Diary of a Wolfeman

Here’s my two cents for the Carnival: Stir Fry

Ingredients:
3 cups white rice
1 lb. beef, chicken or pork
1 stalk celery
1 green pepper
1 small yellow onion
1 large carrot
seasonings

Grau is right that a Dutch Oven is a necessity for good camp cooking, and here’s another tip for you: buy a good wok.

The wok has been around for centuries, for the same reasons as your grandmother’s cast-iron skillets: a good wok is cast-iron, too. Once it’s properly seasoned, it’s non-stick, easy to clean, and is designed to be used right on the coals. If you’re an anachronist like Grau and I, you’ll have to check to see if wok cooking is ‘period’ for you, but I say go for it anyway.

Now, the hardest part about doing stir-fry is getting the rice right. With some experimentation, the rice can be cooked ahead of time at home, and then re-heated on site with little fuss. If you’re doing it all on the fire, though, it can be tricky. You must have a good, solid pot (not too thick) with a tight lid. You will also need to regulate two areas of the fire – one hot, one cooler.

Put 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 cups of water in for every cup of rice – I use three cups of rice for my standard serving. On a hotter part of the fire, bring this to a boil, then cover with the lid and move to the cool side to simmer for about 12 minutes. DO NOT CHECK THE RICE – just pull it off the fire and let it sit for another 5-10 minutes before you remove the lid. There’s steam in there which is finishing off the cooking process. Let out the steam, and your rice won’t cook evenly.

Now for the easy part: gather up about a pound of beef, pork or chicken and a handful or two of your favorite veggies. Chop it all into smallish bits, keeping the meat separate. The pile of meat and the pile of veggies should be about the same size, but you want to stop here and make sure it will all fit into your wok with room to stir – it sucks to have it all fly out into the fire.

Season the meat with whatever you like – McCormick’s makes a great line called “Montreal Steak” or “Chicken” that works good, plus I throw in some Lowry’s and a dash of good soy sauce. Stick the wok in the fire with a tablespoon or so worth of oil (I use the Tsang’s Wok Oil from the Asian isle at my grocers’) and let it heat for about a minute. If the oil starts to smoke, you’ve gone too far and need to cool the pan down and start over.

When the wok reaches temp, toss in the meat and sear it, stirring almost constantly. When it looks about half-cooked, throw in the veggies and keep stirring. Continue cooking until the meat is to taste, then either pull from the fire, or pour in some sauce if you don’t like it dry. Bring the sauce almost to a boil before serving. I like my veggies crunchy, so I wait a little longer before I put them in.

When you pull it from the fire, cover it and let it rest for about 5 minutes before serving, same as the rice. This lets everything absorb the remaining heat evenly.

Here’s an update on todays’ brake job –

I left the car at the shop at 12:30 today. I had a 1:30 appointment, but had nothing better to do, so I dropped it off early and went down to Backspace – you know that part already.

Well, it took them until 2:30 to call me and let me know the results of the inspection – you know those already too. They told me it would be $60 to do the front brakes, which is reasonable. It would cost me $35 for the parts, so an extra $25 for labor ain’t bad.

Around 5:30, I got tired of dead-heading around the coffeeshop and went back to the garage. The Beastie was up on the racks still, all four wheels off, and nobody working on it. The manager showed me the leaks in the rear units, which were slight at most – yeah, they probably do need to be rebuilt. Then he showed me the rear drums, which (according to my Chilton manual) are actually .010 of an inch beyond recommended wear limit. So, he was correct about the rears, I’ll give him that.

What they did not tell me was that there would be $15 additional charge for disposal fees and misc charges. That was annoying. What was even more annoying was when they asked me to come look at the car after they took a test drive.

They showed me how fluid had sprayed out of the cylinder and onto the hood and the firewall and other parts close by, and the master cylinder was almost dry. I have seen that splatter pattern before – it happens when you push the front pistons back into the calipers while forgetting to leave the cap on the master cylinder. Fluid sprays out all over the place. So, their mechanic had done this same thing, then forgot to top off the master cylinder fluid level before driving my car around the block.

That right there is a first-year probie’s mistake, and I expect more out of a shop sporting a BBB plaque on the wall. When I told the manager I was not pleased with the service or the surprise fees, he tried to give me a free oil change. Now, if I don’t like their work, why in the world would I bring my car back to them?

