CK Friday Links--Friday June 28, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!

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I'm not hummus. I'm better: Smoky Black Bean Purée with Diced Avocado, Tomato and Lime. (5 Second Rule)

"The FDA is therefore reaffirming its decision to not require special labeling of all bioengineered foods." (Food Navigator, via Katie Mack)

Dietary fundamentalism causes vision loss, hearing loss--and reading comprehension loss. (A Mindful Carnivore)

Ideology is a filter, not a lens. (Ombailamos)

If there's one concept I'd force-feed readers, it's to avoid--at all costs--a confirmation bias mindset. (Kid Dynamite's World)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

How To Be Fooled By Expensive Wine

If you expect wine A to taste better than wine B, it will.

It's easy to fool wine experts and wine-buying consumers. Your perception of taste is so incredibly subjective that you can easily be persuaded to believe one wine is superior to another. Someone just has to manipulate a few external cues without telling you. And once your expectations have been manipulated, you will be too.

Even world-class wine experts can be fooled by their own expectations (for a particularly embarrassing example, read about the notorious Judgment of Paris wine tasting contest), so it should be no surprise that consumers--even sophisticated consumers--can be even more easily fooled.

What's the easiest way to mess with your expectations? Just put a much, much higher price tag on wine A. Any wine drinker with half an ego will automatically "believe" it to be superior.

And in David McRaney's exceptional book You Are Not So Smart, there's a hilarious example of this exact trick. A group of wine judges were asked to taste two red wines. They were told that one was expensive and the other was cheap.

But the experimenter tricked the tasters by pouring the same cheap wine into both bottles. Want to take a guess which of the two identical wines they preferred?

"The subjects went on and on about the cheap wine in the expensive bottle. They called it 'complex' and 'rounded.' They called the same wine in the cheap bottle 'weak' and 'flat.'"

So, if it's this easy to fake out experienced tasters, does this mean that wine tasting is a total joke? Does this mean we should stick to boxed wine and forget paying up for the good stuff? Are we all just products of our own manipulated expectations?

Of course not. The point isn't that you can't buy good wine. Buy whatever wine you like. Just remember that there are outside forces trying to influence what you like.

More importantly, this influencing occurs with all consumer buying decisions, not just wine. All the product labels, branding, pricing decisions and other psychological techniques companies use to sell things to us are just more ninja mind tricks designed to mess with our heads--so we'll spend more than we otherwise would.

The point is this: Make sure you're the one setting your own expectations.

I'd like to thank Stuart at Addicted to Canning as well as David McRaney and his book You Are Not So Smart for providing some of the ideas in this post.



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Money Sundays: What Would You Do With An Extra Ten Grand, No Strings Attached?

Let's say you received a large sum of money. Say $50,000. Maybe you inherited it from a relative, maybe you got a surprise windfall from an investment, whatever.

Let's also assume (since you're a Your Money Or Your Life devotee and a mindful spender) you apply $40,000 of this money toward "responsible" things: paying down debt, pre-paying your mortgage, giving to charity, establishing your two year savings buffer and so on.

In other words, now that you've done everything you're supposed to do with the vast majority of this windfall, the ten grand that's left over is truly no-strings-attached dough. You feel okay doing whatever you want with this money.

So what would you do with it?

In Laura Vanderkam's book All the Money in the World, where I got (uh, I mean stole) this idea, the author shares a few fascinating suggestions:

* Use unpaid leave at work to take a one month retreat somewhere.

* Earn your pilot's license. (Sounds awesome, doesn't it?)

* Start an award for new poetry ($1,000 per year for five years), and create and promote a Web site to feature the artists you discover (another $5,000 to do a really bang-up job).

These are some pretty cool ideas, aren't they? I'd add a few of my own:

* Rent an apartment in Waikiki and practice surfing every day for two months.

* Live in Santiago, Chile, take six months of Spanish classes, and become a competent Spanish speaker.

* Take two consecutive summers off and hike the "47 Peaks" in New York State's Adirondack Mountains.

What would you do?

This is an incredibly intriguing exercise, because it helps you discover exactly in what way money brings you satisfaction. Money is just a tool: what really matters is how you use it to make your life more fulfilling.

This exercise also indirectly illustrates what kinds of important life experiences you're displacing when you passively decide to apply most of your money toward things like mortgage payments, car payments, credit card bills and other things that actually aren't all that fulfilling.

It gets you to think what money is really for. Hint: it's not for credit card bills and mortgage payments.

One final thought: If the ideas you generate while doing this exercise would truly bring you satisfaction and happiness, why not just... do them? What are you waiting for?

Readers: If somebody handed you an extra $10,000 with no strings attached, what would you do?




How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday June 21, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!

