Fan fiction

Okay, let me be honest here.  I'm a fan girl.  As an example, I love Star Trek.  I loved it so much as a kid that I learned Klingon with several tiny flashcards while my Mom was learning a much more useful Spanish.

So....

While I was growing up, fan fiction was all books.  You had to come up with a story and meet the qualifications of a publisher before actually getting to sell your fiction to the mainstream.  I read every Star Trek fan fiction novel in the Noble public library before I was 10, and we had to start ordering in books from out of town.

Here's a good example of fan-dom:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0MAT1IuHWg

Anyway, I wonder, with the advent of YouTube, if we're transitioning into a phase where my kids won't go to a library to find fan fiction for their favorite sci fi universe, but will instead turn to homemade videos on youtube or whatever the equivalent is in a decade or two.  There are already Hunger Games fan fics populating You Tube, predominantly produced by relatively young kids, in their early to mid teens!  Kids now have the ability to make their own fan fics and share with other teens (although they still need a parent watching them, mind you).  It's amazing.

It's actually very exciting and odd to have to think about things this way, but you know what?  I kind of like it.

Random photographs

I take a lot of random photographs these days, hoping that eventually I'll get around to making a blog post about the day's activities to fully explain all those photographs.  Well, this is a blog post dedicated entirely to making a post out of a lot of photographs taken to detail a process that I've never worked up to making the time to making a real post about.

Here are lots of veggies.  There are radishes, carrots, yams, turnips, and garlic.  Obviously, this was meant to be for a post about Thanksgiving and making a roasted root vegetable and squash dish.  That dish turned out to be pretty decent, had I not added the bread to turn it into a "stuffing."  Apparently no one likes stuffing.  Why do I try every year?  I don't know.

Ahh, a really nice rosemary bread, fresh from the oven.  It would've gone great with Thanksgiving, if a certain someone hadn't eaten it all Wednesday night.

That's me, transferring a beer over to the secondary.  I look bored.

Still transferring.  I look even more bored now.

Lots of cucumbers and peppers, and the smoker full of ribs in the background.  Fun times.

Well, there you go.  That's a few photos from previous almost-blog posts that didn't quite make it there.

Cheers!

Memories - Cats

I used to play the song Memories from the musical Cats on my trumpet in the stairwells in when I was college.   It was so powerful to me, and it kept me going.

I was so young then, but I still found a lot of power in a song all about memories of a better time.  I hadn't had much time yet, and undergrad was a really good time for me, so why was a song about good times in the past so moving to me?

Well, I think there's a number of reasons.  First, we're all human, we all live in a time-space that is linear in time, meaning that all we have experienced happens to be in the past and everything in the future is uncertain.  Any time any of us is looking to reminisce on good times, we'll look in the past.  That's pretty much given.  It's pretty hard to reminisce on good times yet to come, simply because they haven't happened yet.

Second, I had a lot of good times already by the time I was an undergrad.  If you look at life from the perspective of, "I've got a limited time and I'm going to cram as much happiness and hurt and elation into every possible moment," then I definitely had that going for me.  It was easy to find past moments to look back on as times when I was truly happy, because I had so many of them.  That's not to discount all the very painful moments, of which I also had many, but perhaps especially in painful moments I found it comforting to go sit in that stairwell and play a song dedicated to past happy times.

Finally, I was hurting pretty bad when I would play that song.  It was my go-to when I was really having trouble keeping it together, and I remember I'd play, then I'd cry, then I'd play, then I'd write in my journal, then I'd cry, then I'd play some more.  I went to that song when I was really in a low place, and I used it to keep myself somewhat sane in some really trying times.  I don't know if anyone knew where I was emotionally back then, because I used that song to let it all out, then tried so hard to remain normal most of the rest of the time so that I wouldn't have to really deal with a lot of the things going on back then in a public way.  Music has that ability for many of us.  It can be a sponge at times and just soak up all the things we don't really want to let out otherwise.

Anyway, I think I'll post this, despite it being deeply personal, in the hopes that someone will relate and maybe comment in a way that will be helpful to someone else who is still finding that stairwell and playing Memories on their trumpet, all alone.

