Adventures in Cooking: Hot and Sweet

I bought three quinces at a farmer's market because they smelled extremely good. I don't know if it's my nose or bad luck this year, but I haven't run into apples or tomatoes which smelled like much. It's certainly possible to get a tasty apple or tomato with little smell, but if they smell good, you know they'll taste excellent.

Anyway, those quinces were haunting, even at a distance, and I found out later that some people just keep whole quinces around for the smell.

However, the web made quinces sound very intimidating.... be sure you have a sharp knife because the skin is very tough, and no one eats raw quince, it's too dry and astringent.

Somewhere in the course of this, I saw a mention of a Southern European(?) recipe which involved simmering quinces in pomegranate juice and black pepper, and simmering meat in it. This sounded intriguing.

I mentioned all this to jonsinger, who said that he like raw quince, thought the general idea was reasonable, and contributed a packet of Grains of Paradise (crocodile pepper) to the cause. Grains of Paradise (great name) is something like black peppercorns, but with less bite and a lot of fruit undertones.

So, here's a very approximate recipe....

3 quinces
3/4 quart of pomegranate juice (real pomegranate juice, which is expensive-- other juices flavored with pomegranate isn't the same)
an apple (probably a winesap)
3/4 of the packet of Grains of Paradise (unfortunately, I don't remember the size of the packet, probably an ounce or a half ounce)
cinnamon
cloves
Auntie Arwen's Bon Voyageur mix (black and white pepper and a little cumin)
some salt
3 vicious little Indonesian pilipili peppers
some sassafras because it smelled like it might go with everything else
2 little delicata squashes
most of a head of garlic, chopped
about a pound and a half of shoulder steak, chopped into stir-fry size
some olive oil
jasmine rice

Being intimidated by what I'd heard about quinces, I decided to peel them, though I didn't use hazmat equipment. The skin was a little thicker than pear skin, and an ordinary peeler was plenty.

I tried eating a bit. It wasn't as juicy as a pear, and not nearly as sour as a lemon, but very tasty. If I didn't have a Cooking Project and hadn't already bought the pomegranate juice, I would have just eaten them. I don't know whether there's a bunch of wimps on the internet, or "don't eat the quince!" is one of those things people just repeat to each other, or whether I'd lucked into the only sweet and pleasant quinces in the world.

I tasted the peel, and found it was a little sweeter than the quinces and should go into the sauce.

Anyway, I started with the quinces, the pomegranate juice, the cinnamon, a quarter packet of grains of paradise, salt, one pilipili pepper, and cloves, and started simmering.

It was clear at some point (a half an hour? an hour?) that the cloves and cinnamon had taken over and something had to be done. This was when the half packet of grains of paradise, the additional two pilipili peppers, the black and white pepper, and the sassafras happened. I think I also added the apple at that stage.

More simmering. At that point, it tasted pretty interesting. I was in a mood to add things. It wasn't random-- the smoked hot paprika didn't smell harmonious, so it stayed in the jar.

I started the jasmine rice.

I baked the delicata squashes in the microwave and added them. They made the sauce opaque and brown and not as pretty. I'm not sure how much they added to the results, but the results were good, so I think they're a matter of opinion.

I browned the shoulder steak with the garlic in the olive oil, then put it into the simmering sauce.

By the time the beef was cooked through, I was ready to eat, but that turned out to be a little early. The sauce was wonderful (at least if you like strong flavors), but the beef didn't taste like much.

Fortunately, overnight sitting in the sauce in the refrigerator and reheating solved that.

This strikes me as a very flexible recipe format. If I couldn't get quinces, I think it would work with apples, limes, and kiwi fruit. Chicken would be as good as beef. It could be heavy on the herbs or a curry instead of sweet. Cardamom would probably work as an addition to the sweet version. A lot more garlic might be a good idea. Offhand, I can't think of a good substitute for the pomegranate juice.

I generally cook squash in the microwave-- it's very convenient. It's important to prick holes in the skin so that moisture can escape undramatically. Trust me on this. I microwaved a spaghetti squash without pricking holes in it, and it exploded. Fortunately, it knocked the microwave door open, and no further damage was done.

Anyway, are there any reasons to use an oven rather than a microwave for squash?

Little teeny license plates for bees

What Should I Look For In a UI Typeface?-- a discussion of what makes fonts readable when they're very small and a little short on pixels.

This is interesting for calligraphy-- I hadn't realized that the double-story small a (with a hook on top) and the double-story g (loop on the bottom instead of a tail) contributed so much to legibility, though they'd become habits in most of my calligraphy for no obvious reason.

Chalk up additional reasons for considering the handwriting I was taught in school to be unsatisfactory-- the print a and g were single story.

