Roasted Red Pepper and White Bean Salad

THis was a great recipe to use with an abundance of pepers, which we always have in the fall.

• 4 small red bell peppers
• Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 2 teaspoons sherry vinegar
• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
• 1 can (15 ounces) small white beans, drained and rinsed
• 1/4 ounce Parmesan cheese, grated (2 tablespoons)
• 1 cup packed spicy baby greens, such as watercress or arugula

1. Halve and seed the peppers and toss with olive oil, and roast for about 30-40 minutes at 400 degrees.  Coll and cut into strips.
2.   Whisk together garlic, vinegar, oil, and parsley in a medium bowl. Add beans and peppers and toss to coat. Season with salt and pepper. Spoon over peppers and top with Parmesan and greens.

Nile Ethipian Restaurant, Coralville Iowa

This restaurant is in a space that I always felt was not inviting.  The previous restaurant had excellent food,my favorite Middle Eastern food in town, by it was hard to eat there.  Not so now.  The restaurant is well laid out, with good lighting, and continuous hours, so that if you want to eat at 3:30 in the afternoon, as we did recently, it is possible to do so.  And feed us they did.  The food was excellent.  It is primarily served with injera, the crepe-like bread of the region, but you can ask for a fork if you like.  We had a beef dish, a chicken dish, and some vegetarian dishes, and they were all delicious.  The appetizers were great.  The food was so good that even though I have made very good Ethiopian food in the past, I was not moved to go home and make it.  Rather, I would come back here, because it would satisfy that yen, as well as support a new dining option.  And it is very reasonably priced.  In all, this is a bright new start in the ethnic food options in Iowa City, one which I hope is longitudinally successful.

Chips (2017)

I watched this on a trip home that was lengthy (like 5-6 movies lengthy), and while I chose it for its lightness, I actually enjoyed it.  Micheal Pena is great as the serious cop, and Dax Shephard is outstanding as the screw up side kick.  I liked Shephard as Crosby in Parenthood, and his role here shares some of the same features.  He is charming but very imperfect,with a good heart and a wandering eye.  In this version of the story, Shephard is not just a motorcycle cop, he is a professional rider, who can provide value added (Pena provides the solid cop training and knowledge, but also the rigidity that that imposes)--so they are a more modern version of the original TV partners, and some of the fun part of the TV show is also picked up in the movie.  I would wholeheartedly agree that this is super light weight, and very imperfect as a film, but it is a pretty funny chase movie with a hint of nostalgia for those of us who are old enough to remember the original show.

James Cook, 1728

I have been thinking about how to positively respond to the growing culture of a reverence for ignorance. I have been very upset, almost agitated, by the pervasiveness of flat out lying at the highest levels of government, and the deprecation of a free press.  It really feels like the beginning of totalitarianism.  I know that I have a lot of company in theses feelings, and maybe even a majority of people feel this way.  May we rise up and take back what is good and great about our culture.

So part of what I have been doing is to look back at the people who were instrumental in our growth as a people.  James Cook is one of the world navigators of the 18th century who was really impressive.  He dies a grizzly death as a result of his miscalculation and his crew's mistreatment of Hawaiians, but prior to that he provided a wide range of discoveries for the Western world.  He may not have been the first to find Australia, but he opened it to European exploration.  He is most likely the man who first European to seek out both Antarctica and the Arctic Northwest Passage.  He was a talented seaman, but for me, the two things that he gave the future generations were detailed and accurate maps, and he carried talented engravers who did detailed depictions of the native populations of the lands that he explored.  The Northwest Indians culture and art in the 18th century was so impressive and our best record of it comes from his voyages.  Exploration is complicated, but Cook was a master to be remembered.

The Origin of the Mighty Oak

This week's Science Monday comes from the journal of the same name.
The mighty oak.  One of my favorite trees.
It is pretty universally popular, it turns out.  The oak is the national tree of the United States, Germany, and a dozen other countries—as well as the stuff of fine wine barrels—yet little is known about where the North American oak tree came from. Now, biologists have pieced together the past of the most dominant species of oaks and come to a startling conclusion: The mother of all oaks didn’t arise in the tropics, as many botanists thought, but rather near the Arctic Circle, then spread southward.
It is perhaps a spectacular example of an ecological opportunity in the south that allowed for an explosive species diversification.  To reconstruct the mighty American oak’s history, Andrew Hipp, a plant systematist at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, and colleagues obtained tens of thousands of pieces of DNA from 300 trees representing 146 oak species. That enormous amount of genetic material allowed the team to conduct comparisons that revealed which species are most closely related, and avoid the confusion created by genes that jump between the branches of a family tree when two species interbreed. “This is a demonstration of the power of next-generation sequencing techniques to unlock some previously intractable problems,” Pennington says. Hipp’s team also used oak fossils to help it date when certain branches of this family tree arose.

