Dr. Harl Delos's blog

Restaurant owners, at least the smart ones, know we eat with our eyes, then with our noses, before the food ever passes between our lips.

It's even more true in these days of television advertising. A syrupy icy cola, spicy and biting in its effervescence, is appealing enough in actuality, but when it's depicted with ice flying forcefully into the glass of cola, the cola splashing all over in a tsunami of flavor, it's even harder to resist.

That BK Ad

The latest ads for Burger King, showing cola falling sideways into a cup, with a Whopper in the foreground, is exceptionally appealing. If you were to call it food porn, you'd get no argument from the videographers; that's exactly what they call it, themselves.

The Supreme Court uses the word "prurient" to describe porn, pruritis being a medical term for itching. Porn is only porn to the extent that it makes you itch, makes you feel desire - and that's exactly what food advertising is all about.

The Twisted Logic of Yeastbreads

Of late, one of the hot items to hit the television screen is pretzel bread. It's being used in microwavable frozen sandwiches. They used to promote the pie crusts used as a bread substitute, and then tortilla wraps became the hot thing, and now it's pretzel bread. Have you noticed the common theme? They are all things you cannot easily make for yourself at home.

You can, of course, buy Pillsbury All Ready pie crusts, or buy tortillas, but those both look fairly hard to use. Pretzel bread seems even more difficult, doesn't it? That's a key for the restaurant business, and it's increasingly important in the convenience food market.

Cinnamon Rolls A Fraud

About 40 years ago, I was a retail manager, walking through a mall with another manager. We passed a bakery that emited wonderful scents of cinnamon rolls. "That smells so wonderful," Jim told me, and I agreed.

"But did you ever try them? They are a real disappointment. If they tasted as good as they smelled, they'd have a wonderful chain of bakeries."

Jim told me I was mistaken. The cinnamon rolls were too dry because they didn't have enough fat. Butter is expensive, so they deliberately used very little. "They don't see mall workers as their market, but rather shoppers. If you only buy once every 4 or 6 months, you forget how bad the cinnamon rolls really are."

Hot bread is terribly appealing, and if you have repeat customers, it's a high markup item, even if you do it right. Hot pizza, hot donuts, and hot soft pretzels can be the basis of a highly profitable business. Cincinnati used to have two Bagel Factory locations that sold bushels of fresh hot bagels at a high markup. A guy would have to be crazy to open a burger joint when hot bread is both cheaper to produce and more appealing than a hamburger sandwich.

Can I Make Good Pretzel Bread?

All of these ads for pretzel bread have made me wonder how pretzel bread is made. I've wondered for a long time about how pita pocket bread is made as well. Consequently, I set out to make some pretzel bread tonight.

The "secret" of pretzels is that the dough is boiled first in alkali water before being baked. When bakeries produce bread, they have special ovens that inject steam during the baking process. The steam puts a nice brown crust on the bread. Boiling the dough in alkali water not only produces the brown color of pretzels, but the characteristic pretzel taste.

Traditionally, pretzels are boiled in lye. The problem with lye, though, is that it's pretty corrosive. You really need to be wearing rubber gloves, and carefully clean up any spatter or spill, and keep your tongue in the correct corner of your mouth in order to minimize accidents. A saturated solution of baking soda does the same thing much more safely, and although it might be more expensive for an industrial pretzel manufacturer, the costs of rubber gloves, etc., make lye more expensive, not less, for most people making pretzels at home.

A Rather Simple Recipe

I started off with 1.5 cups of warm (about 110F) water, a tablespoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, and a tablespoon of active dry yeast. I recommend you get the rapid rise yeast for everything - there's nothing that the active dry yeast works better in - but a yeast cake, a packet of either kind of yeast, or a tablespoon of either bulk yeast will do. After 5-10 minutes, the water should be foaming up; that'll tell you that the yeast is good.

Add 4.5 cups of flour and a half-stick of melted butter, and mix with the dough hook until the dough is smooth and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Then roll it between your hands to form a ball, oil the outside with about a tablespoon of vegetable oil, and let it rise in a warm place until it doubles in size, which should take about an hour or so.

Dodging The Draft

In modern homes, it's hard to find a warm draft-free place to raise bread. It took me a long time to learn that I should not use a stainless steel mixing bowl for this. A plastic mixing bowl is OK, but a pyrex mixing bowl, or an earthenware mixing bowl seems to be the most satisfactory. I think it's because they hold the temperature best. Plastic doesn't hold temperature, but it's a good insulator. With stainless steel, the bowl can change temperature too easily.

If you're making pretzel bread, what you want to do is to flatten out the risen dough. I would recommend splitting it into 4 equal parts for easiest handling. They make a tool known as a counter scraper that's a flat sheet of metal about 3" by 6", with a wooden handle along one of the longer sides. It's not common in the kitchen, but I've found it very handy. Amazon has the Wilton scraper for about $7 but it's only $2-3 for one at a restaurant supply house.

In any case, to make pretzel bread, you simply pretend that you're rolling out biscuits, only instead of punching out circles with an empty tin can, you simply cut a piece that's 3" by 4".

Boiled In Soda

Each of these pieces of dough needs to be boiled for about a minute or so in baking soda water. Put 3/4 cup of baking soda in three quarts - measure it! - and set it to boiling.

I tried using a hamburger turner to deposit the dough into the soda solution, but I think it would work better if I used the wire mesh scoop I use for french-frying. I used a wide shallow pan to boil the solution, and that was an unwise move as well.

The solution was boiling up in the center, where it was hottest, and sinking down at the edges where it was cooler. The dough kept moving from the center of the pan to the edge. It probably would be better to use a smaller diameter pan, so that all part of the dough were equally treated by the solution. On the other hand, I could see no evidence whatsoever that one side was boiled harder than the other edge.

A Swell Idea

Boiling the dough makes it swell up. I was happiest with the dough that was about 1/4" thick before boiling and 3/8" thick after boiling. After baking, it was thicker still.

While I was at it, I also made some pretzel-shaped pretzels. This recipe is supposed to make about 10 pretzels.

As I removed the dough from the soda solution, I put it on a half-sheet pan that had been coated with vegetable oil. When I got through, I put the pan in a 450F oven for 12 minutes, and it came out just fine. I lubed the tops of the pretzels fresh out of the oven, and since I didn't have any pretzel salt, I just hit them with table salt.

Rating The Recipe

The pretzels were a lot better than the tasteless and tough Hot Sam pretzels (and the Superpretzels found in the freezer section of the store). They were chewier than Auntie Anne pretzels, and a little tastier - pretty much on a par with the pretzels frequently sold in front of Sharp Shopper.

The thing is, though, you can't buy pretzel bread anyplace except as part of a junkfood sandwich. This pretzel bread tastes pretty good as a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and I'm betting it would be great as an egg salad sandwich or a ham and cheese sandwich.

Soft pretzels don't deal gracefully with the passage of time, and I can't imagine that pretzel bread made Saturday night will be very good on Tuesday, or even on Monday, but I'm hoping that it'll be OK for lunch on Sunday. Blondie had fallen asleep by the time I pulled the pretzels and pretzel bread from the oven, so she won't appreciate them otherwise.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
All Ready pie crust - Auntie Anne - baking soda - Burger King - cinnamon rolls - dough scraper - food porn - Hot Pockets - Hot Sam - pretzel - scratch biscuits - Sharp Shopper - Superpretzel - Wilton - wraps

There was a list of stressors circulating around, perhaps 20 years ago, among therapists. How many of the changes in your life have occurred in the past year, in the recent past? The different items were assigned different values, and you were to count up all the points for the changes that were true for you.

If you had a score above 30, you had a 25% chance of having serious illness or injury in the next year. If you had a score of 50, you had a 65% chance of having serious illness or injury. If you had a score of 75, you had a 90% chance.

