing some framing and exposition that goes a long way to help us modern viewers understand the reasons for some of the really bizarre design and storytelling choices, and they talk at length about the direction they would have taken the show in the second season -- a lot of which surprised me, and I'll go over it in length as my review series progresses (Sorry about the hiatus. Sadly, my son doesn't really have the attention span for a half-hour action-adventure yet.). They also debunk and confirm various bits of theoryJMS goes so far as to mention that "people on the internet" had identified rape symbolism in the depiction of digitization. Given what a quick googling of "captain power" and "rape symbolism", I gotta ask: did I just get a shout-out? I've thrown out here.

One of the really weird coincidences I noticed though, was the episode ordering on the DVD: they're in the same order as the order I'd previously announced for my reviews. So that's convenient. The upshot for you folks at home is that I imagine my screen shots will be a lot less grainy and color-corrected.

I will point out this: I wasn't able to get my Power Jet XT-7 to interact with the DVD. They mention the difficulties they had during development getting the toys to work, so my suspicion is that the process of deinterlacing and upconverting that 25-year-old NTSC signal to play on my 1080p screen probably destroyed the carrier signal. I'll see if I can dig out a dumber DVD player and a CRT screen and try again when I get the chance. I also can't rule out that my 25-year-old Power Jet XT-7 just isn't up to it. If you can make it out in the picture, the thing is suffering from a few decades of grime and a couple of missing parts. It does make all the expected shooty-sounds, though it power cycles if you shake it too hard.

In all, this is a great DVD set, well worth the price. I'd probably have paid double for a set with more special features and more work done on the remastering, but at this price, and given the obscurity of the series, it's clearly a labor of love. It's priced like a budget shovelware release, but it makes a really serious effort that you don't usually see with comparable season boxsets for shows of this vintage. Captain Power aficionados have undoubtedly already bought a copy, but if you're just curious: this is worth it. For that matter, if you're a fan of Babylon 5, this is probably worth it just to see an example of JMS developing some of the stylistic elements he would later use.

Next time, I'm going to go into a bit more detail on one of the coolest extras on the DVD. Until then, Power On!

Oh, and one last thing: I'd like to give a small shout-out to CPL of Captain Power Lives!, who has a fantastic collection of images of hard-to-find or unreleased Captain Power toys and links to various other reviews of the DVD set.

• 8 strips of bacon
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 4 celery stalks, diced
• 12 oz baby portabello mushrooms, halved
• Optional: 3 slices of ham, diced
• 8 oz hummus
• 4 tbsp Salsa Con Queso
• 1 tbsp-¼ cup heavy cream or milk
• ½ tsp worcestershire sauce
• 1 tbsp cream cheese

In a large skillet, fry up the bacon until crispy. Take it aside and crumble. Saute onions and celery in bacon grease until tender, then reduce heat to medium-low and add mushrooms. Cook the mushrooms about 5 minutes -- you're not trying to fry the mushrooms all the way through yet. Reduce heat to low. If you want a bit more protein and have some spare ham laying around, toss it in now. Add hummus and queso to the pan and stir. Add cream or milk to thin the sauce to a medium or medium-thick consistency. Add a dash of worcesterchire sauce for flavor and then incorporate the cream cheese. Return the bacon to the pan. If you've got a bit of balsamic vinegar left over, go ahead and drizzle some over the top.

Simmer, covered, over low heat for about 15-20 minutes. Serve over rice.

This makes a very delicately-flavored but savory sauce. I gave some thought to adding some curry powder to kick it up a notch, but it's occurred to us that our son might appreciate it if Leah avoided spicy foods until his stomach gets used to this thing we call "digestion".

Also, this came out a bit oily, so I'd suggest draining off some of the oil before making the roux.

• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 3 boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into large pieces
• 1/3 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp paprika (I used a hot Hungarian paprika. The spiciness was a bit of an issue. If you like the spiciness, maybe try using a cajun seasoning instead of paprika)
• 2 medium onions, diced
• 1 tbsp butter (optional. I used a black truffle butter here)
• 1½ cups chicken broth
• ¼ to ½ cup balsamic vinegar (The real deal. You probably already know that most of the stuff sold as "balsamic vinegar" is just red wine vinegar with molasses. I managed to snag a couple of bottles of Cavedoni Botte Piccola at a substantial mark-down, though it was hard to persuade myself to commit so much of it)
• 3 tbsp spaghetti sauce
• 12 oz baby portabella mushrooms, sliced thick
• 1 tbsp heavy cream

Heat the oil in a large skillet over high heat. In a shallow bowl, mix the flour and paprika. Dredge the chicken pieces and then fry in the skillet until golden brown. Do not overcook. Remove chicken and put aside. Fry onions until nearly translucent. Remove onions and put aside. Add remaining flour (Don't add more than 3 tbsp yet) to pan and stir with a wooden or silicone spoon to form a roux. You can hold back some of the flour if it looks like the roux is thick enough. Melt in the butter if the roux becomes too thick. You should end up with a ball about the size of a small egg.

