The Thumb Test for Firmness

An easy way to judge the doneness of a piece of fish, meat, or poultry is to compare its resilience to muscle on the base of your thumb. The further the thumb has to reach, the more resilient the ball of muscle becomes, which is similar to what cooking does to the proteins in meat. You will know if the meat is done enough for you when it matches the Finger Stage you prefer.

First-finger stage - for lightly cooked fish and underdone/ blue meat. Touch your thumb to the tip of your index (first) finger. With a finger on the other hand, press the ball of your thumb with. The ball will offer no resistance.

Second-finger stage - for rare meat. Touch your middle (second) finger to your thumb and press the ball of your thumb. The ball will feel spongy.

Third-finger stage - for well-done fish and medium-cooked meat, game or duck. Touch your ring (third) finger to your thumb and press the ball of your thumb. The ball will feel resistant.

Fourth-finger stage - for well-done meat or poultry. Touch your fourth finger to your thumb and press the ball of your thumb. The ball will feel firm.

From page 28 of Anne Willan's Cook It Right cookbook.

This is an excellent book. There are color photographs for each main ingredient she describes showing the underdone, perfect, and overdone stages along with an explanation of what might have gone wrong. There are also Quick Fix sections that offer ways to possibly salvage the ingredient, dish, or meal.

The recipes are easy to follow and the measurements are given in both Imperial and Metric.

The sections are Perfect Sauces, Perfect Vegetables, Perfect Breads, Perfect Meats, Perfect Pasta, and Perfect Desserts.

It's a Reader's Digest book and winner of the IACP Julia Child's Cookbook Award

Eat It! (TM)

We played Eat It! last night at my friend's birthday party. We had a great time, mostly because we are West Coasties and had no idea what some of that stuff was.

Eat It! is Trivia Pursuit, but all the questions are about junk food. The categories are Candy, Ice Cream & Dessert, Chocolate, Snack Attack, and A la Carte is the Wild space that lets you pick your category. You move around the board, answering questions about your given category, and collect Triangle Cards on certain special spaces. If the game is dragging on too long, you can come to a consensus and agree that the first person/team to collect two or three cards gets to advance to the Food Pyramid in the middle. If the team gets each question in the Pyramid correct and gets to the top first, they win.

It was mostly a learning experience for us since none of us regularly eat Little Debbie snack cakes or have ever had a Zero Bar. If you are a foodie, junk foodie, or trivia junkie, you and your friends will probably get a kick out of this game.

To be or to be happy: that is the question

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take Zoloft against the sea of troubles, and by opposing be oblivious to them?

At least, that's how it would read if Hamlet had been depressed instead of crazy. It's a question we have been contemplating a lot now that both of my grandmothers have moved in with us. Grandma J has been here for four years now and Grandma M for a week. Both suffer from some form of dementia, just not the same form. In this stage of their lives, quantity and quality of life begin to conflict.

Grandma J is on Zoloft and has been on and off a variety of Alzheimer's preventative medications in the past. The brain deterioration due to depression combined with the imbalance in her brain chemistry make her dementia more emotional. When she is on the medication that makes her think clearly, she is depressed and will sleep/mope and be rebellious. When she is on the meds that make her happy, she will be fatigued (which may or may not maker her sleep), unclear in her thinking, but in decent spirits.

Grandma M isn't on any medication and may mostly be suffering from malnutrition since she has been living alone for the past five years and not taking care of herself too well. Her dementia seems to be more like true Alzheimer's in that she doesn't want to eat and forgets important things, like that she lives here now and how to get back to her room in the dark. After eating, she thinks more because the nutrient is fueling her body. However, she doesn't have full capacity so she knows she doesn't want to be here but forgets that nothing will happen when she demands to go home. After the food wears off, she is more biddable but sometimes seems to be catatonic (yesterday, she sat in her chair for an hour almost without moving). Once again, the deteriorated state puts her in a more pleasant frame of mind.

Which state is better: to be lucid and miserable or out of it and content?

Wifi + Aluminum Foil

My room is really far away from the wifi source in our house, and there are several walls in the way. As a result, the signal is so pathetic it's almost nonexistant. My computer occasionally refuses to connect. We heard something about using foil to "relay" the signal and improve its strength. My dad turned his bulletin board around and pinned aluminum foil to the back and placed it behind the router. As if by magic, my laptop now shows a signal strength of Good to Very Good and a speed of between 12.0-24.0 Mbps when it used to hover around 1.0. Wow, foil really does work! The deflector had directionality, though, so if you decide to use this method to give your wifi a boost, make sure it's pointing in the right direction before you get too far away.

Wifi + foil = speed

Writen Accents in Spanish

If you're wondering which version of a word has the accent, remember that it goes on the word with more importance. "Si" can mean "yes" or it can mean "if" depending on the written accent. An affirmation is grammatically more important than an conditional so yes would be sí.

Nouns are more important than anything, else and pronouns are more important than possessive words. So the tea that you drink is "té" with the accent, and the reflexive pronoun "te" is without the accent.

Other examples:
él - pronoun for him vs. el - masculine article
sé - I know vs. se - reflexive pronoun
más - more vs. mas - but

The Studio System in American Film

The studio system was formed in the 1930s when "The Independents" won the battle against "The Trust" (The Motion Picture Patent Association), who had tried to run the Independents out of business by patenting all of the film making equipment so they didn't have access to it. Obviously, the Independents did it anyway. They used the concept of movie stars and feature-length films, both of which the Trust shunned, to draw in the crowds.

The system included several new measures, the most important of which were that actors were under contract and that the studios developed a certain personality that distinguished one movie from another.

MGM was the most prestigious and best funded. They also had the most movie stars. Their slogan was “More stars than in the heavens.” It was the motion picture leader in the 1930s. Their movies were classy and reassured the people that there was an escape from the Depression. The attitude was relentlessly positive and the movies were first rate, no expense spared. They were romantic, elite, and idealistic and were geared to attract a female audience. Cedric Gibbons was the set designer responsible for the “MGM glow” all of the films had. Stars under MGM contract were Clark Gable, Mickey Rooney, Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracey, Jean Harlow, and Greta Garbo.

Paramount was the second studio in prestige and power. They had more of a European flair due to their heavily-European talent. The films were also smart, sophisticated, comedic, and the DeMille films were epics with lots of sexual emphasis. They had relatively few stars, but those they had were powerful. The list included Marlene Detrich, Joseph von Sternberg, Ernst Lubich, Claudette Colbert, Cecil B. DeMille, Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Bob Hope, and Mae West.

Warner Brothers was the third-ranked studio. It was a younger studio and was only created in 1917. They had very few stars, relatively. They had Betty Davis, Jimmy Cagney, Errol Flynn, Joan Blondelle, and Humphrey Bogart under contract. Since they couldn’t rely on star power as much, they had a policy called the Three Ts: their films had to be Timely, Topical, and not Typical. They were very socially conscious and were called the Depression Studio because they actually acknowledged the tough times. The Warner Brothers also didn’t play down their Jewish roots like most of the other studios did, and most of the people in cinema production were immigrants. They were mostly known for their gangster movies and were male-oriented. The “look” of their films was more flat, like a newspaper photo or a documentary, which was very different from the MGM glow. They were also very successful with their musicals after they got Busby Berkeley, a choreographer, to direct them. His style was that they were often frame stories, like how the film 42nd Street is a movie about the production of a play.

20th Century Fox was created in 1939 when William Fox merged his studio with Daryl Zanuck’s Century Pictures. Their films usually featured curvy blondes and tall, dark men. It is said that their Alice Fay is responsible for the image Hugh Hefner used to create Playboy. This studio had very few stars. They had Will Rogers, Shirley Temple, Warner Olin (known for his role as Charlie Chan), Alice Fay, and Betty Grabble. They also got John Ford to direct a few non-contract pictures for them. The Charlie Chan films where mostly what kept them afloat until Pearl Harbor Day, but they could rely on their musicals by then. Also, they had Technicolor.

Columbia Pictures was a Poverty Row studio that clawed its way up. Henry was the head of Columbia and was “the meanest man in Hollywood.” Frank Capra was an important director and they also had success with The Three Stooges, who did 190 shorts between 1934 and 1958. They also created the first “screwball comedy” in 1934 with It Happened One Night. Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable were the stars, but they were each borrowed from another studio. Colbert was from Paramount and Gable was from MGM.

RKO Pictures is short for Radio Keith Orpheum, a theater circuit. This was the only studio burn during the talking picture era. RKO pictures were elegant, stylish, witty, and funny. They were also considered to be a daring studio and were responsible for King Kong and Citizen Kane. Their cast list included Katherine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Orson Welles.

Universal Pictures was famous for their horror movies. They made Dracula with Bela Lagosi and Frankenstein in 1931. The Mummy and The Invisible Man were in ’32, and The Bride of Frankenstein in ’35. These movies had a very distinct feel as James Whale (the director) borrowed heavily from the German Expressionist style.