Friday, April 11, 2014

Blog Housekeeping Questions And Other Adventures in Cooking





First blog housekeeping question:  Are you, my sweet (and possibly nonexistent) readers interested in the more granola-type dissection of news which are not exactly studies?  For instance, the new Pew survey about the rise of stay-at-home-mothers in the US from 2000 to 2012?  I have a long piece about it stored in my brain, but I'm not typing it out if it's not of interest to anyone else.

And a related question:  Are the longer posts readable or not?  Should I chop up stuff more or not do long-form writing at all?  I have two posts which would become very long, one on the question what is rape culture and the other one on the question of what feminists think about prostitution.  Both of these topics have been recently much debated in articles, books and on Twitter, but, as is the case usually, I first do long debates inside my skull and then people are onto other games.

Then the cooking adventures:  A beetroot loaf recipe came to me much praised, so I decided to try it last weekend.  The ingredient list called for three beetroots, to be grated.  I chose what I deemed to be medium sized ones, not knowing the weight which the recipe didn't state. 

After grating them, I had grated beetroot in all the bowls in the kitchen, I looked like someone who had just carried out a mass murder, and most surfaces in the kitchen were covered with red droplets.  The more serious problem was how to adjust the other ingredients, given that I just may have grated too many beets and given that I pretty obviously didn't have enough of the other ingredients.

For reasons not known to anyone, I decided not to discard any of the grated beets but just to stretch the rest of the recipe to three large beet loaves.

The result wasn't appetizing.  And beetroot loaves go bad really fast even inside the fridge.

This is probably a metaphor about life and the need for balance between work and family and such.