One simple trick to lose as much weight as you want!

Posted on 2015-01-15 by

Ok, I’ve (sort of) spilled my guts about introversion, privilege, gender, sexuality, harassment, and the vicious positive feedback loop between being undesired and feeling undesirable, so might as well get this one over with while my inhibitions still seem to be somewhat loosened. (Can’t explain why.) People have been asking me about weight loss for months now, and it is by far the thing I am most reluctant to talk about. (And be warned, those of you who know me from work, I still consider it to be an utterly inappropriate topic for unsolicited workplace conversation. There is maybe one person with whom I’d be willing to have that convo, and if you’re not that person, keep the comments out of the office, please.)

But since I’m parodying those annoying advertisements that appear at the bottom of far too many Web pages, you might as well ask, “What is your one simple trick?”

(Waits for chorus.)

(Not cooperating, I see. I can take the hint.)

One simple trick to lose as much weight as you want:

Eat less, exercise more.

Seriously. That’s all there is to it. I said it was simple, I didn’t claim it would be easy — if you’re at all like me, it’s probably very difficult, perhaps even the most difficult thing you will do in your life.

(Oh, you want more detail? OK, I can give some more detail.)

I offer the following additional suggestions that might help people actually perform this trick:

  1. Set realistic goals. For most people, it is neither realistic nor healthy to attempt to lose more than a pound and a half (0.7 kg) per week, and just a pound would be more realistic. Remember that what you’re trying to lose is excess body fat, not muscle; a pound of fat represents about 4,100 calories, so to lose just a pound a week means you need an average daily calorie deficit of about 600 over the very long term.
  2. Use the BMI inequality as a guideline for what your goal weight should be — making allowances for the fact that BMI guidelines are based on a statistical model which is subject to random variation from one person to the next. (BMI is defined as weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters, and is a proxy for the surface-to-mass ratio, itself a proxy for density and thus proportion of body fat. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommend that all adults, regardless of sex and age, should maintain a BMI between 20 and 25 kg/m2. For a 5’8½” person, that means weighing between 133 and 166 pounds (60–75 kg) — and where any individual should be in that range depends on frame size, musculature, sex, and other factors.)
  3. Keep track of everything you eat, in real time. This makes an enormous difference: when you have to stop and think about what you are eating, and in what quantity, it makes you take the time to reflect on whether you want to be doing that or not, and at what point you ought to stop.
  4. Get an app to help you do the tracking. I use myfitnesspal, which sucks mightily, but in ways that I’m reasonably used to (and data migration would be a real pain at this point). These days, everyone reading this has a smartphone, and if you’re under 50 you probably carry it with you all the time, so you’re unlikely to forget to use the app, as opposed to an old-style paper diary.
  5. Don’t buy bulk packaged foods, if you can avoid it. Prefer foods that come in packages with a reasonable number of servings (how many that is will depend on your goals and the size of your family, among other things), because it’s easier to not open a sealed package than it is to not have one more piece/taste/drink/handful of nuts.
  6. As a more general rule: don’t eat what doesn’t satisfy you. Don’t be afraid to eat higher-calorie foods (within whatever you’ve established as your daily quota) if the result will be that you are satisfied, whereas supposedly “healthier” foods are not at all healthy if they keep you in a state of desire rather than satisfaction. (I’m looking at you, smoked almonds!)
  7. For this reason, avoid sweetened beverages of all kinds; drink water (or seltzer) to assuage your thirst. If you have that hot chocolate/almond-milk chai/café au lait/caramel macchiato, think of it as a dessert, a treat, and not as something you use to occupy your off hand.
  8. Also along those lines: if you like chocolate, buy yourself good chocolate, according to whatever your preferences are, in smaller packages, that can easily be broken into pieces of about 5 grams or so. Put individual pieces of chocolate in your mouth one at a time, and let them melt on your tongue. Wait until one is completely melted and washed away by your saliva before having the next piece. You’ve now turned a 25-gram chocolate bar from something you eat in less than a minute to something that will last ten, and thereby be more satisfied while eating less. (You may find that your tastes change, perhaps significantly, if you savor chocolate in this way!)
  9. Understand that your weight will vary randomly from day to day, depending not only on when you weigh and what you’ve eaten but also your mood, how much sleep you’ve had, your overall state of health, and many other factors. If you weigh yourself every day (I do), remember that you are trying to bend the trend line downward, and filter out the noise. For some people, the easiest and best way to do that filtering is to weigh yourself less frequently.
  10. Find some form of exercise that you can do absolutely every single day. It doesn’t have to be the same thing every day (although that’s what works for me), so long as you have some time set aside for physical activity day in and day out.
  11. Get a kitchen scale. In order to eat less, you have to understand how much food you are actually eating, and “how much” is a question of mass which you determine by using a scale. Many common food items come in units which vary substantially in size — as much as 30% in the case of sliced bread, for example — and the serving size on the package is often stated as an average, or in hard-to-estimate volumetric units, or in some standard quantity that nonetheless isn’t the way you would normally eat. Also, the overall label on packaged foods represents a minimum quantity, not a maximum. I’ve had some high-calorie foods like chocolate actually contain significantly more than the label indicates.
  12. Ask for nutrition information when you don’t see it clearly labeled. Many foods you buy in the store, as well as most restaurant foods, are exempt from nutrition labeling requirements. However, that doesn’t mean that the nutrition information isn’t available. Sometimes you just have to ask. Other times the maker won’t consider it worth the expense of preparing it (which has to be done by a certified laboratory, not just estimated from the ingredients like I do for this blog) unless customers demand it.
  13. For similar reasons, when the nutrition label is obviously implausible, ask about it. Sometimes it may be a simple production error; other times the label may have been copied or manipulated incorrectly as a product was portioned — particularly in the case of bulk foods that are portioned and sold by weight in the store. Do the numbers add up to more than the supposed serving size? (One particularly egregious one that I ran into recently was at Whole Foods, where packages of some composed salad listed the serving size in U.S. Customary units as “4 oz” but then listed the size in metric as “100g”. The conversion is off by ten percent — how do you know which quantity the nutrient numbers were based on?)
  14. Don’t necessarily trust third-party nutrition databases, either. They are great time-savers when accurate, and when you don’t have access to an original nutrition label they may be all you can get, but very often the data is inaccurate, was entered incorrectly, is in bogus units, or otherwise doesn’t match what the maker is actually legally committed to in the label.
  15. If you’re an extrovert, you might find that various social support mechanisms — whether online, as built into some apps, or traditional meetings, may help you. I’m not, and I find such things utterly horrifying; if that was the only way to lose weight, I would not have managed it. But if you find that it does work for you, by all means continue with it.
  16. If you use a piece of fitness equipment that claims to tell you how many calories you’ve burned, check that it’s calibrated properly. If you own the equipment, you may have to pay someone to do this for you (if it’s even possible). If you are using exercise equipment at a health club, gym, hotel, or the neighborhood YMCA, you probably need to enter your weight and perhaps other details every time you get on — the formula used to compute calories is only accurate with knowledge of your sex, weight, and height. (Unless you’re wearing a mask and measuring VO2 directly, of course!)
  17. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t meet your goals every day — but every day do try to surpass your goals.
  18. Above all, when in doubt, assume that you’ve eaten more and exercised less than you think.

OK, so you’ve done it. You’ve lost the weight you wanted to lose. Now what?

I don’t know. I haven’t gotten there yet, even after more than a year of steady progress. I am expecting, however, that even once I do get to my goal weight, I will still have to practice all of these things, and more, because I know how I got to where I was. It wasn’t just that vicious feedback loop I mentioned, it was also eating far too much of things that I actually got far too little pleasure out of. (Double Stuf Oreos really aren’t as good as your childhood memories say they were!) And, of course, it was working at a desk, driving to work every day, and not actually making any attempt to keep calorie intake in balance with calorie burning. That’s what they mean when they say it’s a lifestyle change. We are uniquely lucky now that we have the tools that can do much of the grunt work of keeping track for us, but without that day-in, day-out commitment, it will never happen.

Posted in Food, Science, States of mind | Tagged , , ,

A not-quite-response to Jean Yang’s response to “Comment 171”

Posted on 2015-01-14 by

Last month, MIT Computer Science professor Scott Aaronson (disclaimer: a colleague, although as he’s a theoretician, not one I interact with very much) wrote a thoughtful blog post about MIT’s response to the allegations of misconduct against former Physics professor Walter Lewin. Scott allows a wide-ranging discussion in the comments on his blog, and in this particular case, it didn’t take much topic drift to bring the conversation around to the role of feminism in technology, and in particular how invoking “privilege” can have the effect of stifling discussion, and more specifically how this can cause well-meaning people who understand themselves as feminists and allies, and wish to make a positive contribution to disengage — simply because they are middle-class straight white cismen, and no amount of good intention can overcome the inherent privilege that comes with that. (The fact that we so easily pass means that middle-class bisexual white cismen like me get no free ride in this regard.)

