Oh, the joys of being away from home! It means that I am removed from my RSS feed, so I don’t have constant access to what is going on. Also, and more important, it means I have to cook a lot. This seems to be the main reason that people have me over: so I can cook for them. It isn’t that I’m a great cook. It is just that I am a cook. And in our modern world, that’s a big thing. People are so dependent upon prepared or mostly prepared food that having something cooked from scratch is a treat — even if it isn’t done by Julia Child or Graham Kerr.

Last night was special because I was going to teach my sister a very easy way to make Chicken à la King. By the end, I realized that I was just going to have to write it down for her because there were too many distractions. But given that I don’t actually have a recipe for it, I figured now would be a good time to get it down on paper (or computer screens anyway). Just the same, be prepared for a little hedging because I’m not totally certain what I do.

Ingredients

½ lb of chicken breast
¼ cup butter
½ lb mushrooms, sliced
½ cup celery, diced
¼ cup flour
1 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1 cup chicken broth

Optional: carrots, peas; see below.

Instructions

1. Cook the chicken. I boil it, myself. In fact, if you cut up the chicken, you may end up with an acceptable cup of chicken broth for the rest of the recipe. Regardless, boil for about 15 minutes. If you are dealing with a really large breast, you definitely need to cut it into fourths (at least).
2. Sauté the vegetables. Cook the mushrooms and celery in the butter for about 15 minutes. I usually add a diced carrot as well. That’s non-standard, but I like it. Frozen peas work too, but don’t add them until the last five minutes, or they will end up as mush.
3. Make the roux. This is what makes the recipe so easy, because this is definitely a lazy person’s way of making a roux — or a “guy’s” way. You sprinkle the flour and salt over the vegetables and mix. Then, you add the milk and chicken broth. I normally combine them together so that I’m adding them at the same time. You will end up with a soupy concoction. Increase the heat until it starts to bubble, and then turn it down. Make sure you keep stirring it.
4. Add the chicken. While the creamy vegetables are reducing, cool your chicken to the point where you can work with it. Then cut it into small chunks. I do about ¼ inch chunks, but it’s up to you. Most people seem to like larger chunks like ½ inch or even more. I like Chicken à la King smooth — even to the point of turning it into strings with a fork.
5. Add the pimientos. I use a 4 oz jar — reasonably drained. Mix it all together and you are done!

Traditionally, Chicken à la King is served over rice. For this, I recommend, as always, Basmati rice. It is so delicious and the texture is wonderful — not mushy. But you can use whatever you want. In fact, last night we didn’t even do rice. I’m very fond of doing Chicken à la King with biscuits. This time, we used the Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuit Mix. They were good. But I the Pillsbury Refrigerated Biscuit Dough is easier to work with.

This is a really easy recipe that produces an excellent result. Sometimes, I think I should start a cooking blog. It isn’t that I’m particularly good at cooking. But as with my approach to grammar, I’m good at reducing this stuff to the simplest way to get decent results. But I hope that at least this recipe will appeal to people who want good food without have to work very hard at it.

Afterword

I found this great little video that goes through the difference between coarsely chopped, chopped, diced, and minced. I tend to think the categories should be a little smaller than she presents, but it is about right.

I am on record saying that I do not care what nutritionists tell me. In general, it seems to change over time. And I’m just not willing to change my behavior about something as integral and enjoyable as eating in order to live a couple years longer. I might think differently if all I wanted to do is eat ice cream. But I have a varied diet, because I like it that way. There have been many problems with how I live my life, but eating is one of the few that seem to be in order. Still, when people start telling me that bacon is as bad for me as cigarette smoking, I can’t help but pay attention.

Of course, if you believe that bacon is as bad as cigarette smoking, I hope you are very rich and interested in some incredibly rare “diamonds” that I have for sell. But bacon causes cancer? I can’t say that I find this surprising. The question is how big the effect is. I think I’m like most people: a little danger would make it even more delicious. So where are we on the goodness scale for bacon and cancer? Apparently, all the World Health Organization is saying is that “the links between processed meat and certain types of cancer are clear and well-established.”

