Internet Pesto

[electra310]

How to Make Beer Bread

Inspired by a friend of mine, here is a brief tutorial on the most efficient way to mix alcohol and carbs. (And yes, I know that almost all of the alcohol in beer bread evaporates during cooking, that's why you have a second can while you're baking it!)

This is a very simple beer bread recipe, with only three ingredients. It is, however, endlessly versatile in its variations. Now pay attention! 

Step One: Preheat

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.  

(Yes, I have a percolator. You know you're jealous.)

Step Two: Find a Bowl

Get a bowl. Not the Tumblr's-Helper kind, this kind. 

Step Three: Flour

Scoop three cups of self-rising flour into your bowl. Don't bother sifting or any of that. We're not building a piano here. If you don't have self-rising flour, you can use three cups of all-purpose flour, four teaspoons of baking powder, and a teaspoon of salt. Just make sure to mix it up really well. 

Step Four: Sugar

Add three teaspoons of sugar to the bowl. 

Step Five: Stir Dry Ingredients

Stir all your dry ingredients together really well. Do not omit this step or you will RUIN EVERYTHING!

Step Six: Add Beer

Add one 12oz can of beer. It may work better if you remove it from the can first. Any beer with yeast will work for this bread, and it adds a lot of the flavor. Try your favorite beer, or be like me and use the cheapest you can find. 

Step Seven: Form Dough

Using first a spoon and then your clean hands, stir the beer into the dry ingredients till you have a nice ball of dough. Everything should be nicely combined, but don't overknead it. It'll still be pretty sticky when you're done with it. 

Step Eight: Grease Loaf Pan

Just kidding! 

There we go. Thoroughly grease your loaf pan. A bigger loaf pan will make lighter bread, a smaller one more dense, English-muffiny bread. 

Step Nine: Pan Dough

Drop your dough-ball into the pan and smush it around with the spoon until it fills all the corners. You can try to smooth the top, but you're doomed to fail. The texture gives it character! 

Step Ten: Bake

Put your bread in the oven for 55 minutes at 350 degrees. If your oven runs hot, check it at 50 minutes. Ideally, you will use this 55 minutes to clean your filthy microwave. 

Intermission: 

Check out this turkey stock I'm making on the stove! 

Step Eleven: Remove From Oven

The bread is done when it's a light golden brown and hard to touch on the top. Dark beer will make it look a little darker gold. Look at that texture and character! 

Step Twelve: Turn Out 

Beer bread does not need to rest in the pan. As soon as you take it out of the oven, turn it out onto a cookie sheet or baking rack. It will smell amazing, but waiting another five minutes will set the inside and save you some tongue burns. Enjoy! 

This recipe for beer bread is the absolute most basic recipe. Make it a few times, learn how it works, then get creative! The simplest way is by trying different kinds of beers, dark beers, fruit beers, etc. I like to toss in a third-cup or so of candied fruit peels and a quarter-cup sugar and make fruit bread. You can also divide the dough in thirds and layer cheese in between the dough for delicious cheesy beer bread. (I use Velveeta because I am a peasant and it is awesome). Dust the top with garlic salt or vanilla sugar for a little extra flavor. You can do pretty much anything with this stuff, so enjoy! 

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[electra310]

1/8 Gates, an awesome photo series! 

[brooklynmutt-deactivated2021090]

Never gets old.

[think-progress]

Good use of time

[electra310]

As a poor person without cable, I was unaware until today of the White House tours being canceled, but very aware of the cuts to all those other programs. Maybe TV really does make you stupider. 

[intothebeautifulnew]

Ladies, take Nervine!  The key ingredient was bromide (a sedative & anti-convulsant); bromines today are used in pesticides, disinfectants, flame retardants, as a gasoline additive, etc.  Miles Medical began around 1885 and operated for years; Nervine was around until the 60s.  

[electra310]

The people today who idolize the self-sacrificing and completely home-oriented housewives of the past often fail to realize the key factor that made these women's lives work: they were blitzed out of their minds, like, constantly. "Oh, Timmy's set himself on fire? Good thing I have my Nervine!" 

[funnyordie]

Guide to the Papal Smoke Colors

As a new pope is being chosen, smoke billows from the Sistine Chapel in indicate whether the Roman Catholic cardinals have made a decision.

Here’s a handy guide to what each color means.

[electra310]

Heck yeah, Nora Roberts! (Though in the interest of full disclosure, Blue Smoke was her only post-1995-or-so novel that I started and did not finish because it was too damn grim. Way too many people getting set on fire!) 

