A GPS Moment

Since my husband gets home a few hours after I do, I try to have dinner ready, or at least close to ready, around the time he arrives, so we can eat together. 

The other night, he was a little earlier than usual, or maybe I was running late. Whichever it was, I had just popped the marinated chicken breasts into the oven as he came through the door. It would be half an hour or so before we could eat the main course (Lemon-garlic chicken and purple mashed potatoes), but I threw together a big salad appetizer to tide us over.

We settled into our designated spots on the couch with our big salads, and watched half an hour of something or other, until the oven timer interrupted us with a loud buzz. Down went the salad bowl, and up went I to the kitchen, fumbling to find the oven mitts. I poked the metal spike of the digital meat thermometer into the thickest part of the biggest piece of chicken, and pressed the button. Numbers appeared on the screen and began to climb, slowing to a crawl around 80. Concerned, I checked the setting on the oven - 375 as usual - and then tried the temperature in a different piece of chicken. No difference: the temperature still wouldn't get past 80.

Damn.

"It's going to be a while, honey. I should have pounded these stupid things; they're too fat and they're going to take a while." I offered him some mashed potatoes, but he was content to wait, so I covered the baking dish with some foil and put it back into the heat, setting the timer for 25 more minutes and returning to my mindless TV.

More buzzing, more fumbling for oven mitts, more temperature-taking. This time the numbers stopped near 100. I may have cursed at this point. I may have flapped a dish towel around in frustration.

"Fine", I may have muttered to myself, "if they don't want to cook in the oven, I will nuke these sons of bitches. They won't taste right but we'll be able to eat something before midnight, and maybe this way I won't kill us with salmonella!"

"They won't get up to temp," I informed my hungry husband, "so I'm just going to nuke them so we can eat. They're supposed to get to 165 to not kill us, and they're still way below that."

One and a half minutes of full-power microwaving later, the thermometer still didn't want to get past 105. I flung it onto the counter and tried to think what the hell else I had in the fridge so I could throw together a quick replacement dinner. And that's when I saw it. 

The readout of the digital meat thermometer, still on, a few feet away on the counter.

It said: 21.

Oven-mittened facepalm ensued.

"Um, honey? I think I just had a GPS moment."

There were two seconds of silence, and then a giggle from downstairs.

"Celsius?"

It amazes me that no other explanation was required.

We ate the chicken. On the bright side, even the hyperthermophilic* bacteria that live beside superheated ocean vents can't survive past 105C, so we were definitely safe from Salmonella.

*Hyperthermophilic: loves extreme heat.

Purple Mashed Potatoes

As I promised, I'm back to share the results of my mashed purple potato experiment.

This batch of purple potatoes was not as purple as the first, so already we've got an unexpected variable to contend with. This is terrible science*, but at least I can admit it - the worst terrible science is the kind that tries to pass itself off as the real thing.

I blithely assumed that the potatoes from Wegmans would look like the potatoes from the farmer's market on the inside, because they looked the same on the outside. Consider this proof that you cannot judge the purple-ity of a potato by its skin. The Wegmans potatoes were pale immediately under their skins, but a medium, radiating purple at their core. Not as dark as the first set, and with more white streaks through the middle, but definitely still purple.

I treated them exactly like I would normal potatoes. I boiled them until they were fork-tender, drained them, and then mashed them by hand with some milk, butter, salt, and pepper. The water I poured off was an unappetizing grey shade, and the end result was a sad greyish lavender color, with a few purple chunks.

Honestly? They reminded me of Montreal's slushy winter streets, and despite them tasting exactly like regular mashed potatoes, I wasn't really happy with them. Some of the color washed out during the boiling process, since the water was greyish, but adding milk likely also contributed to diluting the purple. Maybe very purple potatoes would have fared better, but I'm not going to keep trying, since they're quite a bit more expensive than regular old potatoes. Nope, it'll be russets or reds for mashing, and if I decide to get fancy with purple potatoes again, I'll roast them to preserve their beauty and impress friends.

*To make this a little more accurate, I'd have needed white potatoes to boil and mash and compare to the purple ones, because maybe the boiled-potato-water is grey for white potatoes too and I've just never noticed before because it goes straight down the sink. I only saved the boiled-purple-potato-water because I was expecting it to have color. An experiment with no control, conveniently confirming my hypothesis? I hang my head in shame. Maybe they'll let me use the spectrophotometer at work to see just how much color difference there is in the runoff from boiled white vs purple potatoes...