The good news is that bacon gives you colorectal cancer. The survival rates are quite good if it is caught early: 92% if in stage I. Even at stage IV, it is 11%. Compare this to lung cancer, where the stage I survival rate is 49%, and the stage IV is 1%. So if you have to get cancer, it is better to get it in our bowels than your lungs. But still: who wants to get cancer? And I don’t like the idea of doctors going down there and cutting.

Another way to look at it is how likely different kinds of cancer are. We all have a 4.84% chance of getting colorectal cancer in our lifetimes. That’s pretty common kind of cancer. But we have a 7.43% chance of getting lung cancer in our lifetimes. So that’s over 50% higher a chance of getting lung cancer. But it gets more stark than that. According to the WHO, eating bacon increases your risk of colorectal cancer by 18%. So instead of a 4.84% chance of cancer in your lifetime, you have a 5.71% chance. It’s still about the same.

Meanwhile, smoking makes you 25 times more likely to get lung cancer. Let’s have a little fun with this. (Note: that means math!) Between 10% and 15% of lung cancer deaths are non-smokers — let’s be as charitable as we can be to smoking and use 15%. By combining the equation that comes from this and the data from the paragraph above, we see that the chance the getting lung cancer if you aren’t a smoker is just 0.35% in your whole life. If you are a smoker, it is 8.68%. That’s shocking! If you smoke, please stop! Unless you are Antonin Scalia, in which case: puff away!

So what we see here is that not eating bacon lowers your risk of cancer — but not by a whole lot. But not smoking decreases your cancer risk enormously. But this study is with regard to eating two slices of bacon per day. That strikes me as excessive. I know there are people who eat that much bacon, but that is not me. I pretty much only eat bacon for one thing: BLTs. And I have them perhaps once a month. And I wonder about this. I suspect that someone who smokes one or two cigarettes per day doesn’t have much of an elevated risk of cancer. The problem is that nicotine is highly addictive and everyone I know who smokes, smokes a lot. Is the occasional BLT going to hurt you? I doubt it.

But this all comes back to my approach to eating, which is that you need to mix it up. This comes naturally to me. I get bored — generally after obsessing over something. But I am willing to increase my lifetime risk of colorectal cancer by 0.87 percentage points for the sake of bacon. In fact, I now think I’m not eating enough.

I’m out of town. I had to go down and visit my sister. Her daughter (my niece) is getting married next Tuesday, and I am here to help. Or I’m on vacation. It isn’t really clear. The truth is that when I’m at home, I have a very hard time not working. It’s just so easy to slip into work for lack of anything better to do. But given that the last couple of years have been pretty thin on paying work, it is welcome. Of course, I am working, as you can tell from this post. And I’m doing some of the paying stuff too.

As I’ve noted before, Halloween is probably my favorite holiday. I just love the iconograph. I also love that it is a nighttime thing so the world doesn’t come to a stop for it. And I love decorating for it and giving out candy. That’s another thing. I’m well known for being a “bad influence” on children. It’s really just that I have no trouble getting into the same head-space as kids. And given that I don’t have to be responsible, I can encourage them to be just what they want to be. Fun for me — but not generally for their parents.

So it is nice to be able to give candy to children in a socially acceptable way. And it is nice to be able to scare them in a totally non-threatening way. My favorite things are ghosts. They are fun to make. But I did something different this year. My brother-in-law is way into pumpkins. So we carved three pumpkins. I don’t remember doing this since I was a kid. This is odd. But I just don’t think in terms of pumpkins, even though they are one of the best things about the holiday.

