Nothing funny about feldspar

A few years ago I remember reading (or maybe I heard someone talking about it) about a woman giving a lecture on stuff that’s “OK” or not. One of her examples involved thinking about your saliva, how it feels pretty good when you swish it around your mouth, it’s natural and ought to be there, but once you remove the saliva to a cup, it’s suddenly gross and you don’t want to have anything to do with it. All you did was move a teaspoon of liquid from your mouth to a cup and it became yucky and somehow unsanitary.

I’m reminded of this by a small pitcher of milk that is now in our fridge. Plagioclase’s mother has difficulty lifting gallon milk jugs, so I put some milk in a pitcher for her breakfast. This morning she didn’t use all of the milk, so I put the pitcher in the fridge.

Is the milk in the pitcher still acceptable? What if I added some milk from the jug which has been open in the fridge for 4 days, the jug which originally filled her pitcher?

Frankly, I don’t have my own answer for this. Part of me wants to throw out the leftover milk because it was on the table. Another part of me says “It was on the table for all of 5 minutes; it was out of refrigeration longer when I brought it home from the store.” A third part (which tends to agree with the second) says that milk is getting too expensive to just wash down the sink. However, the first part is really really strong, almost a half part!

But not quite half. Frugality wins today.

2 lbs ricotta cheese (whole milk)
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla
12 oz chocolate (I used about 8 ounces bittersweet and 4 oz unsweet), melted and cooled
1 cup toasted salted cashew pieces (Trader Joe’s)
1 prepared crust (I used a large graham cracker crust)
Some more nuts

Beat cheese, sugar and vanilla until light. Beat in chocolate. Stir in nuts. Dump into pie crust. Sprinkle with some more nuts. Put in the fridge to cool.

Serve with raspberry sauce (12-16 oz frozen raspberries, boiled with 1/4 cup water and a couple of tablespoons of sugar. Sieve, boil down to desired consistency.)

The original for this recipe is half the size — I doubled it because I had the ricotta and the larger crust. It also includes some heavy cream, which might have made the filling damper, or it may have been compensating for the low-fat ricotta. In any case, I didn’t use it because I didn’t have any, and I figured the whole milk stuff was enough to provide richness.

I also didn’t use semi-sweet chips because I seldom use them. They’re too sweet for me. If I had, I would have cut down the sugar.

This first try through, the filling seemed to be rather dry and stiff even before chilling (almost like sticky cookie dough). It broke the crust as I was trying to pat it into place. Perhaps that was part of the reason for the cream? Oh well.

In the end, it’s a very dense chocolate cheesecake, that is somehow missing something. It most definitely isn’t bad — just not as groaningly good as I hoped it would be. It could be that even a little bit of salt mixed it (the salted nuts just disappeared) would be enough.

All in all, it’s dead easy, and as long as you get decent chocolate, tastes pretty good too. Next time I might add some cream (or milk) to see if a little more liquid gives it less body. And I think I’ll make it a smaller version.

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)?

I’ve been using Twitter (and now Plurk) quite a bit. (Not nearly as much as some, but more than I ever expected.) And while I’ve been told I write in a “telegraphic” style, I do tend to write long sentences (much like this one).

I had a bit of a shock last night when I had an IM conversation with the travelling Plagioclase. I could use more than 140 characters in that little box! But I really found it difficult — even though there’s no character count, I have a good feeling in my fingers for how many times I can hit the keys before the numbers start to go negative.

It felt really weird — I wonder if people’s emails & blog posts are going to get shorter as a result of Twitter/Plurk/whatever overuse? I hope they won’t devolve into txtspk.

I’ve just started to learn to drink cocktails. Nothing fancy — just vodka & tonic and vodka martinis (and lemon drops, yum!). This is due to some unfortunate experimentation in my youth… I really can’t stand the smell of most liquors. Vodka is easy, because it’s relatively odorless. (Yeah, I know, connoisseurs can discern flavors, but I can barely tell the difference between two rieslings, let alone two vodkas.)

Anyway, instead of trying to clean up our vintage bar set (which has been in various basements for the past 40 years) I went out and bought a cheap cocktail shaker & some martini glasses. I also bought some vermouth. Now I can try to figure out what kind of martini I like.

I mixed my first homemade martini using the proportions on the vermouth bottle — 1 part vermouth to 3 parts vodka shaken with ice, and threw in a few olives. Oh, wow, they must want to sell vermouth. It was, I dunno, too much. I don’t have the experience for talking about dry vs. sweet or whatever martinis, so all I can say is that next time I’ll reduce the vermouth by half. I’ve read the wikipedia entry suggesting that vermouth shouldn’t be closer than in the same room with the gin (vodka in my case), but in my opinion that’s not a cocktail, just a large shot.

Of course, I’m also learning about vermouths, and realize that they’re all “family recipes” so it may be a while before I find one I like.

I hope my liver will be able to manage all this experimentation.