happy as a pig in compost

just finished baking bread and making hummus ... 8:30 is far too late to eat that robust a snack, but i could not resist, with both still warm and the bread so crusty ...
plus it is now frigid outside, snowing hard and blowing harder, and i managed to fog up all my windows so i can't see it. mmm.

hail!

Man, the weather here is being downright bizarre ... it was 45 when i got up this morning, and i glanced at the weather, which said it would drop throughout the day to around freezing and there would be sleet tonight. so, i'm sitting at my desk, and the day goes from being overcast to being black, and it begins to rain, then pour, then HAIL! it hailed for about 5 minutes, and now it's almost sunny again, and much much colder. and apparently, the temperature is going to drop to 0 tonight, so that we'll have had an almost 50 degree drop in 24 hours. yikes! this isn't winter, this is crazy.

history and culture on the eastern seaboard

I had a lovely visit to the fair city of Philadelphia, Thursday night through Sunday evening. My friend Peter is an excellent host, and lives in an awesome part of town. He lives in Old Town, which is a neighborhood of the Old City neighborhood, right near the river, and chock-full of historic homes and minuscule streets. As we're driving into Old City on the way back from the airport, driving down the main drag, Market Street, we drive past an alley between 1st and 2nd street. The alley is labeled Bank St., and Pete says, "that's my street." I say, "you live in the alley?" and he says yes. Pete is known for telling jokes, so i assume that this is a joke and move on. We park the car a few blocks away and walk ... back to this 'alley.' He wasn't joking, his street is just so old that it's too skinny for cars. He lives in an old barrel factory, with all brick walls and high ceilings with exposed pipes. Very urban, very chic. Definitely a yuppie bachelor pad - a black velour couch, a big-screen TV that's actually the monitor for his souped-up computer, a massive collection of good alcohol, and a fridge full of condiments and no food (that last is a quote from Fight Club, but in this case is totally true - the shelves in his refrigerator were totally empty except a Brita pitcher and assorted barbecue sauces).
The weather was beautiful for us, and we spent Friday wandering around the city - we walked the 20 blocks to the Mutter museum of medical oddities, which is in a medical school. It was horrendously creepy - lots of deformed fetuses in jars and wax recreations of horrible diseases. I was glad i went, but when we left i genuinely felt nauseous. We also visited the Green Market in the middle of the city, which is an indoor market with all kinds of vendors - lots of prepared foods, but also fruit and vegetable vendors and lots of cute Mennonite and Amish ladies selling honey and pickled things. We went out to dinner at a Korean restaurant, where our meals were served in steaming-hot stone bowls - delicious, and a little thrill of danger while you eat ... will i burn myself horribly, or will i be okay?!
then our friends Paul and Ben arrived from Washington, D.C., and we had a fun night out on the town. Saturday was a day with much hanging out and catching up about life as young urban professionals, and wandering the city to see the Liberty Bell (about 5 blocks from Pete's house) and Ben Franklin's house (1 block away) and various other cool old things and neat newer things. Ben and Paul left on Sunday morning, and Pete and I spent a day in Center City and driving around the area.
All in all, i'd say it was a successful weekend - i didn't have to pay for a thing, as i bought my plane tickets. i got to spend many hours with some of my favorite people. i got to see a city i'd never been to before. i'd like to go back to Philadelphia someday - it really seems like a nice city.
Now i'm back to good ol' Chicago, where it's dreary and rainy, which is not making me feel any more energetic or excited at being back to work.

the US is depressing once again

On NPR this morning i heard a story about advances in elevator technology so that people can safely use the elevators in case of a fire ... ostensibly, this is to compensate for making buildings so tall that it takes forever to walk down the stairs, and so that handicapped people who take the elevator in can take the elevator out. All of this makes sense to me, but then the story goes on to say that they're also doing this because Americans are getting so fat and so much slower at going down stairs than we were formerly.
Seems like once again we are treating a symptom rather than the disease. Oh, Americans ... if only we could learn to love the experience of eating, and the taste of eating good food, rather than being devoted to quantities ...

knitting!!

I finished my first hat ever! Pictures to come ... it's a bit rough here and there. This morning i started my next trick, which will be a series of recycled-cotton dishcloths so i can learn and practice different stitches. i'm horribly proud of myself because i successfully remembered how to cast-on.
i wonder if there's enough left of the hat-yarn to make another one ...
i think a scarf is next, because that seems fun and not hard.

books

I just finished reading Oryx and Crake - what a good book! how creepy and awesome. i highly recommend it.
now i'm on to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ... also good!
by 'reading' here i mean 'listening' ... i've got them on cd, downloaded on my ipod, so i can listen at work. it sure makes the time go faster!

