Boom

Helpfulness

This from Emily Post, 1943:
Question: How far may a girl run after a man?
Answer: Cat-like, she may do a little stalking! But "run"? Not a step. The freedom of today allows her to go to meet him half-way, but the girl who runs, runs after a man who runs faster! To be sure, she can invite him to any sort of party, as long as it is not just a sit-at-home party of two. She can even say to one who has been lately introduced to her: "Come and see me some time! I'm almost always at home after five"--or whenever she is likely to be at home.

She also wrote a book titled Children are People which is apparently a help to "embarassed parents" everywhere. I would like to know whether it was helpful for being the first book to explain that children are, in fact, (generally) people, or whether it was helpful for explaining how to most effectively lock that little person away from John and Jane Q. Public (and Mrs. Worldly, who is my favorite) until they were suddenly grown up and stalking potential mates by "being at home after five".

Off I go to my physical therapy session. I've been awake since 4am, for no good reason, so even though it is just 9:30 I am already looking forward to a cozy afternoon nap.

Return to Suet

Since first reading Master and Commander, I have had an obsession with suet puddings. To the best of my knowledge, I have never eaten one, but plan to remedy that at some point in April. After purchasing Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, I have plenty of recipes to choose from; there's also a handful in my two oldest cookbooks (the 1903 Whitehouse Cookbook and the 1930-ish Presbyterian church cookbook which belonged to my dad's grandmother). All of them are basically the same: chop a pile of suet fine, add it to some flour and sugar (and possibly an egg or two), stir in some chopped fruit or roll it up with a layer of jam, and wrap the whole thing in cloth and boil it for a few hours. Some versions add molasses and standard spice cake spices (nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, ginger), and I think I will start with that version--it seems less threatening, somehow.

The boiling thing is interesting: because the dough is wrapped in a fairly thick layer of cheesecloth (or a pudding bag, or basin), I think the result is like those steamed Chinese buns that look so pasty white and have such a yummy, sweet bread flavor. According to Mr. O'Brian's essay on the subject, if the cloth is loosely wrapped the suet will form a rather damp gelatinous mass, and if it's wrapped tightly, it'll be more like the steamed buns. (My mom remembers suet pudding as something that sounds an awful lot like a suet cake one purchases for birds; I have a vague idea that someone played a trick on her about this, or perhaps it was that her family preferred the gelatinous version.) You can view a handful of different puddings at the Loscouse book's website, including my favorite one (as far as the name goes): Drowned Baby (also known as Boiled Baby, which seems more accurate, as the "baby" is cooked in hot water, rather than submerged in any-temperature water until it stops breathing).

Over the winter, I was mulling over suet pudding and had a lot of difficulty finding suet that wasn't a cake of bird suet. I thought I could use lard or leaf lard as a substitute, and while I suspect it'd be pretty fine (same meaty cholesterol-packed goodness), I've finally found actual suet for human consumption (the brand, Atora, is called "the strongest brand in the suet market"). I'm going to check around at a couple of local Brit food shops, and chat with my favorite butcher (Don and Joe's Meats at Pike Place Market) to see if "the strongest brand in the suet market" is in fact "the only brand in the suet market". Some websites claims that butchers will simply give customers suet; others say that it's "impossible" to find--but all those websites are targeted at people making suet cakes for birds, not puddings for humans. (This could be making it sound like birds are less deserving of tasty food than humans; please know, oh ye random web searchers googling "suet pudding" and finding this, that I am nearly as obsessed with birds as I am with pudding, and would never wish poor-quality food on them.)

A side note regarding my subconscious: I had two remembered dreams last night. The first involved going into a restaurant, ordering two doughnuts, and being given a cheeseburger that had a jelly doughnut as a top bun. I was not happy and fussed at the fast-food clerks to no avail. My second dream involved telling some people about the first experience, as if it really happened and was not merely dreamt about, and getting irritated when they didn't get why I was mad. Thoughts about this:

My subconscious experiences are not all that different from my conscious experiences.

People, please: A jelly doughnut/cheeseburger. I challenge you to invent a grosser food combo.