[electra310]

Day Twenty-Eight: Silence

This is a photograph of the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It holds the Guinness Record for quietest room in the world. Picture a nice, quiet nighttime room for sleeping in. That's about 30 decibels, on average. The atmosphere in the anechoic chamber is -9 decibels. It has no sound, and it deadens sound that is produced in it. 

The anechoic chamber is a strange place. After just a few minutes in the chamber, you start to hear your own heart beating and the functioning of your organs. There is nothing else to focus on, so you hear yourself more clearly than you ever have before. After half an hour, the silence leads to severe disorientation, and you had better be sitting down or you'll probably fall. After just forty-five minutes of silence, you may begin hallucinating as your sensory-starved brain creates things for you to listen to. Thus far nobody has made it beyond an hour or so in the chamber. A little silence is nice, but it's easy to get too much of a good thing. 

[electra310]

Day Twenty-Seven: Happy

Nobody is smiling, but everyone involved in this picture is very happy! Robert is happy because he can play with the Model A and make an astonishingly loud AAAOOOGAAAH noise on the hornn whenever he likes. Nana is very happy to have Robert around, because they are very best buddies. And I am unspeakably happy that I don't have to deal with this situation for real for another thirteen years. 

[electra310]

Day Twenty-Six: Ate

In 2008, my paternal grandmother, my last surviving grandparent, passed away after a long struggle with Alzheimer's Disease. It was during my last semester of law school, a time when I was already struggling, and I remember it as a very difficult, sad period in my life. During the weekend we were at home for the funeral, I used my little Flip Video camera to record both big occasions and small moments in time. 

It's really only now, going back and looking at all the raw bits of footage, that I can see the beauty and the strength in that time period as well. The whole family came together, and though there were many tears, there was also laughter and support and good memories being made. Many of those good memories were centered around the plethora of food that surrounds the grieving process. For three days, the extended family was together for nearly every meal. The many meals we ate together helped us to face saying goodbye. 

[electra310]

Day Twenty-Five: Faithful

My maternal grandparents were married more than fifty years. I don't remember how many, but I was pretty young when they had their big party, so it was a lot. In the last years of her life, my grandmother suffered a series of strokes, each of which left her with progressively less of the person she used to be. Eventually she was barely responsive and in a nursing home, seemingly unaware of most of what went on around her, and not knowing any of the people who loved her. Despite all of this, my grandfather was with her every single day, caring for her, tending to her, just being with her till the very end. I don't think I could've had a finer example of faithfulness growing up. 

[electra310]

Day Twenty-Four: Find

After we got married but before Robert came along, Mike and I dipped our toes into the world of animal rescue. At first it was just rescue driving, taking animals from kill shelters and overcrowded rescues and driving them for part or all of their journey to a new home in a different city or state. My first rescue drive, in Chicago, was a lovable (and uncrated!) pittie girl named Liberty who had been used as a bait dog for fights. She insisted on riding with her head in my lap, which was okay except I was going 70 on the Dan Ryan expressway at the time. Rescue driving was fun, but eventually we decided to escalate our commitment and do some fostering as well. Today's picture is Elizabeth, our first foster cat. 

Most cats who go into a shelter or rescue don't go to foster homes. There just aren't enough to go around. Foster is for cats who need special care, typically young kittens or cats with special needs. Our specialty was socializing young feral cats and traumatized adult cats. Oftentimes when feral cats are found, they are beyond the reach of human contact and cannot become pets, but with cats under a year old, if someone makes the effort and takes the time, they can be socialized and made ready for adoption. When an older cat loses its home and is put into a rescue, the traumatic shift can cause personality changes ranging from aggression to extreme shyness. With Elizabeth, then Thomas, Denny, Pookah, Bellamonte, and a handful of others we cared for, our job was to meet the cat where they were and draw out their best selves. Whether it was tiny Thomas hiding behind the toilet for days, or hyperaffectionate, hyperaggressive Bellamonte purring while she scratched us, or sweet, shy Pookah who was a ball of love in a home and an unresponsive, quivering lump in the adoption center cage, we tried to find what was special about them and communicate it to potential adopters. It was really rewarding work and one of these days, when Robert is old enough, I want to start doing it again.

[electra310]

Day Twenty-Three: No

That last one was kind of heavy, so let's just take a breather here. (This makes sense as long as you read up from the bottom of the page like no Tumblr user ever). Anyway, a number of years ago I went through the special little slice of hell known as law school, and the delicious double-helping of hell that is the 1L year. People know law school is difficult, but it's not just because of the mountains of reading and Socratic dialogue lectures. It's because you have to retrain your brain into a legal way of thinking, where you stop thinking "what is the answer that makes sense" and start thinking "what does the law say about this," answers which can be miles and miles apart. By the end of the first year, you've sort of left sense behind and haven't quite reached law yet, and are just hanging out in the middle of nowhere. 

