A free ebook of chocolate recipes from Viking Cruises

The link is a little weird. The button says 'Download ebook', but it doesn't download it. It opens in another window in a browse mode. Below the page scroller at the bottom of the screen, there's a download link, and *poof* you get a PDF in your download folder.

There's some pretty good stuff in there. You'd think they would've sent it out a week ago when you would have had a better opportunity to shop for some of the ingredients and make things in advance rather than sending it two days before Valentines Day!

https://www.vikingrivercruises.com/brochures/chocolate-lovers-cookbook-thank-you.html

I found a pretty good substitute for buttermilk for baking!

It's not like I discovered it - I wish! I subscribe to Milk Street Magazine, Christopher Kimball's revenge for being unjustly turfed from America's Test Kitchen. I received a recipe in email recently that looked interesting, but it also included an article link about a "great substitute for buttermilk: kefir".

Color me interested!

As far as I'm concerned, since I don't live near a good dairy, there is no more such a thing as good buttermilk. (most people would argue that there has never been such a thing as good buttermilk!) I loved the buttermilk that I had as a kid and wanted it for certain applications, but the garbage they sold in the stores here was just that - garbage. The stuff they sell today is milk with an added enzyme culture that is just gross.

Well, Kimball's people had an epiphany and did some testing, substituting kefir 1:1 in recipes that called for buttermilk, testing it against a horror that some people use where you mix 1 tablespoon of white vinegar into a cup of 2% milk and let it sit for 5 minutes. They made biscuits, pancakes, yellow cake, and cornbread. The kefir worked perfectly in all applications, the only case where there was a noticeable difference was in the yellow cake where it was a bit denser but still had good flavor. The vinegar abomination was a fail in everything except the cake - go figger.

I've bought decent buttermilk from Sprouts in Las Cruces, but I don't get there very often and it doesn't last forever, so I added kefir to my shopping list, and tonight I went shopping. And I found some! It was actually a plain, unsweetened kefir 'smoothie' and it has a taste not unlike buttermilk - somewhat sour/astringent. My test recipe: Zatarain's cheddar garlic biscuit mix! I have a special butter recipe to make them quite a bit like Red Lobster biscuits.

And the recipe came out perfect. The biscuits were great, rose perfectly, flavor was excellent. I think the kefir adds a bit of zing, which is what I wanted. And smothered in the butter they are appallingly good! I finished off the gazpacho that I made last week for dinner, having perhaps a biscuit too many, which sometimes happens right after I make them.

So if you're like me and you sometimes need buttermilk but can't find a good one, try plain, unsweetened kefir! I don't know if it'll work in all applications, but it definitely worked for this biscuit mix.

https://www.177milkstreet.com/2019/02/buttermilk-substitute-kefir

Started my internship at the library today

It's one of my two last library classes to complete my degree. It's only an Associates in Library Science, which when coupled with $4.10, will get me a kid's meal at Burger King.

One of the community colleges associated with NMSU offered the Library Science series online. I came across a free ebook titled So You Want To Be A Librarian, and it really appealed to me on a philosophical and ethical level. And since my wife works for the uni, I get six hours a semester for free, so it's only been lab fees and books out of pocket. But I'll only end up with an Associates: the school offers nothing higher, and after next year, they offer nothing at all - the program has been cancelled. But I just need this class and my capstone, which I'm also taking. That, and a communications class which I'll take over the summer, and I'm done.

I'm working at my local uni, and rather than doing general library stuff (which I'm hoping to do some of), I'm doing a scanning project. They bought a high-end scanner that does de-curling, OCR, all sorts of stuff, to scan their archives, starting with the college's annual reports to the university president. Fairly straightforward task. The tricky bit comes in with coding it in RDA format! So I'm coding a database to hold the records, now I just have to teach myself RDA. I've never done anything except descriptive cataloging, while I'm familiar with MARC, I've never actually worked with it. At least I don't have to unlearn anything or eliminate any bad habits.

I'm not going to pursue an MLA, I just don't think it's worth the effort and expense at my age. My hope in completing this coursework was in hopes that at some point it might help leverage my IT skills into a job at a library. Time will tell. At least I learned a lot of interesting stuff, and I do like learning stuff.