[My kindergarten teacher is retiring this month, and her colleagues asked former students to contribute their memories to a book for her. I sent in the following, and am killing two birds with one stone by also posting it here. Just be grateful I don't do the same thing with my grocery lists. I have changed her name below to protect her from the internet, which as you know is always going after retiring kindergarten teachers.]
The trouble with preschool is that no one respects you. It’s true that they’re all very kind and they let you dunk your graham crackers in apple juice, but they also crouch down on their haunches and talk to you in sweet sing-songy voices that make it clear you are not to be taken seriously. This bothered me. I was just as serious-minded as the next human being, and it was irritating that they didn’t acknowledge that. I suppose it’s possible that my fat cheeks and fluffy hair and the way I couldn’t bring myself to stop chasing that red-headed boy could have distracted them, so I really can’t blame them for their lack of perception, but I knew I was ready for the big time. The big K. Kindergarten.
Thank goodness for Mrs Rush.
I have never moved to New York and started a job at a prestigious ad agency, but that’s as close as I can come to describing how I felt starting kindergarten. Mrs Rush was a kind, glamorous leader, dispensing wisdom and sharing the secrets of the Grown Up World: Show and Tell. The Sand Table. Mucilage. Paste. All wonders, and all a part of the new, sophisticated world of Kindergarten. I remember telling my mother about mucilage one day after school, and being astonished that she already knew all about it. But she wasn’t in kindergarten! How could she be privy to the sacred mysteries? Now, did I know then that my mother had been a kindergarten teacher herself before my brother and I were born? Yes, I did. Did that sway my conviction that only Mrs Rush could know about such impressive things? No, it did not.
Mrs Rush gave us challenging and engaging projects, and we earnestly did our best. As we shared our accomplishments with her and each other, she was proud of each of us, every time. I admit that I still feel a surprising amount of personal pride when I remember the tinfoil boat I made to sail in the Water Table. One might even wonder if my entire career (industrial designer, artist, potter) can be traced back to that first satisfying moment when I looked up from sinking ships, sloshing water, blue plastic, and the herd of fellow five-year-old engineers and said to myself, “I have made something, and it is good.”
For me, kindergarten was a splendid combination of industry, loving kindness, and respect. Mrs Rush never spoke to us as if we were children, or at least that’s how it felt at the time. It’s only now, looking back, that I realize she must be one of the few people who know how to speak to children not as if they’re messy and/or adorable half-persons, but truly as if they’re children. As if they’re the willful, perceptive, curious creatures that children are, that we all are, when you really pay attention. So, from my inner five-year-old and my outer thirty-one-year-old: Thank you, Mrs Rush; Mrs Lencester; May. Thank you for paying attention. You are a fantastic teacher. Happy retirement.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
No, really. I'm totally serious.
Those of you who know me in real life should have a seat. Or, if you must stand, try to stand on a resilient surface. Lava fields? No. Rope bridges across South American ravines? Please get all the way across before reading further. Hardwood floor? Edge towards a carpet, or at least a substantial pet. Everyone ready? Good.
I have joined a soccer team.
I haven't actually set foot on a field yet, but I've invested enough money that there's no chickening out now. Did you know that shin guards are now a high tech item? Did you realize that these advances in technology mean that the good people of City Sports can soak you for a good forty five bucks before you walk out even minimally outfitted? Apparently, you have to wear special socks over the sophisticated shin (and ankle!) guards, and oh yes, a pair of shorts. Cut off jeans are apparently not recommended.
This all started yesterday, when I was inspecting a strange bug in my front yard. A neighbor was walking by, and I asked if she was familiar with the little thing, and whether I should greet it with a chipper "Hello little fellow!" a vengeful "Die! Die!" or a detached, enlightened "Enjoy your meal, I'll buy you some more plants next week." She didn't know, I didn't know, and so the conversation moved swiftly on to, "Would you like to join a women's soccer team?" And bless my soul, I said yes. I should add that I gathered the following details before I said yes: All the players are over 30, half the women had never played soccer before this, and everyone stops playing when someone falls down. She told me I should definitely get some shin guards, and maybe some cleats if I got serious about it, but that as far as she was concerned, the cleats mostly just make you feel tough. Which is not a function that should be dismissed in an over-30, women's only, neighborhood soccer team. I have not yet bought cleats. Perhaps a shot of tequila? Cheaper, and possibly just as effective. I will pass a couple of bars on the walk from my house to the field. We'll see.
So yesterday I said yes, today I bought my gear, and my first game is tomorrow. I'm a bit nervous, and starting to wonder what in the world I can be thinking.
The whole process is reminding me very clearly of the spring of 1985 or -6. My brother was getting ready to go to Little League registration, and my parents asked if I'd like to sign up for baseball too. I had never considered it, but what went through my head at that moment was, "It's not as if they'll take one look at me and say no way. It's not like picking teams in Gym. If I say I want to sign up, they'll have to take me! And I bet all kinds of not-very-athletic kids sign up for Little League. I can't be the only one. I could actually do this." And then I started imaging how cool it would be when it turned out I was really good at baseball, and how I'd look all sporty in my uniform, and there would probably be cute boys on the team who'd be impressed and grateful when I led our team to an undefeated season. I was ten-year-old bookworm, and tended to live in the world of my imagination a little more than was strictly healthy. Luckily, once we arrived at the middle school cafeteria for registration, the small part of my brain that still had a grasp on reality looked around. The place was filled with wiry, coordinated boys of all ages, and a few formidable girls, all intent on the serious business of filling out forms, waiting in lines, and looking very, very athletic. My brother fit right in. He walked into the crowd and disappeared in the sea of tan limbs, scuffed with activity and action. I, on the other hand, if I remember my 10-year-old vibe correctly, was probably quite pale from being inside all the time, wearing a pink and white jumper with red leather shoes that buckled,* and sniffling into a kleenex with my interminable seasonal allergies (so thoroughly seasonal, they included all the seasons). The reality-grasping part of my brain registered all this, got the attention of the rest of me, and I realized that my chances of a triumphant, against-all-odds summer filled with baseball victories were probably not very good, and I told my parents I had changed my mind about baseball. Just as they had nonchalantly accepted it when I had told them I wanted to sign up for baseball, they listened without a blink when I changed my mind.
If I were more in tune with feminist conventional wisdom, I would now lament that I allowed cultural expectations and gender norms to affect my choices and prevent the beginning of an illustrious athletic career. Well, I'm sure our patriarchal society oppressed me in all kind of tragic ways, but this is not one of them. I would have hated baseball. There was no chatting! No reading! No making ...things out of ...stuff. And not even anything to snack on until after the whole thing was over. And it was dirty, sweaty, so! boring!, and occasionally required one to think and run at the same time. None of that added up to a good time when I was ten.
Now, however, facing soccer, I have no romantic delusions about how terrific I'll be. I know what I can realistically expect from myself (no skill, little endurance, bad jokes, good attitude) and what I can expect from my teammates (camaraderie, earnest effort, some skill, good humor), and it's starting to sound like fun.
I'll keep you posted on how long I stick it out. Although, both having bought the gear and now told the internet all about it, I don't see this ending with another swift, graceful departure from team sports. I'm bracing myself for a sweaty summer full of indignity, minor injuries, and excellent blogging material.
*You think I'm exaggerating? I am not. I loved that jumper (my mother made it), and I wore those shoes so often, I wore right through the soles and then asked for another pair just like them.
Post-Game Show:
So, I was, ah, awful. I had to quit playing before my lungs rebelled and sought work outside my body, I turned the color of the other teams' pinnies (red! bright, sweaty red!), and I almost scored a goal for the other team. All in all, it was fantastic. It was exhilarating and satisfying and, well, fun. I'm totally going back.
I have joined a soccer team.
I haven't actually set foot on a field yet, but I've invested enough money that there's no chickening out now. Did you know that shin guards are now a high tech item? Did you realize that these advances in technology mean that the good people of City Sports can soak you for a good forty five bucks before you walk out even minimally outfitted? Apparently, you have to wear special socks over the sophisticated shin (and ankle!) guards, and oh yes, a pair of shorts. Cut off jeans are apparently not recommended.
This all started yesterday, when I was inspecting a strange bug in my front yard. A neighbor was walking by, and I asked if she was familiar with the little thing, and whether I should greet it with a chipper "Hello little fellow!" a vengeful "Die! Die!" or a detached, enlightened "Enjoy your meal, I'll buy you some more plants next week." She didn't know, I didn't know, and so the conversation moved swiftly on to, "Would you like to join a women's soccer team?" And bless my soul, I said yes. I should add that I gathered the following details before I said yes: All the players are over 30, half the women had never played soccer before this, and everyone stops playing when someone falls down. She told me I should definitely get some shin guards, and maybe some cleats if I got serious about it, but that as far as she was concerned, the cleats mostly just make you feel tough. Which is not a function that should be dismissed in an over-30, women's only, neighborhood soccer team. I have not yet bought cleats. Perhaps a shot of tequila? Cheaper, and possibly just as effective. I will pass a couple of bars on the walk from my house to the field. We'll see.
So yesterday I said yes, today I bought my gear, and my first game is tomorrow. I'm a bit nervous, and starting to wonder what in the world I can be thinking.
The whole process is reminding me very clearly of the spring of 1985 or -6. My brother was getting ready to go to Little League registration, and my parents asked if I'd like to sign up for baseball too. I had never considered it, but what went through my head at that moment was, "It's not as if they'll take one look at me and say no way. It's not like picking teams in Gym. If I say I want to sign up, they'll have to take me! And I bet all kinds of not-very-athletic kids sign up for Little League. I can't be the only one. I could actually do this." And then I started imaging how cool it would be when it turned out I was really good at baseball, and how I'd look all sporty in my uniform, and there would probably be cute boys on the team who'd be impressed and grateful when I led our team to an undefeated season. I was ten-year-old bookworm, and tended to live in the world of my imagination a little more than was strictly healthy. Luckily, once we arrived at the middle school cafeteria for registration, the small part of my brain that still had a grasp on reality looked around. The place was filled with wiry, coordinated boys of all ages, and a few formidable girls, all intent on the serious business of filling out forms, waiting in lines, and looking very, very athletic. My brother fit right in. He walked into the crowd and disappeared in the sea of tan limbs, scuffed with activity and action. I, on the other hand, if I remember my 10-year-old vibe correctly, was probably quite pale from being inside all the time, wearing a pink and white jumper with red leather shoes that buckled,* and sniffling into a kleenex with my interminable seasonal allergies (so thoroughly seasonal, they included all the seasons). The reality-grasping part of my brain registered all this, got the attention of the rest of me, and I realized that my chances of a triumphant, against-all-odds summer filled with baseball victories were probably not very good, and I told my parents I had changed my mind about baseball. Just as they had nonchalantly accepted it when I had told them I wanted to sign up for baseball, they listened without a blink when I changed my mind.
If I were more in tune with feminist conventional wisdom, I would now lament that I allowed cultural expectations and gender norms to affect my choices and prevent the beginning of an illustrious athletic career. Well, I'm sure our patriarchal society oppressed me in all kind of tragic ways, but this is not one of them. I would have hated baseball. There was no chatting! No reading! No making ...things out of ...stuff. And not even anything to snack on until after the whole thing was over. And it was dirty, sweaty, so! boring!, and occasionally required one to think and run at the same time. None of that added up to a good time when I was ten.
Now, however, facing soccer, I have no romantic delusions about how terrific I'll be. I know what I can realistically expect from myself (no skill, little endurance, bad jokes, good attitude) and what I can expect from my teammates (camaraderie, earnest effort, some skill, good humor), and it's starting to sound like fun.
I'll keep you posted on how long I stick it out. Although, both having bought the gear and now told the internet all about it, I don't see this ending with another swift, graceful departure from team sports. I'm bracing myself for a sweaty summer full of indignity, minor injuries, and excellent blogging material.
*You think I'm exaggerating? I am not. I loved that jumper (my mother made it), and I wore those shoes so often, I wore right through the soles and then asked for another pair just like them.
