Atomic Nerds

So, this afternoon, feeling peckish, I also apparently felt ambitious. Knowing that there was a leftover chicken breast and also some leftover mushrooms, I thought to myself that I’m A Big Girl Now and I’d make myself a fast stir-fry for lunch.

I did not intend to turn this into a CN post, because I thought that this would be an extremely simple, straightforward, and therefore boring endeavor. Yeah. I think this constituted a taunting of the kitchen gods. So since I wasn’t taking the mental notes I do when I intend to blog something and it wouldn’t be that interesting anyway in painstaking detail, here’s a set of Lessons We Learned Today.

1. Stir-fry recipes that tell you to add garlic before you add meat are full of lies.
2. If the recipe wants you to let the pan get as hot as it’s going to before cooking, it will tell you this. IMMEDIATELY start adding stuff after you flick the burner. Don’t take this opportunity to wander around debating seasonings.
3. If you burn garlic, it really doesn’t matter what else you added to the pan. Carbonized garlic is the flavor of the day. It is neither appealing nor healthful.

Also, I burned my hand on the pan and damn near broke my butt slipping on a puddle of water next to the doggie dish. Awesome.

Yeah, I know, I said the mashed sweet potatoes would be next, but other planned activities tonight, we needed something relatively quick. I’d planned to do the mashed sweet potatoes next to a roast leg of lamb, and that takes time, so I picked another recipe to go with bacon and eggs- coconut pancakes from the MDA forum. It’s another entry in the “shredded stuff fried up” genre I like so well, and they looked pretty straightforward as well as tasty. Let’s take a look.

1 cup finely shredded coconut
1 cup almond flour or meal
1/4 tsp salt [table or finely ground sea]
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract [next time i'll probably up it to 2 tsp for more flavour]
1 tsp cinnamon [think i'll do the same with this]
1 tsp lemon juice
2 tbsp coconut oil, melted

I’m pretty iffy on cinnamon as a flavor- it’s not that I *dislike* it, but there are far more instances in which a recipe that includes cinnamon where I find it a distracting or overwhelming flavor than when I enjoy it. I’m reliably informed by Stingray’s entire family that I’m just plain strange this way, but there you go. I also decided to omit the vanilla because I almost always tend to prefer savory-enhancing flavors to sweet-enhancing ones- that, and I wanted to have this come out fairly basic first so I had something of a neutral flavor platform to build on if I decided these were worth a repeat.

I found the coconut oil in the “you crazy health nuts that will pay a premium” aisle of the grocery store, and the coconut in the baking aisle next to the candy, chopped nuts, and mini-marshmallows- be sure to get the unsweetened kind. On to the cooking!

1. The package says “flake”. The recipe says “finely shredded”, and we’re going for a pancake texture. Time to drag out the food processor again! Pour the entire bag of coconut into the processor on the premise that there will be more “finely shredded” coconut in a cup than there will be “flake”, and you can’t really think of a use for the thicker texture that would be hurt by having a finer shred instead. Cap down, turn on, set to “pulse”, and go for that earth-shattering “low” setting.

2. Your first clue that the bowl of the food processor is not properly affixed and aligned to the motor will be that the coconut is not shredding any finer despite furious activity on the part of the motor. Your second clue will be the faint smell of cooking coconut and the fainter smell of hot plastic. Your third clue will be your spouse coming in wondering, from the noise, what the hell is wrong with the food processor. Again. Stop jamming the button and fiddle the damn thing into place before trying again.

3. Much better. Extract a cup of the finer coconut and pour the rest into a plastic bag to throw back into the cabinet.

mix all the dry together in a large bowl. mix wet together. pour wet into dry and stir until combined.

4. Locate your medium-sized mixing bowl, which is clean when you want it for once, and dump in the coconut. Locate the almond flour and dump in that, too. Interrogation of the spouse will eventually, with no waterboarding necessary, reveal the location of the baking soda- in it goes, along with the salt. Grab a mixing implement and poke at it until it looks reasonably well combined.

5. Cheerfully forgetting the middle step of the recipe mere seconds after reading, measure out the lemon juice and put that in. It’s all going to the same place, right? Crack in two eggs. Lucky for you, your stinginess on running the central air means that the coconut oil will be liquid at room temperature rather than the solid it was at the grocery store! Yay! Two tablespoons of that! Whisk to combine.

6. Okay, that seems to be more or less a batter- at least everything is now clumped together. Including the substantial dough ball that has accumulated inside your whisk. Give it a shake, hoping to have it fall out in chunks. Huh, I guess the dough is sticky, because continued shaking is only turning into a more perfect sphere. Shake it a few more times as if that will help. Shout for advice.

7. Spouse tells you to just pry apart the whisk wires and let it fall out. They’re that flexible? Oh.

heat some extra coconut oil in a pan on medium heat. pour your batter into preferred pancake size and cook to desired brownness, flipping once.

8. Grab an acceptably medium-sized skillet (not the cast iron- Spouse will be wanting that for the bacon and eggs later) and pour in a small lake of coconut oil. Preheat the oven to the lowest temperature it will go to to hold a tray full of the finished pancakes during the rest of the cooking since at this altitude they’ll be colder than the tapwater within minutes otherwise. Set flame to medium and stare for awhile. Figure when the oil starts moving on its own it’s hot enough.

9. Using a spatula and a spoonlike implement, extract a chunk of dough and deposit into the pan. This is the time to discover that while it is sticky, the dough is also kinda dry- the pancake will need to be folded, spindled, and mutilated into a roughly flattish roughly disclike shape. Repeat, going a bit smaller this time to make for a more easily manipulated dough piece. Repeat going a little bit smaller still- and that’s about all the pan can hold.

