If, on your journey, you should encounter Veggie-Tales God... Veggie-Tales God will be peeled.

While I may not see my dream of acquiring a solid mag-block of Japanese steel knives fulfilled for a few years, using a protective rubber glove and this thing was shockingly effective today.   20 minutes saw 10lbs of medium-sized Russets go from washed to flawless-white & quartered.

Treehugger has an insightful article from a former prefab homebuilder. These guys came on the scene a few years ago thinking that they would remake the world in a more sustainable image and a CGI image a day went up onto sites like Inhabitat of remote, unique-looking one-off homes perched over a frozen lake with nobody around.  The fact that the world can’t live away sustainably if everybody is in a Michigan state park on custom-built “prefab” housing a mile from the next human being didn’t seem to percolate into their ideological framework.   Their tiny, overpriced product only appealed to hipster environmentalist millionaires who wanted to live in the wilderness – a market which did not support the dozens of outfits that sprung up straight out of architecture school.  The only functional green prefab idea that came out of this movement was to use recycled shipping containers rather than 2×4′s in urban port cities, and even then half the buildings are currently made of purpose-built containers which don’t save any resources.
A commenter suggests that the *real money* is in the mobile home market, and the refreshing response goes:

The problem is the fundamental disconnect about costs in that market. When you build with well insulated walls, non-toxic materials and better build quality, the cost goes up. The people who understand the mobile home/trailer park system, where you rent the spot and own the manufactured home, balked at the price. No, they laughed at the price. They thought we were all kidding.  The people who understood how much it cost to build a proper, healthy green trailer didn’t get the model of tenure. There was nowhere for them to put the home because they had no intention of going into a park.

I’ve tried to maintain a decent number of foodblogs since I cut back on the delicious RSS firehose that is Tastespotting, but I only have one that makes me laugh on a reliable basis. This Is Why You’re Fat is something I came upon while investigating the McGangbang phenomena and stayed for more.
Presenting:
Eggs Benedict Poutine

French fries, brown gravy and cheese curds topped with a poached egg, bacon, Hollandaise sauce

Neopolitan mini-cupcake set with wafer cookies and strawberry marshmallows dipped in white chocolate dipped in chocolate cookie crumbs

A wheel of brie stuffed with chocolate and baked in a puff pastry

The Rubix Cubewich

Cubes of pastrami, kielbasa, salt pork, salami, and two types of cheddar between flattened toast

While on the topic, I am stunned to see that the Gourmet Project has survived Gourmet Magazine – but one does reach a point in photography when it’s clear that their absolutely epic cover shots are within an amateur’s grasp with a little lighting, a $400 DSLR, and a fast 50mm prime. I just bounced my first flash for some family Thanksgiving shots on my aged Powershot S3 IS… and wow, it worked well. Since I used a spoon, it was useful for pumpkin pie afterwards. I see camera gear on my Christmas list.

Favorite food of the moment:
O’Tasty BBQ Pork Bao with Oyster Sauce

“The Revolution Will Not Be Handmade” is one of the most refreshing things I’ve read in a while. I spent Monday night listening to classmates discuss new green buildings and whether plastic bag bans and recycling are a necessary, sufficient, or even worthwhile condition to satisfy environmental needs. Once you learn a certain amount about just how screwed we are vis-à-vis atmospheric CO2, finite hydrocarbon resources, and ecological resilience, and you’ve picked up enough knowledge of science/engineering and geopolitics to avoid being a useful idiot to anyone, you become a bit jaded about the possibility of our society making any changes necessary to avert eventual emergencies. Compare our responses to predicted events which may happen on a certain date (eg. Y2k, or elections) and which will definitely happen on an uncertain date (eg. financial corrections as we just experienced, technological obsolescence, peak oil).

The ‘manifesto’ manages to at least articulate the urgency and the scale of the changes needed to ensure that my great-grandkids and their contemporaries around the world enjoy a better quality of life than I do – which is one of my basic definitions of a ‘sustainable’ civilization.

A concise snippet:

We can no longer afford to mistake the symbolic for the effective, or put our hopes in the mystical idea that if enough of us embrace small steps, our values will ripple mysteriously out through the culture and utterly transform it. We’ve been saying that for more than 40 years, it hasn’t happened and we need to stop lying to ourselves that it will. Live the life that fits your values, but don’t mistake that for changing the world.