12.10.06
Habanero oil redux
I just made another batch of habanero oil. I use it regularly. Easy to make: cut stems off a bunch of habaneros, coarsely chop, and put into a pan of olive oil. I brought the oil to 215º and let the habaneros cool in it. Then I mashed them with a potato masher, tasted to see if I should bring them back to 215º a second time, decided against it, and strained it into the bottle I had used to measure the oil. I keep the mashed habaneros to use in cooking. Very quick, very easy. I do use disposable gloves while handling and chopping the habaneros.
Best standing-rib roast recipe method
From Nov-Dec 2002 issue of Cook’s Illustrated, stripped to its essentials:
1. Take the roast out 2 hours before starting the process.
2. Pre-heat oven to 250º.
3. Using kosher salt, salt and pepper the roast all over. Kosher salt makes a difference, so seek it out. (Your supermarket undoubtedly has it in the salt section.)
4. Take a heavy 10-12” skillet (cast iron is ideal) and heat it on medium for 5 minutes. Put the rib roast in, fat side down, and brown it for 12 minutes. Then turn the roast onto one side for 4 minutes, then the other side for 4 minutes. This is all the browning the roast gets, so do a good job.
5. Put the roast in roasting pan (or simply use the skillet), ribs down, and roast at 250 degrees until temperature inside is 135-140º (that’s my preference, anyway).
6. Remove from the oven and tent with foil to rest 10 minutes before carving.
Serve with this horseradish sauce.
UPDATE: Nowadays, I find the horseradish sauce at the link goes better with, e.g., smoked fish. It seems too rich for the standing-rib roast, which I now will have with grated fresh horseradish—or very thin julienne strips from the tender layer of fresh horseradish.
UPDATE 2: I just spotted this in the LA Times:
1/2 cup crème fraîche
1 tablespoon freshly grated horseradish
Combine the crème fraîche and horseradish in a small bowl and mix well. Cover and refrigerate at least one hour or as long as overnight.
Sounds tasty, doesn’t it? — later: I tried it. It’s great.
UPDATE 3: This year (Xmas 2007) I decided to try dry-aging the roast. From the November-December 2002 issue of Cook’s Illustrated (page 14):
To dry-age a prime rib, buy your roast up to one week early. Pat it dry and place it on a wire rack set over a paper-towel-lined cake pan or plate. Set the racked roast in the refrigerator and let it age until you are ready to roast it, three to seven days. (I left one in the refrigerator for nine days; the cooked roast was meltingly tender with big flavor.) Before roasting, shave off any exterior meat that has completely dehydrated. Between the trimming and dehydration, count on a seven-pound roast losing a pound or so during a week’s aging.
I’m not sure that this was worth the trouble. The problem is that the roast got cooked to a higher temperature (150º) than usual (145º), so it’s unclear whether the results were due to temperature or dry-aging or a combination. The roast was less juicy, which one might expect with the aging. The flavor didn’t seem to be that much more intense. So the jury’s out.
Multivitamins evaluated
I take a daily multivitamin. The Center for Science in the Public interest did a good survey of multivitamins (PDF file) in January 2003, and on checking their Web site, I don’t see anything more recent. I do follow their advice, though. Take a look…
UPDATE: Note that you should also avoid supplements contaminated with lead.
Recent example of human evolution
Recent independent mutation to digest lactose has been selected for. Not quite so dramatic as the X-Men mutations, but still useful:
A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.
The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.
Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.
Such a mutation is known to have arisen among an early cattle-raising people, the Funnel Beaker culture, which flourished some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in north-central Europe. People with a persistently active lactase gene have no problem digesting milk and are said to be lactose tolerant.
Almost all Dutch people and 99 percent of Swedes are lactose-tolerant, but the mutation becomes progressively less common in Europeans who live at increasing distance from the ancient Funnel Beaker region.
