Nobody Knows Anything

Well, I think you’ve got to file this one under “Oops”:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

There must be some way out of this conundrum, but boy am I glad I’m not the bureaucrat who’s got to figure it out.

Update: Oops to me! Sadly, No! sets me straight with a Sadly, No! on this one, with additional pointers to Damnum Absque Injuria and Snopes.

My sister has always hosted Christmas because a)I was living in LA and since the rest of the family lived in SF, it seemed better for me to go there rather than require them to all come to me and b)my parents lived in SF and it was easier to get them to ma sœur than to me.

This year, though, it dawned on me that we could have it at my house: they would only have to transport my Mom (and, of course, the acres of presents). “Hey, do you want to have Christmas at my house?”

She said, no, it was fine to have it at hers. Then she stopped and said, “But next year we can have it at yours.”

Hum. A year away. Just enough time to practice.

See, every year my sister puts on a pretty good spread: prime rib, potatoes, vegetables, rolls. Evidently Andronico’s in the City has a nice Buy Your Christmas Meal dinner package. It’s very tasty.

I, however, am getting so crazed obsessed interested in cooking that I want to do my own. Since I have never cooked a piece of beef on my own before (save making meatballs for spaghetti, which isn’t exactly the same thing), I decided I need to practice at least three times before the big day.

Yesterday I said to Darin, “Hey, I invited Mitch over to dinner tonight. How about prime rib?”

Darin: “‘Kay.”

The menu I decided on:

1. prime rib
2. Yorkshire pudding (mais oui!)
3. a kale-and-polenta pie (why? because the CSA had delivered kale on Friday and I was like, What the f is kale?, followed by, I’d better f’ing cook this stuff)
4. chocolate souffles

Yes, I decided to go whole hog and cook four things I had never cooked before.

Needless to say, by the end of the night I was certifiable. (Also, I have no pictures.) Going completely nuts taught me a few things, however.

Thing #1: Prime rib is f’ing expensive.

Not that I don’t love Mitch a lot but…I nearly plotzed when I saw how much the 5-lb. roast I picked up was. And I would need 8 or more pounds for next Christmas, depending on the number of guests. Holy Jehosophat. Not that Lawry’s and other beef places aren’t raking it in hand over fist with the prices they charge, but I think we got 7 or 8 pieces out of that roast and each one cost about $8 bucks, without the oven charges or cook salary. Whoa.

I was determined to get the prime rib right. For whatever reason, though, I decided to go with the recipe from How to Cook Everything instead of Barbara Kafka’s Roasting. (The recipe from The Best Recipe, which involves cooking the meat over a Bic lighter for 8 to 10 hours, was Right Out.)

Now, I will ruin the suspense: the prime rib turned out magnificently: perfectly medium rare, juicy, flavorful. We had to check it with the instant meat thermometer about 5 times before we hit the right temperature though—the instant-read meat thermometer is your friend and knows better than you or the recipe does—and I was completely off on how long it was going to take to cook. But I have a feeling I would have been more in charge of the situation with Barbara Kafka’s book. I must consult her book in depth the next time I will be doing a large meat roast.

Thing #2: Take the meat out before you’re ready to cook it.

“Oops, there’s a step I forgot,” I said.

“How bad is it?” Darin asked.

“I forgot to take the meat out. Dinner’s going to be an hour later than I thought.”

Which is, you know, deadly when you have kids. You can’t just give them hors d’œuvres—that becomes their dinner.

The meat stayed ridiculously cold after a long time in the oven. I think we sat down at the table at 7:30 when I’d planned for dinner at about 6. Urg.

Thing #3: Learn the difference between soft peaks and stiff peaks when whipping egg whites.

I decided to make the chocolate souffle recipe out of The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook. One of the steps is to whip the mixture of 6 egg whites, cream of tartar, and sugar into “stiff peaks.”

“Darin, what are stiff peaks?”

“Well, you know what soft peaks are, right?” Pause. “Okay, I begin to see the problem you’re having.”

Yeah, I decided to make a souffle without knowing what “soft peaks” or “stiff peaks” or “overbeating” is. I ended up with a tremendous amount of souffle mix, which completely filled the eight ramekins. When we cooked all eight (why did I cook eight when only five people were eating? Volume), all eight rose alarmingly high in the oven; the four on the bottom shelf fought the rack, and the rack won.

