An Asymmetric Game

I’m counting this one as done even though it’s technically not. What’s left are just technicalities.

My brick-and-mortar bank was giving me 0.5% on my savings account and this needed to change. From what I’ve read, online banks tend to offer the best rates. I decided to go with ING Direct. Why?

Several reasons. I did a lot of reading on different possibilities; while anecdotal evidence isn’t definitive, when a diversified audience all say the same positive things, it’s worth looking into. I think I read, maybe, one negative review of ING. Additionally, many of the personal finance bloggers I read speak highly of ING and specifically mention their excellent interface and customer support.

By opening an account with more than $250, they offer a $25 reward, which is pretty sweet. I got a referral from one of those personal finance bloggers (An English Major’s Money), additionally she gets $10 for referring, so we’re all better off.

While they don’t offer the highest interest rate–despite the recent Fed cut, you can still get above 5%–their 3.65% is still seven times what I would be earning otherwise. When the economy gets better, I may look into moving the cash to a higher yield account, but for now I’m satisfied.

The account is open and I only moved a (relatively) small amount of my savings over. I can’t access the money for 10 days, so I didn’t want to move it all because I’m paranoid. But once I verify that I do actually own my checking account and the 10 days are up, I’m moving almost all of my savings over, at least until I decide how to invest the non-Emergency Fund portion.

Accomplishing this makes me feel quite good; this is one of the things on my list that serve, partly, as a foundation for other goals. More on that later.

This is what seems counterintuitive: having goals makes things simpler.

Consider: I haven’t cut my hair in over 13 months now, except for a trim here or there. It’s long, a touch over ten inches maybe, and quite long for a guy. (Within the department, it’s only the second longest–I’ve got about 6 inches on the third longest, but am about 10 inches short for the lead.)

Half of me wants to cut it, primarily because short hair is easier to manage. But I like the idea of longer hair and some days, if I do say so myself, it looks really freakin’ good. Of my friends, about 75% of them like it long, but in the minority are people like my sister, who has the best sense of style of anyone I know. So.

My usual M.O. is to get it cut short, grow it out for 9 months, get it cut short again, rinse, repeat. It’s not that I ever regret getting it cut, but if I do, it would take a year to get it back and it’s an investment of time I’m not sure I want to make. There isn’t a clear good here either way.

Now, number 100 on the master list is to get my hair long enough I can donate it to an organization that makes wigs for children with cancer. There’s is a noble goal; mine? maybe not so much. But having on the list makes my course clear and I can stop worrying about whether to cut it or not. I think I need to give it another 4-6 months.

Goals limit options, but since I set the goal, I’m okay with it. In the bad ol’ days, I only realized the first part.

This goes doubly well for my financial goals, though that’s a post for another day.

I do love seitan. Most often I eat it plain or in barbecue sauce or in a stir fry. As I said in the last post, I’m looking for diversification of my seitan eating, so I tried this one, from Vegan With a Vengeance, the best all-vegan cookbook I own:

2 cups Seitan
2 tsp olive oil
1 onion (~1 cup), thickly sliced
1 green bell pepper, seeded & thickly sliced

Marinade:
1/2 large white onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 1/2 tbsp ginger (fresh)
3 tbsp lime juice (fresh)
3 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp pure maple syrup
1 tbsp ground allspice
1/4 tbsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tbsp ground cayenne
1 tsp ground nutmeg

Throw all the marinade ingredients into a food processor and chop it up real good. There’ll be some chunks left and that’s okay. I doubled the amount of garlic because I always double the amount of garlic. Marinate the seitan in the marinade for a while, at least an hour.

Sautee the other onion and bell pepper in the olive oil until the onions start to brown. Take the seitan from the marinade and put it in the skillet. Do not throw out the remaining marinade. It’s good stuff. Sautee the seitan until it’s browned to your liking. Add the remaining marinade and heat through. Eat.

I wasn’t as wild about this as I thought I would be. There’s two things that might have caused this:

1)I used a slightly different recipe for making the seitan. The recipe I use calls for chickpea flour, which I don’t have and can’t get cheaply, so I just add more vital wheat gluten. This time, I substituted soy flour (thinking they were comparable because of the seitan pastrami recipe). It made the seitan fluffier and less tasty.

