Vegage du Jour - 08 January 2013

I know I've posted about roasting asparagus here before, possibly more than once, but this one was worth an extra note.

As always, the roasting takes place in a fairly hot oven (375F this time), but rather than dropping the spears in a baking dish, this time it was in a skillet.

First, I got the skillet - non-stick with no oil or spray or anything - nice and hot.
While it heated, I cleaned and trimmed a small bunch of scallions and dried them with a paper towel.
Directly into the hot skillet went the scallions, being turned now and again to get a nice brown heading to a char on each side.
Once they were nicely coloured, they were moved aside, and the asparagus was added to the pan.
A drizzle of olive oil and a few good-sized pinches of Herbs de Leelanau went on the spears, and then the scallions were draped over them as well.

The skillet went into the oven where everything roasted away until done, and my goodness but it was tasty!

Highly recommended,
Enjoy!

Belgians and Buffaloes

Well, after decades of painstaking research, the mystery of why Belgians are called Buffaloes may have been solved.
It seems that back around the turn of the century (from the 19th to the 20th), Buffalo Bill Cody took his Wild West Show to Belgium (among other European countries), where the people of Ghent took to him in a big way.
The football team there - K.A.A. Gent - took as its nickname the Buffaloes, and their logo is an Indian chief in profile.
It seems that many of the Belgians moving to the Detroit area came from that part of Flanders, and brought their team affiliation with them.
A mystery neatly solved.

Don't miss this book

No, this time I'm not plugging one of my own.
I'm recommending A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller, Jr.

This is one of the most important works of Science Fiction I've ever read.  It's all there: Good, Evil, Art, Faith, Technology, Science, Politics, Life, Death, Redemption.
Don't miss this book; it's simply too good not to be read.

Spanning centuries during which we pass from post-nuclear holocaust Dark Ages through another Renaissance, another "Enlightenment", and eventually to the brink of another nuclear war, this novel examines human history from the viewpoint of a small religious community - and from the general viewpoint of the Church.
As stated above, don't miss this book; it's simply too good not to be read.