NoriOats: Minnesota Roll

In response to a remark that my reader (Hi, Kurt) made last week. I thought I’d relook at the combination of oats and seaweed. I mean, what could be more natural? It’s the vegetable equivalent of surf and turf. Now, the only time I’d had seaweed in oatmeal was when I tried a miso soup powder in my breakfast oatmeal. This time, I decided to go big. Go sushi.

Sushi, of course, refers to the rice in the rolled up raw fish and rice and nori (seaweed) so beloved of foodies everywhere who have not taken any courses in invertebrate parasitology. For those who have, the baseline object is a reverse sushi, with vegetables instead of fish, and with the rice on the inside, and the nori on the outside. I speak, of course, of the ancient and revered California Roll. Well, if one can make a sushi roll out of rice and no fish, one ought to be able to make a sushi roll out of oats and no fish. Something as American as avocado but as midwestern as cheese. Behold, the Minnesota Roll:

water: 1 cup

oatmeal: 1/2 cup
(one minute variety, we want the pastyness)

potato flakes: 1 or 2 tbsp
(as needed, to firm it up)

cheese stick: 8″ worth 1/4″ strip
(standard snack stick, cheddar)

Swede: 8″ worth 1/4″ strip
(AKA rutabaga, boiled, from your stew)
(you may substitute turnip strips)

nori: one 8×8″ sheet

soy sauce: 1 or 2 tsp to taste

Boil water and soy sauce. Add oatmeal. Remove from heat, stir in potato flakes. When it looks like it’s the right consistency (a little pasty), taste it to see if it needs more soy, or other seasoning, set aside to cool.

Lay out the nori sheet on flexible plastic, or a sheet of plastic wrap. Smear the cooled oatmeal paste onto a flexible plastic sheet so that it’s in an 8×8″ square. It’s easier to do this on something other than the nori.

Flip the plastic sheet with the oatmeal over onto the nori and gently peel the sheet off of the oatmeal, leaving the oatmeal on the nori. Add the strips of cheese and rutabaga across the oatmeal like they were avocado in a California Roll.

Roll up the nori sheet, allow to rest, slice. Serve as you would California Roll sushi.

Result: Very tasty. I ate the whole thing, which ruined my dinner. Seaweed taste was dominant, just the way it is in a California Roll. Cheese flavor adds highlights, with the rutabaga the ingredient that makes one say “Hmmm”. Should go well with a slightly chilled Gewürztraminer, or a glass of Iron City beer.

Med Cruise

Some archaeologists believe pre-humans sailed to Crete

As usual with Uncle Tok’s projects, our Mediterranean cruise vacation came to a bad end. It was my fault. I was complaining to him about what a terrible time I’d had at summer camp in Beringia, and about logging on the lake with birch logs. As usual, he completely ignored my complaints about the cold and the narrow logs and getting my legs all scraped by the bark. Instead, also as usual, he homed in on one point and let it drive a whole new line of thought.

“Birchbark! Of course!” He cried. “It’s tough and it doesn’t soften in water!” He started stamping around the cave, waving his arms, the way he did when he got a new idea. “Instead of using birch logs with the bark still wrapped around them, why not carefully peel off the bark, and lay it out in sheets? Then you can use the smooth logs out on the lake, and they won’t scratch your legs! Plus, once the bark dries, you can use it to start fires with!” Then he dashed out to register his barkless birch water transport system with the tribal elders.

Uncle Tok calls himself an inventor. This is from an Anatomically Modern Human word, meaning to make a list of everything in a cave. Only, Uncle Tok would make a list of all the ideas in his head, and bang them together to see if they made him any sharper.

Uncle Tok wanted to start a barkless birch business right then and there, but Aunt Ja wouldn’t think of it. “For one thing, fool of a Tok, there’s no birch growing within 2.7 thousands of many sprints of here. For another, the last time we went north, you froze your toe off in Denisova. So you can’t build it here, and we’re not moving north. I like it here.”

Here, by the way, was our old ancestral refugia in south slavia. My family had hung out there since they found it during a pre-Eburonian excursion. It was warm and karsty and had a nice view of the sea. But it didn’t have a lot of trees. That’s why Uncle Tok decided we needed to move south for the summer, and look at some opportunities on the Costa del Neand.

The body of water that the AMHs call the “Mediterranean” and we call “The Sea”, ebbs and flows with a really long tide, which our weather-shamans say is because of its astral linkage to the world-covering glacier that the AMHs call “The Ice”, and we call “The Ice”. I think they borrowed the term from us. Actually, we have threemany terms for “The Ice”, but most of them are considered obscene in any language. This year the sea was smaller than the lore-holders remembered it, but it was still too far to see across, and there were many stories of undiscovered islands and the strange continent to the south that our mythology said we were driven out of. Who drove us out, the myths don’t say.

We moved as far south as we could, and then Uncle Tok started looking for trees. Or A tree. He was very particular about the kind of tree he wanted. Not just any tree, but a tree big enough for the whole family, with bark that could be easily stripped off. We finally found a kind of oak tree, with bark that you could pull off with your hand, even though it was three fingers thick. That bark floated very well, too, which got Uncle Tok all excited. “If the bark floats that well, think of what the tree will do.” So we pulled all the bark off, and left it there. Well, we did use some of it to plug the holes in our water bags.

Finally, we finished it. A family-sized tree, with a smooth trunk, ready to be cut down and dragged down the mountain and up the other mountain and down that mountain to the coast. Aunt Ja said she’d have been happier with a smaller tree that was one mountain over, but Uncle Tok said she was just being critical. Despite Aunt Ja’s grumbling, it was only three days later that we were at the coast, packed and off on our first cruise. Everyone sat in their appointed places, with their legs wrapped around the trunk as Uncle Tok and I pushed it into the water. The sky was looking a little grey and thundery, but Uncle Tok said we’d only be out for three hours or so, to see how she did, and that the real cruise would come tomorrow.

The sky continued to get dark, the rain came down, and the wind lashed the oak (which didn’t float nearly as well as Uncle Tok thought it would). Finally, after only two hours of this, Uncle Tok lifted his head above the water and suggested we return to port. Everybody agreed. Everybody, that is, except the sea. We kept rolling and sliding further south, despite our best attempts at rowing. The sun went down, the night went black, and the waves got bigger than the mountain we pulled the oak over; Aunt Ja got really mad and spent some time explaining that to Uncle Tok.

About midnight, the branch she was using to help with her explanation broke off and floated away on the gigantic waves the storm had kicked up. That’s when we realized the storm had passed and the moon was rising. Straight ahead, which meant straight south, was an island. We all gave a cheer and started rowing. It was much easier to row now that we were going the way the wind and the waves wanted us to. We’d dig in going down a wave, then take a deep breath and hang on as the log plowed into the wave in front of us. Then it was time to row again. After some hours we could see the beach, OK, the rocks, and shortly thereafter we landed. That is to say, the log dug its nose into the sand at the foot of a submerged rock, and we were all catapulted onto the shore.

The next month was the worst vacation of my life. The island was big, but uninhabited. There were many manys of seabirds, and lots of bee nests, and we ate lots of honeyed seagull. Lots and lots of honeyed seagull. I looked around for barley and such, so I could make beer, but I couldn’t find any. The rocks on the island weren’t good enough to make tools with, but I’d brought my beermaking collection in a bag around my neck, which is why we had knives and scrapers and the edged object of indeterminate purpose that I’d stolen off an AMH. We had just come to the realization that we were never going to be able to build another log get off of the island, and we had started arguing about how we could survive until the long tide gave us a chance to walk home, when some AMHs came to our rescue.

Well, they didn’t think of it that way. They didn’t even know we were there. They came paddling around the point in a big white thing that looked like a folded sheet of birchbark filled with little round cylinders of oak bark. They had paddles that weren’t their hands. They brought their big white boat in close, paralleling the coast. They sang, they pointed at things. They ran into the end of our submerged log, tipped over, and fell into the water. They were amazing.

Aunt Ja immediately got us to our feet, and we ran down to the beach. We ran past our campsite with our cooking fire and my collection of tools. We ran past the sandy cove where the AMHs were dragging themselves ashore. We ran out along the rocks. We jumped into the water, grabbed the white boat, and pulled it off the log. It filled with water, but the oak bark cylinders kept us afloat. We started paddling with those paddle-things (Uncle Tok hit himself in the head twice, and went back to using his hands). We were soon off the coast and into the current and headed back to the Costa del Neand. Behind us, the AMHs stood on the beach and shook their fists and shouted things that sounded like “Ice”.

I felt bad about it afterwards, leaving all my tools like that. Plus, leaving the AMHs. But Aunt Ja said I shouldn’t worry. Nobody but a cretin would want to stay on that island, so they’d soon figure a way off. AMHs were smart, she said. They had our tools. They had seabirds and honeybees, and if she knew them, they’d just stick feathers to their arms with beeswax, and fly home.

Still, we decided not to go on another Med cruise for a while.

MayoDashi

I had about half a measuring teaspoon of dashi powder left in the packet, and I thought I’d try adding it to about 1/3 cup of mayonnaise. You have to stir it for a bit because there’s not a lot of liquid for the grains to dissolve in, but it makes a perfect condiment for an English muffin with a bit of leftover tilapia sandwiched in.

Fun With Vocabulary

I am working on different ways to remember Japanese kanji characters. Often, as the experts will tell you, it helps to break them up into their different parts. For example, the symbol 女 means woman. The symbol 末 (not to be confused with 未) means, among many other things youngest child. So the combination 妹 means younger sister. Similarly, 姉 means elder sister. And what does 市 mean? Mostly it means city. So while the younger sister is youngest woman, the older sister is a city girl. Of course, you could look on them as women who wear different shapes of dresses.