10. Now is the time to stare and fidget for awhile wondering what constitutes a desired degree of doneness, what constitutes done in a pancake too dry to fork-check for internal wetness, how you determine the degree of browned on a side you cannot see, and exactly how ARE you going to flip them without major error. Fortunately for you, the fretting time is roughly enough time to turn the side down to a light golden brown, at least when you finally get one more or less intact up with the spatula and spoon to check the underside. We didn’t break it! Hooray!

11. The self-congratulations turn to ashes as you break off a quarter of the first pancake turning it. And then the second. Managing to flip the third just barely intact will tell you something about the upper limit of easily manipulatable coconut pancake size. Now’s a good time to ponder the meaning of life, the universe, and how much it matters how much these cook through and the question of how you can tell. Take them off the pan and transfer them to a sheet to put in the warmed oven at some point before they burn.

12. Apply the lessons learned from the first three pancakes and make them just slightly again smaller than the one that didn’t break when flipped. These will cook faster since the pan and oil have had time to get hotter, so it’s a good thing you can manipulate them without a third hand and some calculus notes. Brown on each size (amazing how fast that goes this time), then transfer to oven. Bugger off for a few minutes so your spouse can do the bacon and eggs.

13. Cut off what seems like an adequate hunk of butter from a stick and throw in the microwave to nuke until melted. Wash the fresh blueberries you picked up at the last minute. Apply butter and blueberries to the pancakes. Scurry off with some bacon and eggs and nom.

For these I’d give high marks to taste- they were just all-around more interesting than flour pancakes with a background nuttiness you’d expect from something made half from almond meal- and lower marks to texture. They were a little too dry, crumbly, and a little bit too chewy; while the chewy might be a built-in, I’d experiment more with the quantities of the wet team to deal with the dryness. Stingray and another poster in the original thread recommended a bit of milk to bolster the wet ingredients, and that’s probably the first place I’d go- perhaps even buttermilk. That same poster also mentioned a few whipped egg whites, and that would probably also help with overall cohesion.

Use more butter than the adequate-looking hunk. It’s not adequate. Enjoy.

Most people are aware that it’s a good idea to bring enough vehicle to pack out whatever it is you’re hunting. This has frustrated more than a few sports car enthusiasts who cannot find a good way to combine their interests. Fortunately, BMW owners who enjoy the tasty, tasty flesh of deer now have a new option.

How to pack a 150lb deer into a BMW Z4.

Tam may have to improvise slightly for the differences between a Z4 and a Z3, but for everyone else, happy hunting!

So today began early and was filled with busy before it was filled with tiredness, and all because things were also filled with awesome.

Las Cosas is a cooking store in Santa Fe that also runs periodic cooking classes. The owner (at least I think he’s the owner) is a retired restaurant chef who has figured out one excellent way of getting his store’s stock moving- host classes inside the store, let the students buy the niftiest gear used in class plus whatever else they might suddenly find tickles their fancy (and discount for gear used in class)… and count on the delicious smells coming from inside the store to drag mall-browsers into the store to find out what could possibly be going on. Not that I’m unhappy in the least about this business model- I loved the class and I’m sure we’ll get great mileage out of that pie plate and that nicely marked down All-Clad skillet in just-right-for-eggs size. Also the stovetop grill we had to backorder. Yeah. That marketing model works really well.

Anyway, the reason we went down there is that unlike most of the classes, the feature of the day was the head (and I think only) chef at our favorite restaurant. We can only afford to drop so much of the “fun” budget on that dollar range of food, but when we do have anything disposable in that budget plus a reason to live it up, that’s where we go- I’m sure there are other restaurants in the city with just as good food and maybe also just as good service and even just as good atmosphere, but… with a continually updating menu and folks that know us and what we like, why would we bother? Suffice to say we are fans- so when Stingray polished off the last morsel of his brown butter berry pie the last time we ate there and proclaimed to the waiter that if he knew how to make that he’d weigh four hundred pounds and the waiter said that actually, he’d be at a class at Las Cosas in a few weeks where just that would be one of the items being instructed… well hell, we called and signed up before the listing even went live on the website.

I will confess to having been more than a little nervous about the fact that the students would be cooking, because as those of you who’ve been following along know, my kitchen skills are still pretty, um, basic. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep up; I needn’t have been, the students were split into teams to tackle separate dishes, sides, and sauces, so that the burden of prepwork was evenly spread. The teaching being provided for skills that might be new, like roasting and skinning peppers, was also excellent. I stopped worrying and started having fun as soon as that portion of class began, after the rundown on everything we’d be making plus helpful information like where to actually GET some of the more exotic ingredients in Santa Fe, which was extremely helpful (Although the answer on some of it was basically “suck up the price on mail-order if you really want it”. Oh well.). Naturally, we elected to be on Team Pie, which thanks to previous conversations on the subject with a friend almost immediately became internally known as Team PAH!

Team PAH! operated like a well-oiled or at least adequately lubricated machine; drys got blended, fats got distributed, and Stingray, as the person with experience making actual pie crusts rather than purchasing them, held sway over the combining and working of the pasty dough. The pie was assembled as rapidly as chilling, cooling, and browning phases allowed, and popped into the oven to bake as the most time-intensive feature of the class. In the meantime, casting my eyes about, I learned a fair bit about grilling and julienning vegetables, how to not only wake up the palate but also give it a shiatsu massage with your seasoning, and that really fine food really is fairly simple- all you really need is good ingredients, a really developed palate, and a good working knowledge of food. By the end of class I felt like I could go home and make anything myself of what I’d seen, even the spring rolls, which I predicted I’d manage to stick to my eyebrows or something but actually managed to roll adequately without disaster or disgrace.

The pie turned out awesome, by the way. The crust was so perfect it was the inspiration for buying that pie plate- we’ve never managed to achieve that pleasing brown on the bottom crust before without risking burning the filling. Simple to make with only one slightly difficult to obtain ingredient. And no, you can’t have the recipe. Sorry.

