Friday Hodgepodge

Four Things

1. If you cook for a hobby as I do, you may at some point wonder what, exactly, mise en place accomplishes:

At first pass, practicing mise en place doesn't seem beneficial. Most home chefs are optimizing for time. Shouldn't it be faster to parallel path slicing peppers while caramelizing onions, as Claire [Carroll], former prep skeptic, initially thought?

I write my recipes so I can optimize for time, although they often also include some staging, so the answer left me nonplussed at first: I almost never have to run to the store to pick up anything, as this piece warns the casual home chef might.

But that's because all my recipes have standardized ingredient lists that I can lob onto my phone app on a shopping trip ahead of when I plan to make something, and I check that list before I do anything in the kitchen.

I probably don't have the tight time band around, say, chopping vegetables, that professional chefs do, but my version of (semi-?) mise en place -- if you count checking for the presence of all the ingredients as part of it -- suits my own purposes quite well.

As a bonus, there is a link to a good-sounding recipe there.

2. An American seafood company is in legal trouble for operating a 200 foot-long railway to dodge the Jones Act. Yes. That Jones Act. The one that has all but killed American-flagged shipping on the pretense of "saving" it by protectionistic laws:

Run by a subsidiary of the American Seafood Group, a huge Seattle-based seafood processor that operates in Alaska, the Bayside Canadian Railway is said by the DOJ to fly afoul of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, according to Anchorage Daily News. Also known as the Jones Act, the law requires shipping between American ports be done with American-built, American-flagged vessels, which the ASG doesn't operate. An exemption known as the third proviso, however, apparently accommodates goods that make part of the journey via rail in Canada. [links and italics in original]

So, yes, the company loads its trucks, parks them on a flat car, and, following the letter of that stupid, destructive law, moves a short distance back and forth in Canada, before driving down to the U.S. of A.

The embedded video of this journey below is ridiculous, but not nearly as ridiculous as the law that has grown men having to do this in order to save money.

3. A recent post here about "smart" cars seems to have hit a nerve, but there was one thing it didn't address that a recent recall by Honda does bring up: The cars sometimes perform actions, like braking, on your behalf in the name of "safety."

Guess what?

The NHTSA opened a preliminary investigation into the problem on February 21 after receiving 278 complaints about Hondas that suddenly decelerated despite nothing in their path. [link omitted]

I once had to drive a loaner car that slowed down against my wishes while I was trying to pass someone on a road I was very familiar with. This I found incredibly annoying.

But just imagine phantom-braking right in front of a concrete-mixing truck or tractor truck. That's another "feature" I'd like to have to option to disable.

4. Following my mention of an Indian scrambled egg recipe I'd decided to try, reader Snedcat pointed me to a very enjoyable article on Colonial India's breakfast curries.

The piece, as you might expect in today's noxious/defensive cultural atmosphere, starts off having to defend the cuisine from ignorant, sometimes well-meaning attacks:

These sentiments have been echoed over the past decades, both by academics and even the great actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey, who wrote, "To me the word 'curry' is as degrading to India's great cuisine as the term 'chop suey' was to China's."

Given the rich history of chop suey, this may be a more apt comparison than Jaffrey intends. Although curry is often described as an invention of British colonizers, Indians ate what non-Indians call curries long before the British arrived, and Indians across India still eat all kinds of curry today. Curry is not a colonial relic. [links omitted]

On a humorous note, I enjoyed reading about British expats secretly enjoying the local cuisine at home, while preparing British food when hosting other expats.

The scrambled eggs, by the way, were a hit, although the delicate flavor was somewhat overshadowed by the flour fajitas I had to substitute for roti. My son, a picky eater who is finally becoming more adventurous, tried them and proclaimed My favorite foods are now German and Indian. This was the week after we'd gone to a Biergarten that served sausages he liked. That said, this isn't the first time he surprised me by liking Indian food.

I'm still tweaking the recipe and I want to try serving it over rice before posting it here.

-- CAV

Updates

3-5-22: Corrected a typo.