April 2016
Wednesday 2016.4.27
Pandoro, Again
My second attempt at making Pandoro went better. Thankfully, I didn't need to shoot the first part of the video again. I quickly repeated the first steps to bring the process up to where I had left off when I made the critical error. Then, while the batter was going through its first rise I dressed and set up to continue the video. That saved me some time.
The pandoro dough is a wonderful golden color, thanks to the brilliant orange color of the egg yolks. Here in the USA many chickens are fed marigold petals as part of their diet. The petals are rich in xanthophyll, the color that makes egg yolks orange and also gives the chickens a more appetizing color in their skin. Marigold petals, by the way, are edible. Some people substitute the expensive spice saffron with ground dried marigold petals.
As for the cake, it turned out well enough. I looked on the Internet and in almost all the photographs the pandoro was dusted with powdered sugar; so I decided to go with the traditional decoration.
I'd like to try making this again. I'm thinking of a baking method similar to Pain de Mie. What if I were to invert the mold onto a plate before putting it in the oven and then placing something heavy on top, like a cast iron pan? That would force a shape. Some dough would squeeze out from underneath, but that could be trimmed off. It's worth experimenting I think.
How do you eat pandoro? I didn't know. I looked on the Internet and found a YouTube video made by an Italian chef who walked the streets in a city (New York?) introducing pandoro and panettone to people on the sidewalks. He said his favorite way of eating the bread was to dip it in milk. Coffee and tea are alternatives. I tried it. It's okay. However, I think I'd like it spread with a little strawberry jam or orange marmalade.
Politics
Yesterday, of course, five East Coast states held their primaries. No need for me to repeat the results. They're reported, along with analysis, in the news. The conventions this summer are looking more interesting, especially the Republican convention in Cleveland. And I'm looking forward to the November results.
I can't imagine most Americans, or most Republicans for that matter, think Donald Trump would be a good president. I think people in this country are so disgruntled over politics — a president who can't get a Supreme Court nominee considered by a Senate that is determined to undermine his authority, for example — that they'll vote for anyone who isn't a politician.
Clinton and Trump are not campaigning as presumtive candidates, as in presumed to be their party's nominee. Clinton has mathematically shut out Sanders who now cannot possibly win a nomination, even if he were to sweep all the remaining states. So why stay in the race? Probably because he has campaign funds to spend.
Authors like John Dean, David Corn, and Bob Woodward are probably already writing books about this weird election cycle, and what it all means. I change my opinion almost daily. I look forward to reading the books. Hopefully they can make sense of it all.
Meanwhile, Ted Cruz announced today that Carly Fiorina will be his VP running mate, should he be nominated at the Republican presidential candidate in July. Why? Chuck Todd on MSNBC defined it as: "Throw everything you have to win this thing."
It's amazing to watch. Many months ago the RNC was adamant there would not be a contested convention. Now they're manipulating primaries to assure a contested convention. It's so entertaining, I almost believe I should be paying something to watch this.
Sunday 2016.4.24
The Final Nail
If you keep track of my occasional diatribes, you might remember my saying something about the weight-loss support group I quit two weeks ago. I last blogged about it on April 7th. There has been an informative development. All future meetings are cancelled.
Even more telling: All traces of the group have been erased from the Internet, as if someone was trying to remove the evidence. Perhaps I'm reading more into it than actually exists. The last I saw of it, more than half the members had quit about the same time I did.
I'm not vain enough to believe it was because of me. No one even knew I quit, and I doubt any members of the group read this blog. If anything, they quit because the meetings were not about weight loss. The organizer, as I said much earlier, used the meetings to promote dietary supplements. They have their place, but a bottle of vitamin pills isn't a weight loss regimen.
Oh well. Changes happen.
Featuring Italian Sausages
As you saw on the Home Page, I decided to feature homemade Italian sausages this week. Few people, if any, will rush onto the Internet and look for a meat grinder/sausage stuffer. Here is mine below, disassembled so that you can see all the parts. It attaches to my Kitchenaid stand mixer and is made by Smokehouse Chef (smokehousechef.com). I bought mine on Amazon, but I think the price is slightly lower on the Smokehouse Chef web site.
Visitors to my web site probably won't read one of the many books available on the subject of making sausages at home. And I seriously doubt I'll inspire anyone to make their own. So why do I do it? It's fun. And they taste good.
There is another reason. We can never know everything about something, and some of us can never know enough. I'm always looking at sources, whether the Internet or books or magazines, for information about cooking and recipes. While I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office last week I thumbed through a Food & Wine magazine, looking at the recipes. Learning how to make my own sausages broadens my cooking horizons.