From The Making of FF Tundra

A typeface has two principle directions: The horizontal, the line, which the eye moves along; and the vertical of the individual characters, defined predominantly by the stems. The stems are responsible for the rhythm of a typeface, while the curves (bowls, instrokes, outstrokes, etc) determine its character.

This is something for me to mull, as is the rest of that article.

The next point in the piece about UI fonts is the x-height, but it doesn't discuss how tall ascenders need to be so that words have distinctive shapes.

Link thanks to Geek Press.

Context for the subject line here.

In Time: the cranky person goes to the movies

In Time isn't a hopelessly bad movie. It has a number of good emotional effects and some moderately intelligent world-building, not to mention an action scene in the middle which got applause during the movie. I can't remember the last time I heard applause during a movie (not during the credits). The scene didn't surprise me (it had been rather well set up), so as a matter of courtesy, I applauded a plot twist later on which did surprise me.

However, the movie is unspeakably stupid and arguably evil.

The premise is that aging has been conquered. Everyone stops aging at 25, but they have a count-down meters in glowing green numbers on their arm because they have transferable time, and when they run out of time, they die. There's no time accounting till age 25, and then they get a year for free. Everything is paid for in quantities of time. Some people are barely earning a day per day, and others have centuries or more in reserve. It's claimed that the time restrictions exist because otherwise there'd be disastrous overpopulation.

The stupid/evil aspect is the idea that death is good for people.[1] Somehow, it's supposed to make sense that the horrible situation for poor people (vividly shown, mostly in the first part of the movie-- salaries drop and prices go up, too) is somehow more vivid and alive than the situation of the rich (heavily guarded, many of them don't have much to do), but the best thing is to get more time for poor people.

You could say that the movie is just saying that immortality is bad for people (I wouldn't mind being a test case to find out, myself) if anyone has to die for it, but there's also a repeated idea that (for the main characters), the true sweet vintage of life is living at a one day per day reserve.

Also, there are competing claims that overpopulation is a real problem, and that there's plenty of time. The contradiction is never explored.

I'm guessing on the "the poor are more alive" thing-- my situation has never been desperate and never been extremely well-off-- but I do know people from a wider range of incomes than mine (though none of the very rich), and they seem to be about equally alive. I will also note that there are a lot more people trying not to be poor than there are people giving up wealth to make their lives more interesting, so the evidence suggests that if there is more aliveness at the bottom, it isn't worth the pain for the vast majority of people.

I don't know where "the poor are more alive" idea comes from. Is it cross-cultural?

Back to the movie: I'm not convinced that there wouldn't be a parallel currency-- the time units are attached to people, or there are little time-holder devices. This doesn't seem like a good way to run even a medium-sized business.

I also suspect there would be people who age the way we do, either because the operation isn't available to them or because their parents don't think the risk of counting down to death is worth the chance of extended lifespan. (This was also a problem for the same director's Gatacca-- there should have been more of an underground economy.)

A minor point-- Salas, the main character who's spent his life poor-- is quite a dangerous hand-to-hand fighter. You don't acquire those skills without a huge time investment, but there's a notable lack of martial arts schools where he grew up.

More generally, it seems to me that a lot of people would be scrambling to acquire salable skills before they're 25, but that's not part of the story. Neither is the idea that at least artists and scientists would be making good use of extended lifespans. Most likely, so would anyone who cared about getting better at what they're doing.

One of the good details is the idea that poor people can be distinguished from rich people because the poor people do everything faster. However this is mentioned rather than (as far as I can tell) shown.

I think the right solution to the problem of time distribution isn't handing out more time (the quantities our two main characters could steal didn't seem like enough to make much difference, anyway), they needed to disable the countdown mechanism so that it couldn't kill. They might have needed to leave the tradable time system in place because abolishing the currency would be too disruptive. If we can get by with a currency based on trusting national governments and nothing else, perhaps they can manage on a purely electronic but hard to forge currency.

( The ending has things both ways )

An economist who thinks the economics makes enough sense to be worth thinking about.

An economist who doesn't like it, but for reasons other than mine.

[1] There's a tremendous amount of fantasy and science fiction which will tell you that death is good for you. I think it's sour grapes.

If you want some sf about an immortal who likes it, try Centuries Ago, and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore.

If you want sf about living on a short time tether that's more sensible than the movie, try Rachel Caine's Working Stiff. It has the worst first day at work in the history of worst first days at work, and the book might not be a good choice for readers with major medical squicks. The nanotech for creating zombies is a little dubious (magic pixy dust by evil military-industrial pixies [2] is what it is), but the story logic isn't bad if you can live with the nanotech.

[2] Sorry, no actual pixies in the story. It's a shame. If I want the contemporary human race ruled by an inimical outside force, I may need to read David Icke.