garlic soup

This week the weather has been seasonably cold (for the Northern Hemisphere) prompting a good chunk of the population to complain about how low the mercury has been rising. Look, unlike the unreasonable heat of New York City's summers which are made worse by an urban heat island effect, an average of freezing in December and January is actually normal. According to the BBC the current weather pattern of wintery mixes and icy sidewalks would have been worse (and more frigid) thirty years ago.

For me the cold is a time to embrace a lot of things, like curling up with a good book, drinking hot drinks, wearing sweaters, embracing the cold and the feeling of burning warmth when you go back inside to a heated building. It is also a great time for cooking and not hating yourself for heating up your already hot and muggy apartment or wanting to curse out whole foods for reminding you that you do not own a BBQ. Baking is what December is about!

I've been meaning to try this garlic soup recipe off of 101cookbooks.com, ever since one of my cousins sent it to me. It's not particularly hard but I'm generally frightened of anything that needs a better part of an hour to simmer because soups should be easy. As in open can of soup, pour into a saucepan, pour in some water if need be and heat until hot. It's all right there. Why then, make soup from scratch? Because it is fucking good. And it's winter and freezing outside. Instead of complaining that it's cold out, and you probably have almost all of the ingredients in your kitchen anyway or you should if you know what's good for ya. Take a head of garlic, crush 12 cloves, peel said cloves and the chop the buggers into small pieces. Then bring four cups of water to boil, dump in the garlic, a bay leaf, two sage leaves and some thyme. Add salt. Reduce the broth mixture to a simmer. Leave it like that for about forty minutes. I don't know, go outside and go sledding or curl up a book and read or something. After you've finished a chapter or have lost feeling in your fingers return to the kitchen. Does the pot smell like something garlicky and wonderful? If yes, strain the water into a bowl and pick out the bay and sage leaves. Pour water and the garlic back into the pot off-heat.

Now, in a smallish bowl toss in an egg, two egg yolks, a good portion of grated Parmesan cheese and pepper. Whisk it up until it looks like something you would make scramble eggs with. Now add some olive oil and whisk whisk whisk. Take a ladle full of your broth and SLOWLY add it to the egg mix, whisking all the while. And now we're almost done, so you take the contents of the bowl and put them into the pot, turn the burner of the pot on medium low and continue whisking until the soup has been reduced to a thicker consistency, say somewhere between two percent to half and half cream. Take some bread, crusty, french, whatever but real bread and place it in your bowl. Pour soup over and drizzle some olive oil. Eat and feel warm and smug.

rats ... err mice!

As sure as a perplexed robin sitting on the one piece of green grass surrounded by snow being a sign of spring, winter is upon us as I noticed that the remaining fourth of my wonderful coffee cake has been hollowed out by mice. Not that I was going to eat the rest of it at it had been sitting there untouched for the past week and was going to soon be thrown out. But with the weather turning somewhat warm again, I'm hoping that the mice will soon go back to scurrying around outside because I've heard that they also eat books.

i started reading mine last night

My Kindle is a magical device that receives the New Yorker every Sunday night. Magic! Efficiency from a magazine! Has the magazine industry ever considered that one of the reasons people no longer subscribe to magazines might be that by the time an issue has arrived in the post its been three weeks since it first appeared on news stands? Being able to read a magazine when it's current almost makes up for the lack of being able to flip directly to the movie review section/cartoons.

Peace of Mind

Here's a delightful post (reposted from The Happiness Project) about whether or not something should be considered clutter.

This works for clothes as well, although I'll add that if I haven't worn it within the past year and it's not a special occasion outfit then I can give it away. Alas, that rule hasn't helped me weed through the two dozen sweaters that I own.

Missing the Target on Halloween

I kind of like to watch commercials. Most of them are terrible but a few, like the wonderful Sony Brava commercial, are great short films. But it's not purely for the entertainment value... commercials tell us a lot about cultural assumptions as sales people are not known for their nuanced views of society and gender roles (women are attracted to pink and like shoes! men like boobs! daytime television viewers enjoyed being shouted at while watching their court tv thingies!)... Commercials also tell us about who the producers believe are watching or listening to their programs.

Anyway, I ended up watching Top Chef Just Desserts last night and thought, hey, apparently this is a show watched by homewives who stay up late. Besides learning that women are suppose to care about the softness of their hands and that sponges speak like southern bells (quoi?), I learned that Target thinks that awesomely detailed homemade Iron Man costumes don't compare with their mass produced official Target available one. Not only did the homemade Iron Man costume look so much cooler, but it would be guarantee the child wearing it to get more and better candy than the store bought one. There are two ways to win at Halloween, the first to is have an elaborately detailed outfit and the second is to be clever. The target one is neither.

