Going Rogue (you knew I had to write about it)

Tonight I'm presented with two options: clean the bathroom or write on my blog. Difficult decision there. The way I'm justifying this arguably lazy decision is that, one, writing is edifying, and two, my book group's coming over on Sunday and the bathroom will just have to be cleaned again. (I'm omitting the fact that I could also be grading papers tonight, but somehow managed to avoid that task by cleaning the kitchen and living room, buying 3 songs on iTunes, making tamale pie in the slow cooker, and checking my email.)

So, Going Rogue, otherwise known as The Longest Campaign Message in American History. We listened to 3 hours of it today at work out of a collective perversity for bad literature. First of all, Sarah reads it herself, making for a peppy and gosh-darnit authentic Palin experience. Her perkiness is as eerie and disingenuous as a Stepford wife; this vocal tone is particularly disturbing when she chirps her way through an account of her miscarriage. But more irritating than Palin's cheerleader delivery is the superficiality of her memoir. This is a woman with a potentially interesting life story. She was raised in Alaska just a few years after it gained statehood, and probably did have an unusual childhood compared to most Americans; after all, few of us hunt and eat bear or have parents who were modern pioneers. She could have written in detail about life in early Alaska: relationships between Native Alaskans and settlers, domestic hardships, natural wonders, what it was like to be a member of an tiny gender minority, etc. Instead, what we get is a Little Igloo on the Tundra, snow globe fantasy of life in America's coldest state, where all the men are men, all the women are men, and the children are named after motor vehicles.

According to Sarah, life in Alaska is big, fat snowflakes and pink, fat babies. It's also the locale for her heroic battle against "politics as usual" (the repetition of which phrase could inspire a drinking game). Despite the hundreds of pages in Going Rogue, all the reader gets is the old campaign mantra of a maverick soccer mom. If the memoir reveals anything new, it's Palin's inability to accept criticism and her predilection for thinly veiled character assasinations of people who think critically about what she says and does. She uses her book to lambast Wasilla critics, campaign critics, and any government official who ever made it difficult to get her way. Apparently Sarah is of the Cheney-Bush camp, which reviles the checks and balances process as obstructionist and views independent thought as tantamount to treason.

Perhaps actual autobiography was too much to expect from Palin, but as my friend Katie noted, the book has no depth. There is not one iota of frailty, or bildungsroman failure and growth. Judging from Going Rogue Sarah Palin came out of the womb the wolf-shooting, glasses-wearing, grammar-eschewing, baby-producing cowgirl she is today. And every step along the way was idyllic. (If a little bit chilly, gosh darnit.) Sarah Palin represents herself as the least likable character an author can create--one who is perfect and therefore unrelateable. Her reduction to political ideologies of real-life hardships like miscarriage or having a baby with Down Syndrome (in this case, both anti-abortion messages) made it hard for me to care about her. And her sunny gloss of life in Alaska made me want to puke.

Nothing is that perfect, and no ideology is that cut and dry. The utter absence of difficulty and emotion in Palin's memoir should make any reader suspicious.

But it won't, and that's the hardest part of her story to digest. Right now millions of men and women are reading Sarah Palin's memoir and agreeing with all of her simple, cheery pronouncements. Despite the fact that every sentence in Going Rogue can be re-written more concisely as "I'm a maverick, vote Sarah for president!," this book has generated over 200 million sales.

I'd rather get a lump of coal in my stocking. At least coal, given time, becomes a diamond, whereas Palin will always be a sack of scat.

Thanksgiving

Orange Pumpkin Clover Rolls

The rolls were a little dry, to be frank, as I had to bake them several hours before the feast, and had no oven in which to warm them. But the fresh ones, the ones I rolled with butter, cinnamon and brown sugar, which we ate warm from the oven at 10 in the morning...those were marvelous. Heady with orange zest and cinnamon, and tender as silk. I realize now the rolls need to be eaten immediately, or toasted with some extra butter and honey.

What To Eat When Your Heart Is Empty

Golden foods: brioche, roast chicken, yukon golds, pumpkin curry, yellow tomatoes fat in the sun, olive oil, salted butter, sweet corn bread a little north of pudding.

Tea: Bracing black tea mellowed with milk. African rooibos tea sweetened with raw honey. Chai, peppermint, licorice. If times are really rough, honey vanilla chamomile.

Homemade hot cocoa with a shot of whiskey.

Foods that smell good; that wrap you in their scents like a fog of comfort: Cinnamon, baked apples, burnt cheddar, mushrooms cooking in butter, garlic, meat simmering all day in a bottle of wine, freshly ground coffee, chocolate, bread baking, red wine hitting a hot pan, truffles, tomato sauce, my mom's gingersnap cookies.

Macaroni and cheese. Grilled cheese with chili sauce. Nachos with cheese. Feta cheese sauteed in olive oil with lemon juice and artichoke hearts. Cheese.

Standing in the kitchen, stirring a pot.

Big Bread for the Sweetest Little Whorehouse in Portland

Perhaps in an effort to compensate for the whore-y-ness coming out of me at rehearsal this morning, I have decided to bake an enormous loaf of herb bread. The Hulk Hogan loaf, rising precipitously in the oven, overshadows the swearing, vomiting, sluttish and otherwise charming characteristics of Doll Tearsheet, restoring my sense of self as a nice girl more accustomed to book lights than red lights. The fact that I went to Octoberfest this afternoon with a group of strange men, acquaintances of T's, and proceeded to get drunk is completely besides the point. The gargantuan bread is a towering paean to domesticity that amends my momentary lapses in gentility.

Ah, Doll! The biggest acting challenge I've encountered since deciding to write and perform a one-woman amalgam of Euripidean tragedy my senior year of college. (Really, where do I get these ideas? And why do they seem so good at the time?) She's really tough. A drunken whore--literally--with a mercurial temper that swings from tender to hallucinatory in 30-second intervals. My first line is "hem," Shakespearean for "very big vomit, upstage right." I've been prepping for the role by recalling encounters with drug addicts and listening to Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black." I really like the title track, but the music conveys less heroin-laced insanity than I was hoping for. The music's bluesy, but too triumphantly so, with horns and sass, to be representative of Winehouse's problems. But that's off subject.

Anyway, hollering Doll's lines and embodying her sadness is more upsetting than I'd anticipated. She inhabits such a tawdry, hopeless world--the only whore in a flopsy tavern on a dirty street in London, with an impotent fat man as her only glimpse of the kind life--that it's hard not to leave rehearsal a little ickier than I walked in (not to mention much hoarser). It's good, because the worse I feel the better the character is, but I've never felt so emotionally depleted by a part. Or, not depleted. More impacted: I feel like a dirty whore onstage and am embarrassed by myself.

See why I need to bake bread? Floury, crunchy, salty, aromatic piles of flatbread for dinner (tonight with butternut squash, red onions and stinky blue cheese); giant crusty, herby loaves of white crumb; whole wheat and walnut rounds laced dark with grain. Too much bread to eat, and so bread to freeze, alongside our beef and pork and voluminous bags of ice (T!). Bread to assuage the stress in my shoulders and the inky worm of self-doubt and loathing creeping toward my heart each day at rehearsal's end.

Bread for life. Bread for happiness. Bread for me.

The Zen of Some Butter, Sugar and a Little H2O

The calm before the storm. The island lull before the big kahuna. The deep lungful of oxygen before the plunge from the plank.

It is my last day before the 100-hour work weeks begin.

It's time to bake pie.

I'm not amazing at baking pie, but I love every minute of it. Pie baking is therapeutic, maybe even more so than bread making, because your standing mixer can't pound and smooth the dough, and it doesn't have the eyes to gauge the length and thickness of the butter smears traveling the length of the round. Mixers don't have the hands to appreciate the velvet smoothness of a rich crust, or to delicately pinch the pie into a picture-perfect crinkle (okay, neither do I, but go with me here). More than anything, baking pie is an old domestic art that fills the house with the aromatics of hominess, and ties us to the histories of people who have also spent afternoons in the warmth of kitchens, rolling dough and peeling apples. It's hard to explain, and sounds silly, but when I bake pie I feel like a woman. The rolling scent of my pie is like a maternal caress of all the people I love; warm pie from the kitchen is a kiss and a hug and a premonition of safety.

Today's pie is of apples, scarlett pears and dried cranberries from the farmer's market. The fruit's ensconced in a butter crust heady with lemon zest and brushed with egg yolk and cream to make it golden. I even cut out some sweet little hearts with the extra dough to garnish the top, which I was very proud of until T criticized them as girly. (No matter. Who wants a masculine pie? Should it be covered in soccer balls and naked women? Or for T-Money, a foxy Blood Elf from WOW?) The best part is that the pie is in our gorgeous Italian copper gratin dish, which we've never used and makes it look so rustic and lovely. Even if it tastes bad it looks pretty.

So will tomorrow and the next day and the day after that be a madhouse of grading, shelving and memorizing lines? Yes. But is today filled with pie? Yes.

And for the moment that is enough.

Sola

T's out of town and I'm constructing a perfect bachelorette Sunday. So far it has involved tea drinking on the couch while catching up on food blogs. I should go look at the NYT, but I've been finding American politics increasingly frustrating, polarized and transparently ineffective (these last two qualities work in tandem). Even the mystery novel appearance of Iran's nuclear letter failed to do anything but trigger my inner skeptic. Is John Le Carre is running the world now?

So rather than be a responsible patriot and dwell of the show trial of American politics, I'm going to visit the Irvington Farmer's Market, meet a friend for coffee, and cook dinner with another friend this evening (butternut squash gnocchi in sage brown butter). I may also make an amazing brunch for one with my market finds, some concoction with fresh cheese and heirloom tomatoes and local sausage and my homemade broa.

Ah broa! I've just discovered it; I baked it by accident. Broa is what happens when you combine regular flour with fine cornmeal, add yeast, salt and water, and bake it into a fine crusty wheel. It's a South American bread, I believe, and its barely sweet, slightly salty, moist, dense crumb is perfect for cheese or sopping in stews. It would be equally good flattened into a pizza crust or studded with salami, sharp cheese and olives. I've just made my last loaf from the dough and can't decide whether or not to bake it right up again, or go back to my challah, which was such a resounding success last week for Rosh Hashanah that my parents abducted the second loaf and left T and I crumbless.

Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, day of atonement, so baking challah or bagels today would be appropriate. My family and I will be fasting all day tomorrow and the knowledge that homemade carbohydrates await at the end of the tunnel of atonement might make the day less dreadful. It's not that we're religious Jews (my father announced that he was a pagan several Hannukahs ago, and we have Christmas stockings, if that helps clarify our collective divinity), but the one day of fasting is a cultural reminder that most Jews (my great-grandparents included) grew up poor and hungry in the old country, and that many non-Jews in America today will "fast" tomorrow because they have no cash for food. Here I am rhapsodizing about heirloom tomatoes and someone next door could be dreaming about having enough food to feed her kids this week. I don't think it's bad for me to care about food, perhaps especially because it's wrapped up in an interest in community, farming and environmentalism (or is that just a self-gratifying excuse?), but sometimes I think T and I should turn our once-yearly contribution to the Oregon Food Bank into a monthly thing. I mean, we don't have much, but we have much more than others. Yom Kippur makes you think like that.

But I've gotten away from my Sola Sunday. It's 9am and high time I trek to the market. After all, I have a busy day of relaxing ahead of me. Time to get started!

Eat this Roasted Tomato and Onion Tart

Roast cherry (or other small sweet tomatoes) and sliced sweet onion in some olive oil and sea salt in the oven at 375-425 degrees until soft, browned and slightly blistered.

Meanwhile, brush sheets of fillo dough with olive oil, and drape over a tart or pie pan, layering as you go, until you achive your desired thickness.

Season the roasted veggies with crushed black pepper, and transfer to the tart pan, saving the juices (put this gorgeous broth aside for other uses: I combined it with some greek yogurt to make a dressing for a yellow potato and asparagus salad). Bake the tart in a 375 degree oven until lightly golden, crisp, and bubbling. You may raise the heat to quickly reduce liquid if the tart is too juicy.

Please note that you can first layer the fillo crust with pesto, goat cheese, ham, etc. I made my tart plain, but the beauty of tarts is that you can enrich them in a thousand ways.

Eat this tart. Enjoy the summer. It'll be fall soon!

The End of the Wedding Season

Home sweet home! By some miraculous happenstance the cats have not destroyed the plants, the laundry or each other, and I missed no important emails from school. No new organisms are growing in the fridge, and the apartment needs just a minimal clean-up to de-cat it. The kitten has developed a new taste for human flesh--mine, specifically--but I'm willing to roll with the punches. A few nips are well worth the fact that the little beasts finally managed not to barf all over the bedroom while we were gone.

Kate's wedding was wonderful. There were no hitches (the 5am thunderstorm simply added drama), the food was great, the bride looked beautiful, my toast went well, and the big band music got everyone dancing. Kate and Phil's ceremony was also very touching and personal; several members of the wedding party read poems, prayers and sang songs to supplement the couple's vows. I stood there trying hard not to cry, but I failed miserably. I also cried during my toast. I'm such a girl.

The best part was getting to meet so many of Kate's friends from graduate school, whom I've heard so much about. What a fun and interesting group of women! We had an unabashedly girly time, complete with a pajama dance party (well, by "dance" I mean "last minute seating chart session") and champagne by the pool (and champagne with breakfast, as an afternoon snack, late in the night...) and a bridal lingerie photo shoot. Plus, there was so much love for Kate! It made me really happy. It also made me wish that my best friends lived in Portland, as opposed to being scattered across the country. How do I live without them?

So now I'm back, and life has to resume its normal course. It's hard to gear myself up for what is going to be a hellacious fall of 80-hour work weeks and the opening of the theatre season, but I'm starting today, with an apartment clean-up and my last class of the summer term with what must be the world's most apathetic group of students. (I'm actually tempted to toss their final essays down the stairs, the essays are going to be so revolting.) But it won't be all bad: the autumn is my favorite season, and my birthday's only a couple of months away. And the wedding season, as glorious as it is, is over for another year. We can rest content that there is now more love in the world, and we no longer have to look at people's registries.

The Comos that Didn't

I have two Italian como breads baking into listless loaves in the oven right now. It's all my fault: I left the loaves rising for 10 hours, which might be okay for my slow rise wheat sandwich bread, but it doesn't fly with tempermental artisan breads. The worst part is that I knew this would happen when I patted my carefully tended dough into satisfying rounds before work this morning; two days of patient work from starter to oven, ruined because of impatience and a certain degree of culinary apathy. I have a ton of biga (starter) leftover, a relief since I promised fresh bread for Sunday dinner, but that's little salve for my irritated chef's heart.

When you let breads over-rise, you risk the chance of the yeast dying, which is exactly what I think happened today. My loaves smell lovely and look golden, but they haven't gained a milimeter in the oven and have the surface appearance of rumpled dress shirts (with our names emblazoned across the top--T had some fun while I was at work). Which means they'll probably be dense, doughy and overly crisp--okay for a bread salad or bread crumbs, or fresh from the oven (ALL bread is delicious hot, smeared with salty butter or drizzled with olive oil, or just consumed plain, in secret, in greedy bites)--but not acceptable for proud presentation to all and sundry who wander into the kitchen. (Which means T. But still.)

I think I'll use some of the remaining starter to make puccia, which are little olive-studded rolls from Puglia. I'm hanging out with my little brother Lukas on Sunday and he'll get a kick out of forming the dough balls. Not that I'm abandoning comos: once we eat these lame loaves, I'll be doing it again, and this time doing it right.

In other baking news, Fred, my father-in-law, and I are making croissants in the next few weeks. We've watched the old Julia Child PBS video and read up on the difficulties of creating flaky pastry. I'll keep you posted on the progress and success of our buttery adventure...if you've made croissants before, let me know what your experience was like.

Political Seafood: What's Real in District 9

Attention: Contains spoilers.

District 9 is well worth seeing. It may look sensationalist and sci-fi (it does star prawnish aliens slumming it up in a militarized Johannesburg) but it contains enough realistic elements to keep the plot current, and often scary, in the way that catastrophic news is scary, subverting our everyday ease with the knowledge that well being is ephemeral.

The basic story takes place 20 years after an alien ship has broken down in the sky above Johannesburg. Well intentioned humans have retrieved the ill and starving aliens and established them in filthy refugee camps that are eerily reminiscent of both the post-Katrina FEMA trailer parks and the real slums of Johannesburg. As the aliens grow despondent in the face of unemployment, racism, interment in refugee camps, and permanent estrangement from home, they begin to act out, sometimes committing acts of violence against humans. As you can guess, the South African populace and government respond to the aliens' behavior with that particular blend of militarism, ownership and fear of the unknown that is the trademark of the modern nation state. When the movie begins, the alien affairs branch of the government (MNU) has decided to issue eviction notices to the alien inhabitants of District 9 and move them all 250 kilometers outside of the city.

If you know a little about the history of apartheid then you will get this reference to the independent homelands that the white South African government set up as a means of sequestering, denationalizing and controlling black South Africans. Like the alien homeland being established in District 9, these homelands were policed; likewise, both homelands devolved into crime-ridden ghettos full of angry people. The sociopolitical disaster that was apartheid evolved into a protracted and violent struggle for black independence, but it is not this struggle that the movie copies as the plot progresses. Instead, the movie seems to follow the more recent violence in South African slums between black South Africans and illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe. In the past year Zimbabweans and other aliens have been murdered and burned out of their homes by furious citizens afraid that the immigrants are taking the few jobs available in South Africa's weak economy.

This intra-slum violence is referenced in the relationship that District 9 explores between the aliens and a Nigerian gang squatting in District 9 in order to supply the aliens with desired goods (cat food, for some reason) and acquire alien weaponry (which no human can actually use). The Nigerian boss also engages witch doctors, who tell him that murdering and eating the flesh of the aliens will allow him to acquire their strength, intelligence, and ability to use their advanced technology. Ritual amputations and murders like this do still occur in parts of Africa today, and the movie makes a strong visual statement about the barbarity and idiocy of such "magic."


Alien rebellion is mentioned in the film, but the true focus is on the fears and actualization of miscegenation, and on the ways in which we tend to underestimate the abilities of people when we don't speak their language or understand their culture. The film highlights the political tactic of impoverishing people in order to disenfranchise them; its images of aliens corralled into fenced compounds resonate because there are people in South Africa and elsewhere who really live this way. I referenced Hurricane Katrina earlier; what violence and hopelessness are we engendering by treating our own citizens like aliens, too antithetical to the American dream to touch?


