Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Thursday Thuds #14

Thud the First: The Fast & Furious hearings, aka "gunwalker", get more interesting, and the price of poker is rising. Rep Issa is about ready to cite Holder for contempt for failing to answer the many subpoenas. My take? If Obama wants to cite "executive privilege" isn't he admitting he has something to hide from Congress? The only thing Obama might have worth hiding is the evidence directly linking him to knowledge of or direction of, the stealth gun-control program which went awry.

Thud the Second: The GOP. The Stupid Party has flamed out and is in a terminal dive. It will make a mighty "thud" when it craters in. Don't invite me to the memorial service, I'll be too busy helping it's replacement, a new Conservative Party, get started. The Conservative Party will first strut it's stuff in the Congressional Elections of 2014, and if it makes a good showing there, the GOP will never be seen again. Good riddance.

Thud the Third: The Facebook IPO. It's like Chinese food. You can fill up on it, it's tasty, but you'll be hungry again in a couple of hours. Chinese food doesn't stick with you and neither will Facebook and their IPO. Facebook will NOT have even the influence Apple has, and Apple isn't saving any planets that I've heard of. The fact is, the script-sorcery that brought us Facebook will bring us something better soon, and Facebook will slip into obscurity, just as all the others before it have done. Time, of course, with their gushing over the IPO, is so overblown that it ought to have a Saffir-Simpson rating.

Thud the Fourth: The idea that the Nanny State wants to ban sugar by classifying it as a "toxin". Most people who walk the Earth are NOT diabetics, for which sugar is a problem, and those who ARE diabetics have the personal choice to make, as I made it, to either control sugar intake and control their disease, or not control it and have their bodies fall apart. That's where the decision lies, with the individual diabetic, not with the over-reaching Government. The "thud" you hear on this one is just one of the many jackboots pounding the pavement enroute to taking over your life. Let's say no to the sturmtruppen on this one, and make those jackbooted Government thugs about-face and march out of our health and well-being decisions. Besides, isn't the definition of a "toxin" that of a substance that when anyone is exposed, the bad effect happens? All those non-diabetics have zero effect from exposure to sugar. It's not a toxin.

Thud the Fifth: We get final proof that taxation is harmful to all the world's economies, and it seems that the harder the world's governments try to levy taxes, the more commerce is done "off the books" and goes by untaxed. Fair Tax/Flat Tax, whatever you want to call it, a minimalist, but all-encompassing approach to taxation works best, and the usual socialist "if it moves, tax it" approach works hardly at all.

(m)Eat your heart out!

Yep, those are T-Bones, although some of them qualify as Porterhouse, due to the size of the tenderloin side of the steak.

Yep, your blogger paid $4.99/# for them (@ Fred Meyer, the Kroger store hereabouts).

OK, I had a diet mini-meal of chicken for dinner, then worked on sealing up the steaks for the freezer, now I'm having a Turkey for dessert.

I still haven't exceeded 800 calories for the day. I've lost 11# of holiday blubber in the past two weeks (some of it due to the Norovirus I had for about 9 days).

Mr. Crabby makes a discovery

OK, I have a good friend and neighbor, retired Ironworker, who is a fishing fanatic. Right now, there's little to fish for in the streams or bays, so he takes his river sled, drags it down to the coast, and fishes the bays for Dungeness Crab.

He struck the Mother Lode of crab this week, so, Tuesday evening, he dropped off about 4 large Dungeness here for the gudwife and I. We were out at a Military Ball that night plus had a dinner engagement Wednesday night, but tore into them last night, and today, I picked out the rest of the crab-meat and froze it (about a full pint).

So, I'm dressed in washables, not wool as per my usual habit in Winter, and I'm flying through the job (very detailed job if you've never done it), and crab/crab-juice is going EVERYWHERE.

I had a cuppa joe sitting there, and as I used the shears to cut an upper leg open (smart crab-pickers use shears, not crab-crackers, the shears do a cleaner job with less shell in the output), and a large chunk of crab flies out of the leg-joint and heads for, then lands perfectly in, the cuppa joe. Mind you this is a large tankard of Joe, and it's expensive Joe, $10 per 12-oz (Seattle's Best Level 4).

I take a test-sip of the Joe. Can't taste the crab. Keep sipping the Joe, no crabby taste, all the way to the bottom, where the large chunk of crab, now turned black by the Joe, appears. Slightly crabby, but still decent Joe. I fish out the crab and glom it.

There is a half-crabby, half Joey-nutty flavor there.

I may be onto something here, but first, you have to get by the idea of eating black crab-meat...

"Global Revolution" link, and Occupy Gresham AAR

Here's an "indy-media" link. Big on recording the chants, mostly cell-phone vids, probably the site is there more as a fear weapon for the Glow-bull Revo-lu-shun.

H/T to the Patriot Padre.

AAR:

Fired up the LBT (thought about firing up the M35A2, but it's not a stealth vehicle at all) and drove down to the Gresham Arts Plaza. 1400, the time for the start of the meeting, came and went, and there were maybe 5 or 6 people waiting for something to happen, which it wasn't, so I went over to the Jazzy Bagels, a local lunch counter with class, ate lunch and listened to a not-quite concert quality jazz pianist for a half-hour, then drove back to the Arts Plaza.

By then, there's one guy standing in a quarter-circle of maybe a dozen folks, conducting what appeared to be a "Spoked Wheel" with 3/4 of the wheel AND it's Spokes missing. The gudwife and several of her AFP and TEA Party compadres were walking the park-block's perimeter, snapping photos of all present.

Overseeing all of that were maybe 18-20 cops, most local Gresham PD rozzers, but a few Deputies also, none in full riot gear, but with big "Party Cannisters" of pepper hanging off their belts, and all had Monadnock PR24 tonfas (wonder if they all re-certified with those PR24s...to my knowledge, the Sheriff hasn't held PR24 training in 13 years). Didn't see any four-foot whoop-ass sticks, though. No helmets, either. No formations, some walking the perimeter in pairs or fours, some just standing flatfooted.

All very low key, and there were NO signs, none of any sort. The park was prominently posted at every enetering sidewalk with the park rulz and the closing hours.

We can haz ORDER in our fair little citeh. Yeth.

Time for the Oregon Ducks to kick some USC Trojan butt and toss a giant monkey wrench into the BCS' gearbox. See 'ya!

Five Bean Stew

I may have posted this recipe before, if so, excuuuuuuse me!

It's Bambi season, and if you're in camp reading this, you're not far enough from civilization, but the good news is, Bambi has gotten used to civilization, so you have as good a chance at Bambi in the nearby woods as you do in the Far Mountains. Internet in Camp, my, how we have advanced (or not).

But, I digress!

You have to eat in camp, and you want to fill up on whatever will keep you going from one big meal per day, since you're likely to have to skip a few meals, or eat out of your hunting coat pocket when you're stalking/standing for Bambi.

So, for all you hunters, may I present Five Bean Stew.

Into your provision tubs to go out to camp go (each time you make it is one recipe, but it feeds about 8 or so)

Fifteen ounce cans of: Pork and Beans, Lima Beans, Butter Beans, Pinto Beans and either Great Northern Beans or Black Beans, your choice. You'll need some Garlic and some dried, Chopped Onion. The Garlic can be dried, minced garlic.

Into your cooler goes: one 2# package of Bacon Ends and one, 1# chub of Ground Beef (Chuck is preferred).

To cook it in, you'll need a Large (6-qt) Slow Cooker if your camp is electrified, or your Big Pot if it isn't.

Open all the cans, and dump into the Big Pot or Slow Cooker. Get to heating those 75 oz of beany goodness. Smash up some Garlic and put in there. Put in about 1/3 cup of dried Onions. Stir, have the Junior Camper keep stirring every few minutes. Beans WILL stick to the bottom of most pots if left un-stirred or the pot too hot.

Fry half the Bacon ends, or if you're REALLY into bacon, fry the whole thing. Scoop out the fried bacon pieces and drain on paper towels. In the grease, fry up the Ground Beef, chopping it with your spatula as fine as you can in the pan, while you fry. When it's done, just a few minutes, scoop it out and drain it on paper towels. Add the bacon and beef to the beans, stir. When the beans are hot enough, serve. Goes well with Biscuits. You can make Gravy for those Biscuits out of the fat from the fried meat and some of the bean juice from the bean pot. Just get your fry pan hot, dump flour into the grease, brown it and stir (whisk) well to a paste, then dribble in the bean juice until you get the right consistency for your gravy. Some call that a "roux".

We don't count calories in the woods, so fugged about THAT. You NEED that fat to keep you going in the cold.

