New Phone, Who Me?

     For years, I carried an iPhone, mostly for work and web-browing, and an Android that was on another carrier that had all my family contacts.  Its predecessor was my "Mom phone," with a distinctive ringtone for her calls and mostly used for only that purpose.  I'd bought the replacement online, without having held it.

     That was a mistake: it was too big.  The touchscreen worked differently in small but annoying ways.  I missed text messages often.  Eventually, the screen got cracked, and cracked again, including a really nasty divot.  (I'll say this for screen protectors, though: it took a lot of impacts and even after the screen started breaking, the protector held it together well enough.)  And then it stopped taking a charge.  The frame was bent, too, and when I coaxed it to turn back on, the OS had crashed.  The phone was over six years old.

     There matters sat for over a month.  I kept putting off taking it back to the phone store and then realized I could just move the SIM card.  There's a reputable secondary market in cell phones, and maybe I could find something decent....

     Yesterday, I fired up a refurbed iPhone SE, one of the recent models, and since I had my contacts stored on the card, they popped right up.  It's what I think is the right size for a phone (YMMV) and it mostly does what I expect.  The only touchy thing was moving the card over without touching the contact side -- or sneezing while I did the job.  It's different enough to my work phone that I can tell them apart, and similar enough that I'm not having to code-switch when moving from one to the other.

Rewriting Everything

     Not only does authoritarianism edit the past and abuse the present -- it wants to the steal the future, too.

     It's especially after the future for women.  The Heritage Foundation has a long-term blueprint to shove women back into "church, children and cooking," whether we want it or not -- and they're utterly serious about it.

     It's fantasy bullshit.  My mother was born in 1931, to parents who were born in the 19th Century.  Her mother was a schoolteacher who raised six children, ran a household, and worked all her life, at paying jobs and charity work.  My Mom worked full-time until her first child, worked part-time afterward, was a Girl Scout troop leader and, when my baby brother was older, a Cub Scout Den Mother; but by then, she was already working full-time again, too.

     She kept house all along, and did most of the cooking (dishes and routine gardening fell to the children when we were old enough, followed by lawn care and eventually some of the cooking and other household chores), and her jobs weren't inconsequential; starting as a secretary, she became an insurance adjuster, adjuster/manager, and ended up in the company's main office, handling claims running to a million dollars and more.   Mom and her mother were lifelong Republicans, active in their churches, and involved in local politics; but they certainly don't fit the mold today's conservatives would condemn them to.  And yet there they are, square in the past Heritage is busy lying about.

     This is -- as I wrote yesterday -- dictator stuff, and it aligns squarely with the social roles the WW II Axis powers assigned to women.

     For all their red, white and blue, flag-waving, publicly-praying poses, Mr. Trump's party is selling what the West fought to stop.  Polling suggests it's not quite working for them, but bear in mind that Axis leaders never let a little thing like public opinion get in their way.  Americans need to keep pushing back.

I Didn't Think It Was Supposed To Sound Like That

      Saturday is my day to do laundry.  Especially this week -- I've got to fill in at work on Sunday.  So it had to get done today.

     First load, tops and delicates, a surprising amount of which can go in the dryer on low.  Which is where I put it.  I loaded the air-dry stuff onto plastic hangers and started the washer filling for the week's worth of work slacks that follow.

     H'mm, the old dryer's sounding a little rough.  I decided to check the outside vent as soon as I got upstairs.

     It didn't look too bad, but what was clunking around?  I did have three hooded sweatshirts in there....

     I took the slacks down and loaded the washer.  The dryer sounded worse.  It seemed to be varying in speed as the drum turned.  Was it a drive-belt issue?  Overloaded?  Motor failing?

     Most dryers have synchronous motors.  They need to be extremely unhappy before the speed starts to vary, and they usually don't last long after that.  And the noise was getting worse and worse, with occasional banging sounds.

     I decided to put everything on hangers and let it air-dry while I had a look at the dryer.  Not great, but it's winter and a pretty cold day: the air in my house is plenty dry and a little extra humidity wouldn't hurt.  A fair amount of messing with damp clothing later, I opened up the dryer.

     It still didn't look too bad.  I  found some lint balls in the exhaust vent, and maybe the belt is wearing faster than I'd like, but that was all.  In a spirit of trying things, I got my portable vacuum and started cleaning the squirrel-cage blower; the machine has been taking longer and longer to get clothes dry recently, and it did have some lint build-up on the vanes.

     In the process of cleaning the fan, I eventually realized the impeller was turning independently of the drive shaft.  Oh, it would turn if the shaft was turning, too, but it's supposed to be rigidly coupled.  And it was wobbling quite a bit.  That's the kind of thing that would account for the racket the dryer was making.

     Double-checking the drawings online, it looks like the motor shaft is D-shaped and the fan is clamped to it, with a matching opening at the hub.  I've ordered a replacement impeller, clamp and circlip.  Replacing it is probably going to be a fussy project, down at floor level, and until it arrives, we're out of the dryer business.

     In the meantime, my load of work slacks was done -- two pairs of medium-weight cargo slacks, a matching pair with a warm winter lining and three pairs of heavy double-front dungarees.  I improvised an indoor clothesline in the basement and plugged the dehumidifier back in.  I'm checking the progress of my tops and some time before bedtime, I'll move the dry ones to storage and bring the slacks upstairs, to dry where it's warmer.

     When it comes to clothes dryers, I have a skewed view: my Mom used the same 1949-vintage one well into the 1980s, getting it repaired as needed, and on some level, I may believe they're supposed to last forever.  I'll see how the repairs go.  The parts sites show a lot of the components for my dryer as "unavailable," so the clock is ticking.

Okay, Then...Dammit

     I have now reached the "obnoxiously crabby" stage of my cold.  It's probably a good sign; it means I've got enough mental processing cycles left over to be annoyed about being sick.

     That does not, however, mean it is any fun.  And I have to keep it reined in, despite an unceasing string of petty frustrations this morning: when I act annoyed, the cats get crabby with one another:
     "Mom's upset and it's your fault!"
     "No it ain't, it's your fault, you fluffy monstrosity!"
     "Yeah, well you're yellow!"
     "That's it!"  And they're off, wrestling, trying to chew one another's ears off, rolling over and over down the hall.
     Earlier, one of them was biting the other as he was headed into the litterbox, an offense against proper behavior so dire that we moved the biter to the front of the house and shut the door -- until his adopted brother, business taken care of, began wailing at the closed door about being so lonely, where was his pal, what had we done?

