The NY Times makes Indian food seem too complicated to make at home. It isn’t.

Since all things Indian are now hip and trendy and India is the new China or whatever, the NYT has more Indian food featured in its Dining section. This past weekend TheHusband perused the section before I did and was fulminating about a lamb curry recipe. I wasn’t sure what the big deal was; after all, what’s wrong with “simple lamb curry?” Nothing. But this is far from simple:

For instance, you can get into the pleasant habit of toasting and grinding your own spices. It is a simple matter of heating them (in this case cumin or coriander seeds) in a small dry skillet. When they become fragrant, after just a minute or so, they are ready to be pulverized using an electric spice mill or mortar. This small effort provides the aroma and fresh flavor that packaged ground spices often lack.

Another utterly simple technique is using the essential paste of fresh ginger and garlic found in so many Indian recipes. For a small amount, employ a micro-plane grater, or the fine holes of an ordinary box grater. The lamb, marinated briefly in this paste along with the spices, becomes transformed.

The next step is the careful browning of the meat with the onions. If the heat is too high, they will burn; too low and you won’t achieve the caramelized flavor you’re after. Attentive stirring for about 10 minutes is required.

You keep using that word, “simple.” I don’t think it means what you think it means. Toasting and grinding the spices before you use them is not simple. “Attentive stirring” of onions for 10 minutes is not simple. Marinating either “briefly” or “up to several hours refrigerated” is not a clear and simple instruction for someone unfamiliar with Indian cooking. And have you tried grating garlic on a box grater recently? If you’ve done it without ripping up your fingertips, please share your secret.

The raita has thirteen ingredients. That is not simple. And you forgot to tell the poor cook that the oil will be very very hot, so s/he might want to let it cool off for a few minutes before dumping it into the bowl of yogurt.

I’ve watched a lot of Indian cooks make breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. There are professional cooks-for-hire who make lunch for a half a dozen households in a morning’s work, food that is made in home kitchens and eaten in home dining rooms. And it is excellent food.

This NYT recipe is Indian cooking re-designed for cooks for whom time doesn’t matter, perhaps.

Oh, I give up. I don’t know whom this type of recipe is for.

When libraries lose, the digital divide widens

Last month, thanks to a trigger provision in the state budget, California libraries were defunded. As in, all state funding was eliminated. This is particularly hard on rural libraries because they have less local support to fall back on (and often less prosperous residents, so private funding is less likely).

For comfortably-off people who use public libraries, especially to borrow books, this is an annoyance and an inconvenience. For library patrons who are on tight budgets, this is a hardship. But for the working and non-working poor patrons, this is a disaster. A commenter at Metafilter brilliantly sketches a hypothetical patron’s typical usage (which is probably not all that hypothetical):

If you can take yourself out of your first world techie social media smart-shoes for a second then imagine this: you’re 53 years old, you’ve been in prison from 20 to 26, you didn’t finish high school, and you have a grandson who you’re now supporting because your daughter is in jail. You’re lucky, you have a job at the local Wendy’s. You have to fill out a renewal form for government assistance which has just been moved online as a cost saving measure (this isn’t hypothetical, more and more municipalities are doing this now). You have a very limited idea of how to use a computer, you don’t have Internet access, and your survival (and the survival of your grandson) is contingent upon this form being filled out correctly.

He ends with a concise description of what libraries are up against:

We’re one of the few places left in our society where a great cross-section of people regularly interact, and also one of the few places that is free and non-commercial. Even museums, to bow and scrape to the master of Austerity, have begun to put branding on their exhibits, as if they were a sort of cultural NASCAR. We have amazing potential power, but without concerted effort I’m afraid it will be wasted. It will look better to save 10 dollars a year per person in taxes instead of funding community computer workshops, and childhood literacy programs, and community gardens. All the while we play desperate catch-up, trying to get a hold on ebooks, and liscensing out endless sub-quality software for meeting room reservations and computer sign-ups and all this other rentier software capitalism instead of developing free and open source solutions and providing small systems with the expertise to use them. Our amazing power is squandered as we cut our staff, fail to attract skilled and diverse talent, and act as a band aid to the mounting social ills caused by slash and burn governance in the name of low taxes and some nebulous idea of freedom that seems to equate with living in a good society but not paying your share for it.

The entire comment is a must-read. I found it at The Verge’s weekly “Best Tech Writing of the Week” post. The Verge has fast become my favorite site for tech news and analysis, and the Sunday roundup post is absolutely unmissable.

When I teach undergraduates about the digital divide, it’s hard to convey the reality of computer illiteracy in a classroom context in which 100 percent have computers, 90 percent have smartphones, and probably half of them have tablets. A person who doesn’t have an email account (and doesn’t know how to get one) is as foreign to them as Samoan islanders were to Margaret Mead. How do they relate to someone who uses up his entire 30-minute block of library computer time trying to bring up the relevant social services website page?

SATURDAY RECIPE: Fresh Spinach with mustard seeds and garlic

This is a very simple spinach dish, adapted from a Madhur Jaffrey recipe for green beans. She claims this is a Gujarati preparation but I’d never heard of it or seen it. Either way, it’s delicious and it goes with all kinds of main courses and other vegetables. I’ve made it as part of an Indian meal as well as an accompaniment for grilled and roasted meat, chicken, and fish.

3 Tbsp. canola oil
1 large bunch fresh spinach
2 tsp. black mustard seeds
5 med. cloves fresh garlic, chopped coarsely
1 dried red pepper (or 1/4 tsp. ground cayenne pepper)
Salt to taste

Chop the spinach coarsley so that the leaves are  cut into smaller pieces (this is not an exact science, you just don’t want full leaves-and-stems). Baby spinach can be cooked as-is. Rinse thoroughly and spin in a salad spinner to remove excess water (or rinse in a colander, just be sure to get any dirt out).

Your privacy is no longer in your control

Lately, the interwebs have been full of stories on how iOS apps and other software have been harvesting personal information without users’ knowledge. The cascade of revelations was kicked off by the discovery that the social media app Path was uploading contact information without user permission and without much security. That led to articles about how common this practice is. Apple has promised to address this issue in its next iOS update, although I can’t help but wonder how, if it is so vigilant in monitoring for porn and infringements on its own intellectual property, this violation slipped through:

Apple, which approves all apps that appear in its iTunes store, addressed the controversy on Wednesday after lawmakers sent the company a letter asking how approved apps were allowed to take address book data without users’ permission. Apple’s published rules on apps expressly prohibit that practice.

But in its statement about the issue, Apple did not address why those apps that collect address book data had been approved.

In that statement, Tom Neumayr, an Apple spokesman, said: “Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines. We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.”

I accept that using social media takes what I consider personal information and makes it susceptible to hacking, spamming, and other activities I’d prefer to avoid. I treat it as the cost of doing social media business, so to speak. I reject any requests to download my contacts databases when I create an account at sites like Goodreads and Twitter. What I hadn’t thought about until now, however, is that everyone in my contacts directory has me in their directory (unless they’ve specifically deleted me). If they choose to share their address book with Foursquare, Instagram, etc., my info gets shared.

Therefore, I am limited in my ability to control my privacy levels. As far as I can tell, the only way to do it is to stop communicating with people other than face-to-face and snail mail (since even phone calls would likely put me in their contacts lists), which is not viable.

I’m betting many of the family, friends, business acquaintances, and colleagues that have me in their contacts lists don’t even know they’re sharing my information in ways for which I never gave explicit permission. And since I don’t know all the apps and programs they use, I have no way of telling how secure the transmission of that information is.

Welcome to the world in which we are all Friends with a capital F, and none of us are really private individuals anymore.

Beagle update

I’m almost back to blogging.

The beagle is doing much, much better. The TPLO surgery went very well. The first two weeks were hellish but as the incision healed and the pain subsided, things got easier and she became much happier. She still has to be walked with a supporting sling and she isn’t allowed to jump or go up and down the stairs, but she’s off all the antibiotics and pain meds. Our biggest problem now is keeping her from playing with the Corgi. She is also growing increasingly annoyed at being put in Beagle Jail.

But these are the kinds of problems you want to have. She should be back on the chaise longue, in her standard Sun Beagle position, in a couple of weeks.

And my thanks to everyone who asked about her. She is a sweetie.

On Hiatus

I’m making this blog inactive for a while. I have a couple of big writing projects that require more concentration that I’ve been giving them.

I’ll be back when I’m far enough along, and in enough of a rhythm, to do both at the same time.

In the meantime I’ll be reviewing as usual at Dear Author. And you can reach me on email via this or other addresses. If you’ve lurked and enjoyed without commenting, thanks!

Happy New Year, and best wishes for you and yours in 2012.

Finding treasures in used bookstores: Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels

A couple of weekends ago TheHusband and I went to visit close friends who moved to North Carolina. We were out walking around after their son’s piano recital and we popped into a used bookstore. It was full of books on local history and at first glance, I doubted it would have anything to interest me.

I wandered back past the travel section and the old maps and fetched up in the fiction section. And lo and behold, look what I found at the very back of the store:

Yes indeed. Angela Thirkell first editions (some UK, some US) for $15-25 apiece. That biography facing out? I have the hardback edition checked out of the library as we speak. (I’ve had a half-finished post on Thirkell’s novels in my drafts folder for months. This told me I had to push the publish button on something, however incomplete.)