Month: January 2017

Ingredient Delivery Services

I keep getting promotions from companies that offer fresh meal ingredients delivered – Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Home Chef, and Plated. Each provides recipes and ingredients that show up on your doorstep – some services offer a selection of meals, others give you what they give you. I’ve been curious to try one of these services, but it’s not something I want to pay to test. I finally got an offer of free. I’ve tried it  – and, honestly, if the other services offer up free food … I’ll take those offers too. But I wouldn’t pay for this service.

(1) Convenience – Their advertising is centered around how terrible grocery shopping is and how you can avoid such drudgery with their service. Problem is, there’s no plan that provides anything like the groceries you’d need for a week. Even if you got seven dinners (which may require purchasing multiple plans, quite a few of these services are the 3-4 meal a week type) … what are you eating for breakfast or lunch? Maybe for someone who eats out a LOT, these services eliminate grocery shopping (or more likely reduce it to a once-a-month trip). But for me to feed three people three meals a day … didn’t eliminate a thing.

(2) Cost – This is meant to be cheaper than grocery shopping because you aren’t overbuying. But I usually make enough food for dinner to allow leftovers for lunch the next day. Larger packages are cheaper – a savings that is only realized if the food isn’t allowed to spoil. I’m still learning to preserve everything we buy. I buy a large package of something, and break it into smaller portions and freeze most of it. I buy things to use in multiple meals. I am trying to cook food into something preservable before it spoils – turn bananas into banana bread, milk into yogurt, blanch and freeze veggies. I am certain that buying just the quantity you need for one meal is cheaper than overbuying for one meal, but their cost estimates don’t include *using* the rest of the stuff to make a second and third meal. If I pay 15$ for one meal or 18$ for three, there’s a big difference.

(3) Logistics – I don’t know why I expect companies who are shipping something perishable in unfriendly weather to have come up with some great solution to the problem. I’ve bought plants online and had them arrive dead because of this incorrect assumption. Had the same problem with fresh produce. It is Winter. It is WELL below freezing (lows around 0 degrees F kind of cold). My “fresh” veggies arrived frozen solid – and the ‘cold’ stuff was packed between two ice packs … during a week where the high’s were in the low 20’s, this seemed a bit wasteful. Freezing fresh produce is OK for some things (a lemon that is going to be juiced), but other veggies are only useful for making stock. I don’t want to have to track the long term weather forecast to decide if the weekly meal subscription should be put on hold or not. And it certainly isn’t convenient to be missing ingredients (back to #1, I had to go shopping to replace the things that froze).

(4) Effort – As I mentioned, I usually make a large dinner that is used for lunch the next day. Bonus if some portion of it can be used for breakfast too. Since they have single portion meals, that’s a no go. So I had to make dinner last night, then make something completely different for lunch today.

(5) Meal composition and portion – They quite simply didn’t provide enough food for two people. I’d have had hungry cranky people if I served JUST what was in the planned meal. I serve a lot more vegetables. I supplemented their meals with a salad course, or you can add an additional vegetable side dish … but you’re shopping again. And having to come up with something.

Meal ingredient delivery services are certainly not for me. There’s some convenience to allowing someone else to decide what we’re eating a few nights each week, and there were a few interesting recipes that I’d not seen before. Their promotional e-mails, random cooking blogs, Food TV’s page, cooking magazine web sites all provide new recipes that someone else has selected too.

I know a time when I could have used a service like this (couldn’t have afforded it, but eh): When I left University and lived on my own for the first time. I didn’t have any staples (and it’s expensive to stock a kitchen with spices, flours, and such). I didn’t really have any idea what to buy at the grocery store. Or what to make.

I have had a lot of friends who literally eat every meal from a restaurant – I could see someone like that who wanted to cook a few times a week using a service like this. Sure there are other ways to figure out a few meals and get the ingredients … but this requires you to put about as little effort into cooking as possible.

Web-Accessible History From OpenHAB MySQL Persistence Database

My husband has wanted a quick/easy way to see the data stored in OpenHAB’s MySQL persistence database, so I put together a very quick (and ugly) PHP page that provides a list of all Items. If you click on an item, you can page through the item’s records. The index.php from the page is available here. You need a web server (I am using Apache on Fedora), PHP (I am using 5.6) and MySQLi (php-mysqlnd package).