     There's no managing cats; you just have to figure out where they're headed and try to get there first.

Don't Know Why I Bother

     There was a point during the pandemic when I stopped doing confrontational debunking.  People had their minds pretty well made up, right or wrong, and they were not going to change -- and some of them were starting get threatening.

     I try to not have strong attachments to anyone or anything (it's that Jr. High flirtation with Buddhism), and to not share too much about the stuff I really love if it's where other people can get at it.  I was always dislikeable: nearsighted, clumsy, stroobly-haired, a tomboy who never knew when to shut up.*  It's never nice to discover someone's poured milk in your school locker, glued your Lord of the Rings paperbacks into a series of solid lumps or keyed your car.  I learned to keep things shut away.  At my present age, I would prefer to retain all the teeth I have left and not suffer any more broken bones -- little things, I suppose, but such comforts.

     Nevertheless--  It irks me when molehills are inflated into mountains.  The Federal Emergency Management has been a prime focus for political extremists from the day it was proposed. If they stock up on house trailers, they're said to be planning concentration camps.  If they ask for bids to supply body bags, they're accused of plotting mass death.  FEMA workers are often greeted with hostility when they show up after calamity has struck, accused of being too slow (States usually have to ask for 'em) or too snoopy (it's a government agency; they have forms that have to be filled out) or of doing things they have never done.  (And I get it, it's nervous-making when The Gummint shows up; my Mom was a township property tax assessor, which occasionally meant having to measure the outside dimensions of somebody's house.  Not everyone was okay with that.)

     So I had a blog comment about how FEMA had left Trump supporters in the lurch, and that comment needs to be addressed.

     In the aftermath of disaster, people are on edge.  Armed with a clipboard and a cellphone or radio, FEMA workers have been known to encounter residents who have rather more armament.  I gather the advice they are given is to avoid confrontation.

     In early October of 2024, Hurricane Milton roared from the Gulf and across Florida, killing at least 35 people and doing over 30 billion dollars in damage.  Afterward (some sources say October 27), a FEMA supervisor of 11 canvassers working in Lake Placid, FL told them not "avoid confrontation" but to skip houses with Trump campaign signs.  She got caught; someone leaked the email and by November, she was fired and FEMA sent a new crew to cover the area.  Short write-up here, news stories here and here.  Any search engine will find more.  FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell was hauled up before the House Oversight committee, where she condemned the supervisor's action.  Jamie Raskin of Maryland called the instruction "a bad mistake, legally and constitutionally, which violated the core mission of FEMA and every federal agency to work on behalf of all Americans. [...] It’s plainly wrong and divisive to use a presidential campaign lawn sign as a proxy for someone’s dangerousness," and that's the ranking Democrat on the committee calling it out.  The Republicans said much the same thing.

     That is the sole documented example I can find of FEMA being partisan.  Some crazy rumors came out of North Carolina after their terrible floods, but it appears to be social-media fantasy.

     Here's what FEMA says: "FEMA provides assistance to survivors regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, English proficiency, political affiliation or economic status." They've got a whole fact sheet you can look over -- and if you've got evidence they're not playing by their own rules, there's a "contact us" link right there at the bottom of the page.  Cc the House Oversight Committee while you're at it, I'm sure they'll be interested.

     Or you can huff the fumes of overheated bullshit, if that's what gets you high, but don't confuse the resulting hallucinations with reality, and don't ask the rest of us to take a whiff.  The stink is unmistakable.
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* One of the first signs of trouble with my ex was when we were building a little platform at my previous home to get the house for the feral cats up out of the mud, and it became obvious he wasn't much good with a handsaw and had trouble sinking a nail straight.  It took me by surprise; I think of those as basic life skills, stuff my big sister, little brother and our parents knew before adulthood.  He was...not real happy that it surprised me.  I'll take half the blame for that, but, um, it was a warning of basic incompatibility we both should have heeded.

A Frustrating Pair Of Eyes

     In October, I had my regular eye exam and, of course, my vision had changed.  I own three frames (four counting sunglasses) and it was time for the round ones that I really like.  I left them with the eye doctor and they told me my glasses would be ready in three or four weeks.  My lenses require a complicated, multi-prism grind.  It's never fast.*

     Three weeks later, I picked them up, put them on and looked around the store, enjoying the sharpened vision.  I thanked the tech and clipped the matching sunglasses on.  They didn't fit as well as they had, but hey, new lenses.  Went out into the sunshine, drove to work and didn't take a good look at the new glasses in a mirror until I was washing my hands a couple of hours later.  One kind of round lens, one egg-shaped lens, the frames forced around them with some buckling for the least-round side.  They looked awful.

     I called the eye doctor immediately and took the glasses back the next day, where at first they saw only the frame damage, then realized neither lens was the right shape.  They sent the glasses back to their lab -- a different one than the one that has made my lenses for over a decade; the practice was sold some time ago and the new owners have their own lab.  That was almost a month ago.

     Monday, they called me.  "Our lab says they can't fix your glasses.  We're sending them to a different lab. Those frames are so old, you know, it's hard to put lenses in them...."  My round frames are maybe five years old.  There have been no major changes to the way eyeglass lenses for into frames in my lifetime, and hardly any in the last century.

     The frames are probably ruined.  My trust certainly is.  The "one-hour" place I went to when I needed vision correction in a hurry did okay and while I like the guy who has been doing my eye exams, I won't trust his employer to make me glasses again.

     My vision was terrible when I was a child.  I successfully faked it until third grade, when my teacher figured out that I couldn't read the blackboard at all, and that I thought it was just a cruel joke that everyone got except me.  (Mom: "So that's why you sit so near the TV!")  My world looked like an Impressionist painting, seen too close, all fuzzy blobs and smears.  It matters to me to be able to see clearly.
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* After cataract surgery, I had a "one-hour eyeglasses" place make up a pair of glasses that only corrected my greatly-changed nearsightedness, while I waited for the astigmatism to settle down.  A month later, I went back to have lenses for my full prescription made and the technician told me, "Okay, come back this afternoon and..." before doing a double-take at the prescription and apologizing, "Oh.  Sorry.  This will be two or three weeks.  We can't make these here."  Yep.

