The Penalty Box

I do believe HD hockey is one of the prettiest things on this here planet Earth. Hell, even curling in HD is pretty.

…plus the pre and post games in between, all the games are Canadian teams, Jim Hughson is doing the Canucks game and it’s already started at 11 in the morning.

Today will be a good day. I love Hockey Day in Canada.

This was a recipe I saw while watching the Food Network, so I thought I’d give it a try. On TV they put the end product in a deep fryer, but since I don’t have one of those or a dutch oven to do stovetop frying, I decided to put them in the oven and bake them. So here’s the stuff you’ll need:

• 2 cups of rice
• 1 tbsp of minced garlic
• 3 cups of chicken stock
• 1/4 cup of grated parmesan or romano cheese
• handful of parsley, finely minced (or about 4 tbsp of the dried stuff)
• 2 large eggs
• 2 cups of breadcrumbs (panko would be nice, but plain old breadcrumbs does the trick)
• 1 and a half farmer sausages (or 3 of the smaller brats, whatever you can get)
• As much mozzarella or Monterey Jack cheese as you like (at least 1/4 cup)

Directions:

1. Pre-heat oven to 375F.
2. Cook the rice like you would a risotto. As in, rinse the rice, drain, cook the garlic with some vegetable/olive oil until fragrant (add shallots if you want), add the rice, stir, slowly add chicken stock until all absorbed. This should take about 15-20 minutes. You want the rice in a firm consistency for easier handling. If that’s not how you cook a risotto, then just do what I wrote.
3. Mix in the grated cheese and parsley. Transfer to a bowl and stash in your fridge for 15 minutes (or freezer for 10) to cool it down.
4. Beat the eggs in a bowl and set aside. Put the breadcrumbs in another bowl.
5. Meanwhile, take the sausage out of its casing. You can use ground meat here if you wish, just season it to your liking. Sausage is already seasoned, so that’s why I used it. Cook it in the same pan you cooked the rice in. Might as well wash less dishes.
6. When the meat is done, take the rice out. Wet your hands with some water so the rice is easier to handle. Spoon some rice into one hand and make a bowl-like shape (cup your hand to form the shape). Put some meat and cheese in the bowl area. Wrap the rice around the meat and cheese, adding rice as necessary to cover completely. Use your hands to form the ball. The ball should be about the size of a small orange.
7. Dip the ball into the beaten egg bowl and roll it around. Then roll it around in the breadcrumbs.
8. Put on an oven sheet that’s been sprayed with non-stick or covered with aluminum foil.
9. Repeat until you’ve used up both rice and meat.
10. Put the rice balls into your oven for 25-30 minutes (or until the cheese starts bubbling out).
11. This should give you about 8-9 rice balls.

The first time I ate these I didn’t have any sauce with them, which meant they were a little on the dry side. I think this is where the deep frying part keeps the moisture in. Two options to solve this problem: more cheese or use sauce. I took some marinara sauce I made earlier this month and poured that over the rice balls. A little more parmesan cheese on top and they turned out better. These are pretty filling, so you won’t need more than one and a side unless you have a big appetite. One and a half filled me up pretty good. Happy eatings!

With the Superbowl not too far away, I came across this article about football. As with any other sport, football is a spectacle, but is there any other sport where the social aspect of the spectacle is bigger than the spectacle itself? (Boy I used spectacle a lot in that sentence. Spectacle spectacle spectacle.)

I knew football had really short bursts of action, but I didn’t think out of a three hour production only eleven minutes consisted of the ball in play. No wonder there are so many other things synonomous with football besides, you know, football. Not a bad excuse for a party, but it makes sense why football just isn’t all that fun to watch by yourself. Unless you hear those voices too.

I really don’t spend my day on Youtube, honest. I just had to share this song though. It’s already made the rounds of the various social networking and content aggregation sites, but hey, just in case you didn’t see it, you can watch it here.

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.