serakit

There are definitely times this could have picked that *weren't* St. Patrick's Day... https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/03/14/coronavirus-south-boston-bars-crowded-social-distancing/

I have reached the limit of what I can store in the freezer without attracting the ire of my roommates for taking up the freezer, although once I deplete my frozen meat pies a little more I'm going to take some amount of the frozen meat and turn it into more meat pies. (What do I have in the freezer? Several pounds of ground meat, some tupperwares full of hand pies, and a bag of frozen broccoli. Supplemented by three jars of pickled herring in the fridge.) Now, meat pies are one way of getting vegetables into a preservable form, since I never put *just* meat in there, but I can't freeze enough vegetable to manage a month's worth of vegetable matter, and I don't actually *want* to live on pickles as my only vegetable although I do have two small jars of cornichons in my supplies.

The problem is, the easily preservable things all fall into categories I can't have-- I can't have carrots or onions or beans or tomatoes or peppers. My usual vegetable matter is broccoli, eggplant, spinach, and cucumber. I need a way to get versions of these that are shelf-stable at room temp. Products I need to order off Amazon are fine for the moment while there's still time for them to take a bit filling orders.

And while we're crowdsourcing, I need a way to make pasta palatable using shelf-stable ingredients within my food restrictions-- normally I do olive oil, a grated cheese blend, and anchovies, but my cheese blend isn't stable long-term at room temp. I bought some aged gouda today which was being *sold* at room temp so I'm assuming it's safe to *keep* at room temp.

Getting it working on my laptop took some effort and a conversation with the developers' help forums (the world does not like Linux, although they said there is a fix coming for this particular bug), but now that it *is* working, I very much recommend playing Cats Are Liquid! It's only a dollar on Steam, and it's so well done!

It's a platformer, but mostly it's puzzle-based-- there are only a couple of levels that require speed, in the higher levels. Most of the time you can sit there and stare at it and plan how to time your jumps as long as you want. You are a glowing cat who can turn into a liquid (and later into a gas), trying to get through a series of rooms in order to find the exit from this scary colorful maze you're trapped in.

It's also *really* philosophical for a game that's pretty much all oddly colored geometric shapes, that contains no characters other than you, the liquid cat. Like, pay attention to that text on the screen; it's not just instructions-- they're leading up to an actual plot payoff there, and one that's way more nuanced and thought out than I'd have expected from a cheap glowing platform puzzle.

Oh, and turn the sound on; the music is a delight, and very important to establishing mood.

There are two games in the series. I am most of the way through the first one, which is "Cats Are Liquid: A Light in the Shadows." I already have game 2 on my Steam. (A gift from benign_cremator, and definitely one that landed well.)

Discovery of the day: almond butter cookies do not spread like chocolate chip cookies do, and if you want them to come out the proper texture you really do need to flatten them beforehand. (Also I think my jar of yeast might be dead, but that's a separate issue.)

I attempted to use Baking By Flavor for the first time. Aside from an irritating obsession with vanilla-scented sugar, which I'm NOT 
MAKING, it seems to be fairly legible and well-written. I made almond butter cookies, which I was using as a substitute for peanut butter cookies, and I think they would have gone better if I hadn't drained off some of the separated oil when I first bought the jar. The problem is I don't like/can't digest it when it's overly oily and I'm using it to make sandwiches, but when you're baking with it you really want it to have all that oil. This is probably part of why the batter came out kind of sandy, the other part being that I omitted the shortening and just used all butter instead of part butter and part shortening.

I refuse to believe that vanilla-scented sugar adds enough flavor to something as strongly flavored as a nut-butter cookie for it to be worth using, though. I could see that being good in something that's very delicate or where the predominant flavor is supposed to be vanilla, but in something like this, the almond butter is going to drown it out. I think many of the recipes in this book call for vanilla-scented sugar for no apparent reason. In the vanilla section-- its conceit is that it's divided up into sections, each of which calls for a specific predominant flavor- that might make sense, but I think it very rarely does in the rest of the book.

Incidentally, as far as baking goes, I really need to start figuring out more options for savory baking. They have to exist, and they can't all involve twenty steps of boiling in malt powder the way soft pretzels do. Even if it's just "a few more variations on types of bread loaves", it would be welcome-- though ideally I want some savory quickbreads.

