All Hail Chicken Rice

I've now been posting to this blog daily for the last three months, from October 30th until now. And even though some of my posts are fairly substance-free (some youtube links and an entire month of Christmas songs), I've never had to resort to posting recipes. At least until now.  

Here is my recipe for Hainanese Chicken Rice (or "chicken rice as they call it in Southeast Asia -- sorry vegetarians!). This was one of the regular dishes at my high school cafeteria in Singapore, and I think it's one of nature's most perfect foods. It only has five ingredients (chicken, ginger, garlic, rice, and water) not counting spices, but these five ingredients make a magical combination.

Chicken Rice is an institution in Singapore and Malaysia. There have even been movies made about it! Every coffee shop and hawker stall in those countries has its own variety, but it's pretty easy to make yourself.   I make it myself a couple of times a month. Stewing rice in water and chicken fat isn't super-healthy, but it sure is yummy. Plus it's easy to make in the crockpot, which is perfect for my busy lifestyle. Here's the way I do it.

Chicken Rice

Dark chicken parts (I usually use thighs)
1 large hunk ginger, minced and sliced
Many cloves of garlic
1 tsp salt
4 cups water

Method:

- Stuff chicken with salt, ginger and garlic. Put in a high crockpot with enough water to cover and set on medium for 8-9 hours (morning til night). Ideally the water should never boil, but nicely stew the chicken thighs.

- After you get home, remove chicken and retain stock for making rice. Heat 1 tbsp oil over high heat. Add minced garlic and ginger and fry till fragrant. Add grains of rice and stir fry until they change color (2-3 minutes) then add two cups of stock to cover and cook the rice.

- Serve with more minced ginger and garlic (ginger and garlic are good) and sweet chile sauce or sambal oelek. Enak sekali!

All the junk food you can eat

The Oakland A's have designated a few sections of the upper deck at the Coliseum(previously tarped off last year) as "All You Can Eat Seating". For $35, you get a game ticket and you can consume. It's almost like they're encouraging gluttony.

At least encouraging low end gluttony.  The free offer only applies to the standardized items at the "all you can seat" sections.   You don't get free garlic fries or Everett & Jones spare ribs or chile verde burritos from the concessions in the lower sections that serve better (i.e. edible) food. And "all you can eat" doesn't mean "all you can drink" (besides soft drinks) which is something that would make it a lot more appealing to some people. You can recoup your $35 pretty easy with a few $7.50 Gordon Biersch Marzens.

As the Chronicle points out, this would mainly appeal to people with kids, especially giving a birthday party for a bunch of kids. All the hot dogs, nachos, peanuts, popcorn, or ice cream you can eat, plus there's a baseball game too.   What more could an 8-12 year old kid want?  The price goes down to $30 for groups of  25 or more, so you can feed and entertain a couple of dozen kids for just over $700.   What a deal?    I think I'll give the "all you can eat" section a pass though.
 

Away From The Numbers

Missing the From The Jam show tonight, because I'm just too tired. I've been trying to reconcile my company's numbers across the various systems for the last few weeks, so I've had numbers on my brain this whole month.



I'm also finally reaching the end of the listening to all songs on my iPod in alphabetical order, which comes to all the songs that start with numbers. The songs are sorted alphamerically, which is confusing for songs that start with numbers. I don't understand why "1,000,000" by R.E.M. comes before all the 10 songs or why numbers come after letters in the iTunes sequence when they used to come before them.

In any case, here are all the songs on my iPod that start with numbers.

1. 1 1/2 Way Street - Mitch Easter
   
2. 1,000,000 - R.E.M.
   
