Somewhat
Jul. 7th, 2008
09:26 am - To the Editor
Dear Sirs:
I appreciate that it is technologically possible, as well as terribly modern and Web 2.0 fashionable, to put RSS feeds on everything. However, putting an RSS feed on the collected works of Epictetus is perhaps excessive. He has very few new posts per day.
Mar. 29th, 2008
02:06 pm - Foodblogging: Quick Hits
Well, two weeks of ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ukelele spring break has been great for my sleep, sanity, and productivity at work. For cooking, not so much: Getting home at a sane time means that I've only got 45 minutes to throw something together (later than that means that V gets tired and loses patience before I get dinner on the table).
So there's not been anything particularly worthy to blog. Fajitas, a reprise of last month's chicken stew recipe (this time over herbed polenta -- way excellent!), burgers, that sort of thing. Nothing liable to be novel to any of you or particularly illustrative.
We did do a recurring salad of mine, which might be worth a note:
1c yellow pepper as 1/4" dice
1c jicama as 1/4" dice
1c pineapple as 1/4" dice
Adequate juice from the pineapple to make everything wet
1t chili powder
Toss together, serve cold.
Today I'm doing Irish Stew, again not particularly novel, but a good spring dish.
Also: these pecans, since I had pecans left over from a couple of weeks ago.
Mar. 16th, 2008
03:31 pm - Reprise
Parents in town, so I revisited a success of the past. The flaming step definitely alters the consistency of the sauce -- it gets more viscous and I think less dense (perhaps combustion products act as emulsifiers?). I overcooked the steaks a bit (juggling food for five is much harder than for two, and alters all my timings) but not fatally.
My mother threw together a salad -- arugula, baby lettuces, toasted pecans, raspberry vinaigrette, sliced apple -- that was a perfect complement to the steaks.
This recipe may have to move from the special-occasions category to being a more regular feature -- I could definitely stand to make this once a month, particularly now that I have salad insight for it.
Mar. 9th, 2008
06:49 pm - The price of hubris
Yesterday I noted the absence of my usual drumbeat of failed recipes. Naturally, then, today's dinner was overcooked steelhead under a balsemic reduction, served with the wrong salad and some pesto pasta.
Yeah, I overcooked the fish. Fish and I have serious differences vís-a-vís broiling times. Broiling fish is my personal kryptonite.
And the wrong salad! I had meant to do arugula and roasted pecans with a raspberry vinaigrette. But I get home from shopping only to discover that the raspberry vinegar in the pantry is so old and so off as to be utterly useless. I ended up tossing some store-brand Italian dressing on the arugula.
The saving grace, to the extent there was one, was some Cresti di Gallo pasta with pesto. There's a local specialty foods store, Capone's, whose pasta Whole Foods is now selling. Their Cresti are big floppy oddly shaped pasta half-torus-with-a-wattle things. They are a perfect canvas for thick, flavorful sauces like pesto because their weird shape guarantees that the sauce won't be uniformly distributed, giving a good contrast of sauce and not-sauce that serves to draw attention to flavors.
Overall Rating: Poor
Lessons Learned:
+ Still can't broil fish reliably, just like the last like nine flillion times
+ When brainstorming dinner at the store, do not rely on ingredients that you dimly remember having in the pantry somewhere: Even if you remember correctly that they exist, they're probably bad by now.
Fun Facts: Lillian Harman and Edwin Walker married in 1886 and were imprisoned in 1887 for the crime of... well, it's not quite clear. In the words of anarchist historian Roderick Long: "Judge Valentine...raised the question whether the couple's crime was a) living together as a married couple without actually being married, or b) getting married but in an illegal fashion." Harman and Walker, you see, had used irregular wedding vows in which Harman did not cede all of her rights to Walker, and Walker repudiated any legal but immoral rights the law might grant him over Harman (such as spousal rape).
At the time any couple eligible to marry in Kansas who lived together were automatically married in the eyes of the law. Only those who professed equality and denounced rape, it seems, were criminals thereby. Walker naturally received five times the sentence of his bride.
