Note of the Living Deb

It all started when I saw the Zyliss manual food processor in a Bed Bath and Beyond catalog. I like the idea of using my own power to chop things up but also having it go a lot faster. And this device looked easier to clean than regular food processors. And easier to store because it's small. Here's a YouTube video if you want to see it in action.

So I got one.

The first (and only) thing I've tried so far has been onions. I pull the cord seven times for minced onions. My eyes still water when I take the onions out, but it's probably better than chopping by hand. But most importantly--woosh, woosh, woosh! It's fun. And with a cute tiny rubber spatula, it's not that hard to get most of the onions back out. And then if you get to it right away, it's easy to wash. It's a little scary and dangerous to let the blades dry out in the open (in the dish rack), but so far we have been good.

Besides using a whole onion in beef dishes, I also tried using just a tablespoon or two in omelettes. This is purely because my favorite omelette ever is actually the Denver omelettes we had at Disney World--even though they had green peppers in it, which I don't like.

First put oil and onions in the pan while it's warming up. Then pour in the egg. Flip when it's mostly cooked. Add fillings (okay, just cheese), fold, and serve. Yum. I like this better than plain cheese omelets. The omelette is more likely to tear up than when it's just egg, but I'm not creating a masterpiece of art. It still tastes good.

So then I tried storing the rest of the onion in the freezer. I put it in a sandwich bag that I closed with a twist-tie. The resulting giant blob of onion required an ice pick (okay, I used a fork) to loosen pieces for future use.

So then I tried putting it in a sandwich bag and then flattening it before folding the ends closed. This worked much better. I can easily break off a piece or two and drop it into the pan. Then as it warms up, I can easily break it up with my spatula.

So now whenever I make an omelette, it has a little bit of onion in it. This does not count as a very big portion of a serving of produce, but it's still a good idea. I recommend it!

I am getting a pan in the shape of a castle for my birthday this year, by which I mean I already got it even though it's not officially my birthday (observed) yet.

It looks so cool!

Unfortunately, I am afraid to use it. I once had a waffle iron. After using it, I had real trouble getting it clean. I scrubbed. I let it soak and scrubbed again. Many, many times. Then I was afraid to use it again, even though I learned that you're supposed to coat it with butter or oil first even though it's teflon, so I just gave it away.

Just look at all those nooks and crannies. That is not going to be fun to clean.

The instructions say to "brush" the entire inside "with solid vegetable shortening and dust with flour or cocoa" before adding the batter or dough. Even though the interior is supposedly nonstick.

Robin wants to make aspic in it. I'm not afraid of that being hard to clean out--I just don't want to eat it.

Monkey bread, where each piece is dipped in butter, doesn't sound that scary either, except for the fact that it's yeast bread and that's not really what I want to make.

So, I'm doing some additional research.

Georgia Pellegrini, using a similar pan, has these hints:
* She oils and flours the pan.
* She says to "give the mold a few taps against the counter to get out any air bubbles."
* Also to "take a spatula and pull the batter up on the sides so that it is a bit higher than the center ... since the center rises faster than the edges."
* She dusts the finished cake with powdered sugar, which emphasizes the shape nicely.

The following tips come from Grandma Bonnie's Closet:
1. Wash your pan thoroughly with warm soapy water and dry well.
2. Coat your pan with a baking spray. The baking spray should contain flour in it. Very Important! Use a pastry brush to evenly distribute the spray into every crevice. Make sure there are no globs of flour or pools of oil in the pan.
3. Fill the pan about 3/4. Roll the pan from side to side to coat the walls of the pan above the batter line. This helps the cake to rise up evenly on the sides.
4. Tap the pan on a table or counter to release any air bubbles.
5. Allow the cake to cool for 10 minutes after baking. No shorter or longer than 10 minutes.
6. Pick up the pan with hot pads. Gently shake the cake sided to side. Use a plastic spatula to release any cake sticking along the edges.
7. Invert the pan on a cooling rack or plate. Allow to finish cooling.

One reviewer on Amazon says this "bakes up just like any other bundt cake, so long as you get each nook and cranny of the pan interior with flour-added cooking spray. (It's right there on the grocer's shelf next to the regular spray.) If you do that one simple step, I guarantee that this cake will release from the pan perfectly every time!"

Another says, "Follow the directions for flouring and cooling. If you don't, you'll be using a toothpick to clean those details. Otherwise, the cakes lifts out perfectly. I use Bak-klene spray available at Williams-Sonoma, where I purchased the pan. Then I flour the pan."

Another says, "I tried using Bakers Joy and the cake still stuck. The next time I used Bakers Joy, added flour and baked the cake a bit longer and it came out perfectly. Don't be afraid to let your cake get well done in this pan- it helped rather than hindered."

