Well, it was bound to happen one day: a family recipe recently divulged in a late-night phone call, once made, turned out to be so appallingly good that it is no longer a family recipe.  (I would have posted earlier, but I’ve been licking the pot nonstop for forty-five minutes.)  The resulting dessert is rich, perfumey, not too sweet, and kind of plain-looking - undeniably the Camilla Bowles-Parker of the pudding world.

 SINGH FAMILY KHIR RECIPE

• Blob of butter
• Rice (I used half a bag of Arborio rice I’d been using for risottos)
• Lots of milk (I used skim, my aunts usually use 2%)
• Can of evaporated milk (Carnation or Pacific brand)
• Can of condensed milk (Eagle brand is best)
• 4-5 cardamom pods
• 2 cinnamon sticks, plus ground cinnamon
• Fresh-grated nutmeg (go to your local hippy store and buy one nut)
• 6-7 cloves
• Couple handfuls golden raisins (bulk bin at Safeway)

Melt butter in your biggest stockpot, if you’ve got one - the extra surface area will help ensure that you’re not standing in front of the stove for nineteen hours.  Add rice and stir till slightly golden in colour but not brown.  Cover rice with two inches of ordinary milk, whatever percentage you like, and add the whole can of evaporated milk and the spices.  Putting them in a cheesecloth bag would be a good idea, but I didn’t have any, so I just pitched everything in.  They all float, so you can fish them out before the stuff thickens up if you can manage to do that while continuously stirring.  Don’t stop stirring, and keep the heat low enough that there’s steam but no bubbles - the skin that forms on boiling milk makes the khir gritty, and like, ew.  Plus, there is a real risk of burnage.  After you add the spices, stir for about forty-five minutes, then add the condensed milk and raisins.  Then stir till it gets thick enough to put into tupperware containers and freeze (probably about another hour, depending on how much rice you have and what kind).  I don’t know the fridge life of this stuff (it lasts about a day at our house anyway) but with all that dairy, I imagine it isn’t too long.  Of course, now I have enough khir to feed the British RAF.  Funny how rice puffs up like that, eh?  Anyone in the greater Calgary metropolitan area is welcome to come by for a bite.  :-)

Being a quiet but obssessed student of urban architecture, I was pretty pleased to find the world’s Top 15 Skylines. (Yes, Toronto is on there, Rob.)

Shanghai is my favourite. Straight out of SimCity 2000.

The Ides of March chipped my expensive Nikon glasses with a chunk of metal going so fast it could have turned me into jam, stole my wallet at a private shopping party, threw me into a snowbank the following morning, and forced me to watch ‘Excalibur,’ which is the worst movie ever made.

It has the worst plot of all time, the worst acting of all time, the worst special effects of all time, Sir Bedevere is supposed to throw the damn sword into a pool at the end, not bloody Sir Percival, Patrick Stewart only gets about ninety seconds of screen time, and the music constitutes a crime against humanity inasmuch as injudicious use of ‘Carmina Burana’ can be hazardous to one’s health.

And what is up with that chrome-plated castle?!

Why did this movie rate 7.4 on the IMDB?

Anyway, I got an e-mail this morning that nearly killed me (now I know what it must be like to fall into a volcano from a helicopter), so I did what I always do: watched Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ video.

But in my emotionally-heightened state, something began to bother me.

Everyone knows Robin Williams and Bobby McFerrin. But who’s the third guy? I’ve never seen anyone more obscure, yet famous, in a music video. (Except for that one Cher video, ‘Believe,’ which has a girl in it from an X-Files episode and… where was I going with this.) The inner-net doesn’t seem to know.

Do any of you know?

To temporarily tide some of you over till my Philosopher Kings/Wine Festival blog entry (as soon as I’m done this damn database for wurk), I present for your titillation: AMAZING ANAGRAMS!

My best one was ‘Dream meme hope,’ which is a pretty poor showing unless I use my secret British alias, ‘Dame Hemmer Poe’; some other people got the following:

Karmic men try

Paprika go mu

Inlay oak nerd, and this one also got A Loran Kidney and Inlander Okay (people with vowels have all the fun)

My favourite is ‘Bitterly mocks.’  Yeah baby, you know who you are.  ;-)