….PAH!

So today I’ve been so busy arguing over at Kevin’s that I haven’t even responded to my own comments, let alone come up with any of my own content.

So for those who were curious, I’ll post a quick little review of the Vibrams, a whole two days into using them.

These things are neater than kitten toes. Regardless of any touted biomechanical benefits or possible drawbacks, they’re just plain fun to walk around in; you can feel what’s under your feet without pain, and it really does improve proprioception; it’s a bit like taking a blindfold off a sense I didn’t know I had. It makes me want to hop around like a kid. I’m sure the “ooh cool” factor will wear off, but in the meantime I’m enjoying it.

Today’s effort at “off my butt” included prescribed running, so I tried that, and yes, on pavement. No, my feet and joints don’t hurt except for the incipient blister at the back of my heel, which is more a breaking-in and callus development issue than a problem with the shoes. I did do surprisingly well given I haven’t done any running at all in months- at least as well as when I was keeping up with the fitness thing more intensively for longer, if not better. It definitely improved my stride to something more efficient and less hard-hitting, but my overall form has a long way to go anyway, so someone who actually DID like running and had adapted to running shoes would probably have a different experience.

So so far they’re “as advertised” for those benefits I can immediately perceive. I do not regret the eighty-five bucks and my cushioned sneakers feel weird now.

ETA for those thinking of trying this: If my feet tend toward any morphological extreme at all, it’s high, tight arches. I usually have to buy longer laces than the ones shoes come with because of this, and if I walk through water onto concrete my footprints have only a slim line on the outer edge between the ball and the heel. Someone with flatter feet- especially someone who hadn’t spent all in-house time barefoot for two months first- would probably take a lot more time to adjust.

…With apologies to e.e. cummings.

There’s a fair bit of overlap between my commentariat and Kevin Baker’s, basically because I probably have a bigger wordcount in comments there left over the course of this decade than I do here. For whatever combination of luck, personality, and topicality, the folks there tend to make me wordy from time to time.

For that reason, some of you have already encountered Markadelphia, who essentially functions as Kevin’s reactive target range. (Or, depending on your mental image generator, the site’s gimp. That’s what usually plays in my head when he pops up in a thread for the first time.) The simplistic way to describe him would be as an extremely stock liberal idiot, of the sort that would get accused of being a ridiculous political strawman if he were a fictional character, but it doesn’t really do him, liberals, or strawmen justice; he’s really much more like an Eliza program fed a string of the most commonly occurring search strings and phrases on Daily Kos.

Now, the thing is, despite my politics and despite who I generally congregate with in the blogosphere, I do not actually dislike liberals. I’d have to check a lot of friends off my list if I ever decided to, and generally become a much more paranoid and generally angry person. I have this cute, heart-dotted belief that for most people, if their politics are actually well-thought-out to any degree at all and not just based in raw tribalism (and this may be the most default mode for “political” people on both sides), most differences boil down to a combination of fundamental philosophical differences in how you understand the world, and the priority ranking you put on your values. This is fine. I can solve all of these problems, when they come up, by applying enough beer to the situation at hand. Camaraderie between people that otherwise get along is usually much stronger than politics.

I don’t even, when you get right down to it, usually get all that exercised about people who are assholes and express their fundamental rectum nature through the medium of politics. Assholes are encountered every day, and usually, when I feel like bothering with batting them around at all (which is rare on days I have anything whatsoever better to do with my time), it doesn’t get to me. Their arguments and assertions are usually pretty standard and they behave more or less like normal people, except with a lot more gratuitous insult and general primate agonistic display, text format edition.

What it takes to get me genuinely, britches-burningly furious- and willing to write off the other person as a waste of perfectly good carbon- isn’t an insult to me, or to my politics, or my nonreligion, or what have you. They have to prove they have absolutely no value above that of scoring rhetorical points for their side. Sometime roughly a year ago, Markadelphia managed to do this by equating having to work for a living and be in contracts that require you to uphold a financial obligation (otherwise known as “a boring job” and “a mortgage”) with slavery- not metaphorical “wage slavery”, not even indentured servitude, actual honest-to-$deity kidnap you from your tribe and whip you and sell your children slavery. See, you have to pay your bills and fulfill your contracts, so it’s like the system owns you! It’s slavery! So we should end it, because we should be opposed to slavery!

I should never have had to explain to anyone why this comparison wasn’t just disingenuous, wasn’t just cheap, wasn’t just stupid, but amoral. In order to say that and have any excuse other than having been raised in cardboard box with no exposure whatsoever to history, you have to sit there, and think about slave ships and slave auctions and slave-catchers and whips and chains and shattered families, and you have to think “Well, I’m kinda stuck in this mortgage and I don’t really like my job, I guess it’s kinda like I’m a slave too!” And THEN, having had time to sit there and decide on the argument you are going to construct to criticize the oppressive system, you have to actually type out word by word that they’re really the same thing. And stand by it. You have to consciously summon up all the horror and gravity that this word carries and use it to try and make the point that modern middle-class first-worlders just don’t have it easy enough and this proves we’ve not gotten beyond, have I used this word enough that it no longer sounds like it means something real, SLAVERY.

How much do the words “fascism” and “Nazi” and “Hitler” mean to you anymore? They get thrown around so much that “fascist” now just means “a political system I don’t like”, and “Nazi” and “Hitler” are both almost jokes now, to the point where there’s a law of internet forum discussion about it and Iran can trot out “Israel is just like Nazi Germany” and everyone just sort of sighs and rolls their eyes. It’s lost nearly all meaning now except those who lived it, and those who saw it. There are no fucking words for how much I hate that this is true, but it’s the end point for this syndrome. You want to score a cheap emotional point in a debate you’re maybe not doing so well in, you borrow something horrible and claim that what your opponent supports that you don’t like is JUST LIKE THAT and how could you support such HORROR.