Sometimes, the solution is not chasing after increasingly bizarre and complicated permutations of rsync. Sometimes the solution is getting a damned USB drive and transferring your Firefox profile manually. This solution appears to have captured only about half of my browser history and preferences, and I'm going to have to manually reset a *lot* of my NoScript whitelist, but it got the session and the bookmarks, which were the relevant things.

I'm very proud of myself, though; after benign_cremator gave up trying to talk me through the rsync permutations and decided he'd just come over tomorrow to see what it was doing, I persevered through Google until I found an alternate solution.

On the bright side, spending a lot of time being talked through use of the command line via text message has given me a much better sense of what it *does*. Also my old laptop, which is superior to my new laptop, is functioning again. (The aforementioned rsync permutations were the tail end of a much more involved process involving several hours of benign_cremator dissecting my laptop and putting it back together again to put in a new keyboard. Don't spill water in your laptop keyboard.) Old laptop can now take its rightful place as my primary computer. Eventually we're going to set up a system of regular backups from this one to the new one so I have redundancy.

I have acquired oat flour, and so it is time for Alton Brown's banana bread recipe to make an appearance!

This is from I'm Just Here for More Food, which I haven't looked at terribly closely since acquiring it-- I got it during the move-out from the apartment before last, when the roommate it had belonged to observed that I was going to actually cook from it while he was just going to look at it, and gave it to me. (And indeed, he does not seem to have looked at it much, as it is appears new despite having spent some years before I lived there on the apartment's shared cookbook shelf.) So here I am, actually cooking from it!

This is the first of the banana bread recipes to contain almond extract, which is a new ingredient for me but one I will bear in mind for the future. Even doubled, the almond flavor is a little subtle, but it's there. Tell me, though, what is it with banana bread recipes with no spices? You cannot have a banana bread recipe that's just banana; it needs *some* flavoring agent or it's going to be bland! I added a fair amount of cinnamon and it came out quite tasty. And I'm pleased that this almond extract I bought for the sake of cranberry torte is turning out to be useful for more things than just cranberry torte, as we are coming to the end of cranberry season and I am going to be unable to make cranberry torte for a bit. (I have a giant bag of cranberries in the freezer, but that's for Fourth of July. We unfortunately do not have enough freezer for me to put up enough for them to be a year-round fruit.)

Alton Brown is very, very scientific about how he does things, sometimes to the detriment of, like, simplicity-- he calls for mixing the bananas and sugar in one bowl, the remaining wet ingredients in another bowl, and the dry ingredients in a third, and then combining the two bowls of wet ingredients with each other before combining with the dry ingredients. Needless to say I did not do this. One bowl of wet and one of dry is *already* more dishes than I like to use making stuff; I'd rather do the wet ingredients, add the small-quantity dry ingredients, and then add the flour. But I did do a wet ingredients and dry ingredients bowl for this. He also very clearly prefers you measure everything by weight, including *eggs*. (I'm not even using real eggs, so I was glad he does *include* count-and-volume measurements even if he'd so clearly prefer you not use them, because I have no idea how to translate my egg substitute to "twelve grams of eggs". I know how much is equivalent to one egg.)

It's also written like a science experiment-- you combine the things in these bowls, then combine them with the other things, with some referencing to other pages where he's discussed how to prepare a pan... I didn't have any shortening to grease the pan with, but I read his explanation of why you shouldn't do it with butter and used olive oil instead as the closest thing I had to having the desired properties. (Less protein and water.)

This is the first of the banana bread recipes to call for oat flour, and I think that's related to it being the first of the recipes to be really light and fluffy. I like the texture on this one much better than any of the other recipes.

...apparently I am evolving into a form of recipe blogger.

Thanksgiving! She posts, like, a week late, but things keep interrupting. My usual Thanksgiving didn't announce they were hosting one until, like, two days before this year, by which point I had found other plans. I'm now contemplating the relationship between the traditional etiquette I taught myself so I would have Concrete Social Rules before the autism diagnosis, and modern polyamory. In circles where polyamory is common, you either need to have a very, very Ask culture, such that you can freely ask which members of your polycule you can and can't bring with you to the thing-- particularly in nonheirarchical poly or non-coupled poly where the person issuing the invitations might not be able to tell from the outside who the primary is, or *if* there's a primary-- or an understanding on the part of everyone issuing invitations that they need to be very specific about who's being invited, which is much harder in the modern world when you might be inviting someone to something without knowing anything about their partners or even if they have any. I think my generation is going to have to move more to an ask culture simply because lifestyles are so much less homogenized now; it's much harder for one set of rules to tie everything together the way they have in the past. And I think traditional etiquette doesn't apply as much as it used to across the board; it's no longer considered Deeply Rude to mention you did a thing that someone else wasn't invited to-- I was brought up in a world where people should never know things they weren't invited to *existed*, because no one would ever mention such things to them. Even something as small as "I had so-and-so over for dinner".

