I've been memed

Ed tagged me and since this is a fairly painless and amusing meme, here goes:

4 Jobs I'’ve had in my life:

1. lab tech (what else do you do with an English degree except go and count the number of mice who die after being injected with various strengths of botulism toxin?)
   
2. lecteur d'anglais
   
3. arts education manager
4. mommy
   

4 Movies I can watch over and over:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
3. Persuasion
4. Best in Show
   

4 TV Shows I love to watch:

1. (Back in the happy days when we had HBO) The Wire and
2. Curb Your Enthusiasm
3. (Now that we are HBO-less) 24
4. and Arrested Development (I know, I know the series finale just ran so I won't have this little corner of televised comfort to flee to anymore, damnit).
   

4 Places I have lived:

1. Berkeley, CA
2. Bordeaux, France
3. Evanston, IL
4. Ann Arbor, MI
   

4 Places I have been on holiday:

1. Lake Superior Provincial Park
2. The Jelly Belly Factory, thanks to the lobbying efforts of two small sugar-crazed creatures
   
3. London: theatre, theatre and more theatre
   
4. Cayo Costa, FL (the anti-Florida, an island where the only thing you can buy is ice)
   

4 of my favorite dishes:

1. A really good Greek salad (not authentic Greek--I want lettuce too)
2. Grilled Corn with Cheese and Cilantro
3. Vietnamese Beer Snack with a cold beer
4. Cold whole-grain toast with lots of butter, good preserves or marmalade and a strong cup of black tea with a splash of milk
   

4 Websites I visit daily:

1. Bloglines (the only way to keep track of new posts on blogs)
2. Cute Overload (a substitute for sunshine in this northern clime)
3. Flickr
4. New York Times
   

4 Places I would rather be right now:

1. A clean, well-lit place with a comfortable chair and no one asking me for a beverage, or crayons, or for help going to the bathroom.
2. Talking with a friend, sitting on her deck in Berkeley, with a cold beer.
   
3. Watching a really good play.
4. Hiking in some non-snowy mountains.
   

4 Bloggers I am tagging:

1. Annie
2. Julie
   
3. Lynne
4. anyone else who wants to reveal a little (not a lot) about themselves--go for it.

Ugh and then, the Un-ugh

If, like me, you were tempted to make the Pho recipe in the January issue of Gourmet, do yourself a favor and get the car keys and drive, however far, to a Vietnamese restaurant. If you live too far from any source of Vietnamese food to be able to get there in, say, 2-3 hours, then suck it up and wait until you can visit an appropriate Mecca of Vietnamese cuisine (D.C. sounds good about now or lots of places on the Left Coast) because I am here to tell you that making your own Pho is NOT WORTH THE EFFORT.

(Yes, I know that all caps is the equivalent to shouting at you. I'm in a shoutin' sorta mood this morning, watch out small people and don't piss off mommy.)

I'm not going to go into all the flaws in the recipe and the disappointing result that I served as "dinner" last night because I'd only do that if I thought the recipe could be redeemed with a little tweak here and there. From now on when I crave Pho I'm not going to head for my kitchen, I'm going to get in the car.

On a happier obsession front, my Pho-grumped out mood has been lightened by reading this:

I can't read David Foster Wallace all the time. But sometimes his distinctive style is just right and after slaving over a pot of what turned out to be scummy grey brown soup, I happily escaped my current surroundings and armchair traveled to where ever he was writing his enormously entertaining essays, be that the "Academy Awards" of the porn industry, John McCain's primary campaign bus (in 2000), or in front of the TV in his neighbor's living room in Bloomington when the twin towers were falling.

Despite wincing throughout his essay "Authority and American Usage" since I am one of the criminals he is complaining about who may love language but never learned any grammar, (which I suspect is like the scorn I may feel for a person who loves food but who doesn't even know how to make toast) I can't help but love the fervor of his rant and the fact that he uses vocabulary like "euphemism," "corollary," and " rhetorical" side-by-side with the word "wedgie" and the phrase "Molotov-tossing anti-pants radical." I also could not stop thinking of my Blue Pencil friend Deb and what torture daily conversation must be for her (Deb, if you are reading this, you must request this book from the library now). I remember Deb once breathed a sigh of relief when I said "I feel nauseated" rather than "I am nauseous", not because she was happy that my stomach was upset, but because the latter sentence means that I, myself, am the thing that would cause nausea in others. I didn't have any clue what I was saying and I am just as likely to say the latter and unintentionally refer to myself as a pool of green vomit, but clearly Deb's linguistic awareness causes her to suffer expressions of such ridiculousness so often that hearing something expressed correctly is a rare occurrence.

