Come rain and come shine

So, shortly after the broadcast yesterday afternoon, Otis and I left the Tully’s to take a walk on the beach. My bald bean served as an early warning system to let me know it was starting to rain, so we abandoned the walk and jumped on the scooter to head home. As Dingo put it later that night, it rained for twenty minutes yesterday, and we were riding for all of them.

But the nice thing about getting wet is that you always dry off, so were happy and warm when we joined the gang for dinner at Ballet later in the evening. The aforementioned Dingo, Sylvio, Johnbai, and O all turned out for an informal fete with visiting celebrity Wheylona, and we had the good luck to be joined by a just-off-work-and-still-in-town Yojimbo.

While most of the gang headed off for some postprandial Boggle, O went home to go to bed and Otis and I strolled over to the Egyptian to catch a showing of The 11th Hour, Leonardo DeCaprio’s documentary about environmental crises. It was a fairly straightforward non-fiction film – talking heads interspersed with stock footage or animations – but it has a positive but not overly-optimistic view of the situation. I appreciated that it focused on the systemic and institutional changes that are required to correct the environmental damage already done by our overdependence on fossil fuels and to prevent any further badness: this is not a problem that is going to be solved by re-using our plastic grocery bags. The experts also stayed away from “save the earth” rhetoric, recognizing that the planet will continue long after we kill ourselves, if that’s the choice we make.

Instead, the film speaks to quality of life and imagines a world created by a profound change in the will of the community: a world of sustainable choices in which the economy functions (as it properly should) as a sub-system of the biosphere. And of all the non-fuzzy, non-hippie examples that society can indeed take this kind of action successfully, the film cites the USA’s shift from a civilian to a war economy during the forties, a massive economic and technological re-tooling that was accomplished almost overnight, because of our common will.

In that spirit, perhaps I will be forgiven a little copyright-infringing photoshop.



The film has an action website associated with it. Check it out.

This morning, feeling green and all, Otis and I walked down to the University Farmer’s Market to get us some of those local, organic, sustainable goodies. In addition to tomatoes and beans and all that, we got outselves some Chicken of the Woods mushroom:



Yeah, it’s a big sucker, innit? I talked to the lady shroomer who was selling them and checked things out on the internets and took a shot at cooking it up for lunch.

I cut it into finger-sized strips and sautéed it in butter with some onions for about ten minutes, then added liquid: vegetable broth, a little white wine, and just a splash of cream. I let it simmer, covered, for about another ten or fifteen minutes, and the mushroom absorbed most of the liquid. I served it over white rice with a little carrot, drizzled some of the leftover reduction on top.



Boy, was it good. I was so optimistic that I did the whole lunch up brown, and it lived up to the presentation.



I would recommend this to anyone – it has a firm consistency with just a hunt of a woody undertone, and it carried the flavors from the broth perfectly. I can see this as an excellent main dish for dinner, maybe with some green beans as well. Yum-o!

I guess we could consider lunch a pre-reward, since Otis is a busy bee doing both housekeeping and bidness today. I only have a little bit of productive work to do before we head up to meet the Spokaners (who are in town) for dinner.