The Great Desert University is advertising a job opening at the Tempe campus. They want a business writer who can do PR for their business services branch. It’s a job I could do in my sleep, and it pays $50,000 to $52,000.
Fifty grand, though it’s only three-quarters of what I was earning, would go a long way toward solving all my money problems. It would cover my part of the mortgage on the upside-down house from now until long after the cows come home, leaving plenty to diddle away on extravagances such as clothes and a cell phone. And it would get me back into Delta Dental—I need to get my teeth cleaned, probably need a couple of new crowns, and am afraid to even talk to a dentist about what that’s going to cost.
But…
Yesterday I drove out to campus to take my friend Tina to lunch, by way of thanking her for all the wonderful things she’s done for me this year.
You know, just the prospect of driving from The Funny Farm out to Tempe every day is more than I can contemplate. The trip to GDU is just dreary, and then once you get there, where are you? The campus is so ugly and so depressing…as aesthetics alone go, to say nothing of what’s inside the buildings.
After an evening of light rain, today is just beautiful, the weather like San Francisco’s. The dog and I went for a long walk through the adjacent ritzy neighborhood, schmoozed with several neighbors beneath golden fall trees, tried to kiss a cat, returned feeling very content.
I did not have to drive through homicidal rush-hour traffic to get to an office at 8:00 this morning. I did not have to beg some supervisor or take “vacation” time to be here to intercept the workmen who are changing out the hail-battered air conditioning unit…why on EARTH would I want to take on another full-time job? If there’s really some reason for such a strange compulsion, surely I can find better places to work!
Dang. I’ve already written an application letter. It’s good. When they see this thing, they’ll fall all over themselves to hire me. But y’know what? Think I’ll delete it from the hard drive. I’d rather go hungry than go back to work at that place.
A moment’s exploration revealed that AARP offers Delta Dental at a reasonable rate, with no waiting period for routine care. I’ve re-upped, having found a full year’s premiums can comfortably be paid in one swell foop. And now I believe I’ll ride the new purple bike through the neighborhood. Unemployment hath its charms.
Where is it written that holiday dinners have to feature turkey? Right here it’s about to be written that they should not feature turkey!
Yesterday I cooked a turkey that I’d found at Safeway for a good price. As you know, I feed Cassie the Corgi real food, a mix of about half starch & veggies and half meat. For this purpose I look for meat that’s under $2 a pound—as far under as possible. The turkey was only $1.29/pound. True, the package said it was “up to” 6 percent water, and true, it was a product of one of those hideous mass farming operations. But the poor critter was dead already, so why waste the meat, eh?
Well, after roasting in the oven, so much water leached out of it that I was moved to wonder exactly how much water my money had bought. So I poured it into a big measuring cup and skimmed off the fat. It filled a quart measuring cup. Set on the kitchen scale, it weighed over two pounds.
That’s right…I paid almost $4.00 for water. Bad-tasting water, we might add. The whole bird had a funny off-taste, kind of chemically or dirty-tasting.
Folks, I’ve been around the block a few times and I know what turkey is supposed to taste like. This is not nostalgia for a fantasy “good ole days.” American turkeys have tasted terrible for decades. When we were in England, a friend invited us for Christmas dinner and insisted on serving turkey. We really didn’t want to take the train down to Kent from London and stay overnight for what we expected would be a mediocre meal, but we enjoyed our friends as so of course we accepted their invitation. The turkey was incredible: it actually tasted like turkey used to taste, the way it’s supposed to taste. So it’s not my subjective opinion that American turkey doesn’t taste like turkey.
Thank goodness I didn’t serve this thing up to guests yesterday. It’s barely adequate for dog food.
In addition to poor flavor and questionable provenance, turkey is a nuisance to prepare. The bloated giants coming out of factory farms are too large to handle easily or safely, they often come frozen and take days to defrost, and few people know what to do with the carcass or have time to do anything with it, so the leftovers go to waste.
Do yourself a favor and serve up something other than turkey. Let’s consider three options: pork, beef, lamb, and some other variety of fowl.
