BBRUB: Brooklyn Bridge User Blog

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2008-03-29T01:53:00.012-04:00

For the four faithful friends who persist in hitting “refresh” on this blog even though I never post to it, here is your exclusive (well, almost) scoop: I’m gonna go to grad school! At itp Точка nyu Точка edu,* in case I haven’t already told you all about it.

Yippee!

* Tochka

Updated to add:

FYI, the reason I use Точка above is that I can’t stop thinking of it as “ITP tochka ru,” on account of this song:

whose brilliant refrain, “ve ve ve Leningrad es pe be tochka ru,” translates to English as “www Leningrad spb dot ru,” the band’s URL. Not their best song, especially when the scary guy raps in the middle of it (which he did not do at the AWESOME show I saw a month ago, fortunately), but wicked catchy. Dozens of extremely happy-drunk Russians were yelling this line as they tumbled out of Webster Hall.

My first workout of 2008

2008-01-01T14:29:00.000-05:00

I made two 9-inch cherry almond tarts from The Gourmet Cookbook today, and the things damn near killed me. The pastry and filling were very straightforward, but the piped almond paste–based lattice (the selling point of this recipe, which otherwise is almost identical to the sour cherry pie my mom and I always make) was just too stiff.

I was doubtful even as I scooped it into my pastry bag, but once I'd nearly broken my arm piping out the first strip of lattice—an exercise which took about three minutes of extreme exertion—I was all like nuh-uh. So I scraped all the dough out of the bag and into a food processor, and then I mixed in about a tablespoon of egg white and two teaspoons of walnut oil. (I didn't want to add water, because that would make it tough, and I didn't want to add so much walnut oil that it would either come out greasy or taste noticeably walnutty; I just didn't have any other oil besides olive [I buy canola all the time, but it always goes rancid before I can use it up, even though I store it in the fridge].) Adding those liquids still didn't loosen it up enough, so I put half of it in a bowl and ran it into the oven for a minute or so, to melt it. Then I mixed the warm portion back into the rest.

After I'd done all that, the stuff was possible to pipe, but it was still extremely difficult. I could only do it by twisting the top of the pastry bag like a crank while squeezing the middle with my other hand. I was very concerned that the bag would burst, but they don't call it a Wünderbag for nothing (yes, that is really the name printed on the side; it makes me smile every time I use it).

Needless to say, I piped only as many strips as I thought were necessary to make the tarts look decent. More strips would have taken too damn long—I was already afraid that the cherry juice was soaking through the bottom while I worked, and the pastry dough was melting in my insanely hot kitchen.

Then, once those were safely in the oven, I piped all the remaining almond dough out into a cookie-type thing, for myself. Mmmmmmmm. Cookie.

I could have made it more attractive, probably, but it was already too much fucking work to pipe the stuff in the first place.

This was the hardest workout I've had in months—I definitely exerted my arm muscles to the point of failure a couple of times. I'll be sore for days. And did I mention that I'm doing all this on about five hours of sleep?

Oh, how I sacrifice and suffer for my loved ones!

The Beast

2008-01-01T02:46:00.000-05:00

I had to make a megabatch of squash rolls for my mom's New Year's Day party, so I decided to try out the "new" Cuisinart.

This machine's name, I have decided, is The Beast.

The Beast needed some vigorous cleaning, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't last used to make meth or anything like that; it just had some kind of sticky orange stuff in its harder-to-clean spots. Nothing a scrap of steel wool couldn't handle. There are a couple of things wrong with it, besides the missing fancy blades:

pusher assembly has a crack across one side
pusher's lock (the thing that keeps it from telescoping open) has been snapped off
steel blade has been chewed up pretty bad
engine coughs ever so faintly when you turn the bowl to take it off the base

I think I can live with all that.

Between Amazon and another discount place online, I can replace all the busted and missing parts for $185 (about $40 off list, and less than 1/4 the cost of a brand new Beast). Worth it? Probably. But I should test the machine a few more times, to make sure there's nothing seriously wrong with the motor or the safety thingummy. It sure would suck to stick my hand in the bowl and have the motor decide to fire.

So, how did the rolls go? Well, as I suspected, the 20-cup work bowl was not large enough for my tripled recipe, but it did easily hold 2/3 of that amount, i.e., a doubled batch of 24 rolls each. So I mixed everything in two roughly divided batches, and then I kneaded the lumps together a bit by hand. The resulting monstrous ball of dough was, before rising, only slightly smaller than my head.

My lovely day

2007-12-30T23:40:00.000-05:00

I love IKEA. I hate IKEA.

Around noon, I headed over to Port Authority to wait in line for the shuttle bus to IKEA. Got some knitting and book-listening done on the way, and managed not to get carsick. Yay!

Walked through the store, gathering a few things from various enticing bins. Spent, like, twenty minutes trying to figure out the Pax configuration booklet. Waited in line at a help kiosk and ordered two lightweight items to pick up downstairs. Did not get a lot of things I would have gotten if I'd had a proper ride home.

I had forgotten to have breakfast, so though the cafeteria was mobbed, I thought I had better eat something soon. Waited in a very slow line, behind a woman who would. not. move. her cart. up. as the people in front of her stepped forward. Finally got my lunch (a bottle of water, a plate of gravlax, and a slice of carrot cake) and edged past the not-moving-up woman to check out. Found a free table, of which there were not many.

Child at the table behind me yelling “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” over and over repeatedly again and again got on the nerve that is right next to my last goddamn nerve.

* * *

I would like to interrupt this report to say that I do not think honey and mustard should be mixed anymore. Not only is this a meritless combination that is not one hundredth as tasty as just plain mustard, but also it is so, like, 1990s. You honey-mustard people should just stop it. Now.

* * *

Went downstairs and waited in line at the help desk in the self-serve area to ask where I should go to get my missing hardware. The desk guy said to go to customer service.

Waited in line for the self-service checkout. Registers kept opening up, and the people in front of me kept not stepping forward to use them. Must all have been related to the woman in the cafeteria line. Eventually a clerk came over and started herding people toward open registers.

Fellow IKEA shoppers note: Using a bar code scanner is harder than it looks (actually, scratch that—I’ve used scanners before, with no problem, so it was just this scanner), but self-service checkout is still much faster than waiting in the regular line, which last time I was there took about half an hour.

Waited in line to hand in my paperwork at the will-call area. “Twenty minutes,” the clerk said. Wandered through the throng for a while, unable to find the customer service desk. Went back to will-call and asked if it was in the area marked “Returns.” She said yes.

Went to the cleverly disguised customer service waiting room, which was full of despondent-looking people. Spotted a rack of plastic bins filled with spare parts, in the back of the room. The parts I needed were not there, of course. Took a number—53, as they called out number 10—and went back to will-call.

Waited the rest of the twenty minutes, standing, knitting. Got my two things (they called out “Indiana,” of course; fortunately, I answer to anything that even remotely rhymes with or otherwise resembles my name). Rolled my stuff into the customer service room, where they were up to number 19. Woo! I have seen hospital waiting rooms that were more cheerful. Threaded my cart through the crowd and wedged myself into a seat by the wall.

Waited, knitting, at least another half an hour for my number to be called, while two screamy children stomped all over my last goddamn nerve. Then didn’t get to the counter fast enough, because I had to maneuver my cart back through the maze. Number 54 jumped up to the desk ahead of me, that bitch. “I’m 53,” I said, indignantly. The customer service rep shrugged and said, “You’ll have to wait for the next one.”

Waited until another desk was free, all the while trying to glare a hole in the back of No. 54’s head. Just before her hair would certainly have burst into flames, a counter opened up. Explained that I had been given an incomplete set of hardware for my bookcase, showing the guy my instruction booklet with helpful checkmarks next to the items that I did receive. He wrote down all the part numbers and quantities on a separate piece of paper.

“Do you have a receipt?” he asked.

“No. Somebody else picked it up for me; I don’t have the receipt.”

“Oh. Because if you did, I could just give you a new one.” I am paraphrasing. He was not this articulate.

“Uh . . . So . . . what are you telling me?”

“We have some spare parts in the back; I’ll see what we have. But if you had the receipt, I could just get another box and take it out of that.”

“Well, I don’t have the receipt.” But I do, obviously, have the fucking instruction booklet. And, anyway, who slogs all the way out to IKEA to cadge a couple of free fasteners that only work with IKEA furniture? “Why would I lie?”

“I’m sorry, it’s the store policy.” He would not look me in the eye. Then he disappeared into the back.

