Oriental Veal Casserole

1 lb veal
2 tbs shortening
1.5 cups sliced celery
2 small onions
1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
1 can condensed cream of chicken soup
2 tbs soy sauce
.25 cups uncooked rice

Hot Dog Casserole

Potato Buds ®
.25 cups sweet pickle relish
2 tbs salad dressing
1 tbs instant minced onion
2 tsp mustard
4-6 frankfurters (sliced in half and inserted into the casserole dish upright)

Cereal Topping for Vegetables

Enhance vegetables with a buttery, crisp topping. A delightful disguise for warmed-overs.

1 half cup Cheerios ®, Kix ® or Wheaties ®
1 tablespoon butter
salt

Stir and sprinkle over creamed vegetables

Franko Corn Thins

2 eggs
3/4 cups milk
1 package Betty Crocker Corn Muffin Mix ®
Parmesan cheese
5 frankfurters
1 teaspoon celery seed
1/4 teaspoon garlic salt
salt

Cheese Pennies

1 jar Pasteurized Processed Sharp American Cheese Spread ®
1/4 cup shortening
3/4 cup Gold Medal ® flour

Other recipes omitted:

Olive Cheese Balls
Spicy English Muffins
Cereal Funny Faces
Sassy Sausages
Nippy Shrimp
Polynesian Ham Loaf
Tomato Bursts

Some of the rules are the same: no authors I’ve read previously, no books that I’ve seen adapted into film, a baker’s dozen. New rule: works in translation with a different language each month.

I’ve ordered them, somewhat nonsensically, based on climate.

January: Russian
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita

February: Japanese
Mishima Yukio: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

March: German
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice

April: Dutch
Harry Mulisch: The Assault

May: Spanish
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

June: French
Michel Houllebecq: The Elementary Particles

July: Italian
Italo Svevo: Zeno’s Conscience

August: Arabic
Elias Khoury: Gates of the Sun

September: Anglo-Saxon
Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation)

October: Chinese
Mo Yan: The Republic of Wine

November: Yiddish
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Enemies

December: Norwegian
Knut Hamsun: Hunger

Bonus book:
Portuguese
Jorge Amado: Dona Flor and her Two Husbands

It felt odd to omit all of India but I couldn’t find anything I was interested in that wasn’t written originally in English. I bumped Portuguese in favor of Arabic — the list was too heavy on Romance languages. Within any given language, I went with contemporary over classic.

(I read some excerpts from Beowulf in high school but it was a different translation and I’ve wanted to read this one anyway, plus it’s my project and I can cheat if I want to.)

This Ask Metafilter thread was invaluable, although the project is somewhat different: Which books are most representative of each country?.

Usually when it’s our birthdays we have two dinners: one is a big multi-course prix fixe extravaganza at a nice restaurant, and the other is cooked at home. The home-cooked dinners are easy comfort food (in their own way) and unlike most nights, the other person does not have to do the dishes. That’s the real gift.

When I make dinner for Dan’s birthday, it’s ma po tofu, adapted from Land of Plenty by Fuschia Dunlop.

My birthday was more recently. Dan made pastitsio, from Cook’s Illustrated Best 30 Minute Recipe.

Recipes follow:
Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I had to prepare an impromptu dinner for one. I made a veggie burger with bacon and cheese. The burger was cooked in the bacon fat. It was delicious.

On Friday I had dinner at NYC’s molecular gastronomie center, WD-50. We ordered the tasting menu. An incomplete list of what we had:

• Foie gras, extruded into a squared-off tube, and tied, somehow, in a knot
• Deconstructed French onion soup
• Deconstructed eggs Benedict (the egg yolk sous vide, the hollandaise sauce separated, breaded, and deep-fried)
• “Pizza pebbles”

I was disappointed that “pretzel consomme” and “popcorn soup” were only available a la carte.

Last night while the Red Sox were playing and they were leading 231-2, I tried picking up a book to read but was a little too distracted. I needed something mindless but faintly interactive. So I logged on to Amazon Mechanical Turk to earn $0.02 a minute clicking on links.

Actually I was hoping there were some faintly interesting writing jobs but they were all the sleazy “write a glowing product review on this blog” kind. Instead one of the more mundane tasks caught my eye: “help refine search results.” Hey, that’s basically what I do for a living.

The task was to rank the relevancy of various web page results for a given search query. All of the results seemed to be from Wikipedia (including the Talk: pages and other material not likely to be of interest to a general audience). The queries appeared to be genuine user data.