Mar. 8th, 2008
06:50 pm - Stuffed Pork Chops
Recipe here. I used equal parts chicken stock and cider vinegar for the liquid, as I was embarrassingly caught short of the others.
I omitted the raisins because mixing sweet into savory is a crime.
Overall Rating: Very Good
Lessons Learned:
+ The Alton Brown technique for cutting pork chops for stuffing really works. You don't actually need the plunger, though; a spoon will do.
+ The butter flavor of the outside was a bit intense, and the meat a touch dry (the stuffing may have wicked out the juices?). Both might be addressed by brining.
Fun Fact: I haven't had a totally failed recipe since starting this foodblogging. Y'all are good luck!
Mar. 4th, 2008
05:31 pm - Roast beef
My new guru, Cook's Illustrated, had wisdom concerning roasts. I've always been terrible at roasts, so I was intrigued.
The whole point of a roast is that does magic with cheaptastic cuts, so I grabbed an eye round roast from McKinnon's at $2.50/lb. Salted it heavily and mummified it in plastic in the fridge for a day to start. Then oiled, peppered, and seared the outside. Transferred to a 225-degree oven for an hour and a half until the temp reached 120, then turned off the oven but left it closed for another 40 minutes until the temp reached a nice medium-rare 130. Let it sit half an hour until dinner.
(CI argues in essence that what you would like is to cook at the roast's destination temperature for about a day until it comes up to temp. This recipe is their attempt to approximate that for those of us whose ovens don't go down to 130 and who don't want to leave the gas on for twelve hours. Hence finishing in a cooling oven. dolohov might like this notion.)
Served with a horseradish cream sauce (whip cream to soft peaks, fold in equal quantity of horseradish, salt and pepper to taste), plus a salad of mixed bitter greens.
Overall Rating: Excellent. Perfectly uniform pink medium rare, nice salty-beefy yumminess.
Lessons Learned:
+ Total drippings were less than two teaspoons -- the long salting really locks in those juices.
+ My oven is not as heat-tight as CI's. Not really surprising when you think about it.
+ Whipping cream by hand is much easier if you have angry shouty music turned up too loud on your iPod while you do it. Thanks, Corporate Avenger!
+ Verity loves horseradish cream sauce. Buh-wha??
+ With good time-management, this would actually be a very easy recipe. Good weekend food.
Fun Facts: I'm pretty sure that McKinnon's store scale is off. There's no way that roast was only 3 lbs -- I'd say it was closer to 4.5.
Mar. 2nd, 2008
07:13 pm - Cheap eats
McKinnon's had hanger steak for $3/lb. Mmmm, cheap eats.
Salted for an hour, then marinated (balsemic vinegar, worcestershire, dried anaheim chilies). Broiled, served under onions, peppers, and mushrooms.
Overall Rating: Very good
Lessons Learned: None. I flipped the coin on hanger steak, and it came up heads this time. Good luck teaches no lessons.
Fun Facts: Voltairine de Cleyre became an atheist as a result of her being forced into a Catholic convent as a teen. Her first escape attempt from the convent -- which involved swimming a mile across a freezing river and then hiking, waterlogged and hypothermic, for seventeen miles -- resulted only in her being captured and sent back by friends of her family. Her second attempt succeeded, however. Later in life she would have her son stolen from her by the state because of her political views opposing marriage. Unlike many of her anarchist contemporaries, however, the only assassination attempt against her was by an insane friend of hers, whom she forgave.
Feb. 28th, 2008
09:19 pm - Garlic shrimpies!
I cannot easily describe this recipe, which I got from the incomparable Cook's Illustrated, nor is it on their website. Suffice it to say: Shrimp, plus sixteen cloves of garlic prepared three different ways. Tasty tasty tasty!
Served over wilted spinach in garlic olive oil because, hey, I had this garlic olive oil left over from the shrimp...