I'm not the only person who has found this as appalling. Here's a nice take down on Slate.

the small bugs

I ignore breakfast as a meal because it is too much trouble to wake up earlier to make a meal and I am too much of a snob to reach for a pre-packaged pop-it-into-the-toaster option. Coffee is breakfast with an optional piece of toast and Nutella. Coffee is the base of the food pyramid, no?
Since yesterday I’ve been on an oatmeal kick. I had brought it from the old apartment. Oatmeal doesn’t go bad unless gets moist, than it can grow mold. Or if you realize that it is crawling with little black bugs (I guess book lice or weevils). They weren’t there yesterday, or they weren’t as prominent yesterday… Needless to say, I’m off my oatmeal kick again.
This was the reason why I was never a big oatmeal fan. One of my mom’s co-workers kept a terrarium of mealy worms in oatmeal. My young five year old self couldn’t be convinced otherwise that at the bottom of every canister of Quaker Oats there weren’t more worms.
However, after scouring the internets I found some tricks that might be worth trying – unwrapped spearmint gum and keeping a bay leaf in the flour. Inexpensive and it can’t hurt, right?

finally a room of my own

We’re done with moving. After a half a week of packing boxes, most of which were things that weren’t mine, two days of moving everything from one apartment to another, and negotiating with Verizon for timely internet service -- three hours of my time navigating through the bureaucracy of Verizon's customer service where everyone is nice but no one has the authority to actually be of assistance -- and Ikea for a timely delivery, I’m almost all moved in. My room no longer looks like a storage bin for theater people but a proper bedroom because the Ikea furniture has finally been put together and the clothes have all been herded up and shut away in drawers and the closet. I even managed to make some order of the shoe bin!

There's still work that needs to be done. Except for one spot the walls are pretty bare. I should have bought more frames from Ikea or more prints but the idea of decorating exclusively from one place smacks of being nouveau riche and uninventive at worst. Buying a manufactured personality isn’t the solution to a decorating problem. Picking up interesting trinkets and pictures from friends is the solution. There needs to be curtains not just shades. These things can wait – they’re embellishments of a room not the personality.

It’s mine. The rest of the apartment is under the control of the other roommates, but this is my area. It can be as messy as I’d like, it can not match with the main color scheme. But more importantly, I can write when I feel like it, listen to my music. Having a room of one’s own is very nice indeed.

The Passage

Whatever the creatures are in Justin Cronin’s THE PASSAGE they aren’t vampires. Bloodsucking, mind infecting monsters that live in a hierarchical society may seem to be the pinnacle of the undead, but the Virals, which is one of the many names the remaining humans end up calling the monsters, are closer in resemblance to the fast moving zombies of 28 DAYS LATER then Dracula.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we get to savor the fear of what is hunting us in the dark we must understand the terrifying catastrophe that is the hubris of man and the folly of science. The first part of THE PASSAGE takes place in the near future where the United States has military checkpoints along the interstate highways and Jenna Bush is the governor of Texas. Various plotlines converge to bring Amy, a six year old girl who already has a preternatural air about her, to an extra-government secret research facility in Colorado where scientists are working on Project NOAH and attempting to engineer super soldiers from a virus and twelve convicted men. Super soldiers in a beyond the radar research facility? What could possibly go wrong? Special Agent Wolgast certainly doesn’t wonder about the legality of infecting the condemned men he is asked to pick up until that is he is asked to escort test subject number thirteen, Amy, to the Project NOAH site.
For reasons unknown because this is the first book of a trilogy, Amy doesn’t respond to the virus in the same way as the other subjects do, but before any real science can be done, the rest of the subjects have started to take over the lab with gnashing of teeth and the tearing of necks. The pair escapes and head to the mountains of Oregon where they await what is certainly the end of the world.
And thus we skip ahead 92 years in the future to one of the few remaining human settlements, at least in California but as far as anyone knows this could be the last group in the world called The First Colony. Protected by a series of lights and batteries which have been running for twenty years past their expiration date, a few of the folk of this homestead realize that unless they find a new power source or some batteries worth holding a charge that soon there will be one less group of humans left on the planet. When Amy appears at their gate one night, a group of young people lead by younger brother Peter Jaxon, believe that she is important enough to risk leaving the settlement to bring her back to what was formerly Colorado. In a series of episodes, they risk life and limb, journey to Las Vegas (where they mistake a casino for a church), encounter other humans, some who have made deals with the Virals and some who are fighting them, and eventually figure out what they need to do to save their world. Also, that Jenna Bush must have been a halfway decent at her job because Texas is also one of the few places where humans have been staging a resistance (I’m inferring here about the Jenna part). The second half of The Passage suffers the most from being a set up to something larger, this is the first book of a trilogy and it begins to feel like an early boss level of a video game. They know now what they have to do, but the emotional gambit that Cronin keeps promising never happens. Neither is there any explanation about the nature of the virus or about the nature of Amy.
Seasoned readers of horror and thrillers or anyone who has read Cormac McCarthy might find many parts of this work derivative. Many of the scenes come across as set pieces and there are very little surprises and certainly nothing innovative. Nor is Cronin one for making his character’s motivations ambiguous. It’s not fair to say that his characters aren’t complex because the good ones are allowed to have a variety of motivations, but the good guys do things for right and noble reasons. The characters that aren’t good are either over the top bad that one wonders how the good guys just keep missing the neon sign over some new person’s head blinking ‘e-v-i-l.” Or else they’re people who act irrationally and lose their heads in a panic rather than think, take a deep breath and stay calm. The good guys may do stupid things but only because it seemed like the best strategic course of action.
This is all quibbling, of course. Cronin is an experienced author who has won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize and this book was hyped heavily at the Book Expo America. He doesn’t leave you torn between turning the page and banging your head against the wall because the writing is that bad. In fact, his prose is one of the reasons why you turn the page. But more than that, he is a good story teller and after 800 pages, the end (which may be the most manipulatively brilliant/cheating cliff hanger ever) comes much too soon.
At this time, I don’t want to say that this isn’t a serious book, because maybe by the end of the trilogy it will have become so, but THE PASSAGE is a perfect summer read. It has all the qualities of a summer blockbuster movie but is by far far more entertaining.

the productiveness of my boredom

My dad loves cookbooks. I'm a really lucky girl because he's the only person who doesn't mind getting books for holidays and birthdays as long as they show him how to cook food (and that they are things he would actually use -- no French Laundry or books of Chinese Cuisine for him). This year I bought him a copy of HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING by Mark Bittman, who is also a food writer for the New York Times. Bittman is one of my favorite writers, his recipes are always worth trying and are very easy to follow, and it's nice to share something with my Dad that isn't just another book that I bought because I thought he'd like it.

The same book is available as an app for iphones. I think that I'd rather have a book, but then I started browsing through the recipes. Shrunk down to iphone size they don't seem quite an intimidating, and there's a shopping list option. But it might give me the option to make different foods.

However, I've recently found a lentil salad that I decided to make today. It was a thrifty choice, very filling and, at the suggestion of one of my cousins, by adding some goat cheese it was delectable. With eight servings it's going to last a long time, probably longer than I want.

I also made chocolate chip cookies. And am now debating whether I should give them away or keep them all for myself.

Here's the lentil recipe for all who might be interested.

Mochas!!!!

I treated myself to a mocha today. A real one. I get the Starbucks' version often enough but those aren't real mochas. They're exactly what you would expect from an American coffee chain: heavy on the chocolate, sweeter, and too much milk. For less money it's a bigger drink. The mocha they make at Joe's is bitter like chewing coffee beans. Stronger. Those hit me up with some mad jitters, throw me into a brick wall of caffeine. So what if i'm paying the same price for a smaller drink, that drink is made of mojo.

Why am I sorry that I want to see EAT, PRAY, LOVE?

Geek Goddess Felicia Day tweeted that “I’m speaking solely from my vagina when I say I’m super excited about that new Julia Roberts movie.” For those of you who have tivo or weren’t paying attention she’s referring to EAT, PRAY, LOVE which opens in August and, at least from the trailers, looks like a cute, entertaining summer flick.

Day is rationalizing wanting to see a movie that appeals to her because it is a pretty stereotypical woman’s film (and blames the desire on being a woman). Not that I fault her for either sentiment, because I think that unless the film features people in period costume, I utter something vaguely similar*. A part of me, the rational intellectual part, knows that movies like EAT, PRAY, LOVE pander to the “girly” side that is all emotions, love stories and kittens and that I should be looking for either a “serious film” or at least something with explosions. Serious films can be about love and romance, but are not based upon an Oprah Winfrey approved novel that’s much beloved by women or any movie with a pink and purple color scheme or is only about finding romance. It is pretty insulting to my gender to automatically sum up a film by its target audience and proclaim it stupid because the target audience is women. (Never mind that the majority of romantic comedies are really, really bad.)

Should people apologize for wanting to see a movie that looks like it’ll be entertaining? The very act of apologizing is a way of admitting fault either for an action of a flaw. I wish that women weren’t always apologizing for wanting to see movies that appealed to their sensibilities, and I wish that there wasn’t the group of equally pernicious women who attempt to reject feminine storylines for the ones that their male peers prefer. Plenty of movies directed towards men are idiotic. But men don’t preface their intentions or excited with ‘this is coming from my dick that I’m really excited about seeing GREEN HORNET.’ No, movies the guys want to see are ‘awesome’ no matter how clichéd ridden or unentertainingly bad it will be. They don’t experience guilt over their choices, why should we?

*Especially if the main character is a 19^th Century poet or features either Charlie Cox or Emily Blunt.