FOUND!

Add a new item to the list of apartment awesomeness:

There are some good things lying around in boxes on the sidewalks within 4 blocks the house around 8 or 9 pm most nights of the week. We picked up all of this at just 3 places last night. Already made compote with the apples and strawberries, scarfed down the grapes with shredded ginger (magic!), I've roasted some of the eggplants for eggplant caviar, and stuffed my face with more fresh strawberries. I should add that the best find we didn't even take, which was so many hardy greens - think collards. But I picked up the winter CSA this weekend, and the fridge is seeping greenage. But point being: this neighborhood is prime free food spot!

In other news, for those keeping track at home...

We were all forced to buy new calendars.

Some hot sailors kissed.

New Brunswick celebrated global warming.

First polar bear swim of the year.

We got a new pet.EP danced with a dog. I thought this was a camera. (It's not.)

What have you done in 2012?

Adding to the Wishlist

With the CSA providing vegetable bounties bi-weekly, I have a request of the universe: a website where you plug in some ingredients and it spits out some suggestions for things to cook with them. I know, I know, there is such a thing already. It's called "your brain," and is sometimes also referred to as "your imagination." Or even the "index" in your friendly volume of How to Cook Everything under the Sun. But, you know, I'm kind of lazy. The veggy drawer currently contains beets, potatoes, leeks, sweet corn, onions, sage, carrots, and thyme. I'm seeing leek-potato soup, beet-potato-carrot-veganaise salad, and corn on the cob. But how awesome would it be if there were some kind of thing I could make that would involve ALL of the above? Perhaps this is what my mother had in mind when she would regularly make her famous(ly reviled) "vegetable soup."

CSA Wish Fulfillment

1st week of CSA was quite satisfying, though according to the veterans in the volunteer corp yesterday, the early weeks are a bit light on the harvest. I am not disappointed, though. I picked up:-spinach
-kale
-romaine lettuce
-cilantro-sage
-thyme
-radishes-garlic ramps
These came in generous bunches, and I even got extras for volunteering!

This is what garlic ramps look like:

First CSA meal included: coconut rice with lemony fried seitan and vegan sage-nutmeg creamed-spinach with coconut milk for the cream. With salty radish on the side and almond bits on top.


The spinach is Bittman's, though the addition of coconut milk to all my cooking should properly be credited to roommatenews.com, that is EB.

This Just In

Read all about it: the de-Russification of cauliflower soup!

There is a vegetable soup that my mom used to make pretty much every day of the week after work that was followed by some kind of meat or fish dish that usually varied from day to day. The cauliflower soup, however, nearly always stayed the same and it always kind of grossed me out. It had mushy pieces of cauliflower and carrot shavings floating in a wan broth and had oily bubble slicks on the surface whose job was to collect and pool the multitudes of tooth-clogging, cough-inducing little dill shavings. My job, as it seemed to me then, was to try to get all the oily little bubbles to form one big bubble in the middle of the bowl. (I seem to remember being made to sit with it late into the evening if it was not consumed... Sorry, mom!) Anyway, can you believe, I had a bona fide nostalgia craving for the cauliflower soup yesterday? It's true. Turns out it's not as bad as I remember it. Plus, I discovered an ingredient that saved it from the murky depths of the usual dilly cauliflowery pervoe (1st course) of traditional Russian dinner. Rice wine vinegar! Strange, but true.

--

Not Your Mama's Cauliflower Soup

-1 head cauliflower, cleaned and chopped into bite-sized pieces
-1 carrot, peeled and chopped into circles
-1 yellow onion, chopped
-2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
-as much dill as you can handle
-olive oil
-vegan bouillon cube, if you so desire
-wheat pasta spirals
-rice wine vinegar
-fresh basil leaves
-chopped black pepper

1. Saute onions in olive oil until translucent. Add garlic and carrots. Stir around to get everything coated.
2. (Optional: roast cauliflower before adding.) Add cauliflower, dill, pepper. Stir and cook covered so the vegetables sweat a bit.
3. Meanwhile, boil some water and dissolve the bouillon cube in a bit of it. When the veg is nearly ready - still crunchy - add the water and cube and bring to boil.
4. Once everything is boiling, drop in some handfuls of pasta spirals and cook just until al dente. Turn off heat and sprinkle with some rice wine vinegar.
5. Serve garnished with fresh chopped basil.