Waited about five minutes. The kid came back with two small plastic bags of hardware—one kind to each bag. My kit was missing six varieties of fastener. “These are the only ones we have.”

Contemplated the baggies. “So, what am I supposed to do?”

“Well, if you have the receipt, I could open another box and get them for you. Without the receipt, though, I can’t bring it up.”

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

“I do not have the receipt. Somebody else picked the bookcase up for me, in an order with a lot of other stuff. That person is out of town. I do not have a car. I came all the way from Brooklyn, on the bus. I can’t come back until next weekend. I have already lost my entire day to this. Is there anything else you can do?”

He still won’t look at me, but he looks at the parts list in my instruction booklet again, hesitates, and then pushes back through the plastic curtain to the supply room with the booklet in his hand. He is gone for a long, long time.

Two other sets of customers are helped at the desk next to mine. A woman bumper-cars her cart past me to the counter where 66 has just been called. “I’m 66.” The customers already at the counter turn around to look at her. The cashier looks at her ticket. “You’re 99, not 66.” “Oh, I’m 99?” Zombielike, she rolls back the other way, her cart caroming off mine again.

The boy returns, finally, with three more packets. He lays the booklet down and spreads the bags on it. “The guy who builds stuff here says you can use these [pointing to a bag of pegs] for this [points to booklet], and these [holds up a bag of long screws] for these [points to a picture of a different kind of long screw]. And these [a tiny bag of brads] are these [points].”

I'm afraid that any further requests might jinx me, but I have to say it: “It says I need two bags of those.”

He ducks into the back again. I open one of the bags and start to count out the pieces, but before I’m up to eight (of thirty-two), he returns with a second packet of brads.

“So. The only thing I’m missing now is the stabilizer strap.” I point. He looks at the drawing and shakes his head doubtfully. “I don’t think we can get those.”

“Okay, I guess I can do without them. If the bookcase tips over and kills me, it will have been worth it.” I know I ought to count out all the pieces while I’m there, but the kid seems so downtrodden and anxious already that I scoop everything up and dump it in my bag. “Thanks for all your help!” I chirp, meaning it but sure that I sound like I’m being sarcastic.

Took the bus back (knitted, frogged, knitted, finished audiobook, started new audiobook), got a cab to my mom’s, dropped off the stuff and grabbed an umbrella, dashed to the subway, waited a long time, switched after one stop, forgot that I was on an E instead of an A (fault of audiobook, obviously; was not knitting), took another cab (non-New Yorkers note: when it rains, there are no cabs; I was eyeing a rickshaw for a few minutes in here, but I didn’t know how much to tip), went to the wrong restaurant, went to the right restaurant, ate a bunch of dim sum that all tasted the same, got a fucking Tanqueray and tonic, refused to eat anything else that had been fried or was made of shrimp but tried not to be too obvious about it, got a big plate of Chinese broccoli, got a fucking glass of port, ordered a dish of fruit to share, reminded waiter when he forgot to bring it.

Loquats! Are really good!

Cabbed back to mom’s with her and her houseguests, shoved the big stuff in a closet, hauled the rest—plus two huge jars of sour cherries, for Tuesday’s pies—home on the subway, knitting.

Got home at 11:30.

Did not hit or bite anybody all day.

The End.

Gaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!

Oh, those infernal buggers.

2007-12-29T16:16:00.000-05:00

So I finally get around to clearing out the corner where my new red, glass-doored IKEA Linnarp bookcase—which has been standing, boxed, in my doorway, since September—is supposed to go, and I open the box and start doing my mise en place with the hardware, and what do I find? That of course, just like every other time I've tried to build a big piece of IKEA furniture, half the fucking hardware is missing. They gave me two sets of hardware packet #1 and no sets of hardware packet #2. So now I have to spend my Sunday slogging to New Jersey and back on the bus.

Is it just me?

The other Christmas elves

2007-12-23T22:34:00.000-05:00

My dad died two years and one week ago, and That Other Thing happened a few days later, further insuring that Christmas in my family would forever after be an extremely fucked holiday. Still, that year Mom and I went out and had a nice dinner on Christmas Eve, and the next morning we made hot chocolate as usual and opened the presents we’d gotten for each other before everything had gone to hell. I think my brother came over for a few hours, later in the day. There was a tiny bit of Christmas in Whoville, in somewhat the same spirit in which we’d tried to entertain Dad and ourselves by telling every dirty joke we could remember (or at least half-remember) while we waited for him to be taken off the respirator that was keeping him alive.

Last year, however, Mom announced that she was going to Palm Springs and would not be back until after the holiday. My brother and his wife went to visit her family in Massachusetts, as they do for nearly every holiday. So I, left to my own devices, used the rest of Christmas day (after making hot chocolate for myself) to . . . clean. Because Maudou was arriving on Boxing Day, and I had a tea party scheduled for a few days later, and there was so much to do you can’t imagine. In the evening, in honor of my forthcoming job, I tried my first Jewish Christmas: Chinese food and a movie, with Kato and Billy. Only we had vegetarian Thai food, not Chinese, and Casino Royale sold out while we (then joined by a friend of Billy’s) waited in line. So we wandered in the rain until we found a decent bar, and then we all drank beer and the boys played pool until it was time to return to the theater for the later showing of the movie. I skipped the flick, as I didn’t want to stay out late when I knew I’d need to be up and toiling until the moment Maud arrived. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night! I thought Casino Royale was ridiculous when I finally saw it, anyway; glad I didn’t pay thirteen bucks.

I think if my Dad knew about this, he would be really pissed off at us for letting the family fall apart. He wasn’t a big proponent of familial piety—he interacted with his mother and sister as little as possible, and I didn’t even know we had so many other relatives whom he didn’t talk to until they all showed up for Grandma’s funeral. But he liked our family, and though he cursed about the fucking pine needles every year, he did usually go get a tree, until he became too sick. Christmas is not a religious holiday at all for my family—nothing is a religious holiday for my family—but some rituals are fun, and he did seem to like giving and getting presents, and drinking cocoa, and seeing the family gathered round, surrounded by torn paper and new gadgets. And I think it’s disrespectful of his memory to stop doing that, just because he’s not around. He’d be annoyed by the sentimentality. I can see exactly the face he would have made, before he got sick and stopped being able to make so many faces.

So this year, well before Thanksgiving, I gave my mother a stern talking-to. (I gave my brother one, too, but I have absolutely no leverage with him.) I said, “Are we doing Christmas this year? Because if I’m going to be left to fend for myself again, I’m fucking going to go to Europe or something.” Mom, who at first didn’t recall that she’d skipped town the year before, was contrite and promised that she wouldn’t do it again. She did, in the event, schedule a trip to Mexico, but she made sure to return before the holiday. So she got back today (which was a day later than she was supposed to, thanks to the asshats at Delta), and when she called to say that she was home, I told her I would be coming over later “to put some elves on the piano.” She made some sound along the lines of, “Uh . . . Huh?” but basically she indicated that it was okay.

In addition to having a real tree, when I was a kid we always had these two orange wooden trees on the mantelpiece in the living room. These will always be linked in my mind with the logo on the American Lung Association Christmas seals, which they resemble. They had horizontal branches about two inches deep, and on and around them my mother would arrange dozens of little wooden elves, as well as other Christmasy objects she’d collected over the years. You know, such as the Christmas spider, the Christmas squirrel, and the Christmas airplane. The wooden trees got misplaced when my parents moved to the East Village, around 1989, but the elves and other tchotchkes, most of which don’t have strings and therefore can’t be hung on a real tree, needed to be displayed somewhere, so Mom took to arranging them on the top of the piano. And when Dad became too discombobulated to go out and get a tree, still the elves would be set out.

Last year, not even the elves were out.

Like I said, Dad found aspects of Christmas annoying, but I think he would have found this lack of consistency, and lack of fortitude, even more annoying.

I’d thought about setting up the elves while Mom was in Mexico, but I didn’t get it together yesterday and wasn’t even sure when she was supposed to come back. And today, even though I knew I had until at least early afternoon, because she had called to say that her return flight was delayed, I didn’t manage to get my ass over to Manhattan in time. In retrospect, I’m glad, because (a) it was more fun obsessively lining up the toys with her, and (b) she might have been upset if she’d come home and seen them all lined up, just like when Dad was alive.

Because it was upsetting, for sure, once they were all there—the elves, and the angels, and the wooden nativity figures, and the train, and the airplane, and the Mexican doll, and the spider, and the fucked-up cardboard-and-cotton-ball Santas (??? I’m not sure what they’re supposed to be, actually, but they’re red and white). Mom sat down to contemplate the parade of kitsch, but I had to leave the room and go to the kitchen to scrub sticky stuff off the shoe ornaments from the Metropolitan, because I could feel a lump growing in my throat. And I knew that if I started crying, she would start crying, and this project would have not quite the effect I had intended.

