Coffee heat rising

Pots, Pans, and BKF to the Rescue

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Lenten thanks, Day 35:

What could be better than an old friend who doesn’t forget you even after she leaves town? Thanks, Your Godship, for reminding her to call and come over while she’s visiting here.

While all that conversation was going on, a few days ago, at Frugal Scholar’s place and waypoints, about fancy pans and serviceable alternatives, I was crawling around the Net looking for talk on the subject and came across a thread on some forum (which, alas, I’ve now lost track of) in which people were talking about how to clean scorch and burn stains off their expensive cookware.

You know how if you go off and leave a good stainless pan on the burner and forget it long enough to let it burn dry, it will get dark brown flame marks seared into its shiny exterior? Well, I’ve done that to two very nice pieces, a teakettle and that little 8-inch frying pan whose apparent demise I reported during the aforementioned back-and-forth. One commenter described a way of removing those stains, which I thought were permanent.

Said he: Make a thick paste of Barkeeper’s Helper. Rub this into the stains and then leave it to dry. Leave it at least 10 minutes; longer if desired. Then apply some elbow grease.

Hmh. At the very time I was reading this, I’d pressed a beautiful Calphalon teakettle—very expensive, I’m sure—into service as a flower vase, having scorched and scarred it by, yes, going off and forgetting it on the stove. Calphalon had sent it as a replacement for my all-time favorite whistling teakettle, which a) had a lifetime warranty, b) had corroded through under the baleful influence of Arizona’s godawful water, and c) was no longer being made. I really need a whistling kettle, because the minute I wander off and look at a computer, I become utterly mesmerized and lose track of time as well as reality. That’s just what happened to this lovely, formerly shiny pot.

I’d scrubbed and soaked and done everything I could think of to get rid of the scorch, and finally figured the heat had altered the chemistry of the stainless and there was nothing to be done.

This actually is better than it was when I started the experiment with the Barkeeper’s Friend. What you see above is how it looked after the first application of BKF paste. This cleaned a lot of the stain off, leaving the marks visible here, much better than the state of the pot at the git-go.

Well! If once is good, twice must be better. Soooo…

I coated the whole darned thing with BKF worked together with water to form a slurry. Left it in the utility sink, where it sat for several hours until I had to run the clothes washer. Rubbed and scrubbed and polished with a soft Skoy cloth, and lo! Here’s the result:

Lookee there! It took all the stubborn scorch marks off—without a single scratch. The thing looks just like new.

Well. What would it do to the pitted, scorched little frying pan? This I managed to kill by allowing a strong solution of baking soda and water to boil dry and then leaving it to sit over high heat for an unknown length of time—probably about 45 minutes. The pan had the same dark brown scorch marks all over the exterior, and the interior appeared to be pitted. I’d tried cooking something in it, and it worked, so I figured I wouldn’t throw it away…but I was sad. Very sad.

After letting it sit with BKF paste all over it and then scrubbing like crazy, here’s what I got:

Dang! The interior is as smooth as it was before the little disaster! The slightly yellowish pitting apparently was…what? Baking soda burned on? WhatEVER…it’s gone now! That dark spot is a reflection of the camera. The exterior came pretty clean, too:

That mirror-like finish sure wasn’t there when the thing was covered with burnt-on grease and flame-shaped scorch marks! With one more application of BKF paste, that last little marred spot polished up, and now the entire exterior is shiny and bright.

So. With the help of a little water, a handful of Barkeeper’s Friend, a soft cloth, and a lot of scrubbing, a handsome teakettle and a fine frypan with a copper-core bottom are back in service. 🙂

The Joy of Ethnic Markets

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Lenten thanks, Day 34

Great idea, God, to make us all different. Thanks for all the differences that human beings come in. Wellllll…except maybe for Them Republicans. 😉

Mwa ha ha! Calm down, little heffalumps: it’s a joke! Even God has a sense of humor. Oh, what the heck: maybe especially God has a sense of humor. She’d have to…it’s the only explanation for life on earth.

