For my son's birthday party.  The cake is devil's food, the frosting is vanilla buttercream. 

Here is the amazing napa cabbage we brought home from the farm last week:

Look at it!  That's a cabbage to feed your whole family.  Napa cabbage has not got really anything to do with the Napa valley.  It's also known as Chinese cabbage, which can be somewhat confusing, because bok choy is also also known as Chinese cabbage.  Usually, when you see a napa cabbage in the grocery store, it's a much paler, celery color, but it's still good (just not as good as this one).

To keep things interesting, I used both the napa and the bok choy we got from the farm in the chicken salad:

It's adapted from a recipe in Hot Sour Salty Sweet by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, as per the stuff I had in my fridge.

The important part is the dressing, which is damn simple to make, and absolutely fresh and fantastic, and as follows:

3 TB fresh lime juice
3 TB fish sauce
2 TB rice or cider vinegar
1 tsp sugar
2 - 3 bird or serrano chiles, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 shallots, thinly sliced and separated into rings

Mix up the liquids and the sugar, then add the rest and let stand for 30 minutes or as long as it takes you to make the other stuff.

For my salad, I used poached chicken, the napa and bok choy, cilantro, mint, scallions and some chopped up peanuts.  I mixed it all up and served it over noodles, and had enough left over for sandwiches the next day.  It's really perfect hot weather food.

For the completists out there, the original recipe calls for 2 lbs chicken (poached and shredded), 1 cup bean sprouts (blanched for 30 seconds), 2 cups shredded napa or Savoy cabbage, and 2/3 cup Vietnamese coriander (rau ram), or substitute 2/3 cup basil or 1/2 cup mint, chopped or coarsely torn.

This week was our first farm pickup, and it was incredible.  They've already got lots of lettuces and greens and things.  Next week I promise I'll try to remember my camera, because it's just lovely.

This is just a sauté that I tossed with some pasta and cheese.  The flavors are so fresh that I didn't want to get in the way.  It's turnips, radishes, peapods, some greens, scallions and chives, with butter and walnuts.

I'm not entirely sure why, because sewing isn't really my thing, but I'd been coveting the Stitch it Kit by Jenny Hart for quite a while, before I finally broke down and bought it this weekend.  I blame the polka dots.  Anyway, I bought it, and I embroidered this kitty, which I feel extremely sorry for because that bow is bigger than its head.

It was fun!  I used the opportunity to practice most of the stitches in the how-to book, and, although I messed a few things up, I'm not too fussed.  My daughter likes it, anyway.

The kit itself is very cute, but very, very basic.  Also: I had to consult several websites before I actually got the hang of French knots (that could just be me, though).  The 'tea towels' included aren't so much actual towels as maybe very chintzy napkins, but that's all right, since you're just using them to fool around with.  I do think it's a bit misleading to categorize the iron-ons 'punk rock' when they're mostly things like fruit and teapots and hula dancers and even a lipstick and powder puff.  Still it did deliver at least an afternoon's entertainment, and I still have another 'towel' to go.

Recently I found myself, just before bed, fantasizing about Fettuccine Alfredo.  I wanted the very simple version, more creamy than cheesy, that I used to get as takeout in college.  Unfortunately, it was too late to make my own and I no longer live anywhere near enough to that restaurant for takeout, but the next day I was able to make that fantasy a reality.

Since the sauce itself is very simple, I thought it would be fun to make my own pasta as well, and it was.  I have a pasta roller/cutter thing, which I like using a bit more than rolling and cutting it by hand because the kids always beg me to let them help out turning the crank.  The recipe for the pasta dough, if you can call it that, was simply one and a half cups flour mixed with three large eggs.

And the results were even better than my dreams.  I've made all kinds of Alfredos, and I usually enjoy them (butter, cream and cheese?  what's not to like?), but in this recipe the prosciutto and nutmeg definitely give sort of a form to all that fat, and the cream is reduced and full of flavor, and the homemade pasta just sucks up all the sauce...  I'll be in my kitchen.

Fettucine with Prosciutto, Cream, and Nutmeg
from Marcella Says... by Marcella Hazan
serves 4

3 TB butter
Prosciutto cut into narrow strips to measure 2/3 cup
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1/3 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
Fettuccine made as above or 10 oz. boxed

1. Put the butter and the prosciutto in a large skillet and turn on the heat to low.  Lightly brown the prosciutto, stirring from time to time, being careful not to overcook it and dry it out.

