Reactionary

Yesterday, I was at the market getting new spring produce since I’m tired of eating sweet potatoes and kale. Excited with the coming season, I had picked up some ramps and strawberries and spring onions. I was hunched over the mushroom basket taking my pick of the newest morels. I only wanted a few, for one dish I had planned out with some of Zingerman’s polenta. At $59.99 a pound, a few was all I can afford. I was busily inspecting them and selecting a small handful when some woman, who wasn’t an employee but some other customer said to me, “Don’t they sell them in baskets?” The mushrooms are in small baskets but you can pick and choose them since they’re horribly expensive. She was trying to tell me to get a basket ($60 just in mushrooms, anyone?) and be done.

I was irate but I played dumb. I did my best doe-eyed expression and asked if she wanted one of them. “No,” she said, fat and blonde and stupid, “I just thought they sold them in baskets.” Yeah, whatever. Keep your pug nose out of my business, wench. She probably doesn’t even know what morels are. I hate when people think they know better. Perhaps next time, I should take the entire basket of creminis because, you know, they just sell the basket. Or what about the entire 20 pound box of white onions in the back, just because, you know, they sell just the basket.

I’ll stagger off to bed now. Today I hung the top bar of the new closet doors and bought the newest LP in my collection… Turkey.

P.S. I just wasted 2 hours watching The Time Traveler’s Wife. Eric Bana is stunning but the movie’s just awful. I hate time travel. It’s one of the unforgiveables in fiction for me. I’m still deciding whether I should bother ripping it or not. I doubt I’ll sit through it again.

I wrote this on April 11th, 2010 | Topic: Life, Rant |  Print |  Email | Comments (1)

I haven’t had a proper vacation since last October. I’ve had a few days away from work but they went to things like a brief trip home for the holidays and then I spent my birthday weekend babysitting my mother. I need to get away. Thanks to staffing constraints, getting out from underneath at work has become incredibly difficult. I missed all the deadlines for requesting time off in the spring. I have a long weekend coming up in May that I requested just as a laugh because I had signed up to take some class. Other than that, that’s it. I also opted to take a week in the summer when I usually don’t. I just knew I wouldn’t make it out alive if I didn’t take that week when offered.

I’ve spent the last few weeks maniacally trying to shoehorn some kind of a vacation into those two slots. The times cannot change. They are sure and inviolate. But the options keep changing. For the weekend in May, I wanted to go up to Montreal and bundle that with a visit to a friend I haven’t seen in a while. It turns out that friend will be working that weekend and cannot get away. Darn hospital people. So, I guess Montreal is out because it would be callous of me to plan it knowing that the friend will be working and will be unable to get out to spend time. Where else can I go for a couple of days that wouldn’t cost too much? Europe may be too expensive for such a quick trip. The cost of the ticket alone is so onerous, that I’d be better off only buying it if I plan to stay for a long time. So maybe Canada in June since I know better not to go to Europe in the summer, no matter how much it beckons.

So what about May? Hawaii would be perfect but it’s so far away from this coast. Vegas is trashy. Miami is too humid and too full of posers. DC can be done in a day. Atlanta bores me. Boston… I used to live there. Manhattan can be done in a weekend and since the bedbug problem exploded, I think twice before getting a hotel room there. The Midwest could sink beneath the Earth and I wouldn’t care. Texas is crazy. It may be too warm and hurricaney for the Caribbean. So where? Where to go?

I wrote this on April 9th, 2010 | Topic: Life |  Print |  Email | Say something

Whilst looking at a colleague’s blog today that featured her crafts etc, I let slip that I also maintained a blog. But no, I can’t give out the URL. So that was a cop out and I’m sorry I said anything at all, but I’m not willing to get fired if this place should be found. I don’t care who reads it and I don’t care who knows me, but I can’t let work people put the two and two together. I can’t get fired for something that stupid. Courts have repeatedly come down on the side of the employer and upheld the decision to fire the troublemaker. I will not censor myself, but I can’t have it freely known where I rant on about the Evil Empire. I already get bad job evals from the Equine. I don’t need it to get worse. Pretty soon, I’ll be paying them to work there as it is.

