Hausaufgoblin

Hey, We're Ahead of North Korea!

2012-02-09T10:40:00.002-05:00

Good news: our construction record is so much better than that of North Korea, whose main hotel is already 23 years late and still isn't finished!

North Korea’s super-sized hotel is set to open — 23 years behind schedule

The Gods Smile On Us Again

2011-09-07T18:52:00.000-04:00

Following up on our catsitter's post-Irene report that while we were sipping margaritas in Mexico, he was mopping water from the wall, I called the roofer yesterday to come look at this little leak. When he arrived this morning, the sky had already fallen. Turns out a tiny hole smaller than a dime was responsible for this massive destruction.

Roofer: You know, it was supposed to rain all day today, but the sun came out just long enough for me to repair that hole. I think maybe god is looking out for you!!

Me: [blink. Blink. Arch eyebrows. Deep inhale. Deep exhale Small smile.] I guess you could say that.

I mean, after all, given the amount of rain we had today, had the sun not come out, i suppose the whole house could have collapsed. Or it could have collapsed while my father was sleeping in the now destroyed bed that had been beneath it this weekend. He doesn't mind the couch - he can sleep standing up.

It's always good to look at the bright side.

Je suis chef!

2011-05-31T14:48:00.001-04:00

This is what exhaustion looks like.

-- Post From My iPhone

Still The One

2011-05-28T16:21:00.003-04:00

It always feels like home.

-- Post From My iPhone

12 Hours in Seattle

2011-04-13T22:45:00.007-04:00

Since I'm cleaning house, photographically speaking, i figured it's time to put up the last of the West Coast trip pictures. After the lovely week spent visiting Portland and the rugged Washington Coast, we headed off to Whistler, Canada for a week of mountain biking camp. I was too busy trying not to die to take many pictures of Whistler, and none of them are really worth posting here. We ended our trip with a day in Seattle.

Or it was supposed to be a day, anyway. Then i pulled out of the gas station in upstate Washington with the pump still attached to the car. Such an episode plays out much as you might expect to see it in the movies. There's a miscommunication between the driver and the pumper, and the driver goes to get some Peanut Butter M&Ms and passes the pumper who historically never leaves the pump in the car, so doesn't bother to look as she gets into the driver's seat, turns on the car, and drives away as the awful thumpy screechy sound happens and you can hear the metal of the top of the hose dragging along the pavement behind the car. The driver slams on the brakes, which at this point, does no good, but it's pretty much instinct. Driver inspects fiasco, pulls now-amputated nozzle out of gas tank, tries to casually replace it as hose scrapes along behind her, feels weight of stares of other pumpers as she slinks back into car, tries to hide face as she pulls into a parking space. At least these hoses are designed to pop off now and so it's not like there was also a massive spray of gasoline that threatened to explode. Mortified driver drags feet and rest of self into station to fess up to the damage she has done, and thus begins the calls to the insurance companies, etc., at which point she realizes that they will not have a lovely day to meander around Seattle, after all. And then it started raining, of course.

But in the end, while our day in Seattle became a few hours, all was not entirely lost - some meandering was still to be had, just not nearly as much as had been intended. I really love Seattle - it's definitely on the grungy side, with a decided industrial flavor, but the art there is phenomenal. It's like they took all the great civic art projects for all of the US, and plopped them in Seattle. Then there is the food, which is excellent and relatively inexpensive (although pricey by Portland standards). It's more upscale than the Portland scene - you can tell Seattle is playing New York to Portland's Philadelphia. But i love all of those cities, so had a great time wandering about in the rain.

Pike Place Market

Olympic Sculpture Park

Seattle's Sculpture Park is right up there with the Nasser in Dallas, only it's spread out across the Seattle waterfront. There are too many cool sculptures to name, although you can do a tour via the link above. But a few are worth pointing out. First, Stinger, by Tony Smith, was just unbelievably cool (to me). First of all, apparently Tony didn't take up sculpture until he was 50 years old, which gives me more encouragement on taking the intro to metal sculpture class at the Corcoran next semester. Secondly, Stinger is kind of hidden in this beautiful grove of white birches:

Then you kind of wind your way into the grove, to find this really slinky, seductive, reflective sculpture with an opening inviting you inside:

Apparently, the piece was originally titled "One Gate," but renamed after the Stinger cocktail, "which is deceptively sweet but slyly intoxicating." I wish someone would say that about me. ;) Anyway, I love the artist's note that even those "who take the wrong path, will find their way. It will be the right way, the correct way." It's interesting that he's alluding to Isaiah 40:4 (Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain), and then kind of makes an allusion to other biblical references - possibly Matthew's admonition that one must take the right path and enter the right gate for salvation and few are those who do so - but flips the admonition on its head (and all the other biblical references about taking The Right Path), by saying that even those who take the wrong path will find their way and "it will be the right way, the correct way." Which is how it feels getting here - there's no obvious path to it; you pick your own and then you're there. I love the message - or at least what i think is the message - that in the end, whatever path you take in life is the right one.

Anyway, there are other cool sculptures:

Roy McMakin, Untitled 2004-2007

Beverly Pepper, Perre's Ventaglio III (1967)

Alexander Calder, Eagle (1971)

And then there is my beloved Richard Serra, with the phenomenal Wake, a piece that also requires walking in, around, above, and away from it to get the myriad of sensations implied by the title.

The Seattle Art Museum also has a pavilion in the park, which i thought pretty architecturally cool:

Although nothing in the end was so architecturally fun to me on this trip as the jaw-dropping Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum. Essentially this project is supposed to be an homage to innovation in music and science, brought to you by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. We got there just in time for it to close, of course, but we did ride the one-stop monorail that runs from the Space Needle through the museum to the downtown mall. The building was designed (appropriately enough) by Frank Gehry, and interestingly enough, lots of people despise it, including the NYT architecture critic who describes it as looking like something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died. Read more on the history here. I say some people have no sense of humor. I mean, what is a museum dedicated to the childhood loves of a massive geek - rock music and science fiction - supposed to look like? Anyway, judge for yourself:

Self-portrait of the artist, wet, waiting for tram

And, since it was rainy here today, too, I close with an appropriate Poem of the Day:

Rain

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain.

Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.

Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name.

No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.

The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written:

“Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.”

The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face.

The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.

I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled.

If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.

I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me.

The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.
-Kazim Ali (2005)

Anatomy of a Friday Night Shutdown Watch

2011-04-09T17:22:00.015-04:00

4pm - Attend goodbye party for new work colleague (i barely knew ye!)
5:30pm - Send out last (?) emails, collect work i will do at home (just come and arrest me!)
6:30pm - Decline invites to continue goodbye bacchanalia due to lingering flu effects and responsibly head home sober and stone cold, as temps dropped at least 15 degrees from when i left house in tiny skirt - may as well be walking around naked from waist down. Ooo, and now it's raining too - cold and wet, my favorite!
7:30pm - First Friday night alone in years. Ask Scout for suggestions; decide self-administered tongue bath is intriguing from a gymnastic perspective but otherwise holds no real appeal for me.
8-9 pm - Replumb toilet and successfully stop tiny leak behind toilet that had potential to destroy entire floor. Given how many toilets I have fixed, both here, at friends', relatives', restaurants...wonder if i shouldn't take up plumbing.
9:15pm - check news on shutdown. Nada. Think maybe i should eat something.
9:30pm - Hmm...leftover Chinese? Leftover Mexican? Cereal? Salad? Oh look, here's that block of feta cheese i got to try as an experimental butternut squash-feta-hazelnut homemade ravioli recipe. Huh...it's going to expire next week...and there's the squash....
9:35pm - Cut open butternut squash and roast. Look for something to eat. Maybe the leftover Chinese.
9:45pm - Leftover Chinese terrible. Not really hungry anyway. Still trying to work off the 9 course extravaganza with wine pairing at Per Se, although 3-day influenza and bronchitis did most of the heavy lifting.
9:50 pm - Start making new homemade pasta recipe for ravioli dough.
10:15 pm - No news on shutdown. Hang out with friends...on Facebook. Realize 95% of friends and relatives require advanced planning to visit. Then realize seeing the friends i have here requires as much or more advanced planning to visit. Start to feel very, very old, yet not old enough to live in retirement home where are your friends live down the hall like they did in college and you can count on everyone getting together to watch tv every night in the smoking lounge. So now feel both old and not old enough.
10:45pm - Squash is done and cooled. Start inventing recipe and try to document for blog. Musical selection: Feist, The Reminder. Because I'm feeling feisty. Perpetual problems with taking photos without casting a shadow. Discover standing on counter ameliorates this problem. Realize I need new lens and really, a new camera. And some indirect flash equipment. If only I weren't about to be furloughed...
11:45pm - Squash formula perfected! Time to roll out the pasta dough!! Need happier music - Sufjan Stevens Illinoise!
12am - Don't like new pasta dough recipe at all. Plus, should have kept it in fridge so it didn't dry out. Make best of it.
12:15am - Check the news - have job! Hooray!! Oh wait, they gave away the farm. Or the women's half, anyway. Spend half hour reading analysis of the deal. Democrats doing usual circular firing squad; Republicans win again. Weep for women's rights; write angry FB status update.
12:45am - Back to ravioli. Angry woman music selection/dedication to the Dems: Aimee Mann I'm With Stupid.
1:45am Two dozen ravioli made...filling for ten dozen more.
2:15am - Clean kitchen.
3am - Still not tired. Surf Netflix and find the bad romcom I watched half of on plane to somewhere is available as streaming video. Woo hoo - can now watch other half!
4am - Happy ending!! Time for bed!

11am, Next Morning - Wake up, still upset about budget deal. Disgust with analysis in major newspapers - most of which essentially leave out entirely, minimize, or poo poo the continuing erosion of women's rights. Et tu, Economist?!
12:30pm - Find what I think is tongue-in-cheek political commentary New York Review of Books' Poem of the Day (Remember everyone, it's National Poetry Month, so be sure to read a poem a day!!)
And so, I close, with Frederick Seidel's Evening Man (2008). Learn more about Seidel's awesomeness here and here.

Evening Man

The man in bed with me this morning is myself, is me,
The sort of same-sex marriage New York State allows.
Both men believe in infidelity.
Both wish they could annul their marriage vows.

This afternoon I will become the Evening Man,
Who does the things most people only dream about.
He swims around his women like a swan, and spreads his fan.
You can't drink that much port and not have gout.

In point of fact, it is arthritis.
His drinking elbow aches, and he admits to this.
To be a candidate for higher office,
You have to practice drastic openness.

You have to practice looking like thin air
When you become the way you do not want to be,
An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair
That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey.

Of course, the real vacation we will take is where we're always headed.
Presidents have Air Force One to fly them there.
I run for office just to get my dark brown hair beheaded.
I wake up on a slab, beheaded, in a White House somewhere.

Evening Man sits signing bills in the Oval Office headless—
Every poem I write starts or ends like this.
His hands have been chopped off. He signs bills with the mess.
The country is in good hands. It ends like this.

Three Days in Barcelona

2011-04-05T22:22:00.002-04:00

It's particularly dreary around here today, as it is pouring rain and I am on day 2 of a vicious flu. In between bouts of unconsciousness, I decided to cheer myself up by finally going through the Barcelona pictures from last October's 3-day girls' weekend.

I've always wanted to visit Barcelona's sun-kissed shores, meander the winding streets of the Gothic Quarter, and discover for myself the culinary wonders I had heard everyone talk about. But mostly, I wanted to see Antoni Gaudí's Casa Milà. This is because about 15 years ago, when my mother asked what i would like for my birthday, i asked for a painting. While trained as an architect, she's also a talented watercolorist, and since i couldn't afford to buy any art, i thought it would be great to have her paint something. Inspiration being a funny thing, she was at the garden center shopping for a strawberry pot, when it occurred to her that the pot sort of looked like Gaudí's famous apartment building Casa Milà. So she went to the library, checked out some books on Gaudí, and for my birthday, I received a Gaudiesque strawberry pot.

In some ways, Barcelona is defined by Gaudí's architecture, from the Sagrada Familia, which dominates the central skyline-

...to the fantastical Parc Güell, with its beautiful tile mosaics that partially inspired my own kitchen backsplash, and whose high vantage point offers the best view of the city and the bay:

Most of Gaudí's works are in Barcelona, and because his style was so personalized, it is hard to think of one without thinking of the other, much like it is hard to think of the Paris Métro without thinking of Hector Guimard. Like the Art Nouveau movement of which he was initially a part, Gaudí's works are holistic - he also designed the furniture, the ironwork, the textiles, and did the interior decorating - with organic designs drawn largely from nature. Casa Milà, also known as La Pedrera (or "stone quarry"), is an architectural masterpiece (and UNESCO World Heritage Site) that in many ways best represents Gaudí's modernist style, combining new and old materials and construction techniques to form radically new architecture. There is a fantastic history of Casa Milà by its new owners, the Catalunya Caixa here, including the inevitable story of building code violations, construction delays, and neighborhood opposition, as well as the remarkable story of the building's neglect and ultimate resurrection. And there are three interesting takes on the building and its architect here.

But none of these can really prepare you for how stunning the building is or how remarkably innovative the construction of it was.

As i mentioned above, Gaudí drew heavily from natural forms, and part of his collection of objects is housed in the museum at the top of Casa Milà. I was particularly struck by the following two objects, which seem to be present throughout the design:

To wit, Casa Milà, like most of Gaudí's buildings, relies heavily on catenary arches to provide the openness of the floorplans. A catenary arch is the curve an idealized chain makes when supported on both ends and acting on its own weight. An inverted catenary arch is created by hanging a series of chains to the desired proportions and then using the inversion as a guide for construction. Gaudí was known for rarely drafting his designs on paper, choosing instead to create chain models and then constructing 3D models by viewing the chains in a mirror, like so:

The arches in Casa Milà, however, look more parabolic, and the effect of wandering through them felt very much like being inside the spine on display.

And the chambers and spiral of the nautilus shell feel reflected in much of the ironwork and even the shape of the ceiling:

But then there is that inexplicable roof, a roller coaster of sidewalks, guarded by witch scarers and stormtroopers.

While Gaudí in strongly associated with Barcelona, I would really say he was drawing on a long tradition of brilliant architecture and urban planning that is what really defines Barcelona, the only city to have won the Royal Gold Medal of architecture. The architecture from its Roman beginnings to its contemporary masterpieces are seamlessly interwoven. It feels like every building and park is planned with a 360 degree view - there's never a bad angle.

Self-Portrait of the Artist, On Bicycle

Even the food is beautiful:

Three days was not even close enough to see everything i wanted to - we missed the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion and all the museums, as well as the Parc Montjüic and the Poble Espanyol. But i'll definitely make a point to go back, because I have to say that Barcelona runs a close second to Paris as my favorite city.

And for those of you who like my overly long posts, i've posted a few extra pictures here.

Foolish Choices

2011-04-01T18:31:00.005-04:00

First of all, I must send the happiest of birthday greetings to my dear friend L. I am terribly envious of her April 1 birthday, as I am quite fond of a good practical joke and am prone to foolish behavior. Aries also seem to think they're the best of the zodiac: all headstrong, passionate, brilliant, and always, ALWAYS right. Given that the majority of my friends are Aries, I must subconsciously agree. But it may just be that we leos are drawn to other fiery dispositions.

As this is a significant birthday year for a bunch of us, we are planning a trip to Paris to fête the occasion as one should: with lots of good food, great wines, and best friends. I think it is also particularly appropriate to return to the City of Lights accompanied by those with whom I first visited it. And to help boost the Now Serving portion of this blog, I'll be spending a few extra days there, walking in Julia Child's footsteps by taking some cooking classes!

It's no secret that Paris is my favorite city, although our first introduction was not auspicious. As L can likely recount better than I, since she watched it all happen, we took an overnight train from Switzerland and arrived very early in the morning, and in my groggy state, I ended up tripping over my bag, tumbled down the train steps, and greeted Paris for the first time on my hands and knees. So I kissed the ground of my ancestors and tried to regain my dignity after the peals of laughter from the entire crowd subsided.

Despite the awkward beginning, a weekend was all it took for Paris to steal my heart. So I returned to spend a schizophrenic junior year of college studying at three different institutions, the bulk of which time was spent at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques trying desperately to keep up with my exceedingly bright cohort and generally failing to do so. It's my own fault, of course: most of my friends took a year abroad and lightened their courseloads so they could jaunt around Europe every weekend. Little overachiever that I am, I was offered the "opportunity" to do a program where I was fully integrated into the notoriously difficult IEP program (vs partial integration, where the small classes were with other foreigners and considerably less demanding on the workload front). As with my first trip to Paris, and most of my life generally speaking, I leapt before I looked, and so spent a year where all my American friends spent the weekends discovering Prague or Barcelona sprawled across piles of books in the library. But sticking close to campus meant I spent a year discovering the complexities of Paris, from my piano lessons in Cité de la Musique to admiring the buildings in La Defense. I think I visited nearly every museum on my free student pass from my one art class at the Sorbonne. I taught English to the lycée students near the Père Lachaise Cemetery and took photography classes in the industrial 11th. I loved Paris more than ever at the end of it, but not in the romantic whirlwind way; more in the ups and downs of any long term relationship kind of way.

So planning a trip back opens up doors of memories. Of course, as they say, it's never the same river twice, and so I'm excited to see it anew and am especially excited about my cooking class! However, i need to finally decide whether to take the easier classes at Ecole Lenôtre's Paris branch prettily situated at Le Pavillon Elysée, whose website makes it sound like cooking classes for Ladies Who Lunch, or brave the 3-day course with Joël Robuchon at their professional school located someplace near Versailles called "Plaisir," which sounds pleasant enough, but which is going to entail an hour commute. I have received special dispensation from the administration to attend M Robuchon's course, but although I am thrilled by the idea of being 1/12th of a student body taught by the world's best chef, I am having flashbacks to my various foolish leaps in Paris, and wondering if perhaps just for once, if for the first time ever, it might be better to choose the easier option. Might I not be happier with some perfectly nice chefs teaching a handful of women how to make pain au chocolat instead of trying to understand how to make the most elaborate entrees from a self-described perfectionist who wanted to be a priest - the man who taught Eric Ripert and Gordon Ramsey - while surrounded by more of France's best and brightest? The thing is, while I hated being the class dunce, I loved -and always have- being pushed harder by my peers. But this is my birthday, and supposedly a vacation, and maybe I'd actually enjoy being head of the class for once.

So I put it to you in my second reader's poll: do I make the potentially foolish leap in a quest for culinary excellence, or take it easy for a change and just enjoy the pleasure of cooking in a pretty space with pretty people?

Brooding Over Butternut

2011-03-30T01:44:00.009-04:00

I have spent so long trying to find another good poem about orange or about squash that I probably could have written my own in less time. But I did finally find a marvelous one for today's All About Orange installment of Now Serving: Bidding Butternut Bonne Nuit.

First, the poem. Which is actually part of an art installment and it goes with the picture below, neither of which is my own:

Conversation - Poem on Edward Weston's "Squash" (commissioned for a centennial project of the Yale Art Gallery)

"Delve for me, delve down, delve past your body, crowned
by its hidden stem, into shadowy alarm;
you will not vanish past our dark-shed charm,
throat over throat, ankle to ankle, bound
in our different arches, summer-nicked and browned
interlocking rings in the chain of wrist and arm."

"Lie for me, lie, and I will feel you turn.
Mark out the summer's bending time. Yes, learn
to cradle the concrete ground to softness. Stay.
Measure me past my stem, though your shadows churn;
Close yourself over; encompass me like clay."

-Annie Finch (2000)

Sigh. I wish i could write like that. But I am not a poet, I am a painter (ha ha). And sometimes, a cook. And sometimes, I paint with food.

Before we let spring come bouncing into our kitchens with extravagant abandon, waving her rainbow palette and leaving a trail of edible flowers, I think we should give thanks to the kind grandmother of winter - the butternut squash - who gathered up all of summer's deepest golds and a dash of crimson leaves and bundled them tightly within her shell before waddling into our homes to nurse us through the winter blues and greys. Rich, velvety, sweet squash...how would we ever make it through life without you?