Rick Showed It To Me

My therapist showed it to me. I glanced at it. "Yeah, I've seen that before." I tried to pass it back, but he wouldn't take it. No, he said, I've got another copy. Let's see what your score is he said, and we went through the list, talling up the score. It was 135.

"So?" I asked him. "With a score of 135, I shouldn't just be sick, I should be dead," I told him, "and we both know, death is appealing to me. My parents raised me to do what needs to be done, and it'd be a lot simple, a lot cheaper, a lot less hassle for everybody concerned if you all would get out of my face, and let me do what needs to be done."

He wasn't having any. Rick was a tough bastard. He was an ex-Marine. I asked him what he did in the service, he said, "You ever see the movie 'Chasers'? The rules say that if you're delivering a soldier and he gets away, the chaser serves the prisoner's time for him. No such thing as a chaser giving a prisoner a break. No way, no how." He didn't cut himself any breaks, either. His left knee was frozen solid so he couldn't bend it, due to medical malpractice, and yet Rick raced bicycles internationally. He had recumbent bicycles that were powered by his arms, and he used to fly around the city, even in February when there was 8" of slush in every road, and and piles of snow 4' along every berm, on those recumbent bicycles.

And He Was Tough

And he was tough on me, too, which was good, because if he'd been any less tough, I'd have steamrolled him. And yet, I was sore and tender under the surface, and he kept abrading my emotional wounds, exposing them to the air and the sunlight, so that they would heal.

Did you notice, he said, how many of the items on the list are things we generally regard as good things? If you get engaged, that's a lot of points. If you get married, that's even more. If you get a new job, that's a lot of points, if you get promoted at work, that's a lot of points, if you get a raise at work, that's a lot of points, too. Win the effing lottery, that would be a lot of points as well, I suppose. Suppose the door was to open, suddenly, and the Swedish Bikini Team was to burst in, and they were to make mad passionate love to you. How many points do you suppose that would be worth? And how many points do you suppose it would be worth when you tried to tell someone what had happened to you, and they thought you were lying?

His Point?

His point, and it took me over a decade after I stopped seeing Rick to understand it, was that life is change. Our lives progress by experiencing change, and we call the progress of our lives aging, and aging makes us feel crappy. Even if it's getting engaged or married, or getting a raise and a promotion, or being loved up by the Swedish Bikini Team, or - horror of horrors - it's all three.

Boy, have I aged a lot recently. Blondie's disability was just recognized by the Social Security administration. When she applied for her disability, she had to tell the unemployment people that she wasn't able to work, which meant no unemployment compensation, and we haven't been able to make any mortgage payments since then. We've been tip-toe-ing around, trying to keep the bank from noticing us, in hopes that they wouldn't throw us onto the street. It's been bad enough, trying to figure out which utility bills to pay each month, hoping that we wouldn't freeze to death in the dark.

They Took Her License

The state took Blondie's driver's license away, because vascular dementia causes confusion. It helped financially - it cut our insurance bill, and we were able to sell her car - but I'm not up to all the driving I've had to do as a consequence. As an agoraphobe, though, that's a real burden on me. I want to hide in the dark, curl up in a ball in the cool, damp, air-conditioned air, and if there's no silence - I haven't heard silence since I lived on the farm, years ago - at least listen to music or television rather than neighbors or street sounds. I can't do that. I'm going to have to interrupt writing this post, to take her to an appointment. And then tomorrow, I have an appointment with a nephrologist.

But we got the money order sent today that brings our mortgage up to date. It took five, almost six months, of Blondie's Social Security to do that, but from this point on, her Social Security and my Social Security ought to let us stay current. Yeah, right, except that whenever I've said "Whew", that has meant that the car or the refrigerator, or something that won't wait is gonna go "ka-blooey" in the next week.

