Butternut Squash and Black Bean Tostadas
I liked the results, but nowadays, recipes like this rub me the wrong way. Their butternut squash comes pre-cubed in a bag; the beans come from a can. So I cheated--I whacked a butternut squash in half, scraped out the seeds and baked it in the oven until soft. I presoaked a cup of black beans and threw them in the slow cooker with onion, garlic and cumin.
But the idea was good and the results were great. It's a keeper. I doubt if I'd bother with a recipe next time.
Chinese Inspired Chicken Noodle Soup
Oh, my. I can't think of enough bad things to say about this recipe. Here are the simple facts.
I don't care how good it tastes, the recipe is stupid. You can't cook a chicken and then "remove chicken pieces" from the broth. It was a whole chicken and it fell to pieces. What about all the little tiny bones that fall out of the meat? Were they somehow magically going to hold together so I can dip them out? Impossible.
It was okay, tastewise, but not special enough for the aggravation of trying to dip all those little bones out. I'll go back to the normal approach--cook, take the meat, cook the bones some more then strain the broth.
Here is Where
Discovering America's Great Forgotten History
by Andrew Carroll
I wonder sometimes if editors suffer fatigue when reviewing long books. Is 462 pages long? I think it is, although I've read longer ones. And I suspect it is difficult to sustain the sharp attention to detail needed for editing such a lot of pages.
if so, editor fatigue might explain why I started this book with such enthusiasm but had to force myself to finish it. The last few chapters seemed to cover interesting topics--Daniel Boone's grave, which might or might not be in Frankfort, Kentucky; the current whereabouts of the 200 official copies of the Declaration of Independence; the source of the 850,000 unidentified and unclaimed bodies on Hart Island;.... But I lost interest at some point and the book failed to draw me back in.
Or possibly as the book took shape the author took fewer notes on his journeys to the places, so he was left with just the research materials. I admit to being more interested in reading how a place was discovered, how it's significance was determined, and how it looks now--rather than just the historical facts of its existence.
Here's how one of the stories starts.
My elation is tempered by the fact that I don't exactly know where I'm going.... I have old photos of a relevant site in Springville, just south of Provo, but the area has changed drastically since the 1970s. When I called around before coming to Utah, no one I spoke with from this area--librarians, town officials, real estate agents--key the specifics. Granted, the crime took place about forty years ago, but it's not often that someone carrying half a million dollars jumps out of a plane over one's town.
He goes on to relate the facts of the skyjacking, then his attempts to find someone who can tell him where the man landed. He finds someone who remembers and they tell him where to go. He then finishes the history of the crime and the guy who did it. But when he gets to the site--now an empty field behind a construction zone--dusk has fallen and there's nothing to see. End of story.
See my disappointment? They weren't all like that, but just enough to make me feel like he could have written them without ever walking out his doorway.
Hot Pepper Relish
from Serious Eats
I only made this because I had tons of hot peppers in the fridge and I hated to throw them away. See, in the garden this year, I planted mostly sweet peppers. At the opposite end of the row--where they couldn't cross-pollinate--I put a jalapeno, a poblamo, two small chiles and two Thai bird peppers. but then that freeze hit, and it hit the hot peppers hard. I replaced the ones that were clearly dead but for the ones that were still somewhat alive, I planted the replacements close alongside them but left the survivor to take his chances.
The survival rate was surprising. I had more chiles and jalapenos than I could deal with, plus a huge number of this pepper that's bigger than a jalapeno but not shaped like a poblamo. In fact, they looked exactly like my big sweet peppers--but don't put 'em in a salad! You will suffer. (And then you'll pick them out.)
This recipe had you sweat them with salt for a few hours, then simmer with vinegar and sugar. It tamed the heat slightly. In fact, on a really big bowl of beans, a teaspoon of this would be just right.
So at one teaspoon per serving I have about...one hundred servings. Heavy sigh.
Kale Hazelnut Pesto
by Darya
It's a nice twist on pesto, but only if you have kale and hazelnuts to use up. Mind you, there's as much basil in here as there is kale. If you're like me, and you bring your basil plant indoors when frost hits, you can make this without totally wrecking seasonal eating rules. Because--in case you don't know this--basil is a summer crop; kale a spring and fall crop. Early spring and late fall.
Anyway it came out okay but nto nearly as good as summertime pesto with basil and pine nuts.
Paula Deen's Sweet Potato Fries
Okay, so I cheated by swapping this to replace a recipe I really didn't feel like doing. Didn't I mention losing enthusiasm for this project many months ago?
