The Empress of Cat Food

FrankenMouse

So far the raw diet experiment is going pretty well. The cats all loooooove it. And their poops smell a lot less! I would write about all the reasons that I'm finding it to be a good idea and how I am NOT AT ALL CRAZY to do it, except I'm too busy making the cat food itself.

I tell you what, though, I would totally start my own business making this shit, except I wouldn't make the frozen kind (shipping and storage costs would make it prohibitively expensive, I think) but the pressure canned kind which is shelf stable at room temp. It would be so easy. You would source your meat suppliers (seek out ethical ones) and get your permits together. Call your company FrankenMouse, because the food is basically trying to re-engineer a mouse and mice are the perfect food. (Or call the company something less stupid. Please don't think that the kind of marketing that I do is the kind that involves naming start-ups.)

Christ, you could start production out of your own kitchen. Pressure can all the food, then you can ship it at ground rates. Once business ramps up, look for a commercial kitchen. After that's outgrown itself, move to a farm and raise your own rabbits and chickens locally. Organically. It would cut down on production costs hugely. Raise their feed on the farm as well, natch. Get vets to consult on special needs lines. Do actual research on actual cats. Eat your own cat food, literally - something like a video of me eating the raw cat food would totally go viral on YouTube. Holy shit, right? I should make that video just to see if there's a market. (Also that would be BADASS.) Invest in a sustainable salmon fishery. Make corporate donatations to salmon research. Sell excess produce to local restaurants, because the kicker is that not only is the cat food human-grade, you're raising the chickens and rabbits and salmon on human-grade food.

You could market it as not only the best cat food nutritionally, but also the cheapest and most ethical choice possible. You could get Whole Foods to distribute it, first some local in-store testing and then nationally. You could build an empire.

happy halloween!

at least we know now who ate Joey's mic

Not that knowing does me much good.

Katurdayklok

Do anyting for catklok
Do anything for catklok
Do anything for catklok
Do anything for catklok

I'll teach you who poop

catklok catklok catklok!


Pipgar Pipgelf fell out of a tree



Nibbles Wartooth ate a bumble bee


Bobby Murderface Murderface Murderface


Luckles doodly doo doodly doo ding dong diddly doodly doo




PigBear Explosion



With apologies to Dethklok
& thanks to stoops for his brutal assistance writing this post.

Cyanide occurs naturally too

On the Perils of Being a Hippie



Alas, "natural"

Tom's of Maine deodorant

caused chemical burns

In Which I Combine Three Major Talents

A Not-At-All Exhaustive List of Things I am Good At:
1. Analyzing the crap out of things
2. Baking yeast bread
3. Writing

Now I will try not to bore the socks off you while I do all three things at once. Feel free to judge me in the comments section.

Since I am STILL looking for work (I can't even get arrested in this town right now), I'm obviously broke. Broke enough that I started to wonder if it was worth the effort of making my own bread. I know my bread is better, but is it cheaper? (Let's pretend my time is worth nothing in this scenario, which is what a lot of employers seem to think right now anyway, so in a way it's true.)

A loaf at Market Basket costs $1.99. What about the raw materials for my bread? They have to make a profit, so I'll guess that it costs them a dollar or less to produce each loaf of bread, but they also have access to economies of scale - so I'll stick with the $1.99.

Maybe I'm the only one, but I feel like if I'm going to the trouble of making homemade bread, it should be cheaper than commercially produced versions - as well as taste better and be free of suspect shelf-stabilizing chemicals. Think of homemade tomato sauce - a tin of tomatoes, a couple of spoonfuls of olive oil, salt, pepper, and onion and garlic - those are all inexpensive ingredients and I can make enough pasta sauce for dinner for two about a buck. (Add the pasta and you're talking about two dollars to feed two people for dinner - cheaper, tastes better and it's healthier.)

So I crunched the numbers. It turns out that those economies of scale make a crucial difference. My homemade bread cost $2.11 to make, while I can buy a loaf of bread for $1.99. Ounce per ounce, the homemade bread is 20% more expensive. (That link is to a Google doc version of my spreadsheet.)

But is supermarket bread really a better deal? I was still hoping that somehow homemade bread would turn out to be cheaper, so I looked at cost per calorie efficiency (thinking back to chemistry class and my lightbulb moment when I realized that a calorie was a way to measure energy ... and we eat to keep going ... so calories is probably a more effective unit of measurement here).

Calorie per calorie, homemade bread is 15% cheaper than supermarket bread. This is a good thing to know when you are trying to figure out, as all poor people do, what food will give you the most calories for the least money. Plus, with homemade bread I get to feel all superior about using high-quality ingredients like honey and molasses instead of the dreaded HFCS.

Recipe notes: I omitted the salt from the recipe because I used salted butter in the recipe. I find Beard is sometimes heavy-handed with the salt and the sweet in writing his recipes (probably why they taste so damn good.) I also subbed rice milk for dairy (we just don't keep fresh milk around any more).

Cracked Wheat Bread, from James Beard's Beard on Bread

* 1/2 cup cracked wheat -- fine
* 1 1/2 cups boiling water
* 1 package active dry yeast
* 1/3 cup warm water -- 100-110 deg.
* 1/4 cup butter -- softened
* 1 1/2 tablespoons salt
* 2 tablespoons molasses
* 2 tablespoons honey
* 1 cup milk
* 1 cup whole-wheat flour
* 4 cups all-purpose flour

Cook the cracked wheat in the boiling water about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking until all the water is absorbed. Dissolve the yeast in the 1/3 cup lukewarm water in a large mixing bowl and let proof. Stir the butter, salt, molasses, honey, and milk into the cooked cracked wheat. Cool to lukewarm, then add to the yeast mixture. With a large spoon or with one hand, start stirring in the flours, 1 cup at a time.

When the dough is stiff enough to work, turn out on a floured board and knead a good 10 to 12 minutes, working in a little of the remaining flour as necessary. When smooth and elastic, shape into a ball and put in a buttered bowl, turning to coat with butter. Cover, place in a warm, draft-free spot, and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/2 hours.

Punch down and shape into two loaves.

Put in well-buttered 9 x 5 x 3-inch loaf pans, cover, and let rise again until doubled in bulk, or until the dough reaches the tops of the pans.
Bake in a preheated 375 degree oven 30 to 35 minutes, or until the loaves sound hollow when tapped on top and bottom. Cool on racks. Makes 2 loaves.

That's right, bitches. Quarter cup of butter. I said my bread was better.

Nerdy

I've been reading so many books written or set in pre decimal Britain (pre 1971, that is) that I went to the trouble of writing out a list of the currencies. At last, I know what farthings and tanners are! (The authors are Joan Aiken, Charles Dickens, E.F. Benson, P.G. Wodehouse and Thomas W. Hanshew. What? Job hunting leaves a lot of leisure for reading.)








Also, and only tangentially related, while I don't know if this lap pillow counts as merely nerdy or weird and actively creepy, I'm going to go ahead and guess that this isn't what the popular kids have in their living room.








Update: I don't have one of these pillows myself. My original wording was a little unclear.




















(H/T to geekologie)

Rambly

I have the day off and it's gorgeous fall weather. I took today off because we went to New York this weekend. New York was great. It sort of breaks my heart a little every time I go because there is just so MUCH available. It helps that we always either stay with my sister or friends, so that is like a built-in guarantee of a worthwhile trip. I would move there in a heartbeat IF the cost of living wasn't so high and IF I didn't already really like my life in Somerville. I mean, I know I bitch about cat barf and being tired a lot, but apart from being so damned busy it's a pretty good life. (Inty barfed on my laptop keyboard while we were gone, by the way.)

Anyway, whenever I go on any kind of trip, even if it's only an overnight in New York, I like to take the day off after I get back to get caught up on things. I usually just end up with a migraine from the stress if I don't take the day off anyway, so planning for it is better.

So instead of having a migraine and feeling bad about missing work, I'm guilt-free and ready to do some yardwork (gotta start getting the garden ready for winter), baking (a James Beard fresh fruit pie and some espresso-chocolate shortbread cookies - that's a Dorie Greenspan recipe adapted by Smitten Kitchen. The James Beard recipe is from his American Cookery, a copy of which was given to me by my wonderful friend Lysne, and I'm going to be making some of my own modifications to it.) And other stuff - grocery shopping, laundry, vacuuming, catching up on some stuff for work. Dave took the day off too so I bet he will help with the yardwork and the shopping.

Maybe I'll take the camera out and try to get some pictures in the pretty september light. I haven't made much progress lately on the photography front, technically - don't think I have time for that today but we'll see. I'd better tear myself away from the Wire soon if I'm going to get any of that done, though. (I really like the Wire, but I wonder how accurate it is. Most of the time when I'm walking around in bad neighborhoods, there aren't millions of cops around like there are in the show. That's partly what makes it a bad neighborhood - no cops.)

Oops

Every time I hear the New Pornographers' lyric "the easy call, the call of search" I think for a second that they're talking about the industry I work in. They aren't, of course - no one in their right mind would write a song about the deeply boring* subject of search engine marketing, especially not a song as stirring as My Rights Versus Yours. What the hell would you write a song about, anyway? Here are some catchy ideas:

Alexa's Metrics Versus Compete's
My Conversion Funnel Versus Yours
Google Analytics Versus Omniture
PPC Versus SEO

... Yeah. I thought so. It's total gibberish to anyone who isn't knee deep in online marketing - I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a whole other language, but it's definitely got dialect status.

The other super awesome thing about the lyric in the original song is I've been hearing it wrong anyway. The full verse goes like this:

Under your wheels, your chance is with
The easy call, the called-off search
The medicine, it still won't work
But there's dangerous levels of it here

And here's the song, if you don't know it. It rocks. I can't find a link to the album version but the Letterman show is pretty close.



The one time I saw them live, I was disappointed because everything they played sounded exactly like the album, plus the band looked bored. But whatevs - the album version is a great version of the song.


* I don't find the field boring in the slightest but you should keep in mind that I also regret not having the time to learn and practice the ancient art of bonsai. So there's your measuring stick.

domestic goddess

So sometimes I get a wild hair up my ass and turn into what I think is some kind of superwoman. Today was one of those days. I worked from 9 until 5:45 (technically leaving early, but whatever), went to the chiropractor, cooked dinner (teriyaki turkey tips with a big salad with homegrown tomatoes. I love having a gas grill and the tomatoes were totally worth the trouble. I put them in giant containers, the biggest I could find, and next year I'll stake them better but it just worked perfectly.



I also got a loaf of cornmeal bread underway (I love having a Kitchen Aid), made the bed, put away some dishes (I love having a dishwasher) and cleaned up the kitchen.



And before I got to bed I'll have folded a load of laundry, taken the bread out of the oven and cleaned the litterboxes. I wish I had time to get some embroidery done, but unless I want to stay up until midnight there's not time for that. I am also not going to get around to my mail pile tonight, which I totally don't mind missing.

But for right now, I'm totally going to take an ice cream break and watch A&E's Hoarders. Fascinating! Mental illness! Makes me feel better about my life!

Also I was a little overconfident in trying to get everything done and left the bread on top of the stove, which got super hot from the oven preheating beneath it and kind of cooked a little. I pulled off the weird crusty edges and punched it down and am letting it rise as usual; I think it'll be okay, just slightly smaller loaves than usual. So as a superwoman, I still need some work.

Summer

This is how I know summer has finally arrived: tonight in yoga I did a faceplant out of a balance pose* and now I have a big red mark on my forehead. I may have to wear a hat to work tomorrow. The reason I fell out of the pose was because it's so fucking hot and steamy in Boston and my sadistic ashtanga teacher turns off the a/c in the summer to promote sweating. I just slipped in a puddle of my own sweat and hit the motherfucking deck. Headfirst. I've never taken a Bikram class and I never want to, but I think it may be a similar experience.

* crow pose, or bakasana if you want to be all correct about it.

Friday night bachlorette

So Dave is down the Cape tonight playing a show and I'm on my own. I also left my phone at work (curses!) so I was feeling all lonely and isolated when I first got home from work. Then I watched 3 hours of What Not To Wear and realized that nights home alone can be pretty sweet after all. I even got really excitable and changed the battery in my camera, then (surprise) I futzed around taking pictures for a while. My embroidered apron is coming along.

I finished the space ship.

There are a lot of tiny little hairs on that apron. A lot.

Lucky is always ready to help out.


Bet you're no longer wondering how the apron came to be covered in cat hair.

The underside of the flame embroidery is a hot mess. too bad. The front is hott.

All your robots are belong to us.




When he dies, I'm going to have a taxidermist make him into a wallet that says "Bad Motherfucker" on it.

Listening

Sigur Ros. My favorite album is called ( ), and they released it with all the tracks untitled. The whole album is sung in a made-up language called Vonlenska. Later on they went back and gave the tracks names and translated the invented language. It's really pretty, and they are very hip, in part because they aren't that well-known. Plus Pico Iyer is a fan! How can you go wrong?

This is the first track on the album. It is a beautiful haunting sad song (I listen to it a lot at work for this reason).



The video is unsettling and creepy. In a good way.