JANUARY 2014

Wednesday 2014.1.29

Tax Time

It's tax season—for me, because I start as early as I can.

There is something I don't understand. The IRS knows what I receive for income because my pension and Social Security benefits are on record and reported to the IRS. My bank reports my interest income. The IRS generates the "Tax Table" we use to calculate our tax. They know all the numbers already.

There should be some simple online form. I enter my Social Security number and any security PIN that might be necessary. The form reports: "According to IRS records you received $n,nnn.nn in pension/annuity income, $nnn.nn in taxable interest, and $n,nnnn.nn in Social Security benefits for 2013. Do you have any other sources of taxable income?" I click the "No" button and the form responds: "This is your tax, this is your withholding, and this is your refund or how much you owe." Boom. Done. "How do you wish to proceed?"

It could be that easy. If the NSA can store almost unlimited email and phone data, and build some sort of Omega 13 computer that can decrypt absolutely everything, the IRS should be able to get computers that can do the work for us and make tax time simple, at least for those of us who need to file a simple return for simple income. Because I collect Social Security benefits, I can no longer use the 1040-EZ; I have to use the 1040A. Nonetheless, those who tried to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act might argue otherwise when it comes to governmental simplicity.

I don't mind paying taxes. I've always been honest about them, even when there was income I might have kept hidden. It's easy to be honest when you don't earn much, and therefore you don't pay much. Had I been earning many millions of dollars each year, my tax story might have been different.

2014 made me nervous. I know that Social Security benefits are taxable, but there is currently no withholding like there is for my pension. I can submit a form to request that withholding be taken out of my benefits, but how much? I've been itching to do my taxes this year because I should be able to project the results for next year with reasonable accuracy. It won't be exact, but I should know whether or not I might be hit with a penalty if I don't sign up for Social Security withholding.

Well, good news. My 1099s arrived, reporting my pension/annuity income, interest income, and my Social Security benefits. As it turns out, not all Social Security benefits are taxable. It depends on my other income. I had to pay tax on half the benefit total, but the withholding from my pension was more than enough to cover my tax obligation. Rather than having to pay this year, I am getting a refund. Phew!

Next year will be different because I'll have collected Social Security for the entire year of 2014, rather than the last three months of 2013. If I projected accurately, my unpaid tax obligation at the end of this year will be less than $300. I can live with that.

Sunday 2014.1.26

Habit Forming

I'm reading a book about habits, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg. Part of my transition work for 2014 is to create and develop some new habits that—I hope—will continue to serve me well.

This came about because I washed some trousers in the laundry room here in the trailer park. They came back dirtier than before I laundered them. The black trousers had gray smudges all over them. The lighter colored slacks might have had them too, but maybe the smudges didn't show up like on the black. I had to wash the black ones again, but I hand washed them to make certain they'd be clean.

Some people who read this blog might know that I tailor some of the shirts I wear in my cooking videos. Colors are not always easy to find in men's wear—blue, beige, gray, and black, with maybe an odd green once in a while pretty much sums of most available solid colors. Pumpkin, chocolate, gold, lime, strawberry, raspberry sherbet, hunter green, grandma's face powder (I can't think of any other name to describe this color, but I remember my grandmother's face powder on her vanity), canary yellow, moss green, teal—these are all colors, as best as I can name them, of shirts I tailored. I'm fussy about those shirts because they easily take 10 to 12 hours to make, each. So, when possible, I prefer to wear them little and hand wash them.

I should probably also confess that I have a lot of shirts—at last count, nearly 80 of them. About 30 of them I tailored myself. When I get lazy and put off doing laundry (I can put it off for weeks) the monumental task of laundering all those clothes is overwhelming. During the past two weeks I hand washed four shirts each day to help get caught up. That's half my shirts. (The trousers, as I said above, were machine washed in the laundry room.) The routine is working toward becoming a habit.

My goal is simple. Before I go to bed each evening, I would like to put the day's clothes—shirt, trousers, socks, and underwear—in the washing bucket with water and detergent, and soak them overnight. In the morning, finish cleaning them up (scrub around the neck line and the arm sye), rinse, and hang them on a line I have stretched over my bathtub. After dripping a couple hours they are damp enough to dry quickly in a drier, which takes only 20 minutes. I want to start off each day with all my clothes clean and put away—no piles of dirty clothes on the bedroom floor, no laundry baskets filled to overflowing with laundry.

