Not Everything, Mark Bittman

For the first (or maybe second) time in my life and I cooking out of a cookbook. For a long time I have looked at different recipes from different places and then made something dervies form my impressions of those mixed with the limitations of my on hand ingredients. But now, when I want to make something, I look it up in one book and one book only, Bittman's How to Cook Everything. For years I have been telling my mom that if she was a good mom she would get me a copy of the Joy of Cooking. This year she relented and hot me the "hipper" Joy, the Everything.
How is Bittman doing so far? Like I mentioned -- no gyozas so I had to free form that one with the aid of the wrapping instructions on the package of wonton skins I got. Would have liked to know if I was supposed to cook the meat before folding or not (I did, and it ended up a little dry, hard to wrap, and not molded to the dough like my picture of how gyozas are supposed to be. No Eggie Parm, etiher, though a lot of eggplant cooking strategy suggestions that were fun to read. Just as well I guess, cause EP is pretty tedious and I have got it down to a point where I cheat by cooking eggplant in medalions and then cutting polenta and mozzerella madellions, stacking them up, pouring over tomato sauce and, of course, some parm on top. Still takes about an hour, though. I aslo looked up a french onion soup, but more just to confirm it was basically the same as what I was planning to do. I should add that he has good sections of equipment that have been nice bedtime reading.
Bittman's biggest win thus far comes in the cake category. I was dissapointed to find only three cake recipes in this five pound book when I went to birthday it up for a friend on Monday. The choices are golden, chocolate, and something else. I went with teh golden, in three layers, electing to add both the optional vanilla and the option oragnge zest, though without the requested almond extract (besides vanilla, I only had peppermint on hand and it just seemed like the wrong direction). while it was baking, I got lured into making buttercream frosting by the faithful friend who was sitting on my floor (not so much with the kitchen space in Eastlake's most cheap-rent apartment) cutting up gummy candies to my specifications ("Thinnner! Can you do some of the ltters in gummy relief?" So back into the mixer with yet another stick of butter and four cups of sugar. Whizpow. Buttercream frosting is like crack. I think most of us are drawn to the occasional from the can spoonful of duncan hines frosting, but the buttercream -- it's like the platonic ideal of that. It's like I am mounting Gatsby's skyward staircase with every finger lick. So today I had to put the bowl with the rest of the leftover frosting in the sink with the dishes because feeding the addiction was going to spoil my taste for any non-manna-of-heaven food for the rest of my days.
So I am back down with Bittman. Please someone have another birthday soon.

DIY PT & IRB

I turned in IRB today! For those of you who don't do human subjects speak, that mean 5 months and 25 pages of explaining to the ethics experts why my survey of attitudes towards secondhand smoke among residents of public housing is not going to leave respondents depressed/deceased/depraved/declawed/denounced/defunct. A week ago, when i realized today would be the day, I started to feel upbeat, weight lifted. However, now that I have actually mailed the beige envelope of my past and future toil, I am not as ecstatic. Bearing down on me is the long, dark follow-up of the soul. Sometime in mid-June i will be desperately trying to hit a 50% response rate for this survey, which will be a much bigger barrier than IRB because the IRB was in Engliah, not Somali. All this to say, if you like sane me, get her while you can - she's checking out in June and won't be back until UW dispenses her a degree.

Also today, we lost our second soccer game of the season, and our first where a score on ourselves wasn't the losing goal. I sit here rubbing my hamstring with a large-curl curling iron set to low because after 5 months of being injured, I still can't figure out how to heal. I came out of the game in the second half dreaming about an utltrasound machine, I could picture the machine in the UW PT office so clearly that I could almost feel its warm nub against my butt and leg. Ahhh, bliss. Necessity being the mother of invention that she is, when I got out of the shower and espied the curling iron hanging out in the bathroom cabinet, I conceived my DIY plan. And it's working. Back to bliss.

Coffee is the new margarita

Ok, time to reconcile my fear of blogs, now that I am three cups of caffeine to the wind and sitting across from that eminent blogger MT. To the wind - yes, I am one of those unfortunates who drinks a cup of coffee and then can't walk a straight line. This makes the afternoon-at-work coffee break a stumbling block rather than an energizer, but we all learn to live with our handicaps, don't we.

What it comes down to, is whenever I sit in front of the blogger.com sign in screen, I feel this pressure to add something of value to cyberspace. I create a standard for what that "value" is, strain my thoughts through that seive and come up overwhelmed and emptyhanded.

Now, if you know me, and know how I talk (and talk and talk and talk), this process of elimination seems incongruous. My approach to speaking is that it is not any specific indendence of talking that is important, but it is the net conversation that gets put in stone. So over the course of a week I may talk about a topic five times, 3 times from one perspective, and one time each from two opposing perspectives. The idea behind this, is that conversation is interesting, and the more perspectives that get added in the better it gets. It does not matter if those perspectives are note grounded in my beliefs. This is sort of a Pollock approach to conversating, and I won't deny that it gets confusing for a lot of people, but it is my unbreakable habit.

But out here on the blog, it all gets recorded. There is a real-time juxtaposition of what I said then to what I said now. Because of the written record, I get this feeling that every statement I make now limits the possible statements that I can make in the future. I stayed away from choose-your-own-adventure books as a pre-teen because of the fear of winding up cornered in the back of the cave with the monster bearing down on me after making only two measily decisions.

Mmmm, hmmm. Myabe by articulating this whole mess up front, I have stretched it out from a tight little ball of obstacle to a fluff of barrier. Drawn out to wispiness it is nearly transparent. Due to the fact that I am seeing the screen in double right now, I am going to let the metaphor drop and order another cup.