Holiday cooking December 27, 2008

I’ve been at my parents’ house for several days now, and my primary accomplishment in that time (other than the minimal number of showers and the maximal hours of sleeping I have accomplished) has been holiday cooking.

On Wednesday night I made minestrone soup and latkes for a family Chanukah dinner. On Christmas, in addition to my traditional ownership of the mashed potatoes, I made some tasty garlic brussel sprouts and these rosemary cookies, which were a smashing success. In fact, I still have a second log of dough ready to slice and bake in some exciting time in the near future.

Fresh off of my success, today I jumped on the gingerbread bandwagon, with a bit less success.

First mistake: having looked at a few dozen cookie recipes in the last couple days, I decided to make these crisps on the mistaken assumption that they were gingery. It wasn’t until I was almost done with the flour mixture that I noticed that they were called Cinnamon-sugar crisps and not ginger crisps. Whoops?

I threw a couple dashes each of powdered cloves and ginger into the flour mixture for good measure, only to make my second mistake. More enthusiastic shaking than neccessary resulted in me finding powdered ginger on my shirt and (painfully) up my nose. Ouch!

When the mixture was pulled together I found the final mistake, on the part of the recipe author and not me. The recipe called for rolling out the cookies and cutting them up with a cookie cutter, but I had a sticky substance a bit thicker than cake batter and nowhere near the thickness of dough that would respond to a rolling pin.

I made a small test batch and determined that the consistency was nearer “muffin-top” than “cookie”, and so I made yet another last minute swap. And now I’ve got a dozen chewy, gingery, molasses-y muffins, which is definitely a good outcome in my book.

Recipe:

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
3/4 cup granulated sugar (I used bakers’ sugar)
1 egg
2/3 cup dark molasses
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp almond extract

Cream the butter with a blender and add the granulated sugar. Keep blending until it stops being butter-sugar crumbs and becomes a creamy stubstance. Add the egg, the molasses, and the vanilla and almond extracts, blending each ingredient in before adding the next.

2 1/2 cups pastry flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp powdered cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda (reading error on my part; the original called for 1/2 tsp)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp powdered cloves
1 tsp powdered ginger

Sift dry ingredients together. Slowly mix into the wet ingredients.

Heat oven to 350°F. Find some muffin tins and paper liners. Put a scoop of batter in each tin to fill it approximately 3/4 full. Bake for a little over 20 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.

See, even when you mess up a recipe, you can wind up with something tasty!

Life in the Underground Economy September 2, 2008

I’m back from Mendocino County after a weekend visit to my hometown. As tends to happen with every visit to the Emerald Triangle these days, I’ve got marijuana on the brain. Figuratively, not literally— my of youth spent desperately plotting to get away from there means that I’m one of the few people my age I know who has never once smoked pot. But marijuana’s influence on everything about my hometown stands out and lingers on the brain even after I’ve left.

I guess Mendo has been a center of US marijuana production for at least as long as I’ve been alive, but it didn’t really stand out to me until I went to college, and the impact seems to have increased every time I go home. To be fair, it wasn’t until I moved away that I realized how very unusual some of the basic features of my childhood were. “Trespassers will be shot” signs that meant just that and more. Relatives and family friends who count their income not in paychecks but in crops.

The hardest thing about going home is seeing the ways that there are increasing signs of income (nice homes, new businesses that don’t require profits, teenagers with fancy cellphones and ipods) while the town as a whole stays so poor. If there is one single reason that I think marijuana should become legal, it’s so that all the growers in town would have to pay taxes and we’d be able to afford the improvements that our schools, our hospital, our streets desperately need. As growers get richer and richer, they keep sending their kids to the same underfunded public schools where they get a crapshoot of an education (sorry mom) and know that they have two options for success in life: move out or start growing.

Last week my dad sent me an online survey from the County, which is collecting feedback on where we’re going to go with the relative legality of marijuana, and as I answered question after question I realized just how contradictory my opinions on the subject are.

I hate marijuana and judge marijuana smokers… but in the same way that I hate tobacco and judge tobacco smokers. I think it’s riddiculous that such a relatively harmless drug is illegal, but I’m sceptical of “medical marijuana” in California and the even laxer laws in Mendocino County in terms of how they stack up against National law. How can a substance be both legal and illegal?

My opinons get even more complex when my hometown comes into it. Undoubtedly the economy has improved, but at what cost? And since social services and education haven’t come with the improvements, while a complete dependence on an illegal substance and the resulting addiction among a large part of the populace has, what good is it?

