11:34 – I’m doing laundry and my other usual Saturday tasks. Barbara just got back from running errands. Our friend Bonnie Richardson is stopping over sometime this afternoon in her pickup to haul off a load of leaves for her compost pile. For years, Barbara has been piling leaves in the natural areas in the back yard, so the lower layers should already be pretty well composted. Bonnie has quite a bit of land devoted to her garden, so I’m sure she’s constantly on the lookout for more compost.
We just finished transferring a 50-pound bag of white granulated sugar from Costco into 14 empty wide-mouth PET nut jars, also from Costco. With the white sugar in #10 cans we got at the LDS Home Storage Center, that takes us to about 200 pounds total. I didn’t bother to erase the old dates on the jars, because sugar stored in those PET jars remains good indefinitely. There’s no difference between month-old, year-old, and decade-old white granulated sugar, assuming proper storage. On average, Americans each consume about 150 pounds of caloric sweeteners per year, mostly white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, so those 200 pounds are only about a 16 person-month supply, although we do have additional sweeteners like maple pancake/waffle syrup stored. At some point, I’ll pick up another 50-pound bag or two of white sugar at Costco and transfer it to clean 2-liter soda bottles, which’ll take us over 300 pounds total.
We also have more than 250 pounds of white flour, macaroni, and spaghetti in #10 cans from the LDS HSC, along with about 200 pounds of rice. At some point, I’ll pick up another 150 or 200 pounds of white flour at Costco and transfer it to one-gallon Mylar foil laminate bags with oxygen absorbers, but before I do that I want to experiment a bit with white flour. In particular, I want to experiment with quick bread recipes, which require neither yeast nor kneading nor long rise times.
Most commercial quick breads and home baking recipes use double-acting baking powder, but the problem with that is its limited shelf-life. Baking soda works just as well and many people prefer the flavor of bread made with baking soda, but using baking soda requires also using some form of acid to react with it to create the carbon dioxide bubbles that cause the bread to rise. We have 25+ pounds of baking soda packed for long-term storage, but I’m debating what to store as the acid. One option is vinegar, so that’s what I’ll test first. If it works well, rather than storing gallons of vinegar (which is essentially 5% acetic acid) I’ll store a liter of glacial (99% acetic acid). The stuff I have is both ACS reagent grade and FCC (food) grade, so one liter of it can be diluted to form the exact equivalent of 20 liters of distilled white vinegar, more than sufficient to cover 25+ pounds of baking soda.
http://www.amazon.com/Artisan-Bread-Five-Minutes-Revolutionizes/dp/1250018285/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_z
There are also a couple of books there that cover doing no-knead bread in batches, for picnics, company outings, etc.
It works great. Less fuss and muss.
Thanks. I actually have both editions of that book. I agree that it’s excellent.
Most all breads we had in Berlin, had a slight vinegar taste to it. Actually, I quite miss that flavor in the bread. Occasionally, Aldi has some of the German-made heavy breads in smallish packages. You can sample those for a taste of real bread. What passes for bread here tastes so artificial and spongy. Midwest Walmart competitor, Meijer, sells a 7-grain bread that is fairly dense, but no vinegar tilt to it. Their baker, Ace, is a Canadian company, and I have often wondered if they make the stuff in Canada and ship it across the border. Nobody in the store has a clue, but they do tell me that most of their bread is trucked in about every other day. Meijer does bake a few things in the store.
I mean to try baking soda instead of powder in my next iteration of Plum Cake.
Interesting discussion about ammonia and baking powder here:
http://www.cookingforengineers.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3427
The ammonia is actually ammonium carbonate, which was used commonly through the 19th century as baking powder. I believe it’s still sold (as hartshorn) for baking purposes, but commercial bakeries no longer use it because some of the reaction products are carcinogens.
We’re going to be baking more of our own at home from now on; agreed with Mr. Chuck on contemporary Murkan breads; you can occasionally find good bread made by local bakers in the stores here but dollars to doughnuts it’s at least a day old by the time we can get to it.
From the Sovereign Man email today: (he was discussing the case of the 90-year-old down in Florider who was feeding homeless people and then the cops decided to mount a full operation and lock his rebellious ass up.) (He’s lucky he wasn’t tased and then beaten to the ground and stomped.)
“Instead, they’re trying to make a criminal out of everyone and keep them obedient at the point of a gun. The whole existence has become criminalized.
You can’t even collect your own rain water anymore, or disconnect from the grid, without incurring the full wrath of the government.
They tell us what we can/cannot put in our bodies. They tell us how we can do business. How to educate our children. How to construct our homes.
They tell us who to hate and who to support. They send our young people to their deaths for the sake of oil profits. They conjure stories of evil men in caves in order to make us afraid and willingly renounce our own liberties.
