Monthly Archives: November 2008

Roll Reversal

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Roll ReversalThe night before Thanksgiving, I cooked a batch of rolls using a recipe from a paperback Betty Crocker cookbook we’ve had for years but seldom cook out of. It seemed a quick, easy recipe for simple dinner rolls. The bread book I typically use (The Breadbaker’s Apprentice) is more of an artisan bread cookbook. The breads it provides formulas for are yummy, but they tend to be a multi-day pain to actually make. I don’t know what I did wrong, but my rolls would not rise. After much longer than it should have taken (and with all sorts of coaxing), they nearly doubled in size, so I popped them in the oven and crossed my fingers they’d do the rest of their rising in there. They did not. They tasted more or less ok, but they were small and hard and ugly.

Yesterday, hankering for some rolls for turkey sandwiches, I decided to try the fancy cookbook recipe for white bread rolls. I’ve used one of the three very similar formulas for white bread to make loaves, and they didn’t turn out as wonderfully as expected (they were fine sandwhich loaves but not the kind of bread you go out of your way to eat for its own sake, like the brioche). But confronted with the small hard ugly rolls or a perfectly servicable but not outstanding white bread roll, I opted for a do-over. And the results, as you can see from the picture, were rather better.

Thanksgiving Food

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The rolls are made, although they’re an unequivocal failure. I just couldn’t get them to rise. They’re hard, brown little things, and most of them will land in my compost pile, which frankly is ok by me.

The turkey is on the counter, covered in cling wrap. A friend assures me that non-factory-produced turkey can be left out overnight because it doesn’t have the bacteria that turkeys raised in stiflingly close quarters have. My turkey’s liver and heart and neck and gizzard have been boiled with aromatics and herbs to make a broth, and those organs (except perhaps for the gizzard, which has a surprising and to my mouth most unpleasant texture) will be incorporated into tomorrow’s gravy.

The herbs I’ll mix with butter and garlic to rub into the turkey tomorrow are painstakingly picked and chopped. I had to buy expensive oregano and thyme from the grocery store to get fresh (“fresh” — probably shipped cross-country three weeks ago). The rosemary I stepped barefoot out into my backyard at 10:00 p.m. to pick. Note to self: I’d like to grow some thyme. Plucking tablespoonsful of little leaves from these plants tonight (the thyme in particular) makes me really appreciate the herbs, which I’ve so often been content to sprinkle from a costly little glass jar. I spent nearly an hour tonight preparing the herbs for the herb butter.

Good food is an investment, and it should be. We comparison shop to find the cheapest food we can without regard to the fact that it’s not just some throwaway thing — it’s our sustenance, one of the very few things without which we cannot actually survive. You are what you eat. This is not to say that expense for its own sake is worthwhile. But to drink milk that separates into cream and not-cream (what is the name for the not-cream?), to eat an animal that was raised in a way that allows that animal to grow more or less as it would in nature — these things are increasingly important to me, and worth more money. If the body is a temple, you shouldn’t fill it with shit.

It’s hard to pay four or five bucks a pound for turkey when Kroger has it for $0.79 a pound. What do I gain from doing this? Well, there’s a sense of eating more ethically. I’m eating a bird that has lived roughly as a bird of its type should (compared to a bird crammed with a dozen others in a tiny cage). I’m also supporting a local economy. I have spoken face-to-face with the person who raised, killed, processed, and sold me this turkey. The people I bought this bird from appreciate my individual contribution. Butterball really could not care less whether I buy their bird or not.

I wish more of my Thanksgiving lunch was created from local food. Much of it is, but I’ll do better next year. I’ll have aromatics and more herbs from my own garden at least. I may not ever raise turkeys, but I’m thinking I might have some chickens in the not-too-distant future. And surely I can grow my own potatoes (we’ve already got some started). In the mean time, I’m thankful to have local farmers to fill in the substantial gaps.

Using RewriteMap for query string voodoo

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I had the need today to come up with an apache rewrite that would, in some cases, change the value of a query string parameter. So for example, for requests coming from anywhere but example.com with a URI beginning “/path” and with a query string parameter named “foo” with the value beginning “bar”, I needed to rewrite the value to be “baz”. I spent some time fooling around with backreferences in the RewriteRule, but I never came up with anything that worked. Eventually, I turned to RewriteMap, which lets you specify text files, hashes, or even external scripts whose output values will be inserted into the destination for the rewrite. So in my example, here’s the apache config:

RewriteMap partner_params prg:/path/to/script.pl
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !(.*)example.com(.*)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/path
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} .*foo=bar.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com$1?${partner_params:%{QUERY_STRING}} [R=301,L]

The RewriteMap line points to a script (source to appear below) that will be executed by the RewriteRule. The first condition specifies that the referring url does not contain “example.com”. The second condition specifies that the URI begins with “/path”. And the third condition specifies that the query string must have a key named “foo” with a value beginning like “bar”. The rule itself takes any matching request and diverts it to http://mysite.com with the same URI as the original request (so something beginning “/path”), then adds a question mark to denote a query string following. Then it passes the query string to the script that RewriteMap knows as “partner_params”. that script reads from STDIN and prints to STDOUT either a newline-terminated result or the four-character response “NULL”. If not NULL, the response is what gets substituted into the RewriteRule.

So now for the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$| = 1;
while (<STDIN>) {
if($_ =~/foo=bar/){
$_ =~ s/foo=bar/foo=baz/gi;
}
print $_;
}

Here we simply do a substitution, looking for foo=bar and replacing with foo=baz. And voila, we’ve got custom inline query string munging based on parameters available via pretty standard apache Rewrite data. My particular example probably describes a pretty rare need, but knowing how to have a rewrite call a script to do more complex parsing than is available via apache configuration directives could be handy in a number of ways.

Dirt!

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We’ve been sort of feinting in the direction of composting for over a year now. I built a handy dandy compost bin that’s basically four square frames with wire siding. The bin breaks down into two pieces, each composed of two of the frames hinged together. To set it up, you make a cube of the two pieces and attach them via eye-and-hook hardware. It’s sufficiently sturdy to hold a fair amount of compost, but it breaks down easily and is pretty easy to move around.

So we’ve been throwing vegetable matter into the composter for over a year now. This year, we accidentally grew a bunch of tiny pumpkins from last year’s jack-o-lantern guts. The seeds had settled into the ground before we moved the composter a few feet away to turn it, and the soil I guess was pretty fertile. We haven’t given our compost much real thought, though. We haven’t tried to make any really useful garden material from its contents. It’s been more a waste vanisher than a composter.

As my interest in the quality and origin of the food I’m feeding my family grows, naturally my interest in growing some of my own grows, and so this week, I began to pay a little better attention to the composter. I moved the bin this weekend for the first time since the move that resulted in our pumpkins. When I removed the frame, here’s what I saw:

Compost

I have a similar picture from last year (half of the composter is visible in this one, in case my description above falls short), though the leaves aren’t piled nearly as high. To give the stuff a really good solid turn, I set the bin up just to the left of the pile (its original spot and where the pumpkins had grown) and started inverting the pile back into the bin. To my surprise, when I got to the bottom of the pile, I found this:

Dirt

That’s rich, bug-filled dirt-like compost! There were I’d say 4-to-6 inches of the stuff. It looked a lot like dirt, but clumpier, and if you examined some of the clumps, you could tell they were really compressed rotted leaves. I enriched part of one of our beds with this and planted some garlic in it. The rest I spread in another bed that I’m thinking I might plant some herbs in (our sprawling rosemary plants are lonely).

With this minor, accidental success, I’m now more interested in composting for real. The plan for the moment is to water and turn the stuff twice a week. I don’t know that I need to do the full move and turn each time. I think that if I just give a good solid stir and then add some water to keep it moist, the stuff will take care of itself. Guess we’ll see.