Major problem

I had a dream last night that I was taking a nap. That was about the totality of the dream: just watching myself sleep, while sleeping myself. Can't help but be worried for the state of my unconscious.

Only In Dreams

I must be watching entirely too much Bravo lately, because the other night I dreamt I was a contestant on America's Next Top Diplomat, a show where contestants compete to become the U.S.'s next diplomat to Australia.

Why Australia? Who knows. All I remember is being in front of a panel of sophisticated judges -- maybe on the set of Meet the Press? -- making what seemed in my dream to be sophisticated arguments about America's foreign policy relations with Australia. Perhaps I am still processing through sleep the wonders of the political world this year.

Raisin Bread, Homemade

Midway through making this raisin bread, I realized what I really wanted was a cinnamon-raisin swirl bread, kind of like the classic Pepperidge Farm variety.

My improvised attempt to add a swirl didn't work (see picture). I thought it was really yummy. J. thought there should be more cinnamon, and I don't necessarily disagree. When I was making it though, the two tablespoons seemed absurdly heaping.

Recipe from King Arthur Flour -- next time I'll add more cinnamon & raisins, and see if I can make a swirlified version.

'Tis Still the Season

Buried at the bottom of my stocking was a dark-chocolate-orange. Cracking it is fun; eating it segment-by-segment is even better.

Feeling Resolute

I have an excess of resolutions this year, most of which I'm sure will wind up abandoned if the past is any guide to my future. But today is the first day of the year, I have just the slimmest shadow of a hangover, and 2012 (still) feels fresh and full of possibilities. So here are a few things I'd like to do this year:

• get a new haircut & get better at blow drying my hair straight;
• end the year with less possessions than I started with;
• spend less time procrastinating & making lists;
• take a trip that requires a passport;
• read Bleak House by Dickens.

If I'd known I'd bump into 3 people I know on the B train this morning, I would have definitely put on mascara.

Haiku for Monday

computer broken
server down -- oh yes, monday!
means red wine tonight

Poach Your Eggs

This weekend, should you make poached eggs? If you leave off the hollandaise sauce, they're the healthiest of eggs! Find out how to make them, and then have yourself a mimosa as a reward.

Review: The Savage City, by T.J. English

T.J. English's non-fiction book, The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge, tells three interlocking stories about race, corruption, and the police in 1960s and 1970s New York City. Like the best non-fiction works, this book may leave you wanting to read all of its source material. The Savage City is a page turner, and serves as a nice reminder that 1960s New York was not solely about the boozing and vintage dresses of Mad Men. English also seeks to shine a light on the New York of today, through the lens of the past. In the introduction, he writes:

The past is not past: a city's identity is composed not just of events in the present moment but also of all that came before. If New York City today is a place of prosperity, safety, and good times, as its civic leaders and financial developers contend, it is useful to remember that these things have come at a price.

Hey, here's a handy site for people with jerky friends: Is It Old? Just in case you needed a handy companion to LMGTFY.

Beethoven Awareness Month

 

Really great ad for WQXR's Beethoven Awareness Month  -- and perfectly placed at the Lincoln Center 1/9 train station.

Wheat Is Better

I spent a lot of time inside this past weekend, avoiding the thundersnow that hit the northeast, and engaging in my latest hobby. Perhaps the main requirement for baking bread is a skill for finding good 30-minute tasks. How I Met Your Mother reruns, anyone? I made the whole wheat bread listed on the back of the flour bag. It has so few ingredients: honey, whole wheat flour, regular flour, salt, and yeast. And water.