Scott’s “Comment #171” in the discussion thread takes this head-on, in soul-baring detail, and talks directly both about his personal experience of non-privilege as a shy, nerdy guy, and also about his attempts to engage feminism on its own terms, and how he at times felt himself driven away by feminists’ assertion of his own supposed privilege, contrary to his direct experience. (Scott certainly engaged feminism to a far greater degree than I ever have; doubtless his relative youth and education must have contributed to this.) In the days following the posting of that comment, Scott’s discussion made the rounds of social media several times, and attracted long-form responses from both feminist and “shy, nerdy guy” prespectives.

A few days ago, Jean Yang posted an answer on Quora in response to a question asking for opinions on “Comment 171”. (Jean is a Ph.D. student in the interdepartmental research laboratory where Scott and I both work, and thus also a colleague, albeit one I’m not aware of having ever met in person; our respective social circles have a nonempty intersection.) She surveys some of the previous published responses, including Laurie Penny’s in the New Statesman, and raises the honest criticism that for feminism to succeed, it needs to allow men a place in the conversation — particularly those men who are actually willing, interested, and able to engage in a meaningful way. After all, feminism isn’t about making women superior to men (even if some famous feminists believe that), it’s about breaking down the walls that keep us unequal. (Jean’s response is quite thoughtful and I’m not going to be able to do it justice in summarizing it here — go on, read it; this post will still be here when you get back.)

Scott’s comment (which I didn’t see at the time, only when it made it back around through my social media circle) made me think, and Jean’s response made me think a bit more, about why we so often have this difficulty talking past each other about issues of power and privilege and how those relate to gender and identity. One thing is for certain: we all experience, and perceive, gender differently. (I am reminded of Douglas Hofstadter’s rhetorical query, “Has anyone ever had precisely this thought before?” One might reasonably ask, “Does anyone else have precisely the same gender identity as I do?” I think the answer to both questions must surely be “no”.) But there is also this question of power and privilege, and one of the reasons we so often talk past each other is that every person simultaneously experiences situations of both power and powerlessness, and consequently, has aspects of their life in which they are privileged and other aspects in which they are disadvantaged. The challenge — for feminists and indeed for all right-thinking people — is to understand each other as whole people, not as ivory-tower exemplars of one particular privileged (or stigmatized) group.

I have a great deal of empathy for the particular situation Scott describes, although he was clearly much worse off than I at his low point (and is much better off than I at present), since I too am a “shy nerdy guy” — or as I would put it, a typical strongly introverted, insecure geek — and the society that we live in has expectations that make it extremely difficult to get along if you’re not an overconfident flaming extrovert. (Seriously, have you seen the latest personnel evaluation forms from HR? Doesn’t even have to be MIT HR, most large organizations’ HR departments read from the same playbook. Either I can answer the questions honestly to my lights, in which case I’m setting myself up to be terminated, or I can pretend to be an overconfident extrovert, maybe get a small raise, and feel disgusted at myself for the deception. Haven’t these people ever heard of Impostor Syndrome?) But on the other hand, there’s no denying that anyone who works for MIT, even the people who vacuum the floors and clean the toilets, benefit from more privilege than most of the other seven billion people on earth — and people with steady middle-class jobs like mine, or faculty positions like Scott’s, or even fully-funded graduate assistantships like most students in our lab, have it quite well indeed. This is of course unavoidable in any universe where economic inequality exists.

There are other forms of power differences, however, and my situation is both similar to and very different from Scott’s in another way as a result. I have been a network administrator — in practical terms, the network administrator — for this lab since shortly after my 24th birthday. (This February will mark my 18th anniversary in this position.) I didn’t go to graduate school — that wasn’t an option open to me, for various reasons I won’t go into — and MIT has been my only employer since college. The computing industry has changed a great deal in that time, and the sort of skills that I have are really no longer suitable for working in most other places (and, truth be told, I really have no desire to work in other places, especially not in industry, most of which seems to have moved in a direction that I personally despise).

Even without formal training (which it seems that my hire antedates), I have always been conscious that this position gives me an enormous amount of power — such that if I were a less ethical person, I could disrupt users’ work, read their email or their personal files, untraceably alter database entries, otherwise make their lives more or less difficult at whim — over even the most senior colleagues. Perhaps I am too conscious of this power, because one of the things that it has left me with is the same sort of social paralysis as Scott described in his comment, when combined with my own natural introversion. For many years (and to a significant extent even now), I was always tense and on guard when in certain kinds of situations at work, to ensure that I did not say or do anything that might potentially be considered inappropriate or objectionable — particularly when an attractive young person, especially an attractive young woman (and there have been some), was involved — for fear that one small slip would inevitably result in a career-destroying harassment complaint, and I would spend the rest of my life flipping burgers for $5.50 an hour.

I doubt many, if any, of them ever realized how fearful I was, and I obviously have no idea how they would have responded if I had actually expressed an interest in them beyond the merely professional. I had always resolved that I would never say anything of the sort unless it was someone who I knew very well indeed, and knew for a certainty that they would be flattered if not actually interested, rather than offended — and there were essentially no such people in my life. (Still aren’t.) Thus, the particular, intense awareness of the sort of power that I had (uniquely, in my social circle) joined in positive feedback with my own natural severe introversion to the point that I entirely squandered my own “dating years”, I’m lonely nearly all the time and still single at age 42. This does not make me any less cognizant of the ways in which I am undeniably privileged — to be male in a male-dominated field; to have chosen the right parents so I could go to college, even if I was a lousy student; to have figured out that I was bi at a time when the stigma was finally on its way out; to get paid very well to do what was effectively my dream job straight out of college — but it shouldn’t mean that I am somehow not allowed to contribute to discussions of privilege even when I am (or perceive myself as being) on the other side.

That’s one of the reasons I like to bring up other kinds of privilege that don’t fall into the convenient dichotomies that drive many of these arguments. What about the social privilege of those overconfident extroverts? Our country, and indeed our world, are run by such people, but there is very little discussion of “extrovert privilege”. What about the privilege of neurotypicality? What about the privilege of those who, through the vagaries of chance, have managed to find good, satisfying, mutually supportive relationships of whatever multiplicity and orientation? (There’s plenty of discussion of people who have bad or abusive, or serially unsuccessful, relationships, but this is rarely anchored in the framework of privilege other than the dichotomous gender-privilege concept.) Privilege and power aren’t unitary things: glib aphorisms aside, every person experiences some of both in their lives, often at the same time, and to shut people of good will out of a conversation because they have but one sort of privilege out of many does a serious disservice to everyone involved.

At least, that’s how I see it. I’ve run out of words here. I don’t like to whine, but this has been bothering me for long enough; thanks for your patience if you actually read this far. (Have I mentioned how terrible a self-editor I am? Far easier to say nothing than to say exactly the right thing, so most of the time I keep my thoughts on controversial topics to myself.)

Posted in Law & Society, States of mind | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Recipe quick takes: Joanne Chang’s Vegan low-fat chocolate cake

Posted on 2015-01-12 by

I’ve gotten a bit behind in my baking lately, thanks to travel and the holidays. I was planning on doing two different Joanne Chang recipes this weekend, but since one involved making pastry and all my butter was in the freezer, and I had to get up early on Saturday and drive to Salem to pick up my old Kitchen-Aid stand mixer from the repair shop, I didn’t end up doing either of them. Instead, I did her “vegan low-fat chocolate cake” (Flour, p. 183), which I had been planning on doing last month for my birthday but ran out of energy for. I’ve had this cake in muffin form at Flour 3 in Cambridge, and I liked it well enough then, so I figured it was worth trying at home.

The farthest I got back in December was buying the unusual six-inch cake pan this recipe calls for. All the ingredients are standard, however, and the construction is by the Muffin Method, very much like a mix brownie with water instead of egg as the primary liquid. I made one other (hopefully minor) substitution, using vanilla paste instead of vanilla extract, because I have a whole bottle of it and don’t know how else I’m going to use it up otherwise. (One of those special ingredients that you buy for one recipe and are then stuck with because nothing else you’ve ever made calls for it.) I otherwise stuck by the recipe, including adding espresso powder which I would ordinarily have left out (since I detest the flavor of coffee).

