Salisbury Steak Slow Cooker

We are on week umpteen of our house renovation project, and my wife is doing the part I hate, so I happily take over cooking. The meal is a slow cooker Salisbury steak. The plan was to have this with some decent sides that I would whip up. Like always, nothing ever goes to plan. Another project popped up, and I never really finished the meal except for this dish. The version I made comes with mistakes unlike the recipe below. Where it came from I don’t know, but I thank them.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 lbs ground beef, lean
• 1 (1 oz) dry onion soup mix
• 1/2 C Italian breadcrumbs
• 1/4 C milk
• 1/4 C all-purpose flour
• 2 Tbs oil
• 2 (10.75 oz) cans cream of chicken soup
• 1 (1oz) packet dry Au Jus mix
• 3/4 C water

DIRECTIONS

1. Using your hands, mix the ground beef, onion soup mix, breadcrumbs, and milk. Do this in a large bowl.
2. Shape the meat into 8 patties.
3. In frying pan over medium heat add oil.
4. Lightly dredge the patties in flour.
5. Brown the patties quickly on both sides.
6. Place the browned patties into a slow cooker. If you slow cooker isn’t big enough to lay them all flat, then stack them alternately like a pyramid.
7. In a medium bowl, mix the soup, water and Au Jus. Pour it evenly over the patties.
8. Put the lid on and cook on low for 4-5 hours.

NOTES:

I was suprised that everyone liked this meal. It is an easy one to make and on a day where you’re busy it is a great recipe to use. I bet if I were to add mushrooms to this at some point in the cooking process it would be great.

Expect to have fat from the burger meat. There is not escaping it and some fat is good for your brain. It is better than the carbohydrates and sugar.

Don’t do what I did and that was talk to someone while putting this together. I accidentally put the flour with the beef and tried to remove as much as I could.

Another thing I did was instead of using the Au Jus mix I didn’t have onhand, I used a stew mix packet that we just happened to have for some strange reason. Normally, I would have made my own mix, but I was missing a few ingredients.

Books That Influenced My Life

I believe people do not alway realize that something seeminly so insignificant can alter their path in life to a large degree. Looking back on my life, I see the obvious from having a wife to children to having degrees. A simple action by someone of a different, skin color, political alignment, or nation could have easily changed my views on entire group, but my parents did well not prevent it. Books were another influence on me that changed me in subtle and no so subtle ways. Some of the books I remember and have while others are only a memory.

The first set, yes two, introduced me to the American Civil War and then history. The first book was my brother’s and I went through that book until it began to fall apart. Sadly, I do not recall the name of the book. The second is by Bruce Catton and I believe I have discussed this book before. It is the American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War. These two books familiarized me with the war and got my parents to take me to Gettysburg when I was around twelve. These two book would inspire my love of history and be the cause of why I had hundreds of history books.

This next book would lead to another book and create a love that I had early on in life. Though this genre would fall to history, I still find time to read the genre. I can still recall my friend reading this book with barrels in water and a guy sitting on one. Upon hearing the name, I would seek this book when my parents visited the mall, those places that were so practical but hardly exist these days, and hit either Walden Books or B. Dalton to buy my own copy of The Hobbit. This book would push me to the LoTR and then came “Conan the Barbarian” in 1982. I grabbed the entire set of books that were available and my fantasy era began. Books of this genre expanded my imagination and even helped to lead me to Dungeons & Dragons. Even through college I gobbled these books with my roommates as we bought and shared books. I still have my originals packed away in a box in the basement. My wife and tried getting me to donate them. How dare her!! Even my oldest caught my ire when he damaged one of my LoTR books by ripping the pages when he was two. Since then, my love of LoTR has moved to my sons and we all sets of teh LoTR books with my youngest being the most knowledgeable on Tolkien’s works. Now for a final part to this paragraph. That single book would introduce me to Edgar Allen Poe whose works I have and Sherlock Holmes. The Hobbit pushed me to other literature that I enjoy.

