Rest in peace, Diego Betta

Diego Betta, 3, of Houston, Texas, went to be with the Lord on Sunday night after a short but courageous battle with dropsy.

Left to defend himself as a young fish by a neglectful owner, Diego was adopted by his beloved keeper Olivia. Diego enjoyed fish food, dried worms, getting his bowl cleaned, watching the cat watch him and swimming in circles. His travels include a time spent in Austin where he lived in several different apartments and a coop. His last days were spent in Beaumont, Texas.

He will be remembered for his beautiful red color and willingness to fight. He is survived by his owner Olivia and dear cat friend Moxie. Private funeral services were held Sunday outside at the Eagles Landing apartment community in Beaumont.

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The Tootsie Roll

A concoction from Dennis of Hole in the Wall.

The Wuttup guide to home food preservation

In the days of hardtack and horse drawn plows pickling was an economical way to preserve seasonal foods for year round eating. Today it is a hobby enjoyed by hippies and hillbillies with encumbrances of cucumbers or cabbage.

Chow chow relish is a North American pickled relish made from tomatoes, cabbage, onions, sugar, peppers, vinegar and whatever else you want to add. I used some celery and pears because that’s what I like, and it’s January so it isn’t possible to be choosy about organic produce.

It is common to use green tomatoes and green cabbage as in the store bought variety I sampled. I used red cabbage and red tomatoes, because that’s what I like. I also doubled the spices and increased the sugar suggested by Texas Bob.

Ingredients (fills eight pint-size canning jars):

• a cabbage
• four tomatoes
• a pear
• two lemons
• three jalapenos
• three bell peppers
• four onions
• some canning salt
• half a pint of vinegar
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 tsp. dry mustard
• 1 tsp. turmeric
• 1 tsp. allspice
• a cat (optional)

I used the Ninja food processor. It’s awesome. Peeled the pear and tomatoes. Seeded the peppers. Chopped all that shit up. Put a bunch of salt and some, but not all, of the sugar on it and let it sit there for a while to get crunchy.

Boiled the spices and vinegar for a minute or so and then added the rest of everything and simmered it until it was acceptably hot and soft.

I prepped the pint jars with hot water and soap, then filled them with chow chow. I boiled the jars in a stock pot for 15 minutes, then turned the heat off and let them sit an additional five minutes.

Then I took the jars out of the pot and let them sit overnight on the counter. The little lids start popping and sealing in the first half hour, so the next day it was OK to take the rings off and check the seal by lifting the jars by the lid.

Next time: habanero-watermelon Four LOKO jam!

Butterbeer is the new FourLOKO

Four Loko might never be the same, but America’s children have a new questionably healthy party trend to fear. And I mean wizard-themed slumber parties, not LOKO quarters at your friend’s place in North Campus. The Associated Press just did a fine piece (that I read on Foxnews, fair and balanced) about the Universal Studios runaway success with their Just-Kidding-Rowling-approved $3 frothy cups of atherosclerosis-inducing Butterbeer.

The AP recipe is light on real beer, but heavy on the butter. Each serving has about 600 calories and 30 grams of fat. Oh, and 90 grams of sugar. Who the fuck gives this to a child? I worked as a lifeguard for a summer and a child will have trouble staying under a full-out sprint at 90 grams of sugar. Sitting through a movie marathon wearing a cape and hugging a stuffed owl would probably be out of question.

Is this a liquid Kwanzaa cake? Are we supposed to take a recipe seriously when it asks us to boil a cup of sugar in a stick of butter, and then mix in cream soda?

Analyze your own recipes with this free webapp from some Socialist Canadian Dietitians.

Korea Garden

Chatroulette: For all you creepsters out there

Chatroulette is the best communication medium for creepsters since the internet’s inception. It allows them to engage people in awkward conversation or expose their genitals to unknowing strangers without even leaving their houses.

This was a really cool dude who asked "asl?"

Last night, Frankie and I passed the time during a study session by conversing with some of the people lurking online. He positioned my web camera facing the only girl in the room, and we signed on.

The first person we encountered was a fellow we nicknamed “Cool dude.” Cool dude was lounging on a couch, coasting through the sea of men for that small chance of seeing someone attractive enough to talk to. He stopped on our camera and Frankie started typing.

He didn’t seem interested in anyone not willing to take off their clothes. And anyone who asks “asl?” in chat deserves to be ignored.

After we skipped past a guy who looked exactly like Al Franken, we came across two guys in a row who were showing off their neat skills at smoking “the ganja,” including one fellow bro’ing on a couch with a friend and another lurking in the darkness of his room, alone with a lame orange pipe.

We nexted past those guys pretty quickly and stumbled across a dude who likened himself to Barry White. He offered to sing for us after Frankie mentioned it.

He sang a Barry White song, some Prince and wrapped it up with some Elton John. As you can see, he was quite a charmer:

This dude loved to sing.

