Vegetable minestrone…and extra!

So the other day I noticed this story in the LA Times on minestrones and having done a few before I felt up for making a new batch. Partially this was motivated by circumstance, since I had a large amount of fresh vegetables that I didn’t know if I’d have the time to properly use before my trip home next week.

I used the first recipe in that link but modified it as needed — the beans were canned and ready to go and I had no celery around, substituting it with turnips instead, but everything else was good to go. The vegetable broth was a new low-sodium bouillon concentrate that Trader Joe’s now sells, serviceable and easily prepared without drowning the taste in salt.

Meantime besides the bowl itself I was able, as you can see, to store up a slew of it for freezing and future use. And believe me, there will always be those days where I’ll just want to thaw something out and eat it — it’s just nice to have done all the work in advance!

In the OC Weekly, a Paramount Styles review

Paramount Styles being the new band led by Scott McCloud, who I first noticed when I got into Girls Against Boys back in the nineties. Good little album, about what I would have expected someone of his background and age to have created now — barbed but quieter.

My review of the group’s album Failure American Style is here, and here’s a snippet:

Failure American Style is more of a stylistic patchwork than simply Girls Against Boys go unplugged, in any event—and sometimes to surprising effect. “Hollywood Tales 2” is a ghostly kind of Sonic Youth tribute, “Total Trash” crossed with “Rain on Tin” and classic rock, an approach revisited later with “These Starry Nights.” McCloud sometimes aims for the perfectly understandable, and at others for the kind of murky threat with which he made his name, but the generally brisk, sometimes skeletal arrangements take precedence throughout. There’s even a mournful instrumental that should soundtrack whatever midlife-crisis movie will be made for the generation of (former) alternakids, wherever they are.