Entry number 101 feels like Food 101: I can’t believe I haven’t yet raved about Clotilde’s weblog. Her relationship to food makes me swoon, and I want to try ALL of her recipes right NOW.
fruits of the earth and sea.
Cooking is one of my most beloved activities. It is, largely, how I relate to people. Why don’t I blog more about things I make?
Friend came over today, for dinner-making and conversation. Marvelous evening, all told, complete with some culinary experimentation. I often make things I’ve never made before, either from interesting-sounding recipes, or from my head. The two of us put our heads together to come up with the below-described seafood dish; the soup is from my Mediterranean cookbook, easily the best volume on my cookbook shelf.
Zucchini soup. Mm-mm. Who would’ve thought to put dolcelatte (or, in my case, sweet gorgonzola) into a pureed soup? Not me, not just now. But oh, what fragrance. Fry up a medium-sized Spanish onion in some oil and butter until soft. Add 2 lbs. zucchini, some salt and pepper, and a teaspoon – they say – of dried oregano. (I used a bit more than a teaspoon, and my oregano was ground.) Stir around to soften, for about 10 minutes. Add 2.5 cups of vegetable stock (mine was mixed 3/4 veg, 1/4 tasty mushroom bouillon), bring to a boil, then simmer slowly for about 30 minutes.
Phase two. Add 4 oz. of crumbled dolcelatte and stir until it’s melted. Blend in a food processor, the recipe admonishes, and strain back into the pot through a sieve. I personally used my trusty hand blender, and did not strain. This may have left it coarser than the original chefs intended, but gave it a wonderful character and made it more interesting to eat, lingering on the texture. Add between 2/3 and 3/4 cup light cream. (Another substitution – I used up my last packet of thick Italian panna and diluted it with 2% milk. What?! It was what I had! Plus, it’s tasty; plus, it’s Parmalat and thus makes me nostalgic.) Stir, taste and adjust for seasonings, heat back up until hot but not boiling, stirring all the while. Serve with some freshly ground black pepper and more swirled-in cream. And fresh oregano on top, if you’ve got it. Oh, and crusty, well-made (but not strongly flavored) bread.
So that was the modified-recipe mode. Improvisational mode kicked in when we turned our attention to the 1-lb packet of frozen seafood I’d defrosted but had no specific plans for. C. and I came up with the following, rooting through the cupboards.
(Incidentally, I *heart* those ever-more-frequent moments when I can root through my cupboards and find interesting things with which to improvise.)
Fry up some shallots, a yellow pepper and shiitake-like dried mushrooms, soaked in some more of that broth we’d used for the soup. Butter and olive oil serve as the fat base, and we added some lemon as well. When the veggies are nicely browned but still retain their dignity, throw in the defrosted seafood (which, in this case, consisted of tiny shrimps, many baby octopi, ringlets of squid and pieces of clam). I seasoned with a very little bit of cayene, and significantly more white pepper. Saute until done, Do Not Overcook or the seafood will toughen. Add a little more of the broth, if need be; it’s much better to boil off a little excess liquid than have dried-up dish. Serve with ground black pepper on top.
Coffee and decadent dark chocolate with orange, later. My inner child is delighted.
Oh, you son of a bitch.
I don’t usually swear gratuitously in writing. Lest I continue sputtering uselessly, I will shut up, and refer you to a short post by Xtina, who curses much more to-the-point than I.
When is this goddamn administration going to stop telling me what to do with my body, my interpersonal relationships, my life?!
bibliographic sos.
Does anyone happen to have book 5 of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Wolves of the Calla? I’m checking them out for work, believe it or not. If you’ve got a copy and are not afraid to loan it to me, you will have my undying gratitude. The loan would have to be for at least a month, optimally until May or June.
the invisible blogger dissertates.
While, it might seem, being a female weblogger may be a frustrating, futile affair, I’m not discouraged from posting. What I am discouraged by, at the moment, is the weight of the Thesis. It is seeping into my bones, massive and menacing, as expected around this time. I am yet a year and a half away from graduation (best-case scenario), but there’s a lot to do, and it is monumentally difficult to take a project of this magnitude one step at a time.
Last year, I took a look at Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis. Of course, she isn’t proposing that the “you”-subject of the book only work for fifteen minutes each day. She is, however, proposing that I make myself do fifteen minutes of good, solid work, and then see where that leads me. There’s more, of course – a book’s worth of decent advice, actually – but this is the gist. If things just aren’t productive on a given day, that’s okay. Squeeze out the fifteen minutes and go on with life, doing things that you feel can be accomplished at this moment when your brain just isn’t in the right frame of mind to dissertate.
It takes me a while to get into a good working groove on Roland. [Once|If] I do, several more good hours are likely to follow; but the getting into it part is difficult. So I’m adopting Bolker’s advice, with modifications. A two-and-a-half-hour stretch set aside, in which I can only work on thesis. If thesis isn’t going, I’ll participate in activities that require no external input (thinking, meditation, yoga) and produce no external output (no blogging or cooking or cleaning, for example).
