Skills

On Wednesday, I went to the Fort to do some interpreting for a home schooling group. I always love when I have homeschoolers in, because they ask the BEST questions. This group was a fantastic one, and it included a bunch of kids who were very obviously not normal students but who nonetheless were engaged and engaging. I loved their questions, their interest, and their sharing of their own successes and failures.

This particular week, I decided I was going to try a new to me bread recipe. This is a 1750s “receipt” that came to me from the internet, and the original poster received it by way of people in Illinois, who got it from French settlers, who were originally from the New France area during the Fort’s era. With such an illustrious ancestry, I decided this was THE recipe to work with. Also, the recipe only makes a single loaf instead of two, which is nice because I’m rather afloat in bread right now.

It’s an easy loaf, very simple to pull together, with half the kneading required of my other bread. I was excited to give it a try! I got into the Fort, started up the fires to warm the oven and hearth, and pulled out all the items I needed to make my bread: flour, yeast, water (very warm to the touch), and honey. Like I said, simple recipe. To that, I added my big mixing bowl (a shiny wooden bowl with such a fine grain that the dough barely sticks to it) and a wooden spoon for stirring.

As the kids and their accompanying adults trickled in, I started the process of mixing together my ingredients. As a baker with a bit more experience, I started with my water and yeast, rather than the flour (it’s much easier to add flour if your dough is too wet, but much more difficult to add water if it’s too dry). I put 1.5 cups of water into the bowl, and sprinkled it with about a tablespoon of dry active yeast. I explained to the kids that they didn’t have dry active yeast in the 1750s, and most likely would have used either a bit of salt rising (a golf ball sized bit of the last bread dough you made, saved in a bowl of milk and kept in the salt barrel until needed) or the barm off the top of the beer vat as the source of their yeast. Once the yeast started bubbling, I added in a dollop of honey (about 1.5 tbsp) and stirred until it was dissolved.

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Yesterday’s article was a surprise to me. I started the post with one mindset, and ended in a different place. Occasionally, it helps to talk out your issues.

It started with my statement, Snope should have been GVRed.

Why? Because the Supreme Court has already done a gun ban case. It is a slam dunk, easy case.

Slam dunk, easy cases, don’t make good law. Just like bad facts make bad law, easy cases don’t advance the law.

Every case the Supreme Court takes is important. They intend it to be important. While every case is important to somebody, or to a group, not every case is important to the country or the Court.

Every Second Amendment case is important to me. I want every court at every level to make a good ruling based on the plain text of the Second Amendment and this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation. To do anything less is to flaunt the rule of law and our founding documents.

Too many judges are agenda-driven hacks, black robed wannabe tyrants, operating their rogue inferior court as if they are the supreme authority of this nation.

When an inferior court makes a bad decision, their superior court should step in and set them right.

If every inferior court judge had every bad decision slapped down, there would be many fewer bad decisions. On Monday, the court decided 116 cases.

Of those, three cases were an invitation to the Solicitor General to file a motion on how the US Government stands in the case.

Two were, “You can proceed as a pauper, you must pay to play.” One denial of cert had two dissents written. The rest are denials. Most of which are dealt with by being put in a column titled “Denied”. Nothing more.

If the Supreme Court was capable of dealing with more cases in a meaningful way, then I could see them taking these slam dunk cases.

Unfortunately, the court has painted itself into a corner in what they feel they can say. I can wish all I want that a GVR would say more than “in light of Rahimi“, but a GVR never has more than “do it over obeying this new opinion”. This should be happening with more targeted language.

But they don’t.

Instead, they hear 65 to 70 cases per term. They decide which cases will have the most impact on our country. Which cases will bring common understanding across all the circuits.

They choose. And right now, Roberts is not going to let more than a couple of Second Amendment cases be heard per term.

I agree with Thomas and Alito, the Court should have dealt with Snope in some way other than ignoring it.

Dealing with it now might make a difference in the next few years.