You eat meat! You’re part of something just like the holocaust!

Your mom didn’t abort you! You’re just like a holocaust survivor!

Heterosexual intercourse is penetrative and married women are tacitly expected to have sex with their husbands! Marital sex is just like rape!

This crap proves to me, with no further evidence needed, that the person or organization who uttered it has lost all sense and perception of right and wrong and are no longer worth even remotely humoring, let alone engagement.

That is my line. Call me an angry conservative or an angry liberal or an angry libertarian or just plain pissed off, but that’s my reason, and I think it’s a good one.

So, back in April Peter posted a link to an article in the Daily Mail about how more than just hippies are starting to question whether running shoes actually help protect you from injury or whether they may actually be more like the cause of frequent injury in runners. I kind of doubt the latter- from what I’ve seen watching the running community the most common cause of running injuries is the fact that cardiovascular conditioning comes much faster than conditioning of bone and connective tissue and runners push their training schedule to the former rather than the latter- but it’s an intriguing notion.

The place where I hang out when my “want to be physically capable of enjoying life when I’m eighty instead of just right now” side is ascendant over my hedonist side is very big on shucking the expensive, hyper-engineered shoes and going barefoot or close to, so this was not a new idea to me. I’m not particularly rigid on the whole “living like a caveman is good for you” thing- for examples admonitions to avoid sunscreen because of the “chemicals” don’t impress me much when relatives living in the sunny band of the country who eschewed it as children seem to be getting incipient skin cancers lasered off once every five years or so- but it seems the crazy barefoot people have more actual research backing them up than the “motion control super duper space shoe” people do. Since they tend to keep up with nutty trends anyway, I also began to notice more of the fitness community I hang out on the sidelines of picking up the trend as well. They’re about split down the middle whether it’s only good for sprinting or the best thing since protein shakes.

It also does have a certain straight up evolutionary as well as biomechanical logic to it; our feet aren’t really evolved to constantly be encased in what is essentially a cushioned rubber rocking surface, and it essentially blocks a lot of the proprioceptive (that’s Science for “your body’s sense of where your bits are in space”) feedback that the toes are essentially there to provide, as well as providing minute adjustments for balance. So some of the more overheated-sounding hooey about protecting joints and balance the barefoot runners (who, frankly, sometimes DO come off as crazy in the same way the raw foodists do) does have some logical foundation.

I’ve always been very much “shod”. I didn’t do much running around barefoot in summer as a kid because in Phoenix, the paved areas are too brutally hot for it, and the unpaved areas tend to be very heavy on non-foot-friendly sharp things, animate and inanimate alike. Inside, well… let’s just say that I had reason not to blithely trust my dogs’ housebreaking at the time and no desire to be finding lapses with my exposed little piggies. Eighteen years of this plus four more of “I can’t go barefoot here, I’ll catch a festering foot fungus”, and the habit of wearing some kind of foot covering was deeply ingrained.

So this summer I decided to only wear shoes when necessary- i.e. going anywhere further than a few feet outside, the hostile ground is just as bad here in NM- and it’s been interesting. I was very definitely biomechanically dependent on the support of the shoe- having my feet give me screaming hell just for spending two and a half hours standing and cooking was proof enough of that. I’ve also found that on a non-biomechanical level I just plain enjoy being able to feel what I’m standing or walking on; it’s kind of like the difference between driving a car with a stick shift and an auto, once I learned that- the extra degree of feedback and control is nice. I find myself regretting it a bit when I have to put my shoes back on to go out.

I’m nothing if not willing to undertake an experiment if I’m curious about something, and I am now eighty-five bucks worth of curious. My Vibrams- shoes designed to be as close enough as possible to barefoot except with a layer of protection for your soles so the sharpies don’t get you- should get here tomorrow. If they’re sized right (which they might not be, ordering online is always exciting like that), starting then I’ll be wearing those instead of regular shoes wherever socially permissable by dress code that isn’t snake territory. (Hell if I’ll ever hike in something that doesn’t provide many inches of thick leather between me and a rattler.) About a month in I’ll give a review- how long it took to adapt and if I did at all, if it hurt and how much, if running doesn’t actually go better in the things after all (I hate running, so this may be missing from the review), and if I really did get the claimed benefits of better balance and coordination.

Stay tuned.

I am no huge fan of the ACLU. I don’t think they’re the agent of creeping evil that many conservatives do, and I DO think they sometimes do what needs to be done and stand up for the rights of the obnoxious to protect the rights of all (it takes institutional balls to defend the right of Klansmen to wear their hoods), they are most definitely marching in step to their biggest donors- which tend to the left-liberal end of the spectrum, and thus they have decided that they’re not going to touch some “rights”. Note the double fudge irony in that their position is that second amendment rights are a “collective” right- even though basically their entire existence as an institution rests on defending violations of the rights of individuals, under the principle that that’s a violation of a right, period. Suffice it to say they are mostly only interested in defending the “rights” of those that play well with their donors, although they occasionally manage to take a stand on principle rather than politics*.

That said, an organization that apparently exists as its counter-point, if it exists at all beyond the minds of a few people and their lawyers, is getting it wrong on an epic scale. The basics of this story: a couple of older folks who were especially blue in the nose lobbied their local library to get a Young Adult book banned, which they alleged to be sexually explicit and traumatizing. (If it IS explicit, that somehow managed not to come up in the reviews.) The local library, taking the traditional library position on censorship, voted 9-0 to tell the bluenoses to bugger off. The bluenoses lawyered up, and a Robert C. Braun of the “Christian Civil Liberties Union” filed for a couple hundred kilobucks’ worth of damages for the supposed mental suffering the exposure to a book with gay people in it caused to his clients.

