By David Futrelle
A quick little update post.
First off, GIANT THANKS to everyone who’s donated during this fund drive! I can’t do this blog without you, and I appreciate everything you all do to help, whether your donations are large or small or if you contribute to the blog in some other way.
If you can’t donated yet, please do! Pledges are running behind what I need to cover costs, and every little (or big) bit helps!
I’m going to extend the pledge drive for at least a few more days, and will have another update soon. THANKS!
Second, sorry that posts have been light over the past couple of days!
As some of you know, I have problems with chronic migraines that can interfere rather severely with my productivity. Right now I’m in a difficult spot, trying (on the advice of a neurologist) to break a vicious cycle of rebound headaches by more or less going cold turkey on my regular migraine meds and all other painkillers, which means I basically have to deal with my headaches raw for now in hopes of fewer headaches in the future. Hopefully this process won’t take more than a few more days, but until it’s over posts will be light.
I’ve also fallen behind on emails, but please keep on sending tips!
Thanks for understanding. Thanks for everything!
re: garlic
I personally adore garlic, but my mom’s slightly allergic–it doesn’t cause her any ill effects, but it does numb her tongue and taste bad to her (similar to me with black walnuts).
You should definitely try one then! But I’ll let you know that the butter was a late addition to the recipe and it works fine without it.
So apparently Trump turned the Boy Scouts Jamboree into a goddamn Hitler Youth Rally.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/trump-boy-scouts-rally/index.html
As a former Boy Scout, I find this down right infuriating.
So in fact sauteed red cabbage can be treated as a garlic delivery vehicle.Not a bad idea. The world does not have enough garlic delivery vehicles.
@kupo – ugh, that is so unsympathetic and petty. He does sound like the “ew, icky girls” type. “Uncomfortable” indeed! Cramps are not fun. A few weeks ago I couldn’t work one morning because I couldn’t stand up without stabbing pains (the cramps subsided, but I was sore for three days after). Now, this was my fault for eating a bunch of milk chocolate the day before; luckily I don’t have that bad period pains. But a lot of people do.
Note: according to some “Milk Nazis” this blog discussed, white people aren’t supposed to be lactose intolerant. I showed them, I guess? (Tolerance… intolerance… there’s a joke there somewhere.)
@PoM – Ooh, thanks. I love pan-frying things like onions in olive oil, and I like red cabbage, so this sounds excellent. 🙂
Also, hi everybody! I was very busy with work for a while, and am now a bit less so.
The culinary skills of the community here are amazing.
@Pavlovs House
Eh…I just made chili from ingredients in tins/packets. I mean, it was good chili, but not Pro.
(The family liked it, though.)
Speaking of, anyone have any advice on making broth?
I’ve been experimenting with boiling mushrooms (which I’m assuming is at least broth-adjacent) and mixing the water with instant chicken soup. But I’m also mildly lost about when to add other spices (pre- or post-), other vegetables I could use, or what else I can do with the near-broth afterward; currently on a program limiting me to veggies 40cal or less per cup, plus onions or garlic (limitation to be removed in a few weeks).
@ eli
Ooh! Such as?
@Ray of Rays
The plant based “butter” I use and am most familiar with, is made of oils (mix of palm oil, coconut oil and canola oil). If you’re in the US, look for “dairy free margarine” and you’ll probably find a few different options. I know that Earth Balance is one.
@Policy of Madness
Mmm, red cabbage. Will try your recipe out, with lots of garlic.
@Ray of Rays
Not sure if this meets your restrictions, but my broth base is French style – finely diced leek, carrot and celeriac (celery will do but is a bit stronger with the aniseed notes) gently sautéed in a little bit of butter or olive oil for a long time. When everything is soft and starting to brown add garlic and chopped parsley, stir a few more minutes and add water. You can tie a little bundle of woody French herbs up with string at this point and steep it like a teabag, things like rosemary and thyme, or just chop in in softer herbs like tarragon or sage. Grind in salt, pepper, other spices like nutmeg to taste. And then you have a base for practically any soup from whatever leftover vegetables (and presumably meats) you have, though I would also gently fry some soup ingredients like mushrooms before adding. I don’t eat meat but I’ve heard it’s good with leftover shredded chicken.
