MAY 2014
Wednesday 2014.5.28
Another Memorial Day
I am a bit saddened that some people will remember the Memorial Day weekend as the time when they lost their son or daughter in the shootings in Isla Vista. The holiday is, of course, a time to remember the soldiers who served their country to help keep it a safe and secure land in which to live. Thank you.
I attended a small Memorial Day gathering among neighbors here in the trailer park. I won't say that I enjoyed it (that would be a lie), but I won't go into details because I don't want to use my blog as a platform to complain about the overly-loud music or the deplorable table manners of the person who sat next to me or the person who talked non-stop for three hours. So, I won't complain.
Thankfully the gathering broke up a little early when the neighbor's sewer hookup overflowed and spilled sewage onto the ground, probably due to a blockage. The odor sent everyone home. A quick glance revealed it had been cobbled together with odd and ill-fitting pieces of pipe rather than being assembled and sealed properly. A spill was inevitable.
I made my Finger Lickin' Chicken for the gathering and this time I made only enough for everyone to enjoy one or two pieces. No leftovers getting cold and drying out in the sun. That chicken is always enjoyable to eat, and there's a long story that goes with it.
Supposedly Colonel Sanders started his Kentucky Fried Chicken chain by cooking chicken that really was seasoned with 11 herbs and spices. The source of his success was the use of oil pressure fryers that cooked the chicken very quickly while keeping the chicken juicy and tender. You might not want to purchase one of those cookers. The prices start at several hundred dollars and go up into the thousands.
You can't use a standard pressure cooker for frying because the hot oil melts the gasket and you can be seriously burned if very hot oil at high pressure sprays out onto you. Standard pressure cookers use water, not oil. Some people risk it, but the burns can be nasty because unlike boiling water, which can only reach a temperature of about 250°F in a pressure cooker, the oil can climb to 350°, 400°, even higher.
Sanders sold the chain to someone who was a good entrepreneur. He built the business into a large industry and then sold it for a handsome profit.
Somewhere along the history the original 11 herbs and spices were supposedly abandoned for a cheaper recipe. In one of my cookbooks the story says that someone paid a laboratory $5,000 to test a sample of the coating mix. Only four ingredients were found — salt, pepper, flour, and monosodium glutamate. Someone named Ron Douglas, a former JP Morgan employee, came up with a KFC replica recipe so good that he claimed no one would be able to tell the difference. That recipe is available on the internet.
Some of this history might be more urban myth than fact, but I gathered as much information as I could find and then made a few adjustments for my own tastes. For one, I prefer less salt. I created a coating mix that, although it doesn't taste like modern KFC chicken (probably because their coating only contains those four ingredients), the flavor is nonetheless very good. Every time I make this chicken, people like it. One friend a few years ago remarked to someone, "Isn't this chicken sinfully delicious?"
In my recipe, which is on this web site, I give the formula for the coating I use. I make a lot and store it in a jar in my cupboard. When I cook the chicken I also debone it so that it will be easier to eat — no bones crowding the plate.
Still to come this summer will be someone's birthday party (I'll avoid that one) and a Fourth of July gathering. We can watch the fireworks from here inside the trailer park because they are launched from a public park less than a mile from here. And one friend (who might be a former friend, as I now rarely hear from her unless she knows there is liquor in the refrigerator) might arrange something for August.
Labor Day in early September typically marks the end of picnic and barbecue season, but I live in Southern California. People will be cooking outside all the way to Thanksgiving, maybe Christmas, unless the projected El Niño rains return again. Although that will begin the season of flooding and mud slides, I'm hoping for the rains. We need them.
Sunday 2014.5.25
Sad Weekend
If you've been following the news, you've learned about the seven who died, including the gunman, and seven others in the hospital, from a shooting in Isla Vista (IV). I live about two miles from IV, which is the student community adjacent to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). I heard the sirens during the evening, but I didn't know where they were going. There were so many of them, I thought the sirens might be from fire trucks on the way to a large fire.
I don't need to repeat all the details of the event here. There have been at least two press conferences by the police so far, the last one at 4:00 yesterday afternoon. CNN and many other news agencies have been covering the incident. I know no more than they do.
