Things on the Mind

1) Enchiladas -- namely cheese and green chile enchiladas, bulked out with black beans, potatoes, and smoked almonds (which I could feed to various and sundry Seattle veggie-types).  There are times when I don't have enchiladas on the brain, most of them involve anxiety dreams about showing up to sing somewhere without rehearsals or functional sheet music.

2) Smoked salmon wraps may be the world's best nearly instant meal.  Too bad I'm headed back to the land of exile and not enough salmon, especially not the smoked kind. 

3) Moon cakes -- someday I will understand Asian pastries that aren't hum bao. It's probably not today.  For now they are on the list of foods that I find deeply inexplicable, like horchata. I feel I have had a nearly intuitive grasp on the true place of hum bao in my life since my first one, when I worked upstairs from Charlie's Bakery, and one was a buck seventy-five, which made it an even cheaper lunch than going to Taco King for tacos.  At least you can get hum bao  in Seattle.  I should check out the tacos at Rancho Bravo sometime soon.  I have a feeling that they might be an acceptable substitute.  (After all, they serve horchata, which I don't like, but it is a good marker for Mexican joints that might make me happy.)

4) The woods in Anchorage September smell like home.  This really may be the most beautiful place on earth.  (If you ignore the urban architecture, mostly.) We saw a moose. Another downside to Seattle: no moose.  (Or bears, wolves, coyotes, or lynx.  Oh well.)

5) It's been a very short time, but I am going to miss my coworkers at the UAA bookstore.  All that bouncy youthful energy.  All those interesting conversations with international students about what it's like to be a long way from home.  YU being unearthly cheerful even in the morning. 

Sorry, this post is short on literary merit, but I have to be up early tomorrow, and I want to go bond with Peter Fleming.  Peter Fleming, being the much funnier brother of the more famous Ian, wrote travel books, in which he deploys British imperturbability in the face of the insane, the outrageous, and toads hopping through his sleeping quarters all night long. I offer this quotation from the beginning of News from Tartary as an amuse bouche (because really everyone ought to read him):

It was time to take stock of the situation, and this, with a kind of luxurious incredulity, I did.  It was a sufficiently improbable situation. I found myself the leader of a party of four people who had left Peking the night before with the undisclosed intention of proceeding overland to India ( a distance of some three or four thousand miles) by way of North Tibet and Sinkiang.  For the latter province, which had until recently been rent by civil war and which was virtually closed to foreign travellers, we had no passports. Apart from a rook rifle, six bottles of brandy, and Macaulay's  History of England, we had no equipment or supplies worth mentioning. Two of us were women; and our only common language was Russian. I felt extremely cheerful nonetheless.

He goes on like this for hundreds of pages. Cheefully. Currently, I am not reading News from Tartary, but rather Brazilian Adventure which outlines an expedition at least as mad.

A Minor Offering

1)The Tall Guy characterizes the following as "a funny read, with astonishing revelations about what Allen Ginsberg ate for breakfast". I would characterize it as a funny read with hilarious discussion of unexpected gastropods. I was raised by granola smoking hippies and very little surprises me in the way of breakfast food. These two facts are not unrelated. Either way, fun: The Meal That Ended My Career as a Restaurant Critic.

2) I cannot blame the following link on my altitudinally enhance friend, but I think it's awesome: T-shirt of Awesome.

3) JVW should start a blog, because I keep wanting to post snippets of her emails.  Today she is trying to convince me that YouTube stardom is around the corner, if I just coupled my dubious singing and, I also assume, her considerably less dubious singing with carefully chosen pictures of chickens. She also shared some unorthodox experiences of the apple harvest (such as it is) in Anchorage.  The thing about Anchorage's growing season is that it is short but intense, and when apple trees are blooming elsewhere there is still snow on the ground here.  This does not make for happy apple trees, although there are few optimistic souls, and hardy trees that make the attempt. 

4) Biological accuracy about charismatic megafauna is important to me, even if the megafauna in question is shy and retiring in the forests of central Africa.  In other words, an okapi is not an antelope.  Other than that, I do recommend The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, even though I am probably just about the last person to read it. I blame the author's interview I heard on NPR about his second book.  Too much adultery in suburbia, without a really strong narrative voice to balance it out.  This has adultery in suburbia, but it also has a reasonably well done Autistic narrator.

