Something not related to writing, for once.

Just because I’m a little proud of this one.

1 fresh large red bell pepper, cut into large chunks
1/2 to 1 fresh small-medium jalapeno (depending on tastes), chopped small
1/2 pound of fresh raw shrimp tails
2-3 fresh green onion/shallots, chopped small
Handful of almond slivers
Pinch of fresh ground black pepper
Pinch of Tony’s Cajun Seasoning
A few teaspoons of virgin olive oil
A few teaspoons of brown sugar
A dash of maple syrup or molasses (I don’t really measure, okay?)
6-8 ounces of extremely sweet red wine (not necessarily cooking wine; I used Elysium)

Combine bell pepper, jalapeno, green onion, almonds, black pepper, and Tony’s in a large sauce pan, in just enough olive oil to cover the entire bottom of the pan in a layer. Start the heat on low and bring it up to simmer, stirring slowly. Add about half the wine and stir in the brown sugar and maple syrup / molasses until fully dissolved. Let simmer until about 1/3 of the liquid has evaporated; add shrimp and slowly turn the heat up to medium while adding the rest of the wine. Allow to sautee on medium heat until the sauce begins to thicken and the shrimp begins to turn pink/orange, stirring constantly; keep an eye out for clusters of jalapeno seeds and separate them when you find them. When the sauce begins to thicken, turn the heat down just a little and let it keep simmering until 1. the sauce has fully thickened to an almost syrupy consistency, and 2. you’re entirely sure the shrimp is fully cooked.

Serve on a bed of warm rice. Garnish with parsley if you’re feeling particularly pretentious, and keep plenty of cold milk on hand. It starts off sweet-savory, then kicks in with a hard, satisfying punch of fire after.

I love improvisational cooking. Hikaru was terrified when I gave him the ingredient list to bring home. He really needs to learn to trust me more. ~laughs~ Especially with how he was stuffing his face when I was done.

Posted by on Apr 8, 2009 in Life in General | 3 comments

FYI.

I think, after looking through some WordPress themes and thinking of how I want to customize the site as well as a bunch of content and architecture revamps that I’m planning, that I’m going to end up making an archive backup of all the content on the site…and then just deleting it and starting over from scratch. I’ll copy all the snippets and put them in their own categories of archived snippets, but a lot of the old posts, discussions, etc…they’ll be gone. Sometimes you just need to start over with a clean slate, and frankly the years of speculating, complaining, whining, wondering, hoping…they all feel like excess baggage.

Although I can’t bring myself to truly delete everything, which is why I’ll be just archiving it all privately. There are too many great conversations here and too many years of friendship and support to just wipe it out utterly.

Anyway. That’s all. It’ll be a while before the changes go through, just because I’ll be working on new layout tweaks and content on a test site before I bring it live here.

Edit: Layout’s basically done, as you can see. I’m a little brain-burned right now, and I need a shower before cooking dinner, so I won’t be doing all the archiving / deleting tonight. Hell, my CPRW test is Friday, so I doubt I’ll be doing it until the weekend. I think I’m going to basically delete all the “about this site” and “about me” stuff and write it much more succinctly. Same with the concepts page, with links on the concepts page to any excerpts I might decide to keep up. All the posts are going, but I’ll migrate archived snippets to a separate page with a link to each one.

After this I probably won’t be posting as regularly. This is supposed to be a professional writing blog, so I really need to be more professional in posting about writing (rather than just wiffling about word counts).

Posted by on Apr 8, 2009 in Writing Blather | 7 comments