everlasting cookies

I made these cookies tonight. Really, I started making them three days ago. Then the butter softened for a day, and then the dough sat, as the recipe insists, for another 36 hours. Also, I used only regular flour, ghirardelli chocolate chips, and, for the first time, my own vanilla extract. I tried to make them as big as they say (generous golf balls) but maybe I just don't play golf enough. I got 30 cookies, whereas they got 16 for the same batch. And they're still plenty big and taste pretty good. SH, my roommate, declared them the best she'd ever tasted. I don't know if I can say the same, but maybe my tongue is exhausted from all this working out I've been doing.

Mine don't look like this, but who cares:


Mine are not so flat. The salt-sprinkled on top is genius.

. . .

you tell me.

How's a person supposed to live in a city without an afghani or an ethiopian restaurant, hm? how?
. . .

the last week begins

This time, for HDL, notes on top.

I actually washed the ice trays before I packed them. (I suppose this may still be news to someone out there--I am moving to Omaha on Sunday [same job, different office]).


Adjectives that seem to suggest more than pizza:


Breakfast at Penny's. Tasty, and friendly, but not so easy on the estomago. They throw sugar packets at you when you read at the bar (minimum of two people at the booths).


A North Platte (the river) walk,



accompanied by my dog friend.


At what they call "the rides" at Cody Park.




NP's version of Japan's naval flag.



There should be more of these in parks:


Cody's a pretty good park: a river, "the rides," elk, geese, various playgrounds, frisbee-golf, camping, and outdoor fireplaces. Plus, or so I've heard, gay men are free to gather there at night! Poor things, they have to go somewhere. NP does not strike me as a particularly gay-friendly place. I like its parks though.

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why not YOU?

more people should do this with their cheese wax.

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doo doo dooby doo good thing

As many of you know, by winning National Public Radio's game show, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, you can get eminent voice Carl Kasell on your answering machine. Here are some of the ones he's done. (You have to play them on Realplayer, I think.) A lot of them are boring/stupid/probably annoying to listen to more than once. I am trying to think of what a good one would be. Maybe just having him say "Hi, this is Anne! please leave a message." or something simple.

Also, here's this weird coffee beer. As MH has pointed out, it might be hard to know when to drink it.



. . .

make this recipe as soon as you possibly can

No joke. You got to do it while there are still sugar pumpkins in the grocery stores (they're much smaller than the carving kind).

It's called Kaddo Bourani, it's Afghani, they serve it at my favorite restaurant in Boston, Helmand, and here's the recipe. The dish's got a pumpkin wedge base, with a cold mint-garlic yogurt sauce and a meat sauce. If you don't eat meat, make it with TVP. I've tried it both ways, and while the meat version is better, the TVP version is still amazing. You might add a little more oil, since the meat contributes part of the fat. The pumpkin prep takes quite a while, but it is really truly worth it. You could probably cut down on the sugar in the pumpkin a little, and I didn't happen to have a tomato when I made the TVP sauce the second time, so I used a red pepper and it was still delicious. I also had coriander seeds instead of ground coriander, so I ground some up with my mortar and pestle. I highly recommend doing this, if you have the seeds and M&P. It just takes a few seconds to grind and it smells heavenly. Oh, and I used olive oil and grapeseed oil instead of corn oil and that was fine too. I think the next time I make it I'm going to bake the pumpkins a little first so that they're easier to peel. And then freeze it so I can have it in the coming winter deeps.

Let me know if you make it.

