This is Delicious

It's my lunch hour at work, and I'm digging into what's left of the ratatouille I made on Monday. Besides having a cool name ('ra-ta-too-ee' which I used to call rata-phooey when I was younger and everything with vegetables was gross,) it tastes great and is really easy. So I decided to share the recipe.

Ingredients
1/3 cup olive oil + extra

2 cups onions
3+ cloves garlic
2 cups quartered tomatoes
2 1/2 cups peeled, diced eggplant
2-3 cups zucchini in 2 cm slices.
4 green peppers, sliced thinly

Rice, couscous, pasta, or whatever.

Preparation

1. In a large pot, saute (fry) garlic and onions in 1/3 cup olive oil until golden. Reduce heat when they're almost done.
2. Pour garlic and onions into a bowl. Add vegetables to the pot in layers (two or so of each,) adding salt and pepper as you do. I'd suggest salting and peppering every other layer to avoid overdoing it.
3. Add garlic and onions back into the pot, drizzle olive oil over mess. Cover and simmer at very low heat for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. Then remove lid and simmer for another 10 minutes to boil off (some of) the excess liquid.
4. Cook whatever you want to go with it. Rice works quite well as it absorbs the liquid and turns into super-rice. Pasta does not absorb quite so well.
5. CONSUME.

Now you know how to make it, so go. No really, you should make it some time. Even if you're like me and you don't like eggplant or zucchini, it'll still be good. Just make sure you peel the eggplant if you don't like eggplant. If you don't like vegetables at all, then there's something wrong with you and you should try it anyways.

Cooking, the Oliver Way

I have a unique cooking style, which I will demonstrate through the use of examples, contrasting the standard method and mine. I've included some baking examples

Pasta Sauces
Standard method: Chop up the vegetables you need. Fry onions and garlic etc., fry meat if using some, add liquids and simmer until ready.
Oliver method: Slowly but methodically chop up the vegetables. Take twice as much time as suggested in the recipe. Heat frying pan, burn garlic. Turn down heat, slowly warm onions to death. Turn up heat, burn more garlic. Add too much oil. Add other vegetables, cry as frying pan cools down too much again. Give up and add sauce. Have sauce refuse to boil. Turn up heat, sauce boils ferociously. Fiddle with heat, put the lid on, give up and have a glass of beer or wine. End up eating an hour later than intended. Wonder why, after all the mistakes, it still tastes great.

Omelettes
Standard method: Beat eggs. Pour over pan, cook, flip half and cook both sides.
Oliver method: Beat eggs. Pour over pan, cook, disintegrate half trying to flip it, swear, convert into scrambled eggs. Wonder why the hell people bother with omelettes when scrambled eggs are just as good.

Muffins
Standard method: mix dry ingredients, mix wet ingredients, combine, spoon into muffin tins, bake.
Oliver method: Take twice as much time to mix ingredients, spend half an hour spooning mix into muffin tins, bake. Wonder how a recipe for 24 muffins ends up as 18 muffins.

Bread
Standard method: combine ingredients, let rise, knead, bake.
Oliver method: Decide to make sourdough. Place in laundry room to turn sour. Check sourdough's progress daily as it grows, become sentient, and wages war against the towels.
Mix ingredients, let rise. Rub flour on hands to avoid getting dough stuck to hands and knead. Get dough stuck to hands. Add flour to dough. Add more flour. Add yet more flour and wonder how the hell the dough got so sticky. Give up and place on cookie sheet. Shape with hands, let rise more. Watch as bread turns into amorphous blob rather than pleasing shape. Wash hands. Spend 10 minutes trying to get all the goddamn dough off of hands. Cry into sink when dough is still covering hands. Finally free skin from sticky captor, bake bread. Mmm, bread.

Unfortunately, the Oliver method is losing originality and becoming more like the standard method as I gain experience, so one day I will no longer know the pleasure of soaking my hands in water for extended periods trying to get bread dough off, and my dishes will lack the subtle hint of slightly burned garlic. It only took me 5 minutes to dedoughify my hands this time!

Hey look, it's bread:

"Do no evil"

The title refers to Google's motto, an ideology that came under fire when it included censorship tools in its search software. As I've discussed before, corporations are mandated to act unethically if it is legal and profitable. Google had many reasons to expand into China that far outweighed the criticisms that it received, and while I ultimately agree with they decision, I don't think they should be allowed to keep their motto.

To launch Google China, the Chinese government required Google to filter out censored material, in order to maintain the "Great Firewall of China" that blocks content the government dislikes. Google claimed this was a necessary evil as part of the greater benefit of bringing Google's knowledge to China's many connected inhabitants, but many people disagreed with this claim and criticized the company for its action. Google's real motive was, as it should be, to expand into a rather large and profitable market, at the cost of some negative PR and no significant drop in searches in its other markets. I hardly doubt that many people decided to switch search engines as an act of protest, although critics should have done so to match their actions with their talk.

Obviously, Google's stated intentions can't always correlate to its mandated actions, but on the whole Google could argue that its ethics are part of its appeal and continued use, and are therefore necessary to remain profitable. Google's success, however, is based on its algorithms rather than its ethics, so it can hardly be expected to act purely ethically if The Body Shop, a corporation claims to be fiercely opposed to animal testing, sold products that were tested on animals! Minimizing evil is a perfectly acceptable action for the majority of corporations, as only those overlooked by the public eye can operate unethically without serious consequences, but no corporation can claim that it is entirely ethical.

(This post is something I thought about and could write up fairly quickly. I have a post, masquerading as an essay, in the works on extreme poverty, as well as one on the West's military-industrial complex, and one on my cooking and baking experiences. Guess which one's the funny one?)