Lost in the Taiga

Incredible story about a family of six that lived in the wilds of Siberia, cut off from all other human contact, for 40 years.

Beef soup ice cream redux

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2359

Panda-monium

We have all become obsessed with this live Panda Cam.  It does a surprisingly good job at keeping the camera zoomed in on cuddly panda action for most of the daylight hours.  And there's a panda baby!

Hampers in laundry rooms

I keep seeing photos of organized laundry rooms. Apartment Therapy had a feature about them today. And they all contain something we don't have in our laundry room, except for a few minutes at a time: hampers.
Our hampers are in the rooms where we actually take off our clothes. When we want to wash the clothes, we put them in a laundry basket and bring them down to the basement, where we immediately put them in the washing machine. We keep the laundry baskets upstairs so we don't have to make an extra trip downstairs to get them. Do most people store dirty clothes in their laundry room before washing them?

Oishii!

A series of videos of a Japanese mother cooking international dishes, then her toddler eating them.  I am impressed by (1) how neatly the mother cooks, and (2) how neatly the child eats.

Aging cookie dough

After reading a bunch of articles about how aging chocolate chip cookie dough dramatically improves the flavor of cookies, I decided to give it a try (using my own recipe instead of the more finicky New York Times recipe).  I mixed up a batch and put it in a big tupperware container to age for three days.

I baked up about six cookies each day to get a sense of how the flavors changed over time.  S and I both loved the Day 0 cookies, as usual, which were tender with intense salted butter flavors.  The Day 1 cookies tasted less buttery and significantly nuttier (S remarked that they made him think of peanut butter cookies).  The Day 2 and Day 3 cookies had a subtly darker, more molasses-y flavor. As far as texture was concerned, the dough became more crumbly and harder to scoop with each subsequent day, and the cookies seemed correspondingly drier.

I also froze six unbaked cookies each day so that at the end I could bake "flights" of cookies from all four days and directly compare their flavors.  Here is a crappy picture of the unbaked cookies from one of those batches:

Left to right: Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

It's hard to tell from the picture, but the dough got a little darker with each passing day (maybe because of the leaching of oils from the chocolate chips?).  The Day 0 dough was smoothest, whereas the dough from Days 1-3 was drier and crumblier.

Left to right: Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

The difference in color and texture is more obvious in the baked cookies.

The verdict?  Surprisingly, S and I both liked the Day 0 cookies best for flavor, texture, and appearance, all of which were clearly different from the more aged cookies.  The differences between the cookies from Days 1-3 were much more subtle -- I probably wouldn't be able to pick out which was which in a lineup.  The Day 1-3 cookies were still good, and did have an interesting depth of flavor, but we missed the butteriness of Day 0.  We also prefer our cookies more tender than crumbly.

So I guess we'll be sticking with our usual make-and-immediately-bake routine.  Although, I may try the experiment again without chocolate chips, or with far fewer chocolate chips -- I felt like my palate would have been able to pick up any differences between the cookies more easily if it hadn't been overwhelmed by chocolate.

Goats in Trees calendar

2013 edition.

A Better Use for Pantyhose

I am surprised this game is not more popular.

Books 2012

For posterity: a list of the books I read in 2012.

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

2. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

3. Island of Lost Girls - Jennifer McMahon

4. Mockingbird - Kathryn Erskine

5. The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka

6. The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown

7. Break the Skin - Lee Martin

8. The Peach Keeper - Sarah Addison Allen

9. The Poison Tree - Erin Kelly

10. Private Life - Jane Smiley

11. Winter Sea - Susanna Kearsley

12. Ashes - Ilsa Bick

13. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

14. I Think I Love You - Allison Pearson

15. The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss (REREAD)

16. The Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Rothfuss

17. Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan

18. The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness

19. The Ask and the Answer - Patrick Ness

20. Monsters of Men - Patrick Ness

21. Second Nature: A Love Story - Jacquelyn Mitchard

22. The False Friend - Myla Goldberg

23. Please Look After Mom - Kyung-sook Shin

24. The Year of the Flood: Margaret Atwood

25. The Magician King - Lev Grossman

26. At Risk - Alice Hoffman

27. Swim to Me - Ann Packer

28. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua

29. Galore - Michael Crummey

30. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (REREAD)

31. My Name Is Memory - Ann Brashares

32. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood (REREAD)

33. Zone One - Colson Whitehead

34. The Space Between Us - Thrity Umrigar

35. The World We Found - Thrity Umrigar

36. A Small Furry Prayer - Steven Kotler

37. The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides

38. Fifty Shades of Grey - EL James

39. The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern

40. Delirium - Lauren Oliver

41. The Kid: A Novel - Sapphire

42. Stiltsville: A Novel - Susanna Daniel

43. Breathing Lessons - Anne Tyler

44. The Good Thief - Hannah Tinti

45. Gossip - Beth Gutcheon

46. The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields (REREAD?)

47. The Accidental Billionaires - Ben Mezrich

48. Ape House - Sara Gruen

49. The Senator's Wife - Sue Miller

50. Sacred Hearts - Sarah Dunant

51. Unfinished Desires - Gail Godwin

52. The Stuff that Never Happened - Maddie Dawson

53. The Bright Forever - Lee Martin

54. Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

55. Pandemonium - Lauren Oliver

56. Nightwoods: A Novel - Charles Frazier

57. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver (REREAD)

58. An Available Man: A Novel - Hilma Wolitzer

59. Leeway Cottage - Beth Gutcheon

60. Testimony: A Novel - Anita Shreve

62. The Descendants: A Novel - Kaui Hart Hemmings

63. More Than You Know - Beth Gutcheon

64. The Passage - Justin Cronin

65. Good-bye and Amen (P.S.) - Beth Gutcheon

66. Girls in White Dresses - Jennifer Close

67. The Cottage at Glass Beach - Heather Barbieri

68. A Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore

69. The Road - Cormac McCarthy

70. Wool Omnibus - Hugh Howey

71. First Shift - Legacy - Hugh Howey

72. Cloud Atlas: A Novel - David Mitchell

73. Olive Kitteridge: Fiction - Elizabeth Strout

74. The Tiger's Wife: A Novel - Tea Obreht

75. Everyone's Reading Bastard - Nick Hornby

76. To Marry an English Lord - Gail MacColl, Carol McD. Wallace

77. Mariana - Susanna Kearsley

78. August is a Wicked Month - Edna O'Brien

79. The Flight of Gemma Hardy - Margot Livesey

80. Breakdown - Katherine Amt Hanna

81. The Hurricane - Hugh Howey

82. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

83. The Twelve - Justin Cronin

84. How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway

85. Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward

86. This is How Your Lose Her - Junot Diaz

87. All Woman and Springtime - Brandon W. Jones

88. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark

89. And Laughter Fell From the Sky - Jyotsna Sreenivasan

90. We Only Know So Much - Elizabeth Crane

91. The Healing - Jonathan Odell

92. The Cranes Dance - Meg Howrey

93. The Virgin Cure: A Novel - Ami McKay

94. Coraline - Neil Gaiman

95. Before I Go To Sleep - S. J. Watson

96. The Dog Stars - Peter Heller

97. Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart

98. The Coldest Night - Robert Olmstead

99. The Soldier's Wife - Margaret Leroy

100. Gone Girl: A Novel - Gillian Flynn

101. Swamplandia! - Karen Russell