If I’m going to die while eating the food had better have MSG in it Sunday, Mar 22 2009

Run and never come back. That’s what I’ve done since starting to use MSG in my cooking. I recently have gotten into making Chinese food and cooking with a sort of Chinese style. This ultimately lead to me buying some MSG and using it. And god damn it’s good. If I wasn’t dying I might worry about my sodium levels but I really can’t care about that any longer. It’s good so use it, in anything you can think of.

I have a habit of eating an entire meal -from appetizer to desert- on one plate. This started out because of poverty, and was maintained because of lazyness, but now it’s a fine tradition. The relevance of this is the unique taste of the sauce I made for tacos being left on a plate that I ate ice cream on with a fork. Conversely I had put oyster sauce and mushroom aged soy sauce into the taco sauce which was basically just tomato sauce with a bit of vinegar and spices in it (it’s not tacos without cumin, you can have tacos without chili/peppers as far as I’m concerned, but not without cumin) topped off with some MSG. I enjoyed it quite a bit but a thought lingers.

MSG is cheap, and I don’t just mean the price. You can take a dish with no flavor and instantly impart it with “umami” or basically “savory” flavor just by putting some MSG on it. Of course putting regular salt or pepper onto something will also give you some results but it’s nowhere near as dramatic. So it’s fair to say that using MSG is a shortcut to flavor not unlike using a sauce packet or the like. That is not a lot of fun for someone who tries to take cooking a bit seriously. Then again do people say sugar is a shortcut to flavor? I bet that someone thought it way back in the day; perhaps the same about salt or any other condiment. Isn’t tossing some soy sauce in or on a similar shortcut to give food a different taste? I suppose that is just the way of it with condiments.

Well I’m not an expert on MSG and about the only interesting thing I can say is that it’s called Aji no Moto in Japanese mostly because that’s a brand name, and Wei Jing in Chinese. They had 味の素 (aji no moto) at the Asian market I bought sauces from so that’s what I’ve been using. I can tell you that a little goes a long way. For a bowl of food you really only need a pinch sprinkled over the top. I was told to add it late in cooking because the heat weakens the flavor but I don’t know the extent of that. Today I put it in some stew I made at the start and the stew was as good or better than ever at the end. Although there was definitely a difference when I put some more on once it had cooled down so perhaps this is the case. That means that if you don’t want as strong of a flavor, or if you want to hide the flavor for any reason you should add it earlier, but if you really need that hit then put it on at the end. My last recommendation would be to cut down on the regular salt you use if you’re including MSG. You probably shouldn’t use the same amount of MSG as the amount of salt a recipe calls for, but you can definitely cut out the same amount of salt as the amount of MSG you use.

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Of capricorn and hermes Saturday, Aug 16 2008

Recently I have decided to eat yogurt made from goat milk as opposed to cow milk. There is not a particularly good reason for this, although there has been a certain health movement in that direction recently but I have no idea whether that is valid or not. It is just that I have been eating cow milk yogurt regularly for at least 20 years (my eating habits before even last year are hazy at best but I seem to remember eating yogurt for a long time now) and so I decided that I might as well try something else for a while.

So in general I would say that goat milk products do not taste as good as cow milk products but that could simply be an industry standards problem due to the disparity between the cow and goat agricultural industries. Since yogurt is acidic in the first place and possessing of a bracing and sometimes bitter nature there is less of a taste difference between plain cow and goat yogurt.

I had previously heard that goat milk did not have lactose like a cow’s milk does so it was OK for people who are lactose intolerant (probably the majority of the adult world at this point) but that was apparently not true. I suspect that might mean that all milk has lactose but I do not know that. What is apparently true however is that people who are outright allergic to cow milk (I recall knowing someone with this allergy) are not allergic to goat milk. I suppose this makes sense, they are different species after all. So that is a consideration for people so afflicted but it has nothing to do with me.

In case anyone cares, I like to buy the larger and generally more economical (make sure you check the unit rate for yourself if it is not given to you) tubs of yogurt as opposed to individual servings. For the most part I buy vanilla flavored yogurt and eat it with my own fresh fruit to approximate the popular blended individual serving yogurts. However if I’m going to make curry or something else I prefer to buy plain yogurt. There is not necessarily anything to preclude the usage of vanilla in curry, and with the goat’s milk yogurt I have now you can hardly tell the difference anyway, but I nonetheless prefer to follow recommendations and use the plain for cooking.

As to whether to choose “whole” or “reduced” or “non-fat” yogurt, it depends on your dietary requirements or preferences. I tend to prefer things which are lower or non-fat in general but you do need some fat in your diet for health. Why that is I do not exactly remember but it is probably true. Maybe.

