les pensées de la fleur

Applebutter!

2011-11-06T15:37:00.000+09:00

So this year's batch of apple butter has arrived!

I did it a bit different this year... I don't have a slow cooker here in Korea (or an oven for that matter), so I had to use a stove top method. I used the ratio of ingredients that I used the for the slow cooker method, but this year I added fresh ginger and some green cardamon - since G. isn't here to complain about them. I started out with a low fire until the sugar pulled some of the juices out of the apples. Once I didn't have to worry about burning (as much), I turned the heat up and got a nice boil going. Stir, stir, stir... It cooked down for about an hour and a half. Then I pulled out the cardamon pods, ran an immersion blender through it to smooth it out, and ladled it into jars. Boil the jars for 15 minutes and...

Voila, applebutter! I had to stir it at least every 10 minutes, but I have to say... totally worth it!

There's nothing like fresh, warm applebutter!

Wordless Wednesday: Dak Galbi

2011-11-02T12:21:00.002+09:00

Jeonju Bibimbap Festival...

2011-10-25T00:43:00.001+09:00

... really an excuse to see two of my favorite people...

They really aren't creepy, I promise!

This weekend I went to Jeonju, Jeollabuk-do, South Korea, ostensibly to eat bibimbap. It was after all the annual festival celebrating this awesome food... and it really is an awesome food - I've yet to have an iteration that I haven't liked, though some do shine brighter than others. And I did eat bibimbap. And it was tasty (the best I've had so far, in fact).

Festival bibimbap

However, I also got a tour of some of L. and B.'s favorite places in their current hometown. First we hit the Hanok village, where the bibimbap festival was being held, and the displays of historical iterations of bibimbap were impressive...

But we were all pretty hungry, so we moved on to the real thing - and as stated above, it was super tasty. After we were all fully satiated, we browsed around the Hanok village a bit more. There were lovely booths with crafts and food. But there was more to be crammed into the 27 1/2 hours I was in Jeonju, so we wandered over to the Gaeksa - a shopping district a short walk away from the Hanok village.

B. perusing the offerings in the Gaeksa

The Gaeksa is a wonderland of retail delight, but I managed to resist temptation until we got to Hot Tracks, a stationary store, where I succumbed to the lure of office supplies and scrapbooking necessities. What can I say, they had my favorite pens in colors I didn't, and a box in a box (which has become my desk organizer), and cool fabric tape that I needed to add to my scrapbook of Korea. The little journal was probably unnecessary, but I have a hard time resisting quad-ruled notebooks.

The night was still young and we were getting hungry again, so after a quick break to let the puppy out at home, we moved on to Chonbuk, which is the district next to Chonbuk National University, where I was introduced B.'s favorite Korean food (maybe favorite food ever?), dak galbi. I took pics of the whole process, but that seems a bit excessive here, so perhaps I'll save that treat for some future post. For now, here is the final product...

Dak galbi, which actually means "chicken ribs".

It is a mixture of marinated chicken, vegetables, noodles, rice cakes, and sweet potatoes. They cook it at the table in front of you, periodically stirring and adding more chili sauce. The white-ish river in the middle of the pan is melty cheese. It's served with lettuce in which you wrap the yummy goodness. Which we all clearly enjoyed...

Yummy!

The dak galbi break revived us, so we moved on to a tour of the neighborhood. There was a bit of shopping to be done here, as well. In fact, we found a purchase my scarf daemon would not let me pass up. The lovely carriages are now mine!

Carriage scarf!

At this point we were starting to wind down, so we moved on to a lovely little spot called Art & Travel... they have it all...

Art & Travel

They only do tarot in Korean, though. Sad face. So we restrained ourselves to nightcaps and "Words With Friends" on L.'s iPhone.

The was night finished off sleeping at the jjimjilbang (Korean bathhouse) - it's cheap and not overly uncomfortable, despite the fact that your sleep on the floor in a room full of strangers. That makes it sound much more uncomfortable and awkward than it actually is, but it is also an accurate description of the experience, so I guess this really is a case of 'you had to be there'.

Upon waking... ok, really upon finally getting up and ready... we went off to eat. Again. This time we satisfied my craving for American breakfast... kinda. In Korea, breakfast, even the American one, comes with salad. But hey, hash browns make it all good. Then we walked some more. This time back in the Gaeksa for the things that L. forgot to buy in the excitement of facilitating my Gaeksa initiation the night before. We took a little break at Ann House Cafe Self Bar (or Ann's Self House, according to B.). It's like having tea (and cake!) in a doll house.

Adorable tea!

Revived, we resumed the pursuit of purchasable items, Halloween and pet paraphernalia for B. and L. and irresistible office supplies for me. (No, I don't have a problem. Why do you ask?)

Shopping made us all hungry again, so they fed me once more before I had to head back to the bus station. My camera was already packed, so I will have to post pictures of shabu shabu next time, because, oh, yes, there will be a next time! Yummy!

So that was my weekend of eating and walking, and eating and walking, and eating and walking.

Poetry Break...

2011-10-21T23:33:00.001+09:00

... 'cause I can't get this one out of my head - thank you very much, Mr. Poe...

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

-Edgar Allen Poe, 1849

I will now return to my regular schedule of sporadic posting...

List: Korean food I've tried so far...

2011-10-19T22:57:00.000+09:00

So, first two apologies... I'm sorry, but I was too busy eating and listening to the Korean speakers around me to take pictures. And also, while I'm sure I'm not the world's worst speller, neither am I the best, or even really good at spelling, so some of these may be a bit off...

Kimchi - I haven't tried cucumber kimchi yet, but I think I've tasted most of the other kinds
Mandu (and manduguk) - dumplings
Toeji galbi - grilled pork ribs
Toast (which unlike American toast, is actually an egg sandwich with various other things on it, depending on the kind of toast i.e. ham and cheese toast is egg, ham, and cheese)
Toenjang jigae - bean paste soup/stew
Kimchi jigae - kimchi soup/stew
Seafood pancakes
Bibimbap - deliciousness! rice, veggies, chili paste, and an egg (sometimes meat, too)
Gimbap - a rice roll similar to sushi hand rolls, but I like it better - this is what I usually have on my supper break
Chuseok rice cakes
Many banchan (side dishes) for which I don't have names
Snacks - the snacks (junk food) here is somewhat different... things I expect to be sweet are sometimes salty, and even when they aren't, they are rarely as sweet as I am used to... and things I think will be salty are almost always sweeter than I expect.
Soju (technically a drink, not a food)

That is all I am remembering, obviously I will post more about food - and I will try to remember to take pictures!

Eccentric...

2011-10-05T13:01:00.000+09:00

So, I have a post that is almost ready on some of my Korean adventures, but in the meantime I have been musing on this... as an Aquarian I totally own my eccentricity, but according to this week's horoscope now it's apparently time for everyone else to experience it more fully, as well.

"AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Right now you have license to make pretty much everything bigger and funnier and wickeder. Good fortune is likely to flow your way as you seek out experiences that are extra interesting and colorful and thought-provoking. This is no time for you to be shy about asking for what you want or timid about stirring up adventure. Be louder and prouder than usual. Be bolder and brighter, nosier and cozier, weirder and more whimsical. The world needs your very best idiosyncrasies and eccentricities!"

So, how about it? Which of my eccentricities does the world need to see more of...? My obsession with useless trivia? My fascination with cookbooks and food traditions? My deep enjoyment of romance novels? My tendency to interrupt with whatever bizarre path my brain has taken, regardless of the conversation's current path? My deep and somewhat irritating love for ellipses...?

Einstein Quote of the Day...

2011-09-29T12:39:00.000+09:00

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

I love a point of view that favors fairy tales and the intelligence of children. It's nice to know that Einstein didn't worry about children being able to tell fact from fiction.

Mini-rant... Taxes, because for real, No man is and island...

2011-09-27T20:36:00.000+09:00

I am so sick of people, particularly American people, complaining about taxes... yes, that general pissy-ness has made it on to my radar, even here on the other side of the world. This quote pretty much sums up for me why people, even even corporations (whether they are people or not), need to shut up and pay their dues...

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."— Elizabeth Warren at Political Animal - ‘The underlying social contract’

List: Things that make me happy...

2011-09-23T22:45:00.000+09:00

Eve Dallas
Lady Antebellum
bizarre, yet tasty, Korean pizza
colored pens
new notebooks
jasmine green tea
clean dishes
my stuffed frog, Natasha

A Korean Update... With Pictures!

2011-09-15T21:42:00.000+09:00

Last Wednesday, the 7th, I got to Reagan National Airport at 4:30 am to begin my trek across the country, and then across the Pacific Ocean. The next 25 hours are lost in a blur of airpot trams, plane boardings, and too-small airplane seats. I arrived in Korea around 6 pm local time, on the 8th. After running the gauntlet of immigration, baggage claim, and customs, the very helpful information desk people helped me buy my bus ticket to the correct Gwangju (the one in Gyungki-do). They also guided me through ground transportation to the correct stop to wait for my bus.

I moved into my apartment on Saturday, after staying with my school director and his family for a couple days while the previous teacher moved out. As you will see from the pictures, I am not completely settled and organized... that may happen sometime around when I have to pack to leave, if I know me.

This view is standing on my bed, all the way in the opposite corner of the apartment.

This is next to the door, in front of the refrigerator.

Here's my little patio, complete with washing machine and drying rack.

And my tiny, unseparated bathroom - I'm not quite used to showering in the middle of the room yet.

I arrived for the festival of Chuseok, and so even more than normal, my Korean hosts were anxious to make sure I had enough to eat.

These are the traditional rice cakes - my favorites were the ones with sesame and honey filling.

Here we have the radish kimchi that is my new favorite food. Homemade and delicious!

I will try to get pictures of my neighborhood up next...

A new adventure...

2011-07-15T01:01:00.005+09:00

Much has happened since last we spoke (or really, I wrote at you), my loyal readers. In that time I have applied for and achieved a job teaching overseas, visited my sisters, seen a city that was new to me, moved my things, and I am now staying with my sisters (first G, then M) until it's time to fly. Whew! That's a lot.

So, for the news that is probably of most interest to those of you who read here... Teaching overseas. I will be English teaching in Korea, in a city just outside of Seoul. There are things about the job that make me nervous - no Korean language experience, young children - but for the most part I am overwhelmingly excited to begin. I am excited for the new place and the experiences, hopefully good experiences. This will be an opportunity for me to expand my teaching experience, and at the same time I might be able to save a little money and pay down some of my student loan debt.

This doesn't mean that I am done with academia - I am still following along on the internet, keeping track of what is going on in my various realms of interest. But I am taking this time to figure out what it is I want to pursue - food, medieval lit, popular romance studies - and how it is best to pursue that primary interest once I figure it out. I am pretty sure food will be involved, but how and in what combination of ideas I don't yet know. My teaching schedule should give me a fair amount of writing time, as well. Which I hope to use not only for the aforementioned figuring, but also to work on projects and papers I've started but have not ever thought through and written out. Perhaps in the process of finishing, I will also be figuring. I am also going to spend a lot of time reading - my reading list I never finished, new philosophers I've stumbled across, food memoirs I've added to my list, my auto-buy authors that I can get my hands on in Korea. I've been stocking up on eBooks, as I only get two suitcases. And also because I love the format.

I am not sure what this move will mean for me on the cooking front. It's my understanding that most of the eating in Korea is done out, in a very tasty and inexpensive way. This is exciting for the cuisine I will get to taste, but disturbing that I won't have the comforts of my accustomed kitchen or the excitement of learning new techniques and dishes. However it happens, though, I am looking forward to exploring the cuisine.

I will report more as the adventure unfolds...

100 Word Challenge: Before You

2011-05-20T06:34:00.001+09:00

I am attempting to regularly participate in The 100 Word Challenge. Each week, Velvet Verbosity posts a prompt, and participants write 100 words, in any form, in response to the word. This week's word: Chasm

Before You

There is a line between the before time and the after time - deep, indelible, uncrossable.
Before you I ate everything without even thinking about it;
After you I eat everything because I might not have the chance.
Before you I wanted to go everywhere so I wouldn’t be here;
After you I want to go everywhere to experience there.
Before you I took pictures through lenses without meaning;
After you I take pictures in a heart without filters.
Before you I feared nothing and faced nothing;
After you I fear everything and face anything.
Death changes everything;
And nothing.

Wordless Wednesdays: Historic Princess Anne

2011-05-19T05:34:00.012+09:00

100 Word Challenge: My Mother

2011-05-14T04:08:00.002+09:00

My Mother

Sometimes I have to concentrate to recall how a smile shaped her mouth, pushed up her cheeks, though I can see her eyes glimmer with life’s joys. After a while - minutes, hours, years - her features lose their sharp focus, becoming dreamy soft, as her hugs before disease stripped her bones. Occasionally, I’ll glimpse her hands at the end of my wrists, trace her outline in my sister’s silhouette, hear her pleasure in a Beethoven sonata, feel the pressure of her in my grandmother’s embrace. The tides of memory shift and settle, sharpen and fade, fill and empty me.

100 Word Challenge: Kitchen Dance

2011-05-06T05:05:00.001+09:00

In an attempt to write more, I am going to attempt to regularly participate in The 100 Word Challenge. Each week, Velvet Verbosity posts a prompt, and participants write 100 words, in any form, in response to the word. This week's word: Family

Kitchen Dance

The syncopated bursts of laughter compete with the rhythm of her knife. Chop, sauté, simmer, spice. She loves listening to the retold stories the best, the comfort of favorites filling her up as she fills up the pot with stock and stewed tomatoes. Weaving between listeners, her dance builds layers of flavors, future memories.

The spoon scrapes the bottom of the pot in the silence, the last of the gumbo greedily filling one last bowl. All around the room glazed looks and satisfied smiles meet her searching eyes. No hunger here. No hurt now.

The scent of spices lingers. Loved.

ETA: Here are some of the other Challenge posts...

I'm Not Dead Yet...

2011-05-03T16:47:00.001+09:00

just in case any of my miniscule readership was wondering. During the radio (or really, blog) silence of the past several months, I have been teaching writing, working at a children's bookstore, moving, and job hunting, all while I contemplate the next step in my life. Yeah, still haven't figured that one out.

Also during this long silence, I have been reading. A lot. An awful lot. All sorts of interesting things- food lit, mysteries, romance, biography, fantasy. I have revisisted old favorites, and I have discovered new favorites. One such new favorite has inspired me to actually write a review. Yes, I am that excited about this new author. Who knows, I may start to do this on a regular basis.

First Grave on the Right by Darynda Jones

This debut novel by Darynda Jones came into my life just after I had finished reading, and loving, the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich, and that mood definitely colored my enjoyment of this book. It has some of the same flair and funny, with a supernatural twist. You see, Charley Davidson is the grim reaper - she sees, and talks to, dead people. This is great for a private investigator, and for helping out her cop father and uncle. It's not so great for her public image to talk to people no one else can see.

The elements that Charley has in common with Stephanie Plum - law enforcement profession, family troubles, bad boy complications - gave the story a familiar launching point, and, at least for me, highly enjoyable one. But Jones really takes these elements and makes them her own. Charley deals with her troubles with an attitude and sense of humor that engaged me and made me want to know how it works out for her (and hope that it does work out). Her snark and sarcasm, two of my favorite things, kept the pace set at hilarious. It's true that the funny kept me engaged, but she deals with some seriously difficult issues - 'cause, ya know, dead people - and does it in a graceful and real way. Charley Davidson is definitely someone I think it would be cool to know, so if you read for character like I do, this is a character that is worth your time. While I admit that I am not really widely read in the paranormal genres, this does seem to be an original voice and entertaining adventure.

I will definitely be getting Second Grave on the Left when it comes out in August.

Simple abundance...

2011-05-01T01:05:00.007+09:00

My recent move has inspired much introspection, contemplation, and perhaps even angst...

Among the topics, foremost after only the perennial what-am-I-doing-with-my-life, was, and is I suppose, the idea of simplification. This is a subject that always accompanies the hated moving process - where did I get all this stuff? Why do I have so much of it? Do I really need it all? The questioning accompanying this particular move was compounded by others in my world tackling simplification for various reasons - dear friends moving to Korea to teach, another friend's blog posts focusing on the simplification process, my sister cleaning out her clutter, books where the heroines end up traveling with no luggage and are fine... there were other less easily referenced moments, as well. All of these make me want to pare down the things that I own, reduce the volume of possessions cluttering up my life (or stored in my sister's apartment).

Questions of simplification are difficult for me - I have a nester personality. I miss my pretty nick-nacks. Objects are comforting to me. Clutter is cosy. I am predisposed to collect - books, art, cooking supplies. Having to move, and leave so much of my stuff - those books, dust-catchers, kitchen equipment - in storage for now, has created a cognitive dissonance between my desire for my missing objects, my attachment to the objects that surround me, and the appeal of a simplified life.

So, how do I find that balance point?

Another complicating factor is that move coincided with my purchase (finally) of an eReader, and my subsequent discovery that I love it - I love the experience of reading on it, I love the fact that I can have literally hundreds of books with me at any given time, I love the space it saves. And yet... I also love my paper books. How do I pick and choose in which format I want to keep a given title? Cookbooks are easy - they are still better in paper, though if I do get an iPad, who knows if that will change - but for now, I'm keeping the paper. Poetry I am also keeping the paper - the form matters in poetry, and the formatting of ebooks is not yet at a place where the form is well and consistently preserved, so they stay, too. But I have hundreds and hundreds of novels, mostly genre fiction, well-loved and well-read, many of which I now also have in ebook form. And I enjoy reading them that way. How do I choose which to keep, which to pare away? I feel almost as if I have to choose which friends I get to keep and which ones I have to say goodbye to. Due to the issue of storage distance, it is a decision that I don't yet have to make, but it is looming, and occupying my thoughts to the point of minor obsession.

Why can't simple also be easy?

Wordless Wednesdays: For G.

2010-10-20T20:40:00.002+09:00

Wordless Wednesdays: TBR, partial

2010-09-29T23:41:00.004+09:00

Fractured and out of focus...

2010-09-14T04:34:00.006+09:00

So, this is how I have been feeling often of late - fractured and out of focus... Unsurprisingly, I have turned to a list to try and bring myself back together...

Things occupying my mind, in no particular order, frequently simultaneously...

Food - how to write about it, what to read next, a cogent theory of food (I can't settle on just one), what is the most healthy, the most affordable, why can't those be the same thing, and, of course, what will I be eating next.
Teaching - I am always surprised, even having done it before and knowing what I need to do, how much time is spent thinking about the class I am teaching.
Publishing - In following the online popular romance community, I've spent a lot more time thinking about publishing. Now that I work at an independent bookstore, I am thinking about it even more - and it is creating a bit of cognitive dissonance, because the bookseller and the reader are having to coexist inside my head.
Writing - I am not doing enough - academic, personal, or food. I am just not. And I want to.
Romance - the PCA Romance Area CFP went out and I am torn - I want to do something with food (maybe w/ the Louisa Edwards chef books), but I don't want to move away from Nora Roberts - there is still so much to be explored in her work.
Reading - working in a bookstore has not helped to diminish my TBR list. My theory habit also frequently leads to new texts. And then there's food writing, and cookbooks. There are simply not enough hours in the day. And that doesn't even touch on all the active communities online that I (want to) follow.
Employment - really more accurately my tenuous state of employment, and the high potential for future unemployment. A worry that I know is shared by many.
Family - how much I rely on certain members of my family, and how distant I feel from others.
Organization - how to keep all these pockets of my life together, and to keep me sane while I am tugged in so many different directions...

I think I'll go have a cuppa tea, and not think about anything for a while.

Wordless Wednesday: Ghost Crab

2010-09-08T18:53:00.000+09:00

A beautiful goodbye... for now...

2010-09-06T07:47:00.001+09:00

As I mentioned before, Little Miss Picky Pants has gotten a teaching job on the Eastern Shore and had to move. This is a great loss for the DC area schools (and me!), but a wonderful gain for her new students (and her). The short notice and frantic preparation for this job and move necessitated helping her move part of her things to her new home. This move was rewarded with some fabulous beach time...

Pier for fishing... which I don't, generally... but makes for good photography...

Self-portrait, with jellyfish...

Sand art...

Glistening water... I love the word glistening...

Black and white...

A flying ray... this picture was hard to get, by the way...

Jellyfish are my favorite... ever...

And family...

Love ya, G., and miss ya...

Peach Jamming...

2010-09-04T03:10:00.004+09:00

My favorite part of Peach Jamming is quite possibly the flummery that you skim off as it boils... sweet and light and foamy, it is like a jam mousse, a cloud of happiness in my mouth. I like to mix it with yogurt for a tasty treat... but sometimes I just eat it by the spoonful... yummery!

The perfume of the boiling peachy goodness is fabulous, permeating the house and making mouths water...

...Okay, so, this is my real favorite... watching jam-spread toast disappear into my roommate's mouth... satisfaction!

And excited to have much more peachiness to bring the summer with me throughout the rest of the year... or at least as long as the jam lasts...

"The nectarine, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach..."

2010-08-26T02:09:00.002+09:00

Marvell was onto something... or maybe just on something, but that is a different post. This one is about this year's first installment of peachy goodness...

(Thanks to the PoetAbroad for this great pic of the slicing step!)

I was worried that this crust wouldn't really work- it was softer than I expected, even having been in the fridge for 40 minutes. However, it crisps up nicely as it bakes and the polenta offers a lovely contrast to the softness of the peaches...

And I didn't use much sweetener, just a little drizzle of honey to highlight the peachy goodness...

Peach Galette

for the crust:
1/3 c all-purpose flour
2 T polenta
1 T vanilla sugar
1/8 t cinnamon
1/4 c cold butter
1 T vegetable shortening
1-3 T ice water - enough to bind

for the filling:
1-2 large peaches, thinly sliced
1-2 T yogurt
light sprinkle of powdered ginger
drizzle of honey

Measure the dry ingredients into the bowl of a food processor. Add the fat in small chunks. Place the bowl in the freezer for about 10 minutes, until everything is very cold. Pulse together until it has the consistency of sand. Add water a little at a time and pulse just until it comes together. Turn out onto plastic wrap, form into a disc, wrap, and place in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Remove from fridge. Roll out into a vaguely round shape about 1/8th of an inch thick between two sheets of plastic wrap. Turn out onto a baking sheet.

Spread the yogurt on the rolled-out crust. Sprinkle a little bit of ginger over the yogurt. Layer on the peaches. Drizzle with honey. Push up the edge of the crust to form a juiciness barrier.

Bake at 375º for 30-35 minutes, until the crust is golden and crispy...

Why is it I can never seem to get a picture before we eat... Serves six, or three greedy people... not that I'll say which it was in this case...

Farmer's Market Bounty...

2010-08-25T01:39:00.004+09:00

Orange roma's, green beans, red heirloom tomatoes, green bell peppers, blackberries, basil, canary melon, and ...

I am so excited for peach jam...

Writing today ...

2010-08-24T02:12:00.005+09:00

The view from my seat...

The Wheel of Fortune turns on and on...

2010-08-19T20:56:00.000+09:00

So, as it does, life has changed yet again. Little Miss Picky Pants has gotten a teaching job and will be moving this weekend - only 4 hours away, but still. And a dear, dear friend has moved in this week, as well. So with all the shifting, we've decided to rename our domicile - we are now Flock Hall East: The DC Branch.

These changes come in the midst of my own turmoil, not knowing what I want to do with my future, and what I can afford to do. I have recently gotten two jobs, a lovely part-time job at Hooray for Books, a children's bookstore in Old Town Alexandria; and I will also be teaching a writing course, and as I haven't started yet I don't know if it is lovely or not. There is still so much I don't know about what my immediate future holds, but some things are settling into place.

And family dinner remains at the center of whatever my future might hold, so all will be well...

A taste of summertime...

2010-08-06T02:00:00.006+09:00

This summer has been a crazy trip, what with existential crises, life decisions, and some awesome re-connections with friends new and old. We have managed to get some tastiness in among all that turmoil, though...

Little Miss Picky Pants is the baking sister in our house - which makes sense when you think about it. I am convinced that her super-power is organization, and that along with her picky nature makes for a great baker. These are her shortcakes(ok, she used Nigella Lawson's recipe, but she made them). Not that we don't all love to bake, but G. just has a precision that M. and I don't, and so everything she makes is just a little bit better.

Notice the focus here. These shortcakes were amazing! The were definitely great with the strawberries, and what could be more summertime? But I actually preferred them plain with a cup of tea. They somehow managed to be both light and airy and substantial at the same time. These will definitely be revisited, especially if I can convince G. to do them for us again.