There is one immediate advantage to this: I won't need 80 shirts. Half a dozen might suffice.

There are other habits I would like to develop as well, but it is best to stick with only one routine, working it faithfully for several weeks or through many repititions before adding another new habit. The routine reveals itself as a habit when I automatically start doing it without having to think about it or plan it.

Wednesday 2014.1.22

Waterless World

I love living in Southern California. A few of you have commented on my walking up to my neighbor's mobile home space to pick lemons off her tree, even in the dead of winter. It's not a large tree, and it certainly isn't burgeoning with fruit, but no one uses the lemons except me, and she doesn't like to pick them up when they fall to the ground; so I enjoy the harvest.

I grew up in Connecticut and I couldn't wait to escape to California. I actually wanted to move to Australia to put as much distance as possible between my family and myself, but someone convinced me the opposite coast was far enough and I would enjoy living there. I do.

I often joke about Southern California, claiming we have only two seasons—summer and sort of summer. This year, it appears we are having only summer. Today the temperature is supposed to be in the mid to high 70s, and it's January! By noon yesterday it was nearly 80 degrees outside my home. I made a pitcher of lemonade. However, every silver lining comes with a dark cloud.

During the "winter" months we get our rains—November through April, with maybe an odd storm in May. By June the rains stop and we won't see them again for five to six months. This year there has been almost no rain at all, with none in the foreseeable future. Hazardous fire conditions, usually the situation in August and September, were declared last week. Other parts of the country were struggling with a thing called a polar vortex, with temperatures well below normal, below freezing, below zero. What are we getting here? An equatorial vortex? Actually, it's a stationary high pressure ridge over the Western USA.

The governor declared a water crisis situation for the state, which cuts through the red tape for getting emergency supplies of water. Although we are not in a water rationing situation yet, the residents of the state have been urged to conserve water. If the situation doesn't change, more drastic measures will be taken. We might be assigned monthly water allotments, with stiff penalties to pay if we exceed our allowed water usage.

I'm ready. I have a reverse osmosis system under my kitchen sink. They waste a lot of water. I forget what the waste is—something like 8 to 10 gallons of water flushed down the drain to capture a single gallon of filtered water. When I installed the system I modified it a little with a bypass valve that allows me to capture the wasted water. It drips into a bucket that I can then use the flush the toilet or water my plants. Sometimes it gets double usage—rinse the washed dishes in it, then use it for the toilet.

We've been through this before. When I was in college, one friend from Marin County (up near San Francisco) was under a water rationing program so tight they could flush their toilet only once or twice per day. It wasn't quite so bad here, but it was illegal to water lawns or wash driveways and sidewalks. People were near to forming vigilante groups to run around the neighborhoods with pitchforks and flaming torches, looking for criminals who were wasting water.

It's cyclical. There will be a few years of drought, then the rains will return. There have been times when the officials at the reservoir warned residents downstream that it was necessary to temporarily open the gates and release some extra water to protect the dam from overflows. The reservoir gets that full some years. I can remember one year when there were six consecutive days of pouring rain. Streets flooded. Highway underpasses turned into lakes. Hillsides were giving way and sliding through houses, killing residents who were too foolish to heed the warnings and leave their homes.

Back then, I had a TV in my office at work. A bunch of us watched as a flood inundated a local RV park, sweeping very expensive motor homes into the ocean. The freeway was shut down in both directions because it was under water.

For now, we'll voluntarily conserve water. Yesterday I pruned my neighbor's lemon tree a little, so that it might better survive the droubt. If the weather doesn't change soon, we'll ration water. But it won't last forever. The rains will be back. They're like those relatives you dread might come for a visit: They never stay away for long.

Sunday 2014.1.19

Manly-Go-Round

This past week I joined a Men's Circle group down in the city. 2014 is becoming a year of transition, and possibly transformation, for me. I decided one thing I need more of is interaction with people. I spend too much time (my own judgment) with my computers.

