November 6, 2024 – My Greek Table: Authentic Flavors and Modern Home Cooking From My Kitchen To Yours

November 6, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Welcome to the November selection for the Left Coast Culinary Book Club. This is once again a cookbook with the focus on Greek food. Of course I have heard of Greek food, but I never realized that there was a show on PBS focused on it.

When a cookbook is a monthly selection, I usually read the text but not all of the instructions. I read the recipe header and scan through the ingredients list. This one is no different. I try to pick a few recipes that I might want to try as well as keep an eye on what I might want to make to share at the monthly meeting.

Truthfully, I haven’t quite finished reading all of it, I will but I have read enough to get the gist of what is going on. This cookbook is self described as not specifically authentic but ‘in the spirit of’ Greek food. It is meant as more of a framework to get started. This isn’t an exhaustive list but I have determined that the common thread is tomato, artichoke, cucumber, olive oil, oregano as the primary flavors. It does appear that most recipes have one or more of these ingredients.

I suppose I can blame my heritage and upbringing that is northern European. As a result, I definitely don’t groove on Mediterranean food. I don’t find my tastes to be universally one deminsional however. Mexican, Indian and Korean are cuisines that I find myself drawn to. I suspect that Mediterranean is close enough but not quite what I expect or want.

That being said, I can always find a few things to try. I haven’t totally decided but I think that I am going to make either meatballs or a Greek sloppy joe. Reading the book, I learned that there is a concept called Meze which is like sharing small plates. This is like the more familiar Spanish tapas with a group. It is small bites with a lot of variety. Sounds perfect for a group setting.

We have some frozen pastry that I would desperately like to get rid of but I haven’t found the right recipe yet. Maybe by the time I get to the end of the book, I will find something. By the way, this technique ends up driving a lot of my cooking decisions. ‘What do we have that I would like to get rid of before it goes bad or I am tired of it in my way.’

What do I think of the book? Given that it is not my first choice of cuisine, I have to say that it is not my favorite. There are a lot of recipes that are all variations of the same kind of ingredients. I guess to me, it doesn’t seem given so many recipes (400+ pages), the variation is not very different or novel.

It’s nice to have choices. It sure beats not having any. Like most cultural cookbooks, there is an emphasis on good ingredients. Using tomatoes in mid winter kind of degrades the overall quality of the recipe. In my climate, there is probably only a couple of months where ‘good’ tomatoes are possible. That kind of narrows down the window to make a lot of these recipes as they are intended and likely best.

I’m sorry, the book just wasn’t for me. The truth is, a helpful review would have something to compare and contrast. If I didn’t like this one then what would I recommend? This is my problem with a lot of Amazon style reviews. The evaluation is only made on limited experience with one product. Powder puff reviews just talk about what you would find in the book and real vague language. I will let you do that.

End Your Programming Routine: This review is only my opinion, so don’t get hurt. If you like Greek food or if you are a fan of Diane Kochilas then by all means check this book out. We make gyros from time to time (I have no idea if these are officially Greek) and I like them. I have said this before, I usually find two or three recipes out of a particular cookbook. That shouldn’t be offensive, but a fact. I have stacks of cookbooks now. Some of them, I barely open.

November 5, 2024 – Happy Election Day, We Are Living 1984

November 5, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I have been looking forward to this day for quite a while. I have been getting phone calls and text messages heavily since our primary in May. No matter what the results are, it will be over. That is something to celebrate.

I hope that you enjoyed yesterday’s podcast. I have linked to other podcasts before but this is the first time I have featured someone else’s work. This is a podcast that I subscribe to so the message was not new to me. In previous references, the host never referred to such specifics like the uniform, when and where to wear etc.

Read the story here.

Today we are going to go back to an old friend, George Orwell and 1984. If you remember, the main character Winston worked for the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth. His job primarily was to read through published work and look for words, slogans etc that do not conform with Newspeak. Newspeak was the official, approved language of the regime. Secondarily, if the work he was reviewing was somehow non-conforming in other ways, for instance economic news that was inaccurate, Winston was in charge of modification and document control.

This practice led Winston to change the copy and then go back into the archives and modify any existing documents. Anything that was now obsolete was thrown away in a device called the ‘Memory Hole’ which ostensibly was destroyed and gone forever.

What makes this tactic useful is not that it is accurate but that it frequently changes. This makes it impossible to actually know what the truth is. As you can imagine, it is not easy to recall all of the published newspapers so that one day it might state that we are at war with country A and another day, it might stat that we are allied with country A and at war with country B.

If this practice goes on long enough, it is like playing a shell game. If you didn’t come in from the start and pay attention all along, you will never know what is happening. Combine that with stiff penalties for descent or even questioning, there is no point in trying to guess the truth.

Circle back to today. Based on this story I have linked to, we are living 1984. Honestly, I don’t really care what Biden said. I do believe that he spoke his truth. What is more concerning is that fact that the record was changed. Not only that, the administration is in on the cabal. Karine Jean-Pierre is quoted as saying “… just to clarify, he was not calling Trump supporters garbage…” But in fact Biden did. If he really meant something different, then the proper action is an apology with clarification, not clarification with a changed record. Everybody know that is wrong.

This is dangerous precedent. They will get away with this and a few more times and this will become routine. It is convenient to rail against it when the situation is in favor but both sides now have a new technique to deal with uncomfortable situations.

Do you honestly not know why healthcare mandate was not repealed or government will never stop getting bigger? It will never have to as long as people are willing to accept lies. They don’t care. They don’t care about deficit spending, they don’t care about the environment, they don’t care about LGBTQ+ rights or voter fraud or unions or anything else because we are stuck in our positions and cannot see the forest from the trees.

End Your Programming Routine: You know what they say about sexual assault in therapy? Being angry continues to give the abuser the power. Do you not see the correlation here? Be as mad as you want about your pet issues but I am telling you now that this is a watershed moment. We just took another step toward totality of autocratic rule. Just change the record and deny it happened.

November 1, 2024 – The Art of War, Maneuvering the Army

November 1, 2024 / / 0 Comments

There is no mystery here, the title of the chapter is actually what it is about. Some translations call it Army on the March or something of the like. At least in my translation, I would say that it is a little more than marching but what to do on the encountered terrain is included. At least this chapter is not a complete mystery.

Once again, I would say that the advice is pretty common sense (at least I thing so). It is such things like, if you are in swamp do whatever you can to get out of the swamp or try to pick the higher ground for encampment. It also offers some intuitive advice like if you end up fighting in a swamp, move to end it quickly or get out of the swamp. Or in other words ‘don’t get bogged down’ do what you can to stay in strategic advantage.

There is also some tactical tips in this chapter. Some examples include frothy stream water means that it is raining upstream. Certain dust cloud formations indicate chariot direction and army composition. I would say that this kind of advice is not terribly practical at this point in history. We don’t have too many chariot armies to deal with. It is possible that tanks make different clouds than trucks, I just don’t know. Reading Sun Tzu, I can only comment on what is written.

It doesn’t mean that this line of thinking is totally devoid of value, we just have sift through the non-applicable to the applicable. For instance when I am in the woods, it is often the case that when we humans (me) blunder into the area, animals are disturbed. As long as you sit very still, things will start coming back to normal (before blundering in the woods). I take from it that humans interact with the environment. Knowing the impact of our interaction gives us a strategic advantage over those that do not.

Since playing army and tactics are not super relevant to most of us, there is probably something else that we can get out of this chapter. It reminds me of a saying that is common in self defense circles. ‘Don’t go to stupid places with stupid people and do stupid things’. What that means is that if we knew the future, smart people would not get into trouble.

Said another way, if you knew that going to a certain location was going to get you mugged, a smart person wouldn’t go. We can have all the bravado about concealed carry and BS but wouldn’t it just be better to not be there in the first place? I think so. So, if you are getting the sense that a situation might be trouble, this is your first indication to avoid it. Speaking of which, I would avoid downtown of major cities just after the election Tuesday night.

Using an example from the recent news, Kyle Whittingham. He went to a riot with a rifle under the auspices of protecting a friend’s property. Stuff went sideways and fortunately for him, he got out unharmed physically. But, it sure doesn’t mean that he didn’t have consequences. After having to stand trial and being exonerated, he is now somewhat of a social pariah. When you have to stand and fight, I get it. But that is going to stupid places. I suspect that he wishes he would have just stayed home.

