blogging hiatus for no reason

I've been away from blogging once again for little to no reason - just too many things going on for me to spend time here. I'm returning to write a few posts on recent eating adventures, but also to lay out a political marker so I remember what I thought later on (a way to keep myself honest, if you will).

What I currently don't understand is the argument made by many prominent liberals (chief among them, Paul Krugman ad naseum, but here most recently) that the government should "spend more now" and impose austerity later. The theory is that the economy needs help now and there's no pressure on our borrowing ability (e.g., the market believes we are solvent and able to borrow further). Therefore, the government should spend copiously now to encourage growth and tighten the belt later. As Krugman says, "How hard is that to understand?"

So the part of that equation that I don't really believe is the italicized part. It seems to me obvious that what the pro-austerity people are saying is that they believe us to be on the brink of a market changing event that will cause our credit worthiness to fall off a cliff, like those of other countries have done. The rating agencies can be capricious (as they have been for many AAA corporations) a single bad piece of news can scuttle things, etc. In that context, the current 3% interest rates are no guarantee that our borrowing capacity is solid in the near term. In the context of that belief, immediate belt tightening can make sense. It's better to potentially harm growth than to have a sovereign debt crisis, or at least arguably. Why aren't Krugman et al grappling with this obvious, not very profound objection?

The subway

I remarked to my wife last night that the New York subway is an extraordinary source of erroneous legal knowledge. My favorite example is the sign explaining to patrons that failing to give up your seat to the elderly, pregnant or otherwise disabled is a violation of the law (it is not - the only relevant law, to my knowledge, requires the government to provide such seats, not for individuals to get up). Just on a super-quick, lunch time read of the code, it also appears that the signs admonishing citizens that both toy guns painted like real guns and real guns painted like toys are illegal is wrong, as I don't see the latter provision here. And the ads for various personal injury lawyers are a gold mine.

Death:Expound.

This New York Times article on the examination system at All Soul's college, Oxford cheered me up rather a lot by reminding of some very happy times back at St. Andrews. My Scottish alma mater is not nearly as august as All Soul's, but the emphasis there was similarly on rooting out a students with a certain fluidity and originality of thought and writing rather than more American forms of academic rigor. Thus, the questions I see on the examinations mentioned in the article are quite familiar.

I spend some time thinking about whether my undergraduate education served me well. On one, overwhelming hand, the answer is "yes". Practically, I was able to get into the graduate and law schools I hoped to study at. More broadly, I feel like a well-educated person with a life-long interest in my undergraduate subject - history. Like many college graduate, some of my oldest and dearest friends are from the funny little town on the scottish coastline. And I love whiskey.

What's funny is that St. Andrew's failures are similar to my own. Am I as detail oriented as I ought to be, given where I work and what I do? Nope. Should I have been driven harder in college, rather than allowed to discover the wonders of discussing varieties of gingerbread with my friends? Probably so. But then I wouldn't have liked the experience so much.

Minor setback

I had a bit of a disaster with Jim Lahey's no-knead pizza dough recipe last night. The issue, I think, is that if you're going to "not knead", then you must commit to a full 12-24 hours of rising to let the glutens knit together. In the end, I simply kneaded post-rising, and that worked out fine.

What didn't work out fine is when I decided that I was too lazy to fetch the pizza stone from the oven, and tried a baking sheet instead. I owe my wife for the resulting white, flabby, pizza - except, having settled for a husband of similar coloring and rigidity, it's possible she didn't mind.

Femivores

I hadn't seen this article concerning so-called "femivores" when it came out in March, but it describes a number of women who have eschewed more traditional careers for raising chickens and other hobby farming. I'll leave actual feminists to explain how it is that this activity "has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament" (I do not think earlier generations of women would see it as such, but again, this isn't my bailiwick). As for this sentence: "After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy, the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?", let's just say that the answer is not what the author implies it is.

Am I sympathetic to the idea of working the land, of wresting from its embrace my daily sustenance? Of course. I have all kinds of goofy fantasies of a hobby vineyard, goats from which to make cheese, an olive grove, the dry air of a vinous region playing over my then-leathery skin. But it turns out that in a market economy, what actually makes sense is to ply my trade, which God or nature or genetic accident or whatever has given me some small talent, and then hand over my earnings to people whose talent it is to raise goats and age cheeses and make wines for the fruits of their labor. This is the most obvious insight of traditional economics. By choosing appropriate recipients of my money, I can encourage those who do this work properly, with respect for the land and the earth. Perhaps I might still do some of those activities for fun, to connect myself with the land. But all that is nothing more than fun - a choice I make that invariably costs more than an equally good product from a real artisan.

Crisped Rice Cakes

At a recent lunch at Momofuku SSam bar, I finally was able to try crisped rice cakes, a sort of cylindrical rice pasta(?) first boiled and then pan fried until crunchy outside and soft inside. Why had I never heard of these things before? They're utterly fantastic, especially in David Chang's oily, spicy, Korean style bolognese.

EDIT: Someone else's picture of the dish I mean is here. Just absurdly good - to my mind, the kind of dish that makes a career.

Chicken tenders with pan sauce

I'm utterly beating a dead horse, but last night I had yet another meal inspired by Thomas Keller's ad hoc - pan fried curry chicken breasts with pan sauce. Honestly, though, the curry and the paprika and the white wine and even the chicken broth are optional. If you just fried up some chicken breasts and poured butter over them, preferably with an herb sauteed in it, that would be a tasty meal too.

Simply slice chicken breasts in half length wise, and season with plenty of yellow curry powder and paprika (I used smoked, Keller says sweet). Refrigerate. Sautee on both sides until well browned in canola oil, put the cooked breasts in a pan in the oven to keep warm and wipe the pan clean. Add butter and shallots, and once the latter are cooked, add white wine, chicken broth and butter. Swirl around to make a sauce. Serve.

A freezer clear-out

Ever since my mother delivered a giant pile of the most perfect middle eastern pita to us from a bakery in DC, our freezer has been a little short on space. At least, for anything other than pita. So I surveyed the contents on Saturday morning to think about what I could do to clear out other things that were stealing space from my prized loaves. Initially, things weren't promising:

1/3 pound lean ground turkey

small tub of cream infused with button mushrooms

6 chicken thighs that I had already used for kebabs

After a bit of pacing around between my kitchen (this is really all I have? ) and the cooking section of my bookshelves, I thought I would make a chicken pot pie a la keller in the Ad Hoc cookbook. Broadly speaking, the method was as follows:

1. cook carrots, pearl onions and potatoes in stock for 8 minutes until tender.

2. make pie crust (I used, yurp, fake non-trans fat stuff, because that is all I had). The recipe would have also been fine as a cobbler, I guess, with no bottom crust and just biscuits on top. Put lower crust into a pan.

3. Make bechamel (a cheat, in my case, as I already had the flavored cream - I just added roux to thicken).

4. Strew stuff inside pie crust and season. Add bechamel.

5. Add top crust and give an extremely generous egg wash.

6. Bake at 375 for 50 minutes.

7. Profit.