Cop Car's Beat

Oh, yuck!

"Oh, yuck!" was what popped into my head when first I read the header of the item, below, from Slashdot.org. Of course, I would be in line to try out the product. I postulate that should I try it out on Hunky Husband, he would (not knowing its origin) pronounce that his portion was gristly.

 

3D-Printed Plant-Based Steaks Could Arrive In 2021 (engadget.com) 27

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday July 02, 2020 @06:00AM from the what-to-expect dept.

In 2021, Israeli startup Redefine Meat plans to launch a 3D printer that will allow customers to produce plant-based flank steak at home. Engadget reports: Redefine Meat says that through 3D printing, it's able to create plant-based meat with the same "appearance, texture and flavor of animal meat," according to its website. Texture specifically seems to be the 3D printer's hallmark achievement. "You need a 3D printer to mimic the structure of the muscle of the animal," Redefine Meat CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit told Reuters.

3D printing differs from other methods companies have used for reproducing meat taste and texture. Both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat use combinations of plant-based proteins, oils and binders, like methylcellulose and potato starch, to achieve a realistic texture for their ground beef and patties -- though the texture of ground beef is arguably easier to achieve than that of steak. Atlast Food uses mushroom fibers to emulate animal tissue in its meatless bacon.

 

Cherry Crop 2020

I posted a photo of our North Star Cherry tree abloom this spring, here, and posted about the cherry crop of 2019, here. Today, I'll post photos supplied by our neighbor down the street showing the cherries that she picked yesterday, and this morning, from our little tree. She, Wonderful Hostess, had invited us to attend an outdoor pot-luck-style barbecue that she is holding in her spacious back yard this evening. In telephoning our regrets (my not having felt well for a few days, the horrible heat spell we are having - about which she didn't know when she planned the shindig, and our old-people-reluctance to tempt fate in even an outdoor setting), I mentioned to WH that our cherries had suddenly all ripened a couple of days ago and that she should pick any that she cared to have. WH took me up on the offer and you can see her bounty, below. Of course, we were totally oblivious to her presence at our tree; but, she emailed that she had disturbed the birds at their breakfast, this morning.

Yesterday's take:

 

This morning's take:

Hunky Husband just came in from his morning jog. He wouldn't be much wetter had he jumped into a swimming pool. I was smart enough to get an earlier start - carrying buckets of water to the dogwood trees. (I wasn't early enough to catch WH at her cherry picking, though!)

ADDITION OF 6/7/2020 2:01PM  - Payback

Wonderful Hostess left me a voicemail several minutes ago, letting me know that she had left us goodies on the front porch. Have you ever seen a finer looking cherry cobbler? (I'll note that WH was sharp enough to use a double, disposable, pan for the cobbler.) I can hardly wait to taste it; but, must wait, of course.

Wonderful Hostess included a thank you note in which she lamented that she misses being a farm wife as she had been for 30 years - before moving to town. She is a wonderful neighbor who has provided a sparkplug to our community since moving in last year. We are so happy to have her here.

HH BBs

Hunky Husband will put up with nearly any food I set before him - as long as he has breakfast bars (BBs) on hand. He alarmed me last week by declaring that he was out of the BBs that he preferred and he would be running to the grocery store to buy some. I was able to dissuade his hurried trip, in favor of buying them during our every-2nd-week shopping trip. He grumbled; but, I've put up with grumbling for enough years that it doesn't signal the end of the world to me. In the meantime, the CDC has recommended that we all wear non-professional masks AKA face coverings; that is, the kind of "mask" we can make ourselves - saving the N-95 masks for those who are frontline medical care/fire fighter/security force workers. Today, since HH is not one to don a mask, I did our weekly shopping, alone, going during the hour after the old-people set-aside hour, when I thought it would be (and it was) less crowded. People were sparsely dotted inside the store.