Then, when I’d put the shoes in place (in mismatched pairs, on either side of the airplane), we both fled to the kitchen and talked party menus for a while—for New Year’s Day, the other holiday that has become intensely loaded (among which I have to throw Thanksgiving, too, since it was on the Saturday after Thanksgiving that my father went to the emergency room for what turned out to be the final time).

We have always, always had a party on New Year’s Day, because you have to eat black-eyed peas for good luck, and greens for money, and it’s best to get this over with as early in the year as possible, and to spread the benefits to as many of your friends as possible.

In 2006, two weeks after my father died and one week after That Other Thing That Happened, we had the party as usual, but it was billed as a wake for my dad. And last year, another old family friend had recently died, so the party started as a wake for him. This year, though, we’re just having the party, because we always have the party. My mother’s best friend, who lives in California and with whom she made this most recent trip to Mexico, informed her, apparently, “You’re going to have a big party this year,” and her word is, apparently, law. So there will be about forty people, not including waitstaff and kitchen help, and I have decided to contribute a sour cherry pie with almond lattice, and a few dozen squash rolls. My brother will make an appearance, though he skipped Thanksgiving again and almost certainly will not join us for Christmas, and we will at least start the new year looking like a family. He’ll probably miss the elves, as it’s bad luck to keep Christmas decorations up past New Year’s Eve, but I’ll make sure he knows they were there. What he does with that information is between him and his therapist.

I suspect that shortly after I left, Mom sat back down by the piano to cry, but I think it’s better to put the elves out and cry than to not put the elves out and cry. Fleeing the city, eating Asian food and watching action movies, not arranging the elves on the piano doesn’t make Dad less dead or more missed; it just makes us all more wretched, more dysfunctional, more estranged. Maybe in another year or two we’ll be able to cry over the elves together. Dad would still be annoyed, but I think he’d prefer to have us annoy him as a family.

Those pesky elves

2007-12-16T02:09:00.000-05:00

I was distressed to find, upon walking into my kitchen shortly after arriving home this evening, that someone—presumably one of my supers, who have no respect for anybody's privacy—had left a large Cuisinart sitting on the counter, less than a foot from my existing Cuisinart.

I know they mean well, but I'd really rather if they didn't make it so obvious that they're romping around in my apartment all day while I'm out.

Anybody need a food processor?

Update: It is, for the record, a large $800 Cuisinart.

Update: Of course, the machine left on my counter sports only the basic steel blade. To match the functionality of my existing one, I'd have to buy a shredding disc and at least one slicing disc ($48 each!), as well as a stem to mount them on ($14.50). So the "free" machine would really cost at least $110.50.

Some things I found today

2007-10-28T14:11:00.000-04:00

in the Drawer of Things Not to Lose:

2 drawing triangles
1 bottle blue fountain pen ink
3 boxes canceled checks
2 check registers, 1993–96
1 4" gray feather
25 business cards (of which there are other caches in the house)
- 10 definitely out of date
- 3 possibly out of date
- 12 no reason to keep
16 maps
- Williams, A Visitors Guide: 2005
- Paris Métro, printed from computer: n.d. but 2004 or later
- 23rd Street Association map of Flatiron district: copyright 1996, given to me as part of Holtzbrinck welcome packet in May 2006
- NYC subway: 2002, 2005
- Manhattan buses: 2004
- F and V subway timetable: 2004, 2006
- San Francisco Bay Area: 2001
- Vermont Attractions Map & Guide: 1988
- San Francisco transit and street: 2001
- I [heart] NY state map: n.d., but refers to Governor Cuomo (served 1983–1995) on the front
- Brooklyn buses: 1993, 2006
- Bronx buses: 1994
- train/bus routes to NYC-area Target stores (which I have been boycotting since November 2005)
pocket datebooks: 1996, 1997
14 mail-in deposit envelopes from my bank
manual for Canon AE-1 Program camera
2" wide Ace bandage, no clips
1 pack pocket tissues advertising the film My Life without Me by Isabel Coixet (premiered 2/10/03); I have never seen this movie
eyeglasses prescription dated 1/11/00
1 set of 3 keys, only one of which (mailbox) still works
1 deck playing cards
empty Botan Rice Candy box
postcard to Rachel dated 5/8/99, not sent probably because I didn't have her address
2.25" high (as measured with drawing triangle) stack of 1.75" x 3.5" slips of blank white paper
11 pieces of ID
- 1 NY interim driver’s license: expired 2004
- 2 NY driver’s licenses: expired 1988, 1999
- 1 International Student ID: issued 7/17/89
- 3 U.S. passports: expiring 1989, 1999, 2010
- 2 college IDs: one from September 1987, the other from when I bleached my hair almost white, i.e., probably spring 1988
- 1 CA interim driver’s license: expired 7/21/92
- 1 Social Security card
3 store credit cards, one still stuck to its accompanying letter
1 health insurance card from at least 2 jobs ago
1 Sprint calling card in Mom’s name
Target credit card (as mentioned above, not used since 11/05)
2 credit cards for the same account, same expiration, different numbers; had to check statement online to determine which was valid
ATM card from Republic National Bank before 1999 or 2000, when it was bought by HSBC

Yes yes yes yes yes!

2007-09-06T15:14:00.000-04:00

MUJI Announces NYC Location in SoHo!

Broadway and Grand, baby. Right on my way to work.

Wagons, getting on them

2007-09-03T10:31:00.000-04:00

Happy Labor Day. Why does it always happen that whenever there's a long weekend in which one is supposed to either do fun, traditional things or get the hell out of town, I end up having no plans and then sitting around the house, eating bad things and polishing my malaise? This has not been a good weekend, so far—though I guess I have one more day to redeem it.

On Saturday, I took the bus out to IKEA. I'd just been there last weekend, but I'd arrived quite late, and was trying (in vain) to deal with furniture issues, and then had to sprint through the "marketplace" area in order to check out before closing time. I missed the best part! So I went back, thinking I'd just wallow in the delights of the marketplace. Only . . . they didn't have anything I wanted. No peppy colored sheets. No pink shower curtains (though plenty of orange, which I like, but how many orange shower curtains should one stockpile?). No cute bookends. No Nick folding chairs. No two-tone, scallop-cuffed dishwashing gloves.

I mean, what is the point?

So all I got was a metal cable thingy for hanging a curtain, two glass food-storage dishes (my mother's put the fear of god in me about microwaving things in plastic storage containers), two purple spiral-bound notebooks, a bottle of elderflower syrup, a jar of elderflower-orange marmalade, and some rye bread mix. It really wasn't worth standing in two insane lines for this little stuff, but I was already there, and hellishness is part of the IKEA experience, no?

Meanwhile, between these two in-person trips to the store, I also delegated No. 2 Pencil and a man-with-SUV entrepreneur from Craigslist to fetch two huge bookcases, plus a third red one with doors that's destined to be some kind of bookcase-china cabinet hybrid. Those boxes have been blocking my hallway since Wednesday, and of course I can't build them and fill them with things until I remove the things that are in the places where they're to go. This is a lot of work, and so far, I haven't been able to face it, besides clearing off most of a desk that I've been meaning to get rid of for, oh, maybe a decade.

So the apartment is in its usual state of FEMA-certified disaster area.

But none of this is meant to be my main confession for today. No, what I wanted to tell all my closest friends and perfect strangers is that since I spent a week in the Pacific Northwest at the beginning of August, I have stopped keeping track of what I eat; stopped eating like a giant, cranky rabbit; stopped walking to work, rain or shine. Because, fuck me, that's all been so goddamn boring, and it's had almost no effect on my weight.

Except for this: As soon as I stopped doing all this dead-boring, totally ineffectual stuff, I gained five fucking pounds. Crap.

I blame Moby Dick, which took me more than a month to get through, and which was kind of excruciating until I learned that on newer iPods (such as the Nano I confiscated from my mom), you can play audiobooks at 1.25 times normal speed. Even sped up, the reader's voice irritated me, but at least everything finally came to its tragic and implausible end 25 percent quicker. And I was actually able to settle a biblical question at work last week, it happening to be about Jonah, and how he came to be in a whale. That's me: A Reliable Source of Bible Stories. You know, as long as it was covered in Moby Dick or the Viewmaster reel of the Plagues of Egypt.

