Canthook

Blondie was watching "Funny Girl" last night, when it occurred to me that an awful lot of content is created, about creating content.

In this case, the movie was based on a Broadway musical, about Fanny Brice, who made her reputation as a performer in the Ziegfield Follies. I recently watched Misery, a movie based on a book by Stephen King, about a guy who is an author.

And, of course, I've looked at the links of 37,232,915 Twitter users in the last week, all of whom seem to have the idea of putting an ad in the paper saying "How to fill your mailbox with $20 bills. Send $20 to ...." and then when the money comes in, they will reply with a slip of paper that says, "Put an ad in the paper saying 'How to fill....'".

The Hot Deal

The hot deal right now is to make thousands of dollars monthly posting links on Google. They offer instructions on how to set up a Google account for $1.50. (Like you need instructions? Google's instructions are pretty easy to follow; after all, they make money if you follow them.) Then you send for instructions on how to get software to make websites that you post links to on Google. They provide a link to a site (which is obviously theirs, but they don't want to say so) and the cost is only $1.75 for shipping.

I figure the first part is straight. You look it over carefully, there are no gotchas. Hey, if I thought there was a market for instructions on setting up a Google account, I'd be quite happy to sell those for $1.50. Paypal would swallow about 2/3 of that $1.50, but the remaining 50c for an email? I could live with a million people paying me that.

The second part, though, they've got an item at the bottom of the page. You're getting the software for a 7-day free trial. Undoubtedly, the 7 days starts when you pay your money, and they figure that round-trip shipping takes at least 8 days. Down at the bottom, it also says that after the free trial, it's $83.42 monthly, or some oddball figure like that, for the software. My guess is that even when you realize your credit card is being bitten monthly, you'll have a hard time figuring out how to cancel. Maybe a phone number that always goes to voice mail, saying that the lines are busy.

I Haven't The Stomach

I haven't the stomach to defraud people that way. Maybe that's a shortcoming of mine. On the other hand, they surely must have a lot of people trying to get credit card chargebacks, and those are a pain to deal with. And eventually, there will be people in uniforms, wearing badges, knocking on your door. They are a pain to deal with, too.

The biggest pain, though, is that it's darned hard to get people to buy something online. Even big companies with established reputations, like Walmart and Amazon, have a lot of "abandoned shopping carts." I've read a lot of articles that talk about how to solve that problem, and I've never once seen anyone suggest that people often put something in the cart because that's the only way to find out what the real cost is, including S&H, or to find out whether the company takes Discover Card, or Paypal, whatever.

Designing Websites

If they designed their website correctly, users wouldn't have to go through all that wasted motion. When you walk into a brick-and-mortar store, there's a sticker on the door that says what credit cards they accept, and the price is either on the product or on the shelf. Now, some products are subject to sales tax and some are not, but the rate of the sales tax is uniform statewide, or in a few states, countywide. You don't find a 3% sales tax on pencils, a 12% sales tax on pens at Staples, and a 4% sales tax on pencils but a 6% sales tax on pens at OfficeMax, across the street.

The answer, of course, is to build S&H into the price of the product. A couple of years ago, I was selling a product that cost $3 to ship to a local address, $9 to ship to California. A lot of people would have charged Californios at least $6 more for the product. Nope, I charged the same price to all. That's really no different than a restaurant that charges the same price whether you sit there for two hours and have five refills of coffee with your meal, or you sit there for five minutes, and leave half the food and half the first cup of coffee behind.

Content About Content

So here I am, writing web content about writing web content. What an idiot! It's not quite as as solipstistic as the E! channel, which is especially inane television about especially inane television, but it's too close for comfort.

So perhaps, it would be better to talk about soup.

One of the important rules in building traffic to your blog is to post consistently. You may post a dozen times a day, or post once a day, or post once a week, but you need to be reliable, so that your users know when to look for something. In theory, my intent is to post once daily, sometimes more frequently when there's a lot to be said, but rarely do I want to go AWOL.

Oops. I haven't been posting daily lately.

Good Excuses

I could explain that I have a good excuse - except that there are none. I've not been feeling very good, for the last couple of months. In fact, I was thinking that perhaps I was reaching the end of the road. I had this premonition that someone was going to attack me, and it's not gone away; in fact, it keeps getting stronger.

