Hypocrisy, the other side Tuesday, Mar 18 2008

Recently there was a certain incident involving Eliot Spitzer the governor of New York. I don’t particularly have anything to say about the incident itself but I did notice a certain trend in the commentary and felt that it was worth commenting on. That is, everyone calls Spitzer a hypocrite for outwardly being such a moralist, to the point that the criminal investigation he was caught in was just the type that he had been an advocate of, only to have been using a high class prostitute.

Now, whatever your opinion of his actions is, he broke various laws and got caught so that makes him a criminal. But it’s almost as if the hypocrisy of his situation is really what people are scorning. And I thought about that for a minute. Though it may be hypocrisy to be seeing a whore on one hand and increasing the penalties related to prostitution on another, isn’t that actually a natural guilt response? Thinking about my own life, there are the things I do and the things I advocate, and they aren’t necessarily symmetrical. For example I don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong about a criminal saying to someone “don’t commit crime” and in fact it represents guilt and perhaps penance. It’s pretty stupid to be a criminal if you think it’s so wrong, and it is hypocritical, but it’s not bad to say it’s wrong.

So, forgetting about Spitzer in particular what I want to say is that perhaps people do not automatically deserve to be scorned for being hypocritical in normal situations because hypocrisy is a pretty normal human response. Sort of like taking a shit I think. Yeah being hypocritical is exactly like taking a shit, you’re spewing crap one way and trying to clean it up another way. Although so saying I can’t think of any situation offhand where a person is particularly hypocritical that they don’t deserve scorn for something so maybe it’s a moot point.

Back to Spitzer let me reiterate that my point is that it actually makes a lot of sense that he took such a strong moralist approach if he himself wasn’t able to live up to those morals. Although a typical human behavior is to do everything possible to secure advantage, overcompensating in the face of guilt from lapsed morality is a typical social reaction. In Spitzer’s case apparently the latter won out. Although it is of course possible that he is a particularly immoral person and all of his other actions that indicated otherwise were intended to reap some kind of illicit benefit though from what I’ve heard that doesn’t seem to be the case. Didn’t I have nothing to say about the incident? I don’t think that was hypocritical in this, the term fails me but isn’t it moronic? I mean look I could even go back and delete such things so yeah, moronic.

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god damn you, hotcakes Tuesday, Mar 18 2008

Alright well as threatened I prepared pancakes for a third time in a handful of days and this time I just used egg and milk like you’re supposed to. This is what I have to say: the mix I was using really sucked. It was a whole wheat pancake mix. Whole wheat is very hit or miss. And I remember hearing that whole wheat flour isn’t necessarily that much better for you than regular wheat flour. It occurs to me that since whole wheat isn’t hulled, if it has been sprayed with pesticides then they might be doing you a favor by hulling the wheat and throwing that part away. Pesticide probably soaks all the way into plants though. Anyway let me break it down in order of what turned out and tasted the best

1. Making hotcakes the traditional way with milk and egg. The pancakes didn’t really taste better with milk rather than milk substitute, although they did taste better than the oil pancakes, but the consistency was a lot better and of all things they actually got done faster. Unfortunately I thought that they got too easily burnt on the outside, by far. Which was probably the strength of the oil cakes. Nonetheless if you pay more attention than I did when making them you’ll be fine.
2. Making hotcakes with milk substitute (I used vanilla flavored almond milk) and eggs. This was the first way I made them and even though I am consistently unhappy with the denseness of pancakes made this way I seemed to have the easiest time getting them done properly. They also tasted the best but the vanilla flavoring in the almond milk is what accounted for that. If I had actually flavored any of these pancake mix attempts (cinnamon seemed like a good idea) they probably would have tasted better but more on that later.
3. Making hotcakes with almond milk instead of cow milk and canola oil instead of eggs. These ones just sucked. The poor taste was mostly due to the canola oil but it would have been worse if I’d used anything else I had (actually the only other oils I have are safflower and olive so there was almost no choice). I wonder if peanut oil would have been any good? I don’t use peanuts though. This mix ended out extremely runny, I think this could have been mitigated by less liquid but I didn’t think of that at the time, and in the end less liquid means less cake. The advantage of using oil over egg was that because they didn’t have anything in that got done that quickly they came up easier, another advantage was not having to use an egg. In the end though, as much as I hate eggs I hated the way these pancakes turned out even more. They were though vegan as far as I know so that’s something. I wouldn’t say that I can make all my regular dishes without various common allergens or animal byproducts (I don’t have the spirit to make meatless meatballs), but I can make a lot of them that way if pressed. And that seems to come in handy a lot more often than you would think these days. Fortunately as far as I know I don’t have any food allergies so it’s all academic to me.

Well  anyway that was how it went. Other than being instructed to substitute 30 ml of oil for 1 egg, which I’m not sure is an equal volume conversion, I just substitute milk substitutes in equal amounts for milk. If you tweak a bit the results would probably be better. For the record the only other one I’ve used for hot cakes is rice milk but it’s not quite thick enough for anything that you want to have some consistency. I once used it in rice pudding (which if I recall was just cooked rice, milk, rum, and sugar, I used brown sugar and quite a bit more rum as well as coconut milk for thickness) that came out well though. Speaking of coconut milk I wonder if you could use it for pancakes? I’m not that interested in trying, coconut milk has too much fat for regular use in my opinion. I really like it in curry though.

It occurred to me while eating these flavorless pancakes that if you want to flavor your hotcake batter it’s easier to get a flavored liquid than to try and figure out how much of what, like for instance chocolate syrup, to add and try and mix in yourself. In general I’m a fan of vanilla (especially bourbon vanilla) and cinnamon when it comes to spices to use in sweet things because you almost can’t add too much of the former and you’re unlikely to add too much of the latter. You could maybe put some nutmeg or clove or whatever in there as well as sugar. Being reminded of an actual cake I made a while ago, I wonder if you could make a pumpkin hotcake somehow. I’m not that interested in finding the answer to that out for myself though.

In any case here’s the end of this stupid experiment. Good riddance. Let me once again say that I prefer crepes to pancakes hands down. Although I think that if you tried to substitute 30 ml of oil per egg in crepe batter you would just end out with oil drowned flour. That is not a pleasant thought.

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