Quasi-Dominican Goat Stew

2 lbs goat stew meat
Juice of 2 limes
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp oregano, preferably Mexican
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp oil
1 tbsp sugar
1 large red onion, roughly chopped
2-3 jalapeños, minced
1 poblano or cubanella pepper, chopped
1 28 oz can diced tomatoes
1 shot pomegranate molasses (tamarind paste might also be good here)

Marinate goat for at least 1 hour in the lime juice, garlic, salt, and oregano.
Heat the oil in a large pot. Add sugar and caramelize it slightly. Add goat and brown the outside.
Add the remaining ingredients and about 1 cup of water. Simmer, covered, until goat is almost falling off the bone. Finish uncovered.

Judge William Adams, ladies and gentlemen.

Emma Spaulding Bryant: Spitfire

Letters from a wife to her husband, from 1873. The short version: Woman takes a trip to get medical attention. Husband accuses her of infidelity with the doctor. Woman comes down on him with righteous fury.

I have never lived with you on other terms than those of the most perfect love and trust and equality. I never intend to live with you on other terms. I love you and I hope to be your true wife for time and eternity but I cannot (God helping me) will not) cast my womanhood from me.

...

I have by mistake burned the sheet which I wished to enclose to you, speaking of the husband as absolute head over the wife using the parallel of church, government, nation, companies etc. It was apparently a very conclusive and satisfactory argument to you at the time, but I wished to give you the pleasure of re-reading it with these other paragraphs.

I have only to say in reply -- if you value my love -- if you wish to retain my respect -- if you desire to remain my ideal of what is manly and noble and true, never use such words or sentiments to me again by letter or by word

You degrade yourself by them, and would degrade me if I received them. This sheet is my full, final answer to your letter by express -- I will do anything, everything, in my power for your happiness my darling husband and, if I could, perhaps I would believe (for your happiness) black to be white, and a lie to be the truth, but unfortunately I cant. There are women so constituted that they can, but I am not thus constituted as you must have learned before we were married, so please do not urge impossibilities.

I've been enjoying Ta-Nehesi Coates's recent posts on 19th century feminism, and it's nice to see these independent urges evidenced on a micro level.

East Coast Problems

Can we have a subset of First World problems for things most commonly occurring in East Coast metro areas? Examples:

- The Acela was all booked so I had to take the Chinatown bus.
- Cannot find good Mexican food because "Mexican" restaurants are actually Central American.
- Ruined $500 boots walking in slush.
- Just hired a tutor to help Junior prep for the preschool admission exam.
- Bikeshare station rack was completely empty!
- Terrible service on the subway again.

Open thread

I don't even know what to blog about these days, mostly because I am rarely on my computer at home.  What's new in the world?

Blind squirrel finds nut

Sady Doyle on class consciousness:

So I was in New York, and I was twenty, and as far as I was concerned, I had no father. I’d made a mistake, loving him; I’d corrected it; I was done, ready to forget. Which was hard, because the streets were filled with men dressed exactly like him.

The boys were growing their hair long, that year. They were wearing what they called “trucker hats,” sometimes with the John Deere logo, sometimes without. They wore the tough-guy polyester vests, the puffy zip-up kind. They wore t-shirts for metal bands; the understanding was that you didn’t wear those shirts because you listened to the bands, you wore them because they were funny. In a magazine called Vice, I could see that the daring boys were going for the jean jackets. I was puzzled, thrown off; I’d come here to get away from my father, to get away from the world he lived in, and everyone worth knowing wore that world around, laughing at it. And as little as I loved my father, I couldn’t bring myself to laugh.

Because those boys, and the girls they knew, sounded nothing like my Dad. They talked about their time in Prague, their time touring Europe; they talked about bands they’d hung out with, and those bands were The Walkmen and The Strokes and some of the girls had fucked some of them; one of my roommates was one of the girls, and when she saw that I had a Juliana Hatfield CD, she smiled and said, “yeah, I’ve partied with her a bit, she’s awesome.” I try to remember that these boys and girls were children, some of them only eighteen years old; I try to remember that I was stupid too, unbelievably stupid, that I also had bad politics that make me shudder to recall. It still doesn’t take away the way they made me fee. I still remember the way I felt, standing in a grocery store, trying to pick out beer with the Juliana Hatfield roommate. I pointed to a beer that I thought was suitably exotic, something city people would drink (feeling guilty, dirty somehow, because nice people didn’t drink beer at all, my father drank beer, nice people only drank wine or cocktails) and she laughed at me, picked up some PBR. “I only drink domestic beer,” she said, in a voice I’d come to realize denoted “irony.” Feeling sick and weird there, in that moment, because if drinking domestic beer was ironic, then drinking it unironically was bad and funny, and I’d only ever drunk it unironically, only ever knew people who did, which meant we were bad and funny; if I drank the PBR it wouldn’t be a joke somehow, they would know. Or: Going to a bar, with my boyfriend, with the activist friends he’d made through Greenpeace; it was called “Trailer.” It was decorated to look like somebody’s idea of what you’d see in a trailer person’s home. To be precise, it was decorated to look like my home; it was decorated to look like the houses I’d visited growing up. We sat on a couch that had also belonged to my grandmother. And to my mother, during the bad years, right after she left my father; it was a hand-me-down. I traced the pattern of fruit in the print and thought about how I’d chipped my brother’s tooth, bouncing with him on the cushions.

