chocolate mousse guacamole??

some saturdays i leave the radio on a while after "wait wait don't tell me" --  until it just becomes annoying.

a few weeks ago, a cooking show came on with guest cheryl crow. her recipe for chocolate mousse caught my ear, basically thick chocolate pudding, made with 2 avocados, agave nectar, cocoa powder, vanilla, and almond extract!

i got a couple of avocados and gave it a try. since john doesn't like avocados, it seemed like a perfect test!

it was simple to make and he loved it. 

deeeee-licious!  (it's not green either)

i didn't have almond extract, plus one of my friends is allergic to almonds, but i had just made coffee, so i put in that instead.  we ate it like pudding, in little bowls, not being the owners of martini glasses. 

hell i drink wine out of little juice glasses and john likes to drink water or juice from canning jars....martini glass? gimme a break.

here's the link to the recipe....it's great stuff!

  chocolate mousse recipe
oh another thing...i didn't use a food processor, just an old blender i have.  worked fine!

Mars - another excuse for human curiosity

why does the japanese astronaut selection process involve origami?

who ate the onions experiment?

what happens if you don't bathe or change clothes for 2 weeks?

how much will NASA pay you to stay in bed for 3 months? 

what happens to your bones then?

so how do old ladies benefit from space research? (get it?)

how do dolphins have sex under water?

is that why they don't let male dolphins in the swim-with-the-dolphins pool?

what is astronaut chow?

what concoction best simulates human shit for test purposes?

what tests are those??

what percent of people can light their farts?

why is drinking Orange County's water kind of like being an astronaut?

did you ever think that sustainability engineering and human spaceflight engineering are just different sides of the same technology?

PACKING FOR MARS by Mary Roach - a book by a science writer who walks the fine line between making fun of and seeing what is funny about space exploration and the research that is part of it!

i loved this book, and had a new view of the value of it all... all the research spills out into everyday life. her last paragraph is surely thought provoking - to summarize, any money saved from not funding space exploration would not go to any of the things you feel it should be used for anyway!  you know that!  so why not play and learn.

oh just read it, you'll laugh out loud at sentences like "The zero gravity fart has been a popular orbital pursuit, especially on all male flights."

ricey beanie recipe

cook some brown rice
  (organic is best - for the planet,
     the pickers and planters,
      the web of life,
       your health,
        maybe your karma).
open a can of organic beans
  (the plainer the better,
    the kind you like best,
     black beans are my favorite
       recycle the can).
rinse all the packing liquid off the beans.
put beans in a pan with 2 cups of the rice.
open a jar of organic chunky salsa
  ( local if possible,
     otherwise newmanzone is good,
      whatever heat level you like
         recycle the glass jar).
add to the rice and beans
warm it up good.
put it on nice pottery plates
  (or eat from the pan if you are alone
    and really depressed).
good with salad and red ale
  (or you can skip the salad
    and add seconds on the ale).

Homemade Entropy Detector

easy to make, just put several kinds of beans in a lidded glass jar. then shake it whenever coincidences cause you to suspect entropy is dropping. Mycroft, who probably invented this, gave one to Thursday (in Lost In A Good Book by Jasper Fforde) because someone was trying to kill her using coincidence...such as lightening striking where she stood, a stray bullet hitting her, stuff like that. she had merely to check to see if the beans formed patterns...and if so, run like hell! this doesn't mean low entropy is bad, you might check to see if you should buy a lottery ticket, for example! and of course, usually, a coincidence is just a coincidence.