Lynne Loschky's cheese sauce

Les and I met in Freshman Honor's English class at Lincoln University in the fall of 1982. It was taught by Helen "Lynne" Loschky. Besides providing the forum in which I met my future wife, Lynne has had a huge impact on my life, and I owe her a lot. Unfortunately she passed away from cancer in 2003. I miss her.

She was more than an English professor to me, although it shows what an amazing English professor she was since I took Victorian literature - "Vicky lit" - just to have her for another class. She was a mentor, coach and friend. At one point we lived next door to each other and her daughter babysat my eldest daughter. She was one of the people who actually convinced me I have a brain, and along with Margaret Bridenstine was the best teacher I ever had.

And one of the many things she taught me about life was her cheese sauce for pasta. This sauce, with some canned clams or shrimp, was her "emergency" recipe for when people came unexpectedly for dinner, because it was quick, easy and so rich that it tasted like a gourmet feast while allowing the cook to be unconcerned about it and spend time with the guests. That was classic Lynne.

I've used it since as the basis for many things, including tonight's scalloped potatoes and ham. Which is what made me decide to post it. Here it is, in all it's glorious simplicity.

Ingredients

• 1 stick butter
• 1 package cream cheese
• 1+ cup cream

That's it. But of course that's not it, because like all great cooking, the simple basics can be varied a million different ways. For example, Lynne would add any scraps of whatever cheese she had laying around in the fridge. And of course you want to season it with salt and pepper, plus anything else that sounds good. I've used the following alone or in various combos over the years:

• garlic (lots of garlic)
• oregano
• basil
• chives
• dill
• parsley
• thyme

Lynne used it as the basis for a seafood sauce, adding canned clams or shrimp (or both). You can add whatever you want. Choose any of the following:

• canned seafood
• minced mushrooms
• diced ham or other diced leftover meat (chicken, etc.)
• peas

You get the idea.

Directions

In a double boiler or a non-stick pot on medium melt the three main ingredients together until they are hot. Do not bring to a boil, although a light bubbling around the edges is fine. Add whatever else you're adding and heat through. Done.

Pour over pasta, use as the starting point for scalloped potatoes (that may be another post), or as a dip for a crusty bread (sourdough or pumpernickel would be good). It's very, very rich, so just the base sauce and a pound of pasta plus a salad will easily feed four. Serve with a white wine by candlelight and it will seem like an elegant, intimate dinner for your closest friends, even though they saw how little effort you took to make it. But then again, since you all got to talk and laugh through the brief preparation of it, isn't that the best dinner of all?

Thanks, Lynne. We miss you.

Better living through user stylesheets II

[I posted a version of this a year ago. I've updated it for both Wiki's latest annoying campaign and to add Facebook's "stream" to the list. If you get real serious about this kind of thing, it is probably better to install some sort of ad blocker. But then you have to trust the people who make the ad blocker.]

Most modern browsers support user stylesheets, i.e., stylesheets that are written by the user, deployed in the browser and treated as the last part of the style "cascade." User stylesheets allow for overriding individual web sites' styles at the local level for such things as accessibility.

They also allow us to quite quickly get rid of annoying things from web sites we visit all the time, without having to install a browser extension (how do you know who wrote your ad blocking extension and what they're doing with the browser access you've granted their app?) In my case, the annoying things I wanted rid of were the sad puppy-dog-eyes faces at the top of Wikipedia pleading for more money. That campaign's been going on forever now, it seems - even public radio and TV get the point and only shake us down twice a year for a week at a time. And this time I also wanted to get rid of Facebook's "ticker," especially since they're going to start embedding ads in it.

With a bit of sleuthing I determined what tags were holding the problematic content and quickly came up with some CSS to hide it. Dropping that CSS into the user stylesheet in the right magic location immediately rid all the pages of the ad and Wiki and Facebook were back to looking like their old selves again.

If you have even a slightly technical bent, you can benefit from this, too. The following instructions presume Chrome as the browser, but this article tells you the locations and CSS files to use if you are using other browsers - the stylesheet file content should remain the same.

For Chrome, you need to find the Custom.css file. On Windows Vista/7/2008, it is located at the following (replace your-user-id with, ahem, your user id):

    C:\Users\your-user-id\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User StyleSheets

[Presumably on Windows XP it will be under C:\Documents and Settings\ in a similar location.]

