By: Revanche

Catching up and cookery Sunday: Red potatoes and green beans edition

March 11, 2012

Once in a while, you need home-and-hearth friends. The people you shared everything with, or friends on whose doorstep you could show up, wander in, help yourself to a bowl of something and know that’s a prelude to a good chat or a good comfortable silence, not getting kicked out. The days when we could easily do that are long past now, but the friends aren’t. Everyone’s pretty far away.

Speaking of far away, there’s a chance that one of the old gang are considering an international wedding. To keep the guest list down because the bride and groom will be paying for the whole thing. I wouldn’t have thought that between the travel and all it’d be that much cheaper but the prospective guest list is apparently just as daunting as mine was. So this family dodging is a more common theme these days than I expected. Thank goodness for the early warning so that I can start setting aside money now in case it does happen. The destination sounds intriguing, PiC’s definitely interested, and it’s going to cost … ooooh… moneymoney.

Posts for Perusal

~ This guy has creating things and networking down to a geeky science.  Beautifully simple!

~ Ask a Manager was asked how to be an awesome hardass. She answers.

I agree with so much of it. As you start out in your nascent career, you won’t be as confident and that’s fine, you’ll build it over time. She also points out that if you are projecting confidence well ahead of your abilities, it’s generally less well received. This is true. I have managed a couple of those who don’t have the knowledge, experience and performance to back it up. And it annoys me. I end up having to be much harder on them than usual because they have unfounded belief in their abilities and performance and rather than honestly evaluating strengths and weaknesses, they’re spouting absolute nonsense when they sit down and tell me that they are the equal of so-and-so. There’s a huge difference in believing that you will do your best and learn to be truly competent and thinking that you can snow a manager into believing you’re already there.  And if you’re blindly pretending you’re already there, you’re spending very little precious time developing the abilities that would actually get you there.

Confidence coupled with actual competence is one thing. Faked confidence without anything behind it? Eh.


~ StackingPennies chats along the same lines about the difference between being a girl and being a woman.


~ Suba of Wealth Informatics raises the question: why are women not in more leadership roles?
I saw a ThinkProgress stat tweeted that cites “FACT: Women perform 66% of world’s work, produce 50% of the food, earn 10% of the income and own 1% of the property (via @OECD) #icymi”

Interesting in and of itself, though I would like to see the data behind it. Without needing to say that, I know that while I think there are women are just as competent, confident, capable, and desirous of leadership positions as men, if not more, in a general comparison there is plenty of evidence that our social and cultural norms are still not in any way open having women lead.  This is why consciously or not, women don’t put themselves forward for leadership, why women aren’t as supported in leadership roles, and why women aren’t as commonly confident as leaders.

Watch the differences between the way men and women are treated in politics today and note how men are attacked for their politics unless their personal scandals are brought to light, while women are attacked for everything else on a regular basis. Women in politics are synonymous with their personalities, their families, their looks and their voices. Men? They can be any number of personally negative things: fat, slobby, lazy, cheating, lying, drug abusing, a law-breaker, but that will just be a blip on the radar if it comes to light at all; women can’t expect anything less than to be called the most vile names and come under ad hominem attacks throughout their careers simply for conducting business. And depending on the severity of the issue, men can just apologize for their sins and move on, if their spin doctors are good enough.

If this isn’t an environment that isn’t openly hostile to women, I don’t know what is. Add to that, women who want to succeed have been complicit in this hostility to women, excusing or ignoring the transgressions and abuses of their own parties against women while decrying the same from the opposite parties.

I don’t discuss my personal politics here but I do have political opinions. Yet regardless of my political beliefs  I do not support ANY candidate or ANY individual who feels ad hominem attacks are appropriate. I don’t care which party you belong to, wrong is wrong.

Welcome home from Africa, MoneyMateKate!  She reminded us a couple months ago to tip on the whole bill but I’m really hoping for that post on saving on malaria.

A Recipe

I’m trying to figure out where I found this originally, but I’ve stopped having to use a recipe for it by now which means it’s finally been ingrained even in my long-term memory and it’s that delicious.

Red potatoes and green beans
serves 4

Ingredients:
1 lb new red potatoes*
1 lb green beans
1 tbls salt
1 tbls sugar
minced garlic**
1-2 tbls butter

Directions:
* If you can find the tiny ones for a good price, great. I just use the regular red potatoes and cut them up into about 1.5 inch chunks. A couple always break up a little at the end, no big deal.
** to taste; if you like garlic, one clove. If you love garlic, three or five cloves. We love garlic so we want it to cover every bite of the veggies.

Use enough water in the pot to boil the potatoes and to add the green beans to the pot as well.  Start boiling the water with the sugar and salt.  Boil the red potatoes for about 15 minutes. I love my green beans crispy so I add the green beans to the pot at the 15 minute mark and boil both together for another 4 minutes. They stay bright green and crunchy.

Dump both into a colandar to drain. Transfer into a serving bowl immediately and toss the butter and minced garlic in. Use a serving spoon to gently mix the beans and potatoes and coat both with butter and garlic.

2 Responses to “Catching up and cookery Sunday: Red potatoes and green beans edition”

  1. SP says:

    Thanks for the link!

    Although, following ask a manager’s awesome post, I don’t know that I have much to add. 🙂

  2. Revanche says:

    You’re welcome! 🙂

    She is awesome, isn’t she? It always gives me something more to think about.

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