Digression....

I have a confession to make.  I like music.  I sincerely apologize for this post.  I'm so, so sorry.

I usually like mostly happy music, or at least, music written in a major key with lots of strong major chords, or so pandora tells me.  I know I like happy music, like "Slide" (by the Goo Goo Dolls, and if no one has told you yet, it's about an ill-received abortion), and "Boston" (by Augustana, apparently about a girl who wants to get away from LA at all costs), et. cetera.  The sound is happy, but it makes it better music in my book if the lyrics are horribly tragic.  Black balloon was a really good one for me on that front.

Have you ever heard "Somebody that I used to know" by Gotye?  It's horrible.  Tragic, haunting, depressing, purely aweful.  It's fascinating to me.  Like a moth to a flame I am drawn to that song.  Therefore you should obviously check out this version of it:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9NF2edxy-M

It's much better than the original music video.  I was honestly more disturbed by the Walk off the Earth version than the real version.

They did a version of the Taylor Swift song Trouble.  Let me just say I love Taylor Swift.  I think that music video was genius, and I think the Walk off the Earth version was also great.

Maker movement vs. Charcuterie: A follow up for the paranoid canner

I have a confession to make...

In case you couldn't already tell...

I'm deathly afraid of dying of botulism poisoning!

There, I said it.  It's all out in the open now.  Let's examine where this confession leads us....

Why I am Afraid

Botulism (Latin: botulus, "sausage"): is a rare but sometimes fatal paralytic illness caused by botulinum toxin, which is a protein produced under anaerobic conditions by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum.

Translation:

Botulism can kill you.  It paralyzes you using a protein that a certain little bug produces.  This bug grows really well in environments that are have low acidity, low oxygen content, and low sugar content.  Basically anywhere there is plentiful water and no acids or oxygen, this little bug likes to grow.  It's not like a fungus or other common spoilage bugs - you may not even know it's there until it gets you.  Even if you cook something that had this bug in it enough to kill the bug, if it was there for a while, it could've produced enough of the toxin that you'll still die.

If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.  Okay, maybe you aren't afraid of botulism, after all, you've heard of botox, right?  Well, I have no clue how you'd be reading this, a post to a blog on the internet, without having heard of botox, but I'll explain what I mean anyway.  Some rather vain ladies and gentlemen concerned about wrinkles voluntarily inject themselves with low concentrations of botulism toxin, therefore paralyzing those parts of their body.  This prevents those parts from voluntarily moving in ways that could produce wrinkles, and therefore typically have a relatively expressionless face, seeing as how their faces are now preventing further wrinkling by refusing to smile or frown or look contemplative (of course, the cynical may suggest they never had the ability to look contemplative in the first place, and instead substituted a  confused demeanor when a script demanded it).  Anyway, they're paralyzed!!  Voluntarily!!

What can we do about this fear?

Well, I don't know about you, but usually when I'm afraid of something, I like to find ways to avoid the object of my fear.  Sometimes this isn't possible, like with volcanoes, and then I'm drawn like a moth to a flame to the object of my obsession.  Digression:  aren't volcanoes super terrifying but also amazingly fascinating?!  Seriously.... End digression.

Further information about botulism poisoning

The only way to truly avoid ever coming into contact with the bug that makes the botox toxin is to not eat anything.  Seriously.  Almost everything has Clostridium botulinum, the little bug that makes the botox toxin living on it.  Okay, let's admit that's not very useful information.  Let's delve a little deeper here.