But still, it was worth the experiment. I'd done a baked sweeet potato fries experiment before which involved soaking them in an entire can of beer, and at the time it seemed like a waste of good beer. (Or in that case, cheap beer) Did the beer make a difference?
I don't think so. Her recipe just had me sprinkle them with olive oil, salt, garlic powder and paprika, and they came out just fine. Not as good as deep-frying them, but perfectly edible.
Honey Sriracha Glazed Meatballs
by Eat yourself skinny
This was stupid. First of all, why would you grease (cooking spray) a baking
sheet that you're going to cook meatballs on? I don't care how lean a meat
is, it's going to make its own grease. Second, when they were done
baking--after 40 minutes--they were still awfully greasy. I blotted them with
towels.
Third, the amount of sauce was pitiably small for the amount of meatballs. I
could write a better recipe--
Double the sauce.
Cook the meatballs for 20 minutes.
Drain and dry the grease off them, then toss with the uncooked sauce. Cook for another 20 minutes, crowding them on the sheet so as not to lose all the yummy sauce on the bottom of the pan.
Fourth, they were pretty good.
Who We Are and How We Got Here
by David Reich
Absolutely masterful--widely scoped--detailed--deep but not drowning. State of the research in human population DNA, but with many reminders that the subject is growing and changing so fast that it might be out of date in ten years. Mind you, it's not saying our current research is "wrong", it's just "in progress". There are many things we know now that we never knew before, but there are known unknowns yet to come.
I'd read a good bit before about the interbreeding with Neanderthal and Denisovians, so the early Homo Sapiens migrations section wasn't as exciting to me as it could have been. But if you haven't, this is a good place ot start. But when he goes into detail about other populations, things get wild.
Take India. Due to the strong prohibitions of inbreeding outside the caste, or jati, and further strengthening of the system under British rule,
...many Indian groups today might be the product of population bottlenecks. These occur when relatively small numbers of individuals have many offspring and their descendants too have many offspring and remain genetically isolated from the people who surround them due to social or geographic barriers.
Looking at those, they found that they could measure how long ago the populations diverged, and,
One of the most striking we discovered was in the Vysya of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, a middle caste group of approximately five million people whose population bottleneck we could date (from the size of segments shared between individuals of the same population) to between three thousand and two thousand years ago.
It was surprising, and even shocking. Based on this and other evidence, they determined that the "institution of caste has been overwhelmingly important for millenia".
Toward the end of the book he has a good discussion of the dangers of ignoring "racial" differences--should be "population"--in favor of political correctness. Doing so can blind us to legitimate differences that might explain, for example, different reactions to drugs.
And a lot more throughout. Great book.
Sleeps With Dogs:
tales of a pet nanny at the end of her leash
by Lindsey Grant
I should have paid more attention to the subtitle. The writing is good and the memoir honest, fair and engaging. But the stories are grim.
She's trying to support herself by doing pet sitting for rich people. I like her, but I don't like rich people. Or at least not the kind of rich California idiots she was stuck working for. They were the dog owners who give dog owners a bad name.
And since she desperately needed the money, she felt like she couldn't turn down a job offer or refuse an unrealistic demand. And she had problems saying 'no' to people in general, but the time or two when she finally did were cheer-worthy!
Buffalo Cauliflower
A decent, highly fattening junk food for vegans. Deep fry cauliflower chunks in a thin batter, sprinkle with salt, then add buffalo-style sauce. But there's the problem--there are a thousand different recipes for buffalo sauce and this one didn't make the cut. It consisted of minced garlic, tabasco-style hot sauce, and oil from the fryer. It was hot--that's all.
If I were prone to making such stomach-inflating treats, I'd track down a better sauce. Something with richness to offset the heat. Probably containing ketchup.
Note that all this complaining didn't stop me from eating ten or twenty of them.
Deb's Granola
I never met a homemade granola I didn't love. Oats, seeds, and nuts, sprinkled with cinnamon and salt, then glued together with (in this case) maple syrup, coconut oil, egg white and vanilla. They didn't stay glued very well but what the heck--I'll eat it with a spoon.
She had me add dried cherries (unsweetened) and dried blueberries (wild). I couldn't do that without a trip to a health food store, but cheated with some grocery store dried berries, sugar added, of course. What's wrong with us if we have to add sugar to *all* our fruits. The only fruit I can think of that benefits from sugar are the sour canning-type cherries plus any fruit that isn't quite ripe. And what would be the point of drying fruit that wasn't ripe?
It was a sad compromise of my principles. But delicious.