Yes, I wore a mask - the one that I had made for HH (similar to the one shown at New Project but with the backing comprising two layers of HH's old handkerchiefs), not having gotten my own mask sewn. I tend to judge such face coverings harshly; but, as they say, I guess one is better than nothing - if only to signal to others that the wearer is taking COVID-19 seriously. At any rate, my approach to shopping was strategic. First, I chose to go to one of the two Walmarts in Derby rather than to Dillons. There is a "Neighborhood" Walmart just one mile south of us that is smaller, quicker to get through than is the large Dillons store that HH prefers, a bit over a mile north of us. Then, I planned to leave all of the non-perishable items in the trunk of my car for a few days to allow any viruses time to disassemble themselves; thus, I would check out as two orders - one of the perishables, the second of the non-perishables. It worked like a charm.

This (photo, below) is the trunk of my car with all but one bag (containing HH's BBs) of non-perishables. As you can see, they actually had toilet tissue on the shelves - one package per customer. It did feel a bit peculiar, my not taking my reusable bags into the store; but, it had been suggested that COVID-19-wise, it would be better to use the single-use plastic bags for the foreseeable future.

The photo, below, shows five boxes of HH's favorite BBs (all that were on the shelves) and one box that I picked up, believing that they would "do in a pinch". BTW: It turned out that HH was exaggerating (or, perhaps he just didn't see them on our shelves). He still had three of his favorite BBs (not boxes, but individual bars) on hand.

Not only am I giving the viruses on the non-perishables time to disassemble, I'm giving the viruses on a package that FEDEX delivered yesterday time. It isn't obvious from the photo (below), but the side view of the box is wedge-shaped. Presumably, the box contains my long-awaited manual treadmill. I didn't really want to leave the box on the front porch, in case of rain and/or high wind. (We got the high wind, I can tell. The driveway that I had spent so much time sweeping clear of detritus from our cottonwood tree is, again, covered with such. Oh, well, I won't catch COVID-19 while laboring outside, will I?)

Today's Wichita Eagle carried a photo of a safe hay bale.

ADDITION OF 4/8/2020 - Logical Explanation

Unfortunately, I don't recall which news network carried it last night; but one of the TV news teams aired a short piece on the toilet tissue shortage. The investigative reporter told us that, although there may have been a small amount of hoarding at the start of our taking COVID-19 seriously, the real reason for the shortage follows this logical path:

1. During "normal" times, employed people spend about one-third of their time at work and non-employed people spend time at gyms, stores, restaurants, and such. The toilet tissue that people use in those locations is, in general, single-ply, thin, and made from recycled materials.
2. During CORVID-19 times, many of the employed people are spending 100% of their time at home. The toilet tissue used in homes is, in general, multi-ply and made from virgin materials.
3. The toilet tissue demand from homes cannot be replaced by the toilet tissue excess available due to lagging sales to businesses.
4. Toilet tissue is a low-value, high-volume product; thus, in general, no one in the supply chain stocks a bunch of it in warehouses. In fact, toilet tissue is one of those "just-in-time" products.
5. Because of #4, manufacturers pretty much produce "exactly" the right amount of product. They have no excess manufacturing capacity to open new production lines because that would tie up capital in such equipment and the low-value, high-volume toilet tissue would "never" pay back the investment.

It had, when I first stopped going to the gym, occurred to me that toilet tissue use at home would increase by a tiny amount; but, it didn't occur to me that there would be no excess production capacity to fill the increased demand, nor did I give thought to the effects of so many people's now being sequestered at home. I suppose that the same sort of logic applies to many of the other items that are on shortage in the stores, today, be they paper products or other products. The investigative reporter mentioned the glut on the market of frozen French fries.

Week in Review - 2020Feb22

We had just enough snow a couple of days ago that I was able to enjoy two bowls of ice cream before the sun started melting the snow down. The snow ice cream didn't turn out as well as had the one bowl that I enjoyed the week before; but, poor snow ice cream beats even Häagen-Dazs® in my judgement. It surprised me that this later snow ice cream was NOT the better of the two. The differences were two: this snow was powder snow gathered at 22 degrees Fahrenheit (previous snow was wet, at 32 degrees), and I had to use whole milk (had previously used 1% or 2% fat milk) The photo, below, is from five years ago; but, once you've seen one bowl of snow ice cream, you've seen them all.