I love small-batch canning. We got some damsons (ok, I insisted) at the farmers' market and neither M. nor G. liked them- weird, right? Especially, since they like plums and I don't really. So, rather than eat them all myself, I thought they'd like them better in jam. See what a giving sister I am? Never mind that I haven't made jam all summer, and I want to. So I was off, with my favorite all purpose jam recipe (though I did have to do some math, because I didn't have a whole kilo of plums). While they were macerating, Miss Picky Pants dipped a finger in and tasted it (ok, I know you figured it out - I dipped and made her). "It tastes weird - like cough syrup." Great! I thought, she was going to hate it even as jam. But I persevered - who cares if we have yet another jar of jam/preserves/spreadable fruit substance that only I liked.

I've never worked with damsons before - honestly, they have never stayed around long enough for me to do anything with them. So I was pleasantly surprised as I started to boil the fruit - look at that color! I knew the color, I'd seen it before, but watching it slowly appear and deepen was magical. At that point I didn't care if no one liked how it tasted, it was gorgeous!

Luckily, it also tastes gorgeous. Even Little Miss Picky Pants says so.

Waffles are tasty...

2010-07-11T01:50:00.003+09:00

(I would have put a picture here, but we ate them all up)

Waffles are a favorite around our house, so for our rainy day breakfast they seemed like a natural choice. Though to be honest, it would have been the choice even if it had been sunny... Really, we like waffles. So I regularly get new cookbooks from the library, and a while ago I grabbed Vegan Brunch by Isa Candra Moskowitz. I really like her style and recipes, and I really like brunch so it seemed a perfect match. And it is, if for no other reason than this recipe. I made some changes (in parenthesis) and I will continue to play with it - I want to try adjusting it for an egg or two and see if that accentuates or detracts from the wonderful malty goodness. I also think that these would be easy to do in the blender, which would make the waffle production that much easier. But I couldn't wait to share the recipe, because these are seriously the perfect breakfast food... possibly lunch or dinner, too. Even Little Miss Picky Pants was pleased.

Old-fashioned Chelsea Waffles
From Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra Moskowitz

2 c almond milk (1/2 soy & ½ organic dairy)
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
3 Tbsp canola oil (vegetable oil)
3 Tbsp barley malt syrup, at room temp (last time, brown rice syrup)
1 ¾ c all-purpose flour
¼ c cornmeal
½ tsp salt
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 Tbsp corn starch

Preheat waffle iron.
In large mixing bowl mix together milk, vinegar, oil, and syrup until syrup is completely dissolved.
In separate bowl mix together dry ingredients. Add into milk mixture and mix until smooth. Spray waffle Iron and cook waffles according to manufacture’s directions.

She words the instructions just a little differently, but these worked for me.

Reading notes...

2010-06-24T05:50:00.003+09:00

Some things I've discovered from my reading thus far...

Marie de France's Lais are all about failing
Chretien de Troyes didn't have a high opinion of women
I feel sorry for Grendel, but not his mother
I (still) think Gawain was an idiot
Medieval drama is fascinating and bizarre
Piers Plowman is no more comprehensible the second time through
I need to be quicker with my theory reading, but I don't want to miss anything important
I can't always tell what theory is important

I keep returning to this Einstein quote, "The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." This is the balance of experience and theory I am looking for... and the balance that I am not sure how to find...

The majority of questions I have so far are not about what I've been reading, but about myself and my own life... Perhaps that is the point of great literature, but it is very disquieting...

So... Meat...

2010-06-05T07:09:00.005+09:00

I have been thinking a lot about meat lately. Partly because of my recent attempt at fitness, but also because I just finished reading The Butcher and the Vegetarian by Tara Austen Weaver. She very brilliantly grapples with the problems inherent in eating meat - health, economics, environmental, ethical. I have been reading her blog, Tea & Cookies for years, it was one of the first food blogs I stumbled upon, and honestly one of the few I where still read every post. So I knew going into the book that I would probably love whatever she wrote. And I did. And like many of her blog posts, it made me think. It made me consider my own food choices, especially my meat choices. Which I guess makes sense as it is a book about meat choices.

I am not going to give a synopsis of the book - it is wonderful, and everyone should read it and love it as much as I did. I am fully aware that tastes vary, but really - love it! But what I want to talk about here is the reflections on my own meat consumption that reading this lovely book has brought on.

I need to eat less meat... This particular reflection was one that was brought on not just by the book, but also by my recent attention to calorie consumption. I know that I eat more than the recommended amount - even the excessive, big-business influenced USDA recommendation. Not everyday, sure, but enough that it is a problem if being more fit is a goal I am working towards. But it's hard, because I like meat - bacon is tasty, turkey makes great sandwiches, and lamb vindaloo may be one of my favorite foods ever.

I need to only eat meat that I know where and how it was raised. The animals that is providing my food should only have one bad day, the day they die. Factory farms, feedlots, CAFOs - these are not humane - for the animals or for the humans who share the world with them. They are not sustainable - animal issues aside, and there are many, they consume unsustainable amounts of fossil fuels, water, and grain. Resources that would be better utilized elsewhere. And they produce more unregulated and untreated waste than entire cities. Entire cities. It is mind-bogglingly disgusting. Really, go read about it and you will have a much harder time with your Sunday bacon from the supermarket.

Eating meat I know was raised ethically and sustainably means eating meat from locally raised animals. This might seem like I will be paying more for less, but really I am paying more for more. One of the benefits of eating local, sustainable meat is the meat itself. I will be getting what I pay for. It is healthier - less bad fat, no harmful hormones or antibiotics, higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids. And it tastes better. Even if it is just the taste of satisfaction in knowing that I am not contributing to the problem.

This also means that when I eat out I am pretty much a vegetarian from now on. Except for seafood. Thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, sustainable seafood is easy to keep track of through their Seafood Watch program. The expense is a problem with meat. But cheap meat really isn't. The cost to the environment, to the animals, and to my conscience is far greater than the cost of my grocery bill.

Now you might ask, why not just give up meat altogether if this is how you feel? I thought about that. One of the reasons is I like it. Maybe that is a selfish reason, and if there was not a sustainable, ethical option available, the selfishness of that reason might not be enough prevent me from giving up the pleasure of eating meat. But it is available, so that is not a dilemma I face. I would like to think that I would make a choice for the greater good if it were the case. The second reason is that I believe in a society that is based on enterprise to the extent that ours is, the best way to vote is with your wallet. And my vote would have to be for sustainable agriculture. Not buying any meat is voting against factory farms and giant agribusiness, it's true, but it is not voting for sustainable agriculture. I feel like this choice is saying I am willing to pay for a better way of doing things, not just I am not willing to pay for your way of doing things.

Here are some websites if you are interested in making a similar choice - or just being more aware about where your food comes from...

http://www.certifiedhumane.org/
http://www.eatwild.com/index.html
http://www.localharvest.org/
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx

Summer fitness update...

2010-06-02T23:20:00.003+09:00

I have been exercising more, and it feels great. My sister and I are getting up at 5 every morning and doing the Couch to 5K running program (I don't hate running as much as I thought I would, though it is still early in the program), alternated with kettlebells and hula-hooping. I am buying (actually, waiting for it to be delivered) an interval timer, so I can expand my kettlebell workouts to make them, hopefully, even more effective. I really need to build my strength back up though, as I still can't do some of the exercises I was doing in Laramie.

(these are way heavier than the kettlebells I use - I'm a bit of a wimp still)

I've also started to pay more attention to what I eat. Actually, that is not entirely true. As a devotee to the church of the kitchen I have always payed fairly close attention to what I ate - how it tasted, how I could improve that taste, more recently where it came from, what is in it, how humane it is, how safe it is - all important thoughts in my mind when it comes to food. But now I have started paying attention to how many calories are in the food that I eat; and I have to say I am shocked! I had no idea how much adding a spoonful of sugar to my morning tea added to my daily calorie intake. I've found that I eat a lot of calories... and some times they are the calories that make things taste good- my primary food concern before this summer. So now I am struggling to balance an acceptable calorie intake, with an acceptable flavor quotient, and all this is complicated by the exercise... I am hungry all the time! I was warned this would happen, I knew in my head this would happen, but actually experiencing it is a little bit crazy. I really don't like it. At all.

Still, I am glad I am paying attention to another aspect of what I eat - awareness is never wasted. Perhaps I can turn this hunger into a meditation on lack, on loss, and on what it really means to be fulfilled.

Summer Reading List...

2010-05-27T21:15:00.000+09:00

So, I have a lot of reading to do this summer - 50 texts in about 12 weeks. And I have to be able to speak cogently about these texts by August...

Critical works

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast, Holy Fast. Berkley: Univ. of California Press, 1987

Cohen, Jeffrey. Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006

Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Duram, NC: Duke UP, 1999.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. and “The Mousetrap”. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Joy, Eileen, Seaman, Myra J., Bell, Kimberly, and Mary K. Ramsey (eds.). Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007

Korda, Natasha. Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Prperty in Early Modern England. Philadelphia, PA: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Mulder-Bakker, Anneke B. Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing: Reading the Book of Life. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

Schoenfeldt, Michael Carl. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Phisiology and inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Steel, Karl. “How to Make a Human,” Exemplaria (20, 1), 2008, 3–27.

Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Theoretical Works

Bahktin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. (1968) Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1984.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. (1970) London: Sage Publications, 2003.

Certeau, Michel de. Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley: Univ. of California Press, 1984.

Deluze, Gilles and Guittari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Foucault, Michel. Care of the Self. New York: Random House, 1984.

Norbert, Ellias. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenic and Psychogenic Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1982.

Reynolds, Philip Lydon. Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999.

Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. New York: Continuum, 2009.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.

Zizek, Slavoj. On Belief. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Literary Works

Alighieri, Dante. Divine Comedy. Edison, NJ: Chartwell Books, Inc., 2006

Beowulf. trans. Seamus Heaney. New York, Norton & Co., 2000.

Castiglione, Baldassarre. The Book of the Courtier. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005.

Chretien de Troyes, “Perceval,” “Yvain,” and “Lancelot.” The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes. trans. David Staines. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990.

Christine de Pisan, Book of the City of Ladies and Treasure of the City of Ladies.

Codex Ashmole 61: A compilation of Popular Middle English Verse. ed. George Shuffelton. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008.

Dekker, Thomas. The Gulls Hornbook. New York, Nabu Press, 2010.

Donne, John. The Complete English Poems. New York: Penguin Classics,1971.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain. trans. Lewis Thorpe. New York: Penguin Classics, 1966.

Harriot, Thomas. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. New York: Dover Publications, 1973.

Johnson, Ben. “Bartholomew Fair”. The Achemist and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.

Kempe, Marjory. The Boke of Marjory Kempe. New York: Norton & Co., 2000.

Langland, John. The Vision of Piers Plowman. New York: Everyman Paperbacks, 1995.

Lanyer, Aemilia. “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” The Nortaon Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1. eds. Stephen Greenblatt, M. H. Abrams, Alfred David, and Barbara K. Lewalski. New York: Norton & Co., 2006.

Mandeville, John. Travels of Sir John Mandeville. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005.

“Mankind.” Early English Drama: An Anthology. ed. John C. Coldewey. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.

Marie de France, Lais. trans. Hanning and Ferrante. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1978.

Marvell, Andrew. “The Mower Poems.” The Complete Poems. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.

Montaigne, Michel de. “On Cannibals,” “On Friendship,” The Complete Essays. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

More, Thomas. Utopia. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Rabelais, Francois. Gargantua and Pantagruel. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006

“Second Sheppards’ Play.” Early English Drama: An Anthology. ed. John C. Coldewey. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.

Shakespeare, “Antony & Cleopatra.” The Norton Shakespeare. eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: Norton & Co., 2008.

Silence. trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi. Eat Lancing: Michigan State UP, 1992.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. trans. Simon Armitage. New York, Norton & Co., 2008.

Skelton, John. “The Tunning of Elinour Rumming”. Selected Poems. New Yourk: Routledge, 2003.

Spencer, Edmund. “Book 2.” The Faerie Queen. New York: Penguin Classics,1979.

Sydney, Phillip. “Defense of Posey,” “Astrophil and Stella.” Selected Poetry and Prose. Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

Summer Plans...

2010-05-19T20:20:00.002+09:00

So, existential crises aside, there are things that must be done this summer...

