Cutty Sark

Ok, so the whiskey is named after 


the ship 


which was named after the "garment" worn by a fictional Scottish witch 


from a Robert Burns poem, and it translates basically to "short [cutty] (under)shirt [sark]".


For those of you seeing this on LiveJournal, there are probably a bunch of inexplicable gaps.  Those were pictures.

Someone's calling

The most interesting thing I learned today was how to retrieve a voice mail message from my work phone.

This was actually more challenging than you might think-- the instructions that I was given are in the form of a scan of a xerox of what I can only hope are the original eight year old instructions that lives on the company intranet.  Oh, and they're actually completely wrong.  Possibly they were written for a different model phone?  It's hard to tell.

Fortunately, the message in question was from myself (last night, testing the system), and it's not likely to happen often, because there's no godly reason anyone would try to contact me outside of business hours, and even during the few times I'm away from my desk during lunch or something most people would just call back a bit later.  This is not a complaint, mind you-- I didn't really want the phone, and I'm just as happy if it never rings.

Word for the Day - Curse of Scotland

There are a lot of interesting language tidbits surrounding games, and poker has some of the best.  There's the evocative language of the game itself-- terms for varieties of the game, like "stud," "High Chicago," or "Follow the Queen."   There are nicknames for parts of particular games, such as Texas Hold 'em's "turn" and "river" (the fourth and fifth community cards).  And most people have at least heard of "the Dead Man's Hand," (two pair, aces and eights), supposedly the hand that Wild Bill Hickock was holding when he was shot in 1876.  But I think the absolute best one I have ever heard is "the Curse of Scotland," otherwise known as... the nine of diamonds.


It seems like an odd card to have such an inauspicious nickname, but there are several explanations floating around.  The most lurid (and least convincing) involves a Scottish general writing the orders for an massacre on the back of a nine of diamonds (due apparently to lack of paper).  A slightly more convincing explanation, although still without much actual supporting evidence, draws from the resemblance between the nine of diamonds and the coat of arms of Sir John Dalrymple, 1st Earl of Stair, who was known for being a ruthless and brutal commander.  Either way, I can't wait until I find some way to work this into a friendly game of cards.

The Dalrymple/Stair crest.

Friendly Hockey Thugs

On a hockey team, there are several traditional roles and jobs.  Besides the usual obvious roles of goalie, wing, center, etc., I have been informed (by several usually reliable sources) that there is also the "unofficial" role of enforcer. This is the player (or players) whose job it is to look out for any egregious infractions on the part of the opposing team, and retaliate appropriately, or in some cases inappropriately.  Generally speaking, with fists.  This is technically illegal, but extremely common, and has become more or less just part of the game.

The bit that's completely new to me, however, is the fact that most of these guys (at least at the professional level) are not actually mean, violent types.  They look at this as their job, their responsibility, and they do it dispassionately, and in many cases genially.  A recent interview with one player on the How to do Everything podcast reveals that many of them will bust a guy in the head, or get busted themselves, and then go out for beers after the game, congratulating each other on a particularly good hit.  "Oh, man, I wish I'd known you were a lefty!"

Fish Monday - Salmon cakes

It's Monday once again, and that means fish!

Here's the thing-- I have a problem.  Actually, two problems. First, we have exactly one nearby source of  fish, and that's the local supermarket.  Which isn't horrible-- almost everything is frozen, and fishing freezers are much better than they used to be, so as long as you don't mind "previously frozen" on all of the tags it's reasonable.  But at the same time, they're just the local supermarket, you know? I'm only going to trust them so far-- I have gotten improperly stored fish from them before, that was out in the case either too long or too warm, and had to be thrown out.  And this leads me to the second issue, which is that for some reason I have a great deal of difficulty cooking salmon to the right degree of doneness.  It's almost always either over or under, and for fish you don't trust, even a little under isn't good.  And a little over is sawdust.  So I've decided to give up on the "better" types that they sometimes offer-- the wild caught sockeye, for example.   It's just too much money to throw away if I leave it in the pan for 40 seconds too long and ruin it.  But if I'm going to only buy the cheap farmed stuff, I need to make it tastier.

Which brings us neatly to last night's culinary efforts, a recipe from Cooks Illustrated for salmon cakes that makes even the farmiest salmon tasty AND insulates against over/under cooking!

First, mix breadcrumbs, fresh parsley, one chopped scallion, one chopped shallot, some mayo, some mustard, some lemon juice, a little salt and pepper and cayenne in a bowl.  Then cut your salmon fillets (about a pound) into large chunks, and feed the chunks (in batches) into the food processor, pulsing just a few times to make large shreds.  You just want to break it up, not turn it into salmon mousse.  Mix the salmon into the breadcrumb mix.  Portion the mix out into little cakes, coat in breadcrumbs, and fry over medium/medium-high heat for 2-3 minutes per side.  Serve with lemon or tartar sauce.

It's definitely a bit fiddlier than just coating the salmon with pesto/herbs/spices and slapping it under the broiler, but it's damn tasty, and possibly even doable on a weeknight.  With a bit of practice, I could probably slap it together in under 45 minutes, especially since I just realized while I was typing this that I could have minced the scallion and the shallot in the food processor and saved a bit of time there.

Pickles

I still don't like pickles.

What?  You have to try these things every so often, just to make sure.  They gave me a pickle at lunch with my sandwich.  I tried it.  I didn't enjoy it.

