Vignettes for the Lazy Blogger: Week 1

 

Part of the reason  I've been slow on this blog lately is that I have a huge backlog of stories and photos to think about. I keep planning lots of lengthy posts, but I never get around to sorting the photos on my computer or the stories in my head. I think a vignette approach might be a better idea.

 

First, there was San Diego. We went there to a wedding there.  The bride was beautiful:

 

And so were the botanical gardens:

 

Then there was San Francisco... flowers in the forests......

 

And produce in the  farmer's markets...

 

And urban environments...

 

And foggy skies...

 

 

And the Stanford campus.

 

We went there to see my brother Michael and my soon to be sister-in-law Leslie. They have a dog that looks a tiny bit scary in this picture, but who's really quite adorable and sweet. She just didn't like my camera:

The property near where they lived had some funky old cars (and buses) there:

 

And there was another funky plant:

 

Okay. I'm done for now : ) I'm skipping the trip to Chez Panisse, because it was too fantastically delicious for a lazy photo-only...

Happy Meal

Each bite of salty, crispy, cast-iron-skillet browned rosemary-olive bread makes my mouth water in anticipation. Then, the sharp tomato juice drips over the smooth, creamy cheese, filling my mouth with contrasting flavors and textures. The crisped bacon crunches in my teeth and I am in pure bliss because this is the most perfect, delicious fall treat I can imagine. I dip slices of crisp, tart apples into creamy-smooth yogurt, and I crunch my way through a carrot that was just dug out of the Connecticut earth. There are many reasons why this meal makes me happy.

I am happy about where this meal came from. Not everything we eat is local, but every week I try to see how well we can get by with farmer's market and in-season products only. Here's how this meal stacks up:

• Local artisan bread
• Local artisan cheese
• Local, organic bacon (from a humanely raised, family-farm pig. We recently purchased a
  half side - about 50lb of meat - at $3/lb)
• Leftover bacon grease from aforementioned swine
• Tomatoes from our backyard
• Local, organic carrots
• Local-to-DC-where-I-was-visiting-a-friend heirloom, organic apples*
• Local, farmer's market yogurt

*Greg says local-to-DC doesn't count. But I was in DC anyway, so I think it counts.

I do my best to put my money where my mouth is - for it is true that artisan products are generally more expensive than their mass-produced counterparts - but I am equally as often surprised that the value for the money allows me to get away with better deals than I thought. Let's take a guess at this sandwich. The loaf was $4, but I only used a quarter of it. The bacon was $3/lb, and we fried up a pound this morning - maybe a third of a pound went into the sandwich. A few slices of cheese ($2), two carrots ($0.40), an apple ($0.50), and two tablespoons of yogurt ($0.50). I estimate the cost at (1+1+2+0.4+0.5+0.5) /2= $2.70 for each spectacular lunch. It took me 10 minutes to make, with two dishes, one knife and a cutting board to wash and one cast iron pan to clean.

There's not much that I would trade this lifestyle for. I like knowing that every penny I spent on my food went to folks who are working hard to bring back family agriculture, sustainable living practices and all around good values. I like that the meat I ate came from a pig who led a happy animal life (something I feel sure of, because I look the farmer in the eye every week when I buy his pastured chicken eggs and he asks me how Zane and Tori are doing). I like that the food tastes wonderful and that it fills my belly well. I like that I saw two people buy basketfuls of fresh produce using food stamps. I like that in the imperfection of this world, we are all able to live our lives by the principles we believe in, whatever those principles may be. This is what a Happy Meal is for me.

P.S. Greg says I should have called this post "Porky's II", since we had bacon for breakfast and he's funnier than I am

Pumpkin Zucchini Bread

On a recent drive back from a wedding in Bar Harbor, Greg and I stopped by the home of one of his friends in Portland, Maine. After a delightful lunch and a quick tour of the city (Portland, by the way, is pretty cool), we went on our way, with the addition of one giant squash and one monstrous zucchini taken from our friends' garden.

 

What's a girl to do? She's to make Zucchini bread!

 

I've been wanting to adapt my favorite bran muffin recipe to include zucchini for a while now. It took two tries to work out the kinks to this recipe. The trick, it seems, is correctly balancing the moisture of the grated zucchini with the amount of milk, soy milk, buttermilk or yogurt. Since moisture content of zucchini varies with the size of the zucchini (larger = more watery), I'm going to suggest that you adapt the quantity of fluid ingredients based on whether you're using typical, medium-sized grocery store zucchini or the behemoth, overgrown garden zucchini variety (take out a few tablespoons of milk). I added an extra egg to increase the stability of the flour, and I nixed the white flour. I also chose to use pumpkin butter in this recipe because that's what I had in my pantry... You could just as easily add a applesauce, pumpkin puree, or a little extra yogurt in its place.

Why is this recipe a good one? Let me list the reasons:

(1) You can make it one bowl, if you'd like

(2) You can adapt the ingredients to whatever you'd like

(3) There's a lot of zucchini in this recipe.

(4) The bread is moist, tender, and barely sweet, with hints of the fall flavors of pumpkin, cinnamon and ginger.

