Not that I'm criticizing food ways, but.
I didn't say what dried foods I had.
4 pounds of urad dal, 4 pounds of moong dal, 8 pounds of split lentils, three pounds of split peas, three pounds of channa dal, six pounds of Caribbean red beans, some random dried beans, twenty-five pounds of high-gluten wheat flour, ten pounds of semolina flour, ten pounds of AP flour, ten pounds of low protein pastry flour, five pounds of whole wheat flour, five pounds of rye flour, ten pounds of sugar, twelve pounds of honey, five pounds of molasses, two pounds brown sugar, five pounds baking chocolate, 4 feet of turkish/syriac apricot rollup, five pounds raisins, two gallons homemade redfruit preserves, two gallons blueberry preserves, fifteen pounds of frozen blueberries, strawberries, and cherries.
Two pounds flaxseed. Ten pounds basmati rice. Five pounds sushi rice. Five pounds arborio. Two pounds of cream of wheat. Five pounds of cream of rice. Double crate of homemade cider.
So, we'll be okay.
Typical blond roux is a equal volumes flour to fat, with can thicken up to eight times the combined volume in water-based liquid.
so, 1/4 cup flour to 1/4 cup fat, beiged, gets a pint of milk thickened. Additional cheese gets added after, slowly so it is absorbed by the water-suspension, and not the reverse. You could add a cup of medium fat cheese to that, probably. No more, unless you wanted to reverse the emulsion and let the grease break.
You get go richer or not, as you like. Pure starches do not need preparatory cooking to break open the starch granules. They also do not taste very good, because the maillard browning of the flour adds geschmeck and toastiness.
Maybe I'm being an awful foodie snob? And I'm sure can-casserole can taste good - since I have had 'em. But how long does it take to wash a cutting board, a knife, the working bowl of the food processor and implements, and the prep bowls? I timed it last night, and I had the food processor glistening and turned around, ready for action in three minutes. The cutting board gets scraped into the compost (20 seconds) or scrubbed and sanitized (3 or so minutes). The prep bowls go in the dishwasher and the carbon steel pans get soaked and scrubbed out with salt (30 seconds of scrubbing to remove all food leavings, 10-20 seconds of rinse per pan.) There are a lot of tricks that simplify prep and cleanup, and one of them is to clean as you go so you never get weeded.
Which brings me smack dab against the thing I have a problem with: the cans.
Canned goods we have? Tomato stuff. Coconut milk. Two emergency cans of beans. A can of ceci. Some Heinz vegetarian beans. A can of lentil soup. Three tins of sardines in evoo. A can of condensed milk for making ladoo when I make ladoo. And that's it. No canned veg. No canned fruit, aside from preserves, of which lots are homemade. Some frozen veg, and lots of frozen wild picked fruit. The rest is raw, fresh, unjointed.
Does that make me more virtuous? I dunno. But the very deliberate denial of cans and frozen prepared foods (also we have no microwave), means we eat lots of fresh veg. Just two people, and we go through 15 pounds of fruit and veg every week.
As Escoffier once said, any starch can function in a roux. The best substitute for wheat flour would probably be a rice flour/mung bean flour mixture, which would approximate the ratio of starch to protein in wheat flour. Toss a handful of rice and a handful of beans into a coffee grinder and set to "Turkish". Then use as one would use wheat flour in a roux. One could also use finely ground cornflour (NOT CORN STARCH!).
And alfredo sauce is basically Mornay. The degenerate alfredo is one in which the Bechamel is replaced with creme double, but that has no service stability, and is highly prone to separation. It's a restaurant dish, and a typically over-rich one. Cream-based sauce has a smoother texture than a bechamel, yes, but nobody needs to eat stuff like that.
My kitchen is 8x8, and I have three linear feet of countertop. It's not about size, it's about mis-en-place and planning. Range: 1 Oven, 4 burners. I have 2 12 quart stock pots that nest. One is the pasta, the other the blanching water. One burner is the saucepan with the roux, the other is the frypan to render the chopped meat. Preheat oifen zum 350. Wash, trim fresh veggies, toasting flour for roux.