I was not won over by the souffle I made. It was way too light and airy and had the barest chocolate taste, even though I’d used 71% Valrhona and Scharffen-Berger unsweetened cocoa for the chocolate.

Then I saw the souffles Dexygus made and I was like, Damn. Those are the souffles I wanted.

Of course, I have to learn about whipping egg whites first.

And I’ll probably make this chocolate cake before I return to souffles, unless I find something to do with leftover egg yolks, in a hurry.

Thing #4: Learn the difference between instant polenta and premade polenta, if there is one.

Pam Anderson (no, not that one), in How To Cook Without a Book, mentions that you should always have instant polenta on hand to whip up some polenta on a weeknight dinner. When making polenta from her book I couldn’t find anything marked “instant polenta” at the store, so I bought some polenta from the bulk bins and cooked it and it turned out just fine.

Gotta remember that whole “turned out just fine” thing in the future.

This time, when preparing for the kale-and-polenta pie (from Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop), I asked after instant polenta at Whole Foods and they showed me these plastic sausages full of polenta. Aha! I took my prized rounds of polenta home, cooked the kale, and folded in the cup full of premade polenta.

Which just sat there.

I mushed and stirred and tried to mix and it just sat there.

“You need dry polenta,” Darin said. “What you’ve got isn’t going to absorb any liquid.”

“He says instant!”

Darin read the package. “This isn’t instant, this is premade.”

“I’m pretty sure premade is instant.”

“You need dry,” he said.

I had a teeny tiny bit of the dry polenta I’d made last time still in the cupboard. I threw it in on top of the kale and premade polenta and sure enough: slurp! it drank up the liquid.

I baked the resulting mess for however long the recipe called for and then some. I took it out and let it cool (as the recipe says to do), and when it came time to eat the result was…okay. Good enough for dinner, not good enough to save. Which is why I’m not sharing the recipe; I’m only sharing recipes of things I think I made well.

Anybody knows about the instant-premade axis, I’d appreciate a note.

Thing #5: Stop telling everyone you’ve done everything wrong. Let them figure it out.

Darin actually gave me that feedback during dinner last night. “Everything turned out fine, but you’ve been driving yourself nuts all evening!”

Mitch added: “If you’re not sure it’s great, serve it and find out what your guests think. If you’re sure it’s terrible, throw it away and never let them know. And I would like some more of the kale-and-polenta pie, please.” (Mitch is like Darin: while he is wildly supportive and would eat some of everything to be polite, he wouldn’t take seconds if he didn’t want to. So I was encouraged on that front.)

So, I’m going to work on pretense-of-confidence this year. At least on the, y’know, cooking front.

In a recent post Tamar quotes a great piece by Michael Lind on how “Europe, China, Russia, Latin America and other regions and nations are quietly taking measures whose effect if not sole purpose will be to cut America down to size” and then adds

Kos calls this article sobering. I have the exact opposite reaction. It gives me tremendous hope. It’s obvious BushCo is on a destructive rampage and will do little to nothing to further the wellbeing of the world at large. How wonderful that other countries are stepping in to fill the breech — not only that, but that they’re cutting the US down to size in the bargain. We no longer have any real balance of power in this country as we drift ever closer to tyranny. Thank god this kind of international balance of power has begun to blossom. The US does not need to be a major world power. At this point, it’s better for the world if this country is not setting the agenda.

And I might agree with her, except for the way this is going to happen isn’t going to be a simple readjustment of the world’s power. The way this is going to happen is going to be violent and awful.

One of the things I’ve wanted to do since we moved into this house is redo the floors. I hate this orange carpeting; I want hardwood floors. We have the savings, I’ve gotten the bids. But as I told Darin this week, I can’t pull the trigger. Why? Because I’m scared shitless of what’s going to happen to the economy in the next year or so. What good are new floors going to do me if we need wheelbarrows of money to take to the supermarket?

