The Penalty Box

Quite possibly the most awesome thing I’ve seen in a while.

Fettuccine Alfredo is generally considered a heavy dish, mostly because of the heavy cream most recipes call for. Recipes involving heavy cream generally don’t reheat very well, and since I cook to make leftovers, I skipped out on the heavy cream in favour of half & half. I also whipped up a nice meatball recipe that I found pretty awesome. Let’s begin, shall we?

You should prep the meatballs and stick them in the oven first, as they’ll take longer to cook than the pasta will. Gather the following ingredients for awesome meatballs:

• 500g of ground pork (or a pound-ish depending on how many meatballs you want)
• A handful of fresh parsley, chopped fine
• 1 whole egg
• 1/3 cup finely grated Parmesan
• 2 teaspoons garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/4 cup bread crumbs
• 1 pack of pork Shake n Bake

Preheat your oven to 400 F. In a large mixing bowl, combine all ingredients except the Shake n Bake. Using your hands, mix thoroughly until nothing falls out. Don’t do this too fast or you’ll fling bread crumbs everywhere (yes, it happened to me, and no, I did not take pictures. Shut up). If you’re not going to use this immediately, you can stick it in your fridge for up to 24 hours.

Pour about half the packet of Shake n Bake into a small bowl. You may not need all of it depending on the amount of meat you have. Use an ice cream scoop to portion the meat and your hands to shape the portions into rounds. Roll the rounds in the Shake n Bake and place on a baking sheet. If you don’t have Shake n Bake, use bread crumbs tossed with some salt, ground pepper and ground cumin. Stash in the oven for 25-30 minutes or until golden and cooked through.

Ingredients for the Fettucine Alfredo:

• 400g of fettucine
• 2 cups half & half
• 2 tablespoons of butter or margarine
• Pinch of nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground pepper (or to taste)
• 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Boil a large pot of water. The larger, the better because it’ll take less time for the water to come back up to a boil after you stick in the pasta. Season with salt to taste, add some oil to the top to help prevent boil over. Cook to just before al dente; it’ll finish cooking with the sauce. In a large skillet or sauce pan, bring the half & half to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring constantly (so it doesn’t stick or burn) for 4 minutes. Remove from heat. Drain the pasta and add to the half & half. Over medium heat, toss well and add the rest of the ingredients. Keep tossing until heated through and the cheese gets to a melty goodness stage. The half & half should get a creamier consistency at this stage and not be so liquidy.
When serving, use tongs and give ‘er a twist as you stick it on the plate. That should give you a couple of spots to stick meatballs. Happy eatings!

This morning I happened to catch a TV movie called “Turtles Forever.” It’s the 1987 Turtles I grew up watching being transported to the “future” turtles dimension to battle new Shredder and 80s Shredder. And Krang. And they even brought back the Technodrome and the Party Wagon! Complete with “Cowabungas” and “Turtle Powers”. I was getting flashbacks to my childhood playing around with Ninja Turtles action figures.

It was campy as all hell, and I was laughing my ass off when freaking Bebop and Rocksteady showed up on screen. There’s even an ooze reference! The story was terrible, but I had to watch it until the end. Something just compelled me to, whether it be nostalgia or something else. If you liked the Ninja Turtles as a kid, you should check this one out.

For those of you asking, “what are Ninja Turtles?” you can get the hell off of my lawn right now.

For those of you who didn’t know, I’ve been in China and Hong Kong for the past two and a half weeks. I got back earlier this week and have been recovering from jetlag. It seems coming back from the other side of the world is always tougher than going there. 15 hour time differences kinda suck. I still have about 900 pictures to go through, many of which consist of people walking through my shots. Sometimes it couldn’t be helped; the sheer number of people (17 million in Beijing alone) often causes no actual open shots. Other times it was just mindless douchebags. Speaking of douchebags, the tour guide in Xi’An was one. But let’s do a small breakdown of the trip.

Day 0 - Travel: A grand total of 16 hours in the air (around 13 to Hong Kong, then 3 to Beijing). One flight attendant was wearing some pretty rank perfume on Cathay Pacific. Flew Dragon Air to Beijing, and got food on a 3 hour flight. Hear that Air Canada? Also, a 5 star hotel in China is not the same as a 5 star hotel in North America. Though for note, China apparently operates on a 7 star scale. Still, the one thing I learned about hotels in China: if you stay at an international hotel (like the Hilton), you’re okay. If you stay at a hotel run by Chinese people not from Hong Kong, make sure it’s less than 2 years old because maintenance is awful. The shower leaked in my room and water stains on the wall.

Day 1 - Beijing: Met the tour guide today, her name was Rain. Apparently English teachers there helped pick English names for the students out of a dictionary. Rain has a friend named Apple (and not Gwyneth Paltrow’s kid). First stop was the Summer Palace, where the Emperor went during the summer to cool off (as much as one can cool off in a Chinese summer). If there’s one thing Chinese emperors knew how to do, it was to use manpower for luxury. There’s a 780 metre corridor at the Summer Palace to keep the emperor out of the rain. Every inch of the corridor’s ceiling has paintings on it, from parts of the known world (at the time) to nature to people. It’s amazing how it’s held up for so long. It’s a shame there hasn’t been more money put into restoration; in fact, they’ve actually turned a couple of the old buildings into bloody coffee shops. That’s the government for you. Oh and the reason why China lost the Opium Wars: the money that was supposed to build a navy was used to build this palace.

Day 1 also involved going to Tianamen Square. Unfortunately, Mao’s mausoleum was closed. There were, however, 5 CCTV cameras on one pole. Suck on that, UK. The Forbidden City was also on the stop list. It is big. The architecture and stone work is absolutely amazing though. Each building was crazy detailed and had symbols to determine who could go where and who lived where. The place had thousands of rooms; given the number of servants, concubines, officials and caretakers, the number of rooms isn’t surprising but I still had to stand in awe of the sheer size of it all. Even with the size of the place, people STILL got into my shots and I had to elbow my way into good shooting positions. Fortunately, I was like Yao Ming in comparison so moving people out of the way wasn’t a problem. Oh, another thing learned from China: don’t make eye contact with vendors and they’ll leave you alone; otherwise they’ll follow you for a block or two trying to hawk whatever trinkets they have.

Day 2 - Great Wall: There are two sides you can climb when you get to the Great Wall. One is steep, sort of like the Grouse Grind. The other side is near vertical. I’m not kidding. It still is something you have to see in person to appreciate the vastness of it all. The number of people needed to create such a monstrosity with no modern machinery to lift the stones. The bad air did make it more difficult to climb, but it was completely worth it in the end. The smog unfortunately did make the pictures not as awesome as they could have been, but the view was still spectacular. Second half of the day involved viewing the Ming Dynasty tombs (some funny signs there…gotta love the typos and literal translations) and an acrobatic show. The show was as good as Cirque de Soleil acrobatics-wise, but Cirque has the more creative and colourful costumes.

Day 3 - Travel to Xi’An: Here we met Frank, he was like a bad history teacher on meth. He rushed through everything: we got pushed through the Xi’An History Museum in 45 minutes. All in all, a general douchebag. If you ever go to Xi’An and your tour guide says his name is Frank and his name means “Great Ordinary,” you’re going to get rushed through everything. Slow down on purpose.

Day 4 - Terra Cotta Warriors: Movies don’t do this place justice. The scale is just ridiculous. Just before going to the tomb, we visited the factory where warriors are made in the same fashion they were when the first emperor ordered them made. It takes days to weeks to scuplt them (depending on size) and baking in the kiln for hours a day. All in all, one full size warrior takes about a month. Seven thousand have been uncovered so far. There are MORE. The level of detail is insane. Each warrior is painted, his face, armour, everything. Oh yeah, each one is also 6 feet tall and 300 pounds. Hollow. There are currently 3 pits open. One has infantry, another has calvalry and the third pit has warriors not yet put back together yet. And they still haven’t found the actual entrance to the tomb, which is supposed to have a non-full scale replica of the known world. Just thinking about the sheer manpower needed to create such a tomb, A TOMB, is nuts. The whole thing took about 45 years to finish, back when the average lifespan was about 50. So two whole generations built this tomb for the emperor. All under heaven indeed.

Overall China thoughts:

• Food was average to terrible on the trip, but since it was all covered by the tour, I think they just took us to the cheapest possible places.
• Sights, entertainment and culture are fantastic.
• I’m surprised hotel service is so poor given how complainy western tourists generally are.
• Manners in Beijing are fare better than Xi’An, likely from orders handed down from the government for the Olympics. In Xi’An, you can’t walk a block without hearing someone hock a loogie. In Beijing, only the people from the provinces spit.
• Driving is a “make up your own rules” kind of thing. The following things seem to be optional: lights, following traffic lanes, not driving on the sidewalk. Fortunately, everyone’s going only about 30kph because of the sheer number of vehicles so there is time to stop if something crazy is done. Which is all the time.

Hong Kong was a lot of eating. Every. Day. I have a bunch of aunts and uncles, and of course everyone had to take a turn buying dinner. And lunch. I don’t think I ever felt hungry during my time in Hong Kong, I just shuttled between meals. What I really liked was the Octopus card. Public transit is cheap, efficient and fast. Kind of the exact opposite of Translink. What made the Octopus card awesome was that it wasn’t just a transit pass; it’s essentially a cash card. You can use it to buy drinks from the vending machine or buy stuff from stores if they accept Octopus cards. Stuff is also really cheap there, given the exchange rate (currently about 7 HKD to 1 CDN). Cheap doesn’t mean bad quality either; quality control at most stores is even more strict than here in Canada. Clothes shopping was somewhat difficult though, since I’m not exactly your typically sized Chinese person. XL shirts barely fit and even the largest pair of pants was about 4 inches too short.

Oh in terms of more funny names, I saw a waiter named Box and a bride named Ice. Dictionary names ahoy!
All in all it was a pretty fun trip, douchey tour guide and jetlag aside. I only wish I could have stayed longer if only to see a few more things in Beijing, see Shanghai and spend a little longer in Hong Kong. I don’t know if I could live in Hong Kong though; everything is just so bloody busy.

Damn you XKCD, damn you.

Bonus extra old feelings for hovering over the image to get the alt text. For those of you who follow this comic and never knew that, you’re welcome for the sudden urge to go back through the other 600+ strips to find out the alt text.

But the Canucks lost.

BUT HOCKEY IS BACK!

I could spend hours just watching random TED talks and they’d be infinitely more fulfilling than any funny Youtube video posted on reddit. This TED talk is about photography and how changing the context of how a picture is presented can alter your memories or change what you believe to have happened. Pretty cool stuff. Check it out here. If you have any interest in law, you’ll definitely want to check out the second half of the presentation which talks about wrongful convictions.

I keep forgetting to keep an eye out for fish sales and I wanted to get some fish back in my diet. This one was an easy recipe to put together, and while it didn’t exactly use high quality fish, it was fish nonetheless. Plus it turned out pretty good. Good enough that I forgot to take pictures, so uh, use your imagination.

So here’s what you’ll need to make salmon burgers.

• 2 teaspoons of chopped parsley leaves (or a couple small bunches)
• Half a red onion, diced
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup of panko bread crumbs
• Few cranks of black pepper (or about a teaspoon)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 lemon, zested
• 4 tablespoons Dill Mayo (recipe below)
• 2 cans of salmon (try to find skinless and boneless - you’ll have to judge whether the extra price is worth your time picking out bones of the regular cans)
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil (you can use olive oil if you want)

The cooking part:

1. Preheat oven to 400 F.
2. In a bowl, combine parsley, onions, eggs, bread crumbs, pepper, salt, lemon zest and dill mayo together. Add the drained salmon and mix together. It’s best to use your hands here, and go slow so you don’t fling bread crumbs everywhere. Make 4 palm-sized patties (or however big you want them) and set aside on a plate.
3. Take frying pan or a skillet, put it on medium heat with the two tablespoons of oil. Brown both sides of the patties. If you don’t have a big enough pan, do it in batches. Then put them on a cookie sheet or oven safe pan/dish and stick them in the oven for 5-10 minutes. The salmon is already cooked, so you just want to make sure the eggs are cooked.
4. Serve on buns with dill mayo. Add dressings to your liking, but other than lettuce, I think these things go pretty good just with the dill mayo.

For the dill mayo:

• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 1/2 lemon, juiced
• 2 tablespoons fresh chopped dill (use dried if you need to, fresh tastes better)
• Pinch of paprika (use cayenne if you want more kick)
• Large pinch of salt
• Couple cranks of black pepper
• Optional: couple teaspoons of yellow mustard

Combine these ingredients together in a small bowl, stirring with a fork or a whisk. If it looks too liquidy, add more mayo. You want it to spread like mayo, not be a sauce.

This recipe should make 4 burgers and more dill mayo than you should need. But the dill mayo is good on other stuff too. Happy eatings!

Check ‘em out.

Also, hooray for business decisions being made without due diligence! This doesn’t remind me of anyone at all, nosiree.

If you ever hear anyone list the actual things they like about their job, chances are (assuming they like their job) money is not at the top of the list. It’s almost always something intrinsically motivating, something intangible. Perhaps your co-workers are pretty awesome, or your manager isn’t a dick. Maybe you find what you do incredibly fulfilling. I watched this TED Talk again for the third time and every time I wonder why more companies can’t understand this concept of intrinsic motivation. If your company understands this, you almost certainly work for a really awesome company.