Now I am back to The Wine-Dark Sea, and I once again have some incentive to drag myself out of bed in the morning and walk to work. I miss Jack and Stephen when they're not around.

In other news, I'm thinking that graduate school seems like a good idea. This is always a very good sign that I do not like my job. I have a specific program at a specific school in mind, and I don't really have a Plan B, so it's not likely to go anywhere, but we'll see. I'm attending an open house two weeks from now, and applications are due in January. I dunno. Maybe this is the year. In the meantime, I should be stockpiling all this money I'm raking in, but I'd usually rather have a new dress.

I don't have any exciting looked-up words or Best Things for you, because along with no longer paying any attention to my health, I stopped keeping obsessive records of all kinds.

Oh—but last week, maybe Monday, I saw a guy on Grand Street pushing a handtruck that had no fewer than fifty cardboard vegetable boxes somehow piled onto it. The load was twice the man's height. I have no idea how he got it to stay on there. So that was a Best Thing. And I spent an evening with Jen and James unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago, and that was a Best Thing. And Elisabeth sent me a Marimekko bag with green! pears! all over it. That was a Best Thing. There were, no doubt, more. Maybe next time, having gotten back on the obsessive-record-keeping wagon, I will have a proper collection for you.

An e-mail from my mom

2007-07-19T08:16:00.000-04:00

Subject: Today, Thursday, the 19th
Received: 8:11 am

[redacted],
    I know it's sunny, but the forecast says there'll be more thunderstorms this afternoon. Beware!
    Love,
    Ma

Little changes

2007-07-10T22:12:00.000-04:00

Albert Einstein is widely credited with having defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Okay, so I'm nuts. Sue me.

I've still been walking to work every day, and I've still not been losing any weight, besides the initial five pounds. I know I'm supposed to vary my exercise, but I just can't bring myself to do it. So instead, for the last several weeks I've been eating a lot more vegetables and fruits than I usually do. (The amount of planty stuff I usually eat being very close to zero.) This was largely inspired by the book Eat to Live, which I don't remember how I came across. It's written by a doctor (an MD , not a PhD) who basically advocates a low-fat, low-grain, vegan diet. His thing is not low carbs or low fat per se, though, but rather high nutritional value per calorie. Vegetables and fruits have tons of nutrients relative to their calories, so he wants you to eat several pounds of each per day. And for the first few weeks, almost nothing else.

I am not doing this.

But I am trying to have at least one meal a day consist almost entirely of veggies. And the best way I have found to do this is to haunt the salad bar at the new Whole Foods on Houston, where I've been going almost daily. There are plenty of totally unhealthy things you can get there—you could fill your whole dish with pasta and cheese—but I honestly have not been doing that. A typical Whole Foods meal for me consists of three cups of baby arugula, a clump of grated carrots, a clump of green beans, a clump of asparagus, some beets if they have them, a tablespoon of almonds, a tablespoon of feta cheese, and a splash each of oil and vinegar. Pretty straightforward, and it's at least four servings of veggies, all in one meal. If I'm really starving, I'll also get a tub of fruit salad. My only indulgence at these austere meals is their jumble cookies, which are probably four hundred calories each, but soooo good. The rest of the cookies suck, so if there are no jumbles (and there often aren't), I skip it.

You'd think I could make salad on my own, at home, but I tried it one weekend, and it took me about an hour just to prepare all the components (grating carrots, microwaving a huge beet, washing greens, etc.), and it wasn't even good. The chances of my being able to talk myself into doing all that again are almost nil, and I'd rather pay the yuppie tax than claim I'm going to make a salad at home and instead end up eating another bowl of cold cereal.

So if you believe that eating vegetables actually makes a difference, my health should be radically improving, very soon.

As a weight-loss technique, however, it doesn't do much for me. Well, that's not exactly true. Before I started forcing myself to eat all these stupid plants, my weight was graphing as a sine wave, running up and down between the same four pounds, seemingly forever. Since I've entered my salad days, however, the wave has flattened, and at its lowest point. It hasn't gone down at all, but it hasn't gone up, either, and I've been on an amazing streak, considering. At the same time, though, I've become too bored to continue counting calories and graphing everything. Counting calories takes far too much time, and I'm not learning anything new from it.

So. The next thing I need to do is go back to lifting weights, which I haven't been able to talk myself into for weeks. I should also be going to the gym and doing exercises other than walking—or, better yet, a yoga or Pilates class—as doing the same exercise every morning and then sitting still for the rest of the day is making me alarmingly stiff. But I'm not doing any of that yet.

Another part of me that's been getting alarmingly rigid is my brain, so I'm trying, ever so slightly, to read more and think more about what I'm doing. I've put the Aubrey/Maturin series on hold again, and instead I just listened to Wives and Daughters, and today I started The Vicar of Wakefield; the former I'd read before, the latter not. While on jury duty, I started reading (on paper) a biography of Madame de Staël, but I can't read a book while walking, so I haven't made much progress. And I've been listening to some of Kate's platforms, because she is smart and can talk real good.

Blah, blah, blah. Congratulations on making it this far into the most boring blog post ever.

In other news, um, I made some very dietetic baked goods a while back? Those of you who hang out on Flickr know this, but I am aware that a few of youse don't, so . . . on June 11 I made a lemon-blueberry birthday cake for Lorinne's birthday party, and on July 4 I made a lemon-blueberry tart for Sarah's birthday picnic. Oh, um, and I had a party? Sort of for my birthday. And I think I made brownies for that.

Words looked up

May 31: left-handed (for hyphenation); quip (didn't end up using it); lugubrious, which led to glum; tableaux (for spelling)
June 1: spec (as in on spec)
June 3: ecumenical (decided it wasn't appropriate for what I was talking about); git (n., as in And the king lost again, silly thing, stupid git)
June 4: frontispiece
June 5: banal (this is one of those words I look up every few years; I'm never convinced that it means what I think it means)
June 6: tête-à-tête (for the accents)
June 12: lyrical, lyric (for a blog comment)
June 13: bookie, bookmaker (for a blog comment)
June 14: harass (for spelling, in a blog comment; I had it with 2 rs.), conviviality
June 15: convivial, chitchat, folderol, chinwag, yatter (for a blog comment; used chitchat in the end)
June 16: mansard, derrick (for Flickr descriptions)
June 18: folderol (again; this time, I used it)
June 19: passerby (for spelling)
June 20: habituated (a commenter on my other blog misused it); habit (unrelated to previous lookup; thesaurus; ended up using practice)
June 22: disingenuous (another word I'm always looking up; it seems like it ought to mean something more complex than it does, because it has so many letters in it)
June 29: elocution (for a blog comment)

Flashing out

2007-07-02T23:25:00.000-04:00

I just realized, after sitting at my desk for an hour, that I had walked all the way to work, three and a half miles, with the side of my dress completely unzipped. Didn't feel a draft. Didn't notice at all. Maybe because it has a belt?

Perhaps Betsy is right, and full slips are the way to go.

Or, I suppose I could try looking in the mirror before going out.

Ha! It's not just me!

2007-06-25T16:33:00.000-04:00

Long have I complained that The Pie and Pastry Bible is unreliable, and long have certain people scoffed and said there's nothing wrong with it.

Well!

Two of the five recipes for which Ms. Beranbaum offers corrections are ones I've tried to make and been unsatisfied with. I don't remember what was wrong with the lemon meringue pie from this book—was this the one that never, ever, even after days of chilling, deigned to set, or was that the one from the altogther vile Joy of Cooking? I only remember that the PPB one didn't work—but the correction to the Chocolate Oblivion Tart recipe seems perfectly consistent with my "too fluffy" results.

I commend Ms. Beranbaum for posting corrections, however belatedly, and will give both these recipes another try at some point.

Things come, things go

2007-05-27T19:55:00.000-04:00

It was very sad today to watch Stellou's apartment full of beautiful things being rearranged, picked over, and gradually emptied, but I'm very pleased with the trunkload of things I scavenged:

five pretty bowls imported by hand from Singapore!
two Moroccan tea glasses, to further unmatch my already mismatched set
a dozen pleasingly simple drinking glasses
ten or so nice wooden hangers (half being never-have-enough-of skirt hangers)
some full jars of baking spices
a wooden laundry rack that doesn't have to be held together with twist-ties
a typographically magnificent Macanese cookie tin (detail photo TK)
an orange metal stool

As you might have noticed, even if you've never been to my house, there's a decidedly hot color scheme going on: 1, 2, 3. This is not at all my invention, but rather dates back to my ancestral kitchen, whence most of my orange cabinets came, along with the preference for red Heller plates and the notion that a kitchen's walls should be bright yellow. Even my lousy landlord-supplied stove is Harvest, aka yellow. And then the inside of one cabinet and the outside of another are green, for a bit of respite.

