Recipe: Stuffed Steak
I meant to post this on Saturday, but my upgrade to Windows 7 didn't go quite as planned and I ended up spending the weekend involuntarily offline. However, I still want to share the easy and (relatively) quick recipe that I made for my friends on Friday night. There are a fair amount of ingredients, but it's really tasty.
You need a crock pot, a stove, and a pan (preferably 2). There are three primary elements to the meal. The onion-and-tomato topping, the steak itself, and the pepper stuffing.
The steak should be thin-cut raw sandwich steak, or thin-cut pieces of beef intended to be quickly cooked on the stove. This kind of cut is usually relatively tough, so it needs to be marinaded. A simple marinade of steak sauce and lemon juice for a few hours should be sufficient, but it depends on the quality of the meat you purchase.
- steak sauce
- 2 standard-size packs of thin-cut sandwich steak
- lemon juice
Put the steak into a gallon plastic bag, dump in enough steak sauce and lemon juice to coat the steak. Zip and fold up the plastic bag around the steak, then refrigerate on a platter to prevent leakage.
Then make the topping.
Put 1 tub of margarine into a microwavable bowl. Add worchestershire sauce, hot sauce, lemon juice, paprika, old bay*. Melt in the microwave, stir. Taste, adjust ingredients to taste. Pour into warmed crock pot (on the hot setting).
- 2 baskets of cherry tomatoes.
- 2 onions
Quarter the onions into a petal shape, then peel apart. Place into crock pot. Stir. Cover.
Depending on your crock pot's settings, times may vary, but around the time your onions taste sweet and your tomatoes look wrinkled, it's time to prepare the stuffing.
* If you aren't from the Maryland area, this may be difficult to come by. However, you can google a recipe to make old bay yourself with relative ease. It's just a spice mixture popular in the region.
- 1 sandwich baggie full of cut bell peppers*
- 1 carrot
- 1 cucumber
* My family is friends with farmers, so we have a lot of bell peppers and tend to slice them, then freeze bags with mixes of the three main colors mixed in. I used 1 sandwich bag worth, which was probably about a pepper and a half.
Cut the vegetables. Use a julienne cut--slices should resemble match-sticks and be about 1/4" wide and about 3" long (I cut the cucumber and carrot in half, to be about the size of my bell pepper slices).
Warm a skillet or pan on your stove, wiped down with olive oil to prevent sticking. Add your vegetables. Season with standard green herbs: oregano, basil, parsley. Also add paprika. Stir and flip until vegetable juices begin to accumulate in the bottom of the pan.
Remove the steaks from the fridge and cook on the stove in another oiled pan (I used a griddle because they're bigger and it's a lot of steak in terms of surface area).
Take a finished steak and place on a plate. Using tongs (or normal utensils, but the tongs make it much easier), place julienned vegetables in the center of the steak, crossing the thinner section of the steak. Wrap the steak around the vegetables and secure with toothpicks (I recommend using two). Repeat until plate is full or you're out of steak. Then spoon the onion/tomato mixture from the crock pot on top of the vegetables and serve with a knife and fork.
This was enough to feed three people, but they also work as hors d'œuvres though they aren't bite-sized. Perhaps tapas would be the better term?
Charity Check: Phone Solicitations
It's 6pm. The phone rings, and you answer as you usually do. Immediately the caller greets you and launches into an urgent plea for help: children are dying of hunger, women are dying of breast cancer, or an oppressed minority group needs your support.
"Can we count on your donation?" the caller asks.
Oh, your heart bleeds for this cause, as well it probably should - but don't get out that checkbook just yet, and giving a donation over the phone isn't a good idea either. Instead, take down the name and address of the charity and do a little charity check online.
While I have my arguments with watchdog organizations and the methods they use to judge efficiency, organizations like Charity Navigator, Guidestar, and the Better Business Bureau serve as excellent sources to ensure that the charity you want to donate to is legitimate. You can also check the website of your Secretary of State or Attorney General, as many will list charities and link to their registration and financial reporting paperwork.
Mandatory Reporting of Child Abuse, except for Priests?
There I am, mindlessly reading over my homework assignment for Evidence, when I come across this little gem of a fact:
Priests* are exempt from Maryland's child abuse reporting requirement as to confidential confessors make by the perpetrator, victim, or anyone else with knowledge.
Now, my friend thought that this meant something somewhat more rational, like they were exempt from registering as a sex offender. But as terrible as that would be (and untrue as it is, at least if Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is any judge), the truth is worse and more bizarre. To give an example of what that particular rule of privledge means...
If someone confesses to a priest that they molested a kid, the priest doesn't have to report it. If a child tells their priest that they've been molested, the priest doesn't have to report it.
This news may not come as a surprise to you (it didn't to Charity), but it certainly bugged me. I mentioned it to a friend, who wondered, can priests/preachers report suspicions of molestation? Notwithstanding whether or not their religious oaths give them permission, does the law?
In evidence law, for privilege, it matters who holds the privilege.
For instance, spousal privilege. Depending on the type (yes, there is more than one - some apply to ex-spouses, some to current, etc. but I don't want to get into that here) and the state where the trial is taking place, a husband may be able to waive spousal privilege and choose to testify against his wife, or the defendant may refuse to allow their spouse to testify. See the difference?
So for priests; is it that the confessor is the one being protected against having their secrets spilled, or the priest being protected against losing the confidence of their flock?
The Non-Profit as Female
Dan Pallotta, the author of Uncharitable, posits in an article on The Daily Beast that non-profits face - among other things - trouble due to "gendering". It's a sometimes opaque article, and Pallotta is talking mostly to insiders - people who work in the world of NPOs.
