Month: January 2007

2nd cookie date — toffee nut squares

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Last night was our second weekly cookie date (it being the second week of the year), and we chose to make toffee nut squares (p. 221). This cookie was another one cookie difficulty rating; the rating for most difficult is three cookies, and there aren’t many of these in the book (two examples are filled kurabia cookies and checkerboards).

This week we decided to divide up the labor according to the skills we each needed to work on, which meant I was on electric mixer duty and he chopped the walnuts by hand (I rejected the proposal that we use the food processor for the walnuts; it was starting to seem like we would have to allocate all credit for the result to the machines). I am probably going to exclaim over this every week, but it required basically no baking skill to assemble the dough using the machine. It does, I must admit, require some technological skill, but I’m assured that every other person in their 30s who has ever even thought about baking a cookie, besides me, knows how to use an electric mixer. If you were in our kitchen, you would have heard a running commentary from me something along the lines of ‘Does everyone really bake like this? This requires no skill. Does this mean I should be giving far fewer accolades to people for producing tasty baked goods? This must be why people become obsessed with recipe variations, because there’s pretty much nothing else to focus on.’ To be fair to our baking skills, they were required to spread the dough evenly into the corners of the jelly roll pan, something we discovered I actually knew the technique for, despite rarely (never?) making bar cookies.

In the interest of being able to evaluate the recipe itself, we again followed the recommended approach for keeping them firm and chewy, and let the cookies cool in the pan overnight. Which is a good thing, because they were very tasty and very sugary, and if we had cut them last night, we likely would have eaten most of them and then stayed up half the night before slipping into a sugar coma. They weren’t the best cookie I’ve ever had, but they were certainly good and more rewarding than last week’s selection in terms of trying something new (i.e. we had never made toffee bars before, and these tasted like toffee bars). Plus, having them come out like we imagined they would be made us feel accomplished.

overall ratings:
ease of preparation: 3.5
match to expectations: 3.5
‘the cookie itself’: 4

2nd cookie date — toffee nut squares

the season of water

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For the past two and a half years now, I have been getting acupuncture treatments with five element acupuncture practitioners. All of the people I’ve seen at Crossings graduated from the same school of acupuncture here in Maryland. Five element acupuncture is a variant of traditional Chinese medicine (I’ve heard it described as ‘Chinese acupuncture using Japanese needles’), although I don’t know enough about these fields to say more than that.

One thing I’ve liked with this style of medicine is the way in which the diagnosis and treatment resemble a logic puzzle, which, as the daughter of a mathematician, I have always enjoyed. From symptoms and patterns that may be the same in a variety of people, the acupuncturist determines the causative or constitutive factor of the imbalance. What this means, in my lay interpretation, is that the imbalance may manifest as symptoms in any element, but the root will lie in the element that is dominant or formative for the person. Each of the five elements is associated with various factors, for example an emotion, a time of year, and a color. There’s plenty written about this, in both more clear lay person terms and in more accurate technical ones; I apologize for vagaries of understanding or expression in this brief synopsis.

I bring all this up because winter, the season we’re currently in, is the season that corresponds with my constitutive factor, which is water. For me, with my auto-immune thyroid disease and history of structural alignment issues, the imbalances have been varied, but treatment in water has had the most success in improving my overall health and constitution. In terms of the logic puzzle aspect, reading a description of the seasonal element (provided by the folks at Crossings) is a bit like reading a description of your astrological sign: it’s eerily familiar, and it brings into the light things about yourself that you wouldn’t have listed if asked, but which are clearly there when called to your attention.

When I read that description, the concept of holding two opposites in the same vessel particularly resonates with me, even in as simple a way as my relationship to the season. For many years, winter has been my favorite season. I love the crisp air, the colors, the quality of the light, the clarity of the moon and stars, the starkness of the landscape, and all of the activities that come with it, from playing in the snow to the baking and cooking of winter foods. Yet, I was hardly ever truly comfortable during the winter season: I became cold very easily and found it difficult to impossible at times to warm up again, and I suffered from incredibly dry skin. Since my thyroid disease has been diagnosed and properly treated, I’ve learned that both of these difficulties are common with low thyroid function: the ability of the body to internally regulate temperature (I had inverse problems of being easily over-heated in the summer) and to use water ‘properly’ in systemic maintenance. What is interesting to me, then, is the correlation with an imbalance in the water element in the physiological symptoms I had, but also the way in which I mentally and emotionally enjoy the season even with the attendant physical discomforts.

