Thai Soup

One TBS. miso paste
One TBS. chicken boullion
Quart of water
One TBS. garlic
One can coconut milk
One half a dried Thai pepper
One tsp. dried ginger powder
salt, MSG
Grated peel of one lime.
Simmer.
Juice of half a lemon, and half the lime, added right before serving.
Garnished with cilantro and julienned scallions.

Success! Delicious. Think I'll have another bowl.

This is a fine base for adding other things. I'm thinking shrimp. Or, for another taste, peanut butter. Which I have here now.

(With all the citrus, when I put a dab of peanut butter in the leftovers next day, it unbalanced the flavors. I would suggest saving the peanut butter for another recipe.)

Update: 2-21-10 I recreated the soup and this time added some shrimp which I first boiled, in a spicy bath comprising Old Bay seasoning, a little lime juice, and a few grams of Dave's Insanity Sauce in salted water, for two-and-a-half minutes. Then I put them in a salted ice water bath. Then I drained them and peeled them later. When the soup was ready I put them in just long enough to get hot. Served this time too with scallions and cilantro and lemon and lime juice added right before serving.

Update: 4-27-10 Again I made this same basic recipe. I omitted some of the citrus juice but this time added some roast chicken meat I had pulled off the bone, and a couple of tablespoons of adobo sauce, which comes packaged with sesame oil. Delicioso! (not pictured here; the photo is of the shrimp version, my second selection.)

Mediterranean Wintertime Fish

Hearing some descriptions of a dish from my sister, I promptly forgot the recipe except for a few themes, and created this.

(To warn you right away, this is the story of a failure.)

Sautéed two chopped small onions and stalk of celery, two pinches of whole mustard seeds, 1/4 jalapeño in a skillet I had just fried two pieces of bacon in, reserving some of the bacon fat for later endeavors.
Then, once that began to brown, I added a couple of spoonfuls of water, a tin of anchovies and broke that up in the center of the sauté pan, and 1 TBS. each of minced garlic and capers. This simmered about 8 minutes and the anchovies pretty much dissolved. I added a tin of sardines (3 in the tin) and a handful of chopped arugula, the cooked crumbled bacon, and a can of clams, drained. I decided to add some thyme and black pepper. I put the lid on and simmered this for maybe 3 minutes, wanting the clams piping hot but not cooked any longer. I added a cup of heavy cream, put the lid on, turned off the stove, and cooked my pasta, some farfalle, also known as "bow ties."Could have used some more cream. In fact, it would have benefited by leaving out the capers, replacing the sardines with some other fish. Parsley would have worked better than arugula. Come to think of it, tomatoes would have been better than cream. And the sardines were the wrong kind. Mustard sauce. I rinsed them but really, I should have left them out today.

This recipe needs work. A lot of work. Verdict: minor failure. It was good food, but the flavors were not balanced.

More Malt

Today being a cold one, I loaded up the stove with wood and cooked myself a big pot of oatmeal, and when it was done I poured malt syrup all over it and dug in. Delicious!

I started out when young putting brown sugar on my oatmeal. That trick, which more people ought to know, lifts oatmeal into the realm of excellence. Later, when I learned that brown sugar is just a premixed blend of granulated sugar and molasses, I just began buying molasses. And putting that on my oatmeal. I also make my oatmeal with milk instead of water.

I have also tried maple syrup on the oatmeal, and that's pretty good. But today the malt syrup went on there. I pronounce it a success. It rivals my favorite, the molasses. Call it a tie.

This is part of a slowly evolving series I'm doing about cooking with malt. You can use the handy-dandy search box to find all my articles about "malt."

The Ride

The usual way was to pile a bunch of boys in a car and get to the camping ground that way. But on this day, for whatever reason, the boy and his father rode unaccompanied by others in the family car.

It was a sunny day, and it wasn't winter. They headed north into Wisconsin. He realized he wasn't often alone with his father on these Boy Scout affairs. Usually they would split up; the boy would would spend these camp-outs erecting tents, going on the hikes, doing the rest in a cluster of friends; getting signed off on various Boy Scout instructional lessons which impart some actual useful skills and are designed to keep the boys on the right path. His father would meanwhile be doing father things with the other men - moving logs, fueling lamps, unpacking chests of food. Each of them enjoyed the company of those who were not seen every day.

He was always slightly afraid of his father. A gentle man who probably feared his own anger, mild as it was, more than he feared any other man, he had really only spanked the boy, or his brother, once or twice, years ago, and perhaps whacked his backside once long ago with a belt - enough so that in later years he only had to frown and touch his belt buckle, and he and his brother would quickly realize they were on the wrong side of a line.

A transplanted Southerner, one day over the supper table he had announced a new deal. He had detected some disrespect, he said. The children became serious. He went on. From that point on, the children were to say "Yes sir" and "No sir" and "Yes ma'am" and "No, ma'am." Over the next several months, he even trained the boys in the rudiments of military formation. And the boys, like dogs, loved it.

But mostly it was a vague feeling of not wanting to disappoint. The boy let the moment dissolve in the sun and the road. It was good, too, to have his father all to himself. The quiet between them became comfortable. After a while the boy spoke:

"Why don't you tell me a story about when you were in the Army?"

"Once in Alaska, I had night time guard duty, and I had to walk around the outside of the fence. Yes, it was very cold. We wore parkas over our uniforms. I turned the corner and came face to face with an Arctic timber wolf. I think it surprised both of us. They aren't like a dog; they're big, maybe 80 pounds."

"I was very scared, because he didn't run away; he just sat there looking at me. So I drew back the bolt on my rifle. I didn't even see him go. One second he was there and then he was gone. He just disappeared. They're smart. He knew that sound, what my gun was; they know about man."

