Beige grains in the old green Mason jar
In suspended animation
Await warm water and food.
Feed them the miller’s wheat,
Flavor them with salt.
Knead, rest, rise, bake:
Crusty joy,
Magic.
Bread.
This post has been a Monday Mission, this week's mission being to write a post in the form of a Tanga or a Nonet. I think I'm done writing about bread, at least for a while.
The close reader may well have wondered why I made two different loaves of bread the other day. One was the crusty little boule that accompanied our soup and salad dinner; the other was a basic sandwich loaf for school lunches and toast breakfasts.
I can, and do, make a nice plain white bread by hand, with the usual kneading and whatnot. But more often, I rely on a shortcut - a homemade mix done up in the bread machine.
The recipe is pretty basic - the only non-dry ingredients are water and butter. In assembly line fashion, I measure out all of the dry stuff (flour, salt, yeast, sugar, powdered milk) into one quart plastic containers. Usually I batch up four quarts at a time, in addition to making a loaf right then and there. The mix gets stored in the fridge - which isn't completely necessary, but yeast keeps longer at cold temperatures. (I buy yeast in bulk and keep it in the freezer.) When it's time to make a loaf, I just need to add water and butter. Most of the time, I use the bread machine only for the knead and first rise - because I don't love the way it bakes the bread. It's easy enough to plop the dough into a bread pan for the second rise and bake it in the oven.
Why bother? Because it's cheaper than buying supermarket bread, and it's not full of ingredients that I can't pronounce.
Did you know that is Blog Action Day, and that this year's theme is Climate Change? I'd forgotten until Ilina posted a list of simple ways to be more environmentally conscious. Her list is pretty comprehensive, but she forgot one thing: turn down your thermostat in the winter. She's forgiven, though, because she lives in the south.
We haven't yet turned on the heat in our house - partially out of frugality, partially out of energy consciousness - even though the early morning outside temperatures have been in the 30s, and it is decidedly chilly in the house. (There hasn't yet been a frost.) Last year, we made it to the beginning of November; the other day, my husband quipped that we should aim for the first of December.
Once we do deign to put the heat on, we use a programmable thermostat that keeps the heat at 55°F at night and during the middle of the day. For the morning and evening rush, the temperature spikes up to 64°F. On weekends, we compromise at 60°F during the day. Yeah, it's not toasty warm in the house, but move around! Wear a sweater!
Tonight, I'll probably dig out the second duvet - I layer a newish medium weight one with a worn out thin one to get a nice winter weight down comforter.
And I'm not going to turn on the heat until I have to.
There is something magnificent about the (biblical) slogan above the entrance to the RCA Building, also known as 30 Rock or the GE Building. Alas, wisdom and knowledge have been denigrated and are no longer held in esteem. When wisdom and knowledge are again admired, will stability return?
I spent yesterday puttering around in the kitchen, making two different loaves of bread, a pot of squash soup, toasted squash seeds (as a garnish for the soup), and a plum cake. I could go on and on about the mediocre soup, the awesome seeds, and the excellent cake which the child wouldn't eat. But I won't. I need to proselytize instead.
On a hunch not too long ago, maybe as a result of a stray comment from Mad, I bought a copy of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. It's seriously easy, and seriously wonderful. The basic recipe has four ingredients (flour, water, salt, yeast). There is no kneading, and no special equipment is needed. The five minutes a day part isn't hyperbole. And, as I said to my husband last night, there's no reason to buy bread ever again.
You could run out and buy a copy of the book - but if you don't want to spend the money, you're in luck! The good grey lady ran the recipe and it's available on the internet - for nothing! (Is it any wonder that newspapers and book publishers are struggling?)
In essence, you make a big batch of wet dough, let it sit for a while, yank off a piece, tidy it up and let it rest, and then fling it into a hot oven. The leftover dough goes into the fridge until you're ready for another loaf. That's it. A perfect crusty little boule.
What are you waiting for?
Tangentially, "the staff of life" popped into my head as the right name for this post and because I am wont to do so, I googled it. The phrase, that is. Luckily for me, I found a blogger who had tried to chase down that phrase already, because I was getting lost in the biblical and the Latin and the Hebrew. It's confusing, the staff of life.
Laugh Mom's guest post at Aiming Low - in which she confesses to her small child that she, too, had peed in the pool - prompts me to reveal something that I've been holding close to my heart for a very long time.
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I peed in Madeleine Albright's swimming pool. I was a mere child, and she was decades away from becoming Secretary of State.
Your turn. What's your true confession for today?
How is it that I never learned how to be a girl? A real girlische girlie girl?
