Delicious meatloaf recipe (with some odd ingredients)

I promised my friend Jennifier I’d post this . . . .  a long time ago.  Sorry I took so long.

For other readers — this is a really good recipe. Whenever I make it, it doesn’t stay around long. That includes the times I’ve tripled the recipe to 6 lbs of meat, and it still won’t last a week!

This recipe is a modified version of the “Meat Loaf with Brown Sugar – Ketchup Glaze” that appears on page 451 of The New Best Recipe from the Editors of Cook’s Illustrated, 2nd Edition, ISBN 978-0-936184-74-6 (Amazon.com link) — eagle-eyed observers will notice right away I’ve cut out the glaze. I’ve made other modifications too.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Take a cookie sheet with raised sides and line it with aluminum foil.

Ingredients:

• cooked onions
  • 2 tsp vegetable oil
  • 1 medium onion, chopped, approx 1 cup
• 3 medium garlic cloves (or more if you like garlic), minced or pressed through a garlic press
• 2/3 cup quick-cooking 1-minute oats
• 1/2 cup minced fresh parsley (can be either flat or curly)
• 2 lbs ground beef
• liquid ingredients and seasonings
  • 1/2 cup plain yogurt (or whole milk if you don’t have yogurt, but it tastes better with yogurt)
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 tsp dried thyme
  • 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
  • 1/4 tsp hot pepper sauce
  • 1 Tblsp Dijon mustard
  • 1 Tblsp Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tsp salt (optional)
• 8 0z bacon (or more) — see notes below about bacon

Put the oil in a skillet and use it to saute the onions until soft, about five minutes. Set aside to cool. If you like, you can saute the garlic with the onions, or add the garlic raw in the next step.

Put the ground beef, oats, parsley, and garlic (if not sauted) in a medium or medium-large mixing bowl.

Put all ingredients listed under liquid ingredients and seasonings (yogurt/whole milk, eggs, thyme, pepper, hot pepper sauce, mustard, Worcestershire, and salt if used) in a small bowl and whisk together.

If the onions have cooled, add them to the bowl with the ground beef. Add in liquid ingredients mixture. Mix all together in bowl until the liquid has been absorbed and the mixture is starting to stick together, about 2-3 minutes if mixing with your hands (which is messy, but not as hard on my hands or as time-consuming as when I’ve tried using a fork to mix everything together).

Pour the meat loaf mixture out on the foil-lined cookie pan. Shape by hand into a loaf shape. There should be at least an inch of space between the loaf and the sides of the cookie sheet. If you have doubled or tripled the recipe it may be necessary to use more than one cookie sheet and cook it in two or more batches.

Place bacon strips across the top of the loaf.

BACON NOTE 1: This part of the recipe does not scale linearly with the rest. So if you double the recipe, you will not necessarily need to use 16 strips of bacon to cover the loaf just because a single recipe used 8 strips.

BACON NOTE 2: You can use uncooked bacon. But I personally prefer the precooked thin-sliced sandwich bacon you can now get in some stores, it’s not as greasy as uncooked bacon and I don’t have to worry about whether it’s fully cooked too when the meat loaf is done.

Put cookie sheet with bacon-covered loaf in oven. Cook until internal temperature reaches at least 160 F, about 1 hour. (Might be more in cases of double or triple recipes, depends on shape of loaf).

A fair amount of liquid will come out of the loaf while cooking, this is normal. When done cooking, this liquid and the foil lining for the cookie sheet can be thrown away.

There is an interesting story behind this recipe — I found it while looking for a meat loaf recipe that I thought no one else in the house would like. Leftover meatloaf is good to reheat and also good when sliced cold and put in a sandwich, but if I make anything that tastes too good then everyone eats it and  . . .  no leftovers.  So I found this recipe and thought “parsley??? YOGURT???? Surely no one else will even THINK of trying this!” And the first time I made it, it came out of the oven just as my father, brother, and our hired hands stopped by for lunch. There were already two roasted chickens sitting very prominently in the kitchen where they would be quite obvious, but my brother zeroed in on the meat loaf and said “what’s this??”. I explained it was a new recipe I had just tried, which I had never tried before, and I didn’t know if it would be any good — and within 2 minutes I had only about 1/10th of it left. The chickens got mostly ignored, I was left struggling between pride from everyone exclaiming how good the meat loaf was and irritation that they were supposed to not like it in the first place, and when I asked my brother or father later if they hadn’t noticed that it tasted a bit funny since it had PARSLEY AND YOGURT in it, they said nope, tasted great, they would never have guessed it had those ingredients in it, and was I going to make any more since this batch had disappeared so fast?

Cross-posted to MySpace and Facebook.

Awesome smackdown by Neil Gaiman on needy fans

Hat tip to Ryan Sohmer over at Looking For Group for posting a link to this on his site.

I don’t regularly follow Neil Gaiman’s journal, but I might start after reading his post about Entitlement Issues. A reader wrote in to complain about George R.R. Martin’s blog & Twitter posts not containing any information about a new book the reader is awaiting, and asking Mr. Gaiman what he thought about Mr. Martin’s lack of discussion.

Mr. Gaiman had a very eloquent description of the work that goes into writing, and some of the trials and tribulations — including the intrusion of real life.

But the most poetic part of the whole piece was Mr. Gaiman telling the over-eager reader that authors are not the reader’s bitch. Not George R.R. Martin, not Neil Gaiman, not any author. Just because a reader has read and/or paid for a copy of a book in a series, there is no contract — neither implicit nor explicit — between the author and that reader that there will ever be another book in the series. And definitely no contract that any forthcoming books will be launched in a certain time frame or will be written to the liking of that reader in particular or all readers in general.

A truly awesome smackdown to read.

A Rant: MySpace & Facebook — Brilliant as ever

There’s sarcasm in that title, if you didn’t notice. MySpace and Facebook have decided to make life difficult, for reasons that I fail to comprehend.

——

MySpace first, since I’ve used that for longer — I’ve had a MySpace page for a couple years now. Don’t do a lot with it, honestly. But some of my friends use MySpace a lot and I upload photos to the photo album there so friends on MySpace can see some of my photos.

Used to be, I could open up a specific MySpace web page to upload photos, and I could use just about any address the web could access. My computer, a url from a different site, whatever.

So, I’d upload photos or images I wanted to use to either Flickr or Photobucket. Flickr I’d use for photos that I took myself, and/or photos from events I went to with friends or family where bunches of us took pictures. Photobucket I’d use for images from e-mail and the web, especially since Photobucket has this awesome and nifty little feature where I can forward an e-mail from my e-mail account to an e-mail address for my Photobucket account and Photobucket will automatically strip out the images and load them into my Photobucket album.

Once I decided to use a Flickr or Photobucket image on my MySpace page, I’d go to their handy-dandy uploader thingy, paste in the Flickr/Photobucket image address, and away we’d go.

But no more. At some point in the last six months or so (maybe longer, I haven’t uploaded images to MySpace in a while) MySpace decided I can only upload photos from the computer I’m on.

Which, if you just read all my explanation above, means that all that handy time-saving stuff about pasting in Flickr/Photobucket urls is now null and void.

What. The. Hell????

——

I’ve just started using Facebook and am finding the same thing — I can only upload images from the computer I’m sitting at.

——

Now, I can understand if there had been some nasty lawsuit about people uploading tons of images that weren’t theirs. But is that really what’s going on, or did MySpace and Facebook decide they wanted to monopolize people’s time? (I’ve read in other places that’s why MySpace starting letting people upload their videos to MySpace, they saw all the YouTube videos being posted on MySpace and decided they wanted a piece of the on-line video action.)

And on another side note, something that is REALLY irritating — I added a photo to my MySpace album, copied and pasted what was supposed to be the external link address, and then put that link (to a photo in my own MySpace album!!!) as the background for my MySpace page. Just to be very clear about what I did, on my own MySpace profile I pasted a link to an image that is in my own MySpace photo album. And . . . drum roll . . . the image did not show up on my profile.

But when I pasted in a link to a copy of the same image on my Photobucket account, it shows up as the background image for my MySpace profile with no problems.

CODERS AND WEBSITE ADMINISTRATORS OF THE WORLD: WOULD IT BOTHER YOU SO TERRIBLY MUCH TO QUIT MAKING MY LIFE MORE DIFFICULT????

——

Cross-posted on my MySpace blog.

Second-guessing past decisions — STOP THAT!!!

I haven’t been writing very much lately, and in looking for ways to rectify that I decided to do some writing on the ways people can drive themselves insane.

*ahem* or if you can say it in a more authoritative voice (or imagine it in more formal script), I propose to write  “discourses on the road to madness”.

All melodrama aside, I didn’t choose the terms ‘insane’ or ‘madness’ lightly. It really is possible for a reasonably sane and functional person to drive themselves insane by dwelling on certain thought patterns.

One of these madness-inducing thought patterns is second-guessing past decisions.

What is done is done. If you made a mistake in the past, then resolve to learn from that mistake and hopefully not repeat it. But do not start wondering “what if I had done x instead of y”.

Firstly, there is no human way you can know what would have happened if you had taken a different path at some juncture in your life. Maybe your life would have turned out better. Maybe it would have turned out worse.

Secondly, just as the choices available to you and the decisions you make are affected by what other people do, so too are other people’s choices and decisions (and lives) affected by the decisions you make. So not only can you not know how your life would have been different if you had chosen differently, you also can’t know how other people’s lives would have been different.

I’ll use my life as an example. After I graduated from high school, I went to a four year university and pursued a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering. Partly it was because my father was an engineer and I wanted to be like him, and partly it was because I enjoyed the math that was part of the electrical engineering curricula.

