Working at a Soup Kitchen

   I just started working an hour a week in a soup kitchen. I probably shouldn't say which one because I might share details of interactions of people that are best kept anonymous. The head chef of the kitchen says I do a really good job and she can tell I've worked  in a kitchen before. She always gives me these really hard tasks like splitting leaves of lettuce, cutting away pieces that are brown or shriveled or all stem, and then cutting the rest into bite sized pieces and throwing them in a pot. I like to talk to this other woman who has just as much cooking experience but is sort of the sous chef ("sioux chef"?). Other times La Jefe has me peeling garlic (which I hate) or peeling hard boiled eggs while they're still hot and the shells can come off easily, or cutting up broccoli as small as I can get them and still keep them looking like broccoli. Anyway, I usually feel a little discouraged when I first start each day and then I think of the skills I'm building and how good it will look on a resume if I need it to and I get my second wind. If nothing else, it's an adventure. And the coffee's good.

Trying an Internet Recipe and Having It Turn out Great.

       OK, I got my recipe from searching "vegan recipes" on Bing search engine (not that you can't do t he same thing with google, but I am saying what search engine I used so people can retrace my steps) and then I think searching by season, "Winter" and turning up "vegan falafel" as the first and easiest recipe that was inexpensive to make. I was cooking for my girlfriend, Linda, again and I needed to keep meat and dairy out of the recipe for health reasons, though she said we could slide on the bean protein even though she's really not supposed to have protein more than once a week. Basically, if your diet is so pure that you make yourself miserable then you're either not going to live that long for that reason or you're going to suddenly devour a pound of carnitas every day for a week and wash it down with...dare I say it?...Alcohol! anyway, it's really important to let yourself have a  little of the things that you love no matter what the doctor tells you. This is coming from the guy who quit smoking recently after chaining them down for thirty years and having pneumonia and bronchitis...That's me. But let me try to find the recipe I used:
                                    
          1 can chickpeas (garbanzo beans)
          1 package pita bread (about 6)
          1 bulb garlic (all the garlic we could get)
          1 tbsp olive oil
          1 cup imitation sour cream (actually we cheated and used real sour cream. It was on sale.)
          1 minced yellow onion
          1/2 pint raita (we would have got more if we could. Also, raita is actually an Indian yogurt dressing and turned out to be slightly too jazzy for my tastes with this recipe.)
          1 bunch fresh cilantro (Yes!)
          black pepper
          no salt

Anyway, I started by putting the onions on to fry and then really mashing the chickpeas as good as I could with a bean masher and then mashing in the other ingredients one by one (along with another 1/4 cup of olive oil the recipe calls for late in the mixing process) and what I found is (1) I didn't miss having a recipe in front of me, but I would have used one if I could have. (2) One of the reasons homemade and restaurant made will never taste the same is really good homemade always ends up misplacing the blender and not getting the beans perfectly mashed or the garlic properly distributed, but my funky homemade falafel ended up going to heaven while all the falafel in restaurants was only, well, angelic. But I don't recommend using my recipe to repeat my recipe. Rather I recommend searching "recipes by season" online and giving precedence to ones using ingredients you already have in the fridge. For one thing, falafel is meant to have lemon juice, mint instead of cilantro, and coriander, but I just had to McGiver it. Linda and I had no trouble finishing it all and I wish I could have some right now.

Happy International Women's Day

   I don't want to say that women do all the useful work in the world, because it's not true. I particularly think of the night crew at Second Story Respite House, two of whom are male, as people who do a lot of arduous cleaning without credit and without a lot of complaining. But it's also true that a lot of health professionals are women and the management in my hotel is two women and I'm grateful to them  right now. And basically women are beautiful. I don't know whether to hope they take over the world, but I can see why they'd want to. And I think I've  been a lot happier in the last ten years with women enjoying better status and more wage parity than they did before. I think mostly when women misuse power it comes as a result of a lot of power being misused on them, not only in a personal way, but also in an institutional way and it's been going on since the dawn of time. So I do hope we all will try to interact more fairly in the year ahead, and that includes interaction between members of the same gender, too. if you disagree about any of this, please contact me at congertimothy@yahoo.com or tconger@cruzio.com . Thank you.

Tim

Plenty of Room At The Bottom

   The title of this post actually comes from a mathematical concept I only heard about from an episode of the TV show, "Numb3rs" that comes on CBS sometimes, and also FOX. But enough about them.
    I recently started answering emails that offered free deals as introductory offers to their business classes and so on and what I found is that I never met such a bottom feeding bunch of slime in my whole life. I particularly want to name the company AppSumo, because it offered to send me three business pamphlets for free that it never did, and instead it tricked me into downloading a 7000 gigabite file that slowed down my laptop by about 30 seconds every time I wanted to do anything. Nuts to them!
     There was another website I had a bad experience with and I feel sorry about that, because I felt like there was things about it that were really great. The website, "wunderground," named after the Weather Underground of the Sixties, has a lot about it that's really terrific; it has great graphics and tells you all sorts of weather information and links to all sorts of great facts from all over the world. It's the perfect cure for Liberal Arts syndrome. The problem? Once you've signed their contract, you pretty much can't mention them or use their data in any articles you might write, to say nothing of business applications, and to me it looked like their terms and conditions were so exhaustive no one at all could stay out of trouble with them for long. Luckily, I never signed their contract or I wouldn't be able to write this review. Moreover, they kept reminding me that I had disabled the cookies on my computer and insisted in their terms and conditions on having access to any information I  might have on my computer for making their own cookies for me. Anyway, they really creeped me out and I had to tear myself away from their site regretfully. It's a damn shame.
    It just seems like our economy has gotten so bad that even companies that would  have fostered latent talent in the Nineties nowadays just want to rob everyone of their last ten cents. It's a real shame.
    By the way, the "National Weather Service" is a public service that does some of the same things the Weathermen do without the bullshit.