So here are two favorite dishes you can use to send off your remaining butternut squash with love until next fall.

Butternut Squash Soup
(Adapted from Dorie Greenspan)

This lovely soup is the perfect marriage of two fall favorites - squash and pear. The toasted hazelnuts and squeeze of lemon add depth and brightness. I like the cream as an opportunity to paint a Rothko color block in every bowl.

3 lbs butternut squash
3 T olive oil
1 lge Spanish onion, chopped
1 lge shallot, chopped
1 fennel bulb, trimmed & sliced
2 celery stalks, trimmed & sliced
1 large garlic clove, minced
1.5 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg
freshly ground pepper
6 cups vegetable broth
2 ripe pears, peeled cored, chopped
2 strips orange peel

For garnish:
lemon slices
heavy cream
toasted chopped hazelnuts

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. If using whole squash, cut it in half, scoop out seeds, and rub flesh with a little olive oil and salt. If using peeled and cut squash, toss with a little oil and salt. Bake squash 60-70 minutes for whole or about 45 minutes for cut - checking about 10 minutes early either way with the tip of a knife until flesh is easily pierced with a knife. (Note: this is a great dish to use your new convection microwave for - it'll halve the baking time.) If whole, peel squash once cool enough to handle, and cut into small chunks.

Warm 2 T olive oil in Dutch oven or soup pot over low heat, stir in onion and shallot. Season lightly with salt and cook for 5 minutes, or until onions start to soften but not color.

Add fennel, celery, garlic, dash of salt and cook for 5-10 minutes, until vegetables are soft but still pale.

Add the squash and spices, 1/4 tsp. salt, and few grinds of pepper (i like white and green here, because they're softer). Pour in broth, increase heat, bring to a boil, then reduce the heat so that soup simmers gently; add pears and orange peel. Partially cover pot and simmer for about 20 minutes, or until everything can be mashed with the back of a spoon.

Puree in a blender or do yourself a favor and get an immersion blender so you can just blend the soup in the pot. Add salt and pepper to taste. Ladle into bowls, sprinkle with hazelnuts and swirl in cream (or vice versa). Garnish with lemon slices and serve.

Moving on to the main course...

Fettuccine with Butternut Squash and Pine Nuts

While you can do this with boxed pasta, it just isn't even close to as good as with homemade pasta. And homemade pasta is actually so easy to make if you have a food processor and a pasta machine you almost have no excuse not to do this from scratch, because it really only adds about 15-20 minutes of work. The dough needs to rest for 30 minutes, but it'll take you that long to peel the squash anyway, so just do it already.

For the Fettuccine
2 cups all purpose flour
3 eggs
1/4 c. freshly chopped thyme or oregano

Put all ingredients in food processor and run for about 20 seconds. With floured hands, gather dough and knead into a ball. Cover with a kitchen towel and let rest for 30 minutes (while you peel the squash). Divide the dough into 5 pieces. Run each piece through the pasta machine from thickest to thinner settings until about 1/8" thick - around #6/7 on the Atlas machine. As this is a hearty dish, you don't want the noodles to be paper thin. Run strip of dough through fettuccine cutter. Try to keep the bundles flat - letting them dry for a few minutes on a cake rack while rolling the rest of the pieces works well. Let dry 10 minutes as you boil a bit pot of salted water and prepare the rest of the ingredients.

For the Squash/Kale Mixture

1/2 stick (1/4 lb.) unsalted butter

2 T. olive oil

1/3 c. pine nuts

1 butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1/2" cubes

1 bunch kale, rinsed and chopped

(box of fettuccine or pappardelle if not using fresh)

3/4 cup grated parmesan

In heavy skillet, melt butter over medium heat and cook until golden brown (about 2 min.). Add olive oil, then pine nuts, and cook 1-2 minutes until golden. Transfer nuts to a plate with slotted spoon.

Add squash to skillet and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, about 5 minutes. Add kale and cook until wilted and just tender, about 5-8 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook pasta until al dente. For fresh fettuccine, this will only be about 2-4 minutes - keep checking it. Reserve 1 c. of pasta cooking liquid and drain the rest. Add pasta to squash mixture with about 1/2 c. cooking liquid and toss over low heat until heated through and most water is absorbed - about 1-2 minutes. Add more water if pasta seems dry.

Plate pasta and sprinkle with pine nuts and parmesan. Buon appetito!

Springing Forward

2011-03-22T02:07:00.011-04:00

The daffodils have popped, the cherry blossoms are starting to unfurl, the redbud branches are breaking out in a rash of pink petals, and the weather alternates between 30 degrees and 70 on the same day, which can only mean that spring has arrived in DC. To celebrate my favorite equinox and the return of Persephone, i will tell you a tale of rebirth on the home front called Stairwell to Heaven.

Once upon a time, during The Hadean Age, and even for some time after the initial kitchen remodel, there was a stairwell from the kitchen that descended into the hellacious basement like a carpeted version of the River Styx. One passed from the relatively pleasant world of the now-remodeled kitchen -

- into a terrifying underworld:

Eventually the basement was also remodeled, but that's another story for another time. Flash forward several years and a new, beautiful stairwell in the back of the new addition rendered this one obsolete. This provided a tremendous opportunity to nearly triple my kitchen storage space, which had been the bane of my culinary existence. I had 7.5 kitchen cabinets total, 5 of which were dedicated for all the dishes, bakeware, pots, pans, glassware, storage containers, linens, and electrical devices. As a result, every item was stored like Russian nesting dolls. Getting any single item a multi-step process, and there was always the risk that in the process of obtaining it, the rest would cave in or come tumbling out.

So moving the stairs opened up a world of storage opportunity that i seized upon the moment the contractor finished screwing down the subflooring, whereupon i immediately started shopping for shelving and flooring options. After several trips to Ikea and The Container Store and every other place specializing in storage, i realized that the most economical and best construction option was to build the shelves myself from wire closet shelving hardware and oak boards (all the better to support a 40lb ice cream maker with, my dear).

So here is a step-by-step guide for converting your former stairwell into a heavenly kitchen pantry:

Shopping List

You will need: 4 wall brackets, 13 shelf supports, 4 oak boards precut into appropriate sizes by the really nice gentlemen at Home Depot, sufficient baseboard trim cut to your specs (this may require a compound miter saw, and if you want mine, i am probably about ready to part with it), about 20 ft2 vinyl flooring, a closet light of your choosing, an "old work" fixture box, a fishtape, some 14/2 gang NM wire, an electric drill, a compact, a flashlight, a Dremel (or a drywall saw), a utility knife, an voltage sensor, a wire cutter/stripper, needlenose and flat nose pliers, a screwdriver, various screws, and a level. You will also need appropriate paint for the walls and the shelves. Let me suggest grey and orange as the best color combination.

Oh, and one newly subfloored former stairwell:

Painting the Walls

If you need instruction on this, you should probably stop now, but either way, remember to do it first.

Installing the Flooring

Installing interlocking vinyl tile is like remedial Legos. Your children can probably do this faster than you (unless you still play with Legos and your children are not old enough to be handling a utility knife).

1) Pick the direction in which you want to lay your tile. I went from back to front and put a whole tile against the wall that would be exposed, and trimmed the tile against the wall that would be under the shelves.

2) Put down a piece of tile, put the next one in line so that the tabs and holes line up, and press them together so they lock and flatten.

3) If you need to cut a tile, use a straight edge and a utility knife to score the edge, then bend the tile back until it snaps along the score.

4) Repeat until done.

Installing the Shelves

1) Paint the precut oak shelves orange, because orange is the best color. You will probably need two coats of paint and it's best to put a clear coat of polycrylic on top to prevent marring and scratching. At least, that's what i recommend in light of thinking i could skip that step and now sorely regretting it but also being too lazy to bother with it at this point.

2) Hang the wall brackets. This will require figuring out where the wall studs are and putting at least one, but as many as possible so that they are screwed directly into wood. You can use heavy duty wall anchors, but they are a total pain in the ass. A stud finder is helpful for this, but wall studs are typically 16" on center, so if you find one, you can also measure from there. Your brackets should be relatively evenly spaced and you really don't want more than a couple of feet between them to prevent sagging.

3) Make sure the holes on the wall brackets line up and use a level to make sure they're straight both vertically and horizontally before predrilling all the holes and screwing everything in.

4) Put in the shelves and predrill holes in the bottoms before tightening the screws by hand.

Installing a New Light

It's likely that you have a lightswitch with power in your new pantry:

However, as the light it used to feed is now below the new pantry floor, it leaves your fabulous new pantry very dark:

This can be remedied quite simply by installing a new light. Do not be intimidated - this is a really easy project after you spend all day answering the question of why, when you ripped out the old light that was connected to aforementioned switch, there was no longer any power going to it, by retracing the 60 year old wiring and probably 20 year old jerry-rigged rewiring job to discover that the answer to this riddle was buried in an outlet box in the basement bathroom that you thankfully didn't drywall over and always wondered what was in there. No, it wasn't the first set of wires you encountered in there, but the set buried beneath the top wires, where you found the most insane connection between the feed, the old living room outlet, the switch in question and the old stairwell light. Methinks it would not have passed even 1948 wiring standards. But once you have rewired all of that - and i can guarantee this won't happen to you, so you'll get to skip all that - this is seriously only an hour-long project. And if you aren't trying to document it for a blog, it's probably only about 45 minutes.

1) Pull out the old switch and use your voltage tester to determine where the power is coming in. You do this by holding the tester to the various wires while the switch is in the off position until the detector goes off. This should be a black wire, but sometimes the power gets reversed, in which case you will need to treat the white wire as "hot." Once you have identified the power in, label it and shut off the breaker feeding the switch. Disconnect the wires from the switch. (Note: if there are several wires coming into the box and some of them are red, this likely means that the switch is part of a 3-way switch with a common carrier. Take a look at this diagram. If the initial power feed is coming into this box (which should be a black, white and possibly copper wire (or no copper if it's old wiring, like mine), as depicted by the switch diagram on the left of the diagram (copper wire is depicted as green), you can still do this project. If all that's coming in is one set of wires and one is red, you are on the end of the line and while you can still run a light from here if you leave all the other wiring in place, it's more complicated and i'm not going to explain it here although if you really want me to, send me a note.)

2) Figure out where you want your light to go. I strongly suggest you put it above the switchbox, lest you lose a day ripping open drywall and drilling holes in studs.

3) Use the new fixture box to trace a circle where you want the new fixture to go. Remember to use an "old work" box, because it has little tabs on it that will flare out when you tighten the screws and anchor it to the drywall. Also remember to use the back of the box (which is narrower) and not the front to trace the circle on the wall.

4) Use a Dremel or a wall saw to cut out the hole.

5) Look inside the hole you have cut to see if, by some insane miracle, the wiring for the old light runs up the wall.

5)(a) If the wire to the old fixture runs out of the old switch box and up the wall next to your new hole, hooray for you, you can opt to cut that bit of wire and use it for your new switch - just make sure to test it before you cut first because really, you can never be too sure that there isn't power running through a wire before you sink some metal pliers into it.

5)(b) In the more likely case that there is no wire next to your new hole you can do one of two things:

(i) You can pull the wire that runs from the box to the old fixture. This is probably going to require ripping up a bunch of drywall unless you managed to do it while the stairs were being ripped out and while spending an entire day retracing all the wiring.

(ii) You can put wire nuts on the ends of the old wire and curl them up into the back of the box. I suppose you don't even need to put the wire nuts on the ends, but it's always best not to have random bits of metal poking about where electric currents are involved. A note of caution - if there is something else (an outlet, another light, a switch) that was connected to your old light, it will no longer work. You can determine whether this is the case in advance by pulling out the old light. If there is only one set of wires coming into the fixture box, your old light is at the end of the line leading from your old switch and you're good to go. If there are two wires coming into the old light fixture box, it's likely that the other set leads to another switch at the bottom of your old stairs, in which case you're back to Option B, because you aren't going to care about the power to that old switch. Unless you want to repurpose it. In which case, you may need to do a lot more work or, better yet, you should hire an electrician. But let's assume the best case scenario and carry on.

6) If you've followed Option 5(b), you will need to run a wire from the switch box to your new light. To see if there's anything in the way, pull out your mirror and a flashlight and use it to look down into the hole. Hopefully you will see this:

This is a view in the mirror of the top of the unimpeded switch box below, meaning running the wire will be a breeze.
(By the way, I'd like you to know that getting this picture was the longest step of the entire project and required me to use the mirror and the flashlight with one hands like unwieldy chopsticks, manually focus my lens and take the shot with the other, all while balancing atop a folding chair. I am still amazed that my flashlight didn't end up at the bottom of the hole, so a little applause here would be appreciated.

)

7) Okay, back to the switch box. If your box is old metal, you'll have to pull out the old wire holder and knock out one of the openings in the back with a screwdriver. If it's plastic, you can just pry open one of the openings with a screwdriver or simply pushing the wire through it.

8) Cut an appropriate length of 14/2 wire (you'll need 8" sticking out of both boxes) and feed it through the back of the switch box up through the hole and into the fixture box. Push the fixture box into the hole and secure to the wall by tightening the screws.

9) Remove the sheath from the wire and use wire strippers to strip approximately 1/2" at the end of each wire.

10) Twist the neutral (white) wires together with the flatnose pliers and put a wire nut on the end. Curl the pair up into the back of the box.

10) Connect the power feed coming in (black) to the terminal (usually the bottom screw) and the black wire going to the light fixture to the other terminal (usually the top screw). In new switches you can push the wires into small holes on the back of the switch if you prefer, or you can use the wire nose pliers to curl the ends first and then popping them over the screws before tightening down. Connect the copper ground wire to the green screw.

11) Remove sheathing and strip wire for light fixture. Take bracket from light fixture and screw it to box. Create a pigtail by cutting a short piece of NM wire, removing the sheath and using the copper wire only. Connect one end of the pigtail to the green screw on the bracket and twist the other end of the pigtail together with the copper wire you've run into the box.

12) Twist the copper ground wire from the fixture around the twisted copper wires and secure with a wirenut. Because fixture wires are usually a smaller gauge you can usually do this with your fingers, but if for some reason they are thicker, you should twist all three wires together with the pliers at the same time. Connect the white wires and black wires together and secure with wirenuts.

13) You are ready to test your fixture by turning the circuit back on and flipping the switch. If it goes on, pat yourself on the back, go turn off the circuit and screw the fixture and switch to the boxes. Turn circuit back on. Bask in the glow of your new light.

Finishing Touches

Cut the baseboard trim and paint it orange, because it's the best color. Nail to the wall. Buy 10 different floor transitions until you find the magic one that hides the gap between the two different floors. Buy some Ikea storage bins and 4 casters per bin. Drill holes and attach casters to bins. Slide bins under shelves. Put up weird Ikea curtain panel system in doorway to deter the kitty from curling up on one of the new shelves. Move all your beloved kitchen wares into their luxurious new home. Celebrate by making danishes. Well, that's what i did, anyway. You might want to do something more rational, like drink heavily.

So Funny, I Had to Officially Repost It

2011-03-19T13:51:00.004-04:00

So those few of you who still read this blog because it occasionally has something to do with home improvement might relate at least a tiny bit to the feeling i have that runs nearly nonstop in the background of my mind as if it were an operating system, namely the continuous processing of visual stimuli through a design filter of this is simply divine vs. holy hell what were they thinking?! Of course, most of the time it's less at the end of the spectrum and more along the lines of that's a cool idea or this would be so much better if they just... I'd like to say i'm not a judgmental person but this is clearly contradicted by the inspirations or imagined improvements i silently make in my head to pretty much everything the hand of man has touched. If i have a belief in god it is due entirely to the fact that about the only place that does not inspire such yearnings to rearrange is nature, which i generally find to be perfect - from the environmental and civil engineering to the architecture and interior design.

Anyway, for those of you constantly envisioning a way to improve every room of your house and everyone else's, the office, or the building down the street, this McSweeney's repost is for you: When Aesthetics Get in the Way of Larceny.

Rhymes With Orange

2011-03-16T01:48:00.004-04:00

I have decided to update everyone on my progress toward achieving the two resolutions i made for 2011, as well as provide a modicum of content relevant to this blog's Original Intent (which has subsequently been amended by a long Bill of Rights, Wrongs, and Revisions, all of which are to be interpreted liberally and not literally, in case anyone reading this in 200 years might wonder). First on the list of resolutions, as evidenced hereby: i continue to survive. Unless you're a conspiracy theorist and believe i have met an early demise and someone else is the author of these odd ramblings. In which case, you would not only need to suspend your disbelief that there could be two people with such an enormous propensity for tangents, but would also need to believe that someone else stood to gain both from my demise and the continuation of this blog, the financials of the former and logic of the latter would challenge the credulity of even the most dedicated tea partier.

Secondly, i have made progress in increasing my use of the color orange. Although i technically resolved to "wear more orange," and while it looks like i'll have another 3 week reprieve, my financial future is CRAP (Continuing Resolutions Are Pernicious), and so I questioned the wisdom of purchasing the perfect orange Valentino linen blazer on Gilt.com that would have done much to spruce up my Congressionally-challenged wardrobe and increase considerably my ocherous vestment options. I now question that questioning, but it's too late now - the sale is over. So i've expanded the role of orange in my life more generally, and thought i'd make March, normally a month associated with color (albeit green) All About Orange.

Perhaps "wearing more orange" seems an odd New Year's resolution, but my goal was a resolution that was both attainable and worthwhile, and i believe the world could stand a little more orange in it. I had a long purple phase in middle school, and then a bright yellow year that was inaugurated with the purchase of a fake fur coat of a citrine shade and style most frequently likened to the plumage a certain avian character on Sesame Street. The rest of the 1980s were a blur of terrible teals, fuchsias, and other awful concoctions. I'd always admired orange in its boldness and unwillingness to rhyme. (Perhaps also underlying my earlier love of purple.) But it wasn't until i was 20 that i discovered the magical power of orange.

Have you ever noticed how people sing about Paris in the spring and the summer and the fall, but never in the winter? Okay, Ella Fitzgerald mentions how she loves Paris in the winter, when it drizzles, but she's lying. Nobody loves Paris in the winter. A Parisian winter is grey skies spitting grey drizzle on grey buildings overlooking a grey river from grey streets over grey subways full of ashen faces. It is cold, clammy, and claustrophobic with its shroud of precipitous clouds. December to March is like a four month funeral procession - everyone wearing black, of course - with February stretching out to what feels like seasonal purgatory - a seemingly eternal mist of bleakness. Sometime in early March of my Parisian winter, after a monumentally horrid spring break and shortly before what must have been midterms or papers, i came across a sweater at a store on the Champs Elysées that stopped me in my tracks: in a sea of black knitwear was this arrestingly orange - as in nearly Home Depot orange - sweater. It radiated heavenly joy and hope of a better future against all probability like the baby Jesus in the manger and i spent what i recall as being a small fortune for this acrylic angel of happiness. I am guessing it was not a flattering sweater from the looks of horror on the faces of my BCBG host family, but whenever i wore that sweater, it made me smile - like it came with its own happy force field. It got me through the rest of college and law school before i finally parted with it. That sweater opened up a whole new world of color to me, and while i try to choose more flattering styles and less jolting shades, orange has proven to be a highly versatile and convivial friend.

So the first thing I'm going to share as part of All Things Orange is my favorite poem - I think of all time, but it's so hard to pick just one, so let's just say it's in the Desert Island Poems basket. It is also appropriate/ironic for my role as the General Contractor of this possessed house:

Why I Am Not a Painter
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
- Frank O'Hara (1957)

The second thing I'm sharing in All Things Orange and the modicum of construction-related news is a photo of the new kitchen pantry, a work which i have titled Ode to a Parisian Winter:

A step-by-step guide to transforming your former stairwell into a pantry, complete with new light and orange baseboard trim will be featured in the next installment of All Things Orange.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

2011-02-15T04:04:00.004-05:00

I am not a big television viewer anymore, partially because I just do not have the time to watch it, partially because I prefer to read, but mostly because I find the vast majority of shows on network tv to be either utterly inane or gratuitously violent. There is a whole category of shows that are ingeniously both, and are often titled along the lines of When *****s Attack.