Sometimes Wallace's essays focus on the absurdity of daily life, but thankfully they aren't all irony and witticisms, which can become tiresome. There are some authors who are regularly lumped into the same general category as Wallace but who never, ever drop the corrosive sarcasm. Wallace knows when to employ his wit and when to just be honest and the effect is to make the moments of honesty feel more honest. If you need an example, look at the last sentence of his essay about the twin towers: beautiful, sad and without any irony. I'm not going to quote it here because it really does need the force of the rest of the essay behind it to give it its impact.

So, go get the book. I suspect that you will find at least one essay that resonates with you. And you can also breathe easy knowing that you have in the house the mood antidote for any labor-intensive-yet-completely-disappointing-food-experiment you may have the bad luck to attempt.

Some thoughts on reading and writing

I just finished reading the Best American Short Stories 2005 collection and there are a number of fantastic stories in it. There were three that I absolutely loved. Joyce Carol Oates' story "The Cousins" had me crying by the end of it. I love epistolary stories and this one revealed details about the characters letter by letter in such a heartbreaking way. That sounds trite but I can't think of a better word than "heartbreaking." Kelly Link's "Stone Animals" blended the fantastical and the totally relate-able in a way I haven't experienced before. It wasn't like any of the magical realism I've read before (Rushdie, Marquez) because it didn't feel dreamy at all; most magical realism makes me feel like I'm underwater looking up at a warped world. And my final favorite was J. Robert Lennon's "Eight Pieces for the Left Hand," fragmented prose bits that reflect on each other. I need to get his book of 100 stories Pieces for the Left Hand .

One of my favorite things about all of the "Best of" books in this series is the Contributors' Notes at the end of the book. After reading a story I always go back and read what the author says. Some are brief explanations of where they got the idea for the story, which is fine, but other comments really get at the process of writing.

From this collection my favorite commentary (and I like the story it was associated with, too) was George Saunders' notes about his story "Bohemians". His note is hilarious and insightful and, in my case, completely applicable. Here is his note in its entirety:

I started "Bohemians" in 1994 and got stuck in 1995. There the story sat, stalled at what is now Paragraph 58, through the O.J. case, the rest of the Clinton administration, the Bush election, a change of jobs, the astonishing recession of my hairline, etc., etc., victim of Writer's Error 4A: "Knowing Too Well What You Are Doing." I was sure the story was about The Lack of Relation Between Hardship and Moral Virtue. The story was going to show, rather suavely I hoped, that someone who had Suffered Greatly (Mrs. H.) could actually be a kinder person than someone (Mrs. Poltoi) who had suffered much less! The fact that this idea would be totally obvious to anyone who had ever actually lived in the world did not stop me from periodically brushing off the story, failing, and putting it away again. Finally I noticed that every time I got to Paragraph 8 ("So Mrs. H. told again how she'd stood rapt in her yard...") I got nauseated. It's not uncommon for me to feel nauseated after reading one of my paragraphs, but this was a special kind of nausea, related to how overwritten this paragraph was, how full of a youngish writer's desire to invoke exotica about a part of the world he had never been to. It sounded like Isaac Babel on stupid pills, as if Babel had also taken some dishonesty pills, then decided to write about an Omaha, Nebraska, he had invented in his mind in order to serve a secret moral purpose, then taken some inefficiency polls. Suddenly, after eight years of becoming nauseated after reading this paragraph, a light went on: it wasn't I who was a dishonest posturing braggart, it was the character. And in this way the story came to be about something entirely different from what I thought it had been about all those years, thank God, and could finally be finished.

What Saunders wrote about being nauseated when reading something he'd written and in particular, the reason why ("a youngish writer's desire to invoke exotica about a part of the world he had never been to") is just about the perfect description of how I felt when I went on my writing retreat with Ami and Sarah last autumn and worked on the novel I started, oh let's see, almost 8 years ago! Overwritten? Yup. Dishonest? Yup. Inefficient? Resounding yup. Luckily I have a very strong stomach so reading my own prose didn't put me off the terrific food we had. But it did make me think about chucking the whole damn novel in the trash.