My initial reaction to all this was to write a burning letter to the BBB complaining about this place. After writing it all down, though, I am simply unhappy with the work and will not be giving them any more of my business, and will not reccomend them to my friends, or anyone else that reads this blog. Oh, the name of the shop? Brake Team, on Broadway and Burnside downtown. If you let them do the work on your car, watch them. They might do better with supervision.

Pax Whitewillow introduced himself to me at an SCA event by plopping down between myself and Twiggy. He gave us both his name, handed me a boda bag of booze, and proceeded to chat Twiggy up. (So basically, he bought her from me with peach Schnappes – Twig and I had been just friends for over a year at that point, so it wasn’t a bad deal lol)

Pax is one of those guys that can walk into a room and make every other guy there mostly invisible due to his own good looks, charm and personal aura. He’s about 6’3″ or 4″, with long blond hair and Nordic genes. I have litterally watched a woman walk into a telephone pole because she was too busy staring at the man to watch where she was going.

I was torn between laughing and crying that day, lemme tell ya. Us guys would sit around and try to brainstorm ways to make him less attractive, most of which involved shaving his head. We figured everything we did would just backfire, though, and left him alone. There were certain social events we didn’t invite him to, though, in an effort to improve our chances with the ladies.

Pax was also infamous for his ability to get a ride anywhere, anytime, usually door-to-door service. All he had to do was walk along, reading a book with his thumb out, and a car full of co-eds would immediately appear out of thin air and drive him anywhere. At one point in time, he planned to hitch down to Mexico for a couple weeks. Many of us told him it was a bad idea, but he went off anyway.

A few days later, he appeared on my doorstep – he had found a ride, but about two hours down the road things got generally uncomfortable, so he bailed and came home. My place was closer to the freeway than his, so he stopped in to rest a bit before heading home. While we talked, however, we got the beginnings of an idea on how to play a supremely nasty joke on someone.

You see, Rhias had been one of the more fervent opponents of his planned trip, and stated flatly that if something bad befell him, she would laugh and go raid his stuff. Since I was the only one that knew Pax had returned early and unscathed, we started plotting.

We invited Rhias over for the evening, a fairly regular occurence. Richard and I started wondering about Pax, as no-one had heard from him since he left. In the course of the conversation, one of us got a page and made a phone call to ‘discover’ from Pax’s mom that he had made it to Mexico, but had somehow got into a bar brawl and had had a bottle broken over his cranium – he was now in the hospital for X-rays and at least stitches, if not worse. In Tijajuanna. Pax was actually hiding in the front room closet, listening to the whole thing through the slatted door.

While the accomplices and I started imagining worst case scenarios, Pax got an inspiration and hung some of his hair through the slats to signal me – I caught his drift and came up with a great combination of horror and glee as I said “shit – they’re probably going to have to shave his head!”

All the girls in the room blanched at that, even Rhias, drunk as she was by this time. After a moment of drunken consideration, she came back with: “well, fuck. If he dies, I get his books!” After a moment of stunned silence, we all busted up – even Pax, who fell out of the closet in his mirth. It took Rhias a full three seconds to realize it was him – at which point she went over and started ineffectively swatting at him.

We’re still not sure if it was punishment for the joke, or for getting her hopes up about snagging his library.

Ahh, thank DoC for the advent of free wifi at coffee shops! I’m downtown at Backspace today (NW 5th and Davis or so) while the Little Black Beastie is in the shop for new brakes. Well, two out of four of them, anyway.

According to the chap at the shop, the rear cylinders are leaking and the drums themselves are ‘outsized’ enough that they can’t be turned. They want upwards of 400 clams for the work, which would be a resounding NO! The rebuild kits are only about $20, and shoes another $35, so I’ll tackle that job myself. I was just trying to save myself the time and annoyance of picking up the ass-end of the Beastie and pulling everything apart myself.

(The drums simply can’t be that bad, as I have heard no grinding noises coming from the wheels at all, so they were probably trying to milk me for the extra bits.)

In other news, I really don’t have any. Kinda mellow lately. The Ratboy talked me into getting a new cage for his hamster Tweaker the other day – the rodent is on the large side, and his old cage was a bit confining, especially the wheel. The new cage, however, is all wheel, with a platform riding the axle for his food, water and cubby. He hasn’t quite figured out how to squeeze his hide through the connecting tunnel though, so we have to move him by hand back up to the food an water a couple times a day until I can build bigger tunnels.

Rodent obesity – who’d a thunk it?