In the days of Covid-19, it’s preferable to get in and out of public spaces quickly. So why are grocery stores still hellbent on making your shopping trip as long as possible, potentially exposing their workers to a larger virus load?
I went to a nearby supermarket this morning to get a few things. I must have traversed every aisle looking for a particular item, which I concluded it didn’t stock. While I was searching the baking aisle, a woman asked me where she could find pancake mix and syrup. I conjectured that they might be in the same aisle with the cereal. (Luckily, they were.)
In normal times, grocery marketing logic is to rearrange stock on a regular basis so customers spend more time in the store and pick up impulse buys. These are not normal times.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the small kitchen appliance that we use the most is the rice cooker. We bought our simple on-off device 17 years ago for $50. It’s served us long and well. I’d say that paying $3 a year for an appliance that’s used 3 times a week was a good investment. Unfortunately, the inner bowl’s coating was wearing off. The search for a new rice cooker began.
A search of rice cookers on amazon.com produced over 1000 results. I just looked at the first page. Our old trusty cooker was featured, along with more sophisticated models. More recent rice-cooking technologies included pressure cooking and the multi-cooker. Neither of us has much use for pressure cooking or slow-cooking, so those machines were ruled out. I even saw one cooker that promises the coveted Persian tahdig crusty-bottomed rice. We’d get that from time to time with our old cooker without a dedicated machine.
Julian (obsessive-compulsive recovering physicist that he is) then did research. He consulted Cooks Illustrated and the New York Times’s Wirecutter series. Last week he announced his decision: A Zojirushi model with the neuro-fuzzy logic feature, which received high ratings from both sources. I went along, even though it was three times the cost of our original model. [There’s a strategy to this: If he makes the decision, he can’t blame me if the product’s a lemon.] It’s also a bit larger than our old one, which could come in handy whenever we’re able to have guests over again for dinner.
The box arrived on Thursday. The first test came the following night when I got takeout from a local Chinese restaurant. (This restaurant, like many others in the area, charges extra for rice.) He followed the rice-rinsing recommendations to the letter, then added the appropriate amount of water. He pressed the on button, then we settled on what to order. The rice was done by the time I got back from picking up the food. We noticed that the rice was a bit softer than what we’d get from the old cooker. We should have turned off the keep warm function, because the rice dregs took on the appearance of tahdig. It worked well otherwise. Tonight’s test will be when he makes feijoada.
Washington has vote by mail elections for all offices and initiatives. They work very well. One can sit at the dining room table with beverage of choice and the Voters’ Guide. This year my primary Voters’ Guide-reading beverage may be iced tea spiked with Everclear, for reasons that will soon become apparent. Although our final results don’t come in for a week or so after Election Day, it’s a better way to vote than standing on line at a school or megachurch for hours to cast a vote. In state offices, the top two vote getters go on to the general election regardless of party. This means in some races two Republicans or two Democrats may face off against each other.
Our primary ballots arrived in the mail yesterday. I opened mine up to see which races feature our perennial loser candidates. (Every state I’ve lived in has these folks. Texas was crawling with them. Sad thing was, in Texas they often won.) It looks as if the perennial losers are ALL running for Governor. THIRTY-SEVEN CANDIDATES. The names are listed in random order, so I had to hunt to find the incumbent. The Lieutenant Governor post attracted a crowd as well after the incumbent decided to leave politics to join the Jesuit order. (A higher calling, indeed.)
The Voters’ Guide arrived today. It’s slightly thinner than the September issue of Vogue magazine, with worse clothes. The candidate party affiliations are all over the spectrum. There are the usual Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Greens. Republicans come in multiple shades: Trump, Pre 2016, and GOP. (In previous years, several candidates used the GOP Party as their affiliation because they thought Seattleites would be turned off by the Republican label. Most of them lost anyway.) Then there is the Fifth Republic Party. I thought, what does the French government that went into effect in 1958 have to do with a Washington primary? It turns out that the current iteration of Fifth Republic is a Democratic Socialist party in the mold of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Some of the parties listed may consist of the candidate alone. At least the nominating conventions aren’t “super spreader” events in the Covid-19 era.
To my fellow Washington voters: Please fill out and return your ballot by August 4. No postage needed.
I’ve never seen the point of buying and consuming products dolled up to simulate meat. This includes Tofurky, source of our running joke during last year’s Hood River trip. Yet these products are still popular. (I thought you vegetarians and vegans didn’t want to be reminded of evil animal products.)