I wonder how adding the vinegar at the sweating vegetable stage would change things? I like how adding it at the end gives it a vinegary kick. Maybe cooking it in earlier would mellow it out and make it a more "mature" melding of flavors? Based on the previous anecdote, though, I probably prefer my soup in its juvenile state.

Only Sort of Inspiring (Or Is It?)

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

(Michel Foucault interview in Technologies of the Self)

For all of us trying to write, these words are cold comfort, no? Nonetheless, are they not also secretly exciting?


So, I've decided to stay on and try to write here while I can.

I heard a story recently by the expatriated Canadian Mavis Gallant called "When We Were Nearly Young." In it, a girl goes to Madrid thinking that "if I set myself against a background into which I could not possibly merge, that some outline would present itself." It doesn't work. (Or does it?)

I'm waiting for an outline, too. Not so much of myself, but of the way I want to write about the things that I am writing about. It's coming, slowly, and I'm scared that if I leave and go through all the steps of playing house again, I'll lose momentum and the things that are exciting now will slip my mind.


Here are some boring things that I've been doing to get excited about another Moscow year:
1) ordering books and shoes for MomGote to bring in June
2) reconstituting dried chickpeas for making hummus
3) begging you guys to visit (!)


4) reciting Saroyan: It'll hit you you in July.

Warm and Crusty

Justine Lai, Join or Die,* 2007

I cannot stop looking at these paintings. On the surface of it, the project sounds super-stupid: a 24-year-old recent college grad paints self-portraits of herself getting it on with each President of the United States in chronological order. Yup, that's right. But there's something about them that's kind of amazing. I'm going to try to describe it, but maybe it's just a gut feeling, so feel free to skip these next three parts.

I'm surprised, first of all, because I'm really not into art that's about artists' own sex lives.** Koons's brand of pop being the prime example of why: it feels exhibitionist, flashy, conversation-halting, kind of gross, and not really as interested in exploring meanings as using sex to get a rise. What's most annoying about this is that the rise is temporary. You either put it in the art category, or you don't. If not, you may just say it's pornography, which is fine. We've all got genitals, why not? But even if you do accept it into the hallowed halls of, say, the MCA, it's still, as Koons himself says, just a "ta-da" moment. (Not my thing, art- or porn-wise.)

Lai's works don't work this way. Certainly, her pop roots are strong. There's the initial shock of the subject-matter, the magpie treatment of cultural icons, the play with reality and fantasy. But there's also this other thing, what I think of as the sustainable side of pop. It's like this curious calling-attention-to that touches off more thoughts and resists that Koonsian hardening of the surface.***

For example, John Tyler's strange, blind fingering in her mouth and her fearful one-eyed gaze while grabbing his wrist. What's that about? Or Abe Lincoln's weary teat and wearier face. Of course! Of course, that's what that would look like! As Lai herself writes, it's about the vulnerability and the ambiguity. It becomes more than a game of three-card monte with "the artist," "the presidential likeness," and "the viewer" each cycling through their proper positions. They escape becoming fixed or known entities in the exchange, while the range of emotions on display ensures that the stakes remain fairly high, not jokey. I suspect this will become harder with the more recent presidents, since their roles in our collective sex fantasies are more clearly scripted. The first 18, though, are really impressive.

Justine Lai, Join or Die, 2008

To what else does this post's title refer? Why, homemade bread, of course. I've got a batch of this 20-hour creature rising and bubbling by the radiator right now. Should be ready to go by late-morning tomorrow. In this video, the baker from whom Bittman cribbed the recipe demonstrates how everything, even bread - especially bread! - has all this secret knowledge behind it involving squiggles and cracks, crumbs, crusts, and bubbles, proportions, substrates, and who knows what else? In other words, like snuggling up to a fat Martin Van Buren, delicious. Good night.

*No idea what the title means...
**Strange, I'm having trouble coming up with other examples not by Koons where the artist him/herself figures into the explicit image and not just images of partners, implied partners, or stand-ins. Comments?
***Like a printing error in a Warhol Car Crash.

ETA: The bread was a disaster. Better luck next time?

Toothy Carrot Soup

Totally unintended product placement.

People! MasterGote totally shocked himself today by improvising a recipe and having it turn out good. Like, really good. Sweet, sweet vindication goes well with a little peppery carrot soup.

