White Bean Chili with Turkey

You can cook this chili literally however long you want, on the stove or in a slow cooker.  It's pretty healthy if you keep the garnishes light, and very filling.  Best of all, this is a great recipe for using up stuff you have lying around in your fridge and canned goods area.  Cooking big meals then using up the leftovers in new meals is my favorite hobby, because I HATE eating leftovers.  You can add in or substitute whatever you have around - other kinds of beans, other vegetables, other spices, etc.  The only thing that you really shouldn't skip or change is the green salsa - that's what makes it delicioso and different from regular red chili. 





1 15 oz. can cannelini beans, rinsed and drained
1 15 oz. can "small white" beans, rinsed and drained
1 small can diced green chiles, with juice from can
1/2 jar tomatillo (green) salsa
1 can diced tomatoes, with juice from can
1 can creamed corn
1 can chicken broth

1.3 lb ground turkey (lean)
2 chicken sausages, chopped
~1/2 cup tomatoes, chopped
1 white onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced

2 tbsp. cilantro
1 tsp. chili powder
1 tsp. salt
pinch black pepper
pinch cumin
pinch oregano
* I don't really measure any of these spices so I tried to estimate.  You should taste as you go and see if it's spicy enough for your taste.

Garnish:
red onion, chopped
sour cream
fresh cilantro, chopped
shredded "Mexican" cheese
lime wedges

Heat some olive oil in dutch oven, brown turkey one minute on high heat, then add onions.  Continue cooking, crumbling the turkey up and moving it around until there isn't much pink left.  Turn down heat to medium and add chicken broth, beans, tomatoes (canned and fresh), garlic, chiles, salsa and corn.  If necessary, add some water and/or salsa to bring liquid level up to cover the other ingredients. 

Bring to a boil, stir, and reduce heat to a simmer.  Add spices and chicken sausage, stir again, and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes to 2 hours, 3 hours, etc.  I have made this in a slow cooker and left it going for 6 or 8 hours.  It will thicken as it cooks, so if you plan to leave it cooking for a long time you may have to add liquid.  Before you serve it, taste it and re-season if necessary.

I serve this with the garnishes I listed, plus cornbread or corn muffins and salad.  It's especially dope with an over-easy egg on top. 

i'm not an engineer

but I do spend 20 hours a week having my intelligence insulted by engineers, so when I found Cooking for Engineers, I was expecting a useless collection of gross recipes written in a condescending, unintelligible manner. I should rephrase that - I was hoping it would be like that, so I'd have an excuse to call engineers useless, gross, condescending, and unintelligible.

Oh look, I just did it anyways!

But I digress. Cooking for Engineers is actually a super awesome and incredibly super website. Some of the recipes are weird chemical experiments, mock apple pie and the like. But most of the recipes are good, plus there are lots of pictures, plenty of step by step information for the more difficult stuff, and interesting explanations of the science behind cooking and baking phenomena. Check it out next time you're at work - especially if you work with engineers, who may walk by, spot a chart like this, and think you're actually working:

:

Material	Thermal diffusivity
Copper	120 * 10-6 m2/s
Aluminum	100 * 10-6 m2/s
Cast Iron	22 * 10-6 m2/s
Carbon Steel	14 * 10-6 m2/s
Stainless Steel	4.3 * 10-6 m2/s

who knew?

pumpkin pie contest

since I'm unable to win a pie contest where the participants are "other people," I decided to have a pie contest with myself. I totally won.

this year for Thanksgiving dessert, my mother is making a chocolate-y thing and my aunt is making apple pie. I'm the one who should get to make apple pie, since I've been diligently, painstakingly perfecting my recipe for over two years now. Maybe my family heard about my staggering loss at the annual Halloween apple pie making contest.

Just to recap, last year I was convinced I lost because, unlike some people, I didn't let the Pillsbury dough boy make my crust. This year I lost by an even huger margin, despite using a store-bought crust.

sooooo anyways, i basically suck at making apple pies that people like, yet I decided to try my hand at making pumpkin pie, which I don't even like. (My dad and grandfather like it though). Since I never made it before, I looked at dozens of PP recipes online, confused them all in my brain, then made two different recipes and let The People choose which was better.

PP1 was based loosely on a combination of the recipe from the can of pumpkin and the aforementioned "research." It involved a can of pumpkin, the usual spices and some salt and flour, 3 eggs, 3/4 cup of brown sugar, 2/3 cup of maple syrup, and 1 1/4 cup of half and half. I mixed them all together, poured it into the crust and baked it at 350 for a little over an hour. I had to cover the crust with aluminum foil after about 20 minutes. The middle was a little jiggly when I took it out, so after cooling it on a wire rack, I refrigerated it for about two hours. It came out pretty well, nice and dark, but too sweet for my taste.

PP2, the product of "additional research" plus the recipe from the can of sweetened condensed milk, was a lot more labor-intensive. First I prebaked the crust with foil around the edges. Then I mixed a can of pumpkin, a can of sweetened condensed milk, and the spices - but not the eggs - in a saucepot on the stove and cooked for about 15 minutes. I brought it almost to a boil and then turned off the heat and let it cool and thicken before beating in 2 eggs. I have no idea why I waited to add the eggs, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I put it in the crust and baked it at 425 for 15 minutes (with foil already on the edges) and then turned the heat down to 350 for another 40 minutes, and cooled it on a wire rack.

