Better Living Through Chemistry

The grand no-soap experiment is over, and I'm going back to regular shampoo. Although my hair felt great the first few times I used baking soda, the results proved uneven. Sometimes my hair would be silky/shiny, other times it would feel weirdly tacky/waxy. No good. I think if it's really going to work, you probably have to switch over entirely to baking soda, because the oils in your hair have to rebalance themselves or something. But I use shampoo a few times a week at the gym, so I couldn't make a clean break. (Pun!)

Now I'm looking for other low-irritant hair-cleaning solutions. I found some mild, unscented shampoo at Whole Foods last week, which I fancied up with a little coconut extract. (I figure if something's gentle enough to bake with, it's probably not too harsh for my skin.) It smells great, and the results are a lot more consistent than my kitchen-chemistry method. My skin's still not happy, but I'm starting to wonder if it's the hot water, rather than the soap, that's freaking it out.

As I was mixing up my home-scented shampoo, I read the Free Recipe! on the back of the coconut extract box. It's so laughably post-WWII/pro-chemically-enhanced food products, I'm tempted to make it to see what kind of monstrosity would result. I can't even imagine what a cake would look like topped with canned pineapple, plastered with instant pudding, then spackled over with fakey-fake whipped cream. Just check out these ingredients:

Aloha Cake

1 pkg. yellow cake mix
4 tsp. imitation coconut extract, divided
1 pkg. instant vanilla pudding mix
1 can crushed pineapple, drained
1 tub frozen whipped topping, thawed

PREPARE cake mix as directed on package, stirring 3 teaspoons of the Extract into batter before baking. Pour into greased and floured 13x9-inch baking pan.

BAKE in preheated 350°F oven 30 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool completely in pan.

PREPARE pudding mix as directed on package, stirring in remaining 1 teaspoon of Extract. Spread pineapple and pudding over cake. Frost with whipped topping. Refrigerate 1 hour or until ready to serve.
Makes 24 servings.

I don't know. Maybe it's delicious.

The Night House

Mmm. Hot chocolate with Kahlua: Mother Nature's answer to a chilly, grey afternoon. I was tempted to go to the gym today just to sit in the sauna and warm up. They're predicting a high of 90 degrees for tomorrow, though. Wow.

I was reading Sailing Alone Around the Room the other night and remembered how much I like Billy Collins. You know those statistics they occasionally release saying that 75% of Americans can't name all the continents or whatever? I know it sounds ridiculous, but I would probably get some of those questions wrong, too. For instance, if you asked me who the Federal Reserve Chairman is, I would never be able to think of anyone but Alan Greenspan. Similarly, Billy Collins will forever be the Poet Laureate as far as I'm concerned. I think he's the only Laureate I've ever been aware of.

Here's The Night House:

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging sickle through the tall grass--
the grass of civics, the grass of money--
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in the pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves
even through the heat of the long afternoons.

Which is why the body--that house of voices--
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
to stare into the distance,

to listen to all its names being called
before bending again to its labor.

Food!

I've got some homemade pickles pickling in the kitchen right now. These are really easy to make: dissolve kosher salt in boiling water, cool with ice, then add crushed garlic, sliced kirby cucumbers, and dill. Cover with cold water, weight with a plate to keep cukes under water, and let sit at room temp until desired level of pickleness is attained. They keep in the fridge for a week.

I've been eating like crazy these past few days. My office was closed for repairs yesterday, so Stephen and I went out for brunch at Sound Bites in Somerville, the best breakfast place I've ever been to. Then we drove out to Marblehead Neck and climbed around on the rocks by the lighthouse, and I read about the lack of cohesive food culture in America in my ex-May book*, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. When we'd worked up our appetites again, we drove to Whole Foods and bought stuff for a picnic: fresh mozzarella and baguettes, chick pea salad, black currant spritzers, romaine and Parmesan and lemons for Caesar salad. I was thinking about this passage from the chapter in The Omnivore's Dilemma where the author goes hunting for wild pigs with two guides:

Being Europeans, as well as accomplished cooks, Angelo and Jean-Pierre take lunch very seriously, even when out in the woods some distance from civilization. "So I brought with me a few little things to nibble on," Jean-Pierre mumbled. "Me, too," chimed Angelo. And out of their packs came course after course of the most astonishing picnic, which they proceeded to lay out on the hood of Angelo's SUV: a terrine of lobster and halibut en gelee, artisanal salami and prosciutto and mortadella, Angelo's homemade pate of boar and home-cured olives, cornichons, chicken salad, a generous selection of cheeses and breads, fresh strawberries and pastries, silverware and napkins, and, naturally, a bottle each of red and white wine.

