Natterings, v.1.2
- First of all, may I say I've come to hate iJournal? It doesn't post when I tell it to, it doesn't have the formatting I like (like these bullet points) and whether it eventually posts or not, it keeps the last entry up in the text box forever....unless it crashes right as I'm halfway through a long post, like it did a few minutes ago. In those cases, it seems to lose everything I wrote. The only reason I downloaded it was so that it would grab my iTunes music as I played it, but I've about decided it's just not that important for the world to know I'm listening to Finneston play "Changes" from their "Popular Music That Will Live Forever" album rightthisveryminute. Anybody know of a...watchmacallit...entry writer thingy that will work with Mac OS 10.3.9 and won't crash, but will provide thingies like music i.d. that going straight through Live Journal won't?
- Obama won South Carolina! (BTW, this is where the disappeared post-in-progress started.) Obama won! Obamawon, obamawon, obamawon, obamawon! OBAMA WON!
And he won BIG! The last I heard, Hillary was behind him by about eight points, but the end result was Obama with 55%, HRC with 27%, and favorite-son John Edwards with 18%. Even if Edwards had dropped out (which he wasn't going to do) and all of his votes went to Hillary (which wasn't going to happen), Obama still would have won comfortably. I don't know why I'm so excited, seeing as how I've always said we had a good field and I could live with any of them as candidates, but I was positively giddy tonight when I saw the results. Maybe it's the South Carolina-ness in me. Hillary's already in Nashville. It'll be interesting to see what TN makes of this race. I figure if Harold Ford can do decently in a statewide race--which he did when he ran for the Senate last go-round--then Obama should do okay, too.
But, damn, his wife looks like Condi Rice sometimes. I've purposely not paid any attention to the candidates spouses, except to get irked at Bill, but I keep reading headlines that Michelle Obama is really drawing the crowds. Which could make things interesting....
- I have got to get this book: All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well. (And no, it's not about Julian of Norwich.) A satirical novel about middle-aged loser with a "medieval fetish"? It sounds like somebody wrote my biography.
- Speaking of which, I'm trying to find a source to learn Anglo-Saxon/Old English online. I know the British Library has Latin lessons online, which I could use too, and has something called "An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts" which I think is the artwork more than the language.
- Any suggestions about why my cornbread is so powdery? I'm trying to recreate my mother's, which is nice and course-crumbed yet hangs together. Mine tastes fine, and isn't too moist or too dry, or any of those things, but it doesn't have enough body, or heft, or whatever it is that keeps baked goods from falling into pieces when you eat them. Mama's no help--she says she just uses the recipe off the side of the bag but can't tell me off hand what that is, and I assume the stone-ground yellow cornmeal in Hohenwald comes in a different bag than the stone-ground yellow cornmeal sold at the Soviet Safeway in Washington's Dupont Circle.
Recipe's under the cut.
1 C. Indian Head [i.e. the brand name] yellow corn meal
1 C. sifted flour
1/4 C. sugar (ooh, nasty! left that out.)
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 C. soft shortening
1 C. milk
1 egg, beaten
Preheat oven to 425.
Combine corn meal, flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Cut in shortening. Mix egg and milk together and add to dry ingredients with a few swift strokes. Bake in greased 9x9x2 pan for 20 to 25 minutes.
Pretty basic, huh? Besides leaving out the sugar, the one thing I do that's different is that I don't cut in the shortening, but instead melt it in a nine-inch cast iron skillet in the heating oven, swirl it around the skillet to grease it good, then pour it into the cornbread batter and stir it in before pouring the batter back in the skillet to bake. You get a great crust that way...and I learned it from my mother, whose cornbread I'm trying to copy, anyway.
- On the other hand, my chili turned out great. America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated Magazine recipe here. It's MUCH better after it sits in the refrigerator for a day or two. It makes a vat but freezes great. For some reason, the meat seems a little tough, but that actually gives it a bit of character and isn't a problem. They said on ATK that this isn't any kind of fancy gourmet chili, just good "Super Bowl chili," and that's a pretty good description. They also made the point of adding the chili powder to your sauteeing onions so the spices can "bloom" but this printed version of the recipe calls for doing that with all of the spices, not just the chili powder. Dumping the spices into the onion is no more trouble than dumping them into the pot once everything else is already in it, and the end result was delicious, so I'd suggest actually doing that bit.
- Lessee, what else? I've applied for five more NPR jobs, with no response beyond the automated thing the personnel department sends out when you e-mail them. No word from the one where I auditioned and had two days worth of interviews, which is getting EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING because it seems like they could just go ahead and say "no" if they don't want to hire me and because they were really quite kind when I called before Christmas. The toilet's still broken and may be unfixable because they don't make the parts any more. And I haven't been to the gym since Christmas for no reason besides laziness. And it's cold.