I know growers well, I know dealers well. I know a boy who is funding his college education at an elite university by selling pot, and I applaud him for that. I’ve also noticed the high percentage of news about my high school graduating class that involves incarceration, arrest, or drug-related injury (not to mention the drug-related relationships and unplanned pregnancies).

I get angry when I see druggie San Francisco hippies arguing for the legalization of Marijuana, not thinking about how their high is impacting my community. But would legalizing marijuana make these problems worse? Or would they relieve them by evening them out with the rest of the state and the country? I just don’t know.

ETA: A trailer for this movie was featured content on the Apple start page over the weekend. Interesting coincidence.

Didn’t we talk about this, Randall? August 21, 2008

Turns out Randall Monroe is stalking me again, she posts via the neighbor’s unsecured Linksys.

She moved into her apartment last weekend, the AT&T folks say she will have her own internet next Monday at the earliest, and that depends on the thing that looks almost like a phone jack actually being a phone jack. Otherwise she is screwed and will spend the next year bumming off the neighbors’ wireless and never doing work at home.

(That last bit might not be so bad.)

On the bright side, though, the perilous internet situation is really the only negative about the new apartment, with the possible exception of the angry funeral home parking lot bouncer outside. The apartment is spacious, pretty, centrally located in the Mission, and ::her very own::, if not yet unpacked. It’s inexpensive enough that it’s not embarrassing to tell her monthly rent to other people who live in San Francisco, even if folks who don’t live in that august city would blanch at the price and tell her she is insane. And it’s rent-controlled.

Even the building full of skinny uniform hipsters and the anti-Google graffiti at the shuttle stop are just hilarious features of the apartment, about which her current amusing stories are soon to become repetitive. Fortunately they’ll keep being around and causing more wacky adventures in the near future.

Hopefully there will be fewer awkward hanging out with the building manager in his apartment moments than there were last weekend–he is a hugger, and she is not really, at least with people she doesn’t know very well.

Night neighbors and contingency plans August 15, 2008

After a lot of searching and two weeks of homelessness aka couch surfing, I am going to be signing a lease for a new apartment tonight. The new apartment is small, cute, and ::mine alone::. It is excellent for escaping from in case of fire, but it’s a terrible location for barricading oneself in to escape a zombie horde.

I’m particularly cognizant of this fact because of my coworker Andrew, one of whose conversational habits is to turn discussions of common objects into discussions of using those objects to fend off zombie attack. Thanks to him, I will now feel particularly safe from zombies in gyms, where you can set up a wall of treadmills to fend off the slowly-moving undead.

Zombies are a fascinating earbug–after a couple of mentions of zombies from Andrew over the last week, they suddenly seem to be everywhere. Wednesday’s lunchtime conversation with Brian, today’s A Softer World, even personal ads on the internet–all of them seem to be filled with the idea that we need to be prepared for the undead to rise up and shamble towards us, possibly more than we need to be prepared for fire and earthquakes.

What is this? Does everyone really think about zombies all the time? Is it the Frequency Illusion having its way with me? Are zombies the mental equivalent of glitter, impossible to remove once you’ve been doused with them? Or is the world telling me that the zombie apocalypse is nigh?

[Game: first person to identify the two references in the post title gets gold star stickers.]

The problem with moving July 27, 2008

The problem with moving is that every time I do it, there are more things to pack than the time before. I cry foul.

(To be fair, my mother claims that I don’t actually need to have every bank statement, starting in high school, neatly filed. I like having it. Possessions I can take or leave; data is forever.)

Anyway, I am going to pack the whole stack of books that has eaten my bed, and then I am going to go to sleep. So there.

I feel obliged to mention, however, that today in my bookshelf, I found a Directory of MHC Student Organizations, 2003-2004. I will never know why (a) this was actually shelved on its own, separate from my student government stuff and (b) I didn’t notice this on my last move.

—

Readers, I apologize for the unexciting entry. I have while procrastinating from packing been reading a lot of arguments about racism and antisemitism on the internet; after some fascinating yet frustrating debates about homosexuality on a couple of listserves I hold near and dear, I have an extended post (or series of posts) about rhetoric in internet arguments in progress. Trust me, it will be worth it.

This is how we actually talk March 23, 2008

B: Why is it that none of the hand towels in our apartment ABSORB WATER?
me: Because that isn’t their intended behavior.
B: ::looks at me skeptically::
me: They’re from IKEA; they’re meant to be decorative, not useful. If you want water-absorption, file a feature request.
B: But then I’ll have to pay for the upgrade!