A General Post About Cookware

Some years ago, nonstick cookware was all the rage.  It continues to be popular among people stuck with cooking duties with which they're unfamiliar!

After all, nobody wants to be stuck cleaning burnt-on food off the bottom of a fry pan.  (Unfortunately, non-stick coatings are made out of a type of plastic that does not react with anything, which is why it is nonstick.  But they're impossible to destroy—well, hard to, anyway—which means they stay in landfills for hundreds of years, which is an alarming thing, and considered a biohazard.  Dupont is vilified for inventing Teflon, and justly so.)  There are ways to avoid burnt-on food, and with modern equipment, and a Little know how, you can avoid the need for Teflon coatings. 

• Avoid very high cooking temperatures.  Only a very few cooking procedures actually need super-hot pans, and only for a brief period of time—searing a steak, for instance.  Even boiling water can be done with moderate heat; using the highest available temperature does not boil the water faster. 
• Using low temperatures makes the pan heat more uniform across the base, which makes super-hot 'hot spots' less likely.  Those hot-spots are the places where food burns. 
• Cooking newbies (or 'noobs' which are usually guys) are often in a hurry, and so use super high temperatures, to get food cooked quickly!  That often gets food burned, which in turn gets the frustrated cook interested in nonstick.  If the cook uses low temperatures, then cast iron or ceramic-coated cookware works perfectly well. 
• If you do use cast-iron cookware, many of the recipes you use—but not all—can be completed in the oven.  That's an expert-level procedure. 

ARch 

A New Burner!

The term 'burner' could mean many things.  I'm using it in the sense of one of those round things on which you cook—be it your spaghetti, or boil your water—and, in our home, possibly a curry of some sort.  Or fry your eggs.  You name it. 

You might think that I'm punching above my weight, here; after all I haven't certified in the culinary arts.  But I've taken freshman physics—and in my case, it was probably closer to sophomore- junior level—and that gave me a firm theoretical foundation for many aspects of food preparation, which I followed up with several years of actual cooking.  (Of course, I made an awful mess in our tiny kitchen, which I cleaned up about three times a year, but not more frequently.)

A little after I remarried, my wife and I made a deal with a friend who was moving into a new home, which had a hardly used glass-top range, which they wanted to swap out for a gas range.  (Glass-tops are all-electric.)  We used that range with great satisfaction, for close to 10 years. 

An aside: from the point of view of physics, a glass top range is almost the least efficient cooking system you could have.  The electric burner under the glass heats up fairly quickly, but then it must heat up the glass, which in turn heats up the cookware.  The electric element also heats up the space between the element and the glass, which takes a long time to cool down, once you turn the burner off, and that indirectly tells you how much heat is being wasted.  The entire space under the glass is sealed off, so we must infer what is there; but there's no doubt that there is a separation between the heating coil and the glass. 

About a year ago, we found the controls of the two front burners were screwed up; they could only be set at Off, or Full.  If you're at all experienced at cooking, you know that Off and Full are not good enough.  But the back burners were fully functional, but we gazed at the defective front burners, teary-eyed, as we limped along, with our aging range, and our aging selves. 

It so happened that I saw on Amazon an Induction range—actually, not an entire range, but a single burner—and I thought I would send out for it, just in the spirit of experimentation.  Only cookware that can be magnetized will work on this gadget, but we tried it out, and it did work pretty well!  Like magic, in fact; it makes a humming sound, and gets just as hot as you want.  Once you turn it off, the actual burner is 'off', but still, the burner surface—in this case, also made of Gorilla Glass, or some such thing—takes a while to cool, and so does your cookware, which was cast iron, or heavy aluminum with a steel base.  Well, the most rapid-heating system is gas, but once you shut off the gas, cast-iron takes its own sweet time to cool.

Unfortunately, all the vessels we could use with the induction burner were sort of large: a huge 5-quart pressure cooker, and the 12-inch cast-iron set, which none of us liked to use, because they were hard on our wrists, being super heavy.  They were okay for a pot-roast, or a stir-fry. (Katie got used to doing the latter, but I had to take the thing out to the table once it was cooked.)

So we put the induction burner right over where the front right burner used to be, and we boxed happily on.  We also had a set of non-stick cookware that worked fine on Mr. Induction.  (It looked stupid, to have an induction thing right on top of the unused burner, but Katie and I are good at disregarding appearances.)