One thing I was not prepared for was the way the cake puffs up during baking:
Finished cake, hot from the oven

After cooling in the pan for an hour, the cake released quite easily (although I probably unnecessarily ran a knife around the edge anyway):
Cake pan after extracting cake

The recipe says “serves 6 to 8”. I don’t know about you, but I find it vastly easier to cut anything in halves, quarters, or eighths than I do thirds or sixths, so I had no doubt how many wedges I was going to get:
Seven wedges of cake

Chang recommends sifting a bit of confectioner’s sugar over the top; since I was not serving the whole thing at once, I dusted the individual wedge instead:
One slice of cake, with powdered sugar on top

So it looks pretty, but how does it taste? Not much, unfortunately. I honestly couldn’t have told that this was supposed to be a chocolate cake if you gave it to me blindfolded — and I can detect an (undesirable) hint of the coffee flavor. I’ll bring it in to work and see what other people think, but my feeling is that the lack of fat — particularly cocoa butter — combined with the light texture of the cake doesn’t serve the chocolate fanatic particularly well. However, I remember the muffin-shaped version at Flour being better, so perhaps it might be better baked in cupcake wrappers, and perhaps glazed or frosted (although then it would no longer be either vegan or low-fat!) to punch up the flavor somewhat. It’s also possible that I overbaked it — one of the main ways to destroy chocolate flavor is to let it evaporate in the oven and waft away. There’s only 40 g of cocoa in the recipe, even if it’s the good stuff, which makes me suspect that there are other ways the flavor could be punched up as well — perhaps by adding some chocolate chunks, as so many cupcakemuffin recipes do.

Nutrition

I don’t believe this cake actually meets the FDA regulations to be called “low fat”. But it is certainly lower in fat than a butter cake or pretty much anything with eggs or cocoa butter in it.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1/8 cake
Servings per container: 8
Amount per serving
Calories 230 Calories from fat 63
% Daily Value
Total Fat 7g 11%
 Saturated Fat 1g 4%
 Monounsaturated Fat 4g ​
 Polyunsaturated Fat 2g ​
 Trans Fat 0g ​
Cholesterol 0mg 0%
Sodium 203mg 8%
Potassium 104mg 3%
Total Carbohydrate 40g 13%
 Dietary fiber 3g 10%
 Sugars 16g ​
Proteins 4g 9%
Vitamin A 0%
Vitamin C 0%
Calcium 2%
Iron 6%
Posted in Food | Tagged , , ,

Some random thoughts on my recent trip to New York

Posted on 2015-01-11 by

On sort of a whim, I decided to go to New York the day after New Year’s. Well, technically, I actually did the deciding a few weeks before New Year’s, when I was looking at the NHL schedule, but it only took a few minutes to go from “Hey, why don’t I go to see that game in Newark” to “Hey, I’ve never actually had a chance to play tourist in New York” to “Why don’t I see what’s playing on Broadway that weekend” to buying all the tickets and making hotel reservations. Here are some random thoughts about what I did and saw.

The one anchor point starting out was that I wanted to see the Canadiens play the Devils on Friday, January 2, at the Prudential Center. I had complete freedom of transportation mode — I could drive, take the bus, take the train (express or “regional”), or fly. The Prudential Center is right in downtown Newark, two blocks from Newark Penn Station, so I looked closely at the rail option, and found that the Acela Express fare from Route 128 to Newark was not-terrible enough to eliminate air travel from consideration. I looked at the cost of driving, considered the difference in parking costs between Newark and Route 128, and decided that I’d rather take the train — this also gave me a bit more freedom in terms of scheduling, since I could nap on the train. I didn’t seriously consider taking any of the various bus services, most of which don’t stop in Framingham and so would require more complicated travel arrangements at this end. I chose a fairly early departure from Boston, which would get me in to Newark Penn a little after 1 PM, allowing me time to check into my hotel and then go back into the city for a few hours before the game. I also chose a late return trip on Sunday, primarily because I could get a AAA discount on the fare, but it also worked out well in terms of being able to do some additional sightseeing in Manhattan.

Considering both Amtrak’s official (although apparently not enforced) limits on carry-on baggage, and the fact that I would be lugging all of my stuff through Manhattan on Sunday afternoon until my train home, I had to make a decision whether to bring my camera bag or my audio bag, and ultimately decided to bring my audio bag. (In theory I could have brought both, but only at the cost of carrying a heavy backpack in addition to my roller bag, which I didn’t really want to do.) As a result, the photos you see here are less numerous than they otherwise would be, and of a lower quality since they were taken with my phone camera rather than my proper camera (which a number of the places I went wouldn’t have allowed in anyway).

My initial thought for a hotel was to find a Choice Hotels property (I’m in Choice’s loyalty program) in Newark that looked reasonable. The only one I could find, however, was quite a distance north of Newark Penn on McCarter Highway (NJ 21), which meant spending a lot of money on taxis or very inconvenient alternatives for ground transportation. (I decided I probably wouldn’t want to walk it.) In exploring the map of downtown Newark, I noticed that there was a Courtyard literally right next to the Prudential Center, on the Broad Street side, and it turned out that their rate was not much worse than the Choice property’s. (Normally I would not choose a Marriott property, because, well, Marriott, but in this case it was so much more convenient that I was willing to make an exception. There is also a boutique hotel on Broad right next to the Marriott, and a Hilton closer to the train station.) I later described this hotel as being located at the intersection of Old Newark and Gentrifying Newark, across the street from Poverty-Stricken Newark — my seventh-floor window literally looked out across Broad Street at a run-down nail salon, a grey-market electronics store, and a pawn shop. The hotel was clearly very new construction — so new, in fact, that most of the ground-floor retail space had yet to be leased out. The boutique hotel next door was in an old bank building, and a decrepit old Paramount theater was another block away. Between the two hotels was the First Presbyterian Church, a seventeenth-century establishment.

When I arrived in Newark, it was bitterly cold and windy, but I decided to walk the four blocks from the station to the hotel so I could get the “lay of the land” as it were. Conveniently, the Acela Express used a platform that had a direct exit to Market Street, which was a block closer to the hotel than the station’s main entrance. I walked past the Newark outpost of Syracuse’s famous Dinosaur BBQ, where I hoped to have dinner before the game, turned left on Broad Street, and checked into my hotel. As a security measure, the Courtyard required key-card access to all guest-room floors, something I’ve never seen in this class of hotel before.

New World Trade Center tower

The new One World Trade Center building, with spire, as seen from in front of the 9/11 memorial preview site on Vesey Street. The building opened on November 3, 2014.

I bundled back up and walked back to the Penn Station to take the PATH train to lower Manhattan, which I’ve never done before. (My one prior experience on PATH was several years ago, on the Hoboken-33rd St. line.) Thankfully, PATH now both issues and accepts Metrocards, so I did not need to get more than one stored-value medium for this trip. On arrival at World Trade Center station, I immediately noticed how much like a construction site it still looks, and the evidence of construction was even clearer outside. I walked as far as the 9/11 Memorial Preview, took some photos of the new World Trade Center tower, and then turned around and took the train back to Newark.

I had figured that it would be possible to eat dinner very early — 5:30, say — and still get into the Prudential Center in time to see the teams do their warm-up skate. That was in fact the case, but unfortunately not at Dinosaur: when I stepped in shortly after 5:00, I was told that there was a 90 minute wait, unless I wanted take-out (which of course I didn’t). I resigned myself to getting an overpriced hot dog at the arena, and walked back in the direction of my hotel. I saw what looked like another potential dining option and stuck my head in — they said they could seat me right away, so I after looking at the menu I decided to eat there. I hadn’t realized that this was actually the hotel dining room of the boutique hotel next to mine, and it wasn’t until I asked for directions to the men’s room and was shown out the front door of the restaurant that I finally twigged on to the fact. The service was poor and very slow, even though the restaurant was only about half full, but the food was acceptable if a bit overpriced. I finished my dinner at about 6:30 and walked half a block to the Prudential Center, showed my ticket, and took my seat.

I had a great seat, about eight rows up from the ice and one section to the right of the away bench, and took some pictures during the players’ warm-up skate.

MTL@NJ pre-game warmup

Looking from my seat towards center ice and the home end of the rink


MTL@NJ pre-game warmup

Left to right: Tomáš Plekanec C, Carey Price G, unidentified player (perhaps Max Pacioretty LW?), P.K. Subban D, Dale Weise RW, another unidentified player


Of course it wasn’t cheap, but I consoled myself with the fact that I would have had to pay twice as much for the same seat in Montreal — if such a ticket ever came onto the market long enough for me to buy it.) My streak of unbroken NHL home-team losses continued, although it wasn’t a complete rout, so the New Jersey fans didn’t start leaving until an empty-netter in the last minute of play put the game out of reach. I went back to my hotel and spent some time in the hotel’s fitness center, which unfortunately had only one stationary bike, a recumbent. (Better than none at all, as I experienced in a Comfort Suites over Christmas, I suppose, but I truly hate recumbent stationary bikes as even the good ones invariably rattle and vibrate far beyond acceptable limits.)

In preparation for my Saturday, I had spent some time in Google Maps looking at the various attractions both touristic and culinary. My first stop would be the Doughnut Plant at 220 W. 23rd St. in Chelsea (between the IRT 7th Av. and IND 8th Av. lines) — which I had not realized, from the info page in Maps, was actually a fairly large chain operation. (In fact, I didn’t know this until I actually looked it up while writing this.) The reviews I looked at were good, however, and I was quite pleased with what I saw when I got there — and even more pleased with what I saw when my order arrived:

Breakfast at Doughnut Plant, Chelsea

I ordered a chocolate glazed yeast donut and a hot chocolate. Both were made with Valrhona chocolate (although that doesn’t impress me as much as it was probably intended to).

The hot chocolate in particular was amazing, although I realized as I was entering it in my food diary that it probably had several hundred more calories than I had accounted for — just how much cream, exactly, did they put in there. (All of it?) Undoubtedly I could make both items myself and have them come out just as good, but that would require far more effort than it’s worth for a single person, and what would I do with the inevitably huge quantity of leftovers? It’s the ideal meal to have out. (Besides, I only ever eat breakfast when I’m traveling, so there’s no circumstance in which I would even be awake early enough to have fresh donuts in the morning!)

From 23rd St. I hopped back on the subway and headed (after some substantial and unexplained delays) down to Rector St., and walked from there down to the foot of Broadway and Bowling Green, where the United States Custom House is located. When the original World Trade Center complex opened, the Customs Service moved from the Custom House to leased space at WTC. The Custom House fell into disrepair, but was eventually repaired and refurbished (still under federal ownership) in the 1980s. Coincidentally, George Gustav Heye’s Museum of the American Indian ran into difficulty in the 1980s as well, and a deal was struck to transfer the Heye collection to the Smithsonian, where it would form the nucleus of the newly chartered National Museum of the American Indian. Since it would take several years to identify a location for NMAI on the Mall in Washington and then design and build a brand new museum, and since the Heye collection was already located in New York, the Smithsonian (which already operated the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City) opened a New York branch of NMAI, and the General Services Administration gave the new museum the first two floors of the Custom House. The main NMAI location in Washington opened several years ago, but the New York location has remained open, as the NMAI George Gustav Heye Center. Like other Smithsonian museums, admission is free but a bag inspection is required.

Custom House RotundaThere are three main gallery spaces in the Heye Center, all surrounding the Custom House’s second-floor clerk’s desks, under the great rotunda. There’s a historical exhibit about the Custom House itself occupying half of the clerks’ space: when the building was constructed, customs brokers would come to the Custom House to present their bills of lading and their duty payments to customs clerks for filing, but changes in the shipping industry meant that this sort of in-person processing was now done by customs agents at the ports, so a large public space such as this was surplus to requirements. Even after 9/11 when the Customs Service moved back into the Custom House, the much smaller complement of central staff could easily fit into smaller offices on an upper floor of the building. I’m looking towards the main entrance, which leads to a grand staircase and Bowling Green IRT station; my back is to the middle of the three main galleries, which has a permanent exhibition of (mostly Heye collection) artifacts from native communities throughout the hemisphere. To my left and right are galleries for temporary exhibits — when I visited, the gallery on my right had an exhibit of Navaho turquoise jewelry made by members of the Yazzie family, and the one on my left had an exhibit of never-before-shown black-and-white medium-format photographs taken by Horace Poolaw, a Kiowa man in mid-century Oklahoma, documenting everyday life for non-reservation native people living in the former “Indian Territory”.

When I left NMAI, it had begin to rain, as had been forecast, and I was grateful for the subway station at the foot of the stairs. I took the F train over to the Lower East Side (conveniently, the 5 train was running local that day, replacing the 6, as I would otherwise have had to make two transfers rather than just one) to have lunch at The Meatball Shop on Stanton St. One of the things that makes New York unlike most every other city in the US is that its unique combination of a very large, dense population with tiny apartments containing even tinier kitchens means that even exceedingly niche restaurant concepts can find sufficient custom to thrive — a gourmet donut shop like Doughnut Plant could exist in almost any urban area, but a restaurant that serves only meatballs is something that you really wouldn’t expect to see anywhere outside of New York. (At least until it becomes the next franchise fast-food fad, like cupcakes and grilled cheese in recent years.) The Meatball Shop offers four different basic kinds of meatballs, and they can be had in a variety of forms — as normal meatballs, “smashed” as burger-like objects, as the meat filling in a sub/grinder/hero — with a variety of accompaniments and sauces.

Lunch at The Meatball Shop

Lunch consisted of spicy pork meatballs with traditional sauce on linguine, with a side of steamed spinach.

From Stanton Street I walked down to Essex Market, because I wanted to see what the New York outpost of Cambridge’s famous gourmet shop, Formaggio, looked like. Being a small tenant in a much larger food market, Formaggio Essex concentrates on the small, high-value items that made Formaggio’s name in Boston: cheese, chocolate, condiments, and charcuterie — other purveyors in Essex Market have the bakery and produce business sewn up, and Formaggio’s space is too small to try to compete with them. I bought some chocolate that I hadn’t seen in stock at Formaggio in Cambridge when I was last there. While I was in Essex Market, I also got some dessert in the form of “cake balls” — dense little balls of cake and frosting, slightly larger than a donut hole and far tastier. The cake balls were the very first thing I saw when I entered the market, but I don’t recall the name of the stall where they were sold.

I still had several hours before the 8:00 curtain for Pippin, so I went uptown a bit and visited the Museum of Mathematics, which I had seen posters in the halls advertising at work (only on the Theory floors, unsurprisingly). I pretty much knew what to expect, so I was not surprised, but I thought the $15 admission was a bit steep for what’s basically a very small children’s museum on two floors of a narrow 26th St. storefront. I do wish that it was possible to have an urban museum for any STEM subject that wasn’t a children’s museum. (Those looking for more adult fare, however, can send the rugrats with a chaperone to MoMath and head a block north to the Museum of Sex, a commercial — and obviously adults-only — enterprise.)

From there — with four hours still to waste but all the museums closing — I headed back downtown to see the MTA’s new Fulton Center building and its oculus. Fulton Center is located atop the Fulton Street subway stop, and is a new combined headhouse and transfer station for the 2, 3, 4, 5, A, C, J, Z, and R services, serving the financial district. It’s intended to have two floors of retail establishments outside the fare-paid zone, but the MTA has evidently not leased any of it yet. By this time the sun had set and it was pouring outside, so after a brief look around Fulton St. itself, I headed back uptown to Times Square.

My most immediate problem was to find a place to eat and get out of the cold rain. All of the establishments were absolutely jammed; I went into one barbecue place (not Dinosaur, whose Manhattan establishment is way uptown, on 125th St. in Harlem) where the person at the door could only tell me how long the wait was to go up the escalator to get in line to wait for a table. Shake Shack (not that I wanted that anyway) looked like every single square foot of floor space was occupied. I looked into one place that had a decent-looking menu, and seemed to have a lot of open tables, but these were apparently all reserved. I went next door to a “bar and grill” type place with lots of huge flat-screen monitors showing sports (only two events, a basketball game and a football game), and was seated after only twenty minutes; I got a decent grilled-chicken pizza. It didn’t take nearly long enough to get served and eat (these restaurants being so packed there’s surely an incentive to turn over tables as fast as they can), so I arrived at the Shubert Music Box Theater more than an hour early, and about 45 minutes before the doors opened. I eventually did get in, and found out (albeit not through direct experience) that Broadway theaters are very, very nasty about people taking pictures — of anything, including themselves. Or at least this one was; I heard an usher demanding of several people that they delete their selfies (taken, mind, in a crowded theater balcony facing away from the stage long before the curtain opened). The show, however, was good; the music and the choreography were both well done, even if the plot was a bit thin and disjointed. (Let’s be honest: you don’t go to a Broadway musical for the plot.)

After the show let out, I checked Google Maps and acquiesced to its assessment that I could get back to my hotel faster by walking from 45th St. to Penn Station than I could by trying to get on the subway for a couple of stops. (At least north-south blocks in Manhattan are really short!) I caught the next North Jersey Coast Line train from New York Penn to Newark Penn (fare $5) and, in view of the darkness and rain, took a cab back to the hotel (fare $10, and he didn’t appear to be using the taximeter, although it might have been replaced with a smartphone app). I did some more airchecking before going to bed, but decided against getting back on the stationary bike on the grounds that I had walked enough to make up for it. (This is how New Yorkers manage to eat so much without getting fat — they walk everywhere. Even when they take the subway, there may still be half a mile of walking at either end, and many subway journeys involve navigating numerous underground passages and stairways, particularly when transfers are involved.)