But there isn't a lot to do in the hospital, and when your mom, who is being quite the trooper, is tired of Scrabble and wants to watch tv, that's what you do. It was my fault for mocking the sickeningly sweet teen movie "What a Girl Wants," but honestly, what was Colin Firth thinking? Why is every teen movie now the girl who's really a princess gets the guy, the dad, the dress, and a full ride to Oxford while Miley Cyrus sings some barf-inducing closing theme? Being raised on John Hughes films where all the girl wants is her first kiss, the characters were all actually interesting, and the Psychadelic Furs and Otis Redding were on the soundtrack, I just wonder what happened to the writers guild.

Anyway, I should have bitten my tongue, because my "oh, puke" comment at the end of What A Girl Wants caused my mother to turn to what I will refer to as Crime TV, where every show involved the re-enactment of some true-life horror story. This is a channel that isn't entirely inane nor exactly gratuitously violent, but it does make the most of deliberately jarring camera angles and bad visual effects intended to convey Hitchcock, but mostly leaving the viewer in a near epileptic seizure from the flashing lights. The tone of every show is "This Could Happen to YOU," and is probably heavily subsidized by the NRA. Clearly my mother has been watching a fair amount of this programming; while like every mother she can spot the way an activity can or has lead to someone's death, I've noticed an uptick in the number of ways in which she believes one might be harmed or worse, as well as the increased likelihood thereof. Now having watched several episodes of When Pirates/Children/Fugitives/Crazed Relatives Attack, I believe i have found the underlying cause of aforementioned uptick.

Shortly before we left the other night, the show was all about violent criminals and drug cartel members crossing the border and murdering, molesting, and robbing people across the southwest. Despite my best efforts to bury my nose in my book, Congressional procedure was no match for the show. After dinner, my father and I kissed Mom goodnight and headed back to the house. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by some gutteral screams and much thumping around downstairs. Still on East Coast time and generally in an exhaustion-fed trance, I crept into the dark hallway, and all I could think was "oh my god, it's all true!! I'm under attack!!" Strangely, I did not wake up enough to actually investigate further, which is especially odd given that I actually have had people try to break in my domicile before, whereupon I have called the police. Instead, I grabbed the nearest thing I felt could be used as a weapon if necessary and went back to bed.

And that is how I found myself curled up with the fire extinguisher the next morning. I am still not sure what I thought I was going to do with it. Create a massive smoke cloud and make my escape? Bash the attacker in the head with it? Or both? All I can say is that after my father fed the yowling cat who awoke him with her nightime crazies, it is a VERY good thing he didn't decide to check in on me.

So today, I presented my mom with a Valentine's Day stack of all the coolest art, architecture, and food magazines (along with a couple of fashion and gossip rags) that Borders had in stock which, along with the stack of happy-ending DVDs and the deluxe Scrabble board, will hopefully assist all of us with sleeping more peacefully at night.

Construction Advice

2011-02-09T13:27:00.003-05:00

For those who ask me whether they should take on a construction project, i can sum up my advice with the above cartoon and this clip from In the Loop (which, if you haven't seen it, you should, and fyi a "hod" is used to carry bricks and mortar - see one here):

Holy Cow - My Dream House IS Affordable!

2011-02-02T11:54:00.003-05:00

First, I know I promised to post every day, and was going to put this up yesterday, but our internet was down. And a shame, too, because I have THRILLING NEWS! My prayers for an affordable modern home of my dreams for our land out in West Virginia were answered when this fabulous, fully furnished modern home popped up on Gilt.com. And mein gott, it has all the furniture i would have picked out, too!

It even has the Stem entertainment console i asked for!

And solar powered lighting and a green roof!!

It's like God read my mind, flew over the piece of land we own, picked a design that would blend seamlessly with the rocky forest and glassed the walls so we could always feel like we were outside, enjoying the Almost Heaven-ly views, then did a quick search of my drool-worthy design cache (or has been reading my blog), and then put it on sale for a mere $310.

Lo, i failed to specify that i wanted a life-sized modern home. Ever notice how god is really good at exploiting the loopholes? She must be the world's best lawyer.

I've been trying to decide how to justify purchasing this despite the fact that i have no children and we have no space in our house. I think it'd be hilarious to build our little shed out in WV and bring this out there and call it good.

Anyway, this "Emerson Dollhouse" comes from a company called Brinca Dada, which is a couple of architects (of course) who decided to make toys that adults would like to play with, too. I wonder, though, whether children would actually like this. It isn't brightly colored plastic, the dolls look like art mannequins and, worst of all, appear to lack all clothing and accessories (which is really all any little girl playing with Barbie cares about - except for the making out with Ken/Christie part):

I guess, though, looking back, i had more fun playing with my mom's art/architecture supplies than with my own toys, and i never had a Barbie dollhouse, despite requesting one for several Christmases. My mother said we were too poor (and we were, and she did get me the swimming pool one year), but i can say with reasonable certainty that if the Emerson Dollhouse had been available in the 1970s - even if it were $310 - i think she would have found a way to get it. Being part of the feminist movement, however, and a tomboy to boot, my love of Barbie made my mother want to vomit. She'd get them for me upon occasion, but they usually came with a lecture or accompanied by a smile with gritted teeth. I compensated by climbing trees (in dresses and patent leather shoes), playing with snakes and toads, and bringing home stray animals - all of which she heartily endorsed (except the attire). Anyway, i think i would have loved to play with this as a kid. I'd sure love to play with it as an adult!

I can't decide if god is trying to make up for teasing me with the dollhouse or tempt me with this offer from Gilt: Get $1000 Ligne Roset store credit for $500. This means i could get the Stem console for half price! Oh, wait...nope, it's limited to one per customer. God really does have a sick sense of humor.

BC3: Le Jour de Gloire est Arrivé

2011-01-31T19:00:00.022-05:00

Originally, I had half a mind to spread out the Bear Claw Trilogy across several months, and maybe even tint the photos in an homage to Kieslowski, but feared that in the end, no one would remember the prior installments, thus losing whatever tiny shred of anticipation or interest you may have in knowing the outcome of my pastry travails. I also discovered that as far as a tool for allegorical narratives on liberty, equality, or fraternity, danish pastry just doesn't provide much to work with (The Addition, on the other hand, is like all your favorite trilogies and Freudian analyses wrapped into one (various contractors playing the Godfather, the bank as Sauron, the architect as The Architect/deus ex machina, the house as symbol for repressed emotions, etc.)

So grab some popcorn and a comfy seat for Bear Claws 3: The Viking Uprising

If At Second You Don't Succeed, Try Something Else Entirely
While not a terribly impatient person, i have little tolerance for failure. It gnaws at me, like when you have one last clue in the crossword puzzle but just cannot for the life of you figure it out nor give up. I tend to obsess over puzzles until i figure them out, an affliction that spills over into a lot of the rest of my life in ways that can be both bane and benefit. Why this otherwise pervasive trait never applied to my piano playing i now find to be a curious personal tragedy.

After BC2, i no longer wanted to wait weeks to recover; i wanted the answer immediately. Not getting danish pastry right the first time was a kitchen blunder, a tiny disappointment to be shrugged off with a gallic c'est la vie. Failing the second time, however, especially after such thought and analysis had gone into it, became an existential flaw - two advanced degrees but i can't figure out how to make a f***ing bear claw - i was a disgrace. Also, if ever discovered by my mother, i would hear about how curious this was as she has no trouble making pastry from scratch. And you know what those conversations are like.

So i regrouped, reanalyzed, and decided the fault lay with Beranbaum: Pie and Pastry Bible, my ass! I'd already had a miserable experience with her bûche de noël recipe, which i only used because i forgot to bring my tried and true Susan Purdy recipes with me to Las Vegas (and because my mother's announcement that she suddenly dislikes hazelnuts was an unexpected curveball thrown mere minutes before my labors were to begin). So, i went back to the drawing board and searched high and low for a new and better danish recipe. I have a fabulous baking book from Leslie Mackie's fabulous Macrina Bakery (do not miss it if you're ever in Seattle) whose whose recipes are largely excellent and who has worked quite a bit with the likes of Julia Child. The Macrina Bakery and Café Cookbook should be on everyone's shelf. I analyzed her version of danish dough, which also involves making a butter square and enveloping it with dough. I compared her version to Beranbaum's, which were similar in terms of ingredients, but two things struck me: Mackie noted that (1) dough and butter square must be kept at the same temperature (cold), because if the butter gets too warm, it will start to seep from the dough and (2) proofing was to be done at room temperature. I deduced that the latter process was due to the former axiom, so decided that the fundamental error was the whole proofing-at-an-elevated-temperature defied the cardinal rule of pastry-making that Thou Shalt Keep the Dough Cold.

I was about to embark upon yet another butter block tour when i gazed upon my fabulous Christmas gift - Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table (thanks, cuz!), resting on the counter where i have been drooling over its gorgeous photos and perfect recipes. Dorie is hands down one of the best cooks - and bakers - out there; at least from the "home cook" perspective (i'll leave the post about chefs (i.e., men with toques) vs. home cooks (i.e., women, with jobs besides slaving over the stove) for another time). So, long story short, an internet search led me to the recipe in Baking with Julia (which Dorie edited) that actually came from Beatrice Ojakangas, a Scandinavian chef who is a James Beard Hall of Famer. That was a combination which sounded hard to surpass, especially once i realized her recipe would take half the time to make. I noticed that here again, there was an emphasis on cold dough and room temperature proofing. To be extra sure, i did even more internet research and found several people who had had success with the recipe and technique outlined in The Art & Soul of Baking, which is another excellent book with details not only on the how of baking, but the why. This book uses the butter block method, but also stresses that the dough must be kept cold and recommends proofing in a cool kitchen so that the butter does not seep from the dough. In the end, Ojankagas' quick danish dough recipe won me over with Dorie's advice that "longer" doesn't always mean "better." Freshly returned from a trip to NYC, i had an antsy i-don't-have-time-for-this-nonsense hangover, and the butter block got chucked in favor of the food processor.

Building a Better Bear Claw
What makes pastry flaky? It's a common question, the answer to which is what often ends up dividing the bakers from the cooks, because cooking is mostly heart and a little science and baking is mostly science and a little heart. You can't wing baking - it's organic chemistry and if you cast your mind back to those experiments, you might remember how everything pretty much had to be exact or it would fail and the more complicated the experiment, the less margin for error.

Pastry texture results from a process called lamination, i.e., creating fine layers of butter and dough. This is easily visualized with the butter block method - encasing the butter, then folding it, flattening it, folding it, and flattening it, until there are hundreds of layers of butter and dough. The liquids and flour of the dough combine to make strands of gluten (the structure of the pastry), while the butter acts as a placeholder for pockets of air, which ultimately develop in the oven when the butter melts away and the steam generated during the melting process pushes out the surrounding dough. So when you look at a cross-section of pastry and notice the fine layers, imagine if you compressed them all back down and where there were once holes, there is now butter, and voilà, you're back to the pre-baked dough. Capiche?

One of the interesting paradoxes (paradoces? paradoxi?) of pastry making - and this includes pie crusts, which are pastry - is that the more you handle or overwork the dough, the more you risk making it gummy. Keeping the butter cold and not touching the dough with your hands are two key tips for success; not overworking it is another - not enough layers and it's not flaky but too many and it's gluey and tough. This is why the food processor is not to be dissed, but why you need to resist the urge to watch it form a dough ball and spin it around hundreds of times.

Another question you may have is What is the difference between croissants and danish? and the answer is the incredible, edible egg, which is present in the latter but not the former, and explains why danish are yellower, richer, and more cakelike than their croissant cousins.

So now you've had your pastry primer; it's time to get to work.

D's Grizzly Paws (because they're so much better than run o' the mill bear claws)

First, the dough (adapted from Ojankagas/Child/Greenspan)

You will need:

1/4 c. warm water (105-115* F.)

2.5 tsp. active dry yeast

1/2 c. milk, at room temp

1 egg, at room temp

1/4 c. sugar

1 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. ground cardamom

2.5 c. unbleached all purpose flour

1/2 lb (2 sticks) of very cold unsalted butter

Note: This is a basic dough that can be used for all kinds of shapes of danish. If you're going to do a form with a jam or cream cheese filling, add 1 Tbsp freshly grated orange zest.

1) Pour the water into a large bowl, sprinkle the yeast over, and let it soften for a minute. Add the milk, egg, sugar, salt, cardamom, and orange peel (if using) and whisk to mix; set aside.

2) Put the flour in the work bowl of a food processor fitted with the metal blade. Cut the butter into 1/4-inch-thick slices and drop them onto the flour.

3) Pulse 8 times, until the butter is just cut into pieces that are no smaller than 1/2 inch in diameter. Trust me, 8 times is enough - get your trigger-happy finger off the pulse button.

4) Add flour mixture to the yeast mixture and very gently turn the mixture over with a spatula, scraping the bowl as needed, just until the dry ingredients are moistened. Let me reiterate - just until the dry ingredients are moistened - thou shalt not overwork thy dough.

5) Cover the bowl and refrigerate the dough overnight, or up to 4 days if you're a really advanced planner. Pat yourself on the back for saving yourself hours of time.

6) Lightly flour a cool work surface. Ideally, marble or granite, but if you're poor, like me, stick your silpat mat in the freezer for a few minutes. Turn dough onto surface and dust with flour. Pat dough into a rough square, then roll into a 16" square.

See all those butter chunks? That's good.

7) Fold dough in thirds, like a business letter, and turn so that the closed fold is to your left. Congrats, you have just made your first "turn."

If dough is still nice and cold, continue, otherwise, put it covered in the refrigerator for 10-20 minutes. I do this by just folding up my mat and sticking it in with the rolling pin atop. The colder everything is (the dough, the pin, the room, your hands), the better. Rechill dough every time you start to pick up the slightest swipe of butter on your pin.
8) Roll dough out again into a 10" x 24" rectangle, do the business letter fold, then turn (if necessary) so the closed fold is on your left. You've completed your second "turn." (Notice how the butter is beginning to layer?)

9) Chill if necessary and roll dough into a 20" square. Do the business letter folding and turn so that the closed end faces to your left and roll out into a 10" x 24" rectangle. (Voilà, the third turn!) Fold your last business letter. Cover dough and put in refrigerator for at least 30 minutes or up to 2 days.

Ta da! Your dough is ready. If you look closely, you should see fine layers of butter throughout the dough.

This is enough dough for a dozen bear claws or 6 bear claws and a danish braid. If you want to divide it, do so now. The rest can be put in the freezer for up to a month - thaw in the refrigerator overnight before using.

Almond Filling

Another thing i learned is that the runnier the filling, the more likely it is to leak from the claws. So i went for something more paste-like this time. The cinnamon and amaretto give it a really nice kick. Note - this recipe makes enough filling for 12 bear claws, but don't halve it if you're doing 6. Just stick the remainder in the freezer and use it later.

80 g (appx 4 Tbsp) Almond Paste
85 g blanched almonds
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
2 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp brown sugar
3 Tbsp amaretto

1) Put almonds, cinnamon, and both sugars in the bowl of a food processor with a metal blade and process until nuts are finely ground.

2) Cut almond paste into small chunks and add to nut mixture. Process until fully incorporated.

3) Drizzle amaretto in and run until mixture becomes paste-like. If necessary, add some cream or a little softened butter to thin. You don't want the mixture to be dry or too firm, but you don't want it to be runny. You're looking for something on the firm side of creamy or, if you like your filling creamier, then definitely add the butter.

Making the claws
A key point i also learned from my experimentation is that the thickness of the dough, rather than the exact size of the pastry square, is what counts. Every recipe kept saying roll the dough into a x by x" square then cut into x number of 4 x 4" squares. But several recipes stressed that the dough should be 1/4" thick. So this is the deal: (1) roll the dough that you have made into a square or a rectangle that is about 1/4" (no less than 1/5") thick. I used half of the dough recipe above and put the rest in the freezer. When rolled to about 1/4", the half i used gave me a roughly 9 x 13" rectangle, which i divided into six 4ish" x 4ish" squares. So use your best judgment here, but you'll benefit from thicker pastry over thinner.

2) Take about 1 to 1.5 Tbsp almond filling and roll or shape into a log, then place in the middle of a square of dough. You want about 1/2" from the filling to any edge of dough, and you want to be able to fold the other half of dough over the filling so that the edges touch without much stretching. Once you have the hang of the amount, put filling on each dough square. Try to avoid making potty jokes.

3) Brush squares of dough with water and fold dough over filling. Pinch edges all the way around to seal. You don't want to mush them, but you want to make sure they're sort of glued together.

4) Cut the "toes" by making several 1/3 to 1/2" incisions along folded edge of pastry, making sure not to cut past the area where the pastry is bound together, or the filling can leak.

5) Curve the pastries into the "paw" shape and put on a parchment-lined cookie sheet.

6) Cover sheet lightly with plastic wrap (you don't really want it touching the dough all that much) and set aside to proof at room temperature (hopefully no more than about 72 degrees) for 1-2 hours, until pastries have roughly doubled in size and feel marshmallowy to the touch like so:

Look Ma! No leaking cesspool of butter/filling!!

7) Put pastries in refrigerator to chill for 20-30 minutes.

8) Preheat oven to 400* F and make sure oven is hot for 10 minutes before baking. Remove pastries from refrigerator and brush with egg wash (1 egg beaten thoroughly with 1 Tbsp milk or water). Sprinkle with slivered almonds.

9) Bake claws for 12-15 minutes, or until deep golden brown. Let rest a minute, then place on cooling rack.

10) While claws are cooling, whisk together glaze of 1/2 c. powdered sugar, 2 Tbsp heavy cream, and 1/4 tsp. dark rum (or vanilla) to a thick but runny consistency, adding more rum or cream if necessary.

11) Once pastries have cooled, drizzle with glaze (from a spoon, or from a sandwich bag with a corner cut off).

12) Brew a pot of chai. Relax. Take a deep breath. Cut into grizzly paw. See your success. *Bite into paw. Taste your victory; savor your success. Sip chai. Contemplate your journey. Repeat from * until claw is gone. You have reached baking nirvana.

Bear Claws, Parts 2: Revenge of the Grizzly

2011-01-30T20:15:00.005-05:00

So, when we last left our heroine, she was wallowing in the mauling she received from the bear claws she had spent two days making from scratch. She nursed her wounds over the next few weeks and, finally, after the pain of epic culinary failure subsided and the pendulum of time swung to her side, the fire of revenge lit within her breast as she stared at the other half of danish dough, which had heretofore been mocking her every time she opened the freezer. Determination swelled as she flung the frozen dough onto the counter and vowed that this time, she would conquer the bear. She envisioned licking almond crumbs and flaky pastry off her fingers as the dough thawed into battle position.

Not to be fooled twice, our heroine prepared for the long campaign ahead of her. Like any good coach after an embarrassing loss, she reviewed the film footage of the prior game, jotting mental notes of weaknesses in her position; she reviewed the texts, poring over the instructions for cues she had missed. In the end it was fairly clear that defeat had come during the proofing process. Berenbaum's recipe for the Bear Claws had said that the claws should be set to rise "in a warm place." So our heroine had slightly heated up the stove, let it cool a bit (as one might for baking bread) and put the pastry inside to rise. Having returned to the master recipe for danish dough, Berenbaum elaborated considerably on the particularities of the proofing process, namely that one should proof the dough at a temperature between 86 and 92 degrees, which the author achieved through ridiculous measures involving ramekins full of hot water to support a second jelly roll pan to cover the first, topped with a heating pad. Having no second jelly roll pan, and no desire to retrieve the somewhat buried heating pad, our heroine decided to heat the convection microwave to 100 degrees, let it cool for 10 minutes, and proof the bear claws in there.