Even though the police weren't releasing the gunman's name at the time, it was circulating. I watched Eliott Rodger's "retribution" video on YouTube. He looked like a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia — feelings of grandeur, "I am a god," feelings of persecution, becoming a hero through revenge, the sinister laugh; he reminded me of the gunman in the Virginia Tech shooting.
He also reminded me of a former gymnast at the University, extremely good looking, and obviously very conceited about his good looks. He left the University for a cross country road trip. I heard later he was wanted by the police for several incidents of rape in Texas and Florida.
I received my bachelor's degree from UCSB in 1983. I lived in IV and it was a quiet little college town at the time. I loved this area so much, I chose to live here permanently. I still like living here.
I will be curious to learn how this incident affects enrollment at UCSB. Many parents are already concerned about UCSB being a party school. Isla Vista is infamous for its Halloween parties. Flotopia, an annual drunken beach party in IV, was shut down because of the damage to the environment (the partiers left all their trash on the beach). It was converted to Deltopia, a party on the street, Del Playa, that runs adjacent to the beach in IV.
This is not the first time students have died in IV. There was the David Attias case. He mowed down people, killing three and injuring one, with his car. Drug deals have gone bad and someone was killed. IV is on a bluff with 40-foot cliffs along the beach and drunken students have fallen to their death. In one incident an underaged youth with alcohol ran from the police at night, running directly off the cliffs. He fell to his death. He was from out of town and didn't know the area.
Such tragedies are heart wrenching. By 10:00 the following morning I had already received phone calls from people concerned about the victims and their parents. There is nothing I can add but say I am saddened by the event.
Wednesday 2014.5.21
Slowing Down
As I near my 200th recipe I am beginning, again, to make plans to discontinue the cooking projects or, at the very least, slow down. As I've said before, my goal was 200 recipes. Sunday's featured recipe will be number 198. June 8th will be 200. I'm counting down.
There are many reasons for stopping the cooking videos, not the least of which is my neighbor's dogs. Now that the weather is warm and sunny, the dogs are outside all day, from 7:00 in the morning until 9:00 at night. They bark at everything that moves. I can't shoot a cooking video with constant barking in the background. It ruins my videos, many of which I want to submit to the local TV station. Another reason is that it is simply becoming too routine after nearly four years. And other than "Thanks for sharing," there is no reward or incentive.
As part of my slowdown I've been cleaning up things. For one, I've reduced my Facebook exposure. I don't use Facebook, but I created a personal page to have a fan page. My personal page was typically inundated each day by friends posting about their day's gym workout, or the funny thing their kid said, or baby pictures, or their latest favorite conspiracy theory. I stopped their posts from appearing on my news feed page.
I don't like most conspiracy theories. Are we all doomed because the clouds do not look the same as they did 40 years ago? Some people love to hate. Give them a cause or a reason or a person and they'll jump at the opportunity to hate someone or something. I'm guilty of that too, but I try to fight it when I recognize it in myself. (I hate my neighbor's dogs.)
We have more to fear than global warming and rising water. Yellowstone National Park (or is it Monument) is the site of a super volcano. When it blows, Krakatoa will seem like a burp by comparison and Mt. Saint Helens will be nothing more than a popped pimple. Geologists estimate that Yellowstone blows every 600,000 years and its last eruption was 640,000 years ago. When it blows, most life in the northern hemisphere will be wiped out. Are we 40,000 years overdue? Maybe it's 600,000 give or take 50,000, in which case we won't be overdue for another 10,000 years. Remember those statistics classes you hated in college? Now you know why it's important to understand "standard deviations."
A former friend called me one day to say he believed the Republicans are responsible for hive collapse disorder, trying to make the honey market crash and blame the Democrats for it. His cousin purchases some kind of instrumentation to help warn him of an alien attack from space. These are real people. I'm not making this stuff up. I'm sure some of you know a few.
Of course, not all warnings are crazy conspiracy theories. The revelations by Edward Snowden are very real. Security can be taken too far. However, I'm willing to give up some of my privacy to continue enjoying the security I appreciate. The NSA can read my emails if they want to. Most of them are comments on my YouTube cooking videos. Maybe someone at the NSA is becoming a better cook because of snooping in my emails. That's cool.
