Reviving freezer-burned brats

I can’t promise this will bring back seriously freezer burned bratwurst; these were freezer-burned, but I don’t know how badly. How do you measure that, anyway?

At any rate, I defrosted them. Chopped up a quarter-onion or so and plopped it in water in a pot – enough to cover the brats, so there aren’t really any precise measurements here. I threw in a pinch of salt and maybe half a teaspoon of black pepper. Brought it to a boil and added about a teaspoonful of honey. When it was well-mixed I added the brats, in this case three.

Simmered for fifteen minutes, stirring and turning frequently. Then I broiled them for three minutes a side. Done!

With a can of black beans and some Dijon-style mustard you have a tasty meal that also sports quite a low glycemic load. Would also go nicely with my go-to side dishes of olives and walnuts.

Sadly, I succumbed to the lure of starch and ate them on bread. The fact it’s wheat bread saves me from the horrors of high fructose corn syrup (since I searched to find some that lacked it – don’t assume anything!) It does not in fact help with the GL.

I need to lose weight. Seriously. Going low-GL would help. It has in the past. I probably need to go hard-core Atkins for a while.

The difficulty is I’m still detoxing on my news/opinion fast. It may seem like a wussy rationalization; it may even be. But in my experience and observation trying to change too many things at once is a recipe for failure.

There seems to be a case made for total life makeover working. That entails stuff like changing your appearance, your friends, where you hang out, even where you live. We’re talking everything. I’m not going to do that. Most of my life serves me fine.

Slowly but surely I’m getting things under control. I’d like to speed up the process. I guess I’ll do what I can.

On other fronts: while I ate my tasty revivified brats and black beans I watched a Nova episode called “The Four-Winged Dinosaur,” about microraptor. Microraptor was a chicken-sized beast with well-developed aerodynamic feathers on all four limbs. It’s presumed to have somehow used all four limbs to glide – something no other known animal, past or present, has done. The show chronicled microraptor’s role in a dispute between mainstream paleontologists, who say birds descended from dinosaurs, and a Santa Claus-bearded bird paleontologist who maintains they didn’t either.

Now, I won’t claim detachment: I come down firmly on the “birds are too dinos, dammit!” side. For the very unscientific reason I suspect most scientists do: because I want to, dammit!

That said, I’m afraid I have to call foul for the other side. The basic dispute here was over whether microraptor had sprawling (hence non-dinosaurian) hind limbs, or basically upright, hence definitively dinosaur. They did wind-tunnel tests with a reconstructed microraptor in variations of the “upright hind limbs” configuration. When they found one that worked fairly well, they stopped. Without testing the “sprawled” configuration to see if that glided better.

That doesn’t seem fair.

That said, and quite aside from disagreeing with him about the whole birds-are-dinos thing, I never quite got the insistence that, should microraptor have indeed had sprawling hind limbs, that was the “death” of the theory birds descended from dinosaurs. He appeared to believe it would demonstrate that microraptor wasn’t a dinosaur, but instead an ancestor of birds, which he claims (if I have this straight) diverged from dinosaurs about the time they split up with crocodiles.

How does that follow? What if, for example, microraptor was a so-called evolutionary dead end, and nothing much descended from it?