If you’re not Jewish or Muslim, pork is relatively inexpensive and it tastes ten times better than turkey. Some cuts can even be stuffed, if your friends and family just can’t live without stuffing. Pork loin is tender, delicious, and easy to cook. Personally, I prefer a good pork loin to ham, which is oversalted and overprocessed. Here’s how to fix it:
Buy a pork loin roast large enough to serve all your guests. It’s OK to buy two or three, if one won’t suffice. While you’re at the store, get some fennel seed, dry sage, garlic, onion, a can or box of low-salt chicken broth, and a bottle of inexpensive dry white wine. If you don’t have any olive oil around the house, buy a small bottle of that, too. You’ll need some flour; if you don’t keep flour in the house, buy the smallest bag you can find on the grocer’s shelves.
For each decently sized roast, pour out enough fennel seed to fill the palm of your hand. Toss that into a blender. Add about 1/4 that much sage. Cover the blender cup and whirl the spices long enough to pulverize the fennel seeds. Peel one or two cloves of garlic and toss those into the blender. Add about two teaspoons salt. Pulse the blender briefly–just long enough to chop (not liquefy!) the garlic and mix in the salt.
Next, pour a little olive oil over the roast and rub it around. Wipe your hands on a paper towel. Then pat and rub the spice mix all over the surface of your roast. Stick a meat thermometer into the roast and set the meat in an oven-proof pan that is not made of glass.
Cut up a couple of nice sweet onions. Arrange these around the base of the roast. If you’ve got some carrots, toss those in there, too. Preheat the oven; for tenderloin, set the oven at about 400 degrees; for a loin roast, at about 325 to 350 degrees. Cook a boneless loin or tenderloin about 25 to 30 minutes a pound; a bone-in loin about 20 to 25 minutes per pound. The thermometer should say 160 to 170 degrees.
Now, what if people just must have stuffing? For heaven’s sake. Get yourself some decent bread—a French or Italian-style baguette will work. You’ll need a bunch of parsley, a couple cloves of garlic, and some bottled herbs. Break the bread into pieces and whirl them in the blender or food processor to turn the stuff into crumbs. Add a peeled clove of garlic, roughly chopped garlic, a little salt, and a teaspoon or so of whatever greenish bottled herbs you like. Tarragon is always nice. It’s hard to go wrong with thyme or sage, too, but remember a little sage goes a long way. Whack this stuff around in the blender with the bread crumbs until it’s nicely chopped and blended together. Divide the pork into two, three, or four smaller roasts, depending on how much you have. Coat as above with a flavorful rub. Set the pieces of roast in the pan and pack this stuffing between them. Secure the package with string, or use those metal turkey-stuffing skewers to hold them together. Pour a little olive over the stuffing, and cook as above.
If you don’t eat pork, or if you’ve noticed that factory-farmed meat of the pig also doesn’t taste like real pork, substitute a good standing rib roast for the above, dispensing with the stuffing (35 to 40 minutes a pound at 325 degrees). Use the same rub, or simply season to taste with salt and lots of fresh-ground pepper.
Lamb makes superb feasting food. Try to get imported New Zealand lamb, which is far superior to the muttony American lamb. It should be cooked rare to medium; if you like your meat well-done, opt for something else. Cook a bone-in leg of lamb 15 to 20 minutes/pound for rare and 20 to 25 minutes/pound for medium; boneless leg, 20 minutes/pound for rare or 25 minutes/pound for medium. Over the rub described above, spread a layer of Dijon-style mustard before roasting.
Or cook a passle of Cornish game hens, one for each guest. These also will roast in about 45 minutes or an hour in a 325- to 350-degree oven. These can be stuffed, if you feel compelled to work that hard, but I wouldn’t be bothered. Instead put some stuffing (see above; add a few pecans or walnuts if so moved) in a baking dish, moisten it very slightly with chicken broth and olive oil, cover, and bake in the oven with the other food. Duck is good, as is goose, but it is not hassle-free; avoid if you’re looking for ease of preparation.
