収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Blue Cross/Blue Shield want to stop covering anesthesiology drugs beyond a fixed amount of time

during

surgeries?

So if a surgery goes longer than their time allotment, coverage stops on

anaesthesia?!

I mean

I mean

I mean

there’s also the whole “nothing says quality medicine like rushing a surgery team” but

HOLY SHIT YOU MONSTERS

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November 16th, 2023, was the day I started logging biking miles per hundred on Mastodon. I didn’t check the odometer on the date this year, but it would’ve been around 2940, which means totalling 1,440 miles (2,317 km) in the previous 12 months.

That works out to about 28 miles/45 km a week or 120 miles/193 km per month.

That’s more than Anna and I put on our car combined, which exists pretty much entirely for certain cargo-carrying purposes. Not too bad.

The weather’s pretty good today. Cold, but clear and dry. I should run by the hardware store, pick up some copper and steel wool.

If you don’t know this already, copper is incredibly good for scrubbing oven racks, because it’s softer than the rack metal but harder than food, so it really cuts through whatever might’ve got baked on without scarring the metal underneath.

It is absolutely the best way to clean an oven or toaster rack is what I’m saying. I suspect that’ll be an important tip for some of you today, or tomorrow, depending upon how prompt you are about scrubbing up. 😀

Anyway, like I said, it’s a nice day. Let’s go bike.

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I like to post progress notes and photos to Mastodon while doing my Sunday baking. It mostly ends up being about bagels, but not always – sometimes I’ll make baguettes or sweetbreads or something else entirely.

But mostly, it’s all about the #bagels. I post about bagels so regularly that people have started using my bagel posts as a warning that Monsterdon – the weekly monster-movie watch with live commentary – is incoming.

(#monsterdon is in fact a monster, trending Federation-wide each Sunday evening, starting shortly after my baking posts wrap up. It’s great. Follow #MonsterdonAlert for news and voting on which films to watch.)

Anyway, in response to my latest baking thread, MHowell asked me if I’d blogged about baking bagels, particularly for people who bake only occasionally. And the answer was… sort of? So I threw them a short post that linked my recipe.

But since it’s been a while – and I’ve learned some things – here’s a new, more comprehensive version of the bagel recipe! This version adds more dough variations, includes a couple of important process discoveries, and explains a bunch of steps left unexplained in the original.

It is a bit wordier, I’m afraid, but it is very complete, which should make it good for beginners and occasional bakers.

Unfortunately, that also keeps it from fitting onto a single page, so it’s RTF only this time. If you want a single-page version like last time, you’ll have to put together your own. (ETA: And even so, I didn’t have room to describe how to make your bagels nice and smooth and regular. So have a second post just for that.)

Of course, the more you do this, the less you’ll need the recipe – I barely reference it these days, and then only for ingredient weights. But if that’s you, you probably don’t need a recipe! At least, not more than once.

Anyway. Enjoy DELICIOUS BAGELS! ^_^

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Had a very surprising moment as I was going down the front stairs today to go out biking and two of the stairs disappeared out from underneath me, blinking out of existence like a double-striped peppermint stick

Of course they had not actually disappeared, it just turned out the fuckers who installed them used framing nails in an outdoor application and guess what they’ve been rotting out from the inside allllll along

(To be clear, the nails have been rotting out, the wood seems to be fine.)

Fortunately it was me and not any of the delivery people, my reflexes are pretty good and I just ended up sitting on the next surviving stair going “wha happen?!”

Pics at Mastodon if you’re into it

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We used to have a Great Harvest bakery in walking/biking distance of our house, and occasionally they’d make a spinach feta bread that I liked well enough – particularly toasted, which brought out the best parts of it.

For whatever reason, it stopped being a Great Harvest and started being an independent bakery, and we kept going to it, but then it closed for a while and now it’s reopening as mostly a cafe. So I thought I’d do some experimental baking and create a similar bread, probably in baguette form since I’m good at that and it’s a safe starting point.

I was pretty sure they were using dried spinach, so I bought some fresh from the closest grocery and dried it myself. I also skimmed a bunch of other recipes for spinach feta, most of which were extremely unlike the bread I wanted, but which at least gave me some ideas for baking.

And then this past Sunday I went ahead and tried what I’d come up with, and not gonna lie, I’m really, really happy with how it came out. It’s like what I remember, but honestly better. It’s about as good un-toasted as my memory of the toasted version, and toasting the slices makes it better still, turning the crust into its own entity in a really tasty way.

Here’s my attempt to throw what I did into recipe form. If anyone tries it, please let me know how it goes! And what I’m missing, because I’m probably missing something in these instructions, something I just kind of assume.

I made unexpectedly good bagels at home yesterday, and they were good enough to me, who is a bit of a Montréal bagels snob, that I wrote up the recipe from the original youtube directions in text.

I also added a few of my own notes.

Here’s an RTF, here’s a 300dpi PNG formatted to print on one page which also links to a previous thread with a bunch of photos and the original video. Enjoy!

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