. . .

p.s. I ate mine too fast to take any pictures, so that picture is from the site with the recipe.

on the russian caravan of a cold wet saturday

A long walk with Lulu on paths following the South Platte River, stippled with stops to pull the evil burrs from prancing feet, followed by:

A toot around town, garage saling (no spectactular finds, alas) and finally tasting the homemade cinnamon rolls from Skelly's Inn, complete with sign rather insistently reading "This establishment is a smoking area in its entirety." It makes one feel as if one is not only disobeying the rules by not smoking, but is utterly unwelcome as a nonsmoker. Venturing into the entirely smoking Skelly's for even 10 minutes to await my donut's cinnamoning seems to triple the mental and physical exertion required to stop there. Something about the smoke's complete permeation of an establishment engaged to feed people boggles me. Nevertheless, the homemade baked goods receive high praise, and in this town of little-to-no-homemade-baked-goods and in-general-less-than-stellar eating opportunities, I felt I must give them a go. I had tried to get my hot little hands on a Skelly's cinnamon roll twice before, only to find them sold out (the most believable kind of high praise). I now know that the homemade donuts are better--less goo overdo. Anyway, this toot, followed by:

Endless tea drinking, a long-overdue return to reading, and possibly a little sewing. No cleanings or sortings or puttings-away, if possible. If possible. And let this be the end of my computering for the day.

Ciao.

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awkward

A few weeks ago, HDL, SWT and I had a conversation in which we all agreed that it was unusual for us to form the sort of chatty intimacy with baristas that some others seem to find routine. Not long afterward, I told them about how I seemed to have accidentally fallen into a relationship of exactly that type with the barista at the coffee shop I frequent. Part of the chattiness derives from the barista (we have not gotten as far as names) guessing what I want. This isn't a particularly difficult feat--I always get a latte, and with temperature the only variation. When it's hot outside, I get it iced; when cold, hot.

This morning I went drove through the drive through right before work--usually I go later in the afternoon. I was surprised to see two baristas--one whom I think is the owner, and the chatty one. I suppose they're probably busier in the morning. Anyway, after the owner barista took my order (a regular latte) and went to make it, Chatty McChattersons came by to take my money, and blithely commented, "Soooo, getting it hot this morning?" I just stared at him and said, "Excuse me?!" He repeated himself: "You getting it hot this morning?" It will probably seem exceedingly evident to all readers that this comment referred to the coffee. It did not seem so to me, and the only meaning I could ascertain, after frantically searching my brain for any other possibilities, was very, very dirty. Thinking to myself that although I did pick out quite a fine outfit this morning, such comments were nevertheless inexplicable, surprising, rather unprofessional, and quite beyond the level of the chattiness we'd already established. So all I could say was "What?!?" and look very confused. At this point I think he figured out what I'd thought he meant, and he also got very surprised and said, of course, "The latte. You want it hot?" And then I understood and started laughing like crazy and he said my mind was in the gutter. I had to agree. Perhaps it's best that I just maintain my cool distance with baristas in the future.

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101

the minimalist's 101 simple meals, ready in 10 minutes or less.

. . .

it's summertime, and the corn is sweet

Back when I was waitressing at the Taste of Darkness, lo, in 1994, occasionally the owner/cook would grill herself up some corn on the cob right there on the gas stove, seasoned with salt and chili powder. I was a little suspicious--how do you top butter? But it is tas-t. I haven't had it since, but being back in corn country reminded me and I tried to make it this afternoon. It doesn't really work on an electric stove, alas. (Or rather, I was too chicken to put the corn directly on the heating coil, and I couldn't get it to work right in a frying pan.) But you people with gas stoves are made in the shade. Just turn on the gas, maybe at low or medium, then put the corn right on top of the burner and turn it occasionally till it's cooked. Then sprinkle w/ the aforesaid salt and chili. If like me you're burdened w/ electric, then just boil as usual and then season w/ salt and chili. It kind of reminded me of ghanaian street food, actually, what with the chili powder.

This website has more cooking corn ideas (read thru the comments--there are other indoor cooking options, like broiling, and somebody recommended a squeeze of fresh lemon juice too).


. . .

the great gastronomic goodbye

On Saturday, my possessions, H*s, and I will leave New York in a penske truck and head for the hills of Pennsylvania, en route to North Platte, NE. Right now it seems pretty sad, but I think once we hit the open road (or Memorial-Day-Weekend-congested road, as it may be), I think I'll start getting excited. In between the packing, I've been eating. SWT, H*s, various dinner companions, and I have over the past week sampled: thai, ethiopian, uppity pizza, coffee-shop, bar & grill, polish and italian pastry, seafood, organic cupcakes, bakery, fancy italian, neighborhood brunch, Brooklyn cheesecake, and homemade pesto cuisines. In one day, I had a homemade omelet, raw oysters, flounder, and lobster, and an ethiopian hodgepodge. It's a great way to say goodbye, both to the city and the friends.