Just to mention it the so called “yogurt parfait” has gained a certain amount of popularity as a so-called “healthy desert”. The idea is to layer fruit, yogurt, and granola (fruit, yogurt, fruit, granola probably) and sometimes cover with syrup in a “sundae” or regular drinking glass or bowl. I say that you were probably OK until the syrup came into the picture but certainly yogurt has fewer calories than ice cream anyway which has supplanted custard as the main component of parfaits around the world at this point.

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The vainglorious return of Q and A Saturday, Jun 21 2008

I haven’t done this in a while. I’ve never been sure just how popular it is but people hopefully find some of the things they’re looking for here.

Q: “can you get a cake made without animal byproducts?” A: probably not. If it isn’t one thing, milk and eggs, it would be another, sugar refined using cow bones, and even if it’s not that the chances that one of the ingredients in the cake was fertilized with manure is high. I think manure is a point worth bringing up because I’ve never heard anyone complaining about its usage before. Probably because the people who know anything about manure don’t give a shit (hah) about the exploitation of animals. So let me break it down for you animal activists who have never been on a farm. Manure of course is livestock feces. Being the feces of “living stock” it is typically collected from the “stock pens” at regular intervals. So if you think about it this is not totally unlike milking a cow, you pen the animal up and collect what you want from it when you want to and leave it in there the rest of the time just eating and shitting all over its space. Of course the thing is that no one wants to make shit a focal point of their cause right? I think that a lot of people imagine animals out in the field happily shitting all over the place “like animals” and then some bothered worker goes around the farmland scooping poop not unlike what people do for the dogs in their yard. But while there is certainly feed lot collection the majority of it is collected from traditional barns and modern “confinement buildings” which have now outpaced barns as the location for most live stock. Well that was quite a digression from the original question about cake but my point is that your beloved “organic” foods made with only natural methods rely heavily on manure for crop fertilization and if confining an animal in such a way that it has to live on top of its shit isn’t cruelty I don’t know what is.

Q:”When does it start snowing in Philadelphia” A: Assuming that we are talking about Philadelphia Pennsylvania in the United States of America, being in the northern hemisphere (and at that rate being somewhat in the north eastern area of the united states winter officially starts in december. So it can technically already be snowing in “Philly” when the year starts on January 1st  though allegedly in recent years snow doesn’t start until later in januaray. To my knowledge it is only during the summer months when it will never snow in Philadelphia (this holds true of many US states). So after weather warms past the point of freezing at night (in some parts of the US this year it continued to snow instead of rain at night well into april) in the spring the earliest it is likely to snow in the fall seems to be november in recent years. I don’t live there myself so I could be off with this.

Q:”what kinds of things do women do sexually to a man’s scrotum?” A: For those who don’t know the scrotum is the sack like protrusion of skin below the penis which houses the testicles, hence its slang name “ball sack” or just “sack”. Typical sex acts include fondling, holding, squeezing, licking, and insertion into the mouth followed by sucking all done lightly because of the extreme pain sensitivity of the testicles. Occasionally a woman will attempt to insert either the entire scrotum with both testicles or part of it with just one testicle into either her vagina or anus but this is pretty awkward and I consider it a novelty act. Less typical sex acts (more for the sexual satisfaction of the sadistic woman), follow ing BDSM ranges of sexual torture include  binding, clamping, flogging, piercing, icing, heating, singing, burning, cutting, and severing. It is important to note that it is possible and not especially difficult to eventually damage the testicles to the point where it becomes extremely difficult for a man to impregnate a woman  due to low sperm production and so caution must be taken if this is not a desirable outcome. A similar caution is that testicular damage is not a reliable method of birth control although castration (the surgical procedure called a vasectomy being the accepted and reasonably safe modern method) is. Conversely of these methods only the first ones I mentioned are likely to be considered acceptable and pleasurable to men who aren’t masochists.

Q: “what does nekketsu mean in the SRW games?” A: “nekketsu” 熱血 is a “seishin” 精神 command available to some pilots and sub-pilots in the Super Robot Wars series of japanese video games. As to what nekketsu means, an english translation might be “zeal” but you will typically see it referred to as “hot blooded” because that is what those two kanji mean individually. Seishin by the way means “mind” in the sense of “spirit” and could be used as a term for will. Supposedly the idea behind the seishin commands which function much like support spells (the majority of which being self-afflicting) in other RPGs is that the pilots, who are mostly exceptional characters, are exerting their will on the battle. So in this case the likes of Amuro Rey from Gundam might get fired up when he’s battling his sworn enemy Char Aznable and unleash an especilaly damaging attack. various seishin might be approximations of piloting techniques or mechanical abilities but I’ll leave that to your imagination. As of the most recent traditional SRW game (OG gaiden as opposed to OG saga) I belive there are something like over 40 distinct seishin commands which have been used over the years in the games. As to what the newest one is, I’d say it would be one of the twin formation only seishin like the one that synchronizes the stats of the two who join together to their highest value, the oldest one would probably be ひらめき (flash) or 集中 (concentration).