Overall Rating: Very good
Lessons Learned: Heed Cook's Illustrated. Revere Cook's Illustrated. Follow Cook's Illustrated.
Fun Facts: I meant to serve this with dinner rolls. They are still sitting on the counter where I forgot them.
Feb. 23rd, 2008
07:20 pm - Chicken Stew
The January Cook's Illustrated had a page on stew theory. The things it had to say -- mostly about the order in which stew components should be added -- was something of a revelation to me. I'm an avid stewer, so it gets harder and harder to learn anything new even as I still suffer the alarmingly regular failures of any regular amateur stewer.
( We'll go with unusually much detail this time, as this was a bit of a variation from (at least, from my) conventional approach. Please pretend not to feel patronized. )
Overall Rating:
+ Excellent.
+ With a sourdought baguette: Profound.
Lessons Learned:
+ Building a roux around the savories in stew prep is an excellent substitute for the rather unpredictable buisness of thickening it by boiling it down
+ Adding herbs at the end of cooking is rather nerve wracking -- it's hard to tell if the stew is balanced while you're making it -- but really pays off in taste. The delicate flavors really shone through.
+ The long thin sour baguettes that Whole Foods sells are absolutely excellent.
Fun Fact: Taking the stew out of the oven, I was sure it was a total failure. Some of the roux had gotten stuck to the side of the pot above the stew and burnt, so although the stew looked beautiful, it smelt burnt burnt burnt. Fortunately, a false alarm.
Feb. 20th, 2008
05:13 pm - Lame-out
Too tired to do proper meal-planning, so I picked up some boneless chicken thighs on the theory that I've always got something lying around to do with them.
Unrolled them flat, seasoned each side generously with salt and spanish paprika, rolled them back up, let them sit. Then roasted them over carrots, onions, and garlic (400 degrees, 15 minutes just the veg, then 45 minutes chicken and veg). Sliced the chicken, served plus the veg over warmed, oiled pita.
Overall rating: Good, might have been better with rosemary and sage, perhaps a lemon slice wrapped up in the thighs.
Lessons Learned: None -- this was a lame-out meal of boring ingredients interacting in known ways.
Fun fact: Individualist agitator Ezra Heywood was imprisoned five times and died at hard labor in prison for publishing articles critical of marriage laws. As soon as his judicial murder was complete, the same Attorneys General attempted the same against his intellectual successor Moses Harman, who however managed to survive years of hard labor sentences despite being in his seventies.
Feb. 18th, 2008
06:45 pm - Kheema Paratha
So I have this chapati flour, and I'm still having fun, let's turn things up a notch on the difficulty scale and see if I can't get a horrible recipe failure...
(Lest anyone ask -- this particular self-destructive streak may be a product of self-paced elementary math: My 2nd and 3rd grade teacher took the view that if you can ace the test, you stayed in that unit too long. Failure means you're keeping the pace; success means you're falling behind.)
If you watch Manjula make aloo paratha, or read a recipe for kheema paratha, you will see a Sidney Harris "then a miracle occurs" step. A 6" diameter dough round is wrapped around half a cup of filling, the result is then rolled out with a rolling pin, and mysteriously it doesn't fall apart into pieces. Huh?
Overall Rating:
+ Enh.
+ With a chutney, perhaps, very good
Lessons Learned:
+ On paratha #1, we conclude: No, it really is ridiculously impossible. What we need here is a theory.
+ Whole wheat is slow to form a gluten. Perhaps if we let it sit for a while? ...
+ (But only after we form the ball -- if the gluten forms before we roll it around the stuffing, we'll never pinch it airtight and the stuffing will blort out the side!)
+ On paratha #2, we conclude: Good. Rolling it out forces the filling through the top layer of dough, but not the bottom, so it doesn't stick to the prep surface. Improvement!
+ On paratha #3, a clever idea: If rolling it out forces the filling through the top, roll it twice as big and fold it over on itself!
+ Paratha #4 is actually beautiful.