Deglaze the pan with the chicken broth, incorporating the roux. Whisk in a quarter-cup of balsamic vinegar and the spaghetti sauce. Bring to a boil. Add the mushrooms. Reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, for about half an hour, until the sauce has reduced by about 30-50%. Add the chicken and onions back in about 15 minutes before cooking is finished. Add additional balsamic vinegar to achieve a nice balance of flavors. Finish by stirring in a tablespoon of cream.

• 1 cup frozen mixed vegetables


• 1 bag (16 oz) frozen spinach


• 1/2 lb cream cheese, cut into thin slices


• 1 cup artichoke hearts. (I buy them marinated in oil and vinegar and give them a quick rinse)


• 1 can condensed cream of chicken soup


• 1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup


• 1/2 tsp curry powder


• 1/2 cup heavy cream


• 8 strips of bacon


• 1 oz cheddar cheese, torn into penny-sized chunks


• 2 tbsp ricotta cheese


• 1 tsp grated parmesan cheese

Cook the bacon. In a large bowl, combine two cans of soup, curry powder, and all but 1 tsp of the cream. In a casserole dish, layer, in order, vegetables, spinach, cream cheese, artichokes. Pour the soup mixture over this. Tear the bacon into pieces and layer over the soup. Dot the top with cheddar and ricotta. Drizzle remaining cream over and sprinkle with parmesan.

Cook at 350°F for 1 hour.

• 1 14-oz can (Don't judge me) chopped spinach, drained
• 8 oz Cream of Mushroom Soup (Prepare from 1 can condensed, following directions. Use half)
• 2 oz Jarlsberg cheese, minced
• 2 Tbsp heavy cream
• 1/4 of a large onion, diced
• 2 Tbsp grated Parmesan cheese
• Pinch curry (I used Mohini Indian Fusion Vegetable Blend)
• Salt to taste

Spray a small skillet with non-stick cooking spray. Cook onions for a few minutes. Add spinach, soup, stir. Add Jarlsberg. Cook until spinach starts to stick to the pan, stirring often. Add cream, Parmesan. Sprinkle with curry. Stir. Reduce heat to low and cover.

Go pick up the baby and sit in the recliner with him on your chest. Try not to fall asleep as you comfort the baby. Right before nodding off, ask your wife to turn off the burner and stir. Put the baby to bed.

But being a parent also brings along with it a pretty weighty sense of responsibility. And so, in the months leading up to our formal introduction, I put together this non-exhaustive list. I plan to teach you these things as we go and put them all in their proper context, but just in case, what with all the flu shots and teething and kindergarten and vaccinations and driver's licenses and prom and college and working and marriage you're going to be doing, I miss a couple of these, I wanted to have them all written down here in one place so you can go back and read them yourself once you've learned how to read.

Love,
Dad

1. Always cut the other guy some slack. You don't know what kind of a day he's having. Maybe his mom just died. And then you'd be a jerk.
2. It does not matter that the two words are etymologically unrelated. When you say "niggardly", it will hurt the feelings of some people. Now that you know this, if you use it anyway, you're intentionally hurting them. Don't do that, it makes you a jerk.
3. Don't hurt other people when you can avoid it. When you can't avoid it, don't try to convince yourself that they deserved it.
4. Intent isn't magic.
5. If someone demands you have a completely logically consistent moral system with no room for exceptions or mitigating circumstances, he's trying to trick you into committing to a system that can be manipulated to grind down on those who are already at a disadvantage.
6. If you know it's going to hurt someone and you do it anyway, you did too mean to hurt them.
7. Don't demand someone justify their pain to you. You don't get to tell someone that they shouldn't be upset over a racial slur or a misogynistic joke.
8. From the day you were born, you were better off than 90% of all the people who have ever lived, and the overwhelming likelihood is that nothing will ever happen so terrible that you won't live your entire life better off than 70% of them. Think about that if you're ever tempted to say "Sorry, I got problems enough of my own without being expected to help you out."
9. Every time you tell a racist joke, there's a closet racist somewhere nodding in approval and thinking "Yep, there's a guy who tells it like it is." Every time you tell a rape joke, there's a rapist somewhere nodding in approval and thinking "Yep, there's a guy who tells it like it is." Still seem funny?
10. You can't push a rope. F=MA. Manhole covers are round so they don't fall in. Every engineering problem you will ever encounter can be solved by derivation from these three laws. But not efficiently.
11. No matter how dark it gets, remember: In this place and at this time, there is someone right here, right now, who loves you. No matter what.
12. There is at least one person who is worse off than you are right now. Don't make things worse for them
13. It's tempting, but the thing you feel at the misfortune of others isn't real joy. It's an addictive joy-like form of unhappiness. There's a reason the Germans needed to invent a whole new word for it. Feeling it prevents you from feeling true joy.
14. Test everything. Hold on to the good.
15. Don't be a bully.
16. Permission is the bare minimum you must have. What you really want, though, is an invitation.
17. When someone tells you that you're hurting them, don't try to explain why the thing you're doing shouldn't be hurtful. Stop hurting them.
18. After the second round of Eenie-Meenie-Miney-Moe, the fact that you want to keep going in the hopes of getting a different answer means that you actually know which one you want to pick.
19. On second thought, "Eenie-Meenie-Miney-Moe" has an unfortunate racist backstory. Use this one instead:

    Ippy Dippy My Space-Shippy
    On a course so true,
    Past Neptune and Pluto's Moon
    The one I choose is you
    

20. Pay attention to your surroundings and what you're doing. Especially when driving.
21. Someday, someone is going to say "Oh yeah, if you're so tolerant, you have to tolerate my intolerance!" That person is a douchebag. Tell him so.
22. However tempting you may find it, other people are people. Do not forget that. Do not challenge that. Do not abide others to challenge it.
23. There is no such thing as a neutral stance on racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, islamophobia, or whatever other kind of bigotry is popular when you're reading this. Either you believe everyone is a full person deserving of full rights, equality, and basic human dignity, or you don't. And if you don't, you're a bigot and that's the end of it.
24. Own your decisions. This is even more important than making the right ones. If someone asks you why you did the important things you did in your life, "It just kinda happened," is a lousy answer.
25. If you think a wire may be live, touch it with the back of your hand. Better yet, don't touch it at all.
26. Getting the thing that isn't really what you want, but is cheaper than the thing you want is hardly ever a good deal.
27. People remember you fondly when you make a point of being nice to them.
28. Hold a peppermint patty up to your ear and break it in half some time. The sound it makes is really neat.
29. Learn all the words to the songs you like to sing along to. The other people in the car will thank you.
30. By virtue of your sex, your skin color, the language you speak, the place you live, you carry around a knapsack of privileges that other people don't have. They're not necessarily bad things, but remember that these are privileges, and that not everyone has them. There are things you will take for granted as your god-given right that other people can't do. If you walk down a street alone at night and are attacked, no one's going to say "Well, he shouldn't have been out unescorted." If you fail a math test, no one's going to say "Yeah, those people suck at math."
31. Contrariwise, there will be things other people have to do to keep body and soul together that cross the line of societal acceptability. Don't do those things yourself, but have some empathy for people who have to.
32. Logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority
33. Tipping is not optional. If the service was terrible, you leave a tip, and you also complain to the manager. Waitstaff are paid below minimum wage by an amount that assumes you will tip them, so when you don't, you are stiffing them on their wages. Yes, I know this is a terrible system and we should not let people be paid below the minimum wage on the assumption of tipping. That does not excuse you for not tipping, and anyone who thinks they're striking a blow against the system is an asshole.
34. No means no.
35. Contrariwise, yes means yes.
36. Love isn't a license to hurt someone.
37. Modesty is only a virtue when it's deserved. Don't play down what you're really capable of.
38. People who insist you should always finish what you start don't start enough things. Hardly any that are really worthwhile.
39. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
40. Don't tell strangers that they should smile more.
41. Always use protection.
42. The poor do not exist for you to become a better person by giving to them.
43. If you find yourself apologizing in advance, you've still got time to not do the thing you're apologizing for.
44. Sometimes, you have to break the rules. But if you're not willing to face the penalty if you get caught, then this was not one of those times.
45. This world we live in isn't some kind of immutable law of nature that was inevitably destined to be as it is. It is the result of choices made by a lot of people over a long time. It may be daunting, but this world is your world, and ultimately you get to decide what that means. The world is, at any moment, what you say it is. So say.
46. Sometimes in life, you are going to be in a position where there isn't an option that doesn't harm someone. Take responsibility when it happens. Don't try to come up with a reason that the person who got shafted somehow deserved what they got. You made a choice, and if you can't deal with that, then you made the wrong choice.
47. All things in moderation. When I left for college, your grandfather took me aside, and instead of warning me off of alcohol and drugs and women, he gave me just that one piece of advice.
48. Be passionate when it's called for. There is no virtue in being moderate about the defense of justice, of liberty, of equality.
49. Don't blame the victim. Ever.
50. Do not side with the strong against the weak. End of story. If you're ever unsure, if you're ever unclear on a question like "Should we give tax cuts to the rich, or jobs programs to the poor?" or "Shouldn't we protect the rights of rich straight white male christians to oppress poor black lesbian pagan women as their religion requires?", you just say to yourself "Do not side with the strong against the weak," and then, do the thing that doesn't side you with the strong against the weak. Even if it seems dumb. Even if you've got a good, sound, logical reason for why the weak are in the wrong in this particular case. Do not side with the strong against the weak.

I love you, son.