Some background: I watched this awkward interview the other day and decided that 1) in addition to providing me with sufficiently indignant, yet pleasantly humorous updates on the apocalypse, Rachel M is, indeed, the cutest; 2) Martha S totally has a crush on Rachel, resulting in her uttering responses such as "Oh, really? OK"; and 3) carrot soup sounds kind of easy to make.

Carrot soup, as Martha tells us, requires a blender and two cups of broth. Check and check. Remember aerial reconnaissance? That was the prewar Bundesrepublik Fungusbrothia. Made using both fresh white mushrooms and dried shiitakes from Bella's trip to Switzerland. (Um, yes, that chocolate is long gone...)

So, to sum up, I modified Martha's recipe a little bit and, though I did not try her version from the TV machine, I was shocked (in a good way) when I saw and tasted mine. The key to this carrot soup with a kick are: mushroom broth (instead of regular), a lot of pepper and ginger, additional greenery, such as dill and parsley, to deepen the orange color and make cute little green flecks, and ixnay on the milk. The whole thing took about one and a quarter episodes of Rachel, or about an hour.

Here's how it was done:

1) Chop up a bunch of carrots into circles and half-circles to fill a deep soup bowl.
2) Heat up 3 T butter in a soup pan and add half an onion (chopped). Cook for a bit, and then add the carrots, one clove garlic (minced), a chunk of ginger (grated), sea salt, a good amount of ground black pepper and then a little more, and a couple of pinches of brown sugar. Cook the veg until the carrots start to soften up, suck up the butter, and get a bit dry. (The carrots, not you, dahling.)
3) At this point, add about 2 cups mushroom broth and keep cooking until the carrots get baby-tooth soft, around 15 minutes, or a Rachel interview with Cindy McCain, a story about the Dutch baseball team beating the DR twice in the World Baseball Classic, and Just Enough Pop Culture with her friend Kent.
4) Once the carrots are nice and soft, add some chopped parsley and dill into the mix, and cook a little bit longer, like through the Cocktail Moment and the commercial.
5) Forget the milk, and blend the whole thing in your loud loud loud blender.

Pretend like Spicy Squid Salad never happened.

Cooking Challenge #2

I am imagining a juicy loaf of brown speckled fluffiness. Something between a warm, steamy banana bread and the rolling, fat thigh of a gurgling, laughing baby. That I can slice and put on a plate. Like the meat loaf of your dreams, but made of guilt-free, delicious fungus and root veggies.


I also have a strainer-full of little winking mushrooms and carrots that I've boiled with bay leaves and herbs to make a steamy mushroom broth (see below), with which I am now dressing my daily portion of buckwheat kasha and may use to make a glazed carrot or glazed beet soup. But, the strained goodies, how could I throw these away? Let's travel to the future together and collectively invent a recipe for vegetarian meat loaf made from these little tidbits!

How would you go about making this dream loaf? Would you add some bread crumbs and maybe an egg or two and some milk and blend before baking in a bread pan? Would you roast some other things into the mix? Which herbs? Comrades, let's make this veggie loaf dream happen!

Making Do...Another Cooking Dispatch

The mid-year report that I have been asked to fill out on my progress so far asked how I have dealt with social and cultural differences and changes in my daily life here in Farawayistan. Well, one frankly underreported difficulty (I have hardly complained about this at all!) has been my lack of a microwave and my resulting feelings about cooking for one. Namely, it is a huge pain in the kiester to cook for myself when reheating anything made in more than one portion means frying it in a pan the next day. I'm not even talking about the fact that my frying pan has no handle. This is purely a greasy-food issue. So, in the interest of getting the word out, I'm blowing the whistle on the no-microwave situation. And, as an extra-special bonus, I'm offering a solution that does not involve purchasing extra equipment that will not fit in my suitcases or my future electrical sockets anyway. Here we go:

Step 1) Cook something. Let's say: boil some potato chunks, add butter, salt, and dill. Go ahead, let your eyes be bigger than your stomach and cook way more than you can eat. Don't worry, no need to invite friends over, this one's all for you.

Step 2) Eat more than you should, but leave some in a tupperware in the fridge to ensure self-respect in the morning.

Step 3) Pull out all those little plastic bags you have squirreled away in the cupboard and discover, behind random rice cookers and bread pans...are you ready?...a blender!!!!

