Dan’s Blog

Jenny posts on how to have a spicy weekend. Apparently, it involves rock and roll, dancing, and roller derbies.

Alec — the man responsible for introducing me to indie rock and mix tapes — posts an animal-related mix over on his blog. The high point is, I think, “Ride Me Donkey”, which is surprisingly innocent, given the title.

This morning I realized that have everything necessary to create YouTube content (a MacBook with iSight and iMovie), so I decided to make a short clip. Being fairly lazy about the whole thing, it’s a clip of my cat drinking water. Enjoy!

In a startling throwback to the half-assed vegetarianism of my early twenties, I made a pretty decent jerked seitan appetizer for an Oscar party Jessica and I hosted last Sunday. The basic idea was to make small seitan cubes, and serve them with pineapple cubes of a similar size to create a nice spicy / sweet contrast. Since it’s all cube-style, toothpicks can be involved, meaning that the preparation is suitable for cocktail parties where people are standing around and don’t have easy access to utensils. And since it’s seitan, the preparation is suitable for cocktail parties where vegans are standing around and won’t eat animal products. (Will I travel great rhetorical distances for the sake of parallel sentence construction? You bet.)

The first step is to follow the seitan recipe from the post punk kitchen. They don’t include any pictures, because if they did, they would look like this:

Go ahead and pretend that that’s something you want to eat. It looks more like the end result of a particularly excruciating round of any number of bodily processes than food. That said, it’s tasty.

The next step is to squeeze out the liquid and cube your seitan. You want your seitan deeply jerked, and the drier you get your seitan prior to adding the marinade, the deeper the jerk flavor will penetrate, so don’t be shy with your squeezing and pressing.

Now add a jerk marinade of some kind (I used the jerk seasoning from Penzey’s, which definitely saved time) and bag up the result in a nice ziplock. Let it marinate for a day or so.

Finally, cook it up in a pan over high heat, or, if you can, on the grill or in the broiler. You want a nice crust on the outside — which is easier in a regular pan than a non-stick pan — and you want them to be dry-ish in the middle, or they’ll get soggy and mushy as they cool. Plate ‘em up with some pineapple cubes of roughly equivalent size, and stick toothpicks in them. Enjoy.

While shopping at the Giant this weekend, I noticed a bunch of bruised, green oranges under plastic. Upon closer inspection, it appears that Giant has has a sense of humor about its nastier products: