Coffee heat rising

A Handmade Christmas Present: Bath Powder

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Have you noticed how difficult it’s getting to buy scented bath powder? Drugstores have about stopped carrying it—probably because talc is now believed to cause respiratory problems and even cancer. You can still buy it at a department store, but a brand like Guerlain or Lanvin charges sixty bucks for a box of it!

After I decided to move up from bluejeans last spring, I was reminded of why one wants bath powder: it’s mighty uncomfortable to walk around in a skirt on a hot, sweaty day. Baby powder works OK, but between you and me, I don’t want to go around smelling like the changing table.

Making your own bath powder is easy and cheap. Take a look at the ingredients on a can of Johnson’s baby powder: it’s mostly cornstarch!

You can use 100 percent cornstarch, creating a soft, soothing powder that absorbs moisture and adds no extraneous perfumes. If you’d like a deodorant effect, you can add baking soda; the proportion is one part baking soda to three parts cornstarch. Some people add rice flour, but this is difficult to find and unnecessary.

To add scent, simply spritz a cotton ball with your favorite perfume or scent it with some vanilla or an essential oil. Let the cotton ball get dry, and then toss it into a Ziplock bag with the unscented powder. Shake well. Leave the scented cotton in with the powder for about three days, shaking once a day…and voilà! Bath powder in your favorite scent! After the powder has absorbed enough scent, remove the cotton ball.

Get a pretty shaker can or jar to present it to a loved one for Christmas. For myself, I just keep it in a convenient container. A small jar with holes punched in the lid works well.

To gild the lily, you can easily make a powder puff. All you need is some fleece or other fuzzy textured fabric, some satin or brightly colored fabric, a short length of ribbon, and a little batting. Cut a circle out of each fabric, so you have two identically sized circles about six inches in diameter. Take a piece of ribbon and cut off a six-inch long piece.

Place the fabric circles together face to face with the ribbon sandwiched between them. The ribbon can go across the diameter or be laid diagonally across the circle. Stitch around the perimeter, leaving an inch or so open. Turn the resulting powder-puff casing inside out, so the right faces and the ribbon are on the outside. Stuff the casing with cotton or synthetic batting and then stitch the opening closed.

If you don’t want to go to that much trouble, you can buy a less fancy powder puff for around $2.00.

Many people believe that cornstarch “feeds” fungi and therefore should not be used if you’re prone to yeast infections or on a baby’s diaper rash. Recent studies, however, show that this is untrue—cornstarch does not aggravate yeast infections. Indeed, at least one cream designed for diaper rash is full of cornstarch. For other reasons, I would not put any perfumed powder on intimate places. And if Baby has a diaper rash, it should be treated with a cream or ointment for the purpose. Diaper rash or a yeast infection that goes untreated will get worse, whether or not you apply powder to the affected area.

When you go to buy cornstarch, read the ingredients. Clabber Girl contains added calcium. I bought Argo because it’s 100 percent cornstarch with no adulterants.

Amazon Prime: Worth the Cost?

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Just signed up for a month’s free trial of Amazon’s “Prime” membership program. Why not? A month of free shipping at Christmastime: hard to resist!

Do you think Amazon Prime is worth the annual membership fee of around $80 over the long haul? Hereabouts, sales taxes are now 9.7% and probably rising. With free shipping plus prices that often beat brick-and-mortar retailers, a savings of almost 10% on each purchase is significant.

Or is it? To break even on that $80 purchase, you’d have to buy almost $850 worth of goods every year. How many people have $850 worth of stuff shipped to their house?

Seems to me there are three hidden costs with Amazon Prime:

1. that $850 threshold you’d have to pass to pay for the $80 membership fee;

2. the severe temptation to pounce on every “bargain” that comes along, leading you to buy a lot of junk you don’t need; and

3. the enormous harm done to local merchants by just such massive mega-retailers as Amazon.