I understand that some people love to hate and that's why they love conspiracy theories. I don't love to hate. I watch the news most evenings and see how people are suffering in Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Libya, Nigeria, and the list goes on and on. I'm not rich. I don't live in a fancy home. I live in a mobile home in a trailer park. Nonetheless, I count myself fortunate to live in one of the safest countries on earth. And thankfully planet Earth is very hospitable to life at the moment. It wasn't always the case. And many thousands of years into the future it might again become a very inhospitable planet.
Although life isn't perfect, what with barking dogs and getting older, I still think life is beautiful and I enjoy it. Retirement has been, so far, the best period of my life. I might be slowing down, but maybe I'm just allowing myself a little more time to smell the flowers and watch the conspiratorially shaped clouds roll by.
Sunday 2014.5.18
Sandwich Weather
The heat broke records this week. Tuesday was hot enough, but the week kept getting hotter.
On Wednesday the temperature down in the city was recorded as high as 99°F. That was a new record. Here at my home it reached nearly 102°F. I was comfortable. Once again, I filled my swamp box (evaporative) cooler with water and ran it all day. The humidity was down to 10%, perfect conditions for the cooler to put out cold air. The output measured 69°F. I sat in the breeze, cool and comfortable, watching the Amgen Tour of California bicycle race.
On Thursday the temperature here was even higher. I photographed it and put the photo on my Facebook page. 102.4°F with 9% humidity.
Friday was cooler by about 10 degrees and the cooling trend continued into the weekend. Today the weather will return to normal with mild temperatures in the low 70s. We will then enter into our standard pattern for this time of year — patchy fog and low clouds along the coast before 11:00 in the morning, returning again after 11:00 in the evening. Daytime temperatures will be in the high 60s and low 70s with bright sunshine.
I won't miss the heat. I'm not good about it, at least not at first. It takes me a while to get used to it. Even though I spent many hours sitting quite comfortably in front of my swamp box cooler, by the end of the week the heat began to weigh on me. Evaporative coolers are effective and economical, but they're not like air conditioners. A good air conditioner, for considerable expense, would have kept my home a pleasant dry 72°F if I had wanted to pay for the electricity. I do have one of those very noisy portable air conditioners that vents out the nearest window, but I only use it in the most dire of circumstances. Had we needed to endure a second week of high temperatures, I would have hooked up the AC.
However, that gets the first hot spell of the season behind me. The next one should be easier.
As for cooking, I think the most I did was toast a couple slices of bread and fry a couple slices of prosciutto for an experimental PLT (prosciutto, lettuce, and tomato) sandwich. It was good. The rest of the time it was sandwiches with pastrami, lettuce, tomato, and cheese. Not as boring as it might seem because I seasoned the mayonnaise with a little harissa I had in the refrigerator.
The Tour of California bike race was not as entertaining as it was last year. If I remember correctly, Peter Sagan won six of the eight stages last year. Yesterday, on the seventh day, he finally won a stage. The outcome was almost predictable this year. Sir Bradley Wiggins was in the race. He won the Tour de France last year. His team, Sky, did an excellent job protecting him and leading him toward the finish each day. After his excellent result in the Time Trial on the second day, it was nearly impossible for anyone to take the Yellow Jersey off his shoulders for the remainder of the week.
One outcome pleased me a lot. Mark Cavendish won the sprint on the first day and got to wear the Yellow Jersey for a day. This is what I wrote about the first day of last year's Tour de France: "A major bike crash near the finish took out two of the sprint stage favorites, Mark Cavendish and Peter Sagan. André Greipel's bicycle lost its rear derailer in the crash, taking out another sprint hopeful. (He caused the pileup by touching wheels with Tony Martin, taking him out too.) Marcel Kittel survived to be the first cyclist over the line and into the yellow jersey."
I was angry at Greipel for causing the crash (as were a lot of cyclists). So this year it felt good to see Cavendish wear the Yellow Jersey for a day. Today is the last day of the Tour of California. Wiggins is all but guaranteed to win. In an interview he said it only takes a puncture near the end of the stage for the victory to slip away from him.
So that leaves the Tour de France to look forward to. It starts on Saturday, July 5th.