Even though I was considered to be some genius in mathematics and I’m not, one book helped me to excel and this is the CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae. The color of the cover of my version is green. This book was my goto book in the university and even during my early years of work where I created an integral to do a calculation that was always estimated where I worked. There’s a formula now for this equation. I used it for other areas of my work and when teaching my sons math I used it to help them. This book alone got me out of a few jams. This book has also helped me in other areas of science and engineering through the years until the internet took over, but I’d still keep a copy. This book has been instrumental in my work and how I look at science which leads me to the next topic.

The 35MM Photographer’s Handbook is another that influenced me. I am still no great photographer as my images tend to be on the practical side than artistic. Yet, this one book directed my interest to an area I knew of because of my National Geographic subscription but never thought much of due to the media’s bias as well as a few other scientific biases. This book gave me enough knowledge into looking at how the Shroud was faked as I tried to duplicate it. That obviously failed but it did start me into an area of research that opened my eyes and created questions. My study of the Shroud started my breaking away from traditional scientific thought and expanding my critical thinking outside the science world box. Instead of relying on what “experts” say, I began to look at the evidence available in all areas and with some topics I have changed my rigid view of fake or it can’t happen to I don’t know as I do not have enough information to make a statement. Now when I look at a subject I dig for as much information as I can without relying on a scientist or doctor saying one thing thought they, too, are not familiar and are relying on the accuracy of someone else. I learned science isn’t all fact and truth. We are lied to on many topics because of the lack of data and bias.

I leave the Old and New Testament out as they didn’t influence me but probably not in a way you are thinking. Now there was a book for children that helped me know what is in the Bible. This book Children’s Stories of the Bible from the Old and New Testaments was very helpful simply for familiarization purposes. I still have it packed away. Again, my oldest damaged the book when he was five or six. I should have disowned him. As for the Old and New Testament, the reason it was never influential was for one simple reason, I didn’t know how to read it like nearly everyone. Too many people misunderstand much of it. We forget the Bible was better understood when it was cobbled together and preceding that construction because the early Christians were familiar with the culture and context of the period as well as having leaders who even lived some of the scripture. My growth and understanding of the Bible didn’t start until later in life when I took an interest in early Christianity and even the biblical periods of the Old Testament thanks to my love of history. It isn’t about quoting some passage or verse but understanding the relationship between the Old and New Testament. We too often think we are focusing on the message of God but are only applying our modern cultural view and forgetting the central theme. So, this wasn’t influential, but I know understand it more in a more scholarly way and am impressed with the Old and New Testament. These are beautiful books.

I’ll end with the Qu’ran and say this book did much to push me away from Islam than attract. This will no doubt upset people, but I think it is trash. It is a thrown together mishmash of material that often times makes no sense and contradicts. From a scholarly point of view, I see in this text as well as the related texts a constructed religion. I’ll leave my criticism here. I am not writing to offend or upset anyone, but this did well to awaken me to the idea that no everything is as good as it seems. I was quite influential when I was young and looking for answers in life and this book did well to dissuade me from making a mistake simply because I knew nothing then. Again, I am not including this to insult. This is about what influenced me. There are other religious texts I’ve read such as the Book of Mormon, but they were too obvious to me and never really influenced.

These are not all of the books that have influenced me, but they are the books that had a major influenced even if I did not convey it. Spending twenty years enjoying fantasy and science fiction books is something. There are some books on medicine that influenced me as well as comic books. Yes, I am a supporter of comic books because they, I believe, helped maintain my love of reading when I was young.

The books I mentioned are what placed me on the paths I have chosen and define the reason why I am here. They have influenced the way I live, where I vacation, and how I view life. My degrees are due to these books and their influence. I can’t say that about any Hollywood movie or television show. The books are just one element of what has made me who I am.

The World Of Boxed Mac ‘n Cheese

In college, when money was low I’d buy the 3/$1 boxed macaroni and cheese for quick meals on the cheap. If I could afford cans of tuna then I had a well-balanced meal. Upon graduation, I stopped eating it. Today, my son eats this stuff and makes his own version like many of us did. Boxed mac and cheese is a great based for expanding the variety of your meals.

With tuna being the obvious additive, there are plenty of others. My son creates his own taco flavored mac and cheese. He’s even added different sausages and even ground beef. It may be that the boxed mac and cheese is the perfect food for creating variations. What else can we add?

