From the Desk Of

One of my New Year's resolutions was to spend more time at home on the weekends. During the week, I almost never see the apartment during daylight hours, except for a small sliver of time between waking up and rushing out the door. I spend most evenings at class, at the gym, and/or working late at the office, so it's unusual that I'm home before 8pm.

To date, I have succeeded far better than I could ever have imagined. I've barely left the apartment over the past three weekends, and then only for short errands. I'm working on several school projects and doing a ton of editing these days, so most Saturday and Sunday hours are spent here, at my desk, typing and gazing out the window. When I'm not at the computer, I'm usually reading, trying to keep pace with the Book Club of One, or knitting while working my way through the Netflix queue.

I'm still cleaning, too. I did a deep clean of the living room closet and the bureau in the kitchen today, tossed a lot of old stuff, and finally put the Christmas tree away. Found about a dozen half-finished projects that had been stuffed in there during previous organizing frenzies: the corduroy blazer that Stephen started sewing in 2007, a half-finished hand quilting project, some embroidery still in its hoop, a sundress that I have been planning to finish for each of the past 2 summers, and a 95% complete afghan that I gave up on last winter when I decided it was too ugly to finish. It's a little overwhelming.

It's nice to be at home, though. I know we'll move out of this apartment eventually, and I want to be able to remember what it was like to be here, not just to pass through at the end of the day to actually live in the space.

That said, I think it's time I started spending a little more weekend time in the outside world. I really want to go into the city, see the Shepard Fairey survey when it opens at the ICA, maybe go to the aquarium. The icy sidewalks have thus far dissuaded me from venturing out, though. I felt the first pang of I'm-ready-for-spring yesterday while watching, of all things, a Vampire Weekend video on YouTube. I'm not sure where it was filmed, but the setting is so evocative of rural New York in the early spring, just after the snow has melted but before anything has bloomed, that I could almost feel the warm breeze in my lungs as I watched it. Oh, spring. How many weeks of snow do we have left? Eight?

What's Cooking:

Ah, January. Once I've emerged from the underwater-time of the holidays (quiet, calm, snowbound; everyday concerns far-off and muffled), the first thing I like to do to reorient myself is clean like a madwoman. The second is re-set my schedule. (No more going to bed at 1, 2, 3am. 11:30 is the new bedtime!) Yes, I become quite a strict disciplinarian after three heady weeks of presents, cake, hot chocolate and lollygagging.

The third thing I like to do in January is get in the newly-clean kitchen and start baking, especially things with citrus zest. Maybe it's Vitamin C deficiency, or a hankering for warmer climes, or the seasonality of the fruit, but all I want to eat these days is citrus. When I bit into an orange at work last week, it was like the malt syrup factory scene in Slaughterhouse Five*. I don't even usually like oranges. In the past few days, I've also had salmon with citrus salsa, sole with lemon-caper glaze, salad with lemon vinaigrette, and lemon madeleines with (surprise!) lemon glaze. Can't get enough.

I'm also thinking about making cheese. My sister gave me a mozzarella kit for my birthday, and it looks pretty easy. Stephen's making French bread this afternoon, and we cracked out some of last summer's saft yesterday. It's a non-stop homemade food frenzy around here.

We got several new cookbooks for Christmas. In fact, we got lots of every kind of book. We had to clear off an entire shelf in the living room to make space for them all. I've got a ton of new titles to add to the line-up for the Book Club of One. I'm starting with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, an electric book to go along with all of this acidic food.

I've been thinking about the twelve books I read last year, deciding which I'd recommend to myself if I were t0 start over again. I liked them all--I usually don't finish a book if I think it's a waste of time--but a few in particular really meant a lot to me. Mountains Beyond Mountains was the most powerful, followed by And the Band Played On. They made me glad that I'm learning to do health-related work. Of the novels, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was my favorite. I didn't expect it to be, but I think I read it at the right time, when the news was full of talk about recession, unemployment, and doing more with less: so many of the challenges that Francie's family faces. Somehow, it felt three-dimensional, like a book that I could get into and move around in. I didn't hold it at arm's-length. I hope I'll be able to find books as good this year.

* Speaking of good books:

Another true thing that Billy saw while he was unconscious in Vermont was the work that he and the others had to do in Dresden during the month before the city was destroyed. They washed windows and swept floors and cleaned lavatories and put jars in boxes and sealed cardboard boxes in a factory that made malt syrup. The syrup was enriched with vitamins and minerals. The syrup was for pregnant women.

The syrup tasted like thin honey laced with hickory smoke, and everybody who worked in the factory secretly spooned it all day long. They weren't pregnant, but they needed vitamins and minerals, too. Billy didn't spoon syrup on his first day at work, but lots of other Americans did.

Billy spooned it on his second day. There were spoons hidden all over the factory, on rafters, in drawers, behind radiators, and so on. They had been hidden in haste by persons who had been spooning syrup, who had heard somebody else coming. Spooning was a crime.