The Way Forward

     I've been thinking about what to do next.  Four years of catastrophizing whatever comes out of the White House and Congress -- and the U. S. Supreme Court -- doesn't appeal to me.  Anyone who wants that can find it in plenty of places, often from subject-matter experts.  I'm not going to ignore it, either -- but no Commander in Chief is the boss of me.  All Presidents are temporary employees, hired for a term of four years with a possibility of four more, and then they're out.  And for those four years, the only time they're off the clock is when they're unconscious.  People figure Presidents they dislike are living large, but the job is its own punishment, especially if the office-holder works at it.

     In my opinion, the electorate just handed a machine gun to an angry chimp; but he's got it now and there's no pretending otherwise.  Life goes on nevertheless, with a new and worrying hazard.  There are still meals to be cooked, stories to be written, books to be read, carpentry and electronic projects to be built, maybe even a little sewing.*  I've got a retirement to figure out; I'll be poor no matter what, but if I work it right and the economy doesn't go too nuts, I won't go broke until after I'm dead.

     All of that is of more interest to me, and maybe to my readers, than politics.
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* I keep putting that off, I think for fear of being bad at it.  That's a silly reason; part of learning (or in this case, relearning) a skill is accepting that you're not going to be proficient right away.  The other part?  I bought my little Singer Featherweight folding portable sewing machine so I could easily carry it to visit Mom and sew.  That never happened; I was always too busy and all I have left is regret and memories of good advice. (Prices for these little machines have climbed steadily; Singer made around two million of them but they are in great demand from quilters and anyone who wants a small, full-featured sewing machine.)

Corncakes

     There's been a box of cornbread mix in the cupboard for quite some time.  The oven in my old-but-not-antique gas range is questionable at best.  It's not usually a problem for me, since I enjoy cooking on the covered grill; roasts and curries and holiday turducken or corned beef work out well in a graniteware pan over hot coals.

     I haven't tried to bake in the grill.  Breads are tricky and home baking was a high art until the introduction of thermostatic controls*.  There are ways around it -- most breads and small cakes can be microwaved, though you don't end up with much in the way of crust.

     The cornbread mix microwaves well enough, but I wanted to do something different.  Can't you make cornmeal pancakes?

     Of course you can!  A little more milk and some melted butter, and there you go.  I cooked up a batch this morning, golden brown and slightly crumbly, and when it comes to rising pancakes, I think they're better than the all wheat-flour version, a little sweet (as the boxed cornbread mix tends to be; modern people put sugar in it, having no idea how to make proper cornbread) and full of flavor.

     It's a nice change from the usual.
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* You can bake bread in a clay-dome oven, fireplace-side oven, or a cast-iron wood or coal stove, and plenty of people did.  But it's a skill with a long learning curve, especially judging and maintaining the correct temperature.  Both of my grandmothers would have grown up learning how to run a cast-iron stove with an oven, the latter addition patented in 1867, a decade or more before either of them was born.  They adopted improved stoves eagerly. (Unlike an earlier generation; Mom spoke of her grandmother's irritation at her grandfather, who would mark up the wood-stove blacking by flipping slices of potato onto the sides of it, to stick, sizzle and fall clear when cooked! Caught on a plate, the proto-chips were a treat for him and his grandchildren.†)  Later versions of those stoves included a dial thermometer in the oven door, but a number of methods were used to check temperature from early on -- the boiling point of water at 212°F gives you a low oven, and the ignition temperature of paper, 451°F (a number made famous later) a high oven.  While my covered grill offers the same air-and-damper controls as a cast-iron range, it has far lower thermal mass and is difficult to refuel while burning.  --Oh, I'll try some day, just to see how it goes.  The kitchen is a workshop with a highly-developed set of tools, prosaic though it may appear.
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† So what's in stove-blacking? Plumbago -- graphite, that is -- lampblack -- which is carbon -- and a binder, like fat or paraffin grease.  Tasty!  I don't suppose small amounts of pencil-lead and carbon are all that immediately bad for you, but the state of California has probably already checked and found they are carcinogenic.

The Ads Keep Getting Worse

     It's raining Führerprinzip out there.  Indiana's a Republican stronghold, at least at the statewide level, and so the real contest for Governor and Federal office (in the Senate and most House districts) is in the GOP primary.  The Governor's post is up for grabs this year, the generally moderate and careful Eric Holcomb being term-limited, and a jostling crowd of eager contenders is after it.

     They're egging one another on.  While the general election is a time to emphasize a candidate's* broad appeal, party primaries are just the reverse: contenders vie to be more partisan than their peers, or at least they do if they've got the budget.  If an opponent adopts an extreme position or outrageous presentation, why, the thing to do is lean that way, too, but even more so.

     The race for the Governor's office is illustrative.  The pay's not that great, though the job does come with a nice mansion fronting busy Meridian Street and full-time police protection, and they are fighting for it tooth, claw and AR-15.  While current Lieutenant Governor Susanne Crouch has dipped a tentative toe in the advertising waters, stressing her strong law-and-order, Trumpist-Republican credentials, "outsider"† Eric Doden, former President of the state's Economic Development Corporation, has performed a remarkable turn in his ads, from a kindly paterfamilas emphasizing that his grandfather was a preacher and detailing his work fostering a young woman from the Third World to a series of apocalyptic-looking ads that focus on President Biden as a dire problem, the border as a crisis and contrasting his unflinching support of law enforcement with "outsider"† Senator Mike Braun's dabbling in the mildest of qualified immunity reform, demonstrated by highly edited snippets from Braun's interview by former Fox News opionator (and Putin apologist) Tucker Carlson.  Meanwhile, Braun himself uses processed video to share his image of America under Biden as a hellscape of smuggled fentanyl and invading migrants, touting his strong leadership and love for our police forces as a solution (and never mind what the governor of a landlocked state far from any national border could do about those problems).  And "outsider"† Brad Chambers, former Indiana Secretary of Commerce (and another Economic Development Commission politico), also wants you to know he's a true law-and-order man, ready to take on Red China toe-to-toe as only the Governor of a smallish state can.‡  All of them tout their loyalty to the GOP's hetman, either directly or by implication.

