Monica

My fourth-season Blake's 7 DVDs came last week. In this season they have a new-to-them ship with a computer named Slave. I don't think I had previously noticed that the computer addresses Avon as "master" but the others as "sir". I wonder if Avon threatened it. :-)

Sunday night we joined ralphmelton (birthday boy), lorimelton, and mrpeck at John Harvard's in Monroeville. Dani and I ordered a beer sampler to explore the options; we got the smaller one, which is five five-ounce glasses (your choice of beers). They deliver the sampler on a placemat with a key (so your glasses go on specific places on the mat); I hadn't noticed that the list was ordered from less to more hoppy/bitter until they lined ours up on one side of the sheet. :-)

Tonight's dinner was almost a case of "grandfather's axe": I followed the recipe on the can of coconut milk, except that I used chicken instead of shrimp and broccoli instead of asparagus and onions instead of bell peppers, but it's still the recipe on the side of the can. (Verdict for next time: needs spices; try ginger.)

Dani and I talked about making reservations for an upcoming SCA event (war practice) tonight and we both realized that we're going entirely on inertia. Neither of us is actually drawn to this particular event this year; we're just running on auto-pilot. So we might not do that. Don't know yet. (It was actually Dani who pointed this out; I've become less active in the SCA and am being careful not to influence him in that direction, but he's feeling "eh" about this one on his own. We were just at an event a couple weeks ago, and that seems to have satisfied us both for the nonce.)

At the shabbaton I talked with someone who's currently taking private Hebrew lessons, and she suggested that we share a lesson slot and pair up as partners. I think she's more advanced than I am and I pointed this out, and she said that's fine. We'll probably start this after the ulpan. (Different teacher. She doesn't like the one I'm currently taking classes from and she says her tutor is much better.) This should be quite helpful, and if not, I can drop out and she can go back to what she was doing.

Tonight we attended a pot-luck dinner with the theme "I like cooking with wine; sometimes I even put it in the food" (which has to be one of the best themes we've had in a while). The host clarified that any alcohol would do; she was not restricting it to wine. So we decided to make Welsh rarebit. (Or rabbit, as Dani and half the web calls it.) I had never heard of this dish until Dani mentioned it some years ago, and neither of us has made it before -- but the pot-lucks are in part about experimenting with new things, so off we went. I compared about a dozen recipes found via Google and chose one that seemed to be typical of the lot. There was one outlier, a baked dish, but otherwise the consensus is that Welsh rarebit is a cheese sauce, made with spices and either beer or milk, poured over bread (perhaps toasted, perhaps not).

All of those recipes called for a double boiler. I was speculating about combinations of pans we have that might be pressed into service; a double boiler is just a pot full of boiling water holding a smaller pot with your food, after all. I speculated that this style of indirect heat was to keep the cheese from burning. Dani pointed out that the problem with cooking directly over low heat (you'd need low heat to prevent burning) is that the heat is concentrated in the center of the pan -- but we have a pan that's very good at distributing heat, so maybe I could cook directly in that. That seemed like a good idea.

That was the only deviation I made from the recipe. Other than that I followed it meticulously -- more meticulously than I normally would for regular cooking (as opposed to baking), actually. I even measured the spices.

In high-level form, the recipe is: melt butter, mix in flour, stir until it thickens; add spices (dry mustard, cayenne, paprika) and Worchestershire sauce and stir until blended; add beer and stir constantly until thickened; add cheese and stir occasionally until melted; lightly beat eggs and mix in (first adding some of the cheese to the eggs, I assume to prevent quick-scrambling the eggs).

After the cheese had been cooking for a while it was fairly smooth but not exactly liquid; when I scoped out a spoonful, for instance, it formed a lump rather than pourable sauce. After several minutes of it not changing state further, I proceeded with the egg step. It was hard to get a smooth mixture with the eggs and the small bit of sauce; when I then poured all that back into the pan it was even harder to blend. I wasn't sure whether to leave the pan on the heat while trying to blend it, but I did. Eventually I ended up with something that was mostly blended, except there was some clearish liquid separating out. (Butter? Some chemical subset of the cheese? Not egg.)

It tasted pretty good over toasted French bread, but the consistency was a little too far toward the lumpy side. I'm left wondering whether the double boiler plays a role beyond heat distribution or if I did something else wrong. Maybe some day I'll try it with the double boiler and see what happens.