. . .

possibly the most beautiful loaf yet

hole weet.
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cold brooze (updated)

I'm trying this today, with yogurt containers.

--in retrospect, I seem to be making cold-brewed coffee concentrate. this would explain the ridiculously large amount of coffee in use. alas, too late for this time, but next time I'll try this.--

Do you think that Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers get stoned before every show? It's hard to imagine how they can possibly find the exact same jokes (e.g. "You've wasted another perfectly good hour listening to Car Talk" and "Don't drive like my brother") funny week after week after year after year otherwise.

. . .

(Update: the cold brew's pretty good! Not as good as the Mill's, but that's in part b/c I'm not using whole milk. Definitely richer than regular coffee. I'll be interested to see what my future houseguests think.

I'm also trying making no-knead bread with half whole wheat flour.

I'm going to miss the street tamales when I leave for NP.)

C-Town

This morning, in a classic procrastinatory move, I went out in the rain, sans umbrella, galoshes, or even glasses, to nose about the neighborhood. I met up with two smiley mailmen at the mailbox and picked up a latte at my little now-competing-with-starbucks coffee shop across the street. But the major event was going to C-Town (it sounds like a euphemism, I know, but isn't), my smelly neighborhood grocery store. I've been in my house a lot in the past week, and sometimes when that happens I forget how to act in public--on this particular instance, all wet from the rain and blind from the forgotten glasses, I stood in the dairy aisle, scanning and scanning the cheeses, whispering "goooooooooooat. gooooooooooooooat."

It turns out they'd moved the edible cheeses to another aisle entirely.

Unrelatedly, the woman in front of me bought (in order of my noticing):

• about 10 doublewide boxes of english muffins
• approximately 4 large bunches of fresh mint
• two bags of radishes
• one bag of what I think were kitty treats

And while Kentucky Derby Day, and mint juleps, are merely 8 days off, that mint won't still be good in 8 days. And the only other time I've seen anyone buy that many english muffins was at my parents' for a massive eggs benedict--but surely it's not possible that another enormous family has the same tradition. And the radishes? and kitty treats? Who IS this person?

I wish I worked at a grocery store. Constant speculation, all day long.

Just to be fair, here's what I bought:

• toliet paper (by the way, in England they call it "loo-paper," which sounds funny)
  
• yogurt
• goooooooooat cheese
• two small containers of red pepper hummus
• two bags of baby carrots

. . .

my new favorite breakfast lunch and/or dinner

plain yogurt, honey, pecans. tart, sweet, texture. pecans are good. and you can break them up with your [bare] hands.

also, columbia law school, which got eaten for dinner by our basketball team tonight. go violets.

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histories benedict

My father makes the best eggs benedict you'll find. I don't order it in restaurants because I know it'll be a disappointment. It graces most family gatherings, accompanied sometimes with spats, but always with piles and piles of dirty china, crystal, linens (it merits the good stuff), and lip-smacking, satisfied kin. According to this impressively lengthy NYT article, the dish's provenance, like our meals, is not unmixed with controversy and benign eccentrics.

. . .

well, I tried freshdirect

and it's fine, I especially like the cook & eat stir-fry. but they should have some warnings/advice for the stupid (e.g. me), three that I can think of thus far:

1. Don't forget you ordered it and go to grocery store anyway. I now have four (4) containers of roasted red pepper hummus in my fridge.

2. Don't order a lot of fruits and vegetables right before you're about to leave your apartment for four (4) days.

3. Crap I forgot number three (3). Oh yeah. Baby bananas offered for sale are not likely to be green, like you (e.g. me) like them.