The dough was incredibly sticky -- much more so than last week's plain white sandwich bread dough -- and I added tons of flour while kneading. The recipe had called for adding 1/4 - 1/2 cup of flour while kneading, but I might have added as much as a cup. Here's the bread dough, about to go in a bowl and rise.

whole wheat bread, a little overly-floured up

The recipe for this bread made two loaves; I only have one pan for baking bread. I thought about halving the recipe, but I've read that splitting bread recipes can lead to problems. Also, math! So this dough went on to make one loaf of sandwich bread, and one boule.

whole wheat bread, fresh from the oven

Last week's white sandwich bread was good, but this whole wheat bread was much, much better: chewy and flavorful, the bread tasted complex. It is hard to believe that so few ingredients are involved in making this whole wheat bread.

Homemade White Sandwich Bread

Making homemade bread feels very fall. This is the best recipe I've used for making white bread yet -- honey was my sweetener of choice, and I halved the amount of salt since some reviews mentioned the bread being a bit salty. I don't have a stand mixer, so I mixed by hand and then kneaded for what seemed like forever, but was probably just 10 minutes.

Tomorrow: grilled cheese on homemade bread for dinner.

Bread, cooling. Just ignore the clutter of technology and paper in the background.

Salmon With Leeks Recipe

Salmon, about to go in the oven

Like so many dinners in CSA-season, this meal is inspired by the vegetables in the fridge that look closest to going bad, and by mad-libs style Google searches. The goal? To eat the leeks before their leaves started to get (even more) wilted and sad. Also, on my last visit to my doctor, she practically composed a sonnet of admiration for salmon, so I had fish on the brain.

Recipes from BBC's Good Food  and Fine Cooking were an inspiration as well as my previous adventures in "salmon coated in mustard tastes good however you cook it."

Time: 40 minutes (20 minutes cook-time; 20 minutes prep)


Ingredients: 
2 leeks, washed carefully and sliced fairly thin
1 clove garlic, sliced thinly
Salmon filet (I had about 2 lbs; you could use any amount, just scale the sauce accordingly. Make sure to cut salmon filet into portions before cooking.)
Cherry tomatoes, halved (optional)
Salt and pepper, to taste

Sauce for Salmon:

• 1 lemon, juiced, plus lemon wedges for serving
• 3 tbsp honey 
• 3 tbsp mustard (I like dijon -- either honey or wholegrain)
• 2-3 tbsp olive oil + plus more for pan

Equipment: Cast iron pan or other oven-safe pan. If you don't have an oven-safe pan, use a regular pan and baking dish -- but then you'll have to wash two things, instead of one. 

How to Make:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. 
2. Heat pan with a bit of olive oil. Once it's hot, add leeks and garlic,  along with some salt and pepper. Let them sweat for about 5 minutes, until they look wilted, and then turn off flame. Avoid burning or browning the mixture.
3. Mix together sauce for salmon -- honey, mustard, olive oil, and lemon. This is a forgiving sauce -- don't be afraid to make substitutions. For instance, you could try a different kind of oil, or add a vinegar in place of the acid from the lemon.
4. Spread leeks evenly in your oven-safe pan. (If you do not have an oven-safe pan, just transport the leeks into a baking dish.) Pile salmon on top of leeks, in a non-overlapping layer. Sprinkle salt and pepper the fish; then spread the sauce on top of the fish. Let any extra sauce drip down onto leek mixture. If using, sprinkle cherry tomatoes around the pan.
5. Place fish in oven, and bake for 20 minutes. Check halfway through and rotate pan if your oven has an uneven temperature. Fish is done when it flakes easily and doesn't look raw in center. (Avoid overcooking.) 

The Finished Product: I served with golden beets (roasted in the oven at the same time as the salmon was prepped & cooked) and couscous.

Salmon, ready to eat.

Using Up CSA Bounty

My green-bean heavy cutting board looked pretty to me.

After a few months of the CSA, I start to feel my energy flagging a bit. It's especially true now that it's getting darker earlier -- I find myself thinking, Couldn't I just order take-out?

This past Sunday,  determined not to fall into that laziness trap, I spent a zen-like half hour chopping vegetables for a stir fry.

As it turns out, stir fry is almost always the answer when you have a small amount of several vegetables (egg-based dishes like frittatas or omelets are also great).

