Sourdough is easy

It’s amazing how many human innovations have to do with harnessing the power of expanding gases…bread, engines, guns. Sourdough is one of those wonderful foods that you just know was discovered accidentally, and you yourself can have the same Eureka! right on your kitchen counter.

Want to know how easy this is? Put a cup of flour and a cup of water in a container. Leave it out until it bubbles. That’s your starter!

If you leave it out in the warm air, you have to feed it every 6-8 hours–almost more than I feed my dogs. So refrigerate it and feed it fresh flour once a week.

You will feel like a paleolithic science genius in no time!

I have got some beautiful bread to show you

This is the best bread I have ever made. Why is it so good? Because:

* I made my own sourdough starter. At first, I followed the advice to make a starter using commercial yeast, but it just tasted yeasty. So, I put some flour and water in a cup, left it alone until it got smelly-in-a-good-way, and used that.

* I finally, after 20 years of making bread, bothered to learn how to knead properly. I think I was being too rough. I don’t know my own strength, tearing the poor gluten instead of stretching it. Now I gently caress the wheat protein into stringy goodness.

* I timed the risings properly instead of letting them go to too long/too short. This is the biggest challenge in making bread for me, having two kids and a freaky freelancer’s schedule.

* I put lots of good stuff in it: whole wheat flour, rye flour, honey, olive oil, and a bit of gluten flour I had lying around.

* Also, it just looks like really good bread. And it is!

Let them eat chips

In proper First Lady fashion, Michelle Obama has taken on a health crusade on behalf of our nation’s children. She has sequestered $10 billion in pin money to help them slim down. And just in time, say the nation’s scientists with their clipboards and their white coats. We face a health crisis of historic proportions. Our kids are just too damn fat. They’re flaccid and prone to diabetes. Youth orchestras face a glut of tuba players. Schoolyard bullies no longer know whom to taunt with cries of ‘fatty boob-a-latty,’ being beset with a hippo herd of tubby schoolmates. Or they themselves are too torpid to chase down their prey. Perhaps worst of all, our youth can’t fit in Humvees, excepting them from noble but mortal nation-building excursions.

I say, let them eat chips. All of human evolution, from the hide scraper to genetically engineered soybeans, has been driving against one singular problem: having enough to eat. Frequent famines kept the human population within an order of magnitude for millenia. It was only through the wonders of industrial agriculture and international trade that we were finally able to fill our bellies and fill the earth with humans.

Now we finally have enough. Enough to fatten our children to levels that would please even the most solicitous grandmother. No more does she cry, “I guess you don’t like my rolls any more, you only ate twelve.” Yes, our children are chunky. They’re out of shape. They wheeze going up the stairs (if they even know what stairs are). But in most cases, they will live long enough to reproduce, which from nature’s point of view is really the point of it all. We finally have enough–and all we can do is complain.

Besides, if Michelle Obama wants to change our children’s lives, she’ll have to go further than distributing certificates praising them for the number of chin-ups they can do. Our children live in cities. They can’t go outside–too dangerous. They are chauffeured to every destination. They sit in school from infancy to adulthood learning how to pass tests–so they can spend their lives sitting in offices. Recess, PE, and summer vacation are all on the wane. You’re not going to get rid of television, video games, smartphones, junk food, cities, cars, or cheap corn unless you take a great leap backward (which might actually work; I don’t think child obesity was much of a problem in Stalin’s Russia).

Instead of using obesity as yet another reason to ramp up an expensive government program–in other words, to spend some more money on ourselves–we should see it as a sign of that hoary old sin, gluttony. The extra calories our kids consume could go a long way toward fattening up the less fortunate. It would be a reversal of the old “children are starving in Africa” routine–instead of getting children to pick up the fork, we would be teaching them to put it down. Maybe if our civilization learned to take a little less, we wouldn’t be so eager to let our young people be dismembered for the sake of control over sugar plantations, banana farms, and oil fields. In the meantime, be proud of your fat children. Bear them joyfully into public with a smile on your face, knowing that you are one successful organism.

Beat 2 eggs light with pint sweet milk

I haven’t made these yet, but I wanted to share this beautifully written recipe by Kate Shortell from the Cooking in Kansas Web site. It’s like poetry you can eat.

APPLE FRITTERS
Beat 2 eggs light with pint sweet milk.
Add 1 teaspoon salt, 2 cups sifted flour, 1 pint peeled and sliced apples.
Beat hard.
Drop by spoonfuls in hot fat, drain, and dredge with powdered sugar.

The OS is willing but the case is weak

Folks often try to justify the exorbitant price of Macintosh computers by claiming that they are better-made than cheaper windows machines. After my personal experience with a MacBook (my wife’s) I beg to differ. So far:
* The SuperDrive failed within a week or two after purchase and had to be replaced.
* The motherboard failed, resulting in being unable to charge the battery. Had to send it to be repaired under the extended warranty.
* The hinges failed, causing the LCD to crack. Since LCDs are not covered under warranty, I replaced it myself.
* When I opened the screen casing to replace the LED, tiny bits of plastic showered down–the flimsy bits that hold the nuts that hold the screen assembly together. The entire case was falling apart and had to be replaced. (None of this was due to my taking it apart–it was falling apart to begin with.)

Contrast this with my fairly generic Toshiba Satellite, which has never had a significant problem until the dog jumped on it and broke off the backspace key. It has a 160 GB hard drive compared to the MacBook’s paltry 80 GB–the MacBook’s is already full. I have ridden hundreds of miles on urban pavement with my laptop in a pannier. No problem.