First, fitness... Since moving to the DC area, I have lost weight - a good thing. However, I have also started to jiggle more in places that I didn't before. This may be a lack of exercise in my life - even if that is not why, I am feeling a lack of exercise in my life. So...
I am starting, slowly, to work with kettlebells again. And to hula-hoop again. And to go on more walks. I am also contemplating Couch 2 5K, but I am still not convinced that running isn't for suckers, so I am not yet committed to that particular method of fitness.
My new early morning habit is useful in this effort, as I am awake, but my brain hasn't engaged yet - and I don't really need my brain to exercise, at least not all of it.
Also, I think that exercise is helping to settle my stomach, so in addition to eliminating some of those annoying jiggles, it is helping my digestive fitness, as well.
Speaking of digestive fitness, I am also going to have to adjust my diet somewhat - and more consistently than has been required by my ulcer flare up - more veggies, less dairy, more whole grains, less processed food... I think you can see what I mean.

Second, Qualifying Exam... In August I have to take an oral exam which will determine whether I get to continue in the PhD program, so I will be reading and studying - another reason to exercise, to limber up my brain for all the new theory I am going to have to cram in it. I'll post the reading list later this week for those interested. I am the only one taking the test this fall who has a Medieval/Early Modern concentration, which means I have no study buddies for this particular academic milestone. On one hand that is fine - I'm smart, I generally get things pretty quickly, I have a high level of reading comprehension, and I read comparatively quickly. However, I am also very deadline driven, and lack a general motivation, and this is not the kind of project you can cram for at the end and be fine. I think I am going to have to schedule, and follow that schedule, and that is so not my natural mindset, so having study partners would help give me a sense of motivation, or at least more of one. And I need to figure out a useful method for taking notes on these texts, because they will be the foundation of my teaching career and I will need to be able to easily reference them in the future.

Third, local opportunities... I have lived in the DC area for almost a full year now, and there are still so many local activities, most of them free, that I have not taken advantage of yet. I want to get my Library of Congress readers card, spend some time in the many museums, visit the aquarium - probably more than once, learn more about early American history - I am pretty up on Western Am. history, but not so much on the stuff before the Gold Rush. There are so many opportunities available here and I feel like I am not giving them their due.

And also, I need to get a job.

So, I guess I have a busy summer ahead of me...

Alignment crisis...

2010-04-09T03:57:00.004+09:00

I know I have been remiss in my blog updates this spring... or lack thereof. I have been existing in a weird space of cognative dissonance where I am trying to make various interests and requirements match up in my head... I think that I am starting to get to a head-space that allows me to articulate these various struggles and elements - if not one that has aligned them...

I have been struggling first with what I want to do, with my life - no small question, no easy answer. Tangled up in this question is how grad school/a PhD might help, or hinder, me in doing whatever it is I am not sure I want to do. And two military aphorisms keep running through my head: Plans rarely survive the first engagement with the enemy; and it is unwise to switch drivers mid-charge - and who knows why terms of battle are the key to these thoughts. I don't really have a martial personality. And what do they mean to my situation - should I not plan at all? Clearly, the question of changing course midstream is not as occluded - and really I don't want to change course. I want to continue in academia. I like literature. I like talking about literature. I like teaching literature. And I love my program. But I need a job - a now job, and an after graduation job. And I don't want a job that interfers with my studies now, but if I don't get a job I may not be able to continue with my studies...

My plans - or really more hopes, at this stage - for scholarship are also somewhat dissonant. I love the work I am doing in the Medieval and Early Modern, and I also love the work I am doing in Popular Romance Studies. These are rather disparate tracks. bringing them together has been, and continues to be, a struggle. Add in my passionate interest in food, and you have a whole other level of complication... for both of the other aspects. Food is a wonderful vehicle for analysis, but not necessarily a unifying factor - in fact it is frequently splintering. Can I use it to look at the same things in the two different Studies? Am I just going to have to live in this bi-polar professional space? On a practical level, how marketable is any of it?

I feel like I am being tugged in all these different directions. So, I guess if anyone out there has suggestions on what to do with all this noise I wold appreciate hearing them.

A List of Project Proportions...

2010-03-19T10:44:00.004+09:00

So, I really have been doing stuff, and here is a list to prove it... ok, actually it's a list of projects that are in progress, not actual completed work...

Classes: Past Intimacies - the senses in Early Modern literature and world. I have to come up with a paper proposal and I still don't know what I want to write about - there are too many interesting options. Independent Study - Food in Medieval literature. Also need a paper topic for this one, but the reading has been super interesting and narrowing it has been a problem here, too. My mind is going in too many directions.
My paper for the PCA conference on how food and religion shape the romantic relationships in Nora Roberts Three Sisters' Island Trilogy.
Researching Medieval stones and lapidaries.
TA-ing for "Shakespeare in the City" - I taught "Taming of the Shrew." I still have a bunch of papers to finish commenting on.
Putting together a reading list for my qualifying exam that is comprehensive of period (Medieval/Early Modern), genre (poetry, prose & drama), and methodology (theory & criticism) in 50 texts and accompanying rational for said list.
Keeping up with an endlessly growing To Be Read pile/list of both scholarly works and genre fiction. The commute has helped me keep up with the genre fiction end of things, because I don't generally take notes on them, so I can read them on the train without getting motion sick. Trying to write is guaranteed to nauseate.

All of this has been impeded by a semester fraught with illness and snow. I feel like I am in constant catch-up mode. So for those who wondered, that is why I haven't been posting... this time...

A Mary Oliver Moment for February

2010-02-07T11:44:00.003+09:00

Heavy

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it -
books, bricks, grief -
it's all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down."
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled -
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

~Mary Oliver, Thirst

If I were a prescriptive grammarian...

2010-01-29T08:56:00.002+09:00

... this would be more funny:

In which failure becomes perfection...

2010-01-25T06:35:00.005+09:00

...or at least better.

The other day at the supermarket I saw, and immediately purchased, some Devon cream. While Little Miss Picky-pants wrongly believes that it is gross, I love it - on scones, on toast, on pancakes, on French toast, and sometimes, when no one is looking, even on a spoon. This purchase got me thinking about scones, and other tea-time accoutrement. And I started to wish for some lime curd to go on my scones.

It should be noted that I have not yet made scones, I am hoping to convince one of my sisters to do my dirty (or floury?) work for me.

While ruminating on the yummy goodness of citrusy, custardy, fruit curd, I remembered that I had some Ruby Red Grapefruit syrup in my cupboard. It was supposed to be jelly, but never set up. Yes, sometimes my kitchen projects don't work like they are supposed to - G. is still happy to tell everyone about my high school kitchen learning curve.

So I have this grapefruit syrup languishing for want of use. But I have never made a fruit curd, or really much of anything that requires tempering of eggs. And none of the recipes start with failed jelly. I am not afraid, though ...much.

Off to the internet for research. I first checked Tea & Cookies, my favorite-est food blog, because she has written about both Lemon Curd and Raspberry Curd. Ok, now I have two different methods for curd-ing. Next on to Saveur, which sends me to theKitchn. It now appears that everyone does curd a little differently.

Ok, well I will just dive in then. Heat the syrup and the butter. Beat the eggs. Slowly, oh so slowly, add about half a cup of the heated citrus to the eggs, and whisk all the while. Slowly, again so slowly, whisk the eggs back into the pan. Hold your breath. And whisk. Switch hands and whisk some more. Look closely. Is that egg white? Oh well, it is going to be strained out anyway. Whisk some more. Has it been twenty minutes yet? Strain. Pour into sterilized jar.

Now I can lick the bowl. Hmm, better taste it again... I think I could taste it better if I had a spoon. I guess it is ok. Hey, look! I made grapefruit curd!

Now, if I can just convince G. to make those scones... while I clean out that bowl... with my fingers... so yummy!!

Update: G. rocks!!!

Cooking our way through...

2010-01-23T00:41:00.001+09:00

My sisters and I were talking and we think that we have way too many cookbooks - good, interesting cookbooks - that we hardly ever use. So we have decided that we will cook our way through one this winter. We are not going the Julie & Julia route, with a time limit and every recipe in the book - we (ok, I) don't ascribe to a need for that much structure. We were somewhat limited in our selection as well, because G. is a vegetarian, so we had to pick one of our vegetarian or vegan cookbooks - this limited us to about twelve out of over a hundred.

We decided on this one. We liked the layout, the ingredients weren't over-the-top expensive or hard to find, and we wanted to go with one that we didn't already use a lot, so no Moosewood or Vegan With A Vengeance. The whole point - or at least one of the points - of this project is that we need to make better use of what we have. So starting tomorrow we are going to pick at least one recipe from the book for every supper during the week and for brunch on Saturdays and Sundays. This means more planning of meals, which is something that we have been trying to do more of anyway - and I am a particular fan of, as there is nothing I hate more than "I don't know," when I ask what to make for dinner. We will not be super religious about following the recipes - M. is allergic to anything remotely resembling a nut and G. maintains her title of Little Miss Picky-pants with fervor - but the effort here is to appreciate and make use of what we have, so this is a start anyway.

If I were a fruit...

2010-01-21T05:42:00.006+09:00

...I would be a blood orange.

I know I have said it before, though maybe not here in this public forum, but it remains true - I would be a blood orange. I love January - not for my birthday, though I do like presents; not for the various winter sports, though I am a fan of the warm beverages that follow them; not for the return to school, though I am usually ready for the mental re-stimulation the beginning of a new semester brings. I love January because it is citrus season, and that means blood oranges. Sweet, tangy, rich, lovely blood oranges.

Like so may things I love they are a mutant. Their beauty comes from abnormality - a pigment not found in other citrus.

A deep staining red.

Sanguigno.

Full-blooded.

Beauty on the tongue.

Breakfast.

Holiday Recap... There was cake!

2010-01-10T11:50:00.002+09:00

For the holidays, my sisters and I had incompatible schedules, so my Dad, Grandma, and youngest sister came from Wyoming to visits us. For me the holidays are about family, those you are born into and those you make. This holiday I had a wonderful time with the family I was born into, and terribly missed much of the family I have made – scattered as we are from DC to China, Wyoming to Arizona, and many zip codes in between. The visit from the Wyomingites kicked off with a birthday party for my youngest sister, C., the day that they got here (the day after her birthday).The hit of the party was this cake:

Grand-Maman’s Chocolate Cake
adapted from Chocolate by Nick Malgieri

3 large eggs
¾ c. sugar
8 Tbsp unsalted butter, very soft
4 ½ oz. bittersweet chocolate, melted and cooled
¾ c. all-purpose flour

Confectioners’ sugar for finishing

In an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, whip the eggs and sugar on medium speed for 4-5 minutes, until very light and increased in volume. This works better if your eggs are at room temperature before you start – the light and fluffy will not happen as quickly if they are too cold. Whip in the butter and beat until smooth. Beat in the melted chocolate and beat until smooth.

The chocolate is where I diverged from the recipe – I melted my butter in with the chocolate to make it melt more smoothly, and then added them both in together and beat the batter until smooth. I don’t know how much of a difference this makes, but the cake was a ginormous hit, so I would say it didn’t hurt it any.

Remove the bowl from the mixer and use a spatula to fold in the flour by hand. This is to maintain the light fluffiness achieved by all that whipping. Scrape into an 8 inch round cake pan that has been buttered and floured (I cheat and use the spray that has flour in it – it has worked so far, and I actually think it is better – I don’t miss spots as easily) and smooth the top. Bake in a 350º oven for about 30 minutes. It should still be moist in the center, so a toothpick test might not come out clean, but it should be well risen and firm.

Cool in the pan for about 5 min, then turn out onto a wire rack. I liked the crackly looking top, so I flipped mine back over, instead of cooling it inverted, but if you want a smoother presentation, cool it top down and make sure that the pan side is facing up when you transfer it to a serving plate. Dust with confectioners’ sugar before serving.

I served mine with French Vanilla ice cream and raspberry sauce. And it was super tasty. In fact, my dad, who doesn’t like cake, ate all the leftovers during their visit. Which is a testament to how awesome it was, not to how uncakelike it was, in case you were wondering.

We continued to do touristy things and family things and the sisters, all 4 of us, made a lovely Christmas dinner of turkey and the trimmings. I have to say, working in the kitchen with my lovely sisters really made my Christmas.

Place holder...

2010-01-05T02:59:00.002+09:00

I have several posts brewing about the holidays - with recipes, the new year - with lists, and my upcoming birthday - with reminisces. But my new reading obsessions of Deanna Raybourn, Tasha Alexander, and Elizabeth Peters (the Amelia Peabody Mysteries) have precluded writing of my own. I am attempting to get these obsessions under control by the time the semester starts, luckily I read very quickly. So, until then a poetry place holder to fit my reading mood...

PORPHYRIA'S LOVER

HE rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me--she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time by shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

~Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Notes from a snowpocalypse...