Fall in New Hampshire

  

I've been to New Hampshire every summertime for the past three years, but wasn't able to make the trek up north this year. But now that I've leaf-peeped in fall, this doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice. From a boat in New Hampshire, just before the sun sets, it can seem as though you're watching leaves brighten and get tinged with orange and red before your eyes.

Middlemarch: Unhappy in Rome

After all my (absurd, given the age of novel) complaints about spoilers in Middlemarch, I hope it’s not too annoying for me to let you know that at a certain point in this novel, one of the characters has a chapter devoted to the growing unhappiness of her marriage. Honestly, this is no kind of spoiler because the fact that her marriage was going to be unhappy was known to everyone but her as soon as her romance began – her sister knew, the neighborhood gossips knew, the far superior alternate romantic option in the neighborhood knew, and the reader knew.

Unfortunately for her, she disregarded the opinion of the townspeople. And even more unfortunately, this chapter of marriage unhappiness takes place on her honeymoon, in Rome. By the way, we are back in the time when a honeymoon’s name was more justified; they are clearly on their love-cation for a month, if not more.

Dinner: Tabbouleh Salad & Homemade Falafel

There's an insane amount of parsley in the refrigerator, so much that finding juice feels like a nature expedition. The good thing is, I now know how to keep parsley -- and other herbs -- usable for more than four days. (Just put them standing up in a glass, with a little water on the bottom.) But that doesn't solve the problem of using four bunches of parsley. So I decided to make tabbouleh.

And then once that was done, it just seemed like making falafel was the next step. J made the falafel mix, and after a failed attempt at frying, we wound up baking them in the oven -- that was way easier, and I can only imagine healthier.

Recipes:

• Falafel -- And more parsley in the falafel! We skipped the coriander, and if we made it again, I'd punch up the cumin a bit.

• Tabbouleh -- I used less onion than the recipe. I'd never known that to "cook" bulghur, you just let it soak in cold water, but we did wind up soaking it for more than the hour and a half that the recipe says (but I also overcook pasta, so that might just be me).

A List: Pronunciation Trouble

These are words I know how to pronounce when I say them aloud, but I say (think?) them absolutely wrong in my head:

Sufjan (as in Stevens)
Jens (as in Lekman)
gauche
inchoate*

I know there are more that I'm forgetting. And probably another list could be made of words that I pronounce incorrectly both inside & outside of my head, like "paprika" for just one example.

*I heard someone say this word on NPR the other day and thought "Oh, of course that's how it's pronounced." But I've already forgotten the dulcet NPR-pronunciation. So I'm back to the inner-head pronunciation of in-chote, which can't possibly be correct.

Taking a Break -- Jonathan Dee's The Privileges

I took a break from Middlemarch to read The Privileges last week. It is surprisingly easy to put Middlemarch on hold -- not because I don't like it; I do -- but because it's long and while searching for the link in this post I came across spoilers. Can you still call them spoilers if they're about a several-hundred page book written centuries ago?

Anyway: The Privileges. I liked the beginning of this book best, a set piece about the marriage day of a golden couple. There are a lot of great parts to that section: a moment between mother and daughter where the "specialness" of the day is clearly different for the two characters does a nice job setting up the characters.

The rest of the book I liked less -- the characters (lack of) morality and values seemed dull, rather than shocking. That is perhaps intentional, and a reflection of the times, and crimes, we live in.

One part of the book reminded me of a scene in Mystic River (from the novel, but also in the movie). Cynthia hears about a wrongdoing of Adam's and, rather than displaying judgment, tells him she is proud to be married to him, and that, if I'm remembering right, that he is a "man amongst men." Replace names, the crime, and socioeconomic status, and the scene is precisely the same as a "stand by your man" scene in Mystic River.

Is it a flaw in these two women or in me that I can't imagine myself having that response? Is it a little too ridiculous for me to read this type of scene as being a male fantasy?