This past week I've concentrated on data mining the "diaries" left by my parents. (This is not a short project. During the week I managed to complete data transfer for two years. Of course, I'm still working on Dad and Mom's diaries from the 1930s!) The data are then recorded in my Excel records. I don't know why I do this. When I die no one will look at those Excel files and I can hardly expect to live long enough that the worth of the records is all that great, even to me. (I do refer to those files, on occasion, to see when something occurred or where someone lived at a given time.) I am being reminded/told of stuff that I had forgotten, gotten confused, or never knew. For instance: I asked Elder Brother during his visit a few weeks ago, "Since Mom never had headaches, how was it determined that she was deathly allergic to aspirin?" His answer was that he thought our mother did have headaches and he was unaware of her allergy. Well...I was on firm ground about the allergy. It was on her "Medic Alert" tags and in her records. But, she wrote in her seventies about having bad headaches - sometimes for a few days at a time; so, I was wrong in my "remembering" her telling me that she never had had a headache in her life! Perhaps Mom merely told me that she had never had a migraine. EB agreed that Mom was the only member of our family who did not suffer migraine attacks. Below is a photo of the "diaries" (actually, most of the books are "planners") in one of the boxes - after I had removed a fist full of papers and newspapers.

Below are a couple of photos showing the sorts of notes that my father left in one of the "diaries" (from 1960) that he had used in which to keep miscellaneous notes to himself. On a very few of the pages, Mom had made entries of actual "happenings" of those days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The page on the left is seen to be the legal description of a piece of property - on which stood the house in which Dad's mother lived in a tiny village in southwestern Missouri. The two pages shown in the photo on the right are notes that Dad took while studying the private pilot licensure kit that I had given him for his birthday in the late 1970s or early 1980s (on the left) and a sketch of the platting of the area in which Dad and Mom lived in Kansas City MO. On other pages are notes that Dad took about using my HP-19C, which I got in the same 1970s-1980s time frame. Since the "diary" is dated for 1960, one can see that Dad used that book for note-taking over a goodly number of years.

As I mentioned in a comment, on the 17th the neighbor set metal posts for the back part of his fencing. This morning, he brought in rolls of chain-link fencing to set on the post (photo, below) - which will probably be done, today, since the weather is supposed to be sunny and in the 50s.

 

Fences, snow, & juiceless limes

The neighbor to the northeast of us (we are on a jog in the street) moved in several months ago and let it be known that they would be putting in a fence around their backyard, for the protection of their children (ages 4, 3, and yet-to-be-born in March). The previous owners had taken their fence down as the fence was a constant maintenance issue and their children were old enough that they needn't be fenced in.

A few weeks ago, surveying stakes appeared and, several days later, construction began. The owner and his father-in-law have been doing most of the work although an extra guy or two were around the first day on which they worked. I suspect the extra(s) were from the fire station at which our neighbor, an EMT, works. They used a power auger to drill the rough holes, post-hole diggers to refine the holes, and sacks of pre-mixed (dry) cement to fill in the holes around the treated wooden posts. Below is a mosaic of photos showing the status following the first day of work.

It was about a week later that the neighbor finished installing posts in the large gap between the post near our tree and at the far right-hand end. I was smart enough to take a single photo showing the entire expanse, below.

A day or so after Super Bowl XLV, the dog-eared boards went up, below.

This past Monday, the whole side of their fence that is along our property line was completed, below.

The fence was finished just in time for the snow that we received on President Lincoln's birthday, the 12th, as shown below. The second photo shows snow on the table from which I had scooped snow to make the snow ice cream that I had for breakfast. I had to act fast because the temperature was 32 degrees Fahrenheit while the snow was falling and was to warm by a degree or three before the snowfall ceased. Although our "rain" gage accumulated 0.55" of water, most of the accumulated snow was soon melted.

    

It will be interesting to see how the new neighbor's fence fares. The fence extends to at least 60 feet nearer our creek in addition to which the previous fencing that had gone beyond our tree (next to the fence) had been black chain link fencing. When the creek rises up out of its banks, it will probably come close to reaching our tree, as has it done in the past. Our prevailing winds will tend to blow the boards into the supporting structure, but the creek flow has previously been such that it would tend to pull the boards away from the supporting structure. The neighbor had been told of the periodic creek overflow, and he did use screws rather than nails in attaching the boards, so I will be interested in seeing what happens. In addition, it will be interesting to see how the spacing of the boards works. I've not been up close enough to see what kind of gap, if any, was left between the boards; but, they were installed at 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit and they will be subjected to afternoon sun and temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Hopefully, there is gapping that I can't see.

Then there are limes

Never have I heard of juiceless limes; but, that is what I cut into, this morning, when I attempted to extract juice from the limes that we bought a few days ago. I obtained exactly one drop of juice.

Grapes

Several months ago, Hunky Husband and I changed our regular routine, a bit. HH had, for the previous 28 years, handled the chore of shopping for groceries, by himself - usually on the Thursday morning of each week. I no longer recall what caused the change, but we now grocery shop, "together". (Usually, now, in deference to my gym schedule, we shop on each Friday morning.) I put "together" in quotes because we confer, decide what he is going to seek and what I am going to seek, and split up until we've each found the 3-5 items to which we were assigned. This happens 3 or 4 times in the course of gathering one weeks' groceries. Together, it takes us about 12 minutes to finish the chore while it had previously taken HH 30 minutes or more to chase things down and he was apt to call me once or twice during his tour, asking clarification about what I had put onto the listing or asking where an item might be found in the store.

We shopped, today. The models of efficiency, we find that we can spend $100 in the 12 minutes that we spend gathering items. It always falls to me to buy the fresh produce. As I had 6-8 items to scoop up, today, I grabbed a bag of black grapes without paying much attention to them. I grabbed a bag that was about half-full as we sometimes end up letting the grapes become raisins for our not having consumed them all in a short enough period of time.

As it neared lunch time, I grabbed a small, lidded container into which to place some grapes for HH to have for lunch after finishing his bowl of chili. Strange. Most grapes are, in my experience, ovate. These are elongated.

 

The source of the grapes was Peru. I'll have to pay more attention to see if all Peruvian grapes are so shaped!

 

I'm not a great baker, but....

Slashdot.org led me to an article on the ABC website concerning a subject that is near and dear to our hearts - baking cookies in space! From the ABC article, "First space-baked cookies took 2 hours in experimental oven" By MARCIA DUNN AP Aerospace Writer, ‎January‎ ‎23‎, ‎2020‎ ‎4‎:‎57‎ ‎PM, come a few excerpts explaining the "experiment".

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The results are finally in for the first chocolate chip cookie bake-off in space.

While looking more or less normal, the best cookies required two hours of baking time last month up at the International Space Station. It takes far less time on Earth, under 20 minutes.

And how do they taste? No one knows.

Still sealed in individual baking pouches and packed in their spaceflight container, the cookies remain frozen in a Houston-area lab after splashing down two weeks ago in a SpaceX capsule. They were the first food baked in space from raw ingredients.

....

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was the master baker in December, radioing down a description as he baked them one by one in the prototype Zero G Oven. The first cookie — in the oven for 25 minutes at 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 degrees Celsius) — ended up seriously under-baked. He more than doubled the baking time for the next two, and the results were still so-so.

The fourth cookie stayed in the oven for two hours, and finally success.

One of my first cookbooks - circa late 1950s.