     At least two of the last three are warning of an imminent threat from "men in women's sports," using a fourth-place finishing college swimmer -- not a native of or resident in Indiana -- as their prime example.  But that issue looms most literally larger in the campaign ads of Chuck Goodrich, hoping to move up from the Indiana House to the U. S. House, displacing the occasionally-moderate Victoria Spartz in the Fifth District.  I'm still not sure about the source of this obsession with a handful (if that) of high school and college athletes in other states, but Rep. Goodrich's scare ads depict 6' 1" Lia Thomas towering head and shoulders over three other swimmers -- in truth, the average competitive college-age female swimmer is 5" 9", only four inches shorter.§  Why the misleading edit, followed by big-scare material over allegations about High School basketball game in Massachusetts, in an Indiana election?  At a guess, to get people riled up, over a primary in which the only difference between incumbent and challenger is that the current office-holder has a little more sense of how to get things done in Congress.  Lacking any substantive issue, he trots out boogypersons, tweaked for maximum shock value.

     All this culture-war hype is just hype.  Yes, China's selling drug precursors to any narco with the cash to buy them, but you can't fix that from the Governor's office in Indiana.  And our border with Mexico is indeed a mess -- thanks to various screwed-up Latin American governments and an official border policy based on laws that have not been updated in over forty years.  When a compromise was worked out in Congress recently, the Republicans (many of whom had voted for it) shot it down, apparently at the request of Presidential candidate Donald Trump, on the grounds that half a loaf still undercut his desire to run a scare campaign over border issues (and many other ooga-booga items).  Whoops, GOP, you lost the high ground on that one.  The trans stuff is no more than an updated "satanic panic:" take something scary and weird, and blow it up into an issue based on fear rather than facts: in this case, a teeny-tiny minority about whom much is rumored and little known, with no political power and less money, of whom the most visible members are about as scary-looking as Eleanor Roosevelt.  Unaesthetic?  Sure, but so are a lot of people.  It's hardly a threat to the nation, or even the womenfolk thereof.  We've got 'em well outnumbered.  And yet it all gets mashed up like a bad parody of a WW II Axis propaganda piece, with marching soldiers and scary foes, framed in scratchy red and black borders as overwrought voice-overs speak of onrushing doom -- unless we vote for the Man On Horseback....

     The voting booth isn't supposed to be a bullshit shop but increasingly it is on the Republican side, and it's making the regular grabasstic Democrats look like marvels of political competence in contrast.  As a political "outsider"** I count on there being two mostly-sane, reasonably-adequate political parties, one leaning conservative and the other tilting progressive, keeping one another honest and between them managing to steer a path between wild new ideas and stodgy tradition.  I did not sign up for one of them to go luridly nuts and I don't approve of it.
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* Originally typed as "candifate," which is, ouch, a little too close.
 
† Each one of these guys wants you to know they're an "outsider," untainted by the normal give-and-take of politics and the inside-the-Beltway intrigue of Washington, D.C., and each one of them is, in fact, involved in politics right up to their armpits -- or eyebrows, in Senator Braun's case.  Their assertion of being on the outside looking in is howling bullshit that doesn't survive even the mildest scrutiny, which they are counting on most voters to not undertake.
 
‡ While our Governor is better-off that way than, say, the Pope, it's hard to imagine the Indiana Guard's 14,000 soldiers and airpersons being much more than a before-lunch diversion for the two-million-plus active troops of the PLA.  I think we're going to need the help of at least 49 more states and the regular U. S. armed forces to take 'em on.
 
§ The tallest female swimmer competing in recent years was Russian Yekaterina Gamova, at 6' 7" or 6' 8".  She's better known for volleyball and I don't know anything else about her other than what a quick websearch finds.
 
**No, dammit, I really am outside; the closest I ever came to inside politics was when my Mom was appointed Township Assessor and I helped measure building foundations and stuff envelopes.

Kerosene Stove

     My paternal grandmother cooked on a kerosene stove.  She preferred them.  She would have grown up with wood-fueled cookstoves and a kerosene stove is a lot less bother to use.  The first good kerosene stoves started showing up when she was a young bride: in the very early 20th Century, John D. Rockefeller, eager to find new markets for oil distillates, helped fund efforts to develop improved kerosene stoves that resulted in the "Perfection" long-chimney burner, in which the flame never touches the pots and pans and the long path produces better combustion.  Unlike earlier, pressurized, Primus-type oil stoves, the fuel is gravity fed and a simple wick adjustment controls the temperature.  (The controls on a Primus stove are something of an art.  Similar pressurized white-gas Coleman stoves are considerably simpler, thanks in part to the more-volatile fuel.)

     It would have been a pretty wonderful device at the time.  The Perfection  design worked so well that it is still being made.

     The timeline fits well with the now-demolished brick house my grandfather built for his growing (and eventually large) family.  She would have had a modern kitchen and the kerosene stove would have been the centerpiece.  (I don't know if the house had a matching water heater, but they were certainly available).  Along with city running water and a nice icebox, it would have been very much of the times.  (Ice was cheap and easy to come by for a long time; I don't know if the family ever had a monitor-top refrigerator or if they kept the older technology through WW II.  Mom's family had natural-gas refrigerators by the mid-1930s, when her father worked for a southern Indiana company that made them.  When my father bought a used but upscale travel trailer in the late 1970s, Mom was delighted to discover it had a propane refrigerator.)

     Despite the 19th Century gas boom -- or perhaps because if it -- early gas stoves had an iffy reputation for safety.  Lacking a pilot light and with valves that were easy to turn on by accident, asphyxiation and explosion were definite hazards for the first gas ranges.*  A kerosene stove might leak, but that wasn't much more of a risk than kindling.  They were popular for many years.  I'm told my grandmother kept using hers well into the time of safe, modern gas and electric ranges, until she was finally convinced to replace it with an electric range a few years after my parents married.
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* My first apartment, in a turn-of-the-century building in a town near the center of the Indiana Gas Field, had a minimalist cast-iron stove, bracketed to the wall.  Two burners, no oven, and all of it right out in the open.  The valves were quarter-turn types with 90-degree handles, and the landlord supplied wooden kitchen matches.  Handle horizontal was off, handle down was full on: not exactly fail-safe.  It sat next to a sink made of folded and soldered sheet zinc, mounted on similar cast-iron brackets -- and a modern refrigerator, dating from at least the 1950s.  That last item was a relief.  I'm not sure I would have been up to hauling blocks of ice up three flights of stairs and by the late 1970s, nobody was delivering.

