Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Chris' Project for Thanksgiving Week



The "garden" in front of the large house is made of glue and basil for one crop, rosemary for the other; the firelay should be in the middle under the smokehole, but then you couldn't see it!





In the wider shot, the spot out the window straight across the road almost to the foot of the hill is where indications of a large house were found in the Murphy Site archaeological dig in the 1980's and early 90's, dated to around 2000 years ago. The components of the Murphy site are one of the most studied and analyzed Middle Woodland habitation areas, and we live smack in the middle of them. At any rate, if there was a large family group structure at Murphy 1 (see the graphic in the first link for "structure zone"), it might have looked somewhat like the model on the table in the foreground.

Pie, crust, filling, mmmm

http://www.notmartha.org/tomake/piesbakedintinyjars/

http://www.recipe-recipes-message-board.com/forum/view_topic.php?forum_id=35&id=1752

(As noted in the first link, the key crust recipe is at the second post in this link; scroll down.)

(Oh, shoot -- here:

All-Butter Pie Pastry

Use a combination of tart and sweet apples for this pie. Good choices for tart are Granny Smiths, Empires, or Cortlands; for sweet, we recommend Golden Delicious, Jonagolds, or Braeburns. Wrap leftovers tightly in plastic wrap and store at room temperature for up to 24 hours. To reheat, remove the wrap and warm the pie in a 350-degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes. See below for freezing instructions.

Makes one 9-inch pie, serving 8 to 10

All-Butter Pie Pastry

2 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (12 1/2 ounces), plus additional flour for work surface
1 teaspoon table salt
1 tablespoon sugar
16 tablespoons unsalted butter (2 sticks), cold, cut into 1/2-inch cubes and frozen for 10 minutes
3 tablespoons sour cream
1/3 cup ice water , or more if needed

Apple Filling

1/2 cup granulated sugar (3 1/2 ounces), plus 1 teaspoon
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar (1 3/4 ounces)
1/4 teaspoon table salt
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 1/2 pounds tart apples (firm), about 5 medium, peeled and cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices (see note)
2 1/2 pounds sweet apples (firm), about 5 medium, peeled and cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices (see note)

1 egg white , beaten lightly

1. For Pastry: Process flour, salt, and sugar together in food processor until combined, about 3 seconds. Add butter and pulse until butter is size of large peas, about ten 1-second pulses.

2. Using fork, mix sour cream and 1/3 cup ice water in small bowl until combined. Add half of sour cream mixture to flour mixture; pulse for three 1-second pulses. Repeat with remaining sour cream mixture. Pinch dough with fingers; if dough is floury, dry, and does not hold together, add 1 to 2 tablespoons ice water and process until dough forms large clumps and no dry flour remains, three to five 1-second pulses.

3. Turn dough out onto work surface. Divide dough into 2 balls and flatten each into 4-inch disk; wrap each disk in plastic and refrigerate until firm but not hard, 1 to 2 hours, before rolling. (Dough can be refrigerated for up to 24 hours. Let thoroughly chilled dough stand at room temperature for 15 minutes before rolling.)

4. For Pie: Mix 1/2 cup granulated sugar, brown sugar, salt, zest, and cinnamon in large bowl; add apples and toss to combine. Transfer apples to Dutch oven (do not wash bowl) and cook, covered, over medium heat, stirring frequently, until apples are tender when poked with fork but still hold their shape, 15 to 20 minutes. (Apples and juices should gently simmer during cooking.) Transfer apples and juices to rimmed baking sheet and cool to room temperature, about 30 minutes. While apples cool, adjust oven rack to lowest position, place empty rimmed baking sheet on rack, and heat oven to 425 degrees.

5. Remove 1 disk of dough from refrigerator and roll out between 2 large sheets of parchment paper or plastic wrap to 12-inch circle, about 1/8 inch thick. (If dough becomes soft and/or sticky, return to refrigerator until firm.) Remove parchment from one side of dough and flip onto 9-inch pie plate; peel off second layer of parchment. Working around circumference, ease dough into plate by gently lifting edge of dough with one hand while pressing into plate bottom with other hand. Leave dough that overhangs plate in place; refrigerate until dough is firm, about 30 minutes.

6. Meanwhile, roll second disk of dough between 2 large sheets of parchment paper or plastic wrap to 12-inch circle, about 1/8 inch thick. Refrigerate, leaving dough between parchment sheets, until firm, about 30 minutes.

7. Set large colander over now-empty bowl; transfer cooled apples to colander. Shake colander to drain off as much juice as possible (cooked apples should measure about 8 cups); discard juice. Transfer apples to dough-lined pie plate; sprinkle with lemon juice.

8. Remove parchment from one side of remaining dough and flip dough onto apples; peel off second piece of parchment. Pinch edges of top and bottom dough rounds firmly together. Following illustrations 1 through 4, trim and seal edges of dough, then cut four 2-inch slits in top of dough. Brush surface with beaten egg white and sprinkle evenly with remaining teaspoon sugar.