I’m obviously not the only one thinking along these lines: Stupid over at Altercation is thinking along the same lines:

Name: Stupid
Hometown: Chicago

Hey Eric, it’s Stupid to put my money where my mouth is. I’m not kidding when I say I’m afraid of a dollar collapse. It’s not just that the high deficits and unprecedented foreign control over the economy. It’s all these timebombs waiting to go off. Everyone knows about the baby boomers and Social Security/Medicare, but that’s not going to be the end of it:  Pensions have dwindled or gone bankrupt, homes have been remortgaged, and the adult children who might have helped are in hock like never before. All that “deficit as percentage of gross national product” talk isn’t reassuring. 9/11 proved that a fast-rising GNP is not a law of nature. When the Israel/Northern-Ireland type terrorism begins, it’s safe to say consumer confidence will take a hit.

So yes, I am really scared. I just don’t know what to do about it. Not politically, I mean as a selfish SOB!  For example, with my retirement savings — I called the Big Name Financial Outfit which manages my work’s 401(k) plan and apparently I wasn’t his first “apocalypse call.”  One suggestion was to shift towards European market funds. But if the dollar collapses, other economies will falter too (that’s why the world may take unilateral action to prop up the dollar. Zeesh, I never expected to read something like that, but it was in today’s papers…)  There’s the historic risk-adverse investment: gold. It’s at a pretty high price already, but who am I to argue with history?  (This company also has an investment fund that is indexed against inflation. $20 apples, anyone?)

And what about the present — what am I supposed to do with my life?  Pundits may be safe, but I don’t think there’s going to be a huge demand for quasi-patent attorneys who can handle simple pro bono family law cases. I’ve even considered taking a LPN nursing program at my community college, but there’s a waiting list!  My point is this: as much as we need to fight the good political fight, a little practical CYA is the least the left can do for itself if/when we’re proved right. Suggestions welcomed!

I grew up as the child of Depression kids—and my mother grew up in Ireland, which was really no picnic during the Depression. My Dad, who was 13 when we entered World War II, had a job as a seven- and eight-year-old at a market, bagging groceries, which allowed my grandmother access to foodstuffs that hadn’t been bought, that were going to be thrown away.

Boy howdy. I really want that kind of life for my kids.

But maybe I’m wrong? Maybe I’m overreacting? Let’s hear what Seymour Hersh (who has a longer track record of telling what’s really going on than you or I do) has to say:

Another salvation may be the economy. It’s going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick.

And the third thing is Europe — Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I’m talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody — it’s going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit — our — we’re spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We’re going to see enormous panic here.

But [Bush] could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he’s going to do between then and now is enormous. We’re going to have some very bad months ahead.

The world can’t let us fall totally apart, because if we go down, everyone goes down. But it’s not exactly in their interest to keep carrying us either, as is demonstrated amply in this Newsweek International cover piece—I would ask, like Tamar, why Newsweek Domestic doesn’t have the balls to print this, but the answer is obvious: we’re so used to saying, “We’re great and everyone likes us!” that we’re not well-attuned to hearing different things. Anyone see that letter in last week’s Entertainment Weekly where one letter-writer was decidedly unhappy with EW’s choice of Jon Stewart as Entertainer of the Year?

…Who exactly was Jon Stewart entertaining this year, other than your magazine staff and buddies on the New York cocktail-party circuit? We “flyovers” find him vicious, one-sided, and borderline treasonous…

Dan Crider
dan0311@yahoo.com
Carrollton, Tex.

All week I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to send mail asking, politely, “What is your definition of treason?” Christ, if Newsweek published that story here, someone would firebomb the magazine’s headquarters. (And what’s even more ridiculous is, I don’t even think I’m joking. You can’t joke about that crap any more. Not that magazines are getting firebombed all the time. Just that it feels like it’s going to start happening any moment.)

I don’t know if there’s a way to let us down, uh, “gently.” At least, gently for them. Them being China, India, and the EU. As the Pessimist said over at the Left Coaster:

So now that these foreign central banks are tapped out of enthusiasm for the Bu$hCo Technicolor Greenback, can the private investor be far behind?

And if China floats the yuan…

Everyone points out that instead of savings accounts, Americans have their houses. Which aren’t going to mean jack when interest rates spike, because everyone’s got ARMs. (Ours turns into an ARM 10 years out; we couldn’t afford a 30-year fixed.) And when housing prices fall — they will, even here in the insane Bay Area — what about your savings then? When you can’t get the fucking money?