And, as I think about it, I don't think I ever saw a recipe for homemade sausages in magazines like Bon Appétite or Cook's Country. (There is a recipe for Spicy Italian Sausages on the Bon Appétit web site, published July 2014.) I even checked my Cook's Illustrated books. Nothing. And maybe that's another reason why I made them to feature on my web site: There is a lack of information about making sausages at home.
Maybe homemade sausages are a specialty hobby, like making your own wine. I did that when I lived in New England because our Connecticut home had a basement that was designed for making wine, with fermentation racks and aging racks. There were even a couple empty oak barrels down there. (I made my wine, mostly elderberry, in glass jugs.)
Regardless of the reasons, I'll probably continue to make and feature homemade sausages on this web site. The YouTube videos probably won't get many views. Going viral is, at best, a fantasy. But I can show viewers how to make them and even if they don't do it themselves, they will have picked up some knowledge.
We have a good library system here in this part of California. There are many of them and they are linked together, sort of, such that if I want a book that is 100 miles away at another library, I can request it through the local library and in 7 to 10 days it will be ready for me to pick up. I ordered Bruce Aidells' Complete Sausage Book: Recipes from American's Premier Sauce Maker.
I considered ordering the book from Amazon, but then I thought it might be more useful to look at it first, before I order it. As I've said many times, one of the problems of living in a mobile home is the lack of storage. Even one book is a major consideration because my bookshelf is full already. If something is added, I need to decide what gets discarded, given away or tossed into recycling.
Most of my cookbooks are in digital format, stored as EPUB files on my computer and backed up on a CD. Besides requiring almost zero storage space (how much room does a CD occupy), they have the advantage of being easily searchable. CTRL-F opens up a Find dialog box and I can almost instantaneously search for almost any text. With more than 300 cookbooks on that CD, using my computer to search for text can save a lot of time.
Let the Baking Begin — or Not
The pandoro mold I ordered arrived on Friday. It looks exactly the way it did on the Sur la Table web site.
The pandoro has a long preparation time — about 6 hours — but most of that is waiting for the dough to rise three times. There isn't a lot of hands-on time. On Friday evening I did all the prep work — covering my windows and setting up for a video, measuring all my ingredients, and printing my step-by-step guide and ingredients list cue card. That allowed me to start early on yesterday morning.
And then I accidentally did things out of sequence. There was no way to undo the mistake I made; so everything went into the trash. Thankfully the ingredients are not expensive. Yesterday evening I measured all my ingredients again. I started the first dought step this morning. That has to rise for 1½ hours. While I waited, I uploaded all the updates to my web site. Then, I will continue…
Wednesday 2016.4.20
Fulfilling Requests
In my previous blog I mentioned a request for Pandoro bread (and, as yet, Sur la Table hasn't shipped the pandoro mold I ordered) and another request for Sun Dried Tomato Pesto.
I made the pesto on Sunday afternoon. It wasn't difficult, although I tried to come up with a formula for the ingredients that would allow the flavors of both the basil and the tomatoes to come out. After a little trial and error, I figured it out.
I didn't make an oily pesto, as I might have if I were thinking of using it on pasta. The thing is, you can always add oil, but taking it out isn't easy. So I prefer to make a "dry" pesto and then add more oil later as needed.
As planned, I cooked some fish — in this case farmed steelhead trout from Costco — and I put a spoonful of pesto on the side. I also cooked some broccoli for a side vegetable.
I might also mention I experimented with the Pacific cod Costco has been selling lately. I don't normally like Pacific cod because it breaks apart easily. It doesn't have the texture and flavor of North Atlantic cod. The Costco cod broke up when I cooked it.
Steelhead trout is pink and therefore many people mistake it for salmon in the cooler case at the store. It is the only farmed fish I'll eat. All the others have no flavor. Steelhead has a good flavor and the texture holds up well when frying in a skillet. Fry it 3 to 5 minutes (depending on thickness) skin side down, flip it and peel off the skin. Fry an additional 3 to 5 minutes, then flip it again and plate.
If you like salmon, the sun dried tomato pesto would go well with that fish too. Pesto, by the way, doesn't have a pretty green color like that made mostly with basil.
Here's a question for you artists out there. What do you get when you combine red and green pigments? If the pigments are saturated and you have the right balance of the two, you'll end up with black. That's how pigments work. However, most of the time you'll end up with a muddy color. So, combine the orange/red pigment of tomato with the green pigment of basil, and the result is a muddy brown. Not the most appetizing look for pesto, but the flavor is delicious. I would gladly enjoy it with toasted slices of French bread, maybe with a little extra olive oil.
