/life/sabbatical/Chili Garlic Eggplant
I've
been working on a vegetarian version of this
spicy eggplant (aka Eggplant With Yu-Xiang Sauce; Yu-Xiang Qie-Zi) recipe.
Here's my recipe:
- If you're going to serve it on brown rice, start that cooking. Vermicelli or jasmine or other rices are also good.
- 6 chinese eggplants -- the normal kind don't taste the same. Slice them into fingers (cut the length in four and the circle in four), fry them in ~1/4 cup oil in a non-stick pan until soft. Do this ahead, or at the same time as the next step.
- 1 block extra-firm tofu. Cut into cubes -- 4x4x2 is my usual slice. Fry in a non-stick pan in ~2 tsbp oil. Turn regularly, try to brown each side.
- Add to tofu: ~one zillion cloves garlic (I'm trying about 10 right now); ~2-3 tbsp grated ginger; 1 tbsp+ hot bean sauce. This is "Toban Djan" from Lee Kum Kee or other suppliers. It is not "chili garlic sauce" or anything like that. It's very distinctive and makes my kitchen smell of awesome. Cook a bit.
- Mix together, then add to tofu: 2 tbsp soy sauce, < 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1 veggie stock cube crushed up.
- Cook a bit, then add in the eggplant strips, cook until the liquid starts disappearing.
- Add two or three chopped green onions, stir, then add 1 tbsp cornstarch mixed with 2 tbsp water. Stir to thicken. If it gets dry, add more water at any time.
- Add 2 tsp sesame oil. More is tasty and good for you.
- Make sure everything is hot and mixed, maybe give it another minute, then serve.
- Optionally, chop with topped cilantro.
New Albums from the Gallery
/life/sabbatical/Deryk King Reponse
The Mop & Pail, in all its infinite wisdom, neglected to print my brilliant reply to Deryk King's opinion article, "Carbon tax or cap and trade?". So I've decided to print my reply where it will get even more readers -- yes, right here, on my blog.
In "Carbon tax or cap and trade?" (Business, Feb 8 2008) Deryk King expresses several fallacies in the carbon tax vs. cap and trade debate. First, he says that setting a carbon price is a game of "not too high...not too low". Both cap and trade and carbon taxes require a careful policy choice; only a few paragraphs later, Mr. King mentions the disastrous fall-out of the European Carbon Trading System (ETS) because the cap was set too high.
Mr. King later alludes to the income problem: with both auctioned credits (the flavour he rightly proposes as the best variety of cap and trade) and taxes, the government has a new stream of revenue. With both, this money must be either spent, or used to reduce other income sources. In both cases, a revenue neutral solution is best.
Mr. King's comparison to the highly effective sulfur cap and trade markets of the 1980s is also dubious: sulfur is an incidental side-effect of many industrial processes (mostly coal burning); carbon dioxide is a chemically necessary result of energy extraction from fossil fuels.
Finally, the business case. Carbon markets set an unpredictable price on carbon. In times of economic downturn, the price will plummet and the incentive to reduce pollution will disappear. If the government sets the cap too low, the price could shoot sky-high, and require careful policy intervention. Carbon taxes provide a steady schedule for the price on carbon, and a steady, predictable incentive towards reducing emissions.
Since writing this, I've decided that the implication of feature-equivalence between auctioned cap and trade and carbon taxes is incorrect. There is one important place where carbon taxes differ: pure sequestration projects, like the recently defunct Planktos, who plan(ned) to seed the ocean with iron filings -- which happen to be the limiting reagent in algae growth -- so that an algae bloom would form, and then sink to the bottom, allegedly safely sequestering the carbon. There are many other, less zany possibilities, and they would go unfunded under carbon taxes, unless you either subsidized them out of band, or allowed them to offset taxes, in a sort of "tax and trade" system.
Yes, I just coined a term. Even though I stole it from a private email with Fergal.
In other news, Clare and I are off to NYC for the (long) weekend. Overnight bus there, should be fun. Hopefully we can sleep. If you're one of my New York readers, let me know so I can come say hi. Not that I have any New York readers, but I figure the possibility might be self-fulfilling. Toodles.
/meta/Photos Two Point Oh
After a long drought of photo postings, I've fiinally switched to Google's picasaweb with the iPhoto plugin. It's a pretty smooth process, except picasa doesn't pick up the album date from iPhoto, so you have to do that yourself.
The wiki is currently dead, so I replaced the little wiki feed on the web site with a photos feed.
I haven't captioned them yet, and I'm not sure if or how I'll import all my old photos (it looks like that would use up all my space anyway). But, this accomplishes one of my goals, namely "Catch up photos -- big back-posting, plus some better system for posting." Yay.
