To prepare food faster just make it thinner

 

 

Preserved Lemons

 

Preserved lemons are a Middle Eastern food ingredient. A typical recipe like one in the New York Times calls for slicing them part through in quarters lengthwise, as shown above, and packing them with salt in jars. But then you have to plan ahead and wait for an entire month. I never got around to trying that recipe.

 

But then I saw another one in a book from 2023 by Bee Wilson titled The Secret of Cooking. Her recipe instead calls for cutting the lemons paper thin using the slicer disk on a food processor. And they will be ready in a day.

 

 

 

Griddled Flatbreads

 

Many cultures long have quickly cooked flatbreads on griddles, like the corn tortilla shown above. There also are wheat flour tortillas (called piadina in Italy), and Indian chapatis (made from whole-wheat flour). Other grains are used elsewhere. In Brittany there are crepes made from buckwheat. In Scotland there are oatcakes. On the Mediterranean coast there are chickpea flour cakes called Socca in Nice. And In Norway there is lefse made with potatoes.

 

 

 

 

Schnitzel and its cousins

 

A common entrée is meat pounded thin, breaded, and fried. The classic Austrian one from veal is a Wiener schnitzel. The Israeli variant uses turkey. The Texas beef version is a Chicken-Fried Steak. The midwestern Pork Tenderloin is a deep-fried version served as a sandwich. And the chicken version is called a paillard.    

 

Images of cut and salted lemons, a tortilla, and schnitzel all came from Wikimedia Commons.  

 

Listen to the cadence of your speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary tells us that:

 

“A cadence is a rhythm, or a flow of words or music, in a sequence that is regular (or steady as it were). But lest we be mistaken, cadence also lends its meaning to the sounds of Mother Nature (such as birdsong) to be sure. Cadence comes from the Middle English borrowed from Medieval Latin’s own cadentia, a lovely word that means ‘rhythm in verse.’ “

 

There is an excellent discussion of it in the 2017 book by Sam Leith titled Write to the Point – A master class on the fundamentals of writing for any purpose. Beginning on page 151 he says:

 

“Even silent reading, both neuroscience and experience tell us, is an auditory experience. When we talk about cadence in prose we’re talking about the equivalent of meter in poetry; the sounds of the words. When we say something is ‘well written,’ a very large part of that will be to do with how it sounds. Cadence is prose rhythm. And it’s a hugely important aspect of writing, but it’s also one of the hardest ones to discuss in a formal way.

 

Prose doesn’t scan in the metronomic way that traditional verse does. The basic iambic beat of English verse is de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum and if you write like that in prose it would sound ridiculous. But prose does have its pauses and its rushes and its arpeggios. Punctuation, as I discussed in my chapters on the subject earlier, has its origin as a means of marking pauses in reading out loud – and that remains part of what it does.

 

So where you put the commas, where you break sentences, whether you use polysyllables or short words … all will have an effect on the ease and fluency of reading. A good writer doesn’t just have a brain; he or she has an ear. The more you read and the more you write, the better that ear will get. A good sentence will come to feel right.

 

But – as cannot be said too often – that ear needs training. Experienced composers can read music and ‘hear’ the sounds in their heads. Experienced writers, likewise. But many, many very experienced writers still use a simple technique for, as it were, double-checking. They read what they have written out loud. If you have time to do so once you’ve completed a draft, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

 

An awkward separation of subject and verb, for instance, becomes particularly stark when read aloud: you’ll find your voice holding off as your brain waits for the second shoe to drop. You may even find – if there are enough subordinate clauses getting in the way of the main event; if, as in this sentence, there’s a great long digression separating the word ‘find’ from the question of what it is that you’re eventually going to find – that you run out of breath trying to get through the wretched thing.

 

Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan, has said: ‘Once you’ve finished a first draft of your speech … stand up and read it aloud. Where you falter, alter.’ That applies especially to speeches of course: In that case you’re trying to produce something that’s hard to stumble over when spoken aloud. Tongue twisters such as ‘red lorry, yellow lorry’ are easier on the page than in the mouth. But its also good advice to the prose writer. There is a developmental connection between reading aloud and reading silently – and a neurological one, too.”

 

The image was adapted from one at Openclipart.

 

Does 95% of the population experience public speaking fear?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course not! Back on December 20, 2016 I blogged about Bursting the overblown claim that 95% of Americans fear public speaking at some level. But I just found a web page on Presentation Skills from Blazing Ginger with a paragraph on Their Fearless Presentations Two-Day Public Speaking Course where the third sentence claims:

 

“With 95% of the population experiencing public speaking fear, our certified coaches provide personalized guidance to eliminate this anxiety.”

 

On October 24, 2024 I blogged about how In the tenth Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2024, public speaking was only ranked #59 of 85 fears at 29.0%. Blazing Ginger’s claimed 95% is too high by a factor of three. As usual, the fears were listed as the sum for Very Afraid and Afraid. If we add the 36.6% for Slightly Afraid, we get a total of 65.7%, which is still about thirty percent below their quoted 95% for fear of public speaking.

 

Where is Blazing Ginger located? They are in metro Los Angeles, so they are less the fifty miles from Orange, where Chapman University is.

 

The image was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.