Yesterday I went up to the Ranch Market, an ethnic grocery store that replaced the old, crummy Fry’s, which some time ago fled the threatened lightrail construction. It’s a nice, compact supermarket, unabashedly Mexican. Walk in the front door and you’re greeted by light-hearted, catchy salsa music; check out and all you’ll hear in line is Spanish.

I love stores like this. Perused the fine selection of peppers, plantains, pork cut especially for posole, fresh-made tortillas, open bins of red, black, peruano, and pinto peans…yeah! Their pasillos were gorgeous. Definitely will be back for some of those. In the meantime, though, I went there specifically in search of some inexpensive meat for the little dog. As grocery prices have ballooned, the chicken and on-sale beef I’ve been buying have gone way out of reach, so I’ve begun looking for ways to get a grip on the food bills. One way is to buy cheaper, lower-grade meat for the hound.

In fact, they had rather little “lower-grade” meat. Most of what was on offer looked fresh and of fairly high quality. And cost. Finally I came across some skinned, boned chicken thighs: $1.99 a pound.

Not great, as prices go, but better than anything else I’ve seen lately.

Well, I just opened up the package to set the meat on the grill, there to cook over the lowest heat possible. What came out was not little three-bite pieces of thigh meat, but great big chunks of dark meat. Each piece is as large as a small steak.

Whaaa?

These aren’t thighs. What they’ve done is they’ve boned and skinned an entire leg plus most or all of the back quarter. Each piece equals most of the meat on a dark-meat quarter-chicken!

Yum!

That dog isn’t getting all of this. Whipped up a nice garlic vinaigrette with a bit of anchovy, rubbed that over the surface of one piece, and topped it with some herbes de provence. The whole mess of meat—enough to feed Cassie for almost a week and me for tonight and maybe tomorrow noon—is now slowly grilling over 200-degree heat.

How convenient to have this nifty Mexican market within walking distance!

Way over on the west side there’s another great ethnic store, the westside outlet of Lee-Lee, an awe-inspiring Asian market. Asian and Pacific, actually. This outfit organizes its aisles by country of origin: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Pakistani, Arabic, Hawaiian, Latin American… OMG! This is the place to buy curries of any and all descriptions. The produce department defies belief. And you can pick out a live fish for your dinner. Prices are far lower than ordinary supermarkets, and you’ll find foods you never even heard of.

If you’re lucky enough to live in a city with some ethnic markets, don’t be too shy to check them out. And if you’re even more lucky and have a friend of that ethnicity, don’t go alone!

🙂

Images:

Banana flower. Derivative work: Muhammed Mahti Karim. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
Mangosteen. KayEss. GNU Free Documentation License.

Are You Cutting Gas Use? CAN You?

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Crude oil is selling at over $106 a barrel this morning. Yesterday one of my students reported that gasoline has reached $4.50 a gallon in L.A.; at least one station was charging $4.75.

Paradoxically, the Times observes that people don’t seem to be cutting back on driving this time around. That writer speculates it’s because the nation is better prepared for surging gas prices, thanks to more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Right. We all ran out and bought Priuses the minute the stock market crashed and we lost our jobs.

Au contraire, O Respected Journalistic Establishment… I suggest something quite different is at work: most people have already cut back driving and gasoline use as much as they can, and so there’s not much room for more savings. Most of us haven’t done it by buying new vehicles, because it’s not cost-effective to do so: add the increase in insurance premiums and registration taxes to the breathtaking cost of a car or truck, and it would take years for the junk to pay for itself in gas savings—even at five bucks a gallon.

Americans don’t change their driving habits much in response to fluctuations in gas prices— and IMHO, we don’t because we can’t. We have to get from point A to point B, and because most cities in this country have no useful public transportation, we’re forced to drive. Few of us are fond of driving, and we grow less fond as gas prices bite deeper into our wallets. The truth is, we’re already not driving any more than absolutely necessary.

Don’t know about you, but that’s certainly true in my precincts. When the economy crashed and I lost my job, one of the first things I did was to limit the number of days a week I’ll drive. And on those days, I carefully plan my route to hit the few stores I have to shop in: Costco, a grocery store, and Home Depot are on my way home from the campus, so I do all my shopping on the days when I have to teach.