Frozen mixed vegetables are an option to add to your mac and cheese. They’re already cooked and it makes for a quick and easy meal. If you have some chicken or even shrimp you can throw it in. As I am not a fish fan, I assume you can add fish, too. There is pancetta, but I’d rather use that on a better quality dish than mac and cheese. Instead, I’d use bacon.

When it comes to seasoning the mac and cheese you can go the route my son does and use a taco seasoning. He mixes up his own but I bet you could use the packets or some portion of the packets. You can keep it as simple as you want or go all out. I wouldn’t use saffron as that is a waste of money. There is Sumac, but that has a lemony taste and I wonder how well that would go with mac and cheese. For a bit of spiciness you have crushed red pepper or you can see if Sambal Oelek chili paste would add flavor.

I was never a fan of mac and cheese but ate it for necessity. I wish I would have thought about some of these ingredients that I could have added when I was forced to eat this stuff while in college. It would have made eating more pleasurable.

Nearly a year since I removed DirecTv and how life is going for me

I maintained DirecTv for several reasons the five years before I got rid of it. My son and I were watching The Walking Dead, but the show began to be boring with the obvious plot issues, the repetitive characters they would introduce, and the overall unrealistic actions people take (I’m ignoring the whole dead idea). Finally, my wife was okay with removing it because we could get the local news in other ways. I got rid of them and now I get monthly junk mail from them doing a poor job of getting me back.

Television cable or satellite was becoming a thing of the past for us espcially once we stopped watching The Walking Dead. The last I recall of the show they beat Negan and that is when we stopped. My wife still watched the news, but I had ceased using that as my platform of information. I had stopped watching the NFL with all their political jockeying as I watched the NFL for the sport and not some kneeling or other type of social cause. At one point, they removed the only channel I regularly watched and was for the NHL team I followed. Apparently, they determined I was not in their region. The television shows they have were boring and the reality shows not worth anyone’s time. The educational channels such as the History, Discovery, and Learning no longer taught you anything as they were reality based not that what they offered before was actually educational. At best, I may catch a movie or a sporting event on a boring day. NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox are channels that are no longer needed as is the garbage ones of CNN and MSNBC. I don’t even remember half of the options one has with cable and satellite.

Today, I am reflecting on how I feel about not having a way of watching television. I feel great. I do not miss it. When I am bored with everything I’ll take a walk instead of turning on the tely and flipping through channles I’m not interested in before settling on something I’m not interested in. Yes, I’ll miss the Super Bowl as my son has already asked about watching it with me. That is the only way I watch football anymore. Now, I do miss the little ice hockey I would get to see, but that really isn’t a big deal. If anything I can go online for my entertainment which is also changing.

Note to YouTube, you have made it so miserable for me to watch that there is a time when I’ll no longer watch YouTube. The history and science is greatly muted on DirectTv. You have basically crippled @WorldWarTwo (this is worth watching) with your revenue scam while elevating the mainstream media’s videos that I won’t watch anyway. YouTube has pushed history from real to that censored version you would find in your elementary or middle school textbook that was misleading at best. But this isn’t about online watching.

How is my family handling it? My sons never really watched television that much when they were younger. Yes, there was SpongeBob and a few others, but these shows were not a constant. There was a show here and there but again, they didn’t attract their attention for very long except for the one I have already mentioned. The NFL is what my youngest misses the most, but it was never like he watched it on every Sunday. My oldest when he went to graduate school never installed cable television in his apartment. As for my wife, she never watched television. Yes, she would watch the news but it was never constant as she was busy with her job or something else.

For me, television is dead and there is no having me come back at the prices they charge you. I am not going to spend $100 or even $50 for what little I did watch. I have a backlog of books to read and journals to go after. For what is going on in the world, I have developed a list of people I use to keep up with everything and sometimes know before the major news agencies do. No longer do I have to listen to the biased politcs. I’m good. Next on my list is my internet. Yes, my future plans are to eliminate that, too. That will be a while.

The Book I Received Twice

While in graduate school, I needed a book for research. The problem was I couldn’t get the book from the school library or the other libraries I needed, so I had only one thing to do which I do not mind. I ordered the book “Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triump of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast”.