On his second day, Billy was cleaning behind a radiator and he found a spoon. To his back was a vat of syrup that was cooling. The only other person who could see Billy and his spoon was poor old Edgar Derby, who was washing a window outside. The spoon was a tablespoon. Billy thrust it into the vat, turned it around and around, making a gooey lollipop. He thrust it into his mouth.

A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy's body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause.

There were diffident raps at the factory window. Derby was out there, having seen all. He wanted some syrup, too.

So Billy made a lollipop for him. He opened the window. He stuck the lollipop into poor old Derby's gaping mouth. A moment passed, and then Derby burst into tears. Billy closed the window and hid the sticky spoon. Somebody was coming.

Snowfall

It's a winter wonderland out there. The snow started early this afternoon, and campus shut down around noon. Stephen and I stayed late to tie up the last loose ends at the office before leaving for a lengthy break, and walked home together through hushed streets as the sky turned from blue to purple to that particular shade of orange created by street lights reflecting off a dense blanket of clouds. The sidewalks were thick with snowdrifts, so we walked right in the middle of the street, moving aside when cars appeared. It was quiet and still on the side streets; we felt like we were in another world, a dream world, or underwater. I love snow almost as much as I love fog. I like weather that makes the world feel closer to you. It makes me think of Fog, one of the first Carl Sandburg poems I ever read. Here's another of his that I like:


Prairie Waters by Night

Chatter of birds two by two raises a night song joining a litany of running water--sheer waters showing the russet of old stones remembering many rains.

And the long willows drowse on the shoulders of the running water, and sleep from much music; joined songs of day-end, feather throats and stony waters, in a choir chanting new psalms.

It is too much for the long willows when low laughter of a red moon comes down; and the willows drowse and sleep on the shoulders of the running water.



And this one:

Hats

Hats, where do you belong?
what is under you?

On the rim of a skyscraper's forehead
I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats
Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls, Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.
Hats: tell me your high hopes.

Decemberist

Ah, December: one of my favorite months of the year. Winter is new and exciting; the semester draws to a close and holiday visits commence; Christmas lights are everywhere; the first snow falls. We had a picturesque flurry this weekend, just heavy enough to look beautiful outside the window but not so much that it required manual removal. We put up our little fakey-fake tree on Sunday night, and I think that's all we're doing in the way of holiday foliage this year, except for a real wreath on the door. I love the smell of a live tree, I really do, but they're expensive and the Christmas season seems really short this year, and last year we were vacuuming up escaped needles until May. (Those little buggers go everywhere!) So it's a scent-free, shed-free, tinseled-up Christmas 2008 for us Cantibrigians.

I have a stack of books about a foot high on deck for the Book Club of One, so guess what I did when we went to Belmont last weekend? Marched right into Barnes and Noble and bought another one, of course. I was feeling brain-fried, so I went to the YA section and looked for the funnest cover I could find. Here's what I ended up with. It's a light and quick read, a big change of pace from my last book, which was about the Holocaust. I'm okay with something fluffy right now. Mmm, fluff. Marshmallows.

Which reminds me, did I ever mention the Union Square Fluff Fest that we went to back in September? We missed the first two in 2006 and 2007, but finally made it this year. Wow, there were so many marshmallow-based activities to behold! There were Fluff t-shirts, Fluff posters, Fluff letterpress, Fluff magnets, Fluffernutter sandwiches, and a Fluff hairstyling contest. (Yes, that part was kind of gross.) Stephen got a Fluff comic book and I got a t-shirt that says "What the Fluff?". I like to wear it when I'm doing laundry because it seems like the ultimate laundry day shirt, all softness and laziness and comfort food. Mmm, comfort food.

Lately

I'm:
attending Midnight Madness
finishing up the last PowerPoint of the semester
anticipating Taza factory tour
experiencing arthritis?!
considering acupuncture
listening to Kate Nash (Warning: sound.)
Is it just me, or does she look a bit like the young Fred Savage at times? Something about the cheeks/chin, I think.
looking forward to sleep

Birthday Boy

Happy birthday, Stephen! It's cold and rainy out, a good day for celebrating indoors. This is the kind of weather I was born into about a quarter of a century ago, or so my mother tells me: a foggy and damp December morning, the kind of weather I still love. It does chill you to the bone, though. Brrr. I'm glad we've got bellies full of birthday cookies and birthday risotto to keep us warm.

We went out for brunch to celebrate (nothing says birthday like a stack of pancakes!), then saw the Drawn to Detail exhibit at DeCordova. The museum has a huge staircase flooded with natural light, and it was cozy to watch the sleet and rain run down the windows while we looked at the delicate works on paper. There were some prints, an animation project, and many intricate drawings, some so large and detailed that they made our heads spin.

