Monday, September 24, 2007

Calmness in the Face of Provocation

Just a quick note that I'm doing better on this, slowly and surely.

• Even when things aren't fair, getting upset doesn't do any good and when I am upset I feel worse than when I'm not upset. Peace feels good. And my own peace depends on me, not on circumstances.
• Other people take cues from me and when I get upset, they get upset. If I remain calm and become even more gentle and quiet when those around me are losing it, they have a chance to anchor to me and yield some equanimity from it. It does us both some good.
• I'm finding life to simply be more pleasant. And unpleasant circumstances are less unpleasant than before. Cool.

It's hard to put these in bullet points. Bullet points aren't going to make real change in a person. I'm merely trying to express something that has a much deeper and more complex reality going on already.

Friday, September 7, 2007

How to Fry Cheese

Fried cheese. A recipe invented on the spot by yours truly.

• Select a medium hard cheese. Good examples are Cheddar, firm Mozzarella, Swiss, and Gouda.
- Avoid soft cheeses like Havarti or fresh Mozzarella because of their liquid content--they take much longer to fry and are much more messy.
- Avoid really hard cheeses like Parmesan because they don't melt very well.
• Cut some slices of your selected cheese(s) approximately 1/8th inch thick (3 mm). You can use thicker slices but it will just take longer and will spread out in the pan anyway.
• Put some slices in a frying pan and fry them at medium to high heat. Don't use any cooking oil at all. Adjust heat so frying doesn't go too slowly but you are not getting to unnecessarily high temperatures. Signs of being too hot (much too hot, turn it down!) are smoking, uneven browning, and crackling oil.
• Your fried cheese is ready when it is browned and has hardened some. It is kind of like bacon, being edible from fairly soft through ultra crunchy, and it all depends on personal taste. The cheese when it cools will be harder than when you take it out of the pan. You can get fried cheese to become extremely hard and crunchy if you keep it going long enough (harder than I like).
• Use a spatula to remove the fried cheese to paper towels on a plate and blot away excess oil.
• Eat.

When cheese is fried it goes through some recognizable stages:
• Melting and spreading out
• Bubbling and giving off liquid/oil
• Browning

If you fry a lot of cheese at once, the oil it gives off will slow the frying process. Either fry in small amounts or be ready with a paper towel to blot up oil from the edges of the pan. If you try to blot the cheese directly, you'll just get gooey cheese stuck to the paper.

I don't fry cheese by itself very often. More often, I intentionally put extra cheese in a grilled cheese sandwich or a quesadilla, or I am deliberately uncareful when sprinkling cheese over food so some lands on the pan directly. Depending on the space in the pan and the amount and type of cheese, blotting up excess oil is often mandatory (and helpful to prevent sogging the food). One ends up with a corona of fried cheese stuck to the outside of the item. Yum.

Another way to get fried cheese is to put a slice or sprinkle shredded cheese on the top of a quesadilla or sandwich. Use a lid on the pan to help melt the cheese that's inside and on top. When you flip the sandwich, the melted cheese will fry now that it's on the bottom. It's best to do it on only one side so you still have an ungreasy side for eating purposes, but I have done it on both sides before and it can be good.

When frying cheese together with other food, make sure to use a lower temperature than with cheese alone so nothing burns. Using a lid helps get the temperature up faster and keeps the temperature more even, and by retaining moisture helps prevent the food from drying out. If you experiment you can find the right fairly low temperature where the cheese will eventually fry wonderfully and nothing burns, and you can walk away and do something else for 15 minutes. Be sure to check back often until you are experienced with the stove and pan you're using.

I think that mixing several kinds of cheese yields the best flavor. Grate several cheeses and place in a large ziploc bag. Inflate the bag and seal it. Shake and "roll" the bag to mix the cheeses together. Voila!

If you don't like the flavor of cheese you won't like fried cheese, because frying intensifies the flavor. On the other hand, if you don't like the texture of cheese, frying changes the texture, so you may like fried cheese even though you don't like plain or melted cheese.

Note: It is best when cooking to cook at the lowest temperature that gets the job done. If you want to brown something, do it at the end if possible, with the majority of the cooking done at a lower temperature. The reason for this is that heat damages food, and the higher the heat, the more damage is done.

High heat:
• creates carcinogens,
• creates trans fats,
• generally breaks down and alters proteins and other parts of the food.

350 degrees Fahrenheit (175 C) is one number I seem to remember from my reading about a good goal temperature for keeping food below, where the damage really starts to occur above that.

If you don't know about trans fats, briefly, they interfere with the body's ability to render carcinogens harmless. They also get integrated into cell walls and throughout the body but have the wrong permeability (and that is a Bad Thing). And the body can't distinguish between trans fats and regular saturated fats so they go everywhere and they stick around. And unlike other health topics where there is disagreement, everyone agrees that there is no safe level of trans fat consumption except zero.

Beware of products that tout "0 grams of trans fat per serving" or even simply "0 grams of trans fat." This means they can have up to 1/2 a gram per serving. If a serving size is 20 grams, that could be 2.5% trans fat!