It's impressive that District 9, a mock-umentary that indulges in human-alien sex humor, sight gags, and stereotypical characterizations of shady, sadistic government agencies and brutish soldiers, manages to be simultaneously hard-hitting and entertaining. While the government and military characters are painted with broad strokes, the main characters--Wikus, a clumsy MNU officer, and the ironically named Christopher Johnson, alien genius--are given pathos and greater dimensionality. Wikus's horror at turning into an alien and his growing, grudging respect for Christopher, while well-trodden movie fodder, are sincere and engaging. And Christopher defies alien film convention by eschewing violence; if anything, Christopher's technical genius and self-appointed savior role mark him as the movie's hero.

District 9 doesn't do anything new as a blockbuster sci-fi film, but it's the first high budget fantasy I've seen that acts so simply as an allegory for contemporary political and humanitarian issues without being polemical or contrived. The viewer isn't lectured to by the film's focus on human inhumanity; rather, she is implicated in it, and forced to watch what we do to ourselves and our own.

And we wonder why extraterrestrial life won't come to Earth.

Bon Le Weekend

It's been a day of labor, grading and housework, but now I'm listening to Ella and Miles Davis and relaxing as the mingled scents of basil, mint and roasted tomato swell in my apartment, mixing with the cooling evening breeze.

It's a beautiful night.

I had quite a lot of leftover sundried tomato pesto from the other night, and all day recipe possibilities have been percolating in the back of my mind. I finally decided upon a roasted tomato tart with wilted radiccio and kalamata olives, resting on a liberal layer of pesto and nestled into a whole wheat olive oil crust. I'm serving the tart alongside a roasted patty pan squash and herbed chickpea salad (basil, chives and mint) in a lemony dressing. I'm finishing the tart with a balsamic reduction to add just a trace of sweet verve.

I am so excited for T to come home to this pretty, pretty meal, and I don't care how Donna Reed that is.

My culinary life has changed since discovering Chocolate and Zucchini, which I know is already very popular, but oh my goodness I was late to the table. Clotilde is responsible for the tart crust and is the inspiration for the squash salad. I was persuing her recipe index and can't wait to try a variation on her lentil apple salad (I might make mine more Indian than French inspired, because I have red lentils and Nigella seeds) and the zucchini and mushroom crumble (to do away with the green club our friend Yael thrust upon us the other weekend--her squash plants are palaeozaic--and the sad creminis languishing in the fridge). I must admit that I also love the blog because "Clothilde" is my pseudonymous title of choice when I have to write staff recs for really embarrassing books, and I take a lot of delight in its mixture of Flaubertian bourgeois exoticism and mothball old-ladyness. Chocolate's Clotilde is no doddering old lady, but she's a devastatingly good cook.

But oh, T is home and it is time to eat.

Bonsoir.

The Ramona St Keep

One day I will own and operate a little restaurant that isn't much more than a cozy hole in the wall. The tables and chairs--maybe 8 tables total--will all be rustic and mismatched, as will the tableware and glasses. I'll buy the stuff at rich lady rummage sales and I'll call my restaurant the Ramona St Keep in honor of our town's own Beverly Cleary, and here is what I'll serve.

In the mornings I'll make buttery yellow eggs served with seasonal vegetables, sweet roasted roots in the winter, crisp poached asparagus in spring, heirloom tomatoes and corn and patty-pan squash with bacon in the summer. Eggs come with biscuits some days, some days rich Irish soda bread, studded with fennel seeds or dried currants. For people who don't eat eggs I'll offer one or two alternatives, like an ever-changing breakfast panino--figs, parma ham and goat cheese one day, spinach, garlic and feta the next--and house-made granola with Greek yogurt. Strong coffee. Strong tea that comes to the table in a pot. Maybe on Sundays a wicked Bloody Mary. In a pitcher.

Lunch will be a stream-lined affair, with one daily soup and 2-3 blue plate specials. I'll cook what's on the market and according to whimsy, but it will be lovely comfort food. Creamy roasted tomato soup with my own special red chili grilled cheese, zucchini-corn cakes, curried chicken salad stuffed into hot naan, lemon risotto topped with butter-laced crabmeat. Warm bread twists folded with salt crystals and garlic.

No suppers. I like to spend evenings cooking for my family.

I think the trick will be to keep it simple. Find a rotating menu that I can make sublimely and stick to it. (Experiment at home only.) Get cute waitstaff. And have a little place, so that I don't get too stressed out. And make arrangements with local farmers to get fresh everything.

I'm really serious about this. In the last two years of thwarted ambition and career hell, with the resultant malaise of mediocrity settling over me, I have only genuinely enjoyed a few things. And cooking for other people is one of them. And I've found myself growing unaccountably jealous of the Portlanders I see, not older than me, running their own foodie businesses and seeming, well, happier than I am. And I think to myself, why the f**k am I lugging boxes around for management I despise when I could be at home elbow-deep in flour? And so, I need a plan to get myself elbow-deep in flour and happiness.

I'm going to start taking some cooking classes to bone up on skills I have but need to improve upon, like shaping artisan bread and cooking for a large number of people. (Can you even take a class on that?) I want to start making my own chutneys and pickles, too, and I'll need to start ferreting some money away. I'll also need to read up on running a successful small business.

But--unless life gets in the way, which it does do--this is my new 10-year plan.

At 38, I will own a thriving little business that smells like cinnamon and carmelized onions and pays more than my crap job at the warehouse.

You'll come, won't you?

It looks like two pigs fighting under a blanket

I need to watch every movie starring Olympia Dukakis.

I just watched Steel Magnolias for the first time since childhood. First of all, it stars Dolly Parton and I love her, big hair, face lift, boob job and all. And then, my husband's away at the coast, and Steel Magnolias is the sort of film you only ever watch when your husband is away at the coast and there's only the cats to see you cry buckets when Sally Field finally breaks down. The really surprising performance is by Daryl Hannah, who is hilarious in her various manifestations as nervous wallflower, reformed party girl and evangelical Christian. I didn't know she had comic chops like that! What an underrated performer.

But lest you think that I have lulled myself into a Thai takeout chick flick stupor, I'll have you know that I've been mulling over a very deep question for the last two days.

Does knowledge carry moral weight?

No, I'm not stoned. Seriously: is knowledge morally relative; for example, does that fact that NASA recruited Nazi scientists (aka war criminals) to get us to the moon before the Russians somehow devalue the achievement? Should we have left humanity's feet firmly on earth rather than use our least heavenly brothers to reach celestial heights?

This is a good question, I think, especially given the recent and well-publicized prosecution of John Demjanjuk, an 89-year old alleged concentration camp guard now being held in Germany on murder charges. I'm of two minds about this situation. On the one hand, if he's guilty then he should spend the rest of his life in jail. He's lucky to have lived a happy, safe life after denying the same to thousands of innocent victims and it's time to pay the Piper. On the other hand, what's the point? At 89 he's probably repressed or rationalized his involvement in the Holocaust. Either he feels remorse or he does not, but packing his wrinkly butt in prison will only inspire self-pity and put the burden for his care on the German tax payer. Besides, it's hypocritical of the US to aid in the prosecution of octogenarians 50 years after recruiting their colleagues for the air and space program. Are these arrests the result of residual guilt? A tacit acknowledgement of the failure of the space program to establish whatever world stability and happy American hegemony the original Cold War ideologues thought it would?

Thank you for your time and energies, Herr Nazi. You bad boy, you.

I'm sure that the Nazis' contributions to academia weren't limited to rocket science. What about Mengele's medical experiments, how have they impacted modern medicine? Are we morally obligated to eschew this material; or, are we morally obligated to embrace this material as a means for saving future lives? What about Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen's and Doc Martins? Are ideas and items eternally innocent? And, a related question, when does responsibility for the Holocaust end? Will we hunt and prosecute every last member of the 3rd Reich so that we can people the German jails with incontinent Aryans and wipe from our consciences the shame of sending boats of refugees back to Germany?

...

I try not to dwell on the Holocaust. My application essay for the seminary (yes, I have a graduate degree in modern Jewish history...so how is it that I have just learned about NASA?!) was about relinquishing our hold on a traumatic past that does nothing to strengthen modern commitment to Jewish community and culture. I care very deeply about not defining Judaism by what has been done to Jews. Yet, learning that our trip to the moon was the end result of Nazi experimentation, and enslavement, and the careful erasure of war records, tarnishes an act I've always idealized a bit. And this idealization has been aided by an American educational policy to not teach students about the Cold War and to interpret all technological progress as inherently good and ethically neutral. When you separate "one small step for man" from the USA's and the USSR's petty rat race for universal domination it is an amazing triumph. Looked at within its socio-political context, Armstrong's moonwalk was a colossal pissing contest between two countries desperate to do anything besides examine their own moral failings.


So how did I get from Steel Magnolias to Wernher von Braun? It would trivialize both to reduce each to a lesson about life and death, or the impact of independent decisions on a community. Is science like art, heavy with history and continual meaning? Should it be studied for its nuances, for its dalliances with the emotive--something we try very hard to excise from our laboratories and science funding?