The latest entrants in the fake meat competition are legume-based burgers specifically designed to have the look, taste, and texture of real meat. The marketing is primarily toward omnivores who may want to reduce their meat consumption. Julian was intrigued after reading an article in Cooks Illustrated about these products. We sampled both of the highest rated burgers, Impossible and Beyond. He cooked both in a skillet to do an accurate comparison.
The Impossible Burger was first. The aroma while cooking gave no hint that this was food. The taste and texture were okay. About a week later we tried Beyond Burger. My virtual happy hour friends preferred this product. They were right. The cooking aroma was more food-like, and I thought that taste and texture was better than Impossible Burger.
A few caveats: Neither of these products is cheap. Unless you get them on sale, they cost more than a comparable pound of hamburger. The Impossible Burger contains modified starch, which often means from wheat; therefore, it may not be gluten-free. The soy hemoglobin in the Impossible Burger is actually made by genetically-modified yeast. If you’re averse to foods featuring genetically-modified organisms, you may want to opt for Beyond Burger.
Overall, if I want a burger I’ll eat one made of beef or lamb. However, if I’m at a vegetarian friend’s house, either of these would be okay.
The problem with maintaining a sourdough starter is that you have to throw out a hell of a lot of it on a regular basis. With flour being as coveted as toilet paper, this strikes me as a waste. So I’ve been scouting around for other recipes that use sourdough starter.
I came across a recipe for sourdough cherry cobbler in a Garden Way publishing bulletin I bought years ago. The biscuit topping uses sourdough starter as the sole liquid and leavening. I took liberties with the recipe, of course. The original recipe called for pie filling. I substituted frozen tart cherries, a peach, and some blueberries, mixed with a little maple syrup and some arrowroot powder for thickening. I doubled the amount of sourdough starter that I used to get more of a drop biscuit texture. Julian declared it good. For someone who usually kvetches when I deviate from the path of the One True Cobbler®, this is high praise.
For those of you who need a recipe, here’s what I did: Mix together about 3 cups of fruit in the bottom of a greased 10″ pie plate. In a medium bowl, stir together 3/4 cup flour and 1/2 cup EACH white and brown sugar. Cut in 1/4 cup butter until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Stir in 1/2 cup sourdough starter (thin consistency) until dry mixture is incorporated. Drop clumps of dough on top of the fruit, leaving a gap in the middle of the pan to let steam escape. Bake in a preheated 425° oven for 25 minutes. Cool on wire rack.
Most public Independence Day fireworks shows have been canceled this year due to COVID-19. Many of the towns in the Seattle area ban fireworks sales and use. The glaring exception is our hometown of Bothell. I counted three fireworks stands on our way to the grocery store this morning, within five miles of each other. The city encourages residents to shoot off fireworks exclusively between the hours of 9 and 11 pm on July 4. (Yeah, right. It’s nearly noon on July 3 as I write this, and I can hear explosions.)
It was a cold, wet spring here. Many wags took to calling last month Junuary. This morning I heard the furnace kick on. I thought, “What the…?!? It’s July 1!” So if last month was Junuary, this month is Februly. I daresay when the heat and drought descend in August, we’ll miss the cool weather.
For the average armchair sports fan, COVID-19 has been disastrous. No baseball. No NBA playoffs or WNBA games. Limited soccer. An auto race or two. The Belmont Stakes. This afternoon Julian was channel-surfing and discovered a new televised “sport”: The National Cornhole Championship. Cornhole, for the non-cognoscenti, consists of throwing a beanbag at a slanted board with a hole near the top. It’s a popular bar and backyard game. The introduction to the competition mentioned getting Cornhole into the Olympics. I guess that means that beer will be considered a performance-enhancing drug…
We’d bought some sockeye salmon on sale yesterday and I was puzzling over how to cook it. Julian suggested an Iron Chef challenge. For those of you who are reading this from a television-less bunker, Iron Chef is a cooking competition that originated in Japan where the host unveils a “secret ingredient” that has to be used in three courses. Numerous variations on this theme have been broadcast, including the Food Network’s Chopped. The ingredients he suggested for the salmon? Horseradish and honey.
Horseradish always suggests Jewish deli to me. So I grabbed the spicy brown mustard (not Gulden’s, which is hard to find on the Left Coast) and stirred in horseradish and honey to make a paste. This got smeared (schmeared?) onto the salmon, then broiled until the fish was done. I served it with orzo and Tabatchnick creamed spinach. Julian judged my effort as worthy of cooking another time.
Recent Comments