I noticed that the bigger you make a mouth the friendlier it is. If you limit the amount of light that gets gets out of the pumpkin, the more sinister that it gets. I could see myself getting into this — buying a dozen pumpkins and trying different things. And that’s what it would take, given that I’m not that good with visual stuff. Speaking of which…

My sister recently got distance glasses. I tried them on and I was amazed: the world had returned! My eyes have gotten steadily worse and worse. I’m to the point of using my reading glasses all the time. That means the world more than a couple of meters out is blurry — whether I have glasses on or not. But wearing these distance glasses made my eyes young again. It was wonderful. And not just because I could see long distances, but because I knew that there was a technological fix to my problem. Very exciting — a wonderful holiday gift!

So I hope you all have a wonderful Halloween. Decorate your home. Stockpile loads of candy so you will have plenty left over so you have plenty candy — What are you going to do? Throw it away?! — while you watch a “scary” film. I recommend House on Haunted Hill:

One of the first things I thought of to use this blog for was my cooking. The second article I ever wrote was, No More Butcher Knives. But I don’t tend to get around to writing about food enough. And when I do, it is about things like donuts and honeydew melons. But today is different.

One of my favorite blogs is Lawyers, Guns, & Money. You can probably tell that from the fact that I am forever quoting Scott Lemieux and Erik Loomis and Scott Eric Kaufman. But the great thing about the blog is that it has a good half dozen interesting people writing for it. One of them is Beth Spencer. She tends to write on feminist issues, but she’s a generalist to some extent — like everyone there. Her day job is being an artist. You can check out her work over at Deviant Art, Vacuum Slayer. It’s amazing stuff. I haven’t spent enough time with it to fully get it. But it combines a lot of different elements: Gothic and surreal, with a sensuality that is both erotic and disturbing.

But one of the things that Spencer writes about on Lawyers, Guns, & Money is food. And last week, she posted a recipe, Chicken Thighs Braised in Tomato-Ginger Sauce. You know me: I love chickens, but I also love eating them. So chicken thighs braised in anything at all was enough to grab my attention. So I left up the recipe in its own tab and today, I finally got around to making it.

It is wonderful. I can’t praise it enough. All the flavors mix together beautifully. What’s more, it’s really easy to make. Basically, you saute some spices, dump in tomatoes and chicken, and cook for a couple of hours. It is well worth checking out. I’m going to present the recipe the way I made it, because it is slightly different — in particular, it is all done in a skillet. But here it is in a nutshell: saute garlic (lots), ginger, curry powder, pepper flakes (dash); dump in large can of crushed tomatoes; bring to a boil; add chicken; reduce heat, cover, stir every now and then.

But here’s the actual recipe:

Done this way, it’s actually a rather good recipe for someone who doesn’t have much experience cooking. Yet it’s impressive in the final product. Spencer says to serve it over rice. I served it with angel hair pasta. But I suspect it would work very well with mashed potatoes too. I had some sauce left over, so I’m planning to try it with just pasta — I suspect it will be very good.

I have been desperate to find something non-political to write about. So I was thrilled to find this article by Phil Edwards, Have Donut Holes Gotten Smaller? This Compelling Vintage Chart Says Yes. But I guess I should be clear: we are no talking about “donut holes” — the delicious spherical pastry that is cheekily said to be the part missing from a regular donut. We are talking about the entire shape of the donut. In the image on the left, you will see that a donut looked more along the lines of a pretzel in surface to volume ratio in 1927, and more like a bagel just two decades later.

This is an important issue. Why? Because I’m not that fond of donuts. And this all comes back to the surface to volume ratio. I like more surface area. The less surface area in a sweet, the more gummy and the less delicious. One of the few Seinfeld episodes I’ve seen is “The Muffin Tops.” In it, Elaine opens a bakery that only sells muffin tops, because that is the best part. It’s true: that is the best part. But the episode made no sense because they were baking whole muffins and then throwing the rest of it away. But clearly: I am not alone in wanting a high surface to volume ratio in my sweets.

So why is this happening? No one really knows. People have their theories, of course. But in order to understand what is going on, you have to understand why donuts have holes in them at all. It’s all about even cooking. If they didn’t holes, there would just be a muck of uncooked dough in the center. Over time, as processes became better, the hole wasn’t as necessary. And I suspect that the manufacturers liked the idea that they could create more donuts in the same amount of space.