I haven’t gotten to the civil rights part yet and how, one presumes, this came to be a case for a civil liberties union of any stripe.

He’s also suing for the “right” of his clients to take all copies of this book from this library and burn them in public. Quoth one of the bluenoses:

Ginny Maziarka declared, “We vehemently reject their standards and their principles,” and characterized the debate as “a propaganda battle to maintain access to inappropriate material.”

Well… she certainly made the flat out propaganda battle angle clear, though I’m not sure she knows entirely what she’s saying.

In a final not-really-an-irony, here’s what else the bluenoses want:

Citing “Wisconsin’s sexual morality law,” the plaintiffs also request West Bend City Attorney Mary Schanning to impanel a grand jury to examine whether the book should be declared obscene and making it available a hate crime.

Restrict free speech for the Nazi across the street, and don’t be surprised when someone else comes along and stamps it out against any minority they don’t like, even if you do. Nothing could make the reason for defense of individual liberties regardless of individual any clearer.

*I would like to note that I think the accusations that they’re institutionally anti-Christian are misguided- they’re quite interested in being a pain in the asses of the overly PC on the subject as well as the god-squadders.

First I was betrayed by a major organ that jumped out of the bushes and beat me into uselessness, then there was a surprise swarm of breeding ants in the office, and then there was a raid.

Yeah. I actually have something to say for once, it’s just that now I don’t have *time*. Hopefully tomorrow I will, providing all my bits obey.

And strangely it wound up being more for mom. For the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long, we had a range trip with my folks. They’re finally getting serious about picking up CCW cards, and since NM has a requirement that you carry something larger than a .22 (I believe this is what’s known as a “common sense” gun law), she wanted to try a few things out. Dad hauled along his 1911 and a couple revolvers (didn’t get the models, unfortunately), as did we.

A few rounds went downrange of .357 through a Ruger Something while everyone else plinked. Nah.

A few rounds went downrange through the various 1911s (she was much more accurate with LabRat’s… go figure). More comfortable, but still nothing wild. And just about everything going low and right, so there’s some work to do regardless.

Finally, the part that just tickles me pink, she agreed to try the revolver we hauled along on the grounds of “ought to try it all”. As it turns out, my mom kicks ass with a .45 Colt Smith & Wesson 25-5. Everything in a very respectable group right in the 8-9 rings on a vintage 90s target of Saddam Hussein.

Yes, she’s going to borrow it for the revolver portion of the qualification shoot. Doesn’t that just bring a smile?

Via RobertaX, we get a tale of Feynman and Heinsenberg on a road trip (pardon the click chain to get there, but credit where due and all).

Hee… “Nice going…”

Tam’s looking at a pretty hefty auto repair bill. The Nazi Rollerskate has experienced some epic fail, and those things are NOT cheap to fix. Tam’s fixing on having a gun sale to cover costs, but the thought of Tam with fewer of her guns makes me a sad panda. So I went and hit the tip jar right n’yah on the left. It’s there below the photo and above the Amazon linkage.

My logic is, I may normally read blogs for free, but I’m entirely willing to drop money I’ll never see again on eating out with someone whose company I enjoy. The meal’s over in an hour and I’ll never see that food again in that state either, but yon blog has archives and the “company” is certainly fine. So it doesn’t bother me a bit to pay once in awhile for a friend in need, y’know?

Make sense to anyone else? I kinda thought it might.

ETA: Okay, so the relevant button is technically over on the right. I say left and right are bourgeois abstract concepts anyway. Hmmph.

This “total lack of anything to say” thing is starting to get severely old.

Anyway, have some linkage: Lunch, With Hawk. Exactly what it says on the tin: a man with a camera stops to have some nice barbecued chicken, only to have his lunch perched in by a hawk. If I had to make a wild-ass guess, I’d say it was a juvenile redtail- thus explaining the disorganized plumage, the presence in New York, and the cluelessness- but truth be told I’m not *that* great at hawk identification unless it’s presenting some nice clear collection of field marks to me. The commenters seem to think it’s a Cooper’s, though everyone seems to agree that’s a confused young thing.

Neat photos and the cook in the end is general proof of the badassness of cooks.

Still battling the forces of llama. Did you know that llamas secret a toxin that inhibits human sleep? Llamas are also the only animal that Alton Brown refuses to cook, on the grounds of “That’s just what it wants you to do, and I’m not letting that bastard win.” Kang won’t even try to eat it. She sniffed the llama, and went “arroooooo” and slunk out to build a new den in the back yard.

So while we continue to get llama fur and llama crap out of the carpet, have someone else’s effort, a rather clever short story about a radio host.

Llama!

Click for big.

…Because we didn’t, but one was shipped here anyway. It’s made content generation a bit tougher than usual; Stingray’s spent the week chewing on the walls and I’m fresh out of ideas.

So, for my readers with an interest in very early human history, a question: what colors would be available to a stone age or just plain primitive artist who wished to mark up a cave wall or rock with some nice paintings or petroglyphs, assuming he had pretty much any naturally possible to work with?

Also, for those who participated in last week’s meme, I haven’t forgotten about you- it’s just that coming up with five questions for everybody takes more creative energy than I thought it would, and that’s what llamas feed on before they get to your sanity.

Okay, the close runner up when I polled y’all awhile back on what you’d like to see here was the hash, so here it is. This recipe is from Bruce Aidells and Dennis Kelly’s The Complete Meat Cookbook, where its given title is “Hammy Yammy Hash”. That is the first and last time I will ever type that phrase. I have some dignity and so does my food. It’s pork and root vegetable hash, dammit.