5) Because one needs more beautiful astronomy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14792580

Still Haven't Been Devoured by Raptors

I'm still behind on my blogging.  Oh well, I am at least sort of caught up on my school work.  Somehow these two states go hand in hand.  I consider this regrettable.  I'm beginning to feel like I might have enough stuff for an online design portfolio, so I'll be working that out soonish.  Heavy on the -ish. 

Meanwhile I have been eating and sometimes cooking.  I bring these insights therefore to the table.

1. The Culinary Arts program at Seattle Central is run by a bunch of maniacs out to convert the world to a bizarre cult of deliciousness and pastry cream and really cheap slices of amazing cake.  On Friday my friend A and I stopped in at the coffee stand and satellite chapel of the CA and came away with one goat cheese, onion, and proscuitto pizza-ish baked good, two shrimp and rice salads, and two cream puffs, an almond croissant, and a slice of Seville cake*.  All of it verged on the transcendantly good, and the Seville cake achieved apotheosis, despite getting melty in the sun. 

2. I am baking brioche this afternoon.  I have always wanted to try my hand at it, but have not always had a stand mixer at my disposal.  Today it occurred to me that I have a stand mixer, all the ingredients, and TIME, which as my posting rate will show, has been at a premium lately. 

Or rather I claim to be making brioche, because I did not actually read the recipe all the way through before embarking.  As everyone knows, this is one of the classic blunders:  land wars in Asia.  Going up against a Sicillian when DEATH is on the line.  Frying bacon shirtless.  And not reading the recipe all the way through.  Turns out I will not be baking brioche today, because it needs a minimum of 12 hours to rise slowly and elegantly in the fridge.  I am however eagerly anticipating the results of all of my patience. 

Brioche dough is extraordinarily elastic and tastes sort of like slightly yeasty cake batter, probably because of all the butter and eggs.  As I was scraping the brioche dough into the bowl it will rise in, I couldn't help that think that a) it moved like an alien life form, and b) there ought to be a use for something this strange in the aerospace industry. 

3. Kale continues to be my favorite leafy green,  Closely followed by butter crunch lettuce.  I really like lettuce.  This goes back to a trip to Ireland as a teenager.  During the three weeks I was there, almost the only vegetables that appeared edible were the lettuce and the chips.  So lettuce not only tastes good, but also carries this nostalgic thrill harkening back to the first time I left the country by myself.

I should say that I have since returned to Ireland and eaten some truly excellent meals.  I remember with particular fondness the vegetarian buffet at Govinda's.  I had no idea what I was eating, but I knew it was delicious. 

4. I have currently decided that the best way to cook a game hen is to rub a mixture of butter, herbs, and a pinch dried mustard under its skin, stuff it with a few apple slices, and cook it in a casserole with more apples, kale, and garlic.  350 for an hour and a half, serve it with rice and make your friends, even the gluten intolerant friends happy. 

5. Snoqualmie Ice Cream is the best ice cream for sale at QFC.  Especially the coconut.  Especially the honey cinnamon custard.  No, I can't decide which is better. Molly Moon's may be better (and I'm not even sure about that), but Snoqualmie is cheaper.

*What the heck is Seville Cake, you ask?  In this case it was a cake largely composed of dark chocolate mousse,  on a substrate of chocolate sponge cake, with an intervening layer of custard flavored with marmalade.  Just the description makes me want to drool on the keyboard.

More of this Miscellany Business

Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea. 1951

Happy Saturday!  Have some Edward Hopper. 

I love Edward Hopper's use of light in pretty much everything he painted.  He uses light as means of revelation.  In many of his paintings the light reveals human loneliness and the fragility of human connections but it can also illuminate the beauty in a couple of ordinary shop girls having lunch or a deserted city street. 
 This is my favorite of his paintings, one that seems to move away from his ordinary realism. Here the light streaming through the open door invites the viewer into the mysteries that lie beyond our carefully constructed comfortable lives. 

