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!