What I think Sun Tzu is saying is that he willingly went into the swamp. Then a fight started. Whittingham fortunately followed Sun Tzu’s advice and got out of the swamp quickly, hence he is still with us. March through the swamp as fast as possible, if absolutely necessary.

End Your Programming Routine: I have to say that it is refreshing to not have to read a lot of other’s interpretations to understand what is the point of the chapter. That is giving me flashbacks to Dante. It is just that I am not versed in eastern philosophy so I don’t recognize what is happening even when it is hitting me in the face. Machismo of the past might call my advice cowardly. But, you never know who is bringing a gun to a fist fight. There is a pretty good chance that I will.

October 31, 2024 – So Long, Old Friend

October 31, 2024 / / 0 Comments

It was on my recent fishing trip that I found out about the permanent draining of a reservoir of my youth. It was where we water skied and fished. It was where we tubed and it was the first place I took my boat. I knew that I wanted to go see it for old times sake.

It was a 2023 court decision that finally put an end to the reservoir. Basically, this is a last ditch effort to save the spring Chinook salmon run. The plan is to let the river flow unless there is a major water event in which case they will use the dam to mitigate extraneous flooding. The dam was put in in 1967. My dad grew up along the river (below the dam) and he said that it flooded every year before the dam. It has done it’s job as well as providing a lot of memories for me.

The way that deer hunting goes around here, I don’t hold my breath. I threw my rifle in the car, but the real plan was to go explore. I wanted to validate what I had heard and reminisce about what was lost. If I happened to run across a good spot to hunt, I might want to come back. That is a good way to get my wife to go along as well.

At the beginning of the journey, we stopped at the dam. In all of my years and all of my trips, I have never looked over the edge. We walked about halfway across the dam and I never realized that there was a road on the other side. We didn’t go on it because we had a mission to follow the river up.

This picture shows the exact spot on the reservoir that we used to ski. It is called the Quartzville arm of Green Peter. If you follow this road beyond this point, it turns into a picturesque western stream. I had only gone beyond this point once in my life. At that point, I was probably in middle school so it was really new to me.

A couple of miles up the road, it turns into a dispersed camping area. It really means that there are no services, but it also means that there is no cost. All of the spots are along side the river and include a fire ring. Bring your own water and expect that the nearest toilet might be a couple of miles away. Other than that, it seems like a perfect place to spend a hot summer weekend or a quiet fall hunting trip.

After we stopped multiple times to look at potential camping spots, it was time to complete the journey. We followed the forest service road all the way through. We ended up on the the next east/west highway to the north. We headed west and home just in time to avert a major rainstorm.

End Your Programming Routine: These are difficult and complicated situations. I don’t want to see major flooding or the demise of the native salmon or the loss of excellent recreation. You might call what I was doing was deer hunting but really it was a Sunday drive with my wife. I will miss the reservoir but I have a new appreciation for the area.

October 30, 2024 – A Chance Encounter

October 30, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes things happen by chance. I don’t know why we meet the people we do and even more than that, hit it off. You should know by now, this episode is not necessarily about that but a couple of movie reviews that I ran into by chance. One is about who we were in the past and one is about who we are about to be in the future.

Mentioned Podcast: https://castbox.fm/episode/Exploring-Life-Saving-AI-Tech-with-T-Mobile-for-Business-id4916553-id748574063?country=us

October 25, 2024 – The Art of War, Nine Changes

October 25, 2024 / / 0 Comments

As luck would have it this week, I was listening to a podcast called The Essential Framework to Understanding the Art of War. After listening to it, then reading the transcripts I am sure that I didn’t get a lot out of it. I would say that there are two sort of contradictory things. One is that you cant just read a little bit and get the whole concept. On the other hand, while reading pick one thing that resonates and pursue it (kind of what I tend to do).

To begin to understand it, we really need to have a grasp of the Chinese philosophy and its foundations (see Chapter One). Really though, I should be talking about Chapter eight, not some podcast. I just thought that maybe this tip might be helpful if you are struggling through this like I am.

I feel like it is a little disingenuous to take a two page chapter and copy a two lists out of it, so I wont. But, I do have to talk about them. The first list is the nine items that a leader must act upon (or potentially change). This is the namesake of the chapter. The second list are five items that can cause a leader to fail. It could also be construed as weaknesses or vulnerabilities of a leader.