Q:”how do you write a split perspective story” A: the simplest way would be to write a story directly from the protagonist’s perspective and then copy the story but replacing it with the perspective of a secondary character who witnessed the same events. Alternately you can write two or more shorter stories and alternate chapters of each within the same book. For the most part that isn’t going to help you write a good story but that really seems to be what most people do. The thing to note about a split perspective story is that you don’t have to repeat the same things for each perspective, but you can. A non-traditional way to write such a story would be from multiple perspectives within the same event in the same chapter but this could quickly get muddled. I will recommend once again that you just write a normal story since for the most part splitting the perspective dilutes the story and retards the pace. Then again if you need to do that then by all means.

Q: “is the “his dark materials” series of novels deistic?” A: People have stated as such, or if you prefer made that accusation. I think that a lot of terms like that get confused and misused though. Like is it still deism if you think that god exists, took an active hand in the world, and then forgot about it and took an active hand elsewhere? I would personally describe the book as encouraging self-determination regardless of what any entity or organization has done in the past or mandates doing. If you want to consider that deistic or anti-religious then that is your business. I will say that the book is likely to offend self-righteous people of any persuasion though.

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Staring through the window of someone’s house while eating Royal Edinburgh shortbread that I got from someone Friday, Jun 20 2008

Updating on my personal testing saga things are still in limbo. At least I haven’t lost yet. In other news I said I was learning “advanced mathematics” but that just goes to show how little I knew about math. The reality is something like “pre-intro to intro of advanced math”. So at this rate I will actually be using advanced math in 5 years. I wonder what the oldest age a person ever learned calculus at was? Perhaps more curious would be the oldest age a person learned what a negative number was. I bet it would be older. I’d bet a lot of money on that.

So Royal Edinburgh shortbread. It’s not great, smells a little too much like cheese for my tastes, but it’s not worse than Walkers brand; the other more famous Scottish shortbread with similarly Tartan themed packaging that feeds into the stereotype that all of Scotland is “plaid”.

It has been brought to my attention that I am not prolific about my views on prostitution. So I have decided to share a few thoughts in what might as well have still been this paragraph.

For the purposes of this discussion let us define prostitution as committing a sex act in exchange for recompense (ie: sex to get something). The sex act does not necessarily have to be committed on or in the presence of someone and the recompense does not necessarily have to be material. By this definition the majority of the world has engaged in prostitution, quite likely unkowingly, depending on your definition of a sex act.

Think for a minute on children and some of the things they do to amuse people. They will often do things which would be considered lewd, inappropriate, and possibly sexual if done by an adult. For example a child running around naked in a shop because they’re tired of trying on clothes. If this is a niece of yours it might be endearing in a way as long as you aren’t the one chasing after them to get them to put something on. On the other hand if a 20 year old woman does it I’m pretty sure it’s a crime in most countries of the world. If you’ve ever been around a little boy that realizes that playing with their penis is fun you might find them tugging away at it to raucous laughter in front of a crowd of relatives. Unfortunately males don’t grow out of that habit though they do become a little more discreet about it but fortunately it really is pretty amusing regardless of the age. But if you see a 30 year old man who says “look what I can do!” and starts tugging away you’re likely to call the police.

Those are likely examples that make people uncomfortable but that’s (what? double standards?) my point. If your boyfriend is hemming and hawwing about the price of the engagement ring you want and you say “but honey I’ll make it worth your while” so he buys it and you bang later on then you have in fact just engaged in prostitution. People always like to condemn things, not just people or behaviors but anything. It makes them feel superior. Conversely condemning themselves or things they associate with themselves like friends and family will typically make them feel bad.

If you see a heavily made up young woman wearing a sequined short skirt and hanging around on the street corner she is a dirty no good whore. On the other hand your associate who “accidentally” bumps chest first into a client at a business lunch, treating them to an eye full while apologizing profusely is savvy and aggressive.

So the next time you end an argument through seduction, the next time you soothe with sex, just remember that you’re prostituting yourself. Don’t worry though, we all whore out every once in a while, there’s no getting by without it.