And Another Change

And this morning, we got the wild cherry tree in the back yard cut down. I love wild cherry pie, but this tree was well past menopause. Earlier this year, a big branch fell and took out a neighbor's fence, which was expen$ive to deal with. Luckily, I found some people who are both rather competent and rather affordable. It looks strange. The back yard is all opened up, and maybe the grass will grow now. When I look out the window, I see the maple trees in the neighbor's hard, and they are showing the silver undersides of their leaves, and I'm not used to that.

That's a sign of impending rain, you know. Maple leaves curl up due to the humidity, and they blow in the wind. It's supposed to be a 20% chance of rain tomorrow, 30% chance tomorrow night, 50% chance on Saturday.

The Cordword

The only way I could afford having the tree taken down was to handle the firewood myself. They left me a log that's about 8' long, close to 2' in diameter, and a bunch of lumps of wood maybe 20" long and up to 20" in diameter. I suppose what I need to do is to let the wood just season there in the back yard. In a year or two, I can buy a 20-pound sledge and some wedges and split up the lumps of wood. The big log could be used as a backless bench. Or, at least that's what I'm telling myself. Scoping out the wood, I'd say I have the better part of a cord.

I shouldn't have to buy charcoal for a long time!

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
20-pound sledge - agoraphobia - charcoal - Chasers - cordwood - lumberjacks - maple leaves - Marine Corps - mortgage default - nephrologist - prisoner - racing - recumbent bicycle - silence - Social Security - stressors - suicidal - Swedish Bikini Team - unemployment compensation - utility bills - weather forecasting - wedges - wild cherry

We've heard a lot about inflation all our lives, and how it's so evil that our money isn't backed by silver.

It is with interest, therefore, I read Thomas Jefferson's Memoir. In 1782, he wrote, they were trying to deal with various currencies in circulation. Robert Morris did some work, trying to come up with a unit that would be a common divisor of the penny in use in each state, and found that a unit that was 1/1440 of a dollar would work nicely.

He said this unit was also evenly divisible into british money, with 1600 units being worth a crown. A crown was worth a quarter of a british pound, and the british pound was equal in value to a pound of sterling silver.

What's A Grecian Earn?

At that rate, what's a pound worth? $4.44. That's about what a pound was worth back in the 1950s, as well. If the dollar is worth about the same today, in 1950, and in 1782, that suggests that inflation is not the big problem that we've always been told, and it says that Ron Paul's assertion that so-called "fiat money" is less desirable than money backed by precious metal.

Incidently, Jefferson said that a loaf of bread was worth 1/20 of a dollar, a pound of butter 1/5 of a dollar, a horse or bull was worth $80.

The national debt at that point was $80 million. The population back then was 2,780,000, so the national debt ran about $28.78 per person. This, however, was at a time when average income was about $160 per person - about 18% of the GDP.

Per Capita National Debt

Today's per-capita national debt is $46,197.22 - 98% of the annual income. However, debts need to be balanced with assets. If someone has a mortgage of $10 million on property worth $100 million, he's not impoverished, he's wealthy. Our national assets far outweigh our national debt.

We could sell, for instance, the interstate highway system? It's over 65,000 miles of first class highway, highly suitable for conversion into toll roads. It costs $39 million to build a mile of freeway. That's 2.5 trillion dollars to build the interstate system. The whole national debt is only 14 trillion.

Or consider land. Uncle Sam owns 21% of the land in the contiguous 48 states, and 60% of the land in Alaska. Wouldn't you like a nice plot for a retirement home? About 60% of the land in the US is used for agricultural purposes, and it's worth an average $1692 per acre. If you only sold the farmland owned by Uncle Sam, you could get another trillion dollars, and you could get a premium price for properties with a high recreational value, such as the Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone, or the Grand Tetons.

Playing Hardball

And if the Democrats in Congress want to play hardball with the GOP, they need to meet the gut-Medicare proposal with a proposal of their own.

Gutting the US Navy is actually a quite reasonable proposal. There are no seafaring nations that present a threat to us, only some ragtag pirates near Somalia that threaten other countries more than they threaten us. It's expensive to maintain it, and it takes so long to get a warship into position that it's nearly useless in today's wars.