For the hopefully uninformed, the Constitution does not protect “freedom of speech”. It upholds “freedom of the press”. I am not the press and my words etc can be construed as defamation etc since I don’t have a mandate to communicate news or opinion onto the news. I’m just a lone wolf howling in the desert.

P.S. The Constitution also does not uphold anything about this so-called right to privacy. That’s only a tradition, not a judicially guaranteed right. So, stop invoking it.

I wrote this on April 7th, 2010 | Topic: Rant |  Print |  Email | Say something

In the early morning light

Rittenhouse Square in the first blush of the morning mist.

The courtyard behind the Thinker.

I need to get Aperture 3. The way things are currently, everything is named so confusingly that it’s hard to find a picture. I admit that it’s entirely my fault since I didn’t bother to read the manual when I started using it and so it snowballed from there. Does it have a portal to Photoshop? That would be incredibly cool but probably disallowed by Adobe.

I wrote this on April 2nd, 2010 | Topic: Shutterbug |  Print |  Email | Say something

Spring arrives

Finally, a full day of spring descended upon my reality that’s been fraught with seemingly endless problems, often of my own creation. The above picture isn’t even from this weekend, but the one two before when the sun shone but I had been sleeping on the couch and was exhausted thanks to the Flood and the Monstrosity so I barely noticed. The next, it rained torrentially and the windows leaked. This last one, was a beaut… even though I spent Saturday inside thanks to my stupid idea to paint my closet with the leftover green paint. I also needed to sort my clothes and get rid of what I won’t wear. It was far more work than I bargained for and it took me the entire blessed day.

It was harder than it looks but it was one more step to being done with the spring cleaning. When I think I’m done, I come up with some other psychotic project that I absolutely must do. But it’s spring and it feels like it’s finally the first one for me in the new place.

Now I have to get cracking on the novel rewrite.

I wrote this on March 21st, 2010 | Topic: Domicile, Life |  Print |  Email | Say something

Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar … The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it …
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all; all honourable men)
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral …
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man….
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason…. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

It’s National Backstabbed By Your Friends Day.

Seriously, 15 March is the infamous Ides of March when 2054 years ago, G. Julius Caesar, the original whose name became a title, was stabbed to death in the Theatre of Pompey in Rome. Here’s to the original Renaissance Man… when the things brought back during the Renaissance were having their original date in the sun. Marc Antony, who William Shakespeare would write a terrific speech for 1600 years later, dressed in slave clothes and ran away but gave a speech on the rostra that afternoon. Some people may wonder what the big deal is all about, but those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Think on the date for a moment how easily democracy can be taken away, how you have to stand for something or you’ll stand for anything, and how precarious power can be. And I’m not talking about Caesar, but the plotters who thought, in their blindness, that if they killed him, the old republic would come back. Little did they know that they killed it when they killed him and democracy wouldn’t be seen again until the Colonies broke with Britain. They had no plan, they only had jealousy and fear for their privileges which they felt his reforms were eroding. Think about that, especially with the big tug of war going on now In Washington.

Or just get educated already.

I wrote this on March 15th, 2010 | Topic: News, Scholar |  Print |  Email | Say something

What I did this weekend:

• Hung art in the bathroom.
• Cleaned the bathroom in its entirety.
• Changed out the makeup and cleaned the cart.
• Cleaned the oven.
• Changed the bed linen to the spring collection and washed and stored the fall linen.
• Vacuumed thoroughly.
• Cleaned beneath the steps and changed the storage situation of the towels and the tools.
• Wiped down the pantry shelves.
• Washed the Aran sweater.
• Scrubbed the floors and the steps of the entryway.

Things yet to be done:

• Store winter clothes and winnow the rest of the clothing closet.
• Paint the closets.
• Change the doors.
• Scrub kitchen floors.