An excerpt from list one

  1. There are roads that are not followed
  2. There are armies that are not attacked
  3. There are fortified cities that are not assaulted
  4. There are commands from the ruler that are not accepted.

You would think that as book smart as the US military is, they would have read and studied Sun Tzu. That being said, the first problem is accepting all commands from the ruler. As a result, they will go down any road, attack any army and siege any fortress.

I wholeheartedly believe that the US military is the best trained, the best equipped and willing to do anything. We can subjugate any population as long as we are actively involved. The problem being is that I don’t believe that our moral values permit this type of ‘victory’. We want to go in, kick butt and then have them thank us for the pleasure.

Obviously, you can tell from my tone that there is more to this than what I am saying. I agree with Sun Tzu that some wars are not winnable. This is the very reason that Israel is going to spend all this blood and treasure to be in the same position when it is finally over that it is when it starts. I am not being over dramatic about my hope that this battle will be over and the world is still intact.

Vietnam, the Middle East, Afghanistan these are all unwinnable because when the people don’t want intervention, it is futile. We just cant seem to understand that. I completely get the desire for vengeance for 9/11 but twenty years of war for what? The official statistics are 2448 US casualties from 2001 to 2021 to their 243,000. But, what the conflict did to the ones that came home. I personally have observed more than one veteran that took their own lives as a result. I kind of think this is a nod to Sun Tzu and his teachings. Some battles should not be fought.

End Your Programming Routine: I am not a pacifist nor am I a conscientious objector. I am fully in agreement with defending life, liberty and property. This is where I differ philosophically from our current view of freedom. You don’t find threats to that in Afghanistan or Vietnam. All you really find is a war machine, death and destruction of both guilty and innocent parties. Don’t we believe in letting ten guilty people go at the expense of convicting one innocent person?

October 24, 2024 – Another Grape Juice Method

October 24, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This is another thing that I have been procrastinating this year. I cannot believe the yield of grapes this year. Now, I am almost at the end of the season. I should have done something with the grapes a month ago. The same malaise that is effecting my writing is also afflicting my chores around the house.

It gets to be after dinner time and I have lost motivation to do anything. Part of it is I know that I should be training but it is dark or cold or raining and so I sit on the bed and scroll through the news while my wife watches TV. It is ‘just a break’ that turns into ‘too late to start anything’. I know some of it is seasonal, I also take it as a sign that I need some rest. But really, I can’t afford to check out after dinner.

This is the forth different iteration of juicing hat I have tried. Year one I used inexpensive crank juicer. It worked well but it plugged up the screen something fierce. I would take hours of trying to get all of the fibers out the screen. The next year I tried the cider press. That worked pretty well but it required hours of machinery cleanup. The third year, I tried steaming. This was OK, but I really didn’t want to cook the grapes. This year, I thought I would try the juicer.

I know that wineries just crush the grapes, stems, good and bad ones. The fermentation process is a preservative method. I don’t like the thought of raw bird poop in my juice. I pick out the bad ones and wash the clusters. Then I destem all of the good ones to put in the juicer. Washing the grapes is a step that I do for all of my juicing by the way. In fact, this is the amount of prep I would do for the old juicer too but not for pressing or steaming. Get settled in for a long evening.

I found the Breville juicer to be the easiest to clean up of the methods that I have tried. Nothing got plugged. It was like washing a food processor, lots of plastic parts and some sharp ones. My observation of the leftover pulp was that it wasn’t very effective. It is amazing that two sticks of celery can yield half a cup of juice but a gallon of grapes was about 16oz.

The juice itself was probably the lightest I have tasted. I suspect that has to do with the overall yield plus the amount of air that is whipped into the process as the liquid is centrifuged from the solids. There was a fair amount of striation of the resultant liquid. This indicates that for pure juice, you would want to let things separate and skim the lighter level off.

Based on the four methods I have tried, the one that has the least amount of prep as well as best yield is the steam method. You cannot underestimate how much effort is required to prep and clean. The product was so-so by comparison, but it beats going to waste because you don’t want to deal with it. I would use the Breville if I was dealing with a small amount of grapes, like making a daily juice due to easiest cleanup. Ultimately, it is too much work and too much loss to make this a primary method.