Until Friday, the key exception to this hot, hot color-on-kitchen action was my mixer, a Christmas gift from several years ago. My folks got this in beige, possibly my least favorite color on the entire spectrum, despite my specifying several desired colors (which are, as I've said, my family's preferred colors anyway) on my Christmas list.

Parents. They're just not trainable.

If you have a stand mixer, you know that it's not the kind of appliance you put away when it's not in use. Even the smallest KitchenAid, the Classic, weighs more than twenty pounds and is awkward to lift. You find a piece of counter for it to sit on, and there it lives. So if you don't like the color, you're screwt. Still, I love my mixer, and nothing could ever have induced me to part with it except a nicer mixer.

Then, I happened to notice that Amazon.com had included the red Artisan, the next model up in size, in its Memorial Day sale. Red. At the best price I've ever seen. For a bigger, more powerful mixer (the motor in my Classic has never given me any cause for complaint, but a bigger bowl, even by just one pint, would be very welcome for making three-layer cakes and other unwieldy foods). So I got it.

Anybody want to buy an awesome-but-beige stand mixer? Cheap?

At the same time, I finally admitted to myself that even if I do finally get my great-godmother's gorgeous 1940s Waring Blendor rewired, it won't be very versatile. For years it was merely scary, and I used it anyway (albeit gingerly, and with rubber-soled shoes on). But the last time I hauled it out, it positively would not work. I still hope to get it fixed (though I could always repurpose it as a fabulous vase), but in the meantime, I could really use a real blender. I considered buying the cheapest possible stopgap machine at National Wholesale Liquidators, and I stood staring at their offerings for a good ten minutes one afternoon, but I just couldn't bring myself to spend $20 on what was probably a piece of shit, when another $15 would probably get me something far better. So, again, I went to Amazon.com to read reviews, and again, I found that a red KitchenAid was available at a great price—in this case, as a refurbished model, which is fine with me.

So when I went to the office on Friday, both these items had arrived, and now my kitchen is two large red items louder. Add in Stellou's orange stool, and the joint positively blazes.

I might feel guilty about all this intake, but yesterday I wheeled nine bags of stuff—two high-heaped granny carts—to the Salvation Army in the sultry heat. About half of it was bags. Yes, bags. Handbags, messenger bags, purses, clutches, backpacks, cosmetics bags, carry-ons, . . . Who knew I had so many? I'd had a sense that there was a problem, sure, but I'd never considered them as a mass until Maeve and I piled them all in the middle of the living room and she watched me sort through them. All I can say is that I haven't found the perfect bag yet. With Maeve standing over me ("Not judging! Not judging!"), I whittled it down by maybe half to two-thirds (not including tote bags, which are so infinitely useful as to be practically sacred).

And then . . .

. . . they sat in my entry hall for 2-1/2 months. I stepped over them every day, tripping on them occasionally. Every weekend, I'd tell myself, "I really ought to pack those up and take them to the thrift store." I had an idea that I'd sort out the finest ones and donate those to Housing Works, whose new store on Montague is very swish, while reserving the homelier specimens for the homophobic Sallie Ann. In the end, though, I decided it was more important to get them out of the goddamn house than to express my dislike, so I took all the bags to the store that was half a mile closer. Also ejected were such treasures as

a red-brown cafeteria tray Trish had left in 1994
two vile picture frames, one also carbon-dated to the Trician epoch
a brown mock-neck sweater with the tags still on (why, why did I ever buy it? I hate turtlenecks of any kind)
a pair of Danskos I just couldn't love, but that I had rescued from the giveaway bag at least twice before
a fourteen-inch Calphalon grill pan—think about that; measure it out with a ruler, if you must; a fourteen-inch pan is huge; it's like a bicycle wheel; besides, I have an awesome electric grill now
a small All-Clad sauté pan that even water would stick to
my number-three steam iron

It was a prodigious pile, and as one friend said after I reported this achievement, "Your whole building's probably risen by an inch or so." By comparison, a few good clothes hangers, some pretty dishes, and an orange stool that cheers me up every time I look at it are perfectly harmless.

But I am going to stop with the shopping again. It's increased sharply in the last few weeks, and though I like everything I've bought, of course, I don't like the trend. That's money I could be spending on plane tickets!

But enough about my household. Some Best Things:

Sunday, May 13: Dinner with Rose and Francis, even though we were none of us at our most cheerful.
Monday, May 14: Cleaning! With! the! Help! of! COFFEE!!!
Tuesday, May 15: Meeting for beers with my highly unprofessional professional club.
Wednesday, May 16: Dinner with my mom, two friends of hers, and a friend of one of theirs; between them, my four dinner companions had a combined 283 years of hell-raising.
Thursday, May 17: Taking photos in the diamond district, and in my office building. I thought I enjoyed watching Casino Royale until about five minutes after it ended, whereupon I decided that it had been thoroughly stupid.
Friday, May 18: Ranting about the stupidity of Casino Royale to an unlucky friend. Watching Master and Commander for the second time, finally, having listened to books 1–12 twice.
Saturday, May 19: Got a drawing in the mail from Jack.
Sunday, May 20: Looking at pictures of the NYC Dance Parade. Making my third rhubarb cake.
Tuesday, May 22: Finally managed to order an undisappointing meal at Five Points: Blackfish with I-forget-what, followed by chocolate bread pudding with salted caramel ice cream. I still don't like that place, but the fish was better than I expected, and the dessert was perfect.
Wednesday, May 23: Finally picked up my new glasses, which had been broken since December.
Thursday, May 24: Reading This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It), and then making myself laugh hysterically by trying to make a positive story out of everything (a project that has become an ongoing source of amusement).
Friday, May 25: Eating the perfect ice cream combination from Ciao Bella: fresh mint gelato plus lemongrass coconut sorbet. Visiting Mom and having her positively gush about my new glasses and new dress.
Saturday, May 26: Hearing a young workman outside sing, "If I had a hammer, / I'd hammer your sister . . ." (Yes, I am twelve.)
Sunday, May 27: Hanging out all day with Stellou, even though it was sad.

And words looked up:

Saturday, May 19: None, but I was surprised to hear myself use insuperable in conversation.
Sunday, May 20: flotsam, jetsam
Monday, May 21: secretariat (trying to make sense of a Polish Web page that had been computer-translated into English)
Tuesday, May 22: genial
Thursday, May 24: morbidity, mortality (I'm reading a health book).
Sunday, May 27: whence (for this post; I have to look it up every single time I use it, to make sure it works without a preposition)

That is all.

103 miles

2007-05-23T20:29:00.000-04:00

For maybe a year now, I've had it in my head that my monthly exercise goal was to burn 8,000 calories. Because why? Because Sal mentioned once, over a delicious and healthy Italian dinner he'd made, that if you can burn 8,000 calories per month, that will add up to a weight loss of 23 pounds in a year. No, I don't know where he got this figure, but you have to believe a man who looks like Sal does.

What Sal did not take into account, of course, being very disciplined and having a schedule that permits him to cook all his own magnificent food, is that if I burn an extra 8,000 calories a month, I also eat an extra 10,000.

All the same, I've had this number in my head ever since. And for most of the last year, it took a lot of work to get anywhere near that number. Most months, my burn rate was about half that. But once I started walking to work again, it became easy peasy. I leapt from 3,851 calories in February to 7,392 in March. By April (9,710), a goal of 8,000 was not high enough to be at all motivating. So I made it my May goal to walk 100 miles, that being a mark I hadn't hit yet.

So far this month, I don't think I've taken the subway in the morning once. And I often walk around at lunchtime or in the evening, as well. I've been walking about five miles per weekday, or about 31 miles per week. Today, even though I didn't have to go to work, I took the train to Sol Moscot at 14th and 6th to pick up my so-called new glasses (remember December?), which I finally had repaired. Then I walked across and down, stopping to buy a skirt, three T-shirts, and some lunch, and then down some more, and over the bridge, home. It wasn't a very vigorous walk, especially since (a) I wasn't wearing socks, and (b) I was listening to The Thirteen-Gun Salute, a relatively slow volume in the series, but it was still well over five miles. Which put me three miles over my goal, with a week left in the month.

All this is fine and nice, except that I'm not losing any weight, as far as I can tell. A steady succession of rhubarb cakes hasn't helped, of course; thank god that'll soon be out of season. Also, the discovery of some Italianate Goo-Goo Clusters (milk chocolate, caramel, and hazelnuts) at Dom's was a Very Bad Thing.

