A Shot in the Dark

It's cold here. Finally, legitimately, cold. When it got down to the 30s around Christmas, it was chilly. I got out my gloves and hat, and carried on. I went home to Cleveland, enjoyed seeing the snow, shivered, and came back down here to Texas where it was probably in the 40s. This morning, it was 21 when I went out to my car at 10:30am, and I would call that actually cold. Of course, I already knew that it was actually cold because my apartment has zero insulation and incredibly leaky sliding glass doors. Last night, I slept with long underwear on under my PJs, which I have never done before! To be fair, that's probably because somehow I never thought of it before. Anyway, apparently I am not alone in thinking that this is legitimately cold, because apparently Texas ran out of power. That's right, folks. With wind-chills in the teens, the Great State of Texas is enforcing rolling blackouts. As one radio show put it this morning, "Wouldn't it suck if you were homeless, and you finally decided that breaking and entering was better than freezing to death and you broke in somewhere only to find that the power was off?" I had power this morning in my apartment, and consequently heat, but who knows what the day will hold. Hopefully my cats and instruments will not have exploded due to the cold if the power's out for a while, because it surely won't stay warm in there on its own, what with the practically open to the outside situation of the sliding doors. At least one set of friends here were unlucky enough to have had their power shut off around the time they needed to get up. Not much worse than getting out of bed into a refrigerator. My only personal experience with the blackouts so far has been the darkness of the traffic light at 2222 and Lamar on the way to work. It's a big intersection, and it took forever to get through it. Some of you may have heard me explain that I have learned Texans are afflicted with a tragic disability that renders them unable to observe the rules of a four way stop. Luckily, I've found that they are at least by and large observant drivers, so if one just takes one's turn gingerly in such situations, oncoming traffic will yield. So, here I am at work, typing away, scanning documents, and hoping that the power doesn't go out. Less out of a desire to preserve the work I'm doing than out of a desire not to be plunged into total darkness here in my windowless office. Good luck to those of you who are actually suffering from winter weather rather than just poor civic planning! I'm off to download the flashlight app for my phone...

The Jigsaw of Life?

There is a carelessness that comes of having a good idea where you fit into the world. The world in question need not be the world at large. It could be as small as your family unit, your work, your play. Great upheavals in our lives lead to a sense of something being askew. That something is us, and the difficulty in adjusting is to place a puzzle piece that doesn't quite fit. Do you reshape the piece, or recut the hole? Or simply try the piece in a different puzzle?

Necessity is the mother of reinvention

I am sitting in my half-empty apartment. The movers came today to take my stuff away. They came 3 hours early, which meant I had to cancel a meeting with my thesis advisor to have him sign it so I could submit it. They took what felt like forever but which was actually just a couple of hours, which, given how long it would have taken me to do myself, was basically instantaneous. When they were gone, I went to meet with the advisor, finally, and although he confessed he had not read it due to technological problems, he said he was confident my work was deserving and signed anyway. From his office, I went to another office to get a form signed, then went to the library to submit my thesis, pay the binding fee, and get the form signed by a different person. Then I took the pink copy of this form back to guy number 2, and then I was officially done with my thesis. Despite the scavenger hunt, it was rather anticlimactic. Anticlimax was somewhat countered by celebratory lemon ice, followed by cleaning. The majority of my Boston friends are either on their way to or already in Vermont this evening. I would have liked to have gone with them, but alas it was not to be. I'm sure they'll have a great time, and they might even miss me a little, but all that leaves me here in my echoing room. As I contemplate losing myself in Assassin's Creed 2 to stave off both the echoes and the silence, it seems as good a time as any to redesign my blog. After all, am I not about to reinvent myself in a way? Blogger made a pretty slick new tool for designing, and it's fun! If only self-reinvention came with templates.

Where?