Finals time in law school is especially intense, with study guides and outlines and feverish preparation everywhere. You don't sleep, you don't eat, you just study and gripe with the people who are right there with you. My Criminal Procedure class was particularly important to me because I wanted to go into criminal law, so I was careful to study all the intricacies of evidence-gathering and courtroom procedure. When someone in my class sent around an email with an attachment titled "Study Guide for Fruit of the Poisonous Tree," I jumped on it. Fruit of the poisonous tree is an important Fourth Amendment doctrine that states if the gathering of a piece of evidence is unlawful, other evidence gained from that first piece is tainted. Simple on the surface but complex underneath, it's the sort of thing that could get its very own study guide. When I opened up the file and found the above picture, though, all I could do was laugh and laugh. It became the desktop on my computer for the next year of law school. 

[electra310]

Day Twenty-Two: Shadow

Several recent psychological studies have affirmed what everyone pretty much suspected to be true: the things you believe about yourself in adolescence profoundly affect the kind of person you are for the rest of your life. The pain we experience then can cast a long shadow that, while it doesn't define our lives, colors it in ways that can be quite subtle.

I didn't realize, for example, until I watched this spoken-word poem by Shane Koyczan and began openly sobbing, that there are parts of my heart still broken from the identities that were foisted on me in high school. I don't know if there is any way we can protect adolescents from how ruthlessly unkind the world can be, but maybe if we understand that it's important, that it's not something you grow out of and it's something you grow into instead, maybe we'll at least pay closer attention. 

[electra310]

Day 21: Night

Man, I am just legit terrible at doing anything once per day. If I can put three meals near the table and have Robert in clean clothes, that's pretty much the extent of my daily fidelity. But Robert is "napping" now (throwing toys in his room) so here comes another batch. 

This photo is one my mom took on vacation at Fripp Island, SC. We've been going there since I was a baby, and it is beautiful. This picture is special, though, because it is one of the first things my mom painted when she decided she was going to learn to paint. I kind of thought she was crazy, that she was just going to up and start painting because she wanted to, but it turns out she is good at it. She has a little art studio out in the guest room now and it's cool. It's really brave, I think, to decide you want to do art, then just go out and do it.

I associate my mom with the night because that is when we do our best talking these days. Usually after midnight, I'll see her online and we'll Skype, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for an hour. We're both busy in the day, but in the night we can reconnect and catch up. An hour to talk with someone you love and miss can be at least as refreshing as sleep. 

[electra310]

Day Twenty: Bless

This is Boggle. Boggle is worried about you! Boggle is also an owl. Boggle's entire reason for being is to reach out to the lonely and anonymous souls who reach out to him on the internet, and to bless their lives with the knowledge that somewhere out there, someone cares enough to reach back. Boggle's artist has chosen to remain anonymous,  speaking mostly through Boggle's words and simple line drawings, but the impact that has been made is enormous. Like Fred Rogers and a very few other people, Boggle can extend the simple but enormous blessing of validation, that you are loved just the way you are, and that you deserve it. 

http://boggletheowl.tumblr.com/

[electra310]

Day Nineteen: Thirst

Hey look, it's Robert again! I have two thousand pictures of him already on the computer, and I can't take a snapshot without him begging for one of him too, so you can probably expect to see quite a bit more of him.

Anyway, Robert was never the most reliable nurser or bottlefeeder as an infant. It took him almost months of pumping to learn how to nurse at all, at which point he promptly fell off the bottom of the weight chart and ended up needing to be supplemented with the bottle. It was an anxious, fractious time. When Robert was thirsty, nothing could make him happy. He wouldn't play, he wouldn't sleep, he couldn't be cuddled or sung into a better frame of mind. But like magic, when his thirst was finally slaked, all was well with the world again. 

[electra310]

Day Eighteen: Leave

One of the last important things to do before leaving an apartment for the last time is taking a bunch of pictures to document how you left the place. You never know when the landlord is going to try and charge you for cleaning, so it's important to have a record. That last set of photos also becomes the final memento of a place that was home.

This is the living room of our previous apartment on the last day we had it. We didn't choose to move out, our landlords decided that after four years on an initial one year lease, they weren't going to delay their remodel any longer and we had to be gone. It was hard to leave a place with so many memories. We'd lived through tumultuous years here, a move to a new state, an historic presidential election, the rises and falls of fortune in jobs and schools. I got pregnant in this apartment, and it was the home to which we brought our infant son from the hospital. It was hard to leave, but the move ended up being good for us. We love our new place, and it has had many unforeseen benefits for us. The time is coming again soon when we will face another leavetaking, this one probably much bigger. I just hope that there is plenty of good ahead for us there, too.