+ Oh yeah, flavor. Bland -- the paratha swamps the flavor of the meat. Needs a topping! Maybe I need to make onion chutney soon...
Fun fact: Verity believes that masala kheema is the Bestest Thing Evar. Useful to know!
Feb. 17th, 2008
04:41 pm - Manjula's Kitchen HOWTO
Things to keep in mind when cooking breads from Manjula's Kitchen recipes:
+ If you live in NE, do not mistake her "whole wheat flour" for your whole wheat flour. Hers is much lighter, finer-ground, and lower-protein than what we get up here. The recipes will fail. Go to your local Asian grocery and find chapati flour. You will be happier.
+ Manjula's hands are very, very small. If you use them as visual guides, you will roll all of the breads too thin and they will behave badly.
+ Manjula's quoted measurements are often wrong. Use the measurements (transcribed by her son, I think) in the youtube video descriptions instead. Or use common sense. 1:1 flour to water is soup; 2:1 flour to water is dough.
04:31 pm - Let Us Now Praise Famous rhean
Red lentil pancakes. That is all.
I made them with green chilies, served them with some marinated shrimp.
Overall rating: Very Good
Lessons learned:
+ These can -- and should -- be spread very very thin. Thinner than I did, for sure. But the oil needs to be pretty shallow for that to work.
+ Food processor not required; blender works just fine.
+ Decent leftovers, if reheated in a skillet -- but not a microwave, they tend to sog.
Fun fact: This is similar enough to the Manjula's Kitchen recipe for dosa that you can use that as a rough visual guide.
04:16 pm - Steak poivre
dolohov says that I should use this LJ for foodblogging. Enh, we'll give it a try. The major notable food occurrence around here is recipe failure, of course, but that can be interesting in its own right.
My most successful recent recipe was steak poivre. No two recipes for this are ever even slightly the same, but this did not dissuade me. Got a truly beautiful 2" strip steak from Whole Foods, cut it into two 1" steaks, covered it in a paste of garlic, cracked pepper, cracked brown mustardseed, salt, and bacon grease. Let sit for a few hours. Then pan-fried it, removed steak, added cognac, set on fire. PILLAR OF FLAME! That's a good thing in this case. Tossed in some shallots, a touch of sherry vinegar, some heavy cream; whisked vigorously. Miraculously, the sauce mounted perfectly, something which never ever happens for me. Poured it on the steaks.
Served with a salad -- blanched bok choy sliced thin, grated carrots, and chopped peanuts, splashed with a champagne vinegar. I had meant to do bok choy mignonette, but I forgot.
Overall rating:
+ Steak: Excellent
+ Salad: Okay
Lessons learned:
+ Our stove hood is not powerful enough for dramatic flames to appear reassuringly safe.
+ Something made this sauce mount perfectly. Burnination?
+ Grated carrots are too sweet to take a very sweet vinegar with good grace.
Fun Fact: Because I don't drink, I don't know cognac from Gatorade, so I asked my mother for a recommendation. On hearing my plans for the rest of the recipe, she recommended that I wait a little while and maybe she could make it up to Boston in time for dinner. Alas, she was joking, but perhaps I shall repeat this recipe when my parents next visit.
Mar. 14th, 2007
09:14 am - Basic legal precautions
Quick, LJ'ers! Make sure that none of these people are on your friends list!
Remember, if you have not checked your friends list against this list, you might already be a terrorist.
UPDATE: Better check this one too. It seems that I'm already a terrorist. Oh well.
Nov. 14th, 2006
06:51 pm - Conversation at work today
(Co-worker A starts rummaging through stuff in office of co-worker B)
B: Looking for anything in particular?
A: Yep. (continues rummaging)
B: Well, you've come to the right place: We've got lots of things in particular here.
Oct. 9th, 2006
01:32 pm - North Korea
Dolohov wonders what is up in North Korea. This response being long, I've put it in my journal rather than in a pile of comments. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to assume that there actually was a nuclear test today, and that this isn't just a normal earthquake accompanied by opportunistic PR.
