Tag: stupid is as stupid does

Slow off the starting block

This is a late, late post linking to this week’s Carnival of the Recipes. Some mouth-watering recipes posted. “Macho Sauce,” “Kate’s Garlicky Chicken with Spinach,” “Enchiladas Suisse” and a few more are going to make it into my repertoire of quick and easy recipes (probably with my typical lazyman’s adaptations :-).

Go. Gain some weight just reading through the recipes.

You didn’t think these were going away, did you?

[First posted in the middle of December. Back again… ]

Classic Red Enchiladas–with a twist

Ok, so not-so-classic. The ingredients are authentic, but the preparation is strictly “fast food” utilitarian. The biggest change? No rolled enchiladas in this puppy. Here’s how it goes…

Red Enchilada Sauce
(Makes 16 oz.–give or take)
8-10 dried Anaheim peppers (actually, I tend to use more). Clean the seeds out for merely “sorta-hot”. Leave the seeds in for a little spiciness. Tear the peppers up into pieces and then either

a.) Use an electric coffee grinder to powder the chiles to a fine powder and add boiling water to make 2 cups liquid. Blend in blender. Set aside and let it come together for a little bit. (My preferred “quick sauce” method)

OR

b.) Place the pepper pieces in a sauce pan and cover with boiling water. Place a saucer (or whatever works) on top of the peppers to hold them submerged under the water and then leave them all day soaking. Remove the peppers from the water, place them in a blender with enough water to make 2 cups and blend.

If you absolutely NEED a thicker and/or milder sauce, use a little corn flour in the blending stage to thicken/whimp out the sauce. Keep the corn flour down to less than 1/4 C for each 2 C water, otherwise it’ll really begin to taste “corny”. (Only have corn meal? Put a little in your coffee grinder and make corn flour out of it. Don’t have a coffee grinder? Get one! :-)) You can cut the heat and really thicken the sauce with just a couple of tablespoons.

OK, that is all there is to real Red Enchilada Sauce. It’s really just chiles and water. Here’s the rest of the dish:

Preparation
In a 9×12 baking dish, LAYER (in the following order: sauce, tortillas, sauce, cheese, onions, tortillas… etc.)
24-30 corn tortillas
Red Enchilada Sauce (Yeh, make your own. The stuff in cans stinks.)
4 C shredded Monterey Jack cheese or Jack/Cheddar mix.
One YELLOW onion, chopped. (Need even milder onion? Chop it the day before and store it in a plastic bag in the fridge to “sweeten”.)

The top layer should be covered in sauce and cheese only, no onion.

Bake at 325 F for about 45 minutes. Check it at 30 minutes. Different timing/oven temps result in different textures. Play with that a lil to suit yourself.

I generally use 6 tortillas per layer in an overlapping 2X2X2 pattern and fill in the edges with torn tortillas so that I end up with 4 layers. Play with it. Find a layer/sauce/cheese mix that suits you.

I like to serve squares cut from the result topped with sour cream and shredded lettuce. Add a few sliced black olives for flavor and color or some salsa for a little more pep. A side of “Spanish” rice and one of refried beans make for a pretty well-rounded meal. If you want meat, hash something together, but DON’T put meat in these enchiladas!

Easy “Spanish” rice:

Easiest? Just substitute your favorite salsa for part of the water when making a pan of rice. (Another time, I’ll post my fav fast salsa recipes.)

Easy–and fast–Refried beans:

OK, use canned refried beans if you must. Go ahead. But at least add some, no, not some: a lot! of cumin to them while they are warming up. 🙂 Better? Here’s where you can add some meat to the menu: add some chorizo to the beans. Great cumin flavor and a lil meat all at once.

Better: set aside leftovers from beans n cornbread night and use those, mashed and “refried” with something slightly less than a ton of cumin, some bacon fat, etc.

“The Little Moonvies Take the Sacking”—MQ from Pruden

Wes Pruden’s article about the whitewash of the CBS/Dan Blather Rathergate story pegs the newly released report to the wall. An excerpt:

Mary Mapes, his producer who tipped the Kerry campaign in advance of the scandalous program and tried to get the candidate’s men fired up about it, inevitably becomes the head scapegoat. To believe that she is guilty and Dan isn’t requires us to believe that Dan Rather, of all people, is the virgin in the bordello.

Well, at least now we know where to find Dan and Les and all of Les’ lil Moonvies.

Note to news: Take a number and wait to be “serviced”…

Sure, we’re foxes, but we’re objective foxes…

One (of many) problems with the “Whitewash Report” about Rathergate is its reluctance to note the effect of political motivations on CBS “News” reporting of the events surrounding Rathergate. John Hinderaker takes note of that here. And excerpt:

For some years now, the party line of the mainstream media has been: of course we’re pretty much all Democrats, but that doesn’t influence our news coverage. If nothing else, Rathergate should put that defense to rest once and for all.