While the meat roasts, put things into the oven to cook with it.Baked potatoes should be first on the list. Wash these; dig out any damaged spots with the tip of your paring knife. Punch each potato all over with the tip of your knife (otherwise it can explode inside your oven). Stick these on a rack in the oven at the time you put in the roast.
It’s hard to miss with butternut squash. Slice the squash in half lengthwise, scrape out and discard the seeds (yes, I know, you can roast them for a snack; do this only if hassle-free is not your main goal). Line a cookie sheet or other pan with tinfoil; rub olive oil over the surface of the tinfoil. About an hour before the meat is done, set the squash cut-side down on the tinfoil and stick it in the oven. Melt some butter in a small pan with a liberal squirt of honey. After a half hour, turn the squash over so the cut side is up. Pour the honey butter in the hole and brush some of on the rest of the squash. If possible, reserve some of the butter for serving. Cook another half-hour, until perfectly tender.
Once all these things are in the oven (or, if you’re ambitious, earlier in the day), make a green salad. For ultimate ease, buy some packaged precut salad greens. For maximal laziness, do nothing more—just serve it up with some bottle salad dressing. With minimal extra effort, you can cut up one or two little green onions, chop a carrot, add some canned marinated artichoke, and, at the last minute, cut up some tomato and toss that in. Use your favorite bottled dressing or make a real dressing with one part sour stuff (lemon juice, wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar, or even plain cider vinegar) to three parts olive oil, seasoned to taste with salt & pepper and some bottled herbs.
Now the meat and veggies are cooked and you have those baked potatoes. You can serve them with Greek-style yogurt or sour cream for those who like their potatoes that way. But if you’ve made a good pork roast, you have killer pan drippings to make the gravy from heaven. Ditto a beef roast. The potatoes cry out for the stuff.
This is the only thing you’re going to cook on the stovetop, and if you’ve played your cards right, it’s the only thing you’re going to do any visible work on while your guests are present.
Remove the meat from the pan. Get someone else to slice it. Open the bottle of cheap wine; use red for beef, white for pork. Open the can or box of chicken broth (you can use beef broth for roast beef, or just wine). Remove any vegetables from the drippings and discard (or, if they’re not blackened and too greasy, consider serving them on the side).
If the drippings are very fatty, pour off all but about two tablespoons of melted fat, reserving the delicious brown drippings in the pan. Place the pan over a burner and turn on the heat to medium-high. Sprinkle two or three tablespoons of flour over the drippings. Stir this around to get the flour toasting a bit. Carefully pour in some broth, stirring around to mix. Add wine. I like about 50-50 wine and broth, but it’s very forgiving. You can use all wine or all broth, whatever works for you. Stir this around some more over the heat. Observe the thickness. Add more liquid to thin, if desired. If the gravy seems too thin, get a coffee mug and mix about two tablespoons of flour with about a half- or three-quarters mug of wine or broth, stirring well to eliminate any lumps. Mix this in a little at a time with the gravy to achieve the desired thickness.
If your pan drippings are not mostly grease but instead contain a lot of liquid, mix flour with wine from the git-go, rather than starting by toasting the flour in the oily drippings.
And that’s it. Slice the butternut squash into serving-size pieces, pour the rest of the honey butter over them, serve everything up with some wine or beer, and enjoy.
Dessert? Grocery store or baker. It’s hard to ruin pumpkin pie and some bakers can make a decent apple pie. Pick up a good pie at the bakery and, if you crave whipping cream, get the canned variety. Most people can’t tell the difference. You’re into healthy eating ? Well, that’s easy: serve a bowl of fresh fruit for dessert, accompanied by a plate of two or three excellent, sharply flavored cheeses and a sweet dessert wine or a pot of coffee.
Images:
Roast Pig, by Elias Tomaras. Public domain.
Red Onions, by Stephen Ausmus. Public domain.
Butternut Squash, Wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License.
Apple Pie: USDA. Public domain.