2009-12-20T21:51:00.006+09:00

So, when I heard about the winter storm warning I admit, I was a snow snob. I was skeptical. I secretly laughed at these people who didn't know what real snow is. The previous winter weather warnings this year had done nothing to change this opinion. I just raised my eyebrows at the cleaned out grocery stores.

Clearly, I was wrong.

D. played inside. Jack Russells do not like the snow. It was rather funny - he would be so excited to go out... and the we would open the door. He would sniff the snow and then look back over his shoulder at us, and sniff and look and sniff and look. Hilarity ensued. And then, after outdoor business had been taken care of, he would quickly do anything and everything to eradicate all traces of the snow.

So, this morning the view from our windows was worthy of a snow snob's expectations. Neighbor's car buried, window's obscured, snow mounded everywhere. It is beautiful. From inside.

The official report from Regan National Airport was 15 inches, breaking the previous record of 7 from 1945. Alexandria measured 19 inches. Our back yard has drifts well over two feet.

I guess they know how to do snow here, too.

5:20 am

2009-12-17T20:03:00.002+09:00

I can't remember the last time I was up this early when I didn't have to travel. G., M., and I, and maybe G.'s friends S. & I., have all decided to do the Avon Walk to end breast cancer. Our mom died of it, S.'s mom is still recovering, it is something we all want to see ended. S. would have to fly in, so it is something she is still considering. It is a big walk - 39 miles over 2 days, a full marathon on the first day and a half marathon the second. And so I got up at 5:20 this morning, bundled up, and went for a walk. Neither I nor my sisters are prepared for the physical commitment of this walk. But it is important to us. G.'s bus leaves at 6:45, so we get up at 5:20 and are out walking by 5:30, starting this morning. And we plan to take longer walks on the weekends, until we can walk a marathon in a day.

Maybe it will be good for other things than just getting in shape. Lots of people say that it is the best time to write. And here I am at 6:16 composing a reasonably lucid blog post. I do want to write more. Maybe now I will actually write down the things I used to compose in my head as I would try to fall asleep. And I am constantly lamenting that I don't have all the time to read that it would take to finish my absurdly long to-be-read list, so maybe this can be that time.

It will be hard to completely reset my bodies rhythm, though. I am, or at least I have always been, a night person. So maybe, by getting up this early I am actually losing time, time that was productive for me in the evenings, at night. Time that it will now be necessary to try and sleep. How does an insomniac handle 5:20 am? What will it be like to get up not long after I finally settle into sleep? But if we are going to do this together - and, to be honest, I probably wouldn't do it by myself - this is the time it has to be so G. can get to work on time. So, 5:20 am...

Three Sisters Pasta

2009-12-17T02:59:00.008+09:00

The other night I had yet another lovely moment to pause and be grateful that I am living with two of my fabulous sisters. I love cooking with them.

We have been meaning for a week to make this dish. It is something of a specialty for G. She discovered it watching a cooking show with our grandmother in 2003. All we have to re-create it are a few somewhat cryptic notes that Grandma took while watching. The recipe is for shrimp, but we frequently make it with chicken, or in this case Quorn, the closest vegetarian meat-substitute I have ever encountered, and I have searched far and wide. Really, it tastes like chicken... and it's meant to.

Here is the recipe that we have come up with... It's not perfect yet, and G. maintained her title of Little Miss Picky-pants, stating however good it was, it didn't taste quite right and we would have to try again to get it closer to how she remembered it. Until then...

1 package orzo pasta (other small pastas work, too, like mini-bowties)
1 package fresh baby spinach, shredded
2 lemons, zested and juiced
1 package grape tomatoes, halved
2 tbsp fresh basil, shredded
salt & pepper, to taste
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp minced garlic
1 package Quorn cutlets, cubed small (or raw shrimp, peeled and deveined)
1 tsp red pepper flakes

Boil pasta according to package directions; drain; place in large bowl. Add in spinach, 1/2 the lemon zest, and the grape tomatoes; stir; add basil, salt and pepper; stir. Heat oil in a skillet; sauté garlic; add red pepper flakes and the rest of the zest. Heat for 30 seconds; add cutlet cubes (or shrimp), and sauté until cooked. Add lemon juice to deglaze the pan and toss immediately with the pasta mixture. Serve warm.

Veggie thoughts...

2009-12-09T09:33:00.002+09:00

So, as I was cooking dinner tonight - no, I didn't write down the recipe - I pondered how glad I am that my sister decided to become a vegetarian. While I still eat meat, this decision (made several years ago now) has completely changed the way I think about food. It has caused me to think about what I cook in new ways. I think about where my food comes from - what died so I could eat this meal? Was it part of a natural cycle? When I eat meat, I think about things like how the animals lived? How were they killed?

But beyond these rather philosophical and difficult questions I have also changed the way I think about putting a meal together. Vegetarians, like all of us, want a meal, not a collection of side dishes. I think about what goes into satisfying the people I feed, and how I can do that without basing it on meat. This means I have so many options that I never considered before, and may have never considered if I wasn't cooking for a vegetarian. This thought process was compounded by living with a vegan two years. It has fundamentally changed how I compose with food. There are moments when it strikes me, and I feel like a painter who was only painting with half the colours and now I have a full palette - and yes, the pun was intended and I am not sorry.

So for dinner we had a tikka curry with potatoes, veggies, and paneer. With saffron rice. And it was lovely. Six years ago I never would have thought to put this meal together.

A list...

2009-12-06T06:47:00.005+09:00

I may have mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating: I love lists. I get causght up in the creation of lists and before I know it time has disappeared... time which I really needed for other things, like term papers or cleaning or reading articles or the giant pile of library books I have somehow acquired. But never mind, since I made the list, I will share it with you...

A list of food-related books which I would like to read:

I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti by Giulia Melucci
The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman's Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis by Tara Austen Weaver
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard W. Wrangham
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family by Laura Schenone
A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances by Laura Schenone
From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women And Food by Arlene Voski Avakian (Editor), Barbara Haber (Editor)
The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn
Nigella Lawson: A Biography by Gilly Smith
The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater by Nigel Slater
Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West by Beatrice Hohenegger
Tea: The Drink that Changed the World by Laura C. Martin
The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide by Mary Lou Heiss
Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess by Gael Greene
My Life in France by Alex Prud'homme, Julia Child
Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter by Phoebe Damrosch
American Food Writing: An Anthology: With Classic Recipes by Molly O'Neill (Editor)
Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution by Thomas McNamee
A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg
The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table, a Collection of Essays form The New York Times by Amanda Hesser
The Hunger: A Story of Food, Desire, and Ambition by John DeLucie
Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life by Mimi Sheraton
What We Eat When We Eat Alone: Stories and 100 Recipes by Deborah Madison
Amarcord: Marcella Remembers by Marcella Hazan
Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater by Matthew Amster-Burton
The Recipe Writer's Handbook, Revised and updated by Barbara Gibbs Ostmann
Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris by A. J. Liebling
Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin
More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin
The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pepin
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: My Adventures in Life and Food by Moira Hodgson

It is by no means a complete list, and I think there in may lay some of the seduction of lists - they always need one more item... What would you add?

An All-day Holiday Meal

2009-11-30T02:40:00.009+09:00

This year Thanksgiving dinner gave me so much more to be thankful than I already was. My sisters and I spent it at the home of wonderful M. & K. My sister G. and I met their family when she came to VA to be an au pair for a summer in 2006. Since we have moved here, they have been a brilliant presence in welcoming us to the area.

We started the day with mimosas and a cheese platter, and the celebratory tone was set for the day. When we moved into the dinning room, the food was quite simply amazing. The turkey was moist and perfect, the traditional sides were familiar and comforting, and the new flavors were truly inspiring. The cranberries were done in a compote with pears, a brilliant combination. And M.'s sister brought a sweet potato dish that was to die for. Seriously, if I hadn't been able to bring some home I think I might have cried. And even better, she shared the recipe! There was a creamy potato casserole that I had never had before and was perfect when combined with the bacon and green beans. And the desserts - Italian fruit tarts, cheesecake, chocolate cake, cherry pie, and of course, pumpkin pie. I had to wait a while for dessert though, because my eyes were bigger than my stomach when it came to everything else.

All day, the house was full of the noise of people enjoying each others company. The energy and positive emotion filled it to the brim. This was a place full of people celebrating the mere presence of those around them - whether they had met before or not, and several of us hadn't.

And did I mention that the food was fantastic. This is one of the the few Thanksgivings since I was 16 that I was not a major contributor to the table, and the first since before I was 10 that I didn't do anything at all to make it come out wonderful. All we brought was cheese for the cheese tray, and G. picked that out. I came away from that table thankful for more than just the food that was prepared for me. I now have fabulous new recipes to try for my relatives at Christmas. But more importantly I have new friends, and I can't think of a superlative that does justice to the quality of people who shared this holiday of gratitude with us - the family that opened their home and the friends that they brought into it along side me and my sisters. It was without a doubt a Thanks-giving day.

A love note to tea...

2009-11-25T03:24:00.001+09:00

My dearest tea, you are so lovely, just being with you makes my day better, completing a good day and making a bad day bearable. The words to describe the feelings you evoke in me are as fleeting as the steam that carries your soothing aroma. Your history fills me with awe and I long to be part of your tradition. Wars have been fought over the possession of your favor. You soothe, you comfort, you energize, you refresh. Oolong or Assam, Jasmine or Ceylon, the simple pleasure you impart can not be counted in ounces or cups. You bring joy to every moment I share with you. I will never tire of you as a companion and comfort to my soul.

***
Nota bene: you can get a heart-shaped tea cup here. I haven't tried them, but they are clever.

Food revelations

2009-11-19T00:56:00.000+09:00

I had a wonderful time at the Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining show last weekend. One of the interesting results of attending, though, was the discovery that I would rather do it myself. I have always had a rather wide independent streak combined with a tendency towards pickiness. These traits are balanced by a bone deep laziness. However, the show made it abundantly clear that my laziness no longer balances my pickiness when it comes to food. Nearly everything I tried caused the same reaction - I like mine better, or I could do this myself, why should I pay you way more than it would cost to do it at home. It wasn't that it was bad, there were just very few wowers and the exceptions were invariably things that I couldn't do at home - a really high quality balsamic vinegar, a fabulous hot pepper relish (ok, I probably could do the relish, but I don't like working directly with things that can literally burn my face off). I came away with several good ideas, but very few purchases. I actually bought scrapbooking stuff, not food or cooking or entertaining items.

Even Giada's cooking demo - which I must say, was beyond fabulous - was more inspiring than instructive - not that she wasn't, but that her instructions were things I already knew. Still, an aisle seat 4 rows away from one of my favorite celebrity chef - it bears repeating: coolest sisters ever! The pasta she made was something I had been doing for a few years, only she used butternut squash and I use pumpkin. Several times I kept thinking things like, that's a good idea, but we don't eat pork, I wonder how it would work with chicken or G. doesn't like basalmic vinegar, so I would have to substitute a different acid. (By the way, we discovered this weekend that G. is not in fact crazy and does like balsamic vinegar - she had just never had balsamic vinegar that met her picky standards before.) I kept thinking how I would tweek her recipes to suit the tastes of the people I cook for, all the while being wonderfully entertained by her fabulous personality.

Really, what I took away from the show was a renewed confidence in my abilities as a home cook. I know the people I cook for, and that intimacy of knowledge allows me to create food that is more suited to them. And being able to walk away from the show knowing that, for the most part, my food tastes just as good as the jars and mixes that people pay for (sometimes way too much) - to me that is what being a domestic goddess is all about.

Rainy Morning Comfort Food

2009-11-13T00:12:00.001+09:00

The other day we discovered that we had an over-abundance of bread in the house. Apparently we had stopped eating sandwiches for lunch, for no apparent reason. My offer to make bread pudding was met with surprising enthusiasm - I thought I was the only one who liked it, but apparently my sisters both love it as well. Who knew.

So after consulting several variations here is what I did.

350g bread, roughly cubed (I used potato and oatmeal breads)
3/4 - 1 cup raisins
3 egg yokes
4 eggs
350 g or ¾ cup sugar
750 mL or 3 cups milk
1 ½ teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon allspice
1 ½ teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons mascarpone cheese

Grease a 2 qt. baking dish. Cut up bread and spread in dish; sprinkle in the raisins. In a bowl mix remaining ingredints until mostly smooth - the cheese was still in pieces about 1/8 inch and a little smaller. Pour over the bread and raisins; press down the bread with a spatuala or spoon until all the bread is covered and wet. Let it stand on the counter and soak up the custard for about ½ an hour/ Bake at 350º for 1 - 1 ¼ hrs, until puffy and firm in center. Let stand for 10 min to set. Serve warm or cold.