Animal, Defender of the Home, Killer of Mice

"Hey, um, can I ask you a question?"

When that's the first thing I hear when I get home, I know something interesting has happened.

"Do we have a really, really realistic mouse toy?"

Eep!

Apparently, despite the fangs the vet had to remove from his mouth, our Animal is a mouser. It looks like eleven years of training and hundreds of determined butt-wiggle-and-pounce attacks on the purple catnip mouse finally paid off. At some point last night, Animal found and killed a real made-of-meat-and-fur mouse, and delighted in batting it around the computer room to show off in front of Dave.

And of course, Dave saved it to show me.

For those of you wondering how long you can store a dead mouse in a Gladware container before it smells absolutely rank... most definitely under twelve hours. Probably much, much closer to no hours at all. Just... yeah, don't keep dead mice. Or if you do, and your spouse really wants to see it because they're weird like that, I cannot stress enough the importance of not opening the container you have stored it in.

I have no idea where this mouse came from. We found a few in the garage when we first moved in, and the problem seemed to disappear when we cleaned up their nest area and laid down some traps. There's no evidence of more mice anywhere in the house, so this guy likely ran in unnoticed while we were coming in from the garage. Just one mouse, not a big deal.

No big deal, because I'm not afraid of mice, and it's clear we don't have an infestation, but with the recent study linking toxoplasmosis to suicide and self-harm in women, I'm a little uncomfortable about it. You see, the Toxoplasma gondii parasite is carried in mice (and birds), but requires a trip through a cat's digestive tract in order to reproduce. It manages to do this by messing with a mouse's neurotransmitters and making it attracted to the scent of cats*. Mice walk up to their new feline BFFs, and suddenly find themselves dead and eaten. People can become infected when they come into contact with cat feces, which is why everyone knows pregnant women aren't supposed to scoop the litter box - Toxoplasma is particularly dangerous to a developing fetus and can seriously mess with brain development. And since recent studies seem to link Toxoplasma infection with schizophrenia, depression, and self-harm, the non-gravid among us get to be paranoid too, hooray!

But, as all these news articles are happy to report, if you have exclusively indoor cats, they're not out eating Toxoplasma-infested rodents, so your home's litter box is not a danger zone. That meant my home was free of Toxo-related worries... until the mouse incident. Is it possible that the mouse walked right up to Animal and offered himself up as a sacrifice to the Toxoplasma parasites running his foggy little brain? I hope not, because I don't want to think of Animal, or us, getting sick. I need to stop watching medical dramas and those "OMG Scary Diagnosis" shows on Discovery Health.

I'll just keep washing my hands really well after dealing with the litter and try not to have nightmares about parasites in my brain. And I'll buy some special treats for Animal, Defender of the Home, Killer of Mice.

*It needs to get into a cat, so it controls mouse brains to get it there. Science is awesome. Also scary.

Purple Potatoes

I had to buy them. A coworker and I visited a farmer's market on our lunch break, and there they sat quietly, piled up in a basket at the far end of the table. Purple potatoes.

They were smaller than the basic red-skinned potatoes I usually buy for roasting and smashing and all other forms of tatery goodness, and they weren't cheap, but they were purple. My inner seven-year-old squealed "purple!!!!" and I forked over the money.

Well, my friends, it turns out that unlike red potatoes, whose beauty is only skin deep, the vivid purple shade of this variety goes right to the core. I don't know what species I purchased; there are several varieties of blue and purple potatoes in existence, and the sign said, unhelpfully, "purple potatoes". If I return to the market, I will ask the farmer about their lineage.

Normally, in the nutrition world, brighter and deeper colors indicate healthier food (Cheez-its and Kool-Aid notwithstanding). So, what's with the purple? do they taste purple? Are these potatoes healthier than red potatoes or Russets, and should I keep shelling out more money for them?

As far as flavor goes, my experiment with roasted garlic purple potatoes resulted in... roasted garlic potatoes. With my eyes closed, I'm confident I would not have been able to tell the difference between a red or a purple potato prepared in the same way. And these looked so incredibly cool on my plate beside the chicken!