2. Add the cream and nutmeg and cook down the cream, stirring from time to time, reducing it by a third.  Should you inadvertently reduce it more than you would have liked, stir in 2 or 3 tablespoons of pasta water.  Turn off the heat until the pasta is cooked.

3. When the fettuccine is done, drain and slide into the skillet with the sauce (reserve a few tablespoons of the cooking water; see above).  Turn on the heat to medium and toss thoroughly.  Add the grated Parmigiano, toss again, and serve promptly.  Between the prosciutto and the cheese you most likely won't need to add any salt.

Just in time for sweater weather to be over, I've finished the sweater for my son (that I started in February).  Fortunately, it was cold and rainy this past weekend, and I suppose there's a thin chance he won't grow out of it before October.

Of course, I totally ran out of yarn and had to run out and buy another skein and still managed to run out of that before I could entirely finish the collar, but it turned out all right in the end.  The pattern is from The Yarn Girls' Guide to Knits for Older Kids, by Julie Carles and Jordana Jacobs, and it worked out okay, although I again had to totally rework the sleeves because theirs were way too short and wide.  This was the first time I'd done set in sleeves, and they were a bit more work than the drop sleeves, but not too bad.

I've also finished a bag I've been working on for a very long time, but I'm not showing it off because I again ran out of yarn and so the handles are very short, and while it'll work for its intended purpose (holding knitting stuff), it's extremely homely.

1. Middle Eastern Swan Song by Deejay Om
2. Tandoori is a Snap by Deejay Om
3. So Often by Kidd Jordan Trio
4. Jolie Banane by Kraak & Smaak
5. Jazzhole by Free the Robots
6. Birdflu Guns Up Buraka by M.I.A.
7. Red Sea Black Sea by Shearwater
8. Sing! Captain by Handsome Furs
9. Speak to me Bones by Land of Talk
10. I Better Run by The Rosebuds
11. Arcadia by Apparat
12. The Songs That We Sing by Charlotte Gainsbourg
13. Four Color Love Story by The Metasciences
14. Cuckoo by Santa Maria
15. In My Head by The Ballet
16. Roll On (Feat. Jenny Lewis) by Dntel
17. Wild is the Wind by The Second Band
18. Love and Nostalgia by Friday Bridge
19. Broken Arm by Winterpills
20. Goodnight by Standfast
21. Release Me by Oh Laura

And, recently purchased by me: Someone to Drive Me Home by the Long Blondes, 23 by Blonde Redhead, Cassadega by Bright Eyes and Nux Vomica by The Veils.

Next Week: Bjork!!

Romeo and Juliet is a play about sex, drugs, youth and death.  Yes, Shakespeare anticipated the power ballad.  He's just that good.  It was written probably around the same time as A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the two plays together are more or less a möbius strip of romantic dramedy.

Fighting and fucking are continuously conflated in R&J until you can barely tell which is which anymore.  Double- and triple- and maybe more-entendres flash through the verse like the lightning of lovers' oaths, "which doth cease to be/Ere one can say it lightens."  Everything happens too fast; this play is like that day that you're in such a hurry to get out of your house so you won't be late for work that you forget your keys so you can't start your car so you have to wait around for the locksmith and you end up missing work entirely, when you should have just spent an extra five minutes in the first place getting your head together. 

Every young character ends up penetrated in the end, except Benvolio (Why does he escape?  I'm still not sure.  What do you think?), and Romeo.  Significantly, he dies by the cup, while Juliet becomes a sheath for a happy dagger.  A graveyard consummation, then, with a possible Elizabethan pun on 'to die' meaning to orgasm.  Is there a possible occult connection there, as well?  The cup and the dagger seem pretty ritualistic to me, and need I point out that the play turns on a letter that is undelivered just after Mercutio (a.k.a. Mercury) dies?  (Mercutio's famous dying curse is, of course, "A plague a' both your houses!" and the letter never makes it out to Mantua because of a plague.)

Speaking of Mercury, in addition to making sure the mail gets delivered, he's also responsible for bringing dreams to mortals.  So, when Mercutio goes off on a tangent about Queen Mab riding around in her hazel-nut shell, maybe it's not just a randomly pretty speech.  Not to mention it's a speech about fairies and dreams, which is kind of a shoutout to that other awesome play coming soon to a theater near you.

That other play had something to say about lovers and poets, and so does this one.  Marjorie Garber writes that the first lines that Romeo and Juliet exchange are 'love at first sonnet':

If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this:
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in pray'r.
O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do,
They pray - grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
Then move not while my prayer's effect I take.