Another says, "Just make sure to spray the thing really well with Pam before you bake. I use a baby bottle brush to speed clean up of the pan when I'm done."

Another says, "I spray the nooks and crannies heavily with cooking spray (any kind works fine, not just the flour version) and the cake comes right out." Hmm, opposing advice.

Another says, "I let the finished cake cool for about 10 minutes before flipping the pan over on a wire rack, then I let it cool the rest of the way in the pan (overnight, usually) and give it a slight shake to release. I've been told I should release it after the first 10 minutes, but then I'm afraid the cake will go stale or get wrecked if I try to cover it before it's completely cooled off. It seems to work fine for me to leave it in the pan until completely cooled.

"My only complaint is that I had a hard time locating some information about how much to fill it (2/3 to 3/4 seems to be the best)."

Some cleaning tips:

One reviewer says, "Cute idea If you are bored and have nothing to do ....and have an extra 45 minutes to clean a cake pan with a Q-tip to get every crevice clean then you should buy this cake pan. This is not dishwasher safe."

Here's a thorough one: "First cake did not come out easily. Learned to wait until just ready to pour into mold to spray with flour cooking spray. No problems with cake removal since. This bundt pan is a little hard to clean after use but well worth the extra few minutes. If you boil some water and pour it into the mold and add a squirt of a degreaser dishwashing soap, wait a few minutes, you should have no problem swishing with a wash cloth to get it clean."

Another says, "The pan is a pain in the butt to clean. I recommend a SOFT toothbrush."

This may or may not be smaller than a normal bundt cake pan, so I may have to use less batter.

I'm also realizing that transporting it may be problematic.

I'm not sure I feel better yet. I'll just have to work through my fears and experiment.

llcoolvad introduced me to the Typealyzer which analyzes blogs for personality type. Here are the results for Note of the Living Deb:

ESFP - The Performers

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don't like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.

That's the exact opposite of the results I get by taking the test the normal way: INTJ.

How would my journal be the opposite of me? Don't any of my brains show up in here? I am all about thinking and analyzing and planning.

The explanation above is giving me some ideas, though. I do plan ahead, but I don't like to write about my plans in my journal too much because it feels too much like accomplishing something by itself and thus makes it less likely that I will actually do what I am planning. It's better to write about it after I have seen how the plans worked out.

And writing for an audience limits me some. Of course I try to avoid conflicts and confrontation because you never know who's going to find your journal.

But surely I don't turn into happy fun party girl? (Hey, check out this lampshade! Woo hoo! There are enough lampshades for everyone!)

Another possible explanation is that the application is still beta.

I couldn't resist this spatula today:



Sadly, the cat is only on one side; the other is plain. If you wish you had one, I got it from that place that rhymes with Spate and Peril. It's ten bucks. It's silicone with a very smooth wooden handle. It comes only in orange. You can get it with pictures of those corn candies instead, but it's not as cool.

Fall is a dangerous time for me; I love the earth tones and the bats and things. This will be in use year round. Just like my Santa Baby mug.

(Note for those who read this daily: I added a picture to yesterday's entry.)

Today as I was walking by the car wash this afternoon, I noticed an interesting sight. There was a truck, the kind with a closed box on the end, not a pick-up truck. The back doors were open.

Inside the truck was an oven. The oven door was open. And it was the oven being washed with the soapy sudsy formula, not the truck.

I admit that the sexist part of me checked on the gender of the washer. Yes, this is how a man thinks you should clean an oven. R thinks the man might be mistaken about this, however, because water might seep into where the insulation is and make a big mess. So sad.

I am fascinated when people use tools normally used in one sphere to do tasks in some other area. I first noticed this during a father-son event in Cub Scouts. The females were supposed to leave the house and let the males bake a cake with no help from the females. And these were to be auctioned later. Afterwards, we got to hear the stories.

They dropped the cake taking it out of the oven and a big chunk fell out onto the floor. Don't worry, they didn't sneak it back in. They just filled in the gaping hole with lots of extra frosting. They thought whichever kids got those pieces would be very happy.

They used food coloring to dye the frosting, but they applied it with paintbrushes (bought specially for the purpose). It was a space scene with planets and stars. And Superman. And the USS Enterprise. It took an entire bottle of blue food coloring to make the frosting a dark enough blue. And it was totally cool looking.

So: paintbrushes to decorate cakes. Definitely an interesting idea.

I've seen other good examples, but I'm having trouble remembering any. I've seen a utility knife used as a seam ripper. I have this vague memory that many carpentry and quilting tools are interchangeable. Both folks like to have things square, and measure twice before cutting once, etc.

Metal spatulas are very handy for all kinds of scraping jobs, even stereotypically male ones. I've used brooms to sweep off picnic tables. And certain kinds of whisk brooms make great dusting tools.