This lovely green colored book with a map on the cover what exactly what I needed as it had some of the information I required. There was one soon to be glaring problem. This new book was missing pages. The entire index was missing and this index was important for me to locate what I needed as I didn’t have the time to read the entire book. There were additional pages missing that I also needed. My solution was to contact the publisher and explain my situation. All I wanted was a pdf of the missing pages. I needed the information now. Instead they sent me a new book right away without any delay. I am still thankful to the University of Massachusetts Press for what they did. I received the book in time and was able to finish what I needed and turn my paper in time.

As for the book, it is more academic than pleasure reading, but if you read history books then you’re used to it. The book gets your toes wet in terms of military tactics but doesn’t really provide a deep dive of the warfar in the time and area he covers. The point of the book is to provide you a better understanding of American warfare utilized by the colonial militia. The gist of it is European warfare trumped Indian tactcis. Professionalism wins the day.

I need to re-read this book as I focused more on what I needed at the time. This is one of those books worthy of remaining on my shelf in my library. As for the original book, I may have donated it some time agao as I do not have space for a second book.

Reading Material That Are Not Books

Today, I ordered two books that I won’t be reading in 2023. If I’m lucky I may read them in 2026. Something called fulltime work gets in the way and then my family. I’d rather give up the work. What is not thought of is the amount of papers I have or have access to that are to be read and have been read. Here is a list of some of what I’m talking about.

First as it is still in the psyche of people are the Covid-19 papers or related papers I have read. We are talking over 300 papers. One paper is “Intracellular Reverse Transcription of Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 In Vitro in Human Liver Cell Line” published 25 February 2022. Another is “COVID-19 RNABased Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease” going back to January 2021. I have the Pfizer six month study, papers and metadata on Ivermectin and documents on the mortality of vaccine recipients. These papers require a lot of time to read and then research to fully understand. From 2020 thru 2022 I was voraciously reading the literature and tackling so much.

Moving from Covid-19 and maintaining my study on virology, I have a number of papers on the variola virus and in fact, I was reading much on this when the whole Covid-19 thing hit. A lot of this reading ceased when Covid hit. Some day I’ll go back to the reading about smallpox.

Something that I have been recently looking at but without depth are cancer treatment drugs and immunotherapy. Interesting to understand cytokines, small protein molecules realeased by different cells throughout the body and so on. There are treatments that I discovered existed that I had never heard of before such as Rituximab and Bevacizumab. You wouldn’t believe what the cancer treatment world has. It is a phamracological poison center where you try to kill the cancer before the patient. I am oversimplifying but there are some drugs where the side effects are diabetes.

Still keeping with the medicine side of things I read a lot about what really causes heart disease, diabetes, and other nasties that fat is blamed on. Fat is not your problem. Just look at that nice sugary aisle in the grocery store and the bakery. This is where I learned that outdated beliefs are often too entrenched to change. I recall reading a study on high fat and low fat diets and the data and conclusion never affirmed that a high fat diet was the cause. The conclusion recommended that you exercise, stop smoking, do a few other things then as a side thing have a low fat diet. One would think low fat would be emphasized as that was what the paper was about. I won’t say eating nothing but bacon is good but all of that sugar and carbohydrates do more harm.

I’ll move away from medicine which is where I apply psychology as there are some people that think psychology heals. There is a lot of dubious psychology research out there that have been published recently, and I’d rather get into more interesting topics.

Engineering is another area where I have countless papers and such. I am including mathematics and physics in this as they all use mathematics. Often times, when I am researching history engineering comes in handy as it helps me understand why some moments of history happened as they did. When you understand this part of history you can see why decisions are made or why the results happened. Also, I enjoy mathematics and will do problems time to time or learn about one area of math that I am weak on. I place climate and energy papers within engineering and am disappointed at the amount of bias you find in them some of which can’t be replicated.

History is a broad topic and that is where I have the most or read the most. I break this down into several areas that sometimes overlap. There is military history which can be broken down to periods and wars. One such paper I read is “Crouching Tigers, Secret Weapons: Military Technology Employed During the Sino-Japanese-Korean War, 1592-1598” by Kenneth Swope. There was a time roughly ten years ago when I was studying this war. There was an article on the treatment of war wounds, more accurately multiple articles discussing this.