This is a poem that works, which is to say, it gets the poets laid.  It's also kind of in direct opposition to most sonnets which are all about how much it sucks not to be getting any.  Previously, with Rosaline (and, not to make any biographical conjectures, but when last we saw Rosaline, in Love's Labour's Lost, she was quite possibly a Dark Lady analog), Romeo had exactly that sort of relationship, and was actually pretty bad at making poetry, as well.  It's not until he has a willing partner in poetry that he meets his romantic match.

The Rosaline thing also makes Romeo and Juliet's relationship real.  Yes, they are young, but they are also undeniably in love.  What Romeo had with Rosaline was infatuation, a crush, doting, as Friar Lawrence calls it; what he and Juliet have is the real deal.  Which is what makes it all so, well, tragic, at the end.

I really want to talk about Juliet, because for all Romeo's poetry and duelling and whatnot, she's really the heart of the play.  She's the sun, for goodness' sake!  And yet, for being the sun, she longs for nothing but the night:

Give me my Romeo, and, when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

She even tries, after her brief tryst with Romeo, to deny the dawn and pretend the lark is the nightingale.  She's such a formidable personality by the end of the play that it's painful to watch her being smacked down by her father and betrayed by her nurse.  In the end it's her elders, and their feuds and their rules and their hijacking of youth culture - hey, maybe Shakespeare was anticipating the Baby Boomers' effect on the 21st century - ruin her life.

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings

- Richard II, the emo king

The plot of this play is pretty easy to summarize: Richard II is a bad king who is squeezing nobles and commoners alike for cash and squandering it on easy living for himself and his favorites, and who can't command his way out of a paper bag.  He exiles Bolingbroke and Mowbray instead of letting them duel out a charge of treason (which verdict might implicate Richard in the death of his uncle).  He villanously tents his fingers at the death of John of Gaunt (Bolingbroke's father, and Richard's other uncle), then strips John's estate of cash with which he scarpers off to war in Ireland.  When Bolingbroke returns prematurely to retrieve what's left of his father's lands and goods, he easily sways both the nobles and the commoners to his cause, and when Richard returns from his little wars he finds he doesn't have much of a country left to come home to.  Richard resigns his crown to Bolingbroke (now Henry IV) and is first imprisoned and then murdered.

It's hard to sympathize with anyone in this play.  There's no fool, or clown, or bastard to make you laugh or to feel sorry for.  Bolingbroke is a politician, and he's good at what he does, but he's not particularly interesting.  Richard is interesting, but he's also self-centered, venal, and incompetent.  As he loses his position and his freedom, he becomes more poetic and considered, but it's always all about him.  His final soliloquy isn't about what it means to be human, but what it means to be Richard.

So, while his fall from king to man is interesting to watch, it's not especially moving.  He and the older generation of characters believe that the king is annointed by God (and, can I just say, while we're on the subject, that the word 'chrism' really squicks me out?), and Bolingbroke and his realpolitik cohort school them otherwise.  This would be a good place to note that Richard II was the play that Essex paid Shakespeare's company to perform on the eve of his (failed) rebellion, prompting Queen Elizabeth to remark, "I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?"  It probably wasn't the play's fault that the rebellion failed, but since the forced resignation of Richard II eventually led to years terrible, bloody civil war, maybe it wasn't the best choice.

I'll be honest with you, this play left me a bit cold.  Apart from noting how some of the language and some of Richard's meditations pave the way from Hamlet, I didn't really get much out of it, but, although I've read the play a couple of times I've never yet seen it performed.  I can imagine that a good actor might make me see Richard in a different, more sympathetic, light, but until then I don't have much more to say.

I am in the middle of three knitting projects right now and getting nowhere on any of them because we're in the process of moving.  So.  If there's even less posting than usual around here (is that even possible?), you'll know why.

I made these washcloths on a lark, because I saw them in a book (Yarnplay by Lisa Shobhana Mason) and they looked easy/cute, and I had some leftover cotton yarn hanging around anyway (hers are made of hemp, but cotton works just as well).  They are easy, and I'm entertaining the idea of keeping some cotton yarn on hand from now on in case of last-minute gifts.

The top one is garter knit, which is k1p1 on one side and k across on the other, and the bottom one is broken rib, which is k2p2 across for six rows, then p2k2 across for the next six.  The textures are interesting to look at, they make knitting the washcloths less boring, and they are a little bumpy, so the washcloths are a bit exfoliating.