Apparently I am a fuss-budgety food critic even in my dreams.

A side note regarding spell check: Lobscouse suggestions were "Lobsters" and "Discourse". Googling was "go ogling", which it is, and which I had never realized. Is it common knowledge?

Book Lists

Total number of books read for non-work purposes last year: 227. The ones I liked most, in no particular order:
The Mouse and His Child, recommended to me by the mr. man who wrote the Amazon review, although I love Mr. Hoban's Frances books more than Mr. Hughes appears to. (Perhaps because he doesn't fully understand the pathos behind feeling full of jam.)

The Once and Future King, recommended to me by a man who "drinks a lot, or not at all". How did I possibly live 35.6 years without reading this? The first part, especially, but all of it has burned the Arthur myths into my head far better than all the acres of "forsoothe" books I've sucked up over my life.

Merciful heavens, but Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a fine book. Funny and observant and politically interesting and all about Paraguay, of all the can't-find-it-on-a-map sort of places to be about.

This year, I read pretty much everything that PG Wodehouse ever wrote. While really it's the snips and bits in all of them that are my favorite, I'm picking the one with my favorite title and the one that made me get tea up my nose: America, I Like You.

Lunch with Elizabeth David is on the list in part because it introduced me to Norman Douglas whom I'd never heard of before, and in part because of how it made me feel like I was sitting in meditteranean sunshine for so much of it. And I wasn't--I was sitting in Seattle in January. So that's saying something.

Two words: Creeping Horrors. Two-word title: Brain Trust. Remember back before bird flu, when mad cow disease seemed to matter? Surprise! It still does. And it's still probably too late to do much about it.

The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook is here for one recipe--the caramel peanut butter cup icebox pie that nearly killed all of Boom's nearest and dearest last May. The deadliness (and a couple of pop-up ads) is available over here, sans rest of the book and copyright and all that.

Ms. Atwood's Oryx and Crake has the creepiness of her best stuff with the Cassandra-esque doom/gloom of Handmaid's Tale, the book that kept me from using any sort of ATM card for nearly 10 years. (and if I'd known that the powers behind the old puppethead prez would return behind a new puppethead prez, I might still be operating on a cash-only-pay-bills-via-money-order basis. That good ol' 80s paranoia brings me nicely to The Cocaine Chronicles. Strip away concerns of health and legality and every drug has things that make it compelling and things that make it repellent. The stories here do both sides up right and proper.

05 was a good year for books, in that I have learned to not finish books I hate (and thus don't count them towards the total). So only three to list on the don't-bother-with side of things:
So your dad is Dr. Feelgood and you've got your own room at the Playboy mansion when you're still a kidlet--and you still can't get a good ghostwriter. Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion was a mess. Here's a tip: when telling the story of one's childhood, check that the years given match with your supposed age in a consistent manner, and if one is going to be generally chronological, perhaps it is best to be fully chronological instead of popping in with other oh-yeah-I-forgot bits that you add in to later chapters at the suggestion of your therapist rather than your editor. Or leave the story to a later novelist, and have 'em make it all up, like apparently happened for someone who may or may not have been Nell Kimball. According to some fact-checking I started on, this lil' autobiography is pretty likely to have been faked. Plus it's not very interesting. Neither is A Month of Sundaes, but that's probably because I already seem to have read all the sources used in the author's research, and have found much to argue with there, too. I suppose that as a gift for someone who loves ice cream and has never read some thoughtful food history, it's just fine. And props to the author for getting a book contract on the subject

Snickers for Breakfast

Breakfast is the one meal where I have no impulses other than instant gratification. I had a cup of sweet, milky tea and two fun-size snickers bars this morning. Yesterday, another tea and a bowl of apple crisp. Day before--yes, the tea--and a handful of little cinnamon cookie things made from leftover pie crust. Basically, my breakfast is sugar, with a bit of fat. And I know it's bad for me, and I know I'll probably end up with diabetes or something, but any other breakfast just doesn't quite seem to work. Cereal makes me hungry. Bacon and eggs makes me all full and greasy and slow. Energy bars never really taste very good. Bagel? Feh. We're in Seattle. Toast? Sometimes, but mostly as a jam delivery service.

