You'd think that would be some kind of cool iTunes reference, but it's not.

I've tried to keep some tahini on hand for a while, because it's useful:

1. Unlike peanut butter, it's not usually made with salt (or at least not much), so there are no sodium implications.
2. Like peanut butter, it basically lasts forever, especially if you refrigerate it after opening.

I used to make Dean Ornish's recipe for fat-free hummus (page 152), but that's too high in sodium now—it relies not just on canned chickpeas, but also on that said garbanzos are packed in a salty liquid, which gives the no-tahini version a lot of its flavor. I have no-salt-added canned chickpeas, but they fail in the Ornish recipe due to lack of seasoning.

Cook's Illustrated published a restaurant-style hummus recipe ($) in the May-June 2008 issue, and it works really well with salt substitutes (if I add a little more than ½ teaspoon, at least), but it requires tahini. A few other recipes I use call for it as well, and on this weekend's The Splendid Table, Lynne Rossetto Kasper answered a listener's question about using leftover tahini, and she provided some great ideas. (Download the show for yourself in their podcast.)

I only have one—ok, two real problems using tahini. One, it makes a godawful mess. It's much less viscous than peanut butter but every bit as sticky, so it flows freely and sticks everywhere.

Two, every recipe calls for a small amount of tahini "stirred well to combine." I've had horrible problems stirring tahini, because I get it in big two-pound jars. (I want to slap people when I hear advice to get ingredients at "my local Asian market." The closest one I know about is 40 miles away, and the last time I actually got there, it was closed. They're open when I sleep.) It's less expensive in both time and money to get bigger containers because they last, as noted, just about forever. I've never had tahini go bad on me.

But in these jars, as opposed to short wide tubs like supermarket hummus, it's very difficult to stir. The last jar I finished probably had 10% of its weight in sesame seed solids stuck to the bottom when I had to pitch it because no matter what spoon I used, I just could not maneuver into the jar to get it scraped up. (Yes, that means the "tahini" I did use was too thin. That's part of the problem.)

If I use force with a big spoon, it splashes everywhere, but the jar is too narrow to get a long whisk into, and the force required to move the handle made the tahini splash anyway. I like to mix things in small containers with whisks by holding the handle of the whisk between both palms and rubbing them back and forth, giving the whisk rotational velocity while keeping it centered. It works great for eggs in a measuring cup, but didn't work for tahini: any whisk I could get into the jar didn't reach to the corners, and the whisks big enough to do that (I have three whisks, so don't get ideas) wouldn't fit into the jar opening.

Then, tonight, it hit me: my stick blender has a whisk attachment.

It's just like the one pictured here. I got it because it was on sale and was recommended by Cook's Illustrated except they though the attachments were unnecessary, but I didn't have a smaller blender or a mini-chopper. I used that mini-chopper multiple times per week until the lid on it broke earlier this year, giving the motor no way to turn the chopper's shaft. The big blender part still works, and I use it for smaller blending tasks.

But the whisk? You can probably tell just from the picture that the damn thing has really thin wires. I don't mean "egg-slicer" thin, in that they'll break if you hit a tough mushroom stem, but not a whole lot thicker. They're much flimsier than my Oxo hand whisks. I tried using it on the hand blender a few times, but the thin wires didn't do much, and the thing rotated so fast (even on slow speed) that ingredients went flying. I might use it to mix a viniagrette in a tall jar if shaking wouldn't work.

Tall jar? Hey! I got it out and got out the tahini, which I'd kept upside down so the thick sesame solids were near the top this time (and wouldn't weld to the bottom of the container). With very gentle pressure, the whisk attachment got into the jar opening! And it reached all the way to the bottom!

I held my breath and, preparing to have to clean tahini off every surface in the kitchen, pressed the button. It worked like a charm. There was no splatter. The speed that was a hindrance in a bowl was just the ticket in an enclosed jar, and the looser texture of the tahini didn't stress the thin wires at all. In just about ten seconds, I had better-mixed tahini than in any previous jar I'd ever bought, and with only one dirty whisk attachment for the effort!

So, yay for me, I figured something out. Now maybe I can use this low-sodium, high-flavor (and yes, high in fat, but moderate on saturated fat) ingredient in more dishes, because getting out 2-3 tablespoons is no longer a mixing chore from hell. Hooray for connecting the dots!

News from the Florida Legislature:

State Sen. Michael Bain, a Jacksonville Independent, said he plans to introduce a bill to require teachers who discuss relgion, including Christianity, to also discuss the idea of atheism.

Atheism is the concept that there is no God or other super-intelligent unknowable being in the universe. Atheism differs from agnosticism in that the latter belief says that humans cannot know whether or not God exists, while atheism flatly asserts that God does not and cannot exist.

Bain, the chief sponsor of the bill, expects the Senate to take it up when it meets in March. He said its intent is simple: "If you're going to teach religion, then you have to teach the other side so you can have critical thinking."

Bain said that if the Legislature passes the bill, he wouldn't be surprised if there's a legal challenge.

"You just never know. They use the courts all the time. I guess if they have enough money they can get it in the courts," he said. "Someplace along the line you've got to be able to make a value judgment of what it is you think is the appropriate thing."

…Bain's planned bill isn't a surprise to those who favor teaching evolution.

"We were expecting some sort of effort to blunt evolution education," said Jeremiah Saunders, a theology professor at Florida State University who helped draft the year-old school standards on religion. "What you are describing is one of the tools in the standard anti-Christian toolbox."

It won't be the first time the Legislature has addressed the issue.

After the standards were approved in February 2008, the Senate and House each passed bills that would require public schools to teach "critical analysis" of religion. The majority in both chambers said they wanted to protect teachers from being punished if they questioned Christianity.

