Shawn Mendes & Camila Cabello

The song of the day is I Know What You Did Last Summer by Canadian singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes (Shawn Peter Raul Mendes) and Fifth Harmony’s Cuban-born vocalist Camila Cabello (Karla Camila Cabello Estrabao).

Lauren Alaina

The song of the day is Girl Crush by country artist Lauren Alaina. This song was a #1 hit for country vocal group Little Big Town and was released as a single from their album Pain Killer.

Beyond Mars

I read a review of Louis Friedman’s new book, Human Spaceflight From Mars to the Stars. (Friedman is the executive director emeritus of The Planetary Society, which he co-founded with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray in 1980.)

Friedman is optimistic about human space exploration, but he is quite certain that humans will not travel beyond the orbit of Mars in any significant way.

He says that human space travel beyond Mars is too expensive and is unnecessary; we can send machines to gather data, and virtual reality can give us the illusion that we have made the trip. He also says that space colonies – cities in space orbiting the sun – are impractical and unnecessary, a science-fiction idea that is not in our future.

I was at once reminded of Arthur Clarke’s First Law of Prediction: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

I don’t know what time scale Friedman has in mind. If it’s the next 20 years, then he’s very probably correct. If it’s the next 1000 years, then he’s very probably wrong.

If a human of 300 years ago had been asked about the feasibility of going to the Moon, or of building a city full of skyscrapers, or even of building a network of paved roads like America's interstate highway system, he would surely have thought all of the ideas were far-fetched and unlikely to ever become reality.

Sending humans to the Moon? Not only impossible but completely unnecessary – until the invention of rocket technology and computers made it possible and a space-race made it necessary. A city of skyscrapers? Impossible – until inventions like structural steel, elevators, and electric lighting made it possible. A continent-wide system of paved highways? Impractical and unnecessary (for horses) until mass-production of motor vehicles made paved highways essential.

It’s impossible to predict future technologies and what they may enable humanity to do. It’s impossible to predict what our descendants may want to do or what they may need to do. However, we do know one aspect of the future: some of the things our descendants will do will be, to our eyes, indistinguishable from magic.

Zara Larsson

The song of the day is 2015's Lush Life by Swedish singer-songwriter Zara Larsson.

Barbarossa

The song of the day is Bloodline from the 2013 album Bloodlines by London musician Barbarossa (James Mathé).

Lisa Hannigan

The song of the day is Home from the 2011 album Passenger by Irish singer, songwriter, and musician Lisa Hannigan.

Buffalo Salmon Wings

After reading one of my recent blog posts in which I joked about salmon wings with Buffalo sauce, my friend and fellow blogger CyberDave pointed out that Buffalo salmon and Buffalo salmon wings are real things.

At Epicurious there is a recipe for Buffalo salmon. The recipe uses a salmon fillet that is breaded with panko (Japanese bread crumbs) and baked.

Food Network also has a recipe for Buffalo-style salmon that uses a salmon fillet.

A company called Seabear offers a kit containing a pouch of bite-size nuggets of wild Alaskan salmon in a light panko and flour coating and a separate pouch of Buffalo sauce. The kit is called Wild Salmon Buffalo Wings. Their recipe calls for the salmon nuggets to be cooked on the stovetop. I’ve never tried Buffalo salmon wings but they sure look tasty.

The only thing missing from the picture are the celery sticks.

The Old Skillet

When I was a kid, I usually prepared my own breakfast. Sometimes breakfast was bacon and eggs cooked in a cast iron skillet. There was a grease keeper on the countertop beside the stove. It had a filter to trap cracklings and particles of bacon. With the advent of microwave ovens and Teflon cookware, the cast iron skillet was almost rendered obsolete. It was down but not out. 

Many people have taken to using cast iron skillets again. I recently decided to use my old skillet to cook bacon and eggs again. The bacon doesn’t taste a lot different, but cooking the eggs in bacon grease opens up a whole new world of taste. Actually, it’s an old world of taste. Now my eggs taste the same way they tasted to young me, and to my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. The iron skillet is an antique, but it cooks as well as it did when it was new.

I’ve relearned how to season an iron skillet and what screws up the seasoning. I’ve learned how to clean a pan with salt and when it’s best to just wipe out the inside of the pan.

Teflon and ceramic pans aren’t supposed to be heated past medium heat, but cast iron skillets can be used on high heat (don’t immediately rinse them with cold water – the skillet could warp). Cast iron skillets are extremely durable. At most, you might mess up the seasoning and have to re-season the pan. Not a big deal.

You can fry, bake, and sear in an iron skillet. You can go from the stovetop to the oven to the grill with the same pan. There are many recipes for cast iron skillet meals. For starters, there are 27 recipes at Southern Living, 17 recipes at Rachael Ray, and 10 recipes at Food Network.

And if you’re wondering what you can do with the bacon drippings (assuming you cook bacon), Christy Jordan at Southern Plate has some ideas.

For me, there is something satisfying about cooking in a cast iron skillet. It’s organic, elemental – the opposite of unnatural, artificial. You can use metal utensils when cooking; if you scratch the seasoning, continue cooking and the seasoning will heal by itself. Teflon gives off fumes that are highly toxic to birds. Cast iron does not. Try serving food from a thin Teflon or ceramic pan; the food will be cold before the meal is finished. A cast iron pan stays hot a long time and keeps food warm.

There is one caveat: a cast iron skillet is heavy and its handle will get hot. Use a potholder or oven mitt. If you grab the pan off the stove with a bare hand, only to realize it’s burning you, you could get a burned hand and a broken foot at the same time.

The Month of Meh

I’ve not been very active in the blogosphere lately. The days between Thanksgiving and the New Year are, for me, the Sargasso Sea of the Soul, the Doldrums of the Spirit, the Zone of Apathy in which all of my get-up-and-go has done exactly that: it got-up-and-went. I don’t know where it went, but it left a hole in my psyche – a hole that can only be filled by inserting the proper amount of junk food and excess calories into my diet. And I’ve done that successfully, according to my bathroom scale.

One of the things I do with this extra time is read a lot of news. Some of it is eyebrow-raising. For example, I read that the Food and Drug Administration has approved the sale of genetically modified salmon. Yes, mad scientists have tinkered with salmon DNA and created something unnatural – unnatural in the sense that the fish now have, uh, “features” not found in nature. I think they’ve taken these genetic modifications too far, but no one asked me. These unnatural Franken-fish are not necessarily a bad thing. I hear those same mad scientists are now working on a new Buffalo sauce to go with the new salmon wings.

“Waitress, an order of wings, please.”
“Chicken or salmon?”

Just kidding. I’m pretty sure the new Franken-salmon will not have wings. Nor will they glow in the dark.

Yet.

Anderson East

The song of the day is Only You from the 2015 album Delilah by rhythm and blues/pop musician Anderson East (Michael Cameron Anderson).