For Mac OS X, it is at:

    ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/

On Ubuntu Linux it is found here:

    ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/User StyleSheets

In all three locations you should find a file called Custom.css. Open this file for editing (Notepad is handy on Windows, otherwise use the editor of your choice). It will probably be empty. Inside the file, place the following line (letter case is important!):

#siteNotice { display: none; }

.ego_section { display: none; }

     .ticker_stream { display: none; }

The first line is for Wiki, the second two for Facebook (yes, they really call the ticker the "ego section" - insulted yet?)


Save the file. Navigate Chrome to Wikipedia and you should no longer see the shakedown pleading banner! Nor should you see the stream in Facebook. If you want to revert, simply delete both lines from the file and save the file again (don't delete the file - it probably wouldn't hurt anything, but...)

Caveats:

1. You will never see any other site announcements from Wiki, either, as long as they continue to use the siteNotice tag id for thediv they wrap site announcements in. Nor will you see anything Facebook decides to display in the "ego section."
2. If any other site you visit happens to use an id attribute on an element and call it "siteNotice" or a class attribute and call it "ego_section," you won't see that content either.

I consider both of the above a small price to pay to not have to look at Jimmy Wales again when all I'm interested in is the capital of Albania.

Enjoy!

Dirge

Good mourning

  this morning

Missing lost friends

  this mourning

Lost by death

  cancer, car wreck, noose

Lost by life

  marriage, children, divorce,

  jobs, layoffs, moves

Lost by business

  and busyness

  comfort and laziness

  "you will always be there"

  

Lost by cruel words

  or worse

  no words

Who knows what

  can tip the balance?

Friendships die

  some resurrect

  not very damned often

I knew you

  and you me

I remember us

  laughter, joys

  anger, tears

  food and talk

I love you

  and miss you

I'm sorry

I'm sorry

Good mourning

  this morning

  

How are you

  friend?

Gushy green comfort food

It's been a while since I posted a recipe...

Tonight after church they had a Mexican dinner (we have dinner after every service - I think it is awesome). I had signed up to bring guacamole. For one, because I make good guac, if I say so myself. For another, this weekend was supposed to be a major system upgrade at work (note the "supposed to be" - let's just leave it at that and move on, shall we?) I figured I wouldn't have time to make anything real involved, and guacamole is easy. After missing church and losing a day of my life at work I came home and made the guacamole as comfort food. And it helped.

I don't care if my guac is "authentic," I just know I like it. It has had two major influences over the years. The first was the Wondervu Cafe at the top of Coal Creek Canyon in Colorado. When I lived up in the canyon in 1993-94 going there was a Friday night tradition and their guacamole quickly became a favorite. That was where I figured out the first rule of good guac: the avocados are basically green glue for onions and salt. If you come away from eating fresh guacamole and your breath doesn't stink, it wasn't very good guac.

That kept me satisfied for years. I experimented with adding a bit of cilantro, lime juice, etc., but if all I had were avocados, onions and salt, I was happy. Still am, actually. But it can get better. The second influence was El Torito Grill next to the Hilton in Torrance, California. For three years in a row from 2006 to 2008 I stayed there a week at a time and ended up eating at the El Torito four to five times each week. They make guacamole right at your table - it doesn't get any fresher than that! The menu now shows three types of "Guacamole de Molcajete," but I've only had the first one, and it is delicious. Now I tend to take my general direction from them with a few additions, because cooking is about making things your own.

So, with that background, here is my "recipe" for guacamole.

Ingredients

Essentials

• 2-4 ripe avocados (you want them a bit soft - not too hard, not too mushy)
• ½-1 onion, diced fine (red or white are best)
• salt to taste (I like it salty, say 1 heaped tsp for this recipe)

Optional (one, more or all of these to taste)

• juice from ½-1 fresh lime
• 1+ Tbs chopped fresh cilantro (some people hate it, I love it - you decide)
• diced fresh tomato (I used the last four small Romas from the garden this year)
• finely diced fresh chilies (El Torito Grill uses Serranos or Habaneros, tonight I used one finely minced Hab from the garden - leave out if you are not a hot-head)
• grated Parmesan cheese (or better, one of these hard Mexican cheeses, if you have them available - we don't here in the middle of nowhere)

The grated cheese is El Torito's secret weapon, I think. They don't put it on their list of ingredients in their menu, but it really makes a difference. I believe they are use Cotija Añejo.

The other "secret" is fresh - everything should be fresh, fresh, fresh.