Wednesday 2014.5.14
Something Amusing
So I'm walking around the Costco meats and cheese section, looking for pastrami and Swiss cheese for sandwiches and a woman comes up to me. "Aren't you the guy I see cooking on TV?" She recognized me from my little local TV show, The Mobile Home Gourmet. We had a pleasant little chat. She likes my show because I keep my kitchen so neat and clean.
I'm not a germaphobic clean freak, but I can't stand a lot of things on the counter. Even my microwave oven is inside a cupboard. I had one friend who had more than twice the counter space I have, and he couldn't use most of it because everything was stored on the counter.
Anyway, being recognized in Costco made my day. It reminds me of something the late Dorian Corey said in the documentary, Paris is Burning: "It's only a small fame, but it's still a fame."
How Was Your Mother's Day?
Mine turned into something a little special. A neighbor (the one with the lemon tree from which I get most of my lemons) knocked on my door. Someone gave her about a pound of raw shrimp for Mother's Day. She doesn't know how to cook and asked if I would cook the shrimp for her dinner. (And I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the benefactor of the shrimp had said, "If you play your cards right, you might get Dennis to cook these for you.")
I started a small pot of rice cooking and set a timer for 10 minutes.
I did my usual thing with shrimp. They were already deveined; so after removing all the shells I heated a little butter and olive oil in a large skillet. Lightly sauté a couple minced garlic cloves, then add the shrimp. She also received a little bottle of Zatarain's Concentrated Shrimp & Crab Boil. Forget the boiling. Just add a few drops to the skillet. It's potent spicy hot stuff. A little goes a long way. I also added a pinch of turmeric for color along with a little seasoning for flavor.
When the timer went off for the rice, I added some frozen peas and set the timer for another six minutes to finish cooking the rice.
After a final seasoning of the rice, I arranged it in the bottom of a wide bowl and spooned the shrimp and juices over the top. I ate a few of the shrimp to make sure they were what I wanted. Then I walked it over to her home so that she could eat her Mother's Day dinner. Later, she later told me the shrimp dinner was delicious.
Too Hot to Cook
I was shopping for sandwich things in Costo because this week is another scorcher. Daytime temperatures are again in the low to mid 90s, with low humidity again. This is unusual for spring. Global warming? I knew this was coming; so on Sunday morning I baked a couple loaves of bread for sandwiches. With sandwich meats, some cheese, homemade bread, and a little mayonnaise flavored with harissa, I can survive quite nicely sitting in front of my swamp box cooler.
When it's hot, I don't want to cook. The best I can do is assemble.
And speaking of The Mobile Home Gourmet…
Once again I am thinking of cutting back on the recipes and videos. Part of the reason is the neighbor's dogs. They bark outside all day and I can't keep the noise out of my videos. To compensate, I am once again working on my cookbook. It will have all 200 recipes from this web site, along with many photographs. I have a Barnes & Noble NookColor tablet, which uses ebooks in EPUB format. I also have the Sigil software with which I can create ebooks as EPUBs. So I created my cookbook especially for my Nook. My plan is to offer it for free here. Don't ask for it in other formats. I've experimented with Calibre, which can be used to encode ebooks in other formats, but I don't care for the results. My ebook will be available "as is" in EPUB format only. It will be free. What more do you want?
Sunday 2014.5.11 Happy Mother's Day
Theatre Memories
I had lunch with friends on Friday. Some of them I hadn't seen in a few years. One of them was a student at the same time as I was studying theatre. He remembers my performance in David Rabe's Streamers.
I played the role of Richie. He was a bit of a trouble maker, urbane and overly confident, in a cadre room (the time and setting was 1960s US Army) with two other G.I.s. All of them knew they would soon be shipped out to Vietnam.
I wanted the role of Richie because I knew who would get the role of Billy. Actors are terribly competitive. Billy is a sensitive, frightened youth. In fact, if I could describe the play in one sentence: It's about fear and what it does to people, and what it makes them do. The actor who would play Billy was perfect in the role of Iago in Shakepeare's Othello — sadistic, conniving, without conscience. In a sensitive role, he would be completely out of his element. With him in the role of Billy, I was almost guaranteed the play would be about me.
The play would begin rehearsal in October. I got my hands on a copy of the script in June. Good performances start with good study. You read the play again and again and again, learning all you can about your character and the others in the play with you. When you walk out onto that stage, your character has known the other characters for months, maybe years. Maybe you grew up with them (like the family in Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey into Night). They share a long history. You don't meet them for the first time (unless that's in the play). You therefore need to know everything about them, and yourself.