When Dani was in Toronto a few weeks ago, his sister was showing off a pan she'd just gotten. It was a non-stick pan that really was non-stick (and no coating); he watched her heat it up, pour in pancake batter, and make pancakes effortlessly. The magic word, apparently, is "titanium".

We have some pans that are getting old and dinged up and, well, less non-stick than they used to be, so we looked into this. We found two brands that are available in the US, ScanPan ("Scan" stands for "Scandinavian", apparently; I had visions of flatbed scanners when I heard the name) and Anolon. (My sister-in-law's pan was called "Magic Pan", which we couldn't find.) After looking the two choices (and their spec sheets) over, we bought one representative of each line to experiment with.

I tried the pancake experiment in the ScanPan and it didn't work, but maybe I didn't have the heat level set right? (I almost never make pancakes.) All further experiments with both pans involved at least trace amounts of fat in the pan, but that's ok -- from what I tasted of the failed pancakes, pancakes without any butter are kind of bland. I probably wouldn't add fat if cooking meat, but I designated both pans as dairy 'cause that's where I had the greater need. Eventually maybe I'll have a report on cooking meat in one of these.

Both pans heated pretty evenly; I benchmarked with grilled cheese sandwiches, fried eggs, and pancakes. The Anolon did a slightly better job of heating all the way to the edges. But both of them did much better than most of my current skillets, which I sometimes have to move around on the burners to cause even heating.

Both pans clean up reasonably easily, at least now when they're new. The Anolon seems to be slightly better in this regard.

Both pans have comfortable, heat-resistant handles. Both claim to be oven-safe, but I haven't tried that experiment.

The Anolon pan is rather heavy -- not cast-iron weight to be sure, but my 10" saute pan weighs over six pounds. This doesn't bother me much, though if I were doing a lot of cooking that involves lifting and shaking the pan I might care more.

Anolon is less expensive than ScanPan by about two-thirds, on average.

For reasons I can't quite identify, I find the Anolon pan to be a little more pleasant to cook in. It has also picked up no scuff marks so far; the ScanPan, on the other hand, has a couple of scratches even though I've only used plastic utensils and safe sponges in it. ScanPan's FAQ says that scratches don't impede performance, but...

So all things considered, it seems clear that Anolon is the winner for us.

By the way, both pans came with the warning to not use non-stick sprays lest we degrade the pan's performance. The implication was that this is a long-term effect, not just that that particular food won't cook as well. I wonder what the issue there is.

[Ah, good. My home network connection is happier than it was last night when I tried to post this...]

( daily tasks, cooking, romance, nosy questions, cats )

The Worship Committee decided to hold a congregational Shabbat dinner on December 31 (ending early enough not to interfere with parties). We decided to strike a balance between cost and "luck of the draw" by serving a main course and having people bring sides. (The main course will be fish, to avoid the meat/dairy problems that would otherwise result.) I asked the person at the synagogue who usually arranges for catering to look into this.

(Time passes.)

Her: It's a holiday; we can't find anyone. Do you think you could get a few volunteers from the committee to cook the main dish? (The clear implication was that she feared this would be too much work.)

What I thought: Cook one dish for probably under 100 people? Sure, I can do that myself standing on one foot! (But won't, because kitchen accidents are bad.)

What I said: I think we can arrange that.

SCA feast experience comes to the rescue again. :-)

(I am not actually going to do it myself, because it's good to involve other people in things like this. My co-chair and I will do it together.)

There were a lot of people at the polls this morning, but the folks in charge were running things very efficiently so I was in and out in about 10 minutes. The building where I vote actually serves four voting districts; this was the first time they split them out into multiple rooms, I assume for crowd control. The campaigners outside were reasonably well-behaved too, and down in numbers from the past. Only one person tried to push paper into my hands. There was one person from MoveOn there, but I didn't interact with her so I don't know what she wanted.

Tonight we are going to an election-night party. Not that I think we'll know the results tonight or even tomorrow, but hanging out with friends and eating political food is more fun than staying home. (I'm not sure what constitutes "political food" this year. I failed to look up the recipe for mudslides in time to procure ingredients.)

Sunday lorimelton and ralphmelton fed me a new delicacy. Take Nutter Butter cookies and dip in white chocolate. (They then added two tiny chocolate chips for eyes -- making a ghost.) Yum! I can feel the arteries hardening as I eat them, of course; I guess it's good that they only gave me two to take home, and that I'm probably too lazy to make them myself. But...wow.

A friend sent me this article about Shabbat-compliant kitchen appliances. It's an interesting (quick) read.