Telegram From Planet Dull

     Had a commenter the other day refer to my cooking as "experiments" and express the hope that I "won't poison my renter."

     Look, mister, I'm sorry if your Mom raised you on boxed mac'n'cheese, bologna sandwiches on white bread and box-mix pizza, supplemented by Mickey Dee and The Colonel, but there's nothing particularly experimental about my cooking, and normal, ordinary supermarket vegetables aren't random weeds.  Turnips, rutabaga, beets, parsnips, fennel and celery root have been eaten and enjoyed by millions of people for thousands and thousands or years.  Likewise rice, blackeyed peas, crowder peas, green and red kidney beans, pinto and black beans, garbanzos, lima and butter beans and so on. This stuff is food.  Shishito peppers are a little new in most U. S. markets, but bell and banana peppers, chilis and poblanos aren't.  Radishes and leeks have been around since almost forever -- diakons or "watermelon radish" (red on the inside!) is still uncommon.  Kale and other greens are as old as the hills!

     I grew up eating a lot of it.  We grew kohlrabi, snap peas, green beans, cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, radishes, cabbage, various kinds of tomatoes and melons and more in our own garden.  In the winter, we enjoyed an assortment of canned, frozen and dried vegetables along with the supermarket's fresh stuff.  (Mixed-bean soup made from many different kinds of dried beans plus some strong ham, simmered for hours and served with chopped fresh onion and celery is a winter treat not to be missed!)

     Mom cooked a variety of meat -- various cuts of beef and pork, ham, chicken, turkey (at the holidays) and so on.  At least once, my parents got together with friends and bought an entire side of beef, had it butchered, divvied up the results and stocked the freezer for months.  Several times a year, my Mom made a delicious clear-broth beef stew that neither my sister nor I have ever quite duplicated, and she could turn out chicken and noodles that would float you the the dinner table by sheer force of the aroma.

     There were always cookbooks in the kitchen, and my mother liked to try new foods and encouraged us to do so as well. 

     I'm proud of my cooking, and it is deliberately a little intuitive.  I'm especially proud of being able to cook well over coals.  I've been doing that since I was of junior high school age -- when my family would go on vacation, Mom preferred her Coleman (white gas) or, later, LP stove but I did most of the campfire cookery.

     How and what I prepare and the ingredients I use are about as ordinary as you can find.  They're not very processed.  Both of my parents grew up during the Great Depression and WW II, and in large families without large incomes.  As children, they ate mostly fresh, unprocessed food whenever it was available, and when they started their own family, they fed their own kids the same things.*  It was not health-nut stuff; bacon and eggs was our usual breakfast and there was plenty of red meat on the dinner menus.  But it was often fresh, there were nearly always two different vegetables to go with the meat and they preferred whole-grain bread (Roman Meal, which has about vanished) or home-made white bread to the squishy supermarket version.  Other starches like rice or potatoes were counted the same as bread, not as side veggies.  Highly processed snacks were discouraged and highly-processed sides and main dishes (corned beef hash!) were rare treats.  Mom did like those dinner rolls you buy ready to pop from the can and bake for Sunday dinner: they're a real time saver.  And did we ever have Sunday dinners!  It was a late lunch after church, a large and fancy meal.  Sunday supper was often no more than a late-evening snack.

     To judge by what the supermarkets around here stock, my notion of plain old regular food is pretty mainstream -- or at least it is for people who get most of their meals at the grocery instead of from restaurants.
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* Both of their families had vegetable gardens and their own chickens well before WW II rationing.  Mom's family raised goats for milk and meat; Dad's always had a milk cow.  I don't know if Mom's family kept bees, but she took it up in middle age and did well, using honey in place of sugar in many recipes.

Take A Powder...

      ...And try adding it to the batter to make it rise.  People will fight over anything, but who knew baking powder had prompted many pitched battles?  The stuff's a step up from baking soda plus something acidic plus keep a move on, which was itself a step up from earlier and more skill-dependent methods.  Baking powder is one of the items (along with readily-controllable ovens and a few other moving parts) that took high-quality baking from an arcane craft practiced by professionals to a home activity; my paternal grandmother, who used silverware spoons and an earthenware mug to measure and cooked with wood and later kerosene stoves, had a huge advantage over her predecessors and baking powder was a big part of it.

      The people who gave her that advantage fought among themselves in battles that went from boardrooms to advertising to whispering campaigns, and along the way funded everything from a series of Arctic expeditions to cookbooks* to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway -- no, I'm not kidding; there's a direct line from the "500" Princesses to Clabber Girl and the connection persisted until recently.

      Of course, this much drama has prompted a book, and I'm adding it to my to-be-read list.
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* Calumet, Rumford, the aforementioned Clabber Girl, single-action Royal and WW II-era newcomer Bakewell Cream are search terms if you're looking for home-baking cookbooks.  My Mom was a lifetime Calumet user and I scarcely noticed the other brands for years.

Use It Up, Wear It Out...

      "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."

      If your parents were Depression babies like mine, you heard that more than once growing up.  Now, there's a possibility the "influencer" trend might be getting a little bit threadbare.

      There is a cycle to such trends and there are generational differences.  Sometimes frugality is ascendant, other times we're urged to aspire to conspicuous consumption.  Mass-market stuff or handmade, artisanal items?  It's a trend -- or, often, a necessity cloaked as a preference, especially when the economy gets tight.

      I am (mostly) the child of my parents.  I'm still using Mom's old Revereware pots and pans, some of them gifts from her wedding in 1949 and others more recent presents from my Dad, merely thirty years old.  On the other hand, I've got three trendy cookpans from an on-line start-up, so I can't claim to not have been influencered;* on the other other hand, they're supposedly lifetime purchases.  And on the fourth hand, Mom would doubtless have pointed out that I already had perfectly good skillets and stewpots.

      The culture: we're swimming in it.  Probably better to shower afterward instead of pretending we're above it all.
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* This cannot possibly be a word.  I'm not sure if it should be.