My belts have worn out or ceased to fit, probably a function of buying cheapies at Target and eating a bit too much good food. Have you noticed—if you’re of the female persuasion—how difficult it’s gotten to find an attractive belt that’s also utilitarian? The department stores are full of various flights of leather, plastic, and chain fancy, none of them designed do much other than make you look like you went on a fugue instead of a shopping trip. They have holes. They have hooks. They have chains. They have rhinestones. They have animal hair. They have dangly charms. They have hinges. But they don’t fit through the belt loops of a normal pair of bluejeans!
The ones that do are plain beyond plain, flat unembellished uninteresting strips of leather with buckles made of base metal. Good for holding up your jeans while you’re shoveling weeds out of the garden, but not something you’d wear to be seen in public.
So, I’ve raised my sights above the Target sale rack:
Yes: Brighton belts. And yeah, I know they cost three times what Target is charging. But my experience with these better-quality belts has been that they last for years, not just months. Either of the ones in the top left image would be perfect for jeans or other casual slacks. I need both a black and a brown belt, and that style, the Denver Diamond, comes in both colors. I think the Dakota Chevron Diamond,on the top right, would be great with jeans, too, but Amazon seems not to have it in women’s sizes. And I don’t know whether a men’s 36 is the same as a women’s 36—Brighton women’s belts tend to run small, so there’s no way of guessing how they compare or whether a fat old lady could wear a men’s version in the same size.
Brighton does carry some dressier women’s belts. Below the cowgirl numbers, for example, Brighton Classics Womens Brown & Silver Belt is extremely nice but not gaudy. Alas, they don’t have it in my size.
The Brighton stores in the malls here have a slightly larger selection of women’s belts. Some are way baroque. But a few are very nice, along these lines. If you don’t mind crowds and disconnected salesladies.
Check out this lovely painting La Maya did yesterday at her mentor’s studio!
She calls it “Roses for Love.”
This is the time of year for roses in southern Arizona. The plants are so overjoyed to have survived another brutal summer, they burst forth in spectacular blooms. For some reason, the rose scent seems to be stronger during the fall than in the springtime. A variety of deep red rose that grows here has a hypnotic perfume.
La Maya has posted a number of new works since she started her own website. The still life has always been her forte, and she has done some very nice landscapes. The ones she’s got online right now picture the Imperial Valley and the high Arizona desert. I wish she still had the one she did when she and La Bethulia were in Spain—they came across an incredible field of lavender with mountains in the background. Somebody bought that piece instantly, and she’s never tried to reproduce it. It was gorgeous.
Recently she’s started to do some portraiture, too. That’s brave. I never have been able to draw or paint an acceptable image of a human being. That takes some talent.
Here’s a tool to discover whether your username or e-mail was hacked in the recent attack on Gawker Media and its manifold sites. If like me you downloaded the list of compromised usernames, you found they were all “hashed,” and no explanation of how to translate your username or e-mail into the code used in the document was given. This tool at GawkerCheck converts your comprehensible terms into “hash” and then provides a list for you to search.
Here’s another tool from Slate that’s easier to use. If you want to test more than one username or e-mail, reload the page between attempts.
By now you probably realize that Gawker itself was not the only hacked site. Others include
This morning (Monday) Consumerist reported that when the site went over to Consumer Reports, subscribers were asked to change their passwords. Some people, however, neglected to do so; if you were among them, your data might be compromised.
GawkerCheck claims that, contrary to some reports, if you signed in to any of these sites through Twitter or Facebook, some of your information may appear in the hacked database; while your password will not have slipped through, you still could be at some risk. Might want to consider setting up a dummy e-mail address or two by way of shifting your identity.
If you’re in the habit of using one or two passwords at several sites, it would be wise to change them forthwith. Start with anything even faintly resembling a financial institution and then move on to your e-mail and websites. GawkerCheck advises not changing your password on the Gawker sites.
As of this morning, I couldn’t access the password-change function at Consumerist. If I ever had one at Lifehacker, I sure can’t remember what it was. Probably is outdated by now, if it ever existed. Obviously, though, if the information vandals are still able to hack into the databases, changing your password there would be highly counterproductive.
So here we are at the first stage of hiring workmen to replace the air conditioner and reroof the house. The insurance company ponied up about $11,100 for a new AC, a new roof, and repairs to the CoolDeck. That amount will cover the air conditioner and the roof, just barely.