I’m getting into kanji because when I try to translate anything that isn’t in the textbook I find that probably half of the words are in kanji, with the hiragana used for punctuation and parts of speech and stuff. I’m putting it up here ’cause it’s fun, not because it’s any great insight (after all, it could be wrong), and because it’s my way of recording my thoughts on the matter.

Don’t follow me. I’m lost.

The Press and the Elections — both of them

Once again I find myself channeling Ron Cole. This morning, he has an essay comparing press coverage of the elections in South Carolina and Egypt. What he’s talking about is how information is framed, to use a George Lakoff term. In the US, the coverage is all about the candidates, and by the way 65% of the electorate are fundamentalist evangelicals. In Egypt, the coverage is all about the fundamentalist population and the Muslim Brotherhood, and by the way we have no clue as to the real issues. Cole’s arguments are slightly disingenuous. A pick-one primary is different from a country-wide election of representatives. He is making a point, and it’s a good one. Those who frame the news control how their customers view the world. Given the kind of coverage we get today, even from news outlets that are even more fair and balanced than Fox, is it any wonder that we in the US are cowering under the bed, waiting for Muslim terrorists to follow us home?

The Afghanistan Estimate

The Los Angeles Times has an article on a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was recently prepared on Afghanistan. The picture it paints is as gloomy as anything that came out of the Viet Nam era. Despite local successes against the Taliban in the south, the central government is still considered to be fragile, the security forces are corrupt, and Taliban elements in the east are still finding refuge in Pakistan. The only thing holding up the whole house of cards is us, and it’s all likely to go pear-shaped before the door hits us on the butt.

The Pentagon, and the theater military commanders disagree. If you go back to the NIE’s coming out of Viet Nam, you find the same thing — gloomy NIE’s (unless distorted by pressure from policy-makers), denials from the military leadership at all levels, and requests for increased troop strengths for, as Uncle Owen would say “only one more season”.

UmamiStock

I’m not a big fan of boxed vegetable stock* — not that I make my own, that’s way too much trouble. We use a lot of the beef, and even more of the chicken (Kitchen Basics brand), but the veggie version just doesn’t do much for me. Maybe because there’s just a hint of a Knorr-style dried carrots and peppers taste. Maybe because there’s nothing umami about it. Recently, that changed, because I found a way to doctor up the stock so that it tastes quite good. I tried this with standard ramen noodles, and also with the thick udon noodles. Have not tried it with oatmeal yet.

1 cup Kitchen Basics vegetable stock
2 tblsp mirin sauce
1 tblsp dashi soup powder
1/2 tsp miso soup powder
1/2 tsp soy sauce

The mirin adds a touch of sweet to offset the bitter Knorr-like undertones. The rest add a rich umaminess.

If you are cooking ramen in this, I’d recommend you hold off and put the dashi powder in at the last minute.

*Yes, I know that a stock is made with bones and a broth isn’t. Vegetables have very soft bones that are hard to detect. At least, that’s what the Marketing Department tells me.

“They” DON’T Hate Us for Our Freedoms

An interesting essay over on John Cole’s website. Islamic scholar Anouar Majid writes about the pro-American stance of the Arab Spring, in light of the history of America vs Islam. He makes three key points:
1. Arab Spring demonstrations are pro-democracy, and those that have mentioned the US have been pro-American
2. Wikileaked cables demonstrated to the populace our preference for democracy, even when we dealt with despots, and this helped strenghten the US position
3. Islamic countries need to recognize that the US view of their countries as despotic has some basis in historical fact, and work to change this.

This is a much more reasoned and nuanced look at the situation in the Middle East and North Africa than you will find in the neo-con rhetoric. The fact that some politicians are willing to lie in order to “engergize the base” isn’t new or surprising. The fact that many will do so on topics critical to our national security is frightening.

Fun With Vocabulary

Declassified prizewinning NSA essay (pdf) on translating Japanese.
In other news, there’s a Crypto-Linguistic Association.

Read or Die Part 2: The TV series

As I said in Part 1 (which you should read first), Read or Die (RoD) started out as an anime concept, paused for a light novel, morphed into a manga, then jumped over to the screen by way of an OVA and a 26 part TV series. If you like books, you’ll like ROD.

The TV series is much darker than the OVA. Five years have passed, and much has happened in that time. There was an attack/incident that destroyed the British Library, ending the UK’s power over the world. The Chinese, in the form of the Dokusensha company, are making their own attempt to rule the world through books. Both sides are after a series of seven books with titles like The Book of The All-Seeing Eye.

Bodyguards at work

As often happens in anime, the creators of a sequel try to flip the old series on its head. Things you thought you knew, or assumed, turn out to be wrong.