Wordsworth quote

An old post says that I had a Wordsworth quote, but I appear to have deleted it. It went, "rapine, avarice, expense, this is idolatry and these we adore. Plain living and high thinking are no more." I don't know if it's a quote from one of his good poems or his bad poems, but it sounds good to me.

These We Adore would be a good title of a book, even if it's from a bad poem. At worst I think Wordsworth was a little heavy handed.

The bad thing about this is that, well, let me start over. My first car was a 12 year old Lincoln Continental Town Coupé. Someone had to buy it new for 7 or 8 thousand dollars before I could buy it used for 800. By the time I got it new Lincolns were 35 thousand. I don't know what they cost now, but I can find decent used luxury cars for about 25 hundred.

The point is that I don't believe luxury is bad. It is when it's overdone that it becomes evil.

Been watching TV, also...

I saw an episode of America's Test Kitchen yesterday where Chris Kimball said all you need is 25 good recipes and you are a good cook. I decided to find, and maybe modify, some recipes for my own repertoire. I made the following list:

2 soups
1 stew
1 chili
2 breads
1 omelet
1 pasta sauce   
1 curry sauce (maybe)
2 veggie sides
2 potato recipes  
1 gravy
1 casserole
1 roast beef  
1 roast ham
1 chicken
1 pie (complete with crust)
1 cake (and frosting)
1 fish recipe complete with sauce
1 meatball/meatloaf recipe
1 burger
1 sandwich 
1 pancake

Of course the recipes aren't very sophisticated, but they're recipes I can make. I dunno what kind of soups and stew I'll use, but I have some ideas about the chili. Also the potato recipe I haven't seen yet will probably involve baking potatoes first, then mashing them with whatever ingredients I can come up with. Basically, I am trying to add that "baked potato" flavor to mashed potatoes. The casserole recipe should be mostly veggies, and I should also be able to make a vegetarian version of it. I tried haggis once, and aside from the gross stuff it tasted good. So maybe I'll come up with a recipe with haggis spices, oats and onions, mixed with beef or chicken. That might be my casserole recipe.

The gravy has to be something unique, something that can double as a sauce for other dishes. The roast beef, ham and chicken need to serve a small party, and be something I can use on venison or lamb. Meatloaf and meatballs are different, but similar enough that the recipes should be compatible. There are a lot of burgers on YouTube, as well as sandwiches. The pancake can come with its own syrup or compote. You should also be able to turn it into waffles by adding some oil. I realize the pie and pie crust, as well as the cake and frosting, are treated as separate recipes in cookbooks and shows, but since they are eaten together I will treat them as one recipe.

There are a lot of recipes on the ATK show that I haven't reviewed yet. I have an 11 year recipe book of their advice I have yet to go through. Also while this list is exactly 25 items long, I will not keep my ultimate list that short. Maybe I'll have 30 or 40 recipes.

There's been 14 or 15 years of America's test kitchen as well as 6 or 7 years of Cook's country (a show with the same crew), so I have a lot of shows to go through. I need to get the cookbooks for all the seasons.

The problem is obvious

I've been watching YouTube again. Always a bad sign...

One thing I hate about videos that purport to tell the world some of the bad things that are going on is that they go and perpetuate those same bad things. This video started by showing luxurious cars and talking about how they are still making them when the rest of us are in the middle of an economic mess. The video never says what the cause or the cure for that mess is.

The cause has usually been 'get rich quick' schemers trying to soak the middle class, but this time I'm not sure that's all there is to it. The important thing is the cure. People need to save money instead of just spending it.

Obviously, the rich have more money to invest, so they are going to invest more of their money than anyone else, as a percentage of their wealth. The solution is for everyone to save more. When I worked at a local thrift shop, run by a church, that offered career training, I noticed a lot of the stuff we received as donations was junk made in China. I distinctly remember an entire box of nutcrackers where every one of them had part broken off. We had no facilities for fabricating new parts so when things like that came in we just threw them away. This stuff wasn't very old and it was already falling apart. Why did people buy this junk? They could have saved a lot of money, literally saved it, by buying stocks and bonds. Read more about my ideas on investing to create jobs on this blog. The post is called The Purpose of Money, Investment Capital. I just typed that whole phrase into Google and it was the first thing that came up. Till then, here's a link to the offending video:

How The Rich Keep Getting Richer: http://youtu.be/3DT-DTQke58