Post-Game Show:
So, I was, ah, awful. I had to quit playing before my lungs rebelled and sought work outside my body, I turned the color of the other teams' pinnies (red! bright, sweaty red!), and I almost scored a goal for the other team. All in all, it was fantastic. It was exhilarating and satisfying and, well, fun. I'm totally going back.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Bulghur for Boneheads
Bulghur wheat varies so much, it's practically recipe-proof. You never know quite how what you have in your kitchen relates to what the writer of the recipe had in their kitchen. There's bulghur, there's the (sometimes) different cracked wheat, there are fine, medium, and coarse grinds of both, and there are both red and white varieties. It can be spelled bulghur, bulgur, bulgar, burghul, burghal, birghil, etc, etc, which makes it hard to google recipes. Add to all that the fact that one man's medium grind is another man's fine, and you have an unpredictably and eccentrically named group of ingredients. Cooking one kind of bulghur with a recipe meant for a different kind can lead to bad results. Well-made bulghur can be fluffy and tasty and nutty. Poorly-made bulghur can be soggy and pasty, or tough and hard to chew.
So, to help with this situation, here is a very specific recipe that makes surprisingly delicious bulghur. For best results, follow the instructions precisely. You can never tell what will make the difference between transcendent food of the gods and demoralizing slop. Precision is essential.
1. Have your mother buy a 24-oz bag of Goya Brand Enriched Coarse Bulgar Wheat/ Kiepe-Ble Grueso Enriquecido in a New England seaside town. Instruct her to remove half of the bulghur/ bulgur/ bulgar, and dispose of it as she chooses. It's best if she makes tabbouleh/ tabouli/ tabbooli and takes it on a picnic.
2. Take the uncooked remainder on a 77-mile drive in a five-year old car. Do not stop to pee.
3. Store the bulghur in a cool, dark place for three months.
4. In a twenty-five year old saucepan that has been packed and moved at least 11 times, combine one cup of bulghur, one and three-quarters cups water, and a teaspoon of salt.*
5. Bring the mixture to a boil over high heat. Let it boil, covered, for two minutes. Turn off the heat and let it sit, covered, for twenty minutes. During this time, be overcome with curiosity twice, and quickly lift the lid for a peek. The second time, poke it gently with a fork. Feel slightly guilty.
6. Toss the bulghur with a fork, and then mix in two tablespoons of olive oil.*
7. Eat while warm, or let cool and use in a salad.
If you must, you can try adapting this recipe to your local bulghur brand, just remember: Soggy is bad. Tough is bad. Salt and oil are good!
*This is delicious, but it's not exactly fat-free or low-sodium, (although it's still a lot better for you than a bag of Doritos and a Mr Pibb). If you have salt-sensitive hypertension, bless your heart, you can leave out all the salt. If you're, um... allergic to fat, leave out all the oil. If you're just a moderate kind of person and these amounts seems crazy, halve the salt and oil. It will probably still be pretty good. But if you leave out all the salt and all the oil, and don't have a compelling medical reason to do so, you deserve exactly what you get. The nicest thing you'll be able to say about it is, "My, it tastes so... healthy!"
So, to help with this situation, here is a very specific recipe that makes surprisingly delicious bulghur. For best results, follow the instructions precisely. You can never tell what will make the difference between transcendent food of the gods and demoralizing slop. Precision is essential.
1. Have your mother buy a 24-oz bag of Goya Brand Enriched Coarse Bulgar Wheat/ Kiepe-Ble Grueso Enriquecido in a New England seaside town. Instruct her to remove half of the bulghur/ bulgur/ bulgar, and dispose of it as she chooses. It's best if she makes tabbouleh/ tabouli/ tabbooli and takes it on a picnic.
2. Take the uncooked remainder on a 77-mile drive in a five-year old car. Do not stop to pee.
3. Store the bulghur in a cool, dark place for three months.
4. In a twenty-five year old saucepan that has been packed and moved at least 11 times, combine one cup of bulghur, one and three-quarters cups water, and a teaspoon of salt.*
5. Bring the mixture to a boil over high heat. Let it boil, covered, for two minutes. Turn off the heat and let it sit, covered, for twenty minutes. During this time, be overcome with curiosity twice, and quickly lift the lid for a peek. The second time, poke it gently with a fork. Feel slightly guilty.
6. Toss the bulghur with a fork, and then mix in two tablespoons of olive oil.*
7. Eat while warm, or let cool and use in a salad.
If you must, you can try adapting this recipe to your local bulghur brand, just remember: Soggy is bad. Tough is bad. Salt and oil are good!
*This is delicious, but it's not exactly fat-free or low-sodium, (although it's still a lot better for you than a bag of Doritos and a Mr Pibb). If you have salt-sensitive hypertension, bless your heart, you can leave out all the salt. If you're, um... allergic to fat, leave out all the oil. If you're just a moderate kind of person and these amounts seems crazy, halve the salt and oil. It will probably still be pretty good. But if you leave out all the salt and all the oil, and don't have a compelling medical reason to do so, you deserve exactly what you get. The nicest thing you'll be able to say about it is, "My, it tastes so... healthy!"
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Fried Cheese
[I wrote this last fall, when apples were in season and I wasn't on a diet. This kind of food is perhaps why I am on a diet today. Hmmm.]
How can you go wrong? Everything is better with cheese (except, perhaps, heart disease, a jiggly belly, and digestive clarity), and everything is better fried (except ditto). Frying soaks your food in delicious, satisfying fat, and gives you crispy, crunchy brown bits. Cheese is also full of delicious fat, although it's a strange substance when you think about it. I try to forget that it's the mammary secretions of a big smelly animal, left to spoil until solid and moldy.* It's just so tasty!
Cheese: yum. Fried: yum. So, again, how can you go wrong? Here's how:
Being about to leave on a trip, you have carefully planned to run out of food today, so you won't come home to a fridge full of chilled organic garbage. Unfortunately, this means there's not much to eat. There is one perfect apple left in the crisper, and a few tablespoons of grated pecorino romano (I know, better to grate it yourself, thank you, I'm lazy). Cheese and apples being the world's most perfect snack, there must be some potential there. However, alternating spoonfuls of cold grated cheese with slices of perfect Honeycrisp does not do justice to the apple's perfection, or to the whole idea of a restorative snack. And besides, haven't you read about some little Italian delicacy that involves frying grated parmigiano? Doesn't it yield lacy little crisp cheese wafers? Doesn't that sound charming? Wouldn't they be nice with cold apple slices?
And so to the internet. Type, search, click, read, repeat. Thanks to The Google Cookbook, you seem to have learned something today. And so, back to the kitchen. Sprinkle a little pile of cheese into a hot, well-seasoned cast iron pan and fry for a few minutes. Attempt to flip with a spatula. Switch from spatula to spackling knife and try again. Switch from "cooking the cheese" to "trying to save the frying pan from the landfill." End up with a clean frying pan and a hard, greasy, burnt little cheese turd (like a cheese curd, but much, much worse). Full of misplaced, naive optimism, take a small nibble. Suddenly, instantly, you're full! And you never want cheese again! And you notice that the house in now bathed in Greasy Fried Cheesefunk!
But you will not be beaten. You think that there must be a way to make better fried cheese than that greasy little puck. And there is. Here's how:
You dig out the non-stick, probably-carcinogenic, made-from-puppies frying pan. Heat thoroughly over low heat. Add a little fat, just for the sake of overkill. Sprinkle a tablespoon of cheese in a thin circle, about three inches in diameter. Don't aim for a thick layer of cheese-- little gaps are okay. When you start to see browned areas where the cheese is thin, gently lift with a spatula. It will be surprisingly cohesive, and yet totally non adhesive. Thank the puppies, I guess. Flip, and cook another minute or so. Set aside, and cook the next one (or several, if you have a big pan).
If you wanted to eat some more cheese, which you don't, these would probably taste delicious and be crispy and wonderful and the prettiest thing to come out of the kitchen since you got all dressed up for Thanksgiving. Remember this for later, in case you ever recover your taste for cheese.
Put the cheese wafers in the fridge. They'll probably keep until you get back.
Eat the apple with some peanut butter. Feel better. Go on your trip with a light heart and a full belly.
*So I left out some of the subtleties of the cheese-maker's art, but you must admit it's pretty close to the truth.
How can you go wrong? Everything is better with cheese (except, perhaps, heart disease, a jiggly belly, and digestive clarity), and everything is better fried (except ditto). Frying soaks your food in delicious, satisfying fat, and gives you crispy, crunchy brown bits. Cheese is also full of delicious fat, although it's a strange substance when you think about it. I try to forget that it's the mammary secretions of a big smelly animal, left to spoil until solid and moldy.* It's just so tasty!
Cheese: yum. Fried: yum. So, again, how can you go wrong? Here's how:
Being about to leave on a trip, you have carefully planned to run out of food today, so you won't come home to a fridge full of chilled organic garbage. Unfortunately, this means there's not much to eat. There is one perfect apple left in the crisper, and a few tablespoons of grated pecorino romano (I know, better to grate it yourself, thank you, I'm lazy). Cheese and apples being the world's most perfect snack, there must be some potential there. However, alternating spoonfuls of cold grated cheese with slices of perfect Honeycrisp does not do justice to the apple's perfection, or to the whole idea of a restorative snack. And besides, haven't you read about some little Italian delicacy that involves frying grated parmigiano? Doesn't it yield lacy little crisp cheese wafers? Doesn't that sound charming? Wouldn't they be nice with cold apple slices?
And so to the internet. Type, search, click, read, repeat. Thanks to The Google Cookbook, you seem to have learned something today. And so, back to the kitchen. Sprinkle a little pile of cheese into a hot, well-seasoned cast iron pan and fry for a few minutes. Attempt to flip with a spatula. Switch from spatula to spackling knife and try again. Switch from "cooking the cheese" to "trying to save the frying pan from the landfill." End up with a clean frying pan and a hard, greasy, burnt little cheese turd (like a cheese curd, but much, much worse). Full of misplaced, naive optimism, take a small nibble. Suddenly, instantly, you're full! And you never want cheese again! And you notice that the house in now bathed in Greasy Fried Cheesefunk!
But you will not be beaten. You think that there must be a way to make better fried cheese than that greasy little puck. And there is. Here's how:
You dig out the non-stick, probably-carcinogenic, made-from-puppies frying pan. Heat thoroughly over low heat. Add a little fat, just for the sake of overkill. Sprinkle a tablespoon of cheese in a thin circle, about three inches in diameter. Don't aim for a thick layer of cheese-- little gaps are okay. When you start to see browned areas where the cheese is thin, gently lift with a spatula. It will be surprisingly cohesive, and yet totally non adhesive. Thank the puppies, I guess. Flip, and cook another minute or so. Set aside, and cook the next one (or several, if you have a big pan).
If you wanted to eat some more cheese, which you don't, these would probably taste delicious and be crispy and wonderful and the prettiest thing to come out of the kitchen since you got all dressed up for Thanksgiving. Remember this for later, in case you ever recover your taste for cheese.
Put the cheese wafers in the fridge. They'll probably keep until you get back.
Eat the apple with some peanut butter. Feel better. Go on your trip with a light heart and a full belly.
*So I left out some of the subtleties of the cheese-maker's art, but you must admit it's pretty close to the truth.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
The Further Adventures of Fiber and Fish Fat: Part Two
And lunch yesterday was also fine, fine, superfine. If I'd known how tasty it was going to be, I would have measured things for you. I have so many lists floating around my computer of precisely measured ingredients that ended up as various mediocre dishes not worth writing home about, it's kind of nice to have it go the other way for once. But I'm sure you can figure it out, and if I make it again soon, I'll come back and edit in some specifics.
canned red salmon, drained and broken up
leftover steamed asparagus, cut into bite-sized pieces
mixed greens
grape tomatoes, cut in half
honey
mustard
rice vinegar
salt
pepper
olive oil
whole wheat tortillas
Make a dressing with that second group of ingredients, and toss it with that first group. Warm the tortillas, make wraps and eat them. Or, if you have an anti-wrap bias, call it a "salad burrito" and eat that. If you have a truly deep and abiding anti- wrap-like-constructions-of-any-kind bias, eat the salad and the warm tortilla separately, and try not to think about the vegetable/flatbread assemblage that's being constructed by your traitorous stomach as you eat.
canned red salmon, drained and broken up
leftover steamed asparagus, cut into bite-sized pieces
mixed greens
grape tomatoes, cut in half
honey
mustard
rice vinegar
salt
pepper
olive oil
whole wheat tortillas
Make a dressing with that second group of ingredients, and toss it with that first group. Warm the tortillas, make wraps and eat them. Or, if you have an anti-wrap bias, call it a "salad burrito" and eat that. If you have a truly deep and abiding anti- wrap-like-constructions-of-any-kind bias, eat the salad and the warm tortilla separately, and try not to think about the vegetable/flatbread assemblage that's being constructed by your traitorous stomach as you eat.
