Lazy Substitutiony Vegetarian Mofongo

I got envious of Andrew's culinary adventures without me in Oregon, and decided to make one of my own favorite things, Mofongo.

I did it extremely lazy, and made lots of substitutions, and it still came out really good. I think the mofongo recipes you find out there are way too fussy. Or maybe I just have tin taste buds...

Anyway, here's what I did:

Lazy Substitutiony Vegetarian Mofongo

• 2 green plantains
  
• 1 package of LightLife SmartStrips, the tasty vegetarian meat substitute with the stupid name. If you like to eat pigs, put bacon or pork in instead as a meat substitute substitute.
  
• 5 guks of olive oil (turn the bottle upside down and listen: guk guk guk guk guk STOP)
  
• Too much garlic powder
  
• One package of shrimp ramen

Peel the plantains. They're awkwarder to peel than bananas. Chop them into pieces like half an inch thick. Fry them on medium heat for a while in a little too much olive oil. If your frying pan isn't small and stupid like mine, then you'll probably need more guks. Anyway, turn 'em and don't burn 'em. They don't even have to brown, but you want to make sure they're mostly cooked inside.

Lift them out of the frying pan with a holey spatula so most of the grease is left in the pan, and put the strips in the there and start them frying.

While they're frying, mush up the plantains. Mine were kinda crusty from cooking, so it wasn't easy, and like I said I don't have any kitchen equipment to speak of, so it was a little spoon and a too-small bowl. Maybe you have an electric plantain-o-matic you got at your wedding and haven't used, but don't go crazy and overmush them; you want tasty chunky texture.

Next you're supposed to prep a cup of bouillon. Like I have bouillon. Instead I used half of the flavor packet from the shrimp ramen, too much garlic powder, and maybe a little less than a cup of water. I know what you're thinking, but shut up, it came out good.

When the strippies have browned a little, I took a little more than half of them out, because there were too much. Having no containers left, I put them in a tupper, and it started to melt the bottom. So I floated it in the sink in the hopes it would keep the plastic from melting through, ruining my leftovers AND my tupper. You don't have to do it this way, if you have fancy french-chef kitchen stuff like "non-plastic bowls". Anyway, the sink trick totally worked.

Put the mushed plantains back in the pan, and then pour the ramen packet garlic water in there, and it'll make all cooking noises and smell good.

Oh yeah, you should have cut those strips things into smaller pieces before cooking. But it's not too late -- just attack them with the spatula. It'll slip and you'll get grease everywhere, but that's what cleaning up later is for.

Anyway, keep playing with this watery chunky mess, and as the water cooks down, the plantains will kind of soak it up and finish cooking, and you'll want to take it off the heat when it's dry.

It's supposed to be served on a plate in a kind of big snowball-sized lump. Mine is served in a lump that happens to be exactly the same shape and size as my one big cooking spoon. Same shape, you'll notice as the rice, which I did in a pan, not a rice maker, because I don't have one, and it came out perfect even though I was doing two things at once, because I'm master Plastic Chef.

Also? Beer and avocado.

The cost of gay marriage

The Economist's blog reports that the head of the Republican
party, Michael Steele, is saying that gay marriage costs employers money, because more of their employees will have spouses that employers must provide health insurance for.

I'm not getting it. I thought the GOP opposed gay marriage because they think it encourages and increases homosexuality. Of course I think they're mistaken. But if their absurd strategy works, gay employees will eventually give up on being gay, marry the opposite sex, and employers will have to pay insurance for those opposite-sex spouses. (and perhaps they'll even be more likely to end up with children to insure)

But suppose the strategy doesn't work (as I suspect Steele knows that it won't). Suppose people are gay just because they're gay and not because creeping liberalism lured them into it. Then what Steele is saying is pretty explicitly awful: we admit that banning gay marriage doesn't have the positive moral effect we intend, and in fact we're depending on that failure to save money.

It's like if you decided to train a horse to talk by only feeding it when it said "please". Maybe your horse won't learn to talk, but think of all the money you'll save on oats!

