February 18th, 2010 
Analects, Chinese Philosophy, Pedagogy 
Chris 
2 comments
Lately I’ve been blogging a lot about cooking and baking (hey, it’s fun!). Also, I’m a bit burned out on philosophical writing. I think I may have burned out on sabbatical doing various philosophical projects (which is odd, given that sabbaticals are supposed to be restorative!). It’s not that I’m not thinking about these things, but when I think about writing about them on the blog my brain resists the effort.
That said, I was thinking a bit yesterday about how I decided to go about teaching the Analects this semester (we just finished). I tried a different approach than the one I’ve used for years. I tried the new method out when I taught Chinese Philosophy in China last spring, and I decided to give it a shot here at Drury this semester. As a whole, I’m feeling a bit ambivalent about it.
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February 18th, 2010 Goombah Gourmet Chris 3 comments
Biscotti are an old favorite of mine, and a pretty staple cookie on the Italian dessert menu. I remember as a kid being sent to the Italian Bakery up the street from where I grew up to get bread, and once arriving being faced with the long glass cases packed with Italian cookies and pastries. There would typically be at least a shelf dedicated to a variety of different types of biscotti. My mom isn’t much of a cookie person, so even when I was sent to get non-bread goods, it was usually pastry, not cookie. Sometimes we’d get the box of ‘assorted cookies’ — usually for when we had special visitors — and when we did get it, the box would have a few biscotti.
Although biscotti are a traditional favorite among Italians, they also seem to be becoming more and more mainstream in American cookie culture nowadays. I see them individually wrapped in coffee shops like Starbucks (pretty expensive too, I might add) so it’s clear that they’ve made some inroads into the tastes of the most recent generations. For either reason (well, for me, more the first) — why not give biscotti a try? They are supposed to be hard to make correctly, but I figured I’d give it a whirl. If it didn’t work, I could always use the biscotti materials for a cake crust. As it turns out, they weren’t that difficult to make — I’d say intermediate difficulty due to the many steps — and it does take quite a while to get it all done. Still, it’s worth the effort!
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February 16th, 2010 Academia Chris no comments
I caught this at Sullivan’s blog: Sen. Buttar (UT), who has always struck me as a bit of a nutter, has come up with another one of his great ideas – closing the gap on some of Utah’s state deficit by eliminating the twelfth grade in public education. According to Buttars, funding 12th grade amounts to “spending a whole lot of money for a whole bunch of kids who aren’t getting anything out of that grade.” It’s not entirely clear what his reasoning is here, but one might guess that he thinks that students just don’t take that year very seriously (which is likely true).
There are a lot of reasons why this is a stupid idea, but if this ts the reasoning Butters is using, it strikes me as odd. What exactly does Buttars think would happen to the eleventh grade if the twelfth grade was wiped out? Hmm…let me guess…it might wind up being seen by students the same way the twelfth grade was once seen — as the last year before graduation, and so time to start taking it easy and slacking off. Maybe then we should get rid of eleventh grade?
This reminds me of weeks in college that have days off in them. If Thanksgiving break is W-F, many students stop showing up on M and Tu, seeing it as a “break week”. If the college decides to extend the break to the whole week, thinking that students don’t take that week seriously enough anyway, they don’t show up on Th or F of the previous week.
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February 15th, 2010 Goombah Gourmet Chris 4 comments
So far, I’ve done red sauces, pastas, cheesecakes, cookies, breads and dishes with chicken. It’s clear that something is missing: a red meat dish. To be honest, I’ve been putting this one off, because cooking a red meat dish is a lot more complicated than making a chicken dish. There’s an obvious reason – you just can’t screw chicken up. Well, I guess you could, but you’d have to go out of your way to do it (like fall asleep while it cooks). Red meat, on the other hand – other than a hamburger, that is – is not so hard to screw up at all. One wrong turn and it’s all over, you’ve botched the whole meal and then it’s time to eat cereal for dinner.
As it stands, I’ve been feeling some confidence after making all those things I listed above, and doing them pretty well too (I’m Goombah horn tooting). So I felt finally ready to make the plunge to red meat. On top of that, I was ready to just kick it up 20 notches to filet mignon beef, which is pretty damn expensive. This way, if I screwed it up it would be a royal disaster. After all, you don’t toss away filet like you throw a burnt hamburger patty away. Or maybe Gus would wind up one happy German Shepherd.
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February 7th, 2010 Goombah Gourmet Chris 2 comments
The Goombah Gourmet did a bit too much this week (2 cheesecakes, 120 anisette cookies), so I wanted to chill a bit on Sunday and not make anything particularly difficult. Well, that and the fact that I knew I wanted to give bread another whirl, and bread is a pain to do, so I really didn’t want a high-prep-time dinner. So I gave Christie three choices: (a) Chicken in Lemon Sauce, (b) White Chicken Cacciatore, or (c) Shell Steak with Bell Peppers in Beer Sauce. My taste buds were actually directed straight at (c), but my low level of energy was hoping for (b). Luckily, Christie chose (b), even as I pushed (a) and (c) as more interesting food choices. So (b) it was. I didn’t have my hopes up for a great meal this time, but I was intrigued by the non-typical way this dish (from the Arthur Avenue cookbook) was made. It was actually surprisingly good.