Okay, so ours wasn't that fancy. But it was nice, and the weather cooperated.



Today, we picked up the first box from our CSA share. Inside there was Boston lettuce, parsnips, spinach, and what I think are turnips. (They're completely white, but turnip-shaped.) So we had mashed potatoes and parsnips for dinner. The parsnips look like pale carrots, and added a carrot-like sweetness to the mush. And we had salad. I'm not sure what we're going to do with the albino turnips yet, and we may give the spinach away. No one here is really into the bitterness.

* Yes, there's been more book-of-the-month fickleness. Lugging around the thick, hardcovered Animal, Vegetable, Miracle proved unsustainable, so I left Barbara Kingsolver for the much leaner, lighter Mrs. Dalloway. Things have been going well with the new book, except that I misplaced it last week, so now I'm bookless and the month is over. Gotta catch up!

Saft

When we were traveling to my brother's graduation ceremony out in western New York a couple of weeks ago, my sister mentioned that she was thinking of making saft this summer. I'd heard of it before, but couldn't remember what it was. She said that it's a concentrate made from sugar and various berries--essentially fancy homemade juice. Stephen found an article on saft-making when we got home that identified it as a Norwegian recipe, but I've found versions attributing it to Sweden, too, so I assume it's sort of a regional Scandinavian thing. It sounded delicious and summery, so we decided to make a batch.

Let me begin by saying that this is not a cost-effective way to make beverages. It took more than $20 worth of berries to create enough saft for a gallon of juice. We used blackberries, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries, but you can use any combination you want. I think an all-strawberry batch would be a lot more cost-effective at this time in the season. The recipe traditionally calls for red currants, but we couldn't find any at Shaw's. We're going to try Whole Foods next time.

It's also a relatively long process, so it would make sense to make a huge batch all at once, especially if you had berries growing in your garden and they were all ripe at once. I don't think this works with frozen berries, so you have to do it when they're ripe.

Each pound of berries yields about a cup of syrup, which is later diluted in four parts water or seltzer to create a quart of juice. You boil the berries with water in a big saucepan until they get mushy and pale, at which point all of their juices are released. Then you suspend this mixture in a cheesecloth-lined sieve over a big bowl and let it drain for an hour and a half or so. What's left in the sieve is then discarded (and believe me, you'll want to discard it: there's nothing appealing about boiled, colorless berry glop), and the strained syrup (which is a beautiful deep reddish-purple) is reheated with sugar.

We wanted the saft to be shelf-stable, so we sterilized the bottles, too: a tricky process in which you have to get the saft and the bottles to the same temperature, then fill them while hot. If ever there was a process with great low-level burn potential, this is it. Once submerged, the bottles are extremely hard to get out of the water, and it's not like you can just slap on an oven mitt and reach in, so you have to try to coax it out with tongs. Meanwhile, boiling water is splashing everywhere. Once the bottle is out, you've got to hold the hot, hot glass steady while your partner pours in boiling syrup. There was a lot of foul language involved.


The final product is pretty amazing, though. We opened one bottle immediately and finished it within two days. I don't like soda, so I had mine mixed with water and ice, but I hear that a seltzer/saft combination is delicious and refreshing, as well. We're going to try to reserve the remaining bottle for the winter, but I want to try different combinations as various berries come into season this summer. One problem we encountered with this batch is that each bottle is pretty big, and once you open it, the contents have to be finished pretty quickly or it will go bad. So next time I want to think of a smaller container for this. Maybe jelly jars? That would be cheaper, too. These bottles were almost ten bucks each, and that could easily add up if we made a lot of this stuff. Which I hope we do.

