Winter Braising

In honor of the first/probably only snowfall of winter, I made a hearty dinner full of braised foods. It was delicious. Braising is underrated as a cooking technique, I think. It's easy-you sear meat or vegetables on high heat, then cook over low heat in liquid pretty much indefinately. It's also an easy way to experiment with flavors and making up your own recipes-once you know the basic timing for braising a particular meat, it's hard to mess up. Plus, meats that you braise are usually the cheaper, tougher cuts, so if you do mess it up, it isn't as big a deal as say, messing up filet mignon.
Tonight's adventure included Smitten Kitchen's Braised balsamic brussels sprouts with pancetta and cider braised pork chops with raisins and cranberries, a recipe I made up as I went along. I'm not good at writing recipes, but I wrote it out below the pictures of my culinary adventure.


Figure 1: Counterspace fail. This is the sum total of counter space in my apartment.


Shallots, in various stages of undress


My sister made me an apron for my birthday. My sister is 24.


Breadcrumbs, toasted until golden brown and then for about three minutes longer. oops.


VERY IMPORTANT. When you use a cast iron skillet, cover the handle, or you will grab it and burn your hand 2350832 times. Burns across the palms of your hand=the suck.


Steaming sprouts



Braising pork chops


The finished product!

Cider Braised Pork Chops
4 bone-in center cut pork chops
3 Tbsp butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 shallot, minced
1 12-oz bottle hard cider (I used woodchuck)
1/2 cup chicken broth or stock
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup dried cranberries
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

Season pork with salt and pepper. Melt 2 tbsp of butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Sear pork until browned on both sides, about 3 minutes/side. Remove pork from pan, place on plate, and cover with foil. Add remaining tablespoon of butter to pan and melt. Add shallots and garlic, cook until soft and lightly browned. Add cider and broth to deglaze pan. Turn heat down to medium-low, return pork to pan and add fruit. Allow to simmer until pork is tender, 20-30 minutes. Remove pork from pan. Turn heat up to high, add apple cider vinegar to pan. Cook 3-5 minutes, or until sauce thickens. Serve pork topped with sauce and fruit.

springs

I am not doing well at sitting still today.

Mark Strand

Another of my 1 cent finds on Amazon. This poem is one of my favorites:

Lines for Winter
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

This point of the year, when November flows into December and winter begins in earnest, is always somewhat hard for me. It's funny, I associate it with the change in the air that comes with the change of the seasons, but that's obviously not the case because the first week of December in Ohio is vastly different, temperature and humidity and wind-wise than the first week of December in Alabama. I almost hoped it would be a little easier when I moved down here. But I guess the calendar is too entrained in my head, and the clinging sadness still comes. It also goes, in time, and that is something to be grateful for.

Pumpkin soup!

I made this a little while ago but only recently actually uploaded the pictures onto the computer. The recipe is slightly modified from one that I found on Dr. Isis the Scientist, but I can't find the original on her archives.

Crema de calabaza

1 leek, finely diced (dice it very well! If you do not, the bigger pieces are kinda gross. you could probably use a few green onions if you had issues with leeks)
2 cans pumpkin (NOT pumpkin pie mix)
1 can coconut milk
1 can sweetened condensed milk
3 cups chicken broth ( I used closer to four because that was how much was in the frozen tub I pulled out of the freezer. It was fine.)
1 tbsp coriander
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp turmeric (I used cumin. it was fine)

Saute the leek in olive oil over medium heat until soft. Add the pumpkin, coconut cream, coconut milk, broth and spices. Turn down to medium low and simmer for 30-45 minutes. Top with cilantro-mint pesto (below) and crumbled cotija cheese.

Cilantro Mint pesto: Blend leaves from one big bunch of cilantro and one small bunch of mint with 1 tsp of ground ginger (I used 1 knob of fresh ginger) and 2 tbsp of olive oil.

Used

I don't think I'd ever trade paper books for electronic ones, because I love the way that used books retain traces of those who read them before. My set of classics I read in high school AP english passed from me, to my friend Amy who was a year younger, to my sister. All three of us left traces in the books, and it's fascinating to reread them and see notes and drawings-all in glittery gel pen-from the three of us. I like that our thoughts and insights-juvenile and raw though they may be-have become part of the book. Re-reading The Great Gatsby because not just the story of Daisy and Nick and Gatsby, but also of our thoughts on character and symbolism, the french verbs I practiced conjugating on the inside of the back cover, Amy's careful cursive matching her first name and her boyfriend at the time's last name, Elizabeth's circled words and faulty definitions, all in sparkling purple ink. I drew careful geometric designs and flowers, while Amy sketched landscapes and animals and Libby didn't draw much at all. Our comments in those books tell a little bit about us and hopes and fears at those moments in time. Little traces, but they add a layer to the book that makes it worth so much more.