For many of us, the third isn’t very operative. The Phoenix area, which has cloned Los Angeles’s sprawl and embraced every soulless scheme of Big Business that ever came down the pike, is hardly what you’d call heavy on local merchants. I buy most of my groceries at Costco and Safeway. The few farmer’s markets feature more craft vendors than produce and meat growers, and they take place at inconvenient times, in inconvenient locales.  My clothing comes from Costco or the only two chains that carry outfits that aren’t too ugly on an old lady, and my electronics by and large come from Apple or the roundly hated Fry’s. No one who lives here has many choices: the malls host nothing but chain stores, and local enterprises are few and very far between. Amazon is not about to make me quit shopping at only local merchant I frequent, AJ’s.

But if you lived in a real city or in a small town with character, it could pose a problem.

The second, junkomania…well. That’s another matter.

I want this thing this thing, for example. Oboy do I want to try one of those! It’s called a “Ruby Stone,” and women all over the Web rave about it. Came across it on another site where a bunch of manicurists and their customers were doing some sort of dance to spring over it and decided it’s THE substitute for expensive pink emery boards whose sandpaper wears right off by the third use. I have a couple of glass nail files which work well and don’t wear out readily. But these women say the Ruby Stone is even better. It only costs $1.84, meaning that the cost of shipping, if you’re paying it, would about quadruple the price. So: free shipping? Junk acquisition!

But for just a dollar eighty-four…who could resist?

On the other hand, after I’ve paid the $1.84 plus $0 shipping, I’ll still have $848.16 to go before the free shipping pays for the membership cost.

Because Amazon plies you with “Today’s Deals” (OMG!! A large Moleskine ruled notebook for only $8.02!), you could very well rack up another $848.16 in a year’s time.

But…do you want to? do you need to?

How do I love it? Let me count the ways...

Shop local and get a $25 AMEX kickback

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One of my colleagues sends this intelligence:

If you have an American Express card, go to this site to register the card. Then on Saturday go buy something from a local small business and get a $25 credit. More information about this campaign and its tie-in to Facebook appears here.

“You Are How You Caffeinate”

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Hurry! Buy me for Christmas!

Hang onto your hat, Frugal Scholar! 😀 Yesterday evening while perusing the Times, I was reminded of Frugal’s recent post on small recurring costs, in which she remarks with amazement on the recent coffee pod phenomenon. This increasingly popular method for preparing a cup of coffee—just one!—entails making room for a coffeemaker the size of an infant stegosaurus and feeding it expensively prepared, vacuum-sealed single-serving “K-cups” of coffee grounds. “Do these have any redeeming features?” wonders she.

What's not to love?

Hilariously, there are caffeine delivery systems that make the coffee pod look like the soul of common sense. Almost. NYT writer Frank Bruni’s column on the subject is one of the funniest damn things I’ve ever read. Shamed by foodie friends over his reliance on his trusty Mr. Coffee (to which he had recourse after a Chemex spat in his eye), Bruni goes in search of a tonier, less bourgeois method of brewing an acceptable cup of java. Working against him: a burning desire not to have to work very hard over his morning eye-opener.

Maybe better not to know...

Along the way, he discovers things that look like something from a chemistry lab (well—the Chemex looks a bit that way, but these contraptions are straight from Isaac Newton’s alchemy lab). He learns that hot water may not be dumped unceremoniously over one’s freshly ground, shade-grown, fair-traded coffee beans, but must be drizzled lovingly through the grounds, only after one has released their “bloom” with a delicate pre-pouring through a carefully rinsed and placed filter.

Poetry in glass, plastic, and stainless

He also learns that the French press, my preferred way to generate a decent cup, is teetering on the edge of obsolescence! Heaven help us.

All I want for Christmas is a lifetime supply of French press carafes. They can reside in the closet with my stashes of incandescent lightbulbs and dishwasher tabs that still wash dishes. A French press produces something akin to cowboy coffee: strong, thick, bracing, and richly flavored. It does not turn the brew to battery acid by holding the coffee over a hot plate for hours. Nor does it have to: believe me, coffee made this way will not sit around long enough to get cold.

