Spring cooking

I sort of went through the equivalent of spring cleaning in my kitchen tonight, taking random leftover ingredients I had and seeing what I could make of them. I had some hamburger buns left over from last week, so I looked up a recipe and decided to make scallop burgers. Seemed like a good idea at the time -- you grind up the scallops and add seasonings, chives, a shallot, parsley, orange zest and extra-virgin olive oil. Turn the mixture into patties and cook them up. The process of making the food went pretty smoothly, and I even barely remembered to take the blade out of the food chopper before sticking my hand in there to scoop out the ground scallops.

But upon taking my first bite of this masterpiece, I realized that what I had feared in the back of my mind was true -- by adding all these things that I'm not all that fond of, such as shallots and chives, I had screwed up the tastiness of the scallops. It was crunchy, which I'm not a big fan of, and it just didn't taste right. I also couldn't shake the worry over whether I had cooked the scallop burgers well enough. They looked like I had, but it was hard to tell. And while I think it would be sort of funny if my own cooking killed me one day, I didn't really want that day to be today.

It was about that time that I noticed a spot of mold on the bottom of the bun. (Hello! Only a week old!) And that pretty much cinched it -- the meal was a lost cause. I was going to fix something else, but got so wrapped up in the cleanup and making of the corn muffins, that it now occurs to me that my dinner was three corn muffins and an orange.

I also had some left over marshmallows and chocolate chips, so I decided to try to melt the chocolate chips into a sort of chocolate dipping sauce and make chocolate covered marshmallows. But it ended up being more of a not-tasty clump of chocolate-marshmallow goo.

But hey, at least it's a few less random items around the kitchen.

And with that, let's see what's cooking in the wider world, shall we?

A European investigator says the U.S. outsourced torture to Europe with the governments likely knowing what was going on. You know, the economy would be a lot better if we'd stop outsourcing jobs like that. Sure, people might torture for less money in other parts of the world, but it's a matter of principle. Remember, if you're going to have someone tortured -- make sure you look for the label: "Maimed in the USA."

Sammy "The Gavel" Alito was approved by a Senate committee after offering the legislators an offer they couldn't refuse.

Google has agreed to censor its search results in China for purely business reasons. You can find more by doing a Google search for "sellout."

Monkey update: Someone in South Korea has taught a monkey how to ice skate. Which is totally ridiculous, but totally awesome. (There are pictures with the link, so you can see the awesomeness for yourself.)