Month: January 2026

Avoiding Viruses

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I was at a meeting here in Oakland the other day, one of those wonderful meetings about projects we have around here. There was food – good food, too, not just the usual pizza – and people who had critical things to say were careful in their phrasing.

(As a person who has developed a hatred of meetings after a lifetime of going to them, I am often pleasantly surprised by how good our meetings are in Oakland.)

But there was one thing: I had brought a CO2 meter, because I knew we would be meeting in a basement room, and over the course of the meeting it began to register not just high, but seriously high. I put on a mask, but finally decided to say something.

People were a little surprised, but we opened another door, and the reading dropped back into the good range.

And I realized that very few people are truly aware of the need for indoor air quality, even activists, and even people who are careful to mask in larger gatherings or on airplanes.

Now I’m not measuring CO2 for its own sake – though the higher the CO2 level in a room, the more it makes you drowsy and slows down your brain processing during the time you’re in that space – but as a proxy for the risk of getting Covid or another respiratory virus.

Those viruses are spread in the air, so if you’re sick and exhale – or cough or sneeze – you put the virus into the air. When CO2 levels get above 800, we’re breathing in each other’s lung exhalations, so if one person is sick, we’re all going to be exposed.

There are things you can do about this.

The simplest one is to put more air in the room – open a window or a door, if they are available in that space.

It is possible to put in a heating and air conditioning system that includes good ventilation and also has a filtration system that takes viruses and other particles out of the air. It’s not particularly new technology and if you’re putting in an overall system, it’s not all that expensive.

But it is a lot more expensive than doing nothing, so very few places have done it as a retrofit.

So opening the windows or doors is still the default most places.

There is something cheap and practical you can do in buildings that aren’t being retrofitted and don’t have much access to outside air: you can get an air filter. In fact, if money is a real issue, you can build one cheaply using a box fan and MERV 13 filters. Continue reading “Avoiding Viruses”…

Reprint: The Joy of Mindful Reading

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Deep reading can boost your critical thinking and help you resist misinformation – here’s how to build the skill

Just slowing down gives you time to question and reflect.
Morsa Images/DigitalVision via Getty Images

JT Torres, Washington and Lee University and Jeff Saerys-Foy, Quinnipiac University

The average American checks their phone over 140 times a day, clocking an average of 4.5 hours of daily use, with 57% of people admitting they’re “addicted” to their phone. Tech companies, influencers and other content creators compete for all that attention, which has incentivized the rise of misinformation.

Considering this challenging information landscape, strong critical reading skills are as relevant and necessary as they’ve ever been.

Unfortunately, literacy continues to be a serious concern. Reading comprehension scores have continued to decline. The majority of Gen Z parents are not reading aloud to their young children because they view it as a chore. Many college students cannot make it through an entire book.

With their endless scrolling and easy reposting and sharing of content, social media platforms are designed to encourage passive engagement that people use to relieve boredom and escape stress.

As a cognitive scientist and a literacy expert, we research the ways people process information through reading. Based on our work, we believe that deep reading can be an effective way to counter misinformation as well as reduce stress and loneliness. It can be tough to go deeper than a speedy skim, but there are strategies you can use to strengthen important reading skills.

woman sits on end of bed holding head in hand while looking at phone
Counterintuitively, social media can make you feel more bored and lonely.
Dmitrii Marchenko/Moment via Getty Images
Deep reading versus doomscrolling

People use smartphones and social media for a variety of reasons, such as to relieve boredom, seek attention, make connections and share news. The infinite amount of information available at your fingertips can lead to information overload, interfering with how you pay attention and make decisions. Research from cognitive science helps to explain how scrolling trains your brain to think passively.

To keep people engaged, social media algorithms feed people content similar to what they’ve already engaged with, reinforcing users’ beliefs with similar posts. Repeated exposure to information increases its believability, especially if different sources repeat the information, an effect known as illusory truth.

Deep reading, on the other hand, refers to the intentional process of engaging with information in critical, analytical and empathetic ways. It involves making inferences, drawing connections, engaging with different perspectives and questioning possible interpretations.

Deep reading does require effort. It can trigger negative feelings like irritation or confusion, and it can very often feel unpleasant. The important question, then: Why would anyone choose the hard work of deep reading when they can just scroll and skim?

Motivating mental effort

Mindless scrolling may come with unintended consequences. Smartphone and social media use is associated with increased boredom and loneliness. And doomscrolling is related to higher levels of existential anxiety and misanthropy.

In contrast, attention and effort, despite being exhausting, can deepen your sense of purpose and strengthen social connection. People also feel motivated to complete tasks that help them pursue personal goals, especially when these tasks are recognized by others. For these reasons, sharing books may be one tool to promote deep reading.

One example is a teacher who guides students through longer texts, like novels, paired with active discussions about the books to reinforce comprehension and interpretation. While the debate over the ongoing practice of assigning excerpts over full books in schools continues, evidence does suggest that sustained reading in social settings can promote lifelong enjoyment in reading.

With social connection in mind, social media can actually be used as a positive tool. BookTok is a popular online community of people who use TikTok to discuss and recommend books. Fans post in-depth analyses of “K-Pop Demon Hunters” and other movies or shows, demonstrating that close analysis still has a place in the endless scroll of social media.

three people laughing together at a table, with books open in front of them
Talking about what you’ve read can add a social dimension to what can be a solitary activity.
Alfonso Soler/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Slowing yourself down to read deeply

There are steps you can take to meaningfully engage with the constant stream of information you encounter. Of course, this process can be taxing, and people only have so much effort and attention to expend. It’s important to both recognize your limited cognitive resources and be intentional about how you direct those resources.

Simply being aware of how digital reading practices shape your brain can encourage new attitudes and habits toward how you consume information. Just pausing can reduce susceptibility to misinformation. Taking a few extra seconds to consciously judge information can counteract illusory truth, indicating that intentionally slowing down even just a bit can be beneficial.

Reading deeply means being able to intentionally choose when to read at different speeds, slowing down as needed to wrestle with difficult passages, savor striking prose, critically evaluate information, and reflect on the meaning of a text. It involves entering into a dialogue with the text rather than gleaning information.

Awareness does not mean that you never doomscroll at the end of a long day. But it does mean becoming conscious of the need to also stick with a single text more frequently and to engage with different perspectives.

You can start small, perhaps with poems, short stories or essays, before moving up to longer texts. Partner with a friend or family member and set a goal to read a full-length novel or nonfiction book. Accomplish that goal in small chunks, such as reading one chapter a day and discussing what you read with your reading buddy. Practicing deep reading, such as reading novels, can open you up to new perspectives and ideas that you can explore in conversation with others, in person or even on TikTok.The Conversation

JT Torres, Director of the Harte Center for Teaching and Learning, Washington and Lee University and Jeff Saerys-Foy, Associate Professor of Psychology, Quinnipiac University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Regency Comfort

personby Gillian Polack
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This week, we all need a distraction. Too much bad stuff is too close to home for too many of us.

Food is a fine distraction and a bunch of people in my vicinity are talking about Jane Austen and about Bridgerton, sometimes in the same sentence but mostly in quite different conversations. I happen to have some well-tested recipes from events past. I actually have several cookbooks worth of recipes from Jane Austen’s family and from the south of England at precisely the right time, but the ones I’m giving here are tested and are delicious. They are, in fact, from a cookbook I wrote many, many years ago, when I was younger and more charming. They are in Australian English and I’m quite happy to translate if translation is needed. One dish is for summer and one for winter, for obvious reasons.

I hope these dishes improve your week.

Ice-cream

Ingredients:

Twelve ripe apricots
375 g icing sugar
600 ml cream


Method:

Pulp apricots. Blend with icing sugar and cream. Freeze it then mould it. Keep frozen until ready to serve.

 

Moonshine Pudding

Ingredients:

A loaf of thinly sliced bread
Butter
Currants
Glacé cherries
Candied pineapple
Other glacé fruit900 ml cream
6 egg yolks
½ nutmeg (grated)
Sugar

Method:

Layer the bottom of a baking dish with bread and butter. Add a layer of currants and candied fruit. Add another layer of butter, then more candied fruit. Continue until the dish is full.

Mix cream, egg yolks, nutmeg, and sugar. Pour the mixture on the pudding. Bake it in a moderate oven for three quarters of an hour.

And, if things get too bad, have this for breakfast and then go back to sleep:

Windsor Syllabub

Ingredients:

1 bottle of sweet sherry (750 ml)
6 dessert spoons sugar (or thereabouts)
1 ½ teaspoons nutmeg
1 teaspoon of cloves

Whisk

Add 1.200 l milk and 300 ml cream (thick, but not thickened).

Mix well and serve.

Stop Sharing “AI” Slop!

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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There’s a deluge of “AI”-generated long-form stories, usually accompanied by “AI”-generated pictures, on Facebook. Many of them are clearly made-up feel-good stories about someone doing something unusual and kind for someone else.

They’re easily identified – most start with a similar introduction about how the person never did this before and then something about them, usually including their age, which is often in the 70s – but people still persist in sharing them. And someone always points out in the comments that this particular piece is “AI.”

Actually, the fact that it was written by the predictive software labeled as AI isn’t the major problem here. This crap is a problem regardless of whether it’s generated by software or by some badly paid schmuck trying to cobble together a living.

The stories are presented as if they are true, but they aren’t. They detract both from fiction and from true stories about humans doing something good. And they are put in front of us on social media to keep us from engaging with our friends there.

Another thing I see regularly are supposed biographies of people and other supposedly historical stories presented in a clickbait way – “They thought she was just a little old lady, but then she did this and wowed everyone.” These are often about real people.

Some of the facts are reasonably accurate, but the take is not usually the way things happened. The most recent one I’ve seen has been about Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. I’m pretty sure these are fake pages with pieces by “AI.” They’re certainly not trustworthy, but they’re even more likely to be shared because they look factual.

When someone shares these things because they want them to be true – and I think that’s why most people share them – they are continuing Facebook’s relentless push to make everything in our lives completely false.

It’s pretty clear that the broligarch crowd thinks the rest of us are NPCs and that nothing we do or say really matters. I don’t think it occurred to the people developing social media that we ordinary folks like having a tool that enables us to keep in touch with our friends; they were making something to gather data on us. Continue reading “Stop Sharing “AI” Slop!”…

Miss Vickers Does Not Regret

personby Madeleine Robins
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This week got away from me (or I thought it was last week, or something. In these times, who knows?). So here is a post from a few years ago, from my website. I still love Ann Vickers.

I love the work of Sinclair Lewis.  Even though I know better. Even when his prose is didactic and braying and he can’t make up his mind who he most disdains: country folk, city folk, religious folk, doctors, lawyers, academics, politicians. Ever since high school I have felt like I needed to apologize, maybe even join a 12-step program, for my fascination with Lewis. And yet fascinated I am.

Why apologize? Lewis is respectable, albeit not much in fashion these days. He gave us the terms “Main Street” and “Babbit.” He won a Nobel Prize for Literature. He was passionate and passionately observant.  He had a sharp ear for dialect, for the self-congratulating boosterism of early 20th century America, for the moral compromises that even his most heroic characters (I’m thinking of Martin Arrowsmith in particular) find themselves making. And his portrait of America in the toils of a fascist take over, It Can’t Happen Here, is dated, folksy, and scary as hell. Every time I have found myself thinking of an incoming politician I distrust, “Hey, it’s only a few years, what damage can he really do?” It Can’t Happen Hereswims before my eyes.

Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street and Babbit and Elmer Gantry and Arrowsmith, all of which I love. But my favorite of his books is one that no one I know has ever heard of: Ann Vickers. It’s not that Ann is Lewis’s only heroine. Carol Kennicott of Main Street was his first; and he’s got some remarkable women in Elmer Gantryand Arrowsmith (I love Martin Arrowsmith’s wife Leora; I don’t think he really deserved her, and I’m not sure Lewis did either). But Ann Vickers…

It’s a book that follows Ann from tomboy to Sunday School teacher, to college, to work; she stumbles into a career that works for her, becomes successful–and on the way manages to make mistakes, build a whole life for herself, love the wrong men. Ann is smart but not brilliant; stubborn and strong but not unbreakable; she’s got a powerful moral center but doesn’t always have the strength or direction to change things, but when she does, she raises Hell. And she doesn’t have a plan, not really–she acts sometimes before she considers, and she sometimes wanders onto the easiest course. I found Ann Vickers immensely comforting when I first found it, because when I was in college I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do with my life, and Ann Vickers suggested that I’d figure it out in time.

Reviewers loathed Ann Vickers when it was published in 1933.  Not only does Ann have an affair with a soldier, but she becomes pregnant (and the guy drops her…did I say she loves the wrong men?).  And has an abortion, performed by a doctor who essentially says I hate abortion, but hate even more what the society we live in would do to Ann as an unmarried mother.  The abortion has an effect on Ann–she imagines the child she might have had, even (rather revoltingly) names her “Pride”–but it doesn’t stop her.  She isn’t punished.  Consider how that went over in 1933.  She goes on to be successful–very successful–in her career.  She has an affair with a married man, marries herself, has a child…and at a point when it seems like her world is falling apart (the man she marries is a manipulative creep, the man she loves has been arrested for corruption which might spill over into her work) she finds the strength we’ve seen in her all along.

She doesn’t apologize.  She’s a tremendously human person.  Where Carol Kennicott of Main Street ends the book at a standoff with her husband and her life in the tiny city of Gopher Prairie, the Ann Vickers Lewis leaves us with at the end of the book is heroic–The Woman, as Lewis styles her. Lewis can get a little icky when he’s moved or lyrical–he’s much better when he’s angry, pointing out hypocrisy.  But I can forgive his style for love of Ann.

Golden threads and weirdness and Australia.

personby Gillian Polack
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I haven’t forgotten that I was going to introduce tsedakah last week. Stuff happens. And then more stuff happens. Much of the stuff has links to matters Jewish.

First we had the Bondi murders, and then a major literary conference fell to bits largely because of internal clashes about ethics. These internal clashes became a national mess. And now, Parliament’s back early and we had so many kind words about those lost at Bondi, and a national day of mourning later in the week and I think the whole country is confused. The latest political opinion poll suggests this. A far right party is coming out of the shadows and making one of the two largest parties in the country scared. The far left has most of its old vote, but not all. And our prime minister has lost most of his personal support: if Labor want a safe election next time, they might need to change their leadership. Or not. Labor is stubborn and full of factions.

All this pales compared with what’s happening in the Middle East, in Iran, in the US, and even in the UK. But it’s our mess, and we must handle it. One thing I would like to see us return to is civil society. Discussions and analyses rather than street marches.

Why? The big Sydney Harbour Bridge march last year had a lot of wonderful people doing what they thought was the right thing. Marching alongside them in support of Gazans were the Bondi shooters, and the rather antisemitic writer who upset the applecart in Adelaide and led to one of the most important writers’ festivals in the country being cancelled. Marching alongside this writer was almost everyone I’ve seen who is loudly and opinionatedly antisemitic. Many of these individuals were grouped near a guy holding a picture of Khomeini. I don’t know if it was a photo op, or if all these people actually work together, but the cluster of them in the most famous photo of the march indicates a cluster of problems.

It’s going to be difficult to roll back the performative and to return to the Aussie politics I used to know. I’m not connected in the way I used to be. I was pushed out of the behind-the-scenes stuff through being too Jewish and too ill. Australia admires health. It also has this really stupid habit of sweeping people who belong but should not be heard under the front stairs.

Why am I thinking of front stairs?

I’m back in the Middle Ages this week and ought to be talking about foodways, but have been focused on trying to understand our current very strange politics. What happens when the Middle Ages is there and I try to pretend it isn’t? Literary references happen, most frequently.

The boy under the stairs was Saint Alexis being holy. I’m probably under the stairs, but being sarcastic. The sarcasm means that old friends and new sneak in to join me, and we watch the goings on and are surprised at how people we know to be intelligent get caught up in performance and leave a goodly portion of their intellect behind.

Tsedekah is much nicer, but must wait until life is less exciting.