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25 healthy and strikingly easy one-pot meals. (Stonesoup)

The real data beneath the Farm Bill. (EpiAnalysis)

Be wary of tempting information. (Quick Writing Tips)

"We must be careful about letting others define the standards for our profession." (A Country Doctor Writes)

Seven cardinal virtues for successful writers. (LitReactor, via Monica Bhide)

How to get rich without making any more money. (Raptitude)

You have to learn to receive before you can learn to be generous. (Storyline, via Becoming Minimalist)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Oatmeal Cookies: How To Never Over- Or Under-Bake Cookies Ever Again

The other day Laura was about to bake up a batch of oatmeal cookies and she asked me for some advice:

Laura: So, our oven I think runs cooler than the one in our old place. So, should I put the temp up 25 degrees higher? And add two minutes to the cooking time? Or should I add 15 degrees and one minute? Or what?

Dan: No. All your questions are wrong.

And I wonder why Laura doesn't seek my advice more often.

But let me explain what I was trying to get at. Baking conditions can vary significantly from kitchen to kitchen. Some ovens run cold, others hot. Which means cookies baked to perfection in 12 minutes in one oven can burn to a crisp in another.

Furthermore, baking conditions can vary meaningfully even in the same kitchen: Is it a hot summer afternoon, or a cold winter morning? Did you leave your ingredients out on the counter for an hour while you did something else, warming the shortening, milk and eggs? Do you obsessively check your cookies while they bake (uh, like I do), thereby wasting your oven's heat? Any of these factors can impact a recipe's results.

Therefore, if you're baking something for the very first time, or if you're baking in a new kitchen, be sure to observe the following three rules:

1) Be aware that something unexpected could happen in your baking results.

2) Follow your recipe and cooking times to the letter, but test bake a mini-batch first. Don't risk an entire sheet of cookies.

3) Check the results. If you need to make an adjustment, tweak one--and only one--variable. Start by adjusting the cooking time.


Why adjust the cooking time rather than the temperature? Because it's the easiest variable to adjust on the fly. If things come out underdone, add 1-2 minutes to the cooking time. If they come out overdone, subtract 1-2 minutes. [Protip: Always remember to err on the side of undercooking. You can always put underdone cookies back in the oven. Burnt cookies are lost to humanity forever.]

Laura's mistake was making assumptions about the oven in our new kitchen--and tinkering with multiple baking variables--before she even tested anything. This is a recipe for sadness... and tiny little slabs of carbon. If you start making multiple changes before you've even tested a single cookie, how can you know what the proper time and temperature should be at all?

What I was trying to say when I tactlessly told Laura "all your questions are wrong" was that you can't know what variable to tweak... until you know what variable to tweak. Do a test batch first.

Know this, and you'll never screw up a batch of cookies again.

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Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients:
1/3 cup butter
2/3 cup Crisco or vegetable shortening
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 cups oats

Directions:
1) Thoroughly cream shortening and brown and white sugars. Add eggs and vanilla and mix well.
2) Sift flour with baking soda and salt, add to creamed mixture. Stir in oats with a sturdy spatula and combine well.
3) Form dough into cylindrical rolls about one-and-a-half inches in diameter, wrap dough in wax paper or foil and freeze.
4) To bake, first preheat oven to 350F. Slice frozen dough into (roughly) 1/4-inch thick slices, place onto a parchment paper-lined (or greased) cookie sheet, and bake for approximately 10-12 minutes at 350F until lightly browned.

Makes about 40-50 cookies... with dough left over for eating.

Related Posts:
Mint Melts: Teaching Kids to Cook With an Easy Cookie Recipe
Cookbook Review: The Cornbread Gospels
The Muffin Blogroll: 12 Great Muffin Recipes You'll Love to Bake


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday June 14, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!

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Why one calorie for her is half a calorie for him. (The Healthy Home Economist)

Don't take your (mega) vitamins. (New York Times)

Would you ever refuse to date someone based on their financial situation? (Save. Spend. Splurge.)

How I avoid internet/online drama. (Oil and Garlic)

Mere intelligence is no guarantee of anything. (Alpha Game)

Here's the easiest and best way to make sure a new habit sticks. (Zen Habits)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Re-Seasoning: How To Never Be Bored With Leftovers

Here's a cooking hack you can use to prevent "leftover boredom." I call it re-seasoning.

Essentially, you take a previously-made meal and add new spices and/or new ingredients to change the dish into something totally new. This transforms your leftovers into a new and different meal with negligible effort.

Here's an easy example: Let's say you fire up a batch of my easy Split Pea Soup, one of the least expensive recipes in all of Casual Kitchen. But wait: this time, make a double batch. It's the same amount of work, but you'll produce twice as much food.

Then, feed your family with this central dish tonight and tomorrow (if your household is like mine, people start complaining if they get served the same thing more than two days in a row). For the third night, then, make some other easy and laughably cheap recipe: Black Beans and Rice for example.