The second weak point in her prior assault had been the filling. The remonce recipe in Beranbaum's book was somewhat runny to begin with. In re-reading the text, she also realized that she was supposed to use half of the amount produced for the bear claw recipe. Overstuffing the bear claws with semi-gelatinous almond filling had clearly contributed to the downfall of the danish. Our heroine determined that this time, she would also refrigerate the remonce so as to prevent the butter from melting during the proofing process.

And so, having charted her course, she returned with great courage to the site of her ignoble defeat, gave the cry of battle and gently attacked the dough with her rolling pin. She rolled, she cut, she filled, she sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, she brushed with eggwash, sealed, folded, sliced, brushed with eggwash again, and sprinkled the nascent claws with sliced almonds. Then she put them in the just slightly warm box of the microwave and let them rise for the allotted time, whereupon, they looked like this:

This was a vast improvement over the prior batch; however, while not as visible from the film footage, our heroine was again facing creeping pools of butter and remonce leaching from the claws. She held her head up defiantly as she cast them into the fire for 15 minutes until golden, whereupon they looked like this:

The claws glistened in the light and she wasn't yet sure what to think, so set the kettle to boil and went about making a pot of chai tea, gathering her hand-me-down New Yorker, and cautiously preparing for the first bite. The fruit of her arduous labors looked promising enough:

She bit into the claw and chewed thoughtfully while gazing upon the falling snow. Outsiders declared success, but she hung her head in shame. Store-bought bear claws would be better than these flaccid, flavorless pastries. The almond filling had evaporated into the dough, which was too chewy, too dense, and tasted primarily of unsalted butter. It wasn't worth finishing. End game: Bears 2; Vikings 0.

A Danish Tragedy

2011-01-28T17:36:00.010-05:00

Before i begin the tale of The Girl Who Wrestled the Grizzly Bear (and Lost, Twice), i'd like to issue an open invitation for blog post subjects. I am currently enjoying an unknown quantity of time off while i wait for my new fellowship to start (probably a few more days, maybe a week), and so am planning to make up for my future lack of posts once i start fixing the US budget and tax code with more posts now. I had initially thought that i could just write a couple of really long posts - i was going for a sort of New Yorker main article thing, especially in light of how rarely i seem to write - but after having heard several complaints about the length of A Certain Slant of Light, promise to scale back to fit the more hurried mind/enable you to finish reading before the boss comes back and sees you aren't working.

I'm tentatively seeing if i can manage a post a day - the snow is helping - but make no promises. But i'd like to know what you'd like to hear about - i know this started as a Home Disaster blog, but wandered into Home Disasters and Food Successes territory (today brings the union of the two), and then it just became Whatever Random Thought and/or Poem/Song/Book/Piece of Art/Favorite Architecture/Political Issue du Jour Is in My Head blog. Here are some subjects i've been pondering (or have already started drafts of months ago): a history of modern architecture, why is pretty furniture overpriced, the tiling of the fireplace hearth, the new kitchen pantry and all things orange, photos and stories from the San Juan Islands or Barcelona, and recipes (with obligatory historical investigation) for chicken pot pie, meatloaf and baked grits, apple and pumpkin pie, and revenge of the Danish. But i'm happy to take on anything you've been curious about but not obsessed enough to research to death and write a blog post about. So go on, don't be shy - submit a comment (even anonymously)!

Bear Claws, The History
This post actually started when my MIL came to visit last summer bearing a box of freshly-baked bear claws from the fabulous Amish bakers in Lancaster County, PA. I adore bear claws, and these were especially delicious ones with fluffy layers of cinnamony pastry and drizzled with glaze. I normally never ever ever buy them because i know that the caloric content is roughly equivalent to one's weekly allowance. But if one doesn't actually purchase them, they have fewer calories. These were so good that i actually wanted to eat the crumbs:

But eating the crumbs seemed slightly uncouth, and i didn't want anyone to walk in on me with my face in the box, looking like a horse with a feedbag strapped on or the kid brother showing mommy how the piggies eat in A Christmas Story. Then i had sudden inspiration to use them as a mix-in for a batch of ice cream - a far more elevated approach to wasting not. So i made a batch of almond ice cream and mixed in the bear claw crumbs, creating what would be my new signature flavor, Grizzlies on Ice:

Then i decided to add this to Now Serving, but thought it would be an even better post if i made bear claws from scratch first. And then, i got the new iMac and was playing around with iMovie and iThought: "Oooo, iCould make a stop-motion iMovie about the making of the bear claws!" And so, iSet up my camera on a tripod and took hundreds of photos of the mixing of the dough, the rolling of the dough (4x), the cutting of the dough, the filling the dough, the forming into claws, the raising of the claws, which is when iNoticed that things were starting to go awry. But iPersevered and baked the bear claws and made the iMovie, which will be presented shortly.

But first, a quick history on danish pastry:

1) It's not actually Danish. This sweet, laminated pastry was brought to Denmark by Viennese bakers who were brought to Denmark when the native bakers went on strike in 1850, demanding wages in cash instead of in food and lodging. The Viennese didn't know how to make traditional Danish breads, so did their own thing. This is why the Danes (and everyone else in Scandinavia) actually call danishes wienerbrød or "Viennese bread" (also the meaning of "viennoiserie," as the French call them.) The Viennese, for their part, call it "golatschen," which is interesting in that i grew up in Nebraska calling them kolaches, which is what the rather sizable Czech/Bohemian community there calls them. Anyway, it's not a total lie to call them Danish; when the Danish bakers went back to work, they picked up the laminated technique, but added eggs and more fat, as well as almond filling, jams, chocolate, nuts, etc.

2) In Denmark, the bear claw (or cockscomb, as it's called in most of Europe) is the most popular shape of danish.

Just so you know, i could go on, but I'm trying this new Keep It Short Thing.

Bear Claws, The Recipe
I decided to try out the bear claw recipe in my new copy of the Pie and Pastry Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. In the interest of time, i will not retype it for you here. If you want to follow a set of instructions that makes Martha Stewart look like Rachel Ray, you can print out a copy of the recipe yourself from here. But here's the general gist of things:
1) Proof some yeast and warm milk.
2) Mix the risen yeast with some flour, sugar, salt, cardamom, egg, and a little butter. Let the mixture sit for 30 minutes. Deflate and then refrigerate the dough for 2 hours.
3) Make a butter square with a boatload of butter and a little flour. This part's fun.
4) Roll the dough into an 8" square, then add the butter square, encase the butter square with the dough.
5) Roll/fold the dough. Chill.
6) Roll/fold the dough. Divide dough in two. Chill/freeze.
7) Make the filling.
8) Shape the danish by rolling the dough, cutting the dough into squares, filling the squares with filling (i added a cinnamon sugar sprinkle), closing up the squares, slicing the "claws," brushing with egg wash, sprinkling with almonds, and curving into the bear claw shape.
9) Proof the bear claws. The bear claw recipe only makes the vaguest reference to how to proof the danish, which is found in detail at the master recipe, and essentially requires several complicated steps and a constant temperature of 86-92 degrees.
10) Bake the bear claws.
11) Eat the bear claws.

Bear Claws, The iMovie
Here it is, my first ever film:

As forewarned, it's film noir. The bear claws began to ooze butter as they rose; despite my attempts to mop up the butter, they positively hemorrhaged butter once in the stove. The end result was more akin to fried bear claws, and not in a yummy British chip shop or Texas State Fair kinda way. I thought about rewriting my little film with a happy ending and then thought: Everyone's food blog shows their glowing successes, closeups on their beautifully-arranged dishes, the lighting just so. But how many people show you their abject failures, besides me? And isn't tragicomedy really the story of this blog/my life?

Anyway, submit your own guesses as to what happened and why along with your ideas for future posts! And stay tuned for Bear Claws, Part 2: The Wrath of the Grizzly, along with the critic's film review and cooking analysis.

I Heart NY

2011-01-27T20:06:00.003-05:00

Ahh, New York, New York, City That I Love. I'm just back from a weekend in Gotham City, visiting the besties, the nieces, and checking in with my knee surgeon. Thanks to the lack of job, i was able to squeeze in an extra day to largely meander about, soaking up the streets and the people. I love this City. I love the different neighborhoods - beloved happy hipster Park Slope, the intimidating shadows of Wall Street, the insufferable SoHo with shops full of everything i want and nothing i can afford, quiet Roosevelt Island with its shiny new tram, superb night views, and the lilt of seven languages being spoken at once from the UN residents. I love the East Side solitude, the West Side insanity, the downtown labyrinth of alleys, the uptown smaller-town feel. I love the history, the buildings that lean on each other in the fight for sunlight, i love the subway with its peeling paint and street musicians. I love the brilliant architecture, ever changing, ever reaching. I love the art - the teeming masses at the Met, the hidden gem of the Frick. But i mostly love the people - their hyperactive minds written all over their faces, their emotions shared with you as your eyes meet for a few seconds before passing. Everyone from everywhere is here, getting along (mostly famously), even if it doesn't always look like it. I think perhaps Whitman sums it up best:

Broadway



	What hurrying human tides, or day or night!
	What passions, winnings, losses, ardors, swim thy waters!
	What whirls of evil, bliss and sorrow, stem thee!
	What curious questioning glances — glints of love!
5	Leer, envy, scorn, contempt, hope, aspiration!
	Thou portal — thou arena — thou of the myriad long-drawn lines and groups!
	(Could but thy flagstones, curbs, façades, tell their inimitable tales;
	Thy windows rich, and huge hotels — thy side-walks wide;)
	Thou of the endless sliding, mincing, shuffling feet!
10	Thou, like the parti-colored world itself — like infinite, teeming, mocking life!
	Thou visor'd, vast, unspeakable show and lesson!

I also love the greenery throughout New York - in Central Park, where hidden corners can be found even on the most beautiful June day, or the alley of cherry blossoms in bloom in Prospect Park. Under the blanket of snow and frigid temperatures, Central Park was nearly deserted:

I've nearly moved here twice and pseudo-lived here for a year and a half, and it's always so hard to leave this place, but maybe someday I'll be back more permanently. This poem seems truly fitting for a midwestern girl like me:

These Ever Just So Six Million New York Hearts and Dorothy

Girl, you have breathed the scent of New York and now, no greens, no
       flowers, no daisies . . . not even the wind on greens and flowers
       can hold you long.
You will not stay on prairie wastes, girl, for you have listened to
       the rivers of Manhattan at nighttime: you have been quite too near
       these ever just so six million New York hearts: you have
       watched quite too many New York sunsets and dawns.
You'll come back, girl: quite soon these ever just so New York floors
       and stones will feel your quick, sharp walk.
You cannot stay with prairie wastes and flowers, girl, for you have
       breathed the scent of New York too long.
You have been quite too near these ever just so six million New York
       hearts; and they will someday call you back, girl.
Robert Clairmont, From Quintillions (NY: American Sunbeam Publisher, 2005)

A Certain Slant of Light

2011-01-21T21:17:00.016-05:00

Thanks to the oddity of artificially being between jobs, I have finally - four months after the fact - gotten through the West Coast pictures and have winnowed them down and Photoshopped them to a still-bloated 482, which almost ties the Patagonia folder in size. I blame the beauty of the place: it is impossible to cull these images of haunted forests of lush green and mist-bound coasts that provide a study in pure contrast - it's a natural drama we just don't have in the mid-Atlantic. Others might point to my lack of decisiveness and my penchant for spending vacations behind a lens as the true cause for such photographic overload.

Anyway, to pick up from where my earlier post left off, after a few days in Portland, Oregon, last September, we headed up to "the other Washington," to spend ten days in the Olympic National Park and the San Juan Islands.

One of the things that struck me throughout our trip was the ever-present hand of the Civilian Conservation Corps; they built the park lodges, headquarters, observation towers, roads, and even the trails our footsteps traced through the mountains. The history of the CCC and the establishment of the national park system is too fascinating and too long to be even outlined here; Ken Burns took six years and six episodes to do it. However, as i think about the state of our economy, and the stress fractures showing in those structures, i wonder why it is that, as a nation, we now scorn Roosevelt's economic and environmental policies. The CCC created public works and brought back from the brink of permanent destruction our most beautiful lands that not only now belong to each of us (and to the world), but also gave starving men (and some women) jobs working to improve the infrastructure of our country. Their profit was the nation's profit (not that of any particular individual, company, or hedge fund), and these investments seem to have been some of our most valuable; if you look at how well things were built and how long they have lasted, it seems like the work of the CCC is one of the greatest returns on investment our government has ever received.

I have to digress or expound a bit further here by quoting an amazing piece by Susan Eisenhower in last week's Washington Post, who was in turn citing her grandfather - a man the Republican Party loves to like, but whose sound economic and social policies have since been totally jettisoned in favor of throwing what little is left of our civil society under the bus of the military-industrial complex (we can no longer afford to pay a cent for public media, but have plenty of money for two wars). To wit, Ms. Eisenhower, writing about the current debate going on regarding how to balance our budget with limited resources - a major issue in Ike's time as well - says the following:

The pressures Eisenhower faced during his presidency were enormous. Over the years, as the Soviet Union appeared to reach military parity with the United States, political forces in Washington cried out for greater defense spending and a more aggressive approach to Moscow. In response, the administration publicly asserted that there was no such thing as absolute security. "The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without," Eisenhower said. And he followed through, balancing the budget three times during his tenure, a record unmatched during the Cold War.

...[Eisenhower also outlined] the cost of continued tensions with the U.S.S.R. In addition to the military dangers such a rivalry imposed, he said, the confrontation would exact an enormous domestic price on both societies: "This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. . . . We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

To bring the tangent back full circle, as i look at all the benefits we still enjoy from Roosevelt's massive stimulus plan and compare it to the vilification of all things "government" by the right leaning sectors of our society (and even by our supposedly socialist President), i want to cry in frustration. Many people out west still have near-reverence for Roosevelt and what he did to rebuild their failed economies. And i wonder, as our politicians propose shredding everything except the sacrosanct defense budget how much an F-35 costs in terms of the kinds of economic benefits and long-term security our society would gain from investments in high speed rail, our public schools, more research in the sciences, fixing our decrepit roads and bridges, or restoring our overtaxed parklands.

My Hero, Harold Ickes
Harold Ickes (le père) is the kind of person i would aspire to be if anyone actually let me run the Department of the Interior. A self-described curmudgeon, Ickes, originally a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, became the longest-serving Secretary of the Interior from 1933-1946 under FDR, and also ran the Public Works Administration. He is essentially the man who established most of our great national parks, including Olympic National Park. His tenure at Interior earned him the nickname "Honest Harold," for his opposition to corruption and meticulous management of the budget. He was a staunch defender of civil rights who arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when the fine Daughters of the American Revolution banned her from singing at Constitution Hall because she was African-American, and ordered desegregation of facilities in the national parks. He opposed internment of the Japanese during WWII and as a founding member of the UN, argued for de-colonization. He was a fabulous orator with an ascerbic wit and while Horace Albright called him "the meanest man who ever sat in a Cabinet office in Washington and the best Secretary of the Interior we ever had," i think Horace just misinterpreted a man who didn't suffer fools gladly (or at all) and exposed the nudity of emperors - see, e.g., the fabulousness of such gems as his response when Dewey announced that if elected, he would force Ickes to resign, whereby Ickes drafted a letter to Dewey and circulated it in the press, retorting: Hence, I hereby resign as Secretary of the Interior effective, if, as and when the incredible comes to pass and you become the President of the United States. However, as a candidate for that office you should have known the primary school fact that the Cabinet of an outgoing President automatically retires with its chief. Another truth-to-power-no-matter-which-side-of-the-aisle-it's-on gem is his actual resignation letter to President Truman, which came about when Ickes was brought before Congress to testify regarding the nomination of Edwin Pauley, a former treasurer of the Democratic Party, to be Secretary of the Navy. Ickes testified that Pauley had once pressured him to allow the private sector to gain title to oil-rich offshore lands in exchange for $300,000 in campaign donations, which led to a confrontation with Truman, who asked Ickes whether his memory on this incident was faulty. Ickes' 2,000 word resignation letter said, in part: I don't care to stay in an Administration where I am expected to commit perjury for the sake of the party.... I do not have a reputation for dealing recklessly with the truth. I think this might be the very definition of integrity.

With regard to the establishment of the Olympic National Park, Ickes and Roosevelt had to take on the Forest Service, who were in cahoots with the powerful logging companies. From the Burns summary of the fight:

In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt and Harold Ickes entered into a park controversy that had been raging for 30 years. On the Olympic peninsula west of Seattle, verdant rain forests contained the largest specimens of Douglas fir, red cedar, western hemlock and Sitka spruce in the world. For centuries, the area was the homeland of native tribes like the Makah and the Quinault, the Hoh and Skokomish.

In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt had used the Antiquities Act to set aside 615,000 acres as Mount Olympus National Monument. Since then, every bill introduced in Congress to make it into a national park had been defeated, caught in a seemingly endless battle between the Forest Service and the Park Service.

Meanwhile, loggers were approaching the last virgin stands of rain forest. The president decided to assess the situation for himself – but his visit was arranged by the Forest Service and its allies in the lumber industry, who were intent on convincing Roosevelt that a national park would ruin an already suffering local economy.

The Forest Service ensured that Park Service officials were excluded from the invitation list. They scheduled a logging train to rumble past the president's lodge during his breakfast, a reminder of the jobs at stake. And they moved a sign marking the national forest boundary, giving the impression that a heavily logged area was not on federal land. "I hope the son-of-a-bitch who is responsible for this is roasting in hell," Roosevelt said when he saw the devastation, not realizing that he was looking at a national forest and his guide was the forest supervisor.

When Roosevelt learned about the deception, it only spurred his desire to protect the forest. On June 29, 1938, Congress converted the national monument to Olympic National Park and gave Roosevelt the authority to expand its boundaries. The president saved two of the most threatened valleys by stripping an additional 187,000 acres away from the Forest Service.

I can't say that this dynamic continues exactly the same way today, but I do find it curious that the Park Service is still part of an Agency that also sells off public lands. Anyway, we should all be grateful for what Ickes and Roosevelt fought for, or we wouldn't have seen any of this...

The High Divide Loop
Over the river and through the woods...the High Divide Loop is one of those amazing circuit hikes that takes you through four seasons and several ecosystems in 1 to 3 days, depending on your hiking style. I was amazed to encounter a couple of people doing the entire 17.6 mile loop in a single day. Most people spend at least one night, usually two, enjoying the old-growth forest, subalpine meadows and lakes, montane forest, and spectacular views of the glaciated peaks of the Olympic Mountains - including Mt. Olympus (the other, somewhat less bankrupt one). We really lucked out with the weather, which had been unseasonably wet until we arrived for 3 perfectly clear, non-humid days of 70-degree temps.

Day one of the hike started off in the old-growth forest, and by old, we're talking trees that are centuries old and the scale of which is impossible to adequately capture, no matter how hard you try:

But one's eye is not only drawn heavenward, but the ground beneath is also full of the most minute details:

What captured my heart most of all was the light, which tumbled, unfurled, or sliced through the trees like the finger of god, directing your attention to this one spot, or providing the soft focus on the whole scene, or playing hide and seek as the sun set, bringing to mind a classic poem of Emily Dickenson's that I have loved since my drama-loving adolescence:

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -

Heavenly Hurt, it give us -
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are -

None may teach it - Any-
'Tis the Seal Despair -
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air -

When it comes, the Landscape listens -
Shadows - hold their breath -
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death -

ca. 1861 (From Thomas H. Johnson's Poems of Emily Dickenson (1955)).