The Further Adventures of Fiber and Fish Fat: Part One
Dinner was healthy, but delicious! And fast. And pretty. It only fails in one area: this, dear reader, is a budget-buster. Salmon and arugula are not friends to the frugal, but we can't have everything. Serves two.
5 ounces arugula, chopped (if it's big) and washed (regardless)
2 salmon filets, lightly oiled, salted, and peppered
4.42 ounces whole wheat pasta*
4 cloves garlic, chopped
olive oil
salt
pepper
lemon wedges
Do the cooking show thing, where everything is clean and chopped and ready, because this is a fast dinner with lots of last-minuting. Put a pot of water on to boil for the pasta, and turn on the broiler.
Then make sure the table is set and line up your family in Get Set position with plates in hand, because everything else happens very quickly.
Put the pasta in to cook and stick the salmon under the broiler. In a large pan, saute the garlic in olive oil until it's starting to look a little toasty. When the pasta is only mostly done, drain it and toss it into the hot garlic-and-oil pan (add a splash of water if things look dry or sticky in there). When the salmon is almost done, dump the arugula in with the pasta. Let it wilt a bit, and toss it all around so the olive oil and garlic get distributed. Serve the broiled salmon filets next to the arugula pasta. If you like black pepper, go nuts. Ditto lemon.
*or, a third of a box of pasta that contains, for some impenetrable reason,** 13.25 ounces.
**what do you mean, "metric"?
5 ounces arugula, chopped (if it's big) and washed (regardless)
2 salmon filets, lightly oiled, salted, and peppered
4.42 ounces whole wheat pasta*
4 cloves garlic, chopped
olive oil
salt
pepper
lemon wedges
Do the cooking show thing, where everything is clean and chopped and ready, because this is a fast dinner with lots of last-minuting. Put a pot of water on to boil for the pasta, and turn on the broiler.
Then make sure the table is set and line up your family in Get Set position with plates in hand, because everything else happens very quickly.
Put the pasta in to cook and stick the salmon under the broiler. In a large pan, saute the garlic in olive oil until it's starting to look a little toasty. When the pasta is only mostly done, drain it and toss it into the hot garlic-and-oil pan (add a splash of water if things look dry or sticky in there). When the salmon is almost done, dump the arugula in with the pasta. Let it wilt a bit, and toss it all around so the olive oil and garlic get distributed. Serve the broiled salmon filets next to the arugula pasta. If you like black pepper, go nuts. Ditto lemon.
*or, a third of a box of pasta that contains, for some impenetrable reason,** 13.25 ounces.
**what do you mean, "metric"?
Thursday, April 26, 2007
The Deconstructed Fish Taco of Steadfast Resolve in The Face of White Bread
Two people that I love are getting married this June, and they have sweetly asked me to be in the wedding. Good and good, right? Yes. Yes! I could not be happier for them. I could, however, be happier for me (hey, it's my blog).
My petty problem? I have this picture in my head of the wedding video: the camera pans past four radiant young things in honeydew green and then pauses thoughtfully on what can only be described as a bridesmatron. A short, lumpy bridesmatron. Sigh. I realize I should get over this, and I promise to come to my senses soon. In the meantime, I'm on a diet. I figured short and relatively elderly are beyond my control, so I'm controlling the remaining variable, and I've put myself on a diet-and-exercise regimen. I began with gusto a couple weeks ago, and chewed my way through a lot of fiber and hardly anything white (good old flour, sugar, and lard, how I miss thee). I got some new jogging shoes, and went for some nice long, um, walks in them (hey, I'm working up to it). All in all, it's going well. But today, I hit the wall. Salad, usually something I enjoy, has come up in the rotation one too many times. I can't pretend to be excited by carrots any more. But I'm not yet at the point where I'll give up completely and swan dive into a cheeseburger and fries. I've still got some willpower left, and I'll have even more if I can eat something that reminds me that food can be a pleasant part of life. So I decided to make something both very healthy and super-delicious, so that I could enjoy myself without slipping into the "Oh, screw it" mentality of the Diet Quitter, which for me is usually signalled by white bread and dairy fat. So, healthy fats, ahoy! How about some salmon? And also an avocado? And also some olive oil? Guess what? This is Delicious.
Salmon filets, one per person, whatever size you prefer
one 14 oz can of black beans
one small clove garlic, minced
two teaspoons lemony olive oil
1/4 teaspoon sweet paprika
zest of one lemon, minced
1/2 tsp cumin seeds, toasted
one pint grape tomatoes, halved
one avocado
one small onion, chopped
lemon juice
salt
whole wheat tortillas
Most of the bean dishes I make are mushy and call for a little added salt, so bean-rinsing usually seems superfluous. It's just salt and water, and who am I to say that my salt and water are any better than the bean factory's salt and water? And if I think their salt and water might be sketchy, then why am I eating their beans? For this recipe, though, it's nice if the beans are pretty. So dump them into a mixing bowl, cover with water, swish, drain, and repeat until the water runs clear. Heat the beans in a covered bowl in the microwave, and then mix with lemony olive oil, minced zest, minced garlic, paprika, and cumin seeds. Let it sit so the warm beans can absorb all the goodness while you make everything else.
Make a salsa* with the onion, tomatoes, and avocado. Dress it with lemon juice and salt.
Warm the tortillas.
Cook the salmon however you want. I pan-seared it, but broiling, poaching, baking, and even microwaving would all do the job.
Serves three.
*This dish does lend itself to obsessive arrangement, so if you're in that kind of mood, feel free to slice the avocado thinly and fan it out on the plate, and drizzle oil and pile beans and tomatoes and make little slivers of onions into a funny hairdo on top of the fish and generally go nuts. I just made heaps, and it was still attractive.
My petty problem? I have this picture in my head of the wedding video: the camera pans past four radiant young things in honeydew green and then pauses thoughtfully on what can only be described as a bridesmatron. A short, lumpy bridesmatron. Sigh. I realize I should get over this, and I promise to come to my senses soon. In the meantime, I'm on a diet. I figured short and relatively elderly are beyond my control, so I'm controlling the remaining variable, and I've put myself on a diet-and-exercise regimen. I began with gusto a couple weeks ago, and chewed my way through a lot of fiber and hardly anything white (good old flour, sugar, and lard, how I miss thee). I got some new jogging shoes, and went for some nice long, um, walks in them (hey, I'm working up to it). All in all, it's going well. But today, I hit the wall. Salad, usually something I enjoy, has come up in the rotation one too many times. I can't pretend to be excited by carrots any more. But I'm not yet at the point where I'll give up completely and swan dive into a cheeseburger and fries. I've still got some willpower left, and I'll have even more if I can eat something that reminds me that food can be a pleasant part of life. So I decided to make something both very healthy and super-delicious, so that I could enjoy myself without slipping into the "Oh, screw it" mentality of the Diet Quitter, which for me is usually signalled by white bread and dairy fat. So, healthy fats, ahoy! How about some salmon? And also an avocado? And also some olive oil? Guess what? This is Delicious.
Salmon filets, one per person, whatever size you prefer
one 14 oz can of black beans
one small clove garlic, minced
two teaspoons lemony olive oil
1/4 teaspoon sweet paprika
zest of one lemon, minced
1/2 tsp cumin seeds, toasted
one pint grape tomatoes, halved
one avocado
one small onion, chopped
lemon juice
salt
whole wheat tortillas
Most of the bean dishes I make are mushy and call for a little added salt, so bean-rinsing usually seems superfluous. It's just salt and water, and who am I to say that my salt and water are any better than the bean factory's salt and water? And if I think their salt and water might be sketchy, then why am I eating their beans? For this recipe, though, it's nice if the beans are pretty. So dump them into a mixing bowl, cover with water, swish, drain, and repeat until the water runs clear. Heat the beans in a covered bowl in the microwave, and then mix with lemony olive oil, minced zest, minced garlic, paprika, and cumin seeds. Let it sit so the warm beans can absorb all the goodness while you make everything else.
Make a salsa* with the onion, tomatoes, and avocado. Dress it with lemon juice and salt.
Warm the tortillas.
Cook the salmon however you want. I pan-seared it, but broiling, poaching, baking, and even microwaving would all do the job.
Serves three.
*This dish does lend itself to obsessive arrangement, so if you're in that kind of mood, feel free to slice the avocado thinly and fan it out on the plate, and drizzle oil and pile beans and tomatoes and make little slivers of onions into a funny hairdo on top of the fish and generally go nuts. I just made heaps, and it was still attractive.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Trial and Error, Chicken Style
There comes a time when it seems like there are only three dinners, there have only ever been three dinners, and there will continue to be only three dinners until the day dinners cease to be necessary. In the Northeast, this time is usually early spring, when everything is at its deadest, nothing looks like it will ever be green again, and people respond to a cheery, "Happy Spring!" with either a hollow laugh or just a straightforward left hook. Cold weather is no longer invigorating and exciting. It is no longer an incentive to put on a bright, cozy sweater and curl up with a cup of cocoa by the flickering television. Dark evenings are no longer an excuse to light candles and look sexier than you do under fluorescents. The coldness is just cold, the darkness is just dark, and dinners are just boring.
Last month some time, when grocery day rolled around, the fridge still had a good number of potential dinners in it. If it had been time for duct tape and plastic sheeting, a month's worth of meals could have been squeezed out of the kitchen, with only a few days on the Pickles and Chocolate Diet. Where did all this extra food come from? Could it be thanks to a high level of wifely ingenuity? Does the little woman know how to make one chicken into seven dinners? She does not. The little woman had been saying, "I don't know--let's just go out" all week.
So in the interests of not spending all the mortgage money at the Indian place, we browsed for new recipes that might make life seem like living again. And we came up with Chicken with Rice. Why do we not make this already? We like chicken, we like rice, this only has four ingredients, so it must be simple, so let's make it. Broiled Chicken? Ditto.
The broiled chicken involved so much mincing and stuffing and flipping and timing and basting that it would be less work to make risotto. Not to mention the leaking ziplock salmonella-bomb of brining chicken parts that was involved. But it sure was delicious! Not easy, not quick, pretty gross to put together, but delicious!
The chicken with rice was even more work. Skinning raw chicken parts sounds easy and worth it, right? If you're a former half-assed vegetarian with little intimate experience with chicken corpses, it's neither. If I had been that chicken, I would have been glad my skin was so firmly attached to my ankles, but I'm not, so I wasn't. The combination of tenacious chicken skin, greasy hands and a sharp paring knife seemed too likely to end badly, so I gave up the knife, left it to brute force, and there ensued a lot of tugging and sweating and cursing before the damn things were skinless. The recipe went on to breezily declare several things that turned out to be unlikely if not impossible, and we eventually ended up with overdone chicken and rice that I was sure was a warm, teeming mass of bacteria. I could have made my own version of mediocre chicken and rice in half the time.
Like many educational experiences, these were no fun but they do seem likely to lead to a better future. I learned:
-Brining chicken parts for an hour makes them about 200% more delicious. It's almost not worth having chicken if you don't brine it.
-Brining chicken in a plastic bag makes for an efficient brine/chicken relationship, but the bag should be at least 50% bigger than the stuff in it. Or you could just use a rigid container that the chicken fits into snugly.
-If you're brining in a bag, don't re-use a venerable old plastic bag that's had a hard life, even if it still looks reasonably perky. It probably has a couple of little holes in it, and will make a sweet little salmonella fountain in your fridge.