Step 4) Cook a soup whose main ingredient is whatever you didn't finish the day before. Look! The Times has like 10 soup recipes that involve potatoes in its health section right now. Don't worry that the main ingredient is already cooked, will get mushy, blablabla; when you blend it, it all turns out awesome. I bet it works with anything: potatoes, eggplant, probably pasta, maybe even pickled herring. Awwwright!

Step 5) If you don't eat all the soup that day, repeat the process the next day to create a kind of second-degree soup, or soup to the soupth power. This is a special kind of cooking I like to think of as "cooking with eugenics." (Related examples of this might be yogurt or kombucha, where you grow a strain of "good" [Gr. "eu"] bacteria in a neutral medium like milk or sweet tea and then perpetuate the strain by adding a little bit of the old batch to the regular old medium to form a new batch.) Our leftover soup example, however, is even more eugenic, because not only are you perpetuating the genes of the yummy leftovers, but you are concentrating them in a new and more powerful super-soup whose qualities we can scarcely imagine today. History may condemn you and you might die of food poisoning. But - need I even say it? - it will be delicious.

Addendum: Soup

Because MasterGote is not on Facebook, oversharing of mundane daily details commences now.

The Leftover Potato Soup:

1) Chop an onion and a leek. Fry them in butter for a while in your handle-less frying pan until they are soft. Garlic optional. Don't forget the salt.

2) Boil some water. If you have dried mushrooms in the cupboard, boil some water with dried mushrooms.

3) Put the green stuff in the mushroom water. Simmer for a bit.

4) Add random spices from the spice rack. I tried: basil, thyme, bay leaf, black pepper, salt. You could do parsley or dill. Or hot red pepper flakes. Whatever. Don't go too crazy with the thyme. Or do.

5) Dump last night's potatoes into the simmering soup.

6) Add a veggie bouillon cube that you've dissolved in some of the liquid. Take it slow, those things are kind of strong.

7) Boil until you get bored, then let cool a bit. If you have miso, add it now.

8) Then, when you've cooled it enough that accidental explosions from the blender will not scald your face, attempt to operate your new blender. (Make sure to remove bay leaves and close the cover before pressing any buttons. Duh.)

9) Enjoy with buttered black bread and a subsequent nap in your bear cave.

Queer Links?

What do the following two things have in common?

• an essay about footnotes ("i through xvii" by Christoph Boots, LTTR 4)
• a zine about pickling and cheesemaking ("Wild Fermentation: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Cultural Manipulation" by Sandor Ellix Katz)
  

I'm starting to forget why this makes sense, but I'm going to ponder while my cabbage¹ ferments.

¹Deviant cabbage!!!

Also

I have lost the ability to make salad dressing. I pour the oil. I salt and pepper. I pour the lemon juice. And then my salad tastes like the sourest grape in existance. Actually, it just tastes like it's been washed in lemon. wtf?

Veto

Family obligation obligated me to eat, for the first time in my life, a cheburek.

Although this is not an image of the very cheburek that I consumed, these pimple-faced, meat-filled twinsies resemble the very one very well. And I trust you will not be surprised when I tell you that the verdict is in:

VETO!!!!!

Notes on a Spicy Squid Salad

To the 1.5-2.0 interested parties (and I am not specifying here who is the full party and whose party is potentially half-full; and anyway, the number refers to magnitude of interest, not out and out Personhood):

I herein submit that a Spicy Squid Salad was made.

Signed faithfully,
MasterGote
7/19/2008

Some Further Field Notes:

It seems, from previous and present experience, that MasterGote has a masterful ability for Russification.

Russification (culinary): n. simplification, blandification, the process of removing flavor and increasing salt content, esp. without explicit prior intent on the part of MasterGote.

In this case, Russification of S.S.S. was achieved through a combination of methods. Including, but probably not limited to:
-the washing-out of seeds from all seven hot peppers called for in the recipe;
-the washing and not thoroughly drying of bay scallops and squid;
-the use, instead of a wok, of a dutch oven (obtained from MG's Russian mother via MG's Russian brother), the last two steps resulting not in an oily flash-fry complete with heady display of exploding squid tentacles, but in a liquescent stew accompanied by the niggling possiblity of undercooking resulting in subsequent collective heaving by the unsuspecting subjects of this culinary experiment.

To wit, a picture of the leftovers:


And a close-up to demonstrate the extent of the Russification:


Suffice it to say: my shirt bears the evidence of a delicious morning-after meal.