1. Infants are at a heightened risk for what is known as, well, "infant botulism."  Most of our stomachs are really highly acidic and designed to kill off bugs before they can get to us.  Tiny babies don't have an acidic stomach yet.  Therefore, if they eat something with Clostridium botulinum in it, the bacteria can grow in their little digestive systems, produce the toxin, and eventually kill the baby.  Therefore, while it seems like a nice thing to offer a young thing with a cough a bit of tea with honey in it or give a mother some home-canned babyfood, it's actually a really, really bad idea.  Honey has the bacteria in it, and is rarely heated enough to kill the bacteria.  Storebought canned babyfood is SOOO WELL monitored that botulism poisoning from that is almost entirely unlikely.
2. The bug we're worried about here doesn't do well when there's lots of sugar, lots of oxygen, or lots of acid around.  It also dies when subjected to lots of heat.  (Digression:  Everything dies when subjected to lots of heat.  Take volcanoes as an example.  Did I mention that they are super scary?  End digression.)  Unfortunately, the bug survives boiling water temperatures at normal pressures when there isn't lots of sugar or acid around.  

What can we do about this information?

Well, if you're smart, you'll find ways to get what you want by outsmarting the bug.  After all, it hasn't got a brain and we do....  Here are easy ways to get around the bug.

1. Store things exposed to the bacteria under oxygen.  This is the easiest method.  Oxygen is all over the place, and most of us, whether we mean to or not, store nearly everything under a blanket of it.  The easiest ways to screw this one up is to expose something to the bug and then stick it in the middle of something with no air.  I.E. purees, ground meats, or cans.  The bugs that grow under oxygen make themselves known pretty quickly by producing a fungal growth, off flavor, or off odor, and therefore if you see these you know to toss the item anyway.  Yay for this method!
2. Store things exposed to the bacteria at reduced temperature.  The bacteria in question, as do all the others that make good food go bad, don't grow very well in the fridge or the freezer.  Actually, nothing grows too well in the fridge or the freezer - you can try a very easy experiment by cutting a potato in 4ths.  Spear each with toothpicks and suspend over a jar of water, with the water touching the potato.  Put 1 jar in the freezer, one in the fridge, one in a dark corner, and one on the window sill.  I actually did this experiment once when I was a kid, much to my mother's dismay when she found the potato under my bed, but here are the results:  the one in the window sill grew foilage, the one in the fridge took a long time but started putting down roots eventually, the one in the dark corner grew mold (lots of it, and now you know the reason for my mother's dismay), and the one in the freezer grew nothing.  This is also a good method, but depends on electricity and storage space, one of which I am nearly out of at the moment.  (The one is storage space, btw, roving blackouts aren't an issue in Los Angeles at the moment.)
3. Store things exposed to the bacteria under lots of sugar.  The bacteria in question doesn't grow well when there's too much sugar around, but it remains ready to jump into action should the sugar content go down.  This is why it is bad to feed honey to a newborn - the bacteria is fine with bees and can hang around in honey until it is eaten by the baby.  The digestive tract of the newborn is low enough on the acidity and sugar scale that the bacteria thinks it found a new home to thrive in, spelling all kinds of trouble.  Older children and adults have a digestive tract that is so highly acidic that the bacteria keel over, and that's how we like them - good and dead!   Anyway, this is why jellies and jams are perfectly safe (for most of us over 2 years of age) - they have such a high sugar content that the bugs don't grow.  Therefore, as long as you follow recommended canning procedures and use real sugar (not the fake stuff) home-canned sweet things like jams and jellies are not something to be afraid of.  
4. Store things exposed to the bacteria under lots of acid.  The bacteria in question absolutely hate acidity.  This one is actually the easiest one to do with a high degree of confidence, too!  All you have to do is drop the pH of your food to below 4.6, and then you should only need to boil for about 5-85 minutes in a water-bath canner to kill off enough of the bugs to be fine storing your food for a year or more out at room temperature.  You can buy pH strips to check the acidity of your food at pretty much any store with an extensive gardening section (you'd be surprised at all the reasons you should care about the pH of your soil and/or water if you like to garden), but Amazon and other online retailers also sell these items.  Of course, if you're cheap, lazy, pressed for time, or some combination of the above, you can always follow the recipes from Ball.  They have a financial stake in making sure no one dies from their recommended canning recipes, and you can pretty much bet that a multi-national corporation will not give you a recipe designed to kill you.  Zombie apocalypse aside, they won't make much money from repeat customers if none of them survive.
5. Store things exposed to the bacteria after heating it excessively.  As mentioned earlier, nothing survives in high-heat situations (In the battle between paper, rock, and volcano, volcano always wins.  The jury is still out on whether massive asteroid impact or volcano wins.... why don't you ask the dinosaurs?).  Unfortunately, we're not just talking about living bacteria when we talk about botulism, we're also talking about spores.  Spores are a unique form of life in that they can find all kinds of crazy ways to survive short-term intense scenarios that would kill "normal" life, and then wake up and start breeding when things get less intense.  Spores not only survive the normal boiling water bath of home-canning, but also find ways to survive centuries of being packed in ice in Antarctica, a trip to the moon and back (exposed to vacuum and radiation on the exterior of space craft), and in the cooling water of nuclear reactors.  Spores are pretty hard core.  In order to expose these puppies to situations where they will die off in enough numbers to give you plenty of time to eat your produce before they take over again, you have to (a) eat your canned foods within the recommended shelf life given the identity of the food, and (b) heat them to temperatures you just can't get to here on Earth at normal pressures. Why?  Food has water in it, and water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.  The only way to get the food hotter is to either boil off all the water, thus reducing the "food" quality of your food, or to find a way to heat that water in it to hotter than 100 degrees Celsius.  Fortunately, we've known of ways to do this for centuries.  All we have to do is increase the pressure.  Literally, we must subject our food to a pressure cooker!  Now, here's where things get dicey, and why I start to say this might be not worth the effort....  

