On the color of subjectivity

Franz Marc, Large Blue Horses

Our 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 do actually have strong comforting associations with red -- strong enough that it would make sense for me to include them in the color palette of a room in which I wanted to feel tranquil.  Note also, that the reds and yellows give the painting above a sense of voluptuous abundance, while the symmetrical composition gives it stability.  This abundance and stability provide the perfect setting in which the blue horses can rest tranquilly. Or, at least, I see it that way. However the assignment was to communicate beyond the confines of my skull, so I sidestepped the issue by not illustrating tranquility.

My color associations slip over the borders into synesthesia sometimes. Many, maybe all, scents and tastes have color.  My favorite perfumes smell golden brown and purple.  Lavender is silver.  Eggs are various shades of beige.  I don't like things that taste too beige, unless there is a strong flavor to balance all that mute beige.  Lemon, a bright robin's egg blue, goes with almost everything.  Caraway is a bright springy green, but too bright a yellow green is the color of a headache.  I don't like things that taste like headaches.  Chartreuse' actual color matches the color I associate with the flavor, which should give a nice consistency to the experience, except that it is exactly the color of a migraine. 

And that's just foods and smells.  There is another layer of meaning, color and emotion go together.  Red for joy, protection, comfort.  Dark blue for grief*.  Pink for aggression (positive or negative).  Pale yellow for epiphanies, apprehension of beauty, and power.  Bright yellow green is almost always negative: deceitful, hallucinatory, painful.  Sometimes.  But other people don't see color in the same way. So I try to take into account the commonly agreed on cultural connotations of color.  Or at least not say things like "purple is the color of stability so I chose to use it to anchor this design, as it plays off against the teal of secret growth, and the manic yellow green."  Johannes Itten, the father of color theory, tried to make such personal associations universal.  For example, according to him purple was an ominous, threatening color. That aspect of his work has not aged well, even as his principles for understanding color schemes continue to be taught. 

*Blue is a funny one actually.  My brain tends not to classify many shades of blue as color, but rather as shades of grey with pretensions.   I discovered this in final presentations when someone complimented a student on his colorful composition which took me a moment to understand, because the colors in question were mostly blue.

Peanut Butter Cream Cheese cookies

I was suddenly seized by a twelve year old memory of the peanut butter pie at the Glacier Brew House.  I believe I have only eaten it once and it was so rich I could not finish it.  Suddenly I had to duplicate the experience of the tangy peanut butter cheese cake  swathed in ganache ... in a cookie? 

I don't know why my brain seized on a cookie as the appropriate medium for conveying the experience.  There are recipes for peanut butter pies.  There are no recipes that I could find for peanut butter cream cheese cookies.  I know, I spent a couple of weeks looking.

This afternoon I went and bought cream cheese (and more peanut butter, I was running out).  I forgot to buy chocolate for melting and dipping the cookies in.  I may go back and rectify that, but only after I bake the cookies and find out how they are.  The dough is currently chiling in the fridge.

Experimental Peanut Butter Cookies

3/4 c cream cheese, room temperature -- not the spreadable kind in the tub, they add oil to make it spread.
3/4 c creamy peanut butter, room temperature
1 c sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder

Beat cream cheese, peanut butter, sugar, vanilla and the egg together, until lightened in color, two or three minutes.

Add dry ingredients, and beat on low speed until just combined. 

Cover and chill in fridge freezer (after an hour in the fridge the dough was insufficiently solid)for a couple of hours.

Preheat oven to 350.

Roll heaping tea spoon fulls of dough into balls.  This will be sticky but possibly less so if you keep your hands damp.  Place on cookie sheets, flattening to around 1/2" thick. 

Bake for 10 - 12 minutes until puffed and golden brown.

Or something like that.  As previously mentioned, I'm only at the chilling the dough phase now.  I will be editing with the results this evening.  The dough tastes like Reese's Pieces.

Edit: These turn out to be rather... inoffensive.  Peanut buttery, but not overwhelmingly so.  Nice texture.  But they need something.  So for the next round, I've put dark chocolate chips on top of the cookies on the theory that the chips might melt and and spread into a nice topping.  If that doesn't work, I may have ganache based frosting in my future.  Which would be okay, and truer to my memory of the peanut butter pie.   To be continued...

Edit again:  I never did get around to dipping the cookies in chocolate, because they got eaten.  The cookie victims, my design classmates were universal in their approbation, so these will probably get made again after all.  

The Spirit of Blog Posts Yet to Come

I am falling over early tonight owing to an unwise moment of weakness in the face of a long awaited library book last night.  I have some how not fallen over yet today, despite running on about four hours of sleep. 

On the otherhand, I hope soon to write a short essay about how I came to love iceberg lettuce, post a recipe for peanut butter/cream cheese cookies (as soon as I can invent one, which will hopefully be before Monday*), and quite possibly some pictures of various things, for I have a good camera this weekend (ostensibly for taking pictures of poultry).

Edit:  After a minor debate about whether this article about food and the Interesting Events in Egypt should be a separate post, I decided to fold it in here. 