Pallotta expects, implicitly, that readers know the following before they read this article:
- Donors these days are sophisticated: instead of just writing a check at Christmas to whatever humanitarian organization sends the nicest mailing, many if not most donors are trained (one might even say, conditioned) to look for certain indicators that an NPO is worthy of a donation. The biggest of these is the percentage of overhead a charity has: that is, what the charity spends on administrative expenses (salaries, keeping the lights on, etc.) and fund raising.
- Non-profits reveal their various financial information through three sources: the 990, which is the official IRS tax filing a charity must submit each year; the financial summary in the charity's annual report; and the audited financial statement, which serves as a supplement to the 990.
- The salaries of non-profit workers are, as a general rule, much lower than those of their for-profit counterparts.
Pallotta's argument - that charities are treated as "female" while the for-profit world is treated as "male" - is a provocative one. Certainly the idea that anyone who makes money from charity work must be evil still holds sway in the public mind: when asking people to sign a petition to stop government funding cuts from the NPO where I work, I was repeatedly told that instead of stealing money from the government, we should first cut the salaries of everyone in the organization.
Pallotta would indicate that this sentiment - don't you dare make money by doing charity work - is part of what holds back the NPO world:
Consider: The for-profit sector is free to pay competitive wages based on the value people produce, yet it’s considered unseemly for anyone to make money in charity. This forces our brightest young men and women to choose between doing well and doing good, and drives most of them, burdened by student debt, into for-profit careers.
I have to segue for a minute here. I'm lucky, in a sense. Due to the extraordinary generosity of my parents I'm not struggling under a mountain of student debt. However, because I have chosen to do good rather than do well, I still live at home. I cannot - even were I to have roommates - afford to live independently in a relatively safe neighborhood. My paycheck simply will not cover rent, gas for the car, food, work-appropriate clothing, and the medical expenses my insurance company doesn't cover. These complaints are echoed by myriad young NPO employees who after a year or two will move on to either the most profitable sectors of the non-profit world (health care, usually) or into the for-profit world.
MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS, Devon Monk–Review
Today was release day for Book 3 of the Allie Beckstrom series by Devon Monk. In preparation for this happy day, last Tuesday and the Tuesday before that I, I reviewed book one, MAGIC TO THE BONE, and book two, MAGIC IN THE BLOOD.
I'm not going to talk too much about the cover this time, except to note again with approval that the machete she's holding actually shows up in the story, yay artists (it's still Larry Rostant) whose covers actually address the subject material.
The idea of this book is that Allie has to deal with the soul of her dead father cohabitating her body and generally trying to tell her what to do. She also has to deal with the Authority, which her father was a member of, though he did his dead level best to keep her off their radar and vice versa. Her main goal is to learn to better use her magical abilities, except nothing really comes out of that and she doesn't learn to do too much that's new.
Book three starts almost immediately where book two left off, which isn't something I really like in a series, mostly because it doesn't allow for as much of a lead-in to this story, and because it requires a lot more info-dumping in the beginning to catch the reader up. Unfortunately, MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS kicked off with a lot of infodumping, and I didn't enjoy the set-up too much, although the opening scenes were rather good visually. The pacing was good in the beginning, and we never got cheated out of our payoff.
Unfortunately, as I read through the rest of the book, the pacing started to feel a little hectic. Though I really enjoyed book two and book one had quite a bit of promise, book three felt like a bit of a let down. It was still a solid book, with a solid premise and a lot of good things about it (for instance, there's a moment when Allie splits her lip and she and her boyfriend stop kissing because she hasn't been tested lately, and recently she's had a few sketchy things happen to her--like being injected with a needle and stabbed, and she came into contact with bleeding people while she had open wounds--which I think is a great thing to see happen in a novel) but it wasn't excellent.
Consultant Blues
Sometimes not-for-profit organizations have an empty position that needs to be filled immediately, but they have trouble finding a candidate. Other times, the Board of Directors (sometimes called the Board of Trustees) wants an outside perspective on something. When either of these situations occurs, the Non-Profit Organization (NPO) will often contract with a consulting firm.
This is usually a double-edged sword, if the consultant is supposed to oversee the day-to-day operations of a team or entire department. The group s/he will be overseeing usually has an established dynamic, and the consultant's sudden appearance disrupts that. Sometimes the consulting firm will send in a consultant who turns out to be poor match, whether due to personality conflicts or lack of relevant experience.
In one case I am familiar with, a consultant about my age was brought in to oversee a team of no less than ten people - most of whom had many years of experience in the field of fundraising. She had, to be frank, pretty much no not-for-profit experience - and unlike an older consultant, she couldn't make up for that with management experience. Between that complete lack of experience and the frustration enveloping the team, the tension was palpable and affected not just that team, but the entire department. I can't even imagine what the consultant must have felt like, as most of the department actively gossiped about how poorly equipped she was to handle the job.
In addition to the gossip, some of the younger team members sought out further information about this young woman, using Google and other search methods. Whether they were seeking disparaging information or not, it certainly turned up - and that didn't help matters either. While things seem to have calmed down somewhat, as they always do, it's apparent that this young woman is still treated as very much an outsider, and the consulting firm made a misstep - how serious remains to be seen - in placing such an inexperienced person in a position of leadership. The organization in question, of course, should have stepped in and asked for a more experienced consultant.
Amazon Kindle — Review
The decision for me to buy a Kindle was a difficult one. I've always taken pride in my frugality, and the Kindle isn't cheap. I love to read, though, and I kept hearing such good things about e-books and the Kindle, so I sat down and convinced myself that, with my spending habits, the cheaper e-books would eventually pay for the Kindle in savings (both directly and in gas for trips to the bookstore or shipping from the internet), so I went ahead and bought it.
I've had it for a few months now, and so it's time to sit down and decide how I feel about the overall wisdom of the purchase. The short version is, I'm really glad I bought it.