Tonight I made Thai spicy vegetable soup and it really turned out great. It took me a while to find all the ingredients (or reasonable substitutes) but it was quick to make and tasted wonderful so I thought I’d pass it on. So healthy, so delicious, inexpensive, and easy to make. I’m in love.

Spicy Vegetarian Thai Soup (4 servings)
4 cups of water
1 cube of vegetable bullion (Knorr)
2 stalks fresh lemon grass
3 slices of fresh galangal or ginger root
3 fresh kaffir lime leaves
1 tablespoon tamarind paste
2 tablespoons vegetarian fish sauce
12 fresh Thai chile peppers -or- 2 medium sized jalapenos
1/2 small white onion cut into 1/4 inch slices
2 tablespoons roasted chili paste (nam prik pao) or chili sauce in a pinch
1 16 ounce can straw mushrooms (drain and rinse)
2 stalks of celery
1 large carrot
1 small ripe tomato, cut into wedges ¼ inch thick
1 small lime
2 sprigs fresh cilantro

Preparation

Prepare lemon grass by trimming off the very end of the root and smashing it with the side of a cleaver of chef’s knife then cut into 1 inch pieces. Prepare galangal or ginger root by smashing it as well.  Cut onion into 1/4 inch slices. Cut tomato into wedges 1/4 inch thick. If using jalapenos cut them lengthwise into 1/4 inch strips. Drain and rinse straw mushrooms. Squeeze lime. Cut celery and carrot into 1/4 inch slices.

Cooking Instructions

Bring water and bullion to boil over high heat in a medium-sized saucepan. Add the lemon grass (in a strainer or boiling bag if you prefer not to eat the lemon grass or pick it out of the soup), galangal (or ginger), kaffir lime leaf, fish sauce and tamarind paste (break apart the tamarind paste with your fingers as you add it). Bring back to a boil and cook 3 minutes. Add the onion, chili paste, celery, carrot, and straw mushrooms. Boil for another 7 minutes or until vegetables have desired tenderness. Add the peppers and tomatoes. Turn off the heat. Add the lime juice. Taste to adjust the seasoning. Garnish with cilantro. You can add 1/2 inch cubes of tofu at this point if you like.

(Just a quick FYI to international visitors: To the best of my knowledge, libraries in the U.S. do not send money to publishers based on the lending of books.)

Before getting your panties all in a bunch over Google’s alleged copyright infringement please go read Google’s FAQ on their print service before discussing this issue further. Here’s a place to start:

http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/about.html

Here’s a quick summary:

There are three types of results you will get using Google’s book search:

NO VIEW

If you don’t want your book to appear in any Google search (including the limited snippet view) you can opt-out of their book search program.

SNIPPET VIEW

If no arrangement has been made by Google with the book’s publisher or copyright owner then all you will get is a snippet (approximately one sentence) showing the search term in context.

PAGE VIEW

If an arrangement has been made by Google with the book’s publisher or copyright owner then sample pages of the book, showing the search term in context, will be shown.

FULL BOOK VIEW

If a book’s copyright has expired or an arrangement has been made by Google with the book’s publisher then the entire book will be available on-line.

This service will be extremely valuable to both researchers and publishers and authors as it will link directly to on-line bookstores to drive sales and make onerous card catalogs a thing of the past. It will also allow people to quickly discover out-of-print works and perhaps indicate to publishers when a book has enough demand to make reprinting financially beneficial. Also, with Print-On-Demand now available it’s not hard to imagine out-of-print books being available to those who really want a copy with no need for the publisher to print and store inventory.

I have yet to see a real-life example of an exploit that will patch together a whole book from what little Google reveals based on a search. The result would be very low quality in terms of DPI in any case unless the end result were OCR processed back to text and reformatted as a PDF or text file. The same thing could be done of course with good old-fashioned print books using a book scanner and most (if not all) e-book formats with “digital rights management” (DRM) protection have already been hacked.

More generally, one should consider that progress brings about change and change can be disruptive even if it is ultimately a good thing. Although the Internet brings with it new problems like virii, hackers, spyware, and the like I doubt most people would want to do without it. There has always been a need to adapt and in a technological era of ever increasing change…well, you get the picture.

Many scientists already see nano-fabrication bringing to the world of “real goods” the same benefits and perils we see in the realm of information technology. This is still a few decades away so we’ve got some breathing room before that issue hits us. :-)

So you say you want to help Project Gutenberg by working on a book who’s copyright has expired? Great! You probably already know the basic steps:

1. Perform a copyright search
2. OCR the book
3. Correct the OCR text
4. Upload the e-text and bask in the praise of your like-minded peers!

Well, actually there’s another step squeezed in between correcting the OCR text and uploading the e-text: Format the text according to Project Gutenberg’s rules.

Unfortunately, you have to read the FAQ to figure out exactly what rules Project Gutenberg expects you to follow. Ouch! Although I recommend you still read the FAQ here are a few of the more important rules you’ll need to follow:

Chapter Headings
For a standard novel, you can choose either four blank lines before the chapter heading and two lines after, or three lines before and one line after. Choose one and be consistent.

Line Lengths
You should use hard line breaks (cr/lf) to word wrap all text at 70 characters. A good text editor that can do this is Notetab Light. (Surprisingly, neither JEdit or EditPad Pro could perform this simple task.)

Em-Dash
Use two hyphens — for each em-dash.

En-dash
Use one hyphen – for each en-dash.

Indents
Do not use indents at the start of paragraphs. If you need to indent use spaces, not tab characters.

CR/LFs
Use them.

ASCII
Use it.

Words Edited Out
Use three em-dashs —— to indicate a word that was edited out.

End-Of-Line Hyphens
Remove them.

Italics
Bound words with underscore _ characters to indicate it should be italicized.

Ellipses
Leave one space before and after each dot. –> . . .

If I’ve left anything out drop me a line and I’ll add it to the list.