-If you slice the zest off a lemon in a haphazard fashion (minimize pith but don't agonize about it) and throw the resulting eight or nine yellow strips in with some braising chicken, you'll be so happy. The strips end up soft and delicious and give the chicken a subtle lemon flavor.
-If you want to sadden your companion, who has a low tolerance for lemoniness, deglaze the broiling pan with nothing but lemon juice and pour the resulting sauce all over chicken that would have otherwise tasted just fine. Lemon juice does not "cook away" like alcohol supposedly does (yeah, I know—duh).
-Paying a little extra for pre-peeled chicken is so, so worth it.
-The two sliced onions were the best part of Chicken With Rice. Next time—three.
So, if I apply the lessons learned, keeping the delicious and discarding the tedious and/or misguided, we're left with two modified recipes:
Elemental Broiled Chicken
Chicken thighs or legs, skin and bone intact.
water
salt
sugar
Brine chicken parts for one hour in a mixture of 1 quart of water, 3/4 cup of salt and 3/4 cup of sugar (the sugar helps it brown). Arrange your oven racks like this: one right under the broiler, one near the bottom. Turn on the broiler and let the oven heat up. Put the chicken ugly-side up on a rimmed cookie sheet or broiling pan (a cookie sheet makes for optimal goo-retrieval when it's sauce time). Cook for 15 minutes on the low rack, then flip to the pretty side and cook 15 more minutes, still on the low rack. Move the chicken to the top rack, and broil until the skin browns—about a minute. Set the cooked chicken aside on a serving plate and deglaze the pan with wine or water. Pour those pan juices over the chicken.
Elemental Chicken and Rice
Skinless bone-in legs or thighs (as many as will fit in a loosely-spaced single layer in your biggest covered frying pan)
1.5 cups rice
3 cups broth or water
Rind of one lemon
3 onions
2 tablespoons olive oil
Brine the chicken parts for an hour in a mixture of 1 quart water and 3/4 cup of salt. Slice the onions into rings. Heat the olive oil in your big frying pan (the one that has a lid that fits it), and let the onions cook for 10 minutes in the oil, until they're soft and have brown bits here and there. While they're cooking, heat up the water or broth—you'll want it to be boiling by the time the onions are done.
Dump the rice in with the onions and oil, stir it all up, and then pat it out flat. Lay the chicken pieces on the rice in a single layer, and scootch them down into the rice, so they touch the bottom of the pan. Scatter lemon rind strips over the chicken.
Pour the boiling water or broth over the chicken, cover the pan, and let it simmer for 20 minutes or until the chicken is done and the rice has absorbed all the liquid. If you don't brine the chicken, and you don't use salted chicken broth, you'll want to add salt to the liquid. I like a half teaspoon, which will be way too much for some and pitifully bland to others. I don't want to hear about it.
Last month some time, when grocery day rolled around, the fridge still had a good number of potential dinners in it. If it had been time for duct tape and plastic sheeting, a month's worth of meals could have been squeezed out of the kitchen, with only a few days on the Pickles and Chocolate Diet. Where did all this extra food come from? Could it be thanks to a high level of wifely ingenuity? Does the little woman know how to make one chicken into seven dinners? She does not. The little woman had been saying, "I don't know--let's just go out" all week.
So in the interests of not spending all the mortgage money at the Indian place, we browsed for new recipes that might make life seem like living again. And we came up with Chicken with Rice. Why do we not make this already? We like chicken, we like rice, this only has four ingredients, so it must be simple, so let's make it. Broiled Chicken? Ditto.
The broiled chicken involved so much mincing and stuffing and flipping and timing and basting that it would be less work to make risotto. Not to mention the leaking ziplock salmonella-bomb of brining chicken parts that was involved. But it sure was delicious! Not easy, not quick, pretty gross to put together, but delicious!
The chicken with rice was even more work. Skinning raw chicken parts sounds easy and worth it, right? If you're a former half-assed vegetarian with little intimate experience with chicken corpses, it's neither. If I had been that chicken, I would have been glad my skin was so firmly attached to my ankles, but I'm not, so I wasn't. The combination of tenacious chicken skin, greasy hands and a sharp paring knife seemed too likely to end badly, so I gave up the knife, left it to brute force, and there ensued a lot of tugging and sweating and cursing before the damn things were skinless. The recipe went on to breezily declare several things that turned out to be unlikely if not impossible, and we eventually ended up with overdone chicken and rice that I was sure was a warm, teeming mass of bacteria. I could have made my own version of mediocre chicken and rice in half the time.
Like many educational experiences, these were no fun but they do seem likely to lead to a better future. I learned:
-Brining chicken parts for an hour makes them about 200% more delicious. It's almost not worth having chicken if you don't brine it.
-Brining chicken in a plastic bag makes for an efficient brine/chicken relationship, but the bag should be at least 50% bigger than the stuff in it. Or you could just use a rigid container that the chicken fits into snugly.
-If you're brining in a bag, don't re-use a venerable old plastic bag that's had a hard life, even if it still looks reasonably perky. It probably has a couple of little holes in it, and will make a sweet little salmonella fountain in your fridge.
-If you slice the zest off a lemon in a haphazard fashion (minimize pith but don't agonize about it) and throw the resulting eight or nine yellow strips in with some braising chicken, you'll be so happy. The strips end up soft and delicious and give the chicken a subtle lemon flavor.
-If you want to sadden your companion, who has a low tolerance for lemoniness, deglaze the broiling pan with nothing but lemon juice and pour the resulting sauce all over chicken that would have otherwise tasted just fine. Lemon juice does not "cook away" like alcohol supposedly does (yeah, I know—duh).
-Paying a little extra for pre-peeled chicken is so, so worth it.
-The two sliced onions were the best part of Chicken With Rice. Next time—three.
So, if I apply the lessons learned, keeping the delicious and discarding the tedious and/or misguided, we're left with two modified recipes:
Elemental Broiled Chicken
Chicken thighs or legs, skin and bone intact.
water
salt
sugar
Brine chicken parts for one hour in a mixture of 1 quart of water, 3/4 cup of salt and 3/4 cup of sugar (the sugar helps it brown). Arrange your oven racks like this: one right under the broiler, one near the bottom. Turn on the broiler and let the oven heat up. Put the chicken ugly-side up on a rimmed cookie sheet or broiling pan (a cookie sheet makes for optimal goo-retrieval when it's sauce time). Cook for 15 minutes on the low rack, then flip to the pretty side and cook 15 more minutes, still on the low rack. Move the chicken to the top rack, and broil until the skin browns—about a minute. Set the cooked chicken aside on a serving plate and deglaze the pan with wine or water. Pour those pan juices over the chicken.
Elemental Chicken and Rice
Skinless bone-in legs or thighs (as many as will fit in a loosely-spaced single layer in your biggest covered frying pan)
1.5 cups rice
3 cups broth or water
Rind of one lemon
3 onions
2 tablespoons olive oil
Brine the chicken parts for an hour in a mixture of 1 quart water and 3/4 cup of salt. Slice the onions into rings. Heat the olive oil in your big frying pan (the one that has a lid that fits it), and let the onions cook for 10 minutes in the oil, until they're soft and have brown bits here and there. While they're cooking, heat up the water or broth—you'll want it to be boiling by the time the onions are done.
Dump the rice in with the onions and oil, stir it all up, and then pat it out flat. Lay the chicken pieces on the rice in a single layer, and scootch them down into the rice, so they touch the bottom of the pan. Scatter lemon rind strips over the chicken.
Pour the boiling water or broth over the chicken, cover the pan, and let it simmer for 20 minutes or until the chicken is done and the rice has absorbed all the liquid. If you don't brine the chicken, and you don't use salted chicken broth, you'll want to add salt to the liquid. I like a half teaspoon, which will be way too much for some and pitifully bland to others. I don't want to hear about it.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Foodgineering
Breakfast burritos always seemed like weekend food to me--lots of ingredients, lots of prep, proper-plate-and-fork food. But a tight schedule, a sparse fridge, and a stomach that was about to leap out and forage for breakfast on its own led me to a discovery*. The breakfast burrito, stripped down, might just be the most efficient way to get from starving to fed without resorting to options that are bad for either morale, life expectancy, or the monthly budget.
I'm not usually a fan of eating on the run, but when breakfast is a choice between nothing, fast food, or something that can be made in ten minutes and eaten in the car, then I'd have to support that last option. So allow me to sell you on the breakfast burrito, Winker-style.
If you cook the eggs right, you need neither plate nor fork, and most people won't even need a napkin (I realize I'm a barbarian. If you're revolted, look away).
If you buy tasty eggs and high-quality tortillas, you don't need ANY OTHER INGREDIENTS, and it's totally edible. Almost... delicious.
So, here:
One whole wheat tortilla
One fancy, happy, free-range, organic egg with extra omega-whatsits
nothing else**
In a small non-stick skillet, heat the tortilla while you scramble the egg and feed the cat. Once the tortilla is puffing up a bit here and there, remove it and set it aside. Pour in the egg. If the pan is hot enough, it'll sizzle a bit when you pour it in. Don't stir it around, just let it cook into a flat disk. When the egg is mostly solid, but still damp on top, flip it over, let it cook for a few more seconds, then flop it out onto the tortilla. Roll it up. Eat it.
If you don't like using non-stick pans, use a bit of fat in a regular pan. Just roll the tortilla greasy-side-in, so you'll keep your fingers clean.
There! Warm, portable breakfast, no plate or utensils needed, contains protein, a bit of fiber, and just enough delicious carbohydrate that you won't feel demoralized. For extra credit, have an orange or some blueberries too, and feel really virtuous.
*Which, of course, is how it always happens. I should put myself in situations of desperate hunger and limited ingredients more often, just for the recipe development and blogging opportunities.
**Cheese and other culinary adhesives may be used sparingly. Other embellishments may be added, but are not recommended as they may interfere with the user-friendly design of the finished product.
Update: I timed it this morning, and from what-ever-shall-I have-for-breakfast to mmm-this-looks-good-[chomp], it was three minutes. THREE minutes, folks. No excuse to go breakfastless now.
I'm not usually a fan of eating on the run, but when breakfast is a choice between nothing, fast food, or something that can be made in ten minutes and eaten in the car, then I'd have to support that last option. So allow me to sell you on the breakfast burrito, Winker-style.
If you cook the eggs right, you need neither plate nor fork, and most people won't even need a napkin (I realize I'm a barbarian. If you're revolted, look away).
If you buy tasty eggs and high-quality tortillas, you don't need ANY OTHER INGREDIENTS, and it's totally edible. Almost... delicious.
So, here:
One whole wheat tortilla
One fancy, happy, free-range, organic egg with extra omega-whatsits
nothing else**
In a small non-stick skillet, heat the tortilla while you scramble the egg and feed the cat. Once the tortilla is puffing up a bit here and there, remove it and set it aside. Pour in the egg. If the pan is hot enough, it'll sizzle a bit when you pour it in. Don't stir it around, just let it cook into a flat disk. When the egg is mostly solid, but still damp on top, flip it over, let it cook for a few more seconds, then flop it out onto the tortilla. Roll it up. Eat it.
If you don't like using non-stick pans, use a bit of fat in a regular pan. Just roll the tortilla greasy-side-in, so you'll keep your fingers clean.
There! Warm, portable breakfast, no plate or utensils needed, contains protein, a bit of fiber, and just enough delicious carbohydrate that you won't feel demoralized. For extra credit, have an orange or some blueberries too, and feel really virtuous.
*Which, of course, is how it always happens. I should put myself in situations of desperate hunger and limited ingredients more often, just for the recipe development and blogging opportunities.
**Cheese and other culinary adhesives may be used sparingly. Other embellishments may be added, but are not recommended as they may interfere with the user-friendly design of the finished product.