Geneticists wondered if the lactose tolerance mutation in Europeans, first identified in 2002, had arisen among pastoral peoples elsewhere. But it seemed to be largely absent from Africa, even though pastoral peoples there generally have some degree of tolerance.
A research team led by Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland has now resolved much of the puzzle. After testing for lactose tolerance and genetic makeup among 43 ethnic groups of East Africa, she and her colleagues have found three new mutations, all independent of each other and of the European mutation, which keep the lactase gene permanently switched on.
Where to write to get your records
Via Lifehacker, a very useful site tells you where to get various vital records.
Comment on obscenity
I notice that the quote from the News Blog includes some obscenity. You may have noticed that I don’t use much obscenity in my blog. I have several reasons. First, casually using obscenity robs the words of their power. Second, constant casual use is tiring to read, much like WRITING IN ALL CAPS. It’s as if the writer is talking at the top of his/her voice. And, finally, constant casual use amounts to relying on clichés. So I abstain except for the occasional rare use. YMMV.
Hillary the Mute
Now, if you’ve been reading the New York papers, you’ll notice that we’ve been discussing other things, like the death of Sean Bell and the wounding of two others, you will notice that most of our elected officials have been mute. While Sen. Clinton had expressed her condolences to the family, but has made no public statement, appeared at no press conference or even discussed this in an interview.
But we have to tolerate her lectures on fucking video games.
Understand this, the police gunned down three men with 50 rounds in a crowded Queens neighborhood and her office is more concerned about Rockstar Games than the NYPD. Her office is a wee bit defensive about this, but my God. One of your constituents is shot, there is no evidence of a crime, and you don’t make a public statement? You can go up to the House of Justice and pander for votes, but you can’t make a statement when an unarmed young man is killed?
Which is why any run by Hillary Clinton being discussed is about as meaningful as who Jen Anniston’s next rich boyfriend will be.
Here’s a question: when has Hillary Clinton, confronted with a tough question, not shown signs of cowardice first. She refused to oppose the doomed Iraq War, even with a safe Senate seat. At every turn she hedges and hems and haws instead of standing her ground and taking a stand.
And when she does, it’s on the pointless, like video games. As if the first amendment doesn’t apply to them, when every single video game case has been bounced like a drum from federal court.
Hillary thinks she can bullshit and bluff her way through, but that isn’t going to happen. People will be held to account, on Iraq, on the NYPD.
Some Mencken for you
From Minority Report:
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Very interesting and useful Wishlist
Check out WishRadar . Once you create your free account, you can import your Amazon wishlist. The great thing about WishRadar is that you set the price you want to pay for the item (defaults seem to be: $5 for CDs and books, $10 for DVDs and other), and it keeps an eye on Amazon.com, Amazon Marketplace (used books, private sellers), and half.com. When the item appears at or below your target price, you get an email. I’ve gotten a couple of emails—and in one case got a $65 book for $1.50 (used copy of Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry). You can also share your wishlist. Pretty nifty. Wish it scoured the Web more thoroughly, though—why not ABEbooks.com, for example?
One last shot – J. Biden
Atrios has an excellent post this morning on Joe Biden, who thinks we have “one last shot” at getting it right in Iraq. But the problem is, as Atrios’s collection of Biden quotes has shown, Joe thinks we have an indefinite number of “last shots”. Pretty bad. Hope this guy doesn’t try to run for president.
Causing worker burnout
I once had a terrific case of worker burnout. The cause, I eventually (with some help) realized, was that I had started “owning” thing over which I had no control—for example, decisions made by the Board of Directors, about 5-6 levels above me. Thus I gave myself the feeling that I had no control, which definitely leads to burnout (cf. Martin Seligman’s excellent Learned Optimism for more on this).
Once I started focusing on the area in which I did have some control (thanks in part to Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People), things got better. Let me also recommend Anne Wilson Schaef’s The Addictive Organization, which does a good job of dissecting dysfunctional organizations and how they work on you.