On Sunday morning, I was still considering sticking around in Newark for long enough to get lunch at Dinosaur, since it seemed unlikely that I’d be back there any time soon, but ultimately I decided I would be better served heading (with all my luggage) back into Manhattan and uptown to the American Museum of Natural History. So I walked back to Newark Penn and bought another NJT ticket for the commuter train into New York Penn. (I could have taken PATH instead, for half the price, but PATH on weekends operates a limited schedule with the Newark-33rd St. and Hoboken-33rd St. lines combined.) When I arrived in Manhattan, I knew that I needed to add three more fares to my Metrocard, but after charging my credit card, the MTA vending machine spit out my Metrocard, claiming that it was damaged, and gave me a receipt. The clerk in the MTA booth was entirely unhelpful, and eventually sent me to another guy, who was also unhelpful — there is apparently no way, even in the presence of a damaged Metrocard with matching receipt from a fare vending machine in the same station for the MTA’s customer service representatives to issue a refund or even waive the $1 fee for a replacement card. All I could do, both men said, was mail the damaged card and the receipt to the MTA and some day they might get around to issuing a refund (which would probably be another Metrocard that would expire before I got a chance to use it anyway).

So I ended up buying a second Metrocard, again putting three fares on it, and taking the C train to 81st St. I hadn’t taken note of the platform signs which would have directed me to the museum’s direct entrance from the subway station, so I exited to the street and walked down to the newest section of the museum, the Rose Center, which houses the Hayden Planetarium of which Neil deGrasse Tyson is director. Conveniently, the museum’s coat check and automated ticket machines are located in this new section. With only a little hesitation, I was able to drop my rollerbag at the museum’s coat check, buy a ticket, and then head over to the museum cafeteria to get lunch before exploring the museum.

When I bought my ticket, I had an opportunity to buy timed admission to one or more of the special exhibits at the museum. I chose to see an exhibit on natural disasters, which was a complete waste of time and money — it had been developed originally by Chicago’s Field Museum in the late 2000s, and there was literally nothing in it that I did not already know or could not have easily learned by looking at a Wikipedia page. (Of course, the children who are the AMNH’s bread and butter would not necessarily come so well informed.) The AMNH in general is at a curious crossroads of old- and new-style museums: there are numerous modern exhibits clearly designed primarily for children, but they are juxtaposed with a great deal of material in the older style — mounted specimens, dioramas, and the like — that have more adult appeal. One good thing about the natural-disaster exhibit was that the woman checking tickets at the entrance reminded everyone to go see the “Lonesome George” exhibit on the fourth floor as this was its last day.

Lonesome George

“Lonesome George” was a Galapagos tortoise, the very last of his species, who died a few years back. The park authorities in the Galapagos put together a traveling exhibit after he died.

Of course, the main attraction of any natural-history museum is dinosaur fossils. Children of the right age are still as interested in dinosaurs as they ever were, and this actually is a great opportunity to present evolution, in a paleontological context, to impressionable young people. The AMNH fossil exhibits are for the most part organized on cladistic lines, although the explanatory text always uses “group” rather than the technical term “clade”. (There are a few paraphyletic groups presented, with a caution that these groupings are not “groups” because the animals depicted did not evolve from a common ancestor.) The presentation of birds as modern-day dinosaurs is done particularly well, with many of the evolutionary trees having an arrow off to one said labeled “birds” (the only clade indicated that doesn’t also say “(extinct)”).

Big dinosaur skeletons

What most people paid their $24 for. I’ve already forgotten which dinosaurs these fossil skeletons represent, but doubtless you can find a ten-year-old who knows just by looking.

I left the museum at about 3:30, having seen about a third of the exhibits, and headed over to the Leonidas shop at 485 Madison Avenue. This involved taking the C train back down to Times Square and then an uptown E train over to 5 Av/53 St station; the narrow storefront is located midblock on Madison between 51st and 52nd. The Madison Avenue exit of the subway station is closed on weekends — although the escalators were still running — so I had to double back to Fifth Avenue. I bought more than two pounds of chocolates and truffles, and proceeded to eat far too many of them when I brought them into work on the Monday after I got back. I still had more than an hour to kill before my 6:07 train, so I decided once again to walk to Penn Station, heading crosstown on 49th St. and then down 7th Avenue through Times Square, looking to get a somewhat better view now that there was daylight and it was no longer raining. Along the way, I saw an intriguing storefront for “Baked by Melissa” — they call what they sell “cupcakes”, but in reality, it’s as if you took supermarket mini-cupcakes and cut the bottoms off, so they’re just about half frosting and half cake. I asked, and they claimed that they were under 50 calories each, which was good enough for me to buy six, and I would later eat all of them. (Another example of the niche food that only a market like New York can support, although I found these to be vastly inferior to the “cake balls” I bought the previous day at Essex Market.) When I tried them, I was unable to tell what flavors they were supposed to be — other than the chocolate-dipped one, for obvious reasons — so that’s a product I can definitely scratch off my list.

The trip home was uneventful until we got to South Attleborough, where a malfunctioning switch machine had our train stopped for half an hour. Sitting behind me on the train were a woman who was chivvying her daughter into making one last college application before a January 5 deadline. Eventually she figured out that the application would require materials that she didn’t have with her, so they moved on to other topics of conversation. The rain had started back up again, so I was thankful to be in covered parking at Route 128 station (which also meant that there was no snow or ice to scrape off), although I was a bit irritated at all of the escalators being out simultaneously, so I had to wait out on the cold platform for the s-l-o-w elevators to move multiple loads of passengers and their baggage. I got home none the worse for wear, and only a couple of pounds heavier, and went to work the next day with plenty more sweet things that I really needed to get my colleagues to eat before I managed to.

Posted in Food, Science, Transportation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Quote of the day: Saladin Ahmed on satire

Posted on 2015-01-10 by

From Saladin Ahmed’s Times piece today:

The question for writers and artists, then, is not whether we ought to limit ourselves, but how already limit ourselves. In a field dominated by privileged voices, it’s not enough to say “Mock everyone!” In an unequal world, satire that mocks everyone equally ends up serving the powerful. And in the context of brutal inequality, it is worth at least asking what preexisting injuries we are adding our insults to.

To which not much more can be added.

Quote | Posted on 2015-01-10 by | Tagged , , ,

2014 in review: recipes

Posted on 2014-12-31 by

If you believe the analytics, most of you come here for my recipe writeups, aside from one IT-related article that was enormously popular after being featured on both Hacker News and Reddit. So for my second 2014 year-in-review post, I’m taking note of the new recipes that I tried and found to be the most rewarding.

February
ATK’s Herb-crusted Salmon Fillets has consistently been the most popular food post since it went up. Apparently a lot more people are interested in Cook’s Illustrated‘s recipes than are willing to pay for a subscription to their Web site, and so when they do a search for this recipe, they end up here.
July
Joanne Chang’s Brioche master recipe and Brioche au chocolat were not nearly as difficult as brioche is often said to be. I’m looking forward to making another batch and trying some of her other treats that are based on brioche dough (although I don’t think my diet will ever allow for the “Sticky sticky buns”).
August
Emily and Melissa Elsen’s Sweet cherry streusel pie was my first foray into The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book, and a delicious one at that. With this as a starting point, I ended up baking more pies in 2014 than I had in my entire live heretofore.
September
SeriousEats’ Fresh corn chowder was a great seasonal soup, and gave me an excuse to buy an immersion blender. This chowder reheats wonderfully, even from the freezer, and makes enough that I had to freeze some of it.
October
The Elsens’ Salted caramel apple pie taught me that lattice tops are not actually difficult, and there was no reason for me to have avoided them all these years. Also in October, I organized Pumpkin Pie Fest for Columbus Day (aka Canadian Thanksgiving), and baked six of the pies myself — my favorite of which being King Arthur Flour’s Golden pumpkin pie, which has a whole-grain crust and a custard sweetened entirely with honey.
November
Not every recipe turns out a brilliant success, but I used leftover heavy cream as an excuse to make Alice Medrich’s Extra-bittersweet ganache truffles. It was a light month for baking due to two week-long trips to the West Coast — one for business, in Seattle, and one for pleasure (and Thanksgiving!) in Southern California.
December
For the holiday season, my baking went back into overdrive, starting with CSAIL Holiday Baking Fest, where I did four items, two for the first time, and my favorite of the new recipes was Joanne Chang’s Bittersweet chocolate truffle tart. (Yes, I do prefer the dark stuff, why do you ask?) For the family Christmas gathering, I did three pies, all of which were good, but two were absolutely superb: Joanne Chang’s caramel-nut tart and the Elsens’ cranberry-sage pie — both of which I will almost certainly do again should the occasion arise.
Posted in Food | Tagged