Tonight the butcher had a sign advertising fresh bison. From a species point of view bison is kosher, but you rarely find it at all, let alone slaughtered according to the laws of kashrut. I've never tasted bison, so I was curious.

I decided to have the bison and some beef concurrently, to more directly compare the tastes. Also, the bison was $14 per pound, I didn't even know if we would like it, and I wanted to hedge. So I bought one bison steak and some beef steak of comparable thickness (so I could cook them together), and we each had half of each.

Verdict: tastes like ch--... no, actually, it's similar to beef, but we both found it to be more tender and more flavorful. It did not have that gamey taste that I vaguely remember venison having back when I ate that. I would definitely enjoy eating this again, though I will shell out $14 per pound only very infrequently. Judging from availability trends, though, that's not a problem. :-)

I don't know how much of the tenderness was due to its bison-ness and how much to the cut. (It was a shoulder steak, for what that's worth. Doesn't mean anything to me.)

I wanted to make banana bread last night using the bread machine. I've never made banana bread before (with or without a machine). I got out the book of recipes only to find that the only banana-bread recipe is for a "quick bread". I've never made quick breads, because the manual contains warnings about them being fragile, about needing to tweak cooking time on the fly, and so forth. That's too much work; I want to dump stuff in the machine and ignore it until it brings forth bread three or four hours later.

So I started comparing quick-bread recipes to regular-bread recipes to figure out the mapping. The big difference, of course, is that quick-breads don't use yeast; they use baking soda instead. There was nothing that existed in both quick and regular forms, but after looking at several recipes I concluded that this was the only major difference. I was concerned that the quick-bread recipe might have too much liquid, but I decided to forge ahead anyway. (I did make one other substitution, water for milk, because I keep my bread machine parve.)

So I used the quick-bread ingredients, without changing quantities, but then instead of the baking soda I used the canonical 2 teaspoons of yeast from the regular recipes. During the first mixing the "dough" looked positively soupy, so I added one more cup of flour and helped the machine stir it in. It still looked soupy, but I decided to leave it alone.

Three hours later the bread looked like bread rather than soggy glop. However, it had overflowed the pan rather thoroughly, creating a mess that I will deal with more thoroughly tonight. Because of this, there was no chance of removing the loaf cleanly from the pan. I ended up using a spatula to carve out the main part. I still didn't know what I would find inside at this point, but I had just given up on presentation.

The interior is bread-like and tastes fine. There was some caked flour in the corners, but otherwise the mix of ingredients seemed to be right. Next time I'll just scale it all down to 75% or so.

Busy weekend!

( Simchat Torah )

( SCA: baronial investiture )

( Sunday with family )

( Sunday dinner )

All in all, a fun and busy weekend.

I'm glad I went to my own congregation Friday rather than taking the cantorial opportunity. ( Read more... )

This morning went differently than I had expected. ( Read more... )

I'm still working out the culinary subtleties of Shabbat lunch. ( Read more... )

One of the cats is apparently taunting Dani.

A few months ago, Baldur started going off early in the morning (6ish), meowing in the bedroom. I've been chasing him out and, if it happens a second time, throwing him out and closing the door. This has been happening on a regular basis -- not necessarily every day, but most of them.

Dani left for Origins (gaming con) on Wednesday and returned Sunday. Baldur did not do this even once during those four days. This morning, he was back to normal.

Heh. Baldur is yanking Dani's chain, it appears. I wonder why.



Sunday dinner last night was just three of us; Dani had spent the last several days around a convention full of people, so he bowed out, and the other regulars were busy with various things. So Ralph, Lori, and I sat around chatting about various things, including a fair bit of D&D geeking. (We've decided what to do about polymorph and templates.) Ralph made wonderful steaks on the grill. I've never learned the art of cooking steaks -- I can do good things with roasts, with birds, with stews and soups and chili, but steaks elude me. Ralph has the knack.

Dani did not come home from Origins with many bags of games this year. It was apparently a slow shopping year. :-) He did play some interesting games, but didn't find them for sale.

I spent some of Saturday studying the Torah portion I'm chanting next month. It's a longer portion than I would have bitten off on my own initiative, but it's managable. So far it's going fairly well, and I've internalized a couple more of the trope symbols.

Today while studying with my rabbi we came to the justification in the talmud for all of the Torah and all of the oral law having been given to Moshe at Sinai. (I actually anticipated where the argument was going, and I think my rabbi was pleased that I saw it before we got there.) I had not realized before that according to this argument all of scripture, not just all of torah, was given at Sinai. In other words, that collection includes prophets and writings. That's an idea I'm having trouble with. (Berachot 5a, for those who care.)