1. I intend to revisit the rhubarb custard question this weekend.  I'll see if I can materially improve the texture.  (Rhubarb, still one of my basic food groups.) So maybe I really will get around to posting a revised recipe.

2.  For my local readers -- QFC has Breyer's ice cream on sale for 2.99 a container.  In the words of Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything but temptation." 

3. This poem has been much on my mind of late:  "Otherwise" by Jane Kenyon.  It's been a spring of a lot of quiet happiness.  I'm doing well at school, making friends, settling more into the life of the city around me.  It's tempting to think that this must all go on indefinitely, but one day it will be otherwise.  I do realize that this sounds kind of grim, but it's Lent, and those of us observing are told to "remember that you are dust." It is a fruitful thing to reflect on.  And if I am going to link to "Otherwise" I should post "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" by W.B. Yeats, thereby perpetuating what one of my friends refers to as the Ervine Yeats Infection.

4.  One of the things about moving to a new place is that the seasonal progression of plants changes.  All sorts of things are blooming right now.  Some of them I can identify or guess at, but many things are entirely new and unknown to me.  Many of these things smell absolutely fantastic.  I look forward to a day, when I can wave a smart phone in the direction of the shrubbery that has captured my undivided attention by reason of it smelling like jasmine and lemons, and google the scent, and so get an identification.

5.  Possibly the best cellphone ad ever.   Even though I don't speak Japanese.

Miscellany! With Thunderstorms

1.  The weather lately has been unamusing.  The attentive reader may remember that a couple of weeks ago I was writing exultant posts about the glories of spring time.  No more, it's been cold and grey and dreary.  It snowed in Everett this morning.  This evening we had thunder and lightning.  But no snow, thankfully.

However it's so cold that I shut my window last night.  I  almost never do that.

2.  Lately it seems that I am accursed in the transit department.  I miss buses.  (Once I was standing within five feet of the bus stop, but happened to be looking the wrong way.  I realized the problem when the bus pulled by me.)  Or the bus just fails to show up.  Or, if it shows up, it's the wrong bus, and I end up having unsought adventures.  Today's bus failure fell into the third category.  The upshot of which was that I ended up dashing from half way up Cap Hill to lower Queen Anne, trying to keep an appointment for dinner with a friend before we went to church for Stations of the Cross.  We ended up having to postpone dinner until after the service.

Despite postponing dinner, I managed to traverse the city by foot unexpectedly zippily, however my left hamstring decided that it needed to spazz out just as I was standing up from kneeling.  There is a whole lot of kneeling, standing, and bowing involved in a high Anglo-Catholic Stations of the Cross.  As one is keenly aware when one has a furious left hamstring and five stations left to go. 

3.  Tonight I ate goat for the first time.  It was very tasty in the curry in which it occurred.  Said curry may be the most luridly red thing I have ever eaten, not even excepting Water Melon Jolly Ranchers.

4.  Skadi did indeed visit this weekend and it was wonderful.  Jackie put in an appearence as well. There was beer, cooking, ranting, and laughter.  New Belgium's 1554 is well on its way to being the official beer of my apartment.

In the course of going for a perfectly normal walk, we discovered that one can walk from Capital Hill to Lake Union.  There are a lot of stairs involved in going from sea level to 400 feet in less than a quarter mile.  Because Skadi was around, this seemed like a great adventure, rather than a brilliant way to fall and break your neck.  We also discovered that the oatmeal raisin cookies at Joe Bar are a pretty good way to refuel after climbing all those stairs.

5.  Thanks to those who chimed in on the problem of what to do with a bunch of Kale*.  I made soup.  Lo! It was very good.   Is very good.  I may be eating this soup forever.  Happily. 

Kale Potato Soup

1/2 large chopped onion
8 oz raw bratwurst cut up into bite size pieces
1 lb russet potatoes chunked up
1 1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds
2 Tbsp cider vinegar
5 or 6 cups chicken broth
1/2 bay leaf
1 large pinch smoked paprika or chipotle (optional). I think I used somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 tsp of paprika.  I would have used less of the chipotle. 
1 bunch kale, stems discarded, and leaves sliced up
salt and pepper to taste.

