Luckily, I keep a USB stick with RIP Linux on it handy. RIP Linux is handy. Booting from USB was not as easy as it could have been but I did work it out.

Useful commands: fdisk -l, mkdir, mount, fsck.

Useful rundown: this post on WUBI, especially the tip on looking for “root.disk” and running fsck if you can’t mount it.

I get it now, though. What clicked for me was xldynamic’s explanation of the arrays that a SUMPRODUCT formula creates when you include comparisons.

And I want to know how many rows have the exact same values in columns D and E:

=SUMPRODUCT(($D$2:$D$224=D2)*($E$2:$E$224=E2))

Worth knowing: a boolean result can be represented as TRUE/FALSE, YES/NO or 1/0. I don’t know why that is, by which I mean, it makes sense to me intuitively but I can’t actually explain it to you. So perhaps we’ll explore that in the Ladygrammar Book Computing Club. For now, just trust me. We’re going to represent TRUE as 1 and FALSE as 0.

So. If I were dealing with a table like this:

I’d use a =SUMPRODUCT formula to create two arrays about each row, and add up the product of each array. So the first instance of the formula would first compare my first Col A value (“0″) to every other value in Col A and create an array of the results (which are TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE). Then it would compare my first Col B value (“25″) to every other value in Column B and create an array of those results. Then it iterate through those two arrays and create a third array which contains the product of each pair of values. TRUE * TRUE is 1, FALSE * TRUE is 0, FALSE * FALSE is 0.

Then it adds up the SUM of all those PRODUCTS. Get it? SUMPRODUCT.

1 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 2

There are exactly two rows where Col A is 0 and Col B is 25. I repeat that formula for each row, et voila:

Then, hypothetically, I could use that third column to calculate the radius of points on a scatterplot. Also handy? Libre Office Calc’s save as HTML option.

PS. If you’re clever, you’ll notice that the scatterplot doesn’t really show any kind of correlation. That’s okay — my project was just to figure out how to make it in D3.

Eventually, there will be asparagus. In California, there’s been asparagus for a month already.

8 oz. Asparagus, washed, trimmed and cut into 1 1⁄2 inch lengths
4 lg eggs
1/4 cup milk (or whipping cream, if you’re decadent like that.)
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper (or more, if desired)
1/4 tsp paprika
1 cup small-curd cottage cheese
1 cup grated Gruyère cheese
1/4 cup grated Parmesan or Romano cheese

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter a 9 inch pie plate.

Using a small sauté pan with a cover, heat about 1⁄2 cup water just to boiling. Pour in sliced asparagus, cover, and turn off heat. Allow asparagus to steam w/ heat off while
you prepare the other ingredients.

In a large bowl, beat eggs on medium speed until they are very well blended. Blend in the milk, mustard, salt, pepper, and paprika until well combined.

Using a heavy wooden spoon, stir in the cheeses, stirring until well combined. Drain asparagus (should still be bright green, tender but slightly crunchy). Put it into the bottom of the pie pan. Pour the egg mixture over the asparagus and place quiche into oven.

Bake for 30 – 40 minute, or until quiche has puffed and browned, and is set in center. Allow to cool 5 minutes before slicing.

But … Tumblr.

@embell said Tumblr is for people who don’t like to write — I’m not sure that’s totally true, but there’s a strange format to conversations there, a format that I like.

Bay Leaves from Montenegro

Greek Butter Cookies with Sambuca (actually, that’s pretty much it. If it is winter, eat cookies Cookies while sipping Sambuca.)

And there’s one called Shrimp Curry, from the nutritional mythology files, which goes like this:

I have a few recipes that I saved from my grandmother’s recipe box, most because they struck me somehow and not because I remember her making these things. One is for shrimp curry. It isn’t much bigger than a postage stamp and has floated around my kitchens for the last decade. I realized, as I was reading it over this weekend, that I’ve never actually read this recipe before or I would have been floored by it already.

To make Shrimp Curry one blends 1/2 tsp curry powder into 1 cup of mayonnaise and gradually adds 2/3 cup evaporated milk. Got that? Curry powder, mayo, canned milk. Okay, still with me? You blend these things and add 1 1/2 cups cooked shrimp, 2 T each of chopped pimiento and bell pepper and 1 T chopped onion. Heat these things and serve them over rice.

Next time someone starts rambling about how our grandmothers cooked balanced meals in some long lost once-upon-a-time, do me a favor and set them straight. Some did, some didn’t.

