food, photos, illness, and travel

I have, once again, been sorely neglectful of my blog, but that happens when I get busy at work. For about the past month, we have been busy doing freshmen contracts, which involves printing, mailing, processing, reprinting, canceling, and doing all kinds of other things with multiple thousands of students. It’s fun, but busy.

I have also been down for the past week or so with stomach issues, which turned out to be some sort of food poisoning. I have two different kinds of medication that I have to take for the next two weeks, but hey, I’m not dead or in the hospital, so that’s a plus. In the interests of making food that won’t tear out my insides, I decided today to make a little hummus, because I’m tired of soup.

When I make hummus, I use my friend Renne’s basic recipe:

“2 cans chick peas
1/4 c. fresh lemon juice
1 tsp. salt
3-5 cloves garlic, to taste
1 C. vegetable/canola oil.

Throw everything into a food processor and blend the shit out of it.”

It sounds like a lot of oil, but it comes out super creamy, and when I bring it to parties and stuff people seem to like it. I’ve also adapted it a few times. Last time I added a 4 oz can of minced black olives and left out the garlic, and it came out super-olivey and good, if you like olives. Another time I put in a couple teaspoons of red pepper flakes, and after it sat in the fridge it was really, really spice, but good. Today I left out the garlic and added two teaspoons of dried dill. After it sits in the fridge for a couple hours I’m hoping it will be like, “Mmmmm… dill,” and not like, “There’s so much dill I want to vomit!”

I’ve gotten a lot of practice vomiting this week, though, so it still might turn out ok.

I’ve also been doing some urban exploring around town in the past month, and taken a lot of fun pictures. Here are some randoms:











Clicking will, as always, make them bigger and bring you to my photopage, where there are lots more.

I also took a trip last weekend to the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. It’s one of the Vanderbilt family homes, and was nice, but a little annoying. You can’t take any pictures inside the house, because they sell them in the gift shops. I could see banning flash photography, because over time it fades colors and is damaging to paintings and fabrics, but after paying $40 to get in you shouldn’t have to pay ten to twenty more dollars for pictures. I only paid five to get in, because it was a college trip, but still, the principle of it bothers me.

You can take as many pictures as you want outside the house, though:











It would have been nicer if it hadn’t rained, but I ended up with thirty or so pictures that I really liked, so it wasn’t a total loss.