When I was a child, my mother would get dressed up to go out to dinner, or to the ballet, and she'd put on make-up (and Youth Dew). Not a lot, but a spot of blush and some lipstick, and maybe a little eye shadow. And she always painted her toenails, and for a while she had a hairpiece, a fake bun thing that attached to the back of her head with a comb.
In the past week, two bloggers have posted about the contents of their bathroom cabinets: Mayberry's daughter had a "playdate makeover" which involved serious quantities of lipstick, eye shadow and nail polish, and Ilina catalogued the astonishing amount of "product" under her bathroom sink.
I confess to owning two bottles of nail polish - one pale pink for bribing the child ("I'll paint your toenails if you let me cut them first"), one dark metallic grey to horrify the husband. My usual morning toilette is simple: I take a shower, put moisturizer on my face and legs, brush my hair, apply deodorant, and I'm done. I'm semi-convinced that the reason that the skin on my face looks good is because I never wash it. Instead, I rely on the water rinsing off from the top of my head. I don't wear eye shadow, mascara, blush or lipstick; I never polish my fingernails; I paint my toenails with the afore-mentioned dark grey once every couple of summers; and though I did dye a blue streak in my hair twice this year, I've never otherwise colored my (greying) hair.
My daughter, therefore, is growing up with an unpainted role model. I dress casually, in jeans 95% of the time, I make my own pie crust, I patch and repatch her patchwork quilt. I'm some kind of quasi-hippie, crunchy around the edges. And I'm worried about backlash. Is my daughter destined to grow up and never leave the house without foundation and fake lashes?
Last week's news that Chanterelle had closed made me sad. It's not like I was a regular or anything, but it's the only really high end restaurant that I've had the great good fortune to eat at more than once - maybe ten times in the past twenty years. Some of those times were galas; I work for a non-profit and for several years running we did a fancy fabulous dinner at Chanterelle as a fund-raising event. But some of those meals were just dinners out, for a birthday, an occasion, a celebration. And there are memory fragments from those evenings seared into my head. I can conjure up the taste of an appetizer, a layered terrine of 1/8" stripes of beef shin and foie gras, the unctuous foie gras contrasted with the meaty beef, enhanced with a dribbles of a vaguely Asian sauce. Squirreled away in my jewelry box is an irregular pearl - the bonus in a diver-caught Maine scallop that my husband ate one night. For a while, a good friend worked in the kitchen - which meant extra dishes just because, and once, a raucous late night game of ibble-dibble with the waitstaff after the restaurant had closed. Another night, it snowed. We sat snugly in the warm golden room, watching the snow fall through the big windows.
The food was perfect, the setting was elegant without being stuffy, and the waitstaff was the antithesis of supercilious. Thank you. We'll miss you.
The first grader brings home an eccentric mishmosh of books from the school library. The other day, it was a book about Korea - a "photographic alphabet" called K is for Korea. I think she'd asked for a book about either China or Japan; somehow she ended up with Korea.
In any case, I duly read the book to her one evening, and was amused to find the entry for the letter G:
Perhaps my next blog should be called Ggachi Gamboling.
Did you read the appalling story about meat and E. coli in yesterday's New York Times? You will never eat ground beef from the supermarket again. One of the most egregious comments was from one Dr. Kenneth Petersen of the USDA, who was quoted as follows:
Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. “I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,” Dr. Petersen said.
I'm sorry, but letting corporations dance willy-nilly on the packing house floor without putting public health first is criminal and cynical. The impact on companies should not be a consideration when addressing the health and safety of the food supply for the American public. I hope that Dr. Petersen has had his head handed to him and I faxed a letter to that effect to his boss.
Ever since reading Fast Food Nation, we've tried hard to eliminate supermarket meat from our diet. In each of the past two years, we've bought about a quarter of a steer - grass fed, locally raised, artisanally butchered, excellent beef. The meat is not hugely more expensive than what comes from the supermarket - we pay one price per pound, not less for ground beef and more for filet - though we do have to lay out the cash for a lot of meat all at once, and have freezer space to hold it all.
We know where to get live chickens in our county (though we opt for the recently dead ones), and I can find humanely raised pork and lamb at the Greenmarket. And since joining the CSA a few years ago, our diet - especially in the summer/fall - has skewed towards vegetables. Meat's become an accent, an occasional meal.