I don't know if a dishonest character will be the key to saving what is decent in what I have already written (though it very well might be--the book is loosely based on a person who wrote 4 autobiographies in which many of the same events are told 4 different ways, so honesty is really not a feature of her character). But at least I'm going to try and face down the nausea to find the thing that will (hopefully) release what is good and help me get rid of what is crap.

A Blogger's (Silent) Poetry Reading

Grace's Poppies started the idea.

So here is a poem I read recently on the Writer's Almanac and printed out and stuck on my fridge. It is short enough that I can read it every morning while heating up the milk for my coffee in the microwave (one minute and fourty seconds thank you very much for asking).

Father's Song
by Gregory Orr

Yesterday, against admonishment,
my daughter balanced on the couch back,
fell and cut her mouth.
Because I saw it happen I knew
she was not hurt, and yet
a child's blood's so red
it stops a father's heart.
My daughter cried her tears;
I held some ice
against her lip.
That was the end of it.
Round and round; bow and kiss
I try to teach her caution;
she tries to teach me risk.

Ugly, but Tasty

This is one of those dishes in which half way through preparing it you take a look and think "Damn, I really f***ed up this time. That is so ugly I wouldn't feed it to my dog."

But sometimes ugly food tastes really good, and this pork loin cooked in milk, Arista al Latte, looks a lot worse while cooking than when it finally comes to the table. It will never win any awards for its looks, but the finished product isn't so ugly as to make anyone flee. And once people taste it, trust me, they'll stay and they'll probably ask for seconds.

Another major benefit--it is easy! The gist of the recipe is take a pork loin, cut little slits in it, stuff garlic, strips of lemon zest and some fresh rosemary in the slits, brown it in a saucepan with a little olive oil, then dump some milk over it. The pork poaches in the milk (which keeps the pork tender). The lemon zest makes the milk curdle and the curdled milk cooks down into caramelized curds which, I grant you don't sound too pretty (and aren't) but which make a great sauce.

Here is a step by step photo essay of the process:

The pretty, pink pork loin browning in olive oil. Ugliness coming soon!

Dump quite a lot of milk over the pork loin (about 1 C per pound of pork) and cook for at least 1.5 hours with the lid OFF. The milk will evaporate leaving some curds like this:

ooops, shoulda' used a non-stick pot...And some really homely looking pork.

Wow, that is some ugly pork, but once it is sliced...
it doesn't look quite so bad.
And when you top it with some of the caramelized, garlicy curd-sauce and put it on a plate with some roast potatoes and broccoflower, it looks decent enough. And trust me, it tastes terrific.

Pork Loin Cooked in Milk (Arista al Latte)

1.5 lbs boneless pork loin
zest of one lemon (not microplaned--in strips)
sprig of rosemary, leaves stripped off of twig
2 cloves of garlic, sliced lengthwise into slivers
1.5 C milk (whole is preferable, but I made it with 2% and it turned out fine)
2 T olive oil
salt and pepper

Cut slits in the ends and along the grain of the pork and slip in bits of the garlic, lemon zest and rosemary. Sprinkle with some ground pepper and a little bit of salt (yes, for once I am recommending you go light on the salt. At least till the end. When you cook the milk down it concentrates the flavor and you risk making it way too salty so go light now and you can always add some more at the end.)

At this point, if you want, you can use cotton twine to tie the meat into a more roll-like shape (I've done it both ways and it does look a teeny bit nicer rolled up, but I'm not sure it is worth the extra hassle of wrestling with the meat).

Heat the oil in a saucepan big enough to fit your pork loin but not too big (otherwise the liquid won't rise high enough on the pork for it to poach and stay moist). Brown the pork on all sides, then pour the hot milk over it.

Heat the milk to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer uncovered until the pork is done (1-1.5 hours) turning it occasionally and scraping the bottom of the pot to keep the curds from sticking too badly.

By the time the pork is done, most of the liquid should have evaporated. If the curds still look a little watery, take the pork out, slice it thin (take off the string first, if you used it) and raise the heat under the curds to get the curd sauce to a thick enough (but not too thick) viscosity. Keep stirring so the curds don't scorch. Taste the curds now and see if you want a little more salt.