Cheese is healthier than many people believe because, coming from animal fat, it is higher in saturated fats, which are more resistant to denaturing due to heat, light, and time. The last thing you want to do is deep fry in highly unsaturated (vegetable) oil because you'll be creating carcinogens and trans fats right and left. French fries cooked in vegetable oil are one of the worst foods you could ever eat. At the end of the day, the oil in a fast food's french fry fryer can be more than 30 percent trans. Yuck! If you're going to fry, do it in butter, tropical oils like coconut or palm, or animal fat such as beef tallow. The food will not only be less greasy, but it will taste better. I fry in coconut oil all the time and the food doesn't taste coconutty.

I think I'll post about oils some time and try to cover all this stuff in more detail.

Stress Affects Different People in Different Ways

My son is having heart surgery this coming Thursday (September 13, 2007).

I don't consciously feel very tense or worried, but I am finding myself doing things that indicate I am preoccupied or distracted:

• I thought I'd left my cell phone at home. I even left a message for someone I needed to contact saying that she had to leave a message for me at home because I forgot it today. And then, there it is on my belt clip.

• I tried to call someone, forgetting my bluetooth headset was connected to the phone, and three times I couldn't figure out why I wasn't getting any sound.

• I couldn't find my badge at work today, so at the cafeteria I had to have the lady punch in my employee number. Only, someone had found my badge and given it to me earlier in the day and I was wearing it. No wonder the woman didn't need me to confirm my name after she punched in the number. Bleh.

I did have some moisture in my eyes today thinking about the possibility of losing him, but I definitely cope with the stress in a different way than my wife.

She seems to be more in touch with her feelings and for some months, as long as we've known about his surgery date, has cried a little from time to time. She worries about this being a sign of weakness, but it's not. There's a place for appropriate emotion about things. I was actually more concerned about myself and that I wasn't feeling it enough. But I'm just a different person. And a man, too, who compartmentalizes fairly well.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Co-Sleeping With a Baby Is Not a Good Idea

Subtitle: "How To Construct A Torture Chamber Out Of Your Own Bed"

I love my son. I wanted to do every good thing for him.

I did research about the dangers of co-sleeping, and found that unless the adult is intoxicated or ill, there is essentially zero danger to the infant, as we have subconscious awareness even during sleep. The same thing that keeps adults from falling out of bed in their sleep also keeps them from crushing a baby.

Thinking of some emotional benefit he could reap from being close to us (and also thinking of not having to get out of bed to tend to him) we tried let him sleep in our king size bed, right in the middle.

There was plenty of room. We used rolled towels folded in with sheets to give him a little edged bowl that was his own. He stayed in that place pretty well--infants don't really move much at all, let alone in their sleep, so the rolled towels were adequate.

But now, 16 months later, I wish ever so much that we hadn't done that. Now my son thinks his place is in our bed.

Every night, we put him to sleep in the playpen. (The crib experiment failed miserably and I have yet to do it again--ask me some other time about what happened). Then, somewhere during the night, he wakes up. No big deal. All children do. And we're working on putting into practice the principles from the book The No-Cry Sleep Solution, so there's hope. So that'll be good, some day. And often I can get him to go back to sleep and I put him right back in the playpen.

But then he wakes up again. Then again. And again. And again. And again. I notate the hours I've seen. 11. 12. 3. 3 again. 3 again. 4. 5. His ability to wake up surpasses my ability to tolerate putting him back to sleep. He DOES NOT WANT to be in the playpen. It's not his place, he thinks. So eventually I give in because I'm tired of leaping up to console and placate and tease him back to sleep, and I put him in our bed. The sheet/towel thing is long gone.

There the real torture begins. The whimpering and moaning and crying in his sleep, which awakens me but not him (he's teething). The kicking--he loves to get his feet on one of us and kick and prod. The hand smacking me in the face. The climbing on top of me or my pillow or my face. The very real danger of a vicious head-butt to the nose (poise hard and heavy weight called child's head above face, now child has just to fall over--and falling is a frequent activity by toddlers). The sheet pulling. Put him on top of the sheet and he manages to kick the sheet down. Put the sheet over him and he even more quickly rolls over and tangles in it and then wakes me up.

I've only repaired to the couch once so far. But I've seriously considered it again several times since then.

Our next child is going to sleep in a crib. All the time. Avoiding torturing the parents is a very valuable emotional advantage for a child. Just think of all the potential benefit to the child from having parents who aren't in a bad mood because of that child!

Think very carefully before you let your child sleep in your bed.

P.S. I confess that I haven't very carefully done everything in that book I linked above, so don't knock the book at all when you contemplate our failure to get our son to sleep through the night. I'm sure there's probably something in there that will help. I haven't even finished the book.

We also bought the second book that talks about getting toddlers to sleep, and it has even more detail and ideas. My wife is reading it, and so far we're pretty sure my son is actually suffering from sleep deprivation and we need to put him to bed earlier every night. Now, I haven't read it yet, but I think that pretty soon I'm going to make it a priority. (I've just been distracted with reading some older Andre Norton novels.)