In a normal semester, I teach two days a week: Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday. So the bulk of my driving is done on those two days.

I have to attend choir rehearsal Wednesday nights, but the drive to the church is short and doesn’t consume much gas. Same drive has to be made Sunday morning; my son lives just a few blocks south of the church, so I often visit him after the Sunday songfest.

In fact, I’m now beginning to think I can bicycle down to the church on Sunday mornings, if I can find a place to lock up the bike. Won’t do it at night…but there is a bike path of sorts that would make it pretty easy to get down there in the daylight. That would limit routine driving to two days a week.

And I’ve reverted to the hypermiling techniques we learned way back in 2008, which can squeeze more than 25 mpg out of my 18-mpg clunker. Today is the 13th: only seven more days until the new budget cycle starts. On its second fill-up of the month, my car still has more than half a tank of gas left. That means I’ve got a fair shot at making it all the way through to the 20th without having to refill.

It’s now costing me $100 a month to run my car. That’s as much as I can afford to budget and still have enough to eat. With twice-monthly visits to the filling station, I have to cut off the pump at $50, whether it fills the tank or not. Lately, this has meant that in fact, I’m not buying enough to fill the tank. But that was sometimes true before the current run-up in oil prices.

Driving less? No, I’m not driving less…because I’ve already cut my driving back as far as possible!

What about you? Are you driving less? If not, why not?

Image: Oil well in Lubbock, Texas. Flcelloguy. GNU Free Documentation License.

Funny Wins a Prize!

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Lenten thanks, Day 33

Thank goodness there’ll be a break of almost a month between the end of spring semester and the start of summer session!

Hey! Donna Freedman e-mailed to say Funny won Surviving and Thriving’s giveaway of Personal Finance: The Missing Manual! w00t! That’s one of the few PF books I’d actually like to read. Not only that, but she’s throwing in a fine moose calendar, to boot.

🙂

Thanks, Donna!

Taking Care of Your Health Pays

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Lenten thanks, Day 32

Sure is nice to have the house clean…at last!

Staying healthy pays in the obvious way—lower healthcare premiums and fewer sick days—and it returns cash in less self-evident ways, too. It’s not just that you save you, your employer, and your health insurer money on doctor bills and absences. When you’re feeling even the slightest bit off, as a small entrepreneur you’re less able to function profitably. This is true of anyone who earns money through several income streams, from IT consulting to yard-saling. When you don’t feel like working, you don’t; and when you’re not working, you’re not earning.

Yesterday was the first full day that I’ve felt pretty good since I caught the cold that’s been going around town. After a decent night’s sleep, the energy levels were almost back to normal, and I got a lot done, from housecleaning to paying work.

Even a minor ailment can leave you so wrung out you just don’t feel like doing anything: not cleaning, not cooking food for yourself, not shopping for food, and most certainly not actually working. I’ve managed to hold my own in the work arena only in the most tenuous way. A newsletter that I do on a volunteer basis didn’t get published at all (and in fact, now a new month’s issue needs to be done tomorrow!), student papers didn’t get graded on time, and some papers classmates claim to have submitted got lost in the shuffle. A woman I would like to interview for Funny’s “Entrpreneurs” series has never been called (gotta do that today, when I get home from class!).

I should have been more careful about protecting myself from a severe cold that everyone knew was making the rounds. Of course, it’s hard to avoid these bugs, especially when you’re in the classroom with hordes of people carrying hordes of germs. But I did run out of the hand wipes I like to carry in the car, which meant that every time I walked out of a grocery store, climbed behind the steering wheel, and rubbed my itchy nose, I dosed myself with whatever viruses were on the shopping cart handle. And rubbed them all over the steering wheel.

You can’t walk around in a bubble all the time. But you can do a few things to protect yourself:

• Eat well. That means plenty of veggies and fresh fruit, as well as those fine greasy hamburgers we all secretly love.