Update: I timed it this morning, and from what-ever-shall-I have-for-breakfast to mmm-this-looks-good-[chomp], it was three minutes. THREE minutes, folks. No excuse to go breakfastless now.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Socks: Lessons Learned
Lesson One: Socks ought to be suitable for both the washer and the dryer. Forty little drip-dry socks can be the straw that breaks the camel's back for even the most cheerful and helpful Laundry Manager.* I know this through painful personal experience. It is only recently that my Laundry Manager has softened his stance after The Great Laundry Rebellion, and been lured back to the job, and even then only with promises of dryer-safe socks. Yes, they do seem to fade and shrink more quickly, but domestic harmony is pretty much worth it.
Lesson Two: Each member of the household should have only one kind of sock. For ultimate efficiency, see if you can get all the feet in your household into matching socks, or at least into as few Sock Teams as possible. You no longer have Pairs of Socks, you just have Socks. They exist in bulk, like orange lentils at the health food store. This makes washing, sorting, storing, and wearing socks a matter of almost zero annoyance. There's never a stash of odd, mateless socks lying listlessly in the drawer, waiting for their other halves to find their way back from the crawl space under the basement stairs so they can both get back into, ah, Sock-ulation (heh).
This Unified Sock Theory means, of course, that you must pick a style of sock that comes as close as possible to the Platonic Ideal Sock, and so will always be available when you need a few more. It would only lead to heartache if you were to choose brown and yellow striped socks with small purple flecks, because in addition to being terribly ugly, they would be difficult to find again, so you would have to commit to buying a whole lifetime's supply at once. I'm not sure that many brown and yellow striped socks with small purple flecks even exist. Much better to go with something basic that you can supplement as needed, and the style of Basic Sock you pick should be the one that's most useful to you: The White Tube? The Ribbed Black Cotton? The Navy Knee High? Pick something like that, and get a whole flock of them.
The result of this smart and efficient system is that your laundry process becomes streamlined and your socks become boring. Really, really boring. I didn't fully realize this until, in a moment of madness, I bought a pair of red socks. Later, as I was wearing them, I happened to catch a glimpse of my own ankle. I was tickled beyond all rationality to see that bit of red instead of the ubiquitous Black Rib. It put a spring in my step, and I might even have started whistling.
I draw two opposing conclusions from my experience. You may select the one that makes you feel most at home, and proceed accordingly:
1) Bulk Socks are an unnecessarily grim exercise.
2) Bulk Socks both streamline your laundry experience and give you the opportunity to experience delight in a place you never thought to look for it.
I, personally, find it worthwhile. I have a bottomless vat of black socks that match well enough for everyday purposes, and when I do get all overexcited and buy non-standard socks, I buy two matching pairs, so that I can lose three socks before I have a mateless one.
*Titles are good for morale--mine are Groundskeeper, Senior Dietician, and CEO of Textile Division. The Laundry Manager is also Head of Tech Support, DJ, and Director of Publications. We share the jobs of Library Acquisitions, Facilities Management, and Interior Architecture, and yet we still manage to live happily together.
Lesson Two: Each member of the household should have only one kind of sock. For ultimate efficiency, see if you can get all the feet in your household into matching socks, or at least into as few Sock Teams as possible. You no longer have Pairs of Socks, you just have Socks. They exist in bulk, like orange lentils at the health food store. This makes washing, sorting, storing, and wearing socks a matter of almost zero annoyance. There's never a stash of odd, mateless socks lying listlessly in the drawer, waiting for their other halves to find their way back from the crawl space under the basement stairs so they can both get back into, ah, Sock-ulation (heh).
This Unified Sock Theory means, of course, that you must pick a style of sock that comes as close as possible to the Platonic Ideal Sock, and so will always be available when you need a few more. It would only lead to heartache if you were to choose brown and yellow striped socks with small purple flecks, because in addition to being terribly ugly, they would be difficult to find again, so you would have to commit to buying a whole lifetime's supply at once. I'm not sure that many brown and yellow striped socks with small purple flecks even exist. Much better to go with something basic that you can supplement as needed, and the style of Basic Sock you pick should be the one that's most useful to you: The White Tube? The Ribbed Black Cotton? The Navy Knee High? Pick something like that, and get a whole flock of them.
The result of this smart and efficient system is that your laundry process becomes streamlined and your socks become boring. Really, really boring. I didn't fully realize this until, in a moment of madness, I bought a pair of red socks. Later, as I was wearing them, I happened to catch a glimpse of my own ankle. I was tickled beyond all rationality to see that bit of red instead of the ubiquitous Black Rib. It put a spring in my step, and I might even have started whistling.
I draw two opposing conclusions from my experience. You may select the one that makes you feel most at home, and proceed accordingly:
1) Bulk Socks are an unnecessarily grim exercise.
2) Bulk Socks both streamline your laundry experience and give you the opportunity to experience delight in a place you never thought to look for it.
I, personally, find it worthwhile. I have a bottomless vat of black socks that match well enough for everyday purposes, and when I do get all overexcited and buy non-standard socks, I buy two matching pairs, so that I can lose three socks before I have a mateless one.
*Titles are good for morale--mine are Groundskeeper, Senior Dietician, and CEO of Textile Division. The Laundry Manager is also Head of Tech Support, DJ, and Director of Publications. We share the jobs of Library Acquisitions, Facilities Management, and Interior Architecture, and yet we still manage to live happily together.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
I can't help myself.
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Thursday, March 22, 2007
Allow me to properly introduce my new friend.
I didn't withhold the details on purpose; I must have been a little tipsy on lambwiches. The rice stuff I was going on about is sold under the name "Rice and Shine" by the fine hippies at Arrowhead Mills. Please do not confuse it with "Rice 'N' Shine," which appears to be an over-priced diet food. Apparently, its claim to fame is that it contains "Risolubles™," which I can only guess are some kind of quick-dissolving hilarity aid.
I've made the stuff a few times since my first attempt, and I'm now devoted. It's an elegant, quick, delicious, cheap whole grain. Hoo. Ray. Its only failing is that I don't know what to call it. Brown rice "polenta" is clumsy. Rice cereal sounds like baby food or breakfast. Rice mush? No. Rice gruel? Rice grits? No and no. And none of the puns that keep popping into my head: rolenta... po-rice... grice... um... rits... I got nothing.
So, readers, chime in. What would you call it? And I know you're out there... I can see you through my computer (well, Google Analytics can see you, and I can't stop pestering Google Analytics to rat you out).
I've made the stuff a few times since my first attempt, and I'm now devoted. It's an elegant, quick, delicious, cheap whole grain. Hoo. Ray. Its only failing is that I don't know what to call it. Brown rice "polenta" is clumsy. Rice cereal sounds like baby food or breakfast. Rice mush? No. Rice gruel? Rice grits? No and no. And none of the puns that keep popping into my head: rolenta... po-rice... grice... um... rits... I got nothing.
So, readers, chime in. What would you call it? And I know you're out there... I can see you through my computer (well, Google Analytics can see you, and I can't stop pestering Google Analytics to rat you out).
Not Like Vomit in Any Way That Really Matters
On a good day, I love to cook dinner. I start at 5:30 or 6, and I listen to the radio as I wash and chop and stir and eventually, by 7 or 7:30, dinner is ready and the house smells good and we eat and I don't have to wash any dishes. On a good day, all those things make me happy, not just the last one. On a bad day, I don't even get home until 7:30, I'm already hungry and exhausted, and I can't imagine anything I want to do less than wash and chop and stir. This has been happening a lot lately, thanks to all the work I didn't do while we were away and now have to catch up on.
So I got a crock pot, thinking it would be great to come home to a house that already smells good and where dinner is already ready. I got a 6-quart Rival, and one of the reasons I picked it is that I get to call it a crock pot without anyone saying, "Actually, it's just a slow cooker. Crock Pot is a trademark of the Rival Corporation." Okay, not even my friends are that pedantic, but still. It says Crock Pot right on it, and somehow that makes me happy.
What didn't make me happy is that it's no less work to make a good meal in the crock pot. It's the same amount of work on a different schedule. The first time I used it, I figured I'd chuck the stuff into it right after breakfast, get dressed and go to work. By noon, I was still in my bathrobe, still unshowered, still chopping and browning and deglazing. Which, of course, is just when my friendly and well-groomed neighbor rang the bell (Hi, Jenn!). She managed to conceal her surprise at my condition fairly well. At least I wasn't holding a half-empty bottle of wine. I figure every neighborhood needs someone to set the bar low, and I'm happy to help. I've always gravitated more towards one-downs-manship than keeping up with the Joneses anyway. You don't really worry about letting yourself go if you never had a firm grasp on yourself to begin with.
I finally got everything in the crock pot, got myself looking more like a respectable member of society, and left the house, and I admit that I did feel a certain satisfaction whenever I remembered that dinner was cooking itself as I worked. It was pretty much ready when I got home, and the house did smell pretty good. But it wasn't until two nights later that I realized the true value of the crock pot. Those slow-simmered, stewy dishes that the crock pot specializes in freeze really well, reheat easily in the microwave, and are generally tastier the next day anyway (and with the crock pot, you don't have to be home all day to monitor a burbling dutch oven). My giant crock pot made about six servings of curry when it was only about half full. So one dinner's worth of labor gave me three dinners (for our two-person household), and could have given me six. Not bad at all.
More for my own reference than as a recommendation, here's what I made, minus an ill-advised red pepper. I don't know what I was thinking. I don't like well-done peppers, and what did I think was going to happen to that pepper over seven hours? It wasn't inedible, but I won't slow-cook peppers again.
Crock Pot (or Slow Cooker, if you must) Beef Curry with Garbanzo Beans
two pounds stew beef, extra fat trimmed off, and very well browned
3 small onions, chopped and browned
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 15-oz cans garbanzo beans, drained
6 small carrots, chopped into bite-sized hunks
1 tsp salt
2 cups chicken broth
2 cups water
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp whole cloves
7 cardamom pods
3 bay leaves
---
3 tablespoons curry powder (or more to taste)
cream
3 Tbsp flour and 3 Tbsp butter for beurre manié
Combine everything but the curry powder, cream, flour, and butter in large oval crock pot. Set it to cook for 7 hours on low. Leave the 2 tablespoons of butter out on the counter so it's soft when you get home. Once it's done, thicken it with a beurre manié, or however else you usually thicken things. Taste it, and add salt or hot sauce if it needs it. Fish out any cardamom pods, bay leaves, and cloves that you notice, but don't worry about finding them all. They just, um, add authenticity or something. Also, it's really hard to find them all. You're better off just warning people.
Either stir cream into what you'll serve tonight, or let people add their own at the table. I'm not sure how stable the cream would be through freezing and re-boiling, so don't add it to the whole pot if you're planning to have leftovers.
One last tip: don't serve this on a plate if your cat has been throwing up a lot lately. It's uncomfortably reminiscent of a certain kind of cat hurk. But, but, it tastes good! It's very nice! Where are you going?
So I got a crock pot, thinking it would be great to come home to a house that already smells good and where dinner is already ready. I got a 6-quart Rival, and one of the reasons I picked it is that I get to call it a crock pot without anyone saying, "Actually, it's just a slow cooker. Crock Pot is a trademark of the Rival Corporation." Okay, not even my friends are that pedantic, but still. It says Crock Pot right on it, and somehow that makes me happy.
What didn't make me happy is that it's no less work to make a good meal in the crock pot. It's the same amount of work on a different schedule. The first time I used it, I figured I'd chuck the stuff into it right after breakfast, get dressed and go to work. By noon, I was still in my bathrobe, still unshowered, still chopping and browning and deglazing. Which, of course, is just when my friendly and well-groomed neighbor rang the bell (Hi, Jenn!). She managed to conceal her surprise at my condition fairly well. At least I wasn't holding a half-empty bottle of wine. I figure every neighborhood needs someone to set the bar low, and I'm happy to help. I've always gravitated more towards one-downs-manship than keeping up with the Joneses anyway. You don't really worry about letting yourself go if you never had a firm grasp on yourself to begin with.
I finally got everything in the crock pot, got myself looking more like a respectable member of society, and left the house, and I admit that I did feel a certain satisfaction whenever I remembered that dinner was cooking itself as I worked. It was pretty much ready when I got home, and the house did smell pretty good. But it wasn't until two nights later that I realized the true value of the crock pot. Those slow-simmered, stewy dishes that the crock pot specializes in freeze really well, reheat easily in the microwave, and are generally tastier the next day anyway (and with the crock pot, you don't have to be home all day to monitor a burbling dutch oven). My giant crock pot made about six servings of curry when it was only about half full. So one dinner's worth of labor gave me three dinners (for our two-person household), and could have given me six. Not bad at all.