I did a little digging, and it turns out that the purple color is from high levels of anthocyanins, which is the same antioxidant that makes blueberries a "superfood". Proof once again that sometimes "ingredients you can't pronounce" and "chemicals" can be damn good things to have in your food.* In all honesty, the jury is still out on whether the antioxidants and other compounds in blueberries and other fruits actually make as big a difference in vivo (in your body) as opposed to just in the lab, but I see no reason not to add as many colorful foods to your diet as you can. My educated guess is that these potatoes are marginally better for me than the average white-fleshed potato, but not by a whole lot and probably not enough to justify the extra cost on a regular basis. 

That said, I bought more. I plan on boiling and mashing them this time, because apparently anthocyanins are water soluble, and I want to see if the purple washes out with boiling. Science!

* I still find myself getting pissed off to an absurd degree when I hear natural-foods people railing against "chemicals". If you're against pesticides, or artificial coloring, or preservatives, say so. Oxygen is a chemical, for crying out loud - don't be dissing chemistry as a whole just because you don't understand it.

The Best Broccoli Ever

Broccoli has a bad reputation.

President Bush (the first one) banned broccoli from Air Force One and the White House for the duration of his presidency, saying:

I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli.  - George H. W. Bush

That was pretty bad press for the poor cruciferous vegetable (a family that includes cabbage and brussels sprouts, putting the sad members of the Brassica genus among the least favorite veggies on anyone's lists). "Even the president doesn't eat broccoli, Mom, so why do I have to?"

Recently, poor broccoli has gotten dragged into the health care debate in the United States, with a Supreme Court Justice comparing health insurance to broccoli:

Could you define the market -- everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.

- Justice Antonin Scalia

Do you see a theme here? The president's mother made him eat it. Justice Scalia is worried about people being made to buy broccoli*. Why is it that so many people hate broccoli and see it as something you eat because it's healthy food, and even then you choke it down reluctantly, probably smothered in Cheez Whiz? That's not fair to broccoli. Oh, and don't give me the old "I hate it because I'm a "supertaster" argument, either, because we found out at a science fair that Dave is a "supertaster" and he loves the hell out of broccoli.

Yes, broccoli is good for you. But why do so many maintain the belief that "good for you" and "tastes like crap" are synonyms? You've got goodies like folate, Vitamins K and C, fiber and calcium, all contained in a vegetable that looks like a tiny tree! 

"Broccoli Forest" Artist: Carl Warner

I found a way of preparing broccoli that might, maybe, be able to convert some antibrassicans into broccoli eaters. Voluntary ones. If all you've ever had is floppy, overcooked broccoli, then of course you hate it. Boiling or steaming the life out of something isn't usually putting it in its best light, you know?

RECIPE FOR THE BEST BROCCOLI EVER

Two heads of broccoli
One garlic clove, peeled and chopped
Some olive oil
Salt and pepper
A lemon
A handful of shredded parmesan

Preheat the oven to 425F. Nice and hot. Cut the broccoli into little florets, then toss them with the olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic. Dump it onto a baking sheet in a single layer, and then put it into the oven for 15-20 minutes. Check it after 10 minutes, stir everything around a little, and put it back in. You're looking for the point after the florets to start turning a little brown but before they get floppy. You should be able to get a fork through the stems, but they should offer some resistance.

Take them out of the oven and toss them with a little lemon zest (just a little) and a tablespoon or two of lemon juice, depending how lemony you want it. I juiced half a lemon into two heads of broccoli and it was too much. Let it cool a little before adding a handful of parmesan and serving it up.

If you hate broccoli because of its bitterness, this is a recipe to try before giving up on it entirely. Roasting at a high heat takes all the bitterness out of broccoli and adds a sweet, nutty flavor. The garlic and lemon and cheese just take it to a whole new level.

Try it, and then come back and tell me if you liked it.

*I know that's not the actual argument he was trying to make. I still think it's silly.

Saint Jean and Poutine

June 24th is a big day in Quebec. It's the "national" holiday, by which I mean it's recognized by the province, which considers itself a nation. Or something. I'm not going to delve into the deep political meaning of the day, because I don't want to get into a discussion of separatism and federalism and the language laws and the government. Simply stated, it's the feast day of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, or Saint John the Baptist, who is Quebec's patron saint.