The recipe and video will be uploaded here and to YouTube in coming weeks.
Pain in the Ears
No, really, ears. I know in England you can arrange the letters and come up with something else, but I mean ears. Really.
Yesterday morning one of my ears was bothering me too much. It was itchy. Time to use Debrox again. It didn't go so well. Rather than cleaning out the ear canal, it just made matters worst. I could tell there was wax pressed against my ear drum. I could hardly hear a thing with that ear.
I gave it a second treatment and stepped into the shower, where I tried to flush out the ear canal with that little green water syringe they put in the box with the Debrox. Nothing.
I'm a little obsessive about my hearing because I am practically a clone of my father. When he was in his 40s he was completely deaf in one ear and wearing a hearing aid in the other. His mother started wearing hearing aids early in life too. So I knew my odds. I'll be 65 in July and, so far, my hearing is still normal.
So, I went to the doctor. The nurse came in with a bowl of warm water and a huge syringe, like a hypodermic they might use for elephants. She literally blasted both ears with a gush of warm water. It hurt a little, but it worked. After being nearly deaf in one ear for several hours, my hearing was overly sensitive afterward. I could even hear the rustling of clothing when I moved my shoulder. And chewing something crunchy was loud.
The doctor gave me new instructions for using Debrox. The directions on the box say to treat each ear "for several minutes." How many is several? I was thinking three minutes. The doctor said they sometimes treat patients for 20 to 25 minutes before they flush out the ear canal. And I learned something new. The ear drum tissue is not as delicate and fragile as I thought. The nurse blasted my ear canals with that huge syringe and caused no damage (other than a little pain from the metal tube she stuck in my ear).
And then came a little ingenuity. I have a Waterpik Water Flosser. I wouldn't dare use it in my ear because the narrow jet of water that comes out of the tip is powerful enough to cut delicate tissue, such as the skin beneath my tongue. But what if I were to attach a six-inch piece of plastic tubing, smoothed over on the end to eliminate any sharp edges, and run water through it using the Waterpik? I tested it on my hand. The pulsing stream isn't sharp and powerful, but it could be enough to flush my ear canals after treating them with Debrox. I stuck the tube in my ear. The jet of water isn't as strong as that syringe the nurse used, but it could be enough. I'll keep it in mind for the future.
All this has me wondering about something else. I've been turning up the volume a little on my TV lately. I used to be fine with it set at about 50%. Now I crank it up to 60 or even 70. And I've been preferring the headphones more lately. They help me to hear better. So, could my ears have been partially blocked for quite some time? It's possible.
Last night I watched the news as MSNBC delcared Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton the winners of their respective New York primaries. I was fine with the volume set at 50%. And this morning my hearing seems normal again. Little sounds, like the rustling of my clothing or the tick-tick-tick of my desk clock, go unnoticed.
Sunday 2016.4.17
Pandoro
I received a request that intrigued me — Pandoro. I had never heard of it. None of my books say anything about it, including The Silver Spoon cookbook, which has one of the most comprehensive collections of Italian recipes, Larousse Gastronomique, a food encyclopedia, and more than a dozen cookbooks exclusively about bread.
I searched the Internet and found some information. Pandoro is a sweet Italian bread/cake, similar to panettone, but without the fruit. The bread is commonly served at Christmas or on special occasions, like a wedding or christening. Should it be filed under Bread or Cake? It is somewhere in between.
I asked my friend from Italy. She has been baking bread for years and she probably has more to say about Italian cooking, at least from a regional point of view, than many of my books. Her family in Italy makes its own wine, vinegar, olive oil, etc. I doubt any of them even know what Kentucky Fried Chicken is (and I'm afraid to ask).
From my research I learned the following:
1. It is baked in a special mold.
2. It's a lengthy process. The bread dough goes through three rises. The recipe difficulty level is designated as "Hard" and the preparation time is close to 6 hours. I'll need to prepare my kitchen for a video and do all my measurements the evening before.
3. My Italian friend responded to my email. She said the final bread never turns out as well as the commercial product. "The same is true for panettone," she said. It probably has something to do with proofing ovens and commercial grade equipment and ingredients, as well as stabilizers and preservatives to improve shelf life. However, covered with a thin layer of powdered sugar or glaze, how awful could a homemade pandoro look?
I found a 9-cup pandoro mold on the Sur la Table web site and ordered it (your donation dollars at work). It was only about $12, plus shipping. Amazon offers a better looking mold (and more expensive, about $26), but after doing a few calculations the volume is about 8 cups. The recipe I'd found requires a 9-cup mold.