More for my own reference than as a recommendation, here's what I made, minus an ill-advised red pepper. I don't know what I was thinking. I don't like well-done peppers, and what did I think was going to happen to that pepper over seven hours? It wasn't inedible, but I won't slow-cook peppers again.
Crock Pot (or Slow Cooker, if you must) Beef Curry with Garbanzo Beans
two pounds stew beef, extra fat trimmed off, and very well browned
3 small onions, chopped and browned
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 15-oz cans garbanzo beans, drained
6 small carrots, chopped into bite-sized hunks
1 tsp salt
2 cups chicken broth
2 cups water
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp whole cloves
7 cardamom pods
3 bay leaves
---
3 tablespoons curry powder (or more to taste)
cream
3 Tbsp flour and 3 Tbsp butter for beurre manié
Combine everything but the curry powder, cream, flour, and butter in large oval crock pot. Set it to cook for 7 hours on low. Leave the 2 tablespoons of butter out on the counter so it's soft when you get home. Once it's done, thicken it with a beurre manié, or however else you usually thicken things. Taste it, and add salt or hot sauce if it needs it. Fish out any cardamom pods, bay leaves, and cloves that you notice, but don't worry about finding them all. They just, um, add authenticity or something. Also, it's really hard to find them all. You're better off just warning people.
Either stir cream into what you'll serve tonight, or let people add their own at the table. I'm not sure how stable the cream would be through freezing and re-boiling, so don't add it to the whole pot if you're planning to have leftovers.
One last tip: don't serve this on a plate if your cat has been throwing up a lot lately. It's uncomfortably reminiscent of a certain kind of cat hurk. But, but, it tastes good! It's very nice! Where are you going?
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Lambwiches
I have a food bias. I scoff at foods that are presented as "just-as-good-as" substitutes for other foods. Margarine instead of butter, tofu instead of meat, soy milk instead of milk, "Rice Dream" instead of ice cream, and all those strange wheat-free pastas instead of good old semolina.
I do know that some of those foods (tofu! rice noodles! maybe even soy milk!) are delicious in their own right, and have identities independent of what they're supposed to be standing in for. But in my head, tofu's good reputation is tainted by the travesties that are Tofu Pups and Not Dogs. Soy milk has a bad reputation because, well, I don't even like milk that much, and if all I ever hear about a product is, "It tastes almost like real milk! You almost can't tell!," well, I'm not going to be beating a path to the fake-dairy section of the market to try it out.
But I know I'm wrong about some of those things. I know I'm missing out. I know I have a bias, and I'd like to get over it already. So the other day, having breakfast with a gluten-free friend (you know what I mean), I was happy to discover that her Special Gluten-Free-So-it-Won't-Kill-You, Tastes-Almost-Like-REAL-Cream-of-Wheat Rice Cereal was delicious! Just plain delicious! Not delicious-for-rice-cereal, just plain tasty. AND whole grain. Man. I felt like I had discovered a new continent or something (I believe I've already covered how easily excited I am).
So I spent the next few days thinking of all the things I could do with my new friend Rice Cereal. It had a clear place in the polenta and grits family, but I was so excited, I wanted to push it even farther. I remembered that as it cooled, it had become quite thick and (ironically) glutinous in consistency. That reminded me of arancini and omusubi and I figured I could give something like that a shot. "Lamb-Stuffed Rice Balls!" is what I thought, and then I thought, "Why does all this stuff sound so much better in other languages? Stupid English." So maybe I should call them something else. But first I had to make them.
Shall I spin out the long, sorry tale? Shall I go into all the reasons I thought this was a good idea, and all the reasons I was wrong? Throw in a little suspense? A few laughs? Too late. We're all busy people, and I bet you'll appreciate it if I cut to the part where I was laughing resignedly to my brother on the phone, prodding a cooling, pasty, greyish blob of stuff that was never going to be made into balls of any kind, stuffed or not. I had called him, as I often do, for advice, once the time for advice is long past and all he can do is talk me down from the ledge of Plan A, and encourage me towards a safe, sensible, ground-level Plan B. Thank goodness I can be a bit of a disaster in the kitchen, or I wouldn't end up laughing with my brother on the phone so often.
So the menu departed from the ambitious and misguided "Lamb-Stuffed Rice Balls and Greek Salad", veered alarmingly towards the meager "Bread, Cheese, and Greek Salad," and ended up at the respectable "Seasoned Lamb Patties with Brown Rice "Polenta" and Greek Salad". And what do you know, it was quite good. The only sign of the averted disaster was the tremendous pile of dirty dishes created as I careened from menu to menu. My main Eater and Dish Washer accepted his lot gracefully, and I counted myself lucky.
"But where do the Lambwiches come in? I was promised Lambwiches." I hear you say. Well, I had to set the stage. I had to illustrate how my vagaries and whims and, uh, research, all result in News You Can Use. I do all this so you don't have to! So here, edited down so as to be actually helpful, is a recipe for the delicious lunch we had the next day (you can skip all the above steps, and you're welcome):
Lambwiches (serves 4 or 5)
patties:
1 pound ground lamb
6 cloves garlic (less is fine, but will be less delicious)
half a bunch of parsley, big stems removed
one small red onion, quartered and peeled
2 eggs
salt and pepper
relish:
1 small red onion
half an english cucumber
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
salt and pepper
a pinch of sugar
1 teaspoon dry oregano
mini (3 or 4 inches across) whole wheat pita bread—two or three per person
hummus
Make the patties: Put the garlic, parsley and quartered red onion in the food processor. Whiz until minced (wheeee!). Mix the minced vegetables, the egg and the meat together by hand. Make small patties and sear them in a frying pan, on a grill, or in the broiler. You can do this well ahead of time and reheat them in the microwave right before you make the sandwiches (ground lamb seems fatty enough to survive this kind of mistreatment).
Make the relish: Cut the cucumber and red onion into batons (more or less) and mix them with the vinegar, salt, pepper, sugar, and oregano. Ideally, let them sit for half an hour or so, stirring occasionally. It's nice if the vegetables get a chance to soften and become a little pickley.
Warm the pitas in the toaster or under the broiler, cut a slice off of one edge (halving them makes them too small to stuff), and open them up. Spread a layer of hummus all around the inside of the pita, and tuck in a warm lamb patty. Fill the rest of the space with vegetable relish. Set out other things, like sauteed eggplant and some black olives, but no one will eat them because they'll be too focused on their messy and delicious Lambwiches.
My gluten-free friend won't be able to enjoy a lambwich, but I thank her (and my patient brother) for helping midwife them into existence. Call this my IOU for a home-cooked meal for both of them. How about some braised lamb shanks and root vegetables over rice "polenta"? It'll be good, I promise.
I do know that some of those foods (tofu! rice noodles! maybe even soy milk!) are delicious in their own right, and have identities independent of what they're supposed to be standing in for. But in my head, tofu's good reputation is tainted by the travesties that are Tofu Pups and Not Dogs. Soy milk has a bad reputation because, well, I don't even like milk that much, and if all I ever hear about a product is, "It tastes almost like real milk! You almost can't tell!," well, I'm not going to be beating a path to the fake-dairy section of the market to try it out.
But I know I'm wrong about some of those things. I know I'm missing out. I know I have a bias, and I'd like to get over it already. So the other day, having breakfast with a gluten-free friend (you know what I mean), I was happy to discover that her Special Gluten-Free-So-it-Won't-Kill-You, Tastes-Almost-Like-REAL-Cream-of-Wheat Rice Cereal was delicious! Just plain delicious! Not delicious-for-rice-cereal, just plain tasty. AND whole grain. Man. I felt like I had discovered a new continent or something (I believe I've already covered how easily excited I am).
So I spent the next few days thinking of all the things I could do with my new friend Rice Cereal. It had a clear place in the polenta and grits family, but I was so excited, I wanted to push it even farther. I remembered that as it cooled, it had become quite thick and (ironically) glutinous in consistency. That reminded me of arancini and omusubi and I figured I could give something like that a shot. "Lamb-Stuffed Rice Balls!" is what I thought, and then I thought, "Why does all this stuff sound so much better in other languages? Stupid English." So maybe I should call them something else. But first I had to make them.
Shall I spin out the long, sorry tale? Shall I go into all the reasons I thought this was a good idea, and all the reasons I was wrong? Throw in a little suspense? A few laughs? Too late. We're all busy people, and I bet you'll appreciate it if I cut to the part where I was laughing resignedly to my brother on the phone, prodding a cooling, pasty, greyish blob of stuff that was never going to be made into balls of any kind, stuffed or not. I had called him, as I often do, for advice, once the time for advice is long past and all he can do is talk me down from the ledge of Plan A, and encourage me towards a safe, sensible, ground-level Plan B. Thank goodness I can be a bit of a disaster in the kitchen, or I wouldn't end up laughing with my brother on the phone so often.
So the menu departed from the ambitious and misguided "Lamb-Stuffed Rice Balls and Greek Salad", veered alarmingly towards the meager "Bread, Cheese, and Greek Salad," and ended up at the respectable "Seasoned Lamb Patties with Brown Rice "Polenta" and Greek Salad". And what do you know, it was quite good. The only sign of the averted disaster was the tremendous pile of dirty dishes created as I careened from menu to menu. My main Eater and Dish Washer accepted his lot gracefully, and I counted myself lucky.
"But where do the Lambwiches come in? I was promised Lambwiches." I hear you say. Well, I had to set the stage. I had to illustrate how my vagaries and whims and, uh, research, all result in News You Can Use. I do all this so you don't have to! So here, edited down so as to be actually helpful, is a recipe for the delicious lunch we had the next day (you can skip all the above steps, and you're welcome):
Lambwiches (serves 4 or 5)
patties:
1 pound ground lamb
6 cloves garlic (less is fine, but will be less delicious)
half a bunch of parsley, big stems removed
one small red onion, quartered and peeled
2 eggs
salt and pepper
relish:
1 small red onion
half an english cucumber
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
salt and pepper
a pinch of sugar
1 teaspoon dry oregano
mini (3 or 4 inches across) whole wheat pita bread—two or three per person
hummus
Make the patties: Put the garlic, parsley and quartered red onion in the food processor. Whiz until minced (wheeee!). Mix the minced vegetables, the egg and the meat together by hand. Make small patties and sear them in a frying pan, on a grill, or in the broiler. You can do this well ahead of time and reheat them in the microwave right before you make the sandwiches (ground lamb seems fatty enough to survive this kind of mistreatment).
Make the relish: Cut the cucumber and red onion into batons (more or less) and mix them with the vinegar, salt, pepper, sugar, and oregano. Ideally, let them sit for half an hour or so, stirring occasionally. It's nice if the vegetables get a chance to soften and become a little pickley.
Warm the pitas in the toaster or under the broiler, cut a slice off of one edge (halving them makes them too small to stuff), and open them up. Spread a layer of hummus all around the inside of the pita, and tuck in a warm lamb patty. Fill the rest of the space with vegetable relish. Set out other things, like sauteed eggplant and some black olives, but no one will eat them because they'll be too focused on their messy and delicious Lambwiches.
My gluten-free friend won't be able to enjoy a lambwich, but I thank her (and my patient brother) for helping midwife them into existence. Call this my IOU for a home-cooked meal for both of them. How about some braised lamb shanks and root vegetables over rice "polenta"? It'll be good, I promise.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Estamos en casa!
What's that math thing where you cover half the distance to your destination, and then half of the remainder, and then half of that, and so on? You continue getting closer and closer to your goal, but you never actually arrive. I have no idea what that's called, but it should be known as The Coming Home From Spain Phenomenon.