The only thing that gives me any hope right now is that I am notoriously bad at predicting the future. There are several books out about the growing divide between Europe and America—here is a multi-pronged review in the always-excellentNew York Review of Books—and maybe there’ll just be gradual changes, a diminuation over time of how we live and our place in the world.

But we’ve been living as though we can get something for nothing. And given the deeply insane way* the Administration has been acting, the bill is going to come due any second.

And more: Just a Bump in the Beltway has the cheery news out of Davos:

The day after the White House forecast a deficit of $427 billion this year, some of America’s most prominent economists sounded warnings of a dollar crisis.

Fred Bergsten, the director of the Institute for International Economics in Washington, told delegates at the World Economic Forum that he feared that the beginning of such a crisis could come within days or weeks if President Bush’s budget proposals did not convince financial markets that the deficit would start coming down over the next few years.

“The dollar would come down sharply, US inflation and interest rates would be pushed up sharply and the world would follow a much slower growth pattern. Trade would be a big casualty it would be poison for US trade policy,” he said.

———————————————————–

*Actually, I don’t believe their behavior is insane. I think they know exactly what they’ve been doing. They can see the handwriting on the wall with Peak Oil and adjustments to world power, and they want to get theirs. So what if theirs includes yours and everyone else’s too? They’re fucking set up for several generations. Fuck you, peasants. We’ve got our castles and we’re drawing up the drawbridges.

I went nuts last night: made spaghetti and meatballs (man, the meatball recipe from How To Cook Everything rocks mightily) with homemade spaghetti sauce (which the kids don’t eat, natch).

Then I went nuts and made candied orange peel. That didn’t turn out so well. Possibly I used the wrong kind of orange peel or didn’t scrap enough of the pith off. (Tried to get it all, didn’t always succeed.) But the result had a terrible orange taste. Tossed the whole thing. Will try again another time.

Then, denied candied orange peel, I made Stephanie Zonis’s recipe for hot chocolate. Oh baby. Oh yes, here it is, come to Mama. Nice, thick extremely chocolatey. I used a bar of Valrhona and half a bar of Green and Black’s Maya Gold (slightly orangey/spicey chocolate). Now, the recipe says it makes 2-3; don’t you believe it. This makes 4 easy, and I say this as someone who really, really likes chocolate. This isn’t so much “hot chocolate” as it is “drinkable pudding,” so be forewarned.

I didn’t use the food processor—I whipped out my chef’s knife and chopped the chocolate up. Seemed to work fine. I also didn’t use any sugar, because I like a darker, less sweet chocolate. I did add the vanilla though.

I took roughly half of this last night, pouring the other half into another cup (which I cooled down in a water bath, than stuck in the fridge with plastic wrap right against the surface of the chocolate, to avoid getting a skin). Half of this recipe was way too much; I would have been much better off taking a third or a fourth. Or, as I say to Darin at moments like this, “Get the syringe of adrenaline ready!”

You know, sometimes I just want to slap someone. So far I have successfully suppressed this urge. But the time is a’comin’ I’m just not going to be able to hold back.

In today’s SF Chronicle is a story about how the grocery strike has been avoided (yay!), with another story about an idea of requiring supermarkets in the city to charge 17 cents for every plastic or paper bag.

Getting consumers to cut down on grocery bags is a noble goal, but is charging them 17 cents apiece the best way to achieve it?

Today, the San Francisco Commission on the Environment is expected to adopt a resolution urging the Board of Supervisors to pass an ordinance requiring supermarkets in the city to charge 17 cents for every plastic or paper bag “to reduce the proliferation of unnecessary bags and provide funds to mitigate the negative impacts caused by them.”

A fee of 17 cents seems like a lot considering the deposit on standard beverage bottles and cans in California is only 4 cents, and that is refundable to anyone who brings in an empty.

Under the grocery bag proposal, there would be no refunds for shoppers who return bags and thus no motivation for people to paw through trash bins plucking bags out of the waste stream.

So the big problem with the proposal is that people wouldn’t have any incentive to pick up trash. Like they do so well with that now. And maybe a fee would stop them introducing the bags into the ecosystem in the first place.

