Maggie's Farm

One of the tastiest and most luxurious hors d'oeuvres is soft-boiled quail eggs with caviar. Eggs on eggs. It's really gotta be served with champagne. But how does the regular family afford enough Osetra caviar at $60/oz to be generous with it? They can't, because a minimal dose is about 1 oz. per person. We'll get to that in a minute.

Best way to eat fine caviar? Off those tiny caviar spoons with a shot of Russian vodka. Second best? On a blini. Third best? On a quail egg.

(By the way, if you have any left-over caviar, it's great on regular soft-boiled eggs or on top of an omelette the next day. It also freezes pretty well.)

Since I'm on the topic of caviar, a chef friend's favorite sandwich is a toasted bagel with creme fraiche (or the very heavy type of sour cream or, at worse, cream cheese) with a pile of caviar and a sweet onion.

The great caviars of the world are, of course, from the various varieties of Sturgeon. Today, sturgeon are farm-raised in some places (eg this French farm raised caviar). Yes, there are wild sturgeon in America (relatively endangered) and every once in a while somebody pulls a 16-footer out of the Hudson River.

Farm-raised American Sturgeon caviar ain't cheap. Let's take a look at the American non-Sturgeon caviars, those caviars for us plebs.

Cheapest is caviar from the roe of the Lake Whitefish. Whitefish Caviar is better than nothing, but it's basically low-rent supermarket caviar, around $10/oz.

Another cheap one is often marketed as American Pride. It's the roe of something they call a Golden Herring. I don't know what that fish is. 7 ounces for $50. Inexpensive enough to use in volume.

My third cheap one is often marketed simply as American Black Caviar. It's the roe of the Bowfin, a primitive cool-water fish of the US and Canada. Fishermen consider it to be an annoying trash fish: 

Down Cajun way they call that Choupique. It can be got for $7/oz. Cheap enough to use on pasta as in this dynamite recipe.

Here's a stranger fish from which the roe is marketed: The American Paddlefish. It's a cousin of the sturgeon, lives in the Mississippi River drainages. Here's one plankton-feeding:

I've never had Paddlefish Caviar, but I'd like to try it. Wild American Paddlefish Caviar goes for around $30/oz. It's a shame that you can't squeeze the roe out of a fish and then let the fish go to make more.

Here's a little summary of American caviars.

I forgot to mention Caviar Pie in my recent authoritative American caviar post. This decadent concoction is perfect for a brunch, hors d'oevres, or munchies.

Some caterers make Caviar Pie which looks perfect, round, and daintily-finished, but the ones I've had at fancy New Year's Day cocktail brunches look a little raggedy, as in this photo. They don't have to look good because as soon as they are attacked by people armed with cheese knives or crackers it's messy anyway.

You scoop a piece out and put it on toasts, or bagel chips, or whatever. It goes fast.

As usual, one uses the most expensive caviar one can afford - or not afford.

Chopped red onion is key. Here's one recipe, but you can google for more. It's a real meal, with a glass of wine.

Colleges Substitute Western Greats With Gender Studies

I hope parents aren't paying hard-earned money for this baloney. I have often advised parents here to monitor what their kids are spending your money on, and to have rules about what one is willing to pay for.

It's been repeatedly proven useless from an educational standpoint, but it's government baby-sitting and would use unionized, highly-educated employees, so what's not to like?

Get pre-K facts before investing billions

Oregon's Legislature is kicking around concepts that would make college free

I want free piano lessons and free painting lessons. Can I get that?

Related:  The college-for-all model isn't working - After years of disfavor, vocational
education is being transformed for young people seeking jobs that
require more than high school but less than college.

The Maggie's Farm staff tends to believe in apprenticeships for almost everything that is work-related.

Story here. A quote:

“The American market for straightforward guides to etiquette dwarfs the British one. Even though large numbers of the British and especially the English are sticklers for etiquette, they pretend that such matters are either unworthy of discussion or in no need of it. Much more popular are guides that give them cynical or supercilious treatment. These reflect, wittily and sometimes not so wittily, on when it is a good idea to lie, how to navigate the hell of a second family, and the art of deflecting people who threaten to be tedious. It is a defining feature of English manners that they can be treated, simultaneously, as vitally important yet also comical. But then one could apply the very same terms to Englishness itself.”

Via Dino:

Misogyny and sexism, racism, income inequality, patriarchy, and homophobia and heteronormative ideals course through the culture like a pathogen in the blood, infecting the whole of the being beneath the surface.

Is there a diagnosis for people who worry about these things?

Related: Colleges Substitute Western Greats With Gender Studies

Spending Mom and Dad's hard-earned and hard-saved money to study sexual fantasies? That is sick. In fact, it is parent-abuse.