Just for the record, I could have gone to Parliament House and heard all the sorrowful speeches today. Instead, I watched the second last season of Stranger Things and I did some work and filled in all kinds of questionnaires. I decided it was not wise to hear those who ought to have sorted out the hate when it was straightforward being terribly sorry at all the murders. All those people should still be alive. Synagogues and mosques should not be burning. And all the time we spend trying to find that bolted horse could have been spent in doing so many things that Australia needed.

It will be Purim soon and gifts to two charities are traditional for this festival. I’ve chosen two that are important to me. It’s early, but all this thought led me to think what I could do. One charity gives reading to children. Those children are very rural and living on the land of their ancestors. They do so much better when they have books that concern themselves and are written by people they know in the language they speak. The other is for OzHarvest, which helped me out when I was under the poverty line. It rescues food and makes sure that food reaches people who don’t have the money to buy it.

Maybe around Purim will be an appropriate time to explain why the books are more Jewish as a gift than the food. Not more Jewish. I’m explaining badly. Ranked more highly as a type of gift. You’ll have to wait until March for the explanation.

Tomorrow is research-for-writing. I am interviewing a group of Jewish teenagers for a novel. A rather special novel, and one that I was not expecting to write. It’s not a guaranteed publication, but it’s a guaranteed “I’d love to see this if you’d consider writing it.” It’s the kind of book I’ve been saying we need for the last 20 years, one where Jewish Australia is shown as the driver of a story about Jewish Australians. The US has many YA novels that do just this for Jewish readers, but Australia, far less so.

I’m also finishing a short story where the King of Demons meets a very English vampire in Sydney. I have other fiction happening, including a novel emerging later in the year, but this week everything is Jewish.

The more hate there is, the more I write Jewish stories and Jewish history. Hate has reinforced my Jewishness ever since I was a child. When I was accused of eating baby’s blood in unleavened bread (in primary school), I taught the accusers basic kashruth. These are the type of stories I always tell.

What I don’t always tell is the reason I learned the Grace After Meals (the long one, all in Hebrew). I was so annoyed with several bigots and I decided I would say it every single lunchtime until the haters stopped bugging me. I kept saying it even after they stopped bugging me. Also they would have stopped bugging me anyhow, but I didn’t know this until it happened.

They didn’t stop because I could babble in Hebrew. They stopped because I became the high school student everyone else needed to ask questions of, especially in the lead up to exams. I could teach and I remembered everything teachers’ said and I understood it all. This gave me a place to belong, a role that was so very much mine. After I put the siddur away, someone would sit next to me and ask “Gillian, do you remember the calculus from yesterday?” or, a couple of years later, “Gillian, tell me about this piece of Chaucer.”

What most Jewish Australians have been pushed out of are those places we belong in the wider community. Since Australia is so secular, this is rather more important than it looks. Changing definitions, not listening to our voices, not publishing our books, telling us we have to leave our home country because we’re Jewish, accusing us of all kinds of impossible crimes… this all smudges together and makes an everyday that’s very difficult to handle.

Every single Australian organisation that still accepts me as Gillian (right now, my professional Medieval one, the Tolkien folks, and the Perth science fiction convention) gives me a golden thread to hold and to guide me through this labyrinth. Every single one that cuts off that thread (more than one writers’ organisation), leaves me stumbling. I find my balance within Jewish Australian culture, because that’s the place where my identity is not questioned.

As has been said so many times about Australia, we’re a weird mob. This is just another facet of that weirdness.

Outrage at the Outrageous

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Back when I was a kid, the idea that any kind of authority could stop a person and demand their papers was considered outrageous, the sort of thing that happened in “bad” countries, not in the USA.

I was an Anglo kid, of course – Anglo in the Texas sense of being white and not Mexican American. Black people knew better as did Mexican Americans, including those whose families had lived north of the Rio Grande since before Anglo settlement in Texas in the early 1800s.

These days I know enough history to understand the amount of racial privilege packed into my outrage. Our history is littered with stories of people forced again and again to prove their right to exist while others are accepted even when they’re doing harm.

But I still feel that outrage on behalf of all the persons being harassed by trumped-up semi-cops right now. And I would get very angry if someone asked me for my papers.

I mean, I still get mad every time I’m driving near the Mexican border and have to stop at one of the border patrol stations that are inland from the actual border.