This is where the urge to slap someone comes in.

We really are the people with the greatest sense of entitlement in the world, aren’t we? These bags have never been free; the cost has been factored into the cost of doing business. But obviously the costs are going up, and rather than spread the pain around to everyone equally, they’ve decided that those who use, get to pay for them.

And this is a problem because people don’t get every damn cent back. I hate our society sometimes.

When I was in Germany almost 20 years ago (and I still haven’t made it back, and now it’s a different country, sob), bags cost 10pf. at the grocery. Everyone there (except the stupid American, who kept forgetting to reuse her damn bags) brought their own bags. It was No. Big. Deal. No discount for having brought the bags, merely a penalty if you didn’t. Whoops, your bad, so you pay. I can’t remember if this is Europe-wide—I think Denmark did the same thing. And in the article it mentions

six nations—Australia, Bangladesh, Italy, South Africa, Taiwan and Ireland—levy taxes or have enacted bans on plastic shopping bags. It says that in Ireland, plastic bag usage dropped 90 percent in the first year after that nation imposed a fee of 15 cents per bag.

Almost two decades after the first time I saw it in action, paying for bags gets proposed here—wonder what 10pf. is in today’s money?—and people go freakin’ nuts. And this is in the recycle-everything Bay Area. (At the bottom of the article there’s a note that says there’s an upcoming bill to charge consumers statewide 15 cents per bag, which would be really good.)

What’s especially stupid is, those quoted in the article talk about this as though you need to pay the extra money. In fact, it’s completely possible to avoid the fee. All you have to do is bring your own bag. It’s a habit you have to learn, but once you learn it: bing, you’re done. Buying a canvas bag at Lunardi’s or Cosentino’s—mind you, haven’t priced them at Target; they’re probably even cheaper there—costs $10. Ten dollars. We live in a world of $3 lattes, so ten bucks==not that much. If you save 17 cents every time you use one of these bags, I figure it’s going to take you about 60 trips to earn back the cost of that bag.

Think you’re going to go to the store 60 times during the life of these bags? Remember, they’re canvas. They’re sewn. They’re damn near indestructible. You’re going to fall apart before it does. And if you double-bag frequently, you earn the bag back in 35 trips.

I love using my canvas bags. It’s so much better than piling plastic bags up to the ceiling in my pantry.I’ve taken armloads of the high-quality paper Lunardi’s bags with the handles out to the recycling box myself—they’re great bags, but I can’t reuse them for anything. I reuse the grocery bags in small trash cans around the house. In fact, once a month I don’t take my canvas bags shopping with me, so I can restock on plastic bags.

Should the market pay for my trash can liners? Hmmm. Wait a second, let me think about that…

Augh. Okay, I can’t slap anyone. I’m gonna go eat some chocolate and shake my head a lot.

Cooking and reading about cooking and writing about cooking is not the sum total of my life these days.

It’s a gigantic part of it, of course (although after reading through my favorite food blogs I find my inner voice saying, Shut up about your excitement over learning to boil water already, would you?). But it’s not everything.

I have been writing. Not quite at the NaNo pace, but at the current moment that pace would be pretty hard to keep up. I was stuck for quite a long while on one particular plot point—no matter what I did or how I cajoled, my main character wouldn’t do what I told her to. I got nowhere with my rewrite for, dare I say it, weeks until last week I did an “interview” with my main character, me typing questions, “hearing” her responses. It was spectacular fun and reminded me of that strange way in which writing is an intersection of channeling and psychosis. Whatever. That interview (which lasted three hours) really sparked me to get going again.

Yesterday, in fact, during my Sunday morning writing session (during the weekends pretty much the only time I go and write is Sunday morning—Darin hangs with the kids, plays a little World of Warcraft, I go and caffeinate up and write) I had a spectacularly productive writing session, writing a scene that didn’t even occur during the first draft. I’m still hung up on the same plot point I was before, so I skipped ahead to write something else and found myself eleven pages into it. It felt really, really good to do that writing.

I don’t know why writing has that effect. I know that books and books have been written on the subject, but it’s still the closest thing I have to a mystical or spiritual experience. I see, hear, smell, feel something in my mind, and I write it down on paper to share the occasion with someone else.