Sunday, squash / miso / mugwort udon / scallion / hard boiled egg (loosely based on a recipe); carrot and chickpea salad with lime/sesame dressing. We got some turkey sausage at the farmers market, so we have to use that soon, too. Monday, Possibly sausage spaghetti, or else butternut squash and garbanzo beans with tahini sauce. Tuesday, leftover mujaddara (caramelized onions, lentils, short grain brown rice) with yogurt. Wednesday, see Monday.

See also: cabbage with sambal olek and fennel, and a fried egg; cabbage with umeboshi plums; Moosewood‘s Finnish cabbage with tomato paste, dill, currants.

Unrelated: my sister makes stuffed felt owls with big eyes for her friends’ babies. They’re super cute and super easy (though … my sister sews a lot. Her “super easy” might be your first big sewing challenge). Also, courtesy requires us to insist that whatever we’ve made is no big thing. “Oh this? It’s really easy to make.” You can’t say “this was hard to do, but I enjoy a challenge;” So everyone says “oh, you should sell those!” because that’s what we say today when someone is crafty. Why on earth do you have a job as an ICU nurse when you could make your living sewing stuffed owls?. Etsy hardly invented the idea, but they’re sugar to its little yeasties, bellows to its glowing coals. You’ve really got no excuse now! Nonetheless, it has taken me this long to piece together that there’s something really broken about the idea that if you make something well, you should sell it. That Etsy was founded by men who are making a comfortable living off of the factory produced goods on their “handmade” marketplace could perhaps have been a clue, but that’s not even what I mean. There’s a corollary conversation about pretending not to work, while also pretending not to be wealthy that also matters. Also, not what I mean. I just mean that actually making things, beautiful things, inspiring things … it is possible to just make things. You don’t have to sell them.

I cannot, for the life of me, imagine walking into a restaurant and selecting “Bulgarian Pepper Casserole” off the menu. I can’t. But Jan made it for the farm trip potluck and it was excellent. And then last week we got of an airplane in Atlanta, into a car, onto a highway. Three hours later we were slowly coming to terms with the fact that it was Sunday and we were tired and would need to make dinner out of groceries we hadn’t bought yet, starting from an empty pantry and for that we’d need a plan. So I pulled up the recipe. We couldn’t find feta or anything approaching greek olives at the Ducktown Piggly Wiggly, so I bought some jack cheese. I was really tired, so we only bought one onion and one green pepper. When we got to the cabin and there was absolutely no reception and my phone browser didn’t have the page cached, so I had to work from memory. We’d found a woman who sold brown eggs from her garage ($1.75/dozen, leave the money in the basket, take the eggs from the fridge), so we had some eggs and it made sense to me to add an egg to the ricotta, so I did. It came out pretty good. I bet with a recipe at hand it’d turn out even better.

Which brings me to this: I want to make more casseroles this fall. Just because. I don’t know why really. Before we left, Rachel and I assembled a sort of modified enchilada that got me thinking casserole. Onions cooked with roasted peppers (Zach and Rachel have a flame thrower, always fun to use) and a can of beans. Tortillas, softened a bit, wrapped around some cheese and drizzled with mole and some bean juice. Hippie food, but it came out good, especially for a meal that started with “Well, we have a can of beans somewhere, I think.”

Broke it so’s I had to send it back to SanDisk. Got it back, plugged it in and started the whole thing over again. It seems to hang on syncing with Banshee.

I’ll explain this more, I swear, but for now, I just want to note that mounting it and manually deleting the “.m3u” playlists that Banshee synced — then I was able to turn it on. I suspect that it was choking trying to index those or something.

Why the Fuze?
I genuinely liked my first Ogg player, an iAudio 7, but when it died (just bricked up one day — let me know if you want to try unbricking it) I decided that I wanted something that would support multiple playlists. I can’t really run because my foot is still oddly enflamed, but when I can run, good music makes a huge difference. I probably don’t actually need to explain why a person might want more than one playlist.

I was also looking forward to the larger screen, though honestly, the Fuze makes poor use of all that space.

You need a container. Glass is best, metal and plastic are no good. Some people use ceramic, which is fine, though I like a transparent container so I can keep my brew on a high shelf and check on it from time to time. So I have a giant pickle jar.

For best results, you want the surface area to be wider than it is deep, but it doesn’t matter that much. My pickle jar is much deeper than it is wide, but I don’t usually fill it.

You need tea, green or black or oolong.

You need sugar, white or brown. No honey. 1 cup of sugar per 3 qts tea.

And you need a starter, aka a mother or a scoby.

It helps to have some brew from your last batch.

You need a piece of cloth. I used cheesecloth for a long time until a fruit fly epidemic in our compost made it’s way to the cupboard where my kombucha was brewing. That was truly revolting. Now I use a clean piece of sheeting, which has a much tighter weave than cheesecloth.