A materialist argument for Intelligent Design

From what I know, and I'm no biologist, it seems like we have solid evidence that life evolved gradually, changing from generation to generation because of mutation and genetic recombination, selected by the failure of the least fit to reproduce. Also, from what I've heard, the "intelligent design" (ID) people are almost all Christians who in fact believe in the biblical account of creation, and they're just using the vague ID argument as a backdoor way to eventually teach Bible stories in the science classroom.



But I think there's an aspect of their argument that can't be rejected out of hand.

Suppose you hand a responsible, honest specialist some item, and ask them, "Was this designed by an intelligent being, or did it come about through some non-intelligent process?" Let's say, maybe, that it's a kind of square rock that could be an ancient brick, or it could just be a square rock. How would they answer?

I think, to answer responsibly, they'd have to have some clear idea of what constitutes "design" and what constitutes "intelligence". Otherwise they'd just be talking through their hat. Maybe an archeologist could take the rock and X-ray it or something and show that there were systematic chip marks, just the right size to have been made by a human hand. That wouldn't be proof, but it would be a good indication that it was designed by a person, and we know people are intelligent, so: intelligent design.

But it's kind of a cheat answer because it just relies on the common assumption that "humans are intelligent". It doesn't answer the deeper question of what "intelligence" really means, and how it shows up in the design of an object. It wouldn't help us answer the question of some alien artifact, made by a creature whose intelligence was in question. And it wouldn't help us figure out whether life on earth was created by an intelligence or not.

Well, I don't have a good set of criteria, either, that could demonstrate that, say, some crude hand-axe was made by an intelligence, but the human eye was not.

So here's another possibility. Suppose I said that the hand-axe wasn't intelligently designed. Sure, some person made it, but people aren't really intelligent. Actually they're just made of chemicals and membranes that bounce around and react to each other for eighty years or so, and any apparent "intelligence" they exhibit can actually be seen as the sum of a lot of unintelligent smaller things: neurons firing when they get stimulated, muscle reflexes getting triggered by neurons, etc.

Supposing you buy that, then why is it that the emergent behavior of a bunch of dumb neurons is considered intelligent, but the emergent behavior of DNA reactions and natural selection is not considered intelligent? They both produce amazingly complex artifacts. The time scales are wildly different, and humans have lots of other interesting characteristics like language and feelings and elbows, but aren't they both at least capable of creating some pretty brilliant designs?

The ID'ers, I think, would like to take a further leap and say this intelligent process is part of a great mind, that is self-aware, that created the universe, and inspired scriptures, and hears your prayers, and really likes candles and singing. I'd rather not jump to such conclusions, but instead suppose that there can be intelligence without "mind". Maybe intelligence is just a feature of some natural systems, like for example evolution, brains, and maybe other complicated things: an ecosystem? an economy? an anthill? Maybe humans are just unusual in being examples of intelligence that also have self-awareness, minds, and blogs.

Anyway, I think the ID argument poses an interesting problem: if we say the eye is not intelligently designed, then we are making a strong claim that ought to be justified, not about how the eye arose, but about what exactly is intelligence, and what exactly is design.

Andy and Olivia's Korean Ceremony

My brother and sister-in-law just did the Korean ceremony part of their wedding. My dad just posted his photos of it. I really wish I could have gone. I can't get over the cool hats!

After the coronation, Queen Olivia reads her first proclamation to her adoring subjects.

History is fake

Wow. I just ran into a very very old friend, who I hadn't seen since high school. He's someone I parted with on a bad note, and one of the first things I did when we found each other again, was apologize. The funny thing was, he had no memory of the incident that I thought had driven us apart, and that had being bugging me for a quarter of a century.

I know that the fussy, detailed social dramas we all play out in our heads are make believe bullshit that draw our attention away from real things; the feel of your feet in your shoes, the flavor of ramen, or the way your shirt smells when it's still clean enough to wear a second time. But I need constant reminders like this or I forget again.

A Modern Brown Elephant

Allison and Eric helped us paint our new place last week. Here we see them deviating from the planned minimalist abstract color field, experimenting with representational zöoscape. This represents an elephant: