Category Archives: Life

Winter Food 1 — Seafood Chowder

Giving up some of my hard-earned recipes.  Because–I dunno—science, I guess.

Feel free to use these recipes and even to pass them along to your friends, but please remember that everything here (with notable exceptions) is copyrighted by me (Brett Hainley) and is not in the public domain.  If you like it so much, simple courtesy demands that you at least credit me before republishing any of these elsewhere.  I understand that cooking is never done in a vacuum, and that all of my recipes started with someone else’s, but most of these were years in development after I acquired the base, and it’s simple courtesy.  Anyway, wherever I remember where I got a recipe, I plan to credit the source.

So anyway, this first one has been a staple in our house since the first time Donna and I visited her relatives in Nova Scotia, one August (or, as we in Texas call it, Winter).  Donna’s Uncle Eugene and Aunt Audrey invited us over one afternoon for lunch, and he’d prepared an amazing whitefish chowder.  He hinted at some of the ingredients, but it took a couple years of experimenting before I got something that I consider close.  As far as I know, chicken or pork can easily be substituted for the seafood with no other adjustments.

Seafood Chowder

  • 1 qt. Heavy Whipping Cream
  • 1 qt. Whole Milk
  • 1/2 lb. Butter
  • 1 lb. Seafood (I usually go with half a pound of cod or haddock and half a pound of some sort of shellfish)
  • 4-5 medium potatoes, cubed
  • 1 medium yellow onion, chopped
  • salt
  • pepper

Begin heating the milk, cream, and butter together in a large stew pot on low heat.  Milk and cream get kind of pissy if exposed to too much heat too fast, so I usually start and the lowest possible setting on my stove and work my way up to medium over the course of about an hour.  Stir in the seafood, potatoes, and onion.  Keep increasing the heat incrementally until it reaches medium and begins boiling.  Boil on medium heat for about an hour.  Salt and pepper to taste and allow it to cool enough to eat.

Don’t worry if it gets a little grainy looking.  That can happen due to various oils and acids in the fish, but it doesn’t affect the taste and really doesn’t hurt the texture of the soup in your mouth.  This soup reheats well, and is both filling and satisfying, especially on the cold, wet days of early autumn and mid-spring.  Or, as we Texans call it, December.

Casual Friday—Parental Advice

So, years after this comic went up, I was doing a google search (because I am the kind of insecure egotist who googles his own name and stuff) and it had been copy/pasted to a forum under the heading of “Worst Comic Ever”.  I found it odd, because I thought this comic succeeded in what it was meant to do.

If you’ve ever been the adult child hearing “helpful advice” from both of your parents at the same time, thise comic with its crowded balloons should speak to you.  It doesn’t matter what anyone is saying, it’s the moment.

Casual Friday–It’s Funny Because It’s…Wait, That Just Makes It Creepy

We have a bizarre relationship with celebrities of both major and minor status.  Susan Lucci used to tell stories of the many people who would accost her (sometimes physically) on the street for something her character (Erica Kane) did on All My Children.  Erica was a conniving bitch for most of the show, so Ms. Lucci was often subject to the derision of her fanbase.  And, yes, these were her fans who were chiding her for the scripted actions of a soap opera character.  Mind you, Susan Lucci is an actress and had less creative control over her character than an ABC janitor (in the sense that Ms. Lucci was much less likely to walk past a late-night writers’ meeting and suggest a new twist (such as drunken cross-dressing alien competitive cyclists) to break the group writers’ block).

Anyway, my point is that people got very familiar with Erica Kane.  They saw her antics on TV every afternoon for thirty-one years.  If you remember that much of that time took place long before social media, that means they saw more of Lucci playing a character than they saw of their own parents or siblings, so, when they saw her on the street (which became increasingly rare) they felt like they knew her—not actress Susan Lucci, who was just a name to them, but Erica Kane.

I have tasted minor celebrity.  It’s weird (for me) and a little discomforting to be recognized for some of the community theater roles I’ve played, and even more so for my writing.  Luckily, it doesn’t happen often, but on the rare occasions when it does, it’s bizarre.  People have one of two reactions…they either geek out and get really shy and OMYGOD about it (I did this once at a convention when I met much more famous (and talented) comicker Jin Wicked—I’m pretty sure it creeped her out, for which I’m very sorry, because she seemed like a nice kid, and didn’t deserve to have a middle-aged fat guy being all weird at her table), or they immediately assume they’re my best friend because they happened to recognize me (or my name) from a thing I did, once.

Which brings us around to Steve.  Maritza Campos is an actual person who writes and draws the comic, CRFH (nee College Roomies from Hell!).  As I mentioned before, she announced her pregnancy at exactly the time that I was flailing around looking for some excuse to segue from the school to Scot’s house.  I took the opportunity to poke fun at people who believe that just because they know (of) somebody from the Internet, they believe they have some sort of connection.  This is one of those comics that would have been more funny had it been less true.

That being said, Ms. Campos’s comic is still around and still on its original run, so, if consistently funny drama and rapidly-improving art are your thing, you should pop over to CRFH.

The Founders Intended…

Can we all agree to stop using the phrase, “the founders intended”?  Regardless of what you think you know from reading any particular founder’s commentary about the documents that created our nation, you still don’t know that founder’s actual intent at the time the document was drafted and signed, and you don’t have a clue what was going on in the heads of the other thirty-plus signatories.

Not long ago I saw a link to an organization that wants to restructure the House of Representatives because the founders “never intended each Representative to represent hundreds of thousands of people.”  Of course they didn’t.  The guys most responsible for the House of Representatives and its structure wanted a House of Congress that would give heavily populated states the advantage.  If they’d had their way. the US legislature would look like Burning Man (but, one assumes, without the dirty hippies).

There were 56 signers of the Declaration and 39 signers of the Constitution, and both documents had to be ratified by the legislatures in the individual states.  I have safe money it was a giant headache to get all these people to agree on takeout at the end of a long session, much less any single all-encompassing Vision For The Country.  Let’s just look at some of the more notable and see what their history tells us of their motives.

George Washington was a land speculator who was leveraged up to his eyeballs on Ohio Valley properties at exactly the time that Parliament decided that colonial expansion west was off.  He was literally in a position where he would lose everything if the colonies didn’t rebel.

Similarly, John Hancock was a New York merchant who stood to eat a humongous loss when Parliament extended the ban on slavery to the colonies (only a healthy smuggling trade had allowed him to thrive after Parliament banned the slave trade).

Thomas Jefferson was a good man who never had the strength of his own convictions, speaking out regularly against slavery and the privileged classes while maintaining a huge plantation full of slaves and taking advantage of his position and connections from birth.

John Adams’ whole family had just come out on the losing side of an ass-kissing contest for the Governor of New England’s favor, and his cousin, Samuel, was such a failure as a brewer and a businessman that he ran his father’s successful brewery into the ground (remember that when you pop a Sam Adams Lager).

Thomas Paine wasn’t even a founder.  He was the PR-man of the Revolution, and, like all PR men, nobody liked or trusted him.

None of them were Christian, as that faith is practiced today.  The common concept of God at the time was a Deist belief in a God that had set things in motion with some solid rules and then backed off to see what would happen.  You may notice that in the preamble to the Declaration, “God” and “Nature” are used pretty interchangeably.  It wouldn’t be until the 1820’s that the idea of an active, judgmental god would become prevalent.

I could go on.  There is a story for every one of our founders, and each story gives you an insight into their actual motives and desires.  Hamilton (another douchebag New Yorker) wanted a strong central government so he wouldn’t have to eat losses on all the Confederation Script he was holding.  Madison wanted to transport his tobacco and cotton without paying a tax at every state border. And so on.

(I’m not saying that any of these men were bad men—except maybe Hamilton—they were all good men in their way and their time.  I’m saying they were men, and they were no more likely to design a society for the good of all on their own than you or I are.)

It expands from there.  Slave states wanted to count their slaves as people for the purposes of representation (but not for voting rights or human dignity).  Small states wanted equal representation for all states regardless of size.  Poor states wanted to blow off the Revolutionary War debt.  Merchants wanted a single, stable currency.  Nobody got what they wanted.  They negotiated and got what they could live with.

The Bill of Rights wasn’t even part of the original document.  It was tacked on during the ratification process because the framers realized they wouldn’t be able to pass the Constitution without some sort of assurances on paper that the country wouldn’t be subject to the sort of arbitrary authority that had started the whole kerfuffle.  Of twelve Amendments that passed out of the new Congress, only ten passed ratification.  One set an intricate scaling on the size of the House of Representatives, while the other, finally ratified in 1992, demanded that legislatures could not vote themselves a raise, only one for their successors.

Hamilton thought the rights enumerated in the Bill were self-evident.  Jefferson thought they allowed for Government to claim unenumerated rights as those of the Fed (despite the clear statements in the 9th and 10th Amendments that those rights were reserved for the States or the People–turns out he was right). Again, nobody got exactly what they wanted.

But they all got something that they—and we—could live with.  They got it through negotiation and not being married to a philosophy or a principle.  They got it by knowing that whatever they ended up with, it couldn’t be worse than life as a colony or under the Articles.  They got it by being reasonable.

How to Negotiate

If the current shutdown kerfuffle has highlighted anything for me, it’s the regrettable fact that Americans, on the whole, don’t know how to negotiate (also that a large part of our government is unclear on the actual definitions of the terms, “hostage” and “terrorist”).  So, purely as a public service, and not at all to show people how smart I am and they aren’t, here is my free class on how to negotiate.

Before you Start: Be prepared.  You can not walk into a negotiation without knowing three things:  What you want.  What the other side wants.  What you are willing to settle for.

Let’s say you have a cheap supply of bananas, and your neighbor has a cheap supply of cherries.  Now, what you want in this situation is to trade bananas for cherries; surprisingly enough, that’s also what your neighbor wants.  Of course, what you really want is to trade bananas for cherries at a rate that gives you an advantage (say 30 cherries per banana).  Your neighbor would like the same deal, in reverse (straight up 1:1 trade).  So let’s say that you’re willing to settle for a direct trade by weight (about 10 cherries/banana).

At the Beginning:  Ask for slightly more than you want.  If the negotiation goes correctly, you won’t get it.  You won’t get what you want, either, but, if you play it right, you’ll get more than you’re willing to settle for.  I don’t know who, but someone once said that in the ideal negotiation, both sides walk away feeling like they’ve played the other for a sap.  That’s what you’re aiming for.

Give the other guy a chance to make the first offer.  Opening offers set the boundaries of the negotiation, and knowing what he’s asking for gives you an idea of his limits.  If he is reticent, go ahead and give your own opening offer.  The advantage afforded by the knowledge he can glean from your opener is short-lived at best.

Trading Horses:  Be civil.  Counter to the beliefs of a variety of sociopathic self-help gurus, a negotiation is not a war.  It’s not any kind of contest at all.  A negotiation is an attempt to reach a mutually beneficial agreement.  You don’t have to win, you just have to avoid losing.

Be prepared to walk away.  That bottom limit for which you’re willing to settle?  That should be firm.  If the other guy isn’t willing to reach that.  You should calmly stand up, shake his hand, and thank him for his time while regretfully informing him that you can’t make a deal.  If you’re not prepared to walk away, you may as well not bother negotiating, because you will lose.

Be rational.  Don’t get angry; don’t get sad.  Don’t let his anger or tears affect your decision.  Remember, the soul of a negotiation is “I want A for B, but I’m willing to settle for C.”

Disregard irrelevancies.  The only thing that is important in a negotiation is the item of negotiation.  His lovely wife, ailing mother, and five beautiful children are not your problem.  Negotiation is a business matter, and allowing irrelevant concerns to enter into it clouds the water and makes rational bargaining impossible.

Closing the Deal:  When you have both reached a mutual agreement, understand that, no matter how it may look to you, you both got something out of the deal.  Even if he doesn’t know that you pay less for a pound of bananas than he does for a pound of cherries, you don’t know that he has a sweetheart deal trading apples for those bananas at a rate that more than makes up for his apparent loss.

Basically, don’t second-guess yourself or the other guy.  Both of you have hidden motives and knowledge, but as long as neither is dissatisfied with the final deal, then it’s a good deal.  If you later re-examine the deal and think you let it go too easily, remember that the deal fulfilled your requirements at the time it was made, and mark the issues you discovered after the fact as a learning experience.

And always remember:  Negotiation is how civil people resolve a conflict.