"I'll tell you about a fellow I knew up there. He was an older man. I was a little older than most of the other men but he was a lot older. He didn't get along with the younger men very well. In his forties I guess. He was a writer. Books, detective stories. Yes, I read some of them after the war. They were all right, I guess."

The boy's interest faded a bit; he looked out the window for a few seconds. For some reason the man raised his voice a bit, and lightly slapped the steering wheel. "Listen! This is important!"

"I was his only friend. But he was always complaining about the Army's ways of doing things; about how there were better ways or how stupid they were. I finally told him, 'Hammett, it just doesn't do any good to complain; you may as well try to look on the bright side of things.'

"He looked at me like he had never thought of it that way. Yes, I think he was a little better after that.

"What happened to him? Well he got out of the Army when the war was over, just like all of us! A few years later he died and your mother and I were invited for me to speak at his funeral service. His wife sent a letter. No, we didn't go. He was a communist. At that time, if I had gone, they would have thought I was a communist too."

Just then, the man and the boy saw part of the convoy of Boy Scouts had stopped a couple of cars at the side of the road at the turn off, signaling to the car that this was the turn onto the dirt road that led to the camp ground. The story was over.

Flo, the Progressive Insurance Chick

Flo, whose name I had missed until today, knowing her only as the Progressive Insurance chick, is in reality Stephanie Courtney. I, too, am fascinated by her allure.

However, it is this scene pictured here which I believe has inspired a whole trend of wacky body language. This stance of hers is very odd, to the point that it amuses me, no matter the context. It says, "hands off, come and get me!" Nicely paradoxical, and very feminine. (Here come the thrown shoes. Oh hell.)

However, my prediction - the reason for this post - is that exaggerated body language as a conscious element, inserted into the current zeitgeist, is already here. We will see much more of it soon, and the first imitators and bandwagon-jumpers are coming into focus on the scene right now.

Flo has lots of commercials they don't play in your area.

Name the Artist

Here's an image by a well-known artist. The game is simply be the first to identify the artist.

My thinking was that since there is, as far as I can tell, no easy way to Google the answer, it's not susceptible to cheating. Same with Wikipedia.

UPDATE: The game is a good one but this one was just way too obscure! No one but a specialist would have ever guessed that this artist painted this work. I think the next one should be easier.

Unnatural!!!

Every so often I hear some smug holier-than-thou type telling me it's unnatural to drink milk. I drink milk, and they don't: ergo, they are superior beings.

Without fail I notice these people eat cheese. Which, I must point out, is one step further removed from "natural." Not only are they harvesting hetero-species-ical milk, they are curdling and aging it and allowing bacteria and mold grow in it. So how natural is that, Mr. and Ms. Natural?

Granted, I'm not happy with the growth hormones and such in modern milk. And I even sympathize with vegans. Still, that's not what these kooks are talking about.

Plus, they act like they are somehow "grown up" which is why they eschew milk. You and I both know these people wouldn't drink milk even when they were kids, causing their mothers' to worry about their diets and give them Bosco and Ovaltine and stuff normal kids never had to learn about. Which worries were justified, because now that they are all grown up they live on diets mostly of coffee, booze, chocolate, cigarettes, soda pop and pizza. Grown up food. You know, the natural way of doing things.

I hope their hips don't shatter. Must be tough eating that required half-pound of collard greens per day to get the calcium. What with their preferred diet. Oh, wait, that's right: they eat the cheese. Lots and lots of cheese.


Here is a being acting naturally. I'm not so sure about this or this, but live and let live: that's my motto.

Paneer Breakfast

Deciding on an attempt to eat a healthy breakfast, I knew veggies were paramount. I know this puts me at odds, in general, with most of the U.S., for whom breakfast vegetables are usually limited to potatoes, onions, and, rarely, to what is included in a Spanish omelet - tomatoes and peppers and such. And of course, a bean breakfast burrito. Or the mushrooms, or spinach in other kinds of omelet. All of which is starting to sound not too awful, actually. All right, I surrender: there are more healthy options to American breakfast than I realized.

Anyway, I had some paneer left over. I made it using this recipe from The Paupered Chef. Using the sour milk (yogurt, actually) to curdle the fresh milk was a clever trick which, although thousands of years old, had eluded me. When I made it, I used it in an eggplant and potato dish, but didn't document any of it.

But for today I planned this breakfast dish last night and early this morning, and fine tuned it as I made it. Here's what we have:
One last poblano from the garden, a small green one the size of a big jalapeño; and a small onion, chopped and begun browning in butter. Meanwhile, I began heating a 6" iron skillet to toast some spices in. But first I measured out a half teaspoon each of mustard seed and cumin seed, and tossed that in with the cooking onions. Then I measured out the following:
1/2 a dried Thai red pepper, chopped
1 tsp commercial garam masala powder (this has some cinnamon in it.)
1 tsp turmeric powder
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1/4 tsp fenugreek seeds
6-7 black pepper corns
2 cloves
5-6 cardamoms
1/2 tsp coriander seeds
and toasted it in my little skillet. I kept it moving and tossing; the turmeric and garam masala powder needed the toasting most but was most likely to burn first, so I watched it. Then I emptied my little skillet full of toasted spices into a coffee cup, and as soon as it cooled I ground everything into a spice mix in my coffee mill / spice grinder.

Before it cooled, I had diced up the leftover paneer - a chunk about as big as a tennis ball- and begun browning it. And then added the generous handful of frozen green peas. Stirred in those spices. And finally, some diced leftover sweet potato which had been made the previous evening with a sprinkle of sugar and drizzle of molasses (which equals "brown sugar;" I usually make my own when I need it.)