After what must have been days of journalistic research, Bruni arrives at a conclusion that surely will warm the cockles of Frugal’s heart: “For me personally, was the pleasure of a higher grade of coffee worth the price? In this instance, couldn’t I depart from the orthodoxy (nay, tyranny) of the artisanal? . . . The current generation of automatic drip machines preserves the [Mr. Coffee] tradition while improving, I’m told, on the product. Gastronomic guilt be damned, I just may put one on my Christmas list.”

Get it here, without having to take out a loan!

Happy Thanksgiving!

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One of my students wrote a paper in which she ruminated, in passing, on the menu at the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. By way of checking her facts, I discovered that she was right in saying they had no beef (and why would they? what room would they have had for a bull and a cow on the Mayflower?), and of course, turkeys having been domesticated by the Aztecs, some distance away from the Plymouth colony, they had to make do with the scrawny wild version.

Ever think about what the Founding Parents must have had for dinner that first year? Wouldn’t it be interesting to try to create an authentic, original Thanksgiving meal! A wild turkey, if you can catch one, is a great deal tastier than a modern-day bloated, chemical-filled, brine-saturated, fake-butter-injected domestic variety. On the other hand, the Pilgrims’ kitchen would have been, shall we say, bare-bones.

Modern-day recipes on the web tend to look like this one from a site for wild game recipes. But, alas, the half-starved survivors of a transatlantic crossing wouldn’t have had celery, garlic, parsley, salt, or pepper. Chances are, too, they wouldn’t have roasted the turkey. More likely, they would have boiled it, following something like this recipe from Lorna Sass’s To the King’s Taste , a cookbook describing medieval cuisine.

Fowl in Hotchpot
(Hotchpot was simply a “hodgepodge” of various ingredients)

1 wild turkey, feathered, gutted, and cleaned, including feet, neck, and giblets (the Pilgrims also had duck, geese, and swan)
water to cover
1 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons minced parsley
1/8 teaspoon dried sage
12 cloves garlic, peeled
3/4 pound grapes, preferably seedless
garnish of nutmeg, crushed anise, or fennel seeds

For New-World authenticity, hold the garlic, hold the salt, hold the garnish, and hold the sage.

Scald the bird with boiling water. Remove any fat from the cavity opening. In a large pot, bring water and salt to a boil. Stuff the bird with garlic, herbs, and grapes, and place it in the boiling water. Return to a boil, cover, and lower heat. Allow to simmer until the meat is tender. Shortly before it’s finished, add the remaining parsley to the broth. Cut the cooked bird into portions, and serve together with the stuffing and liquid in soup bowls. Sprinkle each serving with with nutmeg, crushed anise, or fennel seeds.

They probably would have snared a few rabbits. These critters were popular in Europe as well as in America, an abundant source of protein:

Coney in Gravy

Take blanched Almondes, grinde hem with wyn And gode broth of befe and Mutton, and draw hit thorgh a Streynour, and cast hit into a potte, and lete boile; and cast there-to pouder of ginger, clowes, Maces, and sugur. And then take a Conyng, and seth him ynogh in goode fressh broth, and choppe him, And take of the skyn clene, and pike hem clene And cast hit to the Sirippe, And lete boyle ones, And serue forth.

Translation: Simmer some blanched almonds with a good beef or mutton broth. Grind the almonds with the broth and run through a strainer. In a pot, bring this to a boil, adding some powdered ginger, clove, mace, and sugar. Gut, skin, and clean a rabbit; cut it into serving-sized pieces. In a pot, cover the rabbit with the broth and boil it until tender. Serve it forth.

Authenticity check: Hold the almonds, hold the ginger, hold the clove, hold the mace, hold the sugar. Substitute venison broth for the beef or mutton broth.

We’re told the Indians brought some venison for the feast. A sixteenth-century cook would have prepared it along these lines:

Boiled Venison

Take Rybbys of Venysoun, and wasshe hem clene in fayre water, an strayne the same water thorw a straynoure in-to a potte, an caste ther-to Venysoun, also Percely, Sawge, powder Pepyr, Clowys, Maces, Vynegre, and a lytyl Red wyne caste there-to; an thanne latte it boyle tyl it be y-now, & serue forth.