P.S. I read somewhere that you can buy saft at Ikea. I don't see it on their website, but I don't think they list any of their food there, so I'll have to check it out next time I'm there. I wonder if mass-produced saft would be any good.

Much Better

I haven't written in a couple of weeks, but I haven't been idle, I swear! Just look at this dress. When I bought it earlier this month, it was pretty ridiculous looking. This color combination just...doesn't work for me. I'm not sure the photo does full justice to the mess of weak red, grey-brown, and almost-pink that this thing came in, but believe me, it was bad. (If you love it, I apologize. I'm probably crazy.)

So I decided to dye it. I'd never dyed anything before aside from tie dye at summer camps, but I'd seen RIT dye at drugstores and had always wanted to try it. I also considered using natural dyes for this, but I've heard that it's hard to get really dramatic results with onions/tea/etc.

Isn't it surprising that pharmacies and hardware stores still carry this stuff? How many people dye their clothes any more? I imagine each store must sell about one package per month. Their website seems to be marketing to my demographic, so maybe there's some kind of underground dye revolution going on among the young folks.

The bad thing about using this dye is that it's got lots of chemicals (maybe not toxic, but I wouldn't want to drink the stuff), and the directions instruct you to scrub everything that came in contact with the dye (bucket, sink) with chlorine bleach. I really didn't want to buy a big container of bleach to flush into the water supply, so I mixed the dye up in an old stainless steel stockpot, and disposed of it in the kitchen sink, which is also stainless. And indeed, there were no stains.

I wanted to somehow unify the colors in the dress, and so I picked the midpoint between black, brown, red, and pink: purple. (Also, my choices were somewhat limited by what RiteAid had in stock: fire engine red, sunflower yellow, forest green, "denim" blue, mauve, black, and purple.) I didn't want the color to be too dark, so I mixed a third of the detergent into hot water with a lot of salt and a little detergent. I was surprised that you have to add soap to the mixture to get it to set, but I'm sure there's a good explanation for it. Unfortunately, I guess I didn't have enough water in this initial bath, or the water wasn't hot enough, because I later discovered that the salt and dye had not completely dissolved. As a result, there are some little speckles on the dress where dye pellets adhered to it in the initial dunk. But the pattern is so crazy that you can hardly tell.

Despite the long, long list of directions inside the dye pack, the process was pretty simple. Dissolve dye in some hot water, add salt and detergent, add to larger bucket of hot water. Pre-wash garment, then soak in clean hot water. Add garment to bath. Agitate. And agitate some more. The package says to stir the whole thing constantly for up to thirty minutes. I wore rubber gloves, but I still got overheated, standing over three gallons of steaming hot dye and swirling, swirling, swirling the dress. That part wasn't very fun, but it was cool to see the color take and develop.

I left the dress in for about 15 minutes. At that point, the color looked pretty dark, and I didn't want it to obscure the pattern altogether. I accidentally splashed a dish towel that was on the counter in the midst of my agitating, so that went into the bath, too. Now I wish I'd thought ahead and lined up a few things to dye, because the towel came out looking great and didn't add much to the workload.

The dye pack said that the color would dry much lighter than it looked wet, but I didn't realize how much lighter. I would say that the final color was about half as dark as it looked coming out of the dye.

I'm happy with the final results, though. The pattern still looks outlandish, but the palette is a lot more cohesive. And the process was fun. You could make it even easier by doing this in the washing machine (there are instructions for that, too, on the package), but we live in a big building with just two collective machines, and I was afraid I'd screw up the process and all our neighbors would end up with purple-tinged t-shirts. Someday I'll have my own machine, though, and then I definitely intend to try it that way. I also want to try shoe-dyeing sometime, but my current running shoes are still too new and nice to experiment with.

And that's not all I've been up to! But right now I have to go out and enjoy the long weekend, so next time: saft.

The Latest in Shoes and Books

Did you know that five years is the Shoe Anniversary? Yeah. Actually, it's the Wood Anniversary, but that's for wedding anniversaries and we're not married, so I think I get to make up whatever kind of present I want. I got those Tigers on the right for Stephen. While I was shopping, I couldn't resist getting some new sneaks for myself, too. These Converse have Little Red Riding Hood on them, and I love the red laces.