More likely, it would not have accomplished anything. The Court is supposed to set guiding principles. It isn’t supposed to be fixing individual results.

Assume the Court said, “AR-15s are arms under the plain text of the Second Amendment. They are in common use. They cannot be banned.”

What would change in the Ninth Circus court? The First, Second Third, Forth and Seventh Circuit? Nothing.

“The Supreme Court has said that Semi Automatic rifles are arms under the plain text, they are most similar to machine guns which can presumptively be banned.”

Or they require a permit to own an “assault weapon”. It is no longer “banned”. Instead, you are required to register as an assault weapon owner, pay $1000/year per assault weapon.

They didn’t ban those evil assault weapons, they are just making sure that people treat the ownership of such weapons seriously.

We need to see advancement in the Second Amendment.

When Bruen was decided, multiple cases were GVRed. Those cases are making their way back to the Supreme Court. If the Court takes any of them and produces a major opinion, like Heller, or Bruen, then we are on track.

So I’m licking my wounds and preparing to fight for the rights of The People to keep and bear arms.

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When I prep, I store a variety of types of meals. I have a lot of rice and beans, as I can make those into dozens of different meals with very different spice pallets. There’s one type of meal that I do store at least a few of, for emergencies. That’s RTE, or Ready To Eat meals. These require either no prep at all, or just water and heat.

RTE meals are an important part of any prep for any situation. There are simply going to be times when you do not have the time or energy to cook, but you still need to eat. Having meals that require little to no preparation time will save you, time and again. I don’t mean for zombie apocalypse, either, though they work for that too. I mean for that moment when the power goes out right after you’ve finished 3 hours of snow blowing, and you’re exhausted and starving and now can’t use your stove. Or for when you’re backpacking, you get caught in a storm, and you’re stuck under a rock for a few hours for safety’s sake, and you need to eat.

While you can certainly go out and buy WiseFoods or any of the other “emergency bucket” type emergency meal kits, it’s very easy to assemble your own. Job Lots, Walmart, and even Amazon carry many very good options. It used to be that you’d save your cans of tuna for those emergencies, but now the tuna comes as part of an entire meal.

Starkist Tuna Snacks are the gold standard around here. We keep them in our go-bags, eat them as evening snacks, and they always go with me when I am camping away from the house. It’s fast and easy, and requires no heating. Simply slap the tuna on the cracker, and you’re ready to go.

Bumblebee Tuna Bowls are really yummy, and again, require no heating. There are three different kinds available on Amazon, but I’m told you can find a few more if you go looking. These include pasta, rice, and/or beans, and include vegetables as well. You’re getting a whole meal here. At 190 calories each, they’re a quick fix for a hungry person. They also do not contain any added sugars, so they can be eaten by diabetics. They are NOT good for people with Celiac though.

Starkist Smart Bowls are rice and beans with tuna, in a variety of flavors. These are the soft packs, so they stack easily in a backpack or go bag. They’re lower in fat and higher in carbs than the Bumblebee bowls, but neither of those are likely to be an issue when you’re dealing with an emergency situation.

At the slightly more bougie level, we have Cole’s Open and Eat Meals. These are a bit more expensive, but the quality is also higher. You get a larger meal, with more calories (250), and a variety of flavors. The reviews of them are pretty good, with the main sticking point being price. This is definitely one of those “you get what you pay for” moments.

And then there’s the ones I like best: Freshe Gourmet Canned Tuna. They have tuna and they have salmon, four flavors of each. You can buy them in bulk, and the price is a bit less than Cole’s. Each style has a different calorie amount listed, so you have to look at each of the flavors separately. Having eaten these both cold and warmed, I can say they are VERY yummy. I went out and bought a bunch of these at my earliest convenience after a friend introduced me to them.