Translation: Wash and soak some venison ribs in clean water. Strain the water into a pot and place into it the meat, some parsley, sage, powdered pepper, cloves, mace, vinegar, and a little red wine. Boil until tender and serve it up.

In the good old days, they would save the blood and add it, at the last minute, to thicken the broth. Remove the pot from the flame so that it’s not boiling. Mix in the reserved blood to thicken, flavor, and darken the broth.

Authenticity check: Hold the wine, hold the vinegar, hold the parsley, hold the sage, hold the pepper, hold the cloves, hold the mace. Let’s hope the natives urged the Europeans to spit and roast a deer over an open fire.

The original Thanksgiving feast was heavy on fish and shellfish, something strangely omitted from the modern tradition.

Eel in Broth

Take almondes, and grinde hom, and drawe hom up with swete wyn, and put hit into a pot; and do therto hole culpons of eles, and clowes, and maces, and raisynges of corance, and pynes, and ginger mynced, and let hit boyle, and colour hit with saunders; and in the settynge doun do therto a lytel vynegur, medelet with pouder of canelle, and serve hit forthe.

Translation: Grind and mix some almonds in sweet wine (probably sherry).  Pour the mixture into a pot and add fileted fish, cloves, mace, currants, and ginger. Bring to a boil and cook until done, coloring it with sandalwood. Serve up on plate garnished with a little vinegar and cinnamon.

Authenticity check: hold the cloves, mace, ginger, vinegar, and cinnamon.

Mussels in broth

3 pounds mussels, scrubbed and bearded
3 cups boiling water
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons finely ground bread crusts
salt to taste
1/2 teaspooon saffron
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
minced fresh parsley

Plunge the mussels into the boiling water. Cover and cook over high heat just until the shells open (less than a minute). Removed the mussels with a slotted spoon; strain the broth through a fine strainer. Meanwhile, saute onion and garlic in butter in a heavy skillet; return the broth to a pan and add the onion and garlic, bread crusts, vinegar, salt, saffron, and pepper. Simmer, stirring until smooth and well blended. Remove the mussels from their shells and add them to the broth. Cover and simmer about 15 seconds. Serve up in soup bowls, garnished with parsley.

If they had cured venison, they might have made this rather special side dish:

Pescodde

In new peas cooked to be eaten in the pod, you must add bacon on a meat day: and on a fish day, when they are cooked, you separate the liquid and add underneath melted salt butter, and then shake it.

Translation: To new peas cooked in the pods, add bacon (on a meat day) or fish (on a fish day). When the peas are cooked, pour off the liquid and add salted butter; mix well.

Authenticity check: hold the butter; use cured venison or salt fish.

Of course they had pumpkin and other squash, dried maize, and beets. The squash and root vegetable they probably would have boiled. Chances are they made something like Johnny cake with the corn:

Johnny Cakes

Make a dough of cornmeal, salt, and water. Set on a wooden slab or barrel stave at an angle in front of the fire to bake.

Authenticity check: Hold the cardboard box.

Yum. Here’s something for which we can all give thanks: we were born in the 20th or 21st century!

Have a wonderful (and tasty!) Thanksgiving holiday!

Images:

Wild Turkey with Eight Chicks, Kevin Cole, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Eastern Cottontail. Hardyplants. Public Domain.
White-tail Deer in Toronto, Canada. Public Domain.
American Eel. Wikipedia Commons. GNU Free Documentation License.
Mussels at Trouville Fish Market. Claude Covo-Farchi. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Peas in Pods. Gaetan Lee. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.Johnny Cakes. Wikipedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Traditional U.S. Thanksgiving Day Dinner. Ben Franske. GNU Free Documentation License.

Decluttering the In-box

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Okay, now that the desk is shoveled off, the question is how to shovel out the incoming clutter in the e-mail in-box. Am I the only employee or quasi-employee of an institution that engages in an ongoing campaign to strafe the entire planet with pointless, irrelevant messages? You can’t block them, because some of them are very relevant, indeed. But those relevant messages come along once every three months. In between times, you’re hitting the “delete” button thousands of times.