Baywatch (2017)

I chose this movie to watch on a recent long haul flight precisely because I thought it would be light enough not to keep me up.  Possibly not even for the whole movie.  Nothing to think about and nothing to get upset about.
I was surprised to find that while I was right about it's relative safety to watch as one dozed off, that it was surprisingly entertaining.  I never watched the original TV show that it is both eulogizing and parodying, but the character that Dwayne Johnson portrays has his usual charm and sparkle, and Zac Efron does a nice job playing off of him as the screw up of the crew.  The movie has a healthy sense of spoofing off the TV version, and being able to laugh at itself, mixed in with a likable cast, makes for a pretty enjoyable, if very fluffy light movie.  It would be a great family night movie that has an audience of older teens and up.  There is a bit too much bad behavior for a younger audience to watch with their parents, but don't write this off based on its admittedly silly aura.

Aloo Tikka, Made in India

I bought Meera Sodha's book, Made in India and before I could even open it, one of my kids made some recipes out of it, including this one.  It is fantastic!

1 1/4 pound potatoes
1 tsp turmeric
1 tbsp neutral oil, plus extra to fry
1 red onion, finely chopped
2 tbsp grated fresh ginger
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
1-2 medium green chillies, finely chopped
1 tsp black mustard seeds
½ tsp garam masala
1/3 c. shelled peas (frozen is fine)
3 tbsp fresh coriander, finely chopped
Juice of ½ lemon
4 tbsp semolina or cornmeal (or plain flour)
Knob of ghee or butter (optional)
Put the potatoes, whole and unpeeled, into a pan just big enough to hold them, along with the turmeric and a generous pinch of salt and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, then simmer until very tender and drain. Put back into the hot pan for a minute or so to steam dry.
Meanwhile, heat the oil in a frying pan over a medium heat and then fry the onion until soft and beginning to caramelize. Stir in the ginger, garlic, chillis, mustard seeds and garam masala and fry for another minute. Stir in the peas and cook for a minute or so to defrost if necessary.
If you must, peel the potatoes, then mash well, and add to the frying pan. Stir in the lemon juice and two tablespoons of semolina, mix well then season to taste.
Roll the mixture into golf-ball sized portions, then flatten into cakes. Press both sides in semolina.
Coat the bottom of a frying pan with oil, and add the ghee if using. Heat over a medium-high flame, then add the tikki (they should sizzle). Cook until golden brown, then carefully flip over and repeat. Serve warm with chutney.

Sushiya, North Liberty, Iowa

I usually don't do this, but I am writing a review after having been to this restaurant more than once.  I know that a real reviewer would routinely do this to evaluate the consistency of the food, and to have the opportunity to sample more dishes than is really possible on one trip, even with a lot of people.
Even though I live a bit far from this place to eat here regularly, I really like it, and if I were going to go out for sushi, this would be the place that I would go, despite the distance.  The shaman is better than any I have had at a restaurant in Iowa.  The octopus salad has large tender pickled pieces of octopus that are tender and delicious, and again, novel.  The seaweed salad doesn't stand out, but it is ver good.  The sushi and nigiri are both well executed and it is a very good overall experience.  The quality dining scene used to be confined to Iowa City proper, but over the last decade that has been changing, and this restaurant is an example of that trend at its very best.  highly recommended.

Table 19 (2017)

This is a movie about the people who have been invited to a wedding but who are more or less not expected to show up.  Anna Kendrick says it clearly when she says: if you find yourself in the high teens, stop by.  It is lonely there.  It's far away from the bride's and groom's family tables. In fact it's about as far back as you can get and not be out on the street. It takes a while for everyone at the table in this movie to figure out the common element that resulted in all of them being placed at this particular table. Suffice to say that they all have a problematic relationship with somebody in the wedding party, and that's how they ended up seated in a corner near a restroom.
Everybody at the table has a secret, and in due time the secrets are revealed, often through interactions with table-mates that they've just met. The best part of the film is the middle, where the characters sort of wander off on their own and momentarily forget about the reception they came here to attend.  There are some pearls to be had here, and it is a good, but not great, indie movie.

Riverbank by Dong Yuan

Featured by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The majestic Riverbank is a rare and important survivor from the formative days of Chinese landscape painting. This image of a scholar's retreat nestled in a windswept mountain defile offers a window onto the pivotal but mysterious tenth century, when images of nature rose to prominence, replacing pictures of the human figure as the dominant form of pictorial expression for ambitious artists. Only a handful of paintings survive from this period, but they, along with textual evidence, indicate that it was a time of epochal transformation, when landscape painting made a quantum leap in scale, sophistication, and ambition. Riverbank is a key piece of evidence of this revolution.
The painting's central scene takes place in a small waterside pavilion, where a scholar sits gazing at the turbulent surface of a river. Behind him, his wife and two children are framed against a screen of cursive calligraphy. In a complex of buildings that extends back from the pavilion, figures busily engage in housework. Weary travelers approach the buildings on a path, completing the final stage of their journey as a powerful wind arises, bending the trees around them from right to left. Towering and tortuous mountain forms jut and twist with violent force as waterfalls plunge to the river below. At the center of this awesome vision of nature stands the scholar's retreat, a haven of peace and respite from the world beyond its walls.