I'm Not Facing The End Of Whatever Without Coffee

      I don't know about you, but the pandemic-driven shortages prompted me to up my food (etc.)-to-keep game.  Thanks to my Mom's good example, I always did keep some pantry items stocked, enough for a week or more.  These days, it's more like a month, though it would run pretty heavily to rice, beans, pasta and tomato-based entrees supplemented by canned meat, once the fresh and frozen food ran out.

      There are a few things I stock in depth these days and other than paper goods, they tend to be semi-luxuries.  Fancy butter, whole-bean coffee, "raw" sugar (it's not that raw) and coffee creamer: I keep well away from running out.  While I sincerely hope and expect that things won't get too terrible, when it comes to coffee and butter, I'd just as soon hedge my bets.

OMG, What If I'm Not -- Kewl?

      Now, commenters are warning me that they might not sit with me at lunchtime!

      Guys, I eat lunch alone.  Always have.

      I get that a lot of the Right and the Libertarian Right has jumped down a fantasy rabbit hole, but I'm not even slightly inclined to follow.*  And it doesn't matter if a lot of people agree with my analysis, or if no one does.  We count votes to determine large-scale imponderables -- what kind of nitwit we want representing us in local, state and Federal legislative bodies, what kind of nitwit we want in the various Executive offices, and the election or retention of some judges, many of whom are nitwits or at least lawyers who failed to attract clients.  They're not great and at any given time, at least half of us dislike them, but it's what we've got.  Better voting for a selection of mostly-temporary nitwits than Leaders-for-life.

      Matters of personal belief or personal opinion aren't up for a vote, and if you change yours to run with "your crowd," well, a lot of people do, but I don't.  I look at the facts, I look at why I think things are factual and if that can be tested, and I make my own conclusions.  And yes, I look at my own tastes and my own opinions -- just as anyone does.  I don't care if that leaves me nodding along with most of the people around me, or on the front steps in my bathrobe yelling at clouds.

*  *  *
     Another commenter complains, "you chose to censor anyone who disagreed with you."  Nope.  I won't publish comments that are promoting racism or pernicious nonsense.  That's not "censorship," they can go publish that stuff elsewhere or shout it on streetcorners.  Or scribble it on their rifle like a loser.  I publish comments that disagree with me that do have some basis in fact, or that at least don't assume large-scale domestic villainy on the part of groups of Others.  ("Devil theory" thinking is a sure-fire indicator of bullshit.  The Bad Guy tends to be more symptom than cause, and the GOP's current Magic 8-Ball is a fine example of that: take him away and there are a half dozen others eager to step into the role.)  If you're not getting published here, it's because I think what you are writing is crazy or irrelevant.  If that stings, the treatment for it is to go publish elsewhere; I haven't put a gag on you.  I certainly don't owe anyone a forum on my own blog except myself.
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* Most Nolan Chart tests I have run put me at top center, neither Right nor Left.  My parents were lifelong Republicans, socially conservative (but tolerant if you kept the shades firmly drawn), patriotic, fiscally conservative, commonsensical and interested in current events.  They snickered at conspiracy theories -- and Richard Nixon resigned while I was in High School, so there was plenty of conspiracy BS around.  Mom and Dad didn't fall for it and I doubt they'd've fallen for the craziness their party has leaped into, either.  The party of Donald Trump has very little in common with the party of Gerald Ford except for the name.  I can't pull anyone back from the brink but I will continue to point out that they're dancing on the edge of a volcano.

A Mastermind

      What could be better than trying to finish the laundry you didn't get done the day before and discovering you had let a large load of socks run the night before in the dryer with the hot air off?  Once the tumbling-only was over, they sat all night, damp and unhappy.  Of course, I only found them after I had started a load of towels and washcloths, so now everything is out of kilter.

      The towels are drying now with the hot air on* and the socks are in the washer, hoping for redemption through rewashing.
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* I do realize modern dryers have more settings than those two, it's just in my experience those settings are RUIN CLOTHES, DAMAGE CLOTHES, DRY CLOTHES and AMUSE CLOTHES.  That's two more than my Mom's 1949 Sears Kenmore dryer had, but the same number of useful ones.  Mom used that dryer until the 1980s -- it never broke, but she wanted a newer one that was higher off the floor.

Nota Bene

      Just for the blood-and-soil racist nitwits, you can make oblique and supposedly disparaging references to my Cherokee-and/or-African-American ancestor all you like, but the fact is, I am proud of her. 

      We don't know a whole lot about her, but she made hard choices and lived with them.  She was upwardly mobile.  She had smart kids, smart grandchildren, and I like to think subsequent generations weren't especially stupid, either.  Heck, I even have IQ tests to support my opinion.

      My ancestors look like America.  They're from all over -- 19th-Century German farmers and schoolteachers (many of them Mennonites or Old Order Dunkards), 18th-Century Britons and Scots, and who knows what else.  They were farmers and millers, teachers, college professors, heavy-equipment operators starting back when that meant enormous horses and an array of arcane equipment, sailors, carpenters, mechanics, fathers, mothers, homemakers and homebuilders.  Just about all of them could cook.*  There were a few drunks and even one lawyer; but that's not atypical, either.

      I'm proud of them.  They survived, even thrived.  I'm not going to be cowed by any sneering weasel submitting a blog comment; I can outrun and outshoot most people, and I have backup.
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* Both of my parents were younger children of large families with a pronounced gender imbalance: Mom had four sisters and one brother, Dad had six brothers and three sisters (of whom he knew only one, twin girls having died in early childhood of probable TB).  That meant they both had to learn a wide array of skills, and took for granted that any competent adult or diligent child could cook a meal, hammer a nail, sew on a button, hang a picture, sweep floors, wash dishes, paint walls, plant/weed/harvest a garden and so on.  My sister and I weren't allowed to drive until we could check and change oil and coolant, change spark plugs after checking and setting the gaps, and demonstrate a basic understanding of how the car worked.  These were simply "background skills."

It's Good, But...

      I am enjoying a store-bought cornbread muffin for breakfast.  More of a cupcake, really, and quite competently made: nice texture, plenty of flavor.  But it's sweet.  Almost a cupcake.  They put sugar in it.