“…should put that defense to rest,” sure. But denial ain’t just a river in Egypt…

Democratic Voter, Washinton State. ‘Nuff said. 

Blatherized… again

Posting is going to be light. I’m in low-grade mourning… for our society. The CBS report on Rathergate’s been issued, and Dan Blather’s not yet been tarred, feathered, drawn and quartered, the pieces “processed” (and the “processed Dan” cleaned up by the EPA) through the intestines of swine (Les Moonves and News Director Andrew Heywood spring to mind for this role), the pigs slaughtered and their now-contaminated parts incinerated…

There is no justice.

Oh. Well. At least he’s “…read the report…” and “…take[s] it seriously…”

Sure he has. And sure he does.

And his pants are still on fire from his lies.

Give ’em Choice II

Let’s see if advocates of so-called “choice” (referring to a woman’s so-called right to choose to kill her baby or not) are serious about a person being free to choose. Offer this alternative: have every woman who wants to kill her unborn child sign a statement to that effect, and then give the child a choice, say eighteen or nineteen years later, whether he wants to “abort” mom.

Fair enough?

Of course, that would mean letting the child survive the “mother’s” plot to murder it…

Yeh, this idea has a few kinks, but just let it be your lil thought experiment for a day…

Choice? Yeh, give ’em “choice”

Moxie reveals her “1 in 10” and “10 i n 10” outcomes of “Libzilla Parenting.” (N.B. “Libzilla”=monstrous liberal. Obviously.) She ends with this point to ponder:

“Maybe I really am pro-choice. Isn’t it better these kids be aborted than subjected to the lifestyle of the Libzilla parent?”

My only quibble with her observations is that she adopts the corruption of “choice” fostered by baby-murderers who deny the unborn child any choice.

“Will no-one rid me of th[ese] troublesome [High Priest Vulture Elite] priest[s]?*

An American diplomat, posting anonymously as “Diplomad” from the part of the world most affected by the recent tsunami, rants about the UNhelpful, UNtruthful, UNethical, UNscrupulous UN “presence”. WARNING: he speaks his mind clearly, forthrightly and with considerable venom. (And for this reason, he posts anonymously, for did he not, he’d be out on his ear before his post hit the fan, as it were… )

http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/2005/01/turd-world-and-high-priest-vulture.html

About time the UN was served an eviction notice and told to leave our shores, cos we need the space (and our tax dollars) for better things.

*a deliberate corruption of Henry II’s outburst that led to four knights interpreting the king’s will as “Kill Becket.” Hmmm… seems like we not only need a Henry II but a few doughty knights, as well if we are to deal with the High Priest Vulture Elite of the UN.

Waiting on Godot? “Godot ain’t here, man.”

M. Night Shyamalan’s movies… what can I say? Here are the movies I’ve seen by M. Night Shyamalan:

Signs (2002) Read much sci-fi? If you’ve read as much sci-fi/speculative fiction as I have, then this was likely as boring and predictable for you as it was for me. Not to mention the fact that it was full of really lame schticks, a severely flawed premise, etc. One of the absolutely dumbest movies I have ever seen. It even failed to be a camp “B” movie, because of its technical production values and attempt to be “serious”. Just a plain, flat stupid movie. Completely wasted $$ seeing it in a theater. But I should have known better, because…

Unbreakable (2000) was almost as bad. [sigh]. Fortunately, I saw (a blessedly short part of) this on TV and was able to simply CLICK to something less mind-numbingly dumb. Heck, Chris Matthews would have qualified on that score!

Stuart Little (1999) OK, what can you do with a children’s book based on a wildly stupid premise? This was cute [“cute”—shudder!]. OK, I’m cheating to include this one, too. I just couldn’t stand to watch the whole thing, no matter what the rest of the family wanted to do. Bo-ring.

The Sixth Sense (1999) Was anyone shocked to discover that the Bruce Willis character was one of the “dead people” the kid saw? You were?!?!? Rode the short bus to school, eh?

I think there were a couple more I “missed” (but only because I couldn’t hit them).

Now, can anyone give me one reason why I should spend $3.21 (counting taxes) at the local video store to rent The Village? Or even watch it on TV? It’ll have another totally lame “surprise” that fits the M. Night Shyamalan movie formula. A cretin will be able to figure the premise and the surprise out before the first 10 minutes of the film have passed, and any person of average inteligence will be bored to tears within 30 minutes. The characters will be caricatures of stick-figure cartoons drawn by mentally-deficient troglodytes. The film itself will have the typical M. Night Shyamalan bleakness and be devoid of anything enlightening or uplifting.

If I want to experience something comparable, I guess I could stick my head in a dirty truckstop toilet for about 90 minutes.

Or watch Chris Matthews for 15 minutes (or Dan Blather for 5).

Thanks, but I’ll pass.