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November 27, 2005
Support reviews of bad comics or the terrorists have already won.
Sometimes I write about food, sometimes I write about funny pictures, and sometimes, just sometimes, I write about comics. Bad comics. Read my latest Queer Eye on Comics review here.
Making fun of things you can't really create yourself is the American Way. Read my reviews or be declared Unpatriotic.
Posted by kyle at 1:05 AM
November 17, 2005
Baking... but not really.
So I like to bake things. Sometimes these things involve relatively complicated mixes and measures, and sometimes you just dump it all in there and throw that shit into the oven. Sometimes you pick up a Pepperidge Farms frozen job and eat it all in one sitting while watching "When Harry Met Sally." Sometimes.
Anyone who bakes regularly (or maybe anyone whose baked anything ever) knows this, but the people who get to share the bounty of your kitchen aren't that much more impressed when you've made a cake from scratch than when you've made something that came in a box, pan included. That's why I don't mind making the occasional "I baked, but not really" treat. Ideally, you will have used a few actual ingredients (eggs, butter, cocoa), and added them to some pre-fab product (cake mix, powdered instant coffee, a bag of 50 unwrapped Kraft caramels) so you can feel like "Hey! I really made this!" Bonus points if the recipe in question is baked all in one pan and requires no more effort in the end than cutting it into bars or sprinkling it with a little confectioners' sugar.
So when Emily shared the following recipe from a book she was reading, I felt like I had to give it a try. A bit of web-research (and by that I mean one Google-search and clicking on one page-worth of results) yielded a couple of alternate recipes for these brownies, some of which were from scratch, but I like this one because it's base is cake-mix, and we all know how much I love cake mix.
Why the author of the book would ever suggest using skim evaporated milk or milk chocolate chips in this recipe is beyond me (semi-sweet are the only chips to use, in my book at least), but she was writing about dealing with breakups, so I suppose in that situation, any chocolate is good chocolate.
I tried the recipe to the letter the first time I made these last weekend, but they were lacking a certain something, so I altered it a bit, but it remains essentially the same: one of those much-too-sweet one-pan indulgences that Americans are so fond of. I often like my desserts with a little more subtlety (at restaurants, I usually choose the fruit tart over the Chocolate Kamikaze Death Spiral Fudge Torte), but who'd really serve this as a dessert? They're for making and taking to work, so you can say... "Hey everybody! I baked... but not really!"
CRACK BROWNIES *
These are a little goopy at room temperature, but that's OK by me. For less goop, refrigerate them for at least 30 minutes before serving.
50 light (colored) caramels (about one 14 oz bag of the Kraft variety)
1/3 cup + an additional 1/3 cup unsweetened evaporated milk
1 package dark chocolate (like Chocolate Fudge or something) cake mix
¾ cup melted butter, plus some solid butter for the pan
2 cups (one 12 oz. bag) of semi-sweet chocolate chips
flour for dusting the pan
Preheat oven to 350º Grease and flour the bottom and sides of a 9x13 in. baking dish (even if it's non-stick). Set aside.
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine unwrapped caramels and first 1/3 cup evaporated milk. Melt over low heat, stirring constantly, until caramels are melted. Set aside.
In a large mixing bowl, stir together cake mix, melted butter, and additional 1/3 cup of evaporated milk until combined. Divide doughy results in half, and, with your hands, lightly press half the dough into the bottom of the pan. Bake for 8-9 minutes, or until cake starts to puff up a bit but isn't totally done.
Remove pan from oven and sprinkle chocolate chips evenly over the top of the cake, avoiding the edges. Pour melted caramel mixture evenly over the chips, again avoiding the pan edges. Crumble clumps of the remaining cake dough across the top of the caramel.
Return the pan to the oven to bake for an additional 20 minutes. Remove from oven and cool for 15 minutes and then cut into squares.
In the interest of full disclosure, here are the changes I made from the original recipe:
• She called for skim evaporated milk, and I used the full fat version. Unsweetened, of course.
• She called for German Chocolate cake mix, and I used a dark chocolate mix.
• She called for milk chocolate chips, and I used semi-sweet.
*contains no actual Crack. You won't miss it.
Posted by kyle at 2:13 PM | Comments (4)
November 15, 2005
Great Moments in the History of White Trash: A White Trash Wedding
This was an awful story; a poor bride nearly carjacked on her wedding day, and still in her wedding dress no less. Her new husband, in his tux, had just left the car.
Bride testifies about wedding night carjack
Dave Murphy, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
SNIP!On Monday, barely two weeks after their Oct. 29 wedding, Zahn was testifying in a South San Francisco courtroom at the preliminary hearing of Alan Ticas-Soto, the 21-year-old man accused of carjacking and being under the influence of methamphetamines.