All of this beauty caused a bit of a rift between my spouse's desire to get to the next campsite before dark, and my desire to capture every slant of light, delicate flower, honeybee, and panorama. And this is where the fun of a digital camera becomes and even greater time suck. I only recently traded my trusty and battered Canon 35mm for an EOS 30D. Granted, i raise eyebrows for carrying this rather hefty piece of equipment and a telephoto lens in an already overstuffed pack, but my retort is that compared to the number of filters and equipment i used to need, i've shaved off probably 10 pounds. For example, while i do think that not much has changed from Ansel Adams' day in that the real artwork of photography is still most often achieved in the processing (usually via the labyrinthian Photoshop), one no longer needs the various colored filters in shooting black and white, and one can switch between B&W and color with the press of a button instead of having to shoot a whole roll (or worse, have two cameras). Also, since you can see a shot, you can increase or decrease exposure, aperture, film speed, etc. right there until you get the shot right (this is where the impatient foot tapping usually starts), or you can even shoot with filters or effects that where only achievable in the darkroom before (this is where I am abandoned on the trail). But it's such a thrill to shoot these images back to back:

Day two of the hike brought us up into the subalpine meadows and lakes, through fields ripe with huckleberries, traversing waterfall after waterfall (except for the one with the "log bridge" - which is a bridge only if one considers a log wedged between the banks 40 feet up from the rocks below to constitute a bridge - necessitating that i find the mule trail a mile back downstream), past herds of Roosevelt Elk (named after their patron saint), up onto the spine of the ridge across from Mt. Olympus, and finally to our campsite at Lunch Lake (we were the lunch - for the mosquitoes):

Day three took us through tumbling fields of wildflowers back down into the forest primeval, past the famous Sol Duc Falls, and back to the beginning.

The Olympic Peninsula

The next few days were spent on the coast of the Park, which also has a long and fascinating history, that i will leave to you to investigate yourselves. One of the main base towns for seeing the various sights (in our case, La Push, Second Beach, Ruby Beach, Cape Flattery) is the tiny town of Forks, Washington, just up the road from the Quileute Nation, and made famous by the random choice (and subsequent hijacking of their original history) Stephanie Meyers made when writing the Twilight series. We were in Forks the week before - no lie - Stephanie Meyers Day, and most of the inns were already booked up with little goth tweens. The entire town was Twilight themed (seriously - every store has a Twilight something - the Bella Burger at the local diner, the dueling Edward vs. Jacob Twilight gift shops across the street from each other, etc.) I can only imagine how much life in this 5 stoplight town has changed in the past few years. The Quileute have both benefitted and suffered quite a bit from the attention; all of the clothes one sees in the stores that are covered with Quileute designs provide no profit to the tribe, since apparently none of their symbols can be trademarked. Our country's hypocrisy on indigenous rights elsewhere in the world never ceases to amaze and appall me.

But fear not, i'll stick to the script here, and just put up the pictures and shut up. They're worth more than my words, anyway:

Well, it seems that i have once again gone beyond what is acceptable for the length of a single post, and so will save the Orcas Island and Seattle pictures for another entry. Believe it or not, i was extremely restrained in the pictures posted here. If you'd like to see a slightly less restrained set of photos - including some fun before-and-after-Photoshop-special-effects, you can see them here.

But i'd like to close with a return to Dickenson. A certain slant of light is too wintry for this scene, taken in the still-warm days and slightly-cool evenings of early September. I look back on them now, and think that this one is more appropriate (and not just because of the Twilight reference):

As imperceptibly as Grief

The Summer lapsed away -

Too imperceptible at last

To seem like Perfidy -

A Quietness distilled

As Twilight long begun,

Or Nature spending with herself

Sequestered Afternoon -

The Dusk drew earlier in -

The Morning foreign shone -

A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,

As Guest, that would be gone -

And thus, without a Wing

Or Service of a Keel

Our Summer made her light escape

Into the Beautiful.

Le Boeuf et la Bûche

2011-01-01T17:36:00.020-05:00

Well, another roller coaster year has pulled into the station at the end of the ride. While i cannot personally remember a worse December, there were also some lovely highlights of the year, which - as always - centered around friends, family, and food. So to close 2010, i'm going to share with you two of my favorite recipes, the making and sharing of which have become time-honored annual rituals of near-religious proportions and define the term "comfort food" for me. Of course, like all comfort foods, especially French ones, boeuf bourgignon and bûche de noël are labor intensive to make, but for me, a large part of the "comfort" aspect is achieved from the therapeutic effect of losing myself in the culinary process.

Bœuf Bourgignon

Of the two traditions, the newer one (of five or six years) is serving bœuf bourgignon on New Year's Eve. This is hands down my favorite French dish - a popular pick akin, i suppose, to loving apple pie as a favorite American dish. My mother would make it on the rare occasion when i was growing up, but i don't know that it was really a favorite of hers and in any case, i don't remember rhapsodizing about it until i first had it in 1992 at La Crèmerie-Restaurant Polidor in Paris. Le Polidor is a pretty famous spot and was a favorite of James Joyce and Jack Kerouac, as well as me (but this particular fact is not mentioned in the guidebooks); it's tucked away on a tiny side street in the latin quarter, identifiable primarily by the line of people waiting to get in for some of the best (and certainly most reasonably priced) traditional French cuisine in Paris. The tables are pretty much all communal, which is one of the things i actually adore about it, but which has freaked out American friends or family who are used to having acres of space and so-called privacy. What i find interesting about such preconceptions of "privacy" is that i have generally found that when dining in Europe, despite being necessarily packed in like a sardine, one is rarely subjected to the forced eavesdropping that occurs routinely in the States coming from that deafeningly loud group five tables away that just can't help but share with the entire restaurant the hilarity of their incredibly inane antics. I attribute this difference to the loss here in the U.S. of a fine tradition we, too, once had, referred to as "manners," "discretion," and "consideration for others" - or more simply put among some parents I have had occasion to overhear: "indoor voices" (mourning the loss of this tradition is referred to as "being a total curmudgeon").

Anyway, back to le bœuf. The origins of bœuf bourgignon (originally, bœuf à la bourgignonne, aka beef burgundy) aren't that mysterious - it's a peasant dish that came about when some enterprising Burgundian marinated what was likely some pretty tough/nearly inedible beef in a decent local vintage and a bouquet garni, some carrots, and garlic for a day or two, then added a bit of bacon, boiled the whole thing down into a tasty stew, and tossed in some little onions and mushrooms at the end. Interestingly, despite being elevated to haute cuisine, first by Auguste Escoffier (chef of the original Ritz in Paris, and referred to as "the Emperor of Chefs" by Kaiser Wilhelm II), and later internationalized by Julia Child, the ingredients and the process for making beef burgundy haven't really changed all that much. Maybe that's part of the notion of classic comfort foods - the depths and simplicity of the original combine into a culinary essential truth that withstands the harsh tests of time, such that it is no longer just that the dish itself is satisfying, but its essential underlying perfection also provides emotional solace. To go overboard with the analogy, maybe comfort foods are like little stepping stones in the ever-changing river of our daily lives.

It's All About the Terroir
I'm not alone in waxing poetic about such foods. In her chapter on bœuf bourgignon, Sylvie Girard-Lagorce takes far worse emotional liberties in the contrast between nouveau and traditional cuisine, but does point out fairly that stripping away the flourishes of the chefs, at its core, traditional cuisine represents above all else the resources of a given area, and that there are certain "indigenous ragouts," of which beef burgundy is a prime example, that "possess something irreplaceable called native earth." [Ed. note: I am a crap translator. Apologies.] Burgundy is home to some of France's finest wines (like South Americans and soccer, each French province will argue to death that they are home to the finest thing in question (often everything) and there is no "some of" about it, but fortunately as an American, I can love all French wines equally. Except for the reds from the Côtes du Rhone, which are unequivocally the best, though this may be genetic predilection.) And so it is only logical that a Burgundian would come up with the idea to grab one of the many good (but not too good) bottles of wine lying around instead of water or bouillon to marinate the beef, along with the plentiful mushrooms and onions of the area, and then would have the "plain good sense" to use the marinade as the sauce, too. Why burgundy and not any of the other fine "hexagonal red wines with the same fullness of body required to achieve the same tour de force?" Apparently a Bordeaux is "too chic!" a Cadurcien is great in a reduction (but apparently iffy here). But one can apparently legitimately substitute a chateauneuf-du-pape (if one is filthy rich) or a cotes-du-marmandais (good luck finding that here), or can sneak by with any other "powerful and generous" red, so long as one garnishes it with the holy Burgundian trinity of lardons, mushrooms, and pearl onions.

Nicolas Freeling calls bœuf bourgignon an enigma in his charming stories on his time as a cook in France, The Cook Book. Although the wine portion is clear, the beef cut is not, and the vagueness of the term "beef" here "is a heaven-sent gift to the butcher." Freeling's digressions appeal to the distraction in me, and I love his aside of how the "bifteck also means a price-fixing racket which has become a French national scandal dignified by antiquity and immovability, like the pharmacie. These two unmentionables dictate the whole of French life, like the Syndicate and the Mafia in America." In any case, for beef bourgignon, you're looking for stewing beef, an economical cut (like the Burgundians) and in particular for lean, boneless chunks about the size of a demi-tasse cup from the round or the chuck. Don't worry about fat or sinew, everything will end up tender from the acid of the wine and the time of the cooking. As Anthony Bourdain points out in a brilliantly hilarious essay in his Les Halles Cookbook, don't go for Dean & Deluca here - it'd be a waste, as the true origins of beef bourgignon is from French chefs making do with beef that "frankly sucks" and thus have been masters of transforming the "tough, bony, squiggly, and fatty stuff" - into something magical for eons, god bless 'em. Freeling more poetically sums up the results: "Beef stew is nice anywhere, and in Burgundy in particular - the name conjures up not only the bacon, the red wine, the onions, and the white haricots, but large muscular housewives with broad red faces and cunning little eyes, excellent cooks, with placid temperaments and a subtle humor. Most of Renoir's models, including his wife and a long line of famous servants 'whose skin took the light well' and were forever scrubbing the floor with no clothes on when not eating stew, were Burgundian, and the stew is just like them; marvelously tender, honest, beautiful, and innocently sensualist."

Okay, On to D's Bœuf Bourgignon Recipe

There are a lot of recipes out there, and i've read most of them and, like my best dishes, my own version is actually an amalgamation of what i find to be the best points of all of them, but I would like to cite my sources out of intellectual integrity: Julie Rosso & Sheila Lukins, Julia Child, Anthony Bourdain, and Larousse Gastronomique are my main sources, with a little nod to (shudder) Martha Stewart on the mushrooms and onions. While there are those who would still marinate the beef in wine and herbs starting the night before, don't do it. It's not necessary, and one of the biggest keys to a great stew is properly browned beef, which requires that it be bone dry before you put it in the fat. While bœouf bourgignon is the perfect dish for tough, grass-fed, non-"steroid-jacked" beef (which really, is all you should be eating), even that beef is much more tender than those of the days of yore, and so marinating it is not only a waste of time, it becomes nearly impossible to get it dry enough for quick and proper browning. An overview for those of you who are already tired of this post and just want to finally get the recipe, dammit, and will be annoyed by the long-winded discussion about how i go about making this: you're going to cook some bacon until crisp, take that out, put in some beef, brown it in batches, throw in some chopped onions, shallots, and flour and brown it on high heat for about 4 more minutes, pour in some wine and stock and other stuff, and stick it in the oven to roast at 350 degrees F for a couple of hours, after which you will add some roasted mushrooms and onions. You will, if you are wise, be doing this the night before and will then put it in the fridge overnight. The next night, you will reheat it in the oven for another hour at 350 degrees, and will thicken it with a beurre manié before serving with either potatoes or noodles and chopped parsley sprinkles.

Ingredients for 6 servings:
6-8 ounces thick bacon or lardons, cut into medium/large dice
3 pounds beef chuck, cut into 2" chunks
1 cup chopped onion
1 chopped shallot

3 cups Burgundy or Côtes du Rhone wine (spend more than $7/bottle and less than $20)
3 cups beef stock
2 Tbsp. tomato paste
1 Tbsp. chopped fresh rosemary leaves
1 bouquet garni (couple of each: parsley sprigs, thyme sprigs, bay leaves, celery hearts, maybe a rosemary sprig - basically whatever's in the garden still on December 31 - either tied into a bundle with string or if you're really anal, you can wrap it into a little cheesecloth bag and tie that with string)

1.5 cups peeled and cut carrots (about 3-4, you can do 1/3" thick rounds or 1.5" long thick slices)

2 cups red or white pearl or boiler onions
8 ounces fresh wild mushrooms (I like shitake and crimini, chanterelles are good, too)
Spray olive oil or 1 Tbsp butter, melted

1 Tbsp. red currant jelly
1 Tbsp. butter, softened
1 Tbsp. flour

2 Tbsp chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Another note: this recipe is easily (and usually, for parties) doubled. If that's the case you will need two cocottes or dutch ovens in order to properly do all the steps prior to putting it in the oven. If you have a big enough pot you can combine both batches at that point.

Instructions for Cooking (if you're me, anyway, which i don't necessarily recommend):
Again, a helpful overview: this is going to take all damned day (actually one and change), and you will be working a 10 hour day on top of it. However, as Anthony Bourdain has summed up perfectly, in order to be a good cook, you need not be highly trained, nor within a mile of a Dean & Deluca, but you "will need a pure heart, and a soul....You must enjoy what you're doing...You need passion, curiosity, a full spectrum of appetites. You need to yearn for things....You need love." This is in part because cooking is the textbook living example of transformation, and like any alchemist knows, a little bit of your soul goes into the process. If you are in a bad mood, if you don't love what you're doing or who you're doing it for, or god-forbid, all of the above, then get the hell out of the kitchen and order pizza, because otherwise your resentments will seep into the end results. The worst cooks are the ones who hate cooking, which is no surprise, and there are as many fantastic cooks as there are people who pour their love for the heft of a good knife and the satisfying sounds of the chopping, searing, and whipping, or for wanting to please their favorite child returned home, or for the joy of feeding friends or even strangers into the pan on the stove in front of them.

So, remember this - that you are doing this out of love, out of passion and need to be pure of heart when you go to the butcher's to find he doesn't open until 11am, run around getting the rest of the ingredients and come back only to be told that you should have called ahead because he's leaving town tomorrow for two weeks and so isn't keeping chuck in stock and only has 2 lbs and you need 6. Take a deep breath and be amused by his Australian accent; don't stomp back to the car - focus on good will. Go to work. Don't eat dinner. Leave at 9:45pm and head straight to the DC Whole Foods that stays open until 10:30pm and prepare to lay open thine wallet for the very last 6 pounds of chuck in the entire establishment and be glad that you're not doing tenderloin. While dodging the crowds, sweep up a hunk of cheese, some good Belgian beer, and a pecan roll for dinner and dessert. Grab your bags from the cashier, and before you laugh too hard at the little hipster girl in her slouchy knit cap and pseudo-hippie togs whom you follow into the garage where she then incongruously if predictably climbs into a giant Mercedes SUV-type looking thing, remember that you, you little down-to-earth snob, are climbing into an Audi wagon while wearing bright fuscia Paul Smith stockings. It's best to embrace your own hypocrisy and take advantage of that amazing drive train on the way home; take the Parkway so you can have fun racing around the curves while getting home in record time in a driving style you would never permit your spouse to perform with you in the car, and do so hopefully ahead enough of your vegan friends and spouse who are off having dinner to get this thing in the oven before they get back. When you enter the kitchen at 10:55pm, exhausted, fighting end-of-year angst and frustration at all that is going wrong, pull out your bottle of Three Philosophers, your hunk of divine Cambrozola (camembert meets gorgonzola and has the prettiest baby of the cheese world), a handful of crackers, and put on some Louis Armstrong and sing along to C'est Si Bon until you feel your spirits start to lift.

Okay, now you're ready.

Step One: Crisp the bacon over medium-high heat.

Transfer the bacon with a slotted spoon to a plate and leave just enough bacon grease in the pan to leave about 1/16" or 1/8" layer on the bottom. Make sure the beef is patted bone dry with a paper towel, then add in small batches to hot grease until browned on all sides, about 4-5 minutes, and then setting aside while remaining pieces are browned. If you aren't getting a nice deep brown in that around that time, your heat is probably too low - this is where good cast iron pans separate themselves from bad ones - if you can afford a Staub or can get someone to give you one, make the investment. Not only are they beautiful, but they'll save you time because they're just better pans that heat more evenly than my $50 on sale giant Calphalon dutch oven.

Add all the beef, the chopped onion, the shallot, and sprinkle the flour over everything. Season with a light sprinkle of salt and a generous bit of pepper. Stir repeatedly over high heat for another 5 minutes until a rich dark brown:

Add the wine, stock, tomato paste, reserved bacon, chopped rosemary, and bring to a boil, scraping up anything that has stuck to the bottom of the pan.

Once brought to a boil, add the bouquet garni, cover, and stick in the oven at 350 degrees for 2 hours. (This is where you can combine the two batches if you want). You really don't have to do anything to it while it's in the oven - hooray!

Celebrate with dessert and the leftover wine. Clean your knife - there's more work, dear.

Chop the carrots in whatever shape(s) you want and add them to a pot of boiling water for 5 minutes. If you have some leftover rosemary, add that, too - it'll flavor the carrots.

Prepare the mushrooms. If they're small, just trim off the ends, but if they're big, split them in half or quarters, too. For the onions, you can be lazy and just throw them in a pot of boiling water for about 5 minutes, but if you're feeling the joy, cut a small "X" in the bottom of each before doing so. Either way, drain them, rinse with cold water, then trim off the bottom and squeeze them out of the first layer. Julia says to "peel carefully so as not to disturb the onion layers." I disturbed some of them, I must confess. I'd say no one was the wiser, though. Put the onions and mushrooms in a baking pan and spray with olive oil (or if that's unavailable or if you just prefer butter, toss them first in a tablespoon of melted butter), and sprinkle them lightly with salt (truffle salt is superb if you have it). Put the pan in the oven during the last 30 minutes of baking of the stew.

After two hours, the beef should be quite tender. Remove the bouquet garni, add the mushrooms, onions, and carrots to the stew, and blend.

Cool and refrigerate overnight. Woo hoo - it's

and you still have to clean the kitchen

This is part of the reason for doing this the night before serving; the other reason is that it tastes much, much better that way, but if you really don't have time for that, the dish should be ready to thicken anytime after 2 to 2.5 hours. If you have refrigerated it overnight, reheat it in the oven at 350 degrees for one hour. Remove, make a beurre manié by combining one Tbsp each butter and flour into a paste; add about 1/4 c. of the sauce to the paste and mix until thoroughly blended. Add mixture back to rest of stew and stir until beurre manié is incorporated and stew is slightly thickened. Add red currant jelly and blend. Sprinkle with parsley and serve with buttered parsley potatoes or egg noodles to rave reviews and calls for you to open a restaurant (they've all had a couple of cocktails and didn't see your kitchen). And by god, now it's time to crack open the really good bottle of wine and celebrate this wonderful feast and the start of a new year with people you love.

Bûche de Noël
After a post this long, I will not tax you with the story of this year's bûche-making other than to note that its construction required two days and everyone's participation, and while we did have one of the best-decorated bûches yet, we also ate Christmas Eve dinner at 12:30am. Here was the process of making it:

Et ben, voilà!

Happy New Year and All That
Well, it's been quite a year. As usual, the house still isn't done and i haven't really stuck with any of my resolutions, although for once i did lose some weight, but that was due to stress, not anything meritorious, like exercise. My last yoga class was probably 2 weeks ago, and the instructor reminded us that it is also the end of a decade and so we should consider setting intentions for the next decade. The next decade!! Who needs such pressure? This year also marks the end of my 30s, which my favorite law school professor told me would be so much better than my 20s. Were it not for the construction and the four knee surgeries, maybe. It's all quite overwhelming, actually, to look back on this year, the decade, and further, so i've decided to keep my resolution for next year simple, straightforward, and attainable:

Here's wishing you and yours a happy 2011. Cheers.