That effort died in the Legislature, however, because the two chambers weren't able to reconcile their plans into a single bill.

'A lot of hate mail'

This time around, though, Bain - a co-sponsor of the 2008 bill in the Senate - said he expects the House plan to be extremely similar to the one he will introduce. That should make it easier to pass, he said.

Bain acknowledges it's a controversial subject. "I got a lot of hate mail last year," he said. "You'd think I'd never read the Bible, that I was Satan, that I offered human sacrifices or something."

Those bills were a deliberate effort to "undermine" the new Florida standards on teaching religion, said Greg Blum of Florida Citizens for Religion, a group supportive of teaching Christianity.

"My group is keeping an eye out for this bill to pop up again," he said. "Hopefully legislators are worried about other things."

Oh, no, wait a minute, that's not the actual story. And yet the revised version above changes startlingly few words.

(Names have been changed to protect them from the Google, though honestly I'm not sure the parties involved all deserved such courtesy.)

Here's a very simple test of "freedom," folks: would you want the public schools to be forced to teach a belief (not facts) that go against your beliefs, just because people holding those beliefs have lots of money and power? If you think that would be a bad thing, then you should think that forcing the schools to teach your beliefs is also a bad thing.

Failure to see this is called "lack of self-awareness."

Eric Boehlert:

The casual contempt for Obama—an unheard of phenomenon for the press eight years ago when Bush arrived in the Beltway—has already become impossible for many within the media industry to hide.

Digby:

We are still living in bizarroworld. The entire media became hysterical, nearly speaking in tongues, at the prospect of going to war against someone who hadn't even attacked us. Now that we have a real crisis on our hands, they are so,very, very booored with it all. It's infuriating.

Jamison Foser, quoting Digby:

The blogger Digby recently mentioned to me that the media, after years of deference to President Bush, are about to lurch back toward the excessively critical approach they took toward President Clinton:

Just as they treated Bush with extraordinary respect in reaction to their heinous behavior during the Clinton years, the villagers are now preparing to treat Obama with skepticism in reaction to the failures that resulted from their fawning obsequiousness.

Oddly, these lurches always seem to disfavor the Democrats.

Digby's concern is shared by many progressive media critics, this one included. Which is not to say that the media should treat Barack Obama the way they treated George Bush for much of his presidency. That's a key difference between progressive media critics and those on the right—we want the media to do their jobs better, while conservatives are not particularly fond of the concept of journalism and won't be happy unless the media act as the propagandists of the conservative movement.

I think they're missing a significant part of the Washington media's behavior. Progressive bloggers regularly call them the "villagers" or the "kool kidz" because they act like a bunch of people in high school trying to pretend that they are completely hip, while everyone else is so incredibly, you know, not.

It's hard for them to keep up this pretense with a president like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. These guys are, without question, cool. They became cool on their own merits, surviving the campaign process after starting, relatively speaking, out of nowhere. Clinton left office with high approval ratings, such as Obama has now.

George W. Bush is just as undeniably not cool. He might have been a regular guy, the one you'd want to have a beer with, but he wasn't cool. He got to the White House with all the advantages in the world, including a father who had been President once removed from the man he succeeded in the office.

As Bush's approval ratings fell and the country left him behind, the press abandoned its 2001-2003 era man-crush on him, just like the high school crowd at the lunch table ditches the formerly cool kid who's now running his own commercial Web site and making $2000 per month and who doesn't really have time any more for their petty gossip about who puts out and who has the best pot. It was the same way with the first President Bush, if you'll recall, whom they roundly mocked for not knowing the price of milk.

And now comes the new kid, "Barack Obama," who doesn't even have the sense to be totally embarrassed by that goofy name. Even worse, he is obviously cool, and everyone can see it. He has things going on that these nattering ninnies had previously claimed as their own, but when the other kids can see the real thing in action, it's obvious how empty and shallow they really are. He shows them up daily without even trying. He's so cool that even as their admiration for him transforms into seething rage, he's still totally cool to them, talking to them and smiling with them and making them look good.

This, of course, only makes them more insanely insane. And sure enough, just like Bart Simpson does when a new kid appears to be cool at Springfield Elementary, their first, base, primal instinct is that they must tear him down. "He thinks he's so hot? We'll show everyone what a loser he is, and then we'll be the cool ones again."

This never happens with Republicans because:

1. Republicans are never "cool," except in the John McCain "pretty cool for an old guy" sense, and
2. Republicans don't care about #1.

Republicans do not threaten the media's egos, so the media are perfectly happy to co-exist with them. In a one-on-one interview between Charles Gibson and Orrin Hatch, no one's going to doubt that Gibson is the cooler of the two, and Gibson is decidedly uncool (and George Herbert Walker Bush-level out of touch on the economy).

Democrats who are preternaturally uncool (Dennis Kucinich, Harry Reid) don't trigger this impulse either, even if they're policy whizzes (Russ Feingold). Democrats who are marginally cool and yet obviously know what they're doing (Howard Dean) do, and Democrats who are undeniably cool just make the media crazy.

Since it does not seem in Obama's nature for him to stop being cool, it's not clear what the country can do about this. Ignoring the Washington media won't work, because the press is so myopic that instead of understanding the national cry of "Hire reporters who aren't pathologically insecure," they'll instead hear "Americans don't want news from Washington," so it'll go from psychopathic coverage to no coverage. Republicans are fine with that, too, because they do their best work when no one's watching (Gitmo, surveillance, Dick Cheney).

The only answer I see so far is to say, repeatedly, loudly, in the face of every immature reporter who shows this syndrome, "Grow the fuck up, stop being threatened by the President being cool, and do your fucking job."

They'll probably just look at you as if you were speaking Aramaic, though. They have no ability to look at their own behavior. None at all.