When I read the instructions for preparing orzo, I was a little taken aback.
Orzo is sometimes referred to as “Italian rice.” And rice, I know, absorbs the liquid it’s cooked in. So, when the instructions called for 2 quarts of water to cook 1 cup of orzo, I was a little confused. With a water to orzo ratio of 8:1, thoughts of football-size orzo grains popped into my head.
Fortunately, I read the rest of the directions, and noticed …
Whenever I think of endives, I think of the year I spent in France.
During my junior year of college, I studied in Paris, at the Institute of Political Science, or Sciences-Po, as they called it. While there, my classes were entirely in French – it being a french university and all. I even took a Russian language course: nothing beats learning a foreign language in a different foreign language.
For the first semester, all of the international students – and there were a few hundred – went to lecture with the native French students, but then had smaller discussion groups among themselves. The idea was to allow us to develop our French skills sufficiently, so that we could be fully immersed in the regular discussion groups by second semester. It also allowed us a chance to meet the fellow international students struggling to learn the History of the Second Republic in French.
My Russian class, however, was the one class …
If you’ve ever been in a Parisian café, you’ve seen Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at work. In this environment, waiters move about like errant electrons, brushing past you with little care for their momentum, their movements, or their duties. To a stationary observer, it is impossible to know both the location of a server and the speed at which he is ignoring you.
The croque-monsieur made its debut in 1910, in a café on the Boulevard des Capucines. The origins of the name are unknown, but I suspect the etymology is quintessentially French. An exasperated Frenchman …
I am always running late. Always.
I could claim it’s not my fault, but really it is. At the least, my punctuality problem is rooted not in laziness or lack of ambition, but rather in its excess. Dinner in an hour? Surely I have time for an abbreviated workout. Poker at 7:30? I can read one more case before I need to leave. Meeting friends soon? Let me start another blog entry.
Which is exactly what happened on Superbowl Sunday….
Miso is a fermented, soybean paste, dating back to seventh century Japan.
Miso begins with a grain, usually rice or barley, which is then inoculated with mold spores. These molded grains, koji, are combined with soybeans and sea salt, and then pakced into wooden barrels, where the mixture ferments for anywhere from three months to three years. Indeed, the various types of miso owe their differences to the length of the fermentation period. The fermentation temperature, the proportion of koji to soybean, and the type of grain also influence the miso product.
Rice miso (kome miso), barley miso (mugi miso), and soybean miso (hatcho miso) form the three basic categories of miso. These groups …