I bought a few used books on Amazon recently. One of them, a book of poems called American Primitive by Mary Oliver, had a tiny piece of paper tucked in it, marking a poem called John Chapman. The most recent owner-probably Victor, who wrote his name in the front cover, but who knows how many hands the book has passed through-had written in small handwriting "This is my favorite". I don't know who he was or why he loved the poem. Maybe he had a thing about Johnny Appleseed. Maybe he had to read it for class and liked the imagery of sharing a hollow tree for a bed with "a great slab or bear", or maybe he understood how John's "grey eyes brittled into ice" when he spoke of a deceptive former lover. Maybe he's another Midwesterner raised on tales of the stand of apple tree in the local woods that Johnny Appleseed almost definitely planted, who loves the poem out of a nostalgic ache for the cold woods Oliver describes so well.

I don't know if "John Chapman" is my favorite, but I like the last two stanzas:

Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever

the secret, and the pain,

there's a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
sign of him: patches
of cold white fire.

I like:

• January Jones (Betty Draper on mad men) evidently did a terrible job of hosting SNL, but this sketch is pretty funny: A Lady's guide to party planning. Because cats are girls and dogs are boys!
• The Avett Brothers. I am late to this party, I guess, but I started buying up their songs on iTunes after I heard Murder in the City on the radio. I'm a fool for any nice use of language, so I love their clever and sweet lyrics.
  
• Used books on amazon. I bought the next book for sister book club (Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia), as well as a few volumes of poetry (mary oliver, mark strand, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound) to round out my collection. the total (excluding shipping) was less than $3.00. Moving all my books next year? Is going to suck. Not as much as moving MY CATS, but still.
• New space heater! Because it is freaking cold in my house. It isn't even winter yet!
• Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. My mom told me to read it about a year ago, and I ignored her because I rarely like non-fiction. But I got bored and picked up my roomates copy and it is such an interesting and inspiring book. Mortenson, through the Central Asia Institute that he founded, has built schools for girls in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. His work is a testament to the power that educating and keeping healthy girls and women has to stabilize a community.
  
• One month until I head home for (hopefully) a week off for christmas. It'll be a long haul until then, but it's easiest to handle 30 day stretches of work when there is something good to look forward to at the end. And a week in Ohio is definately a good thing:)
  

Sister Book Club

One of the hardest things about my life right now is being so far away from my sister. I miss my parents too, but being apart from parents is a natural part of growing up. My sister and I have always been extraordinarily close-we grew up in the middle of nowhere with two working parents, so for large chunks of our childhood we had only each other as amusement. We were further away than normal when I went to college, but only for two years, as she followed me there, thanks to our Alma Mater's habit of giving away money like it was candy. We were only truly separated when i moved down here for grad school. I find myself wishing frequently that we were close enough to easily visit for a weekend. I miss cooking with her and making fun of her inferior abilities , going to museums and movies with her, wandering aimlessly around target with her, going hiking, sitting around and talking. She's as shy and awkward as I am, goofy and quirky, and has the biggest heart I've ever known. She's my hero and my best friend, and I hate being so far away.
One way we get quality time even from a distance has been to have a book club. We found a syllabus for an MIT class on novels about dysfunctional families, and now we read the books together and discuss. It lets us flex the literary parts of our brains we abandoned for science/sociology. So far we've read Frankenstein, which we liked a lot even though our discussion was heavy on the women's studies interpretation (The monster is Mary shelley and Frankenstein is her horrible husband Percy! The monster is Mary Shelley's feelings about her miscarried pregnancies!). We read Howard's End, which I liked and she didn't, and To The Lighthouse, which she liked and I, um, failed to finish. We read As I lay Dying, which we both adored. And now we're finishing up Go Tell It On The Mountain, which is a great book but hard to discuss in depth. The last book on the list is the God of Small Things, which I have read before but she hasn't. We're making our own list next, possibly focusing on the Devil and God. I can't wait. Even when I don't finish my reading and have to postpone it (frequently...in my defense, my job is much more time consuming than hers), book club night is one of the highlights of my week.
I would put up a picture of us to close out this thoroughly sappy post, but we are incapable of taking a picture where we both look fully human. I have a round face and she has a thin one, and if I look good she looks like skeletor, whereas if she looks good I look like a pumpkin. It's a problem.