They send the police out onto the highways to confiscate assets at gunpoint. They arm local law enforcement with assault rifles and armored personnel carriers. They spy, brazenly and unapologetically, on law-abiding citizens. And allies.
They indebt future generations who will not even be born for decades. They erode the value of the savings that so many of us work hard to produce for the benefit of a wealthy banking elite. Then they tax what little is left over and blow it all on bombs, drones, and excessively expensive welfare programs that keep them in power.
As we reported this past week, negative interest rates for retail banking customers are now becoming a reality. Now you have to pay THEM so they can go and gamble with your money. It’s perverse.
The system is clearly rigged against people. And there’s no fighting it. The best thing to do is to sidestep the system as much as possible. Starve the beast and hit them where it hurts most — by leaving and withdrawing your monetary support for their destructive actions.”
Sovereign Man guy is a decorated combat vet (officer) and mainly tells it like it is here in North Murka and Old Europa, but his solutions involve you having a few hundred thou on hand for investments and moving outta the country to allegedly freer nations around the world. I imagine a bunch of folks have already been able to do this and have skeddadled; but most of the middle class here and all of the working class and underclass are nowhere in reach of doing such a thing and we’ll all struggle together, I reckon, right here.
I can just picture us making a run for it across southern Quebec and most of Noveau Brunswick in the dead of wintuh to get to this place:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester_County,_New_Brunswick
“Carcinogen” according to whose criteria? The dose makes the poison, and I’m sick of the EPA and FDA and everyone else declaring this and that “carcinogens”. Bring back DDT!
Really, whoever it was that made the comment the other day that we are not the same culture as modern-day Europians, is correct. If real oppression, like the German dictatorship that pushed the button on WWII happens here, I seriously doubt the outcome will be such a pushover as the German population was. We’re like poisonous snakes — it takes a lot to get them riled, but when they do: lookout!
Yellen was right in her Boston speech not long ago: the growing disparity of wealth in this nation is the real problem. The danger is not in government, it is in government acting at the bidding (literally) of big business. Big business has no morals. Their view of work ethics, killed a young intern at an investment house in London a year ago, where the workforce there attested to 18 hour days, and if you did not do it, you lost your job. The kid intern had not slept for 3 days straight when he dropped dead. In that same office, someone else took several hours off to go to a family member’s 50th birthday party. That person’s boss, when he could not find the person, called their cell phone, found out where the person was, and told them in no uncertain terms that if they were not back in the office within the hour, they would be fired. That person obeyed, leaving that once-in-a-lifetime party instantly.
Like my grandmother and no meat on Friday: it can’t have been wrong for so many years, and all of a sudden, it’s okay. The conglomerates that caused prosecutions that happened with vigor 40 years ago, could not have been wrong for all those years, and now it is okay.
Those big conglomerates are the reason politicians no longer do the clearly defined will of the people. What the people want is clear; it is who they want (or hope) to carry out that will that is the trouble, because neither choice is willing to do the job.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but you and I both know that we ain’t gonna be pushovers like the Germans were. And we are way better informed. Those perpetrating Abu Graib did not get away with it. The Germans kept the Holocaust under wraps by denying all leaves and keeping virtually all soldiers away from their families, so there could be no communication about what the soldiers were doing. My German DIL’s maternal grandfather was drafted at 17, and did not see anyone in his family for the next 8 years — including during the post-war period when he was a POW in France. But any such separation in this age, is not going to stop communications about what they are up to.
I just do not share Sovereign Man’s view that we are doomed. We will survive. Maybe not at our happiest, but we will survive.
Oh my, Mr. Chuck is firing on several cylinders out in Tiny Town today;
I’ll take it from the top:
I think it was me that said that about Murkans being different from Euros; and that’s a pretty good analogy about the venomous snakes; keep poking at the den and you’ll be in a world of shit. That goes for our own gummint; keep it up, assholes, and see what it gets ya.
Disparity of wealth; Murkans don’t mind a person getting successful and rich; they hope it happens to them, too. What they don’t like is someone like that who got it by screwing ordinary folks and then keeps on putting it to them thereafter, and they don’t like arrogance, smugness and those who insist on entitlements.
“… it can’t have been wrong for so many years, and all of a sudden, it’s okay.”
Like so much in our sick culture. That works the other way, too; if lots of things were so wrong and so evil for so many years or centuries, how is it now that we know for certain that things done differently now are so right? What makes our generation the all-seeing, all-knowing arbiter of right and wrong? Our shit doesn’t stink, is that it?
I don’t think Sovereign Man believes we are totally doomed; I think he’d agree with us that things will be bad and times will be tough here, but we’ll muddle through somehow. We are not pushovers; we have many tens of millions here who won’t sit still forever being sat on by thugs and cretins. I just don’t see how swanning off to Chile, Ireland, Andorra or whatever their latest “safe haven” is, will be that safe. Better the devil we know and the people we’re used to living among and around, I say. This ain’t the former Yugoslavia where the Protestants live next door to us for forty years and then when the gummint falls, they rush over here and blow our shit away or beat us to death with shovels.
I crap on this country and its subjects a lot, but I also have a certain amount of faith in my fellow Murkans, to a point.
Chuck, soldiers wrote home about what they were doing in Ukraine and other places, and you simply can’t hide an operation as big as Auschwitz, with train loads of people going in and not seen again, and the smell…
The Germans knew, and were more anti-Semitic than Americans. Europe, I’m afraid, has a long history of antisemitism.
Looks like you people north of the Mason-Dixon line are getting ready to freeze. We may reputedly get down to the mid 20s here in the Land of Sugar also. Get your mittens on!
Waaal, now, Mr. Lynn, our temps here in the northwestern corner of Vermont went down yesterday, last night, and will be going down tonight, into the mid to high 30s, but not freezing. We’ve not had a frost yet, but on the long ridge east of town we can see snow. So yeah, the higher elevations get some ice, probably, not us yet down here on the Banana Belt.
Mittens? Are you joking? Those don’t come out here until January, maybe.
How about that Polar Vortex coming this week?
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/polar-vortex-42-states/37049255
Miles–not sure where you get your information, but of the letters my DIL’s Opa wrote to the family when he was serving in Hilter’s finest, most never got to the family. Nor did many of their letters get to him. Other older people there told me it was the same with the soldiers in their families. Even high-ranking officers were kept from their families. Tragic circumstances at home were not a cause for leave, and many, many soldiers did not find out about deaths in the family until the war was over.
And surely you know that most of the biggest concentration camps were very far from Germany and its border, in southern Poland. In those days, that might as well have been Siberia. Certainly, very few people knew anything about what was going on in Poland — about anything. How you figure Germans would know about trains or smell the stench from over 700km away, is a mystery to me.
There was a trial extermination facility built around a crematorium in Berlin — the name escapes me at the moment, even though I visited it, — but from that experiment, cremation was deemed ineffectively slow for the Nazi plans.
As far as the mass of ordinary German people knowing what was going on, those I came to know who were old enough to remember the war, say the only thing most people knew was occasionally a neighbor or businessman would disappear. Of course some recognized that there were Jews among that group, but university professors and plain ordinary Germans who resisted the Nazis were also among them; so were homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other people considered undesirables — especially foreigners. This is aside from the fact that the Jewish population of Germany itself was never very large — only a few percent of the population at its peak. Most of the Jews going to concentration camps were from other countries surrounding Germany, especially Poland which had a very high ratio of Jews among its citizenry, and from the Netherlands, where many went to hide.
Look, even with today’s advanced communication possibilities, while some Americans might have surmised, no one really knew how much surveillance of American citizens was going on until Edward Snowden bolted with the proof. And even today, nobody is stopping that clear invasion of privacy by government. When you are being asked for your ID and permission papers to travel just about every time you board a train, you keep your head down. And that’s what most Germans I am acquainted with, did. The horrors of what was really going on, was something most learned after the war was over — not during it.
“Polar vortex” is media-originated panic b.s. We used to call them “Arctic Lows.” But hey, polar vortex makes it sound like the tornado in the “Wizard of Oz” flick. It’s a wicked cold low but it ain’t like we ain’t had them before. Y’all in the Midwest gonna be takin’ the hit for this one. It won’t do very much to make our hair stand on end here.
Agreed with Mr. Chuck on the German military and civilians and the lack of communication access during the war years; it ain’t like now by a long shot. Some towns close to the camps clearly knew what was going on but most did not until the war’s end. And while we keep hearing about all the Jews, it seems to be forgotten that masses of other people were murdered, including Polish Catholics, Russian and Ukrainian civilians and Allied POWs. We also were never taught what our beloved Ike did to German POWs at the end of that war, and it constituted de facto war crimes. We Love Ike hated and loathed the Germans and he made sure the defenseless POW’s died in droves.
Re: colder weather. When I lived in Minneapolis during the ’70’s, the lakes were frozen solid by Thanksgiving, and kids broke out the ice skates for daily after-school play and hockey stick practice around that time. Looks like just a return to pre-1980 weather to me. They never called it ‘polar vortex’ back then. And it really is not the polar vortex, according to what I have read, as that vortex never comes south so far as to actually reach the US. It does push colder northern air farther south, but the vortex itself circles, and stays in the arctic region. Another misuse of the language, it looks like. The vortex might be responsible for colder temps in the US, but it is not the vortex itself extending down to the US as today’s weather people imply.
Oh noooooooo! It’s a POLAR VORTEX and we’re all gonna dieeeeeeeee!
It’s just the media liars trying to juice up their ratings, and the regime likes it ’cause it keeps the masses on edge all the time and worried and anxious and Our Nanny the Almighty State will fix everything.
I do love how a good Polar Vortex in the fall prompts everyone to get off their ass and get that last little bit of yard work done before Winter (and hang up Christmas lights). I was sitting on my front porch nursing a beer and watching all my neighbors work. 🙂
Got my leaves mulched just in time. Last year I missed it and had to look at a yard full of leaves at every snow melt.
Chuck, I got my information here, amongst other places:
Richard Rhodes (2002). Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40900-9.
He’s a famous author and meticulous researcher, he has a Pulitzer Prize to his name for The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rhodes
What about Dachau, near Munich? That was in Germany, and kinda hard to hide if you lived in Munich. Remember that Germany was bigger then, a large chunk of what is now Poland *was* Germany, plus there was the Reichsgau Wartheland which was incorporated directly into Germany and the General Government, which was part of the clearing house for Jews and other undesirables. Close to Germany, especially by European standards. There were other camps not just in Greater Germany but in Germany proper itself.
I’d believe that *some* Germans didn’t know what was going on but most were in it up to their eyeballs: either as “Hitler’s willing executioners” or at least passively.
Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and other *concentration* camps (Konzentrationslager) located on or near German soil were essentially very harsh prison camps. Inmates were required to perform slave labor, but were generally not expected to die in the camps. IIRC, a few tens of thousands of people died over the dozen years or so that Dachau existed, but those deaths were incidental rather than genocidal. The Nazis made no effort to hide or deny the existence of these camps, and I suspect all Germans knew about them.
Extermination/death camps (Vernichtungs/Todeslager) like Auschwitz and Treblinka were in Poland and killed more people in a day than the KZ camps killed over their entire existence. People who arrived in these camps had life expectancies measured in minutes to hours. They went right from the trains into the ovens for “delousing”. The Nazis did their best to keep these camps secret and were generally successful in doing so. Few ordinary Germans were aware of the death camps, other than perhaps by whispered rumors. The Nazis didn’t keep them secret because they were ashamed of what they were doing. They kept them secret because they didn’t want victims to refuse to board the eastbound trains. They promised the victims that they were being relocated to Jewish settlements in the East, and many/most apparently believed that.
That may well be true of the death camps, but plenty of Jews and other undesirables knew what was happening, as did non-victims in the area – some of whom actively helped. Ghettos were liquidated and people marched off in to the woods to be killed, and they knew what was coming. In Rhodes’ book he quotes letters home from Wehrmacht soldiers saying what they’d seen.
And how do you account for the trainloads of people going in but no one coming out? Or the horrific smells from the ovens?
That’s why the death camps were located far to the east, where there was no one to notice these things, or at least no one who cared. You have to remember that pretty much no one liked Jews. Poles and particularly Russians had been slaughtering Jews for centuries before the Nazis even existed.
Poland may have been annexed to Germany, but as far as ordinary Germans were concerned, it was still a foreign land. Polish is a very hard language to learn with many more cases in their parts of speech than even Germans are used to. IIRC, one of my Polish friends in Volkshochschule said there are 8 cases in Polish. And while multi-lingualism is common in Europe these days, it was not common back then. So even though Poland may technically have been a country conquered and ruled by Germany, it was not a part of Germany, in the sense that Germans lived there or cared about it much. Germany annexed it principally for the expansion of farming that it represented, as — back then — people believed for an economy to grow, it must increase its land size. That is part of the reason countries continued to fight to conquer each other even after the kings were dethroned in WWI.
As far as multi-lingualism is concerned, one of the things I found while teaching, was that East Germans pretty much only knew German — unless they were going to be involved in education (university level) or politics, then they needed to know Russian. East Germans (and Russians) generally were like Americans and only knew their own language fluently. West Germans, on the other hand, knew English in much greater numbers — also French and Italian. Few that I knew understood Spanish.
That is all changing, however, as kids nowadays in Europe and Russia are taught English from their first day at school. By the time I left, anybody under about 22, could speak English fluently. Over 30 was hit and miss, and over 50 and they knew only German. That is why I always recommend to Americans visiting Germany that they ask someone young their questions in English. That goes for clerks everywhere — banks, train station, post office, wherever. Only in the tourist areas do the workers widely speak English.
Firstly, back then Germany extended father east than now, in to what is now Poland.
Secondly, part of Poland, where there were a lot more German speakers, was incorporated in to the Reich.
Thirdly, the rest of Poland – which the Soviets didn’t grab, became the General Government – a dumping ground for unwanteds.