People will tell you to sterilize everything. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. You don’t want soap residue, though, so consider boiling your jar first, just to get it clean of soap. Boiling your equipment certainly won’t hurt. So go ahead and sterilize everything.

1. Brew the tea. I usually make a single pot (which is about 1 quart, so I add about 1/3 c sugar)
2. Measure sugar into a jar
3. Pour some hot  tea in to dissolve the sugar (if you’ve already cooled your tea, don’t sweat it. The sugar will probably still dissolve.)
4. Cover the sugar water and the tea pot and go do something else for a while.
5. When your tea is cool, strain it into your jar with the sugar.
6. Add the mother and some of  your last brew if you saved it. The mother will probably sink, or float in the middle of the brew.
7. Cover the jar with cloth and put it in a dark, warm place. Don’t stress out about the warmth, just don’t put it on your fire escape, for instance. That is not a warm place.
8. Leave it alone for at least five days. I know this is impossible. You’re dying to test it, to see what’s happening. Don’t. Leave it alone.
9. After about five days, you can take the jar out very gently and peer at it. This is the part where a glass jar is just better: you can see. There should be at least a film forming over the top of the tea. It might even already be opaque and white. The mother might be floating or it might be stuck to the film on top. You want it to get to the point where it’s a solid thick mass covering the whole brew. Food Renegade has excellent pictures of the process.
10. Resist the temptation to poke at it. The mushroom forms a seal across the top of the tea, which is busy fermenting down below. So look, but don’t touch.
11. Mold is bad, giant air bubbles or odd inconsistencies in the thickness of the new mushroom are not a big deal. If you’re seeing actual mold develop, dump the batch and find better instructions.
12. Once you’ve grown a whole new mother (thick film forming a seal), bottle your tea or look around for instructions on testing it. And when you’re happy with it, then bottle your tea:
    1. Boil some jars or bottles. I use mostly whisky flasks, but it doesn’t really matter.
    2. Funnel the tea into your jars, cap them, and let them sit at room temperature for a day or two to carbonate. Then refrigerate them.
13. At this point you can start a new batch — you should have two mothers now, so give one to a friend. If they’re stuck together (they often are) you can yank them apart. Or, stick the mother in the fridge with the dregs of the brew and start a new batch later.

I don’t have a good link for the “no honey” rule, but I believe it’s got something to do with honey’s antifungal properties inhibiting growth of the kombucha mushroom.

Most recipes seem to think you’ll want to brew gallons and gallons of kombucha. You can do that, but I finally settled on one pot of tea, which seems to take me about a week to get through. Since a new batch takes about a week to brew, the timing is usually about right. I highly recommend starting with just a quart, so that you can get the hang of the process without turning your kitchen into a brewery.

Any recipe I’ve seen has you dissolving the sugar in the tea on the stovetop and brewing it for fifteen to twenty minutes. I stopped bothering. If you make hot tea it will take at least 20 minutes to cool down anyhow. So I just make a pot of tea and leave it for a good long while while I go do something else. Then I measure the sugar, swirl it in the jar with a small amount of tea to dissolve it and pour the rest in. It works just fine.

Most recipes give a temperature range for actually storing the brew. If you live in a cabin in the woods that freezes when you’re not home with a fire going, you might have some trouble, but basically if you can sit around in your home your kombucha can grow. It will grow slower if it is cold out.

Looking for more verbose discussion of teas, step by step brewing instructions, or just great insights on fermentation? The internet is your friend. Sandor Katz is probably your best friend.

You don’t actually need a whole mother. You can start from a bottle of raw commercial kombucha if it’s got some bits of mother floating around in the bottom. Drink half and dump the rest in your tea. It will take a little longer to form a good solid mother, but it will form. I tried this exactly once after the revolting fruit fly maggot incident. Did I mention that cheesecloth isn’t fine enough to keep fruit flies out? Yeah. Gross.

These go in a blender: ⅓ c tamari soy sauce, ⅓ c cider vinegar, ½ c water, 2-3 cloves of garlic,  ½ c nutritional yeast.

Blend them. Then add 1½ c vegetable oil. The recipe makes a big stink about adding it very slowly, which does make some subtle difference in the consistence, but I don’t bother. Put it in a jar, but the jar in the fridge. Or put it on a salad. Or you know … a little of each. You might be tempted to use olive oil, because it is good for your heart or something. Don’t. Use canola oil. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that substituting shoyu for tamari won’t actually ruin the crack-like addictive quality of the dressing.

From Hollyhock Cooks