Posts Tagged ‘Week’

The Food Lab’s Asparagus Week, Day 2: Grilled Asparagus Tacos with Creamy Adobo and Pickled Red Onions

Posted on May 8th, 2012 • Filed under Taste • No Comments

It’s time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he’ll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

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[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Meaty tacos are great, but who doesn’t love charred sweet asparagus in the springtime? I like to cook mine in olive oil until nearly blackened in spots so that you get a nice contrast between the natural sweetness of the ‘gus and the smoky, browned complexity of the charred spots. If you’ve got a real grill burning charcoal, all the better.

The key to getting them to work in taco form is to cut them into pieces that are small enough that you don’t drag whole stalks out of the tortilla as you bite in, but are still large enough that you get a good meaty bite when you shove that folded double-stacked tortilla in your mouth.

If you’re lucky enough to live near a farmers’ market or good supermarket, now’s the time to try out as many different types of asparagus as possible. Slender, sweet green stalks are delicious, but their fatter, meatier purple cousins are great as well. The Spanish specialty white asparagus is grown with dirt piled on top of it, completely depriving it of sunlight—a process called etiolation. Without sunlight, the stalks form no chlorophyll and stay a ghostly white. They’re getting easier to come by in the states these days and boast a delicately bitter flavor and mild sweetness.

I like to use a mix of stalks to give some complexity to my tacos.

For condiments, you could go with a bright green salsa verde if the asparagus isn’t already enough green for you (I like to cut mine with a bit of sour cream to add a touch of richness to the taco), or when the good tomatoes start coming in, a nice roasted tomato salsa would also be a fine choice. In this case, I happened to have some homemade adobo sauce left over from when I made Beef Barbacoa Tacos last week. After combining it with some sour cream, its rich, roasted chili flavor paired so perfectly with the asparagus that I think it’s worth making a separate batch for your asparagus tacos even if you don’t have leftovers sitting around in your fridge like I did.

The base for the adobo sauce is roasted whole chilis along with a few canned chipotles. I use a few different types of dried chilis to add some complexity to the finished dish, but if you’re looking for a quicker, easier, no-cook alternative, simply blending together some canned chipotles with equal parts sour cream and a squeeze of lime juice makes a fine taco condiment.

Additional garnishes are totally at your discretion, but might I recommend some pickled red onions, chopped cilantro, and some crumbled queso fresco or cotija cheese?

Seriously—make these at your next cookout, and I guarantee that nobody will ask you where the burgers are.

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

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Feature: 1859′s “Great Auroral Storm”—the week the Sun touched the earth

Posted on May 2nd, 2012 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

Noon approached on September 1, 1859, and British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington was busy with his favorite pastime: tracking sunspots, those huge regions of the star darkened by shifts in its magnetic field. He projected the Sun’s image from his viewing device onto a plate of glass stained a “pale straw colour,” which gave him a picture of the fiery globe one inch shy of a foot in diameter.

The morning’s work went as normal. Carrington patiently counted and charted spots, time-lining changes in their positions with a chronometer. Then he saw something unusual.

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2012 Congress of Curious Peoples This Week at Coney Island!!!

Posted on April 16th, 2012 • Filed under Learn • No Comments


Hi All! Just a reminder that the 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples–a 10-day series of lectures and performances devoted to curiosity and curiosities broadly considered, and featuring sideshow acts, lectures, performances, and a 2-day scholarly-yet-popular symposium called The Congress for Curious Peoples–launches in earnest tomorrow night, with a lecture by the always amazing Amy Herzog.

This year’s iteration of The Congress promises to be the best yet; it will include a 2-day symposium featuring panel discussions on topics such as pre-cinematic immersive amusements and religion as spectacle, with featured speakers that include Sara Velas of The Velaslavasay Panorama; Paul Koudounaris of Empire of Death; Colin Nightingale, Senior Producer of Punchdrunk, the company behind the mindbendingly amazing Sleep No More Sleep; and Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty. Also featured will be stand-alone lectures on the 17th century artist of fetal skeleton tableaux Frederik Ruysch and the phenomenon of ethnographic displays called “human zoos,” a screening of an over-the-top early 1970s TV Evangelist Christmas spectacular, and introductory lectures by myself and Coney Island Museum director Aaron Beebe.

Full–and hopefully final!–lineup below; hope to see you at some–if not more–of the terrific events making up this year’s Congress!

Monday April 16th
7:30 – (Lecture) Amy Herzog: Architectural Fictions: Economic Development, Immersive Renderings, and the Virtualization of Brooklyn (more here)
9:00 – (Performance) Shea Love and the Circus Emporium

Tuesday April 17th
7:30 – (Lecture) Philip Kadish: “Pinhead Races and the White Man’s Burden” (more here)
9:00 – (Performance) The Squidling Bros Sideshow

Wednesday April 18th
7:30 -(Lecture/Performance) ‘An Evening of Fate, Chance and Mystery’ with Lord Whimsy and Les the Mentalist (more here)
9:00 – (Performance) Jo Boobs

Thursday April 19th
7:30 – (Lecture/Demonstration) The Museum of Interesting Things, WHAT THE SAM HILL IS THAT! (more here)
9:00 – (Performance) The Curious Couple from Coney Island

Friday April 20th
7:30 – (Performance/Reading) A reading of VENUS by Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by Donya K. Washington (more here)
9:00 – (Performance/Lecture) Sideshow Legend Jim Rose

Saturday April 21st
Super Freak Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Continuous Admission, Tickets at the door); Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar
Congress For Curious People (Day 1 of a 2-day Symposium)

Sunday April 22nd
Super Freak Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Continuous Admission, Tickets at the door); Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar
Congress For Curious People (Day 2 of a 2-day Symposium)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FULL SYMPOSIUM DETAILS:
THE 2012 CONGRESS FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE
Saturday and Sunday, April 21st and 22nd

SATURDAY APRIL 21st

11:00 – 12:00: Keynote Addresses

12:00 – 1:00: Lunch

1:00 – 3:30: Immersive Amusements: Cosmoramas, Cycloramas and Panoramic Illusions: Panel discussion moderated and introduced by Aaron Beebe, The Coney Island Museum

4:00 – 5:00: The Business of the Dead: Frederik Ruysch as an Entrepreneurial Anatomist, Lecture by Daniel Margocsy, Hunter College

5:00: Christmas in America: Miss Velma and the Evangelist Spectacle: Screening of “Christmas in America,” an early 1970s television special by Miss Velma, early TV evangelist, introduced by Daniel Paul

SUNDAY APRIL 22

11:00 – 1:00: Religion and Spectacle: A panel with discussion moderated and introduced by Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy Library

1:00 – 2:30: Lunch and Sideshow Visit

2:30 – 3:30: Traveling Ethnographic Shows and Human Zoos, a lecture by Elizabeth Bradley

3:30 – 5:30: Theater Rethunk: An Alternative History of the Theatrical: A panel with discussion moderated and introduced by Chris Muller

Tickets for the symposium are available here; for tickets to individual events and lectures, click here; 10-day Congressional Passes–which provide access to all events!–are available here. All events take place at 1208 Surf Avenue in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York; you can map it here. See you there!!!

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This Week on Rhizome Community Boards: Proclaiming My Love, Jobs, Opportunities, and More

Posted on March 29th, 2012 • Filed under Look • No Comments

Recently added to the Artbase: Proclaiming My Love

Documentation of a performance which took place on 4/20/2010, atop Mount Tom in Holyoke, MA.

Events/Lectures/Exhibitions:

Jobs:

Call for Submissions:

Misc:

 

More…

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