Pizza Due

I mentioned a week or so ago that I was learning to make pizza dough from scratch, and was having some difficulties.  Well, yesterday/today was another attempt, and this time, I did SCIENCE to it!

Which means basically that I did all of the same things (keeping them constant) except for two changes I thought might improve the results (the variables).  Now, strictly speaking, for a "pure" experiment I would have only changed one thing, and thus known exactly to what I should attribute any results, but I'm a little impatient, and I was willing to accept that a positive result could be due to either variable.

As it happens, the results were near identical, which does actually tell me something-- it tells me that if I want to get different results, I'll have to change a different variable.  Unfortunately, the remaining variables are all specifically recipe related rather than technique, and I'm not sure I want to mess around with different flours or anything.  I may just decide to be happy with what I'm getting now, since it's perfectly serviceable pizza crust.

For the record-- I'm using Mark Bittman's basic pizza dough recipe from How to Cook Everything (app edition), and I was messing with hydration levels (amount of water in the recipe), cooking temp, and fermentation time (overnight in the fridge instead of an hour or two on the counter).

History

Today at work we were treated to a presentation of historical materials related to the company's mysterious past.  Ok, it's not really that mysterious, but there was a lot of stuff I didn't know.

For example:  apparently, for the first 50 or so years, the G & C Merriam Brothers & Co. were much more just printers than publishers-- the vast majority of the actual dictionary writing and editing was done in offices at Yale, where the editors were mostly employed.  The Springfield offices were literally just printing houses until they moved into their penultimate location (down by the intersection of State and Main, if anyone's curious), and they finally had room for a permanent editorial staff.  The current location was actually chosen as part of what we suspect (this part is actually slightly mysterious) was a deal with the city to develop the neighborhood, which at the time had only recently acquired actual paved streets.

Also, the charity that we donate toys and etc to every Christmas was actually founded (under a different name) by the wife of one of the Merriam Brothers.  That relationship goes back much farther than I had been aware.

Glonous History

For those of you out there who are partial to a common form of Americanized Chinese cuisine, and have been for at least a little while, you may be familiar with the archetypical example of what is sometimes (unflatteringly) called "Engrish," to wit: The Chopstick Instructions.

For those who can't read past the glare, it says, "Welcome to Chinese Restaurant.  please try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks the traditional and typical of Chinese glonous history.  and cultual."

While I cannot speak to the typicalness of its glonous history, I did just find out that "cultual" is an actual word.  It means "of or relating to cult or worship."

Given the excessive number of posts and images on the web about this particular chopstick exemplar, I have to admit the word may not be completely ill-chosen.

Give them the finger (no, the other one)

As a rule of thumb (ha ha), in men the index finger is shorter than the ring finger, and in women the index finger is longer than the ring finger.

This appears (at least in preliminary experiments with other mammals) to be due to hormonal balances in utero, to wit androgen, testosterone et al..  This means that many other sex-linked traits (biological ones, not cultural) can be correlated to finger length-- for example, one study* supposedly found that women with shorter index fingers (normally a "masculine" trait) were less likely to get lost.

*I don't have a reference; the Scientific American article just said "studies have found" and went on from there.  And now that I look at it, I'm REALLY damn skeptical.  I couldn't track down the actual study, but Wikipedia, funnily enough, does have an impressive list of links to other studies involving second/fourth finger ratios, such as this one (http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(99)00026-4/abstract) investigating musical ability.

Five Guys

I finally got around to trying a Five Guys burger.

Short version:  Burger's good; fries not so much.  Although they gave us a LOT.

I got a cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, and "grilled" mushrooms.  Two patties, with decent beef flavor and texture, with a satisfying amount of cheese, lettuce, and tomato.  The mushrooms were kind of buried, sadly, and I didn't really taste them.  I think they might be better with less accompaniment, or possibly with a double order (will they do that?  I should try asking next time)*.  The patties were interestingly unevenly shaped, which led to a burger with a lot more character than I was expecting, although it was a little awkward to eat at times, with unexpected promontories and fissures in the beefular topology.

My wife got a bacon cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, and mayo, and declared it decent.  The bacon wasn't outstanding, but it added the requisite salty/crunchy/smokiness.

The voluminous French Fries did appear to be hand-cut, as advertised, uncoated, and nicely potato-y.  A little light on the salt, which I actually appreciated (it's much easier to add a bit more than otherwise), but they seemed to be single-fried, which isn't bad per se, but results in a less crispy fry.  I like my fries very crispy.  Next time, I might skip the fries entirely, or share an order with someone else.

And, of course, the free roasted peanuts were free.  Hard to screw that up.

*They were probably griddled instead of grilled, but everyone uses that sense so I can't really hold it against them.  On the other hand, they might have been steamed for all the character that they had.  Limp, not very browned.  Should have stayed on the griddle for a bit longer.

Abortive Food Post

I started to write a post about my latest attempt at making pizza dough completely from scratch, but I realized that I still don't know what went wrong with the first attempt, or what went right with the second, or what's still going wrong now.  Which means that I can't really claim to have learned anything, can I?

So I'll just let you all know that homemade pesto on fresh corn on the cob doesn't quite work as well as I would have hoped.  I think it's the nuts, personally-- everything else in there ought to go with the corn, right? Somehow it just wasn't as good as straight up butter and salt.