We covered quite a lot of territory at first. Got to the airport, got on the plane, and got across the ocean no problem. I'm especially happy about that last accomplishment, because if there's any part of traveling that you want to go smoothly, it's the vast-body-of-water-crossing part. I do pay attention when they demonstrate the yellow vests and the inflatable rafts and I promise, when the time comes, to remove my shoes and leave all hand baggage behind while I follow the floor level lighting to the nearest exit, which may be behind me. But, really. I can't believe that any of that will be the least bit helpful when something awful happens to the plane as we're going a kajillion miles an hour six miles above the ocean (I'm pretty sure those were the numbers on that helpful info screen). So, yes, I'm very happy we did that part without a hitch. But once we landed, there were nothing but hitches between us and home.
We stood in just enough lines (baggage, customs, security) that we missed our next flight by five minutes. The next flight wasn't for six hours, and since we could have hitchhiked home in six hours, we decided to instead take an earlier flight to a nearby city and take the bus home from there. All this decision making and plan-changing, of course, involved many different Airline Officials, and felt like wading through complicated, official porridge. But the officials, even while mired in porridge, were extremely helpful and kind, and we successfully flew to that nearby city, and were done with planes for a while. But then the bus was late enough getting to the airport that it just decided to be both the late-leaving six o'clock bus and the early-leaving eight o'clock bus, just to average things out and piss off a few more people.
Days later (I'm sure) we finally pulled into the dark, freezing bus station in our dark, freezing hometown. The first cab at the cab stand was empty, so after looking around for the appropriate amount of time (given the temperature, about forty seconds), and then hopped in the second cab, belted up, proclaimed our destination, and were about to get a little closer to home when (of course) the owner of the first cab barreled out of the station and requested that we get out, unload our bags, load them in her cab, and allow her to take us home and take our money, as was only right, fair, and proper. We're usually easygoing, tractable people (at least in public), but we had moved beyond usual. This poor woman, who had a point, was our Last Straw. We mustered up all our remembered skills from toddlerhood, set our respective jaws, and said, "No." And (eventually) it worked. Grumpy resistance pays off! Look out world!
So then, only about 45 minutes earlier than we would have gotten into town had we hitchhiked, we got home. After a month away from our native cuisine, we were good, loyal Americans and got Thai take-out for dinner. And then we went to bed.
Now, even after I've warmed up, eaten, slept a lot, and settled in, it still feels good to be home. I couldn't believe how much I enjoyed my first trip to the grocery store. I knew what everything was, I could find everything I needed, and I could rest assured that the cheese was all industrially produced and free of anything offensive like listeria or complex flavor.
We covered quite a lot of territory at first. Got to the airport, got on the plane, and got across the ocean no problem. I'm especially happy about that last accomplishment, because if there's any part of traveling that you want to go smoothly, it's the vast-body-of-water-crossing part. I do pay attention when they demonstrate the yellow vests and the inflatable rafts and I promise, when the time comes, to remove my shoes and leave all hand baggage behind while I follow the floor level lighting to the nearest exit, which may be behind me. But, really. I can't believe that any of that will be the least bit helpful when something awful happens to the plane as we're going a kajillion miles an hour six miles above the ocean (I'm pretty sure those were the numbers on that helpful info screen). So, yes, I'm very happy we did that part without a hitch. But once we landed, there were nothing but hitches between us and home.
We stood in just enough lines (baggage, customs, security) that we missed our next flight by five minutes. The next flight wasn't for six hours, and since we could have hitchhiked home in six hours, we decided to instead take an earlier flight to a nearby city and take the bus home from there. All this decision making and plan-changing, of course, involved many different Airline Officials, and felt like wading through complicated, official porridge. But the officials, even while mired in porridge, were extremely helpful and kind, and we successfully flew to that nearby city, and were done with planes for a while. But then the bus was late enough getting to the airport that it just decided to be both the late-leaving six o'clock bus and the early-leaving eight o'clock bus, just to average things out and piss off a few more people.
Days later (I'm sure) we finally pulled into the dark, freezing bus station in our dark, freezing hometown. The first cab at the cab stand was empty, so after looking around for the appropriate amount of time (given the temperature, about forty seconds), and then hopped in the second cab, belted up, proclaimed our destination, and were about to get a little closer to home when (of course) the owner of the first cab barreled out of the station and requested that we get out, unload our bags, load them in her cab, and allow her to take us home and take our money, as was only right, fair, and proper. We're usually easygoing, tractable people (at least in public), but we had moved beyond usual. This poor woman, who had a point, was our Last Straw. We mustered up all our remembered skills from toddlerhood, set our respective jaws, and said, "No." And (eventually) it worked. Grumpy resistance pays off! Look out world!
So then, only about 45 minutes earlier than we would have gotten into town had we hitchhiked, we got home. After a month away from our native cuisine, we were good, loyal Americans and got Thai take-out for dinner. And then we went to bed.
Now, even after I've warmed up, eaten, slept a lot, and settled in, it still feels good to be home. I couldn't believe how much I enjoyed my first trip to the grocery store. I knew what everything was, I could find everything I needed, and I could rest assured that the cheese was all industrially produced and free of anything offensive like listeria or complex flavor.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Last Miscellany from Spain
-The small food shops (butchers, bakeries, greengrocers) are staffed by women who look like they could be politicians. They are extremely, agressively well-groomed. They wear white smocks or pink aprons or other non-surprising food-service uniforms, but it's clear that their native dress is sensible navy suits with two-inch heels and tasteful gold jewelry. I've never before seen a woman with perfectly coiffed hair and flawless, understated makeup run a bloody piece of meat through a bandsaw.
-The hippest young women here have mullets with very short bangs. The most stylish old ladies have shockingly red or orange (or both) hair. There is a sliver of the population which is both past middle age and extremely trendy (I'm guessing they're gallery owners or fashion designers), and they have bright red mullets with very short bangs. In a month, I have seen five of them.
-My hair is chin-length and brown, I don't have bangs, and I usually dress in what The Great Sarah Vowell calls "the bruise pallet" of black, grey, blue, and brown. As soon as I open my mouth, it's clear I'm not Spanish, but apparently I'm not identifiably American either. So far, everyone who has guessed where I'm from has guessed France. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I didn't think I had enough existential angst in me to look French. Perhaps I have the appearance of existential angst covering my goofy Pollyanna creme center. Or perhaps it's mygiant distinguished French nose.
-First Sign Of Globalization at the stadium during the game: In line for hot dogs (sorry, salchichas) at half time, some guys behind us were talking about market optimization and revenue tracking (or something) in Northern Californian accents.
-Second SOG at the stadium: After the game ended, we clapped the players off the field, people started making for the exits, the music came on, and it was Johnny Cash. Ring of Fire? Walk the Line? One of those—it was weird. But good! Who doesn't like Johnny Cash?
-At a huge, packed, dark, noisy book release party, the food was hard to get to, and not too user-friendly. Standing around chatting outside in the spillover crowd, we saw a pizza delivery guy drive up on his scooter, hop off, look hopelessly at the crowd and say, "Juan?" It was a classic tale of yearning and desire, illustrated. One guy really really wants to get rid of a pizza, get his money, and leave, and some other guy is trapped in a sea of patrons of the arts, desperately hungry. We never found out if the guy who eventually traded money for food was the same Juan who called in the first place, or just some opportunistic hungry guy, but within seconds of that box being opened, it was emptied. Maybe the pizza delivery company is onto something...
-The hippest young women here have mullets with very short bangs. The most stylish old ladies have shockingly red or orange (or both) hair. There is a sliver of the population which is both past middle age and extremely trendy (I'm guessing they're gallery owners or fashion designers), and they have bright red mullets with very short bangs. In a month, I have seen five of them.
-My hair is chin-length and brown, I don't have bangs, and I usually dress in what The Great Sarah Vowell calls "the bruise pallet" of black, grey, blue, and brown. As soon as I open my mouth, it's clear I'm not Spanish, but apparently I'm not identifiably American either. So far, everyone who has guessed where I'm from has guessed France. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I didn't think I had enough existential angst in me to look French. Perhaps I have the appearance of existential angst covering my goofy Pollyanna creme center. Or perhaps it's my
-First Sign Of Globalization at the stadium during the game: In line for hot dogs (sorry, salchichas) at half time, some guys behind us were talking about market optimization and revenue tracking (or something) in Northern Californian accents.
-Second SOG at the stadium: After the game ended, we clapped the players off the field, people started making for the exits, the music came on, and it was Johnny Cash. Ring of Fire? Walk the Line? One of those—it was weird. But good! Who doesn't like Johnny Cash?
-At a huge, packed, dark, noisy book release party, the food was hard to get to, and not too user-friendly. Standing around chatting outside in the spillover crowd, we saw a pizza delivery guy drive up on his scooter, hop off, look hopelessly at the crowd and say, "Juan?" It was a classic tale of yearning and desire, illustrated. One guy really really wants to get rid of a pizza, get his money, and leave, and some other guy is trapped in a sea of patrons of the arts, desperately hungry. We never found out if the guy who eventually traded money for food was the same Juan who called in the first place, or just some opportunistic hungry guy, but within seconds of that box being opened, it was emptied. Maybe the pizza delivery company is onto something...
Friday, March 09, 2007
To Add to the Millionaire List: Second Home in Spain
We're getting ready to go home, and I think I'm almost ready. I've pretty much blown off work this week, in favor of sucking up as much tasty Spain as possible. Now that I'm so comfortable finding my way around the city, it's lovely to just wander down the sunny streets, stopping for coffee or a snack or a new t-shirt with skulls on it (it's fantastic—looks like a nice floral pattern from four feet away), not really caring where I'm going.
But I'm really ready to be back in my own house, where I don't have to be on my best-house-guest behavior all the time, where I can leave hair in the bathtub and leave dishes in the sink and burp out loud (more often). Sounds nice, huh? Wanna come over? No? Maybe another time.
I can't wait to be surrounded by fluent English speakers, but I'm going to miss all the Spanish-learning that's been happening in my brain. I can almost feel the renovations, and it's really sped up over the last week or two. I wish I had a voice-recorder with me, so I could make transcripts of all this stuff that I know I'll be missing soon.
But I'm really ready to be back in my own house, where I don't have to be on my best-house-guest behavior all the time, where I can leave hair in the bathtub and leave dishes in the sink and burp out loud (more often). Sounds nice, huh? Wanna come over? No? Maybe another time.
I can't wait to be surrounded by fluent English speakers, but I'm going to miss all the Spanish-learning that's been happening in my brain. I can almost feel the renovations, and it's really sped up over the last week or two. I wish I had a voice-recorder with me, so I could make transcripts of all this stuff that I know I'll be missing soon.
Visca Barça!
I can't call it soccer, because that's the game where suburban American kids run around a field in a tight pack (presumably surrounding a ball of some kind) while their parents stand on the sidelines alternately drinking giant coffees and yelling, "Go, go, go!" at their kids. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I fully expect to be a coffee-swilling, yelling soccer-watcher one of these days.
I can't call it football, because that's the interminable TV show where giant black men either stand around waiting for something to happen or charge at each other as hard as they can while little white men with wires in their ears yell, "Go, go, go!" at them from the sidelines. Not that there's anything wrong with that either. They're all getting paid a whole lot of money, and I can't say I would pass up millions of dollars to run around in tight pants and be in soup commercials.
I can't be all ex-pat about it and call it futbol, because that's even worse than "amuse bouche" in terms of slap-worthy pretension. So I'm stumped. But whatever it should be called, it was fantastic. It was maybe the fifth professional sports game I've ever been to, but it's the first one that made me understand what all the fuss is about. The stadium holds 100,000 people, but it was a slow night, so there were only 70,000 there. Only 70,000 people all holding their breath together, all jumping up and screaming together, all chanting, "Hijo de puta!" together. I've never had so much fun swearing. And swearing is fun! I got so into it that I twisted my ankle leaping to my feet after a goal. I even found myself doing the back-seat-driver-shuffle with my feet, but instead of mashing on an imaginary brake pedal, I kept trying to nudge an imaginary ball.