I don't like social media because there is no face-to-face interaction. One "friend" on my list posts esoteric little messages that I perceive as attempts to appear urbane or erudite. I wonder what he is looking for. Likes? Other Facebook friends never post anything at all. I know they are still there because every few months there is a note saying they are now friends with someone on Facebook. And then there are the prolific posters who fill my wall with stuff—like how their morning workout went, something funny their kids said, photographs, or today's positive affirmations.

There are a few minor problems with the whole Men's Circle thing, but they simply give me more challenges to overcome. For one, I got my master's degree in counseling psychology with an emphasis in Jungian depth psychology. I know the routine. The facilitator uses words like archetype and shadow; so my mind clicks, "He has roots in Jungian psychology." He talked about the house of the warrior and the house of the hunter; so the following day I watched the movie Bedrooms and Hallways again because there are hilarious scenes involving a men's group. (And there is that wonderful line when Keith's wife Sybil says, "I love being a woman; not because of you but because of me.")

I feel like I'm two people in the room. There is the me who is seeking more social engagement, but there is also the me who has psychotherapy training and looks at the guys as elements in the alchemist's crucible. At one point I even described it to the group. "I feel like the guy in the white coat who is looking at the test tube, wondering what chemical reaction will happen next." I want to be in the test tube with them.

We are all made up of at least two people. There is the child we allow to engage with others, but there is also the parent/watcher who observes and adjusts as the other plays.

Another issue for me is the ritual. We started off being smudged into the room with a large roll of smoking sage. Then there was the lighting of the candles as we faced the four cardinal points of the compass and words were spoken to welcome the spirits of our ancestors into the circle (and I hoped my mother wouldn't show up). As the last three candles were lit we touched the sky, the earth, and finally the circle. Okay. It might be effective for helping others to center themselves, but it doesn't work for me because I can't help being averse to rituals. That is something about me I do not wish to change, any more than I want to change my gender or my love of reading books.

I am reminded of that South Park episode in which the "native" Hawaiians are the mainland whites who regularly vacation on the islands. Why all this fascination with Native American culture? I have a little Native American in me, the Nipmuck tribe of Eastern Massachusetts, but I consider myself to be European American. I even find it a little offensive to adopt Native American rituals for our recreation. Those rituals might be sacred.

On the positive side, it was an interesting and enjoyable evening. I liked everyone in the circle. First impressions were good. This is not surprising because they wouldn't be there unless they were committed to honesty and integrity. They might have their ritualistic little games, but they don't seem to play any games with each other. I respect and admire that.

I'll probably go back at least one more time. It depends on whether it turns out to be a men's association circle or a group therapy meeting. I don't want therapy; I want association.

Wednesday 2014.1.15

Which Substitutions Work?

A while ago I had to deal with a complaint about one of my recipes. The "cook" attempted to make something to give away to friends as gifts. The food fell apart and crumbled. Ultimately, it ended up in the trash.

I used the recipe, and others like it, for years. I never experienced any problems. Intrigued, I had to ask. "Did you substitute any of the ingredients?" The answer: "Well, yes, I had to. I'm gluten intolerant; so I used spelt in place of the all-purpose flour. Eggs are high in cholesterol; so I used vegetable oil and a little water."

This subject comes to mind again because a friend from Portland, Oregon is in town and we discussed this very issue. She mentioned Internet recipes in which people comment: "This recipe works perfectly; however, I substituted chicken for the pork, milk for the cream, canned tomatoes for the fresh ones, etc." My friend asked, "How can they say the recipe works perfectly when they completely changed it?"

I was thinking of my Mom's Christmas Cookies. Mom did okay in the kitchen, but she was prone to substitute to save money. As I mention in the recipe and the video, her Christmas cookies turned into rocks after a few days. She regarded butter as too expensive a luxury; so she left it out and substituted with water. I solved the problem with her recipe and my cookies remain soft and tender until they are eaten, even if they are stored for many days.

A fan of my web site and YouTube channel made these Christmas cookies for the holidays. She sent me a picture. They looked exactly the way they should. She made one improvement. On some of the cookies she used red and green sprinkles for a more festive look. I like the idea and I think I'll try that next Christmas when I bake the cookies again.