This was stimulated by this good post via Lifehacker.
Wize: product rankings
Via Dumb Little Man again (it’s a valuable site), here’s Wize, a site devoted to product reviews. They review a wide range of products and provide a “rank”, based on user feedback, expert evaluation, and “buzz”:
Wize Rank™ aggregates collective wisdom from across the internet in order to make it easy to find the best products available. Wize Rank takes the collective wisdom of more than 850,000 consumer product reviews of nearly 20,000 products and distills them into a single, simple number that’s easy to understand.
The Wize Rank calculation is proprietary, but the math and principles it’s based on are not complicated. The beauty of Wize Rank is that it works, consistently: Wize Rank is the best, easiest way we know to find great products.
Wize Rank is powerful — it’s a single number that helps you find the best products fast.
Wize Rank is comprehensive — it rates thousands of products encompassing hundreds of thousands of user and expert consumer product reviews from independent sources across the web.
Wize Rank is objective — its proprietary algorithm distills so many ratings and reviews that it’s virtually impossible to manipulate.
Wize Rank does not play favorites: Manufacturers and advertisers can’t buy a higher rating. The only thing that can improve a Wize Rank is more positive data collected from independent sources.
50 writing tips
Via Dumb Little Man, here are 50 superb tips on writing, developed through experience by professional writers:
At times, it helps to think of writing as carpentry. That way, writers and editors can work from a plan and use tools stored on their workbench. You can borrow a writing tool at any time. And here’s a secret: Unlike hammers, chisels, and rakes, writing tools never have to be returned. They can be cleaned, sharpened, and passed on.
Each week, for the next 50, I will describe a writing tool that has been useful to me. I have borrowed these tools from writers and editors, from authors of books on writing, and from teachers and writing coaches. Many come from the X-ray reading of texts I admire.
I have described most of these tools in earlier lists, first of 20 and then 30. In those renditions, I defined each tool in shorthand, 50 words or less, without elaboration or exemplification. In spite of — perhaps because of — their brevity, many aspiring writers found them useful, and the tools popped up all over the Internet, translated into several languages. This warm acceptance has given me the courage to do more with these tools, to hone them, to discard some rusty ones, and to add to my collection.
As you study and discuss these, please remember:
- These are tools and not rules. They work outside the realm of right and wrong, and inside the world of cause and effect. You will find many examples of good writing that seem to “violate” the general advice described here.
- It will not help to apply these tools at once, just as aspiring golfers swing and miss if they try to remember the 30 or so different elements of an effective golf swing.
- You will become handy with these tools over time. You will begin to recognize their use in the stories you read. You will see chances to apply them when you revise your own work. Eventually, they will become part of your flow, natural and automatic.
- You are already using many of these tools without knowing it. It is impossible to speak, write, or read without them. But now these tools have names, so you can begin to talk about them in different ways. As your critical vocabulary grows, your writing will improve.
My friend Tom French, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, told me he liked my tool list because it covered writing from the “sub-atomic to the metaphysical level.” By sub-atomic, he meant the ways words, phrases, and sentences work. By metaphysical, he meant the ways writers live, dream, and work.
With that as both introduction and promise, let us begin.
Writer’s Toolbox
Tool #1: Begin sentences with subjects and verbs, letting subordinate elements branch off to the right. Even a very long sentence can be clear and powerful when the subject and verb make meaning early. >>Read more
Taking Bush to court
Elizabeth de la Vega explores the idea and possible reality of United States v. George W. Bush et al in an intriguing essay.
Managing money
Years ago I was mystified at how I consistently failed to have spare money. Then I discovered what I’ll call implicit spending: if you rely on some possession that has a lifetime, your daily use involves implicit spending. Say you own an item that has for you a useful life of 4 years and that you expect to pay $2000 to replace it when it goes. Then as you use it, you’re implicitly spending $500/year, or $41.67/month, by having it, since when it must be replaced you’re going to need $2000. The price at replacement time might vary from $2000, but you expect that you’ll have to come up with that for the replacement.