Some variations. You notice I didn't specify Pepper Sauce, but you add that to your taste at each serving. I also didn't specify it, but you CAN ladle off most of the bean juice (or drain the cans as you open them), and substitute a stout Ale for the liquid. The base created from the ale won't be thick enough, so you might have to thicken it. The fastest way to do that is with dried, powdered Mashed Potatoes, and you probably have some of THAT around camp, as well. Note there's no tomato ANYTHING in this recipe (except for a minor bit in the Pork and Beans). That's on purpose. Tommy-toes ruin it. Clash of acids, or somesuch.

Eat hearty!

Two fingers

If you're gonna drink it blended, you can't go too far wrong drinking that which is imbibed at Buckingham Palace. So, I just poured two fingers of Famous Grouse, a smooth Scots Whisky.

It's to help me get over the equipment-failure shocks to MY exchequer, not the Queen's, that hit me today.

First failure was my oven. Of late, the gudwife has claimed that she couldn't bake pastry without burning it on the bottom, and that the oven was at fault. Well, I could and did cook a few roasts in there with no trouble, so I was skeptical, thinking equipment mis-use. She never gave up though, and stayed on my butt about the oven, so today I had a tech in to look it over. He found that the temperature sensing array, of the old liquid-metal type, was too old to work properly, and was causing too wide of a temperature swing in the oven, which burns the ass off the gudwife's fine pastries. He called in for parts to replace the sensor array, but they are not made any longer. End of the line for the Jenn-Aire Oven. Sic semper Il Fornaio.

Ka-Ching! That will be at least a Large Note for a new oven, and of course, she wants to shop in the $1,500-2,000 range. GAAAAAAHHHH! Jeebus! Nicola Tesla invented this equipment, I believe, they were still improving steam locomotives when he did, and Herr Rudolph Diesel hadn't built HIS first oil-thrasher locomotive yet. How can it be so expensive for a replacement with this old tech? I pumped the technician for info on what's good in the market and what he fixes a lot, and got that info, so now I'm going to look at Frigidaire ovens. I will stay away from LG, and their rebadged stuff sold at Sears under the Kenmore label, even though it was on sale today for 50% off...

So, the tech collects my check for his hour fee and off he goes. No sooner has he left than the gudwife snivels, "Hon-eeee, the dryer's broken." GAAAAAHHHHH! on a stick! I eyeball the dryer, and it is toast. Push the start button and it won't stay running, and if I hold the button in, there's no heat. I run to my puter, and key in "Fixya.com", which is my go-to problem solver, and yes, Fixya comes up with another miracle, a diagnosis for the exact model of Kenmore/Whirlpool dryer with the exact malfunction symptoms. I do a little more work and download a repair checklist, break out the tools and get to work. It's the "even-heat board", a circuit board similar to the temp control board in a gas furnace. I check with the local giant appliance parts warehouse, W.L. May, and they have THREE of them...hmmm... these must fail a lot. A long trip across town to the warehouse, another cheque on my exchequer for $130. They won't give me a core charge back because the old board has a visible toasted spot on it), back home to install the new board, clean up the machine whilst it's apart, and re-assemble. It works, and I've respected the A/C Gods, so I'm not fried, but I REALLY do deserve this Highland Dew...

GAAAAAHHHHHH! Two fingers may be okay for typing, but not for drinking...BARKEEP! Hit me again!

I'm ready for some Football!

************************************

AAR: The Baltimore-Jacksonville NFL game sucked, with all the offensive scoring being from kickers. I shoulda watched Game Five of the Series, which was more interesting.

Lazy foodies: one for you

OK, this is a 4 minute meal.

Ingredients:

One can of Nalley's Vegetarian chili 15 oz size

One can of Snow's chopped clams 6.5 oz

Your favorite hot sauce (Mine is Cholula)

Your favorite cheese (I like Asiago for this)

Method:

Open the can of Chili, remove half of it into a microwaveable bowl. Reserve the rest with a pet-food cover on the can, then put it into the fridge. Make this again within a few days to use it up, or make a hot open-faced sardine sandwich with it tomorrow.

Open the can of clams, drain the juice into a highball glass (more on this later), put the clams into the bowl of chili.

Mix thoroughly, cover and heat on half-power for 2 minutes 20 seconds in the microwave.

Remove from oven to the table, where you uncover the bowl, put however much hot sauce in to get the taste you want, stir, grab your Mouli grater, hand-grate some cheese over the hot goodness, and dig in!

Potables:

Remember that clam juice? Take a couple of ice cubes, drop in the highball glass with the juice, pour 2oz Vodka (cheap stuff, don't use a flavored or spendy Vodka for this), stir gently, and use some hot sauce in here too, if you like that in a Clam Juice Cocktail.