I knew Richie so well, by the auditions I had all of his lines down. Not wanting to appear overconfident I would get the role, I nonetheless auditioned with an open script in my hands.
Callbacks were even better. We were using a couple scenes I knew very well. I got the role. The director later told me he had considered me inappropriate for the role. He had another actor in mind. However, I showed I knew the role so well, he felt he had no alternative but to cast me.
I was off book (all lines memorized) for the first rehearsal. As I said above, actors are terribly competitive. The other actors, wanting not to be upstaged by me, were off book by the end of the first week. With five more weeks of rehearsals, and everyone with their lines memorized, the play grew beyond expectations.
There is one scene in which Richie breaks down into tears. I know where tears come from inside of me. I merely needed to go there and act out of that place in my mind. I could crumble into tears without motivation. At one point in a rehearsal the director wanted to know if the tears were real or faked. In the middle of my crying scene he stopped rehearsal to adjust something on stage. I turned off the tears and looked up as if someone had just called time for lunch. Although I was strictly a method actor, the tears were purely technique.
This play was also my one and only nude performance. In one scene Richie gets undressed and into a robe to go take a shower. I asked the set designer to have a bucket of water and a sponge backstage for me. I quietly wet my hair (I was just behind a fabric wall or flat). A short while later I went back out onto stage toweling my wet hair. I slipped out of my robe and put on underwear. Although my back was to most of the audience, it was a thrust stage with the audience on three sides, like the letter U. There was no way to hide the family jewels from everyone. I just went with it without thinking about it.
And so when some people remember seeing me in that play, what is it they remember seeing? Yeah.
The performances were among my very best because I even made men cry in the audience. And, with Billy played by someone out of his element in the role, the play really was about Richie. This being a university production, many students from the English courses were told to see plays and write papers about them. The professors would share the papers with the directors so that they could read how the audience responded to the plays. The director took me aside one day and said nearly all of the papers were about my character.
That was a long time ago, back in my college days. I hadn't thought about it for many years. So having lunch with someone who was a student in the audience at the time brought back many good memories.
The play was eventually made into a movie, but the role of Richie was practically buried. At the time, people seemed more interested in the negative aspects of the Vietnam war. I felt the movie might have had more impact if the roles were given more consideration. Oh well, a missed opportunity. When have you seen that in Hollywood?
The Amgen Tour of California cycling race starts today. I'll be watching.
Wednesday 2014.5.7
Minute Meal Week
I set aside time this week to do some shopping and stock up the freezer with food portions for my Minute Meals. If you're not familiar, they are heat-and-eat convenience meals with 3 ounces of a protein source, such as chicken or lamb, and 4 ounces each of two vegetables, one high in carbs (corn, mashed potatoes, etc.) and one high in nutrients (broccoli, green beans, etc.). Unfortunately, there isn't much room in my freezer. I blame the weather.
While most of the USA has suffered a harsh winter, Southern California has enjoyed warm sunshine — too much sunshine. Unless you've been living on another planet for the past few months, you've probably heard of our drought. Some like to report it as near catastrophic. That's just sensationalizing the news for the sake of ratings. Those of us who have lived in Southern California for a while (40 years for me) know that the weather is cyclical. We have several years of drought, then the rains return. Meteorologists are projecting an El Niño potential of better than 50% for this next winter. Some are predicting as high as 70%.
Of course, it's feast or famine with the weather cycles here. Drought means failed crops. El Niño means floods and mud slides.
Soups are winter, rainy-weather meals. I love to sit at home, all the drapes open, watching it pour down rain outside while I am warm and dry indoors eating a comforting bowl of delicious soup. I didn't each much soup this past winter. We didn't have the right weather for it. So now I need to force myself to eat homemade soups to make room in my freezer.
On Monday I deboned two chickens and roasted all the meat. That gave me 22 servings of cooked mixed chicken. All the trim went into the freezer to make more — yes, you guessed it — more chicken stock. (Will it ever end?)
