brinconvenient

[brinconvenient]

Food on St Patrick's Day (in the USA)...

...is usually Corned Beef & Cabbage, which is the Irish-American version of the original Irish boiled bacon & cabbage, but while the celebratory Irishness is still going strong, try something a bit more authentic.

A nice warm coddle. Not cuddle, coddle, though just as comforting in its own way. (Some sources suggest it's a hangover cure, not that such a thing would ever be necessary at this time of year, oh dear me no.)

Coddle is a stew using potatoes, onions, bacon, sausages, stout-if-desired / stock-if-not, pepper, sage, thyme and Time.

You'll often see it called "Dublin Coddle", but my Mum made Lisburn Coddle lots of times, I've made West Wicklow Coddle more than once, and on one occasion in a Belgian holiday apartment I made Brugsekoddel, which is an OK spelling for something that doesn't exist in any cookbook.

*****

I do remember one amendment I made to Mum's recipe, which met with slight resistance at the time and great appreciation thereafter.

Her coddle was originally cooked on the stove-top, not in the oven, and nothing was pre-cooked. Potatoes were quartered, onions were sliced, bacon was cut into chunks and then everything went into the big iron casserole, then onto the slow back ring, and there it simmered Until Done.

However, the bacon was thick-cut back rashers, and the sausages were pork chipolatas.

Raw, they looked like this:

...and the bacon looked like this:

Cooked in the way Mum initially did, they looked pretty much the same afterwards. The sausages didn't change colour. Nor did the bacon.

While everything tasted fine, the meat parts always looked - to me, anyway - somewhat ... less than appealing. "Surgical appliance pink" is the kindest way to put it, and that's all I'm saying. This is apparently "white coddle" and Dubs can get quite defensive about This Is The Way It SHOULD Look.

I'm not a Dub, so I persuaded Mum to fry both the bacon and sausages first, just enough to get a bit of brown on, and wow! Improvement! I remember my Dad nodding in approval but - because he was Wise - not saying anything aloud until Mum gave it the green light as well.

Doing the coddle in the oven, first with lid on then with lid off, came later and met with equal approval. So did using only half of the onion raw and frying the other half lightly golden in the bacon fat.

Nobody quoted from a movie that wouldn't be made for another decade, but there was a definite feeling of...

*****

There are coddle recipes all over the Net: I've made sure that these are from Ireland to avoid the corned-beef-not-boiled-bacon "adjustment" versions which are definitely out there. I've already seen one with Bratwurst. Just wait, it'll be chorizo next.

Oh, hell's teeth, I was right. And from RTE...

Returning to relative normality, here's Donal Skehan's white coddle and his browned coddle with barley (I'm going to try that one).

Here's Dairina Allen's Frenchified with US measurements version. (I feel considerably less heretical now.)

And finally (OK, not Irish, but it references a couple of the previous ones and is a VERY comprehensive write-up, so gets a pass) Felicity Cloake's Perfect Dublin Coddle (perfect according to who, exactly...?) in The Guardian.

*****

Returning to the beginning, and how boiled bacon became corned beef (a question which prompted @dduane to start an entire website...!)

The traditional Irish meat animal for those who could afford it was the pig, but when Irish immigrants (even before the Great Famine) arrived in the USA, they often lived in the same urban districts as Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

For fairly obvious reasons pork, bacon and other piggy products were unavailable in those districts, but salt beef was right there and far cheaper than any meat Irish immigrants had ever seen before.

Insist on tradition or eat what was easy to find? There'd have been contest - and do I sometimes wonder a bit if sauerkraut ever came close to replacing cabbage for the same reason.

The pre-Famine Irish palate liked sour tastes: a German (?) visitor to Ireland in the mid-1600s wrote about about what were called "the best-favoured peasantry in Europe", and mentioned that they had "seventy-several sour milks and creams*, and the sourer they be, the better they like them."

* Yogurt? Kefir? Skyr? Gosh...