Now the waiting. I've never ordered anything from the Sur la Table web site. One of their stores is down in the city; so I usually go there. However, the pandoro mold was listed as available only on line, not in the stores. Amazon can take almost a week to ship something (probably a strategy to lure customers to pay $99 per year for Prime). Hopefully Sur la Table processes orders more quickly.
And, finally, one last consideration: How likely am I to use this mold again? If I remember correctly, I spent about $35 for my bundt pan. It was worth the price. I've used it several times and it makes excellent cakes, such as my Triple Chocolate Pound Cake.
So what can I expect from my pandoro mold? Hopefully something good enough for a video. Keep in touch. If it comes out right, it will appear on this web site and on YouTube in coming weeks.
You Win a Few; You Lose a Few
I couldn't resist doing another sausage recipe. They are just too much fun to make. Cajun boudin blanc are white-ish sausages, as the blanc implies. They are made with pork shoulder and rice (which gives them their light color) and vegetables such as onion, green onion, and celery. The seasoning, as you would expect from Cajun, is on the spicy hot side. And they are nice looking sausages.
They are not fried; they are steamed. The directions say to bring them up to 160°F (71°C) in steam and then steam them for an additional 30 minutes to make them really tender.
I cooked mine in my pressure cooker. With the climb to full pressure and then the natural depressurization afterward, the cooking time wasn't shortened. But the higher cooking temperature would make the sausages extra tender — or so I hoped.
When I opened the pressure cooker, the casings (skins) were gone. They burst in the cooker and all but disappeared. The sausages were cooked, but they were just skinless loose collections of meat and rice. They looked like skinless sausages. I thought about making them again and cooking them a different way. However, they only tasted okay, not good enough for a video. Ultimately, I decided my Recipe Archive would do better without boudin blanc sausages. Maybe brat wurst next time.
Meanwhile, another request came in, and I'm feeling a little excited about it. Someone asked if I could make a pesto with sun dried tomatoes. There is a recipe for Spaghetti and Sun Dried Tomatoes in the Archive; so I already have a pretty good idea of how it might taste. I'm thinking the pesto would also be delicious on fish. Made with fresh basil, Romano or Parmesan cheese, roasted pecans, garlic, and plenty of olive oil, this could be a winner. I already have the kitchen prepared for shooting a video (I never dismantled my setup after the boudin blanc failure); so I'm thinking of walking to the stores today to get the ingredients. And there will be a Farmers Market near Costco today, where I might find fresh sweet basil.
It's Official — Dud!
Yesterday's Los Angeles Times officially announced, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that the much-anticipated Godzilla El Niño weather pattern that was supposed to bring us copious rains, is over and nada, at least here in Southern California. Northern California did well. The snow pack that fills their reservoirs is a little above average. But down here in SoCal, we're still dry as a bone. Our reservoir never exceeded 14.9% capacity.
NOAA expects a La Niña pattern next winter, which is a dry pattern. Less rain than normal. Now what? More drought. Even though I did my part last year, removing all my lawn and replacing it with stone and drought-tolerant ground cover, I'm already taking additional steps to conserve water. California's drought will end, someday, but meanwhile all we can do is conserve water and be patient. Thankfully the desalination plant will be operational this autumn.
Where I live there are wells, but there are also dire warnings about depending too much on ground water. It isn't an unlimited supply. I'm hoping the crisis will result in an expansion of the desalination plant (currently operating at 30% capacity), and maybe even another plant. It's expensive, but expensive water is better than no water.
Wednesday 2016.4.13
Caught Up
I have been busy, really busy. Of the last four videos I shot, I hadn't yet edited one of them and none of them had a written recipe on my computer. Then there were the photographs to capture from the videos. I put the photographs in the "Step-by-Step" section of each recipe.
During the first half of the week I completed all this work. Everything that I had procrastinated on is now finished. And, to make certain all my hard work would be safe, I also performed a complete backup of all the computer files.
If I might be allowed to congratulate myself a little, it feels good to see all this work done. And, an Italian friend contacted me after I sent her the photographs of the sausages I'd made. She makes her own sausages too. "Leave it to you to make a first attempt look professional," she said. I'd seen some YouTube videos of people making sausages at home. The results weren't always pretty. Mine, for a beginner, turned out well. Okay, enough patting myself on my back.
