Nothing funny about feldspar

I consider myself a fairly good cook with an eclectic, though limited repertoire. I like looking at cookbooks — especially the ones that focus on the recipes and the techniques and not so much on the photographs. I’m usually looking for sparks of inspiration for my own forays into weeknight dinners.

The public library is an excellent source for recent cookbooks, which helps with my space and monetary budgets — I just can’t afford to buy and store every one that looks interesting. However, once I find one that I keep for a whole month, or check out a couple of times, then I will buy it.

Bake until Bubbly: The Ultimate Casserole Cookbook, by Clifford A. Wright (Wiley, 2008) is one of those cookbooks that I’m thinking of getting for my permanent collection. I’ve had it from the library for a couple of weeks now, and I haven’t put it in the “go back” pile yet. It has a couple of hundred recipes for stuff that goes into a dish to be baked in the oven. (Wright’s definition of casserole includes Meatloaf and Apple Pandowdy.) Many of the recipes sound familiar (Green Bean casserole, anyone?) but Wright makes an attempt to chichify these old standbys by deconstructing Bac-Os, Catalina dressing, and cream of celery soup. It makes for an interesting tension between wanting to eat fresh (local?) food and wanting comfort food (which I think most casseroles are).

I haven’t yet tried any of the recipes specifically, but I expect to in the coming week. My first foray is likely to be one of the hominy casseroles,¹ but some of the eggy ones look interesting too.

I have a few quibbles: Very few of the recipes use leftovers (although there are suggestions on what to do with leftover casserole). Several of the recipes seem to be simple variations on each other. There’s way too much cheese. These are minor, because I can probably adapt quite a bit (I likely would, anyway) and still meet the goal of feeding my family something other than meat and 2 veg.

1. By the way, Mr Wright, hominy doesn’t need dairy to be good, yet each of the three hominy casserole recipes have 1/2 pound! of dairy in them in the form of cheese, sour cream or crème fraîche.↩

Next Week’s Challenge

From a 19th century trade card advertising Bassetts Horehound Troches, a remedy for coughs and colds: A man buys 20 pencils for 20 cents and gets three kinds of pencils in return. Some of the pencils cost 4 cents each, some are two for a penny and the rest are four for a penny. How many pencils of each type does the man get?

Ok, I admit it. I set up an Excel Solver model to do this one for me, mostly because I wanted to remind myself how to use Solver. I do this every so often now that I don’t use Excel on a daily basis, just to stay familiar with the program.

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I’m not a designer. I am not a designer. Let me say that louder: I am not a DESIGNER. And yet, I bring you these snippets (screenshots from SimpleSpark — “Cool Stuff for Your Life Online.™”) of web applications that people have submitted for cataloging.

Even if one ignores the unifying rating bar at the bottom (it seems everything starts with 3 stars), all these logos have a certain sameness. It seems as though they all wanted to be individuals, but were stuck buying their clothes at the same store.

Here are the sites for the past three days:

Is it just that there’s a limited amount of stuff you can do if you’re a web designer? Is it that there is a certain expectation from the web-app-using public? Or are all the designers simply copying from each other, and this will later be known as the “2000’s look” (much like the 1980’s are defined by big hair, tight pants, shoulder pads and bold makeup)?

(Paraphrasing) “A calculator has 5 digits showing on it: 8735_ What is the last number in the series?”

Hint: “calculator” is all the clue you need.

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From NPR:

Next Week’s Challenge: Rearrange the letters of “assembly hall” to spell three loud sounds.

I’m too tired to figure this out for myself, so I went to Wordsmith.org’s Anagram Server

I’m not entirely happy with the result, as I don’t think that one of the words is especially “loud” but it’s the most probable I could find with a couple of minutes of poking about.

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