2)With few exceptions, I have a problem with using high quality stuff when I’m just going to mix it. This is why, if I order a whiskey and coke, I get the rail instead of something good. I mean, what’s the point? So here, I didn’t use my good maple syrup, but the crappy $1.29 stuff at the grocery store. Stuff doesn’t even taste good alone, and I think it adversely affected the flavor of the marinade.

Overall, it wasn’t bad, but too labor intensive for me to do it again any time soon. The flavor went really well with coconut rice; combined, it was greater than the sum of the parts.

From Vegan With a Vengance:

2 cups jasmine rice
13.5 oz coconut milk
1 cup water
1 cinnamon stick
1/4 tsp salt
zest of 1 lime
1/2 cup shredded coconut (unsweetened)

Add everything but the shredded coconut and lime zest to your pot. Bring to boil, lower heat, cover, ans simmer ~20 minutes. When cooked, add the lime zest, mix, remove from heat, cover, and let sit ~10 minutes. Toast the coconut over medium/medium-low heat. To serve, remove the cinnamon stick and sprinkle the toasted coconut on top.

I like this. I used more shredded coconut because I like coconut and I used brown basmati instead of jasmine because, at this point, I only stock brown basmati. It undoubtedly made it chewier and less subtle, but still worked well. Remember, if using brown rice, you’re going to have to cook it longer.

I didn’t do this in my rice cooker—I’m not sure how that would affect the outcome or if it would ruin the machine. But cooking rice on the stove isn’t that big of deal.

I had jerk seitan with this, and it was a mighty fine combination.

I’ve been making my own seitan for about 4 months now and I am a big fan. It’s better tasting and cheaper than the store-bought stuff, if you can find it. I have been using the basic recipe from Vegan Vittles and adjust the spices, but I recently thought I should branch out. Hence, this. (Click and scroll for recipe.)

I don’t know if I could even tell you what real pastrami tastes like. I’ve had it and I loved it, but its price is a bit steep relative to comparable meats. So I can’t say if it actually tastes like pastrami. I would guess no, but it is pretty tasty in its own right.

First time through: I followed the directions pretty closely. I used soy flour instead of chickpea and used the “or more!” option for whole black pepper. I probably also threw an extra or two garlic clove in. I didn’t include the bulger.

The directions say to slice thin and, presumably, eat on a sandwich. I did not try the log with anything—I ended up just cutting off a chuck at a time to chew on. It’s thick, but not hard, and has a real nice texture.

I thought the first one was a bit heavy on the tomato paste. So, the second time I made this, I cut out a tablespoon of tomato paste, used the bulger (it makes a positive difference) and increased all the spices, doubling almost all of them. I like my food spicy, so I put in probably 2 tablespoons of whole black pepper and 2 teaspoons of cayenne. This time it was much better.

Overall, it’s pretty easy to make and relatively cheap—probably $2 or so for a cylinder eight inches high and 2.5 inches in diameter. It works really well—almost too well—as a snack and I imagine it would be good as a replacement for sandwich meat.

Monday night I was out late attempting to cross #79 (local bar’s trivia competition) off my list. It’s five rounds of 10 general knowledge questions. Teams can be up to six players and it’s $2 per player. Winning team gets the entire pot. Monday night’s pot was $38.

I expected to be on a team of five, but three of my partners bailed. While I’m pretty sure we would have won with everyone, the two of us did pretty good — we took second. We had 35 right, the winning team had 36. They also had 5 players, so I don’t feel too bad about it.

What I do feel bad about: $1 PBR cans. So I had nine. Maybe 10. The trivia was upstairs while the bar was downstairs, so there was a point where I was triple-fisting PBR, which clearly makes me a bad-ass or something.

As such, while I still got up early yesterday, I did not do so at 5am. It was 6am, but I’m not going to count it, so today is the new official first day. Today’s also my longest day of the week, so we’ll see how that goes.

There was a time I drank a fair bit of PBR. That time was sophomore year.

It generally don’t choose PBR anymore for three reasons:

1) It’s the hipster drink of choice and I have a bunch of contempt for hipsters.
2) I like beer, so I usually choose something of higher quality.
3) Even in its price range, PBR isn’t my favorite.

But I had it the other night since the bar was offering $1 cans and it’s hard to beat that. So I had at least nine, maybe more.

