Recent Books I've Read

Michael Finkel, Author

"It's the ending, I believe, that Knight planned. He wasn't going to leave behind a single recorded thought, not a photo, not an idea. No person would know of his experience. Nothing would ever be written about him. He would simply vanish, and no one on this teeming planet would notice. His end wouldn't create so much as a ripple on North Pond. It would have been an existence, a life, of utter perfection."

"All women are she," Mykonos once told me. "Treat each woman as the Goddess, because she is. Women are built to reveal openness--they are nature's mechanism of surrender--and they wait for a man they could trust with their utterly surrendered heart. Few women ever meet such a man, so most women suffer terribly, longing their entire lives."

"All this research proved the cancer microbe is a reality. The cell wall deficient cancer microbe is always present in cancer and its forms are varied: cocci, rods, large globoid and yeast-like forms, acid-fast granules, fungus-like forms, and giant "large body" forms. Because most physicians are taught little about cell wall deficient bacteria, the cancer microbe remains the hidden killer in cancer."

Midtown Delights

Hanging out at Midtown Coffee in Quincy, Ca. Rainy day. Reading, drawing, and this:



Coffee:
Ethiopian dark

Grub:
Cherry turnover

Found at C.A.N.

Found a can of this at C.A.N.:


It's delicious, smoky, and hot, man! I've been adding it to spice up my fixin's and I've learned to moderate it.

Chipotles are smoked jalapeno peppers. The adobo sauce usually includes the following ingredients:
cumin, paprika, coriander, fennel, yellow mustard, garlic, onion, ancho, pasilla and Mexican oregano.

In case you want to geek out on it, here's some background info on Chipotle Adobado

Chipotle, which comes from the Nahuatl word “chilpoctli” with "chil" meaning chile pepper and "poctli” meaning smoked (was originally “pochilli”). Morita means “small blackberry” in Spanish.

The ancient civilization of Teotihuacan was the largest city/ state in Mesoamerica (located north of modern day Mexico City). The original habitants of Teotihuacan smoked chiles hundreds of years before the Aztecs (1345-1521) did. This "smoke drying" process was initially used for drying meats but they found that smoking allowed the chiles to be stored for a long period of time. Teotihuacan is actually the Aztec name for the city, which translates to "Place of the Gods" as the original name has not been deciphered from surviving name glyphs (unique marks that collectively add up to the spelling of a word) at the site. Chile historians believe that the Aztecs also smoked jalapeno peppers because the fleshy, thick walls of the jalapeno were often difficult to dry in the sun and tended to rot.

Jalapeños are named after the town of Xalapa (often spelled as Jalapa) in Véracruz State (although no longer commercially grown there), and are also known by the names cuaresmeños, gordo or Lenten chiles. In Veracruz jalapenos are called “chiles gordos”, in Puebla and Oaxaca they're are called “huachinangos”. In its dried form, the traditional chipotle chile (known as chipotle “meco”) is a dull tan to deep coffee brown in color with a wrinkled, ridged surface. It is usually 2” to 4” long and 1” wide, with a medium thick flesh.

A Spanish friar living in Mexico in the 1500s wrote of a dish he ate in Cholula (modern day Puebla) called "teatzin" which had a sauce made from chipotle and pasilla chiles that was used to stew Lenten palm flowers and fresh jalapeno chiles.

After the fall of the Aztec Empire (1345-1521), smoked chiles were found mostly in central and southern Mexico markets of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla and Veracruz.

(from spicesinc.com)