On the other hand, I'm starting to feel a little better. Eight years ago, when I first moved here, I mowed my own lawn; the neighbor does that for me now. I grilled outdoors monthly in winter, and every day or two in the summer; I last fired up the charcoal in 2007, and the time before was in 2006. I planted a garden, not a large garden, but a well-done garden then. This spring, I haven't, although I can blame that on the friggin' rain; I've been thinking about checking CraigsList for an ark.

But I am starting to get more active. I've actually cooked five days this week. I don't think I cooked twice in the entire month of March, although I did sometimes warm up leftovers in the microwave.

Leek Soup Turned Sideways

I saw some nice looking leeks for sale. Gee, that's a stupid comment. Leeks always look nice. I guess I have a good case of the stupids this morning. In any case, I brought some home, along with a fairly nice eggplant. Fried eggplant is sorta like fried green tomatoes in taste, but it's a lot easier to find eggplant for sale than green tomatoes.

And when I got the eggplant out to fry it, 48 hours later, it was rotten. It's hard to spot rot on an aubergine fruit, unless it turns white. Hmmm. Better use those leeks before THEY go bad, too!

I thought about making leek rings - sorta like onion rings, but they are smaller and have a milder flavor. A couple of days earlier, I'd tried an experiment with onion rings, though, and it hadn't turned out well.

Lazy Rings

Instead of mixing up a batter, I simply mixed up a couple of eggs in some milk. I cut up a Bermuda onion, a nice sweet red onion, and dropped a few rings at a time in the egg wash. I pulled down the corn meal, and was about to pour it on a paper plate, when I realized that it'd gone bad. Instead of a nice bright yellow, big areas of it were fairly dark brown.

So I grabbed some graham flour that had been sitting there annoying me, because I had no real plans for it, and I dropped the wet rings in it. Then I fried the onion rings in a skillet of hot lard.

I was unhappy with the results. There just wasn't a whole lot of flavor. I'm thinking partly that the problem was using Bermuda onions, which are nice, sweet, mild, instead of white onions which are borderline hot. Partly the problem was that I was using plain unseasoned flour,
instead of something with seasoning. Maybe if I'd added a little bit of sriracha to the egg wash, it'd have spiced things up adequately. And the last problem was that the egg wash was too runny. I needed a thicker coating on the onion rings.

On the other hand, Blondie thought the onion rings were wonderful. I was simply being too critical. Although, she added as an afterthought, they were kind of tasteless, weren't they?

Leeks Are Mild

Now, if Bermuda onions are too mild, would you want to use leeks, which are milder still? I decided to make leek soup. There had been a couple of TV shows in the past few months where they were making french onion soup, but it takes about five pounds of onions to make a nice batch of french onion soup, and although these leeks were nice and large, three big ones would maybe make a pound.

So I figured I would make up regular cream of leek soup. I split the leeks lengthwise, then sliced them into 3/8" slices, tossed everything into a half-gallon pitcher, added water, and stirred, so that the sand would escape. I tossed them into the stock pot, then noticing that I had a dozen green onions, I chopped those up and tossed them in as well. I was about to attack a bunch of potatoes, when I thought about the half-and-half I had. It was still sealed in the ultra-pasteurized quart box, but I checked the date, and it said to use by January 9. Hmmm. It has been a while since I've been cooking.

But there were three 46-ounce cans of broth in the cupboard, two chicken and one beef. That'll do. The cans were getting rusty - we'd had an overflow from the bathtub directly above, some months ago - so it was a good idea to use up that broth now, before the cans started perforating.

More Veggies

I cut up several parsnips, and a rutabaga, and a huge handful of fresh cilantro, then "het up" the soup until it started boiling. Boy, was the fragrance strong when I lifted the lid. Cleared my sinuses. I've mentioned before that I'm rapidly become a cilantro addict. I looked for something in the way of meat to add, and found some mild Italian sausage in the freezer. These were about the same size as Johnsonville brats, and there were four in the ziplock. I set them out to melt.

Looking through the cupboard, I was trying to figure out what else to add to the soup. I added a jar of Costco organic peanut butter - ground peanuts, nothing else. This may sound strange, but I learned peanut butter is a major ingredient in African cookery when I shared a house with Lenny from Uganda, decades ago. (No, it's not just Lenny; I've found other references to it elsewhere since.) I checked the freezer, too. Oh, my goodness, Blondie bought a bag of frozen okra. Why?

Taste Tests

In the early 1980s, I was working in a research and engineering facility, and every so often, they would round up a bunch of us for taste tests. The company was making breaded cheese for french-frying, as bar victuals, and was looking at offering breaded veggies of various types as line extensions. They didn't tell us anything about what we were eating, and we were supposed to remain dead silent, because they wanted our impressions as to taste and texture, without any preconceived ideas.