Corned beef and Kraut as the immigrants' celebratory "Irish" meal for St Patrick's Day? Maybe, maybe not.

Time for "Immigrant Song" (with kittens).

*****

Corned beef got its name from the size of the salt grains with which the beef was prepared. They were usually bigger than kosher salt, like pinhead oats or even as large as grains of wheat, and their name derived originally from "corned (gun)powder", the large coarse grains used in cannon.

BTW, "corn" has been a generic English term for "grain" for centuries, and "but Europe didn't have corn" is an American mistake assuming the word refers to sweetcorn / maize, which it doesn't.

Lindsey Davis, author of the "Falco" series, had a couple of rants about it and other US-requested "corrections". As she points out, mistakes need corrected but "corn" is not a mistake, just a difference in vocabulary.

*****

In Ancient and Medieval Ireland pig would have included wild boar, the hunting of which was a suitable pastime for warriors and heroes, because Mr Boar took a very dim view of the whole proceeding and wasn't shy about showing it (see "wild boar" in my tags and learn more).

Cattle were for milk, butter, cream and little cattle; also wealth, status, and heroic displays in their theft, defence or recovery. It's no accident that THE great Irish epic is "The Cattle-Raid of Cooley" / Táin Bó Cúailnge (tawn / toyn boh cool-nyah).

Killing a cow for meat was ostentation on a level of lighting cigars with 100-, or even 500-, currency-unit notes. Once it had been cooked and eaten there'd be no more milk, butter, cream or little cattle from that source, so eating beef was showing off And Then Some.

Also, loaning a prize bull to run with someone else's heifers was a sign of great friendship or alliance, while refusing it might be an excuse for enmity or even war. IMO that's what Maeve of Connaught intended all along, picking undiplomatic envoys who would get drunk and shoot their mouths off so the loan was refused and she, insulted, would have an excuse to...

But I digress, as usual. Or again. Or still... :->

*****

For the most part, "pig" mean "domestic porker", and in later periods right up to the Famine, these animals were seldom eaten.

Instead, known as "the gentleman who pays the rent", the family pig ate kitchen scraps and rooted about for other foods, none of which the tenant had to grow or buy for them. These fattened pigs would go to market twice a year, and the money from their sale would literally pay that half-year's rent.

For wealthier (less poor?) farmers, pigs had another advantage. Calves arrived singly, lambs might be a pair, but piglets popped out by the dozen. A sow with (some of) her farrow was even commemorated on the old ha'penny coin...

What with bulls, chickens, hares, horses, hounds, pigs, salmon and stags, the pre-decimal Irish coinage is a good inspiration for some sort of fantasy currency.

But that's another post, for another day.

#everything about this is amazing #st. patricks day #meat #food #corned beef #coddle #dinner ideas

[brinconvenient]

I feel like a lot of people unfortunately need this to be explained, given how they try to "debate" the topic: If you tell a conservative that their policies harm transgender or nonbinary minors, they are absolutely never, ever going to think "oh no, what have I done?!" What they already chose to believe is that everyone by default is born comfortable with their assigned gender role, and only becomes transgender or otherwise nonconforming when exposure to the concept itself essentially poisons and warps their mind. They don't think it's "real" that anyone starts questioning their gender from an early age; they think it's a delusion planted in them by just seeing trans people at all. These people, therefore, believe your liberal ideas already "harmed" those kids by injecting them with the dreaded gender-questioning psychic virus, and they believe kids can be saved from this hideous fate if the culture they grow up in simply hides the existence of trans people as anything other than a punchline or a villain, despite the fact that decades of precisely such a culture did nothing at all to stop trans people from existing. You CANNOT reason with this mindset or appeal to its nonexistent compassion. They are not "uninformed" or "misinformed;" they've already heard all the information you could ever want to give them and they deliberately chose to reinterpret it this way. Begging them to care about trans youth is not only useless but just incites them harder, because they're already angry and disgusted with you for thinking that trans youth EXIST.

#transgender #trans #trans conservatives aren't monsters #they are unfortunately all too human and are just as committed to their worldview as you are

[brinconvenient]

Mom. Get out. I'm doing spells.

[brinconvenient]

Oof.

I moral lesson I wish literally everybody would learn is this: the very same actions that keep you safe when you are powerless can be abusive when you hold power over someone. The difference between resisting subjugation and subjugating others is often more a matter of context than anything else. And when context changes, it can be hard to relearn one's behavior—it requires an active effort. Probably all of us have hurt others needlessly, in some way or another, by doing things out of a reactive instinct for self-preservation. Probably all of us have been hurt by others, sometimes very deeply, when they were acting out of the same instinct.

I don't like speaking about ethics in the language of blame, but insofar as blame is a coherent notion to begin with, I'll say this: neither is anyone evil for the failure to fully rework themselves and free themselves of bad habit after struggle, nor does the difficulty of reworking oneself excuse the abuse of others. Nor, though we may wish otherwise, is it always epistemically possible to our own actions with confidence in one camp or the other. We can only do our best to treat others well and at the same time ourselves, though it is often not clear how.

#interpersonal dynamics #hurt people hurt people #big oof

[brinconvenient]

Hackers (1995)

#embedded video #hack the planet #hackers #skateboarding #skateboard

[brinconvenient]

#how dare #ADHD #actually adhd

[brinconvenient]

Change your Tumblr password now.

Humongous data breach just happened, with loads upon loads of sites being affected. Tumblr's among those. Also on the list is Wattpad for you fanfic people out there- among many, many other places.

There's a searchable list at the bottom of the article. Highly recommend scrolling or searching through, seeing what places you may be on that have been affected, and securing all your accounts. This thing's kind of big.

If you know people on any of the sites affected, let them know about this too, and spread the article around.

#internet security #password #data breach

[brinconvenient]

I love the uncertainty of any decade existing prior to 1980

[brinconvenient]

Wealth, risk, and stuff

Via Anne Galloway on Twitter, I just saw Living With Less. A Lot Less, an opinion piece in the New York Times.

I run into some version of this essay by some moneybags twig-bishop about once a year, and it bugs me every time.

Here’s the thing. Wealth is not a number of dollars. It is not a number of material possessions. It’s having options and the ability to take on risk.

If you see someone on the street dressed like a middle-class person (say, in clean jeans and a striped shirt), how do you know whether they’re lower middle class or upper middle class? I think one of the best indicators is how much they’re carrying.

Lately I’ve been mostly on the lower end of middle class (although I’m kind of unusual along a couple axes). I think about this when I have to deal with my backpack, which is considered déclassé in places like art museums. My backpack has my three-year-old laptop. Because it’s three years old, the battery doesn’t last long and I also carry my power supply. It has my paper and pens, in case I want to write or draw, which is rarely. It has a cable to charge my old phone. It has gum and sometimes a snack. Sunscreen and a water bottle in summer. A raincoat and gloves in winter. Maybe a book in case I get bored.

If I were rich, I would carry a MacBook Air, an iPad mini as a reader, and my wallet. My wallet would serve as everything else that’s in my backpack now. Go out on the street and look, and I bet you’ll see that the richer people are carrying less.

As with carrying, so with owning in general. Poor people don’t have clutter because they’re too dumb to see the virtue of living simply; they have it to reduce risk.

When rich people present the idea that they’ve learned to live lightly as a paradoxical insight, they have the idea of wealth backwards. You can only have that kind of lightness through wealth.

If you buy food in bulk, you need a big fridge. If you can’t afford to replace all the appliances in your house, you need several junk drawers. If you can’t afford car repairs, you might need a half-gutted second car of a similar model up on blocks, where certain people will make fun of it and call you trailer trash.

Please, if you are rich, stop explaining the idea of freedom from stuff as if it’s a trick that even you have somehow mastered.