Stephen stuck to tradition, purely by accident (I think), and got me this little bird, because I love sandpipers:



A few years ago, I sent out valentines with the Least Sandpiper on them, and did a little bit of reading on the subject. These little guys are the smallest shorebird. They're native to North America, and breed on the tundra. Groups of them are called peeps. See why I like them?

I had a final on our anniversary (it always falls on or just before finals week; rotten timing). At least it wasn't the day before the final, when I was studying like crazy. Actually, I was supposed to be studying like crazy, but I was mostly procrastinating. I had just gotten a new book and I accidentally read half of it instead of making flash cards about biostatistics. How did that happen.

Yes, there's been some upheaval in the Book Club of One lately. First I got the name of my April book wrong (I read The Psychology of Everyday Things, not The Design of Everyday Things, although the author and the cover image are the same), then I got way behind and had only finished the first chapter by the last week of April. It was due back at the library on April 25, so I just returned it and went to the bookstore to look for a quick read.

I found The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld, whose emotionally insightful and articulate writing style I really respond to, and finished it within a week. I love books and movies that are set in familiar places; most of this one took place in Somerville/Boston, so yeah, I really liked it. (When we saw 21 on the Vineyard, all I could think about during the Cambridge scenes was whether they were really set in Massachusetts or recreated elsewhere. Most of it was pretty accurate, except the T scenes. Why are the MIT students always riding express trains to Davis? Express trains to Davis don't even exist, and even if they did, MIT students wouldn't ride them. Unless they were going to Redbones maybe? That I could understand.)

Now I've started my May book, but I'm worried that I might not finish this one, either. So far, there's a lot of overlap with the Omnivore's Dilemma. But the truly damning feature is that it's hardcover. I've realized that if I want to finish a book quickly, I need to be able to lug it around in my huge bag for a couple of weeks without resenting its weight or bulk. And since I'm already hauling around some combination of lunch, gym clothes, work shoes, and schoolbooks on any given day, and since I pretty much walk everywhere, tiny paperbacks are much preferred to thick hardcovers. I think I'll try to finish this one up because I've always wanted to read Barbara Kingsolver, but afterward I'm going to try to stick to smaller books.

Lemony Fresh

The lemon bars were awesome. I wasn't sure how they would turn out, because we ran out of both flour and sugar while making them and had to substitute bread flour and confectioner's sugar, which has cornstarch in it. And then I overbaked them, so they were a lot more cakey than they were supposed to be. But still, delicious.

The whole apartment smells like lemons now because Stephen deep-cleaned the bathroom in preparation for replacing the caulk around the tub. We've been trying to use non-toxic cleaners since we moved here, mostly relying on baking soda, borax, and vinegar. I hate the smell of white vinegar, so I add a ton of lemon oil to the mix. It's pretty fun to clean this way: the vinegar and baking soda foam up alarmingly, like an elementary school volcano project.

I've been using baking soda and vinegar to clean my hair, too, for the past couple of weeks. I went to a talk recently about all the hormone mimics and other nasty chemicals we put in and on our bodies. The speaker advised us to stay away from plastics and other synthetics as much as possible. Of course, it's pretty much impossible to avoid plastic (even the speaker was using a plastic water bottle), but I'm trying to cut it out here and there just for peace of mind. Since I make this stuff myself, I can keep it in glass bottles. Also, my skin is extremely sensitive and doesn't like shampoo in general, so I thought I'd give the no-soap regimen a try. It's not nearly as explosive as it sounds. First you rub a little bit of baking soda/water paste into your hair (I think this is different for long hair: you're supposed to dissolve the baking soda in a lot of water so it's much more liquidy--mine's like toothpaste), then rinse it and follow with an extremely dilute vinegar rinse (I use 1/4 tsp vinegar and maybe 20 drops of essential oil to 2 cups water). After I'm done, I rub a little clove oil into my hair for moisture and the nice smell. So far, I see no difference between this and shampoo; my hair feels the same as it always has. I'll let you know if it suddenly turns green or anything, though.