Good Things Friday (131) and Link Love
August 27, 2021
1. We happened past a produce shop we used to frequent a couple years ago, and stopped in. It was such a delight to pick up loads and loads of fresh produce for $22 again. I feel like we just don’t get those prices and that quality, even if the prices aren’t spectacularly low, at the bigger stores. I think we also feel more motivated to eat better and cook more when we get their produce. Though my seasoning for the veggie soup I made was the opposite of inspired. I won’t be making that flavor profile again. PiC wouldn’t admit to disliking it but that’s as close as he’s ever come to showing he didn’t like something I made.
2. I pivoted in the middle of making this lemongrass chicken with bone in thighs, not liking how it was turning out. The rescue recipe used the boneless diced chicken breasts that were intended for another recipe and turned out a lot better than I had expected. Too bad I didn’t have enough lemongrass to make enough to freeze but now I know that I do like it with the diced preparation. I was concerned that it’d be dry, which is why I went with bone in thighs but they required too much cook time for the aromatics. I may play with the recipe some more to make it work with bone-in chicken. Update: actually both recipes were good in the end. I’m glad I tried them both.
3. I made up a big batch of coconut lime chicken for the weekend and will freeze one portion for some later meal. Future me will thank today me for that. I managed to cook enough to cover this whole week of dinners without takeout, supplementing with some frozen foods. I’m proud of myself for making it a whole week and it was really nice to be able to cook even when under extreme pressure at work.
4. I made an experimental batch of biscuits. Everyone else liked them but I want them to be flakier and lighter. I can’t remember what makes biscuits light and fluffy, with those great pull apart layers. Working the dough less? More butter?
Challenges this week: Parenting a six year old feels exponentially harder than parenting a baby.
BETH RIESGRAF | ON ‘LEVERAGE: REDEMPTION’ AND DIRECTORIAL FUTURE
Reading this sort of thing makes me really anxious, why do I do it: When Your Child Is a Psychopath
I love small things like this: “I read somewhere that it’s a good idea to keep a flashlight near the fuse box.”
I would very much appreciate a healer horse: Understanding Horses: The Horse as Healer
Could ‘baby bonds’ close racial wealth gap?
Cat Valente has a new story up at Tor: L’Espirit de L’Escalier
I may have misread earlier reports on this. I thought it was scanned when you upload to Apple, not BEFORE. I’m wondering if this means they will scan photos if you never have iCloud turned on and never back up to iCloud. Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Plan for iPhones Isn’t So Safe: Apple announced several changes at once, but the most worrisome part of its new plan is a system to scan for certain photos on iPhones — specifically, “child sexual abuse material,” or CSAM. It plans to do this scanning on iPhone users’ pictures before they are backed up to Apple’s iCloud servers. Future iPhones will use cryptography — fancy math — in an effort to ensure that, if everything works as advertised, Apple learns only when a user has uploaded a threshold number of images that match known CSAM.
Privacy advocates, technologists, and human rights groups quickly pointed out that Apple is building a new form of surveillance, a tool that scans material on your phone (client-side scanning) rather than on its servers (server-side scanning). This poses serious risks to privacy and civil liberties. Apple can already scan and view images uploaded to iCloud if it wants to because the company has the keys to decrypt iCloud backups.
I think I’ve laughed for a solid five minutes over this one.💀 pic.twitter.com/H3bVVG8rPo
— I ❤️ KITTENS (@DPMCanty) August 23, 2021
I am so excited – I have been enjoying AGSL for ages, and now I can actually give something back! OK, flaky biscuits come from cold butter and soft wheat flour. You might not be able to get the flour because of regional differences (it is basically sold in the South and nowhere else).
I use frozen sticks of butter, and I toss a metal bowl and cheese grater into the freezer about 20 minutes before I start making the biscuits. My first step is to grate the butter on the grater and into the bowl, then toss it back into the freezer for the few minutes I need to prepare everything else including heating up the oven. Then it is all standard biscuits stuff: don’t mix too much and get them into the oven as fast as you can. The steam from the frozen butter is what makes the layers.
Oooh thank you so much for the tips!! I’m really excited to try again now!
Folding the dough can give you lovely layers too. Stir just until the dough comes together, then roll/pat it out into a large circle on the counter, fold in half, roll/pat again, fold again, and repeat a few more times. (Use a sprinkle of flour as necessary to keep it from sticking.) Oh and make sure you’re using a sharp cookie cutter so the edges don’t get smooshed together – using a drinking glass might be a convenient hack, but it significantly flattens the biscuits.
Good point – I forgot about folding!
I was following a recipe that told me to fold ten times – that seems like maybe too many times?
Yep, I stop when it starts to ‘sproing’ back, which often takes less than 10 times.
White Lily flour! It’s a soft flour made from winter wheat that has less protein (gluten). Widely available for cheap in the South. If you ever need advice on all things baking, Southern Living magazine’s website has good advice. Garden & Gun is another good resource.
I have heard of this brand before! Somewhere on Twitter…
I did all of the cooking today, because I agree that having prepped meals makes the weeks so much easier. We do lots of driving (kid activities) & there’s just no chance to make anything between meetings/ending work, & then getting home from activities. One day soon, my kiddos will be driving, but for now, we’ll meal prep. I marinated chicken for tomorrow’s dinner, made four batches of taco meat, granola bars & roasted serrano peppers. Plus, got one teen to make a giant loaf of French bread. Between that & things in the freezer/pantry, we are good to go until Friday. We might fill in with one takeout meal, depending on how chaotic things get/how hungry the teens are. Their eating patterns are unpredictable some days.
I love your weekly menus! They’re such great inspiration both for menu ideas but also to remind me how much I enjoy cooking when I can. I’m glad you share them.
I managed to cook one meal today, that’s all I had time for, but that’s one meal that I won’t need to cook during the week.