Surely yes?

Two Ham Sandwiches

Some days call for nostalgia, even of tastes or sounds we did not experience in their original era. I find that books do this to me all the time; I want to sit at the dinner table with the characters and break their bread, because the author makes those kitchens smell so good.

So it was that I found myself craving a kitschy ham and cheese sandwich with a thin layer of real mayo on white bread all day today. Store-bought bread, too, the kind that tugs at the roof of your mouth tasting like mayonaise and sugar. I'm reading a novel set in the early 1960s, and the children are constantly devouring platters of sandwiches put out by adoring mothers in twin sets and pumps. Several days of such descriptions, and my stomach was growling for Cold War culinary Americana. My reading, combined with my growing disgust with the low-carb, low-everything-that-tastes-good skin diet, made this desire too strong to combat. After work I walked to the store and purchased sliced Virginia ham, sharp cheddar cheese, and Franz buttermilk bread. I came home and put together my white, orange and pink sandwich. I cut it into two triangles.

It looked like elementary school, like childhood. Not my childhood, because we ate crumbly whole grain bread with tuna fish and minced black olives, but the childhood you read about in novels that take place on Canadian air force bases in 1963. Campbell's tomato soup childhoods.

It was so good. I ate my sandwich in the early evening sunshine with a glass of OJ, and then had some cherries. And a couple of hours later, I ate another sandwich, curled up reading on the couch. (I understand now why storybook children eat multiple sandwiches. They're not very filling--probably because they're not very nutricious. I'm already hungry again. And only the grimmest self-restraint is preventing me from going right back to the fridge to make myself an old-fashioned PB&J.)

I know I shouldn't eat like this every day, and tomorrow I have a gourmet meal planned because my parents are coming over (Mussels Marseillaise, baguette, salad, poached peaches) but once in a blue moon you gotta get your Kraft on.

Tybalt

What's little, polydactyl and black all over?

Tybalt, of course! Our new kitten, companion cat to the ferocious Stella (who likes this not at all).

We'd noticed for some time now that Stella gets very anxious when we leave for the weekend, often so anxious that she stops eating and begins vomiting all over our clean laundry. The vet suggested that we get a companion cat for her, but we hestitated, because Stella isn't exactly friendly with other cats. In fact, she's the street bully and enjoys spending her days tormenting the neighbor's dogs. She's sweet and beautiful with us, but she also bites and hisses when she doesn't get her way, and she doesn't adapt well to new individuals.

So.

Knowing all of this, we decided to get a second cat anyway. The lure of a new furry beast was too strong to resist. T's the household animal expert and he's confident that Stella will eventually stop hissing and lunging at Tylbalt; I hope she'll stop making those unearthly Gollum noises while she eats, keeping one violent eye trained on the kitten. In the mean time T and I are relegated to separate bedrooms so that each kitty gets a human and Tybalt doesn't cry all night. Stella has been shirking our company, preferring to make lots of noise under the bed to ensure an unrestful night's sleep and remind us of our perfidy.

Tybalt. The most ill-fitting name for such a merry, prancing kitten! He's joyful and sweet, sleek and black, with the mouth and ears of a Siamese. He talks constantly, which is a little irritating at times (for example, 5am), but he's so loveable and soft that the mewing is more funny than annoying. He likes to meow fiercely at me while I wash dishes. I look down and there at my feet is a tiny little kitten roaring like a miniature lion. Right now he's sleeping against my knee, with one many-toed paw thrown over my leg. How could anyone resist such sweetness?

We think he'll stay sweet, too, because at his age Stella was already a little huntress. She would lurk in corners and doorways for the sheer pleasure of climbing up your bare leg or back, her kitten talons needle sharp. She was completely adorable, but a little scary, too. To me, at least, since I was her favorite victim (T thinks she liked the shrieking).

I look forward to the day when the kitties reconcile. In the mean time, though, we just drink in his cuteness. And give Stella some extra, sympathetic snuggles.

A Post in Need of a Plot

Oy gevalt I've been so busy, you wouldn't believe so busy. Tonight alone I had a rehearsal, went grocery shopping, cooked for the camping trip, consolidated my lesson materials for photocopying tomorrow morning, and began finalizing my plans for Kate's bridal shower. Now I'm waiting for the chickpeas to cool so that I can finish the hummus, shower, and get to sleep.

I have made some tasty treats for camping. In addition to the ubiquitous meats for grilling (in our case turkey maple sausage and burgers) we have watermelon, a brown rice salad with julienned cucumbers, red bell pepper, and napa cabbage in a spicy peanut sauce, and homemade hummus. We also have fresh corn, yams, and russets for slow roasting in tin-foil, Kettle Chips, and rice flour tortillas. I figure if we're going to car camp, we might as well do so deliciously. T is promising a meal out in Manzanita, too, which is very dashing and romantic. In this household, anyway.

I've also been planning my cousin's bridal shower brunch, which is going to be full of all sorts of delicious foods that I shouldn't be and haven't been eating, and so will enjoy with greater gusto than usual. There's going to be a fresh fruit salad with mint, roasted potatoes with sea salt and rosemary, a strata with rustic bread, gruyere and ham, wild rice salad with sundried tomatoes and goat cheese dressing, baked blueberry French toast, scones, cake, mimosas and rose! And lots of silly games and present opening.

This is my first stint as matron of honor, and I'm taking it very seriously.

New York, New Yawk

Here I am in the Big Apple, not doing so much as looking out the window while the rain comes pouring down, and reading a gothic romance (it's from the 18th century, so there's a little literary credibility there). My friends' daughter, Annika, is taking a nap, and so we're taking a break from city activities. Though truth be told, all we've done is gone to see Up in 3-D. We're planning on walking up to Fairway soon to procure ingredients for a great dinner, but I don't know how long the little one sleeps for. It doesn't really matter; I lived in the city for two years, so I don't feel like I have to run around shopping and seeing shows. Especially in the driving rain. It's cold here!

Tomorrow will be more of a city day. I'm going to meet with my friends Sue and Julia, probably for dinner and wine, and I'll probably leave my home-base apartment a bit early in the day to shop at H&M. I've been dreaming of a slice of Zabar's coffee cake for four years, so I might splurge Saturday morning on my way to the LIRR. I'll have to compensate with mountains of broccoli and gallons of carrot juice, but sometimes culinary memories have to be sated and re-explored.

To me NYC is food and parks, anyway. I'd forgotten how amazing the grocery shopping is here: loads of foreign staples and fresh pastas and amazing fruit and vegetables. Fairway was a wonderland last night despite the crowd and rude clerks, and I'm so looking forward to Zabar's. Dean & Deluca is tempting, too, because I know I can find nigella seeds there. My friend Glenna, with whom I'm staying, has been my city cooking companion since we met at seminary, and so seeing her always means making delicious food and indulging in the kind of easy, close friend conversations that one doesn't often have, and so are a kind of nourishment in of themselves. We used to take long walks up Riverside Park; I also took lots of solitary walks when I was lonely or thinking, and once T moved here, we would walk through the Inwood parks with overly sugared coffee and bagels and the newspaper and just be happy.

But the baby has awakened and I'd like to get back to this rare bit of city socializing. God, vacation is good.

Homemade Beef Jerky

I have to force myself to grade ten more papers in the next 2 hours, but I can't resist taking a break to encourage you to make your own beef jerky.

I've never really liked store-bought jerky--it's so hard and dog-foodishly over-processed--but in my search for new protein-rich snacks it occurred to me that homemade jerky just might prove the ticket: chewy, portable, salty, sweet, lean, and somewhat naturopath approved. Besides, my toaster oven has a dehydrator setting, and I've been dying to use it. (As it turns out, the dehydrator is nifty but the oven is better. But do use dehydrating racks, if you can. They'll save you the mess of wiping down greasy oven racks.) And I am so glad that I tried it out, because this jerky is yummy to eat and painless to make. The hardest part is waiting 24 hours for the strips to marinate and dry so that you can eat them with childish abandon.

After doing some internet research, I decided upon a relatively lean cut of steak (top loin) and a marinade of tamari sauce, sweet chili sauce, agave nectar, and thai fish sauce. The soy and sugar in the marinade aren't ideal healthwise, but they seem important if you want your jerky to be salty-sweet, which most people do. You want a pretty lean cut of meat because fatty jerky is both messy and disgusting. Plus, it will go rancid much faster than leaner beef. The same is true for poultry, so make your turkey jerky (so fun to say aloud) with breast meat.

The only downside is that jerky is a somewhat expensive snack, even homemade. 2 lbs of steak cooks down to around 1 lb of jerky. But compare that to the store brands, and this is a steal. Plus, it's a nice alternative to peanut butter crackers or cheese, and hits the spot if you crave something salty.

Here's the rough recipe:

1 C tamari (or regular soy sauce)

1/2-1 C sweet chili sauce (hot would be great, though)

a couple squirts of agave nectar (or some brown sugar)

2 T fish sauce (optional)

2 lbs lean steak

Freeze the beef for an hour or so, so that it's easier to slice into thin (approximately 1/8 of an inch) slices. Dump the marinade ingredients into a ziplock bag or tupperware and shake to mix. Add the beef, coat completely in marinade, and throw in the fridge overnight.

