She's Got a Chicken to Ride

Just learned, via Today's NYT, that a misheard music lyric is properly identified as a "mondegreen." Not to be confused with an "eggcorn," which, for all intensive purposes, is something altogether different. 'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy.

Cupcake Central

With the Gs back home for a week between camps, we've settled on a couple of shows in the evening--both Food Network Programs. BG suggested Iron Chef, but we couldn't find it on this week, so we've settled into Chopped and Cupcake Wars, two not dissimilar cooking competitions with exacting judges,

One of the things that troubles the BG is that every dish on America's Test Kitchen is a success; they never show you what didn't work. Well Chopped is the remedy for that. 4 chefs prepare, in turn, an appetizer, entree and dessert, within a short time limit, using a number of carefully chosen mystery ingredients. Here's your basket--apple pie, fried chicken, artichokes, american cheese. You've got 30 minutes to make a delicious appetizer. Go! At first it was a little intense for the OG, who does not like to watch people fail (the judges mince no words), but she's come around.

The other show uses a similar format, but seems to focus exclusively on cupcakes, which appear to be the pesto of the new millenium. There is a fancy cupcake store on Franklin Street; a bus that visited Raleigh last summer; and the BG and I talked at length the other day with a woman running a cart at the local mall. Moreover, the BG has been, er, devouring, the Cupcake Diaries this summer, a series of stories featuring a set of friends who have adventures and bake.

So we decided to try our hand at it today. The BG had found this recipe for Peanut Butter and Jelly Cupcakes on her own (from the good people at Jif--the choice of discerning parents in my day (mine preferred the sludge from the local food co-op). We used blueberry jam, instead of the recommended strawberry, and chose to top ours with Reese's Pieces, coconut and sprinkles. I would have skipped the coconut, but it's hard for a ten year-old to resist one more topping. We also layered the peanut butter and frosting, as our icing was in an aerosol can of sorts.Still the results were pretty tasty, and the trip to the supermarket, along with the baking, occupied a good portion of the morning and afternoon today.

• CUPCAKES
• 1 package White Premium Cake Mix
• 3/4 cup water
• 1/3 cup  Vegetable Oil
• 3 large eggs
• 1 (12 oz.) jar Strawberry Jam, divided
• 
  
• FROSTING
• 1 container  Vanilla Flavored Frosting
• 1/2 cup  Creamy Peanut Butter
• 3 tablespoons chopped salted peanuts, for garnish

1. HEAT oven to 350°F. Line 24 muffin cups with paper baking cups.
2. BEAT cake mix, water, oil and eggs in large bowl. Blend with electric mixer until moistened. Beat on medium speed for 2 minutes. Fill baking cups 1/3 full. Place 1/2 cup jam into corner of resealable plastic bag. Cut small corner off bag. Make a swirl of jam over batter. Cover with remaining batter filling cups 2/3 full.
3. BAKE 18 to 22 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool cupcakes in pans on wire racks 5 minutes. Remove from pans. Cool completely on wire racks.
4. COMBINE frosting and peanut butter. Place frosting in decorator bag fitted with a decorator tip (4B), if desired, or frost cupcake, leaving center area for jam. Starting at outside edge, work towards center of cupcake leaving a well in the center for jam. Place remaining 1/2 cup jam into corner of resealable plastic bag. Cut small corner off bag. Fill center of cupcake with jam and garnish with sprinkle of chopped peanuts.

OG Birthday tribute

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDBTmmKnuag

Tech savvy daughter gave me this slideshow yesterday to celebrate #47, complete with Lloyd Cole soundtrack. Some great pictures of the Gs, and one of me in high school!

Dinner Assembly

If you are hosting the Gs this summer, as several relatives are, you will undoubtedly wonder what to feed them, as one is a strict vegetarian, and the other likes meat, rice and plain pasta. It's not easy, believe me, but one heuristic that helps is the concept of dinner table assembly. If everything arrives independently--pasta, sauce, meat, vegetable, it allows each diner to put exactly what s/he likes on her plate. This also works with salads, as it is easy to turn a bowl of lettuce and a plate of chopped vegetables with choice of dressing into a host of combinations, ranging all the way from a couple of carrot sticks to a spring salad with roasted almonds and crumbled blue cheese.

For example, last night I served some leftover grilled pork tenderloin, with peanut noodles and salad. The BG is a fan of the dish--a simpler version of the one in my 1997 Joy of Cooking--and would usually eat just the pasta with a side salad, while the OG would eat her pasta plain, with a couple of pieces of meat, a cherry tomato, and maybe a carrot stick, if prodded; and the adults can go all in. Plus, served cold, the peanut noodles make a great lunch, as my stomach would be happy to attest today.