I joined up Angie’s List by way of getting names of contractors who have at least not driven SOME people into fits of rage. The result was a little mixed, but I did find a roofer who’s supposedly OK. And, having become disenchanted with my own AC guy after the company changed hands, I’d already learned of one air-conditioning contractor from my neighbor Sally; the other new neighbors, who moved in to Dave’s (former) Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, recommended a second one based in Sunnyslope, right around the corner from us.
M’hijito and I have used a roofer—both houses needed to be reroofed shortly after we purchased them—who did a good job and seemed to be honest. I called him and found him strangely reluctant, but he showed up and produced a bid of $7,200: almost $2,000 more than he bid five years ago to roof the same house, when he had to replace rotted plywood to the tune of $48.50 per sheet.
The Sunnyslope roofer wanted $5,400 to install a 14-seer Goodman air conditioner, the smallest SEER for which the government will disgorge a $1,500 tax kickback on a high-efficiency unit.
Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever see any tax refund from that federal offer, because it’s unlikely that I will pay any taxes at all this year. Thanks to the costs of Medicare B, Medicare D, Medigap, and long-term care insurance, my medical costs—before the $700 pair of glasses—far exceed 7.5% of my income. Social Security, the main source of my 2010 income, is taxed under some strange and incomprehensible system that keeps the cost fairly low, and I’ve hardly drawn down any of my savings this year. Income from teaching is even more minuscule than Social Security benefits. And the S-corporation will shelter almost all my freelance income, which was more minuscule still.
So…I’m going to have to land the best deal I can on the least cheesy product anyone will offer me.
The Sunnyslope air-conditioning guy came in with a bid of $5,400, and he proposed to defraud my insurance company by emanating a bid for a 14-SEER unit but calling it 13-SEER, since he claimed that the insurance company would pay for nothing better than 13-SEER—once again proving that crime doesn’t pay. Sally’s guy issued a bid for $5,200 for 14-SEER, hold the bullshit.
Two hundred dollars isn’t a big difference, but he didn’t propose to lie to the insurer. In my experience, if a person will cheat someone else, sooner or later he’ll cheat you, too.
Now about that $7,200 roof… The guy whose name I got from Angie’s list gave me a bid of $6,100, eleven hundred bucks better than my old roofer’s proposal. Same job, same quality of shingling (different brand, though), a little higher on replacing plywood, decking, molding, and fascia.
That’s getting down into the almost reasonable range.
$6,100 + $5,200 = $11,300
Only a couple hundred bucks more than the insurance has paid.
However, here is a very interesting site, where various kinds of contractors go online and talk shop. Get into the roofers’ forum, explore around, and eventually you’ll come to a thread where the men are chatting about a practice in which the outfits that descend on a town after a storm offer to pay a homeowner’s deductible to get their business. Well, there is an outfit in the neighborhood just now that doesn’t appear to be altogether fly-by-night. It’s a little suspicious that the company’s A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau dates from November of 2010 (and, one might note, that when one looks into how you apply for an A+ rating, one is not left with much confidence in that), but the Registrar of Contractors shows that they’ve been in business for 20 years. They’re flying through with crews of six or eight men and reroofing each house in a day or two. I could ask for a bid and find out if they’ll come down the amount of the $2,000 deductible.
The forum-going roofing guys think this practice is unethical. Some of them think it’s illegal—they think it’s insurance fraud. However, it’s hard to see how it would be fraudulent if the insurance company has already paid out and has seen bids from legitimate companies that are not basing their bids on any such schemes. Once the insurance company has paid what its representatives think is fair, it’s up to the homeowner to find the best price within the confines of the amount she has to work with.
What fun! I can hardly wait to get started on the construction.
on the top right, would be great with jeans, too, but Amazon seems not to have it in women’s sizes. And I don’t know whether a men’s 36 is the same as a women’s 36—Brighton women’s belts tend to run small, so there’s no way of guessing how they compare or whether a fat old lady could wear a men’s version in the same size.
is extremely nice but not gaudy. Alas, they don’t have it in my size.