Serve slices of the pork topped with some of the curds. And if you think it still looks ugly, shut your eyes and take a bite.

Cook with what ya' got

Last Saturday was a beautiful warm day. After squinting at the unfamiliar yellowish blob that turned out to be the sun (!!) we took the kids for a nice long walk downtown and then came home and celebrated by making this sunny soup:

Robot-approved red lentil soup.

There are a couple of things that are great about this soup:

1. It takes hardly any ingredients and almost all are shelf stable so even if you haven't been shopping in weeks you probably have everything to make it.
2. It is so easy you can make it while half asleep.
   
3. Robots (and robot-loving 2 year olds) like it!
   

Unlike the muddy tasting and muddy colored lentil soup that I grew up with, made with brown lentils, this is a Middle Eastern style lentil soup made with red lentils which turn a beautiful deep mustard shade when cooked. They do not hold their shape (thus no need to puree hot soup which is a pain in the ass) and the flavor is punched up with cumin, garlic and lemon. If you are lucky enough to have experienced the fantastic Middle Eastern restaurants in the area (see, there are some pluses to living in the dark for 3 months of the year!), you will probably have had this soup.

It is great when served with other Middle Eastern stuff like hummus, baba ganoush, pita and a chopped romaine, tomato and cucumber salad dressed with lemon, olive oil, salt, pepper and ground sumac (if you don't live near a Mid-East market where you can get bags of sumac really cheap, you can mail order it from Penzeys.)

Easy Middle Eastern Style Red Lentil Soup

1 medium yellow onion chopped
3-5 cloves of garlic, minced or pressed
1 T olive oil
1 carrot, grated (optional)
1 and 1/2 C red lentils (NOT brown)
7 C water
1 t salt
fresh ground pepper
1 T ground cumin
**Juice of 1-2 lemons (depending on the intensity of your sour-pleasure center)

In a big pot, saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil until the onion is soft. Add the lentils, carrot, water, salt, pepper and cumin and bring to a boil. Then reduce heat and simmer for at least 40 minutes (more is fine--if you are going to simmer for a LONG time then put a lid on the pot so all the water doesn't evaporate). Just before serving add half the lemon juice (at least one lemon's worth) and then taste to see if you want any more lemon juice, salt or pepper.

**If you don't have any fresh lemons in the house, bottled lemon juice will suffice.

Links

I got nothin' to talk about worth using up space here except for a fantastic new drink that Sarah introduced our book group to: Ouzo and Pink Grapefruit juice. Fan-bloody-tastic.

So go out, get yourself the two ingredients (try and get the kind of ruby red juice that is combined with other juice concentrates rather than high fructose cornsyrup--look in the natural foods section of the market) and some ice cubes and while you are sipping away at your lovely anise-grapefruity combo, I give you a couple of links to blogs that are helping me get through this week of single parenthood--escapism, humor, even a little inspiration for when life gets back to normal.

• Monster Crochet--her fantastic crocheted T-bone steaks with eyeballs have to be seen to be believed. I wonder if I could knit a T-bone...
• Pandafix--because in the depths of winter, watching fuzzy bamboo eaters is almost as good as the sun.
• Nixie Knox the Tatooed Librarian--with a name like that, you really must visit. And she's local.
• Go Fug Yourself--because laughing at celebrities (even celebrities who you are too unhip to even recognize as celebrities...) can make you feel better about yourself. And how can you resist copy like this in which Katie Holmes is described as "leech on a man-alien, incubator to the Rambaldi baby (or whatever that thing is in there), and altogether pitiable pregnant lady who just makes us all hurt a bit for how miserable she's going to be soon"?
• Cute Overload--I know, "Cute" and "Kate" rarely occur in the same sentence, but if you are desperate for something to make you smile, try this site.
• thumbscre.ws--some damn funny writing.

For the love of an appliance

Avert your eyes if you can't stand witnessing an excesses of love and joy because I'm about to get all gushy here.

I love my stove. I love love love love love my stove.

No, I don't have a $3000+ professional beast. I have a competent, yet relatively modest, Jenn-air Model JGS8850ADW. It has a gas cooktop and a gas-convection oven.