I learned a number of things from this experience. First of all, searching Wikipedia is often nothing more than a snapshot of the day’s vandalism. The snippet from “Roman Catholicism in Myanmar” suggested that I “keep doin it you pimp!!!” Quite a few pages had no other content besides “fag”. These articles were corrected immediately, no doubt, but their cached states were immortalized by the search engine, and users’ misspellings were often exact matches for misspellings by vandals.

Happily, the query for chicken sexing matched an entire article devoted to it and very few vandalized articles containing the words “chicken” and “sex”. I wish more people knew to quote their search terms because a great percentage of the queries matched an article with those exact words as its title. Correctly quoted, Google would return these highly-relevant pages as the #1 result. Sometimes the queries would find an exact Wikipedia match but be too broad in their scope, resulting in a disambiguation page. Peevishly, I started highly ranking non-U.S. results (“Spanish Civil War” for civil war) even though I knew from context that these searches were all by Americans. A little historical perspective never hurt.

Another thing I might have learned (had I not known it already) is that search engines are idiots. I don’t know the answer to Who helped elect Arnold Schwarzenneger but I do know it wasn’t “New Kids on the Block“. There probably isn’t an answer to Who invented pi but it is definitely not “Hat“.

Often the searches weren’t so much actual queries as cries in the wilderness. I had no idea how to respond to parenting help or debt consolidation. Wikipedia didn’t either.

I stopped, eventually, not so much because I got bored or because the game was ending, but because the sad queries were getting to me. It’s like reading that page that turns up #1 in Google for the query cancel google. At first it’s kind of funny, you know, “Ha ha people don’t understand how search engines work.” Then you realize, here’s this incredible technology that has changed everything, and most people in this scientifically-advanced first world country don’t know a thing about it. And then you come to a query like the Bible says spending too much time on-line is not good, and it’s so much worse than you could’ve imagined that you just close the computer and walk away.

As I was driving home this afternoon I made a left turn and heard a tell-tale squeak from the front tire indicating that it’s low on air. At least, I think that’s what it means. I don’t know anything about cars except how to fill the gas tank, and as a New Jersey native I’m resentful even of that.

I wish that I lived in an era when gas station attendants still performed all kinds of maintenance tasks for free: changing the oil, checking the tire pressure, filling the wiper fluid. The only time I’ll check my wiper fluid is when I turn the wipers on and nothing comes out. I’m pretty sure it’s stored under the hood somewhere.

It occurred to me that people in the 50′s had it easy in a lot of ways that might not be obvious if you’ve been indoctrinated with conservative cries about the modern “nanny state.” Take the recent mortgage meltdown. It used to be that you didn’t worry about whether you could afford a house. A stern banker behind a high mahogany desk would slam down a big rubber stamp that either said, “APPROVED” or “DENIED”. If he approved and you didn’t blow all your money on space-age appliances or cars with huge fins, you’d be okay. And it wasn’t possible to end up with 10 grand in credit card debt because credit cards didn’t exist.

Today people are expected to perform all kinds of social and economic calculus that they never were before. Back when you had a corporate pension you didn’t plan for retirement, you just showed up for work every day. Someone with only a 6th grade education could manage that just fine. Now ask that same person to understand a balanced, moderate-risk, diversified 401(k) portfolio. Even if they pick an appropriate investment strategy they’re still being asked to take on risk that their parents never did.

Sure, there are some risks we are no longer as free to assume. The other day I filled out one of a those internet quizzes about how long you will live, based on actuarial data (answer: 104 years old). There were about 5 questions related to smoking, from the basic, “Do you smoke?” (no) to “Have you ever been a smoker?” (I don’t think one clove every two years counts) to “How often are you exposed to second-hand smoke?” To that last one I answered, a little to my surprise, “Never.” These days, in Massachusetts, that’s true.

Unlike the 1950′s, we are expected to take on more responsibility about our sexual behavior. This is one thing we’re doing right. Again, contrary to the right-wing hysteria, teen pregnancy rates have been lower than they were when my parents were growing up, especially during the free-love Clinton 90′s. Today’s teenagers are sophisticated, and putting on a condom is easier than picking a mutual fund. Sometimes more information is better.

I’m trying to pinpoint an overarching theory to account for these social changes. The regulatory loosening that brought us “creative” mortgages are well-known. Nobody told gas stations to pare down their services but clearly that’s part of a general trend away from customer service and towards rock-bottom prices. People already drive 10 miles away to buy gas that’s 2 cents cheaper — no one will see the value in having their tire pressure checked every month in exchange for pricier gas, even though that will ultimately save money in the long run.

Maybe it’s assumed that everyone is educated enough to take on mortgage financing, retirement planning and ever-more-complex tax codes. The middle of the twentieth century was no doubt a better time to be a skilled blue collar worker: unions were strong, pensions were secure and there were plenty of jobs. Most of those jobs are now overseas. The U.S. has instead become an information economy. That’s great for me — here I am, blogging. I can do my taxes and have a sensible mortgage and I’m pretty sure I’ll be okay at retirement. I’m also a complete idiot because I don’t know how to fill a tire. Nobody should be expected to know everything.

1. Brew coffee at 2-3X normal strength
2. Fill a small bucket with ice water
3. Fill a tall metal drinking cup with ice and put it in the bucket. You may need to hold the cup down so it doesn’t float
4. Slowly pour the iced coffee into the cup

The metal will conduct the heat quickly away from the cup and into the ice water bath. You should go from scorching hot coffee to cold iced coffee in under 30 seconds, with minimal melting of the interior ice cubes.

If you take your iced coffee with milk or cream, try soy milk instead, even if you aren’t vegan. Trust me.

One night when I was about eight, I decided that I would not conclude my bedtime prayer with “Amen.” I thought that praying was like making a phone call, with a ritualized beginning (“Our Father…”) and ending (“Amen”). Only between those two incantations could God hear me — like opening a channel to the away team. I decided that if I didn’t say “Amen” I could leave that channel on and thus make my whole life one unending paean to the Almighty.

Of course being eight years old I pretty much forgot about this the next time something profound happened, like getting a new Trapper Keeper. The next clear theological memory I have is from one afternoon in CCD when I asked how we knew that the Bible was true. The instructor, some poor girl a decade younger than I am now, answered that we didn’t know for sure but instead relied on our faith. At the time I found that unsatisfying. I was looking for some corroborating scientific evidence, having recently learned what science was. Of course, her answer was the only possible one.

Harris’s book is an attack on this and all other forms of faith. Although his examples of the damage caused by religion include obvious cases like the Inquisition and the Holocaust, he’s obviously not writing to convince 16th century Spaniards or Nazis. His targets are contemporary practitioners, especially well-meaning liberal Westerners who want to have it both ways: taking comfort in the history and tradition of Abrahamic religions but discarding the contradictory or flat-out unpleasant messages in its texts.

In my Catholic high school, someone once asked if Gandhi and Buddha were in heaven. “They are,” we were told, because their teachings were in the spirit of Jesus’s message. That same year we were subjected to a guest speaker on abstinence, and part of her routine included massive amounts of misinformation about birth control. I remember thinking then, as Harris does now: why do modern Catholics politely ignore prohibitions about belief in false gods but obsess over premarital sex (a topic which did not seem to especially interest Jesus anyway)? If Gandhi’s going to heaven anyway, why not be a Hindu? The food’s better.

The End of Faith can be a difficult read, even for an atheist. He explicitly rejects any “sensitivity” towards religious belief — in fact he considers this one of the West’s greatest internal threats — and it’s astonishing how transgressive this language can be. Dismissing religion as the ravings of primitive humans is just not how people talk (outside of the internet) even if some atheists do privately. Most of us, I think, try to be considerate of our friends and family. Harris is mad at us too.

Harris has been criticized by atheists, surprisingly, for not going far enough. He claims outright that paranormal phenomena have been shown to exist, and invokes Terence McKenna more times than a scientific rationalist should (i.e., ever). The book ends with a discussion on meditation, and while I get where he’s coming from (that rationalism does not equate to spiritual emptiness or the absence of wonder), it closes on an unpleasant New Age note.

There’s something seductive — and therefore, history tells us, dangerous — about thinking you’re on the correct side of a religious argument. It doesn’t matter from which end of the political spectrum you approach the book; Harris is neither right- nor left-wing. For him it’s equally true that Islam sanctions terrorism as Christianity promotes misogyny and persecution. (Actually it’s pretty much okay to equate every organized religion with misogyny.) His great fear is that these doctrines, codified when foul weather and disease were caused by God’s wrath, now influence people with access to nuclear weapons. In Harris’s worldview, only an unwavering support (I almost said belief) for strict rationalism will save us. And hey, guess what? I’m a strict rationalist. Now I feel great.

I’m not sure that’s right either, but I don’t have a better answer.