But as it turned out, I don’t have a typical electrical engineer personality. I really don’t have the patience, ambition, or temperament to decide on a particular way to solve a problem and then get married to that solution so I have enough drive to stay with it and make it work. I’m far more interested in how systems work together, and how to make things so they can withstand the shocks real life throws at them. If I had life to do all over again, knowing then what I know now, I probably would have pursued a technician’s degree or gone to a two-year college to study the electrical trades.

However, in doing so I would have missed out on a lot of good friends, good times,  and really interesting life experiences I had by pursuing the electrical engineering degree and moving to the Portland, Oregon metro area to find work in that degree. Yes, I would probably have done some equally interesting things and met equally interesting people if I had pursued the technician or electrician paths, but there’s no way to know. And I don’t regret in any way many of the things I did (or tried to do) on the path of life that I did choose.

The inspiration for this piece was a dinner conversation I had with a friend recently. My friend has been working on getting a college degree for a few years now. There have been some bobbles along the way that have delayed her degree. During dinner she started blaming herself for not making different choices in the past, and I told her ‘don’t do that’. I think she’s done some amazing things with her life, things I don’t know I would have been able to achieve under the same circumstances. She looked at her life and saw all the things that could have been but weren’t, while I saw all the things that were which didn’t have to be and which (quite frankly) most people don’t succeed at or even try.

So, wherever you are in life and whatever you have (or haven’t) achieved, accept that for what it is and move forward. But do not start on what could have happened if you had done such-and-such instead.

That way lies madness.

I don’t always quote poems in my posts, but I like this poem by Robert Frost so I’m going to include it.

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Online text © 1998-2009 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Mountain Interval | Henry Holt & Company, 1920

Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken.” in Poetry X 16 Jun 2003, <http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/271/> (07 May 2009).

Also cross-posted to my MySpace blog.

Oatmeal applesauce chocolate chip cookies

Adapted from the recipe for “Applesauce Oaties with White Chocolate Chips, Raisins and Walnuts” in A Baker’s Field Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies by Dede Wilson.

Dough needs to rest at least 2 hours before baking, preferably overnight.

Bake at 325 F.

Oatmeal Applesauce Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 2-1/2 cups old-fashioned rolled oatmeal (NOT instant or 1-minute oatmeal)
• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 to 1-1/2 cups nuts, either pecans or walnuts or a mix, finely chopped and preferably toasted
• 1 to 1-1/2 cups dark chocolate morsels; Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips work well
• 1-1/2 tsp ground cinmamon (can be true cinnamon or cassia cinnamon)
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1 cup / 2 sticks unsalted butter, melted
• 1/2 to 1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar (depending on your tastes)
• 1 cup unsweetened applesauce (preferably homemade but store-bought works fine too)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 large egg

Whisk oatmeal, flour, chocolate morsels/chips, nuts, cinnamon, baking soda, and baking powder together in a large bowl.

In another large bowl, whisk together melted butter and brown sugar. Add in applesauce, vanilla, and egg, blending well after each addition. (This mixture will be very thin at this point.)

Stir dry mixture into wet mixture until just blended. Cover with plastic wrap and chill dough at least 2 hours and preferably overnight.

Preheat oven to 325 F. Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Drop chilled dough by generous rounded tablespoons on cookie sheets 2 inches apart or more. Flatten with floured fingers if you wante a flatter cookie, otherwise they will stay fairly rounded. Bake until edges and tops turn light brown, about 12 minutes. Cookies will also feel firmer when you press on it when it’s cooked, when dough is still raw cookie will easily give when top is pressed.

Cool completely on cookie racks.

This is a very moist cookie that will keep for 3-5 days at room temperature. However, it freezes very well and will easily thaw when taken out of the freezer.

This is one of my favorite cookies, both for the taste and texture, and also because it is like a really tasty energy bar if you pack it along for trips, sporting events, etc.

Oatmeal Macaroons

From my grandmother Doris. (Grandma, we still miss you.)

Pre-heat oven to 375 F.

Oatmeal Macaroons

• 1 stick margarine (or butter)
• 1/2 cup Crisco (or other solid vegetable shortening)
• 1 pound or 2-1/4 cups brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1-1/2 cups flour
• 2 cups oatmeal
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 8 oz shredded sweetened coconut, or 1 bag
• 1 cup chopped nuts

Cream margarine/butter, Crisco/shortening, sugar and eggs in large mixer bowl. Add vanilla.

Stir together baking soda, flour and oatmeal. Add this mixer bowl, with electric mixer set at low speed.

Add coconut and nuts.

If dough is too stiff to mix add water a tablespoon at a time.

Drop onto cookie sheet and back at 375 F. Medium-sized cookies take 12 minutes, smaller cookies less time. Watch the first couple batches carefully, as these cookies go from raw dough to just right to burnt in only a couple minutes.

These cookies keep very well in an airtight container. They will also last a long time in the freezer and thaw very quickly.

Cartoons about social websites — so true, so true

I have active accounts on about a half-dozen different social websites, lapsed accounts on two or three, and there’s another six or ten out there that I’ve heard of and have no interest in joining anytime in the foreseeable future.

Even my “active” accounts are not really all that active.

And why is that?

Because most of the really active accounts seem to belong to people like Greg and popo in the cartoons below.

And I wish I were joking.

UserFriendly, Feb 16-20, 2009

(Crossposted to my MySpace blog.)

Entitled College Students — Such a good article, and so awful at the same time

The article is “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes“(1) The subject of the article is just that — college students who feel completely entitled to good grades just for showing up. (Hat tip to slublog over at Ace of Spades.)

One of the examples cited in the article is Professor Marshall Grossman of the University of Maryland saying this about students in his English classes:

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

The very next paragraph states:

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

Further down the article, there’s another student (who I won’t further encourage by repeating his name) whose whole gripe can be summed up as “if I do what I’m supposed to do and only get a C for being satisfactory and not an A for being exemplary, why should I try?”

Well, I guess that’s a question some of us have asked before. And most of us realize that sometimes you do the things you don’t like to do because that’s part of life — you’re not supposed to get a fanfare and congratulatory shower of confetti every time you wash your clothes, brush your teeth, pay your bills, or stop at red lights. But you do those things because if you don’t do them, then you don’t get to do some of the things that make life convenient — like a driver’s license — or livable, like friends and good health.

But the reactions of the professors and administrators at these various colleges was equally headache-inducing:

“I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.

Aaron M. Brower, the vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered another theory.

“I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences,” Professor Brower said. “They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”

James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “

. . .

At Vanderbilt, there is an emphasis on what Dean Hogge calls “the locus of control.” The goal is to put the academic burden on the student.

“Instead of getting an A, they make an A,” he said. “Similarly, if they make a lesser grade, it is not the teacher’s fault. Attributing the outcome of a failure to someone else is a common problem.”

Additionally, Dean Hogge said, “professors often try to outline the ‘rules of the game’ in their syllabi,” in an effort to curb haggling over grades.

Professor Brower said professors at Wisconsin emphasized that students must “read for knowledge and write with the goal of exploring ideas.”

This informal mission statement, along with special seminars for freshmen, is intended to help “re-teach students about what education is.”

Are they joking? It’s all the fault of the parents caring too much about their kids’ grades, or the fault of the K-12 teachers for being too good at teaching?? Dean Hogge comes perilously close to the truth with his comment “Attributing the outcome of a failure to someone else is a common problem.”  but then talks about how it is up to the professors to make an extra effort to emphasize their grading criteria in their syllabus. Somehow it’s never the fault of whoever (parents, teachers, and popular culture could all be guilty here) taught these young idiots that nothing is their fault. And they’re not responsible for anything either, certainly not responsible for realizing that an A means you did more than was called for.

If it takes all you have to just meet the expectations for attendance and required reading, then maybe your professor is a maniac or maybe you’re in over your head. You might be in over your head because of time constraints or you might be in over your head because the material is getting to be more than you can readily grasp, but in neither case should the professor give you an A for doing only what’s expected.

And then at the end of the article was another head-slapper:

[Professor Brower] said that if students developed a genuine interest in their field, grades would take a back seat, and holistic and intrinsically motivated learning could take place.

Again, is he joking? If you take a genuine interest in a field and don’t care about grades, you get some instructional books/programs/CDs/DVDs or go find a local study group, you don’t pay thousands and thousands of dollars to spend hours of your life sitting in uncomfortable classrooms.

(1) Roosevelt, Max; “Student Expectation Seen as Causing Grade Disputes; New York Times; publish date February 17, 2009; accessed via internet February 19, 2009; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/education/18college.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

Need to start using Firebug more

I downloaded and installed Firebug for Firefox the other day (I primarily use Flock as my browser, but Firefox is nice too) but hadn’t used Firebug much. After running across Kristarella’s tutorial on Firebug, I am going to start trying to use it more. Her tutorial was very informative and I think I’ll learn a lot more using FireBug than trying to reinvent the wheel myself.

For future reference, Kristarella’s blog is here, and this is a really good post she wrote about ways to control your e-mail, instead of it controlling you.

Wow!!! After a lot of tweaking and fiddling, finally got a gravatar set up.

Found another neat new web thing, the globally recognized avatars. I think it’s part of WordPress (either that, or it uses my WordPress OpenID), and it seems to work pretty well.

It took a couple tries to find a good picture and get it uploaded and cropped, but it’s finally all set.

Sites: Gravatar – http://www.gravatar.com

Now THAT’S what I call a social networking site!!!

I just recently found the site 97Bottles, which allows users to enter profiles and reviews of their favorite beers. If you have friends that also subscribe to the site, you can send them recommendations for different beers, but I am not that social so I don’t have any friends on the the site.