G. and M. cut into it as soon as the cooling timer went off, so I didn't have time to make the Amaretto sauce I was going to pour over it (or take pictures of the whole pan), but it turns out that was ok. They loved it as is and so did I. The sauce would have been tasty, but the pudding was tasty on its own. Maybe next time.

On Researching...

2009-11-07T22:06:00.000+09:00

I love research. I spend hours online chasing information and moving through the web of connected facts (no pun intended). When I get a book from the library or a bookstore, I always check out the shelf around it to see what interesting information might be waiting for me nearby. Reading news articles sparks journeys into weather patterns, cultural histories, imports and exports of foreign nations, languages spoken, religions practiced, and - of course - what is eaten.

No, my writing problem is not in the research. It is in the argument. I struggle to get from "hey, look at this cool stuff I found" to some sort of meaning. It is not that I don't make connections and synthesize the information that I love to gather, I do. But articulating the connections I see, and the kicker - proving them textually, that is hard for me. Maybe it is because I am such a non-linear thinker, so research webs work for me, but an organized argument cuts off all these really cool possibilities. Or maybe it is my lamentable tendency to feel that if I can see it, every one can see, and why should I have to prove the obvious?

Sometime I think it might be easier if I wrote fiction instead, but I don't really think it would be. In fiction, there still needs to be a narrative arch. So much of the cool information that leads to building real and believable characters never makes it in to the story. At least with academic writing you get the footnotes for tangents. Either way I am still left with the problem of turning a fascinating matrix of thoughts and information into a clear, progressive argument or narrative.

PCA Conference Paper Proposal

2009-11-06T06:22:00.003+09:00

So, weeks after I had planned to I have finally put together my PCA national conference paper proposal. I am really excited to write this paper, as I have been increasingly interested in the connections between food and religion. I think as I talk about some of my other paper plans you all might see a trend...

Recipes and Rituals:
Food and Religion in Nora Roberts’s Three Sisters Island Trilogy

Many religions involve the use of food both on a symbolic level and on a practical level. After celebrating the Eucharistic meal, Catholics meet in the fellowship hall for coffee and doughnuts. The Passover Seder combines ritual and nourishment to create community with Jews from centuries ago. Baptists’ Wednesday night bible study follows a potluck supper. Wiccans record their Sabbat ritual spells along side family recipes in their Book of Shadows. Food is used in all these cases to both cement common beliefs and to establish and maintain community. These elements of a shared belief system and community are necessary elements for an emotionally satisfying and believable love story. The religious aspects in Nora Roberts’s Three Sisters Island Trilogy demonstrate food as an integral part of the foundations of community and belief. She also shows food to be just as essential to the relationships that develop over the course of the books.

Roberts sets the three love stories against a background of a struggle for good and evil. This timeless conflict is acted out in terms of three good hereditary witches facing progressively stronger evils, and the community of couples fighting evil forces comes together over food. In this paper I will look at how and why this group comes together over food. What is it about Modern Pagan Witchcraft that lends itself to the incorporation of food? What do these stories tell us about why people share food? I plan to explore the questions of how food factors into their struggle to win over evil and how it shapes the relationships that develop along the way.

What do you think, sound interesting?

Resolutions and a change

2009-11-05T03:59:00.000+09:00

Daylight savings time, in addition to making it feel like winter is really here, has for the first time ever succeeded in completely ruining my lazy sleep schedule. So much so that I wake up, without the benefit of an alarm before 8 am. I wasn't even sure a before-8-am existed prior to this - I thought it was a myth. This change has been wonderfully constructive, and I am going to attempt to keep it up. A fitting resolution for the Celtic new year. I have actually been getting things accomplished, and I want to spread that productive spirit to this thought repository.

So, in a fit of creative determination, I have decided to combine the two blogs that I have created. I update with lamentable infrequency, and spreading those posts over two blogs reduces their numbers even more. So from now on there will just be this blog. All my food post will be here, all my scholarly posts, all my pop culture posts, all my random posts... well, you get the idea. This does shift the theme of my postings somewhat, but really it fits with this blog completely - food and books and pop culture and complete randomness are what les pensée de la fleur contain, and as such are what should be reflected here - not divided and relegated to a separate space. And sadly I am no longer feeding the flock, the flock has scattered, everyone going their own ways and starting their own enclaves of irreverence.

This change will hopefully let me be less splintered in both my writing style and my online presence in general, though I don't delude myself into thinking that it will make me an internet celebrity or anything like that. Which is fine. I have always said that I would rather be rich than famous anyway, and I don't think that bothersome fame will arise out of these nebulous future posts. And the reality is blogging is not what makes you rich, sad but true.

Instead I will - hopefully - get a creative outlet, and - again hopefully - this outlet will help me to focus and create a more disciplined writing habit. Now those of you who know me probably just laughed out loud to see discipline in reference to me (if you've stumbled here by mistake, it's true - I am a slacker of the first order). However, I do want to write - papers for my classes, articles, eventually my dissertation, and maybe a book some day. These all require that I write with some consistency, possibly even regularity. So I think that creating a writing habit will be easier, and let's face it- I am reliably all about easier, if that habit had a locus, a central depository. I am not going to make any wild promises about increased updates or daily posts, but I am putting my aspirations out here, publicly, in an attempt to motivate myself to achieve those aspirations. Goals, not guilt...

Well, we'll see...

ETA: I imported the posts from my food blog, so all the food and recipes are on here now. I am in the process of going back through the archives and working out the duplicates. I also plan on working out a recipe list page.

How do you construct your history?

2009-10-13T22:41:00.002+09:00

Last night I want to see The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. It was an experience that was both moving and surreal. I was not in Laramie when Matthew Shepard was killed. I was one of two students from Wyoming at a small, Catholic college in Ohio. I spent weeks saying that is not what we are like in Wyoming, not everyone hates and for sure, not everyone is murderous. It was a frustrating experience, because I knew that the small Ohio town I was in was not anymore “ok” with gay people than the state they were vilifying, the small Catholic college was not “ok” with gay people either.

When I moved to Laramie, long before I met, became friends with people who knew the man, the effects of the tragedy of Matthew Shepard’s death were apparent. Hate was not ok – in certain pockets of safe space - but it was not always silent, either. The “it’s time to move on” contingent was already making noises in 2001. It’s time to move on – without passing legislation that prevents hate crimes, without educating people about this type of violence, without facing the fact that prejudice lives among us – it’s time to move on. This voice was balanced, partially, by non-violence pledges and candlelight vigils, but even just a few years after, it was there.

Hearing that voice expanded and mainstreamed in editorials and interviews was one of the hardest things about watching last night’s performance. The frustration of so few quantifiable changes is hard to balance against the lives that were changed so drastically, and, even when it was for the better, out of such tragedy.

It was also extremely surreal to watch actors perform people I knew, whose voices I could hear in the words – but not in the sound of the speech. For me, this act of theatre gave these words even more power – both positive and negative – because it made them more universal. Yes, these were things that my friends had said, sometimes things I had heard them say in person, but they were also the voice of a movement towards justice and human rights. In the case of the more negative comments, they were also things I had heard people say, and in some ways that was even harder – because they are the blocks to progress and prevention, they are the reason that hate crimes have increased, not decreased, they are proof that it easier to ignore tragedy than to be transformed by it, and they break my heart.

Ultimately, I am very glad that I went to see this landmark production – a production that was performed simultaneously in over 100 theatres around the world. Here is a link to the “trailer” on YouTube for a peek at some of the interviews and here is information about the project itself. If you get the chance to see this play performed, go. And think about how you construct your history. Because this is a play about more than just Laramie, it is about all of us.

Marketing Religion

2009-10-06T06:31:00.004+09:00

This came in the mail today:

"FREE Take Home Coffee Mug. Come worship with us, stay for coffee and fellowship and receive a mug as our gift too you."

Apparently, religion has learned from public radio fund drives - if you give people free stuff they don't mind giving to you as much. Is bribery really the best way to establish a spiritual community?

Also, if you go and get the mug, be sure that you don't blog about your awesome new church, as that would be a violation of the new FTC blogging regulations. Not kidding. Info on them here and here.

Cupcakes!

2009-10-02T02:12:00.000+09:00

So the votes came in on Twitter and Facebook and I decided to make Pumpkin Spice Cupcakes for my evening class this week. Everyone kept saying we should bring food, so I thought cupcakes might be a good initial offering. I found a recipe that fit what I was looking for on Cupcakes Take the Cake. Being constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone, though, I had to tweek it a bit. So, here you go - tasty, easy, and even kinda good for you - in terms of cupcakes, anyway...

2 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 Tablespoon baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup oatmeal
1 3/4 cups pureed pumpkin
1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
1 cup brown rice syrup (if you can't find this, use white sugar and add an extra 1/2 Tbsp molasses)
1 Tablespoon molasses
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cup canola oil
4 eggs (or egg replacer - flax seed would probably be particularly good)

1 Preheat an oven to 350°F. Line three 12-cup muffin tins with decorative cupcake papers.

2 In a bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, spices and salt. stir in the oatmeal.

3 In a large bowl, whisk (I used and electric hand mixer) together the pumpkin, syrup, brown sugar, molasses, vanilla and oil. Add the eggs one at a time, whisking after each addition.

4 Add the flour mixture in three additions, stirring with a large wooden spoon until just combined.

5 Fill the muffin tins about three-fourths full. Bake until the cupcakes are golden and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes. Transfer the tins to a wire rack and let cool for 10 minutes, then remove the cupcakes from the tins and let cool completely. Makes 3 dozen.

...

The frosting I used was a complete improvisation. I wanted cream cheese frosting, but didn't have cream cheese, so I went with sour cream instead - similar tangy flavor to offset the spice in the cake.

1 stick butter (or Earth Balance), softened
4 oz. sour cream (or Tofutti Better Than...)
1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar

Beat ingredients together, adding the sugar in thirds, so as to not powder your whole kitchen. Add additional sugar to bring frosting to your desired spreading consistency. Spread on cooled cupcakes with a frosting knife or spatula.

The Right to Read... Whatever I Want!

2009-09-26T22:00:00.000+09:00

Today marks the beginning of Banned Books Week, "an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment."

I think that censorship is one of the most debilitating crimes against freedom in a modern society - and not just because I love to read. Reading and education fosters critical thinking and debate - both are key to intellectual (and spiritual) growth and fair governance. I know that just reading, without the thinking, doesn't always work this way - but I do think the more you read, the more you exercise your thinking muscles - whether you mean to or not. Reading broadens horizons, allows you to encounter new viewpoints, opens worlds of possibility. Reading is a human right - reading what I want to is a human right. No one should have the right to determine what is ok for me (or anyone else) to read. Banning books bans free thought.

So, celebrate your right to read what you want - go read a banned book this week. Here's a list of the 10 most challenged books in 2008*, in case you need a place to start:

And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
Reasons: anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group
His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
Reasons: political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, and violence
TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
Reasons: occult/satanism, religious viewpoint, and violence
Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya
Reasons: occult/satanism, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, and violence
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: drugs, homosexuality, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, suicide, and unsuited to age group
Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
Uncle Bobby's Wedding, by Sarah S. Brannen
Reasons: homosexuality and unsuited to age group
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
Flashcards of My Life, by Charise Mericle Harper
Reasons: sexually explicit and unsuited to age group

*from the Amarican Library Association (ala.org)

Power, Sex, and Shoelaces

2009-09-26T03:45:00.002+09:00

Disturbing on even more levels in light of my current Renaissance Orientations class...

Power, Sex, and Shoelaces ...

It could be the definition of fetishistic exploitation...

Poetic Interlude...

2009-09-24T12:20:00.001+09:00

Because I love Mary Oliver...

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~Mary Oliver, Dream Work (1986)

Pickles!!!

2009-09-22T04:30:00.000+09:00

So, I have not been cooking much lately. Settling into a new place, figuring out schedules - I am home hand awake when my sisters are gone or asleep. I miss them and I live with them. =( But we do get weekends together - yesterday we tried a new restaurant and went grocery shopping.

I am also adjusting to a smaller kitchen - less counter space means I have to be super efficient while cooking, and I have to plan and prep better. So not how I do things, in the kitchen or out of it. On the up side, I have a gas stove again and it is AWESOME!!

Yesterday at the grocery store, we saw cucumbers on sale. As you can see, we decided not to pass them up. So in two weeks we will have yummy, garlicky refrigerator pickles.