For some reason I’m inspired to mention something that happened today. The most “aryan” looking girl you can imagine (perhaps slimmer and with slightly smaller breasts than what you’re thinking of) asked me in such a disarmingly guileless way about the tattoo on my left arm that I gave a harmless answer rather than shock her with the whole of it. Probably I would have been within my rights for carrying such a stigma to get into it with her about it, or not answer her, or refuse to talk about it. But I did it and she gave me her name which seemed Irish to me so perhaps she wasn’t even german at all. I’m not sure if all of that is progress or tragedy frankly but I guess it’s not surprising either way. Time marches on leaving the past behind after all.

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When people go to a blog they expect to see bitching Wednesday, Apr 16 2008

Just to get it out of the way, Q:”can you boil stew meat?” A: That’s kind of the point of buying low quality anonymously sourced and overpriced pre-cut stew meat isn’t it? In fact if you boil meat until it’s cooked through with a few vegetables in there and maybe a little bit of flour and corn starch (pre-dissolved and whisked in cold water) then you have pretty much got stew. Seriously speaking you generally want to “simmer” rather than “boil” meat when making a stew but that’s mincing hairs you know? It’s all about sanitation! You want to make sure that it’s cooked through and all the little bacterias are dead so even if you hardly get any nutrients, you won’t get sick. Lately there are even stories of raw produce making people really sick. This actually isn’t anything new, it’s just that it’s old enough that a lot of people forgot about it.

Well anyway my life never stopped sucking from my perspective I just try really hard to ignore it. Lately it’s been more persistent as I found out that I’m smart enough that I’m a moron yet not smart enough to be a genius however my output still isn’t much better than that of a moron.  Don’t worry, that doesn’t make sense to anybody but what it means is that I remain screwed as far as just about everything goes. And also that if I only have one thing it’s high standards: the 98th percentile isn’t good enough for me. My sole consolation is that the remaining two percentile who are theoretically smarter than me are even more screwed up than me. It’s not much but you read it here first: people who are smart are really fucked up. The smarter you are, the more fucked up. Unfortunately the opposite isn’t necessarily true, you can still be really fucked up even if you’re a moron. Being really fucked up can even cause you to be a moron.

Recently I discovered what the charm of the Canadian sitcom “Corner Gas” is; watching it while drinking hard alcohol. The cast of the show tries to give you this hint by frequently imbibing alcohol throughout the course of the episodes but they’re usually just drinking beer and that’s not hard enough to take the show from boring to funny. Canada is probably just too nice of a place to take in sober. I will say this for the show: it never makes me sad. That might not mean anything to anyone else, but it’s something to keep in mind if you get a chance to watch the show (which is time better spent doing almost anything else).

You know what else has me down? Cleaning. It might not be apparent but I’m somewhat of a perfectionist and this is most apparent during cleaning. All I can say about cleaning is that there is no such thing as clean, you just eventually reach a point that you have to admit is “clean enough”. Different people have a different threshold for clean enough. This is so that society can keep working in order to have someone provide me with factory sealed sponges, bleach, hard alcohol, and vinyl gloves. I would not necessarily recommend ingesting that combination. In fact I would recommend against doing so.

In my opinion life sucks in different ways for different people, including not sucking. And of course for some people it doesn’t suck because it’s too busy blowing. Sorry I couldn’t resist that one. This is beginning to sound like a bad comedy routine but that’s not a bad analogy for life. You throw your material out there and people don’t even bother to boo. If you can at least get people to boo you then you know they’re paying attention, but if you get nothing from the audience then they’re probably just there to drink overpriced imported beer after being fooled by the free admission. Which itself might be an analogy of life: you get in for free but you’re paying for every last damn thing after that.

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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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Somewhere along the line I realized that being able to type over 80wpm meant that I could probably move my fingers fast enough to play a synthesizer Monday, Mar 17 2008

Today, or something very much like it, I cooked a very simple meal. Roasted pork tenderloin (yes, tenderloin in the oven), green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy. I don’t know if that’s officially a british meal or an american one (I didn’t fry anything that might make a difference), either way it was pretty boring, fairly easy, and plenty filling. I would file this one under a meal that anyone can make that you don’t even need a real recipe for. Although there are of course myriads of recipes availble for such things if you need them and care to find them.

