Comps, and What Happened After...

So...erhm...back in May I had this blog...


And then comps came and stomped all over it, and I stopped posting. So, here I am again, and I'm not sure where to pick up. I haven't eaten anything extraordinary recently, or I would tell about it. So uhm...maybe things will pick up a little bit once the semester starts...


Just a little more hiatus...

Summer in the City

All across Boston, the farmer's markets have officially opened! What this means for me is good, cheap, organic produce throughout the summer months. And now that I have a car, I can pretty much hit any farmer's market in the city. So if I need some greens, or an heirloom tomato, or a radish, I can stop at multiple locations during the week. Now, I tend to frequent the Davis Square market because it is one of the best I've found, but it only happens once a week and I need produce more often than that (it goes bad so fast!).

Anyway, go to your local farmer's market whenever you can. In the first place, when you do you are supporting the farmers who actually grow your vegetables, not a series of middlemen and distributors. Second, more often than not, the farmers at the market are treating their animals and vegetables with great care and respect. By extension, the veg. they produce are better for the environment. Third, the food is tasty. Really tasty. And one of the reasons why it is is because you're going to be eating varietals and species of vegetable that aren't ever available in the grocery store. Those varietals (think heirloom tomatoes) often have intense and concentrated flavors you've never experienced before. So, you aren't just  supporting a farmer, you are supporting biodiversity as a whole. 

 

Farmer's markets aside, you are probably wondering, gentle reader, where I've been since February. Well, I had final papers, and a production of Mary Zimmerman's Arabian Nights, and conference paper submissions, and...well, you get the idea. I was busy. But that doesn't mean I wasn't eating. Because I was. I was eating a lot. 

What was I eating? Well, I've been having some amazing adventures with pico de gallo (the fresh stuff, not the shit you get at most "Mexican" restaurants),  experimenting with macaroni and cheese (and failing miserably), creating powerfully hot chili (successfully), and discovering new delicacies (where has giardiniera been all my life?). I've also been drinking of course-- wines from Virginia and North Carolina, Gin and Tonics as the weather became hospitable, and Mojitos (with Cruzan Rum, and fresh mint of course). Beer is, of course, my usual staple, and I've been trying the plethora of summer seasonals out there (Harpoon has a good one this year) as well. Sigh. Well that's what you've missed out on for now.

 I'll try, as usual to keep posting throughout the summer as time permits. 

I bid you peace. 

Down the Rabbit Hole...

Now that I have access to better food more of the time, I've been cooking a lot more than I did last semester. This has been great for me, but the bigger problem now is storage. Last night, I had pasta with sundried tomato pesto and kale that I sauteed with garlic, olive oil, and a little red wine. This was delicious, but I haven't finished off the roasted vegetables from last week, so I've got seriously limited space. In some ways, you'd think this would give me the motivation to finish more of my leftovers more quickly - but who wants to eat the same thing every night? So, I think it might be time to invest in some serious tupperware, and maybe even some corning ware - really anything I can use to freeze food for later. Right now, the lightweight Glad-ware just isn't cutting it. First of all, it is all too small. Secondly, it just doesn't keep out the freezer-burn over long term storage. 


Until recently, I lacked a car where I could get to important places to buy things like, say, tupperware. Now I have one, and I plan on heading to Target the first chance I get and buying all the things that, for some reason, I could never bring myself to purchase online. Additionally, I realized while chopping garlic last night that my knives are getting quite dull. I have a nice 10 inch Wusthof chef's knife that is my pride and joy, and the other day I detected a nick in it. That's just unacceptable. I've heard tell that there's a store around here where they will sharpen your knives for a small fee, and I plan on availing myself of this soon. When I do, I'll post the name of it on here, because there is nothing more annoying (or dangerous) to have in your kitchen than a dull knife. 


Oh, so many things are now accessible to me that are nowhere near bus or T stations! Besides that, my car is perfect for a city like Boston - a small, blue Toyota Scion Xa that looks a little like a smart car if it was all grown up. It has four doors and a nice hatchback. It was love at first sight. Only I have to rename him now. My last car was named Toulouse (after the little Parisian painter Toulouse-Lautrec), but surely this car has a totally different personality. We'll have to see how he feels after driving him a few weeks (he's definitely a 'he' though). Tomorrow, I need to convert my license to MA (goodbye NC, I guess you've finally got to go...) and confirm my status as a New Englander. This will feel a little weird, especially because I spent years claiming that I would never transfer my license, and also that I never wanted the hassles of having a car here. So it goes. 


Thinking about change again, I remember that last semester I kept saying I didn't have time to cook. A friend of mine (you know who you are) said to me at one point that you have time for what you want to have time for. That is totally true. People make time for the familiar and the habitual because they don't want to do anything new. Because the adjustment always seems harder than it really is. Turns out, I was no different. Forcing myself to break out the cutting board, the knives, and the pans in the evening...is my time. I can just concentrate on making something delicious and drink a glass of wine. After that, I can get down to business. But that time is my time, and damn it, no amount of reading, or e-mail, or whatever, is going to take that away from me. 


I bid you peace. 

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things..."

Usually, I would come to the end of a semester break and feel guilty about the amount of work I've done (not enough) or feeling drained from doing too much (school work, travel, socializing, family-time). This time, I feel pretty content. I worked but also played, traveled appreciably, but also stayed at home. And, most importantly, I started cooking again. All in all, a well-inaugurated New Year. 


One of the best things I've done so far is to join Boston Organics. What this means is that I no longer have to spend a ton on produce for the week or go to the grocery store anywhere near as often. Basically, this is a CSA-type endeavor. The only difference is that they deliver the food right to your door instead of you having to go and get it yourself, which is a smart and convenient upgrade. So far, I love it. In my box this week I got kale, oranges, apples, potatoes, garlic, beets, turnips, and etc. I made a beet, carrot, rice, and bean soup this week. It was delicious, and I had tons of leftovers to freeze for later. In fact, I may thaw some of that soup because it is bitterly cold tonight, and I expect to be going out later to Foundry on Elm with some friends for a last hurrah before the semester begins in earnest on Thursday. 


Speaking of which, I need to get going. I'll have more later, but before I go I do want to tell you that I've installed a new gadget to the right of the page under the "About" section that will link you directly to my Yelp reviews. This way, when I mention a place that I have already reviewed on Yelp, I don't have to replicate the review on the blog, and it is easy for you, my gentle readers, to check out the information on any of the places I mention (even if I haven't reviewed them myself). So, go ahead, click on it! 


I bid you peace. 

Ending the Semester...

Christmas Day, 2010. One of the only white Christmases in my memory, and a strange one at that. I've never been driving through the snow on Christmas day, or expected to do so on the road from Charlotte to High Point, NC. The holidays are hard for a lot of people. What we've done here is to create this arbitrary period of time where we're supposed to reflect on our lives, think about what we've done, register regret, and look hopefully towards the future. It's a simple thing maybe, and we all do it in different ways, but for most people the end of a year is bittersweet. We're all a year older, we've all forgotten about the promises we made ourselves the year before, and we all have concerns about the future - that "undiscovered country."


Thankfully life is more complicated than all that, and the end of a year, however good or bad, is just as arbitrary as it seems. As some songwriter wrote once: "Nothing changes / On New Year's Day." He was right. Nobody changes like this. Real change is difficult and wrenching, and takes real work and dedication. No one changes overnight (I hate to generalize, but I've never seen it happen). And old Ebenezer Scrooge, if he had been a real man, would have taken a long time to get used to the idea that Christmas wasn't all that bad. Change, real change, takes vision, strength of character, and reflection. 


I don't mean for this to be some type of homily. I'm just sitting here on the eve of Christmas Day thinking about the end of my own year, and what that might mean to me. Looking forward, I get anxious about the various hoops I have yet to jump through, about all the studying that has yet to be done, about the next tasks that have to be tackled. But rest assured that I will tackle them, that I will continue to make many of the same mistakes I did last year, and that each task will be completed as I come to it in some fashion. But, like most of us, I try not to make the same mistakes twice, and to know my direction a little better by the time I sit down by myself on a cold winter's evening in December to write a blog entry that no one will ever read. So, in the light of all that, things get a little sweeter and a little less bitter, I think. 


And even if peace on earth is probably not something that any of us can look forward to celebrating, we can possibly be looking to get better at making an environment in which that type of thing might be possible someday. It will take many more years to come, but if we start thinking about it now, we might get there. 


I bid you peace. 

Quakers...