many things

So, Empanada Saturday went smashingly. On Saturday morning, i headed down to Rachel's house and we went to a farmer's market in a Catholic church. they had very little on offer, as apparently winter markets are a new enough phenomenon in Chicago that the local farmers don't have a handle on how much to produce. so, no produce (verb the first time, noun the second ...). but i did get some MEAT from a family-run, free-range, antibiotic-free farm in NW IL. bacon and breakfast sausage!!
then, back to Rachel's house, where we mixed up the dough. i got the recipe from epicurious.com, where all of the reviewers said this was the best recipe ever. it did turn out pretty darn well, despite me misreading the recipe and using it to make twice as many empanadas as it was supposed to - the dough still held up to being that thin! we filled the empanadas with eggplant-almond filling, the recipe from Mom for enchiladas. i was so fat and happy by the end of that meal that i went home and went to bed while my friends went out on the town.
on Sunday, Rachel and our friend Zack came up to Evanston for my session. it was a grand old time. when 6:00 rolled around, the usual quitting time, we headed back to my house and made hippie pancakes (meaning, cornmeal and whole-wheat flour, with yogurt, the ones that Adam wouldn't eat) and bacon and stuffed ourselves silly. my apartment still has a little ... aura of bacon to it. what a treat! it had been a while since i'd had that, and it's *good* bacon.
i am now on my third week of baking pumpernickel bread, and i keep betting better. i think i might be a convert. it's just so satisfying (to eat, i mean - making it doesn't feel any different than other bread).
oh, also on Saturday, Rachel took me to her neighborhood knitting store and i bought some more supplies, including a Stitch Dictionary so i can learn fun tricks! so now i'm trying to finish this hat before i move on to anything else - no Drawer of Unfinished Projects for me! i think i'll be done by bedtime tomorrow. (fingers crossed - i mean fingers knitting furiously!)

recent food endeavors

At the end of last year, my friend Rachel and I decided that January would be the month of food wrapped in bread. We would make a new crusty delight at least once a week. We inaugurated this by making Calzones last weekend ... mm, delicious!! Mom's pizza crust recipe (in lieu of my usual hippie whole-wheat, non-stretchable creation), homemade mozzarella (I made it by myself!) ... here's the recipe for the mozzarella, homemade (by Rachel) sauce with lots of onions and garlic, and a filling of leftovers consisting of roasted butternut squash, onions, sweet potatoes, potatoes, etc. A winter melange, if you will.

I can't remember if i ever reported on my first mozzarella venture - again, with Rachel, and our friend Zack. I ordered all of the necessary supplies (just 2 really, rennet and citric acid) from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, bought a thermometer and a gallon of milk, and went to town. It was awesome! a gallon of milk yields about a pound of mozzarella (and 3/4 gallon of whey, but that's another story ... apparently you can use whey to water plants? i just drink it and use it instead of water in my oatmeal) and fresh mozzarella has a texture that is difficult to describe and produces a joy that is impossible to recreate.

Tonight, we are heading down to Zack's house to make sushi ... for once, a cheese-free endeavor. I just learned (albeit from Wikipedia) that most Wasabi that you can buy is not 'true' wasabi, but is made from a different variety of the wasabi horseradish. I wouldn't have thought to research this, but the checkout man at Whole Foods brought it to my attention.

omnivory

i just finished The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I want everyone to read it. Some parts are scary, about our industrial food system and how bad it is for us, the animals, and the ecosystem, and some parts are incredibly thought-provoking, exploring the nature of the relationship between an organism and its food. there is a good deal of discussion of ignorance versus enlightenment (not with a capital E, just in terms of where your food comes from and its true cost). i think it's worth everyone's time to read it, since everyone eats.
now i'm starting Deep Economy, on mom and dad's recommendation. i think i'll love this one too.
i spent a while yesterday trolling the Slow Foods websites, trying to find a job opportunity ... unfortunately it's still too small to be hiring unskilled, inexperienced folks like me ... but i want to help!!!

last night i helped my friend Rachel cook some chicken. We made an *awesome* dinner of chicken roasted in the pan with butternut squash, fingerling potatoes, sweet potato, onions, and garlic. the winner of this meal was Adam's Christmas Italian rub - i'd never rubbed meat before, but it did a wonderful job. the chicken was wonderfully juicy and imbued everything else with a lovely herby, salty butteriness. And i felt okay about the chicken, my first in ... at least a year, probably more, as it was pasture-raised, organic, and hormone-free. while i have no guarantee that this chicken had a high-quality, happy life, it sure tasted like it. chicken is the one meat that never tempts me to break vegetarianism, as i'm much more of a red-meat girl (and bacon, ooh, bacon) but this was certainly an enjoyable chicken.
It bears mentioning that Rachel shares many of my views on animals and the consumption thereof, and was vegetarian for a long while (vegan, for a small bit), but has since given up vegetarianism in the interest of her own health - her body has dictated her omnivory in no uncertain terms. she, like Michael Pollan is urging us to (both in Omnivore's Dilemma and in his latest, In Defense of Food), tries to consider where her meat is coming from and make very deliberate decisions based on maximizing the nutritional value of what she consumes while minimizing the environmental and societal degradation of that food's production. i find it easier to stick to vegetables. although, as people occasionally point out, vegetarians are contributing to animal death as well, if you count all of the small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and ground-nesting birds that meet their doom in the teeth of crop harvesters, not to mention the loss of life from "pest-control" regimes, not to mention the habitat loss from conversion of woods, prairies, wetlands, whatever, to croplands.
everything's a tradeoff. but i prefer to know these things and think about these things and then decide to keep eating, rather than live in ignorance while the carpet is pulled out from under me.