I stirred for a few minutes, wanting everything to brown just lightly, and when it had I added a splash of water, a little salt, and it was done in another minute.

If you want some Indian recipes, check out Tigers & Strawberries, one of my favorite food sites.

There are some paneer options I've just begun to ponder, such as adding heavy cream for a richer paneer. I could have made my own yogurt, too. Sometimes I'll buy some and start a batch with one spoonful of the store-bought mixed in a quart of milk.

Milk used to be more heavily subsidized in this country. Dried milk used to be substantially cheaper than whole milk. Still, money can be saved if it's bought in the big sizes and I'll champion homemade yogurt made from dried milk as being good as any other.

Shocking Dip Part 2 - Szechuan Sauce for Breading Chicken

Last night, continuing this train of thought, I dipped some chicken in Szechuan sauce before I applied my mix of pankoesque crumbs with flour, salt, pepper and a tad of cornbread mix. I used a different brand than Kame, because I can't find it around. A good Szechuan sauce is fermented all together, in my opinion. It has soy and hot red pepper flakes or powders, and also other flavorings such as plum, garlic, ginger, sesame. I'm no expert on how to make these sauces; all I know is the brand Kame sold a few years ago was really good. I think they changed the recipe; it was not available for a few years and then all of a sudden I saw it again. Just not lately. So I used Asian Gourmet brand Szechuan stir fry sauce.

This made very tasty fried chicken. It almost browned too fast but I turned down the heat, and kept flipping it in the pan, and let it finish on low. I may never dip chicken in egg dip again.

Malted Chocolate Ice Cream

This is another example of using malted barley syrup for uses other than making beer. Here I poured some "amber" malt syrup over some chocolate ice cream. No hops in this syrup, of course.

Malt seems to be a big mystery to lots of people. It used to be sold as syrups more widely. All I can say is follow the malt link and learn. It's widely used in the mass-produced candy market, but no longer a common home ingredient. A malted milkshake is a milkshake with malt syrup or dry malt powder added.

It's a similar taste to caramel, but it is distinctly itself, a different flavor of sweet. It's often blended with caramel sugar, and can be caramelized itself.

"Malted milk" powder is a bit different. It's malt sugar mixed with dry milk powder. And wheat, apparently. I say, why pay for the part that's dry milk when I already have my own milk and ice cream to mix with the pure malt sugar and syrups?

Some use pure malt to sweeten waffle and pancake batter. I think it would make a great syrup on waffles and pancakes. Or both in the batter and on top. It's also used to provide a boost to yeast in breads and rolls.

Before sugar cane or sugar beets, it was known and available as a sweetener in Europe and surrounding parts. I don't know if it was widely used that way much historically. It would take extra fuel to extract pure sugar syrup or crystaline powdered malt sugar. Beer would be easier to make from malted grains.

Here's a link to beer making.
A short orientation about sweets in the Middle Ages.
Maltose.

Oh, the ice cream was delicious.

Strange Bicycles

Strange bicycles.

Tamale Pie

(The photo was taken right before I put it in the oven)
There are several variations of "hot tamale pie" to be found on the internet. Lots of them seem to have bell pepper and most don't use masa. Some criticize it for being "inauthentic."

It has a lot of similarities to a Cuban traditional dish, a pork and cornmeal stew.

In any case, here is mine:
I basically made a recipe of chili con carne, using 1¼ lbs. of hamburger and a little bit - 4 oz.? - of smoked salt pork I had.

No beans. Instead of beans, it uses whole corn. Read further.

I use dried Mexican savory peppers and add cumin, garlic, and oregano instead of buying commercial chili powder to season it. You can heat it up to your level of fire using different hot sauce or hot peppers in addition. I find this recipe benefits from a large dose of black pepper, also. To me it complements the corn flavor.

The recipe then departs further from traditional chili. In this 1½ gal. batch, I then added half a can of corn and 1½ cans of creamed corn and a cup of milk. I made the tomato-y part with tomato paste but I added a 16 oz. can of whole tomatoes. Then I added a whole cup of masa harina, which will thicken it up far more than a regular sort of chili. I prefer yellow masa, aka maize amarillo. It is not as common as white corn masa. (This bugs me. The white corn people are cramping my style. ¡Viva maíz amarillo!)

After it all comes to a boil and then simmers a while on a lower heat, and the masa is fully cooked (about 10 minutes), I cut up a pound of Monterey Jack cheese with peppers in it - "pepper jack." I stuck the slices down into the stew. Then I put that in the 265º F. oven until the top browned just slightly, about 25 minutes. Turned off the oven, cracked the door, let it rest for 15 minutes, and served.

Cabal

In my way, I see Geithner and a large amount of others as guilty of blatant fraud at the highest levels, they are guilty, the talking heads are lying about the legality of what they did (i.e., they are guilty), they are too powerful, that it is an emergency that that they are still in power. Large numbers should be imprisoned immediately with bail sufficient to pay all possible fines they might reasonably be assessed if they flee and are tried in absentia. Stuff like that.

Food Pills and the American Dream

You either understand why the idea of "food pills" strikes me with violent resistance, or not. It's the worst concept the progreNot only food pills were ballyhooed in the United States of America, but certain other promises were made. And the nature of those promises tells a story.

Oddly, it all peaked in the '60s. People who aren't from that era may think the violent reaction against such mechanization was overwrought. I suggest they should re-think the situation.

We were also promised new drugs that would banish sleep; and flying cars, which would presumably transport us from point A to point B without having to bother with the world outside our futuristic capsule at all. In the end, right about when they realized they had been "outed," they were even proposing reproduction without touching.

A curious quest indeed; to lower human consciousness to the level of the present-day machinery, rather than the different, later proposals to do the opposite, and improve the consciousness of machines.