Thoughts... 'cause that's what I do here...

2009-09-18T12:16:00.008+09:00

Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest. ~Albert Einstein

Well, I am definitely striving, and I really feel like I have landed in the midst of the best and the brightest... I love my classes and new colleagues... everyone at GWU has been so wonderful and welcoming. I am getting involved with MEMSI - more brilliant people. I feel like every time I talk to someone - in class, at a MEMSI gathering, over lunch - I am blown away. It helps that they love so many of the same things I do... literature, material studies, theory... sometimes I just stop and savor the fabulous-ness of it all.

Ok, blissful gushing over ... on to what I am thinking about in terms of Renaissance Orientations:
I am still ruminating over that ideas that Sarah Ahmed explores in Queer Phenomenology, particularly the idea of objects and our perceptions of them being layered by what has come before - both for the object and the person perceiving. This idea of layering caused me to wonder about action and choice - how they fit into the process of perception and interaction, especially in regard to literature. I am really interested in the idea of literary genealogies... I am a voracious reader - I can't even count the number of books I have read. I know that what comes before layers over each new book~ I make connections, or I am thrown out of poorly researched narratives, because I have read contradictory facts before. This is concept is really interesting for me because I have so many layers underneath the theoretical works that I have read. I am wondering how these previous stories and poems, facts and fictions inflect the theory I read. This is kind of a reversal, for me at least - before this idea I always thought of theory as inflecting other literary text... this is really blowing my mind... How does a childhood obsession with fairytale influence my reading of Foucault? Blowing my mind...

Near future occupations...

2009-08-28T04:06:00.004+09:00

My fall courses, as described on the GWU English website:

Romantic Childhood and Victorian Children's Literature --- Judith Plotz

"Not only is childhood one of the leading preoccupations of 19th-century British culture, but both juvenilia and children’s literature are two brilliantly opening fields for 21st-century researchers. This seminar will trace the connections between romantic constructions of childhood (there are several, interestingly classed and gendered) and the brilliant body of children’s literature that emerges in the latter part of the 19th century.

Some key figures: Rousseau, Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, the Coleridge family (STC, Hartley, Sara), Lewis Carroll, Ewing, Dickens, Kipling, Nesbit. We’ll also examine the juvenilia of Hartley Coleridge,Marjorie Fleming, Jane Austen, the Brontes. We’ll frame our study with the help of critics and theorists including Alexander & McMaster, Kincaid, Myers, Richardson. Rose. The course will culminate in a mini-conference. Students will be expected to produce papers suitable for major conference presentation."

Constructions of Ethnicity and Identity: RENAISSANCE ORIENTATIONS --- Gil Harris

"This graduate seminar takes as its point of departure Sara Ahmed's recent book, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, in order to think through a cluster of related preoccupations with the "orient" (spanning North Africa, Turkey, and Persia to India, China and Indonesia) in English Renaissance writing. The orient was a shifting compass point in relation to which England in particular, and Europe in general, repeatedly (dis)oriented itself in space and time. How may these processes of (dis)orientation shed light on long-standing conceptions of the orient and its objects? We will pay particular attention to medieval and Renaissance travel writing about the orient (from Mandeville to Coryate, Herbert, and Heylyn) and Renaissance "oriental" drama (from Preston's Cambyses and Marlowe's Tamburlaine to The Adventures of the Three English Gentlemen and Fletcher's The Island Princess). We will also consider other theoretical texts on the orient and its objects, including Said's Orientalism, Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, and Gunder Frank's Re-Orient"

---

I will also be taking advantage of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI). The first seminar is:

"Messianic Time and the Untimely"

Three papers will be pre-circulated. On September 17, we will have short presentations followed by open discussion. The presenters are:

1. Kathleen Biddick, "Dead Neighbor Archives and Messianic Time"
2. Julia Lupton, "Paul Shakespeare: Exegetical Exercises"
3. Jonathan Gil Harris, ""The Untimely Mammet of Verona"

And am not abandoning my JD Robb article either, so I will be a busy girl in the next month or so. I don't imagine that it will taper off after that, but for now this is the plan.

Misc. Minutiae

2009-08-20T10:37:00.004+09:00

An update...

Classes start at GWU on 1 Sept.
I interviewed at the GWU Writing Center for a tutor position... I should know by next Thursday if I will be working there.
Still not all the way unpacked... have I mentioned how much I hate moving chaos?
Working on an article on JD Robb.
Thinking about article(s) that might arise from my thesis.
Speaking of my thesis - it is defended, approved, and submitted... now just waiting on the format check and I will post a link.
Public transportation is not fun when motion sickness precludes reading and abnormally small ears preclude comfortable headphones.
I am struggling with how to describe myself professionally - my interests and writing spans a wide range of time periods and genres, tenuously held together by some relation to food and/or the domestic arts.
My sisters finally have job prospects... after a long and stressful summer of searching. No guarantees yet, though.
For your viewing pleasure, I have updated my various avatar pictures, behold:

Nota Bene: I like lists - especially lists with bullets. That is all.

Cooking Kosher Cajun

2009-08-13T10:05:00.000+09:00

Prep.

Spice.

Bagel.

Bite?

Happy Birthday, Shelley!!

2009-08-04T23:39:00.002+09:00

"Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle —
Why not I with thine?"

Moving, moving, moved!!!

2009-07-03T01:31:00.005+09:00

So, we blitz packed up the house the week of the 6th - with a quick trip to Pinedale to get the furniture we had stored there...

On our last night in Laramie, after loading the truck, no one wanted to cook... we invaded McAlister’s 20 minutes before they closed, they were really nice about it – I hope that it was not because they touched our food.

We were going to leave at 4am on the 14th, but as our plans had changed and we no longer needed to get to Champagne, IL by a reasonable hour we decided that sleeping more than 3 hours before driving all day was probably a good idea…

So we slept in, left late, and ended up driving most of the next night. We stopped at a hotel in Peoria, IL around 6am and slept away the morning, left mid-afternoon and drove through the night again. Because we have an awesome real estate agent, our keys and lease were waiting for us at our new house the next morning…

We unloaded the truck, ended up at Denny’s – because you don’t go to Denny’s, you end up there – and crashed out. Linus’ flight left at the butt crack of dawn, so after that sad task, we all went back to bed.

Saturday we decided to check out the main farmer’s market in Alexandria. It was raining so we didn’t stay long. The farmer’s market runs from 5.30 – 10 am so we left early and got home around 8.30… and went back to bed.

Only to be awakened to a loud crashing noise at 9.15. Our new house is situated in the cross of a T intersection. Some guy had passed the car stopped at the intersection and accelerated right into our driveway – into my sister’s Blazer in fact…

He then proceeded to get out of his car and run down the street bleeding – a real hit and run… Our neighbors saw everything and called 911 – nota bene: there are some fine firemen in Alexandria, VA – We got 3 fire trucks, an ambulance, and 4 cop cars... the cops then proceeded to catch the guy, tow off his car and all the other good stuff cops do…

The Blazer was totaled - bent axle amongst other damage. We were all ok, though.

So,1800 miles, tons of boxes and drama, and 2 weeks later...

We still have a lot of unpacking and organizing to do, but we are settling in nicely!

Check it out!

2009-06-08T06:08:00.003+09:00

Ok, so I added a new sidebar feature of authors whom I read with regularity - it is an eclectic mix, weighing in heavily on the romance but also including food and natural history. I will continue to add to it as I find more websites and start sorting my library as I unpack.

These are all fantastic authors, some brilliant, some brilliantly funny, some both, some just fun. Right now I am especially liking Victoria Dahl, whose novella The Wicked West was a fabulous short break from thesis revisions this past week. She may have saved my sanity...

Recommend, please...

2009-06-03T21:39:00.004+09:00

Now that the thesis if mostly done (keep your fingers crossed for the defense), I am looking for summer reading suggestions. As most of you probably know, I have a voratious and insatiable narrative greed and summer break is the one time I can indulge it unchecked by most other resopnsiblities. And I read really quickly, so I go through books at an astonishing rate...

So, what I am looking for...

In the romance vein: Historical and straight contemporary, by which I mean not paranormal or romantic suspense, not the orientation of the protagonists - as I am a bit burned out on those subgenres... I have my must reads, but I have noticed recently that my scope is rather narrow and I am looking to expand. The voracious narrative greed means I tear through my favourites, even with re-reading. Also, I would not be adverse to expanding in the BDSM direction, as I have heard good things in that direction. But I need names...

In the fantasy vein: I am talking fantasy here, not sci fi. I am cool with magic, but the machines have to be pretty damn cool for me to read about them, as my relationship with the machines in my life is rather love/hate - I think this is also because, as a rule, I read for character over plot and fantasy does that better than sci fi. Anyway...

In the foodie vein: Anything that is good - I read cookbooks like novels, and I love food memoir as well, so really, anything that is good. I am always looking for new ideas in the kitchen...

In the Classics vein: I am planning on revisiting my favorite Jane Austin titles, but over the course of my MA I realized just how much classic literature I had skimmed - or skipped altogether - as an undergrad. So, what are your favorites?

What else would you recommend? I would be happy to venture outside these paths, if the narrative pay-off is there...

A note on formats: I am down with ebooks, though I won't have a reader until the financial shock of moving across the country wears off. I am not so good with delayed gratification, but needs must. But I will get to them, so don't let format be a limiting factor.

Please share - a desperate reader needs to know!

um, yeah, that's why I am a snob...

2009-06-03T01:16:00.001+09:00

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd." - Edith Sitwell, English biographer, critic, novelist, & poet (1887 - 1964)

Finally, I know - my genius makes me above the opinions of the crowd.
=)

A peek at the thesis, unpolished...

2009-06-02T01:28:00.002+09:00

an excerpt:

The section on plum pudding also demonstrates well the ways in which Mrs. Beeton’s text conveys both imperial codes and pragmatic domestic practice using traditional methods of female discourse. The instructional aspects extend far beyond the preparation of the food. Passages on currants, grape varieties, raisins, brandy and citron are interspersed between the recipes, providing a view of the state of commerce, both throughout the Empire and at home. These insertions also indicate the rising middle class audience the Book served.
When talking about currants, Beeton informs her readers, “When gathered and dried by the sun and air, on mats, they are conveyed to magazines, heaped together, and left to cake, until ready for shipping. They are then dug out by iron crowbars, trodden into casks, and exported.” This information is seemingly disconnected from running a Victorian middle class home. However, the facts surrounding this process demonstrate the commerce-based nature of the empire. A thrifty and economical housewife knows where her food comes from and how it is produce, so she can get the best deals when it comes time for her to purchase what is needed for the household she runs. Knowing that “the fertile vale of “Zante the woody” produces about 9,000,000 lbs. of currants annually,” arms the purchaser with a view of the market that she must enter in order to provide the socially acceptable table required by her class. The fact that “we could not make a plum pudding without the currant” requires certain knowledge of the housewife, what currants are and how and where to purchase them, in addition to how to incorporate them into a domestic practice. What seems to be learning without purpose is in fact driven by the economic factors of middle class living in the British Empire.

Sex, Sex, Sex... Yay!

2009-06-01T03:01:00.002+09:00

Mary Roach has written a book called Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex and here she talks about 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm:

Rainy Day Rissotto

2009-05-31T08:32:00.000+09:00

Like much of what I do in the kitchen, these measurements are approximate as I generally am of the dump and pour method. This is as close as I can recreate.

1/4 c butter
1/4 c olive oil
2 Tbsp Chopped garlic
2 sundried tomato garlic spread
3 c rice
1/4 c rice wine vinegar
1.7 Litre veggie bullion
.5 Litre boiling water
2 tsp. cream cheese
1/3 c sour cream

melt the fat. sauté the garlic & spread. saute the rice. add vinegar. cook down. add enough liquid to cover rice. boil down. repeat until rice is soft, but not mushy. add the cream cheese and sour cream towards the end of cooking.

I am not a big fan of sun-dried tomatoes, but when they are not the only flavour, they are ok. For this dish i really liked it. It was pretty tangy, so probably a better side dish than main meal.

Little Miss Picky Pants said, "It's ok." - for those not familiar, that is a ringing endorsement.
His Sinfulness thought, "It is very good, and I garnished it with sun-dried tomato bits." - he likes sun-dried tomatoes much better than I do.
Teh Doctor, who was stranded "The texture was fantastic. Definitely firm creamy. The sour cream flavour lingers a little too long. And I went a little over board with the garnishing." - he also was excited by the sun-dried tomatoes.

Work-out of the non-mental variety...