(5) You can still adapt this recipe further. I kept the zucchini loaf itself plain, but I sprinkled some ground extra sugar, ground nuts and pumpkin seeds on top (see picture above; they all fell off). It would have been better if I had stirred everything in them in. You could add in some ground or toasted nuts (walnuts might be nice), a little extra sugar for sweetness, ground flax, oats, or double the spices for a super fall-themed treat.

Pumpkin Zucchini Bread

Note: less liquid gives you crumbly muffins, and more liquid gives you a soft cake. I am suggesting a dairy ratio for the typical size of zucchini. If you use the massively overgrown zucchini that I did, then take out a few tablespoons of soy milk. You could also substitute 1 1/4 cup buttermilk or play with the milk/yogurt ratio -- I've made the recipe (sans zucchini) with all sorts of dairy combinations, and it's always good. Don't be afraid to cut back by a tablespoon or two on the milk if your grated zucchini has a lot of moisture; it's probably better to lean towards too dry of a batter, since this recipe makes a very moist batter to begin with. If you make this batter and the moisture balance seems off (say, it's dripping off the spoon in large droplets rather sliding or plopping off the spoon in huge blobs), you can always stir in a little extra flour before baking it.

Preheat the oven to 350. Cut parchment to fit the bottom of a loaf pan and use a little butter to secure it in place. If the pan is not non-stick, be sure to butter the walls of the pan. Sift together:

1 cup wheat bran

180g whole wheat flour

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

Stir in spices and nuts, if desired:

2 tbsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground ginger

Dash of nutmeg

~1 cup toasted nuts, optional

In a medium bowl, blend together:

3/4 cup soy milk + 1/2 cup yogurt *

1/2 cup sweetener of choice (I mix 4 tbsp sugar, 2 tbsp honey and 2 tbsp molasses - it's worth the extra effort, I promise)

1/2 cup pumpkin butter

2 large eggs

3 tbsp vegetable oil

Gently fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. Stir in:

2 cups grated zucchini

Pour into  loaf pan. Bake until the tops spring back when pressed gently in the center, about 45-60 minutes.

Lame Post

 

This post is so lame. It's been so long. This blog has been so ignored. And I have been so busy  not busy lately. I really have no excuse, except -- the freedom that I am finding in a Month of No-Work (M.N.W., AKA October) is making me superbly, wonderfully lazy... lazy, lazy and lazier.

 

Plus, I've been traveling. Vermont for a few days to see a friend, then Indiana for the grandparents (and Rosh Hashanah - more on that soon), then St. Louis to present at a conference, and then Austin to see my brother Andy, his wife Leslie, and their new little baby girl Alexandra. Greg and I are off for the weekend to Maine for a wedding, and the weekend after I'll be in DC for a friend-reunion of sorts.

 

So, basically, I've got a zillion photos from all this traveling, lots of stories, a few new dishes and no urge to actually post them. See, this blog used to be my escape from the stress of work. I've had no need to escape anything this past month. Good for me, bad for the blog.

 

I'll post some recipes next week. In the  meantime, happy October, and I'm just saying "hi"

 

Oh. And here's a cow:

 

I've been a little preoccupied by some daydreaming

48 hours from now, I hope I will be placing the final edits into this dissertation.
60 hours from now, I hope I will be walking into Kinko's.
64 hours from now, I hope I will place a copy of this dissertation under my last committee member's door
68 hours from now, I damn well better be in Vermont for the weekend.

And 324 hours from now, I expect to stand in front of a group of people and explain why I deserve the degree. So 327 hours from now, I might feel a little less nervous. And 327.1 hours from now, I might be able to call Greg on the phone with a smile on my face and a piece of paper in my hand.

And on October 5th? I get to SLEEP IN for a month and take my first real time off in.... 8 years, at least. I worked every summer since sophomore year in college. I always wanted to take a few months off after college, but I couldn't. Now I can. Phew.

Golly gee, I can't wait : )

Neither can the dogs - I've been a bad dog-mom. They're bored out of their minds. Greg's been awesome in keeping everything going and letting me ignore the world for this last month. It will be a relief to both of us when I can be a normal part of life again.

Like most of my interaction with other people these days, this post is fairly self-serving :D Hope ya'all are well, and I'll be back very soon.

Meanwhile, wanna see the kinds of things I'm working on? Of course you don't. But check this out anyway:

I'd really like to understand this pathway fully, but it's pretty damn confusing, what with many of those arrows actually going both ways, and the arrows that were too complicated to put on there, and the arrows with big question marks on top. Some days I think, why bother trying to understand this? Even the people who dedicate their lives to just this pathway are still a little uncertain about where exactly the arrows all go...



I like looking at the data this way: averages and individual points on the same plot.




That's the hippocampus. There will be a day that comes when I won't care so much about the hippocampus.




It's been a rough week. But relief is very near by...

Nothing better to say

Things have been so crazy lately that I don't even know where to start. In the past few weeks, I have...

