Pandemic blog 35: Updates

What’s going on with some of the topics previously covered?

Slimming: The initial weight loss reported slowed down, but hasn’t stopped, even though I started eating take-out from restaurants in July and have been doing so pretty regularly. Now at about 18 pounds below pre-pandemic weight. Why, I wonder? Is it really just the lunch out at work and the snack at the coffeeshop forgone?

Pandemic elections: 100,000 people in Dane County have already returned their absentee ballots for November. The city is setting up “Democracy in the Park” events where voters can turn in their ballots to city pollworkers; Republicans are trying to have those events declared illegal, because (this is me editorializing) they make it easy and convenient for people to vote whose votes they’d rather not see cast. There is a lot of noise about slowness of the mail, but it’s been fast here, and I mailed my ballot in; received by the clerk in just two days. The underlying worry here is that political actors will try to retroactively have legally cast ballots invalidated after Election Day, leaving voters with no recourse. The fact that mailed-in absentees are expected to be predominantly Democratic (only 44,000 ballots returned so far in Crucial Waukesha County) creates an obvious means of attack. I don’t really think that’ll happen but people are thinking about it under their mental breath.

Writing: The book is almost done! A draft is written, I’m going through and revising and putting in more endnotes now. To me it seems completely different from How Not To Be Wrong, while Dr. Mrs. Q says it seems exactly the same, which seems a kind of sweet spot: I can hope the people who liked the other book will like this one, while feeling for myself that I’m not putting out the same product again and again like a hack.

Impossible Meat: We’re still eating a lot of it! I have absolutely learned to read it as meat and no longer think of it as a substitute. But we’ve converged on using it exclusively in sauces; as a burger, it still doesn’t totally satisfy.

Smart Restart: After the big surge with the opening of classes, UW-Madison shut down in-person instruction for two weeks and put the two first-year dorms where cases were concentrated into isolation. The positivity rate on campus has dropped back down to around 1% and the campus outbreak doesn’t seem to have created sustained exponential growth in Madison’s general population; but it does seem to have brought our daily case load back up to where it was months ago, from which it is, again, only very slowly dropping. When R_0 is a little less than 1, even a brief bump up in prevalence can be very expensive in terms of long-term cumulative case numbers. Now we are starting football again. Is that smart? There won’t be any fans in Camp Randall (which means the economic catastrophe for local businesses of a year without a football season is going to happen unblunted.) Then again, there’s something hypocritical about me saying “Hell no, why take the risk” since I’ve been watching and enjoying baseball. The enjoyment of millions of fans actually does have value. MLB, because lots and lots of money is riding on this, has mostly kept its players and employees from suffering outbreaks. The Big Ten can probably do the same — if it cares to. What I worry about is this. By all accounts, in-person teaching hasn’t been spreading COVID either. But when we had in-person teaching, everyone felt things were more normal, and thinking things were more normal, they relaxed their social distancing, and that generated thousands of cases. There was indirect spread. Will football generate the same?

Pandemic blog 27: Impossible Stroganoff

We are down to once every three weeks at Trader Joe’s (I fill two whole carts with stuff, it’s an undertaking) which we supplement with other kinds of food purchases in between. I’m unhappy with the conditions industrial meatpackers are putting their workers in, so I’m picking up meat curbside at Conscious Carnivore, our local meat-from-nearby-farms-you’re-supposed-to-feel-vaguely-OK-about supplier. We get shipments from Imperfect Foods, which I’m a little concerned is some kind of hedge-fund-backed grocery store destruction scheme but helps fill in the gaps. And the really exciting food news is that Impossible Foods, the substitute meat company I learned about from my old math team buddy Mike Eisen, is now delivering!

This stuff is by far the most realistic fake ground beef in existence. We served Impossible cheeseburgers at CJ’s bar mitzvah and a member of the ritual committee was so convinced he was ready to pull the fire alarm and evacuate the shul for de-trayfing. Since I don’t cook milk and meat together in the house, there are a lot of dishes that just don’t happen at home. And one of them — which I’ve been waiting years to make — is my favorite dish from childhood, “hamburger stroganoff.”

This dish comes from Peg Bracken’s protofeminist masterpiece, the I Hate To Cook Book. Is that book forgotten by younger cooks? It’s decidedly out of style. Maybe it was even out of style then; my mom, I always felt, made hamburger stroganoff grudgingly. It involves canned soup. But it is one of the most delicious things imaginable and readers, the Impossible version is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

Here’s Peg Bracken’s obituary, which leads with the famous lines from this famous recipe:

Start cooking those noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

And here’s the recipe itself. If you’re vegetarianizing this, you can just use cream of mushroom soup for the cream of chicken and replace the bouillon with some salt (or veggie stock, if that’s your bag.)

8 ounces Noodles, uncooked
1 cube Beef Bouillon
1 clove Garlic,minced
1/3 cup Onion, chopped
2 tablespoons Cooking oil
1 pound Ground Beef
2 tablespoons Flour
2 teaspoons Salt
1/2 teaspoon Paprika
6 ounces Mushrooms
1 can Cream of Chicken Soup, undiluted
1 cup Sour Cream
1 handful Parsley, chopped

Start cooking those noodles, first dropping a boullion cube into the noodle water.
Brown the garlic, onion, and crumbled beef in the oil.
Add the flour, salt, paprika, and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.
Then add the soup and simmer it–in other words, cook on low flame under boiling point–ten minutes.
Now stir in the sour cream–keeping the heat low, so it won’t curdle–and let it all heat through.
To serve it, pile the noodles on a platter, pile the Stroganoff mix on top of the noodles, and sprinkle chopped parsley around with a lavish hand.