For my part I will say that even though I read something that said the tenderloin would be done in 25-35 minutes at 175*C that wasn’t even close. I think that possibly 50 minutes would have been good although I ended out letting it go longer since, as I have documented, I am a supplicant who dependant upon the whims of others and therein I’m always cooking for other people who do not usually share my sense of food (like pork that’s still a fair bit pink or beef that’s bloody). Sometimes I suspect that in various recipes they intentionally give you short cooking times so that you won’t end out cooking something too long but it really wasn’t even close this time. I did have more meat than the directions that I read called for, but 15 minutes more meat? Something else I read said to go 250* for tenderloin because it’s so lean that it will dry out before it gets done during long cooking times. I did not experience that. And I never cook anything that high so I wasn’t really sure whether any of my stuff could take that. Sort of like how you might see a speedometer that goes up to 300 km/h but you know there’s no way that thing is going to go that fast under normal circumstances, and that if it ever does you don’t want to be anywhere near it. If you have the guts to go 250 then presumably you would only need to do it for 25-40 minutes rather than 40-55 (mine went over 55, I stopped even keeping track at the end).

So the roast aside the advice I have about mashing potatoes starts with boiling them. In the first place you don’t explicitly have to boil potatoes before mashing them, you can roast or bake them until suitably soft, it’s just that boiling them is the easiest and fastest way to do it. Moving on, it’s OK to use not only different types of potatoes but to include other similarly suitable root vegetables like rutabaga or yam. But no matter what you do make sure you either start them all at the same time or get the ones that take longer in the pot first and very quickly get the others in. I had a certain embarrassment as I put in one group of potatoes to start and there ended out being about 10 minutes in-between getting the next batch in as I was dealing with other things while trying to peel and chop them. The end result of this uneven cooking was umashed potato parts in with the mashed ones. Other people didn’t care but I say that the moment you’re satisfied with imperfections you become incapable of ever attaining even an approximation of perfection. I put chicken broth and margarine into my potatoes by the way. Someone I know whose cooking I hate but whose potatoes are always rich always uses cream and butter. You can pretty much make them however you like using whatever you like. Coconut milk for instance is also feasible. I like to mix some peas into the potatoes after mashing them, though you could mash the peas in as well if you like, but that’s not what I did this time. Just canned beans on the side. *sigh

At least the gravy turned out alright. Though I’ll confess that it was just a dry prepared mix. Tenderloin does not have sufficient fat to yield enough grease with which to start a gravy (as opposed to regular loin which is also much bigger) . Actually I think that they recommend you trying to make specific fruity (tomato, fig, etc.) sauces for it for that reason. I really wasn’t in the mood to make myself even a simple brown sauce. Not least of which because one of the people I was cooking for can’t/won’t eat it. But honestly, prepared gravy and other sauces (I rarely make my own marinara sauce for pasta, I never make my own plain tomato sauce) have come a long way in my lifetime and it’s definitely good enough for most people. Including the ones I was cooking for and me in the mood I was in.

Well I’ve been making a lot of simple food lately, utilizing a lot of prepared ingredients (mostly sauces, maybe only sauces, unless you count pre-shredded cheese as processed). I seem to be in a bit of a flux between wanting to challenge myself a bit and not wanting to bother with anything much. I had not previously prepared pork tenderloin in the oven so it was an experiment but being such a hands off experience and all you know… hmm… Well we shall just have to see what I whip up next. Probably the last of that dry pancake mix, using actual milk and eggs this time to get a comparison between the variations with it I’ve tried so far (that being milk substitute and egg, and then milk substitute and oil instead of egg) and the usual recipe (milk and egg).

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The eggless hotcake Saturday, Mar 15 2008

So as promised I attempted to make pancakes without eggs since the mix I received said you could use oil instead. It didn’t specify which oil to use so I used canola. Unfortunately the canola I had really didn’t taste so great, and the hotcakes ended out tasting mostly of it. But they did turn out.

Now on this package it had me using 30ml (two tablespoons if you’re familiar) of oil instead of 1 egg. I have no idea whether or not that would work out for a typical pancake recipe. I had previously heard of people adding grease to the mixture in addition or in the absence of greasing the pan, but never had I heard of using it instead of egg. The overall consistency to me seemed both runnier and thicker if that’s possible. I had some difficulty in cooking them as I pretty much had to let the bottom burn (2 minutes a side as opposed to 1-1:30 a side the last time I made them) in order for enough of each cake to cook to be able to flip it over without the whole thing falling apart. This probably could have been solved by doling or spreading the mixture thinner on the pan but I was having other issues so that’s not how it went for me. Speaking of which, the cakes really collapsed once I flipped them over and they ended out so dense it was hard to tell when they were done. I again made this batch with almond milk instead of cow milk by the way, that again might have made a difference.