So I'm trying to get back into the habit (which was never very well established) of lifting weights again, too. This is a lot harder than walking to work, as it requires the laundry hamper to not be standing in the middle of the living room. You might think such placement is not so difficult to achieve, but there the hamper stood, for at least two solid weeks. This is the kind of stuff that happens in my house. Sal doesn't have such problems, not least because he has both a living room and a parlor (and a chandelier the size of a modest rowboat, in the latter). This, no doubt, is related to why the 8,000-calorie rule works for him.

Maybe what he said was "80,000 calories"? Anyway, I'll keep you posted.

Seen in Chinatown, in the crosswalk at Centre and Walker:

2007-05-16T13:00:00.000-04:00

The top twelve inches of an enormous leg bone, as of an ox.

Perhaps tomorrow I will bring my camera.

Seen on the bridge today:

2007-05-16T12:46:00.000-04:00

A handsome blind man with a cane, walking arm-in-arm with a pretty woman. The man wore a T-shirt printed with an eye chart.

I hope that when I finally go completely blind, my loved ones will help me to still dress with a sense of humor.

(Lazyweb request: If anybody finds that T-shirt, please let me know. I did some Googling but could not locate that particular one. It was brown with gold lettering.)

Coffee! Gives! You! Energy!

2007-05-15T01:27:00.000-04:00

I wonder how much of the difference between me and people who actually get stuff done comes down to just this: Coffee.

I had a Vietnamese iced coffee with dinner tonight, and when I got home, it was like I'd had a brain transplant: I told myself I’d tidy up for just half an hour, and the next thing I knew, it was 1:30 a.m. I folded, like, five thousand pieces of clothing, hung up maybe two dozen, made real headway into swapping my winter and summer clothing, made a pot of tea for tomorrow morning, flossed my teeth, etc. I was also able to make executive decisions, like that the two T-shirts I've had for at least seventeen years had lived good and rich lives and could now be honorably placed in the trash. If I didn’t have to go to work in the morning, I’d probably stay up cleaning for another two or three hours.

Is this what it feels like to be a normal person?

Outside, as in "not just dashing down to the mailbox"

2007-05-12T12:34:00.000-04:00

I am not going to spend all day inside at the computer.
I am not going to spend all day inside at the computer.
I am not going to spend all day inside at the computer.
I am not going to spend all day inside at the computer. . . .

But I do want to try to do a "best things" report, especially after reading Pasta Queen's charming post about her day on Thursday. It is clear from her post how much attitude has to do with happiness—I would have been at best unamused and at worst hurt by her first item, at least partly creeped out by her second item, and smugly virtuous but also dissatisfied by the third. I would probably have gone home and eaten some chocolate or something. I share her excitement about urban fowl, even un-cute ones, but otherwise, our approach to life is entirely different.

Anyway.

Monday, 4/30: A nice Indian dinner, followed by a walk down some streets in the East Village that I don't usually go down. (Any Indian dinner must be followed by a walk. Otherwise, the ghee hardens in your veins immediately, and you won't make it home.) Oh, also, at the restaurant, there was an interesting incident with what I perceived to have been a junkie asking very earnestly to be allowed to use the bathroom. The waiter let him, to my surprise.
Tuesday, 5/1: Um, I ate a mango? Totally overrripe, but that's the way I like them.
Wednesday, 5/2: Jen was in the office for an hour or so (as she has been a lot lately; she's been consulting for us). It's always a treat to see her, and her presence makes me feel at home at my workplace. Then she leaves, and I feel depressed again. In the evening I had a gloomy date with Mom, but I made a pretty good lamb stew, with mashed potatoes and sauteed spinach on the side.
Thursday, 5/3: Lunch at City Bakery with a new friend-type-person (not sure if he actually wants to be friends me or if he's just trying to pick up some freelance work, but it's exciting talking to new people, all the same). I walked nearly seven miles, and after work I popped in to H&M, just to, you know, see what was there. I got a great dress (and two others less great), and I also tried on again a dress I'd wanted a few months ago, that had then been too small. This time, I decided that the dress just didn't suit me, but it fit, which was heartening. Received a long, friendly e-mail with a name on it from a previously anonymous commentor on my work blog.
Friday, 5/4: Big day. Ran into my brother on the street. We merely greeted each other—he had just hailed a cab—but it's like sighting Nessie or a Yeti, you know? Saw a boy in the very act of tagging, on Bleecker Street; in all my life, I'd never actually seen a piece of pointless, ugly graffiti in the making. Got an e-mail from the daughter of the very, very, exceptionally nice man I met at Erin's party, inviting me to a barbecue.
Saturday, 5/5: Went for a long walk up to Dumbo with Nas, and took a lot of photos. Posted twice to my work blog (which I don't do very often, since I don't have anything nice to say about my work), and spent a few hours art-directing old posts, i.e., scouring Flickr for appropriate photos and pasting them in.
Sunday, 5/6: While wearing my excellent new H&M dress, sat in the sun on a roof deck, drinking beer and eating tacos at the barbecue of the very, very nice daughter of the very, very, exceptionally nice man I met at Erin's party. This must be what happy people's lives are like.
Monday, 5/7: Walked down to Tribeca for the best take-out in the universe, eaten in one of the cutest parks in Manhattan, and thence to the Strand on Fulton, where I got four books (none of which was, of course, the one I was looking for).
Tuesday, 5/8: Elisabeth took me on a video tour of her office! She speaks! She moves! Very exciting. Used up some languishing iTunes store credits to download Rain Dogs, which I hadn't listened to in years and years, since I only ever had it on cassette tape. Also, selected songs from Swordfishtrombones, and "Temptation" from Frank's Wild Years.
Wednesday, 5/9: A better date with Mom, in which I talked with her more directly than usual about her health, her planned totally unnecessary kitchen remodel, and her habit of ignoring things (in this case, a recurring mysterious credit card charge) that she doesn't want to deal with, in the hope that they will go away.
Thursday, 5/10: Drinks with Jen and Bill. It started off a bit gloomy, but by Bill's second martini (Bombay Sapphire, three olives, dirty, with an ice cube, and I forget what other bizarre instructions), the gossip was flowing.
Friday, 5/11: Watching Music and Lyrics (which, if you like that sort of thing, is the sort of thing you'll like; I found it amusing but wouldn't ever bother to watch it again) and realizing that Hugh Grant has come to look like Bill, or vice versa. Not a bad thing, for either of them, but funny. Mom called to inform me that she had finally tracked down that recurring mysterious credit card charge: she was being billed for the phone line to which the fire alarm in the co-op's basement is connected. I told her I was very proud of her.

So there. Another thing I've been trying to keep track of, inspired by Julia, is what words I look up every day. Because I am constantly using Erin's handy dictionary—so often that I'm not aware of it, since it's right there on my Mac's dashboard. I've therefore been trying to remember to record the words I've looked up during the course of the day, and to e-mail them home to myself from work. What I've noticed is that most often, I'm looking a word up to make sure it means what I think it does, that it doesn't lean toward some undesirable shade of meaning. Second most often, I'm concerned that the word I thought of first is not quite ideal, and I'm looking for something more precise. I almost never look words up for spelling—basically only if it's a word from a foreign language. And I don't use NOAD to check hyphenation of compounds, since Merriam-Webster's Collegiate is still the official dictionary of my field; for those I still go to m-w.com.

So. I don't have a lot of data yet, as I'm still trying to develop this habit (I forgot to e-mail yesterday's word list to myself at home; e-mail is perhaps not the best way to manage this project), but here's what I've got so far:

Friday, 5/4: enigmatic, elliptical, oblique (trying to find a better word to describe a photographer’s work than the condescending "quirky")
Saturday, 5/5: twill (trying to describe the fabric of my new H&M dress), aphorism (posting to another blog), hoarding (tagging Flickr photos)
Wednesday, 5/9: linguistics, wagon (as in "falling off of the"), cheesecake (as in "fellow group-blogger posting a photo of himself wearing a wrap dress")
Thursday, 5/10: behest, poised, confident (more in re "fellow group-blogger posting a photo of himself wearing a wrap dress")
Saturday, 5/12: thence for this blog post

Now I will go outside. No, really.

Q: What's the difference between caramel and burnt sugar?

2007-04-29T12:44:00.000-04:00

A: Caramel tastes good.