Truly. Over a hundred messages come in every single day.

• The menu for the campus cafeteria at Phoenix College, where I do not now teach and have not taught for a good ten years.

• A chatty P.R. newsletter emanating from the Phoenix College president’s office.

• The weekly crime report from the Phoenix College campus cops.

• The program guide for the district’s low-wattage local cable station.

• Endless, endless, endless pitches for the district’s United Way campaign.

• Announcements for various public service courses and minicourses at campuses around the Valley (a “caregiver class” at Scottsdale; “Safe Space” training at Phoenix; Life-long Learning: “Preparing for Finals”).

• Reminders to hourly workers to submit their time & labor reports.

• A “Happy Thanksgiving” message from the district’s employee store (and BTW, they’re offering “special discounts for our valued MCCCD employees!”)

• A bottomless pit of employee training sessions (two sessions to help with the FSA online enrollment process, whatever that is).

• Announcements for stage, open-air, and athletic performances at every campus across the Valley.

• And scores of e-mails from individuals who just want to share with every employee in the vast district: someone sent a photo of Saturn; a coach crowed that the Paradise Valley girl’s soccer team won a championship and a dozen people sent kudos to every single soul on the college’s mailing list. Just this minute, one of my colleagues sent photos of a trip to Greece to everyone at his college.

Some of this stuff is apparently going out to more than one mailing list, and lucky  me, I somehow got on two of them. About half of it arrives in duplicate.

Sifting through all this trash is amazingly time-consuming. You can’t just point and click “delete.” Your cursor has to come to rest on every. single. message, and of course when it does it opens the damn thing. When you’re busy and you have, say, 25 more papers to grade (as I do today), even a couple seconds per message is a distraction and a minor aggravation. I have enough minor aggravations in my day, thank you.

An occasional message is one that needs attention, but not now. If I let it sit on the server until I get time to deal with it, then it quickly sinks beneath the waves of the oncoming tsunami of junkmail.

MacMail allows you to sort incoming messages into various subdirectories, including the trash. If you send something to the “trash” directory on Apple’s servers, it gets deleted automatically every few days, which is nice. However, some of it, I don’t want to have deleted. The guy who sends out his hobby photos, for example, occasionally emits an important message that I don’t want to lose. And among all the chaff that comes from the district are job announcements. Yes. Announcements for real, paying jobs. I still do apply for full-time positions, even though it’s a forlorn hope.

The aggravation rises to the “major” level, though, when the confusion spawned by the constant static leads you to overlook messages that you do want to receive: student papers, e-mails from colleagues that matter (like the occasional valuable messages from the photo buff), incoming from clients, reminders from your calendar.

My answer to this conundrum has been to set up a passel of subsidiary in-boxes, direct certain classes of messages to those, and then check them every few days. If nothing that matters appears, I can then Command-A to select all and send them into the ether.

Most of these sub-mailboxes hold messages I need to hang onto for various reasons. E-mail to and from problem students, for example, needs to be kept until there’s no risk of any later repercussions. Some messages from clients ought not to go away for awhile. Some of the blog carnivals are now set up to forward submissions to the host’s personal in-box, an awful nuisance (and one reason,in addition to the astonishing workload, that I’ve quit hosting so often).

Two or three weeks ago I started marking e-mail addresses that send me totally irrelevant messages so that everything that comes from them goes straight to the trash on Apple’s server. This derails a lot…but it’s quite a chore, since an enormous number of offices and individual employees in the District send out nothing but trash. I’ve now marked fifty-six senders’ e-mail addresses this way! And more keep sifting in.

That doesn’t count the general announcements that are likely to contain job ads, which go into the “CC Announcements” box.

These automatic side-tracking boxes add to the drag-and-drop categories, such as “Act on These ASAP,” where I can stash things that I need or may need until I can get to them.

The goal is to leave the in-box only for those incoming messages that matter and can be dealt with right now and then deleted. This plan is working to get some of the trash out from under my nose. But it’s not perfect:

And I need to get up, feed the dog, feed myself, and start reading papers. 🙄