You've Stollen My Heart

2010-12-13T23:44:00.007-05:00

As i've mentioned already, winter is my least favorite time of year, and this week's freezing rain and frigid temperatures have done nothing to lift my spirits. I also must confess to having a bit of a bah humbug attitude toward the holidays, for which i blame the American retailers who have been torturing me with Christmas carols since Halloween. It's hard to actually get excited about the holidays when you've been bombarded with exhortations to empty your wallet on inflatable yard ornaments and other useless items in the name of Jesus for a quarter of the year. This is probably why i always end up doing my holiday shopping at the last possible moment: i become so inured to the season that i end up forgetting how close Christmas is until about December 20th, which has been really good for all the overnight delivery companies.

However, all is not gloomy here, as i am never more prolific in the kitchen than during these short days and freezing nights. Since i cannot skip down the slippery sidewalks, i bask in the glow of a warm stove. To counter American consumerism run amok, i tend to take on the most arduous and intricate culinary adventures, and send to friends and family boxes of handmade chocolates and Jackson Pollack-painted gingerbread men. Truth be told, about now, the kitchen is usually covered in cocoa, there are smudges of chocolate on the refrigerator door, and there is powdered sugar and flour dusted over most surfaces as i race to finish the 8th kind of cookie so we can get them boxed up and out the door. Every year i've been upping the ante on difficulty, and last year this meant delving into the Culinary Institute of America's textbook tome on chocolate making, the end result of which was that in addition to the 8 kinds of cookies, there were grand marnier truffles and raspberry ganache filled chocolates made in a polycarbonate mold and dusted with edible ruby pixie dust.

Sadly, this year, there hasn't been enough time to bake any cookies (as it was, I had to stay up until 5am to finish the Thanskgiving pies), and as the clock ticks down and the work doesn't let up, i fear i will be driven to give up and go to the chocolate shop down the street and just purchase truffles for everyone. Of course, this would actually be cheaper than what i normally end up spending and they're handmade, too, just not by me. Perhaps it's my Catholic upbringing, but i really feel like if it's too easy - if i can just waltz in and point to the case and have them put it in a pretty little box with a pretty little bow, and finish shopping for ten people in 15 minutes - then it's cheating and i end up feeling guilty.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, a friend of mine proposed taking a stollen class at DC's amazing kitchen supply boutique, Hill's Kitchen, and i enthusiastically agreed. On my side of the family, my mother's clan is the dominant culture, and they've stuck to their French traditions, such as opening presents after midnight mass, and the dessert of choice is the laboriously intense bûche de noël, served with glasses of champagne for all (even the kids, which was the total highlight of my year). My mother always makes the meringue mushrooms; i tend to cheat and use marzipan which you can just mold with your fingers. My spouse's side of the family (who find my bûche efforts exhausting just to watch) has infused its holiday traditions with their years spent in Heidelberg, Germany, and so every year they have a giant 20 lb. tin of German Christmas treats sent from Nürnberg that is painted with scenes of medieval German villages and is full of about 20 packages of different kinds of delectable lebkuchen and stollen. And other cookies that i don't really like as much, so i ignore them as i shamelessly and greedily dig past them for the chocolate-covered lebkuchen. Anyway, i thought it would be great fun to make them a homemade stollen this year, and since i've essentially done nothing to keep up with the Now Serving section of this blog, thought i'd share my stollen class experience with you.

The History of Stollen - Is It a Swaddled Savior? Or a Mine Shaft Entrance?
The generic definition of stollen is a bread filled with rum-soaked dried fruit and sometimes nuts. But its actual history is considerably more complicated and pretty entertaining. Supposedly, stollen was a bread originally made by Germanic pagans that was co-opted, like everything else, by the Christians. Stollen was originally called streizel, which, according to Wikipedia, came from the word strüzel or stroczel, or "awaken" (Old Prussian: troskeilis), which came to mean "early-baked loaf of bread," and was a less-than-festive sounding concoction of flour, yeast, oil, and water. Stollen was first served as a Christmas pastry by the Saxon court in 1427, and was supposed to resemble the swaddled infant Jesus. Dresden, the official home of stollen, has a namesake Streizelmarkt, which is one of Germany's largest Christmas markets and has been going steady since 1434. Apparently the Dresden folks did not see the Son of God in this loaf of bread. They thought it clearly looked like a mine shaft entrance (apparently Dresden is home to lots of silver and tin mines), and so renamed it stollen, which is German for mine shaft. (I guess we all see what we want to see.)

Back in those early days, stollen was made with oil because the Catholic church banned the use of milk and butter during the Advent season, which used to be a time of fasting. However, not only did this result in a dry, crappy stollen, but the northern Europeans felt the butter ban was unfair since oil in that area was scarce, expensive, and apparently had to be made from turnips (how, i can't even imagine - i'd think blood would be more easily gotten, frankly). So a couple of 15th century German aristocrats petitioned the pope for an exception to the rule. This is hilariously described by Bäckerei & Konditorei Gnauck, one of the official Dresden stollen bakeries as follows:

In 1450 Elector Ernst of Saxony and his brother Albrecht applied to the Pope Nikolaus V for an abrogation of the butter-prohibition. The Vatican bureaucracy was a hard test of Saxon Bakers patience. Five popes must die, before Pope Innocenz VIII sent a letter in 1491, known as "butter-letter", to Dresden. In that letter he had declared that richer ingredients were allowed. In return, the Dresden Stollen bakers had to pay a "fine". The money was used for building of [the Freiburg Cathedral].

I don't know if it was deliberate or an amusing translation issue, but i love how "five popes must die" (did the bakers have something to do with it?) before the ticked off Saxons get the right - for a fee, of course - to no longer offend God by using butter in their stollen - well, stollen for the nobility, anyway, which was the limit of the original exception. Because, you know, God will look the other way if you slip him a little cash under the table. (You say selling of indulgences, i - and Martin Luther's Open Letter to The Christian Nobility (look for fn 16) - say bribery.)

The next stop in this long history is when Heinrich Drasdao, a baker in Saxony, decides that the original formula is embarrassingly lacking for a Christmas cake, so tosses some dried fruit into the mix, which then becomes the standard recipe and vast improvement over the original. The bakers of Dresden first enter the World's Largest Stollen Contest in 1560, when they present the nobles with two "Weihnachstollen," each 1.5 meters long and weighing 36 pounds. As usual, this is the beginning of a long competition, whose next major marker was in 1730, when King Augustus the Strong of Poland, an 18th century party boy, decides to amuse himself and impress the population by throwing the first Stollenfest, for which he ordered the Dresden bakers to make a 1.7 tonne, 27 foot long stollen large enough for everyone in town to have a piece. This endeavor required the Court Architect, Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann, to design a special oven for baking this monster, which is how the planner of Warsaw, Poland, added "Giant Stollen Oven" to his portfolio.

I can only imagine what the aliens will think was happening when they see this.

Despite breaks here and there for various wars over the centuries, Stollenfest continues today on the second Sunday of Advent. The stollen now weighs an average of 3 or 4 tonnes, and is ceremoniously cut with the Grand Dresden Stollen Knife, a 4 foot silver-plated replica of the original one used in 1730. This is apparently still an architectural as well as culinary feat, requiring 60 special ovens to burn for 3 weeks to make 370 stollen "plates" of 25 lbs each, which are then glued together with butter and sugar, loaded onto a special Stollen Wagon, dusted with powdered sugar, and paraded through town, with the Stollen Maiden - yes, there's a Stollen Maiden - waving to the crowd (that's Miss Stollen 2010) . Plan your trip to next year's Stollenfest and learn more about the festivities here.

Stollen Today

Like champagne, true Dresden stollen has to be made by one of the 150 official Dresden bakeries and stamped with a seal of authenticity from the Stollenschutzverband (the Stollen trade protection society) or it isn't really stollen. In typical German/European fashion, there are official rules for making a stollen - there's even a European Council regulation mandating what it is and who can make it. If you want to follow the official recipe, here it is:
‘Stollen’ must contain at least the following ingredients: wheat flour (German flour type Nos 405 or 550), whole milk or dried whole-milk powder, granulated sugar, fresh butter or clarified butter, candied orange and/or lemon peel, sultanas, sweet and bitter almonds, lemon zest, table salt, icing sugar, spices.
- They must not contain the following ingredients: artificial flavourings, additives which have been added directly, margarine. [Ed. Note: what on earth are additives which have not been added directly??]
- The following ingredients must be included in the following proportions per part of flour: Fresh butter or corresponding amount of clarified butter: 50 %, Sultanas: 65 %, Candied lemon and/or orange peel: 20 %, Almonds, sweet and bitter: 15 %
- On the outside, ‘Stollen’ have an even form, are suitably browned, and evenly buttered and powdered with sugar. The crumb is light and well-aerated with evenly distributed fruit. ‘Stollen’ have a pure, aromatic and well-rounded smell and taste.

There are all kinds of stollen recipes out there, some with yeast, which gives it more of a panettone-type consistency, and some without, which results in a cross between a scone and a tea bread. I've had and loved both versions, as well as those with and without marzipan, but there i have a definite preference for the marzipan. Being in a hurry this time of year, i appreciate the recipe shared with us at Hill's Kitchen, which is a yeast-less quick bread, and quite delicious. Of course "quick" is a relative term here, and you'll find that if you really want to get serious about stollen (which make really fabulous gifts because they're pretty, they're not terribly fragile, and they last for weeks), then you should actually start around Thanksgiving, when you shove two vanilla beans into a mason jar of powdered sugar and let the fragrance of the vanilla bean infuse the sugar over the next several weeks. But it's too late for that, so let's just go from here. You will need the following ingredients and two days (unless you don't have 2 days, in which case, you can do it in an evening if you must):

Holiday Stollen Recipe
8 oz. almond paste
1 egg
2/3 c. sugar

1/2 c. dried currants

1/4 - 1/2 c. golden raisins

1/4 c. each chopped candied ginger, lemon peel, and orange peel (could also substitute dried cherries, apricots, or walnuts for the citrus peel)

2-3 Tbs rum

2.5 cups bread or all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 c. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. mace
1/4 tsp. cardamom
3/4 c. ground blanched almonds
1/2 c. (1 stick) unsalted butter

1 c. whole milk ricotta cheese (don't use skim - it'll have too much water)

3 Tbl. melted butter
Vanilla Powdered Sugar

Twas the Night Before Stollen
Make the marzipan filling by combining the almond paste, egg, and sugar in a food processor and mix until a smooth paste is formed. This may require a few scrapes of the bowl.

Spread the marzipan onto some plastic wrap and roll into a log. Chill overnight.
If you are reading this and you need your stollen tonight, you can cheat and do this step first and stick the log of marzipan on ice in the freezer while you make everything else. But it must be thoroughly cold or it will melt during baking.

Day Two

Face the fact that you are going to end up covered in flour and just put on one of the several aprons you have received over the years that you rarely use but wish you had when your favorite cashmere sweater ends up splattered with tomato sauce. It will also help keep your poncho fronds out of the batter. No, chili peppers don't match the cuisine, but they're festive anyway.

Combine the dried fruits and rum in a jar or a bowl and add the rum. Give it a good shake or several tosses; do this again a few times while assembling the other ingredients so the rum is absorbed by fruit.

It's unlikely you have found pre-ground blanched almonds, so start by putting some whole or slivered blanched almonds in the food processor and pulse until almonds are chopped, but not powdered. It's good to have some texture in the bread. They should look something like this:

Mix the flour, baking powder, salt, mace, cardamom, ground almonds together in a medium mixing bowl. Cut the stick of butter into small pats and mix together with a pastry cutter or your fingers, until the mixture is a coarse meal similar to pie crust dough:

In a separate bowl, mix the ricotta and rum-soaked fruits.

Add the ricotta mixture to the flour mixture and knead until you have a small ball of dough that is somewhat wetter than scone dough:

This dough can be made into one large stollen or two "small" stollen; I've cut mine in half and they're still plenty big (about 10" x 6").

Roll out the dough onto a lightly floured surface into an oval of about 1/2" or more thick, depending on whether you want a taller or flatter stollen (which also then dictates your baking time). Make an indentation near the center of the oval with the rolling pin or your hands:

Add the marzipan log (half if you're making two), leaving about a half inch from each edge of the dough. Cook's note: I found there was almost too much marzipan and you would do well to use 2/3 of the batch you made and save the rest for bear claws you will attempt again later in the month despite the cataclysmic failure that was your last effort. Brush melted butter on one side of the dough and then fold over to make a sort of stollen taco. You do not want the edges exactly even - it's traditional to see the fold. Press the edges together gently to seal the marzipan in.

Place stollen(s) on parchment lined cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 40-50 minutes for smaller stollen, or 50-60 minutes for a larger stollen. This is really a ballpark, because you are actually baking them until they are deep golden brown, and i think i was at 50 minutes for my two small stollen, if not longer.

Transfer stollen to cooling rack and brush tops with melted butter and sprinkle with powdered vanilla sugar (note on this - if you didn't have time to make vanilla powdered sugar, you can cheat by adding about 1 teaspoon of vanilla powder to 4 Tbs powdered sugar. Or you can skip the vanilla part altogether.)

Baby Jesus in diapers? Mine shaft? Blob? It's a pastry Rorschach Test

There you go - two Christmas stollen, ready for giving or eating. Stollen should be stored for the first day or two in something that allows it to breathe a bit, after that, it needs to be tightly covered, but a stollen can last for 3 weeks. When serving, it's nice to rewarm it for 10 minutes in a 350 degree oven before eating. You can see the marzipan filling in the cross section shown at the top of this post. A nifty trick is to scoop out the marzipan with a knife and spread it across the rest of the piece, as if it were butter. Fro Hay Vie Knock Ten!! (Frohe Wiehnachten!!)

She Bravely Turned Her Tail and Fled

2010-12-07T17:33:00.014-05:00

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of my all-time favorite movies and certainly one of the most hilariously quotable (It's just a flesh wound!!...Look, that rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer!) Generally speaking, I find a lot of Monty Python movie scenes to be applicable to life's funnier/stranger moments. This little ditty gets hummed a lot when I just can't face the addition anymore (or at any other time I'm feeling less than heroic in the face of adversity/heights, which is not infrequent):

I have discovered that the best way to deal with construction woes is to bravely turn away and flee. Preferably to a hotel with daily maid service. Given that this strategy is out of the budget, I have found an even better place to escape: I call it "Chez BFF." Chez BFF is a Bi-College establishment run by two of the best hosts (and coolest people generally) on the planet. Yes, a visit to Chez BFF does require flying to Dallas. But once there, I get waited on hand and foot: BFF makes me chai before I go to work - and puts it in a thermal mug to go! They chauffeur me to and from the office! There are always smoked almonds to nibble on and champagne to sip! They plan social outings and take care of all details for me! They give free guided tours and make dinner reservations! They shuttle me to and from the airport! She can handle all medical emergencies and prescribe drugs when necessary! He knows all the best bike trails! Best of all, they are really fun, funny, insanely smart people who just make life better when they're around. A trip to Chez BFF is my new Addition Coping Strategem #2 (#1 - Denial).

Other than the sublime, world's best service one finds at Chez BFF, there is also the house. If your dream house is in a shambles or otherwise beyond your reach, it's great when you have unfettered (and free!) access to another one, especially when you and Chez BFF's owners have pretty much the same taste in art and architecture. Here are a few (low-quality) photos that still don't do it justice:

All the benefits of mid-century modern design without any of the technical limitations. I love the openness of the floorplan and the endless windows, how it brings the outside in as Uncle Frank (as Wright is known in my mother's household) would have wanted. It's light, airy, minimalist: perfect. Well, almost - that last picture goes to show you that every house has its conundrums: that chandelier hangs over a 3-story gap in the stairwell, so changing the bulb will require significant acrobatic feats.My last visit to Chez BFF also involved a trip to the Nasher Sculpture Center, which is now one of my favorite art galleries in the world. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, the building itself is a work of art.

As i am really bad at keeping track of artist sponsors and collectors generally (i can barely keep the artists themselves straight), i don't know much about Raymond Nasher, the founder, other than that he was obviously obscenely wealthy and had impeccable taste in art. There wasn't a piece in there that didn't capture my interest and imagination. As an added bonus, all of the explanations of the pieces were quite informative without the usual imperious pedantry one often finds all too often at MOMA or the Met or even the Hirshhorn Gallery, the kind that induce much eye-rolling and occasionally a gag reflex.

I love sculpture, perhaps more than other traditional art forms, because of its tangible nature and three-dimensional presence. Paintings can certainly move me and i can get lost in Van Gogh's Eglise d'Auvers-sur-Oise for a half-hour, easily (it happens every time i go). But there is something about an object jutting out in space that compels me to move about, to see all the angles, to imagine the feel of the clay that became the mold, the tiny taps of the hammer on the chisel that carved the marble, or to mentally reconstruct the welding, sanding, and balancing that brought the piece together.

I've included a few of my favorites at the Nasher below, but you can get an amazing virtual visit to the Gallery at their website. First, two gorgeous pieces from Mark di Suvero: Eviva Amore and For W.B. Yeats.

As preface, I have a thing for Cor-ten steel. Between an architect mother and a welder father, it's a material I've been playing on or around for as long as I can remember. The color and texture of it gets me for reasons I cannot articulate, really, other than that I appreciate the intricate variation in the texture and coloration of it. I would love to incorporate Cor-ten into our own project, but the cost of it has impeded its use as a bamboo container/retaining wall at the end of the lot. So far, anyway.

But back to the art, here's the explanation from the Nasher on these pieces: Mark di Suvero's monumental steel sculptures expand to architectural scale the constructivist explorations begun by Pablo Picasso, Julio González, and David Smith in the first half of the 20th century. With beams thrusting outward from a central core, Eviva Amore (Long Live Love) is an exclamation of passion in raw, weathered steel. The 22,000 pound structure spans 47 feet. Welded and bolted together, its carefully balanced, cantilevered elements give the sculpture both an industrial quality and elegant grace.

I agree - it does soar against the sky with incredible grace. I find it reminiscent of my childhood Tinkertoys; i love how it looks so simple, but the balancing act is fairly complex. There is a fantastic interview with di Suvero here. For W.B. Yeats is a reference to the last line in Yeats' 1920 poem Among School Children, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" The guide states: "di Suvero reflects upon the artistic challenge of conveying feeling through form. Much like the fluid, expressive motion of dance, the sculpture balances two elements that rock and pivot on a central point. Despite its size, this kinetic iron assemblage of curves and angles, solids and voids cultivates an intimacy with its viewers, its capacity to twirl or sway enticing one's movement around the object." As it was still when we came upon it, I gave it a forceful yet surreptitious shove and watched it turn slowly, the shadows of the piece shifting in the afternoon light. It did make me think of dancing and i wanted desperately to take it home with me. Since i can't do that, if anyone wants to know what I'd like for Christmas, here it is: http://ce.corcoran.edu/course/SL2250/Introduction-to-Metal-Sculpture - Section A, please, and i'm happy to just audit. If genetics have anything to do with it, this just might be my artistic calling. Plus, i love blowtorches (doesn't everyone, really?)

Next favorite: Richard Serra's My Curves Are Not Mad. This thing is spectacular, and i had recently fallen in love with a piece (5 of them, actually) he did in Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park called Wake. Here, the viewer is invited to walk between the two curves, which compresses and tilts the space around you, providing interesting slants of light and shifts of perspective. Actually, the experience of walking through My Curves Are Not Mad reminded me of the sensation I got walking through the Siq in Petra, Jordan. It's also a favorite trick of Uncle Frank, who routinely has tiny entry vestibules and hallways in his houses that then open into a great room or even just a bigger bedroom with a higher ceiling - the whole intention of the design is to create a physical and subsequently subtle emotional drama of compression and then release.

Okay, moving on: Joan Miro's Moonbird, Magdalena Abakanowicz' Bronze Crowd (another piece where walking through the sculpture is key to understanding it), Henry Moore's Working Model for Three Piece No. 3, Vertabrae, and Aristide Maillol's La Nuit (see explanations here, here, here, and here)

Regarding La Nuit, my friend, the Structure of Cities major (who thus had lots of art history course requirements), was narrating from the brochure and paused after reading the description, cocked his head thoughtfully and said, "I thought she just looked really bummed." This still cracks me up.