I previously mentioned a certain difficulty with the pancakes splashing around on me when I flipped them. The thinness of the mix only added to that problem however I found that by flipping them away from myself (my inclination is apparently to flip them inwards) this was somehow dampened. Also I pressed the cakes flat with my spatula so that they matched up with the splash. Frankly even though I suggested trying to get the cakes to land flat I didn’t make a great effort in doing so. I was holding the spatula extremely low, my hand was nearly touching either the burner or the cakes, while flipping hotcakes, part of that was the spatula I was using which has a parallel blade and handle and part of that was a stiff serving (unless it was supposed to be three) of mead. For the most part the faster I flipped the less fluid deviation there was and the neater the cakes turned out. But whatever. I was baking them in batches of 4 and ended out with 12 which is a pretty typical amount for that kind of thing, I think, so that gives you however many chances to try doing things whatever ways you want.

All said and done, going back to being a bigger crepe fan, even though I dislike eggs as a general matter of principal I prefer the way that pancakes turn out if you use eggs compared to not using them. Same thing with cow milk, probably (I will next try eggs and cow milk with the last of the dry mix I have). However for those of you who are vegan or simply have an egg or milk allergy or whatever there is a glimmer of hope as all kinds of pancake recipes are out there and for the most part they all end out about the same: almost flavorless. So don’t worry too much about what’s in your cakes and instead worry more about whether you’ve got enough of them (those 12 cakes went pretty quickly) and what you’re going to put on them.

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The simplest cakes Thursday, Mar 13 2008

In my opinion the easiest cakes are pan/hotcakes. Whether or not these are truly cakes is debatable but considering recent kitchen forays I can say that you use roughly the same ingredients, eggs milk and flour; and end out finishing in similar ways, pouring some kind of sugary sweet topping on them. And so viva pancakes. But. Crepes are better. By far.

Having a preference for crepes it had been some time since I’d made hotcakes, but someone wanted me to try out an organic whole wheat and coincidentally vegetarian/dairy free mix that they’d obtained. Which conversely had no cooking instructions on the back, just a list of measurements for mixing. Oh well. So I made a batch using it, warily at first and then properly once I realized that my crepe making tips (which conversely is one of my most popular posts since I used the phrase “burnt butter” for the title, I had no idea how much trouble people have burning butter) generally applied only pancakes have a much greater margin for error because they’re quite a bit thicker (if you mix and pour them right anyway). The experience was somewhat unremarkable, however I did use an almond milk instead of cow milk since I was making it for someone that’s extremely lactose intolerant. And of course after going out of my way that person ended out eating just 2 of the 16 yielded pancakes. Yeah fuck you very much too. Actually I don’t mind substituting milk types that much and pancakes are one of easiest things to substitute out ingredients for. It does seem like the fewer animal products you use the thinner and denser and possibly even dryer your hotcakes end out though. I might try that mix again with cow milk, and then another time with rice milk instead of cow milk and oil instead of egg (actually the mix said the egg or oil was optional but that seemed weird and already substituting one thing I thought that I’d better use the egg), if there’s enough for two batches, to see if that holds out or not.

The only interesting thing to happen while making the pancakes was that one particularly wet set ended out kind of splashing because I flipped it strangely. And so in the spirit of my crepe observations I want to give some hotcake observations. First of all use a reasonably long and wide spatula for the flipping. If you use the term “flap jack” to refer to pancakes you should be shot. You might not deserve death for that, unlike riding a vespa on the sidewalk, but you do deserve to be shot. Second is to make sure that the heat is up hot enough, heat the pan to medium high (8 out of 10) to heat it up and then turn to just past medium (like 6 out of 10). You’re trying to burn them to a certain extent you know, that’s the goal of most pan cooked dishes in fact, so don’t worry about it. That said in order to get them properly done enough to flip you need to go a little more than a minute and a half on each side, two minutes is not overkill on the first side as long as you’re using a non-stick griddle and plenty of grease (butter, margarine, oil) but it shouldn’t need as long on the second side after that. As to flipping, you need courage to flip properly. Get your spatula well under there and lift it up off the titular pan, if the cake isn’t holding it’s place firmly on the spatula, like if it’s trying to bend over or the top is sliding off, then you’re flipping it too soon, and then aggressively flip it over all the way in one sudden motion. As opposed to kind of sadly sliding it off the spatula. Upon giving the matter a little consideration, I realized that my pancakes “splashed” when and how they did because of a combination of how I was holding the spatula and the direction I was flipping them. Unfortunately I don’t remember what the right combination was although I’m pretty sure that I was holding the spatula with my palm down and then flipped them towards myself, so in theory you should go the other way. If you’re holding the spatula with your palm towards you then you can flip it towards yourself, just make sure you’re holding the spatula at a height above the pan that when you make the flip it will land flat.