I went out and bought some tealights and they look great in the little IKEA green glass I moved into the bathroom. I also got my stainless steel bowl and a new bottle of linen spray. The relentless rain helped keep me locked inside.

Pictures coming when more is done. Come April, I want to be done with housing updates until the fall.

P.S. Wow, Dirty Pretty Things, while grotesque, is a pretty awesome movie.

I wrote this on March 14th, 2010 | Topic: Domicile, Life |  Print |  Email | Say something

I’d love to come home and stick the iPod somewhere that would recharge it and yet keep the tunes playing. It would be nice to have a James Bondian setup with a little slot in the wall and everything else built in. But I’d settle for a Bose system and the new outlet to house it.

But what do I *really* want for my birthday? Some time with a real designer and an architect to tell me what to really do with this place so I wouldn’t waste any money doing it. When it comes to home design, you either have time or money and it looks like I’m stuck with time, honey.

But what do I really really really want for my birthday? Five seconds of complete freedom with the time and space conundrum. That’s all.

I wrote this on March 10th, 2010 | Topic: Life |  Print |  Email | Say something

The dehumifier that could short out the circuit.

March is said to come in like a lion. What the saying refers to is the changeable weather as winter loosens its grip on the land and green shoots begin to appear in spite of continued frosts, rain, and wind. This year, March has started with some instantly spring weather but it knocked me over in another way. My beautiful paint job scarcely had a chance to dry when I came home late one night and found the floor of the bedroom wet. All wet. At first I thought the 100-year-old windows had leaked since it had been raining.

It wasn’t the windows. One side of the bed, the side farthest from the windows, was soaking wet. I panicked and thought my shower had leaked. It wasn’t that either. While I was putting down towels to soak it up, I overhead my neighbor in the hallway fending off an angry landlord for the apartment on the floor below. Their water heater had leaked. Since my bedroom is sunken, about three feet below their kitchen, the water had gathered in the space and while at the same time dripping into the apartment below, it had found its way beneath the drywall into my bedroom. Are you frickin’ kidding me?

As I write this, there are two huge fans and an industrial-sized dehumidifier that I have taken to calling the Monstrosity in my bedroom. I spent Thursday afternoon having a confrontation with the He-Neighbor and moving books and bookshelves that less than two weeks ago I had moved back into the bedroom and thought that was the end of it. I have spent the nights since sleeping on the sofa with white noise of the two fans and the dehumidifier churning away in the bedroom. They’re generating so much energy that it was 73 degrees in the apartment today. It’s in the 40′s outside and I have drafty windows. Do the math.

Thanks to poor communication by the carpet cleaning company, I missed the guy today to pick the crap up and will have to deal with it until Monday afternoon when hopefully that part of the nightmare will end. And then I can deal with the other part of the nightmare in getting someone to pay for this.

I think I should get an award for continuing to honor my shifts at work around this chaos. I would have been entirely justified in calling out just because of my severe fatigue. If I were 5 inches shorter, it would be easy to sleep on the couch but it just wouldn’t be that easy, would it?

In other news, we’ve bid farewell to our Cute Italian fellow. There goes my model for Marco. Good thing Argentines have a similar word choice and cadence with English.

I wrote this on March 6th, 2010 | Topic: Life |  Print |  Email | Say something

The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

RECIPE SOURCE:

Mascarpone Cheese – Vera’s Recipe (Baking Obsession) for Homemade Mascarpone Cheese.
Savoiardi/ Ladyfinger Biscuits – Recipe from Cordon Bleu At Home
Tiramisu – Carminantonio’s Tiramisu from The Washington Post, July 11 2007

Well, this was so time-consuming that if it hadn’t been for the big snowstorm mid-month, I never would have gotten it done. It also marked the first Daring Bakers challenge that I have had to repeat a part of the process. I don’t love tiramisu and prefer gelato as dessert rather than this rich tourist favorite, but this version has an great cream filling that benefited from some small changes I made to the requirements.