SNIP!
Zahn testified calmly about how she saw Ticas-Soto jump into their car and, without saying a word, start backing it up.
"I tried to get out, but my seat belt stopped me," she said. "I screamed, 'What are you doing? What are you doing?' "
But what you really need to know is that...
...wait for it...
THEY WERE PICKING UP FAST FOOD AT TACO BELL. ON THEIR WEDDING DAY.
Now, it's not like they deserved to be carjacked or anything, but you know if they had just gone for a nice lamb shawarma that none of this would have happened. I'm just saying.
Posted by kyle at 1:24 PM
November 9, 2005
Everyone A Puzzle Lover
So... you've heard Emily and I talk about the radio station that we're listening to a lot these days at work... it's 99.3 FM "The Vine," a station straight outta Napa. C'pher and I discovered this station on one of our many many trips to drink wine (and, for C, to unthaw in the summer), and by some strange quirk of the troposphere, we were able to pick it up on one single radio in our old North Beach apartment. We can't get it at all in our new Mission digs, but I managed to tune it in at work, and now Emily is a convert.
They have these really funny sting promos for the station as they go back into the music from commercials -- I guess they're meant to show the wide variety of music played on the station. They say things like, "From The Gong Show... to American Idol. We're 99.3... The Vine. Just good music." Are you beginning to see why we love this station so much?
One day, I heard one that presented a bit of a puzzle: "From Sonny & Cher... to Nick & Jessica." That got me to thinking -- and we know where that leads. If this tag were a puzzle where we were supposed to show the "steps" between Sonny & Cher and Nick & Jessica, what would those steps be?
I offer the following as a starting point:
Sonny & Cher
Donny & Marie
Captain & Tenille
Ashford & Simpson
?
Nick & Jessica
In the spirit of Word Combinations, please help me fill in the huge huge gaps. E-mail your ideas directly to me, or leave them in the comment section here. When I send the resulting puzzle to Will Shortz for use on Weekend Edition Sunday, I will be sure he mentions your name. How's that for incentive?
Posted by kyle at 3:20 PM
November 4, 2005
Found Porn: Ho Ho... woah.
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
Next time: What are you doing New Year's Eve?
Posted by kyle at 11:42 AM
November 1, 2005
Better Living Through... well, just about Everything
Everyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows this already, but for those of you Google-searching for a specific Kyle Minor, keep in mind that this one is not me.
Soapbox derby does some fast living in S.F.Mark Hedin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
On a gloriously sunny Sunday afternoon, several hundred of the city's most-tattooed denizens spent the day on Bernal Heights' western slope, cheering as a motley collection of wheeled contraptions, maintaining only the barest pretense of control, hurtled by.
--SNIP--
In Sunday's pneumatic-tire category, it came down to a duel between Kyle Minor, driving a three-wheel adapted go-kart, and the man who built that car....
I'm fairly sure the one mentioned in this article is this one, though. I have occasionally gotten calls and e-mails meant for him. They started not long after I moved here in 1997.
That there are numerous Kyle Minors (or is it Kyles Minor?) in the world is not so unusual (the one who owns www.kyleminor.com seems an interesting guy... a writer), but that there is another Kyle Minor right here in San Francisco has made me start to thinking. And we know where that leads.
Here is what I know about him:
• He went to college in Kansas and is probably from there.
• He went to Japan for a long trip a few years ago.
• He races in soap-box derby races (I actually knew this before the article).
• He used to live in or near the Castro.
• He has his own business designing and building furniture and sculpture.
• He is most probably younger than I.
• He designed and built a DJ booth for a soon to open supper club here in SF and will likely be paid partially in restaurant credit.
• His aunt thinks he's a 'really great kid.'
I have no evidence to support that he has ever:
• sung karaoke more than once a year.
• cut out, baked, and decorated Christmas cookies from scratch.
• watched more than one episode of Star Trek in a row.
• looked forward to an evening of ironing at home.
• read, much less written at exhaustive length, about comic books of any kind.
The only thing I may have in common with my accidental namesake is that we both like beer, and I've just extrapolated this fact about him based on the soap box derby article.
Here's what I've concluded: this guy is a way better version of Kyle Minor than I am. It's in the interest of full disclosure that I present him here so that you, my friends can decide if you'd rather upgrade to the newer, hipper, and undoubtedly more-likely-to-build-you-a chair-as-a-birthday-gift model.
I do not seek fawning praise from you either. I just think it's fair to let you know that, when seeking to fill that 'Kyle Minor' slot in your social schedule, that I am not the only local option.
Posted by kyle at 2:20 PM