"C" Is For ...

I *love* the taste of chillies and chocolate, and lucky for me the neighborhood World Market carries several different types of gourmet bars of at least 60% cacao with some type of chili mixed in.

My favorite for baking is World Market's own brand of 64% dark with chipotle chili. I chop up about a bar and a half for these cookies, which—if done right—should come out chewy with just a bit of crispiness on the edges.

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups AP flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1.7 oz. instant vanilla pudding mix
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tabl. vanilla
2 eggs
~1 cup chopped chocolate

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 325°F.
• In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, salt, and pudding mix.
• In a larger bowl, cream the butter and sugars. Beat in the eggs and vanilla until creamy.
• Using a spoon, blend the flour mixture into the butter mixture, adding in about a third at a time.
• Stir in the chocolate.
• Drop dough about a tablespoon at a time onto the cookie sheet.
• Bake for 15 minutes or until the edges are golden and the centers are slightly puffed up.
• Let cool on the sheet for a few minutes and then transfer to racks to cool completely.

The keys to good chewy cookies, I have found, are to use room-temperature butter, do not use an electric mixer to blend in the flour, and bake only until just the edges look done—any longer and the carryover heat will make the cookies too crispy. The pudding mix is a great trick I picked up for keeping the cookies moist for days—if they last that long!

Who Doesn't [Heart] Chaos?

Yes, I'm a slacker. I skipped a few days of posting in favor of sleep, house cleaning, and baking cookies. Get over it.

Luckily I resurfaced in time to read about this ever so awesome complete-ish Futurama time line over at I Heart Chaos. Clearly someone has an expensive DVD box set and a lot of time on their hands, but it works out for the benefit of all of us lazier geeks who need a good reference source.

A few dates near and dear to my fangirl heart:

July 9, 1947: Emerging from a time-warp, the Planet Express ship crash-lands near Roswell, New Mexico.

2008: Stop ‘n’ Drop becomes America’s favorite suicide booth.

2200s: The Star Trek cast do some musical reunions, but the guy who plays Scotty has trouble yodeling so he is replaced by Welshy.



2620: To end that stupid joke once and for all, Uranus is renamed.

~1,000,000,000,002,000: Al Gore, Fry, Deep Blue, Stephen Hawking, Michelle Nichols, and Gary Gygax finish playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Now wasn't that worth the wait?

How Anime Leads to Crop Damage

In the latest twist on invasive species run amok, farmers in Japan are blaming cartoons for ¥164-million-worth ($1.5-million-worth) of crop damage.


Okay, well not cartoons exactly, but North American raccoons, which were imported into the Asian nation as pets in the 1970s "when they became popular on an animated TV show," the Japan Times reports.

Apparently this unnamed show featured cute wittle waccoons washing their food, as the critters are known to do in the wild. In fact, the Japanese word for raccoon, arai-guma, literally translates as "washing bear." People were fascinated by the adorable behavior and started clamoring for a masked washer of their very own.

The problem—as any good wildlife biologist will tell you—is that animated furballs are generally more comfortable living the human life than their natural counterparts. So noncompliant raccoon pets got dumped by the roadsides, and the feral population went to town on crops.

Now 16 prefectures are reporting losses due to raccoons helping themselves to grapes, corn, melons, and other produce. It's hard to say if this is worse than invasive Burmese pythons snacking on alligators in the Florida Everglades. Or feral cats helping themselves to Australia's native marsupials. It's just another case of pet fads taking their toll on the environment.

Incidentally, while trying to figure out which '70s-era anime featured the instigating arai-guma in question, I ran across a rather disturbing Studio Ghibli anime being distributed by Disney called Pom Poko.

The 1994 film actually features endemic Asian creatures, called tanuki in Japan, that resemble raccoons.


The English-language dub consistently calls them raccoons, and makes one other, uh, translational concession. The magical, shape-shifting animals fight for resources as their habitat shrinks by inflating their testicles and using them as weapons.

Disney calls the enlarged appendages "pouches." Insert your own "they ain't got no balls" joke here.