But I think the best bet for why donuts changed can be seen in the 1934 classic, It Happened One Night. In it, Peter (Clark Gable) shows Ellie (Claudette Colbert) how to dunk a donut in a cup of coffee. And it requires breaking the donut in half. So I suspect that it really all does come down to the way that donuts were consumed. As Edwards noted, “As donuts became a treat, their shape may have changed to accommodate that, making them less about holding coffee and more about holding sugar, jelly, and even chocolate.”

It’s also true that donuts themselves seem to have changed. Now they are less often the cake donuts of old and these weird “glazed” and “sugar” and “chocolate” donuts that don’t even taste good apart from their coverings. If you ask me, the best donut is the plain old fashioned. And you will noted of them that the holes are still quite big.

Afterword

Recently, I was buying some ice cream. I’m pretty picky about ice cream and usually stick to Häagen-Dazs or, when I can find a flavor that isn’t totally bizarre, Ben & Jerry’s. Well, I grabbed a pint of Dulce De Leche, but I noticed something. You see: I’m pretty blind and generally out of it when it comes to interacting with the real world. But my sense of touch is very great. And I noticed this “pint” was small. And sure enough, I looked on the label and it said “14 ounces.” What a con! Luckily, Ben & Jerry’s is still producing proper 16 ounce pints. So I purchased a pint of Americone Dream, which is delicious.

One of the most annoying thing in the world to me, is when someone tells me that they aren’t smart. I understand: I bring this out in people. I know a lot of stuff and I’m quick witted. And above all, I’m an intellectual. But none of that means anything but that I’m oriented in a particular way. I’ve been carrying around books with me for as long as I can remember. It’s just the way that I am. But that doesn’t make me smart in any kind of absolute sense, because I don’t even know what it is to be smart in an absolute sense.

I do know what it is to be smart when it comes to an IQ test. Those tests measure very specific things. As I recall, they measured some kind of special reasoning — there were blocks involved. And there were “general knowledge” questions like, “What is a mantis?” When I was young, I did very well with the blocks and not very well with the questions. Now it would probably be reversed. I’ve noticed cognitive degeneration over the last two decades. But I’ve certainly gained “general knowledge” at a far faster rate than I have been aging.

There are an infinite number of ways to be smart. All kinds of people impress me with their intellects in various ways. My greatest complaint with people is that they bore me, not that they aren’t smart enough. But I’ve known people who can’t do math at all, who are absolutely brilliant dealing with numbers that represent dollars. I think that shows the way people put up blocks around themselves and stop themselves from being “smart.” But the bigger issue is that no one feels smart because the things they understand seem obvious. Personally, I think anyone who understands the game of cricket is brilliant.

People think that I’m smart because I am good at the kinds of things that we think of as smart. So we don’t think of people with a preternatural ability to rebuild carburetors as smart. I do! But there is a way that people get a pass by claiming not to be smart. If someone asked me how to solve a differential equation, I couldn’t get away with, “Oh, it’s easy! You just do it!” But that’s what people do all the time with things like rebuilding carburetors, watching cricket, and playing guitar.

Another thing I hate is the distinction between being “book learning” and having “common sense.” For one thing, I have no idea what “common sense” is. If it is so common, why are people constantly complaining that other people don’t have it? As far as I can tell, “common sense” is anything that you know. That’s bad enough. But “book learning” is even worse. It implies that the knowledge wasn’t acquired quite legitimately. Rather than figuring it out for yourself, someone told you. Of course, someone also told them the “common sense” of not running out in traffic, it’s just that they don’t remember it.

But the notion of “common sense” is something more than just a face saving device. It is an indication that everyone actually knows that there are a great many ways to be smart — all wonderfully useful under the proper conditions. I just wish we could get more explicit about that so that I don’t have to hear phrases like, “I’m not book smart, but I have common sense.” That always makes me feel like I’m intimidating people. And I’m really too selfish to intend that. If I find you boring, I’ll just be gone.