The first part I made were the savoiardi on a night off midweek. I attempted to make them using my pastry bag but it was a disaster and the resulting cookies looked like tortured tree branches. I knew they were fated to be lost in the cream, though, so I wasn’t worried, but their complete ugliness prompted me to attempt to make the recipe again the next week. This time, I used a cut off plastic bag instead of the pastry bag and the results were much more even. Recipe-wise, if I ever make them again, I’ll top them with granulated sugar rather than the confectioner’s called for in the recipe. I doubt I’ll make them again, though. Biscotti are so way funner and taste better.

I have never in my life made cheese. It belongs to that family of foods that defy rhyme or reason why someone would want to make it at home when others do it so much better. But, fathfully, I followed the recipe, I even purchased cheesecloth. I have no idea what went wrong. I thought I had done it right, but the resulting product was just a step away from the original creaminess of the heavy cream itself and a far cry from the mascarpone you buy in the store. Due to the price of whipping cream, I didn’t repeat this recipe, since I was also running out of time to get all the pieces done.

On the day of the forcasted (and as yet unseen Snowicaine), I made the zabaglione and the pastry cream as well as finished the tiramisu. I have made zabaglione before but this time it didn’t turn out quite right. I used coffee instead of marsala since I don’t have marsala in the house and I intended to take this thing to work and not keep it at home. I don’t own a bain marie and usually use a glass bowl over water in a saucepan for melting chocolate. I used the glass bowl setup this time as well and proceeded according to the recipe. After 40 minutes of stirring and no change in the stiffness of the cream, I got desperate and moved it to a smaller saucepan that I set inside the larger one. Glass is a poor heat conductor and less so when you’re counting on it to cook the food in the bowl and not just heat it. A stainless steel bowl has been added to my shopping list for next month.

The pastry cream cooked up like a dream, though and I’ve continued my streak of good luck with custards. I used orange zest both in the pastry cream and the zabaglione instead of lemon zest for a nice twist. Oranges are so in this time of year.

For assembling the final tiramisu, I used a loaf pan for ease of transport to work. The homemade savoiardi just fit a row across end to end at the top to make up for the empty space. I’m glad i remade them so I had cookies that were approximately the same size. Once the three layers were done, the loaf pan was filled all the way to the top. I topped it with chocolate curls rather than powder. I always hate the powder on top of tiramisus and wasn’t going to do the same thing with my own. I have an entire box of chocolate odds and ends and this was as good a time as any to use them.

There is one thing I must vent about. The required 2 cups of espresso is far, far too much. It could be my savoiardi were smaller than average, but given the recipe we were given, I doubt they were that much smaller. Unless I misread or misunderstood the 2 cups to mean 2 demitasse cups of espresso rather than the 500ml I made, it’s a huge, wasteful amount. Not even half a cup of it was used. And i had put Grand Marnier in it instead of rum. What a waste. I feel awful. As I write this, it’s sitting on my stove sadly blinking at me. I hate, hate waste and I hate how I didn’t listen to my common sense on this one.

As far as the finished product is concerned, as of this writing, I have yet to taste it but if the leftovers of the cream were any signal, it’s a good version of the dessert.

Addendum 2.28.2010: I’ve tried the tiramisu. It’s less coffeesque than I’d hoped. Maybe that’s from my using instant espresso powder to make the coffee rather than brewing it. Also, it’s a bit too sweet for me. If I made it again, I’d notch the sugar down. The cream doesn’t keep its form and just sliding down so the layers look like a mudslide in slow motion. I’ll stick with my old recipe if I ever make it again.

I wrote this on February 27th, 2010 | Topic: Food |  Print |  Email | Comments (5)

The bathroom needs to be finished Monday. I can’t believe how happy I am with the paint color.

I wrote this on February 21st, 2010 | Topic: Domicile |  Print |  Email | Comments (1)