Arizona’s bumbling state legislators, faced with a budget deficit that would challenge far better men and women, approved a 5 percent cut in pay for state employees.
This will more than negate the 6.2 percent increase they generously ladled out a couple of years ago. You have to understand, every raise for state employees is accompanied by what we call a “retroraise.” A retroraise happens when you get a raise but then your employer jacks up the cost of benefits so that your take-home pay actually drops. Often a state of Arizona pay increase is in actuality a retroraise.
For GDU employees, that 6.2 percent increase was quickly erased by GDU’s decision to inflict a $770 per year parking fee and by the switch from bimonthly to biweekly pay, which effectively meant a pay cut in 10 out of every 12 months. For me the change to biweekly meant a $480/month drop in gross pay.
Well, goodbye to all that! Just imagine: if I continued with GDU past the end of this month, the 5 percent pay cut would have worked out to a $3,275 drop in gross annual income.
If I didn’t have enough reasons to be happy they threw me in the layoff brier patch, there’s another one! If they keep that up, before long my salary would be the same as my cobbled-together postretirement income.
Well, we had quite an evening last night. It was the largest dinner party I’ve ever hosted! We ended up with 13 people, and it was a lot of fun.
M’hijito gave me a new digital camera, since the beloved antique Kodak is slowly giving up the ghost. The fancy new ones are significantly more complicated, so I have a lot to learn… People grabbed it and shot photos of the party last night:
Tony, an artist with professional cooking experience, built a rich melted brie and fruit compote appetizer
Just getting started…we almost look organized, eh?
So there was that scheme to cook up a mess of scalloped potatoes in the crockpot, so as to simplify my contribution to the Christmas Eve potluck down at the Cult Headquarters. Alerted by Frugal Scholar to the likelihood that milk and cheese would curdle during the long cook, I sent out intelligence feelers across the Web. One, count her, (1), authoritative writer offered a true scalloped potato recipe, complete with white sauce and cheese, and claimed it worked well. Everyone else said if you put dairy in a crockpot you’ll end up with curds and whey.
Well, I liked Stephanie O’Dea’s basic idea, which she billed as au gratin rather than scalloped and to which she added walnuts and sage. I happen to have a sage plant that’s struggling to survive the winter frosts and a bucket of Costco walnuts in the freezer. But given the wackiness of the Christmas schedule, I really didn’t want to take a chance on ruining several pounds of potatoes and being left at the last minute with nothing to take to the chivaree.
So… I decided to substitute a velouté sauce—in effect, a white sauce made with chicken stock instead of milk—and then add the gruyère topping at the last minute. This worked pretty well. Here’s how it fell out:
To make enough to choke a horse:
• several pounds of potatoes, peeled • about four handfuls of walnuts • four to six fresh sage leaves, minced or finely chopped • one large yellow onion • butter in abundance • olive oil • 2 Tbsp flour • 2 cups flavorful chicken stock • salt and pepper • a cup or more of grated gruyère (or other) cheese
I happened to have a box of College Inn’s “White Wine and Herbs Culinary Broth,” according to the ingredients panel your basic chicken stock with wine added. It tastes more like they used sherry—their “wine” must be cheap and sweet—but it’s pretty good. But you could use just about any broth, fresh or canned, wine-spiked or not.
Slice the potatoes and onions fairly thin—I used a mandoline for both, creating potato slices about 1/8 inch thick, but if you used a knife, about 1/4 inch would be fine.
Skim a frying pan with olive oil and sauté the onions until they’re just starting to carmelize. In a small frying pan or wide stockpot, melt some butter and toast the walnuts. When the onions are beginning to brown, add the sage and stir to mix well.
Le sauce velouté
Make the sauce velouté: melt a couple tablespoons of butter in a saucepan. Add a like amount of flour. Stir over medium heat until the butter foams, but do not allow to brown. Add the chicken stock and heat over medium high heat, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens.
Generously butter the crockpot’s ceramic pot. Starting with potatoes, layer in the ingredients this order: potatoes on the bottom, dabs of butter, another layer of potatoes, layer of onion/sage, half the toasted walnuts, half the sauce; layer of potatoes, dabs of butter, layer of potatoes, remaining walnuts, layer of onion/sage, remaining potatoes, remaining sauce.
Cook on “low” about 5 or 6 hours.
A half-hour before serving, remove the cover, sprinkle the gruyère over the top, and replace the cover. Allow to cook until the cheese melts.
Ours cooked about six hours. I think that may have been a bit too long for Idahos, because the result, while extremely tasty, was somewhat mushy. Next time, I’d use boiling potatoes (red or white), which should hold their shape a bit better. Stephanie’s recipe calls for cooking the dish on “high” for just three hours; this also might solve the overcooking issue.
I’m fairly certain that you could get away with pouring a cup or so of heavy cream over the top at the time you put in the cheese—about a half-hour before serving. Even though the potatoes are very hot by then, I very much doubt the cream would fall apart in a half-hour. But since I had to sing at the 8:30 service as well as the midnight eucharist, SDXB would be bringing the potful of potatoes to the intermission potluck; setting him to experimenting with cream minutes before he had to haul the stuff to the car…well, that would’ve been asking for trouble.
Although it wasn’t a pretty dish, it really tasted very good, and the diners left little to bring home.
Funny about Money was born two years ago today, as an idle hobby to while away the hours as its proprietor wasted the evenings in front of the television set. Apple’s iLife came with the iMac I’d bought; part of that program was a lightweight blogging platform. Thought I’d try it to see if I could do it. So I was amazed when it was still online a year later, and even more amazed that some people were actually reading it. And now, by golly, Funny has made it through a second year!
And what a year it’s been! We’ve replaced the worst U.S. president since Herbert Hoover with our country’s first African American president, an articulate dynamo who has yet to show whether he can rescue us from the greatest economic fiasco the world has seen since the Great Depression. Indications are mixed: we’re getting ourselves mired deeper in Afghanistan, a sinkhole that will make Vietnam look like a garden party, but our Congressional leaders, despite knee-jerk partisanship on both sides, are nearing agreement on some sort of national healthcare plan.
On Funny’s micro-level, it’s been quite a year, too: furloughs and unemployment insurance, getting canned along with my entire staff, taking a part-time job before the full-time job ends, setting up Social Security way sooner than planned, nailing a discount on COBRA, finding a way to pay next year’s mortgage without touching investments, dealing with enough bureaucrats to populate a giant ant colony, migrating Funny about Money to Bluehost and monetizing it (thank you, Mrs. Micah!), worrying a lot about survival, and finally realizing that the past twenty years of frugal habits and steady savings will make “early retirement” the best thing that ever happened to me. M’hijito’s mellowing relationship with me and going back to sing in the choir have gone a long way to make this rocky time not only tolerable but often filled with joy.
Here are my ten favorite posts from Funny’s second year, in no particular order:
Free Money Finance e-mailed yesterday to say Funny’s “Truth, the Highest Thing” post has been selected to compete in this year’s March Madness competition. If it wins or places, I’ve asked to have the money donated to All Saints Episcopal Church, which not only sponsors the greatest choir on the planet but supports Hospice, Habitat for Humanity, a soup kitchen, outreach to the homeless, a ministry to a nursing home, a caregiver program to help the elderly and infirm remain in their homes, and many other worthy projects made even more crucial in these difficult times. Because of the recession, All Saints was unable to make its pledge goal this year, and so a March Madness gift will help a great deal.
Happy holidays to everyone and best wishes for glorious New Year!
So… What do you do with old CD backups? I mean, really old CD backups that you no longer feel any compulsion to store in the closet?
The other day, when I realized the point had come where I will never have to go back to GDU again (except to return the keys to their office, which I’ll do on the 31st), I decided to shovel everything that has to do with that place out of my home office. This entailed filling the blue barrel to its rim, since I work at home a lot and so my office contains a lot of printouts and digital media related to the job.
It also dragged along with it a lot of other junk of the sort that piles up like dust. Some of it, you suspect you might need some day, so you stash it in the closet. Some, you’re just too lazy to figure out what to do with it, so you stash it in the closet. And some you really should keep, so you stash it in the closet.
So there was plenty of stuff to empty out.
In amongst all that junk were several large containers of old CDs and Zip disks containing Quicken and Word backups, none of which are relevant to anything today. Despite their antiquity, though, they do contain personal information that I’d just as soon not have seen by any random viewers, especially of the sort who go through trash.
The Zip disks were easy to disable: a tap with a hammer dents the metal disk in the center, which I expect will render them unusable.
But all those CDs… That’s another matter. There are hundreds of them. Many are e-books I sold to my students on the side, to help generate something closer to a living wage than GDU pays its lecturers. I don’t give a damn whether anyone reads those. But some contain personal information—because I didn’t have an external disk drive on those old PCs, I was in the habit of backing up Quicken, Excel, and Word files regularly.
Breaking them is problematic. They can be shattered if you hit them hard enough with a hammer. But “shatter” is the operative term: they scatter glass-like shards all over the place, some of which want to fly up into your face.
I understand some shredders will grind them up. Mine will take credit cards, but I’m not so sure about CDs. Just as soon not wreck that thing.
So the question is: How can I render these things unusable without making an unholy mess?
