Softcore food porn

Last week, in because St. Patricks Day is coming up, and there will be corned beef, I put up some sauerkraut. I'd been complaining to Maia that I wanted my kraut-pot, and she got it, and that's the real reason, but to be able to make a good rueben is also a decent excuse.

For those who don't know, or recall, kraut is one of the easiest things I can think of to make at home, and impress your friends and relations.

It needs four things.

1: Some form of kraut pot. The classic is a wide-mouthed, straight-sided piece of ceramic, with a loosely fitting lid; which reaches almost to the edges, and has a handle on the top.

2: Cabbage

3: Salt.

4: A knife.

That's it.

Slice the cabbage (or chop it, this is a personal preference). Layer it in the pot. Sprinkle salt on it and press it down with the lid.

Repeat this until the pot is full. When the pot is full, leave it in a cool place, with the lid. In two-five weeks (depending on just how cool it is) you will have sauerkraut.

The salt will pull water from the cabbage. This is all you need. If it take more than couple of days to extract a brine, add some water.

How strong the brine is will affect the flavor, less than about five percent, and it won't work. Five percent will take a little longer and give you the classic, limp, sauerkraut of cans and second-rate/dirty water hot dog stands.

6-8 percent will have more pep, and a decided crunch.

10-12 percent is kim-chee territory. The color will stay brigter, and the crunch goes way up. If you are making your kraut by chopping, instead of slicing, I'd go with the higher concentration.

Flavoring is to taste. Add some black pepper, some caraway, a bit of cumin; if you want to make stuff to clear out your sinuses (and encourage the neighbors to move) you can use napa-cabbage, garlic, hot peppers and some lemon rind to make winter kim-chee. While it's fermenting it smells as though a sewer is backing up, but the final flavor is pretty good, though I need a lot of rice, or other starchy stuff to eat more than a few bites.

I also figured out, last week, how to short cut one of the steps for country-style hash browns.

I like my hash-browns to be puffy, and that means cooking the potatoes in advance. Last Friday (or perhaps the one before) I offered to make some hash-browns for Maia, and for the sake of speed, used the micro-wave to pre-cook them.

They were, of course, gummy. Feh. They were also a trifle dry at the surface (from the starches coagulating).

So I tossed a bit of water in the pan, and put a (smaller) lid on top of them, which caused them to steam, and gave me, more of, the fluffy insides I wanted, with the brown crust I like (the kind which, almost, pulls off the chunks of potato).

Not perfect, but on the the other hand, it was twenty minutes from start to finish, and didn't take up any space in the fridge overnight.

Something to ponder

When some member of this administration goes someplace like Iraq, or Afghanistan, it's a secret.

Not just the President leaving his guests to go have turkey in Baghdad, but Rumsfeld, Rice, etc.

So how did the Taliban know Cheney was going to be there?

Understatement

Profile entry

Pete Townsend
London,
I'm in a rock band

I didn't believe it

How to hunt deer with a mountain howitzer

It has a semi-gross photo at the end, of a side of venison.

h/t to Making Light

We get letters

The internet is a strange and wonderful place.

A while back, there was a conversation about how soldiers are seen. It drifted, as such conversations will in that group. Someone posted a Wilfred Owen poem.

I like Wilfred Owen, somewhere I have his complete works, as annotated by Sigfried Sassoon, working with Owen's notes, letters, and drafts. It's an amazing book, because Owen did a lot of crafting. He didn't just knock them out, he worked at them.

So someone (an instructor, I believe) sent me a note about that subject. He had some questions/recollections about a line in Dulce et decorum est.

I'm pleasantly shocked. It isn't that he sent me a note, to mention it. It isn't that he sent me a follow-up, after he'd found an answer.

No, it's that in doing research (on a semi-obscure, these days, poet of The Great War; and one who deserves to be better known, but I digress) found a throwaway comment I made.

I love libraries. One of the sadnesses, to me, of my not having a degree, is that I can't be a reader at the Huntington (well, I suppose that, were there someone doing research who told them I was their reader, I might be allowed onto the rolls). I love them because they have books.

And books are no small part of what makes H.Sap. different from the other animals. We can collect the things we've learned in our lives, and pass them on to others. Spoken language is good for that (and with a good oral culture, the time which information can last is thousands of years. The Aboriginal people of Australia have accounts of a meteor which landed there sometime around the year 1000), but print media are better, because the repository is passive.

All of us who blog, we have (so long as the internets last) entered into the company of Aristotle, Li Po, Basho, Donne, Machiavelli, Dante, &c, &c, &c..

That's amazing.