*In addition to being Giant Cephalopod Awareness Day-- which may merit a post of its own -- my subconscious has also decided that it's Take Cookies to Classmates Day, a moveable feast which reoccurs on a schedule that baffles me.

Hmmmm

There ought to be a really good name for a cocktail comprised of two parts homemade ginger ale, two parts cranberry juice, and a shot of gin (at least, I think it ought to be gin -- there is at the moment no hard liquor in the house to experiment with). 

That Must Have Been Disappointing

Two people apparently found the blog today after doing a Google search on "shrubbery + cheap".

I was deeply bemused.  Deeply.  Especially as this blog is nowhere to be seen in the top ten pages of google results.

However in checking this out I did discover in the website snippets that Google posts a reference to "a dance troupe wearing bustiers and exotic shrubbery."  My bemusement is now as the void of interstellar space compared to the void inside a peanut shell now.   Especially since, judging from the rest of the snippet and the url, the site is a Chinese pimp's web presence.*  So now we have men paying for the privilege of spending time with women in uncomfortable underwear and agricultural products?**

What's next inappropriate fixations on hedge shears? 

I don't think I want to know. 

*I did not click through, but s/he does promise virgins, though s/he makes no mention of what sort of plant life they are afflicted with.  Probably aspidistras. 

** How do you wear a shrubbery anyway?  Do you root it in the cups of the bustier?  Do I really want to go on thinking about this?

Cake -- having it, eating it, analyzing it

Today is the birthday of one of the horde of knee high redheads that make up the current baby boom in my family.  I am probably doomed to come down with the horrible ick the birthday boy has, because germ avoidance would have meant not letting him sit in my lap while I read to him (besides which I'd been playing with him earlier in the week).  Easy choice. 

Now I have successfully managed to drag my adorable baby cousins into my blog.  It's only respect for my family's privacy that keeps me from making the blog wall to wall cousin pictures.  I think they're pretty great, as evidenced by my willingness to risk terrible diseases by playing with them.

I have also proved that I am the sort of person who will look at a perfectly awesome cake -- Viking Cousin's* coconut cake involves a bit more than a pound and a half of butter** -- and start trying to figure out how to make it better.  Or at least different.  I'm thinking fresh raspberries.  And a birthday boy who isn't feverish.

*He's taller than I am, speaks Norwegian, and has a red beard.  Nicknaming him anything else for purposes of blogging is unthinkable. 

** As someone who once described a failed recipe with the damning phrase, "needs more fat" I NEED THIS RECIPE.

Oh, So Not Pretty

I have no idea why I thought, "black beans, feta, and peaches would be interesting together" while I was walking to school in the sleet.  I assume other people have discursive thoughts about their hobbies while they are doing normal people things.   I thought about it for a few days and I eventually made it to the grocery store and came home with the necessary ingredients.

I would do a few things differently if I ever do a repeat performance -- most of them have to do with pan size.  The final product was excellently tasty, but as the title indicates it was not pretty.  I think there is something about black beans that dooms them to be forever unlovely and slightly buglike.  I probably should not have written that last bit.

Anyway, this casserole (its consistency is really more stewlike, but it's baked in a casserole dish) exists at the intersection of spicy, sweet, and savory, which is one of my favorite intersections in the world of cuisine.   The canned peaches could probably be replaced with a half a sweet potato chopped fine -- they bring sweetness and a bit of texture, but mostly are there in the ingredients because it was such a strange idea that I had to try it. 


Black Bean and Peach Stew

1 onion quartered
1 pasilla chili quartered seeds and membranes removed
1 jalapeño likewise
2 cloves of garlic with their skin on
2 cans of black beans, drain one of them
1/2 cup cider
1/4 cup rice
2 canned peach halves diced (canned in juice, not syrup) or an equivalent amount of sliced
1 sliced spicy chicken sausages (optional)
3/4 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
Enough feta

Preheat the oven 350.  Oil a pan suitable for roasting vegetables -- a small baking pan etc.  Place the quartered onions and chilis, as well as the garlic cloves on the sheet.  Bake for an hour.

While you're waiting for the veggies to roast, combine the other ingredients, except the feta in a casserole dish of suitable size.  I did not use a casserole dish of suitable size, because I don't have one here.  This is actually a substantial amount of food, plan accordingly. If that seems like a lot of spice, use less.  I have a wild passion for cumin and coriander and occasionally it gets out of hand for normal people. 

When the veggies come out of the oven, chop everything that can be chopped, and peel and smash the garlic, mix those in to the evolving stew.

Crumble enough feta to cover the top of the stew.  Feta generously for feta is a gracious thing.  Cover the dish, and pop it into the oven, cook it for an hour and fifteen minutes covered.  Uncover for the last twenty or until the feta is toasty and the rice is not crunchy.  (Part of the cooking time reflects the fact that I use brown rice, which takes time.)

I'm looking forward to the leftovers.

Edit to add:  The leftovers reach the height of sublimity when dumped over tater tots.  This is acutely embarrassing, but delicious.