Progress on the full-body sculpture! Yes, I started all over (again), and changed the posture to something more expressive. Since I am modeling after someone I am trying to keep the muscles as natural as possible. Hence they are not overly pronounced. Plus, the boots and clothes would mask the muscles anyways, so I am saving the time it would take to carve and model the muscles so I can apend it working on other parts like the head (which I obviously just started on ;) )
A post on Twitter, asking for a recipe of baby back ribs that is neither time consuming, nor involves a grill, made me think of a very good recipe I read about in one of my favorite cookbooks: the Baby Back Ribs with Rosemary Crust.
Anything I have ever tried out of this book always turned out great and tremendously tasty. Hence I think there is not much that can go wrong with this one either, plus - people in South Tyrol really know how to cook! It’s all about the good ingredients and the passion that goes into cooking each dish. So here we go:
For 4 people
Meat
8 baby back ribs, 3.5 to 4 oz each
Vegetables
1 small onion
1 oz carrots
1 oz celery
Other
2 tbsp oil (to sauté the meat)
3.4 oz white wine or beer
8.45 oz veal broth
1 twig of rosemary
freshly ground pepper
salt
1 tbsp cold, unsalted butter for the sauce
Rosemary crust
1.8 oz white bread crumbs
1 tbsp yellow mustard
1 tbsp rosemary, finely chopped
1/2 clove of garlic
1 tsp parslez, finely chopped
2.8 oz unsalted butter
freshly ground pepper
salt
Oven temperature: 355ºF
Cooking time: 35 minutes
Preparation
1. Season the ribs with salt and pepper and sauté in oil in the preheated oven.
2. Clean the onion, carrots and celery and cut into roughly 1/2 inch large pieces. Add the vegetables to the ribs and let everything cook for about 30 minutes.
3. Remove ribs, pour off excess oil from the pan, deglaze the gravy with white wine.
4. Add the veal broth, the rosemary twig, let it boil down.
5. Season to taste with pepper and salt, add some butter to the meat and let it melt. Serve sauce with the ribs.
Rosemary crust
1. Finely chop the garlic, rosemary and parsley and mix with white bread crumbs, mustard and the butter until you have a firm dough (consistency should resemble shortcrust pastry)
2. Roll the dough until 1/8 inch thick and let it cool down a little (gets warm from kneading!)
2. Cut it into pieces, cover the baked ribs with it and bake everything for another 5 minutes at 355ºF.
Variation:
You can also serve the ribs without the crust if you prefer.
The ribs go well with a green salad with cocktail tomatoes or with baked potatoes.
Great, now I’m hungry… ;)
I love diners, and I especially love them when they’re cozy and the staff is wonderful.
The Lighthouse Café in Sausalito is such a place. We had not eaten there ever before, but the café with its miniature, wooden lighthouse on top of the structure had definitely caught my eye on previous occasions. So today was the day.
The café is tiny, and I really mean tiny. There are five tables which each sit two to four people, and ten seats facing the grill. So, with 30 seats it isn’t a huge place, but, as the owners state themselves: it is the greatest little place in town.
The staff was really nice, and the food was absolutely delicious! We were lucky to get a table for four instantly, because after us people came pouring in. And usually people will stand in line to get a table.
The sandwich I had, the House Roast Turkey Club Sandwich easily was one of the best sandwiches I had ever had around the Bay Area - and those who know all the hundreds of different places in and around San Francisco that serve sandwiches sure know what this statement means.
Also, instead of the regular french fries or coleslaw they offer either a potato salad or house made fries. I chose the house made fries, and they were delicious! Actually none of us chose the french fries, because those are nothing special in general and you can get them almost anywhere. Even though of course their quality can vary greatly depending on where you go.
From what I could tell their house made potatoes were made of red potato chunks fried in a pan rather than deep fried in a fryer, mixed with green and red bell pepper and seasoned with herbs and a bit of pepper and salt. In Germany we have a somewhat similar dish called Bratkartoffeln, which basically means fried potatoes. They are made in a pan as well until they are golden and crispy. What I like about this kind of preparation is that the flavor does not get lost in the frying process, they are not as fatty as regular fries, and they add more variety to the dish itself. So thank you, Annette, it was great to get these potatoes and not having to make them myself this time! ;)
Annette Andresen, the owner, is a native Dane and has a lovely accent and outgoing personality. She is open for a chat and even posed for a picture for me. I will definitely come back, because the atmosphere and the service were top notch and we got our food really fast even though there was a lot going on.
A lot of Apple haters like to label those who like Apple products as “fanboys”, and they do not mean it in a nice way. From my own experience with such people in discussions about Apple and PC, they mean that someone who likes Apple products is narrow-minded, ignorant and plain stupid. They cannot, under no circumstances, have valid reasons to like an Apple product but only because they are blinded-by-Apple fanboys.
However, seeing one of those die-hard PC-supporters fumble with his Android device, cursing because that damn pen would not react with the surface of his screen but still saying that his Android device is so much more sophisticated than an iPhone for example, I really have to say that I rather let them label me.
Yes, I do prefer Apple products over anything PC or Android related. Why? They look beautiful, and they work. I cannot assign any of those attributes to any PC related product I have used in my life. It never worked instantly, always had to be sent back for repairs, it looked boring and was neither fun nor intuitive to use. My pre-Apple era has frustration written all over it.
Apple products work. For me at least.
Guess who’s back? Yep, the first good casting in plaster, needed only minor repairs, not many bubbles to fill. I do like the finish of the FGR-95, very smooth. It will be finished once colored in grey (before I will, at some point, airbrush it).