Before we get started tonight, a couple of kudos to the post-apocalyptic world. I spent a good chunk of last week rummaging through blip.tv for web original series that might make for good watching. In the post-apocalypse department, here's what I found:

• After Judgment: Sort of a spin on Christian End-Times fiction, this is a show set after a "Judgment" based loosely on the 19th century idea of a premillennial "rapture" in which God removes the virtuous before destroying the Earth. In this world, though, God has elected not to visit plague and disaster on the unsaved, but rather has just sort of let the universe wind down. The Earth has stopped spinning, no one is born, no one dies, everything is just sort of more of the same forever and ever. Well, except for some creepy guys in motorcycle leathers who occasionally show up, grab someone, and take them away, never to be seen again. The story is about your average ragtag group who band together to try to find a prophecied back-door into heaven.
• Day Zero: This one only has one episode so far, but it's basically a Zombie Apocalypse (These are Honorary Zombies -- radiation-afflicted mutants altered by the fallout of a nuclear war, rather than the walking dead). The eight survivors are a ragtag mismatched group who, y'know, have to do that whole surviving thing. Did make me scream "SCIENCE DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY!" a few times at such ideas as radiation having "killed off their natural immunity to crystal meth," allowing street drugs to be used as one-hit-kill weapons against the mutants, but fun enough so far.
• Exile: Another zombie apocalypse, this time a legit one. The first (and so far only) episode introduced some interesting characters, and then killed them all. So.
• Necroland: Another zombie apocalypse. This one was too disjointed to for me to really have much of an opinion yet, but does feature a foul-mouthed ten year old girl killing zombies, so there's that.
• The Black Dawn: This one is a plague apocalypse of some sort. Though there's a whole season of episodes, I've only seen one so far, so no opinion yet.
• Zomblogalypse: This one's a lot of fun. The Zombie Eschaton as told by bloggers.

I've got a few more of these in my queue, so look forward to more words about them in the future.

One thread that runs through a lot of these web serials is that the influence of Lost really informs the storytelling. Now, I'm sure Lost is a good show, but I really don't look forward to a generation in which every "castawayAs I mentioned back in my review of Captain Power Episode 1, I view post-apocalyptic drama as being a one of several particularly science-fictiony flavors of the literary tradition of Robinson Crusoe: stories which are largely about the challenge of survival in a hostile world, cut off from the protagonist's home culture."-type science fiction drama has to ape it any more than I particularly like the way that The Road Warrior prompted every post-apocalyptic earth for the next 20 years to look like the Australian Outback.

I don't see what you're complaining about. I didn't find the plot of Lost to be impenetrable in the slightest. Now, could you pass the cocaine? I am dangerously close to coming down.

So let's rewind for a bit to the days before you were contractually obligated to frame your castaway story as a series-long mind-fuck ontological mystery, and see how things were in the world of the future-as-viewed-from-the-Eighties.

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future
Episode 4 (or 3): Final Stand
By J. Michael Straczynski

This one is going to be Tank's character focus episode, which is nice because we're four reviews in yet, and I can count the number of lines from regulars who aren't Cap or Hawk on my fingers. We open with some Bio-Mechs emerging through the inexplicable fog into... What looks like basically the same abandoned factory as every other indoor fight scene so far.

The Putties Mechs wander around, looking for the Future Force, who have cleverly hidden behind and under things, until one of them scans what looks like the air cleaner off a Chevy Vega with his DYMO label maker Deluxe, revealing inside the source of the "Vwoop vwoop" noise that has been driving me crazy for this scene so far. Inside the air cleaner is what looks to be... GLaDOS?

I guess GLaDOS is supposed to be some kind of fake bait transmitter thing, because the commander Bio-Mech immediately announces (say it with me everyone), "It's a trap!"

Excellent piece of deduction on the part of the robotic gentleman.

Hawk (For we can not have a scene without Hawk) and Scout decide to press their advantage by... Immediately revealing their position. Scout jumps out in front of the mechs and, in what seems to be a radically misguided Jayne Mansfield impression, says "Looking for me, boys?"

After few exchanges of laser-fire, Tank decides that he needs to get on the Bizarrely Inappropriate Impressions bandwagon by performing what is going to be his major character shtick for the rest of the series: channelling the Kool-Aid Man.

Tank is such a badass that he manages to decapitate a mech with a single backhand, and his weapon is so powerful that its video toaster laser effects make a sort of "Skoom!" sound effect instead of the usual "Pwoosh!". He even wears an ammo belt even though none of the weapons we will ever see take any kind of ammunition (Except Hawk's nerf launcher). It's Hawk's time to shine, and he does, sending dozens of mechs to meet their maker, including one who he only clips across the hip, which staggers to the ground, then struggles back to its feet, and sort of stands there quaking with terror until Tank fires off the coup de grace. Our hero, everyone!

Now, I know that the Bio-Mechs are meant to be soulless automata, without even the capacity for independent thought and self-awareness of a Warlord Bio-Dread like Soaron, and that is why it is okay that they get slaughtered by the dozens without our heroes ever showing them even a hint of compassion.

But here's the thing. Soaron is a (poorly-rendered) CGI robot. He looks funny. he moves funny. He speaks in clipped sentences and his delivery is over-the-top. Overmind does the detached-psychotic-bedroom-voice thing that HAL 9000 taught us to fear in computers. Lord Dread has a human face, but he's barely mobile -- so far, we haven't seen him so much as rise from his chair -- and he looks like what you'd get if the Borg assimilated Darth Vader. And he's a genocidal lunatic.

The bio-mechs, on the other hand, are actors in suits. Stunt men, no doubt, who are doing a lot of very physical acting. And they don't move like robots. They move like people. They bump into things. They interact with their environment in a physical sort of way. They duck behind things. They stagger. They get clipped across the hip by a bazooka-laser, fall down, and try to get back up. When they die, their bodies twitch and they let out little rasping, rattling death sounds. When the last two mechs try to escape, they don't look like robots attempting an orderly strategic withdraw: they look like routed soldiers who are running for their lives.

That mech Tank shoots is staggering, shaking. I don't imagine that was intentional; just something the stuntman did naturally because he is a human being acting out a very physical scene, and his own humanity shines through. And this is kind of awkward in your Ultra Disposable mecha-mook. Because when Tank head-shots an injured mech that is literally quaking with terror, my sympathies ends up on the wrong side. And when Scout guns down two retreating mechs, then calls out "You're out!" in what seems to be a weak Rex Barney impression, it just seems callous.

Undoubtedly, this would be a lot easier today -- in a big-budget exercise, the Mechs would likely be CG themselves. Ironically, it's possible that if they did a modern re-imagining, Soaron, being a major character who has to interact with other characters, might be the only one of Dread's forces not to be computer generated.

Scout dispatches the last two mechs as they desperately try to escape, and claims their prize from the mech corpses: a Bio-Dread transmitter (Or receiver, as it will be called in the next scene). We switch to the jumpship, where Cap makes his log entry: Stardate 47-7.1. They are on their way to "Sector 7, grid co-ordinates 9 by 5," a place which "Had a name once, but doesn't any more." You know, if Cap has been waxing poetic about how much has been lost in every journal entry for the past 15 years, Ken Burns will be rather spoiled for choice when he goes to pick out good voice overs for his documentary on the Metal Wars.

As I mentioned before, I have no idea how their sector numbering works, but according to the map Hawk pulls up, this nameless sector is Sherman Oaks, in Los Angeles. Which seems strange given that back in episode 1, San Francisco was in sector 19, and the military installation that we tentatively placed on the east coast in "The Abyss" was either Sector 14 or Sector 42, depending on who you ask, and in "Wardogs", we supposed that Sector 7 was in Canada. But perhaps I'm reading too much into the map, because I think it's the same map every time someone pulls up a map screen in this show.

It will take them about an hour to evacuate the civilians from Sector 7, which may not be enough time, as their captured receiver has revealed that a Bio-Dread has already been dispatched to digitize the locals. Now, based on all the clues, can you figure out which Bio-Dread has been sent to Sector 7?

Based on a careful analysis of the facts of the case, I notice that there is a scuff on the left side of your shoe, indicative of some sort of back injury that causes you to favor one side. If I factor this in with the presumed geography of sectors 14, 7, 19 and 7, taking into account the theory we previously established that a date of 47-7.1 corresponds to the first of July, and interpolating from the weather patterns of Los Angeles, assuming current projections of global warming, but also accounting for a drastic reduction in pollution because of the wholesale destruction of humanity and infrastructure, I think I can conclude that the Bio-Dread best suited for this mission would be... Soaron.

You just said that because he's the only Bio-Dread we've ever seen.

Elementary deduction.

Well, this turns out to be a fortunate move for our heroes, since the immutable laws of the universe say that Soaron can not appear in an episode without a dogfight ensuing. This time, as Pilot keeps the Jumpship out of sight, Hawk launches a pair of guided missiles at Soaron. Soaron dogfights one of the missiles, finally destroying it, but is caught off guard when the Jumpship takes a shot at him -- the shot misses, but Soaron, having turned to return fire, receives a Actually, and this one just blows my mind, he isn't hit by the missile. The missile sort of... Shoots him. And then he explodes. The future is WEIRD.guided missile suppository and crashes, hurt bad enough that we may assume it will take him almost exactly one hour to self-repair, plus or minus the amount of complications that will arise before they can start evacuating people.

We cut back to Volcania, where Dread orders Soaron to -- you guessed it -- do exactly what they had already established he was going to do. Repair himself, then go to sector 7 and digitize all the humans. Then Overmind tells Dread that he's got some more artifacts from "Tauron". Oh Holy Crap! I just figured it out! This is actually a prequel to Battlestar Galactica and the Bio-Dreads are really Cylons! This explains EVERYTHING well actually nothing. Oh well. It was a nice thought. We only get a passing glimpse of the artifacts, but they look for all the world like RoboCop and Nimon-from-Doctor-Who action figures. They will not come up again after the next scene, where Dread looks at one for a moment, then sets it on fire. Symbolism!

Cap powers on (We won't see them use the pedestal back at base in this episode or the next one. For a show that so often reuses little set-pieces to show off particular things over and over, they seem bizarrely averse to showing the big flashy version of the transformation sequence) and they exit the Jumpship to survey the devastated-village set. Cap quickly identifies the devastation as, "Marauders. Hit and run. Take what they can and burn the rest. It's bad enough we have Bio-Dreads to worry about. But looters... Humans, preying on other humans."

