After the last post, I decided it was high time to create a new department in which I could ramble about food and beverages. The Cucina department, aka “Food Porn,” has accordingly been added. Old posts will be recategorized as I get to it.

The Julie/Julia Project may have its Spicy Thursdays; I have, at least while Lisa is on the road, Leftover Tuesdays. In this case, though, the leftovers were steaks from a beef tenderloin that had been roasted in an herbed salt crust (for the curious, you dispose of the caked salt—it just ensures consistent temperature distribution, retention of juices by the meat, and some small amount of seasoning).

Being a fundamentally masochistic person, I decided that I couldn’t just do leftovers. So (after using our new random-orbital palm sander to buzz off the trim in the Gold Room prior to tomorrow night’s painting) I tried cooking mashed potatoes with parsley and chive oil (it’s in this month’s Gourmet, but probably won’t be on Epicurious for another few months). I halved the recipe but had proportion problems. For instance, I decided to substitute sautéed shallots for chives, since we only have one very small pot of the latter. And I probably didn’t have enough parsley (though our parsley plant is overproducing, I didn’t want to cut off every leaf). So as a result, the potatoes that were supposed to be bright green and presumably bursting with herbaceous flavor…weren’t quite. Still good, but next time I’ll stick to roasted garlic.

I emailed Michael Goldberg today. He founded Addicted to Noise, which in the mid nineties was the coolest music site around. They had Corinne Tucker of Sleater Kinney writing a column for them for a while... Alas, they sold to SonicNet, who sold to the VH1 corporate megalith, and a lot of great content that they had has disappeared (though some of it is still in the Google cache).

That was actually why I emailed Michael. I was looking for good SY and Thurston Moore reviews for musicmoz, but the content was no longer accessible. To my chagrin, Michael confirmed that VH1 owns the rights to all those great stories. There’s a greater point to be made here about the evils of contracts that give all rights to the purchaser of content. You think copyright is bad when Disney owns it? What about a corporation that is bought and essentially ceases to exist, and a new copyright owner who lets all the content rot?

Fortunately this story has a happy ending. Michael’s now at Neumu, a killer little site about music and art that deserves to be a lot better known. Go check it out.

Enough said, really. I picked up Blacklisted the other day and I’ve forgotten all the other music I was listening to, which almost never happens. If you’ve never heard Ms. Case’s music, do yourself a favor and check out the new album’s second track, ‘Deep Red Bells.’