The only way I would take cooking advice from McMegan is if she proved that she could do basic arithmetic. Knowing that 3!=4 is important in many recipes.

How can you be alive *and* have watched that?

Jesus. She expounds the virtues of modern kitchen appliances but still makes a piece of shit cake that her own grandmother would toss out as a total embarrassment.

She allowed this to be posted? She really does have no pride in her work.

Give her a break! She said that the nuts would be finely chopped in a second, then it only took three seconds. She’s getting better.

If you skip ahead to the end of the video (sadly I’ll never get those first couple of minutes of my life back) she ends up with one hell of a motley looking piece of cake—and then tries to fix it by sloppily stuffing some extra pieces on with her fingers.

Freaking hilarious—cooking as metaphor.

Using a food processor to sift the flour? Huh? Do people really do that instead of the hand-crank sifter? The amount of time it takes to wash the processor is greater what it takes to sift flour.

hunt for Archaeopteryx eggs, grow, harvest and mill her own wheat, and milk the goats

Sounds like one of Martha Stewart’s easier recipes.

Rosie the Riveter got her big forearms not from fucking riveting, but from mixing cake dough.

This is the “black guys drive like this, but white guys drive like this” of commentary about cuisine.

Many people still cook in those “old” ways in France, and it’s the best food in the world. I could barely even find “cake mix” there even in a supermarket, just flour, sugar, etc. By the same token, while a lot of people use cake mixes in the US, some don’t, it all depends who you’re talking about, and where.

“People had to shake the milk to mix it”– my god, how did they survive?

This is so idiotic. And along with what UncertaintyVicePrincipal said, a talented cook will make better food faster working mostly by hand. I watched a clip of Jamie Oliver (I know, he’s a bit of a douche) making bread from scratch. Flour, water, yeast, pinch of salt and sugar. His only tool? A fork. He didn’t even use a bowl, just a wooden board.

He put his dough together in a quarter of the time it would take most people to use a bread maker. This video just proves she’s as good at cooking as she is at math.

And what the hell was her larger point anyways? The lower and middle class in America is being ass-raped by their Galtian overlords, but they shouldn’t complain about not having health-care because they can buy Chinese made food processors at Wal-Mart these days?

Fuck the Atlantic.

Not getting out of the boat. Nuh-uh. You can’t make me.

I never was one for wanting to stare at train wrecks, anyway.

Screw that. I’ll hold out for Andrew Sullivan’s recipe for Burkean blood pudding.

In the 19th century you had to slave for hours with a pencil (which you sharpened with a pen-knife) and paper (made by chewing a piece of wood into pulp) to make the kind of elementary mistakes Megan can make in seconds with a calculator.

And what the hell was her larger point anyways?

I’m going to propose that the opposite of “Occam’s Razor” is “McArdle’s Calculator”.

hellslittlestangel @ 13 Made me laugh.

Cooking in the 1940s? How could that happen since agribusiness had yet to be invented so there was no food.

OLD KENTUCKY NUT CAKE.

AHAHAHAAHA.

Sorry, but that was sublime.

The jazz adds to the comedy.

Best of all, the Atlantic’s Randian Bakestress fails to make enough frosting to cover her old timey nut cake. Demonstrating that despite all of the superior modern conveniences, her grandmother would have done a better job with the fucking ABACUS, twig utensils, milling and egg gathering.

I had to click ahead every time it got painful, so I was able to watch the whole video in 30 seconds. It’s official, McMegan sucks at everything.

Also, is it me or is she the tallest elf in the Universe?

She’s at least six ft.

I saw the headline on the Atlantic site, and was reminded of her earlier adventures in culinary crimes against humanity. She’s Sandra Lee without the charm.

Seriously, cooking in the forties and fifties was hell and that is why everyone starved to death leaving earth a cold dead place inhabited only by cockroaches and libertarians.

Whatever you think of Lileks, but he remains one of the internets’ best chroniclers of post-war “food” product. There are a lot of reasons for that generational breakdown in the ability to cook simple things — the rise of the supermarket and shelf-stable processed foodstuffs and mixes, the proliferation of recipe cards and “Serving suggestions” from their manufacturers, etc.

Great link, she should post a Ramen recipe, it would probably be 4 pages long.

