rice bowl, cirashi sushi

Cirashi, 'scattered', this cannot be properly termed chirashi sushi because the rice is not vinegar/sugar sushi rice and the fish is not raw. 

Yet another example among thousands of how Americans tend to bastardize everything they touch. At least that is what Jamie Oliver said one time on a visit to New York City. Oliver is the thick-tongued chef who wrote a few books and who markets a line of highly rated cooking pots. He is best watched with the audio turned off. Everything gets "popped" into the oven, "lovely" this and "lovely" that, everything is lovely and nothing is ever disgusting, he is a bit catchphrase afflicted. He produces an"S" sound by performing an oddly irritating exolabial/dental tongue-smash and squishing the approximation of an "S" out both sides of his wet tongue. The viewer sees his tongue a lot pushing outward for sibilant consonant sounds and for prominence in competition between two thick lips, while imagining spittle sprayed over everything he prepares. B3ta.com satirizes him mercilessly. 

Oliver does great things for Britain and British youths in particular, resistant as they are to improvement, bemoaning junk food culture, improving school lunches, Charity Restaurants providing training and employment opportunities and counseling to economically disadvantaged, efforts that have spread globally. American viewers were appalled at witnessing the abject nulliverse of work ethic characterizing British attitudes of entitlement seen on Oliver's television show describing the efforts of the Fifteen Foundation. Having been presented with amazing opportunities of apprenticeship by Oliver, trainees regularly would not show up. Reason: no bus change, overslept, arrests, drugs, partying, etc., Oliver twisted (no pun) himself into knots trying to counsel and to instill a sense of appreciation and ethic but it was all for naught. They used him, they used him up. Precious few succeeded, at least on the show that we saw. 

So we love MBE and TED prize winner Jamie Oliver, but Gawd, is he hard to listen to. He is British as all hell but ever to be seen non-ironically wearing American textiles, American Levis, American Western shirts, American bowling shirts, American retro, American jean jackets, American ball caps, American trainers, etc. Back at NYC following the bastardize quip we see Oliver come skateboarding (American) into the small NY apartment where a fellow chef kindly offered him room, as he rolls in bouncing and twirling a basketball, quintessentially American, back and forth between hands with the basketball brought in presumably from an outside court, and then with no edited gap whatsoever Oliver shoves his filthy basketball-handling, germ incrusted, NYC contaminated hands directly into a bowl of pizza dough without a trace of awareness of contamination. And we're all went, "Ewwww." 

Having said all that, I saw this cirashi in Sunset magazine and it looked great to me, especially the cucumber. 

Salmon chirashi

*  1 cup white rice

*  1 LB Salmon, cut into 4 segments

*  1/2 teaspoon each kosher salt / pepper

*  1 cup sliced cucumber

*  1 cup cubed avocado

*  1 sheet nori torn to little bits

*  2 green onions cut diagonally

*  2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds (hmmm, seems like a lot)

*  1/3 cup soy sauce

*  2 tablespoons wasabi (hmmm, seems like a lot)

*  1/2 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

Directions

*  Cook the rice. Duh. 

*  Put the other stuff on top.

*  Mix soy sauce and wasabi to have at the side.

Now for something entirely different, something not food-related. 

I mentioned this in Althouse comments. I've always resisted picking up columbine plants, Colorado State flower, because I've only seen scraggly specimens and they seem delicate and difficult. My brother had a few and he was so proud of them but I could not see why. They never did very well. Anyway, I broke down and picked up three small plants. Each plant had a couple of flowers on it. Within a few weeks they grew surprisingly well and surpassed everything else. Now they've grown into this ↓ and it is still very early. 

Apparently they like their mostly shaded spot, their soil, and the nutrients they are given. There are actually more flower buds than there are flowers presently. I've never seen a clump this heavy with blooms. 

Aerogarden switched from a tabular form of nutrient to a liquid form. At one point I searched the Aerogarden site for more of the liquid nutrient, expecting to see the same thing that I already have. Instead, they contracted another firm to provide a different type of liquid nutrients. The set came in three bottles. The user is expected to mix the bottles in accordance with their plant's growth phase. I was so annoyed. The label is so tiny one needs a magnifying glass to read it. 

(Now the Aerogarden site offers a different pre-mixed liquid nutrient but I did not buy that one because this stuff does so well on all my other plants.)

The products get enthusiastic reviews. I tried it on all the plants. They each responded immediately, much faster and dramatically than any other plant food that I've ever used. I tried to find what the bottles contain exactly, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, etc., but the websites cited on the label were confusing and not helpful to me. I think there are a lot of micronutrients in these. Whatever it is, it works. 

These are the chile plants ↘ that I almost killed because germination took over a month, and I was heating the container with an electric blanket that switched off every eight hours. I got tired of it. The habanero chiles germinated within the usual ten days but these did not. I became disgusted with the project.  The aloe below is big, and that is a big window. 

Remember the baby plants looked like this ↑ when I discovered they germinated after I already gave up on them and left the pot to languish still covered with a doubled blanket. I posted this sorry picture in a post titled plants from seeds from grocery store food, which incidentally, gets quite a few page views each day from people all over the world using that precise search queary.

The habaneros started at the same time but quicker to germinate and so a month older, are confused plants. They are much smaller and growing like a bonsai, that is sideways out of the pot instead of upward, and they're flowering as they grow, many of the flowers stay on the plant long enough to form tiny habanero chiles. There are about five or six chiles forming now even as the plant continues to flower and continues to grow vegetatively. Poor thing. The plant's confusion is probably my fault for germinating the seeds in winter when the sun is brief, low, and the light shifted toward red.

I honestly do not know how to mix the fertilizers because the outdoor plants are blooming and growing vegetatively simultaneously. The chiles are already blooming too but I would prefer that they didn't. Do I influence the plant by the mix of food I give it, or must I feed the plants according to what the plant is already doing? I think I just answered my own question. 

The problem with the fertilizer is that the bottles are small and they are not used at the same rate, so you run out of one before running low of the others. If I were a professional plant person this all might be easier. As it is, I am just very well pleased with results in spite of the slight inconveniences. Plus it puts the home grower in control.