End Your Programming Routine: Experimenting is in my nature. It is why I studied science in the first place. It is a real shame that I am going to let so much of a bounteous crop go to waste. But, we have plenty of grape jelly and it doesn’t make good wine even though I have made plenty of it. I guess that is why our modern food system is kind of marvelous. It takes hours of work and distills the result down to a couple of dollars. It doesn’t pay for my efforts, only as a labor of love.

October 23, 2024 – Foreshadowing

October 23, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I started this endeavor for a number of reasons. I wanted to create a lifestyle business where my life was my work and vice versa. I have been a long time listener of The Survival Podcast and this is one of the things the host encourages for personal freedom. Another tenant is that is one or more people can do something and be successful then there is certainly a market and likely I can do it too.

When I quit my job in April 2019, it was not to explicitly do this but that it was a perfect opportunity to have the time to figure it out. The truth is, I didn’t use my time effectively and I didn’t get moving until December. I got behind the gun in 2020 and I had this huge project of remodeling my little house and then I had to go back to work. In that time, I created a formula to test whether I could actually do this.

I actually got my domain name in the fall of 2020. That is where I switched from Floricane on free WordPress to AltF4.co. I guess this is where today’s story starts. I got my renewal notice a couple of weeks ago. Hosting is now over $400 a year. When I first started, it was around $200 per year. I started asking myself, do I want this bad enough to keep paying hosting fees?

I think where I have started breaking down was this summer. I put a lot of pressure on myself to keep cranking out daily posts. The combination of what was happening in my life as well as my fatigue for reading the same book for nine months. I started to realize that I was doing this to myself. As a result, I wanted to make some tweaks, which I did. I dropped the hard daily requirement.

I have talked about needing a vacation, and I took that a couple of weeks ago. This was right around the time that I was enacting my reduced expectations. As a short amount of time has elapsed, my enthusiasm is continuing to wain. Part of it is that I have painted myself into a corner. Now that I have read half of it, I want to be done with the Art of War. I am doing stuff, but it is more of the same. There is only so many times I can write about another way of making Grape Juice.

What is really holding me back is my extremely stiff counter culture streak. I have written over 1000 articles, most of which nobody has read. Why is that, I hate social media. I have realized that I am never going to market my work in a way that I will be successful. Take that to the extreme, if I am not going to be successful, then why am I doing this in the first place? That sounds like insanity.

It is not all negative. I am proud of what I have done. Unfortunately, that doesn’t pay the bills or become a career. I find it useful too. I search my site to jog my memory on things that I have done over the years. Sometimes I am looking for a certain recipe or thing I did and this helps a lot in keeping track of those things.

As a reminder, I started writing as a way to build discipline for podcasting. As a working person, I simply do not have time to do a daily podcast. It typically takes three days for me to get each podcast done. I could do a lot better with time if I didn’t spend so much time writing my outline. That is pretty risky (for me) though. The more prepared I am, the better I deliver. I really do not need a website to continue to podcast. It will still go out on Apple and Spotify and be available at Castbox.

Spoiler alert: I did renew for another year. I will be honest though, I am starting to fade from futility. I don’t mind doing all of this for myself, but I don’t see the point of paying for it too. Maybe I just need to shop the price, if it was more reasonable then I wouldn’t feel like a big waste.

In year’s past, it was a no brainer that I was going to keep going. I think that I am going to set a line in the sand this year. I will probably make the decision by mid- September next year. I definitely want to take what I have done if if the site goes down and that will require some time to prepare. I say all of this because I don’t want to disappear someday without knowing what is going on.

My criteria is yet to be determined. Certainly, if I could find a way that doesn’t violate my being to make some money would be a good start. I don’t need to replace my income to keep this viable. If I had the ability to offset expenses with income, like buying tools and giving reviews as an example, then it would definitely be worth the effort. More on this as the year goes on.

End Your Programming Routine: Don’t just keep doing things for no reason, this would be programming. My reason has been because I like doing it, I still do. But, do I like spending most of my free time doing it? Not as much this year as year’s past. For another year, I will finish out The Art of War and keep working to put up content as time and desire permits.

October 21, 2024 – Trick or Treat 2024

October 21, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I sure had a lot to say for not know what to talk about. I had forgot that I had a Trick or Treat 2023 until I was checking to see if I had used that title already. So, I thought I would do it again after I check in on how those little treats played out from last year. I go of in a new direction this year primarily relating Halloween symbols to current events. That is all I am going to say, tune in for more.