Although America ultimately expressed its rejection of the poisonous tenets of blatant dehumanization, for a brief time this philosophy openly took root in the USA and Britain and lingered through the postwar and cold war periods. And it is assuredly not dead yet.

To lose the experiences of flavor, and dreams, and touch. To gain "efficiency." No wonder people like C.S.Lewis freaked out.

The food pill is not a uniquely American proposal. But assuredly the meme survives here. And there.

Malty Glaze

Malta Goya is a beverage made from malt sugar and carbonated water and hops. It's an odd variety of soda pop not familiar to most in the U.S. but sold in several other countries. There's no alcohol in it but if you opened it and added yeast it would turn into beer. Before it's converted to alcohol, malt sugar has a flavor in addition to its sweetness. (It's the flavor of Grape Nuts cereal, as a matter of fact, which is toasted malted barley and has nothing to do with grapes or nuts.) It is that often hard to define (until now!) flavor that makes a malted milk shake taste different from a non-malted milk shake.

Since I wanted to taste this, I bought some recently. I don't drink many Cokes or Pepsi or drinks like that, and the Malta Goya tastes a bit like a cola but the malt flavor is too much for me even though I like that flavor, if that makes any sense. I also realized I could cook with it, and although I would just as well buy some malt sugar from the beer-making supply store, this was on the shelf of the grocery store where I was.

One of my back-burner projects is figure out if malt sugar is just the right kind of sugar for any particular dishes so today when it was time to glaze this ham I popped open a bottle and reduced it down to a thin syrup on the stove. I added a teaspoonful of prepared mustard and glazed the ham, which had cloves stuck in the centers of the scored fat squares. After the final half-hour in the oven the glaze was just right and the ham done.

It made a very tasty glaze; my instincts were good. It gets competition from maple syrup, honey, molasses, caramel - all respectable contenders for tasty ham glazes. This malt glaze should at least puzzle some sophisticates, provide some conversation and please the palates of some pretty persnickity people.

As I was finishing this article I thought of making an ice-cream soda or float with Malta Goya. The hops in it might foil that plan. Would any flavor ice cream soda work with the hops? Pineapple sherbet? Goya has a suggestion.

I really wish my local "health" food store carried malt sugar... without the hops.

I think I just have to drive out to the beer supply place and buy some malt sugar and maybe some malt syrup. That's where I got some a year or so ago for homemade malted milkshakes. Rather than search for Carnation Malted Milk I will purchase my own milk, thank you, and add malt sugar to my milk - or my chocolate ice cream - or my waffle batter - as needed. I think that will be best.

A product I never tried, Ovaltine, is supposed to be an amalgam of malt sugar and dry milk, plus vitamins and dried eggs or something along those lines. I will pass on that as well.

All this is making me think of adding malt sugar to certain smoothie recipes.

And one of these days I will make some more beer with it, which is what most people use it for in the first place!

Squash or Pumpkin - Squmpkin?

An orange Hubbard. About 6" across, 7" from stem to stern.

Squmpkin: I wasn't the first to think of this word. It yielded up on Google several interesting things: A look inside a ripe Blue Hubbard squash, an obituary of a breeder, and a picture of the biggest pumpkin I have ever seen. Also some nice hybrids seen in another plant breeder's video. I like his attitude.

I plan on roasting this particular calabash like any winter squash, and have it with maybe a pat of butter. I want to taste it pretty much plain, to analyze the flavor.

UPDATE: On the left, just after I cut it. (I saved the seeds, incidentally, removed and washed the pulp off, and toasted / roasted them in the toaster oven with butter and salt. As always the husk is pure roughage but the seed inside is tasty and nutritious.) On the right, after I cooked it in foil for about 35 minutes in a 350º F. oven.

This tastes good. It rivals a very good butternut squash and was better, and oranger, than the average butternut squash that is usually available lately. More beta carotene never hurt. I had half of it with a pat of butter; no salt. (I'm usually a salt-user.) This squmpkin would make a very good pie. Thumbs up!

Those Pluggers...

Or, be careful what you wish for.

Pumpkins - The REAL story

The upper right photo is considered a "pumpkin." The lower left photo is a "butternut squash."

Pumpkins. Never thought enough about 'em. Never made a whole lot of pumpkin pies. I have made "pumpkin pie" from butternut squash, and it was very tasty. And I've had pumpkin pie made from big Jack o' lantern pumpkins that seemed flavorless and stringy, too. I knew pumpkin and butternut squash were probably related, because I saw some pumpkins once at a roadside stand the same color as butternut squash. And I've had 'aha" moments in the past, such as when I realized a cucumber was just a melon, not a "vegetable."

"Pumpkin" is a concept. In fact, in Australia any winter squash is deemed a "pumpkin" no matter its looks, according to Wikipedia. And many other cultures don't place spherical orange squashes in a special category at all. A calabash is a calabash, it seems.

Most of my experience with the squash family has been growing squash, which I have bad luck with (squash borers); and cooking and eating squash. I like crook necked yellow squash, preferably with a few warts on them, but not overly large. Cooked with onion. And acorn squash. And lately I eat butternut squash often. Roasted, with or without butter. Salt.

But I didn't really get it. All these things - squash, gourds, pumpkins, calabash - are basically the same vegetable. I knew this intellectually, but I didn't ever think it through.
A lot of people will tell you that the pumpkins used for Jack o' lanterns are "the wrong kind" or "the wrong variety" for cooking with. At first I thought that is imprecise. Because what I have always known is that there is an ideal size for each kind of squash. A huge yellow squash is too tough, too seedy, and not good. A yellow squash that is too small and young will have no flavor. And the big orange spherical pumpkins have exceeded that ideal size.