Sausages Again
I wanted my next sausage attempt to be chorizo. Here is how little I know about some foods: I know that chorizo is usually sold as a seasoned meat paste, in a plastic casing. I've used it in recipes, such as my Seared Scallops with Chorizo Ragu. I didn't know that it is uncommon as sausage links. I looked around for recipes and finally found two. It was a third recipe — chaurice — that appealed to me the most.
Chaurice is a spicy hot Cajun/Creole sausage of Spanish origin. The books says it is related to chorizo, as the name would also imply. They are pronounced almost the same. Another important point was that there is no one classic way to make this sausage. Seasoning and degree of hot spiciness vary from region to region, and personal taste. I don't like spicy hot foods, but a little bit of spiciness works okay.
I ended up combining ingredients from three different recipes, cherry-picking the ones I liked best. And, I discovered another idea. One recipe uses a little red wine and some brandy. When I see "water" in a recipe, as in the one I used for the Italian sausages, I sometimes think: What does water add, other than moisture? Is there something else that would also add some flavor?
I went to my shelf where I store all my cooking alcohol. It almost looks like a liquor bar, like I really enjoy drinking. I don't drink, except maybe an occasional glass of wine when I'm invited somewhere for dinner. All my alcohol is for cooking. I have some Greek brandy and a little bottle of grappa, which is Italian brandy made from the grape skins after pressing the grapes for wine. Either of those might do… And then I saw it — my bottle of absinthe. I bought it about a year ago. It was expensive, $75, but I had never tasted it before and I wanted a good one.
Absinthe, by the way, is no longer a banned substance. It was once vilified by social conservatives and prohibitionists as evil and addictive, only consumed by despicable bohemian artists and writers in Paris and other depraved cities. Accusations even went so far as to claim absinthe was a hallucinogenic. However, it is no more dangerous than any other alcoholic beverage. (And you probably know that Coca-cola was once made with cocaine — that's where the "coca" in the name comes from. It ain't from cocoa.)
Absinthe gets its flavor from anise, and anise seed is one of the ingredients in the chaurice sausage recipe I found. I have plenty of fennel seed (it grows wild here in Southern California), which tastes about the same. What if I were to use absinthe instead of the brandy, and leave out the fennel seed? What's the worse that could happen?
Inspired, I headed out to search for pork. Costco was carrying pork belly for a while, which looked like a slab of unsliced bacon. It would have been useful to add a little more fat to the pork shoulder I had bought for the Italian sausages. No pork belly. I went to several grocery stores. Nothing useful. Someone recommended a butcher shop down toward the city. I went there and the proprietor said it hadn't been a butcher shop for five years. It's a sandwich shop now. The European deli had nothing useful.
I decided to try the Spanish market, which has some unusual things, like chicken feet. They had "pork butt," which I assumed was sort of like the rear quarter panel on the pig. It is sold as one piece, 7 to 9 pounds, and cost me nearly $18. When I got home I looked it up on Wikipedia. It's just the pork shoulder with the bone in and it gets its name from once being sold in wooden crates called butts. Pork butt has one feature that I knew I'd appreciate. There is a big slab of fat on it.
The boneless pork shoulder at Costco, sold as "Country Style Ribs," is okay. I used it for the Italian sausages. They were lean, and therefore healthy, but I wanted to try making sausages with the right amount of fat in them. The chaurice recipe calls for "lean pork butt" and an additional half pound of pork fat.
And, as a quick little sidebar. I walked to Smart & Final yesterday evening, looked in their meat case, and they have the same pork butt there as well. And it costs less. That's convenient.
So Monday evening I cubed 2½ pounds of pork butt, with the fat, and put it in the refrigerator. Yesterday I ground and seasoned the meat, the same as I did for the Italian sausages, and returned it to the refrigerator to let the seasonings flavor the meat for three hours. Meanwhile, I rinsed and soak two hog casings.
At around 3:00 in the afternoon I was ready to make sausages. This time I had prepared two casings because one wasn't enough for the Italian sausage filling I'd made. All went well. I had only a small handful of filling left over.
One feature I really liked about these sausages: They were juicy. That extra fat from the pork butt was an excellent improvement. Also, the meat inside was so tender, I kept looking at the pieces as I cut them to make sure they were cooked all the way through. They were, but the texture was so tender it was almost like raw meat. I put one of the sausages in the microwave oven and cooked it on high for 1 minute to see if some overcooking would ruin the texture. It didn't. The sausage was still tender.
As for popularity? A loaf of artisan bread might have been a better idea if I were seeking attention. I put the sausage pictures on this web site's Facebook fan page to see how much traffic they might get. Less than 50 people reached in the first day. The Jewish Rye Bread photo I'd posted on Sunday was at 229. I'm fine with that because my web site isn't for commercial purposes. You don't need an ad blocker when you visit this site. There are no ads, even after 5½ years.