Directions

Halve the avocados, scoop them into a bowl with a spoon, and "mush" them a bit with a fork. Stir in all the other ingredients except the grated hard cheese, which goes on top. Serve immediately, or if it needs to sit for a while cover it with plastic wrap smooshed right down on top of the guac itself to seal out all air and keep it from turning color (and if you do this, don't put the cheese on until you serve it). Serve with fresh tortilla chips. For those of you of the ethanol-imbibing persuasion I need not tell you cervezas or margaritas are good with this.

Serves however many can elbow in and fight a few scoopfuls from the bowl before it is gone. Tonight it served one, generously.

Mmmm...guacamole...

I want to live on the western end of a time zone

[...because Frank Black has already claimed living on an abstract plain.]

I may have discussed this before, but I want to end up near the western end of a time zone (preferably Mountain time, so that means western Montana or Idaho). If the time zones were simply longitudinal lines, then the western edge of one would be almost exactly an hour later than the eastern edge. But they're not, the lines wander as does any other political boundary on the planet. So in some cases the borders can be more than an hour apart. For example, today in the Central time zone the sun set at 4:39 in Chicago and 6:05 in Valentine, TX, a difference of 86 minutes. But obviously there are latitudinal factors coming into play there. In the Mountain zone, at roughly the same latitude, the difference between Rosebud, SD, at 4:28, and Owyhee Reservoir, OR, at 5:34, was 66 minutes.

I first noticed this phenomenon when I was staying with relatives in west-central Nebraska in the summer. The summer evening's twilight seemed to go on forever, and part of that was because they weren't that far from the western edge of the Central time zone. So by the time you factor that, plus long summer days and Daylight Savings Time into it all, it was still twilight after 9:30. And isn't that what you want, at least in the summer? To get off work and know you still have four or five hours of daylight left? Of course, that means by definition sunrise is an hour later, too, so for early starters, it might be more ideal to live on the eastern edge.

Just something weird to think about in the early darkness...

Life, the universe, and trick-or-treaters

Last night we had 42 trick-or-treaters, which is also the ultimate answer. We had enough candy for 142. I was handing it out by the fistfuls and still we had leftover candy.

I wish we'd had more. When I lived in Lakewood, Colorado, we had hordes of kids and would run out of candy every year, having to turn all the lights out by 8:00pm or so. That was fun. Some of the neighbors in that area didn't like the fact that "those kids" from the poor apartments four or five blocks away came through the neighborhood, sometimes without even costumes (because they're poor! duh). I always marveled at just how scrooge-like people can be about such things, begrudging handing out candy to poor children. Grrr...

Me? I love Halloween. I don't dress up. I hardly put anything up except a few lighted decorations to help denote our house as being one open for trick-or-treaters. But for some reason I love handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. Young or old. From the neighborhood or not. Rich or poor. I don't care. I just like answering the doorbell, hearing "Trick or treat!," commenting on the costumes and handing out candy. That's it. That's all there is, and I love it. It always makes my day.

I especially like the little kids who are old enough to walk up to the door on their own but still so young they don't know what to say or are in that too-shy phase to say it. Last night's winner was a little girl of about three (I'm guessing), whiskers painted on her cheeks, serious face, big eyes. I opened the door and she just looked up at me with those big eyes. Silence. "Are you a kitty?" Serious nod, big eyes. "I like kitties! Here's some candy!" Serious nod, big eyes. "Bye bye! Happy Halloween! Have fun! (wiggle-fingers-wave)" Walks away, looking back, serious face, big eyes.

That made my whole night. :)

And here's the thing - I am not a big fan of kids.  I wasn't really that good with little kids when I was a little kid. I've long joked I barely liked my own when they were little (I loved them, of course, but I like them more and more as they get older). My idea of hell would be a never-ending birthday party for a four-year-old and all their friends. I am usually fairly curmudgeonly about it all.

Yet still I love Halloween. It lets me be a good guy for a night, just some anonymous dude giving out candy by the handful. I like to see the costumes. I love to hear the shouts of "Trick or treat!" and "Thank you!" I don't even want to shake my fist and yell, "Get offa my lawn!" It's a night where I get "just enough" of little kids, and we both get to be in our best forms - them all cute in their costumes and excited about the free candy, me in a good mood just seeing the parade of happy faces, shoveling out candy, hoping for more to show up, sad when it's over. Weird, eh?

To mix holidays together a bit, it's like that moment at the end of "Grinch" where he's happily tossing gifts off the back of the sleigh. It's the thing that makes my heart grow three sizes, if only for a day.

Anyway, here's to hoping for more next year. Maybe we'll get 142! Maybe we'll have to turn off the lights and go hide in the back of the house at 7:30 after running out of candy. That would be heaven.

If only for a night.