2009-05-30T08:28:00.003+09:00

I realize that I need to exercise, and that it would in fact probably greatly reduce my stress levels, which in turn would reduce my headaches... however, stress has also sapped any minor motivation I might have had... this is a vicious cycle!

On a related note, there is an end in sight for my thesis.

The use of animal byproducts

2009-05-23T05:31:00.000+09:00

Warning: This post is heavy on the philosophizing and includes hot button topics of death, Christianity and veganism. If this is not your thing you may want to steer clear. Also, it is long.

This is a topic that has been much debated amongst various members of the flock - with strong proponents on both sides of the issue. The arguments range from corporate greed to health to evolution to personal pleasure. That is not what I want to talk about today. Today I want to talk about death.

Vegans are, with the possible exception of Christians, people who are more afraid of death than any other group I have encountered. This maybe because many of then were raised in a culture where the shadow of Christianity's fear of death has created a culture of youth that is unable to even talk about death. I don't know why it is, but most of the vegans I know, and know of, equate all death with cruelty and label all death as bad. There is a definite value judgement being placed on the ending of a life. In my experience value judgements are made out of two places - sometimes, they come from great joy; but, much more frequently, they arise out of fear. Now if you do not subscribe to a world-view where there is something after this life - be it heaven, reincarnation, or whatever - this fear makes sense. However, these same people are also frequently deeply spiritual people. I have to admit, this baffles me.

I understand, and even agree with, many of the arguments made about quality of life, health benefits, awareness and all of that, right up until they get to the point where death equals cruelty. That is where they loose me. None of the world-views that the vegans I know support this conclusion. Christians are only concerned with the life-after-death of humans, and it is supposed to be better than here. Buddhists believe in a cycle of reincarnation to end suffering - this one comes the closest to making sense to me, as your choices in this life effect your next incarnation, but death is a release into either the next incarnation or to enlightenment; it is the end of suffering. The Neo-Pagans I know come down on varying degrees between a summerlands-type heaven and a cycle of reincarnation, and the same issue that what comes next is something to look forward to applies to them.

So, if all these world-views see death as a good (or at least not bad) thing, why are vegans so opposed to it? Here we get to the value of life, which ones are more important and deserved to be preserved and which ones don't matter. It is argued by ethicists that the line sentience.The sentience line is usually drawn at the vertebrate/invertebrate line by science. But that is not the line that vegans take - otherwise lobster would be fine. And so would honey. So what is the line that makes some life ok to consume for sustenance and pleasure and other life, cruel. And who gets to decide where to step outside the cycle of life and death. Nothing lives except by the death of something else.

Now would probably be a good time to state that there are several points which vegans make that I completely agree with. That the quality of life of the animals we (omnivores) eat should be improved. And the giant corporate factory farms and animal testing do nothing to contribute to an improvement - or the ienvironment, or the health of developed nations. And that by making uninformed food choices which support these businesses, you perpetuate animal cruelty. I also think that it is important to consider all the consequences of your choices - especially food choices.

But by focusing on the death, I think that much is missed in the beautiful, natural cycles of the present.

OMG, WANT!!1!

2009-05-18T14:12:00.001+09:00

So, recently I was helping a friend determine the best ebook reader for her to buy, as she will be spending a year in China and books are heavy and take up space. Like me, the thought of a year without many easily accessed books was completely intolerable. So the solution was clearly an ebook reader. I was helping her for two reasons - (1)several of the blogs I read have talked a lot about different types of readers and (2)due to the space issue my insatiable book habit creates, I am going to get a reader in the fall, when I once again have funding. (n.b. moving is expensive!!)

We were not liking the Kindle, due to outrageous pricing, no external storage, and the general suckitude of #Amazonfail and their recent attempts to monopolize publishing in a not cool way. With all that in mind, we had decided to go the Sony route. Not only does Sony not suck, they have the deal with Google where you get 500,000 free books. Yay! Free! Books! Turns out however, that Sony is not compatible with Macs - both of us have a Mac. We love our Macs. We will not ever buy PCs again, unless they somehow manage to be as cool as Macs. Or the Devil starts ice-skating on his driveway.

So, no Sony. There was much with the sad face.

But Kindle still sucks.

Our phone conversation got cut off, and while I was waiting for her to call me back so we could figure out what to do, I read my daily blog posts. Turns out Smart Bitches post was on an ebook conference. Turns out there is a European company called Bookeen. Turns out they have a reader called Cybook. And it's compatible. With everything.

Turns out I WANT it.

2009-05-16T13:04:00.003+09:00

I am a big fan of "The Nietzsche Family Circus" and in light of all the paper grading I and many of my friends and acquaintances have done recently I thought this one was particularly apropos...

2009-05-02T13:41:00.002+09:00

So... I love Foamy...

Watch this!!! (NSFW)

=)

perspective...

2009-04-30T00:38:00.002+09:00

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. ~ Albert Einstein

I needed that perspective right now... when I am completely overwhelmed with everything...

Yay! Camera!

2009-04-29T09:03:00.000+09:00

I got a camera! Well, I already had a camera, but now I have a better camera, a camera with which take beautiful pictures of food... or teapots... or anything I want, really. I know that this is not the best demonstration of its powers, but I was too excited to not put up something...

As to when you will get a post of more substance, all I can say is after thesis, grading and moving... but now I will have pretty pictures to go with the posts that I will eventually be posting... so, Yay!

What is it about the Eastern Europeans?

2009-04-17T04:46:00.000+09:00

"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in the times of greatest distress." Milan Kundera, Czech Writer

"To remain aware of the weight of fact without yielding to the temptation to become only a reporter is one of the most difficult puzzles confronting a practitioner of poetry." Czeslaw Milosz, Polish Writer

What is it about the Eastern Europeans?

The Literary Quote of the Day made me think of Poetics last spring and Czeslaw Milosz - his poetry embodies this sense of beauty in times of distress. In fact, the way I ended up describing it in my notes resonates with both of these quotes: In moments of dissolution, the specific and the general meet - intimacy and ephemera.

I am not sure that it expresses the resonance, but there ya go - that's what happens when a non-linear thinker gets to blog...

This lead me to reflect on the beauty of Eastern European writer's works, both poetry and prose. They are so heart-wrenchingly fabulous and frequently they spring from great tragedy and hardship. They are in no way a specialty of mine, but I am blown away whenever I encounter them (I realize the gross generalization I am making here)...

I wonder what it is about the human condition that inspires the creation beauty from pain?

Romance, New Orleans, and PCA

2009-04-14T06:34:00.005+09:00

I love, love, love, me some New Orleans - I always thought I would from all I have read about it, but now I can say from personal experience that it is true - I love New Orleans. Part of this incredibly favorable first impression may be the people I shared a goodly portion of the past week with - the Popular Romance section of the PCA conference. This group is so warm and welcoming and supportive - they are just plain nice! And snarky... oh, the snark. Those who know me know what a requirement that is for a good time to be had by all. Some of them I already "knew" from online, and others it was a huge pleasure for me to meet them for the first time. I came away from the conference with a new/re-affirmed confidence in my work as a scholar and with tons of ideas for future projects.

Now I just have to catch up in the rest of my life...

Eco on Poetics

2009-04-01T02:19:00.003+09:00

"I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed." - Umberto Eco

I think that this is why I can only write about certain romance novelists in a scholarly light - not all of them have this poetic effect, some of them are just entertainment...

Literary Quote of the Day

2009-03-28T11:12:00.002+09:00

"Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future." Mark Helprin, American Novelist

Excuses, excuses...

2009-03-23T12:38:00.000+09:00

I have been cooking, and even keeping a journal - albeit intermittently, but between my thesis and teaching, the time that I may have had for decent posts just disappears... please don't give up, my very few, very faithful readers - I will post about tasty goodness soon...

so funny...

2009-03-08T09:45:00.000+09:00

on this day...

2009-02-06T00:06:00.003+09:00

Feb 5, 1811: After George III was declared insane, the Prince of Wales became Prince Regent of England, and later George IV...

As readers of romance know, this ushered in a time of endless rake dukes and rebel heiresses - in fact, there were so many, that to write about them all, regency romance got its own subgenre...

one more reason to read romance novels...
=)

Literary Quote of the Day

2009-02-05T02:07:00.002+09:00

"If you do not love me I shall not be loved. If I do not love you I shall not love."
~Samuel Beckett, Irish Dramatist/Poet

Birthday and Thesis and Imbolc, Oh My!

2009-02-03T03:56:00.004+09:00

So, I had a lovely birthday weekend...

The day itself was pretty ordinary - I had to deal with a lot of the details that are necessary to teaching and grad school. It really brought home to me that I am where I need to be and doing what I should be ... I love being an academic. More than anything it was a peaceful day, filled with good conversation and dear friends. There is nothing more rewarding than milestones that make you happy with where you are, rather than regretful of where you could be...

My thesis is less on track, but still exciting... I keep meaning to do more than I actually get done, but it is underway and more than just a concept in my head now...

Blessed Imbolc! We are halfway to the spring solstice and in frozen wastelands like the one where I live that is definitely some thing to celebrate... and it is above zero, so we don't have to freeze while we do it.

May yours be blessed!

Birthday foods...

2009-02-03T03:46:00.000+09:00

So my first foray into fondue was lovely... I can't believe I got the the ripe old age of 29 never having tried it... we went to The Melting Pot in Ft. Collins and it was super tasty - I have to say I am a fan of fondue, though I think the caloric intake will be limiting my indulgence... still I could totally see a fondue set in my future...

2009-01-17T05:31:00.001+09:00

Oh my frickin Goddess!...

THIS is ridiculous...

go buy a doughnut! I don't care if you are on a diet - give it to a pro-lifer
=)

Ch-ch-ch-change...

2009-01-16T07:09:00.000+09:00

So...

WordPress and hosting issues have lead me to switch back to blogger, which does everything for me. I am still playing around with templates and formats, but here we are - the address is the same, but you will have to reset your rss feeds, so let me know if there are problems...

tidbits...

2009-01-08T07:58:00.000+09:00

On this day in 1896 that Fannie Merritt Farmer published The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, which was later renamed The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. It was the first cookbook to use accurate measurements.As it is also National Soup Month, I think I will make her Clam Chowder - It is a blustery day here and it will simmer nicely as I put together the grapefruit jelly I have planned.I think a better digital camera will have to be a priority for 2009...

yikes...

2008-12-10T01:43:00.000+09:00

the deadlines, they come... i am applying to PhD programs and i am starting to freak out - the first deadline is friday ... i don't feel prepared at all, even though my application is mostly done and i am getting all sorts of department help ... still super freaked out...

here's hopin' they love me...

Crumpets!

2008-11-27T13:00:00.000+09:00

So I made my first foray into crumpet -making today. The Flock tasters have given their stamp of approval, but I am not satisfied. I used this recipe here. I don't know if the recipe is what needs tweaking, due to high altitude, or my technique needs work, but I am not happy with the centers - I think they are not bubbly and firm enough. Also, I would like them with less of a yeasty taste, but that is me being picky. I have a few more variations that I want to try, so we will see how the next batch goes, but for now the Flock is happy...

so, life gets in the way...

2008-11-12T06:23:00.000+09:00

I really meant to post these earlier, but school happened and life happened. so anyway, pictures...[gallery]

So, applebutter...

2008-10-17T14:06:00.000+09:00

The applebutter experiment was a rousing success. I love that I was able to make it in the slow cooker. And the applebutter aficionado in the house says that it tastes like his favorite store-bought brand - a ringing endorsement, to be sure. Photos of the finished product need work, maybe the batch I do on Saturday will photograph better than this batch did.So, the recipe...

2.5 kilos apples, cored and finely chopped (I ran them through the food processor)

800 g raw sugar

1 1/2 Tbsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp ground cloves

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp salt

Place the apples in a slow cooker. In a bowl, mix the sugar, spices and salt. Pour the mixture over the apples in the slow cooker and mix well. Cover and cook on high 1 hour. Reduce heat to low and cook 9 to 11 hours, (mine took about 10) stirring occasionally, until the mixture is thickened and dark brown. Uncover and continue cooking on low 1 hour. During the last hour, blend it smooth with an immersion blender. Ladle into sterilized jars. Boil filled jars for 15 min. Cool and store.

I used organic Gala apples, but I think Granny Smiths or Jonathans would work well, too.

It seems to me, too...

2008-10-11T03:23:00.000+09:00

"It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it; and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied; and it is all one."M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

2008-09-08T10:06:00.000+09:00

I have a new website - http://feeding-the-flock.com/

Come and visit!