You can always just use a stock cube also. Not quite as nice but much quicker.
@Scildfreja. Interesting that it’s virtue signalling that was the useful now co-opted term! Thanks.
@PoM:
That sounds like deliciousness itself. I’m a low-garlic person but it sounds like it supports a sliding scale of garlic all the way from zero to Scildfreja.
I’m going to try making it with sultanas in place of some of the sugar. Sultanas in red cabbage are something I grew up eating and I’m very fond of.
@Ray of Rays:
I’ve had some success using leeks and celery in vegetable broth. Also, have you tried using a heavier soup base than chicken? I’ve had good results with lamb. It might not fit your current diet though.
For a mushroom base I usually just take the liquid left from rehydrating dried mushrooms.
For a nice bone broth I do this:
1) In the evening of the night before I want the broth, put some soup bones in a crock pot and cover with water. Set on low.
2) The following morning, add oxtail and desired flavor veggies, plus any spices. I’m usually making a nice pho when I do this, so I use onions, lemongrass, star anise, peppercorns, cinnamon, maybe some daikon. If using strong herbs like thyme, rosemary, sage, etc. add at this point. Add more water if needed to cover the veggies and/or fill the pot and continue to cook on low.
3) If I’m using delicate hebs like fresh parsley I’ll add them 30 mins to an hour before serving. When ready to eat, remove solids using a slotted spoon and remove the fat using a fat separator. You may also want to strain through a cheesecloth to remove any solids. You can save the oxtail meat and add it into your soup or use for another purpose as well.
O/T but you might find this nicely surreal. Remember a while back some people here helped choose the name for a new building development? In the end we went with Merlin Court.
Anyway, we ordered the relevant street signs; but they didn’t turn up. Just chased the sign makers. They’ve delivered them to the wrong address.
Yup, they got confused about the address, of a place they have literally made the street signs for.
That’s really tickled me. 🙂
As we’re on the topic of cooking, last night I made a weird, 75% improvised Italian/Japanese dinner. Basically, it was sliced (vegan) chorizo fried with chili paste and sesame oil, mixed with various leafy greens, alfalfa sprouts and pea shoots, fried until wilted, plus Japanese soy sauce, rice vinegar, ginger, garlic, shallots, and finally stirred into glass noodles. It came out fine, but could use some tweaking.
Take whole cloves of garlic (only caveat – they need to be all the same size (ish) ), peel.
Immerse in olive oil in your smallest saucepan (trick: find something stable to wedge under the handle so it sits on your hob in a tipped-up position, to make the pool of oil even smaller. Unless you have the world’s tiniest saucepan, I suppose) and deep-fry as gently as possible, until the cloves are darkish golden-brown; they will be just getting crispy on the outside and will be smooth creamy mush on the inside.
Remove and allow to cool, and mince up fine.
Add to everything.
This makes mashed potatoes into heaven. It makes pasta sauce into heaven. It makes all savoury foods into heaven (especially with chilli flakes).
Also, it leaves you with a little garlic-flavoured oil to cook with, which is obviously a Good Thing.
Seriously, mashed potatoes. The first time, I couldn’t stop eating them.
‘Shapely Prose closed down in 2010, so well over a decade ago.’
Are you from the future?
Deep fried garlic — yum!
Costco has these giant jars of pre-diced garlic in oil. They really help increase the garlicification levels of our household.
In other news: my stuff is about to arrive! It’s really neat watching the barges creep in to the beach (we have no port, so the container ship stays offshore and unloads into a barge), then get unloaded by a forklift. It’s charmingly inefficient, particularly with how they can only do it around high tide.
@Ellesar – no, bad phrasing on my part. The years I was discussing , when I was reading it and similar blogs, were well before it shut down – it was pretty defunct long before it was formally archived. Which doesn’t make me feel like a frisky young thing from the future at all. I think the pre-financial crisis culture gap is much bigger than I would have predicted, looking back at internet politics before 2008.
@Policy of Madness
I just wanted to say that I love the way you said this for your recipe:
That’s exactly how to describe it!