So Sell The Navy

So propose eliminating the US Navy except for the Marines, selling off the fleet, propose selling the Interstate Highway System to a toll road operator, propose selling the National Park System to Disney and other amusement park operators, propose selling off all the federal lands.

In exchange, of course, for ending the tax subsidy to the ultra-wealthy, those who aren't just millionaires, those who have a million in net worth, but those who are earning a million or more every year.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Disney - Grand Canyon - Interstate Highways - national debt - Pound Sterling - Robert Morris - Ron Paul - Thomas Jefferson - US Navy - Yellowstone

I am surprised, at times, at how things change from day to day.

One day last week was the best day I'd had in months. I was up and about, productive, and got more done before 10 AM than I normally do in a week. Then, the next day, I was back where I have been. And then Sunday, I had a particularly bad day. I had Blondie dig out the walker, and had to use it to walk about downstairs. It's the first time in a couple of months that I've needed it.

And yet none of this has affected my mood much. I wasn't elated by my productive day, only surprised. And I wasn't depressed on Sunday, except when I tried to watch the Indianapolis 500. It seems that WHTM's uplink wasn't working right, so DirecTV's image on channel 27 was something like a kaleidoscope, only not symmetrical.

So while I strongly suspected the winner would be driving a Dallara Honda - all 33 cars fit that description - I didn't know until now that there would be a dozen cars completing all 200 laps, nor that Dan Weldon would win having led only the 200th lap while Scott Dixon, having led 73 of them, would end up 5th.

Bah!

Playing With The Puppy-Kitty

I spent a lot of time on the sofa, watching The Sandlot on TiVO with Blondie. Dustin would come over, wanting to play with me, and that was nice. I don't like cats, and they seem to be planning our deaths, but Dusty has increasingly been acting like a pleasant manner as he has aged.

He's always coming up to me, rubbing against my leg, wanting me to pick him up. In the kitchen, that's especially so. His food is in a bowl at the back of the counter, and he can jump up there easily, but he's apprehensive about jumping up there because he can't see where he's going to land. Sometimes, he can get Blondie to lift him up.

He jumps up on Blondie's belly, and paws her breasts, pressing indents with one paw and then the other. She and I laugh about it. "You can tell he's male," Blondie says, and I agree. When I've a blanket covering me, I move my hand under the blanket, poking up hills, which Dusty will pounce on, and Blondie and I laugh at that.

Are we manipulating him, or is he manipulating us? I'm hard pressed to answer that one.

Scratching His Belly

Mostly, though, he comes over and lies on the floor next to me, and I pet him, and he rolls over on his back. If I pet him on his belly, he swipes at me, but with claws retracted, and he rolls, then I pet him on the belly again, and he paws at me again, and rolls the other way, just rolling back and forth as quickly as we we can manage it, and he seems to think it great fun.

All of which greatly concerns Marie. She thinks that when Dusty is pawing me, that Dusty is clawing me, and she doesn't approve of that. Not. One. Bit. She growls at her puppy-kitty, "That's not how a proper puppy behaves!" and Blondie tells Marie that I'm a grown man, and if I get scratched, it's my own fault. I'm not sure if she's saying that to make Dusty feel more like a mountain lion, if she thinks Dusty is actually trying to scratch me and believes that I'm acting like a damnable fool.

Maybe she's jealous. After all, Dusty will lie quietly on Blondie's belly while Blondie pets him, which is something he won't do with me. Blondie also refuses to believe that Dusty is practicing his mountain lion "pouncing" skills.

Maybe A Nittany Lion

He's still afraid to be outdoors, which is strange, I believe, for a cat that spent the first three or four months of his life as a outdoor cat, on the farm. On the other hand, he loves to lie inside the front door and watch the animals outside. It's one of those storm doors that's all glass, so he has pretty good vision of what's happening. They do, too. Squirrels come up and tease him, from just the other side of the door.

