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How to Rescue a Scorched Pan—Easy!

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Scorched-Pan

I did it again. Yesterday morning I burned a layer of polenta to the bottom of my favorite saucepan. Again. Gotta stay away from the computer while food is on the stove!

This is a venerable, beloved, and very expensive pan. It must be saved. Luckily, I stumbled across an easy fix, one that requires almost no elbow grease.

It goes like this:

First, soak or rinse away the stuff that’s not burned on. Then drop a generous handful of baking soda into the pan.

Baking-Soda-in-Scorched-Pan

Fill the pan about halfway with water. Put the pan on the stove over high heat and bring to a boil. Do not wander off! Keep an eye out, because this stuff is likely to foam up and bubble over onto the stove. It’s easy to clean up, but who needs an extra mess to fiddle with?

Foaming-Baking-Soda
It WANTS to boil over!

As soon as the baking soda/water solution reaches a boil, turn down the heat to a slow simmer. Let it simmer for about twenty minutes—watch to be sure it won’t bubble over before going off to do something else. No two pansful of this stuff behave the same way.

After it’s simmered for a while, turn off the heat and let it cool. Once the pan and its contents have cooled to room temperature, you should be able to wash out the scorch easily. Because I was doing this at about 11:00 p.m. last night, I left it to soak until this morning.

Here’s the result:

Clean-scorched-pan

This was achieved with no scrubbing! The layer of scorch fell out of the pan like a piece of brown fruit leather and slithered down the garbage disposal. Then I used an ordinary sponge to wipe out the pan, without benefit of Barkeeper’s Helper.

Amazing, no? I’ve also had this work on a Dutch oven where the burnt carbon had annealed onto the stainless steel like enamel. After the baking soda treatment, a metal spatula scraped the stuff off pretty easily. In that case, I did have to apply a little scouring powder to finish the job, but still, surprisingly little effort was required, and a valued pan was rescued.

Police Presence and Property Values

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Ever wonder whether frequent cop helicopter buzzing affects the property values in your neighborhood?

About ten minutes ago one of the cop copters came blasting in, low enough to rattle the windows in the house, and started circling about three lots to the west of me. This is a not-infrequent occurrence here, because my part of the neighborhood forms a buffer between some very upscale, Old Phoenix streets to the east and a cluster of slummy tenements to the west. The residents of the people kennels get up to all sorts of mischief, from petty theft all the way to shooting and killing Phoenix’s Finest. So as you can imagine, the police are somewhat sensitized.

I used to live closer to the tenements. Since I moved about three blocks deeper into the neighborhood, the cop flyby’s haven’t been so noticeable, but in the old house, which stood near the intersection of two main drags just south of a war zone, I could set my clock by the 11:00 p.m. Friday and Saturday night flyovers. They literally would park right over my house while they ran spotlights around the area and hollered down at perps from their bullhorns.

Besides shattering the peace and quiet (well…there’s not that much quiet to be shattered when you’re right on top of two six-lane thoroughfares), these episodes are disturbing. I figure if I were a perp and the cops were on my heels, I would try to get inside someone’s house and hide. If I were armed, I’d be well equipped to intimidate the residents—or worse.

So every time the cops come flying over (again!), I get up and go close and lock the doors and windows. Annoying, especially when the weather’s nice and you’d like to have fresh air moving through the house. This evening when I got up to do that, I found I’d left the back door hanging wide open the last time I let the dog out. Reassuring…

If you were to look at the city crime reports for this neighborhood, you’d see that the crime rate in this area is relatively low. It’s much lower than it is where my son is living, just two or three miles to the south, and we have fewer sex offenders living nearby. So, in theory, if a buyer were sensitive to that issue, the ubiquitous cop helicopters wouldn’t make much difference to the sale of your house. How, anyway, would a person know that we live under a cop helicopter traffic lane without being here to observe it?

On the other hand, middle-class residents’ nervousness about crime, especially in the presence of nearby low-income housing, has its effect.

When SDXB got up in the middle of the night and found two dudes climbing in his front window (he chased them off with a pistol…far as we know, they’re still running), the first thing he did the next morning was alert all the neighbors. Literally. He went from door to door telling the neighbors that he’d caught a couple of cat burglars in the act, after they’d quietly lifted out one of the windowpanes.

Within days, his next-door neighbor put his house on the market and moved away. He underpriced the place so as to unload it quickly, because, being a middle-class homeowner, he could afford to do so. He bought a house in Sun City, where property values are surprisingly low, and pocketed 60 grand in the exchange.