2014 in review: new books

Posted on 2014-12-30 by

It seems to be a custom for bloggers, like journalists, to write end-of-the-year pieces. I’ve been writing this for more than a year now, so I figure that’s sufficient to consider it a real thing. I’m going to start, though, with something I haven’t done any writing about, because it’s easy (I can just extract this information from a database query): the books that are new to me in 2014. Some of these books I bought on the basis of reviews, or mentions on Twitter, or (in the case of Andrew Wheeler) explicit non-reviews; others I bought because they were recommended by (or written by!) friends. A few of these books have been sitting on my wishlist for years, waiting for their turn to come around (or go out of stock indefinitely, as sometimes happens before I ever manage to get my hands on a copy). They run the gamut from highly technical books on computing, to popular books on history, linguistics, and law, to books of art, photography, and architecture. There are a lot of cookbooks, because I’m a sucker for food porn (as witness most of the content on this blog). Because I am not a book reviewer, I had to pay for all of these — they didn’t arrive free on my doorstep — and so I don’t feel particularly compelled to attempt to summarize what they are. Despite telling myself to cut back, I regularly acquire far more books than I can ever hope to read, or even find shelf space for.

Here’s the full list (barring any last-minute acquisitions between now and New Year’s):

Authors Title ISBN YOP F
Abel, Allen Scaring Myself Again: Far-flung Adventures of a TV Journalist 9780002157865 1992 HC
Adams, John Joseph (ed.) Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, The 9780765326454 2013 TP
Addison, Katherine Goblin Emperor, The 9780765326997 2014 HC
Adler, Tamar Everlasting Meal, An: Cooking with Economy and Grace 9781439181881 2012 TP
Aldersey-Williams, Hugh Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc 9780061824739 2011 TP
Ansel, Dominique; Schauer, Thomas (illus.) Dominique Ansel: The Secret Recipes 9781476764191 2014 HC
Armstrong, Karen Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence 9780307957047 2014 HC
Austin, Dan; Doerr, Sean (illus.) Lost Detroit: Stories behind the Motor City’s Majestic Ruins 9781596299405 2010 TP
Bear, Elizabeth Range of Ghosts 9780765327543 2012 HC
Beard, Mary Fires of Vesuvius, The: Pompeii Lost and Found 9780674045866 2010 TP
Bender, Mike (ed.); Chernack, Doug (ed.) Awkward Family Photos 9780307592293 2010 TP
Beranbaum, Rose Levy; Fink, Ben (illus.) Baking Bible, The 9781118338612 2014 HC
Bierut, Michael Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design 9781616890612 2012 TP
Blanning, Tim Triumph of Music, The 9780674057098 2008 TP
Blom, Philipp Wicked Company, A: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment 9780465028658 2012 TP
Bloom, Carole; Defurio, Alexandra (illus.) Caramel 9781423632122 2013 HC
Bogle, Kathleen A. Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus 9780814799697 2008 TP
Bray, Hiawatha You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves 9780465032853 2014 HC
Briggs, Patricia Fair Game 9780425256183 2013 MM
Briggs, Patricia Hunting Ground 9780425269596 2014 HC
Briggs, Patricia Night Broken 9780425256749 2014 HC
Briggs, Patricia Shifting Shadows 9780425265000 2014 HC
Brooks, Frederick P., Jr. Design of Design, The: Essays from a Computer Scientist 9780201362985 2010 TP
Brust, Steven Hawk 9780765324443 2014 HC
Castellucci, Cecil Tin Star 9781596437753 2014 HC
Chihuly, Dale (illus.) Fire 9781576841594 2007 HC
Child, Julia; Bertholle, Louisette; Beck, Simone Mastering the Art of French Cooking 9780307593528 1983 HC
Cohen, Richard Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life 9781400068753 2010 HC
Collucci, Stephen; Gunnison, Elizabeth; Bagwell, Iain (illus.) Glazed Filled Sugared & Dipped: Easy Doughnut Recipes to Fry or Bake at Home 9780770433574 2013 HC
Cooper, T; Glock-Cooper, Allison Changers: Book 1 * Drew 9781617751950 2014 TP
Cornell, Paul London Falling 9780765330277 2013 HC
Costantino, Rosetta; Schacht, Jennie; Remington, Sara (illus.) Southern Italian Desserts: Rediscovering the Sweet Traditions of Calabria, Campania, Basilicata, Puglia, and Sicily 9781607744023 2013 HC
Dick, Philip K.; Lethem, Jonathan (ed.) Four Novels of the 1960s 9781598530094 2007 HC
Dijkstra, Bram Naked: The Nude in America 9780847833665 2010 HC
Edgerton, David Shock of the Old, The: Technology and Global History since 1900 9780199832613 2011 TP
Editors of Cook’s Illustrated (ed.) Cook’s Illustrated 2014 9781940352046 2014 HC
Elsen, Emily; Elsen, Melissa; Gentl & Hyers (illus.) Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book, The: Uncommon Recipes from the Celebrated Brooklyn Pie Shop 9781455520510 2013 HC
Fleskes, John (ed.) Spectrum 21: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art 9781933865584 2014 HC
Forbes, Nancy; Mahon, Basil Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics 9781616149420 2014 HC
Forney, Ellen (illus.) Lust: Kinky Online Personal Ads from Seattle’s The Stranger 9781560978848 2008 HC
Fossier, Robert Axe and the Oath, The: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages 9780691154312 2012 TP
Fox, Kate Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour 9781857885088 2008 TP
Freeman, Paul (illus.) Heroics II 9780980667547 2013 HC
Friedberg, Susanne Fresh: A Perishable History 9780674057227 2009 TP
Fujimura, Takayuki (illus.) Sorako 9781939012067 2013 TP
Gertner, Jon Idea Factory, The: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation 9781594203282 2012 HC
Gibbons, Stella Cold Comfort Farm 9780143039594 2006 TP
Gladstone, Max Two Serpents Rise 9780765333124 2013 HC
Glouberman, Misha; Heti, Sheila Chairs Are Where The People Go, The: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City 9780865479456 2011 TP
Gopnik, Adam Table Comes First, The: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food 9780307476968 2012 TP
Gregg, Brendan Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud 9780133390094 2013 TP
Gross, John (ed.) Oxford Book of Parodies, The 9780199639373 2012 TP
Gualdoni, Flaminio Female Nude (Skira Mini Art Books) 9788861305397 2008 TP
Hadfield, Chris; Hadfield, Chris (illus.) You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes 9780316379649 2014 HC
Hall, Loretta Underground Buildings: More Than Meets the Eye 9781884956270 2004 HC
Halper, Donna L. Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women in American Broadcasting 9780765636706 2014 TP
Hamilton, Gabrielle Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef 9780812980882 2012 TP
Hamilton, Laurell K. Shiver of Light, A 9780425255667 2014 HC
Harris, David A. Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science 9780814790557 2012 HC
Hartwell, David G. (ed.); Nielsen Hayden, Patrick (ed.) 21st Century Science Fiction 9780765326003 2013 HC
Hausmann, Ricardo; Hidalgo, Cesar A.; Bustos, Sebastian; Coscia, Michele; Simoes, Alexander; Yildirim, Muhammed A. Atlas of Economic Complexity, The: Mapping Paths to Prosperity 9780262525428 2013 TP
Hayes, Bill Anatomist, The: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy 9781934137215 2009 TP
Hayes, Brian Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape 9780393329599 2005 TP
Heather, Peter Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe 9780199892266 2012 TP
Hines, Thomas S. Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970 9780847833207 2010 HC
Hobson, Phyllis Making Your Own Ice Cream, Ices & Sherbets 0-88266-105-1 1977 TP
Holmberg, Martha; Silverman, Ellen (illus.) Modern Sauces: More than 150 Recipes for Every cook, Every Day 9780811878388 2012 HC
Jaxson, Jake (illus.); Sebastian, R.J. (illus.) Thing of Beauty, A 9783867876629 2014 HC
Joannides, Paul; Johnson, Toni (ed.); Groess, Daerick, Sr. (illus.) Guide to Getting It On 9781885535757 2014 TP
Kahn, David Kahn on Codes: Secrets of the New Cryptology 0-02-560640-9 1983 HC
Kahn, David Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II 9780306809491 2000 TP
Kahn, David How I Discovered World War II’s Greatest Spy and Other Stories of Intelligence and Code 9781466561991 2014 HC
Kaldunski, Shelly; Kunkel, Erin (illus.) Ice Creamery Cookbook, The 9781616286842 2014 HC
Kaplan, Wendy (ed.) Living in a Modern Way: California Design 1930-1965 9780262016070 2011 HC
Kennedy, Dan Wired City, The: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age 9781625340054 2013 TP
Kershaw, Ian End, The: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945 9780143122135 2012 TP