Notes:

You have a reasonably fat-free hot dish here, a few hundred calories, a good serving of fiber (the Nalley's has beans in it), and about half your day's requirement of protein. This is a meatless dish for those who count such coup.

Obama job promises

President Obama has promised new jobs ideas from his administration on a weekly basis.

Here's one he could use.

This lady is reputed to clear $1,250 per day from her "point of sale" operation...and I bet the customers don't really care how good the margaritas are or not...

H/T to the Master of S/V Orion, who probably wishes he could have the First Mate dress like that for that function.

Soup Nazis

They're out there.

They're out to ruin your health if you decide to lighten up and have just a bowl of soup for lunch.

This is a good article on how to avoid the Nazis (Sodium & Fat)

Eating Southern-Style

Got started on this subject by this post over at PawPaw's House.

Then, I had my breakfast, Northwestern Style:

190 grams of smoked Chinook salmon (too much, could have gotten by with half that, but I've some heavy work to do later and wanted to build up the protein level).

125 grams of Japanese rice (about 25 grams too much, see above)

40 grams of raisins

Coffee (no nutritional value)

30 ml Jack Black in the Coffee. Just for grins, and I could use the grins (see: R/V gate repairs, in the rain)

That all totals to 690 Calories, 8 grams of fat and 65 grams of carbs.

OK, then.

So, I'm kicking back with the Kaffe-forte, and the gudwife hands me a recipe out of a magazine subscription come-on she got in the mail:

Well, then. I read it, and I can feel myself getting FAT just READING that.

To quote Jay Leno, 'Just how FAT are we getting?"

Let's crunch the numbers. To do that, I go to Calorie King.

• Butter, one cup: 1628 calories, 184 grams of fat, less than one gram of carb
• 1 Cup of chopped pecans: 1613 calories, 169 grams of fat, 31 grams of carb
• 4 oz chocolate bar: 568 calories, 32 grams of fat, 73 grams of carb
• 2 cups of sugar: 1548 calories, no fat, 400 grams of carb
• 1.5 cups of flour: 682 calories, 2 grams of fat, 143 grams of carb
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa: 88 calories, 6 grams of fat, 23 grams of carb
• 4 large eggs: 286 calories, 19 grams of fat, one gram of carb
• 1 tsp vanilla extract: 12 calories, no fat, 2 grams of carbs
• salt: no nutritional value
• 1 each, 105-oz bag of miniature marshmallows: 947 calories, 1 gram of fat, 243 grams of carb

OK, let's total that up (then we'll do the frosting). It's 7,372 calories, 413 grams of fat, 916 grams of carb.

Now, the frosting:

• 1/2 cup of butter: 814 calories, 92 grams of fat, less than one gram of carb
• 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa: 63 calories, 4 grams of fat, 16 grams of carb
• 1/3 cup of milk: 49 calories, 3 grams of fat, 4 grams of carb
• 1 pound of powdered sugar: 1765 calories, less than 1 gram of fat, 452 grams of carb
• 1 tsp vanilla extract: 12 calories, no fat, 2 grams of carbs.

Totals for the frosting: 2,703 calories, 99 grams of fat, 474 grams of carb

KA-CHING! that adss up to: 10,075 calories, 512 grams of fat, 1,390 grams of carb.

Divide that by 15, because you DIDN'T CHEAT and actually ate only one serving (15 servings in the whole recipe): 672 calories, 15 grams of fat, 93 grams of carbs. That ONE SERVING is a square 3.16 inches on a side (10 square inches and one inch deep). That's 4 or 6 forks full, depending on how you shovel food into your maw.

This is the recommended balance for an entire day's eating (2,000-calorie dietary intake). So you have just eaten ONE SERVING, and have used: 23.6% of your calories, 23% of your fat allowance, and 31% of your carb allowance. In other words, about an entire MEAL of your allowance in that little square of dessert.

BUT WAIT: Your blogger's basal metabolism is 1600 K/day sedentary, 2300 (max) mild work (all I do anymore, for the most part). I am supposed to eat those calories in 4 small meals per day to control my diabetes, and I generally do (my breakfast today was too large, wasn't it?). Also, my basal metabolism, considering the diabetes, does best with much less fat grams than normal, I shoot for 30-40 grams of fat per day. Run THOSE numbers and you will see that I just can't eat this sort of thing, AT ALL.

As Leno said....