The buyer? Mr. B***, a.k.a. the suspected vandal.

As soon as this guy moved in, he started buying up houses in the neighborhood, often from elderly original owners who had no idea what they were worth. Before long he owned seven houses in this six-block-square neighborhood, five of which he converted into rentals. He added a tumbledown summer kitchen to the house next-door to SDXB, illegally connecting to the city sewer line. He did all the repair and fix-up on the other houses, always without benefit of building permits—apparently in the Old Country building codes, if they exist at all, are most honored in the breach.

These activities served to push property values down, leading to conversion of still more homes into rental properties; hence Biker Boob and Bobbie McGee in the house across the street.

You could argue that it was the absence of police protection that led to this state of affairs. It was an hour before the cops showed up after SDXB called 911 and said he had a .45 trained on two men who were clambering in his front window. And he made a big point of complaining to the neighbors about that, too.

At least nowadays the cops do show up (if noisily) when you call. A 45-minute to an hour’s wait used to be SOP; if someone actually was breaking into your  house, the trick was to open a door on the other side of the building and start screaming FIRE!!! This would usually bring the neighbors, who’ll come out to watch your house burn down but will hide behind locked doors when they think a crime is under way.

Still. There’s no question that when people who can afford to move don’t feel safe in a neighborhood, they will move. One of our long-term neighbors just moved out, before her house even sold, saying she wished to live “closer to people like herself” (read more white folks, less brown folks).

I wonder if too much police protection, especially when it’s conspicuous, is bad for business. The real estate business, that is.

A PF Blogger’s Glass Ceiling?

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A group of women bloggers I recently fell in with subscribes to the idea that a blogger’s glass ceiling holds women writers back from the big time in the PF blogging world. How big the  PF “big time” is remains to be seen. We know several male bloggers—Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar and J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly, among others—have built sites that earn enough to free them from their day jobs to write full-time.

On the other hand, we know successful women PF bloggers are holding forth, too: Silicon Valley Blogger’s The Digerati Life is going well enough to excuse her from the day job treadmill.

I don’t know whether Squawkfox earns proprietor Kerry Taylor enough to quit the ratrace, but this very day she posted an announcement that the Globe and Mail has her in the running for its Best of Money Blogs poll. Quite a few of the sites on my blogroll are written by women—most of them, come to think of it—but I’m pretty sure none of us is making a living at this business. MSN Smart Spending supports a couple of long-time women journalists, but they’re freelance contractors with no health insurance and, one might fairly guess, frugal wages. On the other hand, plenty of male bloggers aren’t making a nickel and a dime to rub together, either.

Is there some sort of good ole boys’ club out there for bloggers, a virtual country club where men go to play computer golf games together, every day but Ladies’ Day? It’s one of several issues that have been floating around in my coffee cup as I mull over ways to improve on Funny about Money and build its readership. Having reflected on this for a while, I really don’t think so.

Clive Thompson published a fairly nuanced article in a 2006 issue of New York Magazine, reflecting on the permutations of blogger success. He reports on research showing that one key indicator of a blog’s success is the number of links pointing to it, particularly links on large sites. The “A-list,” as he calls the most successful of the monetized blogs, is extremely small; “most bloggers toil in total obscurity.” This isn’t surprising, and by extension it’s unsurprising that lots of women bloggers are among the totally obscure, along with lots of men bloggers.

If you look at the blogs that men write—the ones that seem to be successfully monetized—and the blogs that women write, you see some fundamental differences. Successful blogs tend to be tightly focused; that is not often true of women’s blogs, which characteristically are rather gestalt. I believe that difference stems from men’s and women’s responses to fundamentally different life experiences. Women’s daily lives are gestalt, scattered among a score of conflicting responsibilities, whereas men’s daily lives are often spent on a job where they focus for long periods on the work at hand.

Consider, for example, Peter Rojas, who in 2006 was supposedly “the best-compensated blogger in history.” When Thompson visited him, we learn,

he’s sitting at an Ikea desk bedecked with three flat-panel screens and looking relatively fresh, considering he’s just come off another eleven-hour blogging jag. Like most A-list bloggers, he hit his keyboard before dawn and posted straight through until dinner. “Anyone can start a blog, and anyone can make it grow,” he says, sipping a glass of water. “But to keep it there? It’s fucking hard work, man. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. Eighty-hour weeks since I started.”