The specific recipe is actually meant to be one of those in the book that’s essentially a tasty way to prepare leftovers from one of the previous recipes, and this one is meant to be subsequent to a meal of ham steaks or pork chops with an apple and cider pan sauce. Since planning the dinner menu is one of those chores that tends to be accopanied by a lot of blank stares and “ummmm”, we filled a slot earlier in the week with that recipe that we doubled and I kept two pork chops and some of the sauce to use with this one. If you want to do it just the way I did, earlier in your week, brown some pork chops or ham steaks in a big, heavy nonstick pan. Then, to the pan add the following ingredients:

2 cups apple cider, 1/2 cup packed light or dark brown sugar, 1 cup chopped dried apples, 1/2 teaspoon ground sage, 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/4 cup cider vinegar

Boil rapidly until the liquid is reduced to a little under two cups. Whisk in 1.5 tablespoons of dijon mustard and reduce to a simmer. Return the steaks or chops to the pan and cook over low heat for 10-15 minutes more. Put the meat on a platter and reduce the sauce more to a syrupy consistency if you have to. Serve. Save some sauce and meat for the damned hash if you’re going to bother with this runup at all. (Also I would consider cutting the sugar back quite a bit- this was very tasty but too aggressively sweet*.)

Alternatively, you can just use any leftover pork or ham with enough integrity to be diced, and instead of that sauce use maple syrup (uch, I wouldn’t) or a mixture of apple cider and brown sugar.

ANYWAY. On to the hash. We need:

1 1/2 cups peeled, diced rutabaga
2 cups peeled, diced butternut squash
2 1/2 cups peeled, diced red yams or leftover baked sweet potato
2 cups chopped onions
2 cups diced pork
2-3 tablespoons olive oil or melted butter
1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
pinch each ground ginger and cinnamon
1/2 cup apple and cider sauce, or maple syrup, or 2 tablespoons brown sugar dissolved in 1/2 cup cider
3/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese (optional)

As I said, we made the pork chops in apple and cider sauce earlier in the week, so I had both the chops and the sauce ready for those ingredients. The grocery store had “yams” (red-skinned sweet potatoes, real yams are something else again and look like dead toads), so I elected to go with those instead of screwing around with baking sweet potatoes. I had no earthly idea about how much of any given root vegetable translates into cup measurements, so squinting at the proportions in the recipe plus the relative sizes of the vegetables in the store, I shrugged and picked up two medium-sized rutabagas, two yams, and two of the presliced quarters of butternut squash my store had in the produce section. (Didn’t want to mess around with a whole butternut and it saved work.)

1. Holy cats that’s a lot of “peeled and diced” things. First things first- let’s have some music to knife to. Last week’s 90′s alternative was a bit weird when Kurt Cobain started wailing “RAPE ME” while we were slicing mushrooms, so let’s try blues this time. Bound to be better**. Collect your implements: cutting board, favorite knife, peeler. The peeler may require some archaeological work in the drawers and cabinets- if so, wash it first.

2. Might as well go in listed ingredient order. Choose a rutabaga, lop off the top and bottom to make a more even gripping/slicing surface, and start peeling. As you begin navigating rough, irregular skin with highly variable degrees of force needed to peel while the blade frequently goes close to the hand holding the rutabaga, begin fantasizing about a different peeler. Make a note to yourself for the next visit to the cooking store. Remove all skin from both rutabagas.

3. Squash next! Since these are presliced quarters and butternut squash have nice, smooth surfaces with a gentle curve, this bit of peeling will go like a dream. Peel, peel, peel, with a merry tune.

4. Time to tackle the yams, which make the rutabagas look like racquetballs when it comes to regular surface and skin thickness. It helps to peel the narrowest end first and proceed toward the fattest- that way you’re not grating perfectly good yam mass off in huge sheets every time you get through a tough section and your hand and peeler go shooting forward. Easier on the risk of shaving off your own skin, too. Eventually the yams will be peeled.

5. Now comes the “fun” part: we’re going to learn how to dice on the fly. Slicing is easy- nice even strokes that proceed linearly- and so are chopping and mincing, which are basically just attacking the food with a knife until it’s pulverized down to the required level of “tiny pieces”. Dicing, on the other hand, requires creating pieces that are more or less the same size out of food units that are not shaped like cubes. Oh god.

6. First we’ll try it with the rutabaga! First technique tried: Halve the rutabaga, then quarter it, then keep on halving rutabaga units until you have pieces about the right size. Advantages: intuitive and easy to execute. Disadvantages: pieces are awkwardly shaped, not all the same size, and it took FORBLOODYEVER.

7. It’s not going to ruin anything if we’ve got a bit too much or a bit too little of anything, but in the spirit of trying not to be off by orders of magnitude, let’s take time out to grab a measuring cup and see just how much rutabaga we’ve got. Hmmm- it appears to be roughly a cup and a quarter of diced material per medium-sized rutabaga. We’ll put the other three quarters of rutabaga in a sealable baggie and I’m sure we’ll use them later for, um, something. Maybe more hash if this turns out nice.

8. Next we’ll have a go at the squash! Second technique tried: Slice the quarters of butternut, then line up the curved slices in lines a bit shorter than your blade, then slice again. Then very roughly chop to try and impose some order on the still-too-big pieces. Advantages: faster than the previous tried technique. Disadvantages: pieces still very unevenly sized. Also, squash is annoyingly sticky on the blade. On the plus side, the two quarters of butternut turn out to be worth almost exactly two cups of diced material.

9. Yam next. Juding by the volumetrics on the last two veggies, we have got waaaay too much peeled yam. Oh well. Time for technique number three: slice the sweet potato into thick rounds, then stack two or three rounds on top of each other and make several lengthwise slices. Turn the stack and repeat. Advantages: best technique so far for evenly sized pieces and reasonable speed. Disadvantages: probably wouldn’t have worked so well on a more or less sticky vegetable.