Pour water into a saucepan.
..
You can use a large pot, but there’s no need.
..
Buy a package of ramen. I like to go to a specialty store, but you can get it at you regular grocery.
..
They should be the same.
..
You’ll need to open the package of ramen. I like to use a pair of scissors. My grandmother never had a pair of scissors that would cut thin plastic or cellophane, so she would probably use a knife. It’s one of the advantages of living in modern times.
..
Now remove the package of seasoning. BLAH BLAH BLAH!! SHUT UP STUPID WOMAN!!

A Cuisinart to sift flour?!?! (full disclosure, safe & dry on this boat, DID NOT disembark in search of mangoes…)

Why not just use a band-saw and be done with it? Much more complexity-looking, plus with the added advantage that she might saw off some of the lesser body parts preparing her celebration to Pan.

I kept waiting for her to slice her finger open a la Dan Akroyd as Julia Child. Alas…

Using a food processor to sift the flour? Huh? Do people really do that instead of the hand-crank sifter? The amount of time it takes to wash the processor is greater what it takes to sift flour.

This is where I stopped watching. Idiotic.

I am sure that grandma appreciates the fact that her generation survived the Depression and won World War II so that Megan could grow up to spend ten bucks on a box of salt.

Oh, that was a GREAT way to start the day. I only lasted until the butter bit, when Megan went off about the lack of standard measures. That’s crap, of course (they’ve been around and widely used since the turn of the century — even Megan’s grandma wasn’t that stupid). Interestingly, she might have reflected on the fact that things like standard measures are exactly what governments do well — while Randians like her would still be trying to decide which inferior infant’s empty skull best approximated one cup…

Next season on The Lurnin’ Channel: Smegahn’s Alaskan Kitchen (starring super duper food gatherer Sarah Palin and Master Chef Megan).

My head is spinning just trying to keep up with her temporal references!
Was her grandmother’s day in reference the 1950s, the 1900s or the 1850s? All were referenced in her comparisons when they best served to contrast with all the mod cons.

So many errors and so many points that could be made with such a “show”. And weren’t. I suppose in her world no women worked until her own generation’s intrepid foray into serious business. And all the ladies had muscles because of all their batter churning too.

Usually I rely on Tbogg to explain the wonder that is Megan. I am going back to that. The woman is not worth the effort. In my grandmother’s time (between 50 and 200 years ago) she didn’t have a blog snarkmeister to save her time sanity. She had wait until my grandfather got home with “the paper” to tell her what crap the columnists had spewed that day.

Ah, the wonders of the 21st century!

I only made it to 2:30 before I wanted to slap this woman silly. Arrogant, pedantic, and irrelevant! She cooks like she writes.

Yes, the modern world is wonderful. Instead of annoying just your neighbors, you can now enrage pretty much the entire planet. Aarrgghhh!

Wait – she put icing on a nut cake? That’s just weird.

And sifted flour in a food processor? C’mon, that’s a joke, right?

Who even bothers to sift flour anyway? I have a sifter and maybe I’d use it if I was making a cake…but probably not, since after skipping the sifting in recipes I’ve generally found it makes no difference. Isn’t sifting a throwback to a time when perhaps you might find small pebbles in the flour that needed to be sifted out? Or a time before anti-caking ingredients were included in the flour?

I didn’t watch the video. Reading about McMegan’s stupidity is painful enough; I don’t need to see it for myself.

the difference between a cockroach and a libertarian? When you turn a light on the cockroaches run away. The libertarians are the one that run towards the light because they think it’s a TV camera…

If you don’t sift the flour, at least when making pie crust, the ghost of Mrs. Forbes, my 8th grade home ec teacher, will come back to haunt you. Sift, then measure, then sift again with the salt included.

And what the hell was her larger point anyways?

It is a mystery. At first I thought she was going to show us how to make a cake in 1950, 1900, or 1623. But as she painfully detailed, it was too hard, so she used her modern technology. As a chef, I think she would peak at School Cafeteria Lunch Lady Assistant No. 3 – Sloppy Joe Stirrer.

My favorite part was the two minute description of how hard it was to measure things without – OMG – measuring utensils. Maybe they didn’t have enough room for all the zeros.

