Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

Thai Sticky Rice

I like Thai sticky rice.  I thought it would be easier to make at home than I have discovered it is.

I did buy the right kind of rice.

But I am reluctant to spend any money on a bamboo steamer that I will use three times and then throw into a cabinet and never touch again. 

I am also terrible at deciding I want rice hours in advance, so that it can soak.

Last week, I tried a microwave method I read about, involving putting the dish of rice inside a larger dish of water, so it could steam.  Not great.

I read about a method using a regular steamer insert (which I have) and cheesecloth (which I don't).  Unable to find cheesecloth (I admit I didn't search too hard), I came up with a substitution.  This evening, I will be attempting to steam sticky rice by wrapping it in sterile gauze that my wife took from the hospital. 

Yum.  Maybe it will work.

Game 3 NLCS Preview, or at least a parody of one

Fangraphs just posted a short (two-minute) parody video I made, making fun of baseball announcer cliches in the context of the Cardinals/Brewers NLCS game three tonight.  Check it out.

[Edited to correct: Did I really just type Phillies instead of Cardinals?  I lose some amount of credibility if I can't even remember which teams are playing in the game I am parody previewing...]

James Garfield

One of the best books I've read all year.  Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic, a book about the assassination of President James Garfield.  Here's a sentence no one has ever written before: I am a big James Garfield fan.  I ghost-wrote a book chapter about his assassination back in law school, and did a bunch of reading in order to do that... and discovered that Garfield was a pretty brilliant guy, who might have been a terrific President had he not been shot by a crazy person pretty soon after he took office.  Millard read everything I read, and about ten times more, and has used all of that research to put together a highly compelling, highly readable book.  The medical storyline -- Garfield would almost certainly have lived if he'd been shot in Europe, where Joseph Lister's ideas about keeping wounds clean and sanitizing medical instruments had taken hold in a way they simply hadn't yet in the U.S., and had the doctors simply not inserted their dirty fingers into the bullet hole, repeatedly, he would have been fine -- is probably the most interesting of all, but the entire book is really quite excellent.  I highly recommend it.