I’m writing this post because yet again, a part of the MacBook’s hardware has failed–the Ethernet port. In my research, I have found out that this is a relatively common issue, one for which the fix is typically to replace the network card. Some Mac enthusiasts seem to think that an Ethernet connection is not that important–on forums, they just say, “take it to a Genius” or “get a wireless router.” Excuse me, but the Ethernet cable is part of the computer for which I paid and it should work for the life of the machine. Why should I accept that part of the hardware is dead?

I’m not writing this to give Microsoft or Toshiba any particular love. The laptop was full of bloatware and Windows XP is not the world’s most elegant operating system. But I have never had a problem with the hardware or software simply failing to function. And nobody cuts Windows PCs any slack when it comes to quality issues. Why does Mac get a pass when the machines are so expensive?

Bring a little nature into your brainmachine interface

After several years of listening to the shitty white noise generator (SWNG) we bought to keep babies asleep in their beds while we cavorted in the living room late at night, I’m sort of addicted to nature sounds. Well, the only nature sound that sounds remotely natural on the SWNG is the ocean tide. I tried the bubbling brook, but it sounded like frying bacon which just made me hungry (recall I am a carnivore in a vegetarian household, although I’m making pretty good progress on converting my eldest son to the dark side). I’ve been trying to find something that would produce great nature sounds as I’m working on my computer so I can tune out all the craziness that happens in 4-d all around my home office. I got tired of listening to the same recordings over and over. I looked around and found Atmosphere Lite, a freeware nature sounds generator and it is AWESOME. It has tons of sounds that can be selected, combined, and randomized–everything from a crackling campfire to flowing water to various charming insects and birds. It even has binaural beats to put you into that new age state of mind so popular in the 1980s. Here’s the link:

http://www.vectormediasoftware.com/atmdeluxedown.htm

You can also get it at:

http://download.cnet.com/Atmosphere-Lite/3000-2257_4-10425240.html

Now I just have to figure out a way to put a speaker in the bedroom that can play sound from my computer so I can jettison the SWNG to Value Village.

Homeschooling sounds better all the time

Did you know that the state of Texas has a significant influence over the content of textbooks? California, too. Setting aside the question of why anyone thinks textbooks are better than real books, don’t you find this disturbing?

(For the record, I don’t hate Gingrich, and I don’t hate conservatives. I just hate the idea of history being taught along political lines. I would be just as disturbed if Howard Zinn was in charge of the textbook board.)

It’ll all come out in the greenwash

I finally realized the business value of “green,” when so few consumers seem to genuinely care about it. It’s a way of overcoming objections. With so many choices out there, anything that even slightly tilts the consumer against you is a problem. So, you add “green” to your list of good qualities. Because Wal-Mart has engaged in such massive green-related marketing, a whole market of people who care even marginally about green-ness will be slightly more likely to consider shopping there. The consumer doesn’t say, “I’ll shop there becaue it’s green.” They don’t say, “I’ll buy the fish because it’s sustainably harvested.” Faced with millions of choices and data points, they pick up a package and say, “Hmmm…these are the same in terms of price and perceived quality, but this one says it’s sustainable, so I guess it wins.” Into the bin it goes. I’ve just been trying to figure out the disconnect between how much consumers really appear to care about the “green” thing and the major marketing efforts around it by so many companies. If you’re not “green,” the consumer might choose something else, all other things being equal or at least undistinguishable or so noisy that rational though is impossible.

The Custard King

There’s a little burger stand with a big neon ice cream cone on top of it just on the north side of Astoria, Oregon. I’ve passed it about a million times going back and forth to Cannon Beach, but had never gone there. During a kid pre-nap emergency lunch, it was a convenient spot to stop. It was really good. They have medieval-themed hamburgers (no blackbirds or hot cross buns) and a big selection of ice cream. The food was great (I had the Barbarian burger, which could just as well be called the barnyard burger because it required contributions from pigs, cows, and chickens). The best part was that, because it was windy, we had a picnic in the back of our van. MJF climbed into the front and started working every dial and knob and button trying to get the car started so he could drive to, I don’t know, where would a one-year-old drive you? Into a ditch, probably. LJF said, “Get the camera and take a picture of our picnic in the van,” so we did. Memories get created in the most unlikely places.

MediaMonkey, or, the right tools for the job

I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to MediaMonkey, which is a great program for managing your music collection. It can manage iPods (better than iTunes itself, I think) and helps you organize your tracks. But, best of all, it’s FAST–in my experience, way faster than Windows Media Player or iTunes.

It gets down to something that I always wonder about–why is it that there are such huge performance differences between two programs that do basically the same things? Why is iTunes such a resource-hogging beast? Is it that they’ve added all kinds of gewgaws to it to make it more, I don’t know, Apple-y? I know it runs a lot of unnecessary background processes without asking, which I find offensive. It’s like someone siphoning gas from your tank so they can go to the store and buy you something you don’t want.

There’s also something inherently pleasurable about using a tool that’s well-built for a particular purpose, whether that tool is a piece of software or a can opener. Tangentially, I recently tossed a fancy “easy-to-use” newfangled can opener that stopped working after about ten cans and got a classic Swing-Away, made in the USA can opener, from McLendons, of course–not as “clever,” but my grandkids will still be using it 30 years from now. I also pitched my wife’s crappy plastic stapler without asking and got her one of the most reliable machines ever invented: a black Swingline stapler, which, in addition to costing approximately a dollar at the thrift store, and in addition to doing its job effortlessly and perfectly every time, can also be used to brain zombies.