First up: batshit crazy versus careful planning. Is North Korea crazy, or does this meticulous planning indicate deep cunning? Well, both. I mean, evaluated as a person, there is some metric by which every country is crazy. The term doesn't really apply. I'm not really sure what human terms would apply -- North Korea is whimsical, perhaps (That always-readable bloodthirsty racist Gary Brecher puts it best: Kim Jong Il is impulsive, but the people who work for him are psychotically dedicated and talented. I think that adds up to something like whimsy). In a centralized country, meticulous people can be dispatched on crazy and whimsical errands -- no matter how strange or changeable the leadership is, long-term projects can and do still happen. Doesn't Mr. Kim's new opera open sometime soon?
Here is Central Question #1: Did North Korea have more to fear from internal or external enemies? As with all questions in foreign relations, no objective answers please -- it's the subjective that matters.
From a certain perspective the nuclear test is rational. If you assume that Mr. Kim is more scared of the US than of his own people, in fact, trading sanctions for nukes makes perfect sense. He has just guaranteed that he will never again need to worry about invasion, and the only cost was a bit more mass starvation and cannibalism in the provinces. It's a confident move, but not by any means a bad one.
Now for China. China's number one worry in every respect is anything bad happening to North Korea. This is not because they like North Korea -- even when they were setting up Kim Il Sung, the record is pretty clear that they hated and distrusted him (Gaddis' recent history, We Now Know, has some great declassified info on how the various big Communist leaders got along back in the 50s and 60s. You can call this revisionist history, but since Gaddis wrote the history he's revising, I think he's entitled.). Rather, this is because China is in the middle a very ugly economic puzzle of managing urbanization and controlling labor flows; a million refugees flowing in from Korea are really the last thing they need. So a political, economic, or military collapse in North Korea is to be avoided at all cost, they figure. Their nigh-hysterical diplomatic response to this nuclear test, combined with no meaningful action, means that China answers CQ1 the opposite way that North Korea does. Of course, they've also got some related concerns about nuclear ubiquity, but I'll get to those later.
South Korea is in exactly the same boat as China. Not every day that that happens. South Korea generally seems to believe that the most dangerous thing the North could do, worse than an outright war in fact, would be to collapse. They're probably right: North Korea would lose a war in a matter of days (though possibly destroy Seoul in the process), but a million refugees shambling through the DMZ would wipe out the South Korean economy and possibly political system overnight. As Morocco's "Green March" proved, a few hundred thousand civilians are at least as dangerous as an army against a civilized enemy.
Why now for the test? North Korea may have been trying for some time. They dug the test chamber more than a year ago, and held some sort of public event there then (or so the satellite photos say). It may be that it's just taken them this long to get the damned thing to go off. I don't think it's related to South Korea's recent UN victory -- SK is practically an ally to the North, because since they answer CQ1 "internal" they will do whatever is necessary to prop up the Kim regime.
What all of this adds up to is that basically only the US really cares much about the North Korean nuke as such. Everyone else is more concerned that the response to it -- sanctions, even military action -- might destabilize North Korea. There are, though, a few regional stability implications that China and the US cannot ignore. A North Korean nuke, particularly if it doesn't draw down serious consequences, could embolden a lot of the other local players who would like nuclear weapons. Many local states are "screwdriver powers" -- countries that have exercised their NNPT rights to get to "one screwdriver-twist away" from nuclear weapons. Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, and Australia come to mind; there are probably others. It is easy to imagine, say, Taiwan deciding to go nuclear, and everyone else going nuclear because they don't want to be the last one in the club still defenseless if things go to hell. This sort of nuclear-ubiquity scenario is inevitable in the long term, but in the short term is still scary as hell to status-quo powers (diplomacy's word for "countries with nicer stuff than their neighbors"). Countries concerned with this sort of thing will be extra-nasty to North Korea (to warn others) and extra-nice to, eg, Taiwan (to reassure them that there's no need to do anything hasty). This is very bad news for China, as that is the polar opposite of the strategy it would choose otherwise. This is why the entire executive leadership of China is currently skipping the annual Communist Party Conference to chat with the entire Japanese executive branch, which prior to this month would have been beyond unthinkable.