How many of us, whether we’re women or not, have 11 hours a day to spend on a single task? Writing at Work It, Mom, Lylah Alphonse, proprietor of Write. Edit. Repeat, puts it in a nutshell:

It’s about the daily juggle—my career, my commute, freelance work, homework, housework, married life, social life, and parenting—and finding the time to get it all done.

The issue for women is that few of us have 11 uninterrupted hours, or even eight, or even six, in which to develop, write, and market a blog. Observing my own work habits, I can say they reflect a lifetime of adaptation to demands on my time that come from every direction: work, friends, parenthood, wifehood, school, housekeeping, yard care, pool care, shopping, money management, pet care, healthcare, bureaucrats, editors, clients, advertisers, neighbors, cops…you name it, and somebody thinks they have a claim on my time that’s more important than anything I imagine I should be doing with my time.

The natural response to a cacophony of demands like this is to learn to do several things at once. And that is a very inefficient way of working. Yesterday, for example, around trying trying to get my blogging act together I had to…

• Walk with a friend at dawn, dragging the dog along by way of getting two things done at once;
• Call WellPoint to find out where the bill for Medicare Part D is, necessitating another time-wasting turn through a punch-a-button phone maze;
• Check and adjust pool chemicals;
• Wash two weeks’ worth of laundry;
• Read 80 pages of technical copy for a client;
• Rough out a calendar for one of my fall courses;
• Dredge up some old university-level course materials, rewrite and reformat 21 single-spaced pages newly targeted for lower-division community college students, and key them to the proposed new course syllabus;
• Create another single-spaced page of boilerplate copy-&-pastable comments keyed to this material;
• Feed the dog;
• Feed myself;
• Read page proofs;
• Water the plants…

I was in front of my computer more on than off from about 5:30 in the morning to about 11:00 at night. But as you can see, that time was interrupted repeatedly, and relatively little of it was spent focusing on what I thought of as the day’s primary task: learning more about driving traffic to FaM and putting some of those strategies into gear.

You know…if you have a wife who’s doing those household tasks and doing battle with the outside world, you have a lot more space in which to focus on your enterprise. And an enterprise—a business enterprise—is what a blog ultimately is. My guess is that men are socialized in many ways to focus more directly on the job at hand and are better at resisting interruption.

As I write this, I’m also dinking with trying to figure out how to get Alexa‘s code into FaM’s header. And really I do need to get up and drive to the oculist’s shop and find out why those glasses that were supposed to have been done last Wednesday haven’t surfaced. And brush my teeth and take a shower and wash my hair and fertilize the citrus trees and…oh, yeah: I forgot to eat, too.

Compare a few women’s PF sites with a few men’s, and by and large you see the difference I mentioned above. Check out the topics of the last few blogs at these Male-run and Female-run sites:

The Simple Dollar (M)
• Walking from your mortgage
• Employees’ attitudes
• Financial advice to readers
• Book review
• Frugal tips

Budgeting in the Fun Stuff (F)
• Monthly household budget
• Splurge on bedroom furniture
• Yakezie Alexa ranking
• Weekly favorites link-love roundup
• Gardening

Bargaineering (M)
• Federal legislation re extending tax cuts and unemployment compensation
• Increase on FDIC insurance to become permanent
• Moving a CD ladder to another bank
• Ally Bank’s .25% CD renewal bonus
• “Legal ripoffs”

Out of Debt Again (F)
• Top referrers
• Paperless bank withdrawals?
• Plan to pay off Discovery card
• Gardening
• Review of 2010 Quicken Deluxe

Darwin’s Finance (M)
• Analysis of energy tax credit toward central AC
• Gold bubble?
• Debt & major financial crises
• Saving for college
• Greek debt crisis & the markets

A Gai Shan Life (F)
• Summer travel costs
• Took out a store credit card
• Relaxing; blog challenge
• Weddings & cost of travel
• Freelancing as lifestyle

Five-Cent Nickel (M)
• Mortgage strategies
• America’s worst banks
• Credit card offers
• Traditional vs. Roth IRAs
• Sallie Mae raises online savings rate

Frugal Scholar (F)
• Children’s books
• Pantry remodel leads to domestic squabble, food ruminations
• Cookbook collection
• Pantry project (with literary references)
• Gardening & frugality