I vividly remember the day when they tested breaded okra. I reached through the little window to grab the sample off the plate, popped it in my mouth, and was just about to bite down when Sam, doing the same test over to my right, cried out very loud, "Oh God, french-fried snot"

I understand they dropped the idea of okra immediately.

Split Peas

Blondie is, at heart, a city girl, and folks in Philadelphia don't know how to cook, or how to eat. Even after a decade of my teaching her how to cook, she was confused as to what to do with dried beans. She had always bought beans in cans or jars.

Over her extreme reluctance, I convinced her to try an experiment. Pour some beans into a saucepan, I said, not too many because they get larger. Cover them with water, plain water, no salt or anything else, and start them on simmer. They soak up the water, so watch the water level, don't let them get uncovered, but don't add more water than necessary. Simmer them until they get soft. Then scoop out a bunch of beans into a cereal bowl, salt them, add some butter, and dig in.

You could put a picture of her face in the dictionary, next to the word "flabberghasted", when she tasted them. They are so good, she exclaimed, and so easy.

On the farm, we had well water, harder than walnuts, and we used rain water from the cistern to cook beans, because they don't get soft in hard water. That's why I was so insistent that they be cooked in plain water, no salt, no anything else. Blondie jumped in with both feet, as she sometimes does, and started simply adding the dried beans directly when she was making something, and they seem to cook up just fine, in no time at all. Must be the city water.

Lotsa Bags Of Beans

In any case, we have lotsa bags of beans, dried beans, because for a while, Blondie was telling me that we needed to buy beans, because we didn't have any cans or jars of beans, so I bought dried beans. Hmmm, I thought, and then I took down a bag of green lentils.

Only they weren't lentils. They were split peas. Peas are sorta strong-flavored, but I had three cans of broth, and a lot of leek, and a whole bunch of cilantro, so I was generous with the amount of split peas that I added.

And I added a bunch of dried chives, and a bunch of dried parsley, and a whole bunch of dried veggie flakes. The veggie flakes are dried carrots, mostly, dried onions, dried peppers, and maybe something else, and they're a big staple in both Blondie's cooking and mine. I don't know where to get dried carrots by themselves, but the price of the blend is fairly low. Sharp Shopper carries that blend, and the discount grocery store at Martindale Road and 322. I don't think Amelia's carries it, but I'm not sure.

You've Figured It Out

What I ended up with, as you've figured by now, is not a leek soup, but a split pea soup - except that with all the allium - the leeks, the green onions, the dried onions - and cilantro, and other goodies, it's not an ordinary split pea soup. It's sort've a cross between split pea and texican black-bean soup. Oh, and I added those sausages, cut into slices about every 1/4 inch. (It's kinda hard to specify thickness when the sausage is so soft it deforms when you try to cut it.)

I tasted it, and decided it needed salt. Blondie tasted it, and decided it was too salty, and needed some sugar. The sugar wasn't handy and the honey was, so I added about a quarter cup of honey. Then I let the soup simmer for another couple of hours.

Proof Of The Pudding

The split pea base gives it the consistency of a thick cream soup, but there's a lot of chunks in it. Instead of eating it in a bowl, I put it on a foam plastic plate. It still seemed to lack something. Despite what Blondie said, adding salt helped a little. And then I added some sriracha, and stirred it in. Oh, wow, now this was good.

I should mention that I don't like spicy hot foods, and my recent fascination with sriracha confuses me a bit. I suspect it's because, although sriracha is a hot sauce, the emphasis is on flavor, rather than pure wicked heat. It only takes a few drops to make a big difference in a plate of food, and a few drops more to make the food nearly inedible. That bottle of sriracha is going to last us a long time.

Incidentally, I found the sriracha at WalMart. It's not with the hot sauces near the spices and seasonings, and it's not with the sauces with the ethnic foods display an aisle or two away, but instead with a display of asian foods, another couple of aisles away. I'm not sure why hot sauce isn't all together, and why they don't consider asian to be ethnic foods. Oh, well, this isn't the first time I've pointed out that WalMart is run by idiots. Sorry, Sam.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
bermuda onions - black bean soup - blogging - cilantro - dried beans - E! - Funny Girl - leeks - okra - onion rings - parsnips - peanut butter - Philadelphia - rutabagas - scams - soup - split peas - sriracha - Stephen King - Twitter - Uganda - WalMart