From Twitter 11-16-2010

( Little bits )

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Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town Re-Release/The Promise

This set is enormous and probably the most beautiful piece of music paraphernalia I own.
In a sturdy letter format cardboard slipcase with the Darkness cover on the front and a photo taken at the same location without the jacket you get a spiral bound scrapbook with reproduced hand written notes and lyrics, tour posters, tickets, setlists and lots of photos. The CDs and DVDs in cardboard sleeves are set in sturdy cardboard pages. This photo gives a rough idea of what it looks like.

CDs:
- remastered version of Darkness on the Edge of Town
- two CD set The Promise - a mix of unreleased tracks and proto-versions of well-known ones
DVDs:
- the making of Darkness
- split DVD (the current E Street Band lineup playing the complete Darkness live and a collection of archive videos, both studio sessions and live shows)
- complete 3 hour concert taped in Houston in '78

It's pricey (£74 on amazon) but you get three CDs and three DVDs and that remarkable scrapbook.
If you're not that much a fan and just interested in the new/old tracks, you can get The Promise separately for a normal album price but if you want the DVDs, you'll need to fork out for this set.

I'm going to write up a review of the whole thing when I've had time to listen to/watch/read it all thoroughly but I'm already impressed and it doesn't just feel like a rerelease gimmick. Darkness is my favourite album, anyway, so to hear more tracks from that time (other than the ones that were on Tracks) is cool indeed. You can also tell where he would go musically as a number of those tracks have already a distinct River vibe.

[Cooking] Amazingly easy tomato sauce

I had a bunch of small vine tomatoes that weren't quite ripe enough for using in a salad but already on the edge of their usability so I cut them in half, drizzled a baking tray with olive oil, put on the tomatoes cut side down, added a handful of crushed garlic gloves (skin on), drizzled over more olive oil and seasoning (salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary) and put it in the oven to roast for about half an hour until squishy.
Then I squeezed the now wonderfully sweet and fragrant garlic gloves out of their skins into a bowl, added the rest of the baking tray and blitzed everything up with my stick blender. Out came this wonderfully fragrant, bright orange and tasty sauce that had just the right consistency. I tasted it and could just have sat there with a spoon eating it all.

I used this as a base for a veg dish but it will just as easily work as a stir-in sauce for pasta.