• Completely finished my thesis introduction and the first two research chapters
• Written some heartfelt acknowledgments. Which I wish I could post here (but I can't, not until everything else is done)
• Worked much of the way through a really bad draft of the third research chapter
• Sort of, maybe, not really contemplated the concluding chapter
• Not even thought about writing my defense powerpoint slides
• Canned (I'm not kidding) 34 pints of tomatoes, peaches, apricots, and various kinds of jam (more on that later)
• Not gotten botulism (yet)
• Gone to Yoga three times a week. This is new. And cliche.
• Fell waaaaay behind on my blog reading
• Not edited the photos for or told a single story about our West Coast trip
• Finally figured out this f@#$$! piece of s#$! of a markup language
• --> Actually, let me take that back. LaTeX rocks. It was just the wrong time for me to learn how to use it.
• Realized that my thesis topic kind of sucks
• Realized I don't have any answers about my topic or my research
• Realized that I'm now at the point of knowing more about my topic and my research than anyone else does
• Realized that nobody knows anything about my topic

And, the real important one, I have...

• Generally speaking, been a terrible friend to everyone around me
• Been very fortunate to have such understanding friends (and husband)

So what's left?

• About 20 pages of writing (but it's double spaced!)
• Somewhere in the range of 15 figures
• A tiny bit of data analysis
• 3 more meetings with my adviser
• 3 weeks until submission
• 4 weekends of work until the defense
• 29 days until the butterflies go away

The Weird Weiss-Maliks

My parents met when my mother moved into the same dorm that my father lived in at Kent State University. Three years later, my mother was shopping in a supermarket with her own mother, my grandmother. They were discussing how my mom would deal with the soon to be long-distance relationship with my father. My grandmother asked, "Why don't you just marry him?" They walked the store five times without putting a single item in the shopping cart, and then my mother, a Weiss, called my dad, a Malik, to say yes to a question that he had posed before. And so the Weiss-Malik family came to be.

My brother Andy met Leslie at work. They had been dating for a few months when he pulled out a twisty tie, playfully wrapped it around her finger, and marked the diameter. Soon, during a quiet evening at home, he took out a ring and asked her to marry him. And so within a year of dating, they tied the knot.

Greg and I met at the dog park, less than two weeks after my big move to New Haven, and we were agreeable to the marriage idea from early on. We had been dating for two years and living together for six months; I was gone from New Haven for two weeks, and I think he missed me more than usual. He asked me to marry him when I got back. And so I did.

Michael, my other brother, and Leslie (yes, we have two Leslies), met through a mutual friend. They had some quiet conversations about the topic at home. They decided to get married, kept it to themselves for a month, and then casually announced their engagement to the family. But Michael wasn't satisfied with the original proposal. And so, he went one step further, to Proposal 2.0.

http://www.marrymeleslie.com/

This, from the guy responsible for googlemoon and googlemars and googlesky. This, from my brother who used to spend hours on the computer mimicking newspaper print typeset and copying the design of the Advil bottle to create unique party invitations that he could hand out to his friends. This, from the adult who wanted heelys for his birthday. This, from techno-geek supremo :). What I am saying is this: Michael is creative, technology-oriented, loving and fun. Of course he would do something as adorable as this.

Congratulations to Michael and Leslie! (And to Andy and Leslie, who had their first child, little baby Alexandra, a few weeks ago!) Us Weiss-Maliks are getting settled...

The newest addition to the family. Little does little Alexandra know how weird we Weiss-Maliks actually are...

(Updated: Michael made it into this Wiki entry)

A few snippets

 

Now that Greg and I are in Alaska, there are just a few things to appreciate...

Like spectacular views out the back door...

6-week old husky puppies that live in an open air pen next door...

 

Kitchens on the go...

and tasty home-cooked meals: 4 carrots, 4 ribs celery, a yellow onion, one block of tofu (fried in vegetable oil), obscene quantities of garlic and ginger, a can of coconut milk, jalapeno pepper powder, lime juice, cilantro and Basmati rice.

 

Hope to eat some fresh-caught salmon soon.

Well well well well

There's been a little time to cook - some hummus, a tasty vegetable dish, several delicious al fresco summer meals and grilled things. There was time for a one year wedding anniversary -- with a spectacular meal to follow. There's been a little time to do other things -- like laundry, showers, sleeping, giving Tori a good ear rub or stopping her from eating our dinners before we do. What there hasn't been time for is photographing / editing / writing / blogging / about it all. This whole "dissertation" thing is keeping occupied. It is probably going to keep me on my toes until the thesis defense, which will be first week of September. In the meantime, I'll just be trying to keep up to date with everybody's else's interesting food blogs, and maybe I'll pop in here every once and a while. We'll be traveling in California from 6/19-6/25 and then up in Alaska from 6/25-7/4 and I'll definitely post some pictures from that trip...

Rachael

P.S. I felt very sad about leaving this blog both unattended and undecorated, so here are a few interesting photographs. A, errr, uhm, 10-22mm wide angle lens may or may not have been recently purchased... although there are no wide angle photos contained below, I hope to have some good ones soon. Oh, actually, the picture of the forest at the bottom uses the wide angle lens, but I hope there'll be better ones to talk about.