"Two-Thousand-And-Froze"

     The cats woke me at six, hungry. I fed them, shutting the door that closes off the back of the house so Huck wouldn't eat up all of Rannie's breakfast.  The TV came on and perkily informed me it was eleven below.  I went back to bed and turned up the electric blanket.

     Around about eight, I heard a mild commotion: Tam had awakened and realized she and Rannie were shut away from Huck, me...and the litter box.  The TV was still claiming subzero temperatures.  I went back to sleep, pulling the covers over my head.

     Along about nine-thirty, the tiny, two-dimensional people inside my TV* were finally reporting "warmer" temps: two above.  (For you seafolk -- Canada, Czechoslovakia, Chile -- that rounds to -17). So I got up, despite not wanting to.

     Cold as it is, breakfast is a matter of "what's in the larder?"  A little extra-lean ground sirloin, some bacon, eggs, canned diced tomatoes, canned black beans, an onion and some green olives, along with various spices.

     Fried up two slices of bacon, drained off ninety percent of the fat -- look, you have to fry the lean stuff in something -- and had a look at the onion. Moldy.  Gah!

     But I had some dehydrated onion -- this is why you stock such stuff, after all -- and once the water was bubbling from the beef, I added it, neatly solving the "do I drain the ground beef or not?" issue.  A little this and that from the spice rack (parsley, thyme, hot paprika) went in as well. Then I snipped up a dried hot Chinese pepper, read the label ("Add whole while cooking.  Remove before serving."), fished out all the bits and put in a whole one.  Drained the canned tomato, added it, got it bubbling, tossed in a little basil and some Italian seasoning (also basil, plus some other things).  The black beans were marked "Low Sodium," so I snipped the cooked bacon and a few olives into the wok, drained the beans well, added about half and decided I liked the proportions.  Cooked all that down a little, drained off the nice-looking broth into a Pyrex measuring cup and parked it over a pilot light,† pushed everything to the sides, and quick-scrambled a couple eggs in the center.  Mixed it all together and served with a bit of the warm, spicy broth poured over: tasty! Surprisingly low-to-no heat and a complex set of flavors.

     If I was doing it again, I'd skim the broth for luck , add about half the black-bean liquid to the broth with a drop of hot sauce, and cook it a little, possibly thickening with a little arrowroot or cornstarch.  (Arrowroot can be found in small containers in the spice section.  It costs like gold or Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee but it's a wonderfully unobtrusive thickener.‡) 

     And now here I am, for about a half-day of whatever, since I'm scheduled to go in early tomorrow.
_______________________
* Nothing personal, Kellie and Naomi; the process of televising does that to all its vict subjects.

† This is why we cook over gas ranges, that and the very fast response to control inputs. Oh, and the ability to stack up burner separators to get very low-heat simmering, and....  It's the mature cooktop technology.  Ovens, on the other hand, you're much better off with an electric.

‡  For instance, you can use it to help the egg white get more structure when making "egg nests," or "eggs in a cloud," though that version doesn't.  If you have time, this is a versatile treat -- people make it on top of toast/ham/cheese, or add well-cooled bacon to the egg white, or various cheeses.  Oh, great, now I'm hungry again.

Downtown: Snow, Cold, More To Come

     Downtown Indy last night.

     The little horizontal blue dash in the sky just to the right of center is the lighting on the Chase Tower, about eight blocks away from the parking lot where I took this photo.  You couldn't even see the flashing red lights atop the spires.

     March is only seven weeks away!

We're All Charlie Now

     I haven't commented on the cowardly terrorist nitwits who shot up the editorial staff of the French Satire magazine but it's not for lack of noticing; I figure you don't need me to read you the news and if you are reading this blog, you don't need me to point out that murdering the staff of, say, National Lampoon because they disrespected your religion is plain evil, authoritarian garbage behavior.  Persons who do such things should be shot in the act and it is a great sadness to me that the two most recent affronts to civilization happened in nations where armed self-defense if difficult if not impossible.  (L. Neil Smith has addressed this,* pointing out that these attacks are "a diffuse phenomenon, best dealt with by diffuse means."  Shoot back!)

     The current outbursts of Islamanoid terrorism are based on an approach to the world that makes Racoona Sheldon's The Screwfly Solution look humane.  It's not the way the guy who runs the corner Middle-Eastern restaurant thinks or lives (at least, at the one in my neighborhood) -- and the solution to the present mess depends not only on stopping evil but encouraging good.
________________________________
* Help a brother out! I was alarmed to learn that LNS suffered a stroke last summer. Evidence is he's recovering well but if you were ever inclined to tip me -- or if you weren't but you'd like to help out L. Neil -- tip him instead.  You'll find ways to do so in the essay linked above and at this article.