With history, I have the most on the American Civil War and the Second World War. This miltiary history ranges from prewar to the war to postwar. Should I include the Denmark Vessey papers I read as part of the Civil War? With the Civil War, you get drawn into slavery and that is an entirely different topic of history.

When it comes to slavery papers I’ve seen this change based on the cultural context and not any new found historical discovery that alters anything. I’d say Alex Haley’s fiction Roots could be the cause of the distortion of slavery. Slaves weren’t simply kidnapped from Africa by white slavers. There was a trade going on. And the transatlantic slave trade wasn’t the largest route of African slave transporting as that would be the East Africa slave trade. We shouldn’t forget the slavery occurring in North Africa where Europeans were actually kidnapped and taken. In fact, we have a story of an Icelander village being ransacked as well as the European coastal regions of the Mediterranean. I have read many papers on Haiti and its tragic collapes from a jewel to a horrible place. In connection with slavery, there are your “free coloreds” that lived in America and your black slave owners.

Biblical history is another that has drawn my interest from research papers on the Old and New Testament and to Jesus and his life and crucifixion. There are the Catholic Church and the church fathers that Christianity derives from. There are countless papers discussing sections of the Bible and explaining why there are parts of the Bible that were written within a few months of Jesus’s crucifixion. You quickly learn that the myth of the gospel authors are unknown is just that a myth. If I were new to this area and just read a few of the papers I read then I’d know to never listen to the TikToks about this subject as these people have no clue what they are talking about.

There are many others that I have read on topics such as literature and art. These are fewer. As they are not my main interest they fall aside with what I want to read. Still, I’ll read a few from time to time.

Many of the papers I have are from my memberships to various journals such as The Journal of Military History or medical journals that I’ve belonged to. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to maintain membership with all of them and in fact had to drop all of them at one point. The medical membership is one that I still have a link to. When it comes to reading I have just too much to read. There is more to life that I want to do other than reading all day long. I’ll just keep plugging away.

Masks and Covid

Early on in 2020 when masks were being pushed as a solution, I argued with a friend that masks were not effective. This argument continued as he based his argument on the “journalistic” literature he was reading while I was looking at what research there was. No one was listening. The vast majority of people and many in the medical field did not know what the purpose of the medical masks people always see. Worse yet was the reuse of N95 masks that went through some chemical process in order to be reused. No one cared about the strange odor they gave off and how people got sick after using them. Fear over fact continued even to this present day.

I spent my 2020 and part of 2021 looking into the effectiveness of masks. There was no evidence of their effectiveness in protecting anyone from being infecting. Even Anthony Fauci admits this is true. In his February 2020 email he writes, “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.” That was what I was finding out. Now, Anthony and and I would disagree shortly after when he would say masks blocked infection. This was not based on scientific evidence.

For those interested in some science then you have this: Cochrane Review. ” Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks .” Now, I do admit this one is a little surprising to me even though I should know better, “Four studies were in healthcare workers, and one small study was in the community. Compared with wearing medical or surgical masks, wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (5 studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu‐like illness (5 studies; 8407 people), or respiratory illness (3 studies; 7799 people).”

Now I have gone through a bunch of papers on masks and haven’t found any reason to wear them. Even more so, there is absolutely NO evidence showing you should wear masks outdoors. I looked into this in 2020 and could only find some research on indoor air movement but nothing for outdoors. There was some people looking at doing research on this topic but the fact is it doesn’t matter. There is too much variability when considering outside exposure to a virus. For all those people wearing the full body condom, you not just look silly but you call your intelligence into question. Wearing masks outdoors to prevent getting Covid is like wearing a life preserver on dry land.

Wearing surgical masks and even N95 is not worth it, but if you think it will save you from getting SARS-CoV-2 or want to wear it as a badge of some type of honor, go ahead, that is your prerogative. I am not going to be deceived into thinking they’ll work for me. If you want to afford yourself some protection from Covid-19 then I suggest properly washing your hands. I’ll be honest, it is not statistically significant, but it helps with other viruses whle poor hand washing or none at all can increase the risk of viral transmission.

