Einstein Quote of the Day...

"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...

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...

• 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!

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...

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

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

100 Word Challenge: My Mother

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: Forgetting

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

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...

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...

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.

Wordless Wednesdays: TBR, partial

Fractured and out of focus...

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

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...