10. As it turns out, the larger yam, diced, is just a bit more than two and a half cups, so pop the other one in another baggie. Maybe we’ll grate it and the leftover rutabaga and have another run at fried vegetable pancakes.

11. Extract half an onion*** from the fridge, peel off the remaining paper, lop off the bottom, and start chopping. Ahhh. Bliss. Hack that allium down into submission! Transfer as much of the debris as possible from your cutting board to your measuring cup- perfectly, almost exactly two cups’ worth. Tidy the counter up a bit from where you got a little too enthusiastic on the chopping.

12. Get the baggie with the leftover pork chops and sauce. Extract the pork chops leaving as much of the leftover sauce and apple behind as possible. Slice each loin chop down the middle, then dice the resultant halves. Since meat has a dice-friendly consistency and chops are pretty flat, the cross-slice method will work well here as well. YOU ARE FINALLY DONE CHOPPING AND DICING JESUS HAPLOID CHRIST FINALLY.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, toss the rutabaga cubes with 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons of the oil or butter. Spread in a large baking dish and bake for 10 minutes.

13. Yeah… somewhere in all that produce disassembly, you forgot you were going to have to turn on the oven and cook at some point. Ass. Turn the oven to 350 degrees. Toss your rutabaga… pieces… with some oil and spread in a large baking dish. The oven is now up to something under 200. Find a book.

In the same bowl, toss the squash in the remaining oil or butter. Season with salt and pepper, thyme, ginger and cinnamon and add to rutabagas along with the onions and diced ham. (If you’re using uncooked sweet potatoes, toss them with oil along with the squash.)

14. Now that you’re a few chapters in and the oven is ready, toss the rutabagas in the oven and set the timer. Throw the squash and yams into the bowl. Toss. That’s not nearly enough oil left to coat- hit it with some more. Much better. Now it’s time for a very exciting interlude to hunt for the thyme! Throw open every cabinet in the kitchen and ransack the spice rack! Get the stepladder! Find the oregano and the parsley and the dried bouquet garni mix and every dry leaf spice you own except the thyme!

15. Locate the thyme on the counter behind you where you never put it up after last week. Ass.

16. Add the pinches of cinnamon and ginger. Tenatively strew the bowl with conservative amounts of salt and pepper- you can fix too little easier than too much. Toss. Once the rutabagas are done with their initial bake, throw absolutely everything into the baking dish except the sauce and cheese and mix up as thoroughly as you can.

Mix well and bake about 45 minutes or until the vegetables are fork-tender, turning mixture occasionally with a spatula. If using leftover sweet potatoes, add them in the last 10 minutes of cooking.

17. Time for hurry up and wait. I settled for three fifteen minute increments on the kitchen timer with two breaks for spatula rearrangement.

18. 45 minutes later, using our trusty and highly calibrated Cooking Fork, the vegetables are… not fork-tender! FAILURE. TIME PENALTY TEN MINUTES.

When done, stir in the maple syrup or brown sugar dissolved in apple cider and mix until everything is well coated. Sprinkle with the cheese, if using, and bake for 5 to 10 minutes longer.

19. Okay, now that we pass the fork test, let’s address the sauce. Pouring it into a measuring cup, that’s… about half of what we want. Nab a bottle of hard cider from the fridge and top it off. Keep the rest for yourself. Sprinkle on the cheese- cheddar cheese and apples are a winning combination and it won’t hurt the rest. Pop back into the oven for another ten to let the cheese melt and bubble while you go enjoy your cider.

20. Extract from oven and spoon into the serving vessel of your choice. Nom.

This turned out reasonably well and there were no major disasters. It was tasty enough and worked well for the basic purpose of hash- converting leftovers and long-keeping vegetables into dinner. If anything it was on the bland side; if I make it again I’ll be looking to jazz it up, maybe with some garlic, maybe with some more salt, maybe just with more cheese. I also might consider roasting the veggies longer or at a higher temperature and then adding in the pork near the end of the cooking time.

Total prep time: ~2 hours not counting oven time.

*Or, try it as written first. Upon preview Stingray realized he’d forgotten the mustard when he made this. With that the sauce might balance better.

**Not really. Way too much wailing about being drunk and destitute. Not actually a huge change from Cobain. Next week we’ll try death metal- they will be the darkest, most brutal mashed sweet potatoes EVER.

***”A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter the size of the onion, the dish, or the woman.” – Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment.

So in my last Cooking Noob post, the majority of the comments I got about from friends later was not so much about the food but about an aside I had made while slicing mushrooms about how they’re a bit phallic and coincidentally also the sexual organ of the fungus and not actually the main fungal body itself.

Field biologists, who deserve their reputation within biology for being the most, ah, eccentric group, have one-upped me this week.

One of the more venerable models of field biology, if you’re not going to go sit on your ass following a group of social animals for nine months out of the year and write about them for the other three (like being a soap opera writer, except much less comfortable), is getting a whole pack of them together, begging your respective parent institutions for some money, and going off somewhere remote where the species are barely known at all and spending all your time on expense on discovery and collection- finding things no one else has seen, sticking them in jars or rough and ready taxidermy jobs, and once verifying their newness upon returning home, reporting the basic details of their existence to the world and then the best part, giving it a name.

Well, a herpetologist named Robert Drewes who is apparently well experienced in this sort of expeditionary science, having already gotten a frog and a snake named after him, made what was either the serendipitous or unfortunate choice to include a mycologist friend of his on his next trip to Remote Island No One That Speaks Latin Ever Goes, Africa. As hoped for, they netted some new species, including the mycologist, who discovered a new species of stinkhorn.