To sum up, I gain a great deal of nerdy pleasure from discovering the layered ways in which my physiological experiences, my western medical diagnosis of disease, and my acupuncture treatments align. The convergence is remarkably intellectually satisfying to me. And, unlike many people I know, I find that I have absolutely no curiosity about the mechanics of acupuncture. The system is clearly described, internally consistent, and I am more healthy than I’ve been in years, even by the measures of western medicine. That’s good enough for me.

the season of water

Irish geese

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no geese beyond this point

Much as my trip to Chincoteague Island consisted largely of sightings of shorebirds, my trip to Ireland was populated by geese. In going back through the photos, in order to update my lifelist with the Irish birds, I came across dozens of photos of geese. At the time, we weren’t entirely sure what we were looking at, so the photos were meant as a tool to confirm our identifications once we returned home and had more time.

Now that I have more time, I have indeed been able to confirm the identifications and created a table for the birds I saw in Ireland. None of the birds are particularly rare, but they were all new to me at the time and exciting to see. I have to admit, traveling to a part of the world with different indigenous species than at home was a great way to both boost the list of birds I’ve seen and make me feel good about my identification skills. And, of course, such trips allow me to justify the purchase of field guides specific to the area. In Dublin, I acquired both Irish Birds and the Collins guide for Britain and Europe.

I continue to go back to the pond each day hoping to find new ducks and geese migrating through here, but so far I’ve only seen flocks of Canada geese, nothing new.

Irish geese

Black Girl / White Girl, by Joyce Carol Oates

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Black Girl / White Girl, by Joyce Carol Oates, has a lot of similarities to the book I read in December, The Last of Her Kind, by Sigrid Nunez. Both are first person narratives of well-meaning white girls in the 70s, each of whom felt responsible for the death of a black person and struggled to come to terms with their guilt and white privilege. Both novels also involved left-wing radicals, rich people repudiating their class, and someone going to prison.

This is the first book I’ve read by Oates, so I don’t have grounds to compare this novel to her others. Reading two such similar books in close proximity has also blurred the distinctions between them, and neither stands out as an amazing book. While Black Girl / White Girl discusses issues related to race, it doesn’t ‘deal with’ race in the way I expect from a sociological background. Mostly what it presents is the fumbling self-absorption of a white person who is invested in the image of ‘doing the right thing’ but completely lacking in knowledge or preparation to actually do so. Of course, it’s not clear what the right thing would be, and contemporary standards for the racial self-awareness of white college students may not be those of the time period which the book portrays. One element that did ring true was the dynamic in the dormitory after racial slurs appeared; I have heard the aftermath of these incidents described by my students, and the pattern is frequently the same as that described by Oates.

I would give this book a 6/10. It was well-written, but predictable, and only touched the surface of elements that I would likely have found more engaging. I would be interested to hear the reactions of people of Oate’s generation to the characterization. Perhaps in the context of that time the book presents the racial issues in a direct and challenging way.

Black Girl / White Girl, by Joyce Carol Oates

weekly greens

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This fall we are participating in a farm share for the first time, with Even Star Organic Farm, which uses a modified CSA model (and was featured in a Washington Post article this past November). With our winter subscription, we get a box of food each week from November through May (with six weeks off that are allocated throughout that time period, in relation to holidays or low harvest). Unlike the traditional CSA model, the subscription requires less involvement on our part; we don’t need to volunteer, and we don’t bear the risk of poor harvest to the same degree (i.e. we are guaranteed roughly the same volume of food each week).

I have to admit that we’ve been challenged to prepare and eat all of the food we’ve gotten. This is partly an issue of volume—the share is geared more toward a family of four than two—and partly an issue of organization. Many of the greens are things we haven’t eaten regularly before, and I’m also not used to having fresh herbs in such quantity. At several points through the fall, a particular bag of greens went bad by the time I figured out what to do with it. I’ve heard from other people with farm subscriptions that this is typical of the first year, especially with the winter share that includes less common greens and a huge number of turnips. The turnips have been lovely, though: sweet, tender, and flavorful. The challenge has truly been the mustard greens; they don’t cook up as much to my tastes as the varieties of kale, and there’s only so many you can pile onto a sandwich.

Which is what we’re learning we need to do in order to use all the greens: eat them in salads and sandwiches every day for lunch, and cook them up into hot meals every night for dinner. Not, for example, leave them in the fridge until Sunday (we pick them up on Thursday) and only then start figuring out what we have and what do do with them. So far this week, we’ve done ok. Last night, I made Queer Vegan Beans & Greens (named thusly because the recipe came to me via a string of queer vegans): greens sautéed in olive oil with minced garlic, broth, a can of white beans, and red pepper sauce. Today, we had salads for dinner. Tomorrow we’ll likely have more greens sauteed with garlic, in some manner or another.

Of course, we have five more months of greens coming to us, so more creative recipes are welcome!

weekly greens