“That whole white-trash chic thing,” said the girl who’d invited us there.

That was when I figured it out, the name for what we were. Our name was trash.

She captures this moment so well: the realization that even your aspirations were just further testament to your social inferiority. After you get what you want, you don't want what you wanted at all.

In other news: Winter's Bone is all the movie the critics said it was, and not nearly as depressing as expected. I was anticipating Precious-level poverty porn, and was surprised.

Weekend Bake: Cream Cheese Brownies

An excellent recipe. Best paired with long weekends and action movies.

Brownie base:
3.3 ounces flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
6 ounces milk chocolate
8 tbsp butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
3 eggs





Cream cheese filling
8 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 egg yolk

Preheat oven to 325. Melt butter and chocolate, whip together with vanilla and sugar, then eggs (one at a time). Add dry ingredients and mix until smooth.

Mix the cream cheese, sugar, vanilla, and egg yolk in a separate bowl until smooth.

Line 8x8 pan with parchment paper and smear half the brownie batter, then spoon in half the cream cheese mixture, then repeat. Bake for 50 minutes. Eat.

FDA orders Bay Area man to cease manufacture of sperm

The FDA has begun targeting men who provide free sperm donations.

It began in December 2006, when Trent Arsenault, now 36 and a bachelor outside San Francisco, began offering his sperm through Trentdonor.org, a website bedecked with shots of Arsenault as a cute toddler and hunky outdoorsman. Tall and blond, Arsenault works as an engineer at a tech company and is a former Naval Academy midshipman (he dropped out to move to Silicon Valley). His qualifications might make a sperm bank drool. But he prefers to work independently, he says, having already donated to about 50 women, mostly Bay Area lesbians. Perhaps thanks in part to his twice-daily “fertility smoothies” (a blend of blueberries, almonds, and other vitamin-rich fare), he has sired at least 10 children, he says.

His prospects came to a halt in September 2010, when FDA agents knocked on the door of his 700-square-foot bachelor pad. They interviewed him in his bedroom, and collected medical records and other material related to how he “recovers and distributes semen,” according to the FDA investigation. The tone was cordial, Arsenault recalls. He even wrote a thank-you letter to the agency, complimenting “the professional and courteous attitude” of its agents.

But the following month, there came another knock on the door, this time from local police delivering an FDA order to “cease manufacture” of sperm, the first such order leveled against an individual citizen, according to a search of government records. Per the order, the agency considers Arsenault to be essentially a one-man sperm bank, referring to him as a “firm,” and alleging that he “does not provide adequate protections against communicable diseases.” If he engages in the “recovery, processing, storage, labeling, packaging, or distribution” of sperm, he faces a $100,000 fine and a year in prison.

The FDA has made its decision; now let it enforce it.

Recipes for prison time?

Since investigating the bisongrass vodka issue, I saw this post on Apartment Therapy's The Kitchn blog on how to make crema di limoncello at home, with an eye toward Christmas gifts. Sounds yummy! Unfortunately, it's so incredibly illegal. It looks like making bottles of this sort of stuff means you are an unlicensed, unbonded processor of distilled spirits. Apparently unless it's to be sold in single servings for immediate consumption, even bartenders shouldn't infuse their own booze.

In conclusion: sorry, guys, for encouraging you to become felons. Don't make this or these, even if they look delicious. Or if you do, try to drink it all immediately.

I do not endorse this list.

I like how Bujold is listed in this chart as an option for those completely without humor. I cannot recall smiling at anything outside of A Civil Campaign.

The list as a whole is a cheat, since many of the entries are for series, not individual books.

How to make bisongrass vodka at home

You can't buy the real stuff here because of the FDA, so this may be the next best thing. Another recipe.

Lard: The other white fat

I made my standby quiche lorraine today but subbed 1.5 ounces of farmer's market lard for the shortening in my usual pie shell recipe. It smelled weird and was a bit more delicate to handle, which did not bode well. But: no cracks, no holes, no burnt bits, just straight up flaky/crumbly magic. Also, $5 for a quart is much cheaper than butter. I highly recommend this to everyone.

In which wedding shopping eats my brain

I'm looking at veils and and having flashbacks of LSAT logic games, except without logic and with insanity. (N.B. I only care about certain wedding things, one of which is my clothes. If every decision was like this, I would explode.)

Bride wants to wear a veil during the ceremony and the reception. What veil(s) should Bride buy, given the following constraints?