Why canning is dangerous, even if there were no botulism

In chemistry, we have a term for something you heat up without allowing its pressure to vent to the normal pressure here on Earth at our altitude:  it's called a bomb.  Canning danger takes on a whole new meaning when you realize that what you are creating each time you drop a can into a water-bath canner is actually just that - a bomb.  Grandma's don't say "don't come in here, I'm canning and something could explode" just because they are grandmas and that's what they are supposed to say, they actually mean it.  I could post endless photos here of my own personal encounters with explosive home food-making....  The stakes rise by orders of magnitude when you involve a pressure canner.  If you chose to do so, educate yourself on safe practices and risks and decide what's acceptable to you personally and to the rest of your family.

For example, I'm fine with water bath canning risks for the most part.  I'll accept the risk of about one or two cans per batch dropping or exploding on me while I transfer them.  Just tonight a can of boiling hot tomato sauce fell and exploded all over me and the kitchen.  I tried to take photographs of my minor burns to show you, but all I got was white skin in the flash (it's got to be a pretty big deal apparently for a burn to turn up in flash photography for me).  It's really no big deal to me, as an adult, conscious of the risks, but had it been my 9-year-old sister that got burned, it would be a very big deal indeed.  

 

Anyway, I hope I've left you with a little more information than you had before.  Home-canned foods can be good eats, if you're willing to do the legwork to ensure they aren't overtly dangerous.

Stay hungry, my friends, and above all, stay safe!

"Maker movement" vs. charcuterie

I've been told there's this mass movement of people around my age to become "makers," implying that I am merely a byproduct of my time, age, and culture with my desire to know how to do everything myself.  However, there are boundaries that need to be stated.

(1) The "maker movement" mainly applies to those people making electronics do their bidding, i.e. the Arduino army, of which I am for sure a part of, but I won't post anything here unless I come up with something truly  novel.  People are coming up with new and awesome ways of using these easily reprogrammed units daily, a simple youtube search can debrief you nicely.

(2) Charcuterie, if I'm willing to trust Wikipedia, is merely a term to indicate the intentional alteration of animal protein for it's preservation.  However, apparently it's getting a hipster make-over in that.  Let me make my stance clear:  I'm all for home preservation of everything.  Can, pickle, dry, etc...  I want to know "how" to do everything, and strongly suggest everyone else also learn a thing or two in the process.  Moldy salamis aren't really my thing, though, and nor is bachilism.  Until I'm actually in a do-or-die, life-or-death situation, I probably won't be canning cooked beans (they last so long dried) nor curing my own salamis (have you heard of jerky?  it's quite nice, and not so risky.).  