I make no pretense at being a great baker...or, even, a good baker...but, baking cookies for 20 minutes at 300 degrees F sounds just plain crazy to me. Having lived at an altitude of about 6,000 feet (Albuquerque, foothills of the Sandias), I thought that I recalled having to use higher temperatures and longer cook times. Since "Betty Crocker" has been a household name for as far back as I can recall (at least the mid 1940s), I went to see what "Betty" had to say. From her website comes this advice, below.

Baking at High Altitudes

Air pressure is lower, so foods take longer to bake. Temperatures and/or bake times may need to be increased. Liquids evaporate faster, so amounts of flour, sugar and liquids may need to be changed to prevent batter that is too moist, dry or gummy. Gases expand more, so doughs rise faster. Jan 10, 2017

Even "Betty" confuses me, though, when I read part of a table (below) that was included in her article. (I've added highlighting to the confusing part.)

 

Cookies

Cookies generally bake well at high altitudes. You may notice: • Cookies have a drier texture • Cookies may spread too much • Cookies may not spread enough • Cookies may overbrown • Cookies may be underdone

• Decrease butter or shortening (2 Tbsp to 1/4 cup) if cookies spread too much • Decrease sugar slightly if cookies spread too much (amount depends on size of batch and other ingredients) • Increase liquid by 1 to 2 Tbsp only if dough is too dry and cookies don’t spread • Increase flour (starting with 1 or 2 Tbsp) if cookies spread too much • Increase bake time by 1 to 3 minutes • Decrease bake time by 1 to 2 minutes

I guess the message is that one needs to vary parameters to produce the best result - something that the experiment in space was not set up to do very well. My final comment is that, perhaps, I shouldn't be comparing baking in space to baking at high altitude.

Boil, boil, toil and trouble

Until 2012, I served a family dinner sometime over the Thanksgiving holidays and sometime over the Christmas holidays, each year - sometimes for several days during the interval, depending upon out-of-town family attendance. Dudette took on the responsibility for making the family dinner over the Thanksgiving holidays in 2012, and I provided only the meals over the Christmas holidays.

In 2013, I totally gave up cooking large family meals for holidays. I would still have people over for a less onerous meal; but, Hunky Husband and/or I was perfectly willing and able to take people out to a restaurant for brunch on Christmas day (or a meal or meals another day that worked better for the family - or for a meals on more than one day) rather than my trying to cook. In the first place, I'm not a great cook, and in the second place, there is little or nothing domestic that I enjoy doing. (Why, otherwise, would I have studied physics and engineering? Duh! Perhaps there are STEM people who enjoy domestic duties, but count me out.) I love my family; but at age 75, I decided that I had served my limit.

Because, now, our family dinners are cooked by others, I don't feel that I can complain if they don't serve the foods that I would have served or don't use my preferred recipe. After all, there is no woman in our family who is a worse cook than I. In fact, I've never had a meal at Dudette's, or Bogie's or Wonderful Granddaughter's that was not delicious! (Well, it's been a while since I've eaten Bogie's cooking, but it was great!)

Back in the mid 1960s, a close friend shared her recipe for cranberry sauce which I made, religiously, each year for those holiday meals. Who knows if anyone else liked it? I probably never asked, thoughtful hostess that I was. I liked it.

When Dudette started making the Thanksgiving family meal, she set a traditional menu of roasted turkey, bread dressing, canned jellied cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, olives, crescent rolls (from a recipe HH's mother had given me, exclusively, back in the 1960s) and butter, pecan pie, and chocolate chiffon pie. Wow! That has been the menu since it was set, except in 2016, when WGD served Thanksgiving dinner, and served lasagna.