But I was getting frustrated at not having a medium-sized cookpot for things like soup, or oatmeal, or a dozen different things for cooking which the enormous cast-iron things (or the pressure-cooker) would be overkill. 

So, I sent out for a 2½ -quart steel / polished aluminum cook pot!  It just arrived yesterday, so we haven't had time to put it through its places.  That's next!

Arch 

No Good Reason for Being Cheerful

There really isn't.  But, as I've often said, unless we manage to keep moderately even-tempered, we're not going to be able to respond if some sort of emergency requires us to do something.  That's my theory.  I'm not an expert. 

BTW, I watched a video of Josh Johnson commenting on the Epstein files, and it was so funny that I was laughing out loud, to the point that my spouse, who was doing a jigsaw in the dining room—as you do—demanded that I wear headphones!

I know something has to be done, but—not by me, messeurs.  I'm tired and old, and whoever faces up to bewildered MAGA people looking for answers has to sign up for a longer haul than I'm going to be around for.  Repairing the social safety-net (that took close to a century to put together) is going to take a long time, a lot of thinking, and a lot of work. 

Arch 

High-Church Doggie

Our little dog is a little unusual!

A friend gifted him with a set of little 'blankets', so he can have something to bite down on (chew on, really).  But he has accorded these little squares of flannel (metered out to him one at a time) a special status.

When visitors come, he rushes to the front door to greet them, and then he runs back, and brings them his little blanket.  Just to show them.  Then he runs back with the blanket and throws it on the floor where he can get it when he wants it!

My sister-in-law calls it his ceremonial blanket!  He doesn't really give it to anyone, just shows it to them.  Briefly.  Strange. 

Arch 

Constraints on The Presidency

There are many expectations from the Presidency of the United States of America.  The Founding Citizens (usually called The Founding Fathers, but in the modern spirit of gender equality, I'm calling them Founding Citizens) tried to list many of these expectations in the Constitution.  But if political parties feel free to allow people of low ideals to run for the Presidency, it is quite possible that, once elected into office, the president will disregard these expectations.

We find ourselves dealing with this president with psychological tricks, as though he has to be cajoled to do his duty, and gently dissuaded from doing what is bad for the country, and, indeed, dissuaded from breaking the law.

We have here an unfortunate confluence of a 'House' under the control of the president, a Senate under the control of the president, and even a Supreme Court under the control of the president, who is, in turn, under the control of powerful business interests, and wealthy racists.

Much as we would like to avoid this circumstance in the future, it cannot be legislated against.  The Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Presidency, the Judiciary, and the Armed Forces will all be open to abuse, now that it has been abused without much public outcry once.  The expectation will now be that all these offices and positions can be abused without fear of reprisal.

Arch 

Pendulum?

I'm sure I'm not the only one who believes that Trump is the result of an over-reaction to the unprecedented success of Barack Obama's presidency.  Obama's achievements are a mile long, though many millionaires consider most of these achievements as blows against the financial upper-class.

Put the financial upper-class—the people Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria O. Cortez, and others often regarded as the socialists or the Communists by the MAGA group—call the 1%, and the racists (or even just the prejudiced), and the Anti Feminists, and those against the LGBTQRX, and you've got a winning majority that really can't hold together for more than one election cycle. 

If the supporters of this administration consider this a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate all the wonderful things a 'sane' set of legislators in the government can do (such as pushing back on laws that are unpopular with the conservatives), matters could backfire, and some very 'progressive' legislators could be elected in 2026.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no political home for anyone even as mildly progressive as Elizabeth Warren, or as progressive as Bernie Sanders, or even as (hardly progressive at all) Cory Booker.  The DNC is so fearful of being labeled as 'left' that they appear to be imploding.

Arch 

Distraction on a Huge Scale. Huuuge

The US administration has taken some big steps, and is debating bigger steps, which will increase hardship to the weakest and the most vulnerable components of US society: immigrants, women, children, the elderly, the sick, those who need medical support, and so on.  Opposition to President 47 is mounting.

Meanwhile, the president seems inclined to appease US Jews who are belligerent towards the Islamic neighbors of Israel.  So this attack in support of Netanyahu was not unexpected.  The president pretended that it was a huge surprise; there is no way to verify how much of a surprise it is.

This strike will start a war against Iran, which will be joined by several other states, and provide a lovely distraction from various major missteps in national governance.  Opposition to the president will continue to grow, support for him will continue to wane.  Civil liberties will continue to be withdrawn, and civic unrest will become more widespread.

Gasoline and eggs will be more expensive.

Arch