Krondl, Michael Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert 9781556529542 2011 HC
Kulaga, Agatha; Patinkin, Erin; Barton-Ballentine, Winona (illus.) Ovenly: Sweet & Salty Recipes from New York’s Most Creative Bakery 9780373892952 2014 HC
L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time, A 9780374386139 1962 HC
Lackey, Mercedes Dragon’s Teeth 9781451639438 2013 TP
Lackey, Mercedes Closer to Home 9780756408992 2014 HC
Lambert, Sheela (ed.) Best Bi Short Stories 9781613900888 2014 TP
Litwack, Matthew; JURNE (illus.) Beneath the Streets: The Hidden Relics of New York’s Subway System 9781584235545 2014 HC
Lloyd, G.E.R. Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity & Diversity of the Human Mind 9780199566259 2009 TP
Malgieri, Nick; Yanes, Romulo (illus.) Nick Malgieri’s Pastry: Foolproof Recipes for the Home Cook 9781909487116 2014 HC
Margaine, David; Margaine, Sylvain (illus.) Forbidden Places: Exploring Our Abandoned Heritage 9782915807820 2012 HC
Marks, P. J. M. Beautiful Bookbindings: A Thousand Years of the Bookbinder’s Art 9781584562931 2011 HC
McGee, Harold Keys to Good Cooking: A guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes 9781594202681 2010 HC
McGee, Harold; Dorfman, Patricia (illus.); Greene, Justin (illus.); McGee, Ann (illus.) On Food and Cooking 9780684800011 2004 HC
McKinley, Robin; Dickinson, Peter Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits 9780399237966 2002 HC
McKusick, Marshall Kirk; Neville-Neil, George V.; Watson, Robert N.M. Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, The 9780321968975 2014 HC
Medrich, Alice; Jones, Deborah (illus.) Seriously Bitter Sweet: The Ultimate Dessert Maker’s Guide to Chocolate 9781579655112 2013 TP
Mettler, Suzanne Submerged State, The: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy 9780226521657 2011 TP
Montague, Julian; Montague, Julian (illus.) Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America, The: A Guide to Field Identification 9780810955202 2006 TP
Morgenstern, Erin Night Circus, The 9780307744432 2011 TP
Moss, Robert F. Barbecue: The History of an American Institution 9780817317188 2010 HC
Munroe, Randall; Munroe, Randall (illus.) What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions 9780544272996 2014 HC
Nathan, Zoe; Loeb, Josh; Almerinda, Laurel; Armendariz, Matt (illus.) Huckleberry: Stories, Secrets, and Recipes from Our Kitchen 9781452123523 2014 HC
New York Transit Museum; Robins, Anthony W. Grand Central Termina: 100 Years of a New York Landmark 9781584799948 2013 HC
Nguyen, Andrea; Green, Paige (illus.); Stromberg, Betsy (illus.); Nguyen, Andrea (illus.) Banh Mi Handbook, The: Recipes for Crazy-Delicious Vietnamese Sandwiches 9781607745334 2014 HC
Noddings, Nel Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach 9780521710008 2006 TP
Nunberg, Geoffrey The Way We Talk Now 9780618116034 2001 TP
Nunberg, Geoffrey Years of Talking Dangerously, The 9781586487454 2009 HC
Nunberg, Geoffrey Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years 9781610392587 2012 TP
O’Boyle, Shaun (illus.) Modern Ruins: Portraits of Place in the Mid-Atlantic Region 9780271036847 2010 HC
Ottolenghi, Yotam; Lovekin, Jonathan (illus.) Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi 9781452101248 2010 HC
Ottolenghi, Yotam; Lovekin, Jonathan (illus.) Plenty More: Vibrant Vegetable Cooking from London’s Ottolenghi 9781607746218 2014 HC
Padel, Ruth Darwin: A Life in Poems 9780375711923 2012 TP
Parsons, Nicholas Welcome to Just A Minute!: A Celebration of Britain’s Best-Loved Radio Comedy 9781782112471 2014 HC
Payne, Christopher (illus.) Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals 9780262013499 2009 HC
Peril, Lynn College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now 9780393327151 2006 TP
Pinkard, Susan Revolution in Taste, A: The Rise of French Cuisine 9780521139960 2010 TP
Potter, Jeff Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food 9780596805883 2010 TP
Provine, Robert R. Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond 9780674048515 2012 HC
Quiggin, John Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us 9780691154541 2012 TP
Reeves, Richard John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand 9781843546443 2007 TP
Rickett, Joel (ed.) How to Avoid Huge Ships and Other Implausibly Titled Books 9781845133214 2008 HC
Roiphe, Katie Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages 9780385339384 2008 TP
Roussel, Christine Art of Rockefeller Center, The 9780393060829 2006 HC
Rucker, Rudy Nested Scrolls: A Writer’s Life 9781848631519 2011 HC
Rudder, Christian Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) 9780385347372 2014 HC
Ruhlman, Michael; Ruhlman, Donna Turner (illus.) Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient 9780316254069 2014 HC
Ruwedel, Mark (illus.) Westward: The Course of Empire 9780300141344 2008 HC
Rybczynski, Witold How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit 9780374211745 2013 HC
Schrager, Lee Brian; Sussman, Adeena; Sung, Evan (illus.) Fried & True: More than 50 Recipes for America’s Best Fried Chicken and Sides 9780770435226 2014 TP
Schroeder, Karl Lockstep 9780765337269 2014 HC
Sedia, Ekaterina (ed.) Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy 9780979624605 2008 TP
Seligson, Susan Stacked: A 32DDD Reports from the Front 9781596911178 2007 HC
Shafia, Louisa; Remington, Sara (illus.) New Persian Kitchen, The 9781607743576 2013 HC
Shea, Ammon Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation 9780399165573 2014 HC
Sher, Richard B. Enlightenment and the Book, The 9780226752532 2010 TP
Shinn, Sharon Fortune and Fate 9780441017751 2009 MM
Shuy, Roger W. Creating Language Crimes: How Law Enforcement Uses (and Misuses) Language 9780195181661 2005 HC
Siepmann, Charles A. Radio’s Second Chance   1946 HC
Silverberg, Robert Nightwings 9781600102004 2001 TP
Silverberg, Robert Dying Inside 9780765322302 2009 TP
Silvers, Robert B. (ed.) Company They Kept, The: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships, vol. 2 9781590174876 2011 HC
Silvers, Robert B. (ed.); Epstein, Barbara (ed.) Company They Kept, The: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships 9781590173343 2006 TP
Simon, Taryn American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, An 9783865213808 2007 HC
Sorayama, Hajime (illus.) XL-Masterworks Edition 9783037666524 2014 HC
Spufford, Francis Child That Books Built, The: A Life in Reading 9780312421847 2003 TP
St. Clair, Diane; Clark, Colin (illus.) Animal Farm Buttermilk Cookbook, The: Recipes and Reflections from a Small Vermont Dairy 9781449427535 2013 HC
Steves, Rick Travel as a Political Act 9781568584355 2009 TP
Stewart, Matthew Management Myth, The: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy 9780393338522 2009 TP
Stump, Edmund Roof at the Bottom of the World, The: Discovering the Transantarctic Mountains 9780300171976 2011 HC
Suicide, Missy (illus.) SuicideGirls: Hard Girls, Soft Light 9781934429952 2013 HC
Tan, Cecilia Siren and the Sword, The 9781590032084 2010 TP
Tan, Cecilia Tower and the Tears, The 9781590032114 2010 TP
Tan, Cecilia The Prince’s Boy (vol. 1) 9781613900093 2011 TP
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Phenomenon of Man, The 9780061632655 1959 TP
The Bureau Chiefs Write More Good 9780307719584 2011 TP
Thoma, Benno (illus.) Maybe My Love (Bel Ami) 9783867876315 2013 HC
Truew, Alex (illus.) Young Shaven Beauties 9783943105247   HC
Twyman, Michael History of Chromolithography, A: Printed Colour for All 9781584563204 2013 HC
Valente, Catherynne M. Silently and Very Fast 9781936896028 2011 HC
Vandermeer, Ann (ed.); Vandermeer, Jeff (ed.) Time Traveler’s Almanac, The 9780765374240 2014 TP
Villas, James; Wyche, Jason (illus.) Southern Fried 9781118130766 2013 HC
Walton, Jo My Real Children 9780765332653 2014 HC
Walton, Jo What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy 9780765331939 2014 HC
Watts, Duncan J. Everything Is Obvious 9780307951793 2011 TP
Weinstein, Lawrence Guesstimation 2.0 9780691150802 2012 TP
Willrich, Chris Scroll of Years, The 9781616148133 2013 TP
Wolfe, Gene Peace 9780765334565 2012 TP
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Zanini de Vita, Oretta; Marini, Luciana (illus.) Encyclopedia of Pasta 9780520255227 2009 HC
de Jong, Cees W. (ed.); Purvis, Alston W. (ed.); Tholenaar, Jan (ed.) Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles 9783836544801 2013 TP
Posted in Books

Three Great Holiday Pies

Posted on 2014-12-28 by
Prepared gingernsap crumb crust

This gallery contains 14 photos.

