Leaping Potatoes

At various times in my life I have saved recipes on index cards, in small ring-binder notebooks, and loose pieces of paper, hand-written or cut out of magazines or off packages. But nowadays I keep all my recipes in Word documents in a folder on my hard drive called "Cookbook."

I have tried recipe software for my PC and my iPad, and I don’t like any of them. So, all recipes, old and new, live in my computer. When I want one, I print it out.  When I’m done, I throw it away; I can easily print it again. If a new recipe disappoints, I delete it.

There are a couple dozen documents in my “Cookbook” folder, dividing the many recipes into culinary categories such as seafood, biscuits and rolls, soups and stews, casseroles, etc.

The category with the fewest recipes (5) is for condiments and garnishes. The biggest collections are for appetizers and snacks (45), cakes and muffins (34), and meat and poultry (36). By far the largest collection, however, is cookies and candy, which provides recipes for 68 delights.

Another big one is for vegetables, comprising 49 recipes. Or, at least it did until this morning. I have separated it into two: one for potatoes (39) and one for all other vegetables (10).

Okay, I love potatoes. I can’t think of anything you could do to a potato that I wouldn’t like, with the obvious exception of mixing it up with something repulsive.

I would not even be able to say what is my favorite potato preparation. I like them fresh, frozen, and canned, white, red, and yellow, whole, sliced, diced, chunked, grated, and pulverized, boiled, broiled, baked, pan fried, deep fried, grilled, sautéed, steamed and roasted, in soup, in stew, en casserole, and manufactured into chips, crisps, and sticks.

I believe that in another life I starved to death during the Irish potato famine. That’s why I can never get enough potatoes.

It’s Leap Day today, which I think we should celebrate. By eating potatoes.

Participation

I got an email last week from a dude who says his name is Christopher Wienberg and that he is a doctoral student at USC who is researching the experiences of people who write about their everyday lives on the web. "Your weblog came to my attention," says he, and he would like me to participate in his research.

He provided all kinds of contact information, including the email address of his adviser, so I figured it was legit and decided to partake. I took a short survey, and Christopher is going to analyze what I write "using natural language processing technology" (the kind companies use to search their employees' emails for dirty words) in an attempt to correlate my survey responses with what I write about in this here blog thing.

I don't quite get what he's after.  He wants to see "how the thoughts and experiences written by people like you on weblogs ... can be used to make conclusions about society as a whole." Okay, well, good luck with that.

I suppose this is what sociology majors are doing these days to stay trendy. I don't know if I want to hear what he concludes about me or not.

What's the name of your chocolate?

I baked brownies yesterday, and they are, as usual, fantastic. Of course, brownies from scratch are always going to be better than brownies out of a box, and it is not any more difficult.

I got the recipe from a box of Baker's Unsweetened Chocolate about 45 years ago. They still print a brownie recipe on the box, but they have changed it over the years. I stick with the original.

Just out of curiosity, I Googled Baker's Chocolate this morning and was surprised to learn that the company began in Massachusetts in the 1760's. It was also very interesting to discover the origin of the company name. I always assumed it was called Baker's Chocolate because it was intended for use by bakers. In fact, the name comes from a co-founder, one James Baker.

Brownie time. A glass of cold milk, please.

Class of '39

One day about 35 years ago I was in Litchfield, Illinois, my mother’s home town, doing genealogical research. At the public library there, I got to talking to one of the librarians, and I mentioned that I happened to be in possession of my mother’s high school yearbooks, and I wondered if the library would like to have them.

Without any enthusiasm at all, she said, “Oh, yes, we’ll take them,” which rather put me off, but I was tired of carrying those books around with me every time I moved, so I said I’d mail them to her when I got home. With what sounded like idle curiosity, she asked me what years they were from, and I told her they were from 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1939.

I thought the woman was going to leap over the counter at me, she was so excited. Well, excited for a librarian anyway. It turns out that the library had every yearbook from Litchfield Community High School from 1876 (or whatever it was) to the current day, which at that time was 1979, but they were missing four years – 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1939.

To make sure I would send them, she provided me with shipping materials, a label and the postage.