Seeing as writing the way to not smear your pancakes all over the place was the intended point of this whole entry I should have made a note of what actually happened since I’ve already forgotten. Shit. Oh well. I’ll make them again another day and pay more attention. So by the way, crepes really are better, but if you’re just starting out with cooking pancakes are a lot easier, pancake mixes are pretty reliable too. This is some general cooking advice but if you want to be good you need something to measure against so when possible my usual method is to first have a food cooked for me at a restaurant, which will presumably be the way it’s supposed to be assuming the restaurant or chef doesn’t suck. Then I’ll make the dish from a mix or otherwise partially prepared version. And then I’ll finally make it “from scratch”. This is a much more relevant process as far as sweet or desert dishes go, like a lemon meringue pie or crepes, because those are much more widely available in numerous forms than say… Bollito Misto. Maybe there’s some kind of mix for that somewhere but actually I’ve never even had it in a restaurant myself so I just made it after seeing it on a show one day and have no idea whether the way I made it is the way it’s supposed to be. But it tasted good and that’s all that matters right? Yeah so hotcake away, almost everyone has eaten a hotcake right?

And by the way, being dark brown or black all over isn’t a requisite to doneness for a pancake, it does mean that you burnt it though. Someone I know will without fail always manage to burn both sides of their hotcakes and yet still have it be not quite as done as you’d like in the middle. That’s really the worst you can do, you’d think that being burned at least it would be done but that’s not always the case. If you’re having that problem then re-coat your pan with grease (brush some butter/margarine on) after each batch, turn the heat down a bit, and leave them on longer than you have been. I know what you’re thinking when you botch the batch though “it’s smoking so it must be done” but that’s not always so. You can also apply that advice to anything you cook/sear/fry in batches (like pork cutlet or pan fried fish) as the problem is generally just too much heat with not enough grease.

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On the environment Thursday, Mar 13 2008

This message is inspired by the fine music of the Rolling Stones, because I wanted to listen to “money” by the beatles but had the stones just sitting around.

So listen here’s the deal: we’ve all really fucked the environment up. It’s impossible to return things to their former state, damage is just going to continue to be done, and probably the best we can hope for is to figure out a way to keep living the way we do without… Well everyone dying. I dare say that hopefully a lot of people will die, I mean why not? I’ll probably be among the carcasses though this is something I’ve gone into before so it’s not worth repeating, but in any case if everyone is dead then that’s it.

As to global warming, global cooling, global dimming/dampening (the idea that there’s actually less light reaching us now than 50 or so years ago); I have no idea whether they’re part of the planet’s natural cycle, the result of “industrialization”, or some combination therein. I would wager on the third choice there. At the moment there is only weather data available for a very tiny portion of the earth’s existence, until new techniques are developed to try and sort out the past and the presently available data is sorted properly it’s really impossible to tell how much effect people have had. As to causes, “natural” ones would basically be celestial movement, including the earth’s position relative to the sun. I saw something a while ago that I’ve never looked into much that there’s evidence on the ocean floor to indicate that the earth’s magnetic poles have shifted multiple times. Whether that means that the earth actually moves in all directions or something else I have no idea, and probably other people only have theories. But if something like that is going on, there’s no way it wouldn’t alter temperatures and other things. As to “dimming”, it seems entirely possible to me that there might be other things in the way of the sun, off of the earth, in addition to pollution in the atmosphere of the earth. I have nothing to support that theory, but why not?

I will say that humans have destroyed the natural order in the ecosystem, but you can’t cast sole blame on oil usage, not even on pollution. By the way I personally think that nuclear power is a really bad thing but that’s another story, maybe. As an example of things that people don’t think of that have totally fucked up the environment, the introduction/export has totally fucked up the rivers and lakes of the world. Similarly moving wheat and corn and rice into places that they were not native has done things. Piping water from one place to another can’t be helping things. Bottled Water actually is probably a bigger threat to the environment than carbon monoxide emissions. You wonder why Greenland (it wasn’t Iceland was it? I don’t really care either way) is breaking off when yahoos are selling “glacial water”? yeah…. Recently there have been things about pharmaceutical drugs being found in water supplies around the world. Who would have thought of that? But it has gradually done shit to wildlife and so who knows what it’s doing to us. Actually what the hell is it doing to plants! I mean really, do they even test drugs on plants? Also mining in general, and salt production. Widespread desalinization of sea water is something that I can imagine really fucking things up somehow, it logically depends mostly on what they do with the salt that they separate from the water. But just think about the fact that they’re taking a lot (water and salt mostly of course, but you can’t tell me that other shit doesn’t get caught up in the process) from places that have to this point not had that much taken from them, and who knows just where it will be going? Well there are countless other things which I don’t know about , but you might. Feel free to write in. But in the end my point is that with all these things that we’re doing, there is no way that it’s having NO effect, it can just be really questionable exactly what the effect is, how “bad” it actually is, and what should be done about it.