I've made substantial progress in my November book, but I won't finish it tonight. I've got too much work to do before tomorrow. I'm procrastinating, as usual, but for an unusual reason: one of my assignments is to write a self-reflection essay based on a presentation I gave, which means that I need to watch and re-watch a video of myself and scrutinize my performance. You know how hearing your own voice on the answering machine can make you cringe and ask, "Do I really sound like that?" This is like that, but longer and in greater detail, and I'm being graded on my critique.

So let's talk about something else for a minute, until I absolutely have to go finish my work. How about Thanksgiving travel? I've spent a lot of time in the car over the past week (7 hours round-trip to my parents' house + 6 hours to visit my grandparents) and here are the lessons I learned:

1. Driving on the Tuesday before and the Saturday after Thanksgiving is much easier than on the Wednesday before and the Sunday after, but the Mass Pike is always crazy east of I-84.
2. The content on NPR is better on weekdays than weekends, unless you're really into opera.
3. E-Z Pass is worth its weight in gold, even if it has a silly name (actually, I think mine's a Fast Lane, since I bought it in Massachusetts).
4. If you want to travel by train between Boston and Albany on a holiday weekend, reserve early.

I wanted to take the train to New York state, but it sold out really early. I may try again at Christmas. I love the idea of traveling across the state in a comfy train car, reading and not worried about traffic or road conditions. My mom suggested the bus as an alternative, but it doesn't hold the same appeal for me. My vision of the bus = crowded, sitting in traffic, watching a movie picked out by the bus company, whereas train travel = smooth, sitting by the window, plenty of leg room, quiet, snacks. Maybe I'll take a train ride next weekend, just for the fun of it. Go to the end of the commuter line and look around, see what we find; public transportation as the doorway to adventure.

Something from the Oven

These weeks of the semester are particularly heavy with deadlines, so aside from going to work, class, and the gym, I rarely venture outside anymore. Instead, in between papers and PowerPoints, I've been baking.

This weekend, I made marshmallows. I've wanted to try this ever since I saw a recipe in a Christmas book of my mom's when I was in high school, but the ingredients freaked me out. (Corn syrup? Can you even buy corn syrup?) Now that we've made caramels a few times, the ingredients and the candy thermometer and the weird terminology (soft ball stage, etc.) are familiar and comfortable. Well, as comfortable as things can be when boiling-hot sugar lava is involved.

But I can't say that I was prepared for how messy this stuff would be. It's all stick and no structure: too thick to flow into the pan on its own, but not substantial enough to coax along with a spatula. If you were having a bad day already, trying to wrestle the molten fluff-stuff into a neat rectangle would probably make you cry.

Luckily, I was having a good day, so it was mostly just funny. As we pried the last bits of marshmallow goo from the sugar-encrusted utensils, I told Stephen about an episode of the Muppet Show (not Muppet Babies, which I've actually never seen, but the live show with celebrity guests) where Dr. Bunsen Honeydew develops a Super Adhesive that sticks to everything in the studio. That's kind of what our kitchen looked like on Sunday afternoon. (Update: I found it on YouTube! Wow, that's a blast from my past. Gilda Radner is the guest, if you can believe it.)

Other things I've been cooking up:

Carrot almond muffins, with the last of our CSA carrots. I made these when we were going over to my boss's house for dinner one night. I really like this recipe, which can be modified to fit any combination of nuts and fruit/vegetable. (As always, I got it from here.) There's a variation in the book for pumpkin bread with hazelnuts, which sounds magnificent. We've still got some uncarved pumpkins on the windowsill--I wonder if they would be good for muffins? Or do you have to use sugar pumpkins when baking?

The recipe made a lot of batter, so I made some mini muffins, too. These were perfectly bite sized, and I got in the habit of stuffing three or four in my mouth on the walk home from the gym. I'd tell myself that they're full of beta carotene.

They're also full of molasses, which I substituted for half of the sugar. I love the smell of molasses. I first tried it when I was anemic a couple of years ago and a friend told me to try putting blackstrap molasses into oatmeal, applesauce, and anything else I cooked. I didn't like it in most of those things, but I do love it in gingerbread. Smells like Christmas to me.

I've also been making good use of these implements, which we got on our trip to the Cape last month. The honey is from Plimoth Plantation, the donut mix from a gourmet food store, and the mixing bowl and corn pan are from a fancy kitchen shop. Food and kitchen shopping is pretty much the only kind of shopping that I like to do on vacation, and luckily Stephen feels similarly. He's been making donuts (excuse me, doughnuts) from that mix, and, like most fried things, they are heavenly.

I'm kind of a sucker for most shaped pans. I don't like Bundt pans for some reason--I guess I like cakes in traditional shapes, and the ones that look like castles or flowers just seem silly to me. But I do like shaped pans for other things, like madeleine pans for cookies and corn-shaped pans for cornbread.

Our first attempt to bake cornbread in this didn't work out very well--it was tasty, but it didn't pick up any of the decorative detail from the pan. Maybe we'll have to try another recipe. Or maybe I should try baking non-corn bread in here? A sort of culinary faux bois? Tricky.