I think it was awesome and you guys are just jealous that you don’t have six 8″ pans hanging on your walls. And you underestimate how incredibly difficult it was for women in the 50s, who had to use a mixer, versus women in the present, who also have to use a mixer, but now it is stainless steel and her cake is cooked in an oven that cost as much as a car.

The point is that GE brings good things to life, including magazine advertising that puts money in Megan’s pocket so she can buy cooking equipment that she never uses because she and her husband, P. Suderman, boy chef, usually just heat up a Hot Pocket in their Cuisinart Convection Brick toaster oven anyway.

I thought it was going to be a parody video. I swear. Then she actually appeared. And she never tied back her hair, did she? When you are cooking, you kind of have to tie back your hair.

Other than that, I don’t know what she is talking about. We didn’t have cake when I was a youngster. We killed our enemies, then ground their bones to make our bread, which we cooked over the embers of the smoldering ruins. We sifted not, neither did we frost. And look how I turned out! Oh. Wait. There may be a small flaw.

Speaking of flaws, I wonder if Ayn Rand ever baked a cake. It does not seem likely, does it?

Unless she ate the entire thing herself, it would just be encouraging the moochers.

Types of sifters (NB: Food Processor not included)
* Colander, a (typically) bowl-shaped sieve used as a strainer in cooking
* Chinoise, or conical sieve used as a strainer, also sometimes used like a food mill
* Tamis, also known as a drum sieve
* Zaru, or bamboo sieve, used in Japanese cooking
* Flour sifter, used in baking
* Mesh strainer, or just “strainer,” usually consisting of a fine metal mesh screen on a metal frame
* Spider, used in Chinese cooking
* Tea strainer, specifically intended for use when making tea
* Cocktail strainer, a bar accessory

“…confectioners sugar was made with a rolling pin or, sometimes, more extreme methods were used….”
More extreme methods? My first mental image was of Wile Coyote on a steam roller but in her grandmother’s day that would have been the “hoisting a boulder to the top of a cliff with a rope and pulley and drop it on a pile of sugar” method…..

My grandmother was known as a ‘good country cook’. Married in 1917, u noes how she made confectioners sugar? She went to the store and bought it. And u noes what else? If she wanted baking powder? SHE BOUGHT THAT TOO!

There seem to be quite a few people who are unclear about historical reality.

Fer the luvva Mike: can someone pls tell me what that large object is around 1:26-1:32 just outside the kitchen, to the left of the fridge? It looks like a gigantic stereo speaker with two big cones (and no grill).

In a tiny hallway, facing a slab of wall and the kitchen doorway.

Isn’t that kind of ludicrous? It’s like putting a big flat screen tv over the bathtub in the bathroom, so you can catch a glimpse of it as you walk by.

Jeez, McMuffin, did your grandma wear safety goggles too?

Megan babbles, at about the nine-minute mark: See, that’s why they had big bowls back then.

[sigh] Jeezus H Fucking Lollapalooza. Just wanted to prove that I watched the whole thing.

…and, FWIW, her final point is nonsense. She says that the reason such old cookbooks have so many nut cake recipes is that the preparation of such cakes was a major undertaking. But that would more likely argue for including fewer such recipes in a given book.

She talks so fast, she looks half embarrassed, she’s posting for the entire world to see something that has nothing to do with her purported area of competence and can only elicit jeers: Megan, for fuck’s sake, find a therapist and put an end to all this self-ignorance. Ignore your libertarian fantasist peers and step into the fucking light for once.

You’ll thank me later.

Her stackable washboard and clothes line.

The full monstrosity of this just hit me: this is not a helpful amateur cook with a hastily assembled homemade video, shared out of a love of cooking, but an actual work product of the employee of a major mainstream magazine. For money. This is what she does for a living. My God.

I just had the thought of the women who would watch this an try to emulate it, good little con wifeys using a rolling pin to try to make some confectioners sugar…

A rolling pin the size of a lawn roller maybe….

I think it’s a set of giant pneumatic tubes that send and receive laundry to/from the Chinese lady down on Tenth Avenue.

Her ears are gi-normous!!

the opposite of “Occam’s Razor” is “McArdle’s Calculator”.

UncertaintyVicePrinicipal wins the intertubes for today.

@drewsz: My thoughts exactly.

Is she aiming for Alton Brown’s job? I wonder if we can get his critique on this video.