One of the most unique "pieces" was James Turrel's "skyscape" called Tending, (Blue), which can only be described as a sort of meditative experience. The photos don't begin to capture it so I didn't put any up - but check it out here.

Well, you've all probably had enough of the art tour now, so I'll just give you a quick view of some of my other faves from the Gallery. A prize (batch of homemade gelato, perhaps?) goes to the first person who correctly identifies the artist and title of all the following:

The art tour was the end of my visit to Chez BFF, unfortunately, but the escape did much to restore my sanity and serenity, enabling me to face the dragons chez nous.

This Really Does Change Everything

2010-11-24T13:55:00.004-05:00

I left it all to you, my dear (handful of) readers, and (all 5) of you (plus the 5 on Facebook - or are you the same people?) who voted in my Mac or PC poll . And what you said, in a vote of 4-1 (or 7-3, maybe) was to suffer the slings and arrows of paying an outrageous fortune, so based solely on your advice, i ran back into the arms of Apple. (This way, if this ends badly, I can blame all of you. And I know who 3 of you are.) I realize that i've given the ending a bit of a surprise twist, but i realized that i could get a vastly more powerful iMac for less than a PowerBook, and the fact is, i don't really even take my laptop anywhere, so why limit myself to such a tiny screen and confining keyboard? And there she is, in her 27 inches of minimalist powerhouse glory. I am so in love, even if we don't yet speak the same language (Is alt now control, or alt, or that weird infinity-meets-number-key command button? Where is my Windows Explorer button?) It's okay - hand gestures seem to be enough to get by on for now.

There's glare on the screen from the windows behind my desk, so i'll have to take more shots at night (which is generally when i use it anyway). But my, oh my, ohhhhh myyyyy is that screen and its resolution mind-altering. I get sucked into the screen savers like hypnotized cartoon animals whose eyes become little swirls. For example, and this doesn't even do it justice at all, but here is what editing a photo on this thing looks like:

To give you a sense of scale, that's a full-sized keyboard (Look, Ma! No wires!) Then there's the fact that I finally uploaded (downloaded?) all 750 photos from Barcelona (6 weeks later) and another 800 or so stills for a stop-motion movie I'm making on making danishes from scratch (to be posted soon, although be forewarned, it's going to fall into the film noir category). These photos are huge digital files on my Canon EOS 30D, so they take for-flipping-ever to transfer. Normally. On the new Light of My Life, it took approximately 1.5 seconds per photo. This used to be about a minute per photo, I swear. My life is forever changed. Plus, iMovie is really fun and pretty intuitive, since I've never done movie editing in my life and put together my little film (the first 3/4 of it) in about an 30 minutes. I even did my first guitar lesson - the E major chord - on Garage Band (my fingers still hurt 3 days later, though, so I'm not sure about my future as a singer-songwriter). So, you'll all be happy to know that the acquisition therapy seems to be working, and I promise to post some happier things.

Which reminds me of a story (as all things do). One day, a BFF and then-roommate of mine and i came across an interesting discovery. After crap-on-crap weeks (possibly months) for both of us that left us each wallowing in deep and wide pools of self-pity, my friend's mother offered - nay, demanded - that we borrow her Audi TT convertible and go for a drive on what was in my memory still one of the most gorgeous summer days DC has ever had. So, we put on cute summer dresses and made a plan to drive up and down the GW Parkway and then get cocktails at the Georgetown waterfront. About halfway into the drive/flight, with the engine purring as the trees, the curves of the road, and the Potomac whizzed by, and with the wind in our hair, sun on our shoulders, and music in our ears, I turned to my friend with a grin from ear to ear and said "You know, money actually can buy happiness. How can you be unhappy in this car?" (Rumor has it that this story has made it to someone who works for Audi and may show up in some marketing campaign, so if it does, this entry will be proof that they stole it from me. It's okay, for a TT of my own, they can have it.)

Autumn Songs

2010-11-22T14:01:00.012-05:00

When I was growing up, I always loved autumn. I loved the way the air suddenly felt cleansed of summer's humidity, how the skies were suddenly more blue, and how all the trees burst out in infernos of red and orange. Although my leo heart belongs first and foremost to summer, being an only child, autumn meant the end of lonely days when my friends were on family road trips to exotic sounding places like Saskatoon or The Badlands. Best of all, autumn meant going back to school, which always held the promise of new classes and adventures, maybe making new friends, and growing up, which, when you're not an adult, is Priority Number One. As a kid, I would have my first day of school outfit picked out a week ahead of time and would barely sleep out of excitement and nervousness the night before, a feeling that really only left me by year three of law school. I know, I know, you're thinking I was a geek and probably a teacher's pet, the latter half of which is true and the former not too far off the mark, I suppose. As my mother was also getting her degree through much of my childhood, fall meant a new semester for her, too, and I spent a lot of time on the University of Nebraska campus as the architecture department mascot. I loved the smell of art markers, the click of mechanical pencils, the rustle of drafting paper, the way classes were give and take instead of rote learning. I couldn't wait to go to college and took every opportunity to spend more time there, so I lived for Model United Nations, which was held there and run by college students; this in turn led to me dating college students, which upped my social status with my peers, if not my parents. I was ecstatic to finally be invited to real dinners that didn't take place at shopping mall food courts and to have intelligent conversations, both of which are hard to do, I suppose, if your only income is a $10 weekly allowance and your hormones are fogging your vocabulary skills. And once I finally got to college and later to grad school, it was and wasn't everything I thought it would be - growing up was a lot harder than I'd imagined - but I can say with certainty that those years were unequivocally the most intellectually enriching of my life, and I was pushed and pulled into shapes I didn't know I could make. Most of my closest friendships were forged in the fire of late nights philosophizing about the meaning of life over bottles of wine. My time at Bryn Mawr especially very much shaped me, even if the seeds planted while there didn't fully bloom until much later, and when I think of my alma mater, I always think of the view of Rhoads Beach from my senior dorm window, with the trees in their finest fall regalia, lit behind from the sun.

Autumn was in many respects the halcyon of my youth. And passing through the arbor of autumn leaves that surround me these days (a few shown above) reminds me of one of my favorite poems, one of the few I can (almost) recite from memory, because I read it at a French poetry reading contest held at the University - one of my first forays onto the campus not associated with my mother. I chose Verlaine's Chanson d'automne at the time because I loved the sound of it and the images it conveyed, both of which have stayed with me ever since:

Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l'automne

Blessent mon coeur

D'une langueur

Monotone.

Tout suffocant

Et blême, quand

Sonne l'heure,

Je me souviens

Des jours anciens

Et je pleure;

Et je m'en vais

Au vent mauvais

Qui m'emporte

Deçà, delà,

Pareil à la

Feuille morte.

There's a lot here that's lost in a literal translation, but you can find some versions here. The funny thing is that the poem is now a favorite for different, sadder reasons, namely that I am old enough now to understand what Verlaine was talking about. At 14, one has no old days to cry over, really. I think in some ways, the hardest part of being an adult is the monotony that can ensue once one chooses a career path and a hometown and is responsible for a mortgage and dealing with contractors. Whereas autumn used to mean new clothes and excitement, now it's just the leaves that change. I suppose this is different if one has school-aged children or if one is an academic by trade. But I find that where each period of my life used to be so clearly demarcated every year with the falling of the leaves, now the seasons and what I do from year to year is generally a big blur. I can tell you, for instance, where I was, when it was, and more or less what I did for every year I was in school; after that, it is hard to place any event in time. Sometimes I forget that the 1990s were now 20 years ago; half the time I can't remember how old I am. My grandparents tell me that this phenomenon only gets worse with age.

So now Chanson d'automne strikes a more haunting chord with me. Every fall reminds me of my dear friend Matthias, whom I met one Halloween and lost to leukemia three autumns later. He taught me everything I know about painting a house correctly, which he learned painting houses in Germany during summers spent visiting his father there, so when I say correctly, I really mean with a level of exacting precision bordering on obsession. He was an exceedingly patient teacher, which is why he succeeded in getting me to pay attention to the details (every single cotton-picking one of them) where so many others had failed. He would be mostly pleased with the work I've done on the addition to the house he helped me rip apart and put back together back in the beginning (although he'd have long ago fired the contractors), but he would be exasperated that I didn't dovetail the baseboard ends where they overlapped, and there are some spots on the ceiling that I should even out with a sanding sponge. He'd give me an A on the wiring and an F on the hookup to the rainbarrel on the roof, which is totally gerry-rigged and I should really paint the barrel brown so it blends in to the wall. I hear him chiding me in my head every time I try and do something half-assed, but I also hear him telling me to lighten the hell up over the whole thing and be patient that it will all get done eventually. He had a great sense of humor and adventure, and he really knew how to give adversity the finger. He made me jump swimming pool fences after midnight and go for motorcycle rides. In doing so, he taught me how to live in the moment and really appreciate the gifts life hands you. He also made a mean peach cobbler. He had zero tolerance for moping or self-pity, so I try to remember these things when I miss him, and how fall is also about Halloween (my favorite holiday), picking apples and pumpkins on farms out in the country, perfect hiking weather, and a great time to beachcomb shells at Assateague since the crowds and mosquitoes are finally gone. Fall will always be the most dramatic and beautiful, if also sentimental, season, whose soundtrack goes like this:

Sadly Symbolic

2010-11-03T20:39:00.007-04:00

This is the tree that was given to me by the Alexandria Environmental Policy Commission and several City staff members as a thank you for helping develop the Eco-City Charter and Environmental Action Plan 2030. The Eco-City Alexandria effort has brought together people from every level of the community - from citizens of every age and income level wanting to learn more about the issues, to Virginia Tech professors, City Council members, and the dedicated members of the EPC - to put together a sort of environmental Magna Carta for our city, an effort that has already garnered major awards and is already making our city more sustainable. I don't know that my efforts truly deserve special attention, as I just happened to be the one holding the gavel during the meetings, so I jokingly think of that tree as my cat herding trophy. But the truth is that I poured my heart and soul and 2.5 years of my life into that effort (as did everyone else involved), and still believe that it will probably be the most positive thing I ever do. I am truly just happy that I got to be a part of the team. That tree actually means the world to me, both because it is the kindest and most unexpected gift I have ever received and because it came from a group of people i admire and respect immensely. As my friends and colleagues led me to this red oak with a red ribbon and gift card tied around it on the grounds of the school across from our house, I imagined it growing tall and providing shade for kids a hundred years after I am gone, and no thank you gift could be more fitting. Trees always represent life to me in all it's forms and cycles, even as they do now in fall, the most bittersweet season, when summer's last and most fiery sunset is burned into every leafy finger while the cold air whispers that winter is near. And they are the first harbinger of hope when their green buds poke out against the grey landscape to remind everyone that even the dead of winter has an end every spring. I'm probably happiest on summer days spent reading under shady canopies rustling in the breeze.

I walked by my tree seeking its solace today, a gloomy day for anyone who truly cares about the environment, but where gold and crimson leaves should be there are instead parched and barren branches. Every other tree managed to survive the drought but mine. It's really just too symbolic of the state of my heart right now, which feels like there is far too little compassion or love left in the world, and that trying to make the planet a kinder, gentler, happier place is essentially a sisyphean task. I mean honestly, what is so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

RIP my little tree. :(

Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus (Le Remix)

2010-10-28T14:45:00.015-04:00

Oh, Apple, je t'aime. I have loved you since I was doing cutting-edge BASIC programming on the Apple II in my gifted class, circa 1980 (50 IF A$ "Yes" THEN GOTO 120; 120 PRINT "You are TOTALLY AWESOME", U$) . That was pretty shrewd marketing on your part, hooking me on your drugs at age 8. But I was willing; you were so cool. If it had been me buying the computer instead of my father, we would never have bothered with the two Trash-80s (although I think there is now a certain cache to having actually owned the one with the cassette tape drive), nor would we have thrown money down the drain with that Amiga 500, but you know, the old dudes were hooked in their youth on IBM.

Though largely a slave to the Macintosh side of the college computer lab, once free to spend my (parents') money on the computer of my choice (as opposed to the obligation I/my father had to replace my friend's half-typewriter/half-computer in Paris after my confusion as to whether or not it needed a 110-220 converter (it did) led to its immediate and fiery demise), I ran straight back into your loving arms my senior year of college. My trusty PowerBook Duo with docking station saw me through an 80 page thesis on how democracy and Islam were inherently compatible (as would surely play out in Algeria), preparation for oral philosophy exams (requiring relearning and regurgitation of 4 years of study), and then three years of law school.

But then, entry into the legal field required working with Word Perfect. And while I maintain, to this day, that WP is a vastly superior product to the crap Microsoft cobbled together in an extremely poor imitation thereof, the fact is that you and Corel never got along. And thus, I was finally required to cross over to the dark side of PCism. I'm so sorry, Apple, you know I didn't want to do it, but you made me. Had you been a less belligerent company regarding software, or not been so half-assed about allowing me to flip between operating systems, I never would have left you. Your ridiculous and spiteful ways regarding Microsoft have always left those of us who love you unable to work with you. And now you're doing it with Google, too, you idiots. J'accuse, Apple!

Still, I cannot escape my addiction to you. The fact is, you are the most beautiful thing with two USB ports. (Who needs 3, really?) Growing up with a modern architect who insisted on all white walls and no knick knacks, of course I love your minimalist design. In short, I was born to love you, 15" Macbook Pro, with your beautiful (recycled!) aluminum unibody and glass construction, the magical Multi-Touch Trackpad, backlit keyboard with ergonomic keys, brilliant HD display, and high-end graphics card. And you are Energy Star rated, with an 8-hour battery life (if I'm not running anything). I really, really, really want you.

And the truth is, I have, with the advent of the new laptop system at work, been freed from my absolute need to have a PC at home. And even though our new laptop system came with a new tech system that no longer supports Lotus Notes on Macs, the truth is that I have this old Acer here that I can use if for some reason I'm working from home and didn't lug home that 10 lb piece of crap Dell laptop the USG provided me. And to be honest, I don't know which I hated more - the old HP I had (which was produced under Carly Fiorina's tenure there and does nothing to inspire any confidence whatsoever in her ability to produce a useful, working product, much less state government), or the Acer I now have. Why Acer felt the need to partition my 80 GB hard drive into two unmergeable 40 GB drives, thus leaving me insufficient memory to run anything, is beyond me. People say, "d, d, whenever WILL you put up the pictures of [the house/the trip/your really cute kitty]" and I have to reply, "Well, I've been trying to upload them for 17 days now and I'm still only halfway there!!" And then there is the whole nightmare of trying to run Adobe Photoshop when your computer is essentially powered by a really tired, old, fat hamster. I'm so tired of the random BSOD periods that are apparently related to the graphics card that has never properly worked, which take over my computer for entire days at a time and then disappear as if there's no problem at all. I'd like to be able to run my iPhone on my own computer (instead of my spouse's) for a change, since there isn't enough room for Windows, Word, Photoshop, and iTunes on this doorstop-cum-laptop. Not that I don't appreciate my spouse's generosity, but I'm tired of the eyerolls I get when I ask him to download my favorite ELO or No Doubt CD, and I'd rather just cut off his ability to sneak in the entire Morrissey catalogue in the (vain) hope that I will learn to worship The Moz. Of course, if I turn back into your cold embrace, Apple, I know that I'll have to fend off his theft of you, just like when he railed against you for years but then promptly stole my 2Gen iPod.

So, I'm ready, Apple. I'm ready, but it's the extra $800 I'd have to spend to own you that has come between us. I've priced the Runner Up (the Vaio), Miss Congeniality (the new Samsung), and the Ugly Duckling (ThinkPad), and in order to get what I am told I should probably have for what I want to do (mostly photo work, running my iPhone, working from home once in awhile, and maybe some Garage Band action): 8GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, i5 processor, 15" HD non-glare screen, and MS Office, everyone else is considerably less than you. No, they aren't made from recycled materials, no they aren't as pretty, their batteries are shite, they aren't as energy-efficient, they don't run as well, and they don't have your magic Multi-Touch, and I know these soft variables do have value but they are so hard to quantify, especially when you're still trying to pay your contractor to finish your house. It's just that I'm not sure your extras add up, especially since I'm still going to have to go track down some student or teacher willing to buy me a copy of Photoshop CS5 Extended and then I'm going to have to come up with tuition money to figure out how to use it.

I know, I know, you're reminding me of my earlier post about buying cheap crap and asking me to put my money where my consumer and aesthetic moral mouth is. But really, are you even worth the extra money or are you just trying to gouge me the way you always do, you evil, heartless computer pusher? You are the Ligne Roset of computers. But still...you'd look soooooo good on my desk.

Whatever is a girl to do?

Je t'aime (moi non plus)

2010-10-22T17:21:00.003-04:00

Oh, Ligne Roset, je t'aime!

Stem Entertainment Console, you have stolen my heart.

I long to run my fingers over the curve of your walnut, the gloss of your lacquer.

I want to worship daily your perfect dimensions, your gorgeous form.

I have looked so long for you, over the internet and through U Street furniture stores.

You must be mine, you simply must...I will have no other!

You are $4,077.00 on sale...je te deteste, Ligne Roset.

Bread and Roses

2010-10-19T22:15:00.041-04:00

After saving up a year's worth of vacation (and home improvement injuries to body and soul), I have finally taken a real vacation - three whole weeks off! (You'll never see an American strike over having to work a few extra years, good little drones that we are!) This long absence is in part why there has been no news on the home front; in solidarity with the French, who I can't help but love for being one of the last populations willing to hold its entire society hostage to fight for a culture of leisure, and also with the perhaps more noble and certainly more justified textile workers of the 1900s whose protests are immortalized in poem and my Bryn Mawr class song, I have gone on strike. My life shall not be sweated from birth until life closes - give me bread, but give me roses!!

And so, even though I've been home a month now, I'm still (mostly) on home improvement strike and instead of amusing you with my latest construction calamity, I am taking you, fair reader(s?), on a tour of my new favorite U.S. city - Portland, Oregon - also known as The City of Roses, and home to amazing food, excellent beer, stellar design, sustainable living, and, most importantly, the company of near and dear friends. There is also, apparently, a stubborn libertarian nudist streak (we saw bumper stickers lauding the joys of naked hiking, jogging, and biking in our few days there), which only adds to its charm from a visitor's perspective. In short, despite the weather, I would put Portland ahead of even New Orleans as what America can be when we take the best of what the world has come up with and make it uniquely ours.

In many respects, Portland shares a similar feel to DC - it is based on the confluence of the Willamette (Will-AH-mette, by the way) and Columbia Rivers, upstream of the Pacific Ocean by a couple of hours. Portland proper has about 500,000 residents, but the greater area is about 2.2 million people, which is a lot bigger than I had thought. The city itself is superbly planned, with incredible public transit (free to all in the main 3-mile downtown area, and each rail car and bus equipped with bike hooks/racks) and bike lanes everywhere (I give the Portlanders extra kudos for biking in all that rain). There is not only recycling but also city-wide composting. Portland is the U.S.' most sustainable city and one of the top 10 in the world (some say #1, some say #2, but to be totally fair, I think Freiburg, Germany has been wrongly dismissed in the lists - not only can you basically not have a car in certain neighborhoods, but not even Portland has laws limiting how much heat can leak from your house). Green space abounds throughout the city, with Forest Park, the largest wilderness city park in the U.S., covering 5,000 acres, and the lovely Washington Park, perched on a hill overlooking the city and home to the International Rose Test Garden. Apparently all that rain makes for good rose growing. I agree:

Can't you just smell these? White roses have been my lifelong favorite, although after seeing the beauty and smelling the most perfectly delicate perfume - an almost half rose/half lavender scent - of the pale purply-pink ones below, I think there is at least a tie. There were so many unique and interesting specimens, it was hard to pick a favorite.

In addition to the amazing Test Garden, there is also the most lovely Chinese garden I have ever come across, the Lan Su Chinese Garden right in the middle of downtown. I am a huge fan of Japanese gardens and had never really seen a formal Chinese garden, but there are lots of similarities:

In general, P-town has a pretty funky artsy industrial feel to the place, and they've done a lot to revive old warehouses. Everywhere you go, there seems to be either cool art and/or great design.