Dogs walking by, with their masters, ignore him, which surprises me, because if Marie is lying by the front door, they see Marie and will bark at her, and Marie barks in response.

I suppose I should mention the new printer. It's an Oki B2200. It's a fairly compact black-and-white laser printer. I got it from Overstock.com, my first time dealing with them. They offer $2.95 shipping on any order, promising 14 to 28 days shipping, so that they can get you to pay extra for faster shipping. I cheaped out, and it took about a week, including time in transit, to arrive. I'd have to give The Big O a thumbs-up.

Oki Printers

If you're not familiar with Oki, they used to make bulletproof dot-matrix printers in earlier times, rugged enough to handle business needs, and the ribbons were affordable enough that businesses liked them. I'd guess that Epson was the most popular - they pretty much invented the category of "dot matrix printers for PCs". There were a lot of IBM printers out there in IT departments, too, because IT departments were used to dealing with IBM. IBM's own printers were always very rugged, being designed by the people who make trouble-free line printers for high capacity mainframes, but a lot of IBM's dot matrix printers were actually Epson printers with an IBM badge. Oki generally was #3 in terms of popularity, and yet I didn't see them for sale in businesses that mostly sold to consumers.

My first laser printer was an Okidata, and I was very happy with it, until it needed a new drum. With it, toner and drums were sold separately, which meant that I could use the same drum for years, saving a fortune in expendables. When I got to the point that I needed a new drum, it was fairly expensive - something like $250 or $300 - and I saw a complete laser printer on clearance at the QVC for about $90. Hmmm, I thought. I could use that until it needs a refill, and then redrum the Oki. However, that printer was faster than the Okidata, and it had a button to "print light" for toner savings, and when the replacement cartridges - toner and drum both - were only about $60, I got rid of the Okidata laser printer. I think I sold it for $40 to someone, pointing out the scratched drum.

Samsung Printer

Maybe I should offer the Samsung for sale here. The big drawback is that it has both a serial and a parallel port, and you can use either one - but most computers get sold these days without either one. If someone was using a desktop computer, they could get a multi I/O card for $10 online or $30 locally. If you have two computers, you can run it as the local printer for each, with one computer hooked to the serial port, and the other hooked to the parallel port, which is a convenient way to do things.

It has a driver for Linux, and drivers for Windows. It does not have drivers for 64-bit Windows, however. It has feeds for two types of paper, so you can put letterhead in one slot and plain paper in the second, or you can put letterhead in one and envelopes in the second. If you want to print on card stock, you can open a gate at the front that bends the card stock less, but the regular output nicely corrals output at the top of the printer.

Fast, quiet, and it doesn't shake the table. Really nice output, and this time, the printer has an unscratched drum. Instead of the 25c/page that an inkjet runs you, you can print for about 2c/page. It also has about half a cartridge of toner. The cartridges sell for $60, so I figure $30 for a complete printer, with half a cartridge, is a fair price. If nobody contacts me, interested in it. I'll eventually put it on Craig's List.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
cats - DirecTV - disability - dogs - Indy 500 - laser printer - Oki - Overstock - Samsung - squirrels - WHTM-TV

Ed Schultz is taking a week off.

A number of feminist groups complained to MSNBC, who broadcasts Ed's television show, about Ed's language Tuesday on his radio show. According to MSNBC's release, Ed volunteered to take a week off without pay, and MSNBC agreed.

The objectionable language? He called Laura Ingraham a right-wing slut, a talk slut, and I can understand why the listeners were upset. It's terribly insulting to actual sluts.

After All

A slut, after all, is simply a woman who is open to accepting and returning affection, even with people she doesn't necessarily know very well. That's not a good description of Laura Ingraham. She broadcasts the talking points of the day, whatever they happen to be, apparently showing no discrimination whatsoever, and she gets paid for doing it. Instead of insulting sluts, Schultz should have used a more appropriate metaphor. Laura Ingraham is more like a cheap talk hooker.