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was a Quaker. After an extremely hectic Thanksgiving, filled more with research and writing than eating and socializing (though, there was some of that too), I decided to go to meeting for worship for the first time in a long time. It apparently needed to happen, because my mind breathed a sigh of relief during the silence. Suffice it to say that that hour every week of reflection has been something I have not only missed, but has become a time that I need in order to take care of myself properly week to week. Why is it that at those times that we most need it, we neglect the life of the spirit and choose to hunker down deeper into our troubles instead? I suppose that when we feel low on energy and/or stressed out, it is natural to turn inward instead of outward, to become insular and isolated. Basically, this is one of the most un-helpful impulses I think we can follow. Better to turn outwards to a supportive, loving community than to dwell on problems that, if we are honest with ourselves, aren't anywhere near as big when we can tackle them with each other. 

This might sound extremely "kumbaya" for those of you who don't know very much about Quakers, but it is certainly a very real and tangible feeling when I leave meeting and re-encounter the tasks I need to perform that week. Certainly today was a day that, for no particular or specific reason, showed me why the act of having faith is so unbelievably important and visceral, and why reaching out again to the community is an act from which a great deal of perspective can be drawn about our lives and the lives of others around us. I know that if I don't do it, I start to lose the ability to have grace and compassion for people who I don't necessarily see eye to eye with, and I lose the ability to be frank, kind, and honest about what I'm thinking and feeling with the people around me. These are qualities that I'd like to try to embody in my day-to-day world that just don't get fostered by the environment of graduate school, or of Boston in general. 

I know I haven't posted since October, and there's no way I can catch the blog up on the things I've been eating, thinking, or reading for the past two months. However, I'd like to start by saying that I went to Seattle and ate a lot of delicious food. I can pretty much stop eating burgers now, because no burger will ever come close to the one I had at Lunchbox Laboratory. Nothing will ever be able to compare with this. Period. If you're in the Seattle area (and you should be because this is an amazing and wonderful city), you MUST go here. Additionally, I could spend forever going through all the possible beer choices in Seattle, but I won't. I won't because good beer practically falls into your lap at many, many, microbreweries and pubs all over town. Just take a walk. Also, I found this, and I want one. 

Next, let me say that I recently bought a 15 inch cast iron skillet. That's right, 15 inches. As one of the greatest kitchen purchases I have ever made, it has so far produced perfect and bubbly Mac n' Cheese that I'm busily patenting the recipe for, and I plan on making cornbread in the near future. Comfort food, here we come! The main advantage here is the ability to start something on the stove top and finish it in the oven with even heat. Not to mention, if you use it the way its supposed to be used, the pan is non-stick and lasts a lifetime. 

I'm working on all kinds of papers right now as well, so you can expect another long wait before I actually post again. I'm trying to find a way to post or link my papers to the blog somehow (in the interests of academic posterity and the possible future failure of ol' compy), but I haven't figured it out yet. I'll be in touch. Go cook something. Right. Now. 

I bid you peace. 

Onward/Upward

As an extension of my life in graduate school, this blog has served a lot of purposes. Food, of course, has a special place here, as do musings about the academic world and the life I've chosen. So it would be remiss of me if I neglected to let you know (whoever it is who actually reads my blog) that I passed my thesis defense and now have a Masters in Drama. You may well ask, "now what?" Does the blog end? Do we go our separate ways? Is there life after graduate school? In short: no, no, and I hope so. 

First of all, I'm not going anywhere because I'm now in the doctoral program. Second of all, I've really come to appreciate having what amounts to a non-academic outlet to talk about academic life. Because the world is scary out there right now for everyone. Jobs are scarce in the profession, and the competition for what jobs there are is intense. Keeping up, from what I understand, is about consuming critical/theoretical tools like we were eating or breathing and then formulating immense amounts of original work from all that consumption. But while doing that, you should be applying for fellowships and grants, pursuing publication, attending conferences, and...oh, right...teaching. With all of this to do, its important to have somewhere to go to talk about something else, or vent, or...whatever. And that's what the blog is for. 

Pursuing this life can be overwhelming, but I think that I'm much more excited about it than frightened these days. There are moments when I feel like my life is totally out of control, but these have gotten fewer, and I've learned a lot about the way that works and how to control it. As it turns out, you do what you can when you can and how you do it best. You improve over time if you can acknowledge your mistakes as places for growth and not as personal flaws, and you also learn how to give yourself the impetus to keep going without being constantly overwhelmed with what you could be doing. Because you can always be working, but you also simply can't always be working. So, you know, I'm excited all over again for the next step in the process. Because this work is incredibly important and fulfilling, and I love teaching. 

I bid you peace.