An apartment dweller might count as sources of implicit spending things like a car, tires, car battery, vacuum cleaner, mattress, TV, computer, and the like. A homeowner must also account (and accumulate) for a roof, water heater, furnace, dishwasher, refrigerator, washer, dryer, exterior paint, carpets, and so on.
In our possession-laden lives, the burden of implicit spending can be significant—and it’s in addition to explicit spending: insurance policies, automobile registration, birthday gifts, and the like: periodic expenditures that we more obviously and explicitly must make.
I created an Excel workbook (download at link) to track all this, starting with the money you get from your take-home pay. Each page examines one category of saving/spending (mostly spending, I must admit) and allows you to enter the amounts appropriate to you. Each page is protected so that you don’t accidentally overwrite formulas, but if you want to tinker with it, the password is “123″ (without the quotation marks).
I think if you work through this you’ll be surprised at the amount of money you’ve obligated yourself to pay, on average, each month. And if you don’t have that money, bad things will happen to you, sure as my name is Leisureguy. Take a look, and see how it works for you.
UPDATE: The obvious corollary: the fewer material items you accumulate, the less money you must put aside in your replacement savings. By adopting a lifestyle that’s light on material goods, you free up more of your income for saving and investing. That’s part of the message of the interesting and useful book Your Money or Your Life, by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. I highly recommend the book and the application of its ideas. Quite often, it seems, a material object is acquired and valued not for what it is, but in an attempt to satisfy some psychological need. It’s much wiser to identify these needs and deal with them directly than to try to satisfy them by accumulating stuff (and increasing the implicit spending you do). And an Update to this: watch this little movie for a new appreciation of the burden of stuff. — Dominguez, Robin, and others also started the New Roadmap Foundation to provide further support for their ideas. The Web site for that is FinancialIntegrity.org.
UPDATE 2: When you do acquire things, many of those things must ultimately be disposed of: given away, sold on eBay, thrown away, or whatever. Some may be simply used up: a washing machine, for example. But still it must then be discarded.
It helps when you go to buy something—a book, a vase, a chair, a set of dishes, whatever—if you take a moment to decide how it will be disposed of. You can’t assume, BTW, that giving it away will automatically work: it might well be that the intended recipient will not want it when the time comes. One way to give things away is through the Freecycle program.
It will then perhaps occur to you that you can finesse the problem altogether by not getting the thing in the first place.
UPDATE 3: A suggestion on the money you’re setting aside for future use: save this money via automatic transfer to ING Direct. (Last I checked, passbook savings accounts in regular banks paid 1/10th of 1% interest per year.) As the money accumulates, put it into one of Vanguard’s low-fee balanced funds. (For most of their funds, “low-fee” becomes “no-fee” once you have $10,000 in the fund.)
UPDATE 4: The Simple Dollar has a good post that sums up the fundamentals of personal finance. Take a look.
UPDATE 5: I just added a bit to the workbook. This latest version has my email address on the “Summary” page as “leisureguy.wordpress@gmail.com“. If you have some other email address there, you might want to download the latest version. The main difference is small. I include this text in the “Savings” page:
A comment on the 401(k) and other tax-deferred plans: the account balance is misleading. You don’t really have that much money available to spend in retirement because you must pay taxes on the money that you draw out—and it’s taxed as ordinary income. So the total available for you to spend is (depending on your tax bracket) is 25%-30% less than the total shown. That’s one reason after-tax savings are so important: that balance is actually available to you.
BUT: Be sure to max all all your tax-deferred options (401(k), IRA, and the like) BEFORE you start your after-tax savings. Also: check out the ROTH IRA: that money perhaps can be withdrawn tax-free.
UPDATE 6: Be sure to check out the resources available at FinancialIntegrity.org.