I also made up a small batch of mashed potatoes (9 servings) and portioned and froze seven pounds of ground beef I'd bought, into 8-ounce raw portions for use later. Everything that would fit in the freezer went into the freezer.
That leaves yesterday. I had lunch with a friend, so no opportunity to eat a bowl of chicken soup. I did, however, prep and roast a leg of lamb, sliced and portioned it, and put it in the freezer. 13 servings. So that sets me up with some easy meals for a while.
And Now For Something Completely Different
A while back I blogged about adding Windows 7 to my other computer. I've been testing a lot, taking some risks, some big, but not too big. One program I tested said to deactivate the virus protection software so that the installation would work. Yeah, right. I ran the program with the virus software running and it protected me from a backdoor.graybird.trojan virus. I might look dumb, but I ain't.
So, having done all the testing I wanted to do, yesterday I did a fresh load of the operating system and started again with setting up my programs. I'll finish today. However, I'll take no risks this time. One of the blessings of building and loading your own computers is that you have the freedom to really screw up and still be able to keep yourself out of trouble.
And, in my humble opinion, other than a faster version of Internet Explorer, I don't see any reason to use Windows 7. Most of the software and hardware I have working in XP won't work in Win7. Even though Microsoft no longer supports XP, I'll keep using it. Replacing all my hardware and software would be prohibitively expensive.
Sunday 2014.5.4
Swamp Box Cooler Days
This past week the weather has been unseasonably warm. I expect temperatures in the high 80s and low 90s in August and September, not at the end of April. Is this Global Warming? The week ahead will be filled with more normal seasonably cooler days.
This is the time of year when we expect "May gray" and "June gloom." The marine layer, a layer of low clouds and fog, moves in from the ocean and blankets the costal area in gray. We might not see much of the sun for weeks at a time. Some people find it depressing. Thankfully, I don't.
Once again, I'm glad I have a swamp box cooler, otherwise known as an evaporative cooler. My unit is like a large floor model fan with a tank for water and a fiber screen behind the fan. When running on "Cool" a pump trickles water down the fiber screen, which evaporates as air is pulled through it. Evaporation is a process that absorbs energy, effectively pulling heat from the air.
For an evaporative cooler to work properly, you need warm dry air. Humidity less than 50% and a temperature of at least 80°F are recommended. The humidity was at 12% most of each day. When I got out of bed in the morning the humidity was already down to 33%. That promises well for the cooler. (This morning it's 60% — as I said, back to seasonably normal.)
I also don't like to waste water, especially under current conditions. Here in Southern California we are in a severe drought. This area isn't too bad. We have stored water in underground aquifers. Other areas are enduring shortages and rationing. I even read of vigilante groups, known as water waste patrols, that harass people for watering their lawns. Whatever.
I have a reverse osmosis water filtration system on my sink. They are notorious for wasting water. However, when I plumbed mine in, I added an alternate waste water line that allows me to capture the water. When my filter system recharges itself to store a few cups of filtered water, it can dump as much as 3 gallons of water down the drain. My evaporative cooler's water tank holds 3 gallons. Ergo, I keep a bucket at the sink and capture the water, then use it to fill the tank in the cooler.
When I don't need the water for the cooler, I use it in other ways, such as watering the plants. Nothing goes to waste.
Another waste is electricity. Air conditioners, because they run a compressor, use a lot of energy. That is why the gas mileage in your car goes down when you run the air conditioner and your electricity bill goes up when you use you house air conditioner. However, because there is no compressor in an evaporative cooler, they use no more electricity than a standard fan. They're economical.
At 12% humidity, there was a lot of evaporation going on in the cooler — nine gallons of water each day. I used a digital thermometer to check the temperature of the air being pumped into the room. At times it was as low as 66°F. The air going into the cooler was in the high 80s or low 90s. That's more than 20 degrees of temperature drop.
The dryness comes from hot Santa Ana winds that blow into Southern California from off the desert. When I was feeling a little overcome by the heat, I sat on the sofa or at the dining room table with the cool air blowing over me. It made for a pleasant day.
One final point: The word swamp is appropriate. What with all the evaporation going on, which concentrates minerals and other gunk in the water, the reservoir tank can get pretty grungy after a while. I drain mine often to prevent any buildup. Evaporative coolers require a little more maintenance, but they are worth it for the savings.