First I woke up and made coffee.

Then I got to work making some arrabiata sauce from scratch.  Arrabiata is essentially a spicey marinara, and seemed a natural fit given the ingrediants I had on hand.  To whit: a bunch of thai chilis from the farmers market, some awesome sweet white onions from the farmers market, a ton of garlic, and a big box of tomatoes my friend Laurie gave me last night.  Laurie works at Garden City Harvest here in town, and besides doing awesome social justice work also has access to massive amounts of quality produce.  My recipe, made up on the spot, is as follows.  (Having a good food processor makes this way easier, when I say dice below, I used the food processor.)

-Coarsely chop 10 thai chilis, peel the cloves from six whole bulbs of garlic, finely dice and sautee in olive oil in the bottom of a big pot on lowish heat.
-Dice four big onions, add to pot, stir well.
-Add one can beer to pot, continue stirring.
-Once garlic and onions begin to brown and become very aromatic, add spices to taste (lots of oregano and a bit of thyme and sage recommended).  Add 2-3 tablespoons of salt.  Also add 1/4 cup balsalmic vineager and one very heaping tablespoon of honey.  Stir well.
-Roughly puree a lot of tomatoes.  6-8 pounds or so.  Add to above, stir well.
-Turn up heat and bring to a gentle boil, reduce heat and partially cover, stirring occasionally and cooking down for 2-3 hours.  Volume of sauce should reduce by about 30%, and be a uniformly liquidly yet chunky consistency.
-Serve immediately (linguine or fettuccine work best, with some shredded parm or asiago), chill in fridge for later use, or can for the depth of winter.

After that I wrote the immediately proceeding blog post.

Then I made a banana and peanut butter sammich, loaded up the truck and went for a ride.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/15614703

It’s not really ok that I haven’t ridden Blodgett before, given the bitching I’ve done about the lack of technical riding. I got it in spades today, with loads of redlining uphill rock crawling, and saddle slammed, butt to tire, hope to not crash and loose teeth descending. Funfunfun, on another just gorgeous day.

Then Jill and Kelly came over and confirmed my culinary prowess, before packing off for the Wilma and the superb Facing the Storm: Story of the American Bison.

http://www.youtube.com/v/WhB5pAbQWAQ?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999

There’s not much I could say about the film that I haven’t said here before, though it was eye opening to see Governor Schweitzer in an official interview saying that the bison controversy boiled down to people being scared of them, and to cattlemen not wanting to share rangeland.  Overall the film covered an impressive amount of ground in 70 some odd minutes without being overly reductive about any of it, balancing affect, history, and science throughout.  Very enjoyable.   And Missoula being “the Paris of the west” that it is, we got to see the Montana premier in an old theatre that sells beer at the snack stand.

After that we got Big Dipper ice cream, talked under the clear night, and walked home.  Ahh, funemployment, best enjoyed with the light at the end in sight.