Anyways, there's a lot of mis-information out there, especially regarding home canning / preservation.  I saw a Cooking Channel special on home canning just today that suggested you should pack cold jars with cold tomatoes and somehow they'll all be okay (the cans winded up half-full and mis-colored.  If it looks bad and unhealthy, it probably is).  Let's lay a few ground rules: never can something you wouldn't eat fresh, always boil anything you can for at least 5 min or more, follow well-established canning recipes when you do can, and never, ever, EVER, feed anything to an infant that has been home-canned.  Are we clear?  Good.

The risks of home-canning run pretty high for low-acid foods, and a vast majority of what we eat are low-acid foods.  If it's high-acid, it's sour, so you already limit your consumption of those foods, naturally.  You can, in reality, home-can low-acid foods, for the most part, using a pressure-canner and a little common sense.  Unfortunately, I have only a minimal of respect for the average person's common sense these days, seeing what passes for common sense among those of use with post graduate degrees working with Caltech and NASA.  Here's the baseline:  If you screw it up, you and everyone who eats your food will die.  

There's a really good chance you won't screw it up, though.  I can't drum up the statistics right now, but it's pretty unlikely that you'll kill a dinner guest with food poisoning from home-cured veggies compared with killing them with a parallel invitation from someone from oh, say a Borg offensive?

So let's share a few non-Borg recipes quickly, before they break through the kitchen door and proceed to kill off all of humanity:

Tomatoes (crushed or sauce)
Lots of tomatoes
Lots of off-the-shelf lemon juice

Prepare your tomatoes as you like - peeled, crushed, pureed, whatevs.  Sanitize a lot of jars in a simmering water bath, along with canning rims.  Put a tsp of lemon juice into each jar for each pint canned.  Leave about 1/4" (6 mm) headspace.  Put the tops on, screw down rims to "fingertip tight", and boiling water process for 15 min.  Honestly, if you have to ask questions about what all this means, you should probably look up more information and educate yourself better before you try to home-can anything.

Pickles (sour dill)
Lots of cucumbers
Lots of vinegar
Lots of spices
Fresh dill

Start at the top (most people won't start with canned tomatoes, so I'll actually go into more detail here).  Here's what you do.  Find your biggest, baddest pot around.  Find some Ball or Kerr jars that you can find lids (they have a little rubber seal) and rims (they screw down onto the glass jar) fittings for.  See if those jars plus lids and rims will fit in the pot and let 1" of water cover them.  If your pot is too shallow (let's face it, most of us don't actually own large stock pots or water-bath canners), then you should either give up on shelf-canning (refrigerator canning is also awesome, no worries), or you should buy shorter jars or a bigger pot.  I'm not going to waste a lot of time here, but freecycle is pretty awesome, and seriously, if you don't have a pot large enough that you can't boil two whole chickens in it at once, then you should start looking.  I know it seems too big, and I know you have no space for it, but believe me, a good, large soup stock pan is worth it.  How else will you survive the zombie apocalypse?  No, seriously, those who went before us always had one really large pot and it's so useful to own one that you should probably invest now, before everyone else figures it out and the best deal you'll get is a $60 pot from Martha Stewart.

The basic idea is this:  wash and cut the vegetables and pack them into the jars, then pour over hot liquid, cap them, and boil until all the bugs are dead.

The details are: wash and cut the vegetables, and pack them into jars.  Boil the liquid, then pour it over the vegetables. Cap the jars, boil them, and be happy all the bugs are dead.

More details, oh yes.  Dilute the vinegar 1:1 before boiling, or plan to eat your pickles within a few weeks.  Recommended spices include whole coriander, whole mustard seed, and whole cumin.  About a tsp spice per quart is good, but more never hurt.  The worst you can do is wind up with a spicy pickle, and no one ever complains about that.

Anyway, pack the pickles, pour over the liquid and spices, then cap them with lids and rims, then "process" (boil) for 5-15 minutes, depending on your risk tolerance, then store in a cool dark place and enjoy!!