The game we saw was an extra-exciting one, because there were four goals scored. I know the joke is that it's a boring game because nothing ever happens, but it's actually more exciting. There might not be any goals scored at all, or there might be one or two, so when one happens, it's a huge deal. All 70,000 people leap out of their seats simultaneously, screaming. There is hugging. There is even a little crying. There are flags as big as bed sheets. I was sitting next to a guy who clearly spends his days being very quiet and respectable, and for most of the game, he wouldn't do any more than mutter, "Venga, venga, venga!" under his breath. But he leapt up and yelled with everyone else at the first goal, and even threw his hands up for a moment before he composed himself. After sitting next to him for two hours, leaping and yelling and muttering together, I felt like we'd been through quite an experience, and I half wanted to kiss him on the cheek and wish him a safe trip home, but I didn't want to cause an international incident ("American Terrorist Assaults Local Accountant"), so I let him go without even a handshake.
I can't call it football, because that's the interminable TV show where giant black men either stand around waiting for something to happen or charge at each other as hard as they can while little white men with wires in their ears yell, "Go, go, go!" at them from the sidelines. Not that there's anything wrong with that either. They're all getting paid a whole lot of money, and I can't say I would pass up millions of dollars to run around in tight pants and be in soup commercials.
I can't be all ex-pat about it and call it futbol, because that's even worse than "amuse bouche" in terms of slap-worthy pretension. So I'm stumped. But whatever it should be called, it was fantastic. It was maybe the fifth professional sports game I've ever been to, but it's the first one that made me understand what all the fuss is about. The stadium holds 100,000 people, but it was a slow night, so there were only 70,000 there. Only 70,000 people all holding their breath together, all jumping up and screaming together, all chanting, "Hijo de puta!" together. I've never had so much fun swearing. And swearing is fun! I got so into it that I twisted my ankle leaping to my feet after a goal. I even found myself doing the back-seat-driver-shuffle with my feet, but instead of mashing on an imaginary brake pedal, I kept trying to nudge an imaginary ball.
The game we saw was an extra-exciting one, because there were four goals scored. I know the joke is that it's a boring game because nothing ever happens, but it's actually more exciting. There might not be any goals scored at all, or there might be one or two, so when one happens, it's a huge deal. All 70,000 people leap out of their seats simultaneously, screaming. There is hugging. There is even a little crying. There are flags as big as bed sheets. I was sitting next to a guy who clearly spends his days being very quiet and respectable, and for most of the game, he wouldn't do any more than mutter, "Venga, venga, venga!" under his breath. But he leapt up and yelled with everyone else at the first goal, and even threw his hands up for a moment before he composed himself. After sitting next to him for two hours, leaping and yelling and muttering together, I felt like we'd been through quite an experience, and I half wanted to kiss him on the cheek and wish him a safe trip home, but I didn't want to cause an international incident ("American Terrorist Assaults Local Accountant"), so I let him go without even a handshake.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Metro Strategies
Old metro-taking strategy: When exiting the train, step onto the platform in the midst of a scrum of harried, bustling Spanish commuters. Barrel along an underground tunnel with them, carried by the current. Come to a fork in the tunnel, with signs pointing to two equally unfamiliar destinations. Thoroughly annoy the horde when you stop abruptly in the middle of the passage and unfold your giant map. Flap it about, turn it upside down, and try to read 8-point type in a language you're only just getting the hang of. Give up, and decide to follow the herd to wherever they're rushing. If so many people are in such a rush to get there, it must be good. Carry on barreling down tunnels. Eventually, daylight will appear at the top of an escalator. Let yourself be carried up, and out onto a street you've never heard of, with no familiar landmarks, and facing who knows which way. The herd will be immediately absorbed into the city. You are now alone on a deserted, unidentifiable street. Walk to the nearest intersection to begin your research. Since whoever laid out the city had a very fancy plan that involved snipping off the corners of the blocks so they are more like very square octagons than very square squares, it's impossible to see the street signs for both intersecting streets simultaneously. You identify one street, but then you have to walk around a corner, pass two cafes and a flower shop, and walk around another corner and past a cellphone store until you can identify the other street. That done, you can now identify exactly where on the map you are. That might be handy if you were meeting someone, or if you were calling a taxi, which you now begin to feel might be the best way of getting to your destination, which must be around here somewhere. But you want to walk. You want to figure this out and be done with transportation already. So that means you have to figure out which direction you're facing. So you set out down one of the streets, making your decision of which one based solely on which street is sunnier (if it's chilly out) or which is shadier (if it's hot). One block later, the map and the city will start to agree with each other in a helpful way, and you now know that you have only to walk back up the block you just came down, turn right, go two blocks, turn right again, and you're done.
New metro-taking strategy: After nearly a month of the practicing the former technique, realize that, while you don't know the streets well enough to know where you are precisely, you do know the neighborhoods well enough that whatever direction you walk in, things will start looking familiar within a few minutes, and you'll be able to navigate from there, without ever having to look at the map. It's very freeing to leave the train, not even try to understand any of the signs, just following the flow of fellow-travelers, end up on the street, and continue strolling. There is no anxiety, no map, no back-tracking. You know the city well enough to know that there's no chance you'll accidentally wander into a scary neighborhood, but it's still unfamiliar enough that there's a lot of interesting things to look at as you walk. Like the beautiful scooter parked next to the dumpster. Like the old office chairs someone has left next to the dumpster, to wait for the garbagemen. Like how the chairs look pretty clean, and they're just the right distance from the scooter to offer a really good view, and they look comfortable enough to sit on for a while while you draw.
New metro-taking strategy: After nearly a month of the practicing the former technique, realize that, while you don't know the streets well enough to know where you are precisely, you do know the neighborhoods well enough that whatever direction you walk in, things will start looking familiar within a few minutes, and you'll be able to navigate from there, without ever having to look at the map. It's very freeing to leave the train, not even try to understand any of the signs, just following the flow of fellow-travelers, end up on the street, and continue strolling. There is no anxiety, no map, no back-tracking. You know the city well enough to know that there's no chance you'll accidentally wander into a scary neighborhood, but it's still unfamiliar enough that there's a lot of interesting things to look at as you walk. Like the beautiful scooter parked next to the dumpster. Like the old office chairs someone has left next to the dumpster, to wait for the garbagemen. Like how the chairs look pretty clean, and they're just the right distance from the scooter to offer a really good view, and they look comfortable enough to sit on for a while while you draw.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Translating "Sick" into Spanish
To the citizens of Europe's most beautiful cities, an American vomiting into the gutter is nothing new. They see it all the time. America practically specializes in exporting binge-drinking college students to Europe. So I shouldn't have been so worried about whether or not I could make it to the corner store and back without hurling. They would have just stepped around me and continued on their cultured, sophisticated ways. As it happened, it was no problem. What was a problem was my desperate craving for the sick-foods of my home country.
In general, I'm an adventurous eater and I like trying new foods in foreign countries. That all ended when I was flattened by food poisoning. I wanted 7-up and only 7-up, dammit. And when I wanted something more solid, I wanted saltines and I wanted applesauce. And what I really wanted was for my mother to bring them to me, but I knew that was probably an unreasonable expectation, with her being 3000 miles away and recovering from surgery. And I don't think the TSA is letting you take big bottles of 7-up on flights any more anyway, so that was out. I had to handle getting my own sustenance, at least until my domestic-support-staff/ home-health-aid got back from the office.
So I made it all the way down the block, and stood there in the market, trying to will the familiar packages into materializing on the shelf in front of me. It didn't seem to be working. So I took a deep breath, forced my brain to concentrate on problem-solving and not on nausea, and did my best. I gathered the blandest, softest, plainest foods I could, managed to pay for them, and scuttled back out into the street. I made it all the way back home without incident, kicked off my shoes, dropped my grocery bags, and whimpered my way back to bed clutching a bottle of lemon soda.
It must have worked, because I did not die (despite my midnight resignation to a life tragically cut short by my own cooking). My heart still beats, my stomach still does its gurgly work, and my brain still hosts an overactive imagination. An aside to my family: apparently I really do love you an awful lot, because it was very sad to picture you all at my funeral. But, on the bright side, you do look good in black. Such a handsome bunch.
So, for future reference, and in hopes that someone might benefit from this hard-won information, here's how some traditional American home remedies translate into broken Spanish:
Saltines = Grissini (those plain, crisp breadsticks the diameter of pencils)
Applesauce = Purée de Patatas (Instant Mashed Potatoes) (as close as I could get)
7-up = Fanta Limón
Bananas = Bananas
Love of a Good Man = Amor de un Hombre Bueno (not available in supermarkets)
And a note about the grissini: they might actually be a better sick-food than saltines. They're made of the same basic stuff, of course, but their long, thin shape really lends itself to being eaten while lying in bed. All the crumb-producing chomping action takes place inside the mouth, thus preventing cracker crumbs from ending up in the sheets or stuck to the neck or in the hair. Cracker crumbs in the hair=bad morale.
Now that I'm feeling better, I've learned something else: a country known for its fantastic food is a great place to be newly-recovered from food poisoning. Think you liked the food before you got sick? Try it now, when it's the first food with actual flavor you've eaten in days. "This is the best bread I've ever eaten!" "This fish is astonishing!" "Oooh, can I have some more rice? I love it!"
It's kind of fun. I wouldn't say it's worth it necessarily, but it is a nice bonus in the whole nasty affair.
approximately:
-I don't want to eat anything.
-I'd like a little broth to drink.
-I want some noodle soup.
-I'd like some chicken soup.
-I want a small cheese sandwich.
-I want a beer, some salad, fish, potatoes, and a coffee, please!
In general, I'm an adventurous eater and I like trying new foods in foreign countries. That all ended when I was flattened by food poisoning. I wanted 7-up and only 7-up, dammit. And when I wanted something more solid, I wanted saltines and I wanted applesauce. And what I really wanted was for my mother to bring them to me, but I knew that was probably an unreasonable expectation, with her being 3000 miles away and recovering from surgery. And I don't think the TSA is letting you take big bottles of 7-up on flights any more anyway, so that was out. I had to handle getting my own sustenance, at least until my domestic-support-staff/ home-health-aid got back from the office.
So I made it all the way down the block, and stood there in the market, trying to will the familiar packages into materializing on the shelf in front of me. It didn't seem to be working. So I took a deep breath, forced my brain to concentrate on problem-solving and not on nausea, and did my best. I gathered the blandest, softest, plainest foods I could, managed to pay for them, and scuttled back out into the street. I made it all the way back home without incident, kicked off my shoes, dropped my grocery bags, and whimpered my way back to bed clutching a bottle of lemon soda.
It must have worked, because I did not die (despite my midnight resignation to a life tragically cut short by my own cooking). My heart still beats, my stomach still does its gurgly work, and my brain still hosts an overactive imagination. An aside to my family: apparently I really do love you an awful lot, because it was very sad to picture you all at my funeral. But, on the bright side, you do look good in black. Such a handsome bunch.
So, for future reference, and in hopes that someone might benefit from this hard-won information, here's how some traditional American home remedies translate into broken Spanish:
Saltines = Grissini (those plain, crisp breadsticks the diameter of pencils)
Applesauce = Purée de Patatas (Instant Mashed Potatoes) (as close as I could get)
7-up = Fanta Limón
Bananas = Bananas
Love of a Good Man = Amor de un Hombre Bueno (not available in supermarkets)
And a note about the grissini: they might actually be a better sick-food than saltines. They're made of the same basic stuff, of course, but their long, thin shape really lends itself to being eaten while lying in bed. All the crumb-producing chomping action takes place inside the mouth, thus preventing cracker crumbs from ending up in the sheets or stuck to the neck or in the hair. Cracker crumbs in the hair=bad morale.
Now that I'm feeling better, I've learned something else: a country known for its fantastic food is a great place to be newly-recovered from food poisoning. Think you liked the food before you got sick? Try it now, when it's the first food with actual flavor you've eaten in days. "This is the best bread I've ever eaten!" "This fish is astonishing!" "Oooh, can I have some more rice? I love it!"
It's kind of fun. I wouldn't say it's worth it necessarily, but it is a nice bonus in the whole nasty affair.
approximately:-I don't want to eat anything.
-I'd like a little broth to drink.
-I want some noodle soup.
-I'd like some chicken soup.
-I want a small cheese sandwich.
-I want a beer, some salad, fish, potatoes, and a coffee, please!
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