The important reason for sausages is, for me, they add breadth to my cooking experience, broadening my horizons, and they demonstrate to my viewers that they can, if they choose, make their own sausages at home. I'm still about the teaching.
Sunday 2016.4.10
Sausages
Thursday I did homemade Italian Sausages. They were a lot easier than I thought they might be, or maybe it was just beginner's luck.
I set two links aside for cooking and wrapped the others using my vacuum sealer, and then put them in the freezer. Unlike the sausages you see in the store, these contain no nitrates to inhibit bacteria growth. Therefore, they need to be frozen or cooked soon. My sausage book says they'll keep in the refrigerator only about two days. I won't use them before then; so the freezer was the best option.
I cooked the two I set aside. They were delicious. I like the texture. It's a little firmer than the ones in the store, probably because I ground the meat myself and used less fat.
These are also better seasoned. The ones in the store taste like they contain only salt and anise (or fennel) seed. The recipe I used also included pepper, coriander, garlic, paprika, cayenne (optional), thyme, and bay leaf. The extra spices add complexity to the flavor without overpowering the anise/fennel, which is the most characteristic flavor in Italian sausages.
Will the video be popular on YouTube? Probably not. I posted two pictures on this web site's Facebook fan page. In two days they had reached fewer than 40 people. The onion rings I did last month reached 400 people during the first 24 hours and was up to 500 a day later. That's okay though. Having a video of homemade sausages adds breadth to my cooking library.
Yesterday I did an easy dish. I found a restaurant recipe that intrigued me because it pairs prosciutto with orange in a pasta sauce made with heavy cream — Tagliatelle with Prosciutto and Orange. That just has to be delicious. Although I like to make my own noodles from scratch, I used packaged spinach tagliatelle. I'm still figuring out the photography (see the recipe page). Imagine white sauce on white pasta. Boring. If I wanted to make the photo even more boring, put it on a white plate. And so, for the sake of color and contrast, I went with the green pasta. And I added two short homemade Italian sausages too.
The plating is a bit sloppy, but the photo is good enough for my needs. The flavor, however, was fantastic. As always, the recipe and video will be here and on YouTube in coming weeks.
Thursday, yep, Thursday 2016.4.7
I Forgot
Yesterday was the first time in 5½ years that I forgot to write my regular blog. I'll blame it on age, but it's more than that, much more.
I've been saying that I wanted to do homemade Italian sausages for a video. Yesterday I started the process, shopping for the meat and missing spices, then setting up my home for a video (typically a three-hour process). While this is going on, I'm watching the clock closely because I need to fit a dinner in somewhere and then take a shower before I join my friends for a small gathering at Panera Bread down in the city.
While I had a short break I went out to check my mail. A neighbor corralled me and held me for half an hour while she gossiped about her least favorite neighbor, and smoked. I do my best to be patient. Besides, I needed a lemon from her tree. Lemon juice is one of the ingredients.
Then I'm ready. Apron on. Wired with my mike. Camera set up on its tripod and the memory cards formatted. My cue card of ingredients in place. All my herbs and spices measured and in little glass bowls. My cheat sheet printed and taped to the wall. I'm ready.
Camera on. Frame and focus. Test the volume. Go. I do the introduction, explaining what I will demonstrate, hopefully, in this video. It's my first time making sausages. I show the pork shoulder meat I will be using. I show the meat grinder that I've been keeping cold in the refrigerator, and I explain that it is an expensive all-stainless-steel attachment that fits on my Kitchenaid stand mixer. Keeping everything cold helps protect the fat from melting, which could make the sausages oily.
A loud noise outside stops everything. I check. The neighbor across the street is having his car detailed by a professional service. They come every few months. The noise is the pump in their truck as they spray water on his car. That usually takes half an hour. I could have written my blog then, but I'm feeling frustrated.
I use the time to chop the meat into 1-inch cubes, which I arrange on a tray and place in the freezer. Letting it slightly freeze, about 20 minutes, will be enough to help keep the fat solid.
Finally the noise stops and I can get started again. I grind all the meat and put it in the refrigerator. I shoot a quick cut-away to explain bacteria in ground meat. Then I prepare the seasonings and other flavoring ingredients, along with a little water. Everything is going well.
I need to buy some time; so I cut out a step. The seasoning mix is supposed to chill in the refrigerator for 15 minutes, but I don't have that much time. Besides, what good would it do anyway? It doesn't seem important.