PP2 looked much lighter and the filling was a lot less dense, but the texture was a lot better and more even. I'm sure that was due to cooking the pumpkin before putting it in the oven. It was also a lot less sweet, which I like, but the maple flavor of PP1 was really nice compared to the canned white sugar flavor of sweetened condensed milk. I can't believe modern chemistry hasn't come up with a sweetened condensed maple milk yet. If any Future Homemakers of America are reading this, consider SCMM development and testing as a possible final project. Now stop reading and get back in the kitchen!

so The People's votes were pretty much split down the middle at work today - I think they were just happy to taste pies instead of reducing toxics. So for Thanksgiving, I think I'm going to try a combination of the two recipes, somehow incorporating the mapley deliciousness of PP1 into the fluffy better-cookedness of PP2. And I'll take pictures, because these pies are a gorgeous vision to behold.

the lord's day

I skipped church on Sunday morning and went to the laundromat, where I washed some of my own clothes but mostly rags and cleaning cloths, soaked with homemade furniture polish from our training on Thursday. While I was there my boss stopped by with presentation copies from Kinko's, which all turned out to be missing the even pages. he went back and re-did them, and we met up later for some collating and a long conversation about organizational behavior.

after a long work-related afternoon, I took BART to Emeryville to meet up with Han, a friend from college. he lives with his sister in a cute little loft, where he cooked us some awesome thai curry. besides the sandwich I ate the first day we were here, it was my first home-cooked meal, and it was amazing.

after dinner we smoked some cigarettes on the porch and I talked about the strange hatred I felt towards the tourists I'd seen on Saturday. Living on Cape Cod for so long, I feel justified in hating the tourists there, because I depended on them for income and so often they were cheap jerks. But i was kind of surprised to find myself hating tourists here too, especially since technically, I'm one of them. Han made an excellent point, that there's a difference between the tourist who comes to "observe" from the outside, and the tourist who comes to be a part of what's going on.

While I'm certainly fascinated by the things that make this place different from my hometown(s), I make it a point not to come here acting like I'm at the zoo. In fact, I hate the very idea of zoos precisely because I think it's so offensive to observe animals like that. I'm sure I don't "fit in" here, but I try not to act like local things and local people exist simply for my enjoyment. I feel like a lot of tourists are here to extract and exhaust local resources, always ethnograph-izing about the strange and exotic things they see, which because they are tourists and confine themselves to tourist attractions suggested in guidebooks, aren't even representative of wherever they are.

So anyways, we talked shit about this kind of tourist for a while, then went to a store in Berkeley called the Elephant Pharmacy, where I tried not to ogle too much, despite the fact that it was the kind of place that inspires me to think I'm not in Kansas anymore. Oh, the irony. This "pharmacy," which I gather caters to UC Berkeley students, did sell all the regular pharmacy stuff, but was mostly stocked with stuff like $80 yoga mats and hemp stationery. We got some organic blueberry newtons and raw juice "health tonic."

sabado gigante

Since I got here I've kind of been avoiding hanging out with my boss and his wife, not always on purpose, but usually because our schedules don't quite sync up. Anyhow it was starting to make me feel a little guilty, so on Saturday morning I joined them for a trip to the waterfront area on the Embarcadero. We went to a cool arts and crafts fair at the end of Market Street and then an awesome farmer's market at the ferry building.

Being Saturday, the whole place was packed with tourists. It was insane, especially when we got down towards Pier 39, a place I hope I never get to visit again. There were some cool sea lions:

but other than that, it was nothing but fanny packs and visors and sandals with socks in every direction. I felt kind of bad because my boss' wife wanted to shop for souvenirs for the grandkids, but my boss seemed to think I was bored and kept trying to keep her moving. I wasn't so much bored as claustrophobic, but when they mentioned they were heading to In and Out Burger, I had to bail. I've been eating out for every meal since Tuesday, and it's hard enough to be healthy just based on eating out, never mind eating out at places like In and Out Burger. Plus if I saw one more fanny pack I was going to puke.

There were so many people out that the streetcars and MUNI cars were full and kept going right past every stop, so I decided to walk back. Even though it was only like 2pm, I already felt stressed out from all the tourism, so I stopped for a drink at a place on a little side street. I'm obsessed with bars and restaurants that have outside seating, and although the weather seems to be constantly gorgeous here, not many places have patios. I guess Californians are so used to the awesome wetaher that they're over sitting outside. But I'm not. So I ordered a gin and tonic, which I later found out cost $9.50, and had the extreme pleasure of eating these guys:

Healthy, delicious, and only $3 more than the drink. I walked towards the hotel and got accosted by a Greenpeace volunteer who wanted to talk to me about, of all things, Cape Wind. Well this poor guy, who approached me asking "Hey! Do you care about the environment?" sure picked the wrong passerby. I gave him a talking-to... told him about the time I met Jim Gordon... assured him that I, too, love renewable energy... signed his letter to Nancy Pelosi... and went on my merry way, feeling like such an educator.