The crowded nature of the area means that nearly every local power has a territorial, sovereignty, or maritime dispute with every other country in the area. There is one possibly oil-rich set of islands claimed by no fewer than six different countries. While the notion of a war breaking out may seem remote to us, it is definitely not remote to the locals. Asia's Cold War is on the horizon, and it just got worse. Perhaps Taiwan will play the role of Berlin; Indonesia may star in the local remake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Absent serious diplomatic talent, the next half-century could see a dozen shooting wars between nuclear powers. That is enough to put this all in longer-term perspective. The US really ought to be propping up and encouraging China (and India and Russia) to exercise some goddamn adult supervision on the diplomatic side, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Asia needs its Kennan, its Kissinger, its Acheson, and its Stevenson rolled into one right now. And speaking of jobs no sane person would want... how about that new Secretary General? If I were he, I'd be pondering having a good disqualifying sex scandal right about now.
Finally a brief polemic of a political nature. Given that the US is unable or unwilling to do anything actually, you know, helpful in East Asia, perhaps it should bloody well get the hell out? Just maybe? Let Taiwan and South Korea internalize their own security costs for a while (if they can even be troubled to; they can bloody well kiss and make up with Japan if they can't). The long-term US interest in sitting nearly two hundred thousand troops in the middle of a multipolar nuclear security funhouse, generating ten times as much resentment as actual security, is pretty damned thin and getting thinner. The simple Cold War truth is they're not there to defend themselves or others -- they're too few. They're there to get killed and force the US into a wider war if things go to hell. Is that really desirable now?
Sep. 12th, 2006
11:15 am - Traffic mysteries
(I also mailed this to the Globe's "Starts and Stops" column. As a cyclist, this is the closest I have to the bizarre signalling puzzles that train geeks like dzm have.)
A little traffic mystery for you.
As a cyclist, I generally find Mass Ave in Cambridge to be a fascinating collection of bizarre, misconcieved, and awful bicycle "accomodations," from the "please balance on this white line" markings westbound near Dover street (a sobriety test, perhaps?) to the suicidal bike lane of Central Square to the perennial "where exactly does the bike path cross at Cameron Ave?" question. But by far the strangest is the new signal at Porter. I simply cannot figure out what it is meant to do, and am filled with a constant worry that I'm breaking the law by being baffled.
The device in question is a traffic light at the intersection of Mass Ave and Somerville Ave. Unlike all the other lights, it faces west, almost along the direction of the commuter rail tracks, and a sign on it
says, "Bicycle Signal."
But what on earth could a bicycle be doing to end up facing that sign?
Nobody westbound on Somerville or northbound on Mass Ave would ever even see it, so it must be intended for cyclists eastbound on Mass Ave. Those proceeding directly through on Mass Ave, though, already have a perfectly good traffic light. And to make the turn onto Somerville Ave, you have to have moved into a left-turn lane quite some distance before the intersection, and so when you reach the stop-line the signal would be well to your right (which cannot possibly be a safe place to be looking in traffic) when there's a perfectly good conventional signal directly in front of you.
My best guess is that perhaps the light has been knocked into facing the wrong direction, although I have been unable to figure out which other direction it could reasonably have pointed.
Aug. 17th, 2006
09:33 am - Milestones in computer history
Today I received both legitimate email and spam with the same subject line. I guess all that "pick words randomly from the dictionary" thing actually worked for once: The monkeys have typed one word of Shakespeare.
Jun. 4th, 2006
01:38 pm - Coolest thing ever
In the unlikely event that you do not already read the lovely ukelele's journal, read this post.
And yes, we are thrilled.
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