Brown the sausage and onions.  If the sausage is very lean, you may wish to use a bit of vegetable oil as well.

Add the caraway seeds, vinegar, potatoes, chicken broth, bay leaf, and paprika.  Bring to a simmer and allow to simmer for ten minutes or until the potatoes are just growing tender. 

Add the kale and simmer for another ten minutes or so or until all the vegetables are nice and tender.  Salt and pepper the soup to taste.  Serve with a crusty whole grain bread.

*I was trying to learn more about Kale and discovered that all sorts of wild claims are made about its health benefits, but more interestingly I learned that cabbages, kale, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, and broccoli are apparently all cultivars of the same species.  Furthermore in frostless climates, a cabbage can grow on its stalk to a height of 3 meters, providing fresh leaves year round.

Miscellany: End of Quarter edition

It appears to have been a bit more than a week since I last posted. School is over for the quarter, and won't resume until a week from today.    The quarter finished in a final presentation session of Biblical proportions.  Four and a half hours of people talking about their quarter long typography projects.  Now while I am in no way complaining about listening to people talking about things that have demanded their attention, enthusiasm, time, energy, heart, and soul -- I think we can all agree that that is a long time to sit still. I have since then been celebrating, recuperating, NOT going to Costco*, and celebrating my grandfather's 85th birthday.  And seasonal allergies.  I hate seasonal allergies.

So here are five things to justify this post.

1. Foodwise I will probably be experimenting with a different base for the cheese cake brownies at some point this week (I am expecting company of the highest caliber next weekend -- my friend Skadi).  The cheese cake brownies were Awesome.  Even better than the rhubarb custard, and I generally like fruit desserts better than chocolate desserts.  However they were less than ideally cohesive since the brownie recipe I was using as a base was one of the gooey brownie type recipes.

I will probably eventually reveal the recipe, if I can get it to do the things I want it to.  AND next time I will remember to more accurately account for the amount of jam used in the recipe.  Because "enough jam to turn the cream cheese mixture Mary Kay pink" is not the most useful instruction ever in the history of useful instructions.

The rhubarb custard is also getting a redo, so revisions may show up later this week, hopefully these revisions will lead to a better texture.

2. This is the brownie recipe I used as the brownie base.  It is gooey.  So much so that these are more like fudge than an actual cakey brownie.  They are my favorites, and well worth the pan scraping to get every last nibble.

3.  In honor of the end of my first quarter of typography, here is illustrative typography that overwhelms me with its playful elegance.  Someday I want to be that cool.

4. XKCD goes philosophical. 

5. Given a week where I don't have to be up in the morning at any given time, I immediately resume my natural pattern of staying up half the night reading.  This means that my spring break list is moving much more slowly than my reading list. 

*J and I packed a picnic dinner, with the intent to watch the end of a beautiful spring day from the beach at Carkeek park and then go to Costco.  It quickly became apparent that sitting on the beach and chatting about our respective weeks was more fun than Costco.  Somehow I ended up covered in mud.  Such is life.

Design-y Miscellany

So I'm sitting here locked in battle with my nemesis Final Cut Pro, if locked in battle is the right cliche for sitting and waiting for video to render for years.  I am going to have floor length snow white hair by the time this is done.

Time for five more random things while I contemplate the vast yawning chasm of suckitude that is my lack of aptitude for anything to do with editing video.  No really, I'm not good enough to be incompetent.  However, I keep getting paired with people who are scared of their own ignorance. I on the other hand am willing to look like an idiot in public, so I keep editing.  Maybe the next time I get handed the baby, I'll get someone to teach me how to edit audio.  If this keeps up, I may end up being mediocre.  Good seems a bit too much to hope for, as my respect for my friends and family members who really are good at this stuff rises. 

Anyway five things of interest, for loosely defined values of interest.

1)  Even in the midst of editing film, big band still makes me outrageously happy.  The film soundtrack ended up being Glen Miller's In the Mood.  It makes me wish that I were a better dancer. Maybe like this:

2)  Instructions for cocktail making AND any of the creative disciplines at the very same time.  A Twist of Lemon.