Bride must wear a chapel-length (70"+) veil during the ceremony.
Bride cannot wear an unbustled chapel veil during the reception.
Bride can bustle a chapel veil by attaching a clear loop to the underside of the veil comb and pulling part of the veil through it to shorten.
No layer of the veil at any time can be between 18 and 25 inches long.
No layer of the veil at any time can be more than 80 inches long.
Bride can wear a bustled chapel veil or a birdcage veil during the reception.
If Bride wears a birdcage veil for the reception, she can buy either a firm silk or a soft silk chapel veil.
Soft silk looks less like nylon, which is the point. 
If Bride tries to switch veils, there is a significant chance that Bride's hair will get trashed.
If Bride bustles a chapel veil, it should be made of firm silk, lest it wad up like a towel on her head.
If Bride wears a single-layer chapel veil, then the number of layers when bustled is three, with the bustled loop either on top of or beneath the end of the veil.
Unbustled single-layer veils look better with edging than without.
If Bride wears a double-layer chapel veil with blusher, the number of layers when bustled is four, with the (edged?) blusher layer fully covering the bustle.
Four layers sounds pretty much opaque.
But maybe so is three.
Opaque is probably okay with scattered crystals.
Opaque with unseen edging is a waste of money. 
Soft silk cannot have crystal edging or scattered crystals.
Birdcage veils have scattered crystals. 
Bride likes shiny things.
Chapel veils can be gathered or ungathered. Gathered is better with firm silk than soft silk.

Which veil purchases are the utility maximizing choice for Bride? [number of veils, veil length, veil material, number of layers, gathered/ungathered, edging/no edging, crystals/no crystals]

The big one

There's probably going to be a 9.0+ earthquake in the Pacific Northwest in the relatively near future. And when it happens, a lot of people are going to die. Wouldn't you like to know if you were likely to be one of them?

At Oregon State University’s O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, one of the world’s leading tsunami-research centers, wave hydro­­­logists have run sophisticated ­simu­lations of a CSZ-generated tsunami hitting Seaside, Cannon Beach, and other coastal towns. The findings do not suggest sticking around. “A lot depends on wave speed,” says Solomon Yim, director of the lab. “We found that in some blocks of densely packed houses, the first line of houses took the brunt and the second line was shielded.” The specifics of the tests haven’t been released to the public for fear of causing an upheaval in the local real estate market. “If your building was one that did not survive the simulated tsunami,” says Yim, “it would be … not so good for the resale value, you see.”

Does anyone else have a problem with a state-funded research lab withholding potentially lifesaving information because it might mess with the property values of established interests? Just me? Okay.

Get it and forget it.

This was my first thought when I heard about the new contraceptive coverage requirement. IUDs are by far the most reliable and cost-effective method of birth control.

Don't miss the part about the dead nun.

Via Bookslut:

La Maupin was always willing and ready to draw the sword. One night she had the caprice at a public ball to make eyes at a lady attended by three gentlemen. The latter challenged her, supposing they had to do with a man, for she used never to wear the dress of her own sex. They left the ball-room, and la Maupin killed the three men one after the other. She got off with nothing worse than a short sojourn over the frontier in Belgium.

—from The Sword and Womankind: Being A Study of The Influence of “The Queen of Weapons” Upon The Moral and Social Status of Women by Alfred Allinson.

On teaching and grade inflation

Some professors cleverly include a "class participation" grade, and these professors pride themselves on using "the Socratic method."  Sigh.  Asking random students random questions is not the Socratic method, it's annoying,  In order for it to be a true Socratic method, the professor would have to ask the student to state a thesis, get him to agree to a number of assumptions, and then masterfully show, through dialogue, how that agreement undermined his own thesis.  In other words, the professor would have to have considerable fluency with his topic and be interested in each individual student, as an individual.  Good luck with that.

Book Rec: The Dragon's Path

It's volume one in an unfinished fantasy series! But don't run away screaming just yet. Daniel Abraham writes much faster than George R.R. Martin, and he is one of the few authors in the genre today who combine excellent storytelling in a multivolume format with creative world-building. You should try The Dragon's Path.

Abraham twists expectations and conventions in many respects. The setting is emphatically not an alternative Europe, and draws upon a deep well of weirdness. The viewpoint characters include the scion of a noble house scrambling to protect the throne from plots ... so racial slavery and feudalism can be maintained; a portly, bookish young man who is trapped in political webs of others' making ... who orders the murder of an entire city because he was humiliated; and a plucky orphan who turns from success to sot in a depressingly realistic fashion. It's like The Iron Dream, but without the historical baggage. Strongly recommended.

Book Rec: Deathless

Cat Valente is one of the best, most creative fantasy writers working. Her use of folktales and lesser-known fairy stories is superb. I really enjoyed her two-volume set, The Orphan's Tales, but didn't have time to immerse myself in Palimpsest, which has a more modern setting. Her latest, Deathless, is short and bittersweet, with a disorienting blend of Stalinist Russian history and old Russian tales. Recommended.

The fee IS by unit, not volume ....

Tell me if you think this is swingable:

You can bring in your own wine to Venue X for a $Y per bottle corkage fee.

Boxed wines (now in non-horrible varieties!) come in five liter units. That's equivalent to 6.67 bottles.

Could you successfully argue that the corkage fee for a box should be $Y, not $6Y?