This is a bit of paranoia on my part, but even on a page that is ONLY available internally … I don’t like to use an account with read/write access to display data. I create a new user and assign read access:

CREATE USER 'YourUserName'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'P#ssw0rdH3r3';
GRANT SELECT ON openhabdb.* to 'YourUserName'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Then use *that* user in the php code. This example has a web server running on the database server – and you connect to the MySQL server via localhost. If your web server is located on a different host, you’ll need to create and grant ‘YourUserName’@ the web server hostname.

How Running A Country Is Nothing Like Running A Business: #1

Well, Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet and I’ve got my first entry for this list: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/trump-wall-mexico.html?_r=0 in which he says we’re going to float the debt to build this massive wall (hopefully finding the least environmentally damaging route, eminent domaining the fewest people, and so on). Then we’ll get Mexico to pay for it. Umm … so in business, this was basically the 2008 crash. We find a pool of people who aren’t going to pay, create debt on that not-a-payment, build a heap of stuff, and then act surprised when they fail to pay. Now, in the business world, you turn to the government to bail out your bad debt.

When you do this as a government … I don’t think the IMF is going to pay in Mexico’s stead for debt to which they’ve never consented. And if you look at the IMF requirements in Greece or Ireland, I sincerely hope that isn’t the direction the US goes.

The Monkey’s Paw

a.k.a ‘be careful what you wish for”

There is a short story written by W. W. Jacobs called “The Monkey’s Paw” which centers around an enchanted paw that grants wishes but in horrifying ways. A family wishes for two hundred pounds, and receives the sum as a sympathy payment when their son is killed in a machine accident at his place of employment.

I think of this story a lot in politics — it’s a little like the law of unintended consequences (consequences which can be beneficial, negative, or harmful which arise from ignorance of the impact of your change). The monkey’s paw has individuals who well know of the possible tragic effects (the first owner wished for his own death, the next owner threw it into the fire to avoid its curse) but decide to use the object anyway.

So you’ll get the Affordable Care Act overturned. Good for you. Now you no longer have coverage for pre-existing conditions … which means you’re stuck in your job until the condition is cured because you cannot afford to pay for the treatments (hope it is curable!). You have a lifetime coverage limit of a million or two – which sounds like a lot until you talk to someone who had premature babies and incurred a quarter mill in a couple of months. Oh, and once the kids are born their lifetime limit kicks in — so your one year old miracle baby has used up a quarter of their lifetime limit. I don’t have a 25 year old in college still on my plan … hope you don’t either. Bonus, there’s no limit on how much overhead and profit the insurance company can include in their rates. I’m sure that will lower the plan cost.

And that just assumes things go back to the bad state they were in before — Republicans advocate allowing inter-state competition for insurance plans. I see that going the way of credit cards — there’s no federal usury rate. A state could ensure themselves a couple thousand jobs and a some corporate income tax money by setting their usury rate higher than any other state. And then the banks would locate there, issue cards using the local jurisdiction usury rate, and there are a load of 23% interest cards. So now states will compete to have the lowest standards for insurance – and all of the insurance companies will go there. If we’re lucky, there will be the equivalent of a credit union — a company HQ’d locally that follows YOUR state laws that you’ve got a little chance of changing (i.e. I write the state congresspeople in ND and ask them to lower the usury rate, they don’t care. I write my local representatives about Ohio’s rate … well, at least I’m a constituent).

Driver For Automation (And Other Fallacies)

The recent “saved” jobs announcements, name-dropping Trump even when the decision had been made months earlier bother me. But the bigger picture is more troubling. There are a lot of off-shored jobs that cannot be threatened with tariffs. What retaliatory action can be taken when a company off-shores their customer support call center. Or data processing. Or coding. A vast majority of American jobs are not in manufacturing.

But, sure, let’s not focus on the bigger sectors being off-shored. As a manufacturer, you can go where the labor costs (as well as, I suspect, real estate / regulatory requirements / etc) are cheap and face a 35% import tariff. You can hire Americans and  increase your prices … but unless *all* foreign imports get taxed, that just makes you noncompetitive. You can hire Americans and reduce your profit … notwithstanding investor revolt, there’s a point at which you lose money on each product you sell. Or you build out an automated factory in the US – real estate and such may cost more, but your labor costs are REALLY low.

It might not have been cost effective to build a robotic manufacturing line in the US compared to overseas labor. Overseas labor – 35% tariff though … may well make automation cost effective without actually increasing manufacturing employment in the country. Learning how to program and maintain robots, though, may be a growing market.