Like all other summer holidays in North America, it is a day for grilling, beer, flags, and fireworks. And that's all that really matters. A day to get together with friends and family, enjoy the time off work, and have a couple of burgers and a Molson while kicking back and fighting mosquitoes.

That's what you do when you're in Quebec for the holiday, anyway. Far from home and without my fun and boisterous French Canadian family and friends, it's hard to really get the party on.

For my celebration, I had my morning coffee in my Quebec flag mug, and I greeted the cats in French for a change. They gave no sign, naturally, that they noticed the deviation from the norm. Instead of fireworks and beer, we had a day of Costco and laundry, and I popped over to Facebook a few times to see how others back home were celebrating. A day at the beach, hot dogs and champagne... even my sister, far off in Vancouver, draped a Quebec flag over her patio table for her coffee break.

I set things right in my home by having poutine for dinner.

Poutine, for those who don't know it, is pretty much Quebec's national dish. It's a delicious mix of cheese and french fries covered in a brown gravy. Not just any fries or cheese or gravy will do, though, and so making poutine here in the States is a challenge.

French fries are easy enough to get, and I sent Dave out to get some from Five Guys Burgers and Fries because they're the perfect poutine fries. They're equivalent to the ones at one of Quebec's best poutine makers, the fast-food chain La Belle Province. You're going to use these fries to sop up gravy, so they need to be soft enough to spear with a fork and flexible enough to curve into the corners of the bowl and get all the gravy. Five Guys gets it just right.

I have packets of poutine sauce, so I made a batch while Dave was off at Five Guys. It's just a basic brown gravy, nothing too fancy, but different restaurants back home have their own versions. I may try making my own one day, when I run out of packets, but I think it would be acceptable to use a generic "brown gravy" packet if necessary.

The hardest part to get right is the cheese.

Before you can even consider throwing some poutine together yourself, you will need to find the freshest possible cheese curds. Do not even think about using shredded cheddar or mozzarella, no matter what you've seen on the internet or tried in American restaurants. Ideally, you need "squeaky cheese". Curds so fresh that they squeak between your teeth as you bite into them. Unfortunately, that's not easy to find in my area, and probably not easy to find in much of the United States, but the grocery chain Wegmans sells a reasonable facsimile (right flavor, no squeak).

There aren't many Wegmanses around here, which is why I've never had the chance to make my own poutine before. Last week, though, the brand new store opened up in my neighborhood just in time for me to do this for Saint Jean! Hooray!

Admit it. You want some.

Playing with glass

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Father's Day

Certain moments have the power to shape you. I adhere to the belief that one's personality is already sketched in at birth, and that the experiences of one's early years serve only to fill in the picture, to add color and depth.

As you may have gathered, if you've read any of my blog, I'm sort of a geek. It took me a while to come to terms with it, but now that I embrace my geekiness, I realize that I need to thank my father for adding much of the shading and color to that part of my self.

It may have started even earlier, but my first geeky memory is of my father reading us The Hobbit out loud, making different voices for the characters, a few pages each night before bed. Yes, his Gollum sounded suspiciously like Grover, and his songs were a little off-key, but it didn't matter to me. When we finished the Hobbit, he read us the Lord of the Rings. I remember the apprehension I felt as the Fellowship entered Moria, and my sadness when Boromir fell. It was summer, and we were on a family vacation in a cabin in the Laurentians, when Theoden King defended Helm's Deep, and the Ents took Isengard. I read the books for myself soon after he was finished, and loved them even more. I didn't get all crazy and teach myself Elvish (Sindarin or Quenya), but so far, I have re-read those books at least twenty times. I know I'll read them again, probably another twenty times, and I look forward to reading them to my children someday. 

It occurs to me, now, that I've never sat down to watch the Lord of the Rings movies with my father. Maybe I should fix that sometime.

Thanks for your half of the geeky genes and the encouragement, Dad. Happy Father's Day.

Cat tooth

This is a cat tooth.

Normally, one would find it inside a cat's mouth.

