You light up my life

[austin_dern]

My mother got into a spring cleaning mood and if that seems late to you, well, maybe it's just actually very early. She had promised we were going to spend Saturday washing the windows, but I missed that exciting task by sleeping in until the rainstorm got comfortably started. The storm ended not too much later, but that was good enough reason to call off the rest of the window-washing until Sunday, when I again missed it by sleeping until the racket of ``insight'' being passed off at 80 dB from the Sunday morning shout programs made it too annoying to try to continue sleeping. And my father wonders why I sleep through the whole of a weekend morning, given the chance. (Fortunately, my brother -- the one I write about most often here -- sleeps much later than I do, and will not infrequently be waking up around 3 pm on a Saturday, the sort of thing I haven't done since graduate school when I'd be up until 8 am watching the engagingly bad Cartoon Network Friday overnight block of 1970s cartoons with spaceroo and then not being able to get to sleep right away.)

Another part of the spring cleaning was washing off the light bulbs above the dinner table. My mother warned me that they'd be surprisingly bright given all the dust she got off them, and yes, they were much brighter even though one of the bulbs was burned out and not yet replaced. I didn't know there was that much dust on them, but then, I had honestly thought they were frosted bulbs. They're clear. Now, anyway. When my mother repeated this witticism to my father, who going against character hadn't heard it, he said that then I should get off my duff and dust the bulbs myself. She pointed out that the point of the comment was that I didn't know they were dusty; I had thought they were frosted.

Later, after dinner, my father asked if I would take the pot with the (sigh) spaghetti sauce (we had penne, which is I suppose marginally better than spaghetti) and pour the leftovers into a plastic bowl, and fill the pot with soapy water. I said sure. Thus, a minute later, he was sulking angrily to himself and pouring the leftover sauce into a bowl and putting the pot into the sink to fill with soapy water. I guess the light bulb controversy really got to him.

Trivia: Giovanni Domenico Cassini, based on observations made in Bologna in 1666-67, estimated Venus to rotate once every 23 hours. Source: Planets and Perception, William Sheehan.

Currently Reading: The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, Alan Trachtenberg. Remember what I said about liking lots of gritty facts? This hasn't got nearly enough of them. It's an interesting read but it feels like the introduction to itself. I don't just want grand sweeps of the development of society; I want to know relative egg prices in Madison, Wisconsin, from 1867 to 1907.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

sigh) spaghetti sauce (we had penne, which is I suppose marginally better than spaghetti)

I prefer Penne over Spaghetti as well, generally- though Bowtie is a personal favorite (It works nicely with just about every sauce.) I take it that.. as you're calling it 'spaghetti sauce' instead of Pomodoro, Marinara, or Bolognaise.. it wasn't exactly of high quality or flavor. More to the point, I saw the sigh.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't hold anything against spaghetti or pasta-class meals in general, it's just, I had plenty of spaghetti in undergraduate dining and I'm tired of it. Penne is better than spaghetti, which is better than bowties, but all things considered, if I could have tortellini, ravioli, or lasagna, that's more like it.

I don't know what the class name for spaghetti sauce is, but, you know, tomato-based, put on spaghetti, what's it supposed to be? The stuff you can add spices and maybe vegetables or chopped sausage (beef, turkey, tofu, what have you) to improve on.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Generally speaking it's Marinara as your base tomato sauce. Once you start putting meat into it, it becomes Bolognaise. Olives and Anchovies make it Puttanesca, if it uses whole roma tomatoes it's Pomodoro, etc.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Is this single- or multiple-inheritance, though? What happens if you have meat and olives and anchovies? Besides me not eating it, since I dislike anchovies on taste and on principle grounds? How about with meat and roma tomatoes but olives and no anchovies?

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well, then you're into calling it 'X plus Y'. You'd have "Bolognaise with olives and Anchovies', and 'Bolognaise with tomatoes and olives', etc. Or. alternatively, 'Puttanesca with meat'. There is no such thing as a Puttanesca Bolognaise.

Of course, with enough incredients and proper methods, you could name it 'Sauce Austin' and see if it makes it to culinary widespread acceptances. This does happen.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but coming up with a ``Sauce Austin'' would be working against the generalization and abstraction classes for which I'm looking. I'm glad we don't have to get into explaining spaghetti versus linguine with all this.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well, in Western cooking, the five mother sauces are Bechamel, Espagnole, Marinara, Hollandaise, and Veloute. Those are the real abstract ones, and once you add ingredients to them, you've come up with a Daughter sauce. (Hollandaise plus orange flavor is Maltaise; plus tarragon is Bernaise, etc.) While sauces further 'grandaughter', it isn't frequent.

I had to explain spaghetti versus linguine to a co-worker earlier this week actually. He wasn't sure that the only difference between the two was the shape (Spaghetti is circular, linguine is a flat oval). He thought there may've been different ingredient composition, and there isn't in basic pasta.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's not an unreasonable guess to suppose there might be something different in ingredients between linguine and spaghetti. After all, there's that something in some bow-ties that makes them green, and when the boxes of dried pasta have 850 different kinds identified it does seem like there should be something substantial. The linguine being less rotationally symmetric doesn't seem like enough, really.