The solution may be simple, I thought: Cook with smaller pumpkins. I thought there probably is a loss of flavor when pumpkins are bred and cultivated for large size only. In general the small pumpkins should taste better. But this wasn't exactly right.

Winter squashes, including pumpkins, have been bred differently, and should be always fully matured by the time they are picked. Jack o' lantern pumpkins have been bred for size. Other winter squashes and pumpkins have been bred for taste. Some pumpkins have been bred for large seeds, and some varieties have been developed specifically for the seed harvest, with no hulls growing on the seeds!

Unlike my usual habits, I have shamelessly ripped off these photos from the internet. Maybe I should photograph my own illustrations like I usually do. I apologize for the appropriation of these images.

Ham Pie

Ham pie is a concept. To me the crust is unique. I am unsure of the traditional names for this. It's a meat and vegetable gravy topped by cheese biscuits and roasted in the oven until the tops of the biscuits are done and the undersides are fully cooked like well-prepared dumplings.

This particular version has cubes of a homemade amateur sort of prosciutto cotto made of pork loin with maple and hickory flavors, which was then smoked and then cooked later four hours at low heat in pork fat and pork gelatin. I recommend ham, though, as a rule.
This has been around the family for a while. My brother and I conduct mock skirmishes on its proper preparation, and our mother weighs in too. It is from a recipe she found and developed. It became a repeat item. So I decided to see what the internet has to offer, and I find there are two popular versions. One has broccoli and the other green bell peppers. This, using bell peppers, is the version we make.

Every time one makes it there are certain deviations, major or minor. Todays deviations are, I used a red bell plus two fresh poblano peppers instead of green bell peppers, a little extra celery, Swiss cheese biscuits, the homemade prosciutto, and too much thyme. I had run out of marjoram, one of my favorite comfort-food spices. Marjoram often loves a cream gravy.

Light roux, sauted ham cubes, onion, celery, diced green bell peppers; add chicken stock or boullon, milk, butter, garlic. Make the stocky gravy with everything in it. (Barbarians or anyone in a hurry add a can of cream of chicken soup or cream of celery soup, even, to take the place of most of the gravy-making steps.)

Make a recipe of homemade biscuit dough, add grated cheese, usually aged cheddar. Or Swiss, etc. In a pan suitable for oven put everything and add the biscuits (I spoon them on) on top of the hot "everything and gravy."

As you see I made everything in a big iron skillet on the stove, then added the biscuit dough and placed the whole hot thing in the already hot oven.

I make my biscuits with butter. I grate the cold butter with my grater, then grate in whatever cheese I want in my cheese biscuits. Then I finish. (There are biscuit recipes somewhere on the internet but not in this article today!)

Mentally Impoverished, Wrecked, Ruined, Facebooked

Achtung, time for a new post! This will be an ultimately empty, shallow, Twitter-like post devoid of any inspiration. It is because I joined Facebook recently despite this. Now I am damaged goods.

Not a total loss, but I fear for what it has done to my normal incisive self. I am even now more self-absorbed than previously. It has become, temporarily I hope, for the present, all about me.

In the spirit of things I have posted a picture of me.

Old Man of the Woods

Sqirlz morph

Pankoesque Breading, Shocking Dip

Imagine this spaghetti-sauce-covered slice of eggplant flipped over, coated on the other side, and then fried.

Making eggplant Parmesan again, I decided to alter my recipe in two ways. First, since everybody is raving about the superiority of panko bread crumbs, I decided to push some saltines through my kitchen screen which has a lot bigger holes than my regular sieves. Easy enough if you have the larger sieve, which I do.

I am becoming convinced a modern versatile kitchen needs several sizes of sieves. I have already used mine to sort nutmeats for various recipes. If the nut pieces don't go through, they need a bit more breakage.

My normal breading for eggplant is a mixture of flour, a bit of cornbread mix, and cracker crumbs, plus a lot of garlic powder and salt, pepper, and thyme or oregano. The panko-sized crumbs were a new thing and I liked the looks of it. I usually pushed my crackers through my fine standard sieve, which does make a tasty breading with good texture. Most people actually achieve roughly the same fine texture by rolling their crackers with a rolling pin. Still, the panko people had me wondering. So along with the other ingredients, I mixed the coarser sized cracker crumbs.

The other new thing was a technique I saw on Diners Drive-ins and Dives. Somebody breaded fried chicken by first dipping it in, instead of a milk and egg dip or similar, a dip of barbecue sauce! Then they dipped it in the breading. My jaw dropped open! I never thought to do that! So today's dip was into the same spaghetti sauce I am going to use to assemble my eggplant Parmesan.

I dipped every piece of eggplant slice into that spaghetti sauce and then into the breading mix. I fried them in hot Canola oil.

The results were excellent. I am having to fight the urge to eat them all before I assemble the final dish. The tomato sauce did not cause the eggplant to blacken or anything, and the spice of the sauce is built in to the final product.

Sure, there will be more sauce added later. But I saved a step, by not having to mess with eggs and milk. I had spaghetti sauce to handle anyway. And the taste is better than my former method. I think I will try this with squash, maybe okra, and who knows what.

My eggplant Parmesan is a layer of elbow macaroni (yeah, how cheap can I go?) then the layer of sliced fried eggplant, then some sauted yellow tomato slices, a bunch of grated Parm, then the store-bought spaghetti sauce. About 10 minutes before it's done I'll toss on some more grated Parm. I figured about 25 to 45 minutes at 325° F. total time in the oven. 48 minutes did it.

UPDATE: A friend has told me her grandmother used plain yellow mustard to make the crumbs stick to her fried fish, notably catfish! Boy howdy!