It’s a clock. Hands; pendulum. Why it’s where it is I leave as an exercise for the snarkers.

And I’m almost sure she said, re the sifter, this is what my gm used, and I usually do too, but then she demonstrated the Cuisinart method. So which is it?

I wondered about that too. Mind you, isn’t that pretty indicative of her level of understanding generally?

I thought it was funny that she practically pulverizes that poor walnut. Most people when they need the meat from a shell open them with some finesse so that bits of shell and meat are not commingled. Walnuts are actually pretty to open in such a fashion.

Let me get this straight. She gets PAID to do this?! I am SO in the wrong line of work.

I especially enjoyed (well, as much as I could stand, anyway — only made it to about 1:10) the soundtrack. Reminded me of cheap porn movies.

I simply cannot admit the possibility that this was real or authentic in any way. TBogg — “T” — may I call you T? — T, this has to be a hoax or the universe as we know it does not in fact exist.

Also, who gets butter in 1/3 c sticks? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

I got yer Old Kentucky nut cake right here, Meg, meet Jim Fucking Bunning.

The new Kentucky Nut Cake is busy making a complete ass of himself on the Senate floor.

Those would be the same people who buy their butter by the third of a pound. Granted, in the old days, we didn’t have pounds, we had lugs and so at the butter mill you’d ask for a lug of butter and when you got it home you’d divide it into thirds – ‘threes’ being the most common form of measurement.

So that’s how she does economics – she puts the numbers in a cup of water and then measures how much liquid is displaced.

1/3 of a cup of butter sticks! I wondered about that too! I thought maybe it was one of the fancy upmarket store kind of things.

Up here in Canada you can buy butter in sticks but for the most part they come in blocks and you have to cut the butter to the size you want. It does take some time to look at the handy measuring marks the butter company prints on the wrapper. Some of us are even pretty good at estimating how big a cup or half a cup or whatever is.

A lot of baking in olden times, if not done with approximate measures and indications of desired consistencies was done by weighing ingredients, especially things like flour. Depending on the humidity it could make quite a difference.

Not gonna get out of the boat for this one, but does anyone get the sense that this video serves two purposes: 1) to show off her kitchen and gadgets; 2) to try to show Paul Krugman and everyone else who criticized her earlier posts about kitchens that kitchens DID SO change as radically as she said they did?

But, seriously, a fucking Cuisinart to sift flour? Does she enjoy washing dishes?

I use a mesh strainer myself when I can be bothered to sift ingredients together. Or sometimes, I use a fork. I own a Cuisinart, but it would just simply never occur to me to drag it out and dirty it up for something that can be done with a fucking fork.

As for confectioner’s sugar: once upon a time, if you didn’t have confectioner’s sugar, you made a cooked icing with regular sugar. Why would you go to the trouble of making your own confectioner’s sugar when you could make a fudge icing or a seven-minute icing with what you already had?

Without bothering to submit myself to watching that video, can I assume that her cooking presentation and product is as half baked as her ideas on economic theory?

There’s a reason McMegan and the other libertards identify with John Galt as opposed to the Little Red Hen. Because actually doing all the work yourself isn’t as much fun as paying others a substandard wage in return for doing the work for you, leaving you plenty of leisure time to lay around and bitch about all those useless parasites who are actually baking the bread.

In this scenario, McMegan’s grandma was the Little Red Hen, sifting the flour with an archaic hand-powered device, working the butter into the flour with nothing more than a primitive spoon, whipping cream with an outrageously outdated whisk. McMegan is John Galt, relying on the parasites to construct machines to do it all, then paying far above the true cost of the machines in order to make sure that the deserving factory owner makes a hefty profit.

McMegan’s cake costs more than 10x what her grandma’s cake cost, after adjusting for inflation, because McMegan has convinced herself that she’s purchased “convenience” for herself rather than having been suckered into needless consumption by a pitchman.

The kicker is, McMegan’s grandma probably turned out better cakes in the same or a smaller amount of time than it took for McMegan to embarrass herself on the internets.

Maybe there is value in the lessons we learn from McArdle after all….just not the ones she thinks she’s making.

Ihad no idea she had such a freakishly enormous lantern jaw.

But, seriously, a fucking Cuisinart to sift flour? Does she enjoy washing dishes?

No, she just enjoys wasting water…because she can.

It’s a libertarian thing.

Hey!
That’s a Toastess kettle! I have one!

IT’S CANADIAN.

The kicker is, McMegan’s grandma probably turned out better cakes in the same or a smaller amount of time than it took for McMegan to embarrass herself on the internets.

Now THAT is a statement you can take to the bank.

I believe I saw that measuring-butter-with-water-displacement method on one of the early kinetoscope episodes of Cooking With Archimedes.

I’ve now looked at a good 35 seconds of this.

This woman doesn’t know the difference between 1900 and ‘the early 20th century’ – more importantly? PUT AWAY UR G-D POTS AND PANS! WHERE DO U THINK U ARE, IN SOME 16TH CENTURY GREAT HALL WHERE U HANG THIS STUFF ON THE WALLS AND FROM THE CEILINGS???? WE HAZ CABINETS AND CUPBOARDS TO PUT THINGS AWAY!

Chuy. This woman is a clown.

Yes, before Gramma had real ounces marked on her Pyrex, she had to drop handfuls of butter into water and measure how much water it displaced. Brilliant!

She’s thinking of measuring irregular objects like grapes, not butter, but never mind. Let’s just think about her formidable powers of analysis based on this shining example!

@phugh and brendanscalling: the battlefield is this target-rich and you two mutts go after her looks. Classy. Did you remember to tense your washboard abs as you typed?

Yowzuh. I made it to about 4:25, then noticed smoke coming from my ears. A few comments:

The thing in the background is an upscale stacked washer-dryer combo.

I cooked like that with my mother and grandmother in the 60′s and 70′s, and taught my kids how to cook in the aughts. McMegan completely ignores that her grandmother had a helper or two to shell the nuts and grease the pans. You could call it child labor, but it was more like apprenticeship for adulthood.

Helpless dependance upon machines and products is not really a good thing.

It takes just as much time to buy the spray and clean the food processor as it does smear some butter and sift some flour. Megan has confused convenience with economy.

If this is what passes for sound reasoning in this country, I fucking give up. We are doomed.

My God she’s a crap cook, er, baker. Apparently they don’t teach Home Ec at her Intellectually Intimidating school. Maybe they should add a requirement?

Do they still teach Home Ec? My kids, now in their 20s, didn’t get it at school.

No, Ayn Rand never baked a cake. She did, however, write about the fabulous men and women who bravely baked cakes with wheat harvested for at free market wages, sugar donated by plantation owners, milk squeezed from grateful dairymen, eggs plucked from factory egg farms, and nuts provided by pecan growers who felt trampled by government interference in their lives.

The cake looked a lot like McMegan’s and tasted like shit. But all Ayn’s readers agreed it was fantastic, the best they’d ever eaten even as they went to their local ERs for food poisoning from the pesticides in the wheat, heavy metals in the sugars, SR-90 in the milk, eggs covered in fecal matter from the factory farms, but the nuts were okay because the trees they came from had been sprayed with DDT years ago. You see, the free market worked as advertised, even back in the 50′s but no one wanted to admit that THEY got sick from Ayn’s cake… it was all the fault of the Commies. Or Obama.

I’m guessing–but pretty sure–that MM is big on getting all the bright (brilliant) pals she had in pre-school, primary, Advanced Placement High School and exclusive/upscale college, grad school, etc. are as smart and adept as she is. Like the ultra brilliant guys and gals who were in engineering–nuclear engineering.

She is sure that they will be as smart in designing nuclear power plants as Meggy is in designing brilliant economic analyses of both baking and the wonders that have been wrougt by kitchen engineers. It’s only a short hop from the kitchen to the nuclear power plant.

Now we’re cookin’.

Right, so (looking at what twoth the McMegan) when she’s made aware that many cooks, many very good cooks, don’t in fact use all of the gadgetry that she claims “we all use” nowadays, her response is “Well, they should!”?

Is that about it?

She turns it from a pointing out of her error to an argument that those people should do what she claimed they already do because then her idiotic overgeneralized stereotyping would make more sense?

It must be hard being that at odds with reality itself, like a little Joe Btfsplk cloud hovering over only you, following you around, making everyone and everything else just wrong and you just right no matter what facts to the contrary anyone makes you aware of. Especially then.