Today, I went to the activity center to use the treadmill and weight machines. Stopping at Walmart on the way home, I (spontaneously) bought some cranberries and an orange. I made three half-pint jars of the cranberry sauce that I prefer - and a like number of jars of jellied cranberry sauce for those who prefer it. Below is a photo of our fully-loaded natural gas cooking range. Shown are a small sauce pan in which canning jar lids are heating (near, right burner), large pan with canning jars boiling (far, right burner), the pan in which my preferred sauce had been made (far, left burner - you can see that the control is turned "off" under the empty pan), the pan in which the jellied sauce is boiling (near, left burner), and the green funnel to use in ladling sauces into canning jars.

I didn't make a large amount; but the photo, below, shows all but the "leavings" of the two batches of sauce - my preferred sauce (you can tell by the orange slices in the sauce) being in the three most-leftward jars.

Oh, wait! Did I tell you that I'm not a very good cook? Believe me. To make sauce out of the product in the three most-rightward jars, I'll need to reprocess them with pectin. Such a little thing to forget!

The now-sweetened cranberry juice is prettier than it looks in the above photo. The late afternoon turned cloudy and dreary, necessitating using flash for the photo. Back-lit, the jewel color would stand out. Perhaps we'll have some sunshine, tomorrow, to show off the color.

       Ah, yes, better.

Just to set the record straight

I erred in In Cop Car's Kitchen. The plum dumpling recipe had been posted, long ago. It may be found at Puddings and Pastries - if one scrolls down to the third recipe - just after Paul Neuman Pie.

In Cop Car's Kitchen

I love the colors of produce from the garden. This year my huge garden comprised four tomato plants (only one of which produced tomatoes, and those within the past 10 days!), one banana pepper plant, and one bell pepper plant. The photo, below, shows the pickings from the past few days. The banana pepper plant has been a bountiful producer. BTW: The banana peppers in the left side of the dish were picked several days ago while everything else was picked last evening. (Yes, a bug got to the red bell pepper. I don't spray for bugs.)

BTW: I don't count the cilantro, dill weed, chard, and fennel that come up, voluntarily, each year as being part of the garden, though I use cilantro and dill weed, on occasion.

Ten days ago, on Hunky Husband's birthday, he was attending an all-day class in Wichita. Taking advantage of his absence, I baked him a chocolate chip/pecan pie and cooked him up a few plum dumplings. I failed to take a photo of the pie (every pecan pie looks about the same), but I did get a photo of one of the dumplings. [The system is this: I put a piece of pie, cake, etc, or a dumpling in this case onto a small plate; cover it with a glass dome; and place it on the breakfast table so that HH may partake whenever he cares to do so.]

As I've mentioned, before, I am not a great cook - passably edible is more my style - however, I try to (on occasion) make dishes that my beloved, late mother-in-law used to make. (For those who do not know, HH's mother was from Serbia and a wonderful, wonderful cook!) Some of the dishes for which she left me a recipe are included in the Category Cop Car's Chow. The recipe for plum dumplings is not among them.

Until recently, my beloved sister-in-law, Helen, owned a bakery and a deli. She has slowed down in her old age (she'll be 79 in a few weeks) and now merely serves as pastry chef for one of the fancy restaurants in St Louis. She got her talents, and some of her recipes, from her mother who got them from her mother. [We called HH's grandmother Babu Corner - because she lived on the corner - to distinguish her from the other babu (who lived two doors away) who was called Babu Tetu - because she and HH's only aunt lived together.] Helen recently published the recipe for Plum Dumplings on her website. I've never eaten one of Helen's plum dumplings, but the recipe is close enough to Mom's that I know that her recipe will produce delicious results.

Addition of 9/16/2018

Liz's comment about her husband's making relishes reminded me that I had pickled a bunch of the banana peppers during the past several weeks - a fate that awaits most of the peppers in the above photo. I was convinced that I had previously posted a photo of my pickled peppers; but, alas, I find no such posting. Below is a photo of the last three pints of pickled banana peppers. They don't look as pretty as some of the earlier (but already consumed) peppers because I did not bother to insert dill weed fronds into these jars. Too, these jars include no ripened (red) peppers. (The frosty look of the lid flats is due to condensation. The jars had been in the refrigerator.)