On the other hand, some substitutions work better. Another fan had asked me for a Chicken Riggies recipe because all the ones he tried from the Internet were disappointing. I researched those recipes and saw the problem: "A can of this, a jar of that…." I substituted with fresh ingredients and the result was a delicious meal. He wrote recently to say he used my recipe to make the dish for his daughter—a fussy eater—and she loved it.

In my recipes I often suggest substitutions. I sometimes substitute ingredients when cooking. At the top of my recipes I often write something like, "modified from a recipe found in…" The modifications were my own substitutions. Therefore; I don't discourage anyone from substituting ingredients. However, if the recipe fails, don't blame the recipe—rethink the substitutions.

With experience we learn which ingredients we can substitute and which ones we cannot. Water is not a practical substitution for butter in cookies, but a good vegetable oil might suffice. They both provide the fat to give the cookies a soft and moist texture. Eggs, especially the whites, are a binder that will hold biscotti together. Substitute with water and/or oil and the biscotti will likely crumble and fall apart. Learning what an ingredient does, rather than only how it tastes, can help with subsititution decisions.

Sunday 2014.1.12

An Odd Failure

Those who follow my videos will know that I like working with recipes I find in restaurant trade journals. For the uninitiated: Trade journals are magazines that only go to specific businesses (trades). You typically do not find trade journals on the magazine rack at the grocery store. Restaurant trade journals usually advertise products the average home owner wouldn't buy—steam tables, walk-in freezers, or commercial grades/quantities of food products. How many people have room for (or need) in their pantry a five-gallon drum of ketchup, even if it does come with a pump?

The recipes in those trade journals are often written by professional chefs for their own restaurant. As such, you are almost guaranteed that they will work properly and taste delicious. What chef would write a lousy recipe for his restaurant? Well, maybe one.

In a recent edition of Restaurant Hospitality magazine I found a recipe for moussaka. I'd heard of moussaka, an eggplant dish, but I never tried it. This seemed like a good opportunity. Sadly, this wasn't the recipe. In the MOP (method of preparation) the chef mentions potatoes and peppers, but there is no mention of them in the list of ingredients (the formula). Furthermore, the formula for the yogurt bechamel sauce is wrong. Cooking 1½ tablespoons of melted butter with ½ cup all-purpose flour in a saucepan does not result in a mixture that is creamy and smooth.

I've made béchamel plenty of times. I usually use equal measures of flour and butter. I tossed the mixture into the trash and looked up the béchamel I use for my Arancini recipe. I needed to triple the proportions, but it worked perfectly.

This is the only recipe from a restaurant trade journal that had problems. The omissions and other errors were maybe the result of careless editing. After making the corrections, and a few modifications of my own, I ended up with a beautiful moussaka that was delicious. I love eggplant; so this recipe was destined to please my taste buds.

Here again I can't stress enough the importance of experience. The restaurant chef who might want to test the moussaka recipe, as originally published, might automatically detect the problem areas and know how to correct them.

As these chefs' recipes do not appear in popular consumer magazines, the beginning cook won't be foiled by them. Of greater damage are the cookbooks and magazines with recipes that were never tested. I've encountered more than a few of those. While it might be a fun challenge to solve the mysteries of these ill-fated recipes, the beginning cook probably won't have the experience to fix the problems.

I try to advise some people to consider all cookbook and magazine recipes as potential failures. Try them anyway. There is wisdom in the saying, "We learn from our mistakes." (I like to say it is less expensive to learn from the mistakes of others.) If you do manage to make a success of a failed recipe, you can feel all that much better about yourself.

Wednesday 2014.1.8

Advertising

I learned a few things about advertising this week. One of the reasons why is that I am still feeling more and more burnt out on the whole cooking video thing. I wondered if maybe signing up for the YouTube Adsense monetization program, and earning some revenue from my YouTube videos, might generate some incentive to keep going.

From what I read, Google pays a "per click" rate on advertising. The rate depends on the key word for the ad. Without going into all the details, the averge is about 50¢ per click. If someone clicks on an ad displayed with my video, I would earn 50¢. Google pays when the amount owed reaches $100. What is the click rate? In other words, of all the ads that are displayed on our computer screens each day as we browse the Internew, how many are clicked?