That's all I can think of for now. Feel free to tell us more in the comments.

Nothing in particular comes to mind as a good topic to write about today, so I'll just tell you a bunch of little things.

We had spectacular weather today. This morning it was foggy, which is rare here and which I don't have to worry about because I don't have to drive in it. So all the trees were well framed. And there was a mild, wonderful-smelling breeze, like evergreens. And it's right near the peak of fall color right now. We actually have some brilliant reds and yellows as well as some rich dark reds and plenty of oranges and browns.

Also, it's deliciously warm. Just perfect for wearing long sleeves.

**

I no longer enjoy work party food as much as I once did. I'm much more conscious of the probable fact that virtually none of the foods belong on a diet of no hydrogenated fats or totally processed grains. And a lot of it just isn't as yummy as what I can make myself and seems not quite worth the calories. So sad.

**

The CSS validator at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ sure has a lot of warnings nowadays. Even though my new page was valid, I still had six pages of warnings to go through. I mostly got ones about dangerous possibilities that the font color and background color might match. I added some redundancies to my code to make it obvious that this could never happen except in the one case where I want it to happen. (It's the link where blind people can skip all the stuff in the navigation bar that they've probably heard a million times already. So no one needs to see it.) I got it down to about ten lines of warnings referring to I think five lines of code, to each of which I added an explanation so the next person who looks at it understands. I have very heavily commented CSS code.

**

I learned that turning off the heat when you first add the ramen noodles and expecting them to cook anyway works well for me, even though I like my noodles overcooked.

**

I saw my dentist this week. I didn't get my numbers measured, but there was much less scraping, especially at the gum line. Basically, it was a fantasy cleaning. I actually mentioned this to the lady, and she said my gumline was fine except in one spot. I still wonder if maybe the difference is that she's new.

I asked if she's seen anyone who didn't need any scraping at all. She said yes. One. People had warned her that she wouldn't find anything on this one guy, and she looked hard and couldn't. So, it's possible!

**

You may not hear from me tomorrow because I have five activities to slide in. First, two games of winter league ultimate frisbee. Second, a game and puzzle and juggling party. Third, a housewarming party that is also a prelude to R's company party. Fourth, R's company party. Fifth, post-party party at one of the hotel rooms (we probably won't make it to this one).

I read somewhere that most companies that are throwing parties are having them this week, and my data supports that.

This morning I was reading my neighborhood newsletter and reading about various events and thinking that I really need to get a good calendar system.

I have a good one at work. I use the same Outlook system as everyone else, so we can all see each other's calendars. And it reminds me when something's coming up in case I get sucked into what I'm doing, which I always do. I finally added an activity for 5:00 every weekday called "go home" so I don't get sucked in too far at quitting time either.

Then I also have a paper calendar for work which I can carry with me, add optional things to, and look at first thing in the morning before the computer is ready.

And I've been thinking about how many interesting resources I've been finding on Google lately. (I finally made a personalized homepage and am using it for the first time to take advantage of RSS feeds. And they have an online spreadsheet of all things.) And so I decided to see if Google has an online calendar.

And they do. So I'm trying it out. So far I like it except for activities that don't start or end right on the half hour. You can change the time to show the appropriate time, but then the little descriptor box jumps off the calendar and into the header. That's no good for me. So I use the nearest times and then detail the real times in the description of the event.

However, I do like this feature for items that don't have a particular time, like I just want to get something done on a certain day or start thinking about something on a certain day. I don't like having to make up a time. So for this system, I just call it an all-day event and then it pops to the top.

It also lets you schedule weekly and monthly things, which is great except for the meeting that's offered the last Wednesday of every month. Again, I just settled for the fourth Wednesday of every month and added a note to the title. (There's room for a description and comments, but they don't appear unless you click on things.) You can tell this feature was made with students in mind because it's very easy to click on an Monday-Wednesday-Friday option or a Tuesday-Thursday option instead of having to put check marks in all the relevant boxes yourself (which is also an option).

And if you've gone off into the deep future to plan things, there's a little "today" button you can click that will snap you back to the present.

And best of all, I can access this system from work and from home.

Of course, now that I'm writing this, I'm remembering that in the olden days I just carried around a calendar in my purse. My old bank used to give one out, but then stopped. Then I used to get the tiny ones from Hallmark, but they're really a bit too small. The bank ones were checkbook size, and these were half as big. So then I started just making my own. I don't remember now why or even when I stopped.

A paper calendar would be even better than the electronic one (except for the magically repeating appointments), so I probably should just do that.

Well, there's one other good feature to the Google calendar that I noticed and that's that you can invite people or "add guests" to your meetings. I haven't tried this, but if it's like outlook, then this would be a way of letting other people add the same events to their Google calendars by just clicking "yes" in their e-mail notification or whatever.