Toxic Instruments

War is a toxic asset. More to the point, it is a complex derivative. That is, lots of horrible stuff spread out over a lot of contributors so no one person can take much blame.

Chicken Soup

About 75 cents worth of chicken, and the carrots were a super deal. I don't think the whole thing cost over $4.14 and will feed two people for at least day, or one for two days. I made a lot, about two gallons. This is an informal attempt to think along the lines of the $15 per week per person food contest. I remember the carrots were definitely on sale, and I used a lot of them. The chicken was about $1.50 per lb. for a mess of legs & thighs and I used a lot of it already in another dish. The bell pepper was on sale also, I think $3 for three peppers (a red, a green, and a yellow!) and I used half a yellow pepper only. There is a homegrown poblano in there that was half red and half green. One drop / glop of Dave's Insanity Sauce for fire. Some old miso, and some lemon juice also. Lots of spices in small amounts: 3 whole allspice seeds I then ground up, a little garam masala, some nutmeg. Plus regular pepper and Accent (my new kick) and some chicken bouillon. And a cup of rice. How could I forget? Easy. I forgot to mention the celery I put in too.

The Churn

We will analyze "News" as a simple problem of fluid engineering. News is introduced to the vessel at a certain average rate. While the news is in the vessel, all news is mixed thoroughly. The resultant mixture of old and new news exits at the same rate new news arrives. This means that some new news, an infinitesimal part, leaves the vessel immediately. Also, some particulates or "atoms" of news last for long amounts of time. Observed, but not well understood, are occasional "Great Red Spots," i.e., massive "weather-like" events in the noosphere such as the Jovian phenomenon referenced, or the O.J. Simpson trial.

Here however we are ignoring this complication and will analyze news as an average flow. The question is:
To repeat: for the purposes of illustration, let us assume that I introduce newest news at a tiny rate, and mix it with the existing news very vigorously. What comes in is pure newest news, but what goes out is that instantaneous tiny amount of newest news diluted with older news, a small amount of even older news, and extremely small amounts of really old news. Because we are mixing very, very well. Perfectly.

So: If you introduce one volume of new news, how much remains at the end of that?

Confusopoly

Scott Adams, who draws the cartoon Dilbert, said on his blog:
"A confusopoly - a term I concocted several years ago - is any industry that intentionally makes its products and services too complicated for comparison shopping. The best examples of confusopolies are cell phone carriers and insurance companies. And health insurance companies might be the most confusing confusopoly of all. I suspect that no individual has the knowledge, time, and information necessary to effectively compare two health insurance plans. And in that environment the free market doesn't operate efficiently."

This got me thinking. I posit that "having a job" is the biggest confusopoly of all! You rarely get a contract stating exact duties in detail. Simple rules or algorithms fail: "Do what you are told" won't really stand up for very long - there are illegal orders, sexual improprieties, etc. Likewise, what it takes to be fired is often not explained very well, either. Often, employers attempt to be mind-readers, and will fire an employee for what they think the employee is thinking! And even more astounding, fired for realizing the job is a confusopoly!

One of the things lost with declining Union membership is a certain attitude antithetical to confusopoly. I just now realized this. Old-time Union guys must know quite well how deliberate confusopoly has been employed to screw over the workers.

I had a job as private construction inspector very similar to this! First I noticed that, we had no clear mission statement, unlike some jobs I had had, and contrary to the recent faddishness of the very concept of "mission statements." We were told our job was two contradictory things: "Your job is to ensure that the men doing this work (not my employees) do it right" and "your job is to simply observe and report." So I would report the men had not done the work right. My bosses got upset: "your job is to make them do it right!" "How?" I responded. "I can't shoot them and I can't fire them because they don't work for me." (I won't even get into the fact that they could often not speak my language.)

My job was a deliberate confusopoly.

Often in a corporation, the rules of confusopoly prevent the bureaucrat from getting a solid idea of whose interests are covered by "company loyalty." Is it loyalty to the stockholders? This sounds good until you think of the day-trader who bought stock in your company this morning and, sure as day becomes night, is going to dump it either this afternoon, or at most wait until the end of this week. What is the employee's loyalty to this stockholder to be?

There is no real answer to this. This case then also shows the job itself is the confusopoly.

Incidentally, confusion over this confusopoly is why Enormously Overpaid Executives are allowed to totally game the system and enrich themselves with no consequence by deliberately crashing their companies and along with them, the economy. They know "loyalty to the stockholders" has no real bottom to it.

Secret Hobo Signs

click the old print to read in larger window

We may need to know these, the way things are going.

Bear Faced

click illustration

Once upon a time, I used to feather in the edges manually. Using Photoshop Elements. This is necessary almost without exception with hairy critters whose hair fades to invisibility at the ends. I invented a trick. I make a duplicate image layer, use the "average" effect (turns the cutout uniform) and then the "find border" effect. So I have an outline. I can increase the contrast and blur it (to make it extend further inside the original outline of the cutout) also and then select the blurry outline. Then I apply the selection to the original cutout and run my eraser around the edge at 30-50% and then blur the result of that. (Not to mention that it took me a fair amount of time to discover I could use one layer to select, then apply that selection to another layer.) (I began the project with Sqirlz Morph software.)

I get greater control than with the "feather" tool.

Fall Flowers

The Orange Jewelweed is Impatienss. capensi. I didn't know what the purple flowers are. They sprung up where we used to mow but don't now. Then wise people led me to believe they are Ageratum houstonianum also known as Flossflowers or Blueminks.