I am sure that my perception of my stove is influenced by its predecessor, an electric, evil piece of crap I used to call "The Inferno" since it had two settings: Off and Burn. When we finally decided to replace it, we didn't even consider donating such a malicious machine to a place like the Re-Use Center. Instead we got a little therapeutic relief by ripping the damn thing apart and throwing the pieces into the driveway. Seeing an appliance that has tormented you reduced to a pile of debris is really very satisfying.

My latest reason for loving my current stove beyond all reason is this:
See that button at the bottom of the (grubby) control panel in the first full column on the left? The one that says "Bread Proofing"? I used it last night to make this:

perfect, thick creme fraiche.

We keep our house pretty damn cool in the wintertime (daytime setting 61 F, nighttime setting 59 F) and without this nice warm place for the bowl of cream with a tablespoon of buttermilk to sit and fester I would have had watery glop that was decidedly not "fraiched".

Tempting as it is while solo parenting to sit down with a spoon, a bottle of potent alcohol (more Poire William anyone?) and a video of a Jane Austin movie and eat the whole bowl after the kids go to bed, I am actually going to share this glorious stuff with my bookgroup tonight. We read Three Junes by Julia Glass (which, I confess I didn't re-read though I did enjoy it the first time I read it about a year and a half ago) and in honor of the portion of the book set in Scotland, I am making an appetizer/canape sort thingy with smoked salmon, salmon caviar and some of that glorious creme fraiche. I haven't exactly decided what form the completed dish will take, but with three such ingredients, how can it be bad?

Before and after

I am no organization queen. Far from it. But to prepare for the chaos that will be this week of solo parenting (Brian is off in sunny Phoenix again) I decided that I would clean out a few of my kitchen cabinets. Because we all know that if your kitchen cabinets are organized and tidy then you won't lose it and start drinking gin at 3 pm. (Though I'm out of gin after taco night so I'll have to venture into the disorganized booze cabinet and see what else is hiding there.)

This urge to organize in a vain attempt to feel in control of your life reminds me of my friend Lee who decided the night before she was to host a baby shower that had been foisted on her and that she didn't want to host that she simply had to alphabetize all her books rather than clean or cook. And this woman has a lot of books. But you know, the next day when people arrived at her kinda dusty, disheveled house and ate supermarket hummus and crackers she felt a whole lot better about the whole enterprise because all the Margaret Atwood books were together on the shelf. And really, a happy host has a big impact on a party.

Often when I open this cabinet:
something falls on me. Here you see the impressive engineering feat (and you thought Brian was the one with the engineering talent in the family! Ha!) that is my cabinet: teetering packages of crackers, a precariously balanced container of currants and a bunch of stuff on the top shelf that I don't think I've looked at (or for) in a few years.

I also decided to tackle this cabinet:
Tea towers to the right and piles of cans to the left with a few miscellaneous items hiding in the back.

The scariest things that I found were these:

Baby food that expired in 2004....

I also discovered that I had four boxes of baking soda, some green tea I didn't know I owned and don't remember buying and over three pounds of dried apricots--why three pounds? I dunno. I guess every time I went to the store I thought I was out of them and bought some more. What will I do with three pounds of dried apricots? Apricot scones? Other ideas?

Half a day later, this is what the two cabinets look like:

Raisin boxes lined up with almost military precision! Nothing threatening to bonk me on the nose when I open the door!

Oh my, you can actually find what you are looking for in this cabinet. And no scary baby food either.

So this week, when the kids make me cuckoo and I can't stand the chaos that is the rest of my life, I plan to open the doors of these two cabinets and just gaze at the order and (hopefully) remember that life will not always be insane. And if the view doesn't quite do it on its own, I'll try gazing at the cabinets with a vodka tonic in hand.

Ann Arbor Bloggin' News

Just a short post to direct you towards a terrific new blog my friend Deb started called "Blue Pencil: The Uninvited Editor". She re-edits sections of books mostly for the flaws that British authors make when trying to write American characters, but also just grammar goofs in general. The kind of thing that we passionate readers wish more PAID editors would catch before publication. As many of you know, my little sub-specialty in the uninvited editing world is culinary accuracy in fiction. Deb has the British/American idiom thing down pat.

And while this may not be news to you all, it was quite a thrill for me to meet Julie "The Bookworm" while swimming with my kids at the Y this morning. In between wrestling our respective children back into their clothing we were able to talk a little about books and the aesthetics of book printing and how we feel when a badly printed book or crappy cover art turns us off of the book.