• During the cold and flu season, when you dine in restaurants, eat only hot foods. Because restaurant workers may not get sick leave, the person preparing your salad in the kitchen could be shedding viruses into it. Heat kills germs, and so it makes sense to stick to hot foods and drinks.

• Drink plenty of water. You can be a little dehydrated even if you’re not thirsty, and dehydration can leave you open to any number of ailments.

• Get some exercise every day—outdoors if it’s not snowing and blustering, indoors if the weather is inclement.

• Try not to hang around people who are coughing and snorting.

• But if you have to, wash your hands frequently and be careful not to eat or drink out of utensils the sick person has handled.

• Keep your hands away from your face! Cold and flu viruses are commonly transmitted when people rub their eyes, scratch their nose, or put their hands in or near their mouths.

• Away from home, carry a package of antiseptic hand wipes in your car and in your purse. As soon as you leave a public place, immediately wipe your hands with one of these.

• Wash produce well. This not only will help to remove chemicals and microbes picked up in the field and at packing plants, it also will eliminate viruses that land on food while it’s sitting in grocery bins.

• Get a flu shot every year. I used to get sick as a dog every winter. Since I started taking flu shots, I haven’t been seriously ill with a respiratory virus once, and I rarely even catch colds.

If you do get sick, stay home as much as possible. Please don’t spread the misery. Drink plenty of liquids, try to eat something, and go to bed.

Long Days, Long Nights

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Lenten thanks, Day  30

Thank God I don’t live in Iowa!

Lenten thanks, Day 31

Today is my mother’s birthday. She would be 100 years old today. I’m glad I had some time in my life with her, and thankful that most Americans no longer buy the products of the people who murdered her. But I do wish my son, who came along just a year after she died, could have met her.

Time to quit complaining because a minor cold has caused me to fall so far behind that I’m working every day to catch up and still falling further behind! Things could be worse: way worse.

Take a look at this incredible footage from Iowa:

Those are just two of the ten tornadoes confirmed to have struck the state. Makes a little hailstorm seem as nothing.

Seeing this news reminded me that I haven’t seen the $650 supplemental check that was supposed to be forthcoming from The Hartford. Just sent off a reminder to the claims adjustor, but I’ll bet he has his hands full with other issues just now. Many other issues, no doubt.

I’m still playing catch-up with the work that piled up while I was sick. With Blackboard deciding not to play nice with anyone who had the temerity to update their browser, student papers have gotten lost in the vast tide of e-mail that floods my in-box every day. Yesterday I tried to sift through all that stuff, but evidently lost some of them, since several students who never miss a deadline turned up with no papers. That means that on top of the full class of papers I have to read today—also belatedly—another four or five dreary freshman comp papers will come thudding in today or tomorrow.

To gild that lily, the chronic insomnia is back with a vengeance. Haven’t had more than four hours’ sleep in a good two weeks. Yesterday after I planned to spend the afternoon reading the rest of the comp papers so I could spend today reading the journalism papers, but after lunch I was so tired I couldn’t hold my eyes open. So laid down for an hour’s nap. Two hours later M’hijito called and jarred me out of a comatose sleep. By then it was 4:30 and I was so groggy I could barely move around the house, much less think clearly enough to read an awful paper, figure out what’s wrong with it, try to explain what’s wrong with it, and try to attach a fair grade to it.

He invited me to dinner. Shouldn’t have been driving the car, but I never turn down that kind of invite. On the way to his place I realized nooo, right about then I was supposed to be headed to evensong. So when I got to his house I e-mailed the choir director to weasel out of that. Really didn’t want to cop out, but I wouldn’t have been much use in those parts.

So while M’hijito shopped for food and then cooked it, I read two papers, both of which were pretty bad. Still was too stunned to eat much…couldn’t get around all of the wonderful dinner he fixed. Then back home to read the rest of the stuff. Finally into bed around midnight.

Dropped two Benadryl by way of drugging myself back to sleep. It worked: slept till 7:30 this morning.

Guess I need to get off the coffee again. And off the wine, which probably doesn’t help things. And off the whine, too! 🙄

A perfect storm of stoont papers doesn’t hold a candle to a perfect storm of 165-mile winds.