After I got back to the hotel I collapsed on my bed for a few minutes, briefly stopped by the wine social, then met up with Hannah's sister Marisa in the Mission. We went to a tapas place on 16th Street, ordered a pitcher of sangria, and did some serious catching up. It occurred to me that I haven't seen Marisa since 2002, which is a seriously long time. Even though we had five years of personal life updates, we ended up talking about Michael Pollan and structural adjustments and other semi-dorky things i love to talk about. It was really refreshing to meet up with someone I haven't seen or spoken to once in five years, and feel like we hadn't skipped a beat.

The restaurant was ridiculously loud, so as soon as we paid the bill we got right out of there and headed to a bar called Delirium, where the people were dressed in black and the PBR flowed like water. Marisa ordered us pints of a delicious local amber beer called Boont's and we resumed our catching up. By the time we got to about 2004, it was already past my bedtime, which has gotten a lot earlier since I've arrived. The time change was actually really beneficial to my waking up early, but that night was probably the first time since I got here that I've been out past midnight.

dia cuarta: viernes

at this point I can barely remember what i did a few minutes ago, let alone what I did on Friday. but for the sake of all of you for whom a day without my blog is like a day without the Lord, I'm going to try.

I got to sleep a little later than usual, and we went to a meeting near the Embarcadero to check out the location of our second two trainings. the lady was a half an hour late, so we pretty much saw it without her help. But then she got there and we all went out to lunch at the ferry building.

The ferry building is kind of like Quincy Market, lots of food and food-related retail. Its customers seemed to be half tourists and half people who work in the neighborhood. We got some fresh bread from the Acme Bakery (lame name, good bread) and some interesting cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery (ditto). And I got gelato.

After the meeting I decided to walk back to the hotel, which turned into an epic excursion. I stopped at a few places trying to find tarnished silver, as is my custom, and got some [relatively] cheap pants at Anthropologie. Thank GOD there aren't any of those around Lowell, or else I'd be insanely broke.

I figured since I was already on a three-hour-minimum walk, I'd veer off and take an even less direct route and ended up back in the Mission. I wandered into a bookstore where I found this little gem:














if you can't see it clearly, it's Kermit the Frog saying "modernity has not come to terms with its own technics." true, I thought, and bought a postcard of some Mexican luchadores.


I made it back to the hotel just in time for the wine social. I was pretty thirsty after my four hours of walking, and ended up polishing off an entire bottle of white wine with another guest. He was kind of a strange bird, a dude from Baltimore who was here to visit his boyfriend. At first I was talking to a couple from England who were here celebrating their anniversary, and he was kind of off to the side, chiming in occasionally but looking a little like he was off in space. After the English guys left we bonded over missing our boyfriends (his lives in SF, but it seemed like something weird was going on between them) but things got a little awkward (for me anyways) when he started talking about personal stuff like his boyfriend's blanket-stealing habits.

All of a sudden I realized it was already dark out and I'd been drinking wine since 6pm on an empty stomach. My boss called to see if I wanted to go to dinner with them but I felt a little bit beyond the point where I felt like trying to make intelligent conversation in a family setting. So I took a long walk and ended up stopping at a dark, dank diner, where much to my own surprise, I ordered a beer. They had Newcastle, which I haven't seen much here, on tap, and I just couldn't resist.

day three: thursday

morning came very, uh, early on thursday. I woke up around 4am and realized that I had fallen asleep in my street clothes, with all the lights on. I turned the lights off, changed, went back to sleep, and woke up what seemed like 5 minutes later. We headed off to the train station with even MORE supplies, schlepped everything to the conference room, and prepared for our first training.

I was a ball of f-ing nerves, so I headed downstairs to smoke a cigarette before the training started. By then my boss had already caught me smoking for the first time, so I felt OK about telling him where I was going. In a way him catching me was a blessing in disguise. I had briefly considered making my first day in SF my "quit date" and trying to go cold turkey. In fact, I suffered through the entire day on Tuesday and most of Wednesday without smoking, not wanting to let him and his wife know I smoke. But after he caught me on Thursday morning, I figured, "who am I kidding? this is one of the more stressful times in my life, and trying to hide my smoking is almost as stressful as not smoking at all." almost.

so aaaanyways, I went downstairs for a cigarette. Although we were in a pretty busy area of downtown Oakland, only two people walked by me the entire time I was smoking. Guess who those two people were? Oh yes, you guessed it, the commissioner of the SF Department of Public Health, and a woman from the American LUNG ASSOCIATION. Jesus Christ on a bike. Of course, i didn't know who they were until i got back upstairs and found my boss talking to them inside the conference room. yes, these ladies and 20 other asthma activists were participants in the training we were about to do. The training in which I had to get up in front of the room and tell people about avoiding toxics in household products that can decrease indoor air quality and trigger asthma attacks. When he introduced me to them I nearly passed out. Granted, my area of "expertise" has more to do with chemicals in cleaning products and pesticides, but I've never felt like such a huge asshole in my entire life.

Other than that embarrassing little incident, about which no one said anything, thank god, the training went fine. Everyone seemed to really respond to the make-your-own cleaning products activity, which i was excited about, because it's kind of my forte. After we lugged all the supplies back to the hotel I went on another adventure, this time to the Mission neighborhood.

As you might expect, the Mission is full of old Spanish architecture and taquerias. As you might not expect, it's also full of auto repair shops, used book stores, and hipster-y vintage clothing stores, where used clothes cost more than new clothes from regular stores. I wandered around the Mission until I got hungry/thirsty/tired, then I stopped at an amazing bakery called Tartine to sit outside for a glass (OK, maybe closer to a bottle) of red wine and a ridiculously delicious prosciutto and provolone sandwich.