Thanks @Scolar! I’ll see if I can find the original article. I suppose what I’m really fishing for are some tangible examples of quote-unquote “objectionable” behaviour on the part of those termed SJWs before the label became corrupted. Because I’ve noticed that the half-remembered “just so” stories that become de rigueur on the right rely on the actual case to have become lost in the memory hole. Like hippies spitting on Vietnam veterans or the mysterious fate of Erin Pizzey’s dog. Wherever video evidence is presented, it’s always context-free, but it’s just enough to become a meme amongst those just itching for an enemy. Chanty Binx then becomes “Big Red” not because of anything she actually said, but just because she was upset, wore glasses and had dyed red hair and once or twice shouted “patriarchy” over a guy interrupting her. At that point, she’s an avatar for every “Tumblrina” that the garbage people have heard about, but never actually encountered and raked over the coals for wholly imagined slights.
That’s why what Dave does here is so critical. And he does it right. Plenty of online doofuses lazily regurgitate a dropped name like “Big Red” or “Trigglypuff” (in a very virtue-signally way, I might add) fully cognizant that a bunch of other doofuses are going to know exactly what that means. But finding specific examples of terrible behaviour with context completely intact and cataloguing them so carefully is key to holding their feet to the fire. Because make no mistake, this little cottage industry of memes and kekistan and Pepes that opportunists have been feeding on will eventually collapse in on itself the same way GamerGate did and they’ll be scrambling for escape hatches in the form of “Wha? Me? Alt-right? No, no, I was a liberal this whole time! A totally principled classical liberal!” Don’t let ’em rebrand themselves; remind ’em just who their audience was with a WHTM post. 😉
I was under the impression that terms like “SJW” were used jokingly within the left for a long time. Usually, “SJW” (or similar terms) could mean that someone is overly and unnecessarily (and often hypocritically) critical of others on the left for their lifestyle choices, usually without really understanding the underlying issues. It could also mean identifying much more with an identity group than warranted, like assuming having 1/16th Native American ancestry makes you culturally Native American.
Off topic, but one issue I’m particularly concerned about is that Betsy DeVos will not enforce the Obama-era regulations on for-profit online universities (one of the few issues I’m 100% with Obama on). The Obama administration required all schools offering degrees focused on job and vocational training to have “gainful employment” disclosures and started enforcing strict regulations. Some of the worst for-profit schools started eliminating admissions screening (they didn’t even care if you got disqualified from community college) and emphasizing “easy” vocational majors with poor employment prospects like criminal justice rather than stuff IT or computer programming (which have better employment prospects for someone with a vocational associate’s degree and no bachelor’s degree).
There’s usually some community college or state university in your area that has an online or night class degree program. You can get federal aid at a community college if you need it and your education will probably be much cheaper and higher quality. The problem is that community colleges and state universities usually don’t aggressively market their programs like for-profits.
@History Nerd, far as I know, Betsy DeVos is interested in dismantling all regulations on private schools, and dismantling the quality of public schooling. She positively encourages schools as for-profit enterprises, and would no doubt privatize the whole lot and disband the department of education if she could.
Sorry that isn’t an encouraging statement to make, but hopefully it lights a fire in you to oppose her every gosh-darn step. She scares me almost more than any other in the Trump Menagerie.
Re: Pre-alt-right “SJWs” –
They existed, mostly as an example of people shouting over other people in order to show how progressive they were. Thing is, they were never nearly as common as the alt-right wanted to make them sound once the term SJW started flying around with wild abandon. It wasn’t used very often prior to the alt-right getting their hands on it, but I did see it occasionally, and it was something said by progressives, albeit rarely.
Also, people who identify with GamerGate have always tried the “But I’m ACTUALLY liberal, totes for reals” tactic. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t been making many friends in the gaming community lately. Even the ones who aren’t alt-right are just brogressives who start ranting and raging about how terrible feminists are at the mere mention of Anita Sarkeesian.
This is apparently my entire circle of friends. I need to go live in a hole or something.
I used the term SJW jokingly to refer to a guy in a class I was taking who would talk over women and POC to explain the experiences of women and POC. He was usually about half wrong with his assertions and always really angry/offended on behalf of the people he was talking about.