I have been thinking a lot recently about place. Specifically, if I have one. If so, where is it? If not, how do I find one? Is it something I even need to have? In Cleveland, there is an empty house that was once "home" with all the messy, sentimental glory the term suggests. That glory faded not quite 4 years ago. In Cleveland there is also a house that has become a home again, but not "home." It isn't mine, and I've lived away from it too long to claim it as my own. In Oberlin, I had "home" but had to leave to have "life." Pity when those two can't coexist. In Boston, I have had apartments, dwellings. Boston was never home. Now I am leaving here for somewhere new. What I did not realize when I left for college, or when I left for grad school, is that moving to new places is made significantly easier by knowing that what you're leaving behind is solid. You know, viscerally, that when they say "you can't go back home" they're absolutely right. But you can still visit, and that's as it should be. We grow up, we move away, we come home to visit, and return to our lives. But what happens when "home" is a moving target? My father is being interviewed for a position at Dartmouth. I hope he gets it for a lot of reasons. But the prospect of not having a place to stay in Cleveland is unexpectedly disturbing. Can a city feel like home when you have to sleep on a friend's couch when you go there?

Consort Conspiracy

After a very long time in the works, our first concert is this Friday night! Please come if you're in Boston, and please bring your friends! It's going to be great music, in an entertaining format.

http://www.consortconspiracy.com

Whole Chicken Adventure, Part 1

This is exactly what our Crockpot looks like.

Digikami and I are in the midst of an experiment. "I want to try cooking a chicken in the slow cooker," I said. I am currently obsessed with the Crockpot, and use it ALL THE TIME. (That last part was not a quote from the conversation, but might as well have been.) "Sounds like a plan," he said, "and by the way, here is this website where they used a whole chicken to eat for a week on $26." We made some plans, which involved scrapping every one of those people's recipes and subbing in our own, and went to the store to stock up. I forgot to save the receipt, so unfortunately the money side of our experiment will have to remain conjecture. I think it is safe to say that two people eating all of a chicken will be saving some money. And also might get totally sick of chicken and never want to eat it again. So on Wednesday at 8am, I put the water on for coffee, cut up some carrots and celery, and hacked an onion in to quarters. I ground the coffee beans, and cut the plastic from our 7 pound roasting chicken, let's call her Beatrice.


This is someone else's photo, but it represents the grace and beauty of our dear bird quite well.

It turns out that good old Beatrice was a pretty opinionated bird and was a little reluctant to relinquish her internal organs. I managed to convince her it was in her best interests to let go of the packet, but her retaliation was to remind me the hard way that there's quite a bit of bloody water inside a whole chicken. At this point, my kettle was screeching, so I washed my hands and poured the water into the French press. I finally got Beatrice cleaned up, plopped her in on top of the veggies, sprinkled her with salt and rosemary, and triumphantly put the lid on the Crockpot. Then I swore because 1) I hadn't had any coffee yet, which is a serious problem with Crockpot cooking that nobody ever warns you about, and 2) the chicken was sticking up out of the Crockpot and the lid wasn't on right. After a moment wafting delicious, life-giving coffee steam toward my nose, I proceeded to shove as many of the vegetables as would fit into the gaping body cavity of our honored guest. Equally triumphantly and significantly more successfully, I smacked the lid on, poured my coffee and ran off to work. Returning home at about 5:30, I was delighted to find that the apartment just smelled vaguely and pleasantly of chicken, not like the smothering, disgusting stench of cooking chicken broth, which, as you might have inferred, I don't like very much. "Well hello, Beatrice!" I said. Yes, I talk when there is no human around to hear me. DEAL WITH IT. "Let's see if you're done, shall we? Good thing I have this handy meat thermometer!" Ladies and gentlemen, chickens are done cooking when their internal temperature reaches 160 degrees F. Ideally, you take meat out/off of the heat source a little early so the residual heat finishes the cooking and it doesn't get too done. Well, upon jamming the probe into poor Beatrice, the reading shot up to 185. "Good heavens!" I think. (Or something similar, but quite possibly more profane.) "I'll just try a different part, maybe that was incorrect." My next reading being an instant 200, I decide it might be time to liberate Beatrice. There is a nifty trick in which you use the handle of a spoon stuck inside the bird to lift it, and I figure that would be my best bet for getting a really hot bird out of a really hot ceramic pot. I select my weapon of choice from the utensil pot, put it in the chicken, lift up, and promptly fling little bits of meat and grease up the side of the fridge. Turns out the only thing holding Beatrice together at that point was habit, and the spoon slipped right through, breaking the wishbone in the process. Beatrice wins again. Abandoning the spoon trick as a lost cause, I settle for grabbing a drumstick and pulling as gently as possible. A lot of cursing and splattering later, this is what our beautiful whole chicken looks like upon her emergence from the Crockpot:


Thank you, thank you. I know my culinary skills are truly inspiring.