I don't think humans should forgo meat - animals eat animals, after all - but I do think that it's incumbent upon us to do it as graciously as possible, and to remember what Michael Pollan said: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
Did you know I was a nerd? I kind of am. I like word games, like Scrabble (in the flesh and on FaceBook) and Moxie (on my iPhone). I spent countless hours in college playing Boggle with my roommate, while we listened to Springsteen and drank Black Russians. I think logic puzzles – the kind that you need a grid (and a pencil eraser) to figure out – are fun. Back in the day, I got an 800 on the analytic section of the GRE. Most mornings, I do the Ken-Ken in the Times, though it makes me crazy that they print it across the fold.
I have a Nintendo DS, but the games I had for it never really grabbed my attention. I tried MillionHeir/Mystery Case Files – but it’s kind of tedious, and not terribly challenging (and the music is annoying). Rhythm Heaven is fun, but it’s more about timing, not logic. But what’s really gotten under my skin?
Professor Layton. 
I haven’t played the first one (Curious Village), but I’m in the midst of the Diabolical Box and it’s enchanting. It has a meandering little story line with a lot of puzzles – some tricky, some simple, many varieties. The scenery and people are somewhat reminiscent of those in the Miyazaki films. Sometimes the story advances through little videos, sometimes it’s more interactive in that you have to "talk" to the characters you encounter. I like that you can play it with the sound off because all of the dialogue is also shown as sub-titles - but the spoken dialogue is pretty well acted, with a mess of British accents. The puzzles are clever, and there's a "memo" feature that lets you scribble on the screen to figure out sums or paths. I did, however, resort to modeling a cube out of folded paper to solve one of the brainteasers.
The only bad thing? It's keeping me from reading! Instead of climbing into bed with my current book, I'm playing a video game. My husband thinks I've lost my mind. In point of fact though, I may be exercising it to enhance plasticity and stave off forgetfulness. Good justification, right?
My Italian grandmother of a husband has been at it again. A bushel of tomatoes, and a half a bushel of peaches, have become:
She climbs into our bed
somewhere in the middle
of the night
and throws an arm over me,
proprietary,
"you're mine, Mama".
I have a hard time denying her,
me,
this simple pleasure.
Someday she won't want
such sweet proximity,
she'll cut her apron strings,
she'll grow into her own,
she'll proudly sleep all night in her own bed.
But now,
the little, warm, sleeping body
with the heavy arm draped across my belly
is far closer to the babe in the womb
- my babe -
than I'd ever thought possible
almost six years ago.
She takes my breath away.
Dear C&B2:
"Cylinder" is not a verb.
Yours,
Magpie
The news that William Safire has died leaves me a bit wistful. On the one hand, his politics were execrable. On the other, his explorations of language both written and oral were erudite and entertaining, not to mention a reason to open the New York Times magazine every Sunday. And, though it was words for Spiro Agnew, you have to respect one who can pen such an ace archetype of alliteration as "nattering nabobs of negativism".
I do believe that he would have agreed that "cylinder" is not a verb.
Seven squared.
Indium.
The number of strings on a harp.
The number of keys on a celesta
The code for international direct dial phone calls to Germany.
The Crying of Lot 49.
Alaska.
William Faulkner was born on this day. So were Mark Rothko, Ethel Rosenberg and Glenn Gould. Emily Post died on the 25th of September. And it's the feast day of Saint Finbarr.
But today? Today, today? It's my husband's birthday. Happy birthday, sweetie.
The inimitable Niobe finds all manner of electronic ephemera, most recently the website of the Oracle of Delphi. One of my teeth has been bugging me, so I thought I'd address the problem to the Oracle.
You have asked:
What's the matter with my tooth?
I respond:
Find glory in a storied industry
Whose wrought chronologies be not to scale.
My dentist, whose office is adorned with a cringe inducing foot-powered drill and and antique dental cabinet of many small drawers, will be amused to hear that his is a "storied industry".
Later in the day, I was poking around my child's elementary school's website. The site has links to some other educational sites, including the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. Putting aside the weird jargon of "manipulatives", I was struck by the notion that children in the K-2 age group might be expected to know what the Sieve of Eratosthenes is. Do you know? I'd never heard of it, but, as ever, Wikipedia elucidated me: it's an algorithm for finding prime numbers.
So, dear readers, where have you found Greek today?
I thought only Congress could decree things to be "National Day of Thus and Such", but Hasbro has proclaimed tonight to be "National Family Game Night".
And even though I'm kind of viscerally opposed to participating, sheep-like, in invented holidays, I rather like sitting down en famille and playing games. Unfortunately, while we could play Jenga, or Chutes and Ladders, or Pictureka tonight, I think we're stuck playing an Everyday Math version of War instead.
The joys of homework: it involves the entire family.
