The first haggler to mention a price loses, right? Wrong. The first person who proposes a price sets the tone & expectations of the entire bargaining session. Even if it’s just for self defense, I highly recommend Slate’s Negotiation Academy, a series of 10-minute podcasts, one per week, on the art of negotiation. Session 3 just published. http://slate.me/vanUPk
Tomorrow’s trash day and metal scavengers are already circling the neighborhood, but I’ve found GOLD! Gold, I tell ya’. My neighbors do all the work of sweeping and bagging these leaves for the trash guys. I just roll around the neighborhood picking up free compost material.
Mulch, then re-bag with the mower, and 6 bags of leaves make one nice compost pile (older woody stuff in bottom, a few limbs stuck through sideways for ventilation).
Cage is an end length of rabbit fencing and 3 old stakes. Should have some nice leaf mold by Spring.
Corn bread was pancake flat yesterday, which got me to studying the recipe and the ingredients. Then I realized I’d never understood baking powder. What is it? what does it do?
BP acts like yeast, releasing CO2 to make gas bubbles so the batter will be fluffy. Yeast do it by eating sugars and then farting CO2. BP does it by chemical reaction.
It’s like those baking soda rockets we made when I was a kid. Fill the rocket with acid (vinegar) wrap a little ball of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) in a piece of Kleenex to delay the chemical reaction, and stuff the ball of baking soda into the rocket with the vinegar and ram the plug home…and stand back. Eventually the CO2 would propel the rocket off the launch pad, usually landing on a roof somewhere.
Important safety lesson, do not stand over a charged rocket and look down with your remaining eye.
Baking Powder is comprised of a base (usually baking soda–sodium bicarbonate) and an acid (usually Cream of Tartar–potassium hydrogen tartrate, an acid salt) in powder form, which prevents reaction. There is usually a filler, too, like corn starch or potato starch, both to add volume when measuring out and to buffer and slow the reaction. Dry, these items will not react. But any liquid activates the baking powder and causes it to off gas CO2.
Here’s the lesson of where I went wrong:
Lesson 1: I put the liquids into the bowl first and then added the dry ingredients. This allowed the BP to cook off before I mixed the batter and trapped the gasses. If BP had been the last item added, I might have gotten away with this, but when it’s among the first to get soaked, I was sunk. (This is the reason you’re told on the box to mix the dry ingredients first–I failed to follow simple directions).
Lesson 2: I probably made the loss of CO2 all a lot worse by over mixing (again, this caution is on the box, so I failed to follow simple directions). BP, unlike yeast, releases a set amount of gas per reaction. If you mix the batter too much, you release all the gas from the batter and it goes flat. With yeast, they keep digesting sugars and farting CO2 until they die, which is why you can work a yeast batter loner.
We use baking powder instead of yeast because we like biscuits in 20 mins vs 2 hours with yeast. (this also is why they sell “Yeast Rolls” and “Dinner Rolls” side by side. I never thought that there was a difference.)
Lesson 3: there are double activation or double acting baking powders available. These act like single action baking powders when you get them wet, but also have a second reaction that is heat activated by baking, which give you a second chance.
Lesson 4: honey (as well as buttermilk) is slightly acid. So I should have cut back on the baking powder and substituted baking soda because I used 1/4 cup honey instead of sugar in the recipe.
Double acting baking powders have the same first acid, Cream of Tartar, but add another acid that is temperature activated as well, giving the pastry a second rise…or in my case, a second chance.
Eric writes about baking powder, pancakes, and the baking powder recipe here.
photo by EmmiP
Our $10 Wal-Mart B&D rice cooker stopped working last night. I just opened it up and, using a multimeter, found an inline fuse blown.
I clipped the fuse off and reconnected the wire. I can’t imagine any real harm, since the circuit is gfi protected anyway. Am I missing something? Running a test batch of rice now to see how it turns out.
BTW: if you’ve always wondered about those center spring mechanisms, they’re pretty simple…and interesting. The center plunger is not charged with electricity (unlike a lot of toasters, which are actually engaging electromagnets when you put the plunger down–hence the futility of slamming the plunger down, it not a mechanical catch of some sort). Inside, the rice cooker there’s a magnet on an arm connected to the front mechanical operating slide, a bit like a toaster–up is warm, down is cook. The weight of the water and rice in the pan hold the plunger down and the magnet sticks to the underside, closing the high heat or cook circuit.
When enough water boils away, the spring pushes the plunger up, which lifts the pan and breaks contact with the magnet breaking the high heat connection. There’s a separate permanent circuit always connected for “warm” with it’s own little heating element. You have to unplug the whole thing to turn the warming circuit off.
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the system just “popped” open, turning off the high heat coil. Looks fine, but you always wonder…at least I do. OTOH, a rice cooker isn’t like a crockpot. We’d never leave it running all day. Any ideas? At $10 am I being penny wise and pound foolish?