Livin' In A Winter Wonderland

     ...It's highly overrated.  -6°F this morning!  That's -78 Centrifugal, of course, and cold enough to freeze your socks clean off either way.  TV weatherkins are begging viewers to "wear several layers of loose clothing" and that's just to stay inside and lookit the various flavors of timesuck screens -- if you actually go outdoors in suboptimal clothing, you've got about ten minutes before frostbite begins to set in.  In another ten, the synovial fluid in your joints freeze and you're stuck in whatever pose you were in until someone comes along with a teakettle-ful of warm water and thaws you out.

     We did get a little sun the last couple of mornings, hooray!

     The snow is not too deep and remains fluffy wherever it has not been compressed or thawed.  But I'll tell you what, along about Thanksgiving, the squirrels around here were getting fatter and fatter, until some of them could barely manage the usual dramatic leaps and were just lumbering lumpishly along, clambering up the fence posts and pausing to catch their breath before waddling along the tops of the boards to the nearest tree, where they'd blink up at it a bit, trying to work out how it'd got so far away, then push off, drop out of sight, and reappear making their way up the trunk with painful effort.  Now I know what they were putting on all that fat for.  Haven't seen a one since the snow and cold started.

Senator Scary-Go-Boom Rides Again

     Indiana State Senator Jim Merritt, who appears to be frightened of loud noises, is once again trying to restrict the sale of Tannerite, a high-stability binary explosive used to make reactive targets.*  --He's a Republican, so don't tell me any one party has a lock on wanting to be Nanny.

     Two years ago, the Senator went on a crusade to ban sales of the explosive to anyone under 18 -- despite the fact that you can't set Tannerite off with anything but a high-velocity rifle round, and guess who can't, per Fedral law, buy high-velocity rifles?  Yes, persons under 18.  His bill got, well, not exactly laughed out of committee, not in public, but it didn't make any progress, either.

     Like a quivering zombie with shot nerves, he's back with the same tired tales of foolish people doing foolish things and proving the flip side of Darwinism, about which There Ought To Be A Law.  This despite the fact that there already are laws about building bombs, as opposed to filling up a bag or cardboard box with something that will go "Ka-BLAM!" when you shoot it with an AK-15/AR-47.

     He'd also like to limit the amount that any one retailer could sell you at one go -- forgetting, I guess, that a person enamored of big booms could save the stuff up, or enlist the aid of a few few friends.

     Hey, kids: don't surround your reactive targets with shrapnel.  Get adult supervision if you want to blow up old refrigerators or junk cars and remember, the thing about an *explosion* is that using anything you can buy off the shelf, it goes in all directions -- including the desk of Nervous Nellie Jim Merritt.

     At present, the chairman of the committee looking over the bill isn't convinced.  He doesn't see the need -- and neither do I.  Senator Merritt's district sprawls across northeast Marion County (Lawrence Township and a tiny piece of Washington) and  southern Hamilton County (Fall Creek Township).  It might help lead him back to reality to hear from you.
___________________________
* Also to trigger avalanches and scare off birds.  So try not to avalanche yourself, either. 

Hey, Look: Winter

     When I went to bed last night, it was doing this outside:

     It continued all through the night.  There's four inches of snow on the ground now, or a bit more.  More photos may follow; I'm going to have to bundle up and see what I can get cleared away.

Three-Pepper Soup

     Dinner tonight: three-pepper soup de jour of the day! Take a fair-sized stewpot and cook a half-slice of bacon, a half-pound of stew beef (salted and peppered), a (large) chorizo sausage snipped into rounds, half a red onion, a little bit of fennel root (I'm pretty sure that was what it was; raw, it tastes mildly of liquorice), browned/sauteed together in that order. Yes, the meat gets a bit of a head start -- I got it going, then cut up the vegetables, and the timing worked out. When the meat looks good, add enough water to cover and a whole container of beef stock, and cover while you cut a big potato into 3/8" cubes (do not measure!) and add to the pot. Liquid should cover the contents. If it doesn't, add more.