Dalrymple: Some to misery are born:

I think even the sternest of moralists—such as I—could not help but think on hearing her story of Blake’s line, “some to misery are born.” Prison was the first time in her life she had experienced reasonably consistent and decent treatment; and sad to relate, her loss of freedom was a boon to her. She flourished (comparatively speaking) there.

When I returned home from having examined her, my wife told me that she had received a telephone call from her bank. The person from the bank had asked for her by name and then said, “First I have to ask you some security questions.”

“Since you phoned me,” said my wife, “are you sure it is not I who should be asking you some security questions?”

Kudlow on the radio today ruminated about, bemoaned, the lack of moral and spiritual equality in America today.

It reminded me of something a niece said about a friend, who had gotten engaged, at Thanksgiving: "She's psycho-socially a bit primitive, not too refined, so they're a good match."

“We don’t so much have higher education, as merely longer education.”

Steve Balch, via Phi Beta Cons

The potato is a native American food, as American as turkey. Good for your soul. I suspect my Indian ancestors made their holiday mash with Moose or Elk milk and cream. This is my Mom's delicious Thanksgiving and Christmas recipe:

4 lbs. Yukon Gold potatoes, or whatever you like
8 ounces sour cream
1 stick butter
2 ounces chopped fresh chives (one bunch)
1/2 cup heavy cream
Salt and pepper

1. Boil potatoes (peeled or unpeeled - I prefer peeled) in water till they're tender (when you can stick a fork in and it comes right out).
2. Drain and let the steam evaporate off, then cut them up.
3. Mix in the ingredients and cut or mash to preferred consistency. (I prefer them casually mashed and lumpy - but I do understand that the Irish expect them to be creamy, and that a single lump is the shameful sign of an incompetent wife.)
4. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve, if you must, with a side of steak, roast beef, turkey, pork chops, lamb chops, or roast chicken, and daintily drizzle a reduced jus of the meat on top of your potato piece de resistance.

From Why Asian Students Are So Important on Campus:

Despite the alleged benefits of "diversity" in the American educational system, in the actual behavior of pre-adolescents and adolescents, diversity does not appear to be the most important characteristic that youngsters themselves use in their choice of friends and companions. If you observe college students walking, eating or choosing where to sit in a large lecture hall, you are far more likely to see males with other males and females with other females, blacks sitting with blacks and Asians with other Asians. But Asians, despite their reputation for remaining aloof on campuses, seem good at finding commonalities based on shared interests. They are visible, not segregated in Asian enclaves by prejudice against them or by choosing friends exclusively from their own ethnic group, and they excel, on the average, on academic accomplishments.  It is almost inevitable for them to be role models for less academically single-minded students to emulate.

It is true. Student loans simply enable higher ed to raise costs. Economist Says Higher Ed Bubble Starting To Burst

Does higher ed produce a better product than it did 50 years ago? I very much doubt it.

The comment section is good: The Stereotypes About Math That Hold Americans Back

I see no reason to accept the author's assertion that math education in the US is broken:

We need to change the way we teach math in the U.S., and it is for this reason that I support the move to Common Core mathematics. The new curriculum standards that are currently being rolled out in 45 states do not incorporate all the changes that this country needs, by any means, but they are a necessary step in the right direction.

What do readers think? What was Isaac Newton's math education like?

Over the past decade or two, the marketing of higher ed has been to sell it as a financial investment. Of course, financial investments are about supply and demand, and when the supply goes up and demand goes down, the proud grads with their marketing-inflated grades are SOL.

What is the economic value of a college degree today?

If they want to market higher ed to the masses, they need to either market as adolescent sex resorts as Club Ed, or as an opportunity be become a citizen who is more deeply rooted in their culture. I suspect the former, "the college experience", sells better to the youth.

As I think about it, there's also the social angle (non-college grads like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan have trouble getting invitations to the nice parties and clubs) -  and also the networking angle, but that mainly works well for high-prestige and high-visibility schools: Ivy League, Little Ivies, Big Ten, UT, MIT, Va. Tech, and so forth but many other colleges have established very tight networking for their grads. I'm thinking of USC, Connecticut College, Georgetown, Kenyon, and there are plenty of others where loyal alumni will do anything to help grads find a career track they want.

Just the euphemism "unprepared" exposes the college diploma fraud that is sold to so many American kids and families. As I have asserted many times, if you can't handle calculus, statistics, college physics, Econ, Plato, and Thomas Aquinus, you do not belong in a serious 4-year college.

There are immense other learning opportunities in the US for anybody who wants them, for motivated scholars. Public libraries, for one example. They do not close at 5 pm. Useful community colleges have sprung up all over America to provide some of the basic and remedial education that was not done in government high schools, and to teach practical skills that used to be learned in apprenticeships or on the job.

"Unprepared" is a euphemism for unmotivated, uninterested, or unable for personality or intelligence reasons. Not everybody can play in the NFL either.

