Melinda Lee's Cooking Tips

Melinda Lee had a lot of useful stuff on her program this morning.  We had our own version of Mc Nuggets for lunch with catsup, which was something new for us.  Of course chicken is one food that “Just isn’t brought to its full flavor potential” without the use of monosodium glutamate.  Of course Melinda Lee used to say that “a tomato actually tastes more like a tomato with added salt”.  This is one remark of hers I take exception to because I prefer my salad vegetables “au natural”.   Of course the Frugal Gourmet - - who got sent up the river for child molestation or something and is long off the air- - - anyhow, he used to say that he would not put any wine in his recipes he would not drink directly from the bottle.  So toss out that old bottle of cooking sherry.  Of course Melinda was talking about kosher salt.  I just might say that any food product will be of higher quality if it says “kosher” on or it has that circle K insignia they have, and this includes kosher salt.  The salt is apparently corser grained, which apprently chefs prefer working with. I used to as a kid suck on those salt tablets we used in our water softener and noticed the difference right off.  Of course after we moved from "The City" we had major water hardness problems.  Of course back in "The City" that neighborhood has changed a whole lot less over the years- - than any place around here, that's for damn sure.  Of course you know don’t you that Morton salt and Scotch tape are both Romulan companies.  But the thing is that salt straight from the shaker doesn’t take that good.  As Melinda Lee says it has a rather sharp, metallic taste.  This is because of all the Iodine and a host of other additives they dump in that stuff.  Kosher salt is much better and Melinda Lee likes the thicker grains.  I’ve had a slight varience of opinion with her when it comes to rice.  Melinda Lee says to use a cup and a half of water for every cup of rice you use.  My experience has always been that you use two cups of water for every cup of rice.  Perhaps Melinda uses fresher rice that hasn’t been dried, or something.  But also Melinda Lee says you have to stop at tripling your rice recipe.  That is- - you can prepare as much as six cups of fresh rice using four and a half cups of water.  But if you try to make a bigger batch you “will lose quality control” and have uneven cooking or what have you?   Of course this is the final weekend of Mardi Gras, and I’d like to attend that at least once before I die.  People will be making a lot of jumbeliah this weekend in the Bayou. Anyhow Melinda wants you to make sure and not to overcook the shrimp, or else it will just get tough.  Convection ovens are just a fancy term for “wind current”.  Melinda Lee said something I didn’t know.  She said that baked goods and rolls and stuff- - has a marvelous brown quality with a convection oven you can’t get otherwise.  And it will cook 20% faster.  You can use a convection oven on a small roast but not a large one.  Not only will the roast cook more evenly and twenty percent faster but you don’t have to turn it up and then lower the temperature after browning or whatever.  There is that Missan Plus thing I’ve mentioned before where you be sure to get all of your spices and other ingrediants out before hand- - so you don’t have to go hunting for them later.

Welcome to the year of the Snake, but in Peking (yeah, I'm "old school") they have scaled back their fireworks demonstration due to air pollution concerns.  This is the water snake, actually - in the cycle, which Becky Daniels was born under, which makes her officially a Sexagenarian   That was the word that had Granny Clampett all upset in that episode.  We have a potpuree of other news stories for you.  They use heat sensors to try and track people in the cold and snow, and that makes sense.  They could even track Christopher Dorner at night if they cared to with a chopper, but they don't work at night. This whole thing is looking like a case that could go on for a long time because from where I look - the case has gone cold.  Dr. Levy mentioned how people from California get depressed in winter when they move to Washington State.  Move to Oregon.  There are more Federation connections there. It raises an interesting question about those people with SAD or seasonal affected disorder.  Do Blind people get it?  How can they because they see no light ANY of the time, which has to be depressing in itself.  Of course I'm sure Blind people have evolved their own ways of perceiving.  Of course Arleen talked about flourecent lights but here you'd get the ultra violet light you'd need- - assuming even that the presence or absence of ultraviolet light on your skin is what counts.  But here is a real story from Leo Le Port.  There is now a new virus "product' out there that enables you external control over someone ELSE'S firewall without going on their computer.  So the firewall thinks that a security porthole is being opened up by the URL and it's externally controled so that bogus accounts can be set up FROM your computer.  This could be a problem is the Police are tracking you for your computer activities.  Apparently the corporations who put out this product have no inclination to want to correct it because it's too techy and "nerdy" or whatever, and it isn't worth it.  I guess it would just cost too much money to six and since some of these companies are in it for the money, they just don't care.  Today I've been getting these troubling messages from Blogger warning me of some code error and then I click Close and everything is all right.  But I have some dark suspicion they are a warning of - - something.