There are chicken versions and salmon versions of all of the above. I would guess you can probably find ham and Spam ones, as well. I prefer to have the cans in my camping bin, because they can safely rattle around in the bottom of the bin and not be harmed. They will still be good to eat next summer, if I don’t get to them. The flat pack ones are best for backpacks and go bags. I usually slip mine into the front pouch of my backpack or in the interior flat area of my go bag, where they won’t be punctured.  Read More

Tuesday I picked Ally up at The Fort at No 4. On the way home, we stopped to do some banking and pick up some groceries.

As we were walking to the bank I said, “Oh, it is closed.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s Sunday.”

“Huh?”

I then got home and posted “Tuesday Tunes” to show up on Wednesday.

I’ve been working on a major website. This includes a content management system for the site that meets the requirements for that vertical.

What I decided on was a “management bar” for those logged in as manager. When they activate the “edit page” function, all the blocks that can be edited are highlighted. Click on the block to start editing the block.

Save your changes. When you are satisfied, click “make live” on the management bar to make all the changes at once.

There are a few good tools for editing text in place.

This left all the other blocks, image editor, carousel editor, calendar editor and a few others.

Design from the top, build from the bottom

I know what I want to do, how I want it to work. Fortunately, I only have to worry about the “working” part. Not the pretty part. I have a team member who helps with that.

What this means is that I see the entire system laid out. This thing will do this, this other thing will do that, the user will see this.

Which leads to a balancing game. How much is done in the template build out? How much is done in the JavaScript module? How much is done on the backend? And how much support does the Frontend request from the Backend?

Currently, I have three different editing models built, each one a bit different from the others. Why? Piece wise progression.

In my original implementation, all logic was done on the Frontend from data provided by the Backend during page load. These led me to a working edit for the carousel. Click here, drag and drop or upload an image. Click there, and you can rotate, mirror, flip, and crop an image, maintaining a fixed aspect ratio.

The next was the text editor. That was simple because the editor works in place, sort of. But it is working. I’ll be adding more features to it, but that is mostly done.

Then the new image processing came into play. Click on the image you want to edit, a dialog pops up, the original, raw image is loaded. Recorded edits are applied, the image can now be edited.

All modals had to be preloaded. All the content of the modal was preloaded. Everything works by modifying existing elements or modifying the DOM. The only communications with the backend are fetching the raw image.

Which led to the calendar editor.

Piecewise progression.

With this, the amount of data started to exceed easy storage in the DOM. Access to needed data was looking more and more like a call back to the backend. The need to serialize objects on the backend for the frontend to manipulate was starting to get stupidly complex.

This led to a redesign. Instead of multiple modals, there is now a single modal (dialog) which is fetched, on need, from the Backend. In this modal, there is a tabbed pane. Click on the tab, a different pane shows.

By listening for a pane to be displayed, we can determine what content we require and request that from the backend, which has full access to all the data and logic required to make this work.

Bingo, everything starts to get easier.

Which means, once this edit is completed, I’ll return to the image editor, make the same design decisions, which in turn will make the carousel editor a simple modification of the image editor.

Things are getting a little easier as I become more comfortable with TypeScript and “promises”

Why the concerns?

First, when I started programming, you didn’t do redundant things because there were no spare cycles and there were no spare bytes.

As an example, I like to write a = do_it(param)->do_other(params2)->do_different(do_wildly_different(param3)).

This seems reasonable to me. No extra cycles, no extra bytes.

Today, it is better to do r1=do_it(param); r2=do_wildly_different(param3); r3=r1.do_other(param2); r4=r3.do_different(r2); This performs the same actions, but it is often clearer to read and allows for checking results at each step. All good.

The other big thing is communications. My last project was a shopping app. Our family still uses it. It creates shopping lists that you can then use from your Android Phone. It has more to it, but that’s the gist.

Because communications is sketch around here, it was designed to work in a standalone state, uploading changes when it could, downloading changes when required.

This lead to an entire mindset of “Communications is expensive”. Which I’ve had to break. The new site makes seriously different design choices.