Lunch and dinner are all about fresh, organic things that I've made taste better with herbs, spices, wines and vinegars (Monday night's chard was delicious, and I mean that for real, Mr. Dalton). So what's up with breakfast? How do I reprogram my robotic sugar jones? Should I even bother? (Let it be known that I run happily along for six or seven hours on my sugar high; no further food needed. So it's convenient as all hell, too.)

Thanks to Sweetie having to monitor the Canadian Weight Watchers site yesterday, I learned about poutine, which combines cheese curds, french fries and gravy for some kind of blessed inferno of delight. I'd be at the Canadian Weight Watchers site too, if I had regular access to poutine.

I am reading a book called Hope Is the Thing with Feathers (although the title brings Woody Allen's "the thing with feathers is my nephew" to mind, rather than Ms. Dickenson). It's the short history of six extinct and beautiful birds--the Carolina Parakeet and Passenger Pigeon (one photo for both),  the Great Auk and Labrador Duck , the my favorites, the  Heath Hen and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Even if you don't especially care about birds, his writing, especially for the Heath Hen (close relative of the still-existing Greater Prairie Chicken), is lovely. Sad and funny and thoughtful and not too bitter about the total extinction of these creatures.

We leave for Brooklyn in a few days. I found a site called smalltownbrooklyn.com that has the coolest block-by-block map I've ever seen. We're staying on the border between Park Slope and Windsor Terrace, a few short blocks from Prospect Park. I plan on eating my way from one end of the city to the other. 

Side of Peanut Sauce and A Shotgun

I have been having more excel sheets than fun of late. The problem seems more easily fixable if I just remove excel from my system than by going in search of fun, because I'm mostly crabby and judgemental right now, which are two fine conditions for fun prevention.

Sweetie just returned from 05's trip to Vegas. Five straight meals featured bacon, which is something of an accomplishment. Nobody won any money this time, and my magical Frank Sinatra nickel slot has been removed (I was up about $500 on that little machine). It's been replaced with one featuring the Death Star, which Sweetie didn't feel comfortable using to risk my money.

I have recently switched my morning tea from wee bags to loose, made with a rather space age Swiss filter that fits nicely in the wide-mouth glass I like to use for tea (warm hand are nice; who needs handles?) It took a few cups to figure out how to make good tea--I can see why Americans are routinely accused of Bad Tea. The directions specified one teaspoon per cup and brew for five minutes, but when using the bags I prefer to use two bags and brew for about 45 seconds. When I tried my double-and-cut brew method with the loose tea, it was watery and bitter at the same time, precisely the opposite of what I meant to do. So now I follow the recipe, and am happy. It's kind of amazing in a Magic Washcloth way, because the tea bits get really, really big, and go from twigs to leaves in the few minutes of soaking in water (interestingly, the opposite of what happens to human fingers. Just say no to finger tea).

I'm reading a stack of Jonathan Ames right now, because several trusty people recommended Wake Up, Sir! to me and while I wait for it at the liberry (sorry, Mr. Ames, if you read this--I know library borrowing doesn't put more money in your pocket), I'm checking out his collections of New York Press columns. He's totally blown my recent attempt at having a daytime book and a nighttime book. I think that rule might work better when I'm reading work books. I have a new stack on the shelf, but am taking a break while I catch up on recipe hunting for the last list. I'm working on some great stuff about manners right now. According to a courtesan-heroine of Colette's, the three most difficult things to master eating are asparagus, homard a l'americaine, and a boiled egg. For the record, asparagus should be picked up and eaten with one's fingers (if the tough ends have been cut off, it's easy and rather elegant), when you follow the above recipe for the lobster, it's all been chopped up ahead of time (it used to be whole lobster tails cooked in rich, chunky lobster gravy) and I'm still working on the boiled egg. I assume she meant a hard-boiled egg, and damn, but those are difficult. I've never figured out why one would want to eat a soft-boiled egg.

