Ornate
Here’s an excerpt from Metacritic’s synopsis of the 2004 film Garden State:
Her warmth and fearlessness give him the courage to open his heart to the joy and pain of the infinite abyss that is life.
Sounds like a good description of how Mykala has touched my life. Happy almost-four-years, Miss!
A three page article in the New York Times about chocolate chip cookies? Well, OF COURSE, I’m going to link that! Cookies recently surpassed doughnuts as my favorite food, and so I sat up and took notice at some helpful suggestions for baking great cookies in this article.
On Maury Rubin’s recommendation of letting cookie dough set for 36 hours in the fridge before baking:
“Oh, that Maury’s a sly one,” said Shirley O. Corriher, author of “CookWise” (William Morrow, 1997), a book about science in the kitchen. “What he’s doing is brilliant. He’s allowing the dough and other ingredients to fully soak up the liquid — in this case, the eggs — in order to get a drier and firmer dough, which bakes to a better consistency.”
And of course, there’s the mouth-watering description of cookies baked after 12, 24, and 36 hours in the fridge:
At 12 hours, the dough had become drier and the baked cookies had a pleasant, if not slightly pale, complexion. The 24-hour mark is where things started getting interesting. The cookies browned more evenly and looked like handsomer, more tanned older brothers of the younger batch. The biggest difference, though, was flavor. The second batch was richer, with more bass notes of caramel and hints of toffee.
There is also a discussion of the right chocolate to use; if you are following along at home, there’s no reason to special-order fancy baking chocolate. Oh, no. Just use Guittard Milk Chocolate Maxi Chips, available at your local grocery store. To enhance melting, chop them into halves, or lightly food process them. I eat the darn things for a small snack, and they’re the best widely available sweet chocolate I’ve found.
Aaaand the recipe:
2 cups minus 2 tablespoons (8 1/2 ounces) cake flour
1 2/3 cups (8 1/2 ounces) bread flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt
2 1/2 sticks (1 1/4 cups) unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups (10 ounces) light brown sugar
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (8 ounces) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract
1 1/4 pounds bittersweet chocolate disks or fèves, at least 60 percent cacao content (see note)
Sea salt.
Yield: 1 1/2 dozen 5-inch cookies.
Note: Disks are sold at Jacques Torres Chocolate; Valrhona fèves, oval-shaped chocolate pieces, are at Whole Foods.
I’ll be the first to agree with the spirit of George F. Will’s editorial about the historical importance of beer in the growth of urban populations (via Daring Fireball), but there are two issues in this piece of which the reader should be aware:
I.
Mr. Will is committing the fallacy of equivocation when he speaks of the “beer” consumed daily by our urbanizing ancestors. When a brewed beverage had to substitute for water, it was generally a “weak beer” or “small beer” with extremely low alcohol content. (cf. Beer in the Middle Ages)
II.
Alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) was correctly named in the editorial as the dimer that catalyzes the first step in our digestion of alcohol. Mr. Will asserts that those people who couldn’t process beer due to ADH mutation didn’t survive to reproduce; therefore, alcohol intolerance was selected out of the population. However, the story strays from the truth a bit:
“Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.”
Johnson’s view is Euro-centric and ultimately incorrect. The issue is this: “European populations express an allele for the alcohol dehydrogenase gene that makes it much more active than those found in populations from Asia or the Americas.” That makes sense: people with European ancestry can digest alcohol faster and safer than those from Asia. However, people in Asia make up over half of the world’s population, so it is silly for Johnson to state that most of the world’s population is tolerant to alcohol.
To reiterate: over half the world has a mutation on the gene encoding for ADH. This causes deficiency in the metabolism of alcohol and results in the well-known alcohol flush reaction. Therefore, the sterilizing power of alcohol in weak beers secured the water supply and in doing so propelled urbanization, but the effects of this beverage didn’t shape humanity’s genetic profile as profoundly as this article would have you believe.
The lighting made for some interesting colors on the ceiling.
Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D is a game for the iPhone. For the iPhone? For the iPhone. Holy cow, it’s like they made the Nintendo Wii mobile. The new iPhone comes out this Friday for $199. I still can’t afford it, but with its business AND gaming features, well… I think if you clicked through and watched that video, you just saw the reason why this thing has won. A list:
Now I want to see some company actually compete with this thing so the price will come down further.
Coldplay’s new album “Viva La Vida” has a song called Strawberry Swing.
People moving all the time
Inside a perfectly straight line
Don’t you wanna just curve away
When it’s such
When it’s such a perfect day
It’s such a perfect day
Really digging this, along with the rest of the album.
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