This is an excellent video for the approach of Pesach and actual cooking in Casa 4jkb4ia. (Many of the recipes are Sephardic and thus complicated)
(I have baked a cake once in 8 years of living in this house. All the Passover cakes involve separating eggs and it’s too hard)

And in the year 2002, when I got it, I can get all these recipes from Claudia Roden instead of doing the awful, bland Ashkenazic stuff.

Golly, there is a LOT of win here!

The post is full of win.

The comments? Win-a-Palooza!

Knowing that Ayn Rand mooched off the system before packing it? Yep! Full of win!

And Meg’s video is, uh, nevermind…..

What? Oh, damn. I used to get Old Kentucky Nut Cake for my birthday, with mocha frosting. I’m not saying Mom was a great cook, but it was one dee-lish cake when made by, y’know, a non-idiot.

I learned from Poor H. Allen Smith’s Almanac years ago that women in the Netherlands would measure butter by smearing it on a plank, then sliding down the plank, and whatever sticks to her ass is a pound and a quarter. I didn’t look to see if Megan was “hip” to this advanced method.

God, I’m LMAO at all these comments, without having had to watch the video. I am moderately curious…and have lately been around a few 20-somethings who have entertaining, if appalling, views on what constitutes “cooking.” Or “education”, for that matter. (college was so much harder than high school!”)

P’raps I’ll be back to watch the video when I have more time.
Who mentioned their 8th grade home ec teacher re: the importance of sifting flour for a cake? Yeah, me, too. I don’t think I could make a scratch cake without sifting…it just wouldn’t feel right.
The thing about sifting is…depending on the recipe – it will make the cake come out lighter and maybe more tender. Unsifted-flour cake might be edible, but sifted will be better.
MHO.

Oh, gawd, I started watching. Great grandma in 1900 had no standard measuring cups…bc there were no standard measuring cups UNTIL THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY!!!

?????????

Oh, my gawd. They “actually took the bowl and creamed it together.”
O my fucking grandmother’s Pennsyvlania Dutch apron strings.
I don’t know how much more I can take of this….

Oh my fucking gawd again….she’s using those god-awful plastic bagged shelled year-old STALE nuts?
Face palm.

Yeah, the frosting is the “equivalent” of canned frosting – NOT! Even what MMcA made is better – less sugar and none of the preservatives and god-knows-what-else flavor enhancers, shelf stabilizers, etc. in the canned frosting. Even her version will taste 10 times better.
Sheesh. Yeah, I know I’ve overposted, but this bugged me much more than I expected.
I never thought I had a youtube-worthy skill, but perhaps I could do some basic but not stupid cooking lessons for our woefully ignorant-about-cooking young friends.

I didn’t mean to offend, but there’s something awesome about a Libertarian who can’t bake choosing a nut cake recipe with “Old Kentucky” in the name.

Given all the goings on in US politics, the spectacle had Tea Party written all over it.

I’m sure the cake is delicious.

Trust me, if she’d picked Lemon Loaf it would have even been funnier. (For me.)

Do you know any good lawyers? (;

I’ve never baked a cake in my life, but I am sure that I could grab that cookbook and do a better job without using any cooking gadgets made after 1945.

I hope the ghost of James Beard haunts her for that. He pointed out in one cake recipe that you could use one container to measure everything, and the recipe would work. (They were probably using a teacup in the 1850s. Or maybe a coffee cup.)

My grandmother could do a better job. Without a mixer. (Not sure she ever had one – she used hand tools making pie crust.) Heck, I’ve made cakes from scratch, without a mixer. If you use a 19th-century recipe, you don’t need one.

Having everything hanging in plain sight was really ‘in’ during the 70s and 80s. It’s wonderful if you never actually cook anything. Otherwise, you have to wash your pans before you can use them, because they collect grease from the cooking and dust from everything else.

made it to 48 seconds. I want to say she’s a faux dilettante even though I know it’s not right.

Back before my spouse swore off (most) carbs, I used to make homemade pasta in the old Italian way: Mound of flour on the counter, with a well for the eggs and whatever other liquid ingredients are to be used; mix up from the inside out; roll out with rolling pin, making sure that surface is floured; score into strips for either immediate use or to dry for later. Total time: fifteen minutes, if I was being particularly slow. Later I got a handcranked pasta machine that made the dough flatter (I also used it for empandada, tart, and pasty shells) but I still cut the strips by hand.

