Lasagna

OK, I know I\’m going to get a lot of mail saying \”Well, of COURSE, you dumbass\”, but I\’m going to risk it. I remember helping my mother make lasagna. I remember my Auntie Glenna making lasagna. I swear they cooked the noodles beforehand. I\’m pretty sure I\’ve made lasagna, and, well, I cooked the noodles beforehand. It was kind of a pain, keeping the noodles from sticking to one another while doing the whole assembly part, but if my mother did it, and my Auntie Glenna did it, then it must be the way things are done. (OK, I could get some wiggle room on the way Mom did things, but Auntie Glenna was an unearthly power to behold. She could, and did on a number of occasions, make anything, from her four daughters\’ (and my sister\’s) wedding dresses (yes, bridesmaids too), to indestructible piñatas, to a knitted (perhaps crocheted?) fully-stocked bomb shelter in the 1960\’s. So if Auntie Glenna did something in a particular way, then damn it, that\’s the way it should be done.)

A few years back, somebody came out with lasagna noodles that didn\’t have to be precooked. I figured they probably didn\’t taste as good (it\’s easy to dismiss stuff out-of-hand from this ivory tower), and we never really even tried them. (We to include my wife. We both cook. We both live in this ivory tower. We both tend to dismiss things out-of-hand.)

So it came as a complete surprise to me a few weeks ago, when, reading a lasagna box to find out how much of a pain it would be to make some lasagna (because, after all, it is a pretty tasty dish), that the recipe called for breaking the noodles to make them fit. Not cutting, but breaking. Now, I\’ve got a college education (yes, an accredited institution of higher learning), and I immediately caught the implication there. It\’s really really hard to break a cooked noodle, so the recipe author didn\’t precook the noodles.

Intrigued, I secreted away a box of lasagna noodles in my grocery cart, and headed back for ricotta, some shredded pizza cheese, a package of sweet Italian sausage, a bag of sliced pepperoni, and two jars of Paul Newman\’s (God bless his soul) Marinara sauce. That stuff is good enough where I don\’t put a whole lot of consideration into making my own sauce any more. And I can make a pretty good sauce. Besides, if the lasagna came out screwed up, I could blame it on a dead guy.

I read the instructions again, and there was nothing about precooking the noodles. So I went ahead with my grand experiment, mixing the ricotta with a couple of eggs and some parsley for color, precooking and slicing the sausage (after removing the casing, which gives Peg the willies), and assembling two pretty good-sized pans of lasagna. Then I put it into the oven and waited.

The suspense was palpable. I was certain (well, nearly so) that there was an unwritten rule in lasagna making that it\’s SO obvious that the noodles need to be precooked that they don\’t even BOTHER to include that part in the recipe on the box. So for an hour I waited, ticking off in my head all the excuses for such stupidity that I could use when the lasagna came out of the oven, crusty brown cheese, firmly set ricotta, and bubbling-hot marinara sauce ensconced in crunchy, inedible, uncooked lasagna noodles. I could fall back on my engineering background, where nothing is assumed, nothing is left to folk-lore, and everything that needs to be done in a specific manner is so documented. (Not that that is actually the truth, but we can usually fool the lay people with our \”disciplined engineering approach\” and \”proven scientific methodology\”).

I was pleasantly surprised. The noodles actually cooked in the lasagna, absorbing liquid from the sauce and ricotta, and it came out quite nicely!

I repeated the experiment tonight on a smaller scale just to validate the first experiment, and I\’m happy to say that the lasagna was delicious.

$150 saved is $150 earned

OK, so I probably should have done this a few years ago, but today, I\’ve written a note to our insurance guy (Chris Norton in Fitchburg – We started dealing with his Mom and Dad when we first moved to the area ) to drop the collision insurance on my 10-year-old truck.

Chris made an even more compelling argument for dropping it – the $500 deductible. I went to Kelly Blue Book (www.kbb.com) to check the value of this old (but still running well) beast.  A fair-condition 1999 Mazda B2500 SE Cab Plus 2WD with 183000 miles on it is worth about $1200.  More than I thought, but still at $150/year, counting the deductible, I\’d save that up in under six years. If I\’d taken the insurance off of it five years ago, I\’d be well ahead of the curve at this point.

Yes, folks, that\’s how boring my life has been over the past few months. I feel compelled to write that I\’ve canceled collision insurance on a 10-year-old pickup truck…

West Virginia Vacation 2008, Take Two

In July we traveled to West Virginia for Peg\’s Family Reunion, and did a little bit of touring around. Unfortunately those blog entries were lost in an inexcusable failure to backup my files prior to upgrading WordPress… Grrr.

But anyway, in the past couple of days we\’ve visited the New River Bridge, the Beckley Coal Mining Exhibition, Moundsville, and the Customs House in Wheeling, in an attempt to introduce some Culture and History into our lives…

The New River Bridge has some incredible view. It\’s VERY high over the river. We crossed that as we drove to Beckley for the Exhibition Coal Mine. The Exhibition is impressive – a retired coal mine was purchased by the City of Beckley to demonstrate the inner workings of a coal mine circa 1900. There is more modern equipment on display as well, but the docents (ours was Marvin – totally an enjoyable tour) describe how mining used to be done before all of the safety advances.

The Adena Indians populated the middle Ohio River valley circa 1000BC..100BC. They occasionally buried \”significant\” individuals in burial mounds, one of which is still in existence in Moundsville WV, just south of Wheeling.

Our last bit of History and Culture was a trip to the Customs House in Wheeling WV, also known as the West Virginia Independence Hall, which was where the Virginia separatists gathered and voted to secede from Virginia and form the new state of West Virginia.

Great fun, and we even learned something!

More fun on the Web

I have lately been playing with Facebook and today I discovered what might be a Godsend for a scatterbrain like myself – Remember The Milk – a task management tool from a bunch of blokes Down Under. From anywhere, you can access your list of things to do. No more excuses (well, I\’m sure I\’ll still come up with them, but I won\’t be as convincing).

Also, if you\’re a fan of the Firefox browser (maybe others?) get the StumbleUpon AddOn. It\’s just brilliant. Plug in your interests, and click on the Stumble! button to find yourself at a random page that you\’ll probably enjoy. Try not to use it at work – your productivity will suffer…

Fun on the web

I\’ve been having fun of late playing with Twitter, (I was accidentally invited by my friend Adam), and Facebook, (invited by my niece Susenn). Facebook is pure fun social networking, and I\’ve reconnected with some friends, which is cool. Twitter allows you to post what you\’re doing so your friends can see. If you\’re going down to the local, they might join you.

Another good connecting point is LinkedIn, which is social networking, ostensibly for business purposes. Sort of like a more formal Facebook…

Facebook and Twitter are for fun, but I totally recommend signing up for LinkedIn – you can never tell when someone from your past is going to come up with a job for you. I\’ve always gotten jobs by recommendation. Never been on a cold call – and I\’ve been in this business for 25 years.

Somebody thinks I\’m a complete moron

Well, there might be more than one, but I got this email today:

\"Stupid

Even to the casual observer, there are a number of things wrong:

  1. From: \”greetingcard.org\” but email is from \”lovells.com\”
  2. To: \”dear friend\” – somebody sending me a card might know my name
  3. Card link is \”pieralbrechtdr.com/e-card.exe\” an EXE for Pete\’s sake! Can you get any more transparent in your evil intentions?
  4. Various typos and misspellings (\”aviailable\”, \”enjoy you eCard\”) sure put that \”professional polish\” on the presentation

Needless to say, I didn\’t click on the link (though with Thunderbird as my email agent and Firefox 3 as my browser, I\’d likely get out of it OK).

If you should happen to find an email like this addressed to you, just discard it. It\’s only going to cause you problems in the long run. Really.

Somebody thinks I\’m a complete moron

Well, there might be more than one, but I got this email today:

\"Stupid

Even to the casual observer, there are a number of things wrong:

  1. From: \”greetingcard.org\” but email is from \”lovells.com\”
  2. To: \”dear friend\” – somebody sending me a card might know my name
  3. Card link is \”pieralbrechtdr.com/e-card.exe\” an EXE for Pete\’s sake! Can you get any more transparent in your evil intentions?
  4. Various typos and misspellings (\”aviailable\”, \”enjoy you eCard\”) sure put that \”professional polish\” on the presentation

Needless to say, I didn\’t click on the link (though with Thunderbird as my email agent and Firefox 3 as my browser, I\’d likely get out of it OK).

If you should happen to find an email like this addressed to you, just discard it. It\’s only going to cause you problems in the long run. Really.

I had lunch with my cousin Cheryl today

\”Cousin\” is probably a bit of a stretch. Three brothers, Michael, Matthew, and Edward, emigrated from England to Connecticut in 1630 – ten years after the Pilgrims managed to find shore near Plymouth Massachusetts when they realized they were out of beer and need to find a packie.

I forget which way it goes exactly, but I think Matthew was the progenitor of my family\’s branch, and Edward was the progenitor of Cheryl\’s branch. It really only matters to the geneologists of the group – I\’m not one of them, but Cheryl is, so she\’ll probably correct me – ever so politely, because that\’s her nature – if I am wrong.

Cheryl and I used to work at the same company a number of years ago, which is how we knew one another to begin with. While researching her family tree, Cheryl ran across my family name, and asked if perhaps, in my distant heritage, there might have been three brothers, Michael, Matthew, and Edward, who migrated from England about 1630 – ten years after the Pilgrims managed to find shore near Plymouth Massachusetts when they realized they were out of beer and need to find a packie.

\”Why, yes!\” I exclaimed (well, not really exclaimed, but I\’m trying to pump up my writing), and borrowed what few geneological references I knew about from my elder brother, and loaned them to Cheryl. We did have a connection going way, way, back (yes, when three brothers, blah, blah, blah). Now we refer to one another as \”Cousin\”.

This might seem rather a non-sequitur, but have you tried Linked-In? It\’s a marvelous web site, designed to let folks network to friends, family, co-workers, and that ilk. It can come in handy to have \”networked\” if you find yourself in need of a job. Anyway, I\’m a member, Cheryl\’s a member, and that\’s how we found one another again. Certainly the email addresses of our former defunct employer aren\’t worth a hill of beans for connecting.

It turns out that we now work about 15 minutes from one another. And that\’s on foot! So I walked over today and we chatted in the cafeteria for an hour and caught up a bit. I even got to see another former co-worker, and there are others who work there as well. It was like old home week.

So that was fun way to end the week!

More Yogurt

Last week\’s batch was a quart of whole milk and a pint of half-and-half. It yielded 5 six-ounce servings. This week I just bought a half-gallon of whole milk, and a tin of plain Market Basket yogurt for the culture. There was no Stonyfield Farms plain yogurt to be had, at least at that store, and I wasn\’t going to make a special stop.

Saturday night I slowly brought the milk to a boil. Rats! I turned my back for a second to get the culture yogurt out of the fridge and it boiled over, ever-so-slightly. But still a mess to clean up.

In an ice bath, again, I cooled the milk down to about 108°F, stirred in the culture, and poured it all into an insulated container, where it sat overnight.

The next morning I washed out my muslin sieve again, but this time, instead of just putting it in a colander, I hung it from one of the cabinet knobs, and let it drain for about three hours. OK, I sort of lost track of time.

The resulting yogurt was really thick, because a quart of whey had drained off. You do the math – I ended up with 5 six-ounce servings. I picked up a gallon size insulated container at WalMart later that day. Next week I\’m going big-time!

(Oh, and the Market Basket yogurt seems OK as a starter culture. I hated changing two variables at once, but those are the breaks of Science, I guess).

(Monday August 25 update)

I made another batch over the weekend, using my new 1-gallon container. I think it\’s made by RubberMaid, and cost all of $5. Once again I had to change my culture yogurt because Market Basket can\’t seem to maintain a consistent supply of everything. I don\’t know – maybe the yogurt market is in deep flux… But a gallon of Market Basket whole milk ($2.99) and a tin of Dannon plain yogurt ($0.50) was the extent of my expenditure. I used the new Martha Stewart pan that Mrs. Imaginarythreedimensionalblackboard.com purchased at Macy\’s the other day. It\’s stainless, and has a pretty heavy bottom on it, but it was a trick to bring that whole gallon of milk to a boil without scorching. (I scorched). But an ice bath brought the hot milk down to 115°F in a few minutes. I mixed in the Dannon yogurt, poured it all into the bucket, and screwed the lid on for the overnight.

I got up at 7 the next morning, washed the muslin, put it in a colander which was apparently just 1 gallon in size, and tied it off to let it drain for about three hours while I went and helped with the local highway beautification project with my radio club. I got back about three hours later, and packed the yogurt up in nice little plastic lidded GladWare cups. Even though it was scorched, just a little, the yogurt is pretty good. Next week I\’ll try not to scorch it!

Happy Birthday, Grandpa!

Earle A. Griswold

1900 – 1986

He\’d have been 108 today, but I doubt he\’d have been happy about it. Living to 108 would have been far too ostentatious for his tastes.