3. 10-5-60 - The Long Ryders
   
4. 10:01 - Rogue Wave
   
5. 14 Cheerleader Coldfront - Guided by Voices
   
6. 15 Step - Radiohead
   
7. 17 - Field Music
   
8. 1941 - Harry Nilsson
   
9. 19th Nervous Breakdown - The Rolling Stones
   
10. 20 Questions - Amy Rigby
    
11. 2AM - The Primary 5
    
12. 32/20 - The Flamin' Groovies
    
13. 36 Inches High - Nick Lowe
    
14. 40 Watt Solution - Cotton Mather
    
15. 4th of July - Aimee Mann
    
16. 5D (Fifth Dimension) - The Byrds
    
17. 65 Love Affair - Paul Davis
    
18. 720 Times Happier Than the Unjust Man - The Loud Family
    
19. 8:05 - Moby Grape
    
20. 9-9 - R.E.M.
    
21. 92 Subaru - Fountains of Wayne

Hey now, you're an All Star!

Yesterday was the NHL All Star Game, which the Eastern Conference won in an 8-7 squeaker with a last minute goal. Last year the Western Conference won the game 12-9. I watched it mostly because there wasn't anything else on television, but the NHL All Star Game is always worth checkin out if your problem with hockey is that there isn't enough scoring. There's no body checking at the All Star Game, so there's always a bunch of scoring.

The All Star Game phenomenon for professional sports is limited exclusively to (North) America. Nearly every major and minor sport has it's own version. And February is All Star season. The Pro Bowl is in two weeks (after the Super Bowl gets out of the way) and the NBA All Star Game is the week after that. Every professional sport in the USA and Canada has its own All Star Game.

There aren't any "All Star Games" in overseas sports leagues though. Japanese and Latin American baseball don't have all star games. None of the European soccer leagues have "all star" competitions. There's no Russian hockey all star game. All Star Games are clearly something that the rest of the world hasn't caught on to yet.

Probably because they really don't make a lot of sense. The Major League All Star Game gets a big buildup for the homerun derby and who ends up getting voted on the team, but very few people care about the game itself, even if the winning team does get a home field advantage in the World Series. The NFL's Pro Bowl is after the regular season, and most of the players seem to be focused on getting a free trip to Hawaii and not getting hurt.

All the various college football All Star games seem to serve no purpose whatsoever. Why aren't there any college basketball all star games? And I don't understand the minor league all star games in baseball. If these guys are so good, why aren't they at the next level? The NHL All Star Game is the most fun to watch though, especially if you like 12-9 hockey games. It's almost like playing without a goalie!

Bittersweet Symphony

Yesterday was Australia Day, here are two different videos of the Hoodoo Gurus performing "Bittersweet" with Cyril Jordan of the Flamin' Groovies last March at the Cafe du Nord . Two different videos of the same performance. Try sync them up!




The second song of the Gurus encore with Cyril was the Groovies' "Teenage Head". There are also two videos of that peformance.

The rock album meme is a mighty good meme

Since almost everyone else on my RSS list is contributing to the Foma* rock album meme, so I thought I'd play as well.

1. Pick a band name by visiting a random Wikipedia page.

My band name is Systemic Constellations

2. Pick an album name by going to this random quote page. Take the LAST quote on the page and select the last four words of that quote.

My full quote is..

As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider,
Northern Exposure, Zarya, 1994.

The last four words are "have forgotten The intangible". So this is one of those albums where the title completes a sentence with the artist name as its subject. (Barenaked Ladies Are Me, etc.). Or in this case Systemic Constellations Have Forgotten the Intangible

3. The album cover art is the THIRD image on the random Flickr page.

Here is my image. Another copyrighted photo of a beluga from the Vancouver Auditorium. I decided to use a script font similar to the copyright notice (Brush Script MT) for my artist and album name.



Frank Viola! So long, and thanks for all the fish.

You'll get one number and one number only

Too busy for a fully fledged "Friday music" post, so here's the last song from the last Sex Pistols gig ever (until they reformed 18 years later) at SF's Winterland on January 14th 1978. Thirty years and eleven days ago.



Thirteen more numbers from that gig on the youtube.

1. Anarchy in the UK(USA)
2. God Save The Queen
3. I Wanna Be Me
4. Seventeen
5. New York
6. Pretty Vacant
7. EMI
8. Holiday in the Sun
9. Liar
10. No Feelings
11. Bodies
12. Problems
13. Belsen Was a Gas

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?