Portland also has an incredible music scene whose sound seems to match the weather. If i'd included a soundtrack to this post, it would feature The Shins, The Decemberists, Blitzen Trapper, and my very beloved M. Ward. Also, keep your eyes open for the debut of Aquavit! Our friend's band practice space is perhaps the coolest one ever, housed in a former industrial warehouse and complete with center stage free for any of the bands to use for concerts, and guitar strings in the vending machine:

Then there's the food and the beer. Portland has nearly 30 microbreweries, the best pinot noir in the country, and generally has fabulous food everywhere. Best of all were the prices, which were usually the equivalent of taco night in Alexandria, no matter how nice the place. (This might have something to do with Portland's 25% unemployment rate.) The city also has a burgeoning foodcart scene, complete with every kind of food you can think of, even if it wasn't one you thought of actually eating:

But the pies at this place looked pretty awesome:

They even best DC with having one of a handful of US Teuscher chocolate boutiques (one of my desert island foods is a Teuscher champagne truffle)...

But as usual, they were closed at an absurdly early hour (i have a growing collection of photos of closed Teuscher stores). I guess the Swiss keep Bahnhofstrasse operating hours, no matter where in the world they are.

If you're into Asian food & architecture and keep late hours, Biwa is a dream come true. Kobe beef sliders with sake and seaweed salad at 11pm. It's also housed in some sort of architecture school, so even the bathrooms are uber cool.

While technically outside of Portland, I also have to say that the best wood-fired pizza I have ever had was at Solstice Wood Fire Cafe in Bingen, WA. You may not have thought blackberries, mascarpone, and prosciutto belonged on pizza, but you would be oh so very wrong.

There was also quite the taco scene, much to the delight of my spouse, who is planning to apply for the Head Lab Researcher/Taste Tester position here. If he gets it, I expect we'll become a bi-coastal couple:

And then, there is Broder, home to the best bloody mary on the planet, made with fine Danish aquavit and homemade pickled vegetables instead of a celery stick. I asked for the recipe, but given their total silence, I'd say it's a trade secret.

Although perhaps my favorite meal of all was the lovely breakfast our friends made for us at their beautiful bungalow apartment in Irvington, complete with home-grown tomatoes:

As well as being a great city, Portland is surrounded by natural beauty, including the Columbia Gorge, where the two rivers cleave the Cascade mountains into a swath of cliffs and waterfalls, and which was one of the last stops for Lewis and Clark in their nearly 3 year ordeal/exploration of the United States. Multnomah Falls, the most famous of the string of waterfalls along the Gorge, is the second highest in the U.S. at 620'.

Bridal Veil Falls is another really famous fall in the Gorge:

But the clear favorite was Latourelle Falls, whose scale and colors defy explanation.

What is amazing is the scale - here is a shot with the guys waving from behind the falls (the two red dots):

After I returned to work, I was walking down a hall in a distant part of the building, and passed a framed poster for National Public Lands Day that has probably hung on the wall since the 1990s, and suddenly realized that it was almost this very shot.

Sadly, four days in Portland just isn't nearly enough time to take it all in. As it is, we missed Pine State Biscuits by 30 minutes. But that's okay; aside from the best reason to visit (two of our favorite people on the planet), it's always good to save something for the next time.

(Stay tuned for Part 2 of our Western Exploration, where we hit the San Juan Islands, the Olympic National Park, and Whistler, Canada. As soon as I sort through the 700 photos, I'll get a few up on the blog.)

Uh Oh, It's Magic

2010-09-28T11:22:00.004-04:00

There it is, my 2:48am Victory Festbier to celebrate the painting of the kitchen. The first coat anyway. Given that i didn't really start until 10pm, and had to do a little sanding and all the cutting first, a 2:30 finish isn't too bad.

As you can see, it's a pretty dramatic change from the terra cotta walls of yore. We went with a Martha Stewart (shudder) paint called Heavy Goose for both the new room and the kitchen, which has engendered lots of jokes. Where do they come up with these names? What is it, exactly, about this particular shade of wintry white that made Martha think of some fat feathery fowl? Maybe she was making foie gras that day.

I'll do a proper photoshoot when it's all done, which you should expect sometime in 2012.

And now, the bad news:

Last weekend, I finished painting the new room, and was putting in the trim for the recessed lights when I discovered to my horror that only half of them work - the ones now dangling on the left side above. The right side doesn't work at all. First, I tried to troubleshoot: different bulbs, checking the connecting wires inside, etc. Nothing was wrong. I spent some time on the web and read a suggestion that a neutral wire was probably not connected somewhere, which made sense, although it had passed inspection and I had been very diligent about the connections, but thought maybe the drywall guys had inadvertently knocked something loose. The problem is that now that the ceiling is finished, searching for the loose connection meant ripping open holes to find it. So I did the logical thing and put my head down on the counter and wept bitterly.

Once I got my wits back together, I came back to the lights with dogged determination and the electric tester and found that all the boxes were getting power, so it likely wasn't a missing neutral connection. But mysteriously, not only are the hot (black) wires hot, but all the neutral (white) wires in the nonworking lights are also hot, whereas the working side are properly hot and neutral. This is bad, obviously. It's also really a mystery, because i wired all the boxes in a line, so i have no earthly idea how half of them would be in a different electrical state; maybe I had accidentally screwed up the wiring in the box somewhere. I consulted my wiring book and learned to my great relief that wiring in recessed boxes can actually be fixed from the hole- you just remove the shield that holds the trim and there is an access panel that can be opened from inside the box (a good idea). I was beginning to rue our decision to go with the 3" lights as i searched for a screwdriver short enough to fit in there, and once the trim pieces were out, it was still fortunate that i have such small hands, as getting those plates off the inside required squeezing your hand and wrist in there and feeling around for the latch, because there's not enough room for your hand and your eyes. There's a market for women electricians here, for sure.

Sadly, almost, my wiring was perfect. The fixture connections were fine, too. So no obvious solution exists. I thought about the switches and took all of those out to see if something had happened on that end - our electrician had actually done the switches and half of the wiring (including running power to the switch boxes and the last switch leg for the run), so I thought perhaps he had wired them incorrectly. They're on a 4-way switch, which is sadly not as kinky or fun as it sounds, but is definitely as complicated to organize. (Also, like all things relating to construction it makes no sense - a 4-way switch means you have 3 switches controlling one light/set of lights. A 3-way switch is actually two switches. A 2 x 4 piece of lumber is actually 1.75 x 3.75, the 2 x 2 mosaic tile is actually 1.85 x 1.85. Etc., etc.) Anyway, I pulled all the switches out and realized quickly that I have no clue what is happening in those switch boxes. Was it the traveler or the common...or the power in? I couldn't tell from the tangle before me. I am not, it turns out, an electrician.

These kinds of wiring fiascos (and I've had several in this project) remind me of a story my mother told me about the electrical engineers she went to architectural school with, who, when discussing radio frequencies and how they work joked that what FM really stands for is "Fucking Magic."

I am calling the magician.

[PS - I think this diagram sums up my experience pretty well.]

Past My Prime

2010-08-18T13:02:00.005-04:00

What were you doing at this time last night? I'm guessing you were resting peacefully, hopefully having the sweetest of dreams.

Here's what I was doing:

To clarify, I was wrapping up priming the drywall on the first floor of the addition. The worst part of the job was, as it always is, the ceiling. Painting a ceiling requires that you keep your head back, supporting that heavy noggin of yours, while your shoulders also strain to control the roller, which in this project has the added joy of requiring balancing a 6-20 foot pole (extending to reach the part of the ceiling that's over the stairs) atop which the roller sits. I find this to be one of the most excruciating tasks of home improvement, for not only does it leave your entire upper body in a tangle of knots, but you end up walking into things because you aren't watching where you're walking. I almost knocked over the paint twice, acquired about 10 bruises, and 2 bloody gashes. As an added bonus, I ended up with paint in my hair and all over my bare arms and legs. In addition to skipping the common sense notion of wearing full body cover, I also ignored the warning on the primer to wear eye protection, figuring my eyeglasses were enough, but narrowly missed a splotch of runaway paint that bombed right past my lens and missed my left eye by a lash.

It occurred to me as I was wrapping up that it was nearly 10 years ago that I started working on this project I (now) call a house. Back in The Hadean Age, my daily routine consisted of working from 9-6:30 pm, coming home, having a bowl of cereal, changing into work clothes, and tackling some project until the wee hours of the morning, then wrapping up the day's work with a beer and a cigarette on the porch. I washed, rinsed, and repeated this daily cycle for about 2 years. Now I no longer smoke and avoid the front porch because of the crazy neighbors who are always on theirs. And until last night, I had forgotten about how good it felt to wrap up a day of hard labor with a cool bottle of good beer and (i'm sorry all you non-smokers) the delicious pulsing of nicotine through my veins, which had an amazingly restorative effect. Having neither item, I had to make do with another vice - namely wasting lots of hot water in an effort to soothe my poor, now ten-years-older body. I guess I should be happy that I can still pull off such late-night labors.

Anyway, things are starting to shape up, and I'm especially pleased with the way the exposed beam looks:

And now that the walls are primed, now all we need to do is pick out a shade of white to paint the walls. And then paint them.

Are you there, God? It's Me, D.

2010-08-06T11:41:00.013-04:00

Dear God(dess/Allah/Yahweh/Buddha/Vishnu/Takuskanskan/Zeus, et al.),

Seriously, what have I done to offend thee so? I'm not trying to dismiss my imperfections - and they are many - and I'm not trying to sit in judgment of others when I write this (truly!) - but am I as bad as the Tony Haywards or Rush Limbaughs of this world? Because I bet their houses haven't been under construction for four years, and I have to wonder - pretty much every time I pick up the paper and see a stream of viciousness, vile, and oil spewed forth to sully this beautiful world you all have put together - you know, the one I have devoted my entire career and much of my "free time" trying to protect from the whims of these crazy creatures called "humans" you chose to invent for reasons I'm sure you don't remember anymore, either - I can't help but feel a bit of resentment about their (respective) $18 million reward for overseeing the biggest environmental catastrophe in the Gulf and five house compound complete with a miniature version of the Biltmore Library - an offense to those who actually seek wisdom and truth if there ever was one.

I'm not even asking for a 24,000 ft2 mansion with cherubs dancing on the ceilings of my library or an $18MM golden parachute and transfer to Russia. I'd just like to finish a 500 ft2 addition without going into bankruptcy or the insane asylum. But while we're on the subject of libraries, I would also like to be able to sit on our worn out sofa to read a book without ending up covered in cat hair, although I know the vacuum is clearly under my control (I'm just saying, if you could engineer a cute and furry cat that doesn't shed, that would be perfect - and that bald sphinx cat thing clearly had to be a joke in response to someone else's prayer who fogot to specify that they wanted a cat with fur that didn't shed. I'm guessing they didn't realize your penchant for specificity, which should be obvious from all the laws you've set forth. So, while I'm thinking of it, if this new cat didn't want to naturally shred the furniture, yowl at 5am for no reason, or use its bodily functions as a means of expressing displeasure, that would involve major bonus points.) (But let me be clear, I can totally live without my dream cat - that's more of an extra-curricular project if you're interested. I'm here about the addition. But you know how I always digress.)

I remained optimistic when you sent that weird tornado-like storm through our neighborhood yesterday and took down half the trees in the area that the power would be on in time for the drywall guys to come in today and sand the mud so we can finally paint, so we can finally put in the floor, so we can finally put up the glass block wall and finally move on with our lives. I did not ONCE complain about not having A/C last night - not even silently, in my head. If you were listening, you would have heard my usual optimism saying "Well, at least there's a cool breeze tonight! Could be worse!!" You saw me reading my book on the roof garden by glowstick - you did not hear me complaining! You heard me enjoying the night air and the sounds of your multitude of chirpy insects (I'm sorry if flicking that spider off of me offended you - i'm sure it didn't get hurt, though). And when the power finally came on at 7:45am - right before the 8am deadline to let the drywall guys know whether they could work today - I thanked you, but was not surprised. I knew you would come through.

It's when I heard the transformer behind the house explode as the power shut back off at 8:15 am and stayed off, despite my pleading with you on actual bended knees to turn it back on before 9 am pretty, pretty, pretty please with sugar on top, pleeeeeeeeease!! and yet off it remained and then, to top it off, the drywall guys now can't come to work until Tuesday, that I was reminded of Job's most famous line: Oh God, why hast thou forsaken me?! I'm sorry, I know that when Job said it, you were gravely disappointed, and so you're probably none too pleased with me for thinking it, either. But there's only so much the human spirit can endure, you know?

I know, I know, I'm a drama queen. You made me, though, so you get what you pay for, I guess. But seriously, consider this a formal petition: please, Lord, let my project go. I'm sorry if I built it on a sacred burial ground or the font of your perpetual anger. Like Eve, I didn't really know what I was getting into here - I was lured by the slick talk of a snake and a heavenly (i.e., Dwell-worthy) design. You would have fallen for it, too, had you been facing the real estate market of 2006 when you made this decision. But anyway, I'm really, really sorry, and I beg your forgiveness and I know there are googles of things that are vastly more important than the construction plight of one silly girl (and boy) - wars, floods, famines, diseases, etc. - seriously, I get that and feel guilty for even bothering you about this. But if you have a little extra time - just a second - we could use your help in bringing this project to closure before I lose my mind. I'm not even asking for a return of all my previous good fortune seven-fold (besides, if we had 7 cats, I think the boy would move out, so one is cool), I'd just like peace.

Yours truly,

The Butterfly

2010-08-04T16:50:00.012-04:00

I have so many things to write about the house, but none of them are particularly inspiring. So, per the urging of a friend of mine, I am sharing with those few of you who still read this blog a little story I related to her regarding my journey home yesterday.

I was riding the metro home, lodged in my turbulent head, feeling like crap (ill, old, wondering what it's all for), when my eyes happened upon the most beautiful butterfly resting on the very bottom of the divider by one of the doors. This was around Pentagon station. Despite the stops, no one else seemed to notice this majestic yellow and black bit of fauna that had inexplicably left its more appropriate context for this industrial world. And, as it didn't once flap its wings or move the slightest bit despite the shuffling on and off of the passengers, I thought it might well be dead.

As we approached my station, I got up and walked over to the butterfly and just as the train stopped, bent down to see if it was alive and to try to take it off of the train. As I gently reached out my fingers, suddenly up and away it flitted, and a frantic effort to catch or direct the butterfly off the train ensued. There I was, chasing a butterfly about the train car, trying to get both of us off before the doors closed. And everyone's sullen spaced-out faces suddenly came alive with the surprise adventure playing out before them and I could feel the collected hush and tension - everyone rooting for me to help this poor creature escape, while also thinking I was slightly batty. There were oooos and finally ohhhs as the butterfly miraculously latched itself onto my waist and I was able to dart out the doors just before they closed.

And there the butterfly remained as I walked home trying to shelter it from the wind, past the quizzical stares and smiles of passing strangers. It was a little ragged at the bottom of its wings, and clung to me all the way to the house. I thought it might be at the end of its life and just couldn't bear to think of this beautiful creature dying alone on a subway car. So I transferred it to our tomato plant in the hope that it might eat something (not knowing, exactly what butterflies eat, but having seen some in the zoo eating fruit). I went out an hour later and it hadn't moved and as I was terrified that it would be knocked from the leaves by the wind, we plucked the leaf it sat on and placed it on the more sheltered lavender cotton plant, which is closer to a patch of moss, so that should its end be nigh, it would not drop down onto a ragged concrete sidewalk but onto a soft green space as would be more appropriate.

This morning I went out, holding my breath, but the butterfly had flown away.

Finally, Hope!

2010-07-19T11:52:00.004-04:00

In today's Post Express, I find hope for our contracting woes:

OMG - I have all of those symptoms!! Well, except for "Obeah" and "Blocked Ways," which I don't know the meaning of, but if they're related in any way to all the others, I am very likely exhibiting those symptoms as well.

I am on my THIRD CONTRACTOR and I definitely have PROBLEMS and I am ready to GET HELP. If you're looking for me on July 27 after 8pm, you know where to find me.

Our life, in pictures

2010-07-09T13:39:00.001-04:00

If you can't see this very well, click here.

If Only We Were Contractors

2010-05-14T16:23:00.007-04:00

What we have accomplished in the last 30 days, on top of our other full time jobs:

1) Powerwash and stain fence and shed. Install hooks to hang family of bicycles, thereby proving viability of architect's plan (as improved by builder) for all 3 bicycles to fit in shed and disproving husband's disbelief on this point.

2) Plant 2 ginormous trees. Prune trees and shrubs in front, plant annual vegetable crop.

3) Plant tree and 10 shrubs for neighbors to thank them for putting up with the crap they've endured for the last 3.5 years.

4) Run all audio wire and cable for addition.

5) Installed new microwave (okay, we really only helped our friend on this one).

6) Scheduled repairman for new microwave's terrifyingly squealy and smoky convection setting.

7) Called animal control on neighbors regarding feral cat problem; first response from City in years to delight of entire neighborhood.

8) Tried to schedule inspection of fireplace only to discover that permits expired 10 months ago for lack of work. Pleaded with City Code Department to not force us to reapply all over again lest I end up in insane asylum. Pleas heard; permit reinstated; asylum avoided. Scheduled fireplace inspection. Passed inspection - we are now batting 1000 for inspections in 2010!

9) Freecycled all the tile samples getting in everyone's way to the delight of all.

10) Finally picked and ordered wood flooring.

11) Left several (unreturned) messages with HVAC guy to please, please, PLEASE come finish this project.

12) Demo'ed the stairs. Again, not us, but amazingly kind friend. (For all the woes of this house, the one positive constant is the warmth and love our friends have shown us over the years in pitching in. Warm fuzzies to all of you!)

13) Called City to challenge new tax increase clearly based on a finished addition which clearly does not exist. City appraiser kindly came out for a look and voluntarily retracted increase.

14) Replaced old potrack that required a wall with much improved new potrack which dangles from ceiling. Figured out how to hang new potrack from steel beam. Problem solved in 4 days, start to finish (this was entirely husband's handiwork, so kudos to him).

Here's the special i-beam clamps we found on the interwebs:

And here's the final product:

That's a pretty long list if you knew the hours we were pulling at work, too. So I am very proud of all these accomplishments! YAY US!!

On the downside (because apparently, with this project, there's never just an upside), our actual contractor has put in less time on the project over the last month than we have. And, apparently, we can't get him full time until August because he has a client he was hired by in January whose basement he gutted 2 months ago who he just can't keep putting off. He said this as if to evoke our sympathy, but we stood there speechless, as we hired him a year ago, he knocked down our wall 6 weeks ago, and our entire house is a total wreck...

Sometimes I think I should quit my day job and go into contracting. Here is what you would get from me if I did:

1) A full cost estimate and realistic timeline before the project. You wouldn't have to double anything, because I already would have, and I'll tell you that. So odds are high that I'll come in early and under budget, but if I was still wrong, that's my problem, not yours.

2) I would work solely on your project until it was done. Other people, even if good clients, would just have to wait, unless it involves Rule #6. Everyone would be willing to wait, because my policy will be clear and they will benefit from it, too.

3) I would clean up after myself everyday.

4) I would give you status updates at least twice a week on my own initiative and would not avoid you even if the news was bad.

5) My employees will be treated respectfully and everyone will have health insurance. Also, I will not hire anyone whose work isn't as good or better than mine even if I'm not looking. Which I will be. Good people will work for me because I will pay them appropriately. This means I will not be as cheap as others, but I will not be unfair either, and what you get will be worth every cent.

6) If it breaks afterwards, I will assume that it was my bad and fix it toot sweet.

7) You'll get some homemade cookies to celebrate at the beginning and at the end. And to console you if there's a hiccup. And if you're not happy with my work, then I'm not done yet.

There it is: Seven Steps to Highly Successful Contracting. Now if I only had all the necessary skills...