Here's where it gets interesting. On the night after you serve the Black Beans and Rice, reheat the leftover Split Pea Soup, but add a twist: Briefly saute four or five links of Italian sausage, and add them plus two generous tablespoons of Tabasco sauce to the soup. Then, for an intriguing mix of sweet and hot flavors, add in two peeled and cubed sweet potatoes.

In just five minutes of prep work and 15 minutes of simmer time, you've "re-seasoned" your Split Pea Soup into a something completely different: Fiery Sausage and Sweet Potato Soup.

Voila! A totally new, healthy meal for your family for two more nights, made with minimal cost and effort. Most importantly, you're not serving leftovers. Technically.

Here's a few more re-seasoning ideas using recipes from CK's archives.

1) Starting to get sick of that big pot of laughably cheap Black Beans and Rice you made a couple of days ago? Add the juice of a lime--and a couple of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce--to give it an entirely different flavor profile.

2) Make a double batch of my Chicken Mole Sauce, and then for your re-seasoned meal, crack two or three eggs into the sauce to make a Mexican Shakshouka.

3) Take an extra large batch of leftover Savory Moroccan Chickpeas, and puree the leftovers in a food processor for a nuanced and unusually flavorful Hummus.

4) Take my Shrimp in Tomato Sauce recipe, except this time make a double batch just of the sauce. After you've enjoyed the shrimp and sauce for your first meal, briefly fry up four or five bone-in chicken thighs and add them to the leftover sauce. You've now got a delicious Chicken In Tomato Sauce recipe, but with an interesting middle eastern twist.

Look: on one level, this cooking hack is simple, almost to the point of obviousness. It's also not always a perfect solution. For example, some re-seasoned meals will still closely resemble their predecessor dish. After all, you can try to change the flavor profile of black beans all you like... but you're still eating black beans.

And some re-seasoning transformations simply don't work well: I'm not sure what you could do to re-season CK's Corn Pone Pie recipe, and I'm also drawing a blank on Laughably Cheap Carrot and Fresh Cabbage Curry. In other words, this hack may not work well with certain recipes. However, it does work quite well on simple, basic recipes that feature simple and mild flavors.

Readers, can you think of any re-seasoning ideas of your own? Share them--with links to recipes on your blog if you like--in the comments below!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday June 7, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!

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Easy steps for cleaning and eliminating food odors from your wood cutting board. (Dad Cooks Dinner)

Challenge yourself to try 13 new recipes this summer. ($5 Dinners)

Recipe Links:
Five stars! Chicken Satay with Spicy Peanut Sauce. (Food and Fire)

Algerian Baked Fish. (64 Sq. Foot Kitchen)

Off-Topic Links:
Watch out for "Tiny Details Exaggeration Syndrome"! (Mr. Money Mustache)

Investment geeks only: Get the real facts on the USA's "too big to fail" banking system. (Sober Look)

Put yourself in uncomfortable situations. Being nervous is a good thing. (Penelope Trunk)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Ask CK: How Do You Do Your Friday Links?

A reader writes in:

One of my favorite features at Casual Kitchen is your Friday Links posts. How do you find all that material? You hardly ever feature the same blog twice, so you must read a zillion blogs, right?

It's ironic that I get this question just as I'm starting to publish my Friday Links posts less regularly! But it's true: I do read a lot of blogs--my feedreader contains 788 blogs at last count, which probably sounds ridiculous. But my process for digging up material for readers is simple: three or four times a week I spend about an hour or two a day wandering through my feedreader. I pick blogs and sites at random and wade through the past posts.

This is essentially my leisure reading, and when I see anything that really stands out, I'll cut and paste it into an upcoming links post. It took me a while to develop this system, but now I produce the majority of my Friday Links content as a natural byproduct of material I already read.

I also find about 10-20% of my Friday Links via Twitter, and finally, readers email me another 10-20%.

It's not always a perfect process however. Some weeks I'm buried in links to great recipes, but I can't find any interesting articles about food. Some weeks I'm buried in off-topic links to the exclusion of all else.

The last thing I do before queuing up each Friday Links post is use the 120% method. I fill up each links post with more links than I actually need. In my final edit, I go over the post one last time and eliminate (roughly) the worst 20% of the articles. I find that this dramatically improves the overall quality of each Friday Links post.

One final thought: I'd be remiss if I didn't take a moment to encourage those of you with your own blogs: do your own links roundups! Why not share with your readers the interesting (or controversial) things you read? You don't have to publish one every single week like I usually do. Ask your readers to share their thoughts, agreements and disagreements in the comments, and enjoy the conversation.

Links are the currency of the internet. This is how blogs and readers find each other, and it's one of the best ways to start conversations where we can all learn more.

As always, if you have any feedback, or if you'd like to share one of your posts with the readers here at CK, email me!

Related Posts:
How to Write A Killer Links Post
Ask CK: The Purpose of Friday Links and Using SEO
Ask CK: I'm Offended!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.