I sat down next to a girl with blond dreadlocks who weighed about 75 pounds. She struck up a brief conversation with me, something that people seem to do all the time here, which I actually find really refreshing. Coming from the heart of puritanical frown-at-strangers land, it's been so nice to find that people here are genuinely friendly (and not half as pushy as they are in Boston). We were both peacefully drinking and reading our books in the sun when her obnoxiously hipster friends walked across the street from the laundromat and sat down across from me, blocking my sun and loudly fawning over the "energy" of the vintage Russian Army hat they had just bought at one of those stores I just mentioned. They were arguing over who should take the hat - one of them had bought it for herself but decided that it matched the other girl's "spirit" better. I wanted to puke. But it only got worse.

I like to think I'm an open-minded person, I do yoga (when I'm not busy smoking and drinking and eating meat) and love my neighbors and all that. But these girls pissed me off so much that had I not been completely fascinated with their vapid conversation, I would have gotten up and left. It's hard to do the experience justice through the written word, I even tried to explain it to a few people on the phone and it was impossible, you just had to be there.

A homeless and somewhat not-quite-there guy had apparently followed them from the vintage clothing store to the laundromat, and eventually found them across the street at the bakery. he came over to the table and asked them for a cigarette. I was smoking at the time and he probably thought I was with them because we were all sitting so close together, but I kind of ignored it because at the time I thought he was a friend of theirs. Instead of saying "No, sorry," they went on an interminable tirade of cutesiness, throwing out gems such as "smoking isn't sexy," "we don't kiss boys who smoke," and "why don't you go to the public library and take out a book about yoga?"

Honestly, this poor guy was just confused by their egging him on. Like I said, there was something a bit off about him, I'm not sure if he might have been a little slow, or maybe just a little mentally ill, or both. But either way, their tactics were not constructive. They kept rolling their eyes at each other, and when he would wander off to ask someone else for a cigarette, which he did several times, they would say stuff like "oh that poor lost soul, I feel so bad for him, but I wish he would just leave us alone." But every time he came back, they kept going with their quasi-flirtatiousness and led him to believe he was getting somewhere. At one point he asked for one of the girl's phone numbers and she told him "I don't have a phone," although she had been texting a minute earlier. He said he didn't either, but he used a pay phone sometimes. they laughed, and i wanted to punch them. he asked them about their parents, and one girl said her father was an astronaut, winking at the other girls. again, I felt a twinge of violence. what they were doing was cruel, not kind like they thought.

after what seemed like forever, he gave up on them and asked me if he could have the rest of my wine. I said "no, sorry," and he said OK and rode away on his bike. After he was gone, the girls practically wet themselves laughing and saying "oh my God, i can't believe you just got rid of him like that!" Then, to top it all off, one of the girls felt some remorse and confessed that she felt like they might have been messing with him. NO FUCKING SHIT, YOU DUMBASSES. The other girl said, "no, you're just so kind, but people like him need to be with other people who are on his same level." Same level? Thank GOD they got up at that point, because that was seriously the last straw and I was about to break the bottom of my wine bottle off on the pavement and assault them with it.

before they left they told me they hoped I wasn't insulted by their "smoking isn't sexy" comment, saying that they all actually smoked. Like the pleasant person I am, i said "no problem," because in the end I'm sure they were nice people, just a little misguided.

sorry for that little rant.

day two: wednesday

In addition to the dopeness of having the room right off the courtyard, my room is also right next to the hotel kitchen. It's a regular kitchen like you would find in a house, with all the regular kitchen stuff like plates and glasses, ice, a dishwasher, and best of all, food. Food you can eat any time. Delicious food, like cheese danish and peanut butter and wasabi snack mix. On my second morning in SF, I discovered the awesomeness that is being able to roll out of bed and get coffee in my pjs. Instant gratification, and because my room is so close to the coffeemaker, I didn't even have to worry about anyone seeing me skulking around the kitchen with my ubiquitous morning cowlick. After four or five cups of coffee and four or five danishes, we went to a meeting at the office where our first training was.

We got on the subway to Oakland with bags and bags of cleaning product ingredients that I had shopped for on Tuesday night. It was quite a hike to the train station, and holding the stuff, which included two five-gallon jugs of vinegar, made the train ride itself into yet another workout. Between tooling around the city buying supplies and then taking them places, up and down these crazy hills, my muscles have been in a constant state of achy breakiness. But all the exercise makes is a lot easier to justify eating gelato twice a day.

After the meeting we went to Union Square - picture Downtown Crossing plus two thousand additional tourists plus cars. Pretty nuts. We ate at a New York-style deli, which wasn't nearly as New Yorky as anything I've experienced on the East Coast, but still pretty good. We got some latkes, and they were $10. This place is nauseatingly expensive. More on that later.

I left my boss and decided to walk back to the hotel. This took about two hours, what with my stopping at various antique stores and jewelers trying to find tarnished silver (to demonstrate our green silver polishing technique). When I asked, people generally looked at me like I had twelve heads, each one crazier than the last.

I stumbled upon a really cool farmer's market in front of the Civic Center. A lot of the produce was stuff I'd never seen before, mostly Chinese and Mexican vegetables and fruits. And yes, there was Durian fruit. I would have bought some, except it's heavy to carry, smells like ass, and tastes worse than it smells.

I was a little bit luckier finding liquid castile soap. When I finally got back to the hotel I decided it was time to stop fucking around and just go to a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. The point of this part of our training is to utilize ingredients that people around here can easily find at local (and cheap) stores, so I was trying really hard to not wuss out and go to a yuppie chain store, but my feet were killing me. So I mapquested the closest Trader Joe's (two miles away) and set out for Haight-Ashbury (on foot, not really solving my achy feet problem).

Well I never quite got to Trader Joe's, because I got distracted by gelato and then found castile soap at one of SF's many many MANY vitamin/herb/other hippie crap stores. I did end up walking almost all the way there, and I got to see most of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in my wanderings. All of the stereotypical legends about the neighborhood seem to be true. The whole place smelled like nag champa and cloves, alternatingly (I know that isn't a word.)

I walked up many a steepass hill through the Lower Haight and up to Buena Vista park (good views, as the name would suggest) and then Duboce park, where there was a doggie play group thing going on. In a word, it was f-ing idyllic. The area where Duboce park is is pretty much what the intro to Full House looked like - long rows of tall, skinny Victorian-ish houses on a steep hill, with wholesome-looking young family types all over the place, their kids in expensive jogging strollers and baby gap clothes. It was a far cry from the neighborhood where I'm staying (which I'll get to later).

I got back to the hotel, made some phone calls to my loved ones, and collapsed in a heap on my bed. I was going to just call it a night, but it was only like 9pm, plus I needed a burrito, like, asap. So I headed deeper into the Castro district, where I'm staying. By all accounts it's the most vibrant gay neighborhood in the city, which is really saying a lot. I was tempted when passing by bars like The Men's Room and Moby Dick, but I kept going in search of a sweet taqueria.

On Castro street, which is like the main drag (yes) of the neighborhood, I found a place that met all my needs, i.e, eggs and avocados. The B&B is awesome but severely lacking in the egg department. I got huevos rancheros that would bring tears of joy to your eyes. Fresh eggs, cooked juuust over easy, right in front of me, with warm corn tortillas, Spanish rice, black beans, some kind of delicious fresh green salsa, and a WHOLE avocado sliced over the top. And for san francisco food, it was actually pretty cheap. I ate the bejesus out of that thing and passed out cold.

day one

san francisco is the dopest. I am blogging to you from the courtyard


of my fabulous (in every sense of the word) bed and breakfast in the heart of the most fabulous (again) neighborhood I've ever seen. My boss' wife and I are the only two females in the entire place. We just might be the only two females on the entire block. There's a "wine social" every afternoon in the "sunroom," which as you can see from this picture of my fabulous room, is right outside my window.

We got here a little later than planned, after the weight of the plane crushed the tow bar that was trying to pull it away from the gate. So that sucked. I tried to sleep a lot on the flight but I was sitting next to a ridiculously lovey-dovey newlywed couple who kept making loud, gross (and they thought, hilarious) sexual innuendo jokes to the male flight attendant.

After we arrived we took a taxi to the hotel but our rooms weren't ready yet so we went to have lunch with my boss' daughter-in-law and granddaughter, who is a super-cute seven month old baby. My first California food was exactly what i expected after a lifetime of absorbing stereotypes about California food... lots of fresh vegetables in weird yet attractive combinations, avocado everywhere, sourdough bread, arugula, fennel, other assorted whole-foods-yuppie things, all on plates that were so "rustic" they bordered on precious. I forgot my granola bar in the morning and slept through boxed lunch time on the plane, so I found it all incredibly delicious and ate twice my body weight in snap peas that cost $15 a pound.

Then we walked up the hugest hill I've ever seen in my life, walked down the hill, and went to the hotel where I discovered the fabulousness that is my room. I messed around for a while unpacking and whatnot, then feeling a little parched, I decided to explore the neighborhood in search of cold beer. I learned that beer, like everything else, is crazy expensive in San Francisco. After looking at the menus posted outside a dozen bars, I settled on a huge can of PBR from the Chinese grocery on the corner. It was superb. I even took it in the shower with me.

Boss and Mrs. Boss went back to their son's house for dinner, and I stayed in, or so I told them. I was really exhausted from waking up at 5am and wandering around on foot all day, but I really just needed a break from the company. I ended up taking a super long walk from the hotel to a supermarket, where I did a little research to see which green cleaning products were available. I found only one, and took a picture of it:

good stuff. It was still kind of light out, so I tried to get used to the layout of the city by taking my super long walk a little further. But my feet were KILLING ME so I headed back to the hotel, made some phone calls, and passed out before midnight.

deep thoughts

• it's f-ing hot and gross
• it's been pouring rain for 15 minutes
  
• 20 minutes ago I put a bunch of clothes on the clothesline
• I'm sitting at a window from which I can see the clothesline
• again, it's pouring rain
• and it just occurred to me that I should take the clothes down
• they are already soaking wet
• I'm leaving them on the line

• I am sweating over boring power point presentations
  
• I hate work
  
• more than work itself, I hate the fact that I'm spending a Sunday catching up on work that I was supposed to do this week
• even more than that, I hate that I was expected to do this work during 4th of July week
• 4th of July is not allowed to happen on a Wednesday ever again.