I cover that mess with foil and shove it in the oven to get it out of the way. Then, because I am a good Midwestern girl at heart, I see the goo and think it should become gravy.



It is at about this point that Digikami gets home from work. He is much amused by the small glass full of chicken fat, and even more amused once I point him toward the mangled remains that we are going to call sustenance for the next week or so. He agrees to begin making stuffing. Relieved to be off the hook, I take a shower. When I return, Digikami is poking at some bread crumbs and muttering to himself. Now, while the latter may be a more or less common experience, the former isn't so much. "There's plastic in here," he tells me. One garbage can spelunking trip later, we determine that somehow part of the bread bag got mixed in during the process. I volunteer to pick it out.


Henry is supervising. Irony of ironies, there is an issue of Fine Cooking on the table.

Once the plastic was all mostly removed, dinner progressed nicely. The gravy was gelatinous and lumpy, but all in all, everything was quite successful! Somehow, despite cooking the chicken in a single pot, we managed to use every other dish in the entire kitchen in the 20 or so minutes leading up to eating, so the clean up was epic. Because my roommate is awesome, he did most of the washing up while I dismembered Beatrice. It was a highly educational anatomy lesson.


Except she was missing her head, neck and feet, of course. And had fallen into about a billion smaller pieces by this point.

At the risk of grossing you out even more, dear readers, the neatest part was the bit of spine, complete with spinal column. Yes, I was a little wigged out, but in that "oh man, that's so GROSSAWESOME!" way that is familiar to many of us from biology class.


The HUGE amount of meat is center. Veggies to the right in the bento. Sorry I didn't get a picture of the huge pile of bones!

I had planned to update you on each of our chicken meals, but 1) I think that would actually be pretty boring for you, and 2) I am kind of lazy, guys. Last night, we had curry. It was yummy! Tonight, we had fajitas. They were also yummy! We have leftovers of our leftovers (meta-leftovers?) and I am, so far, only a little bit sick of chicken. And now I would like for us all to raise our glasses to Beatrice, who didn't have any say in becoming our dinner, but whom we appreciate nonetheless!

Granola

So I've never posted a recipe on my blog before. I have no problem with recipe blogs, and in fact I read a few religiously. I just don't do it myself. But today, dear readers, I am going to share a recipe with you. This blog is sort of a cross-section of my life, right? And I cook A LOT. So it seems only logical. I took a random recipe as a starting point, but did my own thing. All measurements are approximate, especially the spices/seasoning. That part of the process basically went "Hm. Not enough cinnamon." "Hm, still kind of boring. What else is on this shelf?" .

4 cups oats (the regular kind, not quick)
1 cup nuts (I used walnut "baking pieces" because they're cheap. You could use whatever!)
1/2 cup flax seeds (I love them)
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1 1/2 cup dried fruit (I dumped in an entire bag of Trader Joe's "golden berry mix." I think it was about a cup and a half...Welcome to my cooking process! Dump dump dump!)
3/4 cup sweet stuff (I used not quite a full 3/4 cup of agave nectar, and topped it off with molasses for fun. The molasses gave it a little bit of a bitter flavor I'm not sure I like)
1/2 cup butter
2 1/2 tsp cinnamon (would use more)
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp vanilla (not sure this made any difference. probably optional)
1/4 tsp salt

1. Mix oats, nuts, fruit in a bowl.
2. Melt butter in a saucepan. Add sweet stuff, spices, and vanilla. Boil for about a minute.
3. Pour this mixture over the dry stuff and mix well. If you're me, at this point you start tasting it and throwing in whatever you feel like.
4. Put in a 300f degree oven. Stir every 10 minutes until it is all golden brown and a bit dried out. Don't over cook it like I did.

Do your own thing and experiment. As long as you come back and share your improvements!