/life/sabbatical/Giving Up For Lent
I'm not going to buy this tshirt, despite its
high awesomeness quotient.
I've been mulling over a moratorium on purchases; despite writing about this idea on Pancake Tuesday, I didn't make the Lenten connection. The Church of England pulled it together for me with their Carbon Fast. I'm pretty up on my carbon, but I can take the hint: I'm giving up purchases of durables for lent. This, at a time when I've just lost my iPod, heaven forbid. (Though given my loss-and-destroy rate for iPods, calling them "durables" and not "consumables" is suspect.)
Here are the consumables on the white-list: soaps and cleaners, food (including restaurant food), toiletries.
Lent lets you skip Sundays, as I understand it, but that's no good for durables purchases. So instead I'm going to give myself three (3) exceptions for exigent circumstances. I have an interview-ish-things to do volunteer research/advocacy work with Pembina Institute, and have to match the office dress code, which is slightly higher than I'm used to. Okay. More than slightly. Not quite bowties and cumberbunds, but still far from jeans and a tshirt. I think I can make it go without anything new, though it may take one or two remaining exceptions. I also have an Economist subscription that I'm not going to cancel.
So yeah. It's a couple days late, but retroactive from Feb 6 to Mar 22. I don't think it'll be that hard, but we'll see. The trickiest thing will be to remember the rules every time I bust out my wallet.
Also, this is blog number 200. Woo.
Oh right, aalllso, in other news, I went out canvassing for the first time, last night with Chris Tindal. We did several floors of a large apartment building. Of perhaps 100 knocks, maybe 50% were absent, one guy was moderately hostile, a few doors were closed promptly, but most people were friendly. I was surprised how many people positively indicated who they were voting for, one way or the other. People seemed receptive, and Chris was good at what he does, including playing friendly with dogs, despite mild allergies. Oh, the things politicians do!
/life/sabbatical/Painting Ourselves Red
This image shows the contributions to atmospheric CO2 including land use changes over the period from 1950 to 2000.
The only countries that get a brighter shade are those that are extracting oil for us to burn (itself a carbon-intensive process), or slashing their rainforests to grow beef for us, or, in the height of irony, burning peat bogs to make the way to grow palm oil...for "environmentally friendly" biofuels.. (I'm not actually sure why Guyana is so red. I assume it's dominated by clearcutting and land-use changes, but I can't find anything to back that up.)
/life/sabbatical/Objectives and an Interview
I've finally published my objectives -- this is a living document, and I invite feedback on it. It's basically continuing the quarterly organization I grew used to at Google, though simpler.
I also had a chat with someone at the Pembina Institute. He pronounced it Pem'-bin-ah, not Pem-been'-ah, so I will too. It sounds like there's a good possibility that I'll be able to do some form of structured volunteer work on their advocacy side, which is very exciting. He proposed two possibilities, both of which sound great -- one that sounds roughly like the kind of work I thought I might get, and one that sounds like a much larger, more nebulous but far-reaching goal. Did I mention that both are very exciting? Good.
This week has suddenly seen a bit of a slow-down. Yesterday was
lost to an addictive flash game reminiscent of Jezzball and some Linux/Debian/Etch/Sarge upgrade SNAFUs on our
webserver. Also reading a tonne of blah blah blah about the YHOO+MSFT>?GOOG question. And blogs and stuff.
In addition to my current moratorium on flying, and on
seeing movies I've already seen, I'm considering sanctions against myself -- a sort of targetted "buy nothing" month.
I'm reading Natural Capitalism and the first bit is all about the collosal amounts of
waste everything generates. It's not the TV. It's not even the box, the styrofoam. Nor the lighting in the shop, the
receipts and paperwork. It's the large (more than 10-to-1 in many cases, and even more for electronics) waste from
manufacturing, not even counting effluent water. It's the tailings from the mining of the various metals, and the
wasted runs of moulded plastic from parts manufacturing. And, of course, it is the TV, and it is the
lighting in the shop, and all the things you can see, but there's so much more that you can't see. No, I'm not going to
make an iceberg analogy.
Last night I had the second installment of my media course, which was every bit as good as the first -- full of things I have no idea about, but aren't particularly difficult. It turns out we actually have to do some work, which somehow caught me off-guard, but it's not actually that much. She also gave us a free copy of her book.
Tomorrow I'm going to go to the Green Party office again, and hopefully start kicking a bit more ass there. I've also gotten in touch with their tech guy, who seems quite keen to harness my energy for his nefarious purposes.