1. All Manager level actors will have modern browsers
2. All staff working with the site will have reasonable download speeds
3. All volunteers using the site will have reasonable browsers and speeds.
4. All visitors to the site will have a relatively modern browser.

In other words, If you are working on the site, and it takes 5 seconds to get an updated pane or modal, this will be acceptable, or you will need to upgrade your device.

In looking at the current usage of browsers on the Internet, more than 95% of the people using the Internet will do just fine.

Now back to the Bootstrap 5 grind as I design pretty forms.

Tourtière is one of those iconic dishes that gets served in Northern areas. While it hales originally from France, it was popularized in Quebec, Canada. Early settlers made Tourtière frequently, and it’s a filling and very tasty pie. I don’t normally like French Canadian stuff, but Tourtière and Poutine are acceptable.

Ingredients:

• pie crust
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• 0.5 teaspoon dried sage
• 0.5 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 0.5 teaspoon ground ginger
• 0.25 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 0.25 teaspoon ground allspice
• 0.25 teaspoon ground mustard
• 0.125 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1 pinch cayenne pepper
• 1 large russet potato, peeled, quartered
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 1 pinch salt
• 0.5 cup finely diced celery
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 pound ground pork
• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 cup potato cooking water, plus more as needed
• 1 large egg
• 1 tablespoon water

First, make the spice blend. Mix together the salt, black pepper, thyme, sage, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, mustard, clove, and cayenne in a small bowl. Set it aside.

Next, make the filling. Place potatoes and 1 teaspoon kosher salt in a saucepan; cover with cold water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until tender, 10 to 15 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to transfer potatoes to a bowl, reserving potato cooking water in the saucepan. Mash potatoes with a potato masher until smooth; set aside.

Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add chopped onion and a pinch of salt. Cook and stir until onions turn golden, 10 to 15 minutes. Stir celery, garlic, and spice blend into the skillet with onions. Stir until onion mixture is evenly coated with spices, about 30 seconds.

Add ground pork, ground beef, and about ¾ cup potato cooking water to the skillet. Cook, stirring occasionally, until meat is brown and tender and most of the liquid has evaporated, about 45 minutes. Stir in mashed potatoes , turn off heat, and let cool to room temperature. Preheat the oven to 375*F.

Place your dough in a 9-inch deep-dish pie plate. Have the top crust rolled out into an 11-inch circle, and keep it for later.

Fill bottom crust with meat mixture. Smooth out the surface. Whisk together egg and water in a small bowl to make an egg wash. Brush egg wash over the edges of the bottom crust. Cover with top crust; press lightly around the edges to seal. Trim excess dough and crimp the edges. Cut small slits in the top crust to allow steam to escape. Brush entire surface of pie with egg wash.

Bake in the preheated oven until crust is well browned, about 1 hour. Let cool to almost room temperature before serving.

Notes:

I have a vegan version of this, where I replace butter with margarine, and the meat with a Beyond Beef “ground pork” sausage. It turns out very well, and has been enjoyed by many friends who were surprised to find it was not real meat!

I know I harp on about practicing all the time, but it is THAT important. I do that on a fairly regular basis, more and more so as I pick up events as an author. When I go to an event, I’m cooking over an open flame at the very least, and sometimes living on site with limited access to water, food, and shelter.

Yes, I pack in food and water with me. If an emergency happens, friends and family are a mere phone call away. I’m in a fort that does have electricity if I need it, even if it’s a bit less than convenient to get at it. Heck, I could walk to the grocery store if I wanted; it’s a mere mile away.

While I’m there, though, I do my best to learn more about survival and prepping skills. I learn more about how our ancestors lived, knowing nothing about dishwashers, cell phones, televisions, and print on demand books. I always approach fort weekends (or an entire week, as in this case) with a goal in mind. I want to learn something that I don’t know much about yet, or have only book knowledge of. Or I go to practice a skill I already know, but am not comfortable with yet.