Uncured sausage is uncured sausage. Pork butt, and fatback or belly, and the mincer. The stuff is 1/3 to 1/2 fat by weight - it's how you get the mouth feel. And I've been scared shitless of o157-H7 so much I don't trust my kosher butcher to keep his grinders clean.
Frozen spinach starts behind the curve, and then it gets the hell cooked out of it in the fat. Sure there's more liquid in the fresh vegetable, but there's also more taste!
Finally, a bechamel/Mornay can be cheesier than cheese - it's all about the mouth feel.
Why the alfredo sauce? Why the pork sausage filling?
Honestly, I have no problem with flavor, but commercial alfredo sauce and commercial forcement is so laden with extra fat - just - why?
Because - from a Béchamel to a Mornay (which is alfredo) is the addition of gruyere and parmesan, in equal quantities. If you're going through the effort of boiling the pasta, you can make up a roux with liaison, add milk and parmesan and gruyère, correct with nutmeg, salt and pepper, and cook out the grittiness, all in the time it takes to boil the ziti.
If the meaty bits from the sausage are what you're after, why not take lean pork and grind it up in a food processor? Pure uncured breakfast sausage is a generally a 5-4-3 forcemeat, with the 4 being the fat. I can't advise supermarket mince, in this day and age of Cargill, Wampler Foods, and Topps. I bought a meat grinder attachment for the mixer. for the more serious forcemeats.
I can understand the ricotta (ricotta doesn't melt, retaining texture)but you can dial back the fat by using lowfat ricotta (even my Nutritionist Mrs. agrees nofat ricotta is vile) and adding instead olive oil.
And frozen spinach - why? What about chard? Or collards? Or mustard greens? Or rapini? When you set up the boiling water bath for the ziti, you can blanch a pound of rapini (three-four minutes, no more) shock in cold water, and chop. Inestimably better, and retains its vegetal freshness and salutary bitterness much more than frozen, in counterpoint to the fattiness of the meat and dairy.
Add nutmeg. Or mace. Nutmeg improves all cheese dishes. Add fennel seed, lightly toasted, if you're after the distinctive flavors of Italian sausage. Perhaps garlic is asking too much, but you may want to add some chopped onion to the meat . Finally - breadcrumbs on top, in addition to the mozzarella cheese, it will taste good, and brown nicely, and it won't be so crunchy fatty heavy.
My last year in Ithaca, I lived directly beneath AC's successor at the Review, Joe Sabia.
Google young Sabia. In person not as scabrous as his prose.
Needless to say I got no sleep on the night of November 8, 2000, and not just because of the chaotic election results.
Anne Coulter was in DG? Across the street from DDD on Triphammer on North Campus?
One of my signal memories of freshman year was rush week in January during an awful cold snap, three days after course exchange, after dinner at Risley, walking past DG and DDD and observing ~75-90 freshman women in thin evening gowns, some strapless, all shivering, bawling communally in the subzero cold, makeup streaked and tears frozen. The very picture of desolate misery, like the third bolgia of the 9th circle of hell.
I never joined the Greek system - since EAM wasn't that Jewish anymore, AXS was coed chem and I wasn't chem, though a lot of my friends were, and I wasn't interested in SXA, the other coed service frat.
My other favorite memory of fraters and sorors is of SP going up in brilliant flames on slope day, 1994, because of a dumb idjit, a welding torch, and a gas line.
I'm trying to remember - which frat was it that sat right across the street from Risley?
[...]
The White Plains Galleria,
Second floor B Dalton,
Six blocks from the 4:00pm bus up Benedict Ave.
Fantasy bricks above the Niven and below
the Anderson.
I didn't buy them.
Then the eternal September,
came the r.a.sf.* flamewars.
Alt.fan.robert-jordan bled into alt.warlord,
and aol'ers.
And I still didn't buy them.
It's been fourteen years,
I'm not a reader of fantasy.
I haven't bought his books.
It's sad whenever somebody dies.