I put on rubber gloves and explain to the camera that I wasn't sure if this seasoning mix could leave an aroma that I might not want on my hands when I join my friends. Then the ground meat goes into the bowl with the seasoning. Mix, mix, mix, gently so that I don't crush the texture out of the ground meat — I'm making sausages, not hot dogs.
Finally, I cover the bowl of seasoned meat with plastic and put it in the refrigerator. One final clip for the camera to explain how the seasonings will flavor the meat overnight. Tomorrow I'll make the sausages.
Done. Camera off. Mike off. Apron off. Lights off. And I have only enough time to either take a shower or eat dinner. Not both. I choose the shower. I'll grab a bagel at Panera.
The evening goes against expectations. A friend and I started a weight-loss support group. He, however, wants to talk about dietary supplements. I had prepared 16 lessons to use in these meetings. He uses them only to placate me. He doesn't even read them in advance. When he uses one he is obviously reading it for the first time. However, he came prepared with four documents that he believes proves why we should all be taking vitamin D supplements, starting right now (or at least as soon as we get home). "Don't you agree, Dennis?" "No, I don't, and it angers me when someone pushes their supplements on me." He promised he wouldn't, but he can't seem to stop himself.
I'm not a pill popper. The human specie has been around for at least 40,000 years, possibly double that (and one scientist on TV said 200,000 years), and we've gotten this far because we discovered fire and used it to cook our foods. It's true. Cooking pre-digests foods, turning potential calories into real calories by unlocking them from the various plant structures that bind them. If we had to rely on raw foods, we'd need to eat constantly for many hours each day to get the calories our brain needs, something that is impossible. Cooking is one of the major inventions that raised us above other mammals, allowing us to develop neuron-dense brains. We got where we are because we ate cooked food, not because we popped pills. That's why the USDA "My Plate" illustration of food portions doesn't include a place for pills.
I came home needing to make an important decision. Do I suffer through more of these useless (to me) meetings? He made a good point yesterday. He said he hates to waste money. I hate to waste time. I really hate it. So when I waste 3½ hours preparing for and then sitting through a meeting that is a complete waste of my time, it's time to think of something else.
Before going to bed I wrote an email to my health insurance company. Last year they gave me a free membership into the Prevent weight loss program. I really liked it and I benefitted a lot. I am receiving invitations again, but I don't qualify because I'm "already a member," even though I "graduated." I asked if they would approve me to join again, as a new member. I'm waiting to hear. Their web site says they try to respond within 24 hours. If they approve me, I'll gracefully (trust me, it won't be very graceful) tell my friend I'm withdrawing from the meetings. He won't take it well. His ego requires a 100% approval rating. Not a decimal less. It will be ugly. But, as I've explained to him many times, I received my master's degree in counseling psychology and I know the value of self-empowerment and taking care of oneself. I can't help others if I can't help myself.
What's the worst that can happen? He also runs the World News Discussion Group I attend. If things get really nasty, I'll drop out of that one too. Changes happen. That's life. "Life. Don't talk to me about life." — Marvin in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
So that's why the turmoil of yesterday got in the way and I didn't write my usual blog.
Thank you Nancy for your gentle reminder. You're a gem.
Sunday 2016.4.3
Politics
I received some amusing advice this week. Steer clear of politics; otherwise, you'll lose fans. What fans?
I could probably count the dedicated fans of this blog on the fingers of one hand, or maybe just one thumb. I do care, but my readership compared to that of, say, The Washington Post, could be calculated to a decimal beginning with lots and lots of zeros before getting to any significant numbers.
Besides, I do this for me. I love to write. I've been doing it for years. Three published books, two never published, and an unknown number of unfinished manuscripts. I started another one this week. I write because I love the words. There's a feeling that comes when I'm expressing my thoughts with these little combinations of the 26 letters we call an alphabet. And it might come as no surprise that, as a lover of words, I also love to read. I've been reading books since I was a teenager in high school, and that was so long ago I barely remember it anymore.
Enough about me, sort of…
Yesterday was another meeting of our World News Discussion Group. The same dedicated people have been meeting consistently every two weeks for many months. I can't remember when I joined, but I know it was well before July last year because I remember missing one discussion when I stayed home to watch a stage of the Tour de France bicycle race. I'll say I've been a member of the group for about a year.
I gave myself the unenviable task yesterday of trying to explain how a contested Republican National Convention might work. Sorting out the rules by which those conventions operate is a monumental task that I described as: "Easier to untangle a hair ball inside a tornado." By the end of my presentation everyone was sufficiently confused to agree that it was complicated.