We use this approach quite often with pasta, as well as burritos, and even stir fries, where plain meat on the side can be added at the table, or eaten independently, as you prefer.

I'm certain that this approach is better than the traditional eat-it-or-starve position, although I can see the advantages of the latter, both immediately, and in the long term.

Peanut Noodles

Blend in a food processor 2 cups peanut butter (chunky is better), 1/2 cup, white vinegar, 1/3 cup soy sauce, 2 cloves of garlic, minced, 1 tsp. chili paste, 3 tbs sugar, 2 tsp salt. Stir in 1/2 cup sesame oil, 1 cup freshly brewed black tea. Serve with pasta.

** If I'm making this for myself, I'll double the chili paste. At home, I make sure the Sriracha is on the table. If you are pressed for time or ingredients, you can substitute Sriracha for the chili paste and garlic.

Here Comes the Hot stepper.

I am usually the first one downstairs in the morning, especially during the school year, when I have to make lunches and come up with the Song of the Day. The BG is usually next, followed by the OG and Worldwide.

For some long forgotten reason, when I hear one of the Gs coming down the stairs, I'll sometimes launch into "Here Comes the Hot Stepper, a minor hit for someone named Ini Kamoze in the early nineties. I don't think either of them has actually hears the song, but they both know to fire back "word 'em up. I'm the lyrical gangster" at the right time, and it was especially funny to hear it coming out of a four year-old back in 2005.

Yesterday, the BG and I were at the mall looking for a new backpack for school. She had decided that she might want to spend her NBA Pool winnings on a game called Just Dance, Summer  Party, which she had enjoyed on a friend's Kinect. We found a used copy at Gamestop for $20, and she happily brought it home in her new tie-dyed blue and green backpack.

The disc has, among other more forgettable tunes, a simplified version of the aforementioned song, and when I heard the pounding bass, I just knew that I had heard it someplace else. To answer these types of questions, I love whosampled.com, which does a really nice job of keeping track of what samples artists use, as well as where they're songs have been sampled. I discovered that the familiar beat was from Heartbeat, a 1981 song from Taana Gardner that I had put on a Valentine's day playlist for the OG.

That was fun. Here is the playlist:


Don't Go Breaking My Heart, Elton John & Kiki Dee
Groove Is In the Heart, Deee-Lite
Piece of My Heart, Erma Franklin
Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? Lloyd Cole & The Commotions
What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted, Jimmy Ruffin
Heartbeat (Party Mix), Taana Gardner
Heart Of Glass, Blondie
Hungry Heart, Bruce Springsteen
Heart Like Mine, Blue Rodeo
Queen Of Hearts, Juice Newton
This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You), The Isley Brothers
Take My Heart Away, Johnny Clegg & Savuka
Another Nail In My Heart, Squeeze
There's A Song in My Heart, The Commodores
Feel the New Heartbeat, The Treacherous Three
Open Your Heart, Madonna

Houseguests

With Worldwide and the Gs due back this afternoon, I did something that I have dreaded doing all week. At times there has been a staccato series of chirps emanating from the fireplace. At first I thought it was a mouse, or perhaps a bird had gotten down the chimney, an occurrence which had bedeviled Worldwide awhile ago.

The morning after I first heard the noises, I carefully opened the fireplace doors. I saw nothing, and confirmed that the flue was closed, eliminating the bird in the house problem; so, like a responsible homeowner, I forgot about it. But at various times throughout the week, I could hear the chirps, so I knew there was something in the chimney, and that I couldn’t tell Worldwide or the Gs that I hadn’t noticed it all week, which is what 12 year-old me would have done.

So yesterday, I gave myself up to the Internet. Try Googling “chirping in my chimmey” to stoke your imagination. Cicadas? Raccoons? Mice? Bats?

But the most likely culprit was the chimney swift, a bird described thusly by Wikipedia:

In flight, this bird looks like a flying cigar with long slender curved wings. The plumage is a sooty grey-brown; the throat, breast, underwings and rump are paler. ...The breeding season of Chimney Swifts is from May through July. Their breeding habitat is near towns and cities across eastern North America. Originally, these birds nested in large hollow trees, but now they mainly nest in man-made structures such as large open chimneys. The nest is made of twigs glued together with saliva and placed in a shaded location. They will lay three to seven white eggs, which the female will cover at night. The incubation period is 19-20 days, and the fledglings leave the nest after a month. Chimney swifts can nest more than once in a season.