Baruch dayan emet.
I have had experience doing membrane and filter-bed through and blind pore characterization, primarily through bubble-point/flow porometry and mercury porosimetry.
Muslin cloths would be useless. Mean through pore sizes in the 200 micron range. In other words, drafty as a barn.
Hypoallergenic bed linens get you down to the 25-50 micron range, but to get much lower, you either need to use fiber, powder bed, or sintered/fritted filters.
Municipal water treatment plants use beach sand powder bed filters, with enough of the right in the right layers sand, you get through-pore sizes down to the 1/2 micron, enough to filter out the vast majority of pathogens.
As I said before, well-known molecular gastronomist Hervé This recommended the use of fritted glass plate filters.
Laboratory fritted glass filters - http://www.adamschittenden.com/technical/500Frits/502Frit_info.php - made to arbitrary mean and absolute range pore sizes - sealed into glass tubing, and used with a waterjet vacuum pump.
By the way, if you don't already own a pressure cooker, buy one. I just made boeuf en daube with lavender and haricots in 25 minutes.
Laboratory fritted glass filters which according to Hervé This, works fine. Also, they are reusable and cleanable.
Graydon;
I think I've been clear as to what I think activism's praxis ought to be. We got the problem, now we have to manage its sequelae with grace and enlightenment.
Carbon emissions have already screwed us. Snrkng t t thm wth bbbl-bbbl pps th zts f tmprry hgh ddgn, spllng n rschlm f nrvtd ndffrnc t ncssry cntnd wrk.
nd *tht* s my bf wth th snr.
(BTW, Graydon, you've known me on Usenet going on twelve years. We met in Kitchener eight years ago during Jo Walton's visit.)
jy - tht ws brsh snr.
Cmplnng bt glbl wrmng n ths mttrs ds prcsly fck-ll whn the Greenland icecap is melting and the thunderstorms are dumping decadal rains annually into the watershed of my hometown.
Th grnd pln t sv th wrld by cmplnng bt crbn mssns dsn't ppr t b defending my family, friends, and childhood neighbors from flooding caused by incompetent management of Catskill hydrology.
Remember the picture I linked, the two figures Kevin and Barbara? They are the Grefs (Kevin is an environmental activist and ex-submariner, Barbara is the editor and publisher of the Narrowsburg River Reporter) whom I have known for fifteen years: I watched their kids grow up; I clambered in the basement of the hydrohouse between station-ids at the radio station, feeling the turbines thrum. They are my friends.
The flooding is in my home county, the rambling hills of my youth. The reason this flooding is worse than it could have been is because of overdevelopment and neglect of hydrology infrastructure - nt bcs f rmgddn rns lldd t n hck scnc fctn nvls.
We have this neglect because intelligent potentially interested parties of the body politic left policy up to party hacks and time-serving sinecurists because they were too damn bored to get involved. gss snrky cmmnts nd grnd prtc gstrs mk ll th dffrnc n ths wrld.
Not that I haven't been involved in these issues for over a decade, or anything, ajay. (find footnote 8.38b)
There are pictures of mountain watershed flooding archived here. This is a picture of a small dam on the Jeff Creek, above Jeffersonville, NY. Ordinarily, the lake remains between three and eight feet below the top of the dam. The house below the dam is has two hydroelectric generators, one 25KW and the other 200KW. Usually, only the first runs this time of year, while the other feeds power into the grid in the fall and spring, during the fall rains and the spring runoff.
South of the dam, and about twenty feet higher is the radio station. I worked there for nine years, and looked out at that stream for nine years, and I never, *ever* saw the water level rise any higher than the bank. Not like this. The two figures in the foreground are Kevin and Barbara, caretakers of Jeff Hydro, and residents of the hydro-house. They have three children.
Eight hundred people live along the stretch of Rte. 52 west of Lake Jefferson. The town is 200 years old. One of the best Turkish restaurants/greasy spoons in the world is across the street from the Peck's Supermarket. Tonight the town is evacuated because the Lake Jeff dam is about to burst.