All of that was prelude so that I could tell you a story and about how smart I am. The other day, Will told me, “I saw on Facebook that Rich joined a band called the 999 Megabytes. They haven’t got a gig.” Here’s the thing: I don’t like Rich and I never have. But I do know that he has a lot of talent as a musician. So he’s in a band. Whatever.

The next day Will told me the same story. I said, “You told me that yesterday. Is there some reason I should care? I know Rich is a pretty good musician.” Will replied, “Gigabyte?” I said, “Oh! That’s funny. So Rich didn’t join a band?” He told me that he had not. Even realizing it was a joke, I needed to be assured that Rich hadn’t, in fact, joined a band just to make a joke.

At the same time that I was totally clueless about joke, it also bothered me that it wasn’t quite right. I mean, a gigabyte isn’t a thousand megabytes; it’s 1,024 megabytes. Now sure, it’s true that 999 megabytes is also not a gig, but so too is 999 kilobytes. But that’s the thing: I would gladly trade all that mindless digital knowledge for just having gotten the joke in the first place.

It takes all kinds in this world. And I’m happy that I add something unique to my small part of the world. I wish other people were more happy with their own unique contributions to the world.

Afterword

That image above really has nothing to do with this article. But hey: mouse fairy. That’s brilliant.

At Slate recently, Gilad Edelman complained, New York Bagel Places Put Way Too Much Cream Cheese on Their Bagels. But he couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, he strikes me as representing everything I hate about many of the political and cultural writers that I most read: this tendency to think that they and their friends are somehow representative of the larger society. But let me back up a bit.

Edelman finds that the amount of cream cheese on a New York bagel ranges from 0.7 ounces all the way up to 3.9 ounces. I’ll admit, a quart-pound of cream cheese is a lot. But it is hardly normal on my coast. But he complains about the glob of cream cheese in the hole. But really, most bagels don’t have much of a hole. In fact, that kind of geometrical perfection is usually reserved for the fake bagel: bagel shaped bread. But I know what he’s talking about. And I either throw it out or redistribute it in the rest of the bagel. It has never occurred to me that it might be something bad — something that I ought to complain about.

But why do bagel shops pile on the cream cheese? Well, a couple of vendors give him the two reasons. First: if there is too much, you wipe it away. Most people are not whiny “writer, musician, popcorn enthusiasts” who complain about this. It’s better to have too much than to have too little. Second, bagel places do charge a small fortune for cream cheese. It’s not just that I would feel cheated by paying a buck fifty for a thin butter-like layer of cream cheese. It is that I wouldn’t want it. Cream cheese doesn’t have a very hearty taste. You need a fair amount of it to experience it.

Here is the ultimate thing: the right amount of cream cheese isn’t just a personal thing. The right amount depends upon my mood. So today, I may want 0.7 ounces and then tomorrow, I may want 2 ounces. So what the bagel places are doing is providing me with the option to ingest as much cream cheese as I want. What am I going to do? Walk into House of Bagels (which is fantastic) and say, “Well, I want a fair amount of cream cheese, but not too much, you know, the way you made it last Thursday, something like that”? It’s crazy. It is expecting too much of the bagel place, and frankly, it’s expecting too much of me. I know that if I press down harder on a bagel with a lot of cream cheese, it will squish out and I won’t eat it.

So come on, Edelman. Man up! Take responsibility for your bagel! This just isn’t hard. But I’ll make a deal with you. If you go work in the Peace Corps for a couple of years, helping poor farmers in Haiti, then I’ll start caring about our wasted cream cheese problem in the bagel industry. Until then, I will eat bagels the way that God intended poor people to eat bagels: I will buy them in bulk, cut them myself, and apply generic cream cheese to them. But the next time I’m in Palo Alto, getting a bagel and cream cheese — I will think of Edelman as I relish each ounce of excessive cream cheese that House of Bagels offers me.