Someone should thank him for that exposition. It might have been difficult for the audience to sort it out otherwise. Unless, I suppose, they were to actually look around, or pay attention in the preceding scene when we saw one of these marauder fellows peeking out at the heroes from hiding.

Yeah. And for all I respect Tim Dunnigan, frankly, Patrick Stewart would have a hard time keeping this exposition-heavy purple prose from going over like a lead nerf missile, and Tim Dunnigan is no Patrick Stewart. Tank adds, "Marauders hit ze place hahd, Keptin. Throw everybody out."

Hawk is more optimistic: "At least it keeps them out of Dread's hands." Well, given the extended rape metaphor in episode 1, I suppose he might have a point. Better to be assaulted, robbed, possibly murdered or sold into slavery than to be digitized, right? Ick.

The local Marauder, a burly, sort of vaguely Or maybe Irish. Or maybe he just smokes way too much. His voice is all over the place.Australian-sounding guy named Kasko, shouts a taunting warning before stepping out of a ruined building. He's played by Charles Seixas, an actor about whom I have been able to discover absolutely nothing at all other than his filmography. He's hamming it up as a middle-aged-punk type, with the mohawk and the leather, sort of like an evil version of Blank Reg from Max Headroom. But much more like a character lifted directly from The Road Warrior. The major point here is that he's a Punk Rock Type, which is basically '80s shorthand for "This man is a dangerous and unsavory element from a dystopian future". Tank recognizes Kasko by his voice, and identifies him as having "Came out of the same place I did. Genetically engineered. A freak." "Like you!" Kasko accuses. "Like me," Tank repeats, impassively.

Kasko has some survivors imprisoned nearby with a time bomb, and offers to trade them for a chance at unarmed single combat. Cap is unwilling, but Tank insists that it's the only way, what with their limited time and Kasko being a psychopath. So he strips down, takes off his Tron underwear, comes out of the Jumpship to fight according to "Street Rules", which is a lot like Navy Rules: First one to die, loses.

Kasko takes an early lead by pushing a brick wall over onto Tank. Since they don't especially trust Kasko to keep up his end of the bargain, Scout is busy trying to rebuild the walkie-talkie Kasko had used earlier to talk to his hostages then smashed and discarded. He explains the procedure of tracking the signal by interfacing with the crystal in a ridiculous fake spy-movie German accent, which Cap finds about as endearing as I do. Is stupid voices going to be Scout's thing now? I do not like this thing.

We cut around a few times, showing Soaron repair himself, Cap and Company track the hostages, and Tank playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Kasko before getting caught in an incredibly obvious trap when Kasko offers to just give him the detonator for the bomb, and walks out onto an unstable bit of floor, which he promptly falls through.

Or, if you are observing carefully, gets lifted out over and lowered through, presumably by invisible guide wires.

Indubitably. Kasko runs downstairs to kick and taunt Tank some more, preparing to detonate the bomb early just to be an asshole. At the same time, Cap and Company find the prisoners. Tank begs Kasko to let the hostages go, as he's got what he wants. Kasko accuses Tank of having gone soft and holding back, to which Tank responds by kicking Kasko through a wall.

They fight some more while Cap tries desperately to diffuse the bomb. Then, just as things look tense, with about a minute and a half left...

Cap opens the door and lets the hostages out. Wait. A minute and a half? Who diffuses the bomb with a minute and a half left on the clock?

Kasko hits Tank in the face with a cinderblock, retrieves the detonator, and declares, "You lose!", but Cap barges in and declares the hostages rescued, entreating Tank to come with them before Soaron gets there. Tank, in a move that will surprise you if you haven't watched this show at all yet, turns to not be at all hurt from a cinderblock to the face, gets up, decks Kasko, and leaves, shouting "Quick! Let's hide!" I just want to point out that this sounds absolutely adorable the way he says it. This six-foot-seven bear of a man with a Scandinavian accent, all covered in sweat and brick dust, saying "Quick! Let's hide!"

Without his armor, Tank wouldn't stand a chance against Soaron, and Kasko is just enough of a dick to not take his defeat like a man. He breaks cover and shouts "Captain Power is over there!" to Soaron. Soaron, of course, doesn't care what an organic like Kasko has to say, and instead shouts "Obliterate!" then digitizes him, which I assume is to spare us the moral diciness of having Tank kill a human, even if the human is a dangerous psychopath. That said, let's not forget that episode 1 has established that digitization is a metaphor for rape. So don't get too much schadenfreude out of this. Which puts us in the uncomfortable position of cheering for Kasko's defeat as it comes in the form of what is essentially a metaphor for corrective rape. Yeah. I feel a bit soiled now.