On the other hand, how much of the modern tradition of "I'm having a giant potluck and inviting my entire social circle" is modern hosting shifting and how much is trying to apply that rule in an age of social media where you really can't count on your social circle not finding out you had a party and didn't invite some of them?

But all of that's a tangent because actually today we are discussing baking.

Thanksgiving had the rather amusing episode of a number of people realizing the day before that desserts were looking a bit thin and deciding to bring a dessert in addition to what they'd already brought, so there was a *lot* of dessert available. I made pecan pie, as is my tradition no matter where I'm going for Thanksgiving. benign_cremator expressed that this was not the best iteration of this dish I've ever done, and he's quite right-- when I'm not exhausted and dealing with new routines and baking far too late at night, I play around with it, do things like adding maple syrup or experimenting with spices, and look at the pie crust recipe before I do it. (Honestly I really need to get MathFriend-- who lacks a DW username-- to teach me his from-memory pie crust recipe, so I have something in my back pocket for when I am trying to make a Company Dessert.)

Which brings me to the pie crust recipe. The recipe for the pie *filling* is longstanding, and while I generally only do this once a year it's not difficult even in the years when I am conducting experiments on it. Pie crust, however, is something I don't have a standard for-- or, well, I *do*, but only for savory pies. The yeasted almost-bread crust I use for meat pies doesn't work for sweet pies. Also I am trying to experiment with my cookbook collection... which I probably also should not do while exhausted or for a company dessert, although in a fascinating turnaround it took gluten-free quite well, significantly better than it took with regular flour.

Anyway, I was very tired and was going "Which of my cookbooks will have a good pie crust recipe?" I forget why but I was somewhat dissatisfied with the options offered in How to Bake Everything, so I pulled out Cooking for Geeks, which I have actually never used before. This was... not a great plan, as it turns out, because it's not written in a way that's functional if you can't compensate for the ways the recipe is poorly written. It starts out offering a comparison of ingredients in Joy of Cooking versus Martha Stewart's pie crust recipe to discuss error tolerances in measuring. *Just* the ingredients; not either book's instructions. Joy calls for shortening, so I used Martha Stewart's version... which I suspect is more functional in her book, with her instructions. *This* book tells you to measure and combine all the ingredients for either one of the recipes. Yes, you read that right, all of them. Including the water. Then chill, then pulse in the food processor or if you don't have a food processor use a pastry blender.

I have *never* encountered a pie crust recipe that wants you to add the water before you add the butter, unless it's asking you to combine water and butter separately and add to dry ingredients (which is rare). It's going to be so much more difficult to cut in the butter if you add the water first. Even with the "chill all the things" step. (And in fact the Martha Stewart recipes I've found online don't suggest doing this; they are normal pie crust recipes written by someone who understands how food works.) I caught that it was asking you to do this and cut the butter in first, because I am an experienced baker who can compensate for these things, but it really makes me skeptical of the rest of the book, particularly since the pie crust didn't even come out that well.

Well, okay, as previously stated, the gluten-free pie came out extremely well for gluten-free pie. The one with gluten came out kind of sandy and overly crumbly.

Later in the book it goes on a long tirade about how instant yeast is *obviously* superior to active dry yeast and you should always use instant yeast unless you have some special reason for active dry because with active dry yeast you *always* have to proof it and that adds time and an extra step, and... I have many, many issues with that line of reasoning. (Also you don't always have to proof active dry yeast. I have made plenty of bread recipes where it just goes straight into the dough without the mix-with-water-and-sugar step and still comes out fine.)