97Bottles is a really easy site to use and has a nice artistic theme too. Membership is free (yay!) but you can’t see reviews or people or anything else on the site unless you are a member and logged in (boo . . . ). Another annoyance is the only current way to find other friends on the site is through Twitter, which I don’t use. Being able to search by geographical location or e-mail would be really nice — their feedback site does say they are working on a way to find other members in your geographic area.

I checked for Pigs Ass Porter, which I have been drinking lately. It’s brewed over in Belt, Montana at the Harvest Moon Brewery. Oddly, they had Harvest Moon in their list of breweries, but didn’t have any entries for beers brewed by Harvest Moon. Seeing the lack, I added all the beers I could find on Harvest Moon’s list, and added reviews for their Beltian White and Pigs Ass Porter beers.

Anyway,  neat website. Hat tip to Jeff Croft, whose blog I found it mentioned on.

UPDATE, Feb 19, 2009: Jeff Croft left a note and kindly explained that 97Bottles is in private beta and is only open to those who have received an invite or who have an OpenID (see below).  Once the site becomes a public beta, you won’t have to be a member to see beer reviews on the site. They will probably also add some of the features I was whining about, like being able to search for other members in your area. Thank you for the note, Jeff!!! And yes, I like the site very much!

(There are a whole bunch of social websites whose membership can serve as an OpenID for you, including Blogger, Flickr, LiveJournal, Yahoo, and WordPress, and there are other ways to get an OpenID which are all explained here.)

(Original post and update crossposted on my MySpace blog, with some editing.)

Web Standards

After a long hiatus from doing anything creative or constructive  on the web — besides infrequent comments on various blogs — I am going to start playing around with various web pages and code and layout again. And trying to write more stuff in general.

I have been following a number of sites that talk about web page development. Webmonkey is a really nice site, although their blog has slowed down quite a bit since some of their regular contributors had to decamp for real jobs with steady paychecks.

Recently, they posted an article and a link about a very nice program called ExCanvas World Map which uses HTML’s <canvas> tag to produce a world map similar to the world map created by Google Analytics. Like a lot of people, I think Google is becoming the next Microsoft — an industry leader who is an industry leader because they have some great products and have done some amazing things with the technology, but also an industry leader who has become so used to being an industry leader they are now very thin-skinned and sometimes a bit high-handed (I’ve heard the term “badge-heavy” applied to cops who have this personality quirk, but I don’t know an equivalent term for tech companies) — and so I am happy to see alternatives.

(And for future notes for myself, after playing around with the setting I like a background color of 7098cd, a foreground of dddddd, borders of 606060, a border width of 1.5px, padding of 0px, and a highlight color of ffffff.)

Since the canvas tag is a creature of HTML5, I figured it was time I started reading up on HTML5. And what I found was . . . . quite interesting.

The last time I really read about web standards, HTML5 had not even really been proposed yet, and XHTML was being promoted by most of the books I was reading. Another site I follow regularly is A List Apart and Molly E. Holzschlag had an excellent article there in September 2008 about web standards in general with a little bit about XHTML vs. HTML5 in general.

That the article was titled “Web Standards 2008: Three Circles of Hell” should be a clue as to how upbeat she was about web standards. To briefly summarize her article (which is well worth reading in its entirety), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short) writes a lot of web standards, but is seen by many in the web community as outdated, glacially slow-moving, and mostly a bunch of ivory tower academics who write in terms best understood by other ivory tower academics. While it is open to individuals as well as company representatives, the cost of traveling to different conferences and keeping up with correspondence is burdensome for individuals who do not have a company sponsorship. But on the other hand, there are things done by the W3C that wouldn’t be accomplished anywhere else, and the web would be a much worse place if there weren’t any standards at all.

But, as the W3C was working on standards for the next phase of the web, a number of web professionals came to the conclusion that W3C was (a) moving much too slow and (b) was focusing too much effort on XHTML and other XML-based standards, while HTML itself was slowly being left behind. Since HTML, an acronym for HyperText Markup Language, was what created most web pages as we know them in the first place (and made something more visually interesting than the usenet e-mail discussion groups, file transfer protocol servers, and the remote terminal sessions that comprised a lot of internet traffic when it was still mostly college students and professors and when most people were still on dial-up and the entire Montana university system probably generated traffic for only one T1 line) many people though it was stupid to let it become obsolete. So groups such as the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), The Web Standards Project (WaSP) and the Web Standards Group (WSG) started focusing on creating a specification for HTML5 (in the case of WHATWG) and drawing public attention to the need for standards-compliant browsers and websites (in the case of WaSP and WSG).

And that was all well and good, and it does look like HTML5 has already accomplished some nice things (as this article at WebMonkey talks about). But then came the announcement in September of last year that HTML5 probably won’t be a fully developed and released standard for another 13 years, or until 2022. Since 13 years in the past was when the internet was still almost entirely the usenet, hyperterminal, and ftp/gopher sessions I alluded to earlier and browsers were something a new company called Netscape had just created for Unix and Linux machine and which Microsoft hadn’t even really considered yet, I think anyone trying to write a standard now for the web which won’t be a mature standard until 2022 is laughable.

Blogger and web professional Jeff Croft said the same thing when that announcement came out, and in much more elegant and authoritative terms than I can manage.

So, where does that leave me with web standards? Personally, I would rather follow a standard than not if I can make it work, and Ethan Marcotte had an article about following web standards in a late February 2007 issue of A List Apart. To paraphrase Ethan, a webpage that works but doesn’t try to follow standards is fine and dandy — as long as it works. But if it runs into problems, it takes twice as long to fix because you have to spend hours figuring out what isn’t broken before you can find where it is broken. Like Roedy Green wrote in his  guide to writing unmaintainable code (comprehensive version, original easier-to-read version), it’s hard to find the off-kilter piece of machinery causing the problem if everything looks off-kilter because it’s all non-standard to start with.

So, in the interest of being somewhat consistent in what I do, I will try to follow web standards whenever possible. While search A List Apart for articles about web standards, I found an article by Craig Cook from January 2007 about grokking web standards. He states that to get web standards, you have to rearrange your thinking and start thinking in terms of structure as much s presentation; it’s like being a writer, an artist, and an enginer all at the same time. Sounds like a bit of a high hurdle, but I’d rather shoot for that than spend the rest of my life than randomly throwing stuff into a .html file in the hopes that maybe this time it will look decent (and not break the instant I try to click on a link).

And on a random note: WordPress updated their interface for blog writers a while back. It was nice before, but now it’s really nice.

A big thanks to all the military veterans out there!!

I didn’t go to the local Veterans’ Day memorial service in Great Falls (and I still feel kind of guilty about that), but I did want to put up a post saying thanks to all our military veterans.

There are always a number of daily cartoons that will send out a big thank you to the vets on Veterans’ Day. One of the best I’ve seen was the Over the Hedge Veterans’ Day cartoon from 2007.

This year, UserFriendly had a week-long series about Veterans’ Day that was . . . very sincere, but a bit heartbreaking too. (While UserFriendly is a Canadian comic, Canadians celebrate Veterans’ Day on the same day we do, November 11. Veterans’ Day was originally called Armistice Day and was chosen by a number of countries as the day to celebrate the end of World War I. In 1954 the name was changed to Veterans Day in the United States because that would refer to all American military veterans, not just those who fought in World War I. Some countries celebrate November 11 as Armistice Day or Rememberance Day.)

And here are some links I found for groups that support veterans:

• The USO – The USO has been around since before World War II. I thought they mainly sponsored entertainment shows and visits by popular performers for the troops, but this summer one of the custom cutter who worked for us during harvest was carrying around journals for people to write messages to the troops, and he said he’d gotten the idea off the USO site. And looking at their site, there’s a lot of other stuff they do too.
• Soldiers’ Angels – On Veterans’s Day, Ace of Spades and Commander Salamander had links to the Valour-IT project run by Soldiers’ Angels. Valour-IT focuses on veterans who have physical disabilities such as hand wounds that make it hard to use some electronics. They started out by just supplying voice-controlled laptops, but the webpage says they’ve expanded beyond that and offer other devices in addition to the laptops to physically disabled veterans.
• Operation Interdependence -  This organization was mentioned in a Veterans’ Day article in the Great Falls Tribune. They specialize in providing care packages for regularly deployed troops. The care packages provide reminders of home (and reminders that they’re appreciated and haven’t been forgotten) to troops out in the field, and includes stuff like sports clippings, magazines, games, and grooming aids.
• True to the Red White and Blue – This is a locally-run charity, based in Great Falls. Their website is a little sparse, but I’ve seen them around town a number of times. They hold regular raffles and the lady who runs it is very nice to talk to.

There’s lots more out there (here’s a list of charities and support organizations from BlackFive’s site), these are just a few I’ve run across personally. For anyone who’s interested, here’s the Department of Veterans’ Affairs page on the history of Veterans’ Day.

Cross-posted on my MySpace blog in case anyone has problems seeing the cartoons here.

Some notes about design

I am writing this post for two reasons. One reason is it will be an entry in the Design Group Writing Project for Charity, run by Jacob Cass who writes Just Creative Design.  But the other reason is to provide encouragement and maybe a couple of ideas for people like me, who have stumbled onto design as an interest and are wondering where to go from here.

As someone who was a geek in high school and went on to get an engineering degree in college, ten years ago I would have told you that small aesthetic details did not make that big a difference in the long run.

And truthfully, I remember very few classes that discussed design at all. Even in engineering classes, the ins and outs of product design (how do you design something to be made cheaply and reliably? custom components vs. off-the-shelf? and so on . . . ) were not talked about in great detail. As far as aesthetic design? Well, there were some English classes, a high school social studies class, and some other presentation / writing assignments that spent a little bit of time talking about how writing assignments should be formatted, and maybe a couple of high school art and drafting classes.

But that was it.

Obviously, my viewpoint on design has changed. But while design is now a topic I find fascinating (and very relevant to day-to-day life) it is still something I struggle with occasionally.

So here are the things I’ve learned along the way about design.

First off, figure out what it is that you like, and then why you like it.

This is one of those things that falls under the three rules “the important things are simple”, “the simple things are hard”, and “the easy way is always mined”. Figuring out what you like means that you have to actually start paying attention to the world around you, and also to your reactions to the world around you.

Sounds simple, but for some people it can be really difficult to take some time and just experience the world around them as it presents itself. If you have this inability to “let go”, it’s not necessarily for bad reasons, and not necessarily for good reasons — you might have a lot of pent-up emotions you dwell on, a tendency to daydream, a pre-occupation with abstract concepts, or any of a whole list of other things going on in your head. But until you can get all that mental chit-chat to shut up for a while, you won’t have a very good idea what it is you like. You’ll have a very good idea what it is you think you should like, and what your peers like (or at least, act as if they like), but there’s a very good chance you will have only a fuzzy idea what you actually like. So start paying attention to the things around you — what you wear and how it affects how your mood throughout the day is a good place to start. From there start noticing what you like to look at, including what you like to look at or read when you have a quiet moment to yourself.

And then figure out if there are any themes that start presenting themselves. Some of the themes I find in my tastes are cool colors and clear boundaries. But you can also have tastes that run counter to each other; while I like clear boundaries, I also like to sometimes mix things up in odd and unexpected ways — those three rules I quoted at the top came from an old poster titled “Murphy’s Laws of Combat”. And at the end of the day, I always want something that works – I don’t want jewelry or clothing I can’t wear, a quote that doesn’t contribute to the point I’m trying to make, a webpage that doesn’t render correctly, or a gadget that doesn’t do it’s job.

But you might be different. So take some time to figure out what it is you like. And be prepared for the possibility it’s something you thought you wouldn’t like, or it’s something your family or friends didn’t expect you to like.

Secondly, start creating! And have some pride in your work!!

Doodle, sketch, make jewelry, embroider, weld, paint furniture, code, write — whatever! Don’t necessarily limit yourself to one media. But do get used to making things!! Small things, big things, decorative things, utilitarian things, things made to hang around forever, things that will be gone in a month — all fine, but make something!!! Don’t sit there endlessly daydreaming about the Great and Wonderful whatever-it-is you’ll make some day when you have the time.

If you wait around for tons of free time, motivation and inspiration to just drop out of the sky into your lap, you’re going to be waiting a very long time. Make the time now, and get used to giving yourself a kick in the butt every so often to make something. Even if it’s just buying a couple flowers at the grocery store and arranging them nicely in a vase on the dinner table, it’ll be something you can look at and think “I made that. And I liked making it. I wonder what I’ll make next.”

But don’t forget the other part of making things — have some pride in what you do.  If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. That’s true no matter what your occupation is or what you’re doing. If it’s flowers in a vase on the table, don’t just throw them in a dusty vase and shove them in a dark corner — take the time to get them arranged nicely (and wipe off the vase if it’s dusty). If you think you’re done making whatever it is you’re making, imagine being shown a picture of it by a friend a year from now. If you don’t think it’s something you’ll be willing to take credit for a year from now, then you’re not done.

And one other thing — once you get done with whatever it is and you’re satisfied with it, you’re done. Don’t be like the engineer that never gets a product to market or the novelist that never sends their manuscript to a publisher because there’s always just one more thing. Make something nice, finish making it, stand back and give yourself a small pat on the back, and move on to the next project. When you’re done, you’re done.

Finally, make some friends who like design too, and always look for opportunities to educate yourself further.

There are still times when I will like something but I can’t put my finger on why I like it. I have a friend who understands art a lot better than I do and I can say to him “I like this and I don’t understand why . . . ” and he’ll take a look and usually be able to help me figure out what it is I like about it. If you have a friend who can help you like this, don’t be afraid to ask them for advice. When that friend and I lived in the same city, he and I would regularly go check out exhibits at the local art museum.

I’ve got a female friend who is in the process of redecorating her house, and we talk about things she’s thinking about doing and what colors she’s thinking about painting the different rooms.

One of my first inspirations to look more closely at design came from a male friend who was a salesman at a men’s clothing store — I walked in one day for some pleasant conversation and some shopping, and my friend was wearing a tan suit with a red shirt, red tie and red silk kerchief in the breast pocket. Everything he was wearing looked great together and looked great on him, and I thought at the time “I have no idea how to be able to mix colors and textures and fabrics like that — but I want to learn!“

Be sure to have friends like all the people I just described, who will inspire you to do things that otherwise you might let slip.

And take the time to keep learning more. I started reading Just Creative Design for that reason — Cass has a lot of good ideas on design, and he has lots of links to other people with good ideas on design. I still go to museums a few times a year, and browse through art books in the bookstore a lot — also jewelry and sewing magazines, and photography magazines too. I spent an afternoon looking at what was submitted at this year’s photo contest at the fair. There’s lot of opportunities like that all around you — take the time to look at them.

Post on Captain Capitalism about the economics of courtship (and my ridiculously long reply)

I have been reading Captain Capitalism’s blog regularly for about a month now, and would highly recommend it. He present good solid arguments with lots of facts and figures, both of which I find highly lacking in most news articles.

He has recently been posting some very interesting thoughts on courtship in the modern world. His most recent post said (among other things):

The basic fundamentals, the basic laws and principles on which human attraction and courtship have been based, have been violated in that I think arguably for the first time, there is a progressively larger and larger percentage of the male population that no longer cares to pursue romantic or sexual interests. Be it because the proposition of chasing women in today’s world is no longer appealing or that the alternatives of X-Box 360, cigars, cars, riches and never being poor due to too many “capitas” in “income per capita,” are all that much more attractive, the basic rules of the game have changed with no real emotion or passion or desire having anything to do with it.

Men simply quit or are quitting in greater numbers. It’s, again cold as this may sound, an economic decision.

I was going to submit a comment to his blog on his post, but after a while I realized I wasn’t really posting a comment as a whole blog entry myself. So, I moved all that over here, and I’ll send him a link and an invitation to quote as much of this post as he would like.

But I’m posting it here first because I think it’s kind of rude to hijack someone else’s blog by posting comments of such length they’re blog entries all by themselves. Probably an old-fashioned viewpoint, but that’s me.

Anyway:

Dear Captain,

I read your recent post titled “The Economics of Conventional Courtship”, and have a number of thoughts on the issue I would like to express.

I am female, and in some ways I agree with what you are saying. But in some ways I disagree.

Why I agree (in part): During my high school and college years, most of my friends were guys and I have long since come to feel a lot of pity for guys in modern society. While I appreciate the opportunities open to me that were not open to my mother’s or grandmothers’ generations (I have both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in electrical engineering, and worked as an engineer for nine years in the Portland, Oregon area), in many ways feminism has long since become an excuse for women to beat men over the head with a never-ending list of flaws.

In some cases, the perceived “flaws” women denigrate are a natural part of the guy being a guy. While it’s not an absolute rule, in general there are structural differences between the male and female brain, such as male brains tending to have each particular section be more specialized, while in the female brain functions tend to overlap more, which leads to men often being more focused on a single task than women, being less comfortable talking about feelings (the emotional and verbal centers are more tightly linked in women) and also to men being more prone to some learning disabilities such as the Einstein syndrome. (See Thomas Sowell’s book The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late for more information, or I can post more about that if you would like, but I’m trying to keep this reply from wandering too far off into the weeds).

In conversations where I tried to explain my frustration with the attitude of a lot of women my age, I used the example of a man holding the door for a woman — a woman angry with that man, a different man, men in general, or just having a bad hair day, can arrange it so no matter what is done by the poor schmuck by the door, he can’t win. If the man opens the door, she can chew him out because he is a chauvinist pig who obviously assumes she can’t open the door herself.  If the man doesn’t hold the door she can chew him out for being a thoughtless jerk. This may seem a minor example, but it’s typical of some women who treat all men with an attitude of “no matter what you do, I’ll find a reason to be unhappy about it and you’ll be sorry!!“

Not only is this damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t stance rude and unethical on the part of women who pull this crud, but it also leads to a lot of men assuming all women are like that. This in turn really frustrates the hell out of me when I just want to unwind with some pleasant conversation over dinner or a beer. Now I’m in a situation where I can’t win, because the guy has come to the conclusion all women are self-centered witches and either (a) blusters and gets confrontational, or (b) whimpers and hides behind the nearest door or chair.

The really sad part of that (besides the part of “good Lord, I didn’t ask if you wanted to get married, I just asked if you wanted to grab a beer after work, if you’re not interested then you can say no”) is guys who assume all women are self-centered witches create self-reinforcing social filters because any woman who’s not a self-centered witch gets tired of the runaround and suspicion, leaving the guy with the self-centered witches, who then confirm his expectations.

And once you start talking about divorce laws, it goes from sad to heartbreaking! I have heard of men who abuse the system, but have seen far more cases of men who are on the receiving end of women abusing the system. I’ve seen far more women wallow in their hurt feelings and rationalize misbehavior and lies that are absolutely disgraceful, than I have seen men do that. And I spent six years in college studying and nine years working in a profession that is still very predominantly male. I’ve also observed that women in a divorce are much more likely to use kids, the kids’ schedules, and the kids’ feelings as a way to hurt and harass their ex-spouse, than are husbands in a divorce.

So I can completely understand why some men say “to heck with it” and get out of the dating / marrying game. For a while.

Why I disagree (in part): A lot of men like the company of women. And I don’t mean just for sex. Specifically, they really crave . . . the comfort and support, for lack of better terms, of knowing there is someone out there who has their back, believes in them, and maybe if they can’t confide in this person at least they know if life has dealt them a heck of blow they can go to her and find a place where they can curl up and lick their wounds while they heal up.

Also, a lot of men I’ve known have unpleasant things they’ve thought or seen or experienced that they’d like to talk to someone about, but don’t feel particularly comfortable really digging deep and opening up with most other men — some women would probably argue that’s some sort of suppressed homophobia, but I don’t think so, I think it’s more a constant subtle competitiveness men sometimes have with each other.

But whatever the case, it is that loneliness that will eventually drive a lot of men back into the dating game, maybe even the marrying game. It depends in part on the ratio of interested women to interested men in the specific social group the guy is going back into. A recent issue of New Scientist had an article about how the ratios of available men to available women may be a hidden cause of some of the social problems seen in inner-city ghettos. (Don’t have that issue right in front of me, I will have to update this blog tomorrow with specific title, author and date for that article.) Update: Many thanks to Michael Le Page, he posted the link to the article in the comments section. The article is “Perspectives: Still a question of black vs white“, by James Flynn, appeared in the Sept 3 2008 issue of New Scientist.

What seems to be an underlying cause of some of this: Unfortunately, even when guys get back into the dating game, they can run into problems. Some types of feminism (from what I know of the different waves, second-wave feminism in particular??), popular culture, and especially some areas of female popular culture really push the message that women have one of four stereotypical roles they can play, which I refer to as bitch, basketcase, bimbo, or den mother. The bitch role is the constantly nagging and controlling type who’s never happy about anything; the basketcase is the whiny twit who always seems to be in some crisis or another and always needs consoling and comforting, preferably by a big strong man (but never seems to want to avoid a crisis in the first place); the bimbo gets by on looks and promiscuity, either implied or actual; and the den mother is the codependent fixer type who smothers everyone to death with all her well-meaning caring and coddling.

Each of these roles is probably either a product of, or reaction against, some particular wave of feminism, and a well-rounded woman will exhibit parts of each role — able to make decisions on her own and speak for herself, but willing to compromise and ask for help when needed, pride in her looks, and showing care and compassion for others. Every woman will have a stereotype she tends to favor and revert back to under stress or in unexpected circumstances (my bad habit is the den-mother stereotype) but there is a difference between favoring and identifying with exclusively. And popular culture among women very strongly pushes (in some popular television shows and magazines, I’d say it demands) commitment to one single stereotype.

Which leads to a scenario I’ve currently been seeing a lot, of guys who will speak sincerely and honestly (or at least very convincingly) of wanting to find someone who is not just a wife / girlfriend / lover, but also a partner in life who can be trusted and relied upon and who will trust and rely upon the guy. But then these same guys will get burned a couple times, and to add insult to injury will probably run into a string of women who are all wrapped up in “girl power” or “you go girl!” or whatever the popular “women are great! (men are crud!)” female cheering line is this week. Instead of thinking “wow, so-and-so is really a messed-up dame”, they’ll think “that seems messed up to me, but all their friends seem to think it’s a great way to be and they’re all patting each other on the back about it”. And since the guy is starting to wonder (or even be convinced) that a certain type of behavior or stereotype is normal*, instead of saying “hmmm, this is really not working out, maybe I should change my social circles or start reconsidering my criteria, maybe looks / income / occupation / education level / number of kinky fetishes / whatever isn’t the be-all end-all I thought it was”, these guys will pick a certain mood or feeling as their single top priority (which usually corresponds with one of the stereotypes, “she’s really decisive and helps me make decisions I’d otherwise avoid” = bitch, “I like being strong and I need to be needed” = basketcase, “she’s really HOT and all the other guys are jealous that I’ve got such a babe” = bimbo, “I have so many issues and she understands” = den mother), and having created a self-reinforcing social filter, they’ll go through a succession of girlfriends who will be different in some ways but who will generally all fit into a particular stereotype.

I think this is one of the underlying imbalances with the economics of courtship, the guys don’t just get burned a few times and give up for a while, they eventually go back, fall into the same patterns, get burned again, and each time they try again and get burned again their expectations and filters are further reinforced**. Recently at a party an acquaintance made a comment that he can’t understand why some husbands refer to their wives as “my better half” since he’d never met a woman who he even considered his equal, let alone his better, and I looked at him and said “not to imply anything about the people you currently hang out with, but if you’ve never met a single woman who’s even close to your equal, have you ever considered dating a better class of women? ” and he looked thunderstruck like . . . this thought had never occurred to him.

In all fairness, I found people to be much more class- and occupation-conscious in Portland, Oregon, both at work and in leisure activities, than I ever did in Great Falls, Montana. So for those men living in large metropolitan areas, realizing “the social circles I’m moving in right now don’t seem to be introducing me to women I like, maybe I should see what it’s like around other groups”*** may be easier said than done.

Some caveats:

* The girls are putting just as much effort into convincing each other those stereotypes are “normal” as they are in trying to convince the guys. There are definitely a few women out there who would rather play a shallow predictable role than deal with such bothersome things as charm, grace, wit, conversation, courtesy, or manners. But most of the women you meet are as confused and uncomfortable with the stereotypes presented in popular culture as the guys are. Unfortunately, among other bad habits of thought created by feminism there’s the whole “the personal is political” guilt trip and an expectation of female solidarity. So anything seen as encouraging subservience to men or setting back feminist gains is absolutely taboo. Women being able to wear anything besides floor-length dresses and high-necked long-sleeved shirts was a huge gain for feminists, so if a woman wants to dress in ways that would make a prostitute feel cheap (bimbo stereotype), another woman has no right to criticize that. Your earlier post about not turning down men for dancing? Totally taboo for one woman to say to another — all those intricate social rules about manners and courtesy and reciprocity and not saying exactly what you’re thinking were just another way women stifled themselves to make men happy. One woman never tells another woman to not speak her mind (expressing your displeasure at all times, usually at top volume, is part of the bitch stereotype). Same for the basketcase stereotype — everyone knows women feel emotions more deeply than men (a completely crackpot notion in and of itself, but often overheard in girls-only conversations) and all this emphasis on intellect over emotion and planning instead of spontaneity, this talk of thinking about the consequences of your actions before you act — that’s all so typical of men. If a woman wants to be a spontaneous and free spirit, no one has the right to squash the beautiful butterfly every woman has within her soul, and if she runs into difficulties in pursuit of her true self, it’s the duty of her sisters to help her back on her feet and back onto the road to her destiny, and it’s also the duty of her sisters to let every man know he needs to help this free spirit too. And same for the den-mother stereotype — women are nature’s nurterers. Everyone knows that. How dare you tell a woman that her caring for someone may be stifling or enabling that person instead of helping? Would you rather she be one of those cold-hearted authoritarian fanatics of yesteryear ? These expectations of constant support and encouragement if you are following some feminist-approved pattern and censure if you’re not are never clearly stated, but they’re a recurring theme in female magazines like Cosmopolitan and Vogue, and in chick flicks and on channels like Lifetime and Oxygen.

** I myself am far from perfect. About five years ago when I realized that while the den-mother role was just a tendency that showed up occasionally in my friendships, it was becoming a very dominant factor in my dating relationships. And that was when I realized how much self-reinforcing filters had to do with it. I would withdraw from dating for a while, then talk myself into giving it another try, and while I had a whole list of criteria I was supposedly following, it all came down to wanting to be around someone who was funny and could talk about almost anything and to whom I wouldn’t have to explain and justify every single freaking thing I said (a lot of engineers use logical argument as a substitute for conversation and when they’re feeling competitive or insecure it becomes semi-logical arguments that thinly veil a determination to prove the other person wrong, stupid or misinformed, no matter what it takes, and at the time I hadn’t realized how much being around that all day at work was affecting me outside of work) — which inadvertently created a filter for men I can best describe as momma’s boys. Once I realized the pattern, I voluntarily withdrew from dating to spend a while figuring out what my filters were and how to get rid of them. That’s been almost five years ago and while I didn’t plan on staying out of the dating game this long, life has been a lot calmer and steadier than it used to be and I have a lot better idea of how to spot problems early on in a relationship.

*** I realize hardly anyone actually thinks like that, but that came across a lot cleaner and more meaningful than “this really sucks, it’s been sucking for a good long time, and maybe it’d be better to go see if there’s a place somewhere that doesn’t suck as much because I’m tired of thisgoddamned place.”

10 Tips to get the most from Happy Hour — From Unthirsty.com

A site I found today is Unthirsty.com (oddly enough, I found it while reading a Webmonkey post on forum avatars). It allows users to enter happy hour information by area (no information on Great Falls, Montana, so I guess it’s time for me to do some research — sweet!!).

Clicking on some random links, I found a blog entry from Aug 1, 2007 by Jason Glaspey on how to get the most from happy hour.

So here, without further ado, is a summary of 10 Tips to get the most from Happy Hour. I would highly recommend you go read the whole thing if you are a happy hour connoisseur.

1. Tip like it’s full price, or better.

This is the most important take-away from the list, so it’s all the way at the top. . . Also, if you make sure your servers are happy, they’ll make sure your happy hour is all it can be.

2. Know the specials.

. . . Ideally, you’ll know the special before you arrive, but if not, don’t be afraid to ask. Be direct, ask what the specials are, and if there are any requirements. . . . BONUS: Being prepared to order right away will give you that much more time to enjoy the special, as well as shows respect for the wait-staff’s time.

3. Know the cocktail waiter/waitress.

The difference between a good waitress and a bad waitress can really be the difference at a happy hour. . . .

4. Know what time it is.

. . . So, be aware of the clock, know when the specials end, and how often your waitress comes by. Do not miss out because you were chatting.

5. Don’t be afraid to approach the bartender.

If you failed to recognize what type of server you have, and almost lost track of time, this tip is your last resort. . . . Bypassing waitresses can be received differently at different establishments, so be careful and make sure you tip generously to make up for oversights.

6. All specials are not created equal.

A $4 burger with fries is a much better deal than a $3 burger without. . . . It’s all about knowing what you get when you order, and to not let price alone dictate how good a special is.

7. Be mindful of seating capacity.

. . . If you’ve got a crowd, go to crowd friendly places . . .

8. Be prepared with cash.

. . . with people rotating in and out of the group over the course of an hour or two, often with wildly different purchases. Nothing is more annoying that trying to figure out a bill split between 11 people, who’ve been there any length of time, drinking and eating at different intervals. It annoys the waitress, which will definitely impact service. . . Let someone else do that as you throw down your $20 bill to cover your $16 order, and cool like a cucumber walk out the door.

9. Go at off times.

. . . you get a better experience if you Happy Hour at off-times as well. Pick nights that are going to be less crowded . . .Service is better, it’s quieter, and often the drinks are stiffer because the bartender is in a better mood. They’re also looking to maximize their tips, so they’re going to be extra nice.

10. If you’re sitting down, you should be ordering.

. . . it’s only fair to at least order something while you’re taking up space at a waitress’s table. . . . It’s just courteous.

If you look at what parts I excerpted, it’s probably obvious I’m biased towards being nice to your server. And one of the reasons I recommend this article so highly is because the original author Jason Glaspey is also very biased towards being nice to servers.

Being nice to servers is SOOOOO important, and it’s both pathetic and infuriating how often people ignore this. I’ve had servers remember me by face and even some details about my orders after just two visits because I make the effort to be nice, ask how they are doing, and tip well. I’ve talked to numerous former servers who have told me that as a server, they REALLY notice who is a nice customer and a good tipper, and who isn’t, and the servers will let each other know who is nice and who is a pain.

I honestly cannot count how many times I’ve had a cruddy day and have had my entire lifted because I walked into one of my regular places and a server came up to me with a big smile on their face and told me they were happy to see me. This has happened everywhere from small and cheap Mexican restaurants to mid-level places like Chili’s to fancy places like the Cattlemen’s Cut near Great Falls. Even if I order cheap specials each time and maybe only one or two drinks, the fact that I am nice, polite, courteous, and tip well still makes a HUGE difference to servers. They deal with jerks all day, it makes their day that someone gives a damn and is nice, and that in turn makes my day. It’s a win-win situation all around.

Humor, and also a personal update

The Six Phases of Work

• Phase 1.

  
  You are listening to jazz — Your first day at work is great. Your coworkers are wonderful, your cubicle is cute, and your boss is the best!

• Phase 2:

  
  You are listening to pop music — After a while you are so busy that you are not sure if you’re coming or going anymore.

• Phase 3:

  
  You are listening to heavy metal — This is what you feel like at month’s end.

• Phase 4:

  
  You are listening to hip hop — You become bloated due to stress, feel sluggish and suffer from constipation. Your coworkers are too cheerful for your liking and the walls of your cubicle are closing in. You have started thinking ‘whatever!‘ about your boss.

• Phase 5:

  
  You are listening to gangsta rap — After more time passes, your eyes start to twitch, you forget what a ‘good hair day’ feels like as you just fall out of bed and load up on caffeine.

• Phase 6:

  
  You are listening to the voices in your head — You have built a makeshift door on your cubicle to keep people out, You have a dartboard with your bosses picture on it in your cube, You wonder why you are even here in the first place!

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And in more personal news . . . . .

I’ve been spending the last week or so taking out the old computer at home, putting in a new one, reinstalling old programs and drivers, installing some new programs and drivers, transferring files, and getting the computer desk here at home rearranged.

One new site I’ve found is Just Creative Design, which is about graphic design but also about how to actually use the tools that are out there for websites and how to build a workflow. A List Apart is another very handy and awesome site I found a while back. Between typography and layout information from JCD and page-building and site-building advice from ALA, I’ve got a lot of good information which my stubbornly thick skull is slowly absorbing.

Currently I’m trying to figure out how to better archive and update the files for a couple of sites that I (very haphazardly) administrate, but some of the tools I’ve been finding have not worked as well as hoped. Argh.

We’re done with fall seeding here, and the weather is starting to turn cool. While harvest didn’t go as well as we could have hoped (we had enough rain for a great crop, but crop stand and sawfly problems reduced it to an average crop) and neither did seeding (we got into fields about 2 weeks behind our normal schedule because of intermittent rains in early September, were very rushed for time, and still didn’t seed everything we might have if we could’ve started earlier), we did get everything done. That isn’t true for a lot of farmers in this part of Montana. Due to a cold wet spring, most farmers saw their crops come up and mature later than usual. Some farmers didn’t get everything harvested before the spat of rain in early September, and when the fields waiting to be harvested dried out it was time to seed the fallow fields. There’s a lot of wheat all around Montana that might never get harvested this year. There might be similar problems in other states too — there was a lot of late planting and replanting this spring in corn country because of cold wet weather.

For everyone who reads this, I hope all is well for you and that you are looking forward to a pleasant fall and holiday season. Cheers!

-Camille

Note: Also cross-posted on my MySpace blog with an additional note to one of my friends there.

Cobbler recipes

All are adapted (with some changes) from The New Best Recipe from the Editors of Cook’s Illustrated, ISBN-13 978-0-936184-74-6.

Tart Cherry Cobbler

• Cobbler:
  • 6 cans Montmorency sour cherries
  • 1 cup demerara sugar
  • 1-3 cinnamon sticks
  • 2 cups dry red wine (preferably chianti)
  • 3-6 Tbls corn starch
  • small amount of cold water
  • 1/4 tspn almond extract
• Topping:
  • 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 cup whole grains – 1-minute oatmeal, barley flour, etc.
  • 4 Tbls demerara sugar
  • 1/2 tspn baking soda
  • 1/2 tspn baking powder
  • 6 Tbls unsalted butter, chilled, cut into small pieces
  • optional – small amount of finely chopped nuts
  • 1 cup buttermilk

Heat oven to 425. Open all cans of cherries, drain juice into saucepan, put cherries into cobbler pan / pie dish.

Add 2 cups red wine and cinnamon stick(s) to cherry juice, put on oven at medium to medium-high heat. Stir occasionally.

Put parchment on a baking sheet, or grease an insulated baking sheet. Mix together all dry topping ingredients. Cut in chilled butter with pastry blender until mixture is crumb like. Mix in buttermilk and drop small biscuits on baking sheet. Bake in oven for approx. 10 minutes or until just underdone. Check often. Remove from oven but do not turn oven off.

Let cherry juice simmer as long as need be to reduce by desired amount. Remove and discard cinnamon stick(s). Mix 1 cup demerara sugar with cornstarch. Mix in just enough cold water to form paste or slurry. Add mixture to cherry / wine mixture while stirring briskly. Let cherry / wine mixture come to boil again, remove from stove. Stir in almond extract. Pour thickened cherry / wine mixture over cherries in cobbler pan(s), stir until just mixed.

Put pans with cobbler filling in oven. Wait until they are just bubbling around edges. Set biscuits on top of cobbler filling, return to oven just long enough to lightly brown biscuit tops. Remove and cool.

Entire cobbler may be sprinkled with very light dusting of cinnamon sugar prior to serving, if desired.

Note: The cookbook this recipe came out of says Montmorency are a type of amarelle sour cherry, and griotte sour cherries (Morello being a common type) are much tastier.

Blueberry Cobbler

• Filling:
  • 1/2 c dark brown sugar
  • 3-4 Tbsp minute Tapioca
  • 1 – 2 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 – 1 tsp ground allspice
  • 6 c fresh blueberries, rinsed and picked over; or 6 cups frozen blueberries, thawed and drained with juice reserved.
  • 1-1/2 tsp grated lemon zest
  • 1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
• Topping:
  • 3/4 c all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 c plu 2 Tbsp stone-ground cornmeal
  • 1/8 c demerara sugar
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp baking soda
  • 4 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted
  • 1/3 c buttermilk
  • 1/2 tspn vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 375.

If frozen blueberries are used, put reserved juice on stove and simmer until it is syrupy and thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Mix blueberries, sugar, tapioca, cinnamon, allspice, lemon juice, and lemon zest in large bowl. Mix thoroughly. Add blueberry syrup from above if using frozen blueberries. Mix thoroughly, pour out into a 9-inch glass pie plate. Put in oven, bake until hot and bubbling around edges, approx. 25 minutes.

For topping, mix flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda together in bowl. Whisk melted butter, buttermilk, and vanilla together in small bowl. Add liquid mixture to dry mixture until just combined.

When berries have just started bubbling, remove from oven. Increase oven to 425. Pinch off pieces of topping dough (divide into 8 roughly equal sections if possible) and put on hot berry mixture. Return pie plate to oven until biscuits are cooked through and just barely beginning to brown on top.

Note: Variations include more or less cinnamon in filling; cinnamon sugar on top of topping; finely chopped nuts such as pecans in topping; more or less lemon juice in filling; no allspice in filling; addition of small amounts of liqueurs to filling, such as Amaretto (almond / cherry flavor) or Drambuie (has nutmeg flavor, among others); addition of ginger — either fresh ground, dried and powdered, or candied — to either topping or filling.

Peach Cobbler

• Filling:
  • 2-1/2 pounds ripe but firm fresh peaches, or 2 – 2-1/2 pounds thawed frozen peaches
  • 1/4 c brown sugar
  • 3-4 Tbsp minute tapioca
  • 1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
• Topping:
  • 2/3 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 1/3 cup 1-minute oatmeal
  • 2 Tbsp demerara sugar
  • 3/4 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp baking soda
  • 5 Tbsp unsalted butter, chilled, cut into small pieces
  • 1/3 c plain whole-milk yogurt

Heat oven to 425.

If peaches are fresh, peel and slice. For both frozen and fresh peach slices, remove dark red flesh (if any) that would have been around seed. (This tends to make the cobbler bitter if left in.)

Mix peaches, sugar, tapioca, and cinnamon. Put in large sauce pan, cook until just bubbling. Stir in lemon juice, pour into 9-inch pie plate, and put in oven until hot and bubbling around edges.

Mix all dry biscuit ingredients together. Cut in butter until mixture is crumblike. Mix in yogurt until just forms cohesive dough (don’t overmix or the topping will be tough.) Break into about 6 equally sized chunks.

When filling is just bubbling around edges, remove from oven and place topping on dough on filling. Return to oven and cook until biscuits are done and just beginning to brown on top.

Note: Variations are similar to those described for other cobblers.

News story about persistent herbicides damaging crops in UK

This post is about Caroline Davies’ article “Home-grown veg ruined by toxic fertiliser“, published in The Observer by guardian.co.uk on June 29, 2008 [1]. I stumbled across the article after stumbling across posts about it on a couple of other blogs [2][3] (further information at end of this post).

To briefly summarize the article in guardian.co.uk (all quotes below are from the article):

1. Dow AgriSciences makes a number of herbicides, some of which use aminopyralids. One of the formulations goes by the brand name Forefront in the U.K. “Aminopyralid is popular with farmers, who spray it on grassland because it controls weeds such as docks, thistles and nettles without affecting the grass around them. It binds itself to the woody tissue in the grass and only breaks down when exposed to bacteria in the soil.”
2. “Aminopyralid, which is found in several Dow products, the most popular being Forefront, a herbicide, is not licensed to be used on food crops and carries a label warning farmers using it not to sell manure that might contain residue to gardeners.”
3. Despite the existing label warning, and also despite Dow’s “campaign within the agriculture industry to ensure that farmers were aware of how the products should be used”, some of the herbicides have gotten into the food chain. “It appears that the contamination came from grass treated 12 months ago. Experts say the grass was probably made into silage, then fed to cattle during the winter months. The herbicide remained present in the silage, passed through the animal and into manure that was later sold. Horses fed on hay that had been treated could also be a channel.”
4. Gardens that have been treated with the contaminated compost have seen pretty severe effects on many plants.
5. It is unknown at this time how dangerous it is to consume vegetables that were treated with contaminated compost. Although most government agencies have said that the exposure to humans is probalby minimal, Dow is still recommending that possibly exposed food not be eaten. They suggest that ground treated with contaminated compost should be safe to plant in again after one year.
6. There is already talk of numerous lawsuits, bans, etc. In general, it is going to be difficult to establish who was the guilty party in lawsuits, as most compost providers bought silage from multiple sources, and some of those sources may have in turn bought from even more sources and intermixed everything before selling it.

One of the things NOT pointed out in the article is what repercussions (if any) there will be for farmers who sold contaminated silage without telling their customers, and/or farmers and livestock owners who bought the silage without asking if it was safe for manure production. Even if the herbicides in question are eventually banned, we are still left with the issue the products carry labels for A REASON. It’s not possible to make the world completely foolproof, nor is it possible to produce chemicals or goods that are impossible to misuse. There does come a point where users, especially COMMERCIAL users, have to be expected to read the freaking labels and instructions for the products they use.

Also from Davies’ article:

How to deal with the problem
Do you have contaminated manure?
Tell-tale symptoms of crop damage include distorted foliage, with cupping of leaves and fern-like growth. There are no remedies once damage has occurred. Susceptible crops include potatoes, tomatoes, beans, peas, carrots and lettuce.

How should you deal with the affected area?
Experts say rotavation is the best practice, or forking over several times as soon as possible. This incorporates the plant tissue into the soil, where it will decompose and the chemicals will eventually be degraded by soil microbes. Repeat the rotavation in late summer/early autumn.

Should you replant this season?
No. The plant residues need to be given time to break down. The advice is not to replant for a year.

Why has the chemical lasted so long?
Aminopyralid, like other herbicides, works by binding strongly to plant tissues. Once the plant’s tissues decay, the chemical breaks down in the soil. If manure is stacked it takes far longer.

Regarding the blogs whereby I found this article — I found this article after seeing posts on it at LeisureGuy’s Later On blog and Kirk James Murphy’s post on Firedoglake. While Davies’ news article for guardian.co.uk is quite interesting and does a good job of presenting multiple sides of the story (in my opinion), Murphy’s post on Firedoglake is mainly an editorial about the evils of corporations and the chemicals produced by corporations. The damage from persistent herbicides as described in Davies’ article was used as an example of this evil, along with biosolids gproduced from treated sewage which are not safe for use as fertilizer although labeled as such, and the prevalence of hormone-mimicking compounds in the food chain. For Firedoglake, Murphy very briefly and very selectively quoted Davies’ guardian.com.uk article such that the warning labels on the herbicide were not mentioned, nor was Dow’s attempts to educate farmers about not using the herbicide on food crops or silage that might go into the food chain. In turn, Later On by LeisureGuy only quoted parts of Murphy’s Firedoglake post.

In all fairness, Murphy did check to see if aminopyralid herbicides are used in the U.S. He said yes, they are, Cleanwave is registered for use on wheat, Milestone is registered for use on pastures, and Forefront is registered for use on pastures and rangeland.

Yet, this also brings up the question — if the problem is the inherent evil of aminopyralid herbicides being anywhere near the food chain, why are we not seeing this problem in the U.S.? (Although true believers will say this is only a further sign of the insidious influence of chemical companies in the U.S. and their control of the media and government.)

Reading through the comments on Murphy’s Firedoglake post, there was a commenter who said properly composted material should reach an internal temperature high enough to decompose most agricultural chemicals. I thought this comment was very interesting.

Sources:

1. Primary – Davies, Caroline; “Home-grown veg ruined by toxic fertiliser”, The Observer, guardian.co.uk; article dated June 29, 2008; article accessed by internet July 1, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/29/food.agriculture; copyright Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
2. Secondary – blog Later On, author LeisureGuy. Post titled “Persistent herbicide destroying crops in UK”, dated June 29, 2008; article accessed by internet July 1, 2008. http://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2008/06/29/persistent-herbicide-destroying-crops-in-uk/
3. Secondary – blog Firedoglake, author Kirk James Murphy M.D. Post titled “Persistent Herbicide in Compost Destroys U.K. gardens – Can It Happen Here?”, dated June 29, 2008; article accessed by internet July 1, 2008.

Last night’s dinner (fourth week of Feb 2008)

Also cross-posted on my MySpace blog.

Yesterday was my sister’s birthday, so I made her a dish that has become one of her favorites. It’s similar to a dish I had at a pasta restaurant last time I was in Portland, I think the dish was called “carbonara”. Simply put, it’s pasta with peas, bacon and black pepper in a white sauce. The bacon is any bacon I have that’s already cooked, drained, and cut into small bits. It doesn’t take very much, just enough to flavor the sauce and provide a little something to chew on. To make the white sauce, I usually make a pretty thick roux with unsalted butter and flour, then I stir in some whole milk and just a little bit of heavy cream (if there’s any in the house) and bring it to a simmer before pouring it on some already-cooked pasta. For the peas I use frozen green peas that have been heated up in a separate pan. Just mix that all together and add some cracked black pepper and you’re done!

My sister liked it so much she thanked me profusely last night and sent me an e-mail today saying how good it was.

We also had some nice steaks that my brother cooked, and some salad at the beginning of the meal.

For dessert, my sister said she wanted something “appley and cinnamony”, so I made her an apple upside down cake that I’ve made before, and which turns out . . . well, very appley and very cinnamony. The recipe is below.

So, all in all, it was a good meal and my sister said she had a really nice birthday. Yay!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is adapted from the “upside-down toffee apple brownies” recipe in the book Blissful Brownies.

Bake time: 35-40 minutes at 350 C, 9-inch square or similar sized pan

Ingredients:

• Topping
  • generous 1/3 c dark brown sugar
  • 1/2 stick or 1/4 c unsalted butter
  • 1 apple, cored and thinly sliced (I’ve had good luck with Braeburns and Fujis, but you can use pretty much anything depending on the taste and texture you want)
• Cake
  • 1 stick or 1/2 c unsalted butter
  • 3/4 c dark brown sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 c all-purpose flour (you can also use oat flour here, but the cake will be much crumblier if you use that)
  • 1 c 1-minute instant oatmeal
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp allspice
  • 1/4 tsp ginger
  • 1/4 tsp cloves
  • 2 apples coarsely grated (if you don’t peel them, the cake will be noticeably chewier, but also have more apple flavor; apple variety is the same as mentioned above)
  • 3/4 cup chopped nuts (can be hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans, whatever)

Preheat oven to 350 F and grease your pan.

For the topping, heat the sugar and butter in a small pan over medium or medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until sugar is melted. Pour into pan bottom and arrange apples on top.

For the cake, mix butter and sugar in a mixing bowl. It can be mixed just until blended, or can be beaten until fluffy. If beaten until fluffy, cake will be fluffier. Mix in eggs, then mix in grated apples.

In second mixing bowl, mix together all remaining ingredients. Mix together wet and dry ingredients (it will be a relatively stiff dough at this point) and pour into cake pan over apples and molten sugar. Smooth down cake dough and place in oven.

Cook until firm and golden brown. Cake is moist enough that a knife inserted into the cake will always come out moist, so check for firmness instead.

Once done, take out of oven and let cool in pan for 10-15 minutes. Turn out only plate or platter, slice and serve.

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And now for a couple of random notes:

- I didn’t actually do this, but I did think about making some D’Vine Joy Rooibos tea to go with the apple cake. D’Vine Joy is a really good cinnamon and spice rooibos tea available from The Carnelian Rose Tea Company. There are other tea companies that have tried to make similar blends, but there’s nothing like D’Vine Joy.

- Speaking of bacon, I found the site Grateful Palate recently, they have a bacon-of-the-month club!?  I’d be almost tempted to sign up, except that it’s a lot more expensive than I’m willing to pay. But still . . . interesting concept.

Monster cookie recipe

I really thought I had already posted this recipe, but I can’t find it here, so I’m posting (or maybe reposting???) it.
Monster Cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 lb unsalted butter
• 2 lb brown sugar
• 2 c white sugar
• 12 eggs
• 1 Tbs vanilla
• 1 Tbs karo syrup
• 2 Tbs baking soda
• 3 lb crunchy peanut butter (we usually use Jif)
• 1 pkg mini chips 12 oz (see note)
• 18 c oatmeal (1-minute, see note)

Instructions: Mix first 9 ingredients in order listed. I don’t know of any mixer besides a Cuisinart that has the bowl capacity or mixing power to do a full size batch, so be warned.

Measure oatmeal into a (very large) separate bowl. Pour peanut butter mixture on oats and mix thoroughly. Shape into whatever size cookie you want and bake in a 350 F oven for 8-14 minutes. Cookies are done when golden brown on edges and in the middle, and cooking time depends largely on whether you are using an insulated cookie sheet (or not) and how large the cookies are. Since there is no flour in these, they don’t dry out the same as flour cookies do if overcooked; that said, they’ll get progressively darker and darker and will probably start to burn if cooked for way too long. Also, it sometimes seems like I have decreased cooking time by about 30 seconds by the end of a batch of dough, I think the oatmeal in the uncooked dough may absorb moisture and decrease the cooking time slightly as time goes on.

Note for chocolate: The original recipe from Mom called for a 1 12-oz package of Nestle’s minichips. The last couple batches, I have changed that to 16 oz of Ghirardelli’s bittersweet chocolate chips. The minichips have a higher sugar to chocolate ratio, so a 12 oz package of minichips adds a lot of sweetness but not as much chocolate as I’d like. The bittersweet chips have more chocolate and less sugar, so I can get more chocolate flavor without adding as much sweet by using them. There are other bittersweet chocolate chips in the grocery stores besides Ghirardelli’s, I just used them because I picked up a 3-lb bag of Ghirardell bittersweet chocolate chips in Sam’s Club.

Note for oatmeal: The last time I measured it out, I found that one full-size canister of Quaker 1-minute oatmeal had 15 cups in it, which means I can dump in one whole canister and then add another 3 cups and be done with the measuring. However, for years Mom said that a canister held 13 cups. It probably comes down to how high you heap the measuring cup and how loosely the oatmeal packs in the cup, but it is something to keep in mind. More oatmeal makes for drier firmer cookies; less oatmeal makes for chewier moister cookies.

Upside-Down Apple Cake

This is adapted from the “upside-down toffee apple brownies” recipe in the book Blissful Brownies, ISBN 978-1-4054-9127-3.

Bake time: 35-40 minutes at 350 C, 9-inch square or similar sized pan

Ingredients:

• Topping
  • generous 1/3 c dark brown sugar
  • 1/2 stick or 1/4 c unsalted butter
  • 1 apple, cored and thinly sliced (I’ve had good luck with Braeburns and Fujis, but you can use pretty much anything depending on the taste and texture you want)
• Cake
  • 1 stick or 1/2 c unsalted butter
  • 3/4 c dark brown sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 c all-purpose flour (you can also use oat flour here, but the cake will be much crumblier if you use that)
  • 1 c 1-minute instant oatmeal
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp allspice
  • 1/4 tsp ginger
  • 1/4 tsp cloves
  • 2 apples coarsely grated (if you don’t peel them, the cake will be noticeably chewier, but also have more apple flavor; apple variety is the same as mentioned above)
  • 3/4 cup chopped nuts (can be hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans, whatever)

Preheat oven to 350 F and grease your pan.

For the topping, heat the sugar and butter in a small pan over medium or medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until sugar is melted. Pour into pan bottom and arrange apples on top.

For the cake, mix butter and sugar in a mixing bowl. It can be mixed just until blended, or can be beaten until fluffy. If beaten until fluffy, cake will be fluffier. Mix in eggs, then mix in grated apples.

In second mixing bowl, mix together all remaining ingredients. Mix together wet and dry ingredients (it will be a relatively stiff dough at this point) and pour into cake pan over apples and molten sugar. Smooth down cake dough and place in oven.

Cook until firm and golden brown. Cake is moist enough that a knife inserted into the cake will always come out moist, so check for firmness instead.

Once done, take out of oven and let cool in pan for 10-15 minutes. Turn out only plate or platter, slice and serve.

Butterscotch sauce recipe

The butterscotch sauce comes from a recipe I saw on Food Network from the show Throwdown with Bobby Flay.

For the Butterscotch Sauce:

• 1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 2 sticks unsalted butter
• 1/2 vanilla bean, split [I used vanilla extract]
• 2 to 4 tablespoons good quality Scotch (depending on your taste)
• 1 teaspoon salt [I omitted this]
• 1/2 cup heavy cream, heated

I didn’t even look at the directions, I just cooked the sugar and butter over medium heat until it was thick and bubbly and the sugar had all melted. I took it off the heat, and poured in the rest one at a time while still stirring. I then let it cool a bit before putting it on ice cream.

Last night’s menu, Third Thursday of February 2008

NOTE: Also crossposted to the Nightowl Camille blog on Myspace.

So, I’ve decided I’m going to try posting more regularly on this blog. No guarantees that I’ll stick with it, but I do feel like I need to back to writing more often.

That said, I’m also going to start posting more about the Thursday night dinners. As some of you know, since I moved back to Montana my brother (who lives only about a mile away) and I have started getting together with three or four friends and family members every Thursday night at his place to cook up a nice dinner. We’ve been doing that weekly for about three months now, and it’s pretty fun. My brother usually takes care of any meat cooking that needs to be done (he’s really good with the grill and also the oven) and also the bartending and general entertaining, while I take care of the rest. I am posting the menus here so I can keep track of what I’ve been cooking recently, and so any of my friends can write me and ask for a recipe if they see something that looks good.

(Note: I am ALL ABOUT food with a lot of flavor that doesn’t take incredible amounts of work to prepare. The recipes where you start hand-grinding and steeping the spices three days beforehand so you can baste and knead the very rare and expensive goat’s-milk-cheese every three hours for the next two days prior to starting on the very delicate and easy-to-screw-up light souffle six hours before your dinner are NOT the types of recipes I go for.)

So here (in no particular order) is what we made last night, the third Thursday of February 2008:

• Green salad,
• Steamed broccoli,
• Farfalle pasta with a sage butter sauce I found in a fancy cooking magazine (maybe Bon Appetit?) a couple months ago. It’s absurdly simple but surprisingly tasty – melt a little bit of unsalted butter in a saucepan (for a whole box of farfalle I used only half a stick of butter) and once it starts to bubble a little bit, throw in some fresh sage leaves and continue cooking and stirring until the butter starts to brown a little bit. Take out the sage leaves, toss the pasta with the flavored butter and there you go!
• Leftover pork steak, cut up into small pieces and cooked with some reduced and thickened chicken stock, a little bit of dried oregano and some garlic pepper, and a whole bunch of fresh shittake mushrooms. Wow, that was good, especially on the pasta! My sister said it was like a pork stroganoff.
• Ice cream (store-bought) with butterscotch sauce (homemade) and some fresh bananas. The butterscotch sauce comes from a recipe I saw on Food Network from the show Throwdown with Bobby Flay. It was the first time I saw a butterscotch recipe that used real scotch, and WOW!!! was it good. We all agreed that none of us could go back to store-bought butterscotch sauce after this. Which on the one hand is a great compliment, but on the other hand only reinforces something I’ve found with these Thursday night dinners – once you have really good homemade, it’s HARD to go back to storebought.

Intense chocolate cookies

Adapted from “Chocolate Almond Sparkles” in A Baker’s Field Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies by Dede Wilson, ISBN 1-55832-295-7.

• 8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, 70-80% chocolate
• 1 ounce bittersweet chocolate, 70-80% chocolate, finely chopped
• 3 Tbsp softened unsalted butter
• 2-3 large eggs
• 1/2 cup demerara sugar
• 1 Tbsp light-colored honey
• 1/3 cup ground almonds
• 1 Tbsp Dutch processed unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 Tbsp amaretto
• 2-3 Tbsp (or more) dark rum (such as Pusser’s)
• 1/2 cup 1-minute oatmeal

Melt 8 ounces chocolate in double boiler. When melted, stir in 3 Tbsp butter, mix thoroughly, and set aside to cool.

In mixing bowl, beat 2-3 eggs with sugar until they form a thick ribbon. This will take A WHILE.  While still mixing, mix in honey.

Add egg mixture to chocolate mixture, folding by hand. Then add cocoa powder, ground almonds, remaining 1 ounce chopped chocolate and oatmeal, and fold by hand. Last, mix in alcohol.

Chill overnight in refrigerator.

Roll into small balls, flatten slightly on greased cookie sheet or parchment-paper covered cookie sheet. Bake 8-10 minutes at 325 F.  Cookies are done when they are no longer shiny and have small cracks across surface. Cool briefly and store. Will store for 2-3 days in plastic bag or covered jar, will store longer in freezer.