Some cool facts about animals images:
Chicken, Chorizo and Red Pepper Pie
Image by cowfish
The winner of the "Best Pie" category. Made by me.
However, in true eurovision style, this means that I will be hosting the next pie-off.
Recipe:
Ingredients (to fill my 9" by 2"-ish pie dish):
* 2 Chicken Breasts
* 1 Largish Chorizo
* 1 Big Red Pepper
For the Gravy:
* 1 tablespoon of Tomato Puree
* Dash of Worcester Sauce
* Dash of Garlic Tabasco
* A small teaspoon of cayenne
* Flour
* Water
Firstly make some shortcrust pastry - Recipe from the evil witch of the kitchen's website
Put pastry in the fridge in a plastic bag to do whatever gluten based magic it does in there.
Chop up the chicken, chorizo and pepper into chunky strips and then fry the pepper and chorizo in a little olive oil until the oil is red and the pepper is soft. Then take them out with a slotted spoon (leaving the oil behind) and leave them elsewhere while you fry the chicken until it is white all over. Then add them back, turn the heat down and leave to simmer for about 10-15 minutes, until the chicken is cooked, stirring regularly.
Now extract the chicken, red pepper and chorizo (with the slotted spoon again) from the pan, leaving the oil. Mix up the tomato puree with a little water to make a passata-thickness tomato juice. Add the worcester sauce, tabasco and cayenne and mix it all up. Add to the pan and add a little more water to bulk it up a bit (I tasted mine to make sure I hadn't watered down the flavour too much. Adjust amounts to make more or less gravy. YMMV etc) and bring it to a gentle simmer. Mix up the flour with some water to make a paste and slowly add it to the gravy, stirring as you do, until the gravy thickens to how you would like it (for me this was "thick enough to coat the back of a spoon", or in actual fact "to coat and stay on a piece of chicken which I can steal from the pan covered in nice and tasty sauce"). There was about enough gravy in my pie to coat the meat/veg mix and not a lot more, so you may want to make a bit more to make a runnier pie (I knew this one was going to be eaten on the hoof, so deliberately made less. Well, misjudged the amount of gravy and then realised it was probably a good thing at least). Add the chicken mixture back in, stir to coat everything and leave the pan on low with a lid on while you prepare the pie dish (although if this takes more than a little bit of time as I did, you may want to turn it off, but make sure it's hot before you put it in the pie).
Take out the pastry, let it warm up a bit, roll it out and do all that funky magic.
Line your pie dish with pastry, spoon in the filling, stick a lid on it, cut an attractive cross-piece hole in the top (functional and decorational - dual porpoise!), decorate with animal and vegetable shapes cut from left over pastry, sacrifice your 2 extra chorizo that you bought not knowing how big your pie dishes were to the freezer gods, egg wash the top of the pie and then stick it in a 180degC oven for X minutes, where X is enough to make the top go all nice and golden and stuff (maybe slightly burnt around the edges for safety). I think it was about 30 minutes or so.
General Winfield Scott
Image by dbking
Lieutenant General Winfield Scott
Scott Circle, Massachusetts Ave. at 16th Street NW
Sculptor: Henry Kirke Brown
Date: 1874
Medium: Bronze
---two block west of the statue of Logan (one of the cities best) lies what critics deem as one of the city’s worst.
---Scott was the first of the bronze Civil War general to be immortalized in the new traffic circles arising in the post war city.
---Scott is also the only Civil War era military man represented in Washington by two statues; a full length statue of Scott was erected in 1873 at the Soldiers Home as well as the one described here
---Scott resigned as General-In-Chief of the Army in October 1861 after a 50 year military career, dying in 1866 fifteen days before his 80th birthday.
---March 1867 amid praise for one of the nation’s most illustrious old soldiers Congress authorized ,000 for an equestrian statue to honor him
---Commission was awarded to Henry Kirke Brown whose 1856 equestrian statue of George Washington in Union Square, New York City had been widely praised.
---Brown completed the model for his Scott sculpture around 1872. When it came time to cast it, the government contributed old bronze cannons captured during the Mexican War.
---The statues block was carved from a single block of granite, the largest stone ever successfully quarried at that time.
---Erected in 1874, the statue had no formal dedication
---The figure of Scott, with his hand on his hip, as if irritated, quickly garnered criticism. Critics complained that the statue portrayed him as too old, too fat, too stiff, and too short legged One critic said Scott looked like an “old sack of flour”.
---Greater ridicule was heaped on the horse, saying that it was too light, too delicate, too thin, too timid and dreadfully proportioned.
---General Scott who lived a few blocks away on Massachusetts Ave is said to have begged his wife never to let him be immortalized on such a dreadful animal.
---Legend has it that, the awful horse was not the fault of Brown. Brown had learned that Scott’s favorite mount had been a small mare so that is what he placed Scott on. Just as Brown was about to begin the casting, some of Scott’s descendants saw the model and protested that the general must ride a stallion, not a mare. Annoyed by this Brown made only minimal changes.
The result was the too small horse, with the head and body of Scott’s mare, but with the genitalia of a stallion showing.
---All of this might explain the strange looking mount except for the fact that the horse Brown sculpted 3 years later for his Nathanael Greene equestrian statue with its spindly legs and long scrawny neck was much worse than this one.
---It seems as though Brown was better with Civil War era hero’s when he stayed away from horses.
Among his best known works are:
…President Lincoln in Union Square, New York City and in Prospect Park, Brooklyn
…Major General Philip Kearny, for the NJ Capitol’s Statuary Hall
braai
Image by maureen_sill
decided to go for a walk with hayley, will, and nelisa in langa today
bottlecaps crushed into the paved streets, plastic bags and goat blood
will looks at the head of cows being picked at for mince and says to hayley and i
so that is why you are vegetarians
this is considered to be an advanced township, an advanced black settlement
but there is no electricity for so many people, no water for so many people
"post apartheid, are you kidding?" he says
when the tiny kids stare at us like martians, we are white
i kick an orange peel across the road
i kick a wadded up newspaper across the road
i kick a bottle out of a puddle
i have never been more aware of the fact that i am american when i am standing in the face of african poverty
and i have also never been more aware that i am white
it never, never leaves my mind and probably won't for the next 14 weeks
an extremely small little boy who lives nextdoor links himself onto my leg
i scoop him up with one arm and give him a piggy back ride
i can hear him smelling my hair, his little hands on my skull
every time i pick him up he puts both his hands in my hair and rubs it and smiles with no teeth
my brother yemi calls it "big, red, american hair"
a lot of the kids here have never seen red hair before
they don't say anything, they just come to my feet and put their arms up, so i pick them up
and then they smile and pet me, like a big animal that wandered onto their street
a four year old with a toy gun
i take a picture of the sky and he says take a picture of me take a picture of me please please please
yemi says to me every single day: how sure are you that barack obama will win the election?
it is so important to him and he is so paranoid that he will not win
he says, how certain are you that he will win, he asks every day
i say, well, i am not certain at all, but i hope
he says, one of the kids i work with was stabbed to death yesterday in khayelitsha
i can't even imagine what he sees at his job
i don't think i can emotionally handle social work in america
he is a social worker in south africa
coming here, i have heard so many things about south africa, that it is "not really africa"
from some of my african friends at school because some rich people live here
but what i have found is that south africa has all of the problems of africa
and it also has many of the problems of america, because it is westernized
so it is fucked existentially
if what i saw today is not africa, then what could possibly