He also loved leaning back awkwardly like this.

After we finished talking with Barry, we nexted through a few wack dudes until we reached Frankie’s new enemy. The guy was a Greek-Canadian who didn’t have his web cam microphone on because he was watching the Simpsons. This is how the convo went down:

In short, what I’m trying to say is stay off Chatroulette. Like in life, there are a thousand wack dudes for every Barry White impersonator. You’re really better off with Facebook chat, safe from all those penises.

A recipe for mannish water/ goathead soup

MANNISH WATER/ GOATHEAD SOUP

source: jamaicamix

Ingredients:
4 lbs cut up goat’s head
3 gallons of water
10 – 12 green bananas
1 lb flour for dumpling
1 lb coco
1 lb yam
1 lb carrot
1 lb cho cho
1 lb irish potato
1 lb yam
1/2 lb scallion
3 medium sized scotch bonnet peppers
4 sprig. Thyme
salt to taste

Directions:

• Clean and cutup goat’s head, tripe and or goat’s feet. Put 5 gallons of water to boiling temperature. Place meat in pot.
• Let simmer for about 3 hours or until meat is tender. Add vegetables and seasoning.
• Peel and add green bananas to pot and cook for another hour.
• Make dumplings and add to pot. Let cook for another hour. Remove hot peppers! Adjust seasoning and amount of water if needed.

Photo Brief: Danger

danger fail

A recipe for fruit loko punch

 

 

FRUIT LOKO PUNCH

Makes a little over a quart of punch. Check photos for size reference.

2 cans of Fruit Punch Four Loko
2 cans of mandarin oranges
1 can of tropical fruit salad
1 can of chunky mixed fruit
1 can of grapefruit

• Combine all contents.

 

Additional directions:

• Fruit options are unlimited for this recipe.
• Grapefruit tends to cause a discord on the palette, due to its bitterness. Omitting it is advised.
• If time and energy permits, chopped and freshly-squeezed fruits would enhance the flavors tremendously.
• The juices from canned fruit must go into the punch as well. It dilutes the Four Loko so the intense malt liquor flavor isn’t as prominent.
• It is imperative that this recipe include mandarin oranges. While omitting grapefruit is advised, an omission of mandarin oranges is sacrilegious.

WACO

By Austen Sofhauser
WUTTUP Staff

Waco—The road north from Austin, IH-35, is quite flat. Very little crowds the two-way service roads flanking the freeway, marked only infrequently by access ramps and green signage with shimmering 24.5 cm high sans lettering. The green rolling terrain of Central Texas is visible for maybe a quarter mile off either side of the highway.

Waco is a little over a chill hour from our city, depending on how you drive. I’m driving pretty fast, the windows are cracked to vent the milky vapor trailing from my cigarette, and this admits a steady stream of fresh fall air to the cabin. I think Alex might be hungover. Her glasses are too big for her face but she’s kinda halfway smiling and anyway, she brought her iPod laden with Phoenix and Architecture in Helsinki, which I’m enjoying. We don’t talk to each other much until the ride home.

I’m typing this on my iPhone months later, the film has been developed and I have a real job now. I’m flying Delta. Somewhere down there is New Mexico or maybe the Texas Panhandle. Alex is a senior reporter for the Texan and a singer in a whiskey-and-Four-Loko-soaked post-pop-party band called Metal Bunnies. Waco is a town brought back from the dead. Someone hid these kids in a closet sometime after the Cuban Revolution and there is no indication that the locals have been made aware of the demise of Che or even of the exploits of Black September at the Olympics or of the Armadillo World Headquarters. Waco is post-industrial in a way Austin is not (but occasionally pretends to be). Big brick and concrete brutalist structures are ringed by neighborhoods full of bungalows and simple ranch houses with brick faces and wood sides and carports. I was reminded of New Orleans’ recovering business district in the vicinity of the cruise terminal and war museum. A large brutal concrete building in the center of town is the Texas Masons headquarters. It contains a 4,000 seat auditorium and a museum dedicated to the history of Masonry in Texas.

I really liked the collection of pictures of every Lodge in the state. Brilliant. The Dr Pepper museum is cool in the way that some grandmothers are. Not my grandmother or yours, but you know someone who has one like that and you understand what the experience is by me comparing the place to a cool grandmother. Nothing else to say there, it even smells a little like old folks. Oh yeah, and there’s no period after the “Dr” in Dr Pepper. Children were singing at the Waco mall and there were some obese people praying to Jesus over their food court pizza, oblivious to the show.

We enjoyed it but it was pretty Waco. Shit, my iPhone autocorrected wack to Waco. Pro-tip: hot Dr Pepper is a perfectly acceptable substitute for hot cocoa but it still makes you just as fat. If you have feelings of wackness or inadequacy, don’t let them get you down. It’s 2010, the year to deal with it. Learn from our Wacoan friends to the north.