Obviously, this means the beasts have graduated from the level of "cat fight" to "hockey fight". I'll have to buy them little jerseys they can pull over each other's head. I hunted them each down in turn to play the "show me your mouth" game so I could figure out who's won a vet visit. Mojo was first, and he's easy - after months of pills and medicines and vet visits, he surrenders after only the most perfunctory of struggles and lets me check his mouth. He was fine, so Horton was next. Also a simple task, since he very much enjoys baring his teeth to bite my face off. I pissed him off, let him pounce, and quickly counted fangs before he made contact.

So, that leaves this furry Animal.

He hasn't been acting differently at all, so I'm incredibly surprised to find him shedding teeth. How long has he been in pain? How bad are the other teeth? It doesn't look like it broke off in a fight, because the edges are too jagged. I suspect that he inherited the same bad-teeth genes as his older half-brother, and will need some kitty dental surgery. 

I'm feeling so guilty about not bringing them to the vet more often, but they're healthy and happy and there was really no need, or so we thought. They're getting older, and we only recently realized that - Mojo is 12 and Animal is 11, which means they're considered "seniors" in the cat world. Like older people, I guess the health problems start to stack up as kitties age. We'll be doing regular visits to the vet now, for all of them, so we can hope to catch problems earlier and not have to resort to anything drastic.

Things.... in.... Spaaaaaace!

I like to get excited about space. Google can vouch for me: I have a gold Google News badge for reading 4 times as many articles about space than the average reader. It's just an internet badge, though, nothing I get to wear proudly pinned to a sash like a Girl Scout. Yet.

If only I was better at math, I'd have aimed myself at astronomy, because there are so many amazingly awesome things in space. And for once, I don't mean "awesome" as in "totally rad". I mean to say that space inspires awe. Mouth-hanging-open, mind-totally-blown, world-slowing-down awe. Can anyone look up into a starry sky and not feel like a tiny speck in a huge universe? Between Cosmos, Star Trek, NOVA, and televised Space Shuttle launches, a love of space was planted and nurtured in me well before I was out of elementary school. If I could have gotten away with it, I would have done every project, in every class, about Mars.

Part of what amazes me about space is the distances and sizes of things. How are we supposed to wrap our minds around the fact that we can fit over a million Earths inside the volume of the Sun? Venus is almost the same size as the Earth, and when it passed between us and the Sun on June 5th, this is what it looked like from our point of view:

Photo from a fancy NASA telescope

That little black dot on the top right is Venus. See how tiny it looks? Now here's the best part: it's still about 70 million miles from the sun! If it was right up against the sun, it would be too small to make out at all (not to mention completely incinerated). You can imagine that if you hollowed out the sun and started filling it with Venuses, it could very well take a million or more. And we live on a planet that's about the same size as Venus. In little tiny houses with little tiny yards where we can stand outside with little tiny telescopes and watch Venus travel across the sun, making us feel both completely insignificant and profoundly connected to it all.

I don't have a telescope, because I've always lived too close to big cities to make stargazing worthwhile, and because good telescopes are pretty expensive. So the best way for me to enjoy the transit of Venus across the sun was to find live pictures online. Someone posted a link on Facebook to a live Google+ "hangout" featuring Phil Plait (The Bad Astronomer) and other space nerds, and hearing those guys get giddy and excited about what they were seeing, made me need to try and see something outside. The sun was setting, and it was mostly cloudy, but I saw some rays poking through the clouds and figured it was worth a shot.

Obviously, staring into the sun is horrible for your retinas, so in order to see the transit safely, I rushed to make a pinhole camera.

There are many how-to guides online, and they all follow the same basic pattern. I opened a cereal box and put a roughly-cut-to-fit piece of white paper on the bottom to give me a nice viewing surface. Then I cut two small rectangles out of the top of the box and taped the box back together to hold its shape. I taped some tin foil over one hole and made a tiny hole in the center. I didn't have a pin handy, so I used the lead from a mechanical pencil, which worked fine. Here is my gorgeous sun-viewing device:

So there I was, standing in my front yard with my back to the sun, one eye squinted shut and a tin-foiled Cheerios box held up to the other, while neighbors walked their dogs past me and wondered why I was peering so intently into my cereal. If I'd been able to see anything, I would have invited them to have a look, but the image of the sun was too small for me to make out the tiny speck of Venus.

I'd make a better viewer for next time, using binoculars and a filter, but the next transit of Venus isn't until 2117. The best I'll be able to do is convince my eventual grandkids that they should look up.