academic p.c. and butter

I was thinking, "Hey! Why not incorporate sex, race, and income equality awareness in my everyday activities in bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice, once in awhile, eh?" Let's give it a go.

"I have a present for you." 

"You do?"  She stops.  Face relaxes, eyes brighten, posture changes. We move toward each other.

"Yes. This is the type of candy rich white guys like. (dismissively) It's all butter and sugar."  But it is presented in a  Glad food storage container, déclassé as can be, another thing insouciant white people do, since I'm emphasizing race with my arc bending.

Arc bending and this whole time I was imagining it merely being a person.

Later I learn it was shared and they like it really super dooper well too, they said. It is average candy and most of that complimenting is being nice to me in return and encouraging but at least part of that stated satisfaction must be due to my sales presentation, don't you think? 

Apart from all that, this is what I want to tell you, this is the point of this post. Last night I discovered a way to quickly produce a sheet of butter used for flake pastry, and it simplifies things tremendously and makes the whole thing much easier to get to the business of moral universe arc bending  toward justice quicker, more easily and more efficiently this way, by spreading around the delicious attractive indulgent toasted butter flakes.

Rip a sheet of wax paper the size of the baking sheet. The size of the working surface used to size rolled dough and to transport a sheet of rolled dough back and forth between the freezer. I use a flexible rectangular cutting surface, not a cutting board, but a thick colored plastic sheet. They come in a set, as with kosher kitchens to keep things separate by color.

A space in the freezer is cleared to place the sheet of dough. That is just customary Boy Scout preparation. 

A cold stick of butter is smashed directly onto the wax paper  and felt as to  how it smashes. What it feels like determines how the rest is smashed, to wait for it to soften a bit or go on. The palm of the hand is used to flatten, the chunks separated  from each other, slide them apart, and smashed  separately until the bar is flatted and spread out and lumpy but fairly even, covered with another sheet of wax paper and rolled   to near-perfect flatness. It rolls easily in half a minute. I was surprised how easy this is, and how fast it freezes hard. The sheet of butter is useable in minutes. The paper peeled off. From stick of butter to flattened sheet in minutes.

It is not necessary to roll, chill, turn roll chill, turn roll chill, turn roll chill, all that is nonsense. In its workable state you can get at least two rolls and two folds and sometimes three, whether turning or not. All that turning and folding in half or in thirds is up to you as you do it to get a shape of a rectangle or square. And inserting the sheet into the freezer to chill it is determined by how flexible the dough becomes in the time that you do it by the warmth of the kitchen and by how fast you go and how cold your things are. It must not become too floppy. You do not want the butter to melt but it is not necessary to keep it ice cold. 

I used too much butter and knew that when I did it. I knew by the weights of both. The result melted while baking then rose up, lifting in layers out of the melted pile and baked into a thousand layers, maybe a hundred layers, okay fine! Twenty layers, but that is still impressively tall and  flakey and with surplus butter, so incredibly delicate the pieces fall apart while being lifted to your mouth and then dissolve completely once in there, so you go, "What just happened? Where did my apple turnover go? " You get little flakes all over the place and trying to get rid of them just makes them tinier until they turn into air and disappear. 

"Don't share with him, 'cause he's a boy." HA HA HA HA HA HA all around. A guy in the office just sitting there, I have no idea who and it doesn't matter. Being academically pc allows one to be openly sexist.