The only way to own very little and be safe is to be rich.

#wild that this post is a decade old with less than 2k notes #also #too fucking true though

[brinconvenient]

love myself a cockroach of a character. i look at them and go ”how is that fucker not dead? they should be dead. they should be dead ten times over. how are they not?” and 90% of the time the answer is a combo of sheer stubborness and homosexuality

#Elliot Spencer #leverage

[brinconvenient]

masks and helmets that hides someone's face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved

these are all creatures to me

#other people's art #plague doctor #astronaut #beekeeper #new gods #this is why I can never leave this hellsite #where else am I supposed to learn about new gods for the pantheon? #these are friend shaped #q

[brinconvenient]

#rom com #liked this way more than I expected #q

[brinconvenient]

It was really satisfying to watch again, for the record

My elder daughter is in London and very excited to see her first professional production of "Noises Off" so I decided I wanted to watch the movie, which I'd not seen in ages, again. I call this piece "For we live in a world of madness and I, sadly, remain sane"

#Noises Off #physical media

[brinconvenient]

My elder daughter is in London and very excited to see her first professional production of "Noises Off" so I decided I wanted to watch the movie, which I'd not seen in ages, again. I call this piece "For we live in a world of madness and I, sadly, remain sane"

#physical media #Noises Off #brin is old #brin is so extra #hitting a fly with a sledgehammer #vhs #video tapes #video tape #videocassette #who but the fbi called them a videocassette?

[brinconvenient]

The only two things I will push back on in the second image, speaking as an Official Old Person are the smoke detector and the non-stick cookware.

Smoke detectors really do have an expiration date, most often 10 years from manufacture, because they operate using a small amount of radioactive material to detect the presence of smoke, which becomes inert and ineffective after 10 years. You can still put new batteries in it and the test button may still work, but they are not actually functional. Replace your smoke detectors every 10 years. Trust me on this one, fire will fundamentally change or end your life. Every single time. So don't fuck around with this one.

As for non-stick cookware, replace it when the coating gets scratched. That coating can and will flake off into your food and that shit is no good for you. Better yet, if you're buying the cookware yourself, not receiving it as a gift, just don't buy non-stick. Some kind of bare metal pan will last you so much longer.

Who the hell can afford to replace these things that often? Being able to buy my FIRST couch is like a daydream I come back to?! (I don't want a used bedbugs one) Also what the fuck do you MEAN microwaves have removable filters somewhere

#brin is old #don't fuck with fire

[brinconvenient]

This image is the inevitable result of improper storage and transportation practices when dealing with High-Density Gender Concentrate™.

Its potency is constantly underestimated and spillage can have dramatic effects upon the unsuspecting.

I know that The Youth like to treat it like a party drug, and disregard the risks, but long-term exposure can result in serious consequences, including, but not limited to:

Scaring The Straights

Queering the very concept of Gender across an entire culture

An unprecedented and inordinate increase in one's perceived hotness, beyond one's allocated position in the Sexual Marketplace

Rejecting binary thinking, despite all cultural forces compelling you otherwise

Leather pants

Please be cautious when handling High-Density Gender Concentrate™ and be sure to read the entire OSHA Safety Data Sheet (SDS, formerly known as MSDS - Material Safety Data Sheet). Link

Matthew Lillard and Angelina Jolie as “Cereal Killer” and “Acid Burn” in Hackers (1995)

#transgender #trans women #teams men #nonbinary #trans #Gender #the gends #surreality

[brinconvenient]

My Samsung phone updated this morning only to reveal that the Swype+Dragon keyboard, which I've used since like 2014, is no longer compatible with current versions of Android.

I appreciate your grace and ask that you respect my privacy in this time of grief and sorrow.

#typing #all of the punctuation and special characters are in the wrong place #I'm dying actually #I'm too old and my brain has no more plasticity left to relearn this #keyboard