      Mom was a Northerner, born and bred; she took Yankee magazine* for years.  Dad's father's people had hailed from Missouri.  His mother was part "Cherokee or something," which counts for exactly bupkis with the Cherokee Nation (they make the reasonable point that tribal membership is as much about continuity of culture as who your ancestors were, and require stringent proof of descent as a first step after which, well, they'll get back to you.  Or not) and her cooking was quite Southern.  While the flour up North is different, cornmeal is cornmeal, recipes are recipes† and she made cornbread that certainly did not rely on sugar for any hint of sweetness in it.  Mom learned from her to cook foods my Dad enjoyed, and home-made cornbread from her kitchen was distinctly different from any mix.

      The stuff from the store is good, but it's not like home-made -- all the more reason I need to buy a new kitchen stove.

*  *  *
      I made a kind of goulash last night, very much without measurement, starting with a flank steak marinated for a few hours in my usual mixture (soy sauce, bit of lime juice, balsamic vinegar, Worcestershire, a dash of hot sauce, tiny bit of sugar and ginger, garlic) with added paprika and parsley.  I was hoping to use turnips as the main root vegetable but all the grocer had along those lines were some huge, ungainly rutabagas.  I like them, but they can be tough, and cutting one up very nearly requires a hacksaw.  I managed to get it peeled and cubed with a large kitchen knife (mind your fingers!) and gave it a nice dusting of paprika, za'tar, and a very small amount of ground cloves and nutmeg before adding it to the pot shortly after starting the meat.

      After fifteen or twenty minutes, a parsnip followed, along with a red onion, a small fennel bulb, carrots, celery and the last of the mixed purple and white fingerling potatoes, cut into discs.  I take my time with the vegetables and did other tasks while I was adding them, so the last of the potatoes went in at least a half-hour after the parsnips and I followed up with some fancy fresh mushrooms.  Thirty minutes after that, I snipped in three pickled Spanish peppers with some heat to them, and the whole thing bubbled along under low heat until the meat had been cooking for about two and a half hours.  I had to add enough bone broth to cover all the vegetables but the natural broth was the bulk of the liquid.

      I removed and sliced the meat, and served it up almost like a pot roast with plenty of broth; it would have been just as good had I diced the cooked meat and added it back in as a stew.

      It was tasty -- but it should have included some kind of fresh peppers.  The ones in the store just looked too tired to me.  Nevertheless, a fine treat and one I will make again this winter.
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* A nice little magazine.  As far as they are concerned, "Yankees" are from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont; the rest of the North is somewhere else.  It's full of history and country living with a very large dash of seacoast and seafood and can make even a Maine winter sound charming and cozy.
 
† Except when they're not, exactly. My  maternal grandmother came from the cooking tradition in which an old mug plus a tablespoon and teaspoon from from the everyday table service were as much "measurement" as anyone could want.  Her first cooking stove with a thermostatic oven control came along long after she was a woman grown, and probably burned kerosene; gas or electric arrived in her kitchen much later.  Much of her cooking was done in a way that appeared magical to onlookers.   My mother's family background included a lot of northern Indiana immigrants from Germany and a wonderful tradition of baking (which generally calls for careful measurement).  The collision of kitchen cultures resulted in far more synthesis than disagreement, thank goodness, but anything that got written down was likely to be in Mother's hand and not her Mother-in-law's

Cooking: One Pan Pork Chop Dinner

      Pork is remarkably affordable compared to beef those days.  I like it.  Tam is more skeptical, pointing out that it can be much too dry to suit her.  So I normally cook it in a covered pan with some kind of sauce.

      Typically, I'll marinate pork and cook it with apples and onions, then add whatever is on hand -- carrots, celery, turnips, potatoes, bell peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms.

      Yesterday, I had a couple of nice bone-in pork chops, about an inch thick.  I was clean out of apples, and when I went to make the marinade, realized I was out of balsamic vinegar, too.  What to do?

      Start with the marinade: the goal is something flavorful and a bit acidic, with a touch of sweetness.  I dissolved a teaspoon of table sugar* in a tablespoon or more of white vinegar† and went looking. A quarter-cup or less of soy sauce, a hefty addition of Worcestershire, a couple of tablespoons of Iwashi fish sauce (garum, more or less), a dollop or two of Truff truffle-infused hot sauce...I was going to use a little lime juice but what I had was very old.  There was some good oil and vinegar-based Italian salad dressing in the fridge, though, and I put in about as much as the soy.  Ginger powder, clove powder, smoked paprika, garlic powder and parsley flakes -- when it was all together, I had nearly a cup of liquid.  I poured it over the chops in a freezer bag and let it sit in the refrigerator for eight hours, turning occasionally.

      A little more than two hours before dinnertime, Tam had been to the grocery.  She picked up balsamic vinegar and mustard.  I mixed a couple of teaspoons of sweet orange marmalade and Dijon mustard with a tablespoon or so of the balsamic: a little sweetness and hotness does pork a world of good.  The pork chops went in a lightly-oiled frying pan‡ and the marinade from the bag went over them, then I added the mustard and marmalade mixture on top of them.  I put the cover on, set the heat to medium until it was hot and turned it down to low for an hour.

      An hour later, things were coming along nicely.  I turned the chops over, tasted the sauce (if you don't taste what you are cooking, how can you know what it might need?), and added a very small can of sliced black olives and a small can of diced mild chilis.  I let that simmer another fifteen minutes while I looked over the vegetables.  I ended up stacking another burner grate to keep the pan simmering but not boiling, which you sometimes have to do on a gas range.  (Electric ones will usually go lower).

      I diced up three-quarters of a nice red onion and added it, followed by a carrot chopped small and a couple of stalks of celery, likewise cut up.  (Also three whole caperberries, just for fun.)  Then I cut a largeish potato into rough cubes 3/8" to 1/2" on a side and added them all around the meat, put the lid back on, and let it cook for an hour until the potatoes were soft and had taken up the sauce.  The potatoes are a more certain guide than the clock.

      The potato is also part of the trick to this.  That's a pretty strong sauce, after all -- but the potatoes will mellow it, and end up better for having done so.  Turnips and even apples will do this, too, but the potato is the champion.

      The finished pork chops were moist, tender, dark and flavorful.  The vegetable mix was really good.  Best served with plenty of the sauce over both.

