Link Roundup, December (late)

Figured I’d try something new and put together an actual list of interesting articles I found this month. Maybe I’ll try to journal my web browsing a bit more in the future.

Web components, and evolving web standards

I ended up reading a bit about Web Components this week, in part because of a blog post that Alex Russell shared, “Lived experience” which captured much of my feeling about current web development and frameworks–a large part of why this website looks the way it does, too.

It also amused me to no end that, as I was reading this article on The New Stack, I realized that the page’s scrolling was really stuttery, and when I went to look in the inspector, a bunch of elements were just getting animated all over the place… even though they were static and in fact empty (since my adblocker was handling it.)

The experience proves the point.

Recipes and ideas

I’ve been meaning to stretch into new ingredients, and finding a shop that stocks long pepper in Seattle (The Souk, in Pike Place Market) gave me a reason to go on a meander last weekend. I haven’t had a chance to cook with it yet, but I’m interested to see what other peppers are like.

Another thing I picked up was curry leaves; I haven’t had many chances to use this ingredient, so I have no idea how it tastes, and I was casting about for a recipe when I came across Max’s Butter Bean Curry. This dish has a lot of similarities to my coconut & kidney bean curry, but with a different base bean – and now I’d love to give it a try, seeing as I have a pound of dry lima beans from Rancho Gordo.

Popover pans

Wow, popover pans are pretty much all nonstick nonsense now. Given that I crank my oven to 400°F and leave the pan in to get plenty hot first, I don’t want to be using anything coated or anything like that. Instead, I want cast iron, or seasoned carbon steel. Much to my chagrin, nobody is currently making either of those, but Wagner did previously make cast iron popover pans, or what they called “gem pans”. I hunted down specifically a Wagner S mold gem pan with deep, tapered cups. The specimen that I found on ebay had significant surface rust but seemingly no integral rust, so it’s salvageable. I’ll need to refurbish it a bit.

The whole idea here is to preheat the molds up to full oven temp, grease the individual wells, then put just enough batter in so that it can inflate up the sides of the pan, same way a “Dutch Baby” or pannekoeken does. The upside to a popover pan versus a muffin tin is that the deep wells and steep sides of the popover pan induce the popovers to rise further than muffins usually should, since their ideal shape involves spilling over the sides. Popovers should rise up, but not out of a tin.

Much to my surprise on Christmas day, the Yorkshire Pudding recipe I used was more or less identical to my just-linked recipe, with the additional requirement that the batter sit at room temperature for at least an hour before baking. I’m still puzzling over that one but have a desire to make a batch with buttermilk instead at some point and see how it turns out. Once this pan’s in seasoned condition, I’m sure I’ll get the excuse to do it.

Pyrrhic defeat

Imagine not quite liking a beer enough to not sue it out of existence. Olympia Brewing was a sub-brand of Pabst (previously a standalone brewery) which got sued out of existence over it supposedly falsely advertising being made with water from Tumwater. Pabst just decided to stop making the beer instead, which … yeah, that’s a solution. Congratulations, bet you’re the life of the party. (The guy was claiming that he wouldn’t be buying it if he knew it was using water from the San Gabriel Valley; I’m really ambivalent about this, but okay.)

Read James, seriously

I read James by Percival Everett earlier this month. Read it. Just go do it.

The M/V Wenatchee fire

The Washington area has an expansive ferry network, involving Roll-On/Roll-Off ferries run by WSDOT. In 2021, an improperly tightened bolt resulted in the no. 3 engine exploding, and a fire in the no. 2 engine room. The NTSB wrote a report on this, and how the crew responded by sealing the ventilation and shutting off fuel to the engine room, causing it to self-extinguish before it caused any further damage. The report’s great, I highly recommend reading through it, and check out the included logbook pages.