I would like to state that I looked at handwashing many, many years ago and found it intriguing that back in the day when obstetricians were forced to wash their hands between patients there were fewer infections and deaths among mothers who just had babies. That was an interesting read as doctors refused to wash their hands and the mortality rate of birthing mothers was extremely high, and it took a lot of effort to make hand washing mandatory.

Finally, I must state that all of this is based on the current evidence we have. There may be some miraculous study being done or will be done that won’t have biased information and not sponsored by mask companies or drug companies that will show that God should have designed us with masks from the beginning, but I doubt it.

It May Be You’re Not That Good, Therefor Not Valuable

In my career, I have been in situations where massive layoffs happened. Looking back, there have been numerous layoff periods that I have experienced where the expression of “head down and ass in the air” was used. You went around looking busy and tried to keep out of eyesight in the hopes you were not going to be canned. When the rumor hits it was already a forgone conclusion who was going to be laid off.

At one institution, I was at some intense training six months after I was hired when the lay offs hit. This was a huge one and when I had called in to talk to my boss I even asked do I still have a job. I was lowman on the totem pole and knew the likelihood of being laid off. I wasn’t in fear or having a mental health issue. I accepted that this is part of life. It was quite suprising to see the number of people gone when I came back and it wasn’t done yet. In a span of a month or two, the company reduced the workforce drastically. Yes, they were still making money, but it is about paying the investors and if the company begins to struggle something has to be done and employees are the most expensive element, so the lesser people were canned. The more valuable and useful people always survive and then you do have those who look and act like they’re too valuable to lose. Those people have scammed the system.

That was not my first layoff rodeo. Another I experienced was where I was comfortable in my position knowing they wouldn’t lay me off, but you still felt the tension as everyone knew something was up. Then it began with a few people here and there before a large chunk of people were let go. One worker that I knew wouldn’t come into work thinking if he stayed at home they couldn’t lay him off. Not so.

These layoffs and the others I have experienced have one thing in common. Revenue is down and something has to be done. Pressure is applied to leadership. Also, the office personnel has bloated with a lot of useless people. Everyone knows who is good and who is useless even if we don’t want to admit that ourselves are useless or our best friend. Unless you can increase revenue, you have to cut something. Cutting salaries is not the best option as I’d now be upset and looking for a job. In fact, recent events where retirement was stopped for a year or two and raises were decreased caused a massive exodus of talented young people. The dumb ones tend to stick around and the older people who are counting their days do, too. Those laid off are the worst performers. During my period of experiencing layoffs, we could easily predict who would be gone. You don’t do your work – gone. You’re too slow – gone. You take too much time off – gone. You complain about everything while not excelling – gone. It is simple. You were let go because you value is not there and it is because of YOU. Those who are laid off are angry and wonder what their future holds. The truly dumb people do not realize this.

It is difficult to be laid off. I was on my very first job out of the university where I actually thanked them for laying off. I hated the job and frankly, was not very good at it. I struggled to do the job I was hired to do. I am not assembly line assembler as I learned. I accepted that I was not good enough. I didn’t learned the tricks to make myself more productable as I came with a university background where I focused on unimportant details. They were right to be rid of me. My attitude upon being laid off would help me months later when I was rehired for an office position. I didn’t cry and whine about mental health or even complained how unfair the company was.

With all of the companies that I’ve worked at, you had some nice perks. These perks would eventually trickle away depending on the economy and business. Now, none of the companies I worked for was anything like Google, but people still expected to retire from the place as it was located in their town. Some of these companies had several generations of family members working at them, so it does come as a surprise to discover you won’t retire from the company.

When it comes to videos showing some TikTok complainers like the one below begins to confirm that we parents have done a poor job of raising our children as we give them a sense of entitlement and have made sure they have never had to experience true stress that makes us hard and well-balanced mentally. I imagine social media like YouTube, the Chinese spyware TikTok, Twitter, and such haven’t helped, either. They have given people the sense of self-importance that isn’t real. I am certain many or even most people of this age are not like that, but I can’t have sympathy for people who act this way because something didn’t go their way as shown in the video below as they are quick to blame leadership and money but never themselves for being at fault.