Of course KNX has their “rewind” and February 9^th is notable for two major events.  One is the Sylmar earthquake in the San Fernando Valley at 6:01 the morning of the Ninth.  Freeway interchanges collapsed.  The other is this is the Sunday in 1964 where the Beatles first played on the Ed Sullivin show.  Oddly I don’t have any definitive memories of watching the thing, or what songs the Beatles played, although I must have.  The night before was Saturday February 8^th and Nana was out for the weekend.  And we used direct recording off the TV and Dad recorded a lot of stuff from the Laurance Welk show- - as a sort of sound check.  I may or may not still have that roll.  That Wednesday it was ditto for the radio- - employing the first direct connection recording.  Of course Monday February 11^th that will be here before you know it- in 1963 comemorates two events.  One happy event for our family taking place on a drizzly Monday evening.  The other one involves a major event in the lives of the Beatles I’ve probably talked your head enough already.  It was Saturday the 15^th that Dee’s Wedding took place in 1964 in Santa Barbra.  It’s one of the few times I partook of an alcoholic beverage as a child.  Dennis Prager is always saying that celebrating Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday- - were occasions we don’t want to tamper with so that we “understand their historical context”.   Of course we don’t have the nasty trait now of having holidays fall on a Saturday like Washington’s did in 1964.  But Dad got off work that Friday and was over taking photographs of the construction of the Fellowship hall at our church.  On Sunday February 23red 1964 we have the case where we came the closest of actually having sound to go with movies.  That same day I recorded the sound of Alan’s power lawn mower he’d had for a few months- - the previous summer.  Of course here in California the grass grows all year around so you don’t have to worry about work.  There is both film and audio coverage of that event- - - in events that are only a few minutes apart.   I had more to say about reel to reel mic recordings from 1967 but this file is already running into the third page, and will make a fairly lengthly posting as it is. 

Kodac was not blind to the coming digital photo wave but did everything they could, making major adaptions and revisions as to how their country is run and their product and their clientel.  But despite doing everything right- - doing all the right measures - - Kodac still went belly up.  And the reason is that there was just not enough money in digital photography as opposed to the chemical processing of film and paper.  That’s where the money was.  I did everything I could to make Christianity work for me, and still I failed.  Of course some times it’s much less a case of imcompetence than old fashion sabotage- - or in the case of the Post Office, it’s Republican tea party sabotage.  This mantra that “the government never does anything as well as the private sector” is just that.  It’s a falsehood, as Randy Rhodes reminded us all yesterday devoting an awful lot of time to lauding the Post Office.  The government doesn’t need UPS and Fed-Ex, but Fed-Ex and UPS sure need the US Postal Service.  And the government is not allowed to open a lot of stores and sell other things the way private carriers are.  No siree.  It’s like rural electrification and the Tennessee Valley Authority back in the ‘thirties back under Franklin Roosevelt.  There are places that private carries will just refuse to serve because there is no profit in it.  It’s kind of like a Christian Pastor when he comes across what he regards as “a real problem case” will hand the problem off to a secular therapist.  Isn’t that the thing.  There are those who claim they have “The Answer” but in the end if they screw up or something they leave it to others to pick up the pieces.  The private carriers NEED the government, but the government itself was doing just fine without the private carriers, thank you.  Of course the US Postal Service offers free "Franking" preveleges to Congressmen, and these ungrateful bastards retaliate by forcing the Postal Service to fully fund their pension funds for 75 years in advance, which no other business could possibly do.  And they offer free postal service for those in the Armed Forces.

Dr. Levy now has a contract to train the Orange (?) police department on how to deal with mentally people they come across on the street, particularly scitzophrenics. He's committed to doing regular training courses till December of 2014.   He says you should “ask them how they’re doing’ and start off friendly.   But they even do that on the “Cops” show, just to verbally disarm the person.  Apparently you don’t want to say “I know you’re acting crazy because you’ve gone off your meds” but personally I don’t view this as an inappropriate opening line.  What a police officer never wants to do in any situation is to take personal offense from anything the person you’re encountering might say.  But this goes double for a mental patient.  This is the problem the Fullerton PD had with Kelly Thomas.  These people have little cognitive awareness of what they are either doing or saying.  Dr. Levy passed out a thing including “twelve things you can do to improve your life” and one of them is to be optimistic.  My view on optimism is that you should always keep your options open, because you never know which of your feelers will pan out fruitfully at a future date.  I would say the same thing about the US economy in that this economy is "adjusting' and adapting to the times and making inovations, and as such is now "better prepared to face the future" as even conservatives had alluded to.  Of course these people were all hoping this would all happen on Romney's watch and not Obama's.  And don’t make generalizations about yourself or others- - or think one bad event “ruins it for all time”.  And don’t take refuge in words like “Always” and “Never”.  I can testify from personal experience that the ego tires of hearing these limiting remarks from others, and everybody would be a lot better off neither hearing them nor using them.  Of course - - I know a lot of you were expecting “Something Else” for this blog posting.  Well never fear, that “Something else’ is on its way.  It’s not a question of whether but when.  But as William Holden once remarked about Gloria Swanson, “Some people will do it when they get good and ready”.