Like the bank executives who got incredible bonuses while writing dodgy mortgages … in the short term, this does mean jobs are saved. A couple years from now, as the robotic manufacturing replaces those workers … they’re still unemployed.

Anya’s 4th Birthday Cake

This year, I made a banana caramel cake for Anya’s birthday. She assembled her own cake & put the candles on it – messy, but she had a lot of fun. I’d have done more dulce de leche if it wasn’t melting the whipped cream. I made it in the pressure cooker – 15 mins on high @ about 10AM, let the whole thing sit until we made the cake. Microwaving the caramel enough to get it pourable made it too hot to be near the whipped cream. So we spread the caramel on the cake, let that cool a bit, then spread out the cream and topped it with bananas.

Chocolate Chip Butter Cake

Ingredients:

    • 3 cups cake flour, plus more for dusting the pans
    • 3 teaspoons baking powder
    • 1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus more for coating the pans
    • 2 cups granulated sugar
    • 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
    • 4 large eggs
    • 2 large egg yolks
    • 1 cup sour cream
    • 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
    • 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Method:

  1. Preheat to 350 F.
  2. Coat three 8″ round cake pans with butter. Line the bottoms of the pans with a circle of parchment paper. Lightly butter the parchment. Dust with flour.
  3. Sift the flour and baking powder together.
  4. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter, sugar, and salt on medium-high speed until lightened and fluffy. Add the eggs and yolks 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Scrape down the sides of the bowl a few times while beating.
  5. Remove the bowl from the mixer. Add half of the sifted dry ingredients and beat by hand until combined. Beat in the sour cream and vanilla. Add the remaining dry ingredients and the chocolate chips, beating until combined.
  6. Divide the batter among the pans .
  7. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cakes comes out clean, about 20 minutes.
  8. Set the pans on a wire rack to cool for about 10 minutes. Invert the cakes onto the racks, peel off the parchment, and let cool before frosting.

Whipped cream — mix 1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream, 2 tbsp maple syrup, and 1 1/2 tsp vanilla. Whip until firm peak stage.

Dulce de leche — Pour one can of sweetened condensed milk into a canning jar. Place lid on jar and lightly screw on. Place canning jar in the pressure cooker pot and add enough water to come about halfway up the side. Pressure cook on high for 40 minutes followed by a fifteen minute natural steam release. Remove jar from pressure cooker and allow to cool for another ten minutes. Open jar and stir to smooth out the caramel.

 

Assembling the cake — take a cake, cover in caramel, top with whipped cream, add slices of bananas, and then add another cake. I sliced off the domes of each cake to ensure the whole thing was relatively flat and stable.

Women in Office

I was talking with my father-in-law a few days ago about zero-sum power (old white dudes have been giving up power for a long time as minorities and women were allowed to vote) and he asked why women kept voting for the same old white dudes when they were allowed to vote — obviously the old white dudes were doing a good job, or the women would have voted them out.

I vote for men because that’s the option. There’s a township Trustee position here for which I’m not going to apply because between work, house stuff, and Anya … do I really want MORE work? Is there something I want to change badly enough to give up my non-existent free time?

For some reason, even with both parents working … the male has a default of “free time” and can volunteer to give some up to cook/clean/entertain kids. I have to say what it is I want to do (‘just be alone’ or ‘not listen to CONSTANT NOISE’ aren’t good enough … what are you doing). How badly does a country need to be run before a statistically reasonable (i.e. if 50.8% of the population is female, then the percent of women running for any office should be around 50% too)?

So women gained the right to vote, but have to settle for “and I’ll vote for you if you halfway pander to my concerns”.

Winter Gear

I think I finally have enough cold-weather clothing to enjoy winter. Not just the usual hat/gloves/scarf — that’s a good way to hate winter. Layers are a good start – heavy weight silk base layer under any type of regular shirt/slacks. Top that all with Berne insulated bib overalls along with the matching coat. Thick wool socks from Carhartt and regular waterproof hiking boots. Gloves with insulation even in the fingers; and a lightweight, breathable balaclava under the hat/scarf.

Shoveling the driveway at eight degrees isn’t the most fun I’ve ever had, but I was perfectly warm. Well, right up until my nose got drippy … that’s a heap of unpleasant and time to go back inside. Luckily I was 98% through with shoveling at that point … figure I’ll toss the shovel in the car and get the last little bit at the bottom as we head out.