On the menu tonight, Shrimp + Pancetta served atop fresh Polenta. Delicious.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Shrimp-and-Pancetta-on-Polenta-356050

This year my contribution to my family's thanksgiving meal was a pear and blueberry gallete. I made a modified version of Alton Brown's No-Pan pear pie. This is really a gallete, a freeform tart, but it's quite pie-like. The crust uses corn-meal, which I'd not used in a crust before. I must say the corn meal adds a bit of crunch and grit that's fantastic.

I made a few modifications to this recipe to suit my own tastes. I'm not much of a sweet tooth, so I used 5 pears instead of 2, and got rid of the pound cake for the filling. I also multiplied the crust ingredients by 1.5 since some commenters on the recipe page mentioned the pie this made wasn't very big. This maxed out my food processor's capacity, and gave me just enough crust for the different quantity of filling. I also added in a more sugar to the filling to compensate for the reduction in sweetness I anticipated from removing the pound cake. The result was delicious. With these ingredients it created a gallete that had about 12 2"x5" pieces.

Via Cranky Fitness:

Food high in Saturated Fat makes you not feel full when you in fact are.
Also, Low Carb Diets make you more unhappy.

I'm not totally convinced, at least that's what I'm telling myself to explain dinner tonight. I went with the High Carb, High Fat, High Everything diet.

On the menu: Baked Potato w/ Pancetta, Swiss, and Creme Fraiche.

Notes from tonight's Dinner.

Pancetta + Spinach = Awesome
Swiss cheese on pasta = Decidedly not awesome

The Top 50 worse voice acting moments from video games: 

Out in Wyoming, by the Grand Targhee Ski Resort is a stretch of smooth asphalt traversing a steep decent. Perfect for street skateboarding. Brandon Gust grew up skateboarding out there and is making a video about it. Check out some video samples at the Snaz after the jump.

I felt inspired Sunday night and took this self portrait. It is lit using two Canon SpeedLites and the lamp in the picture. I ended up needing to retouch it in LAB to get the delicate color balance. The light pattern behind me created in post. See the full sized version here: http://www.andrewvc.com/#view-photo-blue-self-portrait

An illustration of my brother's dog Lucy, by my father, Vartkes.

A fascinating article on strategy pages about the inevitability of an all unmanned fighter fleet. An interesting thing to note about this switch is that UAV Pilots are starting to show signs of PTSD. The New Yorker covered this in a recent article I can't find online. They made the point that people aren't quite comfortable killing people remotely, it removes the element of danger for the killer. By taking your troops off the battlefield, and eliminating all risk, the notion of being a warrior is significantly changed.

This article about GHB and bodybuilding is fascinating. I'm not a bodybuilder (obviously), but it's an interesting look into how a fringe drug culture, which body building to a certain extent is, analyzes substances. It's interesting when the veneer of scientific reasoning erodes, leaving a strange alloy of prose: "A combination of the two can allow a a shitfaced intoxication subjectively quite similar to that produced by alcohol, but with the consumption of only a few drinks, thus only a few hundred calories."

This reminded me of the documentary Bigger Stronger Faster, an amazing film about Steroid use:
http://www.biggerstrongerfastermovie.com/

The full article on GHB is available here:
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/par3.htm