This trip, I’m working on pie crust. You might ask, why pie crust? It’s not particularly necessary, not a skill that’s high on the list of things to help you survive. On the other hand, being able to whip up a hand pie for a journey IS a handy skill. Modern me might go buy a pasty, but here at the fort, I get the opportunity to work and make my own.

So this week is all about Cheshire Pork Pies, Tourtière, Apple Pie, and baking bread. I consider myself a subject matter expert about basic breads at this point, but I am adding something new to my skillset. This week, I’m firing up the big outdoor beehive oven. It’s large enough to bake many loaves of bread and pies, all at the same time.

I know that the basics are just like firing up the miniature one in my cabin. But this will be production cooking. See, there’s a primitive rendezvous going on in the lower field, and I’m going to be attempting to bake bread and pies for sale. Or rather, for trade, because while money is nice, I have several things I need that I can get at the rendezvous. I look forward to enjoying morning coffee with the folks in the field, then going “shopping” among the various vendors that attend.

After, I get to go back to my comfortable cabin with the fireplace roaring to keep the chill out. Temperatures during the day aren’t supposed to get much above 65*F, and the evenings will be in the low 40s, so having dry wood and the ability to be comfortable and warm (and dry, on the days it’s likely to rain) will be wonderful.

What skills are you working on this summer?

I wanted to make a birthday cake for my vegan friend, and that meant no milk, no butter, and no eggs. I decided to search for vegan alternatives, and came up with several awesome looking ones. As a side note, chocolate is easy to make vegan. However, I didn’t have the ingredients for most of the cakes I found. I did what I usually do, however, and I took an existing recipe and re-made it in my own image. That’s right, I am a Food Goddess! This is my lovely sweet treat: Orange Cake

Ingredients

• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp white vinegar
• 5 tbsp canola or vegetable oil
• 1-1/2 tsp orange extract
• 1 cup orange juice

Preheat your oven to 350*F. Line a 9×9″ pan with parchment paper, leaving an inch over each side overhanging, for easy removal.**

In a large mixing bowl, add your dry ingredients and mix well. Form three depressions in the dry mixture. In one, add the vinegar . In the second, add the orange extract , and in the final one, add the oil. Pour the orange juice over the top and, using a whisk or wooden spoon, mix together until fully combined.

Transfer your cake batter, which will be quite runny, to the lined baking pan. Bake for 25-30 minutes and then check. It will probably take close to 45 minutes to bake entirely, but you need to start checking every five or ten minutes after the 30 minute mark. Continue to bake until a skewer comes out clean. Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool in the pan for 10 minutes before transferring it to a wire rack to cool completely. If desired, frost the cooled cake.

** I used a round springform baking pan, fully lined with no-stick-sprayed parchment paper. You do have to allow the cake to cool completely before removing the parchment paper, but it works very well. I used a 9 inch diameter pan that was about 1-1/2 inches deep.

I had frosting for this cake. We didn’t use it. We literally ate hunks of it with our hands. It was moist, sweet but not unbearably, and delicious. I would recommend removing 2 tbsp of orange juice from the cup, if you plan to frost the cake. It was so moist, if I had tried to frost it, it would have fallen apart despite having good crumb.

We are a rich people, here in America. Even our poorest has enough food (or could if they applied). We just don’t see people in the US starving. It doesn’t happen. There are no swollen bellies here.

That doesn’t mean people aren’t hungry. As someone who’s lived on food stamps and charity at one point, I can tell you that the pickin’s are slim and you don’t get a lot of veggies. I had to be creative to keep myself and my family fed. But I managed.

This is an art that too many people just don’t get. I covered it briefly in my last article about food, but it bears repeating. There are too many people in our country who have such a sense of entitlement that they think everyone should have “great food.” While I’m liberal enough to believe that we should be providing just enough food for people to survive on, even if they’re poor, I’m not of the opinion that it should come in the form of filet mignon or lobster tails. If you are poor (when I was poor), you have to learn to budget.