• an NPR commentator just called someone a "jackass." whoa.

• I just made some clams stuffed with
• ritz cracker crumbs
• celery
• onions
• chorizo
• white wine
• cholula sauce
• butter
• and clams
• they look delicious, but it's too f-ing hot and gross to eat
  

april wasn't all that cruel this year

There are probably two or three people in the universe who I haven't [drunkenly] told about my plans to throw a Super Festive Post-Graduation Drunken Softball Extravaganza. If you're one of those people, I should let you know that I live right across the street from the best little league field in all of Lowell. I don't know what makes it 'the best,' probably just that I can see it from my porch, but whatever, it's the best. Anyhow, I was at school all day pretending to work but not really doing anything, so I decided to come home and pretend to work on the porch. That didn't really work out very well because there was an awesome game going on and also, somehow I get wireless internet out here. I've been totally unproductive, surprise, surprise.

But blogging is kind of like work, at least in the sense that it's something I haven't done in forever. I have an excuse though - I was really sick! OK, I was only sick for like 12 hours, but it was horrible timing. I literally haven't gotten sick since the first summer after I graduated from college, so I don't handle it very well. I missed an entire day of this conference that I was supposed to present a paper at, a paper that I've been working on for months with my boss/professor. So that sucked. But I made a full recovery and went to the conference all day on Friday.

Since I am mentally unable to sit in one place and listen for more than 15 minutes, I volunteered to photograph, which gave me justification to do what I do best - wandering around aimlessly for 7 hours talking to people and occasionally taking some pictures. As far as academic conferences go, it was actually a really cool one; people came from all around the world to present about community-university partnerships (in the past I've referred to them as 'stupid f-ing community-university partnerships, but once we finished our paper they seemed a lot less aggravating).

On Friday night we went to see Robert Randolph and the Family Band at the Avalon. Their music itself was along the lines of Medeski Martin and Wood, but they reminded me more of the North Mississippi All-Stars, a very Southern sound, long jams but with a lot of bass and a lot of energy. It was by far one of the best live shows I've seen in a while - possibly the best since the legendary New Deal extravaganza at the more-infamous-than-legendary Palladium. Palladium horror story #374: I briefly dated a guy who left a bouquet of dead sunflowers on the hood of my car. I should have known better - he had a Palladium "Gold Card."

Speaking of the North Mississippi All-Stars, the Beachcomber opens in just a few weeks! The first few Friday nights they have a special deal where the $10 cover gets you a free season pass. For anyone who hasn't been there, it's uh-mazing. It's a Cape Cod institution: a big shack-like thing with sand and sawdust all over the floor, overlooking the most gorgeous beach on the Cape, with incredible live music almost every night and a ridiculous raw bar. Opening night is May 24th - who's coming with me?

My yearning for home-cooked food struck again yesterday, and I spent pretty much the entire day cooking Syrian food. My ancestors did not mess around: the food is almost impossibly labor-intensive and time-consuming to make, and there are almost no shortcuts. There are definitely times when, although you end up with an equally "home-cooked" meal, you will have used the microwave, a store-bought sauce, or even spices from a jar. I'll admit I didn't make my own yogurt or grind my own lamb, but other than that I was faithful to the way I saw this stuff made when I was growing up.

I got home from the store around 2pm and started making tabbouli - by the time 6pm rolled around I hadn't even finished drying the parsley yet. This is as much a function of my procrastinating and puttering around as anything else, but still... I brought some of the food to a potluck at school today and a friend asked for the recipe, so here it is. Keep in mind this is one of my Not Recipes, and if you enjoy the tabbouli you get at the supermarket, or Lebanese tabbouli for that matter, you might be surprised at how this comes out. So feel free to omit ingredients you don't like, add other stuff, or change the amounts according to your tastes:

Rinse a cup of medium bulghur wheat and get most of the water out, then put it in a big bowl. Add 5 or 6 big tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of two lemons, about a teaspoon of salt, and a tablespoon of Syrian pepper (which I will explain below). Mix it up and let it sit and marinate while you deal with the vegetables.

Wash and drain 2 bunches of flat (sometimes called Italian) parsley. Spread out a bath towel and put the leaves on it as you pick them off the stems; let it dry out for a while then pick up the ends of the towel and shake it around to get more of the water off (you don't want to bruise and wilt the parsley by patting it dry - if you do pat it dry to save time, be gentle.)

Put about half the parsley in the big bowl on top of the wheat. Then add in the other vegetables, which are all chopped: three seeded tomatoes (or use beefsteak tomatoes and don't worry about seeding them), half a large peeled cucumber or a whole small one, a bunch of scallions, and bunch of fresh mint. Add the rest of the parsley, mix it all up, cover it tightly, and put it in the fridge for at least an hour. Then taste it and adjust the seasonings, adding more lemon juice, oil, salt, Syrian pepper, or whatever else you want. It gets better the longer it sits in the fridge.