My parents live on the other side of that watershed, on the eastern side of that particular landform. I live on the transverse slope of the Long Island Terminal Moraine, about forty feet above sea level. And maybe, maybe, if I didn't know not only the local area but the hydrology and the water-impoundment system of the area to a more rudimentary degree than I do, then I might run around with my head cut off squawking about global warming instead of the real problems in the area which I will mention in two paragraphs.
m strck by mmdt rfrnc t Km Stnly Rbnsn's mst rcnt wrk by th rglr cmmntrt f ths prtclr wblg. mgry nd jky, rrlvnt cmmntry frm lssr wrk f fctn r btwxt nd btwn th sbr rprts f th dtls f hrrnds ntrl dsstr. nd, f crs, Grydn s rdy wth xcrctngly wll-cnstrctd Nrs Stntrn tchncl dmsyng.
One of the NYC watershed reservoirs (Swinging Bridge Reservoir) has been drained because the private company that received the contract to maintain the earthen dam and manage the hydroelectric dam failed to report severe undermining of the dam - they went into receivership and didn't maintain the dam. Two giant sinkholes opened in the dam, ending the dam's career and threatening thousands. Dam safety engineers have been discovered falsifying safety records for two other NYC water property reservoirs, Rondout and Neversink, and there are concerns about sinkholes opening below Neversink.
The reason that dam in the pictures is in the process of bursting is that Lake Jeff hasn't been dredged in fifty years, and it is stuffed to the gills with silt, reducing its capacity by thirty to fifty percent. If the dredging had been done, the dam would be holding, instead of eroding along its crest.
There has been gross neglect of the public and private water-management infrastructure throughout the area, which, combined with a lot of deforestation and second-home development in the catchment basins, and a nice ten year rain, is inflicting a great deal of pain on impoverished communities.
This wasn't caused by global warming -- this was caused by criminally negligent oversight of public works. Put the shrill clarions against appositely irrelevant bugaboos aside!
t wld b nc t s slf-prclmd mlrsts wrk fr gd gvrnnc nd tchnclly cmptnt mncpl wrks vrsght, nstd f fnctnlly slss bt mtnlly stsfyng plnts gnst glbl wrmng.
nd myb sm Prl Bck Yllw Rvr Fld rfrncs t, nstd f KSR's rrnt trsh (gd hlp s!).
Michael, I can take spelling corrections. I did not correct the spelling of Teresa's name. I should have checked that last night.
And I have a rich sense of humor, appreciating subtle wit and brash, laugh-out-loud boldness. Yes I do indeedy.
But, am I unwelcome on Making Light now?
Theresa, I pointed that out almost three years ago, here, on Patrick's weblog.
I'm still mad at you for being nasty to my friends Doug and Carlos, but nobody deserves to be SOL without good doctors.
My dad did his pulmonology fellowship at Albert Einstein with Charlie Pollak, whom I believe is part of the Sleep Center at Weill-Cornell.
I would suggest another thing: You need to possess a full copy of your medical chart(s) such that when you seek new medical care you can short-circuit the initial battery of evaluative examinations. As circumstances in my life have changed, I have ensured continuity of care personally by being able to provide physicians with my documented history.
to j. s. woodyatt:
Your comments -
In summary, I get that you think the situation in NMI was not so bad, that it's getting better, and that you think Delay and Abramoff were superheroes who saved the day and now those evil illiberal leftists, for whom no incremental reform is ever enough, are trying to piss all over their laudable accomplishments. Drink it up, Buckaroo. Your guys are crooks and gangsters— and they deserve to be sucking the pipe in a dark prison hole in the godforsaken midwest, not sitting in control of the U.S. Congress.
- are examples of a game I hate. I refuse to play this game. I refuse to infuse my politics into my substance of my sentences. I have _no_ bonafides to prove. I am not an ideologue. wll nt ttr grbl ms fr t nlck th "s" flng n th cnvrstn.
Reading comprehension should be enough. Bt t s nt, whn ppl r rdy t lp t th mst <>cmfrtbl</> f cnclsns.
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