Porterhouse Steaks

Partly because of my high cholesterol and partly for environmental reasons, I don't eat a lot of beef these days. Since it is a rare part of my diet, I only want to eat excellent beef. A porterhouse steak from Peter Luger's Steak House in Brooklyn, for example. The NY Times has a short article today about Peter Luger's, accompanied by this multimedia feature. Be sure to click on the full screen link.

Buy Lance Snacks

It can be hard to believe, but every once in a while a corporation does the right thing.

According to CNN, in the middle of December, the Archway bakery in Ashland, Ohio was suddenly closed by the private equity firm that owned it. 300 workers lost their jobs just a few weeks before Christmas. That's the unsurprising bad news.

The good news is that Lance Snacks, which makes vending machine snacks like peanut butter crackers and Cream Cheese and Chives on Captain's Wafers (all too often my lunch in college consisted of various Lance crackers, especially the CC&CoCW) bought the bakery at an auction and have already reopened it. They hired back 60 of the workers, and hope to hire the rest by the end of 2009.

Not only did they reopen the bakery and rehire some of the workers, they also gave all 300 of the former employees a $1,500 gift card.

David Singer, CEO of Lance, says the gift cards were a way of letting Ashland know the new owners are different. "We wouldn't do it willy-nilly," Singer says. "We do want to make money. But this is the pool of folks that we intend to hire. We just wanted to let them know who we were."

The 60 workers rehired so far are earning their previous salary and retained their seniority. They also were provided health insurance from day one.

It seems it is possible to treat workers with respect.

Hat tip to Don Lindich

Lime-cello

2 friends.
3 microplane graters.
20 pounds of limes.

The day after Thanksgiving, I followed up my limoncello experiment (the limoncello was good, a bit too sweet, but still good) by starting a batch of lime-cello.

The only recipe I could find online was at LimoncelloQuest, a blog describing itself as "a personal pilgrimage to create the perfect Limoncello." Ben made a half batch with only 10 limes and vodka, and although he reported that he was pleased with the distinctly lime flavor, the color of the finished liquor was almost indistinguishable from the limoncello.

I took Ben's basic technique for limoncello of filtering the Everclear multiple times but greatly increased the amount of lime zest. In fact, the zest produced by 20 pounds of limes could not be covered by 750 ml of Everclear, so I had to add a bottle of vodka to the initial infusion. With that much zest (and using grain alcohol) I don't think there will be any issue with the color of the limecello being pale. As you can see, right now it is an extremely dark green, almost black.

Big thanks to Suzanne and Kristy for helping with the major task of zesting all of those limes! Oh yeah, if anyone needs some frozen lime juice, I'm your man.

My poor, neglected blog

It's been over a month without any activity on my blog. Sigh.

In the past month...

1. I felt proud to be an American. I think part of the reason I have not been writing much (or even reading other blogs) is that after the election I felt a huge sense of relief. Before the election, I felt like I had to know everything I could about the world of politics on a daily basis because some new horrible thing might be happening. Beginning on January 20, adults will be back in the White House.
   
   Four years ago, when we re-elected a president who we knew authorized torture, I think I was depressed for weeks. I could not believe what we had done. It only took a couple of years for the American public to really understand what kind of president Bush has been, but the reasons his approval ratings have been at record lows were all evident four years ago. Obama has a lot of crap to undo.
   
   
2. The National Bureau of Economic Research officially announced that we have been in a recession.
   
   
3. I have tried to buy a house. At the moment, it looks like I need to start over.
   
   
4. I bought a new camera. My old one ended up getting something stuck inside the lens, so there was a mark on the right side of every picture. You can see an example below.
   
   I looked into getting the camera repaired, but it would have cost about $200 just for the shop to open it up and clean it. Not only would there be no guarantee that the $200 would actually fix the problem, but it could take up to 8 weeks for me to get the camera back. That would be cutting it too close to my trip to Hong Kong, so I bit the bullet and got a SLR. I hope to have lots of practice with it before my trip. Here's an action shot of the puppy from my first practice session.
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. I've been making dinner every Sunday night at my church this fall. It's been a great experience. I'll be writing more about these dinners in the future.
   
   
6. It's Advent! My favorite time of year music-wise has arrived. I rarely listen to classical music, but that changes in December. Today we did Lessons & Carols at church, which included some pretty tough pieces. I have not participated in Christmas Eve services at my church before, but based on the music we are preparing, it should be amazing.