consumerism for the cause

I kind of want this shirt.

The wording is awkward, and it's so very fannish and shippy that I'd probably be too embarrassed to wear it out of the house. Also, I'm suspicious of the vagueness of "a portion of the proceeds will be contributed to the fight against hate." (What portion? Contributed how and to whom, exactly?)

Nevertheless, I kind of want this shirt.

September

Out of the mirror they stare
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong
--W. H. Auden


Noam Chomsky on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

easy and extremely delicious roasted peaches

Tonight I made roasted peaches with thyme, peppercorns, lemon, and ricotta (or mascarpone in my case) based on this super-easy recipe by starlady.

I more or less followed the recipe, except that I used some vanilla extract instead of a vanilla bean, kept the thyme leaves on the stems (I'm lazy), and topped the peaches with mascarpone rather than ricotta (every ricotta I've had has been grainy and tasteless, and I didn't have the energy or money to seek out a good specialty ricotta, whereas mascarpone is readily available at Trader Joe's). It was delicious, and unlike most easy desserts, you could serve this at a dinner party and really impress people.

Don't, by the way, be tempted to omit the peppercorns--they add an elusive spiciness without making the peaches taste like pepper.

And now I am attempting to make bread via Mark Bittman's food-processor-based, no-knead recipe in How to Cook Everything. We'll see how it goes, considering I had to adapt on the fly for active dry yeast rather than instant yeast, and about an 18-hour rise in the fridge rather than 12 hours. Ah, well, it cannot turn out worse than my last few attempts at yeast bread. They had the texture of cake crumbs and no flavor whatsoever.