cimorene | (no subject)

Even if you're awesome, if you're a non-native speaker you need a beta. wax_jism is more fluent than probably 98% of native speakers of English - I probably wouldn't have shacked up with her otherwise! - but she still makes mistakes.

Which animal is cooler? No, there's no purpose to this.

[Poll #1290613]

hermit crab

Miami 1988: as a kid I preferred hermit crabs to alligators.

gotz hung up

A random bit of cooking advice for the day! If you like to use uncooked olive oil - for example, as a salad dressing, or when making sauces for use on pasta or anything that doesn't involve frying things in it - it is well worth the money to buy a more expensive bottle for dressings/sauces and a cheaper one for cooking. In fact, I don't use extra virgin for cooking because someone or other, probably isilya (who knows everything), told me you're not supposed to.

But anyway, sometimes wax_jism will buy store brand olive oil and if I have only a bottle of that in the house when I'm preparing uncooked pesto dressing for pasta, I use a teaspoon of lemon juice, a tablespoon or two of pesto paste and a few tablespoons of water to thin it out with only a few drips (half-teaspoon maybe?) of the cheap olive oil, because if you end up with a bite of pasta coated mostly in cheap olive oil, it will taste bitter and... kind of disgusting.

My mother says the best she can buy in the grocery store is Colavita, which is a step up from Bertolli according to her, and isilya recommends several yuppie brands that I've never even heard of, but Bertolli is the best you can get around here and it's easily good enough to make a difference. With Bertolli, the dressing has a few tablespoons of pesto paste, a few tablespoons of olive oil, a dribble of water and a teaspoon or two of lemon juice. It actually tastes good.

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I'm deeply pleased to see that so far, everyone understands that octopus is the only option.

Octopi are not cool. I can't believe so many people are so mislead.

Octopodes are AWESOME. Eight kinds of awesome, in fact.

I agree that octopuses are awesome. However, they are not cooler than llamas. There is really no creature cooler than a llama.

(Your icon slays me with laughter!)

I really wasn't expecting anyone to vote for the tortoise! But I've always had a soft spot for them. Poor guys.

Oh, the tortoise! You know him. Always wins the race!

I bet the Galapagos tortoise wouldn't. He'd be like "...I weigh two hundred pounds! I don't think so, YOU bring me what I ask for! NOW!"

Hee hee hee! The Tortoise Master!

Indeed, there IS a creature cooler than the llama. And that creature is the hermit crab!

Hermit crabs are the best pets! We have two, and they never give us any trouble. ;)

I was always trying to adopt them and they always died.

damnit now I want pesto pasta so bad!

It's a very quick meal if you make the sauce uncooked!

Cook's Illustrated (a nerdy food magazine) did a big test on cooked v. uncooked olive oil a few years ago. They found that the ones that did best in cooked dishes tasted AWFUL in raw form - they contain the chemical acetone, which when heated forms tasty fruity notes, but when consumed straight up tastes like nail polish remover. SCIENCE! It works, bitches!

SCIENCE RULES! \o/

Hahaha, oh Moonbeam, you silly girl...

Believe it or not, that's from icanhascheezburger.com - it's not Moonbeam! (She's been dead for like three years!)

Hermit crab! Hermit crab! Hermit crab!

Really, it's so obvious. That laconic demeanour. That air of a loner. That tough shell with a soft heart. What's not cool??

You make valid points!