One site I read reported the rate to be an average of only 1 in 10,000. We've simply become too efficient at ignoring ads. Another site said we are typically exposed to about 800 ads per day, whether on TV, thumbing through a magazine, driving to and from work, listening to the radio in the car, watching TV—does any of this sound familiar? We are so good at ignoring them, they are simply part of the landscape. We are no more likely to pay attention to an ad for driveway paving on the back of a bus than to the corner sign that displays the name of the street on which we live.

The ads haven't gone away, of course. Advertisers have sought new ways to attract our attention. Animated ads have replaced static banner ads because our eyes are attracted to motion. Targeted ads are popular. If I search for dog leashes on the Internet, that will be noted somewhere and I will be labelled as a pet owner. I will see more ads for pet food or from my local veterinarian. I have an ad blocker on my computer, which stops some of them, but more and more I find myself using the Tools/InPrivate Browsing option on my Internet browser to stop some of the information gathering about my shopping patterns.

Most people are not impulse buyers when it comes to advertisement exposure. Seeing an ad for a sofa while we're checking our email doesn't make us want to click and buy—especially in this current economic climate. We buy by searching. If we want to replace the rechargable battery in the lawn mower, we Google or Bing "rechargable batteries" with the make and model of our mower. When we visit Amazon, we typically don't browse. We use the search bar. Therefore, "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) is the current darling of those who want to earn money from the Internet.

SEO is a way to get our web site to the top of the list when people are searching for something we offer on our site. Although I don't do anything to optimize this site, it usually comes to the top if someone searches for "white trash cooking" because the name is unqiue enough. "Trash cooking" even works because there isn't much competition to get to the top. However, search for "tiramisu recipe" and you will very likely never see mine because there are millions of them on the Internet. I tried it and Bing reported 3,580,000 results. Google found 3,630,000. I looked for mine, but gave up after looking through 20 pages on each search engine. All the big names were there—famous TV celebrity chefs, well known cookbooks and magazines, popular name brand products, etc.—but I never saw mine.

Tiramisu is too common a recipe? Try a relatively unknown recipe like arancini (a rice croquette, and quite delicious). My recipe is still not listed among the finds. Maybe if I were to get into the whole SEO thing it might be, but I don't use my web site to generate revenue. There is still no advertising, and I don't pursue it. It is my fun little vanity site and I'm content to keep it that way.

So, a little math discouraged me from signing up for Google's Adsense program. The total views for my 180+ videos on YouTube is currently about 320,500. If one in 10,000 views results in an ad click that earns me 50¢, I would have earned about $16 during the past three years. Not much incentive there.

Sunday 2014.1.5

A Raging Debate…

…well, in my mind anyway. Is chili a soup? Stew? Main course? Let the research begin. The subject comes up because a visitor to my web site said there was no listing for Texas Chili, even though one link calls up a PDF. The dish was listed in Main Courses as Beef "Texas" Chili. I have since changed the title to Texas (Beef) Chili for the sake of consistency.

I should point out that I am not a chili afficionado. The late Craig Claiborne was. My first chili recipe was his "Real Texas Chili," cut from a Family Circle magazine and glued to an index card back in the 1970s. It was my only chili recipe for decades. Only recently did a try a new one, Smoky Pork and Bean Chili, which I enjoyed more. That recipe will be on my web site in coming weeks.

None of my paper (analog) cookbooks have a recipe for chili, not even my Soups and Stews book. I have more than 300 cookbooks in digital format on my computer, and although I did not look through every one, the scanning I did revealed almost nothing useful. One book that looked the most promising turned out to be a vegetarian cookbook—hardly the place to look for information about beef chili. That left only the Internet.

Many people regard Wikipedia as laughably inaccurate. Anyone can have an opinion. I don't use Wiki the same as I might the Encyclopædia Brittanica, but I consult it as one potential source for information.

Ultimately I did a few Bing searches, asking questions like, "Is chili a soup or a stew?" There were many answers/opinions, from which I gleaned enough information to come to an educated decision I could feel good about. Opinions varied, of course, and some were amusing.

More than one person believes that chili should be in its own food category. That doesn't answer any questions; it just raises more. Should pizza be its own food category? How about milk? Many years ago I read an article that said milk is a food, not a beverage.