Remember the shocking reality that half of Americans have below-average IQs. College curricula have been aimed at well-above average IQ and well-above average curiosity and self-motivation levels. Some "experts" opine that only 5% of a population are really able and interested in the demands of traditional and rigorous higher ed.  I'm willing to admit that, of that 5-10%, only about half would be motivated to self-educate without the structure of a school. That's simple lazy human nature.

Were I (God forbid) a college admissions officer, one thing I would care about is what the applicant learned outside of school on their own initiative. As I have often said, learning is not something that is delivered, it is something that is taken. You can lead a horse to water, etc. Even the "worst" schools, whatever that means, offer huge opportunities for anyone who wants them. Teachers want nothing more than motivated, capable, and respectful kids, and will respond to them. Yes, even unionized teachers.

People can dumb higher ed down all they want to fill seats, collect tuition, etc., but it doesn't mean a thing anymore.

Anyway, this prof gives a dismaying report from the front lines of higher ed today.

Somebody commented recently that we should be grateful that our founding fathers were all home-schooled.

The Common Core Rabbit Hole

I have mixed feelings about this general topic, but I conclude, at the end, that the federal government has no business in local education. Not in their job description. It always seems to me that, the more jobs they take on, the more costly failures occur.

I try not to post about political matters and to try to stick to my portfolio here, but this is something for all to remember: Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist who idolized Castro and hated America.

He killed JFK because JFK was an anti-Commie. I think the Bay of Pigs pushed him over the edge.

Head Start is just one more useless, expensive federal boondoggle. It has a constituency, however, and nobody really wants to be "against the children." It was a failed and possibly destructive experiment which devolved into federal babysitting with unionized babysitters.

The wisdom of Reagan: "...a government program is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!"

As we have reported here at Maggie's for many years, they probably are mostly bunk.

That's why wise people are always skeptics about "studies." Ten years ago, transfats were to save us from butter. Now, vice versa. Ten years ago, broccoli was good. Now, it's said to be carcinogenic. Ten years ago, the experts told us to avoid fats. Now they tell us they made a mistake; bacon is back and carbs are the bad thing (I think this seems correct from what little I know about insulin and carb metabolism). I take to heart little of what I read, but I read it anyway. Reading is recreational, often entertaining, and beats hard work.

Were I to live with no TV, no internet, and no newspaper, I think I would be a wiser man to simply focus on my daily experiences.

In this case, the kids did not want to hear Charles Murray. Seems like they did not want to hear fresh ideas. Fresh, thought-provoking ideas are threatening.

If you do not want to hear new viewpoints and new information, what are you doing in school? Murray is always interesting, because he is one smart dude who just follows his data wherever it leads. I have no doubt that he is smarter than those arrogant students. As with Sen. Moynihan, it was data that led Murray from Lefty to Centrist.

To learn, one must become humble because new ideas and new information disrupt comfortable biases. Disruption of biases is uncomfortable.

Here's an online course: How to Think: An Introduction to Logic

Speaking of logic, here's a comment on the fallacy of the precautionary principle from one of this morning's links:

     ... the precautionary principle itself — a framework under which no one would venture outdoors at any time for work or play, as any number of horrors loom, all of which carry probabilities greater than zero. Even indoors, of course, the precautionary principle requires eternal vigilance, as Pravda in its glory days would have put it, as the roof might collapse at any time. I am surprised that the Left has not proposed a requirement that individuals wear hard hats when indoors, a diktat qualitatively identical to seatbelt and motorcycle helmet laws and other such manifestations of nanny-statism.

The precautionary principle, accordingly, is a fundamentally totalitarian construct, as it leads inexorably toward a world in which government dictates which risks are acceptable.

A little risk is good, isn't it? It adds zest to life, the hot sauce. I would never go outdoors without my tin foil hat, however. Never know who might be listening in to my brain waves. Beware of the Thought Police.

Yesterday we had a post by Bulldog about colleges as teen fun 'n sex resorts. By coincidence, this morning I chatted with a dad whose daughter is applying to college. She only willing to consider a college with a major football or basketball team, modern dorms with pool,  sauna, and work-out room, and which offers a major in pre-school education. Plus she wants to go out of state to "be independent."

Would "the college experience" cost any more or less without the "education"?

She has high grades but mediocre SAT scores. Clearly the slick college marketing has captured her attention. She wants to try out for cheerleader.

I've been reading Edmund Wilson's A Prelude: Landscapes, Characters & Conversations from the Earlier Years of My Life. Wilson had the real, old-time "college experience," investing himself in a rigorous and vigorous life of the mind at prep school and at Princeton (advanced math, Greek, Latin, French, and his own literary and intellectual pursuits and interests on the side) while inhabiting spartan quarters and making many lifelong relationships.

He writes with such relaxed clarity and innocence that even his musings about aunts and uncles are a delight.