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Since my last post on the elusive perfect home-cooked Kung Pao chicken, I have pursued this grail a half-dozen more times, and I believe I have achieved my goal, or as close as I expect to get in this lifetime.
I started working from a recipe I found here -- the photo looked somewhat right, and the ingredient set was close to my preference for a simple chicken, scallion and peanut dish.
I tried out a variety of modifications, including the use of hoisin sauce instead of sugar for the sweetening, but in the end found the simpler white-sugar approach, combined with a switch from light to dark soy sauce, did the trick. I added scallions, eliminated some extra salt, brought the cornstarch level way down (I've never been able to put a whole tablespoon of cornstarch into any dish without ending up with muck), and tinkered with the sauce ingredients -- adding rice wine and black vinegar. The result is just what I was after. Here's the full recipe.
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Things are usually quiet in mailing-list land over the holidays, but today I was distressed to find in my inbox a report from a fellow Salon blogger that the comment system for Salon Blogs, which is operated for us by our partners at Userland, seemed to have developed an odd political bias: If you tried to post a comment that included the word "Socialist" or "Socialism," the server refused to post it. I double-checked for myself, and sure enough, this seemed to be the case.
Now, I know that no one at Salon has any interest in censoring the political slant of comments on blogs. (And even if we were that conspiratorial, this particular choice of verbiage to block would seem to go against the stereotypical grain of our hotbed of freedom-hating leftie bias.) All sorts of peculiar things are known to happen in the world of software, so I checked in with Userland, and got the explanation that, if I'd really been thinking carefully, I might have guessed at.
Like all blog software developers and service operators, Userland is doing what they can to stem the flood of comment-spam. Recently, it seems, they'd introduced a keyword-based spam filter for the comments server. Now, if you take the word "Socialism" and remove the "so-" and the "-m," you are left with the name of a certain male-potency-enhancing drug that is among the most popular wares peddled in spam circa 2005. (I'm also regularly in receipt of offers for something called a "rash guard," and I haven't a clue what that is -- it sounds like some sort of medical unguent for use in activities better left undescribed, but most likely it's far more innocent, right?)
Chalk up this "censorship," then, to fallout from a turn in the spam attack/countermeasure cycle. "Socialism," you are an innocent bystander in the war on Cialis advertising!
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