9. Set pie on preheated baking sheet; bake until crust is dark golden brown, 45 to 55 minutes. Transfer pie to wire rack and cool at least 1 1/2 hours. Cut into wedges and serve.

10. Freezing Instructions:

We tried two different methods for freezing: (1) fully assembled and ready to go directly from freezer to oven and (2) divided into separate components of crust and cooked apple filling to be thawed, assembled, and baked. Both versions were good, although the reassembled pie was deemed marginally better for its slightly flakier, more evenly browned crust. You'll probably want to choose one method or the other based on how long you expect to keep a pie (or its components) in the freezer.

Assembled pies kept well for up to two weeks in the freezer; after that, the texture of the crust and apples suffered. To freeze an assembled pie, follow the recipe all the way through sealing the pie crust, but do not brush with egg wash. Freeze the pie for two to three hours, then wrap it tightly in a double layer of plastic wrap, followed by a layer of foil, and return it to the freezer. To bake, remove the pie from the freezer, brush it with egg wash, sprinkle with sugar, cut slits in the top crust, and place directly on the baking sheet in the preheated oven. Bake 5 to 10 minutes longer than normal.

For a longer freezer storage time of several months, freeze the crust and apples separately. Freeze individual batches of the cooked, drained apple filling in quart-sized freezer bags (this doubles as a great alternative to canning). Then make the pie dough, shape it into two 4-inch disks, wrap the disks tightly in a double layer of plastic wrap and foil, and freeze. When you're ready to make the pie, simply thaw the apples and crust in the refrigerator the night before, assemble as per the recipe instructions, and bake as directed. Of course, you can always just freeze the apples and make the crust fresh the day you bake the pie.

Couldn't Get Me More Interested Even With Sprinkles

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081124130956.htm

Annual Thanksgiving Traditions . . .

. . . of which a story like this is sadly one:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-thanksgiving25-2008nov25,0,1458033.story

Thursday, November 20, 2008

from NRO, the eHarmony case is settled

pcHarmony.com [Mark Steyn]

This doesn't seem an encouraging development ( http://michellemalkin.com/2008/11/20/eharmony-forced-to-offer-same-sex-dating-services/ & http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/11/eharmony-goes-g.html ):

The Pasadena-based dating website, heavily promoted by Christian evangelical leaders when it was founded, has agreed in a civil rights settlement to give up its heterosexuals-only policy and offer same-sex matches.

EHarmony was started by psychologist Neil Clark Warren, who is known for his mild-mannered television and radio advertisements. It must not only implement the new policy by March 31 but also give the first 10,000 same-sex registrants a free six-month subscription.

“That was one of the things I asked for,” said Eric McKinley, 46, who complained to New Jersey’s Division on Civil Rights after being turned down for a subscription in 2005.

I don't know Mr McKinley's taste in men, but this would have been a less predictable case had he attempted to acquire a Muslim boyfriend at, say, singlemuslim.com. Indeed, Mr Warren and his colleagues at eHarmony might have been better advised to convert to Islam and claim the right to have the case settled by one of the west's fast multiplying Sharia courts, which are (to put it mildly) less antipathetic to "heterosexism". As the Belmont Club comments:

Sharia law is at heart a desire to live outside the system and while its spread is probably a bad thing for the West, one wonders how much the paralyzing and expensive effect of excessive litigation and over regulation in Western society has driven the rise of parallel private institutions.

There'll be more of that in the years ahead. As Michelle Malkin says, the eHarmony settlement is like a meat-eater going to a vegetarian restaurant and demanding a ribeye. The "tolerance" enforcers are jeopardizing the very possibility of any shared societal space. Good luck with that.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Inconvenient Truths?

The world has never seen such freezing heat
The London Telegraph

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

The Lessons of Ghost Towns

One of John Derbyshire's best -- http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzU0ZDliOGZjNjA0N2JiZjcwYmM2NzY2NGM4ODg3YjY=

Friday, November 7, 2008

Hoo-aah!

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGEzN2MxYTQ5MDE2YTc5M2Y1MzFkNThlNjZiNGI4ZmM=

Evangelicals and Obama

From 78% to 74%, but that 78% was a record; no sea change here --

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctpolitics/2008/11/the_evangelical.html
If you check the hotlink balloons, you'll see Ohio was 70% and Indiana 66%. Midwestern economic turmoil did much to help Obama, i expect particularly in the area of health insurance uncertainty.

And the much vaunted "new evangelicals"?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122601904162807153.html

Very interesting analysis on income inequality and party

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzdkOWQ3MmRmYmQ0ZjNiMTZmYWZhYzQ0MTMwNmIyNTY=

Lengthy, but no longer than it should be.

Monday, November 3, 2008