And therein lies the problem. This generation has a terrible time with budgeting. They can’t seem to budget time, money, credit… and who can blame them, with the various people who’ve been in office over the last couple of decades. “Budget” has not been much in the vocabulary of any of our leaders. It definitely doesn’t seem to be in that of the parents of today’s generation.

I remember a time, about ten years or so ago, when I was picking up supplies in a bump and dent store. We were tight, and I wanted to make my grocery dollars stretch. I walked past a gentleman with his very young daughter, staring forlornly at the dried beans. I paused, and asked if he had a favorite bean, and he looked at me with tears in his eyes and explained. Seems his wife had left him, and he was trying to work, care for his daughter, and feed her. Money was too tight, and he couldn’t afford meat. He knew beans were a way of getting protein, but he had no idea how to cook them from dry. He’d only ever had canned. I sat and explained to him several really tasty recipes that I thought would go over well with a toddler, and he bought up bags of beans with a grateful thank you over his shoulder. After that, I actually printed out several bean recipes and with the store’s permission, posted them in the beans aisle. They would be picked up every single week. I got a lot of thank yous.

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I haven’t touched on the topic of what to drink when you’re enjoying your post-apocalyptic spam, so I think today I’ll go there. 😉

There are several really tasty, easy to make drinks for when you’re doing a lot of labor or it’s extremely hot, but you don’t have access to Gatorade or its equivalents. I would hazard to say that they’re much better for you, as well.

Sekanjabin

This is what we refer to as “Viking gatorade” because it was popularized by the Vikings. It originated in Persia as a mint based drink, but the Vikings played with it, and I played with it more. It is basically a simple syrup that you add to water to make it more palatable. The vinegar and sugar help balance your electrolytes, and the ginger makes it just “warm” enough (from your body’s standard) to drink even in very hot weather without causing yourself cramps. Just a note, the Vikings and Persians both added crushed mint to this. I don’t, so it isn’t included in my recipe. Feel free to add it to yours!

Ingredients

• 4 cups red wine or apple cider vinegar
• 4 to 8 cups sugar/honey/sweetener/blend of choice
• 2 tbsp minced or grated ginger
• fruit of choice (I like lemon, strawberry, and blackberry, or a mix, but you do you)

In a pot, add the vinegar. You can even mix red wine and apple cider vinegars for a different flavor if you like. Get the cheap stuff, by the by. This is not something where the vinegar has to be bougie. Bring the vinegar to a low boil, then begin to add the sugar, a cup at a time. I usually use four cups of a mix of sweeteners, but always use at least one cup of real sugar to help it become syrup. Stir in between, preferably with a wooden spoon. When all the sugar is in and has dissolved, add in your ginger, and your fruit. When it comes to fruit, you can use fresh, but frozen works better because it sort of dissolves in the vinegar. I’ve done it with fresh, though; just cut it up into chunks so the “meat” of the fruit is exposed.

Simmer your fruit stew for a minimum of 20 minutes, and likely much longer.  You should reduce the amount of liquid in the pot by AT LEAST one third. It’s usually easy to tell, because it leaves a sugary ring on the edge of your pot. What you want is a syrup, not a liquid, so wait for it to really begin to thicken up. You want it to have the texture of a light corn syrup or maple syrup, but not be as thick as molasses. Allow your syrup to cool for several hours.

Once it’s cool, strain the sekanjabin through cheesecloth or a lint-free towel, and store in jars. I usually purchase the apple cider vinegar that comes in a glass bottle (it’s cheap), and so I pour it right back into the bottle and put the diffuser thingie back in. That way I can easily shake out just enough to sweeten my water.

To use, add about a tablespoon of syrup to 8 oz of water, stir, and enjoy. You may want to add a bit more or a bit less depending on both your tastes and the intensity of your sekanjabin. Store your sekanjabin at room temperature for up to a week, or in the fridge pretty much forever (I’ve never had it go off).

Note: it’s pronounced seh-KAHN-ja-bin

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