Continuing my personal-record-breaking year of pie-making, I decided that for the family Christmas gatherings this year I would make three pies. I actually started out making only two — Joanne Chang’s “Ooey, Gooey Caramel-Nut Tart” and Four & Twenty Blackbirds’ … Continue reading →

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Nutrition estimates for those pies

Posted on 2014-12-21 by

In my post about CSAIL Holiday Baking Fest, I neglected to provide any nutrition estimates for the pies I made. Since I’m about to start making more pies for Christmas, I was reminded that I had left this undone.

I gave nutrition data last year for Cook’s Illustrated‘s Chocolate Caramel Walnut Tart, so I’m not going to repeat that one. I believe my data from last year were based a higher-cacao chocolate than I used this year, but the biggest difference from the numbers shown in my previous post is always going to be exactly how much of the dough makes it into the finished tart crust.

Pie crusts

I wanted to give separate data for the two pie crusts that I made, since (a) I have the numbers, and (b) that makes it easier to calculate nutrition for another pie crust using the same or very similar pastry dough. Note well: I have used the more common and traditional serving size of 1/8 pie here; I usually cut pies into more slices than that. I’ve also provided the details for the whole recipe. For double-crust pies, obviously, you must double this number. (For the most accurate results, use the whole-crust values and weigh the dough before rolling and the scraps after rolling, then compute proportional values and divide by your preferred portion size. I often find that I only use about 90% of the pastry dough called for, but in computing the nutrition facts I have assumed that the whole dough recipe is used.)

Four & Twenty Blackbirds‘ All-Butter Pie Crust

For the Green Chil[e] Chocolate Pie, I used the regular “all-butter” pâte brisée rather than the chocolate version actually called for in the recipe.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1/8 pie
Servings per recipe: 8
Amount per serving Whole recipe
Calories 164 from fat 99 1308 from fat 792
% DV % DV
Total Fat 11g 17% 88g 135%
 Saturated Fat 7g 35% 56g 280%
 Trans Fat 0g ​ 0g ​
Cholesterol 30mg 10% 240mg 80%
Sodium 110mg 5% 880mg 37%
Potassium 25mg 1% 200mg 6%
Total Carbohydrate 14g 5% 112g 37%
 Dietary fiber 0.5g 2% 5g 20%
 Sugars 1g ​ 7g ​
Proteins 2g 4% 15g 30%
Vitamin A 8% 64%
Vitamin C 0% 0%
Calcium 0% 0%
Iron 4% 30%

Joanne Chang’s Pâte sucrée

Several of the pies from Joanne Chang’s Flour cookbook call for a pâte sucrée crust. Pâte sucrée is more like a cookie dough in construction than a traditional pie crust — in fact, it’s made by the creaming method, like most cookies, and gets most of its liquid from egg yolks rather than water or juice as in pâte brisée. Chang’s dough is quite stiff and requires a good bit of effort to roll out; when using it as a tart dough, I generally follow the construction technique from Cook’s Illustrated, which involves freezing the flat sheet of dough and then using the tart pan itself to cut the dough to size. When applied to a 10-inch tart pan, Chang’s dough must be rolled out quite thin, and does not need to be weighted during blind baking.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1/8 pie
Servings per recipe: 8
Amount per serving Whole recipe
Calories 195 from fat 104 1562 from fat 837
% DV % DV
Total Fat 12g 18% 93g 143%
 Saturated Fat 7g 36% 58g 290%
 Trans Fat 0g ​ 0g ​
Cholesterol 56mg 19% 450mg 150%
Sodium 73mg 3% 591mg 25%
Potassium 3mg 0% 20mg 1%
Total Carbohydrate 20g 7% 158g 53%
 Dietary fiber 0.5g 2% 5g 20%
 Sugars 6g ​ 50g ​
Proteins 3g 5% 21g 42%
Vitamin A 9% 69%
Vitamin C 0% 0%
Calcium 0% 2%
Iron 2% 12%

Green Chili [sic] Chocolate Pie

Four & Twenty Blackbirds' Green Chili Chocolate PieThis recipe is from Emily and Melissa Elsen, Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book, p. 204. I’d call it a tart, since it stands on its own when removed from the baking dish, although it’s actually made in a nine-inch springform pan rather than a tart pan. And it’s made with green chiles (jalapeños) and ginger, not green chili (a stew made with chiles, onions, and cumin). But it was delicious regardless of what you call it, and I ended up making photocopies of the recipe for a couple of coworkers who particularly appreciate spicy things. I used Callebaut 811NV for the chocolate, as previously described, Country Hen eggs, and Sky Top Farms unhomogenized cream. For ease of comparison, I show eight servings per pie below, but at Holiday Baking Fest we cut it into sixteen slices, and for normal home baking I’d make ten or twelve. You know the drill.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1/8 pie
Servings per recipe: 8
Amount per serving Whole recipe
Calories 558 from fat 346 4460 from fat 2765
% DV % DV
Total Fat 38g 59% 307g 473%
 Saturated Fat 27g 133% 212g 1060%
 Trans Fat 0g ​ 0g ​
Cholesterol 121mg 40% 965mg 322%
Sodium 224mg 75% 1791mg 597%
Potassium 99mg 3% 793mg 23%
Total Carbohydrate 40g 13% 318g 106%
 Dietary fiber 4g 15% 30g 119%
 Sugars 21g ​ 165g ​
Proteins 6g 12% 47g 95%
Vitamin A 21% 69%
Vitamin C 3% 0%
Calcium 24% 2%
Iron 35% 12%

Joanne Chang’s Bittersweet Chocolate Truffle Tart

Joanne Chang's Bittersweet Chocolate Truffle TartThe photo in the cookbook (Flour, p. 226, photo on p. 227) shows a straight-sided tart which looks a lot like the Four & Twenty Blackbirds pie-in-a-springform-pan. I used a normal (fluted) tart pan, but it was still a favorite of those who had a chance to try it, and it was definitely my personal favorite of the things that I brought to Holiday Baking Fest. I used Chuao’s 72% “tasting discs” to make this recipe, but the nutrition data below are computed using the more easily available Valrhona Guanaja (and Valrhona cocoa powder on top); the recipe specifies “at least 70%” chocolate.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1/8 pie
Servings per recipe: 8
Amount per serving Whole recipe
Calories 495 from fat 357 3955 from fat 2852
% DV % DV
Total Fat 40g 61% 317g 488%
 Saturated Fat 25.3g 127% 202.4g 1012%
 Trans Fat 0g ​ 0g ​
Cholesterol 148mg 49% 1187mg 396%
Sodium 130mg 5% 1045mg 44%
Potassium 72mg 2% 577mg 16%
Total Carbohydrate 34g 12% 279g 93%
 Dietary fiber 4g 18% 36g 143%
 Sugars 16g ​ 130g ​
Proteins 6g 13% 51g 103%
Vitamin A 20% 158%
Vitamin C 0% 2%
Calcium 22% 177%
Iron 12% 94%
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Quote of the day: Atul Gawande on priorities

Posted on 2014-12-19 by

Everywhere I see the mistake of ignoring that people have priorities in their lives besides merely surviving another day. Even in severe illness or frailty, people desire connections to others and to purposes of their own choosing. I think we’ve been wrong— I think we’ve been rather limited about what we think our job is in building systems of care for human existence. We think our job is to ensure health and survival, but really it is larger than that. It is to enable wellbeing, and wellbeing is ultimately about sustaining the reasons one wishes to be alive.

Atul Gawande, “The Idea of Wellbeing“, BBC Reith Lecture, 2014-12-16, at 22:36

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