Sam's Super Salad

Here's a recipe for Sam's Super Salad, as invented by Sam and Matthew out of empty-pantry necessity.

Serves 3-4

Ingredients:

2 handfuls of assorted mushrooms, sliced
1 ball of buffalo mozzarella cheese
2 red bell peppers, halved and seeded
1 can of chickpeas, drained
1 packet of rocket/roquette/arugula/rucola
balsamic vinegar
olive oil
salt
herbs & spices

1. Start frying the mushrooms with a bit of olive oil and whatever herbs you like. (I like thyme on my mushrooms.) Fry them until they're brown and soft and squidgy. Then leave them aside to cool.
2. Roast the red peppers. To do this, but them in an oven tray and drizzle them with oil, as well as adding some herbs, salt, and pepper. Put them in the oven at about 190C for fifteen minutes or so. When they look warmed but still quite hard, turn your oven to HOT HOT OMFG HOT (broil/grill) and put them directly under the element until their skins are burning. Be careful when you're roasting the peppers, watch them and wear over gloves, et cetera. When the peppers are done, they will be mooshy, so you can shape them into slices with a spoon. Leave them aside to cool.
3. Drain and mildly salt the chick peas.
4. Cut the mozarella into cubes.
5. When everything cool and drained and cut, you're salad-ready: combine all the ingredients, and drizzle with the olive oil and balsamic vinegar and serve with fresh bread.

Jessi's Super Salad:

As a variation, use brie instead of mozzarella.

Oscar's Super Salad:

Oscar loves blue cheese. So, try using blue cheese instead of mozzarella, and maybe substituting chunks of toasted bread for the chickpeas.

Shiny shiny, shiny boots of leather...

Oh, hello! I'm back after a hard slog of exams, have have much to post from my recent adventures of breaktime 'twixt booktime. So, first of all, you can download free audiobooks here, on LibriVox. I've been listening to Von Masoch's Venus in Furs in the bath, lime cordial and soda in hand. It made me feel glamourous for a about a quarter of an hour, and then noodle-ish, as if I was a little udon noodle floating in miso broth, but this had more to do with my submersion in warm water than the musical and engaging voice of LibriVox's volunteer reader.

I'm a Linux user, and my open-source operating system distro of choice is Ubuntu, billed as "Linux for human beings." I use Ubuntu for two reasons: One, I used to be a Macintosh type of girl, but my love affair with Apple came to a end when my iPod and iBook collapsed within a month of each other in a veritable Liebestod of fading batteries, old-age bugs, and disk fragmentation, and I lacked the cash and brand dedication to renew them. Second, there is, of course, an ethical and political imperative I feel towards the use of open source software; see the legendary The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay and the other excellent essays and hacker reference bits on Eric Raymond's site . Basically, I really like open-source software but I'm too much of a former Apple point and click noodlehead to run something butch and heavy efficient like SuSe or Fedora. Anyhoodles, you're using Windows, and would like to try something different for your beloved compy (something speedier, more user friendly, more secure, less of those McAffee pop-up windows. Seriously, how do you guys deal with those?), take a look at this manga: Ubunchu. It's all about a group of high school kids installing Ubuntu on their new PC. As my friend Sam pointed out, manga as a genre is about as varied as "talking pictures" as a genre. So no giggles please. Okay, a few. Tee-hee.

Sorry I've been away...

I've been hunting isopods. Or, rather, running away from them as fast as I can, sometimes using roller-skates, sometimes using a home-made hot-air balloon weaved from plastic carrier bags, and sometimes simply legging it, screaming
"OMFG, kill it, kill it NOW!" Thanks for your patience. I will return to post more regularly soon.