The greatest majority of answers stated that chili is a stew, not a soup, and they provided valid reasons why. Soups are usually made quickly. Stews require long slow cooking times. Because of my mother's cooking, I divide soups and stews by the size of the ingredients. My mother made beef stew occasionally and the beef, carrots, potatoes, etc., were cut into large chunks. Soups had smaller pieces, like the little cubes of chicken meat in chicken soup.

Settling the debate with "stew" works for me because I always regarded chili as a main course, not a soup. Stew is a meal, and therefore also a main course. Ergo, the recipe was in the correct place on my web site, although it was named incorrectly. However, that does not settle the issue entirely. What are people's expectations?

The person who raised the question had looked for chili in the Soups category of the Recipe Archive. One person on the Internet pointed out that chili is always listed among the soups on restaurant menus, most likely because there is no "stews" category. Should I list it under Soups? Clam Chowder is listed there and it is closer to a stew than a soup. In many restaurants clam chowder is offered as a first course, where salad or soup are typical options.

A few years ago I ordered chili as a first course in a restaurant and it was served in a small bowl, like a soup (and I suspect it was some brand of canned chili—Dennison's, Hormel, Campbell's, etc.—because it certainly wasn't made fresh at the restaurant). It was good enough to be enjoyable because (1) I was hungry and (2) it was a cold wintry day and therefore a hot "soup" was welcome.

And not to leave it there, I was asked what I thought of the chili sold at Wendy's. If you're not familiar (say hello to your fellow Martians for me), Wendy's is a chain of fast-food hamburger restaurants, like Carl's Jr. or McDonalds. At about $1.75 with tax for a small bowl, the chili isn't bad. It may be at the opposite end of the spectrum from gourmet, but it tastes good enough to eat and enjoy.

Ultimately the debate was, hopefully, settled by listing my chili recipe under Soups in the Archive and changing the name of the category to Soups and Stews. Sometimes the simplest of solutions is also the most elegant.

Wednesday 2014.1.1—New Year's Day

Happy New Year, One And All

Well, maybe not the Chinese. They're New Year begins on January 31st this year. It will be their Year of the Horse. If I remember, I'll make Chinese Dumplings/Pot Stickers that day.

New Year's is always a good time for reflecting backward and looking forward.

I prepared a very early video, one of my first, for YouTube this week. At the time, it was too long for YouTube, and so it ended up on Vimeo instead. It made me look back at when I started making videos. I didn't even have a way of facing the camera back then. Eric, who was my cameraman at the time, had to shoot the videos from the side or over my shoulder. I've come a long way since then (nearly 3½ years). My videos look almost professional now.

The TV experience was another valuable learning curve. It took a while to figure out which set of available presets (there are literally dozens!) in my video editing software were the right ones for the station. Once that puzzle was solved, I made steady progress, delivering to the TV station the 45 shows I agreed to provide, all of them delivered well before the deadline.

One change that excited me this year was upgrading to high definition on YouTube. When I first started three years ago, YouTube limited videos to a maximum of 15 minutes. After I established a fairly long record with no violations (YouTube frowns upon copyright infringement), YouTube granted me unlimited video time.

Of course, the most recent change was the upgrade of this web site's Recipe Archive. Although it has been less than a week, so far everything appears to be working perfectly. I am still testing. No one reported any broken links or missing files. In fact, I was literally inundated with no email about the enhancements. It was a carefully orchestrated upload. It went so well, I anticipate the President will call me to ask that I work on the Affordable Health Care web site.

What about 2014? Currently, that is an enigma. There are no projects that interest me. I did an experiment on Monday. Someone asked if the Triple Chocolate Pound Cake recipe could be baked in other pans rather than a bundt pan. I thought it might be worth a try; so I used two layer cake pans. What a mess! Everything went into the trash. The answer is No. Because of the denisity of some cake batters, they need the heat that comes through the center hole to properly bake. Lighter cake batters work fine in standard layer pans.

Although I have ten TV shows in the vault, I'm not enthusiastic about doing another year of TV. I have also lost some of my enthusiasm for cooking. If things don't change, I anticpate a slowdown in future projects. Maybe all I need is a little vacation. Time will tell.

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