Get Rich Slowly (M)
• Home safety precautions
• Personal data collection
• The $20 challenge
• Learning from Baby Boomer experience
• Finishing what you started
(These are all guest posts, since JD has been on vacation)

The Digerati Life (F)
• Nintendo Wii games to cut down her gym costs
• Credit card review
• Carnival of Financial Planning
• How to lower homowner’s insurance costs
• Rant at annoying “Wall Street trader letter” circulating on Web

Notice how tightly focused the men’s most recent posts are? While the women are not exactly off-topic, they tend to write more personally and they often wander from the topic of personal finance in its strictest sense. Counting a discussion of a financial matter framed in terms of the current events in one’s own life as “personal” posts, I come up with this quantitative comparison of subject matter:

Men
• Personal Finance, Economy: 21
• Personal commentary: 2
• Blogging: 0
• Other: 2

Women
• Personal finance, Economy: 5
• Personal commentary: 13
• Blogging: 5
• Other: 2

Sooo… Does this have meaning? Should all us girls who just wanna have fun making a living off blogging start copying the boys?

Not IMHO. But I do think we need to recognize that women have a different blogging style from men’s. Possibly we have different things to say to the world.  Moi, I like reading personal takes on personal finance (isn’t that why we call it “personal,” after all?)—but I have to recognize that may restrict my readership to other women.

The other lesson I take from this observation is some of the men’s blogs show how much focused energy is devoted to those sites. Making one of these things fly pretty clearly requires stretches of uninterrupted concentration. You don’t get the sense of gestalt from, say, The Simple Dollar, where Trent is posting at least two articles a day, often lengthy ones, that you do where authors appear to be writing on the fly, while they’re braiding the threads of their lives and can’t let go of even one.

Choir Is Over…

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Today was the choir’s last performance before its summer hiatus. {sigh}

Everyone else, I expect, is happy for a break—especially the paid staff, who take the term “hard-working” to a whole new level of meaning. But I’ll miss it. When you don’t have much of a life, you tend to get invested in an activity that brings you together with a bunch of nice people.

I really will miss the superb voices of the professionals and near-professionals who form the chamber choir. They sing each Sunday during communion. It was this incredible music that drew me to the church: attending a service there is like going to a chamber music concert. Every week. All through the fall, winter, and spring.

We had a great party this afternoon, wherein the James Beard potatoes au gratin knockoff was a humble entry among some truly awesome dishes. One couple occasionally brings salmon smoked in their own cooker—it is invariably splendid. Everything was good; one broccoli salad was just delicious, and I don’t even like broccoli! And some of those people are dessert artists.

Many of them leave town for the summer, since they own vacation homes or they live somewhere else and spend the winters here. Almost all are gone for at least a week or two. But I expect some of them will show up at the regular Sunday services. I suppose if I would get myself in gear on Sundays, I could reconnect with them there over the summer.

I’m not very churchly myself. But the director said we could sit in the choir loft, if we chose, during the summer services. That would work: first because I enjoy watching the organist as she plays, and second because it’s amazing to be close to the various musicians who come in to perform. And third, because it makes it easy for me to evade going down to the communion rail. I’m superstitiously averse to drinking out of a communal chalice, and I do not believe for a moment that dipping the host in the wine is one whit more sanitary than sipping shared wine.

Really, I don’t fare well with colds or the flu—almost died from one case of influenza, and recovery takes about twice as long as it does for most people—and so I don’t do things that put me at risk. As adjunct faculty, I get no sick leave; the college docks your pay if you don’t show up, and I can’t afford to lose even one day’s shekels, much less a whole week’s worth. And when you live alone, getting sick can be difficult, because there’s no one to help you or to get you something to eat when you can’t drag yourself into the kitchen.

So that’s my excuse. 😉

Welp, it’s gunna be a long, hot summer, financially very scary. I have no idea when or how the college will pay for the online course prep and so can’t rely on that income to cover bills. While the Copyeditor’s Desk holds some funds that could cover a shortfall, I want to keep that money in the bank in case I need it this fall. There’s no guarantee that either of the eight-week courses slated for fall semester will make. If either fails to make, it’ll be a nuisance; if they’re both canceled, I’ll need every penny the S-corporation can disgorge to make ends meet. At the moment, though, it does contain enough to carry me through the fall semester, and then some. I just don’t want to diddle it away over the summer.