      Heat up a very little oil or butter in a non-stick skillet -- you really only need enough to pretend -- while you dice the rest of the onion and an Anahiem pepper and add to the skillet. Cut carrots in the pan (I used baby carrots and kitchen shears. I cheat), saute until the onion goes translucent. Let it cool a bit, the add to the stewpot. Cover, let it simmer, go do something else for at least ten minutes.

      Dice at least half a bell pepper -- I used a red one. Whatever -- and a poblano pepper. start up your saute pan, throw in the red pepper, push it around some. Then add the poblano. --You have to be nice to poblanos. They should not be overcooked. The trick is that it will start to smell really good, and the second it does, take the pan off the heat, let it cool a bit, and add the contents to the simmering stewpot. Let it simmer at least ten more minutes or until the potato is soft. Add salt (etc.) to taste at the table.

     The end result is a kind of red-brown broth stew or soup. In general, the longer this simmers, the better it will be. You can add hotter peppers for more of a bite. You can add a can of diced tomatoes (or you can add them and various other canned veggies the next day). If you let it sit in the fridge overnight, some fat will come to the surface, depending on how fatty the bacon and chorizo were, and it can be skimmed.

     With dark bread, crusty rolls or crackers, it's a warming meal on a cold night.

Most People Are Good People....

     But just like the way one "Aw, sh!t" wipes out ten "Attaboys," a single encounter with a bad person can contaminate an entire week.

     Try'n remember that most folks aren't like that jerk.

Back To Normal Hours In An Abnormal World

     With something very like a feeling of relief, I work up at six this morning and actually woke up.  I've been stumbling around in the morning, feeding the cats and heading back to bed.  Today, I was awake.

     ...Just in time for some interesting weather, gusts of wind that shook the house!   The forecast said it would be gusty, along with sharply falling temperatures, and so far, they have been right.

     I have been resolutely avoiding politics.  There's no good news there.  Sure, one side is much worse on issues that immediately impact me -- but over the longer view, the other's about as bad.  These days, neither one is especially willing to leave people be and that's a pity.

     There's been a big push on to show support for the police but I find myself leery.  Most LEO's are decent folks, who face both dire risk and appalling boredom, along with working hours at least as lousy as those of my own trade -- but their baddest apples are very rotten, and many don't get tossed out until they have done great harm.  Faced with a choice between rioters and police, I'm most likely to side with the police but I'm nagged by the feeling that if civic officials had done their jobs just a little better -- and that includes running the police department -- we might not be having riots.  An old saw has it that the rot runs from the head down: hand the Long Arm Of The Law an untenable situation and you're going to get unpleasant answers -- and unpleasant people providing them.  I'm left with great sympathy for good cops and little inclination to screw in a blue porch light: changing light bulbs is not gonna help.  Might as well be rearranging deck chairs while the band plays Nearer My God To Thee.  --And you know where it all starts?  Most of those "civic officials" are elected.  You can blame a lousy pool of nominees or a damfool electorate (probably both), but it's a marginally-circular process, made all the worse by those who didn't bother to show up at the voting but are only too happy happy to get in on the looting and/or head-bashing end.

Oh, All Right, I'm Up.

     Observers will note that I have been sleeping in, reclaiming the sleep debt I managed to build up through the holidays and perhaps trying to bank away a little for the future.  Sure, it doesn't work that way; but it feels as if it does.

     This afternoon, I have some actual things to do, like try reading the smog code my car is on about and shipping this and that to here and there.  It's rainy but not cold, and this may be my last chance to clear the gutters before we get temperatures below zero.  Between the rain and the steepness of the roof here at Roseholme Cottage, that'll be a pure ladder job.

New Year's Food

     New Year's Day went without much hitch, barring a sub-optimal head of cabbage:

     Good corned beef (the flash was unkind to it), excellent vegetables otherwise.  I don't know what was up with the cabbage; I found it acrid.  Too long in the tooth?  Possible.  And here I was saving back a wedge to have some to put on a hamburger.  (The old Penguin Point drive-ins did that instead of lettuce and if you ask me, it's far superior; on the other hand, my lineage possesses a fondness for the brassicas that would do credit to a Pratchett character)

2015 And All's...

     It could certainly be a great deal worse.  On the other hand, it's two-thousand-fifteen and there's nobody living on the Moon; there's a space station but it's more of a mobile home.

     On the other hand, while your car still fails to fly, it does some amazing things; the gas mileage alone would have sounded insane to your parents or grandparents.  And we have not managed to blow up the planet or even a major city this century.  So far, so good.