      One pan and a measuring cup for mixing the marinade, one cutting board, a knife, a fork and a spoon (I did baste the up side of the pork a few times during the first hour).  Add in the dishes for dining (a couple of shallow white-glass pie plates, knives, forks and tumblers) and that's very little mess for a nice supper.
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* I use Sugar In The Raw, but about the only things I use sugar for are coffee and oatmeal.  If I baked, I'd keep white sugar and brown sugar on the shelf and there is no reason why either one couldn't be substituted.
 
† White vinegar is something you should just have.  My Mom would add cider vinegar to that list as well, and it would have been better here.  The white's about as harsh as it gets (and is very handy for cleaning!), so use it with restraint when cooking.  (There's a list of cooking staples that I know but have never written down, which I guess I absorbed by osmosis as I was growing up.)
 
‡ Having inherited a lot of Mom's wedding-gift and 50th Anniversary-gift RevereWare, getting out the less-used pans can be heart-tugging.  The smaller of the two skillets had been dropped so long ago that I'm not sure I remember it.  The handle chipped and some of the hardware that held it on was lost.  Dad had replaced the original bolt and Chicago screw with a longer screw and hex bolt.  Every time I use that pan, I am reminded that it has been that way longer than I have been cooking.  I could replace it with correct hardware, but I'd rather have the memory and a solid bit of repair work done by my own Dad.

Eggs Pomodoro, London Broil Pot Roast: Garden Bounty!

      Sunday morning, I made Eggs Pomodoro.  Our tomato plants have started to ripen, and I had a nice, fresh tomato, a big one, one of the green-topped heirloom types.

      I started by frying a couple strips of bacon (lightly peppered) while I chopped the tomato into small pieces, putting them into a bowl as I went and adding a little seasoning to each layer: freshly-ground pepper and onion powder, basil and Italian seasoning mix.

      Once the bacon was done and draining on a sheet of paper towel, I poured off the bacon fat, being careful to leave all the lovely flavorful bits.  Not all the fat comes off but I got nearly all of it.  Then I added the tomatoes.

      I don't peel them or remove the seeds.  I grew up being told that a lot of the nutrition and flavor was in that;* I don't know if it's true or not, but heirloom tomatoes have thin skins that cook almost to nothing.  The seeds essentially vanish.  (Most of the tomatoes you buy at the supermarket have thicker skins so they will survive being shipped. If you dislike bits of tomato skin in the sauce, you'll want to peel them.)

     The tomatoes started simmering away and I stirred it, then lowered the heat and put a lid on the skillet.  I had a small can of tomato sauce in the cupboard; the can is half the height of a soup can, about 6 ounces.  It's about as thick as spaghetti sauce.  I try to keep a can or two on the shelf, right next to the one or two cans of much thicker tomato paste.  They're both very useful and keep well.

      The tomato cooked down in five minutes or or less; I  added the tomato sauce, gave it a stir, and had a taste.  It was a little thin and wanted salt.  I thought about that, snipped the bacon into it, let it cook open a little and had another taste.  It wanted basil and a little more salt.  Basil was easy.  Instead of more salt, I added six Castlevetrano olives, cut up, and that did it.  I covered the pan, let the sauce get good and simmering, then took the lid off, used the spatula I had been stirring with to make a couple of wells, and cracked eggs into them.

      Cover back in place, the eggs cooked a bit and I broke the yolks with a toothpick and stirred them a little.  I prefer the yolks cooked.  If you don't, just leave them be.  I sprinkled a little parsley over everything and put the lid back on.

      When the eggs were as done as I wanted (pretty firm; this is a matter of personal taste), I dished them out and served it with some grated Parmesan cheese.  About as good a breakfast as anyone could want!  (Tam takes hers without egg; I just can't convince her it's better with, no matter how I make the egg.)
*  *  *
      Saturday afternoon and evening were hot.  Steaming.  I had a London Broil thawed in the fridge, a great big chunk of beef that really needs to be slow-cooked.  I had it marinating in a mixture consisting of two tablespoons of vinegar brine from"Jeff's Garden" brand hot pepper rings (the flavor of these takes me back to childhood, not very hot but complex) along with a tablespoon or more of the pepper rings themselves, a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, a couple tablespoons of soy sauce and a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, plus ginger and garlic powder, parsley and za'atar (which is sage and some extras).  I wasn't sure what I was going to do; I was just hoping to intimidate what can be a tough cut of meat.

     I had a couple of large tomatoes from our garden, one "Amish Paste" and one of the green-topped heirlooms.  They needed to be used up.

      Running the stove for hours on a hot afternoon wasn't appealing.  I have a nice little roasting pan for the grill and the grill certainly wasn't going to make the outdoors any hotter.  Around four o'clock, I started setting up the grill, building my usual miniature tower of kindling and lump charcoal in the middle.  I stuff the bottom of it with small, crumpled balls of newspaper as I assemble it.  It's usually a one-match start that results in roaring flames up the middle and falls on its own once the charcoal is well-started and the kindling (in a tic-tac-toe grid) has burned away.

      For roasting, the coals get pushed into two rows each side of the center, and the oval pan goes in the middle.  I oiled the bottom of the pan (a quick wipedown with olive oil is all it takes) and put in the London Broil and its marinade.  I gave the meat ten minutes on a side with the lid on while I cut up a collection of vegetables: the big tomatoes diced small, an onion, carrots, three celery stalks and a large potato (with a shake of smoked paprika), loaded into a big bowl in that order.  Gave the meat another five minutes, then added the vegetables and couple of bay leaves.  (I added a small can of mushrooms about midway through the cooking -- wish I'd had fresh, but they were okay.)  There's a trick to picking the order of the vegetables: add them to the bowl in the order of what needs the least cooking to the most, taking into account the relative sizes you have cut them into.  Then when you put them in the roasting pan, you can just pour them in and it will work out.

Tamara Keel photo

      An hour later, they were cooked and the meat was fork-tender.  The addition of tomatoes had made the broth a deep orange hue and it was a tasty a dinner as I have had.  The vegetable take up the broth and end up remarkably well seasoned without being overpowered.

     I should have taken a picture.  Tamara may have and if she did, I'll ask to add it. (She had taken two!)

Tamara Keel photo

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* And Mom and Dad said the same about potatoes; in fact, they told my siblings and I that the skins were the best part.  Unless potatoes have gone green from sunlight, I don't peel 'em.  YMMV, but I even make mashed potatoes with the skins on and they taste great.