Today we went to my parents' house to do the holiday get-together. (The rest of the family is my sister and her two kids.) Things went reasonably well, though both of my parents were more distracted than usual (my father by a football game, and my mother by a string of small things). So we didn't spend all that much time talking, which was unfortunate. I can sort of roll with stuff like that because I've known these people a long time, but I could tell that Dani was feeling somewhat on the outside and I didn't know how to fix that.

My parents gave us a George Foreman grill. Woo hoo! I wondered if they were fishing for possible reactions at Thanksgiving when they showed us theirs, but it turns out they bought this for us back in August, before we ever saw theirs. I'm looking forward to using it. It looks like a good size for two people.

They also gave me the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD (I suspected they would, so I held off buying it). They gave Dani an anime movie (on DVD) that I have failed to retain the name of. We got my mother a season of X-Files, my father Band of Brothers (but it's been delayed, so we had to give him a promissory), and my sister the Back to the Future trilogy and the first season of Buffy. It was the year of DVDs in our family. :-) (We all acquired players within the last year, so this was forseeable.)

(There were other gifts, but it's not my intention to catalog everything here. I am pleased that almost all of the gifts we brought were well-received.)

Dinner featured a lamb roast (I really like lamb), which my mother hasn't been making much lately. My sister doesn't like lamb, so they threw some chicken into the GF grill for her. It's about as fast as nuking, I guess, but a lot more tasty. My spice cake went over well. My sister seems to have had a Martha Stewart moment; she fabricated a train out of candy, crackers (small ones for wheels), and assorted other stuff. It was novel. Apparently she got the idea out of that Pilsbury cooking magazine that we both subscribe to; I haven't yet read the recent "holiday desserts" issue.

My father is currently wrestling with DSL from Verizon (sound familiar?), apparently the only carrier serving their town. (I just sent email to Telerama to check on that, as he hadn't heard of them.) He had some problems getting it set up, and spent a while on the phone with a guy with a script, and eventually he got a connection. Then he rebooted the machine, and ever since he has been getting an error (number only, no text -- I thought Macs were supposed to be better than that), and no network connection. And whatever is happening is also hosing his modem, so he can't dial out. I hope he's able to get some help from Verizon tomorrow. Dani and I tried to debug it but didn't get very far. Oh, and one oddity: they have to put some sort of special "filter" hardware on every phone in their house because DSL messes up the phone line. I knew that Verizon required something like that back in 1999, but I was told that they'd eventually fixed that. I wonder if, when they enter new service areas, they start by recycling all the hardware they've stopped using elsewhere. :-) (My parents' town only got DSL recently.)

My niece has become rather sullen and rude, particularly in the last year or so, and I don't know why. I hope that going away to college next year fixes it, rather than making it worse.

Thursday when we were at my parents' house they showed us their new George Foreman grill. It looks like it would be really handy! It's sloped so the grease automatically rolls out the front (they provide a drip pan), and it's double-sided (like a waffle iron) so the food cooks from both sides at the same time. They said it cooks chicken breasts (on the bone) in 5-7 minutes. Five to seven minutes! I could do a lot with that. I don't often get tool envy, but I think I've got it this time.

Since I wasn't home for the first two nights of Chanukah, the latkes had to wait until last night. Dani walked into the kitchen while I was grating potatoes and said "You know, latkes are not biblically mandated". Yeah, sure, whatever; I like latkes, and once a year I try to make them. This was my best batch so far, and Dani even complimented me on them.

"Andromeda" has been very spotty this season. About this weekend's show I can say only this: stupid, stupid plot (don't they have security protocols in the far future?), but very pretty incidental music. It sounded similar to some of the music in "Earth: Final Conflict"; I wonder if it's the same musicians. (It's the same studio, so it could be.)

Tomorrow night we are getting together for "D&D Smackdown" -- no role-playing, no consequences, just combat. It's a way of helping both the players and the GM explore options in a safe environment. It should be fun. (Ralph did this once before, but Dani and I couldn't make it.)

According to the nutrition information printed on the sides of most food packages, a generic person should consume 2000 calories, 50 grams of protein, 60 grams of fat, and 320 grams of carbs per day. I wonder if those are actually reasonable target proportions; I don't really know anything about stuff like this. (Lately I seem to be coming in a little high on protein, somewhat low on carbs (but not anything like Atkins levels), and more or less right on fat.)