More Fail

I was really looking forward to wearing a skirt and looking nice for a baby shower today. It is not often I have both the occasion and the motivation to primp. Unfortunately, I foolishly tried to walk and apply chapstick and the same time last night and took myself out in a spectacular fall. Now both legs are solid bruises and scrapes from knee to ankle. Pants for me. :(

Not Healthy

Today I had a grapefruit for breakfast. Good job! Then I had sunchips for lunch at 3:30, and donut bread pudding, celery and a pear for dinner. Grown up fail.

Permanence

I very recently deleted two years worth of entries on here, starting fresh. It was mostly a whim-I rarely wrote, and there was nothing I truly wanted to save, nothing that revealed anything about myself. Still, it's weird that my only written record of the past few years is gone.

I have been writing about my life on the internet forever, way before oversharing was cool. I had a xanga site in college and my first year of grad school, mostly a way to keep up with my sorority sisters over breaks. In between breaks, I updated every so often with funny conversations I had with my sister or my roomates, what I was reading and what music I was listening to, what movies I liked, people that made my day. It's a snapshot of what I was like for those years. Before that, I kept a livejournal. It still exists, but that point in my life was so sad that it is almost unbearable to read. Again, it's a snapshot. It's good to remind myself how dark things were, and how I got better. And I wrote offline about my life, obsessively, in a paper journal. Between all of that, I have a clear history of 1998-2006. The details-not consequential enough to remember at the time-of what I liked, what I didn't, what made me laugh, who I loved. From those details I can piece together an overarching picture of what I learned, how I grew, who helped me. It tells my story, in a slightly different way than reaching back into my memories does.

It is a bit strange, now, to have a gap in the record. Perhaps because I reached a point in my life where I don't change as fast. Maybe because I'm less interested in myself. I'm much busier, and too tired most days to be introspective. Or maybe because I'm so focused on the big picture-finishing the next paper, finishing grad school and leaving here-that I forget that it's the little details of every day that make up the good parts of life. At any rate, I am trying once again to fill in the record.

40 days of rain rain rain

I used to love rainy days. Falling asleep to the sound of rain, or waking up cozy under the covers on rainy mornings (provided I had time to stay in bed for at least a little while) were among my favorite things. After this fall: no more.

It has not, technically, rained for forty days. In fact, until the goddamn hurricane remnants swept through, we had something like 10 days without rain. But september and october were exceptionally wet, and four inches in the past 24 hours I think have ruined the patter of raindrops on windowpanes for me forever.

Do not go to graduate school, children

I have been in graduate school approximately forever.

This is not true. I have been in graduate school for four and a half years. I will be done with my PhD sometime between five and five and a half years. This is entirely reasonable. I will graduate right on time. It just feels like it has been forever.

On average, I like the work I do. Intellectually, I love what I study and find it exciting and fascinating. On a day-to-day basis, some tasks are soul crushing, some are fun, most are routines I could do in my sleep. In theory, it is like any other job, really better than most jobs. But something clicked in my brain and I am Ready. To. Go. I have told everyone I know who will listen, and several people I don't know, including two (2) cashiers at the grocery store. I'm not sure when it became unbearable, or why. Right now, whenever someone asks me to do something that does not move me one day closer to finishing, I feel like there is only a thin veil of will power keeping me from devolving into a shrieking banshee.

More than anything, I feel like the rest of my life-whatever it holds-is somewhere else. Waiting for the next year while I slog through to the finish will take patience. That's something I have never had a lot of.

Le blog, encore une fois

I had a very good day. I'm drowsy from sitting in the sun with a beer outside a football stadium tailgating with friends for hours and hours. I won't miss many things about the deep south, but gorgeous 70 degree days under golden leaves in November is definitely one of them.

Now the air has cooled, and I am sitting in my recliner, wrapped in my handmade blankets, anxious cats on my lap, both frightened by a stray outside. I am thinking about how I am happy with my life today. I have thought about myself more than usual this week, and this is what I have learned: For all the sorrow thus far, I am remarkably whole. My capacity to love is great and undiminished. I am almost a doctor. I am still shy and guarded, more so than I want to be, but the challenge of overcoming that is almost exciting. Or maybe being at a point in life where my biggest problem is shyness is exciting. I am loved by amazing people, friendships that are standing strong through tests of time and distance. I am brave: I moved away from everything I knew and built a new life from scratch. I had no idea the courage that takes, the courage it gives you. In a year I'm going to do it again and I can't wait.