Syrian pepper, or da'a, is what makes Syrian food taste like Syrian food, so don't skimp on it, and whatever you do, do NOT try to use plain black pepper instead! Over the years I've realized that everyone makes this a little differently, even within a single family, which is kind of weird. I prefer this formulation; it's a little heavier on the cinnamon than most, and easier to remember because it goes 3-3-2-2-1-1:

3 parts allspice
3 parts cinnamon
2 parts black pepper
2 parts white pepper
1 part nutmeg
1 part ground cloves

this week in homemade food

A quick note while I wait for the floor to dry... I did a lot of cooking this past week, starting with a beef stew extravaganza on Monday. I had some potatoes that were growing a few too many eyes, some carrots unfit for raw consumption, and three onions I bought when Homero moved in (that would be January). The weather was cold and blustery, and my fireplace, well, it doesn't exist. The moment, it seemed, was right for me to get my beef stew on for the first time this winter.

So I called my mom to demand her beef stew recipe, which is basic but amazing, and went down to Tha Sto to get some nice marbly stew meat. She said a pound of meat, but it just didn't look like it would be enough meat to satisfy my needs, so I got three. Then I had to compensate for what turned out to be waaaay too much meat by putting in a whole bitchload of other stuff, an ended up with too much stew.

You may be asking yourself, "can you ever have too much beef stew?" the answer, weirdly enough, is YES. 16 quarts of beef stew is officially TOO MUCH BEEF STEW. Please come over and eat some, I am so sick of beef stew and so is everyone else who has happened to walk into my house over the past few days. I live across the street from callery park and my door is always open to the tired, the cold, and those yearning to break free from beef stewlessness. Anyhow, for those of you who can't come over, or refuse to come over because "oh, I couldn't possibly drive to Lowell, that's in a different county!" I say, you're a pussy, but here's the recipe anyways. It's based only loosely on my mom's, and while it doesn't quite capture her mastery of all things stew, it's pretty f-ing delicious. I have more-or-less halved the amounts I actually used, so this will make about 8 quarts of delicious beef stew:

mix together some flour, salt and cracked pepper in a bowl. Put some stew beef in the bowl (like at least 2lbs) and mix it up till the beef is all covered in flour. Heat oil in your stockpot and add two chopped onions and at least two big spoonfuls of chopped garlic, sautee them for a minute or two then throw in the beef and brown it. there will be nasty stuff sticking to the bottom of the pot - don't worry, that's the 'flava.'

add 6 cups of liquid (some combination of wine, water, beer, worcestershire, hot sauce, and/or beef stock). I usually use however much wine I have in an open bottle, however much beef stock comes in those cartons, a few good tablespoons of Worcestershire and hot sauce, the open beer I may be drinking at the time, and the rest water. Bring it to a boil, stirring it occasionally to keep the beef chunks from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Reduce the heat, add two bay leaves, and simmer for at least an hour.

Add 4 big carrots, chopped, and simmer 20 minutes more. Add a bunch of chopped potatoes (like 5 medium or 3 large), 4 stalks of chopped celery, half a chopped rutabaga (way better than a turnip), some mushrooms/peas/green beans/whatever else is lying around, and, very important, one serrano pepper, seeded and diced up very fine. Simmer all that about 30 minutes more, or until the potatoes are nice and tender. Adjust the seasonings, salt, pepper, hot sauce, etc. and remove the bay leaves.

Turn off the heat and eat a bowl of stew to gauge the stew's thickness after cooling. It usually comes out perfectly thick, but anything can happen. if it is too thin for your taste, make a roux: heat (on medium) 4 tbsp of butter and add 6 tbsp flour, whisking constantly until it bubbles, then reduce the heat and whisk for a minute or two more. Add the roux to the stew and bring it back to a boil, continue to cook it for about 20-30 minutes. Don't thicken it with cornstarch, plain flour, or forget to cook it after adding the roux - the stew will taste like nasty raw flour.

Note: it's also easy to make this in a crockpot, just throw everything in together and crock it on low for at least 5 or 6 hours. If you're not much of a "solid chunks of beef" purist, there's really no upper limit - I once left it crocking for about 16 hours and it was perfectly delightful. If you do crock it, you should still brown the beef first with the onions and garlic.


During the snowstorm on Friday, Craig and Lydia came over to help me eat my beef stew and bake up some delicious apple spice cake, which I brought to Laurie's delicious boiled dinner. This cake is one of my favorite ways to use up mushy apples, and it looks so pretty, especially if you drizzle a little glaze on top (confectioner's sugar mixed with some OJ or water).

preheat the oven to 350 and butter (really lay it on thick unless you have a nonstick pan, trust me) and flour a bundt pan or tube pan. with a fork or a mixer, mash together two sticks of butter with 2 teaspoons of vanilla, 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar and enough maple syrup or molasses to make it easier to blend. The goal is to have a total of almost 2 cups of sugar-related ingredients, I usually mix it up according to what I have and getting the consistency I want (smooth but pasty, not liquidy, is the goal). then mix in 3 eggs, one at at time.

in another bowl put 3 cups of flour (white, wheat and pastry all work fine), a big teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of baking soda, and some cinnamon, nutmeg, and whatever other spices you like. I usually do like a teaspoon each of those and then half a teaspoon of cloves, sometimes a little allspice or fenugreek. The "actual recipe" calls for 1/8 tsp of mace, which I never have around, and one teaspoon of cinnamon (no nutmeg or cloves - but they're so delicious!) sift the dry ingredients together and add to the wet ingredients.

on the subject of the "actual recipe," when I finally located it I was surprised to find that it calls for 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking POWDER, but I swear to god I've always made it with 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. I have no idea how I got it into my head to make it that way, but I've made this cake literally dozens of times and it always comes out pretty good. maybe I'll try it the other way next time and see what happens.