Sometime the next day, place foil on the bottom of your oven, and preheat your oven to 160 degrees (or 200 degrees with the door slightly cracked). Lightly oil your dehydrating racks or oven racks and place the beef strips in rows on top of them. Leave to dry out. This can take 2-4 hours, depending on how thickly you sliced your jerky. The oven temp is so low that you can go about your business without too much concern. I went to the gym, but maybe I'm reckless with appliances?

Pull the jerky out when its flexible but dry, and the coating is a beautiful dark caramel. Cool completely before storing in a tupperware in your fridge.

This won high ratings from T, and the cat seems pretty interested in it, too. Make some today and your family will love you forever. Or at least until the container is empty, at which point you just might make some more...

Taking Deep Breaths and Focusing on the Inner Carrot

I'm learning a belated lesson in patience and the evils of superficiality. As my body detoxifies from its fairly benign history of misuse, my skin continues to worsen. I probably have the worst acne of my life right now, and age 15 didn't find me looking too pretty. It's getting difficult to work up the courage to put on my clothes and walk out the door, and even scary to host friends at our house without feeling pressured to cake on concealer and wear my long hair down around my cheeks. Poor T has to deal with a wife who's an emotional wreck with zero self-esteem and listen to my angry tirades against the naturopath who has me looking like this.

But. I'm sticking with it. The no wheat, no dairy, no sugar, no caffeine, all veggies, all meat, all water diet: the wacky nutrition regimen that has me drinking carrot juice and eating broccoli and turkey for breakfast. Because as horrible as this is physically and psychologically, I know it's good for me. And once all of this gunk is out of my body, and once my body is able to digest everything more easily, my skin will improve.

The thing with naturopathic medicine is that it is a slow, creeping process. Americans are used to going to the doctor and coming home with a miracle drug that cures our acne in 3 days; it is not in our collective patient psychology to wait 3 months for improvements to occur. The waiting game is hard. It's hard to wake up each morning, look in the mirror and cry. It's hard to have a gorgeous husband and not begin to question how he can look at you each day with such wonder and love; can such blind passion be real? And it's hard to admit, also, that this problem you're facing is a minor one in the grand scheme of the world, and that you should be grateful to have acne and not leprosy, and to have health insurance and a job and a beautiful man who loves you no matter what you look like. It is so much easier just to take a drug and stop thinking and feeling. And it's even easier to be seduced by our society's dominant ideas about beauty, and to associate one's beauty, or lack thereof, with one's success in the world.

So as I prepare to travel back east this week to visit friends and family, I'm working on finding my self-worth beneath my face and projecting it outward. I'm drinking lots of carrot juice and trying to focus on the positive. And it's hard. But if I'm going to detoxify my body then I might as well detoxify my mind and spirit, too. I think that both of those things have been neglected for a long time, having been filled with negative thoughts and energy.

This doesn't mean I won't wake up tomorrow morning and cry. It doesn't mean I feel proud of my face or that I want to leave the house. But it does mean that I won't let these feelings consume and define me, and I'm going to try really hard to reach that mythic "inner beauty" we're always hearing about.

Besides, I'm going to need to be in a real zen place when my father and grandmother both tell me how horrible I look. Which they'll do. Repeatedly. So that when the inevitable occurs I'll be able to stand there and smile, focusing on the inner carrot. And plotting revenge.

Weird Science

Remember when you were little, and you would mix up a bunch of kitchen ingredients or bathroom supplies or backyard dirt and berries in a container like an amateur alchemist, just for the sheer joy of concocting something new? To see what fantastic, smelly potion you and your compatriots could design? And then dare each other to consume?

I still love doing that in the kitchen. These days I don't mix ketchup and vanilla extract on a double dare, and the only mud pies I like are of the Mississippi variety, but I love perverting other people's recipes and making them my own. My father calls this shit cooking, swearing up and down that this is the Yiddish term for kitchen improvisation. I don't know about that. It sounds like an excuse my Russian great-grandmother came up with to justify Sunday night failures. Still, it's the term that rings in my head every time I tie my apron on and set to deconstructing someone else's recipe, and it always makes me smile.

Now that I'm doing a lot of gluten-free baking, my mad scientist urge has to be curbed a bit. All successful cooking relies on chemistry, but GF baking in particular, because the unusual flours, starches and gums are simulating the protein, taste and texture of wheat gluten. Too much brown rice flour can leave pastry chalky and bitter. A heavy dry:liquid ingredient ratio makes for dry, crumbly inedibles. A heavy liquid:dry ingredient ratio yields mushy goods. Plus, you have to use more flavorings and sweetness to mask the flavor of rice and bean flours. A good recipe is hard to come by, and it's tempting to adopt an orthodox attitude when you find one you like.

The thing is, I just can't do that. Why leave well enough alone when you can put your own unique stamp on something, and then feel extra proud when you succeed in producing something delicious? So, after reading a bunch of GF blogs (I love Gluten Free Girl) and the introductions to trustworthy GF cookbooks, I decided to get jiggy with my muffins.

I need to pause here and mention my love for muffins, and pretty much every other carby breakfast treat. I love scones, rolls, buns, biscuits, croissants, tarts, savory pastries, even toast with really good butter, or mashed avocado and lemon juice, or crushed tomatoes and garlic. Breakfast just isn't the same without a wheaty companion, and I've been eying my recent egg and veggie breakfasts with lackluster appetite. So I allow myself to splurge on Sundays, which is when we go to the in-laws for brunch. My father-in-law is a rail of a man who disdains dietary guidelines, and so their house is a wonderland of salty, buttery, white-floured foods. It's pretty much impossible to follow any sort of diet there, and so rather than sit and mope while everyone else indulges (I tried that, and it was terrible), I've started bringing goodies that we can all share.

Truthfully, my goodies have run the gamut from delicious to "eh," but I think this week's sour cream apple muffins with grated coconut and toasted walnuts will be a hit. And what's so cool about them is that they worked--they rose, fluffy and moist, with a tender, slightly sweet crumb--even though I threw a bit of this in and a bit of that in, and basically turned my nose up at the GF gospel of no alterations. I did start with Annalise Robert's phenomenal recipe for a brown rice baking mix (I mix up big batches and keep it in my pantry) and I drew inspiration from her pumpkin muffin recipe and Gluten-Free Girl's sour cream apple muffins. But then I changed the sugar to honey and reduced the amount, added some vanilla extract and cardamom, used pureed apples, added some sour cream and molasses (it gives the apples a kick), and 2 big handfuls of unsweetened coconut and toasted walnuts. The best part? I didn't measure a thing once the leavening and flours were in the bowl.

There's something liberating about using your own kitchen sense to concoct something that will warm people's hearts and tummies, and something so satisfying in recognizing that you're learning to work with new materials, and doing so well. Baking is the best way to set a poor day aright.

Here are my muffins. Enjoy!

Sour Cream Apple Muffins with Coconut and Toasted Walnuts

1 1/4 cups brown rice flour mix
1 teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon xanthan gum
¾ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg or cardamom
½ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
2 large eggs
water as needed
1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons Canola oil
2 tablespoons molasses
approximately 1 C apple puree or sauce
1/2 C honey
couple handfuls each unsweetened coconut and toasted walnut pieces

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix dry and wet ingredients separately. Add the wet to the dry and mix until just combined. Don't leave floury pockets in the bowl, but don't over-mix because this will lead to drier muffins. Scoop batter into a greased muffin tin (go ahead and fill it to the top) and bake for 20-25 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean when you insert it into the middle of a muffin. Remove from the pan and leave to cool on a rack.

Eat with a warm cup of chai and your sweetie by your side. Or, at least with the chai. Let's get our priorities straight here.

The Little List of 21st century Irritables

1. Facebook applications. (And the social taboo of ignoring them.) (And the fact that they always, invariably, do something terribly obnoxious to my computer.)

2. Text messaging. Yes, I understand its convenience. But does one have to text all the time: during rehearsal, in the middle of conversations, at the dinner table? What would Miss Manners say? I'm tempted to take the next texting phone that gets between me and the conversation/dinner/project/lecture I'm working on and throw it out the window.

3. American politics. Okay, so the American body politic is not an exclusively 21st century annoyance, but our government (including our eloquent, dashing president) can go suck the text message that just went flying out the window. War in Afghanistan? Increasing funding for the Pakistani government? Letting GM declare bankruptcy after giving the company billions of dollars in tax-payer funds? Refusing to close Guantanamo because heaven forbid a "suspected terrorist" acquire a cell in a Colorado maximum security prison? (Apparently we're okay with American born terrorists; we only break the Constitution for Muslims.) Paying attention to that gargoyle Dick Cheney, and running ads accusing Sotomayor of racism for suggesting--gasp!--that a judge might approach the bench with individual biases? Insinuating that North Korea behave or we'll kick the country's ass? And yet, somehow, despite all of this, today's top news story is about the government's new commission against computer hacking?

COME ON PEOPLE! This is making Mussolini's War Against the Mosquitoes look well-considered.

Nothings.

You know those days when you're just very glum, and you yell at your husband for nothing in particular (and yet for everything: never making the bed or doing his lunch dishes or making money); when you desperately need a vacation, and looking in the mirror makes you feel like committing hari kari?