A couple of weeks ago, Rose and I walked down to Red Hook and had a treat at Baked. She ordered the Grasshopper Cake, if I recall correctly, while I snagged the last slice of Sweet and Salty Cake—a chocolate layer cake with salted caramel between the layers, caramel frosting, and a sprinkle of fleur de sel on top. Rose's cake was good, but my cake was awesome. For days, I kept thinking about it. Should I hike back down there and try to get another slice (a mission unlikely to succeed, as they've never had the same cakes twice in all the occasions I've been there)? Or should I try to make it myself? I turned to Google, in search of any recipe for a salted caramel cake, and what did I find? A recipe at MarthaStewart.com for that exact cake.

Imagine my joy.

Then, imagine my magnitudes-larger joy upon being invited to a party by Her Most Excellent Coolness. Salted caramel and lexicography—two (or three) great tastes that taste great together? I thought they might, so I gathered ingredients to make the cake.

I made the layers early in the day, hoping to be done with the whole project in plenty of time to let the assembled cake sit and, if needed, chill. HA!

I took a few photos of prep steps, for your edification—

Cutting waxed paper to fit each pan:

There are many ways to do this. My mama taught me to trace the pan and cut the circle out with scissors. Then several years ago on some cooking show, I saw a chef lay the paper over the bottom of the pan and kind of . . . scrape? a knife almost flatwise around the edges to basically abrade the paper off. I'm not describing it well, but he made it look clever. Then I tried it and was like, "This is stupid." Anyway, this method is the best I've found: fold the paper into a point as if you were going to cut a paper snowflake, hold it with the point over the center of the pan to eyeball the correct radius, and snip. I cut all three pan liners at once this way (having solved the aforementioned unequal cake pan diameter issue by buying a third real eight-inch pan).
Bringing eggs to room temperature:

by placing them in a bowl of hot tap water for about fifteen minutes, refreshing the water as needed.
Bringing butter to room temperature:

by cutting it into one-tablespoon slices and setting it near a toasty lightbulb.
Softening my eternal chunk of rock-hard brown sugar. The recommended method for this seems to change with each box of sugar I buy, but the one on the side of the most recently purchased box seems like a keeper: put the sugar rock in a microwaveable bowl, cover the bowl with a damp paper towel, wrap the whole thing tightly in plastic wrap, then microwave. This actually works, unlike the method involving apples that graced previous boxes (as if everybody just keeps apples lying around for such purposes), or the one where you had to set up some kind of in-microwave double-boiler using two bowls and a lot more plastic wrap, if I recall correctly.

Made the batter without incident. Used a scale to get the amounts in the pans exactly equal, and repeated the Magi-Cake Strip documentation begun with Francis's cake:

All quite uneventful, though the baking time was almost twice that specified in the recipe. Then I started on the salted caramel, and this is where my troubles began.

I am not a candy maker. The only time I boil sugar is to make a brittle that's going to become part of a cake, or when I make a frosting that uses sugar syrup. So, maybe, twice a year. I do it infrequently enough that I have retained a primal terror of the process, which surely dates back to the demonstration in the awful Mrs. Gibbs's science class at I.S. 70, in which she showed us how sugar goes from solid to liquid to caramel to blackened scunge when heated in a beaker over a bunsen burner. The smell of scorched sugar was in my hair for what seemed like days. So I have a candy thermometer, and I'm always very cautious when I work with this stuff, and so far I hadn't had any mishaps besides seeing most of my carefully tended sugar syrup weld itself to the sides of an ungreased Pyrex cup. I know better than that now, and I thought I could manage this. The recipe certainly didn't indicate that there were any pitfalls to be avoided:

Combine 1/4 cup water, sugar, and corn syrup in a medium saucepan; stir to combine. Bring to a boil over high heat. Cook until the mixture reaches 350 degrees on a candy thermometer, about 10 minutes. . . . When the caramel mixture has reached 350 degrees, remove from heat and allow to cool for 1 minute. Carefully add the hot cream to the caramel; stir to combine.

Sounds straightforward, right? Only, here's the thing: the thermometer takes a while getting to 350°F, pausing at various points while the sugar gathers up its petticoats to step into the next subphase. For several minutes, it looks like this:

with the bubbles becoming more syrupy than foamy. Then, you see an edge of browner bubbles along one side of the pan, and then WHAMMO!, the thermometer's skipped past 350°F, all the way up to 370, and the whole potful is a roil of dark brown. In this photo, it's not even at 350 yet, but the caramel's obviously done its thing:

And then here's the other thing: merely turning off the flame underneath does not stop the cooking. This shit is totally, perilously hot at this point, and it will keep boiling away, getting darker and darker, long after your brain, used to the behavior of less primitive substances, will admit is possible. During the one minute when this was supposedly cooling, the caramelization briskly continued. I poured it into my handy Pyrex cup to make it stop, but still it boiled. Then I added the scalded, salted heavy cream, thinking that would settle its hash, and the mess nearly boiled over. Gaaah. The whole experience was very stressful, not to mention suffused with the smell of Mrs. Gibbs's dreadful experiment. At this point I could have decided to throw it out and start over, but I committed myself by adding the sour cream. It tasted burnt, not caramelized. Maybe the flavor would mellow as it chilled? What do I know. I stuck it in the fridge.

And the next step of the recipe? Doing the same thing all over again, to make the caramel buttercream. Same caramel situation, but with no salt, much more cream, and a pound of damn good chocolate. Before launching into this, I consulted the Cake Bible to see if I could determine whether the caramel behavior had been normal. On page 436 she lists 356°F as the temperature for a "Medium brown liquid: The liquefied sugar darkens. This is used for praline, spun sugar, caramel, cages, and nougatine." There is only one more step—"374°F / Dark brown liquid"—between this and "410°F / Black Jack," at which "The liquefied sugar turns black and then decomposes" (aka Blackened Scunge), but she doesn't say anything about how to hit one stage rather than another. She does say, in one recipe on page 313, to set the pan in cold water to stop cooking, but I didn't see this until just now. In another recipe, on page 316, she says, "I find 370°F produces the perfect color" for spun sugar. So it didn't sound like I did anything wrong . . .

Anyway, to make a long story slightly less long, the second batch of caramel went the same way as the first, and though I was worried, I added it to the chocolate and made it into frosting anyway.

Then, there were the assembly issues. Why do I always forget this? You can not assemble a three-layer cake in a warm kitchen. You maybe can't even do it in a cold kitchen, if you're me. But you especially can't do this if between the layers you've got not only a cup of buttercream, but also a quarter-cup of barely viscous caramel. Maybe if I'd trimmed the tops off my cakes, as the recipe directed, there would have been more friction between the layers; but the recipe said "trim tops of cakes to make level," whereas mine were already dead level because of the Magi-Cake Strips. So. Slippery. So then I had to unstick the layers to jam some toothpicks in there, and still it listed to one side. I finally got some frosting all over the cake, and the cake mostly upright, and I crammed it into the fridge.

At this point, I was already running half an hour late. I had called B., my date for the party, and told him so, and now my extension had elapsed, as well. I pinned myself into Elisabeth's dress (which only just, just, sort of fits and was threatening to reveal a bit too much of the coin of the realm), and got myself together to finally leave the house. So the cake chilled for maybe fifteen minutes, which was enough to stabilize it slightly. But it had already beaten against the side of the cake carrier before I got out of the subway at Broadway-Lafayette and hailed a cab, and it took more abuse in the jouncing taxi.

Finally, the cursed cake and I arrived, and people started to dig into it, and they said they liked it! One very, very, exceptionally nice man struck up a conversation with me over it, and it turned out that I used to babysit for his upstairs neighbors, and his grandparents came from the same places (roughly) as my dad's grandparents, and his daughter lives in my neighborhood, and he was just darling, darling, darling. And when he and his partner were leaving, he said, "I thought that the cake was the highlight of the party, but I was wrong—you are," which may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me, ever, in my entire life. And it was especially nice because it was a lovely party, full of charming people, and I'm sure there were many more compelling highlights available, had he not spent half an hour talking to me.

Half an hour during which B. was apparently visiting every building on the block, trying to find the party, because he had neglected to write down the address. He eventually gave up and went home after calling my cell phone—which was stashed in the closet—twice in vain. Bummer.

Anyway, blah, blah, blah, most of the cake got eaten, even though I felt it was too bitter and had an undertone of science class. Another man whom I'd only vaguely met in December came up and asked if I had made the cake, and then kissed me on the cheek when I said I had. Like I said, charming people; A++!

Later, Rob asked if I had calibrated my thermometer recently. Say wha? Calibrated? My thermometer? Um. Yeah, so I guess that could be it, maybe. He said that in food service they have to calibrate them every day, or something like that. Okay. I'll try it.