Dog Day Afternoon

Sqirlz morph

Calling a Spade a Club

The entire body politic is misreported. It is as if the press, our lookouts, have psychotic hallucinations, and we must divine the truth by furious reading between the lines. The entire left-right divide, which they are so adamant about preserving, completely misses the idea of populism. Not looniness, but this kind of populism: Most people have an idea of what "insurance" is. Yet when "insurance" quits being "insurance" and becomes an undefinable racket, instead, the normal people know it is not "insurance" as they know it, but both the "left" and "right" and the press keep calling it "insurance."

It is akin to calling an occupation a war, long after occupation begins, and anyone with any sense whatever knows it's an occupation, but the Right, the Bushies, out of their own form of political correctness, refuse to call it that, and the "Left", and the Press, obey in lockstep.

A Good Man Knows His Limitations

Clint Eastwood said that. In any case, half the reviews on this picture say it's "weird" and the other half said they "like it." I saw a picture of a kitten with its tongue out and then saw a picture of a baby with the exact same expression and angle. A morph was born. Sqirlz morph

Europeans Discover America

Europeans discover America is the title because as it has been pointed out, other cultural traditions, especially of those who already lived there, perceived these events differently. And the joke goes, "Columbus is remembered because he was the last one to discover America."

But my own education was infused with long European traditions in which I was immersed, and in that narrative I still have not received a good explanation of the discovery of America.

I have the mechanics of it, the Colon voyages. What is lacking is the story of the impact of the new knowledge that vast unknown lands were now known. Was there a sense of shock; were philosophers dumbstruck, fabulists confounded, teachers enthused, storytellers bemused, churchmen aroused? About the awesome revelation that the entire world's past know-it-alls had neglected to find two huge major continents, even after 7,000 years of recorded history?

In thin defense of Western tradition, I can point out that after the discovery of America, the East, i.e., China, as far as I know, exhibited no dumbstruck philosophers, or aroused churchmen, etc. either. In short, all of Eurasia seemed to issue a bored yawn, a "so what?" stance. But this added piece of evidence is barely enough that we can establish a likely new thesis: in those days, wilderness was so common it was regarded as completely and utterly worthless.

Max Contrast Jupiter Gash

This post has been updated a few times...
Several naively employed techniques I used in Photoshop increased the contrast of this collision remnant. NASA released the original taken July 23rd by the Hubble telescope today or thereabouts. At this point the estimated size of the object which caused it is unclear. The JPL infra-red telescope in Mauna Kea displays this photo of Jupiter.

It's frustrating in that I can only find two good photos on the entire internet.
Updates
7-29 New photo
7-30 Optical photo from 7-27
7-28 Several images
8-1 Volunteers

8-6 Here's part of a later photo of the Jupiter impact from Donald C. Parker of Coral Gables, Florida, posted to Japan's Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers. I have flipped it (and clipped it and sharpened it) to show similar orientation to above and the public Hubble shot:

Also, compare with a near-simultaneous white cloud seen on Venus. Still some possibility of comet impact although no cometary cloud - coma - was seen in space. Best bet is still a volcano. See best pix of the Venus White Spot.

Now there is another astounding planetary impact: an unknown object smashing through one of Saturn's rings
The inset is the same image, size unchanged, with added high contrast. At the time of this writing, clicking on it opens it larger in a new window.

Strange Visitor From Another Planet

Sqirlz morph
He looks disgruntled but I think he's enjoying the desert air all the same.

Goldilocks Sudoku

Uses numerals 1 through 8

The ironclad mathematical laws of the universe are what I was bemoaning to myself , something I don't normally do except in the case of sudoku. In which one is pretty much locked in to the fact that 3 x 3 equals 9, and 9 x 9 makes 81 squares to fill, minus the clues.

This is just a tad too much for my poor head. I am one who likes to not fill in candidate numerals, and so keep in my head the various possibilities. There are a few of us who like to solve sudoku without pencil marks. By this I mean we allow ourselves to only use a pen or pencil to fill in the correct numeral only when we know for certain that it is correct.

And recently I began using a little program that generates "jigsaw" sudoku. This is essentially the same as regular sudoku except the boxes, instead of being 3 x 3 are irregular. But they have 9 regions and 81 cells to fill, minus the clues.

I had an odd thought. Irregular subregions don't need to be symmetrical. A puzzle with 64 squares is certainly possible with jigsaw sudoku. You don't need boxes 2.828 x 2.828 cells, an impossibility. (The square root of 8)

So I cranked up my lovely little jigsaw sudoku generator and plugged in some odd initial inputs, and lo and behold: I got the above puzzle. I had it set on "extreme" difficulty but it's not so hard. Heh heh.

There are several popular sudoku variants. For me this is not too easy, not too hard. "Just right."

I got the original program from Simon Tatham's webpage for games. I was in such a rush to download the newer jigsaw version a while back, and because the earlier version was so intuitive and easy I didn't need a help file, that I didn't see or download the newer help file for the jigsaw variant explaining how to do unorthodox sizes of puzzles. I had to figure it out myself.

UPDATE: August 2010 My favorite Sudoku forum disappeared. I have changed the link that was at "solving without pencil marks." Apparently the original forum vanished. There is a new forum full of smart people. Many are the same old crowd.

Nice Temple

"I especially like the vines."

This fellow has probably 100,000 hairs. There is very little Photoshop magic that makes it easy. Sqirlz morph

Grail+

OMG he's showing Metalvision again.

Fourth Fashion Faux Pas

Here Roy Rogers violates protocol with a flag shirt. Or maybe it's Abbie Hoffman with Roy's head photoshopped on top. Happy Fourth and Happy Trails.

I Say!

Do you have any Grey Poupon? Sqirlz morph

Half Moon Night

What's wrong with this picture?

Reinventing the Wheel?