I'm having one of those days. My naturopathic regimen is doing a great job of keeping arthritis at bay, and an equally good job of giving me tremendous acne. I'm beginning to look like someone ate Elmo, had indigestion, and then threw up all over my face. And I'm just cranky, too. I finally have 2 entire, consecutive days off--a first since Christmas--and I'm too embarrassed to leave the house, which needs cleaning, anyway.

I did meet our new neighbors (well, one of them), whom I am determined to be friends with. T and I are both tired of having polite but superficial relations with our neighbors. It would be so nice to come home and share a beer out back, and feel comfortable asking someone to look after our cat and vice versa. Jennifer and John seem like really friendly people, so we may be in luck. They're also closer to our age; for too long we've been surrounded by silly college students who are in the dramatic throes of living together for the first time. I teach the fools. I don't want to live with them. Anyway, I'm going to invite the newbies over for a slamtastic wheat-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free dinner. Maybe we'll all develop moderate acne from dietary asceticism and form a club.

I do intend to leave the house to go to the gym in an hour or so, and to take a hike and have a BBQ with some friends tomorrow afternoon. One can't hide one's face forever--it's vain, and of all the seven sins I could commit today, I'd much rather indulge in gluttony and sloth.

So, I suppose that's all. If I was a songwriter or novelist I could write an angsty and yet emotionally accessible and literarily genius piece about my acne and become a millionaire. Alas, I am neither of those things, and so must content myself with some red bush tea and a rice flour scone, and the sunshine, which is quite nice despite one's unhappiness.

Vegan Gluten-Free Banana Yum

Even the most skeptical gourmands will fall in love with the vegan gluten-free banana muffins I made this evening. The muffins are so good that I'm posting the recipe now, in the hopes that someone else will make them and be surprised by their spicy, moist homeyness.

As you know, I'm new to the gluten-free world, and as an avid baker I've been casting around for recipes that not only approximate the flavor and toothsome qualities of wheat products, but actually taste good, as well. Too many gluten-free breads and pastries crumble at the slightest touch, taste oddly beany or ricey, are prohibitively expensive, or require eight zillion obscure flours and additives to rise or bond ingredients. Thanks to my friend Abby I've found Annalise Roberts, who has a great gluten-free baking book titled Gluten-Free Baking Classics. Ms. Roberts provided the foundation and inspiration for tonight's banana muffins.

The original recipe is for pumpkin bread, and so the first substitution I made was to use 4 bananas in the place of 1 C of pumpkin puree (I do this switch-up all the time with quick breads: sweet potatoes, yams, bananas, squash, and pumpkin are all interchangeable). The second change I made was to swap 1/3 C + 2 Tb virgin coconut oil for the canola oil that Ms. Roberts calls for. I've been doing a lot of reading on coconut oil lately, and though it is high in saturated fats, not all saturated fats are made equal. Once consumed, the fat in coconut oil quickly converts into energy, and is not stored in the heart or arteries. It's a favorite with serious athletes and dieters. It lowers bad cholesterol, has antimicrobial and antifungal properties, aids in digestion, and helps boost immunity. A surprising number of people use it to treat acne. It also tastes amazing (in the muffins, at least) and feels very good as a facial moisturizer. The third change I made was to substitute cardamom for nutmeg, though to be honest this was a substitution borne of necessity rather than experimental verve. The fourth and final change was to use brown sugar in place of granulated white sugar. I just like the taste better.

Bake and eat these, because they will warm your soul. A word to the wise, though: these are not diet muffins. Just because they lack dairy and wheat, are whole-grain, and use a healthy fat does not mean that they are a health food. Treat them as you would any muffin, and at least eat a big bowl of fruit alongside one at breakfast. One more word: you could probably substitute regular flour for the mix as long as you keep the batter wet-thick and omit the xanthan gum.

Little Chef's Vegan Gluten-Free Banana Yum Muffins (inspired by Annalise Roberts)

1 3/4 C brown rice flour mix (see below)
1 C brown sugar, not packed
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp xanthan gum (Bob's Red Mill makes this and it lasts forever)
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp each cinnamon, ground ginger & cardamom or nutmeg
1/4 tsp cloves
2 large eggs
1/4 C water
1/3 C + 2 tsp coconut or canola oil
2 Tb molasses (I use blackstrap for its health benefits--potassium, magnesium, iron--and very rich flavor, but any molasses will do)
4 mushy bananas

(To make the brown rice flour mix: combine 6 C finely ground brown rice flour, 2 C potato starch--not flour!--and 1 C tapioca flour. Mix in a bag or Tupperware container and store in the pantry for easy access.)

It's just occurring to me now that I may have used only 1 1/4 C flour mix, in which case the muffins still turned out beautifully. They'll be a bit less moist with the proper flour amount, so I suggest adjusting the flour:ingredient ratio to meet your tastes.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Mix the dry ingredients (including the sugar) in one bowl. In an second bowl, combine the eggs, water, molasses, bananas and oil. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix until well combined. Do not over-mix. Add the batter to muffin tins, filling them up almost to the top. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into one of the muffins comes out clean. Let the muffins cool completely (well, you can eat one lukewarm if you like, I did) and store in a Tupperware or wrap well in plastic and tuck in the freezer. Enjoy!

Moral Reasoning and the Great Acne Adventure

I've just now finished writing my lesson plan on moral reasoning for Monday. I'm tired and shouldn't be blogging. I should be in bed reading the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. But I feel like discussing my ridiculous travels through the limited diet world, because food is weighing on my mind.

For at least two months now I have abstained from eating dairy because I was beginning to get rheumatoid arthritis in my little finger, and dairy can aggravate arthritis. Cutting out the dairy has really helped, and I don't miss it that much. I eat lots of dark leafy greens and fortified rice milk to get my calcium.

Then T told me that wheat can aggravate acne, which I have in spades lately, the really lovely kind that sits in huge lumps under the skin looking and acting for all the world like underwater volcanoes. So I decided to abstain from wheat as well, and have been getting progressively better at baking with gluten-free flours. Unfortunately, my gluten orthodoxy has yielded nothing but a longing for my baking stone and a taste for brown rice flour scones; the acne remains, uglier by the day.

I think I can deduce that neither dairy nor wheat cause my acne. I'm still abstaining just in case, and because--to be honest--I feel more energetic with less wheat in my system. But I'll probably reintegrate some bread after seeing my naturopath.

So I'm down to the remaining dietary culprits for acne: soy, sugar, corn, caffeine.

I can live without milk, cheese and yogurt.

I can live without corn.

I can even live without wheat.

And I don't drink a lot of coffee.

But no sugar?

Do you know all of the delicious dishes made possible by a dash of brown sugar or honey?

Sauteed greens with tamari and sugar; Thai peanut sauce; tomato sauce; coleslaw; vinaigrette; every conceivable baked good, including bread and gluten-free goodies; dark chocolate; orange chicken; Vietnamese chicken and beef salads. Coconut curry.

I like sugar. Sugar is delicious. And it's not as though I can replace the maple syrup on my oatmeal with something savory like Parmesan cheese, because cheese is off limits.

I'm an epicurean trapped in the frustrated, pimply, arthritic body of a 28-year old book clerk. Yuck! I sound like an unlikeable character in one of Dostoevsky's short stories.

I don't know. There's really no point to this blog, other than catharsis. I will get to the bottom of my skin troubles one way or another, and I intend to enlist my naturopath in the hunt for a solution. Until then, though, I'm a little bit hungry and a lot bit zitty.

And I don't like either condition one bit.

The Recession in my Wallet

Well, the inevitable has occurred: the greedy bastard who runs the book company I work for has reduced our hours. I'll be losing close to $100/month, which isn't pennies, especially as they just raised our health care premium. I'm lucky, I know, that this is as far as the recession's tentacles have reached into my life (thus far). But it is nevertheless frustrating and scary to know that the security of our financial future lies in one man's determination of how well books are selling.

I'm trying to look at this with a glass is half-full attitude. For example, I'll have a little more time now to research gluten-free baking, which I'm really enjoying. Sometimes I think I would be much happier if I'd studied baking instead of English and Jewish Studies. Mixing and shaping wheat breads, and doing all of the food science necessary for gluten-free baking, is really physically and emotionally satisfying--even when gluten-free pastries emerge from the oven and spontaneously deconstruct into sorry crumbles. (Damn you, rice flour!) Besides, I like getting up early in the morning and having my afternoons off. I like fussing around the kitchen and wrapping myself in cooking smells. Baking probably pays as well as what I do now, and the physical labor can't be much worse. And people will always need bread; books are a luxury, but bread is forever.

But instead I was seduced by academia, and here I am: bedraggled adjunct professor and bookstore peon, now on a temporarily reduced schedule due to the American consumer's new found fiscal responsibility. Which reminds me of one last thing, before I get ready for my day at the warehouse. Us bookstore employees listen to a lot of NPR, and I'm getting really tired of Nancy Pelosi's shrill and disingenuous appeals to the American public. Perhaps if the Democrats and Republicans took a day off from bullying each other, they might have the time to focus on real problems like unemployment numbers and, oh I don't know, the national budget. Or the fact that our new president, who I like immensely, but am in intense disagreement with, is ramping up another never-ending war in a Muslim country. I don't understand why our politicians are engaging in party assassinations at a time when they absolutely have to work together to help their constituents; how do they justify this behavior to themselves as they go to sleep each night?