Rose suggested checking Cookwise, which I own but have never so much as opened. It turns out that Corriher gives a similar chart of sugar stages to that in The Cake Bible, with the difference that her upper limit is 350°F for "Caramel / Syrup from tan to brown." She also recommends greasing the pot in which the sugar is to be boiled, which is an interesting idea, though I have to say, despite all the warnings—or, I suppose, because of them—I've never had a pot of sugar syrup crystallize, though I've certainly broken the rules by stirring, and I'm not always diligent about brushing crystals off the sides of the pan. Larousse Gastronomique says to stir constantly with a wooden spoon, so there.

The Baker's Dozen says, "Caramel can turn from the perfect color to burned in a flash, so watch carefully. Judge the caramel by its color but also by its aroma, which should smell rich with a hint of sharpness. You cannot use a candy thermometer when making caramel, as sugar crystals could form on the stem" Well, that's news. It goes on, "The darker the caramel, the deeper the flavor. Take the caramel to the farthest point that you dare before it burns. You may see a few wisps of smoke at this point. If there is a cloud of smoke and the caramel smells burned, it is." Well, I don't remember any smoke, but it certainly smelled burnt. However, since unless you douse it in cold water, the stuff keeps cooking long after you remove it from heat, I think one should err on the side of lightness.

So that's my exciting cake saga.

Today, I'm making another rhubarb cake, to take to a potluck. There will have to be a gap in "best things," as I haven't been writing them down, but I will say, Cold Comfort Farm? Why didn't anybody tell me? I watched this last night twice, and I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud, hooted, and clapped while watching a movie. Loved it. Hilarious.

What do you think?

2007-04-25T15:41:00.000-04:00

There was not one single, solitary chickpea in my Spicy Chickpea and Beef soup from Dean & Deluca. Is that good or bad?

Cake: The Real Thing

2007-04-08T14:18:00.000-04:00

So, remember this cake—

which I didn't have time take a photo of?

Well, I tried that Devil's Food Cake with Brown Sugar Buttercream recipe again yesterday, and this time I did take a picture:

I also got the frosting right this time, thanks to remembering to grease my Pyrex measuring cup beforehand. But I had a little annoyance with the layers' being different sizes. (Hmm. Come to think of it, I don't recall having that problem last time I made this. Did I accidentally get rid of a third truly-8-inch cake pan?)

Anyway. The occasion was Francis's post-birthday party, which was quite fine. Interesting people! Tasty beer! Balloons! Festive attire!

Other highlights this week:

Saturday, 3/31

Mostly, I spent the day proofreading. But I did go outside for a little while, whereupon I ran into Natalia and Larry. And I made a zucchini–tomato–Swiss cheese frittata kind of thing, which was not half bad. (From Quick Vegetarian Pleasures. When I had the cookbook section at Tower, I copied a bunch of recipes from this and used to cook from them all the time. Then I gradually stopped cooking. Last year I had dinner with Sarah C. and some of her friends, and one of them brought a cake that tasted wonderfully familiar: it was one I'd made several times back in my cookful days. So a couple of months ago, I finally bought the book and started making things from it again. Haven't made that cake yet, though.)

Sunday, 4/1

Still proofreading, so nothing fun going on, but the scale said I'd lost another pound (since regained, but I takes 'em as they comes).

Monday, 4/2

Lunch with a bunch of publishing friends, where we passed Hwaet! around the table. (This is just to say: Forgief me / hie wæron smæcclice / swa swete / and swa cealde.) Then finished that bloody proofreading and ran it down to FedEx. I decided during this project that it would be the last freelance proofreading I'd ever do (except for the lit journal that I'll probably have to start tomorrow or Tuesday).

Tuesday, 4/3

Took a walk with Rose! To Baked! Where I had the Sweet and Salty Cake! Oh! My! God!

Also, I totally enjoyed Dean Young and Tony Hoagland's podcast for the Poetry Foundation (which I only listened to because Ed pointed it out—I do not have a habit of listening to poetry podcasts; don't worry, I haven't lost that many more marbles).

Wednesday, 4/4

This was a sad, sad, sad, sad day, on which I learned that I had missed a LeningraD concert at Webster Hall on April 1. Nyeeeeeeet!!!

But that heartbreaking discovery did lead me to this kickass song by Spitfire, the band that opened for them (and that at least partially overlaps in membership with them). And to a . . . not worksafe . . . video of LeningraD performing . . . naked.

Don't click here.

I warned you. (Undeterred fans note that the trumpeter wearing the jaunty belt is also the lead singer in the Spitfire video. I think he's in the Webster Hall clip, too—he walks to the front of the stage to take a swig of something, then fades back into the absurdly large brass section. This is significant mainly as proof to anyone who might have thought, while watching the Spitfire clip from this February, that he plays trumpet very well for a twelve-year-old, that he is, in fact, at least seventeen, as he had already passed puberty in 2002.)

Thursday, 4/5

Finally finished Great Expectations while walking to work. Good fucking riddance. I hate Dickens.

Friday, 4/6

Quiltsrÿche! The Cheney Creep video! Started The Far Side of the World for the second go-round!

Saturday, 4/7

Asian pears! I got some from the farmers' market, and I have never before noticed how amazingly delicious they are! Must investigate whether they can be baked into anything effectively.

The End.

Happy Passover!

2007-04-03T11:19:00.000-04:00

So, for how many months do you suppose my super has been letting the exterminator into my apartment without my permission (and without even knocking first, as I learned this morning)?

And on what other occasions do you suppose they invade my apartment while I'm out?

Walking my ass off

2007-03-31T10:49:00.000-04:00

I started walking to work again this week--did it four days in a row, every day but Monday. And then Elisabeth asked me to take photos along the way, something I'd been meaning to do for a long time, so those are up at Flickr: My commute. I'll probably add another morning's worth, in a week or two.

The best thing about walking an extra 3.5 miles a day is that it burns enough calories that I can afford to eat things such as a chocolate eclair from Ceci-Cela. Of course, if I hadn't eaten said eclair, and comparable treats, I might possibly have lost more weight this week than just the same two pounds that I gained back from sitting indoors moping all last weekend. But if you ate one of these eclairs, you would understand.

I now have to spend the entirety of this weekend, as well as probably most of the day on Monday (which is a half-day at my office—yay! the start of my first sprawling Jewish holiday!) doing the proofreading job that I blew off last weekend. So I will sit perfectly still for eight hours at a time, gradually going more blind and gaining back the two fucking pounds again. Perhaps this will teach me to say no to unthrilling freelance work.

Probably not.

But before I turn Airport off and retreat into my cave, some Best Things from the week in review:

Sunday, 3/25: This was a spectacularly shitty day—a 1.5 on the mood/exercise scale in my aforementioned Excel chart—but I did have the sense to make cocoa at the end of the day. Droste, with a dash of cinnamon. Mmmm.
Monday, 3/26: Was fish-sitting for Mom and found a small box of slides from a dinner party at my ancestral apartment in 1989. My brother still had hair, and it was brown! I had exactly the same non-hairdo I have now, and it was still kind of blonde-ish! I've scanned them all and posted a few on Flickr (only Flickr friends can view them; if you're not one yet, and you want in, ask). I'll add the rest next week.
Tuesday, 3/27: Mom was back, and I had an uncommonly cheerful dinner with her. She was really excited about those slides. Also, at work, we had lunch from Snack at our weekly meeting. Mmmm, dolmadakia.
Wednesday, 3/28: The otter video, which has since become wildly famous. Talking with Jen on the phone. Talking with Rob at Last Exit.
Thursday, 3/29: Lunch with Ed, finally. And, on the way to lunch, stopping by my jewelry lady's table to buy an emergency pair of earrings (this, too, is visible to Flickr friends only). The walking-to-work thing requires a lot more organization in the morning than I'm used to exhibiting, and until I get some rituals in place (such as laying out my clothes the night before), I'll keep forgetting things. On this day, I forgot to put on any jewelry. Considering that I put on a necklace and earrings even on days when I'm leaving the house only to do laundry, this was unacceptable. Besides, I hadn't seen my jewelry lady in months—she goes home to New Zealand for our winter/their summer—and needed to reassure myself that she hadn't left for good.
Friday, 3/30: It was fun taking photos along my walk, though I always feel self-conscious walking around with a camera in my hand. I got this fancy camera so I would take more pictures, but mostly I've been using it to photograph drawings, indoors. Maybe I should try taking it out one day a week. New word: igry, per Francis.

Now I must go work.