We also spent a considerable amount of time talking about the latest projections and why Donald Trump, even if racks up 1,237 delegates before the convention, might not get the nomination. The delegates, which haven't been chosen yet, will be Republican party loyalists who would rather throw their mother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (to quote one of the many books I've read) rather than disappoint someone like, say, Mitch McConnell. An editorial in the web site FiveThirtyEight.com said those loyalists almost unanimously despise Trump (he's making a mockery of their party) and given the chance, they'd vote for anyone — mabybe even Bernie Sanders — before voting for Trump.
Remember, the 1,237 are not necessarily committed. The states send "bound" delegates to the convention, which are expected to vote for their state's preferred candidate, as selected in the primary or caucus. Some states send unbound delegates, with Pennsylvania having more of those than the bound ones. So some of Trump's delegates are not obligated, either by party rules or state laws, to vote for him in the first ballot. And after the first ballot, if he doesn't get 1,237 votes, well, then hell breaks loose. With each round of balloting, more and more delegates are "released" (unbound) and free to vote according to their wishes — or, more accurately, according to their party's wishes — and the whole process devolves into chaos. At some point, someone will be seen to emerge from the smoke and ashes as the party's nominee for the November election. Currently, no one knows who that person might be. Meanwhile, the media is dizzy with anticipation.
And speaking of the media, Callum Borchers wrote an interesting column for The Washington Post this week. He basically asked, if Donald Trump is supposedly hated by nearly everyone — women, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, millennials, Mormons, Republicans, and even some blue collar white guys — then why is he doing so well in the primaries? One recent poll claimed he has a 67% unfavorable rating, the lowest of any potential candidate in the poll's 32-year history of tracking. Don't people read the many horrific stories written about him? Don't they watch the news? According to Borchers, they might, but currently only about 40% of the population believes anything they read or hear in the media, giving the media an unfavorable rating almost equal to that of Trump's.
And, to be honest, the media is to blame. They sensationalize their reporting in an attempt to grab more readers or viewers, thereby improving their ratings, and thereby increasing the amount they charge for advertising. It all comes down to profit. And so they write nonsense. "Trump demolishes Cruz in the whatever state primary, winning a spectacular 51% of the votes compared to Cruz's paltry 49%!" It's all in the words. "No extra-strength pain reliever is more effective than Excedrin," or Bufferin, or Aleve, or Tylenol, or Advil. Did you see it? No pain reliever is better. They all say it. In other words, no pain reliever is better than any other pain reliever, except the one you believe is best, which is the one you'll buy. The trick is to get you to believe something. Enter the media.
So how does this all boil down into something sensible to say about our World News Discussion Group? I've admonished them again and again. I watch France 24, DW Journal, BBC World News, PBS New Hour (sometimes), MSNBC, CNN, not Fox Noise, and I regularly check sources like The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Slate, Huffington Post, etc. And I read books. Do you remember from school when some teacher asked you to "compare and contrast" something in an essay? Compare and contrast. CNN might extol Trump's popularity compared to that of Clinton's. MSNBC might call Trump a jerk. Noam Chomsky advises people to get their news from many different sources. Then, after sifting out all the sensationalistic nonsense, you might get the facts.
Water
I read something on Friday that explained why Southern California received almost no benefit from the season's "Godzilla" El Niño weather pattern that restored nearly all of Northern California's reservoirs to full capacity. Forget climate change. Think climate changed. The West Coast, it appears, has entered into what could be a permanent weather pattern caused by a high pressure system over the Pacific. It has been stuck there for many months, and it keeps storms away or pushes them northward. And that is why the capacity of our local reservoir increased from 14.8% to only 14.9% this season. We're screwed. It is doubful that April showers will provide any relief. It's supposed to rain later this week, but no one is expressing any optimism.
What's next? Tighter water use restrictions. The county might prohibit all watering of landscape vegetation. All that drought-tolerant Dymondia I planted might die. I probably have nearly $1,000 of Dymondia in my yard. Crops will decline. More food will need to be shipped in from other areas. Higher food costs. You get the picture.
It won't make life impossible, just a little more expensive. I'm hoping they'll allow us to water at least once per week. That would keep the Dymondia alive. And there is another, albeit more expensive, positive outcome. The continuing crisis would probably encourage the county to expand the desalination plant. If I remember correctly, the plant, which is currently in its testing phase, will run at only a third of its potential capacity.
The Pacific Ocean is big. There is a lot of water out there. Making it drinkable might be expensive. But if that is our only option…