Now, when I say table mushrooms are phallic, you need a little bit of imagination. However, stinkhorns look like this:

The new species looks like this:

Given a world of possibilities, the mycologist opted not to name it after himself (although so far as I know he might already have half a dozen mushrooms named after him), but after his esteemed friend, colleague, and expedition leader: thus the newest species to join Dr. Drewes’ list of conquests is Phallus Drewesii. The genus name actually isn’t new- Phallus is a pre-existing and well-known genus, the one to which the common stinkhorn belongs. Dr. Drewes got the honor partly because he is the esteemed expedition leader, fearless leader, and all-father, but mostly because it’s one of the smallest representatives of the genus ever discovered.

And thus, by the hallowed rules of taxonomy, will be how a camp dick joke became immortalized in the Linnean system forever. I love science so much right now I think I may cry.

*sniff*

Darwin published two great books: Origin of Species, and The Descent of Man and Selection In Relation To Sex. This is not to say they were the only ones, but they were the ones to go on to have the most foundational influence on evolutionary theory to come. Sexual selection theory has, ah, evolved a lot since then, but Darwin’s original frame on the matter was the selective forces produced by competition among males, which he phrased as the “struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex.”

138 years later, it turns out everything is a lot more complicated than that, up to and including the individual definition of “sex”.

Reef and deep-sea fish in particular tend to develop systems of sex, gender, and reproduction that seem from a mammalian perspective to be odd. When your habitat consists of maybe a few square feet or less, or you could possibly travel miles of ocean without ever seeing another member of your species, the dynamic that we think of as the traditional male-female one becomes problematic. If your internal plumbing is actually fairly similar between males and females, with the important differences only being in which kinds of gametes your gonads are producing, then an option not on the table for animals that don’t just squirt their gametes out into the immediate environment and hope for the best becomes sensible: changing gender as convenient.

Let’s talk clownfish. Everybody loves clownfish because they’re colorful and cute as hell, and they make a nice little story of symbiosis with their relationship to sea anemones. They also make us pair-bonding hominids feel very warm and fuzzy because they form stable mated pairs that last until the death or disappearance of either partner. Awwww, cute.

Any given suitably sized anemone will contain a mated pair of male and female clownfish, and as many juvenile clownfish as that particular anemone can comfortably sustain. As a general rule the offspring of the original pair disperse shortly after hatching (effectively, they are plankton) and find an anemone that has room for one more, though they don’t like to go too far from their original home anemone if they can help it. All juvenile clownfish are technically neuters, with no functional reproductive organs. They stay this way until something in particular happens- the removal of one of the adult mated host pair. When that happens to the male, the largest of the juveniles will mature into a fertile adult male and take his place. Clownfish sort quite neatly by size that way- the largest clownfish in a given anemone is always the female, and the second-largest the adult male. Makes choosing an heir extremely simple.

When it happens to the female, the adult male will immediately proceed to become a female, growing in size and trading in his testes for ovaries. The largest of the juveniles then becomes an adult male and a new pair is formed.

Kinda puts a whole new spin on why Marlin was so desperate to find Nemo, doesn’t it? Personally I think the movie is much more interesting this way, but your mileage may vary.

I ran across this on an LJ friend’s journal (which is locked so I can’t link it, but hi Scarab!), and it seemed like a lovely little content-generator, so here goes. The rules of the game are thus: comment on the post and the original blogger will give you five questions. Here are the five she gave me.

1, The holodeck – possible during this century, or a little beyond our abilities?

Beyond. Physics is not my strongest suit, but the holodeck, while an incredibly spiffy plot device, is one of the most handwaved aspects of Trek physics. Generating an environment with effectively solid objects that appear and disappear at the push of a button is no trivial task… but if you don’t mind a creepier version, we’re MUCH further along the path to being able to manipulate the brain well enough that we could perhaps create the experience rather than the actual environment.

2, Is imagination important to a mathematician?

Extremely, as it is to any scientist, hard or “soft”. In order to innovate, you have to be able to take discrete collections of facts and then imagine possible new ways they could interact to create new results; otherwise you’re just cataloguing, and while you can get away with that to some degree in some of the sciences, mathematics isn’t really one of them. If anything they have a far greater pressure on them to be imaginative than many visual artists, as their field is one that exists purely in the abstract. Math is one of those fields where learning discrete facts and skills takes so much time (all of primary and secondary school and most of a college education) that it’s hard to see where the imagination and creativity comes in unless you ARE one of those people.

3, Your opinion on the assumption that violence in video games causes an increase in violence in real life?

Disagree. To the extent there’s a correlation I suspect it’s for the same reason there’s a correlation between people who play football video games and people that actually like to play football from time to time- people that already enjoy an activity are more likely to enjoy the video game version as well. As a species we seem to be perpetually preoccupied with the line between reality and fantasy, but in practice people that actually have trouble with the difference have a name- severely mentally ill. I’d question whether people who wring their hands over violence in movies and games have ever experienced real violence from either end; viscerally it’s an *incredibly* different experience. Some few individuals find they enjoy it, most emphatically do not.

4, The government: is there, or is there not, a worldwide conspiracy of some kind in progress?

I don’t believe our government or any other is competent enough to run a successful conspiracy. They can barely hold on to basic intelligence programs without having the New York Times cheerily reporting on every last detail, seem to be fundamentally incapable of spending or earning efficiently, and are the source of all jokes about bureaucracies. Run a highly secret and complex plan with thousands of participants? Not happening.

5, How on earth do you GROOM a dog with as much fur and form as Kang?

Vigorously. That thick double coat actually doesn’t mat or tangle and it sheds dirt, so it’s just a matter of “a lot of coat on a lot of dog”. Most of the time it needs minimal attention, but when they “blow coat”- shed out their entire undercoats, which happens twice a year- you can brush and brush and brush and there is still MORE LOOSE FUR. You need lots of arm stamina and to just do it daily until it’s over.

Gratuitous photo of Kang fully groomed for show:

Posture, young lady, posture!