UPDATE: Presentation: 9, Goombaliciousness, 8.5
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February 6th, 2010 China Chris 3 comments
A colleague at work sent me this NYT article, “Dog Days in China,” the other day. He was confused about the recent banning of eating dog on the mainland but the continuing acceptability of eating any other kind of meat. Why, he wanted to know, would dog be out of the question but not pig? (This is the question of the author of the piece as well). It’s a good question, so I’ll put it to you. Whereas arguments can easily be put forward for vegetarianism, can you think of an argument (a decent one) that suggests that eating certain animals is wrong whereas eating other ones is okay? Of course, leave out the clear cases where a religious component is part of the story (like cows in India). Instead, I’m curious if anyone can think of a secular argument.
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February 6th, 2010 Goombah Gourmet Chris no comments
The kitchen of an Italian grandmother typically smells like one of two things: tomato sauce or anise. Or maybe both, or maybe one (sauce) followed by another (anise). It’s just a fact. Any Italian knows it. When you smell anise in a cookie, you’re immediately transported back to that kitchen from your youth and back to those soft cake-like cookies that nonna used to make — which is exactly why I had to fire up the Kitchen-Aid and make a batch of those cookies of love.
UPDATE: Presentation: 9, Goombaliciousness: 9
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January 26th, 2010 Politics Chris 3 comments
If you’re like me, you like to keep up on what’s going on in the political world, but a lot of times you just don’t have the time to read all the books required to truly understand some of the wonk-oriented policy disagreements. For me, one of those areas is economics. Is Obama’s stimulus a good thing? Bad thing? Much the argument comes down to a fight between Keynes (it’s good!) and Hayek (it’s bad!) and their outlooks on markets and governments.
I don’t have the time to read their books, but I do want to have an informed viewpoint. When the modern world is so busy, you need simplifying tools that can get the information you need without the need for massive time investment. No, I’m not talking about Wikipedia (though there’s that too). I’m talking about rap. See below.
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January 25th, 2010 Academia Chris no comments
Yglesias has an interesting piece about the race (particularly China’s) to compete with world class Western universities. I can attest to this: I did get the impression when I was teaching in China that Tsinghua (which is arguably one of the best in China), wants to quickly become not just the best in the nation, but a top university in the world. I’m not sure about the state of other Chinese universities, but I think that if becoming world competitive will require attracting international faculty and international students, the Chinese will need to make quite a few improvements to their universities before that happens (in a variety of areas; even at Tsinghua there’s still a sense of “roughing it” that will deter many potential teachers/students). The Yglesias piece is good and provides some decent links.
In one place Yglesias wonders how you would even measure whether a university is any good, and how much should be even taken from the fact that a university can attract world-famous talent. Money quote from Yglesias:
The fact that our very best universities are world-famous and attract talent and interest for all around the globe is nice, but it can lead people to just assume that everything’s fine throughout the sector when the reality is that we actually have no idea.
Surely a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one?
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January 25th, 2010 Goombah Gourmet Chris no comments
I was soundly defeated this weekend by bread-making. It was a sad and pathetic attempt. However, not everything was so bad in the Goombah’s Bakery! As I’ve detailed elsewhere, I had a lot of success recently with New York style cheesecake. There were just a few little issues with it, but I knew I was close to really making an excellent one. So I did it again (to give away – jeez I can’t eat all this) and succeeded. I think I’ve made the perfect cheesecake. I now consider cheesecake pwned. I have scratched another notch into my Kitchen Aid mixer. See below for the proof.
UPDATE: Presentation, 10; Goombaliciousness, 8
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January 25th, 2010 Goombah Gourmet Chris 9 comments
This week I set myself the (overly ambitious) challenge of making some Italian bread. The immediate reason is obvious: the bread made by the local indigenous population — they call it “Italian Bread” too — is really a loaf of Wonder Bread pulled out to look more oval shaped. It’s so damn awful I have a hard time coming up with the right words to describe it. So it’s no surprise that it’s on my Goombah Gourmet list. However, try as I did to reconstruct Italian Bread this weekend, I failed. Miserably. Three times. I have clearly met the enemy in baking bread. I may have gone down in flames this time, but three battles doesn’t decide a war. I’ll be back after I’ve licked my wounds (and read some decent material on baking Italian bread). I outline the disaster below.
RESULTS: Presentation – 2; Goombaliciousness – 3
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January 24th, 2010 Goombah Gourmet Chris 2 comments
I realize that this post was supposed to be about bread. Let’s just say that my bread escapades did not go so well yesterday, so I’ll be returning to that tomorrow after I get another crack at it. In the meantime, on Friday night I made (among other things) chicken parmigiana, and it’s a great Italian meal that needs to be added to the Goombah’s bag of culinary tricks. We’ll talk about the bread thing later on (if I am not soundly defeated again, that is, and then I might just act as though it never happened).
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January 22nd, 2010 Life Chris 7 comments
I just saw this story at CNN about the ethical dilemma of cruise ships stopping in Haiti while in the capital there is such sheer devastation due to the earthquake. The article (and the ethics professor quoted) suggest that there’s no ethical problem, but the reasoning is very clearly utilitarian (cruise ships = money = trickle down effects for Haiti). Anyone have any opinions on this? Trickle down or not, I can assure you I wouldn’t be vacationing in Haiti at the moment. There are other ways to contribute to the trickle down effect there, if that’s your concern.
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