My favorite new vegetarian dish: Pasta salad with peas!

I had a brain-wave a couple weeks ago while driving home from work, and got an idea for a tasty pasta salad. It was so compelling that I had to make it when I got home. Fran and I love cheese, but if you want to go vegan, you can obviously just leave it out.

Peas Pasta Salad

• 1 package multicolor/shape pasta
• 1 small package frozen peas
• Sun-dried tomatoes (to taste - I use about 1/4 cup)
• 1 large shallot
• Roasted garlic cloves (to taste - I use about 6 cloves)
• Kosher salt
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Hot pepper oil (you can just substitute some fresh peppers or chili powder if you prefer)
• Black pepper
• White pepper
• (optional) Asiago, romano, or parmesan cheese (to taste- I like at least 1/4 cup)

Boil your pasta until done, following package directions. Steam your frozen peas (don’t boil them, you lose all the nutrients!) - bonus points if you steam the peas over the boiling pasta water to save time, energy, and water!

Chop sun-dried tomatoes, shallot, and roasted garlic, and heat together with olive oil and pepper oil (or peppers) in small pan until shallot just begins to color. Add kosher salt, ground black pepper, and white pepper to oil mix.

When pasta and peas are done cooking, rinse them in cold water immediately, to stop them from overcooking, and keep their firmness.

Add the cooked (and now rinsed and cooled) pasta back to the pot you cooked it in, and mix in the peas, and oil/tomato/shallot/garlic mixture.

Grate cheese into pasta mix, and mix well.

Taste your creation - add more seasoning to your preference, or more oil if you prefer your pasta salad a bit more wet.

I love this dish because the peas are high in protein, vitamins, and minerals, giving a bit more of a nutritional *punch* to otherwise empty pasta salad. The pepper oil gives just enough of a buzz on the lips and tongue that it makes things really interesting.

Let me know if you try it, and what you think!

Enjoy!

Giving “Real” Support to our Troops?

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know the process that the US Armed Forces uses when rotating troops out of combat and back home at the end of a tour of duty, or when a soldier leaves the military altogether. I’m very curious to learn more about the process in place, and would ask that anyone with real experience with this help inform me.

On the way into work this morning, I was listening to NPR (as usual) and heard a disheartening “preview teaser” for a story to come, mentioning an Iraq war vet who had returned home, but found the adjustment to life at home too difficult, and took his own life.

It got me thinking about how we can better serve our soldiers who have served their country… not just by sticking a ribbon magnet on our car or other patriotic gestures - but how we can give them REAL support. It’s not right that more and more soldiers who actually survive the war come home to find that they aren’t able to adjust to the home and neighborhood they once knew, and die at home by their own hand because they didn’t get the help they need to fit in again.

I’ve seen stories and interviews with the families of soldiers who have returned, and the soldiers themselves, and common threads seem to be, “my guys over there need me”, “nobody here understands what I’ve gone (am going) through”, and in some cases, “I don’t know how to do anything else”.

Again, I don’t understand all the logistics of war deployment, and I’m sure it’s a complicated puzzle to work out, especially with our armed forces already overtaxed and resorting to stop-loss measures to remain at the troop levels needed for our current level of engagement around the world…

…but why not rotate out entire “squads” (insert service-appropriate term here) together at the end of their tour, and keep them together as a group at whatever base they’re stationed at (in the US) for at least 6 months. Let them adjust to living outside of a war zone together, where they can be there to support each other, just like they supported each other out in the field. They’d still do drills or whatever sort of work their specialty would do while stationed at base, but why not make it a mandatory part of their service schedule for those 6 months to do work on “re-integration” together as a team?

For those that are going to retire from the service when their time is up, provide them the same sort of skills and job placement services that large for-profit companies do when they have layoffs.  Provide counseling, job training, resume/interview tips, and the like.  Our government should take responsibility for helping soldiers re-integrate into “normal” society, including the necessities for being able to have a life when they’ve returned.

It’s criminal that some soldiers can leave the armed forces after years of service to their country, and when looking for a job, be told they’re not employable - that they don’t have skills that companies need!  Some of these soldiers joined up as soon as they turned 18, and aren’t interested in college (not to mention how pared-down the GI Bill’s benefits have gotten!), just in getting a good job to support their families.

Why should soldiers get any less support from their government and society than we’d give someone who lost their job in a layoff?  Athletes know that you have to do a “cool down” after your high-adrenaline workout… why not support our troops by giving them the same sort of re-integration time while still on the gov’t dime, so they have a fighting chance of adjusting to being at home again?

Am I totally off-base here?

Excellent commentary on Obama’s recent speech

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/19/commentary.ashong/index.html

Good stuff.

Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry

Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry

SPECTACULAR!

New header image…

I’ve got a shiny new header image now, cropped from an excellent free image from Smashing Magazine.  I actually quite enjoyed the colorful Pantone palette default header image that comes with this theme, but I can’t exactly keep the default, can I?

A guy’s gotta customize!

My wife would say, “That’s because men can’t just leave well enough alone - they have to tinker!”

She’s not entirely incorrect…

Portable contact lists and the case against XFN | FactoryCity

Portable contact lists and the case against XFN | FactoryCity

Good stuff.

-Rick

Mmm… Freshy is quite nice!

I wish each post could be saved in the theme it was written under, so if you clicked on the permalink for each post, it would display in that theme - I expect you’ve have to save the formatting for the post in a “side-band” CSS file/folder for images.

Wouldn’t it be fun way to be able to do a sort of weblog wayback machine, though?  Instead of even the oldest of posts being re-formatted to display in the latest theme?

It’d need to be an option, of course - choice is king!

More theme goofing

“Contempt now”… I think I’ve decided to let Twitter be Twitter, and set up the blog with a more “blog-like” theme.

Bye for now, “Prologue”!

Interesting. I definitely like this “P …

Interesting. I definitely like this “Prologue” theme, but it *is* quite minimal in terms of links for “about” and such. I think I need to tinker with it a bit to flesh things out.

Rick's Twitterings for the Day

08:50 I've got a great idea for an iPhone app, but I'm a web-guy, not an app developer. I need someone's chocolate to go with my peanut butter! #

09:29 @jkusters It's desperation. Every calculation, even generously giving HRC 20 point wins in EVERY remaining contest has her LOSING. #

13:25 For those who watch LOST: is.gd/1ML “I baked you a delicious ham, Juliet” Hee! #

13:38 @megfowler *HUG* #

13:57 Retweeting @megfowler: tinyurl.com/38yg7k - OMG, people suck. #

14:13 @ShanZan Hi! #

14:44 @jkusters AWESOME! Congratulations! How long is escrow? #

15:09 @CurtMonash *Some* do (don't overgeneralize), as many Hillary supporters demonize Obama. Unsurprising. CANDIDATES should be above that. #

15:14 @CurtMonash I'll even grant you that more BHO fans demonize HRC. The actual point was that HRC and BHO shouldn't stoop there. BHO doesn't. #

15:45 @CurtMonash I think we'll have to agree to disagree about that. #

15:46 Which candidate acts how you'd like your kids or neighbors to act? Or prefer to be your boss? Or has a better chance of uniting the country? #

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