Wikipedia has its own style guide. In crafting this, the volunteers are, in some limited ways, attempting to unify British and American usage, and perhaps worldwide English too. I was wondering if they were attempting to reinvent this wheel, and set off on the internet to see if anyone else had attempted this.

Once upon a time I pondered the various branches of mathematics, and could see no discernible structure, that is, an organizing overview of the entire field for the layman. I postulated a "math tree," a sort of pre-Wikipedia concept. But then I checked on other organizational schemes and realized the Dewey Decimal System had already classified math in its scheme. Whether it's a good system is not for me to say, but it's very well established. There also are other mathematical classification systems. It's not entirely solidified, though. But research tells the tale. In other words, it's useless for a layman to try to reinvent the wheel, it's better to just search intelligently. Think.

So I looked around on the net and haven't found any record so far of any successful attempts to unify British and American English. I'm sure book publishers have traditional different layouts for different audiences and readers. The United Nations has document style guides but seems to have adopted Oxford Dictionary and BBC English style by default as templates before adding their own particulars, so it does not seem to be an attempt at unification of any sort.

Cat Wolf

Sqirlz morph

Hamburger You

Everybody has heard of Hamburger University by now. This is the training site of McDonalds, and more important, it's where several test labs are located to research the intricacies of flavors and taste experiences. In other words, they have a huge database of research reporting what people think tastes good. By this advanced research, they construct their signature hamburgers based on their findings. The exact manner in which they build each burger is to remain exactly the same, because different taste buds are activated, and flavors develop, in the right sequences to satisfy the maximum number of people.

I am pretty sure the other big chains such as Burger King, Wendy's, and others have done some of the same testing.

Also, the results of this testing are different for countries outside the U.S. Australia and England, etc., get their menus tweaked differently than here in the States. Look at the variants of the Whopper.

I don't eat many fast food burgers or fast food in general, so I'm not up-to-date on their entire menu and new items. But I know how to analyze what's put right in front of me. (I thought!) So let's take a technical look at what specialists have determined. It may lead us, after all, to some insights in constructing and assembling our own delicious homemade burgers.

I've had two insights already, before beginning this article: most of my life I had the unconsciously acquired idea that ketchup and pickles should be separated. On analyzing the fast food burger, I realized a few years ago I was wrong. The second insight more recently is that mustard on the cheese is not only not a no-no, it's good.

At McDonalds I acquired a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese. Starting at the bottom, and moving up, here is what I found and the order in which they placed each item:


Big Mac: bottom of bun; mayo sauce with onion and shredded lettuce; cheese; meat; center section of bun; mayo sauce ("special sauce") with pickle and shredded lettuce; meat; top of sesame seed bun. Supposedly 1.6 oz (uncooked) meat per patty. The mayo sauce is rumored to be similar to thousand island dressing but it wasn't very pink looking. Or pink tasting. Note especially that this is the only mass-market burger with any condiment on top of the bottom bun.
Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese: bottom of bun; cheese; meat; cheese; mustard; pickle; onion; ketchup; top of sesame seed bun. Supposedly 4 oz. (uncooked) patty.

New to this rigorous analysis, I didn't note the exact amount of light toasting on the insides of the buns. They don't have a toasty mouth-feel. I also paid little attention to the sesame seeds, because they are so lightly toasted I can never discern the taste of them. Okay, after making some initial notes and taking some photos which didn't show all the details, I admit I scarfed those babies down before I realized my analytical shortcomings. I won't repeat this mistake.

I did notice some unorthodox cheese placement, and that there are the blank areas of bun with none of the ketchup, mustard, or mayo/sauce. This is unlike what the home burger maker often does, and is counterintuitive to many burger ideas, I believe. Yet they must have found people report this as tasting best. Note also that neither of McDonalds's signature burgers has tomato on it by default. Interesting.

Next, Burger King's Whopper and Whopper Jr., which turns out to be exactly the same burger except for size. Starting from the bottom, it's lightly toasted bun; patty; ketchup; pickle,onion, and pickle (three pickle slices and about a square inch of onion - and it looks like the onion is deliberately enclosed in a "pickle sandwich" with pickle above and below the onion); tomato, lettuce, mayo, and the sesame seed bun on top.

Notable here are two things: tomato slice, and no mustard on the "standard" edition. And again we see the bottom of the bun has no mustard, mayo, ketchup: the meat patty sits right on the unadorned bread, which was lightly toasted but had no real toasty texture to it, similar to McDonalds's offerings. It's become obvious the "toasting" is a purely cosmetic procedure.

Last up for now is the Wendy's basic cheeseburger. Here we have a plain bun with no sesame seeds, untoasted. Stacked from the bottom, again the meat is directly on the bun, and cheese on top of the burger of course. The basic Wendy's burger then was adorned with a large crunchy lettuce leaf, tomato, four pickle slices, a wee onion slice, and ketchup, with a larger area of mayo under the top of the bun. Adequate, no frills; a decent enough burger.

On the Fourth of July, I made some cheeseburgers and I was very conscious of this research while assembling the burgers. I made sure to leave the bottom bun "blank." I did pre-toast the sesame seed buns, tops, bottoms, and inside surfaces, in the toaster-oven enough to brown the seeds and they emitted that wonderful fragrance that they should. I also had some homemade ketchup I used instead of store-bought, and used no mayo nor mustard this time around. I placed the cheeseburger, then onion, pickle, and ketchup, and put shredded lettuce and tomato slices right under the top part of the bun. This burger was quite tasty; a cut above my regular burgers. This research has improved my overall burger technique, I believe.

I will point out that Wikipedia and YouTube have various information about hamburgers, McDonald's, etc. The most important is how to pronounce "hamburger."

Here's "How to Clone a Big Mac."