Oh, I know, I've been down this road before, what with my evisceration of the Smencils and their packaging. But at some point while I was mulling over the whole recycled pencil situation, and poking around on the intertubes, I came across another purveyor of recycled pencils. One thing led to another, and a week or so later, I had a bunch of O'Bon pencils and a couple of their notebooks on my doorstep.
Let's start with the obvious: they're not scented. You don't need to wash your hands when you're done writing with them, because they're not scented. You don't have to wrinkle up your nose and cringe, because they're not scented. This is a good thing. The mere idea of scented pencils is just bewildering - why did someone think that was a good idea?
So, O'Bon = good, because they don't smell. But they are also fetchingly designed. The company sent me five packs of pencils. A dozen colored pencils, each one wrapped with a vibrant photograph of fruit in the appropriate color. Three 10 packs of black pencils: pop-art rainbows, animal prints, and my favorite, newsprint. And a set of artist pencils - 10 pencils graduated in hardness. Each set is packed in a cardboard box; the 10 packs are in an efficient triangular box - no plastic tubes! no vinyl case!
They sharpened easily, and did I mention that they don't smell?
The company's mission is pretty good, and unlike Smencils, I can't find any holes in their environmental argument. In their own words:Why buy O'BON products such as O'BON pencils?
Multiple reasons. By using old newspaper to make our pencils, we aren't cutting down any trees or using any new raw materials to make our products. By choosing O'BON, our customers are making the better environmental choice. The graphite in the pencils are wrapped with used newspaper so tightly that the graphite inside is given a strong layer of protection. This means that the graphite hardly ever breaks, resulting in a pencil that lasts about 3 times longer than the average wood one. And to top it all off, our designs are the best in the business.
See for yourself. I can't possibly use all of the pencils I got, even what with having a first grader who has homework to do, so I'm giving away a set of the wildlife pencils and a matching notebook. Leave me a comment on this post before day's end on Friday, and I'll choose a winner at random. [Edited to add: Mama Goose wins the pencils and pad!]
It's my mother's birthday. Or it would be. Actually, I guess it is. After all, January 27 is Mozart's birthday, and he's been dead for a lot longer than Moky has.
What to say, what to say? I kind of want to mark the day in somehow, and she has been in the back of my head all day.
In some strange detour on the web earlier, I found a plastic birdhouse that repels dogs - if the dog barks, the birdhouse makes a noise that shuts up the dog. It would have been a perfect gift, a yard ornament to combat the neighbor's barker that drove her bananas - especially because she'd never have spent $69 on a plastic birdhouse of dubious merit.
I thought about the last time I saw her - I kissed her cheek before the undertaker zipped her up. And then they bumped the removal trolley down the front steps and hoisted her into the waiting Cadillac hearse. At that point, my sister turned to me and said "she'd have hated that". "Yeah", I added, "it's a good thing it's so early that none of the neighbors are up."
She was easy to buy presents for - she was abstemious and frugal - so I could get her a stellar piece of cheese or some fancy chocolates or a soft and lovely sweater or the fleece hat she's wearing in the photo to the left or a brand-spanking-new hard cover book just out - and she would be pleased and tickled and happy to eat the cheese, washed down with some boxed wine. But a ride in a limo would have appalled her, just as she had no interest in manicures and massages - too indulgent, too ostentatious.
She would have been 74 today, and I wonder what she might have liked, this time, this year.
Happy birthday, Moky. Requiscat in Pace. And I hope Mozart is there singing the Ave Verum Corpus with you.
(Note: photo taken by my sister on my mother's 73rd birthday.)
On the other hand, the fact that my husband isn't going to work every day means that he's cooking dinner every night. Oh, he cooked a lot before, but now he's got more time to devote to it, so it's not just hamburgers and a salad alternating with pasta. And I've become the executive chef. What's been happening is I look at the list of vegetables from the CSA, the list we keep on the fridge because otherwise stuff gets skanky because we forget about it, and I say "how about you make ______?"
We had beautiful baby Red River kale, plenty of onions, and one Delicata squash. So the other day, I suggested risotto with roasted squash, kale and caramelized onions. He makes a fine risotto, though he usually sticks to ham and peas, or ham and asparagus - but he was game for the vegetable variation I suggested. Both the squash and the onions take a while to do, so it's totally not the kind of thing you start after work.
I can't give you a recipe, but he roasted the squash, pulled it out of its shell, and chopped it. He cooked four onions until they were nice and golden brown. The squash and onions were added to the risotto about midway through. The kale got rough chopped and thrown into the risotto about five minutes before the end - just enough time to wilt it. There was plenty of parmesan involved.
And it was good.