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swimming and cornnuts

Yesterday was a good day. I cleaned my apartment, did my laundry, and took my first swimming class since probably 1987. I cannot tell how many hundreds of meters I swam in that hour. But it felt good, and I felt like I was a better swimmer after just one class. There's only 3 other people in the class (Angela, Aneek, and Yuli), so Sammy, our instructor, gives us fairly personal attention, which is nice. The great thing about classes, as opposed to exercising on one's own, is that one can't really rationalize stopping until the end of the class. While it's fun to imagine just saying, No, I Don't Feel Like It Anymore, Swim The Next 200 Meters Yourself If You're So Keen On Someone Swimming Them, this is sort of a dumb thing to do if you've signed up for the class for any purpose whatsoever.

I am also now a firm believer in the beauty of swimming goggles. They Keep the Water Out! That's the whole point, right? I'd never worn them long enough to really figure out how well they work. For some reason, when you're not underwater, they're really foggy. But under the water, wow, the clarity! You can see those lines on the bottom that help keep you going straight! I swam the first 100 meters without them, crashing into both sides of the swimming lane, feeling ridiculous, and ended up with sore eyes. Sammy handed me a pair of goggles, and presto-chango, straight swimming and relaxed, pain-free eyeballs. Swimming caps, on the other hand, still need some work. Mine was continually coming off, pulling my hair, and my hair ended up all wet anyway. Apparently the point, from the point of view of the gym, is to keep hair out of the pool--I thought it was to keep my newly-washed hair from getting all chloriny. I should just get a haircut.

And, in sadder news, LWT and I joined the Nebraska Society of New York at the Irish Rogue, in midtown, to watch the Cornhuskers lose to the University of Southern California Trojans. For some reason ol' Coach Callahan decided to restrict our passing game to the fourth quarter, by which time it was too late for Husker Quarterback Zac Taylor's cannon to save us from J.D. Booty's 3 touchdowns (I think some other Trojan scored once too). But the wings and the burgers were good, there were over 200 lively Nebraskans in the house, I got some QT with LWT, and I chatted for a while with a former member of the UNL marching band (alto sax).


Go Big Red.

. . .

salad

baby lettuces & herbs


tomato


carrots


dried cranberries


chopped walnuts


crumbled goat cheese


half a lime's lime juice


olive oil


salt n pepa



mmhmm.


. . .

p.s. those are two pictures that I found when I googled "salad."

blo me filla now

I’ve gotten bored with learning straight-up Twi, so now I’m cornering the slang. Blo me filla now is actually Ghanaian English slang (I think); I translate it as “blow (tell) me filler (information) now. Basically the same as “s’up?” I’ve also learned some bad words and gestures. The gestures are especially great. In one of them, you put your hand out in the same pose as if you were going to shake someone’s hand, but you spread your fingers far apart and shake the hand up and down and make a mean face. For another, you stick out your fist as if you were going to give a thumbs up, but instead you wave your thumb up and down a bunch and again with the mean face.

**Adult Content Alert **

Things have been busy. I spent the first part of this week at an abortion workshop for the media. The workshop was sponsored by an American organization called the Population Reference Bureau. The thrust of the workshop was pretty much: women are dying horrible deaths from unsafe abortions because they don’t know that abortion is legal in Ghana. Abortion, like premarital sex and children out of marriage, is highly stigmatized here, and so women don’t like to admit they’re pregnant in the first place, and then don’t like to ask for help if they need to terminate the pregnancy. And, while everybody seems to know about contraception, contraceptive use is very low; women who insist upon it are assumed to be promiscuous, and therefore unattractive. Men seem to think that condoms anyway reduce their pleasure. And there seem to be lots of misconceptions about how to use contraception, especially among young people. Myths about reproduction abound; one we heard about a lot was that many people seem to think that a woman can’t get pregnant the first time she has sex. Parents don’t talk to their children about sex, and I think “family life education” isn’t taught until higher education, so children learn only through their peers. The whole society is set up for an epidemic of unsafe abortion deaths; and in fact it is the single largest cause of maternal mortality (15-30%--numbers vary b/c of secrecy).