I teach my students--and I will go to my grave believing fervently in the truth of this--that argument is for the purpose of reconciliation and solution. We don't argue to be assholes. We exchange conflicting ideas in the hope of salvaging peace, and establishing well being.

Our Congress needs to remember that its job is to reestablish well being in an ailing nation. So that we can all get this recession out of our wallets, and start living up to our potential.

Chekhov's Three Sisters at ART

(Disclaimer: My husband is in this show.)

Just when I was satisfied with the excellent work of the ladies in NWCTC'S Richard II, I had to go and spoil my bliss with the tremendously charming Three Sisters at ART. A typical Chekhovian piece about the landed gentry's inability to find happiness in their emotionally and physically indulgent lives, Three Sisters focuses on--who else?--three sisters struggling for personal emancipation in a claustrophobic society crowded by suitors and soldiers and dead-end jobs. The youngest, Irina, imbues the far-off city of Moscow with all of the romance and possibility lacking in their small town; Masha, the middle sister, longs to escape her suffocating marriage to a kind, but weak-foolish, school teacher; and Olga, the eldest, just seems existentially unhappy, like she carries all of the historical weight of a fading Russian aristocracy. Olga is a premonition of the responsibility and fatigue of the new proletariat.

The actresses steal the show. I've always been lucky to see excellent Chekhov--I saw Vanessa Redgrave in The Cherry Orchard and a wonderful Uncle Vanya in Ashland--but I don't think that those productions eclipse the work being done by the three sisters in ART's cast. Amaya Villazan, Luisa Sermol, and Andrea Frankle slip into the lives of their characters so gracefully; there is no artifice in their acting. Their skill in establishing a naturalistic environment on stage is especially highlighted--and disrupted--by Marjorie Tatum's cartoonish performance as Natasha, the sisters' gold digging sister-in-law. Ms. Tatum's performance is dynamic and focused, but so campy as to be distracting. Natasha is vulgar enough without the yelling, charging, and sneering that this production emphasizes.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the actor playing Vershinin lacks the dynamism and charm needed to convince Masha (and the audience!) that he is worthy of passionate, illicit love. Luckily, his is the only genuinely weak performance in a cast of stunning actors, and Ms. Sermol's Masha provides enough pathos to compensate for Vershinin's dullness. My one critique of Ms. Sermol--and this is really a directorial critique--is that she is too old to play the middle daughter. Ms. Frankle and Ms. Villazan are obviously much younger actresses, and the physical contrasts can be distracting.

The supporting cast is vibrant and varied, providing an exciting diversity of personalities and physical features. It is impossible to be bored by this production, which clips along at a perfect pace, pausing for moments of emotional intensity and highlighting much-needed moments of levity and satire. Design-wise it is lovely, with strands of birch trees mingling with house pieces like a piano and chairs. The characters drift in and out in choreographed movements, making the production visually arresting, and reminding the audience of the paradoxically highly structured and aimless lives of the characters.

ART's Cherry Orchard is a must-see production for anyone with a yen for a really professional show: tight, gorgeous, big budget. It is a genuine pleasure and indulgence, even while you cry your eyes out.

Tuscan Beans in Tomato Ragu

Kenichi, you're probably going to find the following ode to Tuscan cuisine gastrically distressing:

O white buttery bean,
Cloaked in velvet rich tomatoes,
How I love thee!
Creamy on my tongue,
Aromatic to my nose,
Warming to my toes,
Such splendor! Such fiber! Such all-ensuing Grace!
I could eat thee with polenta day and night
and be content.
At least
for one or two
more days.

Okay, that was poetically distressing, as well. These beans are worthy of greater verse, so delicious were they in my mouth!

Tonight I made Gourmet magazine's recipe for Tuscan Beans in Summery Tomato Ragu, with the small substitutions of fennel stalk for celery (bleh, celery) and rosemary for thyme (someone's husband took all of the thyme for his doctor bag...an aromatic to revive all of those patients in stays? Very odd). The house filled with the heartwarming aroma of hot tomatoes, garlic, and herbs, and the buttery vapors of stovetop polenta. I swear this ragu has umami, what with it's luscious mouth-feel and taste: just the right amount of salty, with the right amount of rich, and all the conscience-quelling righteousness of vitamin rich tomatoes and fiber rich beans. It's also incredibly cheap and so filling. I used all organic ingredients and I can't imagine it cost me more that $.25 per serving. (And there are a lot of servings.) Oh dried beans how thou are the sustenance of frugal gods!

Seriously though, the dried bean is grossly under-appreciated by the majority of Americans. Canned beans are easy, sure, but you're paying the same amount for one pound of organic dried beans as you are for one can of cooked beans. And a pound of dried beans yields a lot more fruit. Plus, protein, fibre, and the lovely feeling of being so domestically savvy that you can create gourmet goodness from something as unprepossessing as a little, withered legume. I usually cook up a big batch and then freeze the beans in bags or tupperware. Now when I want hummus or a quick meal, it's defrost, fiddle with, and enjoy!

I know that (rude) people will cite the various gastrointestinal distresses that bean consumption causes, and these claims are true. Don't eat beans every day for 5 days if you don't want, let's just say, easy passage and your own built-in wind power system. But eaten in small amounts, beans are heavenly and healthy, especially when smothered in some sort of delicious sauce or whipped up with garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and salt (for hummus) or olive oil, cumin, oregano, and sofrito (for refried beans). I even toss pasta with white beans, adding some salty anchovies, olives, and lemon zest for quick flavor.

I know I'll probably be regretting my indulgence after the fifth consecutive lunch of bean ragu, but for now I praise the bean for filling my belly and warming my insides, in only the way that a truly yummy dinner can.

Calling All Portlanders: Go see Richard II at the NWCTC!

I've just returned home from watching King Richard II at the Northwest Classical Theatre Company, and it is an excellent production. Director JoAnn Johnson uses an all-female ensemble cast to tell the (frankly, rather pathetic) story of the deposition of Richard II and the rise of Henry IV. My favorite aspect of the production is Johnson's addition of a Greek Chorus, which harmoniously blends the musical notes of Shakespearean verse with the play's cyclical sense of time, and something that I can only describe as "womb-y-ness." (Like a Wiccan convention at midnight in a dark wood, or one of those workshops where women look at their vaginas in hand-held mirrors.) It's not that patently ridiculous, but the chorus effects a deeply feminine community atmosphere that comforts, even as it reveals all of the decay and doom of the Plantagenet reign.

The ensemble cast is very strong, and the actors who don't capture your attention at first all shine magnificently at some point in the play. Their voices are all low and lovely, very grounded, which doesn't make them seem more masculine, but still somehow authenticates their inhabiting male characters. Likewise, there's perhaps one delicate woman in the cast--otherwise, they are strong, bosomy, handsome women who seem empowered both by the roles, which would ordinarily go to men, and by the bond of ensemble acting. No one ever dominates the stage, which is sometimes frustrating (shouldn't the king overpower his courtiers?), but overall does two really wonderful things: (1) It allows the audience to experience Richard's inefficacy as king, and to squirm just a little in what we imagine must be his shame and humiliation when his subjects ignore his commands, and (2) each actress is able to find little moments in her lines that are so poignant and which would probably be obscured by an overbearing scene partner. The actresses listen to one another and stand almost stock still until it is their turn to speak. The effect is still, solemn and tense.

The play is riveting, which is impressive given that it contains no sex, no fights, and the characters basically alternate between yelling at each other and grovelling at one another's feet. I think it's the passion that infuses every single line delivery, and again, that magic of stellar team work.

This is a show worth seeing; it's certainly Shakespeare worth doing.

The PB Blues

Blue no longer. Peanut butter, bacon and white bread is the atheist's manna. Now the difficulty is resisting making it for breakfast every morning (luckily, we used up the rest of the bacon fixing our sandwiches). To stave off any errant PBB cravings I made a batch of oatmeal breakfast bars with dried cranberries, granola and bittersweet chocolate, and I have a pot of french onion soup burbling on the stove for dinner. I'm going to add some fresh focaccia and a salad and a large glass of red wine, settle on the couch, and write my new syllabus.

T starts rehearsals at one of Portland's premier theatres tonight, so the cat and I have the run of the house. It's so beautifully clean (downstairs, anyway)! T and I spent all day spring cleaning--stove, cabinets, bookshelves, linens--which was boring but entirely satisfying. I've promised to clean the bathroom, and I need to leave for the gym in 20 minutes, so I better stop blogging. I just wanted to recommend the Elvis-wich. EAT IT. It will curtail your woes and make a party in your mouth.

What Will I Eat To Cure These Sunday Blues?

It's been a difficult week, partly because of Monday's dental fiasco and partly for reasons I don't feel like enumerating. There have been highlights, like finding out that my health insurance covers my visits to Bernie the Naturopath Sensei and watching my younger brother get spectacularly drunk and begin shedding his secrets like an itchy second skin. I also have T, who is always a comfort, and a carton of chocolate sorbet and a disc of Freaks and Geeks episodes for when I really need to mope. We also spent a couple of evenings with Tom's childhood friend Carrie, who is gorgeous, charming and so totally full of shit that every moment with her is delightful and hilarious. So when I survey the week in its totality life is not so bad.