So moving on there’s something I was thinking about that’s worth bringing up at this point, actually it’s what sparked this whole thing. So called “Organic” food. For those not familiar with the idea… all food that I know of (plants and animals) is technically an organic life form originally so this is somewhat of a redundant term, but it’s become pretty embedded now so what can you do. Anyway the idea behind “organic” food is that it’s “natural”, as in not genetically modified (including cloned), and grown without the use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides, and also not processed with such things (like preservatives). This is actually just about impossible to achieve because all water in the world is rife with chemicals but they have certain varying standards for what is and isn’t organic. The two main claims of those who produce organic food, and to a lesser extent organic materials (clothing mostly), is that it’s better for you to not have altered product, and that it’s better for the environment not to use such product. A lesser claim is that all things being equal organic food tastes better. I heard about a test in which monkeys would consistently choose “organic” fruit over other fruit.

I need a new paragraph. The only claim of the three regarding “organic” food that I’ll stand behind is taste, which is the main reason that I generally use organic ingredients. Just how harmful altered food is to people is really debatable. I’m not aware of any studies comparing lifeforms raised exclusively on one or the other to each other. An ideal testing situation would be cloning various specimens of given life forms a bunch of times and subjecting them to different types of feed. I have no idea what cloning really means for the world, it presents unique and useful scientific opportunities but whether it’s good or bad for anything else isn’t something I can speculate on. I’d say the same of gene modification. I’m more worried about the latter though. Anyway as to the benefits of organic farming to the environment… It becomes a complicated logistics issue. There’s no way in hell for instance that the production of organic maple syrup is good for the environment, whether or not it’s worse than chemically processed maple syrup. The main issue as far as organic crops goes is that you need to produce more, I don’t know how much more but at least 120% more and probably more like 150% more, in order to get the same yield in the first place as altered crops. And similarly if you don’t put preservatives in processed food (keep in mind that bread, cheesecake, tofu, and yogurt count as processed foods here) they won’t stay as good for as long so you ultimately end out wasting more of them, which means you’ll need more raw food, which similarly ramps up the amount that you need to produce. As far as I know the demand for organic almonds in the united states of america is vastly greater than what can be produced for example. Now, needing to produce more food means that you need more available arable land to cultivate, which translates to less area for wildlife and deforestation.

So with that last part in mind I ask you, what’s worse for the environment: A plot of land the size of your apartment complex growing chemically fertilized and genetically modified maize which has stems that can grow taller than buildings (as far as I know no such thing exists that grows edible corn but it should be possible eventually), needs comparatively less water and nutrients, and produces more than 1 ear of maize per stalk (supposedly the techniques and types of maize commonly grown produce less than an ear per stalk)? Or a plot of land the size of your neighborhood growing “organic” standard sized corn producing less than an ear per stalk? Actually, I really have no idea, who knows what the hell would happen to the plants of the world when bees (which might be dying out themselves, which in fact might herald the end of the human race as we know it) spread the pollen from that monster corn. But the latter would use up more land which is definitely the one finite resource in the world (water possibly is as well but since it’s the easiest thing in the world to recycle), and farming that larger area of land would almost certainly require more energy as well. Actually it’s a pretty tricky thing and I think we’re screwed either way which is pretty much my whole point here.

Well there are probably other issues here… Oh yeah, every single thing in your house is giving you cancer at this point. Even that organic American cotton shirt that cost you at least 5 times more than a cotton shirt made in china from the recycled rags taken off of dead bodies before cremation. Probably everything in the world is cancerous by now, even sunlight is after all, and there’s no way to change that. Going back to humans being organic, all things can be broken down to chemical compounds, so cancer is itself a chemical reaction (this is some pretty creative deductive reasoning going on here). A lot of research has been put into isolating exactly what factors go into this chemical reaction, some are obvious now like silicone and plutonium and petroleum but other things are vaguer. Not everyone that smokes cigarettes and drinks alcohol gets cancer after all. Most people do in the end though. I’m trying to remember now just how old cancer is, or if anyone knows. That might be something worth looking into for another time.

Until then remember, no matter what you’re going to die anyway so change what you want if you want, but there’s never any point in worrying about things. Go read a book and listen to the Stones or something. I’m really not sure whether it’s actually better to relax with a glass of juice than wine but I do know that wine is more relaxing and no matter what tastes worse than even juice of only a fair quality. Ridiculous bastards. Yeah go eat a crepe or something, and flip off the sun the next time you see it. Go have sex on the floor with the drapes drawn sometime, the only things you’ll hurt are your joints, unless you have carpet in which case there might be additional chafing.

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