It was very interesting to watch the participants over the course of the workshop. At the beginning, nearly all of them thought that abortion was wrong and some even thought that women who die because of unsafe abortions deserve it. We didn’t count or anything, but I’m sure that all of them were either Christian or Muslim, and quite serious about it too. But as the presentations and activities continued, they were completely swayed. Part of it was just the getting the facts straight: knowing that abortion is in fact legal, and not just when the mother might die—so there’s the factual legal aspect. Another part was the overwhelmingly gruesome statistics—the practical aspect of women dying unless... They were also called upon to fulfill the journalist’s duty as educatoràunsafe abortion, and abortion at all, might happen much less frequently if the press took an active role in educating people in general about reproductive health, and targeting parents and young people especially. They heard a lot about their unique capacity to hold politicians and policymakers accountable. For instance, we took a tour of the post abortion care facilities of the biggest teaching hospital in Ghana, and it has one nurse, who comes in the afternoons. The gynecological surgery area (they called it the gynae theatre) had been refurbished (it was literally falling down, I think) and the President had a big news conference about opening it up last year—and it is still sitting empty, no tools, no furniture, nothing. So while the President got some political capital, the people actually got nothing. But I think many, or at least some, were also actually swayed from being pro-life to pro-choice. This was incredible to me, coming from the U.S. where, in abortion “debates,” nobody ever actually listens to anybody else or changes their minds about anything. It was also interesting because the pro-choice arguments that were used were sometimes pretty terrible. But (I think) they had not really been previously armed with pro-life arguments; they had only been told that it was wrong by their pastors and mothers and newspapers and everybody else. So when they were presented with actual arguments, even though some were bad, they didn’t have much with which to combat them.

I think they also learned a lot about straight-up journalism: how to tell a story without judging the players, how to research a story, and also how to advocate.

Toward the end of the third day, I was pretty tired of listening to other people have a conference, but on the whole I think it was (from the point of view of the organizers) a very successful conference. It was also, as a whole, quite interesting to me, first because I just learned a lot about abortion in general and abortion in Ghana, and second because I watched that transformation of people’s beliefs.

** End of Adult Content **

Oh, and Ghana lost to #1 Brazil, 3-0. Boo. But the Black Stars are returning home today, and the city is again abuzz.

The hotel we stayed at was quite posh—hot water! and air conditioning! (which we didn’t even use). And a balcony overlooking the sadly dirty and rocky beach, and clean and rock-free swimming pool. The food was great (ostrich! is! good!) although something decided I was having it all too easy and attacked my digestive system. There was also a guy there whose job it was to weave kente cloth, just for tourists to watch, and another couple of dudes who carved gigantic mancala boards in the shape of alligators. Perty sweet.

In other news, I have completed my selections for my clerkship applications. The whole process starts ridiculously early—the clerkship wouldn’t be till after I graduate. But interviews are in September or October, and I guess it takes a long time to assemble the application packets (letters of reference, resume, writing sample, cover letter, for 70 judges). I’ve been getting lots of pretty clothes and other things made with the wacky wax fabric they have here—my seamstress, Auntie Vera, lives right in my driveway in a little blue rectangular prism, and she does great work. I think I’m probably paying her rent right now. I think this weekend Kristin and I will take a day trip or two, hopefully at least one of them to a pristine beach somewheres. We have Monday off for a national holiday—I think maybe an Independence Day sort of thing? but there’s no big celebration or anything, so the beach should be a fine way celebrate. And I hope to go to the U.S. Embassy’s invite-only party on the Fourth; my boss has an invitation.

The overhead light just went out for some reason.

One crazy thing I saw in the hospital on our workshop site visit there was thousands of files marked confidential tied together with twine and sitting in a big heap on the floor of the obstetrics unit lobby. I would have taken a picture but I didn’t want to violate anyone’s privacy.

I want to upload the right video but using this connection it will take 3.5 hours. It will have to wait.

Enough writing for one day.

. . .