But that's no reason not to eat like it is. To cure the aches in my heart this week I think I'm going to cook something divine and scandalous, like Nigella's grilled Skippy peanut butter and bacon sandwich on white bread. I'll walk to the local Safeway feeling deliciously guilty and excited. I've been morbidly fascinated by the Elvis-wich ever since Martha Stewart Living did a spread on alternative club sandwiches several years ago. It looks so good! Golden bread laced with butter, smothered in rich, sweet peanut butter and graced with a few strips of crisp bacon drizzled with maple syrup. Each bite must be a combination of sweet, salty, creamy and crunchy Americana that even Ruth Reichl would approve of. (Ruth Reichl is, by the way, my culinary hero. She understands the sensuality of ingredients and dining, and is never afraid of food.) I'll eat my sandwich on the couch and watch the latest episode of Survivor, just to fully savor the trashiness of my weekend coping mechanism.

But before I descend into the subversive world of emotional eating and television I have to finish grading my students' finals and call my sweet friend Glenna. T and I also have to go watch the latest show at the theatre and have dinner at his parents' house, so I will have to grade with speed and determination in order to save ample time for Glenna and my sandwich and possibly a long hot shower to wash away the yuckiness of this week and make me feel new again.

Food.
Friends.
Hot Water.

What else could a girl ask for?

Dr. Doom and Hades' Porcelain Crown

It all started with an ill-fated trip to a dentist who specializes in cosmetics. I don't go in for unnecessary dental work, but Dr. Calcagano was recommended to me by a coworker and I needed a routine cleaning. This was several months ago. I went in for the cleaning and emerged with an appointment to have one of my metal fillings replaced with a 3/4 crown. According to Dr. Tooth Demon, this is because old fillings can crack and they contain mercury. I wasn't over-eager to spend the money on an uncracked filling, but the dentist's precaution seemed valid and I wanted to avoid the root canal that comes with a fractured tooth.

That was my first mistake. The crown was expensive and led to a lot of new sensitivity and discomfort. I decided after the procedure that I would resist all of Dr. Blond Evil's future efforts to replace my remaining fillings, but--on the plus side--I'd learned a lesson about the ideology of cosmetic dentistry (Why Leave Well Enough Alone When You Can Replace It With A Prettier, More Expensive Prosthetic) and moved on, albeit by favoring the left side of my mouth.

That was my second mistake. (Not that I had a choice by this point: it's useless to mourn over a tooth now calcifying in a bio waste facility.) Three months passed and I began experiencing a deepening discomfort in my crown. First an acute sensitivity to cold, then a deep ache that woke me up in the night and pursued my jawline in a near perfect semicircle of ow.

Back to the Dental Dominatrix for a new round of pleasure.
"I'm probably overreacting," I told the jovial dental assistant, "But it's really starting to hurt."
"No problem," she replied in the kindly, conspiratorial tone that all of Doctor Barbie's assistants employ. "We don't want you in pain!"
Not in pain, perhaps, but certainly in debt. For here is what happened next.

No sooner had the good doctor x-rayed and tapped my teeth when she cheerily announced that I had irreversible nerve damage and needed an emergency root canal. She got to work immediately, stuffing my mouth with a dental dam (the domestic equivalent of water boarding), numbing my face up to the eyeballs, and drilling away with a stunning array of equipment. I knew something was amiss when my otherwise petite and Prada-clad dentist started breathing heavily and sweating over the din of the drill.
"Well, I can only find one canal," she regretted to inform me. "And I can't even get down that one. We'll have to send you upstairs to Dr. Johnson."
Dr. Johnson is a root canal specialist. The perky assistant marched me upstairs mid-procedure, swollen, stuffed with cotton, and oozing little trickles of bloody spit, where I got to sit for 45 minutes and try not to cry with frustration. The icing on the cake was the unfeeling secretary, who informed me that I would just have to wait because they were very busy and I "didn't have an appointment." When I finally got into the new dentist's chair (shockingly Ken Doll-ish, if Ken was curt and a little chubby), I received another numbing shot, another joyous dental dam, a broken spit suction tool, an aggressive large male hand in my mouth, and HALF of a root canal.
"I'm sorry," Ken said sympathetically while I squirmed in pain and irritation, "But we're very busy today. I'll just medicate your tooth and see you next week to finish the job."
To be fair, I think he stopped in part because the numbing medicine that I had received 3 1/2 hours earlier was wearing off and I was clutching the arms of the chair like an action hero clutches the mountain cliff's edge. His sympathy didn't extend to the bill, however, which was enormous. Again, imagine me confronting the emotionless secretary, trying not to cry while I hand over my first born child. Still drooling blood, of course.

The day would have concluded relatively unhappily after this, but more adventure was in store for me. You see, Dr. Blond Evil's office validates parking, but Dr. Ken Doll's does not. So I got to walk several blocks downtown in the pouring rain, looking like Clint Eastwood after a stroke, grimacing in pain, to find an ATM machine to pay for parking. At this point I also realized that I hadn't eaten since 6:20am.

What eats at my heart and soul, and mouth, is that my tooth was 100% healthy before the Blond Death took over. And now I have paid for a crown, a root canal, and innumerable x-rays in two dental offices. The injustice of it all! The naivete of Little Chef! And deep in my lidocained, bitter heart is the (basically irrational) fear that they've tapped the wrong tooth.

I have half a mind to write my dentist a letter, but I hate to be "that patient." My mouth feels like Dante's 7th circle and my cheek looks like Cerberus' ugliest head. My wallet is empty and my faith in dentistry is shattered. Thank goodness for T, who is bringing me hot and sour soup. Life is full of the biggest blessings.

Cohabitation, Family-Style

My dad made an interesting suggestion the other night, one which my parents have coyly talked around for years and are only now making explicit. I have a feeling that this change in rhetorical method has to do with the fact that T and I are planning on buying a house some time this year and that the houses we can afford are, in real estate jingo, "cozy," "full of character," and very "vintage." They also all happen to be in "good neighborhoods for first-time home buyers," which is a transparent euphemism for, "We've just evicted the meth addicts and people of color! Come, o ye educated young white folk, and gentrify the Hood!"

But this is besides the point. What my father is suggesting--with my mother hovering earnestly nearby--is that T and I consider moving into a large house with them.

Consider the benefits:
1. Built in babysitting when the time arrives.
2. Shared household expenses.
3. Shared organic garden.
4. A return to the centrality of family intimacy and support in American life that began to die out with the baby boomers.
5. Partially exempt ourselves from the failing American system of individual acquisition--reducing our geographical and, to a lesser extent, carbon footprints.
6. Provide our filmmaker friend with the basis for an excellent, European cinema-esque family dramedy.

It might be nice to live with my parents, provided that we had (as my father insists we would) a private apartment and the same financial and social independence we have now (more so, in fact, as we get older and more successful). I like the idea of collective dinners and proximity to the people we love. I also like the idea of living in a classy house in a beautiful neighborhood, rather than a 900 sqft bungalow in Felony Flats.

But, I have considerable concerns:
1. Is it possible to have real independence from your parents' concerns and hopes for you if you live one ceiling away from them? My father already shoots rays of anxiety and advice from across the river. Won't the temptation to intercede just grow stronger as the distance between us recedes? Also, how can T and I grow as independent adults if we remain somewhat dependent on my parents' resources?
2. There's something to be said for privacy. I like making my own financial decisions. I like raising the heat if it's really freezing out. I like coming home and feeling unobserved. Kicking my shoes off, changing into pajama bottoms and getting dinner rolling. Taking a hot bath if I feel like it, having sex on our orange velvet couch if I feel like it, conducting ridiculous and embarrassing conversations with the cat if I feel like it. Not waking up to the morning habits of other people. You might say that most of this is possible even living with my parents (the couch would obviously be in our section of the house), but a lot of my daily activities remain exciting and fun because they're things I started doing when I first moved out on my own. It just feels good--physically and psychologically--to stretch my legs in my own space.
3. I love my baby brother, but I don't want to become the in-house babysitter. This might change as T and I have children--why not have another youngster running around--but right now it's lovely to shirk the daily responsibilities of parenthood.
4. Our design input--house and garden--will be severely limited if we share space with my parents. It's important not to feel like a guest in your own house.

In the end, I doubt we'll move in together, at least right now; I'm sure we'll end up caring for either my parents or T's parents down the line. But I do think a seismic shift needs to occur in the American lifestyle so that we all live more sustainably and more connectedly with one another. Owning one's own piece of the pie may be intrinsic to capitalism, but it's hurting our resources and landscape. Maybe the independence and privacy T and I crave are the negative results of a social system that privileges consumer acquisition--that illogically equates success with buying your own stuff and spatially separating yourself from your family and friends. Our children would love living with grandma and grandpa and Uncle Luke. It would be nice after a long day to run down the stairs and suggest a communal dinner. To all be in one place and around to help one another.

I don't know. Part of me is seduced by the idea, and the other parts repulsed. We can always buy a house now and consider a collective move later, after watching the evolution of the American financial market and social welfare system (health care, education, employment) for a while. All I know is that I do want to make a greater effort to live well in this world, making healthy decisions for our environment and city. And it's a start, but not enough, to buy organic and local food and to use organic skin care products. It's going to require reappraising what it means to live successfully and self-satisfyingly in a space that needs to be shared and preserved.