3) My color theory teacher discussing the particulars of an assignment:

If you interpret tranquility as lots of reds, blacks, and yellows, I can't really disagree, but I will send you to the school nurse.

I have considered devoting a section of the blog to this particular instructor's gnomic utterances, but type just does not capture the delivery. 

4)  "I'm sort of a god in the Twin Peaks community."  Later the statement was amended to an unequivocal assertion of TP godhood.  However, I think equivocation is funnier. 

5) Lapsang souchong is the best black tea for editing film. 

Miscellany Again

1.  The End is Nigh...

No really.  The quarter is almost over, so I will go back to writing again.  I have a short film to edit, a printing bid to write, and a presentation to pull together. That's doable, right?

2.  Pearled barley makes a tasty substitute for rice in rice pudding.   Or at least I think so, possibly the reason I ended up with the leftovers is that my dinner companion did not agree.

3.  From the same meal:  toasted sunflower seeds, garlic, and olive oil make a wonderful topping for baked cod and/or catfish.  Especially if garnished with fresh cilantro.  (Some of my esteemed relatives will disagree, but I'm not one of those unfortunates who can't do cilantro.)

4.


Probable sound track for the short film referred to above.

5.  Strangest search term of the week?  Shrubbery shirt cake

So Tired

An online thesaurus offers these synonyms for tired: all in, beat, bone-tired, bored, burned out, bushed, dead tired, dead, dog-tired, done in, drained, drooping, drowsy, enervated, exhausted, fagged, fatigued, flagging, out of gas, overworked, pooped, punchy, ready to drop, sleepy, spent, taxed, wearied, wearing, wiped out, worn out, zonked.  Most of these are applicable.  I am once again facing the reality that if I were getting paid for the time I spend at school, I would be pulling some serious overtime, and that's not counting the night when I was up until one am doing research.

But that's me whining.  Have some random bits and pieces instead. 

1. To your left you see the doodle that happened when I was supposed to be paying attention to a lecture about paper.  Those of you who have "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" burned into your brains may notice that there are two problems with this quotation.  One I figured out on my own, and one a friend* pointed out to me.  Only the latter was fixable.  

I should try to remember to update the image tomorrow with the fix.  I should also try to remember that I now want to do a gigantic Prufrock poster when I have time and energy.** 

2.  The second item is vaguely related two the first.  My shoddy memory dropped "sirens" into Eliot's deathless verse in place of "mermaids".  I drew a mermaid anyway.  (I like drawing mermaids, and have been drawing more or less rubenesque mermaids since sometime in high school. This may be because I don't particularly love drawing feet.)  A quick google image search, which I don't actually recommend, will show you that most sirens in the popular imagination are fish tailed temptresses (or else scantily clad women lounging on motorcycles).  However, the ancient greeks, imagined the Sirens as bird women.  Often just a woman's head on a bird's body.  Sometimes a winged woman with duck feet.  The webbed feet are fairly constant though (or possibly, they are the most memorable).  Temptresses with duck feet.  Get your head around that.  

Now consider this, the Ancient Greeks adorned their funerary monuments with images of the Sirens. Yes, at least some Greeks apparently hoped to be conducted into the afterlife by duck footed women.  This fact is not mentioned enough during the acquisition of a liberal arts education.   

3. Today is the 110st anniversary of my great grandmother's birth.  Today I learned that she, like me, loved canned peaches.  I also learned that, unlike me, her first name was Alvira (I've probably been told this fact before).  For reasons that are probably obvious, she went by Belle instead.  

4.  The strangest search term to find me in the last 24 hours was "Happy Giant poems."  Apparently this search points you at the Giant Cephalopod Awareness Day post, which does contain links to poetry.  And yet somehow I don't believe it was what they were looking for, although what they were looking for puzzles me.   

5. Breyer's ice cream at my local safeway is $2 a carton this week.  They have found my Achilles heel.


*To the best of my knowledge, this friend does not have Prufrock burned into his brain.  The fact that there are people in the world with perfect pitch for scansion would be the a cause of much teeth gnashing if I were not all of the things the thesaurus claims I am.  

**I do have Prufrock burned, however imperfectly, into my brain thanks to a college habit of dramatic reading duets with my roommate.