It gets worse. After digitizing Kasko, Soaron throws his head back and lets out a sort of vaguely orgasmic howl. Gross. The heroes take advantage of Soaron's post-digital distraction to break cover, shoot the Bio-Dread, and make a break for it. Cap has to fight his way back to the jumpship, which should be a really tense scene, but it doesn't really compare well to the mech fight from the beginning of the episode. Soaron fights rarely do -- in this case, we cut back and forth between Cap running around a ruined city set and shots of Soaron, framed by nothing but sky, shooting. It makes the fight seem disconnected, and that takes a lot away from the drama. As the jumpship flies off, apparently having decided that the audience has forgotten that whole "It'll take three trips and an hour of travel-time to evacuate these people" thing, Soaron caps off an episode full of weird impressions by adding his own: he channels Dr. Claw, and shouts, "Next time!"

In the jumpship, Tank talks about his escape from A street gang? A genetic engineering lab? Undersea colony? Our last, best hope for punk rock? Who can say? This is all we'll ever hear about it.Babylon 5, and laments that he'd thought he'd put his violent past behind him. In a scene that I think woulda benefitted from the Full House Music, Cap comforts Tank with a speech about how, sure, he used brute force to solve his problems, and sure, maybe he enjoyed beating up Kasko, but it's all okay because he used his violence to help people rather than to harm people. Which is an unusual moral lesson, but I think it's kind of cool for that: a sort of dystopian moral for a dystopian world.

That's "Final Stand". Next time is "Pariah", which has a bit of focus on Pilot, but is basically another character focus episode for Hawk. I told you the writers really liked Hawk.

The following paragraphs talk about gender issues in the media. If that sort of thing is not your bag, hop down until you see the image of Boston Red Sox Manager Eddie Kasko.

This sort of gender imbalance isn't unusual for an action-adventure of this period, but it's the sort of thing that we have to call out when we go back and watch the show today. Despite all my quarter-century old memories of Pilot as a major character, she's far and away the least developed of the Future Force so far. Her dialog is perfunctory at best, and while Scout may have an incredibly annoying habit of breaking into silly voices, at least he's got a trait. As of right now, we know nothing about Pilot, and her dialog might as well have been delivered by the disembodied voice who warns Cap when his batteries are low.

This serves to point out very neatly why a 4:1 gender imbalance in your Five Man Band isn't a good idea. There's a reason that Power Rangers was almost always 3:2 (And of those seasons where there is only one female ranger, only Ninja Storm fails to supplement the cast with expanded roles for female "sidekick" characters). At this stage, it's less a deliberate structural thing as an artifact of the overall cast imbalance (Pilot won't get a character-focus episode until "Gemini and Counting", halfway through the season. Scout, so far as I can remember, never gets one), but would it have been so hard to add another female member of the team? I happen to know that the original pitch for this series included a sixth teammate, and that the proposed second season was to have added one, but in both cases, the sixth member was to have been... Another white guy. It's problematic but unsurprising that on a show where the core hero cast is three white guys, a woman, and a person of color, the three white guys all get character focus episodes (Multiple except for Tank -- though a second Tank episode had been written, meant to air before "Final Stand", but was cut to make the season shorted) before the others get any.

Is there some fundamental reason we need so many male characters? In my dim quarter-century-old memories of this show, I always took Tank to be an underdeveloped character, much like Scout. But watching it now with an adult's eyes, that looks like it might not be the case. Could it be that the writers basically wanted to do a Power Trio with Cap, Hawk and Tank as Ego, Superego and Id, and just threw in the characters of Pilot and Scout in an act of tokenism? It seems unlikely, given how the Five Man Band ensemble is pretty much a staple of this genre, but we have to wonder. How much did the show really need all these characters to be male? Would it have changed anything were Scout a black woman instead of a black man? Possibly not, though it might have inadvertently made the tokenism even more profound given what a weak character Scout is. Could Cap have been written as female? It would probably never have flown in '87 with the romantic subplot between Cap and Pilot, but maybe. Tank? Tank was genetically engineered, so we might presume his gender was selected deliberately, and it's reasonable that if he was bred for some kind of physical attribute, the requirements of muscle distribution would have necessitated his gender, but I do rather like the idea of Tank as a muscle-bound warrior-woman. Now that I think of it, though, Hawk is probably the character whose gender could be flipped with the least amount of revision -- heck, we practically have a prototype for a female Hawk already in Vi. It's a little ironic, then, that the character who seems to be the writers' clear favorite is the one that could most easily be rewritten. But maybe we shouldn't be surprised: Hawk is the most fleshed-out character -- and therefore the only one where gender is just one trait among many we've seen in his character.

But of course, you can't have too many female characters in an action-adventure series. Unassailable Conventional Wisdom tells us that boys Will Not Watch a Show With Too Many Icky Girls In It, and as this show existed primarily to sell toys, it's also Unassailable Conventional Wisdom that toys for girls must be pink and lame, with action features like "Can urinate," unlike toys for boys which must be military and use recently commercialized NASA technology, and NOT have Too Many Icky Girls. So by packing the cast with men, they ensured marketing and Nielsen success. And that is why Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future is the second-longest-running Science Fiction Series of all time. Oh. Wait.

