A beautiful goodbye... for now...

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...

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..."

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...

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 ...

The view from my seat...

A taste of summertime...

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.

Summer fitness update...

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...

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...

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...