§

I am also attempting to get back into the swing of things at the gym. I’ve made it at least three days a week since the beginning of the year. My attendance gets iffy when Simon gets a head cold (and boy, he seems to have one at least once a month), because I can’t bring him to the Kids Corner when he has a runny nose. (Hey, I wouldn’t want anyone else bringing their kid in if they had a runny nose; fair is fair.)

When Darin came home I said, “I have to stop cooking on Mondays. Or at least cooking anything complicated. Or anything new. I have the kids all day. I’m a wreck by dinner time.”

“What happened?”

“I made a chicken pot pie. And it’s all going wrong! Look at it!”

He looked in the oven. “It looks fine.”

“But it’s not browning! It says it’s supposed to be golden brown! Something probably went wrong with the dough.”

“Okay, you’re having free-floating anxiety. Just calm down.”

“I forgot the mushrooms! Chicken pot pie is all about the mushrooms and I forgot them.”

“It’ll be okay.”

Later, after eating:

Darin: “You know, with mushrooms this would have been perfect, but this was pretty good. In fact, this is the best thing you’ve made recently.”

Diane began to hit her head against the table. “You can’t say that to someone with free-floating anxiety!”

“Because now you’re wondering what was wrong with all the other meals you’ve made? Everything is fine, hon.”

“I’m only making pasta on Mondays.”

“If that’s what you want to do, that would be fine. But this was great.”

§

I used the chicken pot pie recipe from The Best Recipe. And I have to tell you: I am a die-hard follow-the-recipe-exactly kind of girl, and something always goes wrong with these recipes. This time it was the pastry topping. Add the flour and salt to the food processor, it said. Okay.

Add the butter, cover them in flour, pulse so many times, and it should look like such-and-so.

Huh. Mine still looks kinda just like flour.

Add the shortening. Pulse in. You should get something that looks like yellow cornmeal.

Hmmm. Mine kinda looks like flour with a few lumps here and there. Food processor works okay, I’m pretty sure of that.

Add 3 tablespoons of water to the dough. Add one more tablespoon if and only if the dough isn’t hanging together.

Is adding 2 to 3 more tablespoons okay? Because that’s what it’s taking me to get mine to hang tough.

In the end it turned out okay—tasty, but the kids wouldn’t eat it (of course). Darin was quite pleased. The pastry topping was tasty. But man…The Best Recipe never runs smoothly for me.

Errrr, I accidentally bought some self-rising flour instead of standard, run of the mill flour.

1. What in the heck is “self-rising flour”?
2. Does anyone have any recipes that call for self-rising flour, so I can see if I can rid of this stuff?

Update: Aha. Well, with more judicious Googling than I had been doing, I found the following: “1 cup of self-rising flour contains 1 teaspoon of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. It can be used instead of all-purpose flour in a recipe by reducing the salt and baking powder according to these proportions.”

So to use self-rising flour in recipes asking for flour, baking powder, and salt will require math. Well, okay.

Earlier this week I had open the Complete Cooking Light Cookbook and Simon said, “I wanna make that.” He was pointing to the blueberry pound cake on the cover.

“Sure!” I said. “We’ll make it on the weekend, for breakfast.”

This morning Sophia shook me awake and said, “It’s time to make the cake, Mom.” (I can see what the rest of my life is going to be like. Mistake #1: teaching her what “the weekend” is.)

So we mixed and shook and folded and baked, and after baking we had this:

My intrepid assistant attempts to steal the cake

The cake, unfrosted

The cake, frosted

The inside of said cake

This is, in fact, the first time I have ever made a cake from scratch. Darin made his own birthday cake from scratch, and my contribution to that effort was to clean up, both work area and plate. I have made cakes from boxes. I have never made a cake from scratch before. I didn’t even know you could while growing up.

Blueberry Pound Cake

From: The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook

2 cups granulated sugar
1/3 cup butter or stick margarine, softened
1/2 cup (4 ounces) 1/3-less-fat cream cheese, softened
3 large eggs
1 large egg white
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour, divided
2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
8 oz. lemon low-fat yogurt (1 carton)
Cooking spray
1/2 cup sifted powdered sugar
4 teaspoons lemon juice

1. Preheat oven to 350F.

2. Beat granulated sugar, butter, and cream cheese at medium speed of a mixer until well-blended (about 5 minutes). Add eggs and egg white, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla.