What is there to say about PBR? It goes down like water because it’s a lot like water. Doesn’t have much flavor, though it does have a bite and an aftertaste that isn’t completely pleasant (this is true of all cheap beers, in my experience).

So here’s my basic thought on PBR, though it’s true of all cheap beer: Spend a little bit more and get something with taste, unless the deal is too good. The only real reason to drink beer like this is to get drunk and/or to be able to drink for 8 hours in a row. I try to avoid the first reason and the second is relatively rare. Unless I’m in [the town I grew up in].

[See here for complete list of beers drank for this series.] 

Today was the first day of starting #18: "Become an early riser and get up at a set time every day for two months." I’ve decided that "set time" will be 5 a.m.

The methodology and inspiration for this goal is here. The basic jist is get up the same time every day and go to bed when you’re tired. It makes a certain intuitive sense.

So my alarm went off at 5:02 and I was up at 5:04. After showering I checked my email, rss reader, and made some breakfast (homemade granola). I was going to head into the office, so I checked the bus schedule not knowing when the earliest bus is…6:30am, it turns out, though it was 6:25 when I saw it. So I caught the next bus 25 minutes later. I would have just walked, but it’s really fucking cold outside.

Campus was beautiful this morning. For the first time ever, I did not see anyone between the bus stop to entering my office. Of course, it was 7:15am on a Holiday Monday, so I didn’t expect many. I was working by 7:45 and downloaded all my readings for this week. But–and this shouldn’t really surprise me–there’s a problem with the printer so I can’t print them (and therefore can’t read them, because I hate reading articles online). Because of the holiday, there’s nobody I can get to fix it either.

Nonetheless. I’m starting this task now even though I may lack the disciple to continue for 62 straight days. If it keeps, though, it should give me between a half and two hours extra time a day. This would help me achieve some of these other goals, plus help me out in my course work. Even if it doesn’t do that, though, I should have a better idea of how much sleep I ‘need’ instead of ‘want’ or ‘get’. It might be useful information to have.

Merrick: …and we, who have pursued our destiny outside law or statute, will be restored to the bosom of the nation. And that’s what I believe.

Hickok: Does bosom mean ‘tit’?

Stapleton: Same thing.

(episode 1.1) 

I cheated, a bit. In between when I started this list and when I finished it I already completed this item. And I knew it was going to happen—the absinthe had been purchased and the date was set, so this was a gimme. However, this had been on my list for a long time, so I don’t feel too bad.

It had been a vague goal, since tasting the Green Fairy would have required me to travel overseas. But! A few months ago, the US finally decided to allow absinthe again, so I can legally drink it at home. (See wikipedia for more information.)

So, a friend picked up the bottle at the local liquor store and we had it…and it is wonderful. We tried it in a variety of ways. First, the traditional with a dissolved sugar cube and ice-cold water. Second, mixed with equal parts whiskey and gin. Third, as an “absinthe-bomb” with Red Bull. Fourth, straight. The results: excellent, okay, good except the aftertaste, and okay.

I liked it enough that I looked into ordering some online to perhaps get better quality or at least have some variety. Based on this research, I believe there’s only one American company manufacturing absinthe and they sell it for $75 a bottle and sold out their first run. Ordering from Britain or Germany is possible, but very expensive due to the shipping…usually doubling the price of the bottle. I did, however, find one company in New York who will ship for free on orders over $50 (which is fine, since they have no absinthe under $50) but lacks selection.  Probably end up doing it, though, just to try a different brand.

So, for the time being, I have to stick with the stuff the local store stocks. It sells for $45, and I got two bottles yesterday. I tried it with not-ice-cold water last night and was not impressed. It has a strong anise flavor and is 110 proof (though some absinthe goes up to around 160 apparently). I don’t know if it’s the strength or something about the liquor itself, but three drinks (probably about 4.5 oz Worth) had me buzzing pretty good…it usually takes whiskey about 8 oz. to get me that good.

I imagine that absinthe will cut into my whiskey drinking, since it’s an equally good sipping beverage and has enough flavor and quality that I like it even if I don’t get drunk (though that is a benefit of it).

I recommend giving absinthe a try if you like anise flavor. Given the expense of the bottle, though, go in with someone else to at least defray the initial cost in case you don’t like it. That’s what we did—four of us split the first bottle.

Plus, you get some pretty awesome spoons. And, really, how cool is it to be able to tell people you’re an absinthe drinker?