Oh, and you can get little reminders, but for my personal life, I don't generally want a fifteen-minute reminder like I do for my work life. I added a two-day reminder for some things. But it doesn't seem like this feature will be that useful for me.

Oh, but I can let other people look at it. I'm not sure how they look at it, but I've added my gym buddies as people allowed to look at anything so they can see if I'm still planning to make it to the gym.

If interested, you might want to start at Google's calendar overview page, which I just now looked at. Informative.

How do you handle your need to remember what you've scheduled for yourself? Does it all just fit into your brain, or what?

A friend of mine, I'll call her Buddy, has gotten really active on MySpace. It has helped her greatly expand her social life, and she's having a blast. She's found people to join her in all kinds of activities, and they give her ideas, too.

She's been encouraging a bunch of her friends to join, if for no other reason than so she doesn't have to post all her activities twice (once on MySpace and once via e-mail). But there are also a lot of other fabulous reasons to join.

Except that after looking the place over I'm not impressed. It feels a little too much like a keg party. With spam. But to access our friend's stuff, Robin and I decided to join as a single, bare-bones user, right after I thought up a user name I like: BuddyMadeMe.

In other news, we watched a movie called "Bend It Like Beckham." It's a coming-of-age film, a sports movie, a romance, and a comedy. It's got your generation gap, your culture clash, secrets, huge wedding, and sappy sections. It's too soon yet to tell whether it will stick with me and I'll want to own it or whether it will be just another movie I forget about. What stands out now are that there are several characters who mean well but do a terrible job. But they continue to mean well, and this helps them get a clue. I like that notion. Also, it kept me chuckling.

The reason I am writing about this movie is to advise you that if you ever get this movie on DVD you should watch the featurette extra called "Who Wants to Cook Aloo Gobi?"

The movie director always fantasized about having a cooking show, and so she took that line from the movie as an excuse to show us how to cook Aloo Gobi, a curry made with cauliflower and potatoes. So of course she's got all the ingredients and explains things about them and shows us the chopping and the measuring. But she's also got her mother and her aunt sitting right behind her the whole time. Both of them are experts at making this dish and neither is at all afraid to speak up. So you get up to three philosophies on how to do each step. It was definitely the most fun cooking show I've seen.

Today the network administrator came around to give us all new IP addresses or something. Afterwards, neither my boss nor I could get to our documents.

Ah, yes, every day a new reason why I can't do any work.

My boss's was an easy fix; the My Documents icon was pointing to the wrong place. Network Adminstrator typed in the proper place.

However, my icon was pointing to the right place. I suggested that the problem was that I had the address of Satan. Network Administrator was not overly amused. I said I bet there were three sixes in there. He assured me there was only one. Nevertheless, he did decide it was a bad egg of some kind and tried a new one. This worked.

Today I learned how to turn my water off at the street. I am actually strong enough to do it.

I should have learned this as soon as I bought my house, in case leaks sprung and I wanted to stop them, but no. Because you need a special tool. But now we have this special tool.

So, at my house, you go out toward the street and find a square metal plate at the street end of the front yard, at the property line between me and my neighbors to the south. Robin brings out a hammer so we can use the claw in the keyhole-looking part of it to pry the plate up, but then I find that I can just slip my fingers under there and lift one end as if it's on a hinge. Then I scootch up to carefully flip it over onto the grass when suddenly my foot drops six inches into the ground and I lose my grip and it goes over not quite so gently.

Then I pull my foot out of the hole and remember that there used to be a little round metal cover over this hole, which has a concrete pipe inside it. I don't know what that's for. (I guess a neatly mown lawn is good for safety reasons.)

So, under the square metal plate are two water meters with two metal bars attached. I jump to the conclusion that the meter closer to my side is mine and the meter closer to my neighbor's side is theirs.

The special tool is the shape of a capital T at the top, with a little bracket at the bottom. The bracket perfectly fits over the bar attached to the meter. Then I start turning it clockwise/right (righty-tighty, lefty-loosy--and turning off the water means tightening it, right?). It takes quite a bit of my muscle, but not more than I actually have. After 180 degrees, it stops. Voila! The water is turned off.

Oh, I'm sorry, is suspense building? We just needed to replace the rubber gasket thingies in the kitchen faucets. You know how you bring your old parts to the hardware store to make sure you bring matching new parts home? Well, this would not have worked if I had been doing it myself because our old gaskets had a very different look to them due to the years of gouging and splatting that had been happening to them. Let's just say the older ones were much more decorative than the newer ones.

Boring as it seemed, I really should have watched/helped my dad do more of this kind of stuff. At least I observed cooking and learned embroidery (which is close enough to sewing to be helpful) when I was a kid so I can feed myself cheaply and make minor clothing repairs.