Part of me wonders whether this will affect my personality, as it is expressed in relating to other people. Will I become less likely to seek others’ company? More likely to go for long walks? More or less articulate about the subject of my thesis, let alone other important topics? Hm.
On a different note entirely, there are no official provisions for collaborating with others on the subject of one’s dissertation, in the humanities. Or are there? Am I just not seeing guidelines where some actually exist? Perhaps I will contact the Graduate Council again, and formally arrange with them for technical collaboration with a colleague. So that there aren’t Issues later.
Of course, if said colleague releases some code as open-source (or a Creative Commons-type license), then even a formal permission shouldn’t be necessary.
round and round.
I get into these mental loops
where I take the time to reconnect with myself and my [larger-than-Roland] world
and all the while question whether I can afford to be taking the time
but *know* that it’s important, and that it’s what keeps me happy
but then wonder if I’m just a slacker who’s all talk and no action
and then I look at my work and think no, I’ve done some things I’m proud of, and others are in progress
and return to the reconnecting, but go through this same loop again
none of it is drastic, just kind of comes and goes in waves
taking time out to reconnect should probably happen regularly, no matter what, because burnout is no fun and after a while you just start spinning your wheels while trying to work, and not using time efficiently —
but the trouble is, overload-mode is sometimes my most productive time
but yes, it’s important to take the time regularly
although it doesn’t get me out of the loops: I’m a graduate student, am not *supposed* to have a life ever
etc.
Libraries, and privacy.
It’s so much easier to throw up the smaller updates once you’re done with the larger one.
Remember when the gummint made waves, trying to track terrorists and similar undesirables through library records? Well, this is heartening, at least.
words end in winter.
First we forgot where we’d planted those bulbs last year, and then we forgot that we’d planted at all. Then we forgot what plants are altogether, and I blamed you for my freezing and forgetting. And the nights were long and cold and scary; can we live through February?
I took the time to go to California over the holidays, to visit my family, have my love meet my mother, and go preside over a session at the MLA in San Diego. (Preside, v. bask in the coolness of one’s presenters and participate in lively debate, without actually having had to write a paper.)
MLA was fun! I very much wish I could’ve stayed for the whole thing, but family took precedence. My session’s respondent was stuck in Denver with a broken airplane, which was a cryin’ shame because we’d all been really looking forward to having him there. Hopefully, our paths will cross at some later point.
Holidays with my California-residing family are never boring, and this year proved no exception. For the first time since my father passed away, I was there on the anniversary of that day; so E., my mother and I made the trip over to the cemetery and stood in the drizzling tinny rain, contemplating words to say. On another day altogether, two of us sneaked out of the house in the early hours of the morning, drove over to Malibu and the Pacific Coast Highway, and greeted the sun on the ocean’s shore. Rather chilly, but the most gorgeous sunrise I’ve seen in a while, with the added bonus of a lapping-water soundtrack and ocean salt on our breath.
My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s is progressing, and things are difficult for everyone. There are so many challenges associated with this that the sole mitigating factor of my mother’s cousin being there to help out is but a drop in the bucket.
Upon returning home to Providence, I spent a week or two reassembling my worklife; which brings us to now. Now, the weather is cold and dreary. Hasn’t been daylight enough in ages, which affects me more strongly than I’d like. Tasks take much more time than usual, and sleep is a precious commodity of which I seem to need more in the winter. It is difficult to do anything, much less keep up the pace I usually have no trouble maintaining.
And so I light candles against the darkness, put on music, buy gorgeous vegetables that do not smell of summer at all and wake them up by cooking them. Then I work, huddled in sweater and blanket, Earl Gray with milk in the mug beside me, soft warm metal of the laptop reassuring against my leg.
Solstice is past, and the days are lengthening little by little.
You know the little film that sometimes forms on top of milk, if you’re warming it slowly enough?
I actually really like that. It’s silky and tenuous.
If I get enough work done tonight, I’m allowing myself the luxury of updating the blog that’s been so neglected, the peanut gallery has actually begun to expostulate. And, oh, I’ll get enough work done tonight: it seems to be Appreciation Eve for my drug of choice, hot and fragrant in its black coffee mug with yellow writing.
Rewriting history.
This Washington Post article is nothing new, but I wanted to document it nonetheless, and possibly disseminate (that’s where you, Reader, come in). Mostly, “White House Web Scrubbing” is about Iraq-related issues; here’s a particularly nauseating non-Iraq excerpt:
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID have removed or revised fact sheets on condoms, excising information about their effectiveness in disease prevention, and promoting abstinence instead. The National Cancer Institute, meanwhile, scrapped claims on its Web site that there was no association between abortion and breast cancer. And the Justice Department recently redacted criticism of the department in a consultant’s report that had been posted on its Web site.