The aftermath of the mad shopping spree, the dental bill, and the glasses comes due with this month’s AMEX bill, speaking of diddling money away. However, it appears that diddle-it-away savings will cover those extravaganzas. So I’m pretty certain the overage collected during the cool winter months, when I didn’t have to run either the heat or the water, will carry me through the summer.

I may need some divine intervention, though. It could be worth visiting the church now and again.

Shrine-of-Guadalupe

Image: pgnielsen79, Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Wikipedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The Ultimate Church Potluck Dish

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Sooo…. The instant the sign-up sheet for the end-of-year choir party surfaced, I shot over like a rocket to get my name in first, so as not to be cut off at the pass in my quest to volunteer to bring my favorite amazingly cheap but amazingly delicious dish, potatoes au gratin.

Never sign up for anything when you’re distracted by ambition. My beady little eyes were so blinded by the glory of getting there first that I neglected to consider the venue. This shindig is not taking place at the church, which has a kitchen (two of them, actually) with enough refrigerator space to accommodate the 11th armored division’s mobile mess hall. It’s happening at the choir director’s house.

{sigh} What was I to do with a bubbling, 350-degree panful of potatoes, sauce, and cheese for the two hours in which we are to rehearse and perform before the party starts?

Couldn’t easily take it with me. It would have to be cooked in the church kitchen, which would mean it would be overcooked, since the period between the time we process up the aisle and the time the last note soars out of the organ is over an hour. Also, it would be wildly hot: getting a pan of searing hot potatoes from the stove to my car through a mob of people and from my car to the choir director’s house would be a challenge…to say nothing of figuring out how to keep the pan from melting the synthetic rugs in my car.

Having chewed on this dilemma for a week, I’d about decided to punt with potato salad. Then I flipped open my ancient Beard’s American Cookery, and what should I find but M. Blot’s Recipe for au Gratin Potatoes. This little gem uses precooked potatoes. Not only that, but it turns out to be very easy to prepare—much easier than the traditional lasagna-like layering of potatoes, butter, béchamel sauce, cheese, and crumbs.

And it takes ten minutes flat to warm in a 400-degree oven.

E-mail to the boss: OK to use your oven to heat this thing? Boss to underling: Nooo problem—we have all our ovens at the choir’s disposal.

Though I haven’t tasted this yet, obviously (because the party’s tomorrow), I did prepare it this morning, and it looks delicious. The sauce is splendidly savory.

Here’s my adaptation, enlarged for a crowd:

You need:

6 or 8 boiling potatoes
2 cups milk or 1½ cup milk and ½ cup heavy cream
4 Tbsp butter
4 Tbsp flour
4 egg yolks, beaten
cayenne pepper
salt & pepper to taste
a cup or so of shredded cheddar or Gruyère cheese (I combined Irish cheddar with Jarlsburg)
more butter to oil the pan
buttered breadcrumbs

Wash the potatoes but don’t bother to peel them. Bring a big kettle of water to the boil and place the potatoes in it. Cook over medium-high heat until a knife blade can be inserted easily into one of the larger potatoes.

Meanwhile, grate the cheese and beat the four egg yolks.

When the potatoes are done, drain them in a colander. Allow to cool for a few minutes. At this point, the peels will slip right off—so, when the potatoes are cool enough to touch, remove these with your hands and then slice the potatoes fairly thickly.

Butter an oblong baking dish.

Next, make the béchamel sauce.

How to make the béchamel:

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and cook gently, stirring, until the butter foams. Add the milk (or milk + cream) and heat over medium-high heat, stirring frequently and watching, until the sauce thickens. Flavor to taste with cayenne, salt, and pepper. Remove the pan from the heat. With the pan off the heat, stir in the beaten egg yolks.

Now add the grated cheese to the hot sauce and stir well to blend.

All that remains to do is to arrange a layer of about half the sliced, cooked potatoes over the bottom of the baking pan. Spread half of the béchamel-cheese sauce over these, and then layer the rest of the potatoes atop that. Spread the rest of the sauce over the second layer. Finally, top it with buttered bread crumbs.

To cook: heat in a 400-degree oven about ten minutes or until heated through.

Since I expect there’ll be little room in the fridge at 9:00 a.m. and I don’t want anyone stacking stuff on top of the tinfoil-covered pan, I’ll  wrap it in a big plastic bag with several of those cold brick-shaped things, frozen solid. That should keep it cool until it goes in the oven at 11:00.

Voilà! A scrumptious dish guaranteed to turn the best of church ladies green with envy, hand-made by you with almost no hassle.

Yum!