There are two ways to analyze cookbooks: vertically, by baking a bunch of recipes from the same cookbook, and laterally-- baking a bunch of the same recipe from different cookbooks. I attempted to analyze my cookbook collection laterally only to discover that there are disappointingly few banana bread recipes in any of my cookbooks-- there's the one in Baking by Flavor that we saw last week, one in Bakewise that calls for heavy cream and is thus unusable for me (I've never yet found a good non-dairy, non-coconut, non-chickpea substitute for that, though admittedly I haven't done a lot of experimenting), one in Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food which calls for oat flour and thus will be making an appearance after I've acquired some, and today's one in How to Bake Everything.

That is *it*. Sure, there is at least one more box of cookbooks that's still in the storage unit, but still!

I am realizing, thanks to this whole experience, that there is a massive problem skew in my cookbook collection that probably explains why I use so few of my books: I am a baker. I'll deal with the stovetop when and as I need to, but for the most part I am a baker first and foremost. Baking is art and instinct; cooking is following the recipe and having it still come out wrong half the time-- the only things I can do successfully on the stovetop are things someone outright *taught* me. (I can make rice bowls and chicken-and-dumpling soup. I live on these things, ramen, insta-food, and baked food-- which includes things like pot pies and roasted vegetables; I just *really need* an oven involved.) My cookbook collection has far too many things that are for *stovetop* foods, or slab-of-meat roasts which I don't do because they're expensive and uninteresting. (Before you tell me I just haven't had a good one, no, I absolutely have; benign_cremator is excellent at making roasts. They're just not... interesting, as a food.)

The bright side is that this digging in is both telling me what cookbooks I need more of and what cookbooks I need to weed-- not that I'm weeding anything very rapidly since I probably should expand my repertoire of stovetop cooking more generally and some of my cookbooks are here because they're sentimental or adorable, but if I am afraid to even look for a dish in the index of something because I don't particularly trust it to provide me with decent recipes, that's *maybe* a sign I should get rid of the book. I might look at it more closely to see if any of the recipes in it look edible first, but I have a lot of books, several of which I *know* are better. (The book in question is "Dad's Own Cookbook", which may have survived the last weed mostly on account of it being done in a massive rush before the move as just a quick skim to take out the truly terrible things, because when I was building up a collection by wandering home with random stuff from library sales... I didn't have especially discerning judgment in those early days, nor much of an idea of what I wanted.)

Meanwhile, the actual recipe that we cooked today was banana bread from How to Bake Everything. The recipe calls for *no* spices at all, just a little vanilla extract, which I have issues with. Banana bread needs spices, it really does. Recipes being guidelines to me, we added both the same mixed spice blend we added last time ("Omar's Secret Indulgence" from Auntie Arwen's, if you want to play along at home) and a lot of chocolate chips. Even accounting for the fact that we underbaked this loaf a bit, I prefer Baking by Flavor's recipe. This one is just... uninteresting. It's denser than the other one, and it somehow has less flavor despite the fact that we added the same spice mix.

This is overall kind of a pattern I've noticed with How to Bake Everything. It is excellent if you really need a functional recipe on just about anything right now without time to page through the indexes of twenty cookbooks, but if you have time to hunt up a recipe in a more specialized cookbook, you really should; his recipes work and are often tasty and often wind up giving me ideas for preparations, but they're far more on the "no really, *just a guideline*" end of the spectrum than some cookbooks, and then even after I modify the heck out of them they're just okay. There are a couple of gems (the yeasted pie crust for the Lebanese Meat Pies is something I have taken to using for a whole lot of other things), and there are a lot of times I find myself relying on it because I need a recipe for a given thing RIGHT NOW, but if I'm thinking coherently I can usually find a better version of the whatever it was somewhere else. (That being said? This cookbook remains a workhorse part of my collection.)

I present to you: Cliche Bingo! Inspired by the list of cliches jducoeur posted. These come from the list he linked to and the Forbes slideshow linked to at the end of the list.

The rules:
Issue everyone a cliche bingo board. Each time you hear a cliche that's on the board, place a counter on that square. The center space with the star is a free space. First one to accumulate an entire row, column, or diagonal of five squares wins. Since everyone has the same board, cliche bingo works best when played by people in different departments or companies and will therefore have exposure to different situations at work. Cliches only count when used in a workplace setting. Cliches said by any players do not count.

Cliche bingo can be played for a pool or for free. The honor system is required by the situation; we trust players will accurately report the cliches they hear.

The board: