WhimsyLand

Horses.  Lots of horses.

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That sweet young Tricia who has a giant brain, warped though it may be, continues to astound with her online party for Wallace Stevens.

I received another Cook's Illustrated.  Now, I don't know if I get it or I don't get it, since it's seemed so long since the last one.  I love the mag, but the editor is so New England schmaltzy I just want to throw up.  Every issue in the editorial he's going on about hunting ducks with his older boy, or gathering mushrooms with his daughter, or making pancakes so the little burg can buy a new fire truck, or taking his whole family to a good old fashioned picnic at the lake.  This issue, in a single editorial, he manages to evoke:  sitting at the round table at the Wayside Country Store before dawn and chatting with the townfolk; having coffee after church with a neighbor who always likes a wee drop of the Highlands in the cup; local newspaper announcements about square dances  and Easter Basket Raffles and school bottle drives; feeding the pigs, fetching the eggs, grooming the horses, picking the berries.  It's enough to make you prefer listening to some loud, rude Nyawker.

The good parts of CI follow.  New zero-transfat Crisco works as good as the bad, old kind.  Even though shallots are 3 times the cost of onions, their subtlety is necessary in mild sauces and vinaigrette.  Beans produce gassy side-effects in humans because only the bacteria at the end of our alimentary canal can break them down, but washing them before cooking removes up to 25% of the culprit (oligosaccharides).  Use a pizza cutter to cut up waffles into bite-sized pieces for kids.  To keep ginger fresh, cut it up into 1-inch pieces and freeze until you need it.  Don't pay extra for a mushroom brush, a soft toothbrush works just as well.  For perfect skin-on, bone-in chicken breasts, place a small portion of butter-plus-ground-pepper under the skin, rub some vegetable or olive oil on the skin and bake with the rib cage down in a roasting pan to ensure that heat circulates under the breast.  For perfect pan-seared shrimp, toss them in salt, pepper, and sugar in roughly equal parts before tossing in a medium-hot pan.  The best American-style potato salad requires using russets, white vinegar, celery, minced red onion, sweet pickle relish, mayo, powered mustard, celery seeds, parsley and hard-boiled eggs. For tender pork chops, brown over medium-high heat on both sides, then cover and reduce heat to low until the center registers 140 degrees.  Big, ugly supermarket green beans turn into wonderful fare when pan-roasted with a little oil, salt and pepper.  The best boxed brownie mix is Ghirardelli Double Chocolate Premium Brownie Mix.  For better peach cobbler, remove the dark red flesh that was in contact with the pit before slicing.  The best Dijon mustard is still from France (Roland Extra Strong Dijon Mustard), but Grey Poupon (made by Nabisco in the US) comes in a close second.  To kill bacteria, you must subject it to at least 160 degrees for 39 seconds, and some dishwashers never achieve that temperature.  The back of the issue has the usual veggie artwork, this time root vegetables (parsnip, beets, turnips, rutabagas, and burdock root).

So, My Bank calls today and says:  "We'd like to authorize a line of credit for your fine company".  I said:  "Aren't you the same bank who turned me down last year?".  Apparently, the bloom is off the home loan rose.  So, we go through the numbers and he offers some obscene level of credit, completely unsecured, at prime plus a half a percent.  OK, sure, I don't have to use it, but it's nice to know I could if my receivable hit the peaks they have in the past.  Then, he calls back and says we have a problem:  The State of Colorado says I'm delinquent.  Of what, he's not quite sure, but that's what the report says.  So, I browse over to the website for the Secretary of State for Colorado and, sure enough, Set Software Services is "delinquent".  There's a link to a place where I can become "In Good Standing", so I click and there's this nifty little shopping cart affair with a place for me to put a credit card charge for $50.  I do that and 30 seconds later, my report shows that I'm in "Good Standing".  This is such a great scam, I'm beginning to wonder if the Colorado Secretary of State is Nigerian.

I still have that Poetry to read.  More tomorrow.