My Peterson’s guide concurred, describing the sound as “Loud, rapid, ticking or chippering notes.”


This morning, I went up to the roof to investigate. I confirmed that we did not have a chimney screen, which is the recommended defense against the birds--who are reported to return to favourite nesting spots after their winter in Peru--but I couldn’t see anything down the chimney.

So I sat and watched for a few minutes. Sure enough, two creatures flew into the chimney, a couple of minutes apart, followed by a burst of chirps. They looked a lot like flying cigars. Case closed, in my view. I can’t say with 100% certainty that they weren’t bats, but I’m confident enough.

But what to do now? My decision is to live with the birds, savouring the chirps as the celebration of the death of the many insects that make up the birds’ diet; and to install a chimney cap in the Fall, after the visitors have flown the nest for warmer climes. So no action immediately required, which is pretty much how I roll.

Market Forces

Loyal readers (i.e. Worldwide and G-Lo) will remember that Daniel Kahnemann’s Thinking Fast and Slow was my book of the year for 2011. The key theme in the book is that, due to the effort required to reason through a problem, the brain looks for shortcuts, or heuristics, to enable quick decision making, and that we often use this technique unconsciously, sometimes to our detriment. The book also mentions a well known experiment, called the Dictator Game, where someone is given a sum of money--say $10--and told that s/he must make an offer to share with another person. If the offer is accepted, both parties get to keep their share; if it is refused, no-one does.

Classic economic logic predicts that the offeree should accept any offer, because it yields them something for nothing. But experiments have shown that people will reject offers that they consider unfair: if you give me $1, I will take it, but if you offer to split your $10, 9 for you, 1 for me, I will refuse. The math of the situation is identical, and yet, there is something in our brain that uses our own concept of “fairness” to override acting rationally. This is one of the basic tenets of behavioural economics, for which Kahnemann won a Nobel prize.

Which brings me to the grocery store. Like most people, I have a loyalty card for Harris Teeter, our local supermarket. This entitles me to valuable discounts in return for them knowing everything about what we eat and drink at home. A little Kafkaesque, but, in my view a fair trade, particularly since the pricing structure in the store dramatically favours the VIC (Very Important Customer) card holder.

They have also trained the cashiers to automatically conclude every purchase with a “You saved $xx” and I applaud them for the success of their implementation; it is a rare day when someone fails to acknowledge my excellent shopping habits.

But lurking below the surface is a monstrous deception; an elaborate con-game in which the supermarket moguls try to separate us from our cash using the latest data from behavioural economics.

Here are two of the heuristics that I apply to get in and out of the grocery store in a hurry.

1. Something discounted is a better deal
2. Larger quantities are cheaper on a per unit basis

The truth is much different. For instance, Worldwide and the Gs love the store’s blueberry muffins (have you noticed that most stores have the bakery and deli alongside the produce now? That is because it creates an impression of freshness, which leads us to think of blueberry muffins topped with a sugary glaze as healthy, which they are not). The muffins today were “on sale" for $3.47 for a 4 pack, marked down from the regular price of $4.99. This lowers the unit cost to about $0.87/muffin--not as expensive as the $3 it might cost you at Starbucks, but five times more than the banana across the aisle. But since the price is 30% lower...

Except that it isn’t. The muffins are always priced at $3.47. In two years of buying them weekly I have never seen them at any other price. The only change is that, about 4 months ago, someone decided that the regular price should be $4.99, instead of $3.99, which had been the asking price for most of last year. So my local grocer just saved me an extra $1/week. Wow, thanks. I can just see the newly minted MBA at next week’s staff meeting making a pitch to use the Starbuck’s price as the benchmark. Think of the savings for the hoi polloi!

The second heuristic--that larger packages are cheaper--is equally fiendish, because it is true in some cases, but not all, and there doesn’t seem to be any pattern in the data. For instance, although Worldwide consumes enough Half and Half with her morning coffee to warrant the purchase of the half gallon carton, the quart is always $0.30 less per quart. But this does not hold true for the milk. And to make it worse, when I was comparing two boxes of soft pretzels (a staple in the OG’s school lunches) the 25-unit box gave me a per pretzel unit cost in easy to read 6 point font, while the 6-unit box was per ounce. What’s the deal? Are the preztels in each box the same size? Are the ingredients different? Should I ask the manager?

I threw up my hands and walked away; which is also an available heuristic. But we gotta eat something. Whole Foods doesn’t have loyalty cards; but their prices are higher, although their produce is better, and their milk is cheaper. My head hurts.