Locate a friend or someone who owes you a favor, and have them peel, core, and slice a bunch of apples. I've figured out that the amount of apples is totally irrelevant. I've used anywhere from two to six apples and it comes out fine no matter what, as long as you cut them up uniformly (sliced pretty small). I usually use cortland and/or macintosh apples, once I used granny smith and wasn't crazy about it because they don't get soft enough, even though the apples I used were way too soft to eat. Anyhoo, mix in your apples and at least a cup of nuts (I lean towards two cups because I really like nuts). I usually use walnuts, but this last time I didn't have enough so I used some pecans.

make sure everything's all mixed up well (you will probably have to use your hands to squish it up thoroughly if you use a lot of apples) and put it into the pan, bake it for an hour or so (it's done when you press on the middle and it feels only slightly mushier than the outside - or just use a toothpick, whatever). Let it cool for a few minutes before turning it onto a plate, and voila, delicious apple cake! let me know how it goes.

what's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

thank you, elvis costello, for getting this question out on to the airwaves. it's been bothering me for years now that people think there's something odd about three of the five of the things I stand for (the other two would be fairness and community).

when I heard this song on the radio this last night, I happened to be enjoying some of the delicious pasta I made on tuesday night with some friends. I'd give you the recipe but we don't "do" recipes, and that's kind of where I'm going with this - bear with me. OK, you really want to know?
- roast some walnuts
- and some green beans
- mix some feta with some olive oil, lemon zest, salt and pepper
- boil some linguine and throw it all together.

delicious. at the last minute we also threw in some leftover spinach from an equally delicious, and equally recipe-free spanakopita. that one is way too complicated to describe. it's all up here (imagine me pointing at my head). OK, so anyways, back to "where I'm going with this."

I have two super-awesome friends, Craig and Lydia, with whom I have three big things in common: 1) love of homemade food; 2) love of pooling resources, being communal, etc.; and 3) more-or-less abject poverty. One night a month or two ago, I looked into my fridge and nearly shed a tear when i saw it was full of once-appetizing food that was on the brink of going bad. I have two roommates with very enigmatic eating habits. One isn't around much and the other, I'm led to believe, just doesn't eat. So I'm always buying fresh fruits and vegetables but I rarely get around to eating them before they go bad. and although I do love to compost, I don't have the kind of disposable income where I can be wasting much food.

so I called Craig and Lydia and said, "Hey, I've got a bunch of crap that's about to go bad. Want to come over and help me cook it?" They came over with their crap that was about to go bad, and the rest is history. We've made some delicious food, including but not limited to various spanakopita renditions, meat pies, spinach pies, breads and pies, chicken stir fry, the aforementioned pasta thing, etc. etc. The first spanakopita we made, inspired by a bitchload of ground lamb I happened to have on hand, lacked nearly every single ingredient that's normally in spanakopita, except for the phyllo dough and eggs. It had a ton of ingredients, just none that are actually used in regular spanakopita recipes. Frozen asparagus? yeah, i'm never going to cook that shit - let's throw it in! spring mix? why not?

I just can't say enough about the virtues of our "cooking crap that's about to go bad" tradition - it's the manifestation of everything I live for - frugality, cooking, sharing, improvising, and making something out of nothing. I highly recommend that everyone find some friends who share these passions, and get a "cook crap that's about to go bad" club going. It's immensely satisfying and I think, getting back to the Elvis Costello song, it makes the world a little bit of a better place.

tha wood

Last night after the scintillating (really) Grad Student Association meeting, I went down to Norwood to get all up in some greek food with Roo Roo and Laurie. We went to a place called X&O in Stoughton, and it was delicious. I could detect the Greek ownership the second we walked in the door: big black menus, lots of overwhelming "art", corner table (in an otherwise empty room) full of 30-something guys dressed in black, drinking and talking on cell phones. It made me a little wistful for the days of yore when that might have been my table. It would have half-sucked because those guys, at least three of whom would be named Benny, would get everything comped and run me around like they were the only people on the planet... But it's always a pleasure to wait on people who know how to eat, know how to drink, and know how to walk that fine line between familiarity and sexual harassment.

As always, I have digressed. The food was super-delicious, the waitress was obviously brain-dead but had a cute headband and got Amanda to order a Viagra Martini ("You had the Viagra, right?"), which was also super-delicious. I got a cucumber martini with Hendrick's and frankly, it scared the shit out of me. I'm not usually one to fear alcohol, especially gin, with which I've developed quite a rapport since college. This martini was nuts - not even Amanda, after two other martinis, could get it down. Laurie suggested I give up trying to drink it and just wash my face with it. It stayed, we left. I pity the unsuspecting busboy who went to clear the table and drank it in one gulp, thinking he'd stumbled upon a treasure trove of almost-untouched "shift drink" deliciousness.

At the bar, Amanda and Laurie taught me some life lessons I'll not soon forget. I was lucky to have been in the company of two such wise women of the world, whose sage advice I'll be trying out sometime soon, once I grow a pair of [metaphorical] balls. I'm 25, but a lot of times I think that movie "13 Going on 30" (not that I've like, seen that movie or anything) could be based on my life.