Going out with a bang

My father used to like to say that his grandfather blew himself up and that there was so little of him left, "they buried his shirt."

That would have been my great-grandfather, Matej (aka Michael) Knez who was born in 1858 in what is now the Czech Republic. He came to America in 1902, got a job and saved his money so that the next year he could send for his wife and five kids. They settled in Chicago originally, but some of the family went to Wisconsin; some stayed there and some returned to Chicago after a couple years.

My dad said that Michael and family had been living on a farm in or near Phillips, Wisconsin, and that he hated it. One day he was drinking heavily in a local tavern and bragging that the box he had with him was full of some highly dangerous explosives and that he intended to go home and blow up the farmhouse.

The genealogist in me has always wanted to find what truth, if any, there was to this tale, and I've been looking for a death notice or coroner's report or even any proof that the guy ever actually lived in Wisconsin. But I found nothing.

Then one day last month I got a brilliant idea and posted a question to a Facebook group called Wisconsin Genealogy Network.  Shortly thereafter one member of the group supplied me with a short article from a Rhinelander (Wis.) newspaper about the incident, and the next day someone posted an image of an article that appeared in the Phillips newspaper, The Bee, on Decebmer 17, 1914. This is the gist of it, which appeared under the headline, "Suicide by Dynamite:"

"The shattered remains of Mike Knez, a resident of the town of Emery, were found in the woods about a half mile from the home of C. F. Glissendorf, on Saturday last, Dec. 12th.... It is evident from all that can be learned that Mr. Knez took his own life, as on Monday, Dec. 7th, he came to town and purchased five pounds of dynamite and from remarks he made to people in the city that day he had made up his mind to commit suicide.  The deed was done, it is thought, on Wednesday.... It is supposed that he either sat upon or laid down on the dynamite and lighted the fuse."

It's good to know finally that this outrageous story is actually true, but what is more astonishing is that I chased this for 40 years without success, but once I put it out on Facebook, I had an answer within ten minutes.

And the very same to you

I have decided that it is time for me to put away my scoffing at those who take all the fun out of life by insisting on Political Correctness, even if they attempt to force us into it by emotional blackmail.

In fact, I plan to be so ridiculously correct, politically, in all things this holiday season -- I mean, this season in which there are, um … well, holidays -- but in order to be safe I guess I should just say, in December, but in some cases, up to and including January – 

Well, I guess my best bet is to say, “at this time of year.”  That seems acceptably PC to me.

So here is my plan:  If anyone wishes me a Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah or Joyous Kwanzaa, or anything to do with Ramadan or St. Lucia Day or Tet Nguyen Dan or the Twelve Days of Anything -- or for that matter, if they wish me a Happy New Year – and I guess that would have to include anybody’s new year, you know -- Chinese, Jewish or Ethiopian – as well as the Occidental …

Anyway, if anybody does reveal their own proselytizable prejudices by saying something like that to me, I am simply going to flash them a big toothy grin and in all Political Correctness carefully designed so as not to offend ANYBODY, I am going to reply very sincerely, “Open Moon Pudding!”

If that ain't innocuous, I don't know what is.

I'm still trying to decide

I don't know why I fall for these things.

I just tried to log on to Ancestry.com to do a little work on my wife's family tree, and before I got there a screen came up announcing I had been chosen to participate in an eight-question survey, my reward for which would be a free gift worth up to $112. (Yes, not $100 or $125, but $112.)

I clicked the button out of curiosity, and it turns out that seven of the eight questions were about Ancestry, so I figured this one might actually be on the up and up. The eighth question asked my gender, so I dutifully checked "Female."

The screen immediately moved to the rewards page, and I was asked to choose my prize. (But don't wait! You only have ten minutes! These things are going fast!) Here are my choices:

1. A product to smear on my face for 30 days after which I will look 10 years younger
2. Something to make my hair grow thicker and fuller (risk free)
3. A device that vaporizes smoke so I can smoke a cigarette anywhere
4. A weight-loss kit especially designed to fight Holiday Fat Buildup
5. A male testosterone booster to make me more muscular, lean and mean

I don't know why I fall for these things.