I meant to say something about Mr. Ames, but veered off into boiled eggs. Perhaps because he talks so much about baldness?

The Horror

Happy note: Honey Crisp apple season is here! We missed the Broadway Farmer's Market this weekend, but I found them at QF(uckin)C. Pick them over; they bruise easily, as the web link notes. But oh so tasty. I was planning on eating one right about now but must wait to feel less repulsed from the dental pictures.

I am starting a new reading experiment. Instead of reading one book after another in an endless stream, I am breaking it up. Now I have a Bedtime Book and a Daytime Book. This helps when I'm reading a whole book that I'm enjoying but is also work related (such as the current "Nell Kimball: Her Life As An American Madam", which is a possibly faked autobiography), because I don't have to worry about taking notes while trying to go to sleep. And it lets me choose a book of short stories or essays (or at least a book with reasonable chapter breaks) for the bedside table (currently Stories of the Night: An Insomniac Reader) which is very nice but not at all insomnia inspiring.

I have been on a pillow making spree of late. Four of them went to live at Coach's house. Two of them are living here. When will it end? Sweetie fears the answer is NEVER.  He may be right. It starts with covering the sofa with pillows, and poof, next thing you know, you can't fit in the front door because the whole place is awash in the damn things. At least they're not showing up in dumb little shapes, or trimmed with lace, or whatever. Yet. If they start inbreeding, who can tell what design mishaps might happen? (hmmm...the Purtymouth Pillow Company has a nice ring to it...)

Mess

The news continues to horrify. I am going to assume everyone has thrown some dollars at the red cross already (the RC's computers have been bogged down; try Amazon for quick-n-easy cash transfers). It's hard to deal with the punditizing, desperately looking to attach blame to people in the other party (or other race, or other economic class). In the long run, I'm not sure it matters. Some good, caring people will get fired, and some incompetent morons will continue to be employed in jobs that are dangerously crucial to society. Some good politicians will lose their next election, and some bad ones will win. Most of the displaced people will recover their lives to a large degree. Remember how, after 9/11, we were first told to donate blood and then told to go shopping? Let us at least appreciate the changes for this disaster: we are told to donate to the red cross, open our homes to the newly homeless, and conserve gasoline.

Over the weekend, Sweetie and I made a number of ice cream sammiches for various social obligations, and I read Candy Freak, which I loved. (It didn't hurt that it was a total escape from the NO mess.) I am now eager to try Five Star Bars, which must be ordered in six packs (each bar is a whopping $4 each!) Somehow, I'm not feeling quite up to the decadence. Perhaps next week. (I'm also reading Freakonomics, which is more entertaining than actually useful. I compared it to the fruit on the cover: looks juicy, but no core. More on that later.)

We also finished the first season of Deadwood and are A-totally hooked, B-wondering who's got the second season TiVOd and will invite us over to watch, C-regularly noting that the series did not help my guttermouth problem in the least. I owe all of you a penny, times infinity.

Retrograde Mercury

A couple of months ago, I reviewed David Kirby's book Evidence of Harm; I don't often write here about the books I review, because so often they're diet books that need killin'. This one, though, hung around in the back of my brain, in part because of the never-named guy who added a pro-Eli Lilly rider into that horrendous piece of work known as the Homeland Security Act. So yesterday, Sweetie comes home and mentions Kennedy's lead article in Salon (you will either have to pay up or watch an add, but it's worth it) that covers the mess--the presence of organic mercury in a vaccine preservative that may have caused a huge increase in autism. It's likely a bad choice of misreading "the greater good", rather than a "ha Ha! We want your kids to need further medications from us in the future!" I typically favor incompetence and stupidity over actual maliciousness.

Then it turns out that young Robbie K knows that Mr. Unknown Rider is, in fact, Public Enemy #1, Mr. Bill Goddam Frist. Way to go, Mr. Frist, to play such a historical role in a business/government mess that will have the world questioning the safety of every vaccine for generations. Currently, the preservative--Thimerosol--is no longer used in the US; instead, these lovely cheap vaccines are being shipped overseas, particularly to China, which is beginning to see a huge jump in the number of autism cases.

