Today is the election for those of us here in the USA.

I'm not going to beat too far around the bush here. A vote for Romney is a vote for insanity and evil. If you're doing it, don't let me know.

If you are in NY or NJ and have been displaced you can cast a provisional ballot at any polling place. If you can get to your own polling place that is best, but if you cannot, this is an option. Tell anybody you know who is worried about this... even if they are voting for the other guy.

The bagels came out well enough.

They didn't look like bagels because of the aforementioned indecision about how many to make. Once you grab your ball of dough you have to stick with it! But they tasted pretty good. Next time I won't make the same error. (I'll make a different one!)

We're having potato pancakes for lunch as the nieces are home due to Election Day. Lots of people make those out of a box, but they're pretty easy to make the real way. Still, it took me a while to learn a few tricks, most of which I'm sure, as always, I was the last to know.

First, potatoes really are full of water. You have to squeeze them several times to get all the water out, and it's always at least one more time than you think. Salting the grated potatoes helps a little, as does letting them drain. If they drain into your bowl you can save the starch to help bind the pancakes, or you can let any visiting children play with it. That's always fun. If you're adding other root vegetables, they should be grated after the potatoes are all squeezed out.

Second - and this took me ages to work out! - most flours and such are awful binders. They do weird things to the texture and tend to turn gluey. Ick. Mashed potato will do much better, and taste better as well. I wanted to try some mashed chickpeas today, but I burned them. Careless! Well, they'll go in the compost.

Third, it always is better to make applesauce than buy it, because it's not cost effective to buy a small jar but the big ones don't get used up fast enough. That might just be us, though.

Finally, whatever Jenn says, it's not strictly necessary to grate onions. Finely chopping them works just fine.

If you do all the grating yourself, you can eat as many as you've cooked on the grounds that grating burns calories and works up an appetite. Which is what I did, but I probably should not have eaten quite as much sour cream. Oh well!

Well, I voted.

That is, I told the nieces what to do, and they marked my ballot and put it in the thing.

This year, as always, I am reminded that what we really urgently need is voting reform. Our system actively discourages having more than two parties, which of course are more like one party in the corporate pocket. There are numerous ways to improve this. The simplest I can think of is to make voting a "pick all that apply" system instead of a "pick just one" system, like having checks instead of bullets on an Internet poll. There are literally dozens of options out there, but we still plod along with the simple but flawed choice because the writers of the constitution didn't have the experience or foresight to realize the trouble.

It really just *bugs* me.