Apparently, I have today off. I didn't actually realize this until Friday evening when a coworker pointed out. "Don't show up on Monday," he said. How could I argue?
Though I certainly should have spent this time getting as many applications into the ether as possible, I change my focus to distracting myself fairly quickly. I did get two applications in first thing, but I'm left with a nagging suspicion that I screwed them up royally. So, I decided to take a "break." Thankfully, my breaks have a rhizome like quality of branching out in random directions at the slightest provocation.
I started by continuing to read Nikos Kazantzakis' Christ Recrucified. It's a book I've had on my shelf for quite sometime and have never really given a chance. I have a couple Kazantzakis books (this and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel), and I've viewed them both as something I should some day get around to. Since I've been in a fiction drought as of late, I thought I'd go ahead with the less intense of the two. So far it's fairly interesting. It has a sort of Gogol like quality where everyone in a small town is a bit of an asshole that makes it darkly amusing. Since one of the assholish qualities Kazantzakis highlights is the gluttony of the town elders, there's a fair amount of interesting and, to my palette, unusual gastronomical details. Most, like raki, are beyond my pantry's capacity (if not my wallet). However, at some point a character is said to drink his morning coffee which was made with chickpeas and barley. This may, in fact, signify how tight fisted he, as he is tight fisted. But it occurred to me that, hey, I actually have some chickpeas! (I may, in fact, have some barley as well, but I'm not sure where it is, or what it actually looks like.)
I wondered how one goes about making coffee with chickpeas. The chickpeas that I'm familiar with come in a can, soaked in water. Perhaps, I thought, grinding those up would not be the best idea. So I looked up how make some chickpea coffee and found this intriguing resource, which also details how to make barley coffee. As it instructs, I preheated the oven to 300° and shoved the chickpeas in there on a cookie sheet.
While I waited for that to finish, I started to download and listen to the cut ups of Top 100 songs that you can find over at the excellent WFMU Beware of the Blog. Nat Roe combined the Top 100 list of songs from each year since 1956 by laying 10 second snippets of them one next to each other. He let a computer algorithm figure out the hooks by looking for the loudest section, which, surprisingly, works fairly well. That being said, it's an intensely odd listen as it plays out as the worlds longest Time Life compilation advertisement ever. Add to that the occasional novelty track in there and it's just plain weird sometimes. I've only got so far as 1962 as I type (which, nonetheless, totals over an hour and a half), but it's interesting seeing the dips and peaks of musical evolution over the years.
So, while that was playing in the background and I did the dishes, the chickpeas roasted. Because of my impatience/ignorance, it was sort of difficult to gauge when the chickpeas were done. The instructions say that you should roast them until they're the color of coffee beans, but I was getting bored with opening the oven every ten minutes or so to see how they were doing, so I took them out after they were crunchy and let them cool. Now I'm going to try it for the first time as I type this.
Hmm. It tastes like weak coffee.
Though I certainly should have spent this time getting as many applications into the ether as possible, I change my focus to distracting myself fairly quickly. I did get two applications in first thing, but I'm left with a nagging suspicion that I screwed them up royally. So, I decided to take a "break." Thankfully, my breaks have a rhizome like quality of branching out in random directions at the slightest provocation.
I started by continuing to read Nikos Kazantzakis' Christ Recrucified. It's a book I've had on my shelf for quite sometime and have never really given a chance. I have a couple Kazantzakis books (this and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel), and I've viewed them both as something I should some day get around to. Since I've been in a fiction drought as of late, I thought I'd go ahead with the less intense of the two. So far it's fairly interesting. It has a sort of Gogol like quality where everyone in a small town is a bit of an asshole that makes it darkly amusing. Since one of the assholish qualities Kazantzakis highlights is the gluttony of the town elders, there's a fair amount of interesting and, to my palette, unusual gastronomical details. Most, like raki, are beyond my pantry's capacity (if not my wallet). However, at some point a character is said to drink his morning coffee which was made with chickpeas and barley. This may, in fact, signify how tight fisted he, as he is tight fisted. But it occurred to me that, hey, I actually have some chickpeas! (I may, in fact, have some barley as well, but I'm not sure where it is, or what it actually looks like.)
I wondered how one goes about making coffee with chickpeas. The chickpeas that I'm familiar with come in a can, soaked in water. Perhaps, I thought, grinding those up would not be the best idea. So I looked up how make some chickpea coffee and found this intriguing resource, which also details how to make barley coffee. As it instructs, I preheated the oven to 300° and shoved the chickpeas in there on a cookie sheet.
While I waited for that to finish, I started to download and listen to the cut ups of Top 100 songs that you can find over at the excellent WFMU Beware of the Blog. Nat Roe combined the Top 100 list of songs from each year since 1956 by laying 10 second snippets of them one next to each other. He let a computer algorithm figure out the hooks by looking for the loudest section, which, surprisingly, works fairly well. That being said, it's an intensely odd listen as it plays out as the worlds longest Time Life compilation advertisement ever. Add to that the occasional novelty track in there and it's just plain weird sometimes. I've only got so far as 1962 as I type (which, nonetheless, totals over an hour and a half), but it's interesting seeing the dips and peaks of musical evolution over the years.
So, while that was playing in the background and I did the dishes, the chickpeas roasted. Because of my impatience/ignorance, it was sort of difficult to gauge when the chickpeas were done. The instructions say that you should roast them until they're the color of coffee beans, but I was getting bored with opening the oven every ten minutes or so to see how they were doing, so I took them out after they were crunchy and let them cool. Now I'm going to try it for the first time as I type this.
Hmm. It tastes like weak coffee.
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