3. Light spoon flour into dry measuring cups and level with a knife. Combine 2 tablespoons flour and blueberries in a small bowl; toss to coat. Combine remaining flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add flour mixture to sugar mixture alternately with yogurt, beginning and ending with flour mixture. Fold in blueberry mixture.

4. Pour batter into a 10-inch tube pan (angel food cake pan) coated with cooking spray. Sharply tap pan once on counter to remove air bubbles. Bake at 350F for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean.

5. Cook cake in pan 10 minutes on a wire rack; remove cake from sides of pan. Cool 15 additional minutes on wire rack; remove cake from bottom of pan. Combine powdered sugar and lemon juice in a small bowl; drizzle over warm cake. Cut into slices using a serrated knife. Yield: 16 servings.

Calories 288 (22% from fat); Fat 6.9g (sat 3.9g, mono 2g, poly 0.4g); Protein 5 g; Carb 52.2g; Fiber 1 g; Chol 56mg; Iron 1.2mg; Sodium 212mg; Calc 45mg

Everyone pronounced themselves quite happy with the cake and all pieces were eaten. (Well, all the pieces that were served, of course. And 16 slices? Hahahahaha. I don’t think so.)

Problems I had with this cake: As you can tell, the crust of the cake is quite a bit darker and harder than the crust of the cake in the book. Overcooked? Too near the heating element? Bundt pan instead of angel food pan? It was still tasty. I just wanna know why mine wasn’t golden brown.

I also made a)too much icing with b)the wrong type of sugar. I used the extrafine granulated instead of powdered, which made the icing grainy instead of smooth.

Eric Alterman speaks for me:

What is one to say about today?To the horror of its well-wishers across the world, the United States—once the “last, best hope of mankind”—is re-inaugurating the worst president in its history; one who has exploited an attack, the success of which its own incompetence helped enable, in order to execute an extremist agenda that is killing thousands, costing trillions and leaving all of us far more insecure than when it began. Before November 2, we could argue it was all a mistake; the guy ran as a “compassionate conservative,” misrepresented his record, Nader screwed everything up, and we actually voted for Gore anyway. It took the Republicans on the Supreme Court—two of whom were appointed by the guy’s dad—to stick the country with this regime filled with ideological fanatics and corrupt incompetents. Now, what are we to say? Fifty-nine million members of our nation do not mind that we were deliberately misled into a war that has drained our blood and treasure to create nothing but hatred and chaos; and that the very people who were at fault have been rewarded and promoted, encouraged to look for new targets to spread their hubristic malevolence. It defies all logic and truthfully, my ability to explain or even fully understand it. One thing is for certain: Based on an virtually unanimous unwillingness to consider its past mistakes and learn from them, things are going to get far, far worse before they get better. Thousands more will die. (Twenty six yesterday.) Trillions more will be squandered. Millions more will grow to hate and revile the name of the United States of America and prepare to attack us in ways for which our government is resolutely unwilling to prepare. Avoidable catastrophe awaits this nation and its victims during the next four years as we will undoubtedly reap what we have sown.

One thing’s for certain, none of this would have been possible without the enthusiastic cooperation—if not cheerleading—of the nation’s mainstream media. Thomas Friedman, considered a liberal opponent of the Bush administration who nevertheless advocated for its mendacious arguments vis-a-vis Iraq and then explicitly excused its willingness to lie because, after all, Hussein was a vicious dictator, cannot help but recognize the damage the administration has done to the nation’s good name the world over. Still, he once again chooses to empower its worst instincts vis-a-vis yet another abominable adventure in Iran by finding what? A single Oxford student in Paris. And pronouncing on the basis of this intrepid bit of investigative reporting that Iran is a “Red state” by extension, would welcome an American invasion of the type outlined by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. Four years from now we will be assessing the fallout from that catastrophe undoubtedly in dead Americans, Iranians and additional hatred—and terrorists—bred the world over. God Bless America. We are going to need all the help we can get.