Not that I ever have any problem there. I’m very obviously Anglo and dealing with cops brings out my Anglo Texan accent. But it still pisses me off in a deeply personal way, and not just because I’ve noticed at those places that people whose skin is a little darker than mine end up spending a lot more time answering questions.

In his January 15 issue of his Law Dork newsletter, Chris Giedner reports that the awful woman who is running our Department of Homeland Security (an agency whose very name evokes Nazi Germany in my mind and has since the right wing came up with it after September 11) says anyone in the vicinity of an ICE operation can expect to have to prove their identity.

And of course, even proofs of identity don’t work if they want to abuse you. Or shoot you.

It is reported that a couple of the thugs doing these raids have said to people after the murder of Renee Good, “Didn’t you learn your lesson?” Continue reading “Outrage at the Outrageous”…

Summer

personby Gillian Polack
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I have two draft posts, lurking. They’re serious. Very serious. Full of the stuff of the moment. Half my day is spent fighting against hate, and those posts are about different facets of that.

I need a break. You need a break. We all need a break.

This is the perfect day for a break. It’s only 33 degrees C outside! And there’s only mild bushfire smoke! Positively salubrious. Also, someone has replaced the flag on the Iranian embassy (which is just a few miles from where I live) with the flag of the rebellion.

Let me give you an update on some of my 2026. It might be quite busy. I have 2 books to find homes for, novels emerging from the difficult period, short stories and essays emerging from the difficult period… and a conference the weekend after next where I get to talk about food and Tolkien. I have a meeting with an organiser to introduce them to the types of Jewish writing in Australia so that they can consider them for their annual programme and I have been tentatively approached about possible actual paid work.

This gives me hope.

I’ll let you know about the books and chapters and short stories as they appear. And now I go to consider how Sam Gamgee adoring potatoes is actually a Really Important piece of worldbuilding.

We Got Cats!

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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These are the times that try human souls.

I know that’s not how Thomas Paine said it – he wrote “men’s souls” of course. That’s usually excused by the explanation that “men” used that way includes all of us, but – not to disrespect Paine, who was a force for good in the Revolution – it really means that no one considered the thoughts, or even the souls, of women important.

At the moment, I am angry and depressed over the murder of a woman by an agent of an over-funded federal police agency that shouldn’t even exist, by the various actions against the people of Venezuela, by the way surveillance tech is creeping into all of our lives, and by the efforts (and not just by the regime controlling our federal government, but by local utilities) to slow walk renewable energy and keep polluting.

That’s just the short list for this morning. There are many other things I’m mad about.

However, I interrupt this listing of horrors for an important announcement:

We got cats!

Meet Shadow (female dark gray) and Piper (male gray tabby), our new beloved and chaotic housemates.

A dark gray cat stands protectively over a sleeping gray tabby.

Continue reading “We Got Cats!”…

Making and Tools

personby Madeleine Robins
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8 inch three tier chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, decorated with torn gold paper in the center of the top.
Birthday cake made for Chaz Brenchley. Chocolate cake with black-cocoa frosting.

I like to make things. In particular, I like to cook (in very particular, I like to bake). There are other things I do when the spirit takes me: bead, sew, very occasionally, knit. And write. And for all of these things making is rendered easier, not to say better, with the right tools. 

I began to think about this after seeing a clip on the internet where someone was asking “what is your favorite kitchen utensil.” And at least one of the people who was asked the question drew a total blank. “Who has a favorite kitchen utensil? Like, a spoon or something?” I can only assume that this person doesn’t cook, and regards the kitchen as a sinister place where wine glasses and bottled water are kept.

My initial problem with the question was kind of the opposite. Choose my favorite utensil? Outrageous: they’re all my favorites (and I don’t want to hurt my round Dutch oven’s feelings by preferring the oval Dutch oven, clearly). But as I was working in the kitchen this weekend I realized that, for certain purposes, I do have favorites, and they’re not unreasonable.

This weekend I made a cake for Chaz Brenchley’s birthday. Chaz, if you don’t already know, is a wonderful British writer of mysteries and fantasy (also writing as Ben Macallan and Daniel Fox), who married the lovely Karen Williams (now Brenchley) here in California and moved to the States. Usually when I visit Chaz and Karen I bring some baked goods, because it’s an excuse to bake without having the products in my own house. But a birthday requires something special and cake-like. And Chaz (unlike the man I married) does not turn up his nose at chocolate. So a chocolate cake it was, with dark chocolate frosting.