I remember a time when thinking about the country I live in didn't make me feel queasy and tearful. Mr. Frist's term is over in 2006, but he has promised to not pursue reelection. Democrats, start your engines--this guy could well be the next presidential (or vice presidential) candidate for the opposition.

I Blame You

You know who you are. The one who played back-to-back Rod Stewart songs on Saturday night. Thanks to you, my internal soundtrack now alternates between "Tonight's the Night" and "Young Turks". Damn you and your iPod to hell with extra cheese.

Wait. There is no extra cheese in hell.

Yesterday afternoon, the Sweetie and I went to see Hari Om as the next-to-last SIFF flick. The director was there, and seriously, I invented a new category of "Golden Space Needle" award just for him: Cutest Director. When a 5' tall beaming bald brown man bows and says 'namaste' and then tells us its his first feature film so be kind and then snaps a picture of the audience with his digtial camera? Dear lordy Shiva, he has my vote. Plus the movie was really enjoyable; like Bollywood, but a-it was a road movie featuring a sparkly rickshaw (rickshaws: they're the new minis, just you wait); b-it wasn't actually a musical, even though there were some scenes where the background music earned subtitles; c-there was an actual kiss rather than nose-rubbing or hair-smelling; and d-the basic plot was far more straightforward than any Bollywood movie I've seen yet. Find it. Love it. Hug the director for me.

I thought everyone knew about the loveliness of rhubarb, but have learned otherwise. How can anyone not love a vegetable otherwise known as "pie plant"? Go learn about rhubarb, or as they say in France, "rhubarbe". Chop some up, throw it in a saucepan, turn the heat on low and let it get all mushy; add sugar to taste, let it get even mushier, and you have yourself some tart-n-tasty jam stuff to spread on damn near anything: yogurt, poundcake, english muffins, grilled chicken, vanilla ice cream, granola, pancakes, or just a spoon. You can freeze the mush in wee containers for a few months if you like, but it seems to live in the fridge pretty happily. Plus, if you stir some flour into it, it makes a nice thickener for other fruit pies later in the summer. Three cheers for rhubarb! (Um, and too much is a laxative. Just so you know. I can see how calling it "pie plant" rather than "poop plant" might have been some kind of pioneer-days attempt at marketing.)

This morning, I realized that I will be out of town the day the new Harry Potter book hits the stores. My copy is preordered and all, but...but...but I've been so patient, and now I'm off camping? How did that happen?

Make with the Insulin

Thanks to recommendations from Ms. Broomhall, I got The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook from the liberry. Sweetie was flipping through it, and either I offered or he requested a baked item. As it turns out, it's a non-baked item: the craziest pie in existence. Peanut butter + caramel sauce + Reese's cups + cream cheese + whipped cream = diabetic coma. Weirdly, the verbatim recipe is here, for free. That seems like a touch of a copyright violation, since it doesn't credit the book's authors at all, so let me say that I am pretty sure the recipe's authors are the Magnolia Bakery girls, rather than Mrs. Pryor who owns the website I link to. My conscience flip-flops a lot (like a good liberal) about the difference between modern free media usage and old-fashioned stealing. Since I changed the recipe (baked graham cracker crust, bottled dulce de leche, different assembly), I could just change how it's written and avoid the whole issue, but I would never have come up with this combination so feel obliged to give credit where it's due. Blah, blah: just go make yourself a Copyright Violation Pie. (Should I copyright that name?)

Sweetie and I also got tickets for the SiFF movies we can't live without (he claims the interface is the world's easiest, so buy your tickets online like we did). This year, a lot of them are documentaries. I can't wait for March of the Penguins. If you go look at the images on that link, you will also not be able to wait for it. There's also the non-documentary 2046, which looks better in this single image than it does on all of the rest of the information superhighway.

An official non-copyrighted thank you to Mr. Hughes, for telling me to read A Mouse And His Child. I love Muskrat and Uncle Bittern equally. The main characters in the book are flocked wind-up toys, which I have never seen. There don't seem to be too many of them anymore, but I did find a walrus and his son.