I'm not saying that the show would have been more successful had there been a better gender balance -- the gender issues in this show are really just the tip of the iceberg of why this show was doomed commercially. But the process of overcoming some of the other difficulties that arose from trying to do a serious post-apocalyptic action-drama at the same time as doing a merchandise-driven half-hour kids' show would have been helped by having some roles for women that went beyond "love interest", "victim", and "love interest who is also a victim".

The character of Kasko never really goes anywhere. He's a dick and he likes to hurt people. He has a grudge against Tank, and like Tank, is genetically engineered. But to what end? And why does he have a grudge against Tank? What did Tank ever do to him? Why did Tank, with all his similarities both of nature and nurture, turn out to be a good and noble character while Kasko is a murderous barbarian? But no, we can't explore that because we haven't hit our fight-scene quota.

In my imagination, there is an "Unredacted" Captain Power -- each of these stories carries with it another hour or so of what-must-have-been, all those details and elements that would have fleshed out these stories. A flashback to Tank's escape from Babylon 5. Something to establish that Kasko and Tank were once friends, and why they broke with each other. A scene where Pilot DOES SOMETHING. But the show that should have been isn't the show we've got, so all I can do is wonder. We have so many tantalizing hints, but try as we might, we can never make them add up to anything.

I'm working on it.

Yeah, so are we all. Power down.

This was a big hit with my wife, and I'll likely make it again. The prep work was a bit labor intensive. Since I'd had a slightly carb-heavy lunch, instead of rice, I served this over a cutlet (Is that even the right word?) of seitan. This was my first time making seitan (or eating it for that matter), and I think my technique needs some work. I probably should have introduced it to the curry while the curry was still cooking to let it pick up some flavor. Of course, seitan is off the menu for the gluten-intolerant, in which case, just go for rice, or even something like cauliflower.

(You can look up how to make seitan at home for tips and tricks, but the general gist is to mix about 4 parts Vital Wheat Gluten with about 3 parts water, erring on the side of less water, and a bit of soy sauce. Knead until it tuns into a sort of rubbery ball, then roll it out into several thin flat shapes, and simmer it in a liquid that tastes like what you want the seitan to taste like until it plumps up and becomes firm)

The time-consuming step of this dish is pressing the water out of the tofu. I think it was worth it for the texture you end up with (and for your tofu not dissolving into mush), but people with more experience than me at tofu might have better suggestions for how to get that texture. Heck, for all I know, you can buy your tofu pre-pressed at fine upscale tofuscarias.

I tried two methods to press the tofu. First, I laid them out on a cookie sheet, then placed a second cookie sheet on top, and weighed the top sheet down with a water-filled casserole dish. This spent an hour in the oven at 250°F. That got a lot of the water out, but the tofu still felt like it wouldn't survive cooking, so it went into the skillet with a large plate on top, weighted down with a jumbo-size jar of peanut butter. That spent another 20 minutes on the range at low heat. During both steps, I drained the pan occasionally to get rid of the water that pressed out of the tofu. The result had a firm, meaty texture that wasn't entirely unlike grilled paneer cheese.

• 1 lb firm tofu, cut into 1/2 inch thick 1 inch squares and pressed
• 2 cups of your favorite tomato-based spaghetti sauce (If your favorite is especially sweet, use someone else's favorite.)
• 3 tbsp Vegetable Curry Spices (I used 2 tbsp of Shan Vegetable Curry Mix and 1 of Mohini Indian Fusion Vegetable Blend
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 cup mixed vegetables
• 1/2 cup almonds (optional)
• 1 tbsp heavy cream
• 2 tbsp Greek yogurt
• Vegetable oil

Fill a skillet with enough oil cover the bottom of the pan thoroughly and bring it up to a high temperature. Fry the onions for a few minutes, but not all the way to translucency. Add the tofu. Now, I had a hard time getting the tofu to fry without breaking up without keeping the pan so hot that the tofu instantly burns to the bottom. Anyone who has experience pan-frying tofu, pointers are welcome.

The tofu won't need more than a light sizzle before you reduce the heat to medium and add the spaghetti sauce and vegetables. Stir in the curry spices, being careful not to break up the tofu too badly. If you've got the tofu pressed really well, this shouldn't be too much of an issue, but I made the mistake of trying a similar recipe with unpressed tofu, and it basically dissolved into a mashed potato consistency.

Sprinkle the almonds into the mix. You could try cashews instead, but I wouldn't use salted nuts, as it'll make the curry too salty. Stir in the cream.

As it happened, I had a pack of breaded spinach fritter appetizers in the fridge, and I put a few on top while the pan simmered for about 20 minutes. They mixed well and added a lot to the eating experience.

Right at the end, stir in the yogurt. You can adjust the amount of yogurt up or down based on the final level of spiciness you want. Leah sometimes uses sour cream to the same end when I make dishes like this, but for this one I think the you don't want to add any additional sourness over the acidity of the tomato sauce.

As I said above, I served this over a seitan fillet, but next time, I think I'd prefer to cut up the seitan and cook it in the curry. It should work over rice or maybe over naan bread. With all the vegetables and onions, and depending on the consistency of your spaghetti sauce, you might be happy to just eat this like a stew, without any kind of substrate.