Rectangular stainless steel electronic scale, and folded instant-read thermometer.It was as I was making the cake that I realized I do have some very favorite kitchen tools: my instant-read thermometer, my kitchen scale, my decorating turntable, and my cake lifter. The utility of the instant-read thermometer is pretty obvious: no matter if you’re making fudge or rib roast, being able to  know what the temperature of the object is can be crucial. When I bake bread I can be misled as to the doneness by the golden color of the loaf, but my instant-read thermometer will tell me the truth about the interior. If I’m making filling for a cake, the instant read thermometer will keep me from turning the it into something stodgy and unlovely. I use my instant read thermometer daily.

Same goes with my kitchen scale. Particularly for baking. When I was a young, enthusiastic baker, I thought the point was to jam as much ingredients into a measuring cup as possible. More is better, right? Except that the variation between jamming all the flour you can into a measure, and sprinkling flour into the measure and wiping off the extra with the edge of a knife (the preferred method for bakers in the know) can make an actual difference in the finished quality of the baked good. This matters particularly when you’re following a recipe: to ensure success, you want the amount of flour or baking powder you’re using to match what the recipe developer is using*. It’s not that long ago (the late 1800s, I believe) when there was no standardization in measurements: “take a good knob of butter and add to it a spoonful of sugar” where no specification of what either measurement means? Waaaaaay too loosey-goosey.   Precision is a lovely thing. 

As I was making Chaz’s cake I thought about how comforting that precision is: I may screw things up, but it won’t be by putting in the wrong amount of stuff (it might be by omitting a step, but that’s another essay).

Cake lifter resting on my cake decorating turntable.

Once the cake was baked and ready to be frosted, I got to use two other of my very favorite kitchen tools: my decorating turntable and my cake lifter. Look: did I decorate cakes for years before I even knew these objects existed? You bet. But these are tools that make life easier, and isn’t that a good thing? This weekend I did not, aft first, deploy the turntable: after all, I wasn’t going for a highly finished cake. And the turntable lives in the basement along with a lot of my other cake-making paraphernalia (yes, I have that much. My husband still has his model trains in the basement. Don’t judge me). For a moment I didn’t feel like going downstairs to get the turntable. But as I started applying frosting to the cake I remembered how frustrating it is to have to turn the cake while it’s sitting on the counter, and how messy. I yielded to common sense and brought up the turntable, as well as my cake carrier (yet another indispensable tool for the cake maker). The base of the cake carrier is roughly the same size as the turntable, but if I tried to use it as a cake platter… 1) it would slip right off the turntable, with predictably distressing results, and 2) it would look awful. So I put the cake on the turntable and frosted it. Once all the frosting was in place I could rotate the turntable while scraping the sides, so they look nice and straight and smooth. The right tool for the project, right?

Finally, when I was happy with the cake, I used the cake lifter to lift it off the turntable without damaging the bottom edge of the cake, and deposited it on a platter which could then go in the cake carrier. For years I did the same thing using several standard spatulas, and it just… never worked properly. Fully frosted cakes are heavy, and tend to want to slide off smaller spatulas and… please don’t make me explain further. Things sometimes got ugly

So those are (some) of my favorite kitchen utensils. When I get a new one I frequently have a honeymoon period where every time I use it I am just tickled that I have such a thing. I really am a simple soul. Eventually it just becomes another object in my armamentarium of kitchen tools. But I still appreciate it.

For other things–Oh, I could sing you a paean of praise for my thread burner (for beading) or my Oxford Compact English Dictionary (for writing–also an excellent weight when cheddaring cheese). It is an excellent thing to have a tool that helps you do what you want to do.

So what’s your favorite tool? Or tools? 

 

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*Even now, when recipes on the internet can come from all over the world, the astute baker keeps track of whether a recipe is written in Imperial measurements, grams, etc. It’s all well and good to measure vanilla “with your heart;” baking soda, not so much.