Julia Child did it that way, but then again she used every one of her wall utensils all the time so they didn’t have a chance to get greasy. (That, and I suspect she had an industrial-strength stove fan.)

Everybody seems to be assuming that she’ll be the one to clean the ‘nart after using it to sift flour. I can’t imagine she wouldn’t have some menial hired to do that and paid with the kitchen scraps.

My nut cake is god,
My talent is on display.
Sift my flour, bitch.

It addds air, so the volume changes. If you’re not going to sift it, you should use less – I think it’s about 1 1/2 tablespoon less of unsifted flour for each cup of sifted flour called out.

She should have made the W H Harrison pound cake. It’s really good – although lemon extract is a lot easier to get hold of than lemon oil.
I’ve made it two or three times, without a mixer or a food processor, and it worked fine.

In general, weighing rather than measuring ingredients is better, especially for baking. That said, in pastry school, even though we weighed everything, we still sifted stuff on occasion. At home I almost never do, unless it’s something that has clumped.

But I would never, under any circumstances, use my Cuisinart to sift flour. That is wildly demented.

Over at Edroso’s place, the comments are also quite good.

You, know… I’ve been making up for the extra-crispy ionized atmosphere here in Tokyo to make a series of apple & mixed-berry (blackberry, blueberry, marionberry) pies, and quiches – from complete scratch (crust included) with a bowl and a sifter. Also a gas range. With Fuji Apples, sweet, sweet Fuji applessss (drool). Anywho, this reinforces that McAddled is an idiot, my central point.

does anyone get the sense that this video serves two purposes: 1) to show off her kitchen and gadgets; 2) to try to show Paul Krugman and everyone else who criticized her earlier posts about kitchens that kitchens DID SO change as radically as she said they did?

I’d say showing off her kitchen gadgets was WAY higher on her list than replying to Krugman’s criticisms. We’ve learned that she’s not interested in accuracy, but she’s always been very interested in trying to impress people by offering tantalizing glimpses of her heady, privileged lifestyle. AKA, thumbing your nose at the richer kids who were mean to you in high school.

“Envy me, ye peons, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal fake, innumerate, unfair,
The steel and copper pans stretch far away.

I just want to thank y’all on the thread, Tbogg and everyone, for some first-rate snark and hilarity, and thanks to McMeegs herself for a video of stupefying banality, slipshoddiness, and wacky assertion. (I hope the camera guy was well compensated, because I’d rather feed my arm into McMeegs’ KitchenAid than have to shoot take after take of her flailing around.)

First of all, her “grandmother” (by which I guess she intends to signify, someone “REALLY REALLY OLD!!!!!!”) would have had an electric hand mixer AND a stand mixer, and a big-ass wooden spoon with which she could do damn near everything that needed doing in this video, and could have gotten her butter/sugar mixture creamed while McMeegs was still trying to figure out how to put her KitchenAid together (and by the way, a sleazier, more pathetic bid for some largesse from the KitchenAid peole I have never seen).

Second, the pride thing. McMeegs’ pride isn’t in the final result, which is pathetic–it’s in “knowing” and “having.” What she does with her high-end kitchen ware is turn out something that looks like it was made by a five-year-old, with a five-year-old’s “baking set,” and she presents her “knowledge” grandly like a five-year-old would. You try not to notice the soupy “whipped” cream, the haphazardly smeared frosting, the cake with a consistency of particleboard, and you might chuckle indulgently and congratulate her–IF she’s FIVE! For an adult to produce a cake, and a video, like this? As my grandmother would have said after watching this, “That gal ain’t RIGHT.”

Finally, two other things I enjoyed: the single, glowingly polished copper pot on the wall, and the surreptitiously sneaked-out-of-the-picture glass of wine. I know serious cooks with copper in the kitchen, and none of it’s polished: it’s USED, and has the color of a very old penny. Her gleaming pot is a badge of Knowing, that’s all. And the glass of wine….hmm, I used to cook like that myself, back in the day. To be honest, some of my kitchen creations, after several glasses of wine, looked as akimbo and off-kilter and gollywumpus as Meegs’ cake. And so did I!!!