When the Escape Becomes the Habit

I must confess that I have an addiction. An addiction that apparently only gets worse when schoolwork gets heavier and more hours are spent typing away. My addiction is eBay (of course). How tempting it is to turn off the brain for a few minutes to troll through screens listing items I feel I should probably have in my life. Add to this the thrill of the hunt, the need for constant vigilance and the bated breath of a bid put in last minute (and always with $.51 added! always!). The glory of an item won, especially at a ridiculous low price, keeps me coming back again and again. The question now seems, should I eBay, or finish this blog entry?

May I present to you my latest eBay purchase.


I've be wanting a caramel brown bag for awhile and I'm a sucker for tooled leather. Now bags and I have always had an uneasy relationship. As a messy person, I find it near impossible to keep one bag organized let alone have the ability to swap bags with any regularity. When I try, I always leave something behind and end up cursing, sans unlimited MetroCard, at the subway turnstile. For most of grad school I have survived throwing everything into my increasingly ratty Longchamp, yet with my new purchase I vow to keep things tidier and switch up more often. Now I wonder, how do my more organized friends do this?

Post-rewards with Pasta Carbonara

What is it about going to the doctors office that makes you want to have a treat afterwards? I think perhaps it is a result of a childhood spent getting a lollipop after every horrid shot. Yesterday I had an early afternoon appointment which coincided nicely with the last hour of the Union Square farmer's market. I bought spring garlic (which I have never cooked with before), a scallion cheddar scone (instant reward) and then happened upon a women giving free samples of bacon.

Now as an off and on again, pescatarian, I am currently very, very off. And bacon has always been my downfall. The bacon was cooked very minimally, floating in its fragrant grease. I had a sample, speared on a toothpick, and suddenly was in bacon heaven. It really was the best bacon I have ever had. Chewy, meaty, sweet and smokey. After a walk around the park, we had to go back and buy some even though for bacon it was pricey ($11 a pound!).

Now what do to with the best bacon in the world? I instantly thought of Carbonara. A favorite childhood dish of mine, I thought it would highlight the bacon and be an excellent post doctors visit comfort food. As there are many variations on Carbonara, I stuck with the one my mother made with the addition of fresh oregano. I cooked the bacon a little more then the woman at the market did and this was a mistake. Really, it is best minimally cooked. This is something that I have often had disagreements about (ahem certain college friends), but this recipe especially would be ruined by the charred taste of crisp bacon.

Pasta Carbonara
1 box of pasta (you can use a little less for more flavorful pasta)
1 lb. bacon
1 onion, chopped
3 gloves garlic
3 eggs, beaten
3 tbp. chopped fresh oregano
fresh pepper

Boil salted water and add pasta to cook. Dice bacon and saute for a few minutes until very slightly browned. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon and put in a bowl. Add diced onions to bacon grease, cook for two minutes, and then add garlic. Cook for an additional minute, then add to bacon.

Meanwhile, when pasta is al dente, drain it and return to pot. Add in the bacon mixture and then the eggs and fresh oregano. Toss the pasta, the heat from the pasta and the bacon will cook the eggs. Add lots of freshly ground black pepper.

B & G

A few weeks ago, my friends Brandy and Greg were married. I met Brandy in grad school and we bonded working together on a formidable assignment that involved reading the New York Times everyday for months, clipping articles on information policy, long nights typing and editing and one particularly delirious day spent running around Williamsburg trying to find a coffee shop with the rare combination of wireless internet, ready electrical outlets and the benevolence to allow bleary eyed graduate students sit for hours. (Hint... Atlas Cafe and Eat Records always fit this bill.)

Brandy had just met Greg at the beginning of the project and it's been a pleasure watching their relationship grow and bloom. They are both amazingly fun and creative individuals with generous, open hearts. Their wedding represented this, held in a loft in Greenpoint and with a DIY attitude that allowed friends and family to contribute. I made a couple of dishes for the dinner and fittingly enough, used a recipe culled from the New York Times.


This feta torte is surprisingly easy to make, rich and delicious. It involves folding sheets of paper thin phyllo dough into a bundt pan and then filling the torte with a rich filling of feta, romano, eggs and herbs. Then you just tuck the edges over to make the bottom of the torte and pour melted butter over the whole shebang, letting it trickle down the sides and coating the dough. As the torte is traditionally made for Greek Orthodox Easter, it seemed fitting to be made for another, special new beginning. Congratulations Brandy and Greg!

Maps inspired by maps

Here are three maps that my friends made last night. I love seeing what parts people remember and highlight and what gets forgotten. Across the board, everyone knows the east coast very, very well.

Amateur Cartography

This is a picture that Adam and I drew of the United States. From memory! It's pretty hard! We forgot Wyoming and Minnesota and definitely made the east coast larger then life, but it was a fun project and all-in-all I think we did okay... though perhaps a fifth grader could have done better? More recent geography lessons? Next we're going to try South America or Europe.PS.... I'm baaaack. New computer, new scanner and ready for business.

Elk Preserve

Pennsylvania, 2008

It's Super Natural

Now that the holidays are over I've been focusing on my exhaustive list of New Years resolutions such as: drinking less, cooking more, tackling the new spring semester (despite my growing indifference to grad school), practicing yoga as much time and my body allow it and a bunch of new age crap that I'm too embarrassed to admit to in a public space.
My friend Jes introduced me to an amazing cookbook Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson (of 101 Cookbooks fame) which has definitely been inspiring me to keep up on the cooking resolution. Last week I made dinner for friends that included Quinou and Mushrooms with Cheese as well as Roasted Broccoli with Lemon. Both recipes were simple to prepare and used only (super natural!) unprocessed ingredients.
I was inspired to contribute my own recipe to the dinner. I was aiming for Brown Butter Maple Sweet Potato Hash Browns which turned more into mashed potatoes then hash browns. I need a potato ricer and some serious hash brown pointers before I attempt them again. Anyhow, here is the revised recipe. Enjoy!

Brown Butter and Maple Mashed Sweet Potatoes
4 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
2 large russet potatoes, cubed
1/2 cup butter
10 leaves of sage, whole
1 tbsp. maple syrup
milk
dash of salt

Boil cubed potatoes until tender and drain water. Melt butter on low heat. Add sage leaves and let butter reduce until it turns into a dark tan color and is slightly foamy. Pore melted butter and desire amount of milk on potatoes and mash away.

Holidays! Holy days!

I have been lazy about posting for awhile but wanted to somehow address the holiday season. I have not been doing anything that I really feels warrants a post. No cooking, crafting or doing strange things and taking photographic evidence. I've been so lackadaisical I even brought store bought fruit salad to my foodiest friend's brunch potluck!

The good thing about the holidays, perhaps my favorite thing, is that it's a time where you're allowed to put a halt to many normal responsibilities. It becomes the utmost importance to attend holiday parties, have long brunches (with naps afterwards) and hole yourself up in cozy bars with good friends and hot beverages. And shopping! It's a time when you absolutely must go shopping. I've been doing a lot of those things but won't write about them here, at least not in detail. After all, this is Blogspot in 2008, not Livejournal in 2004.

I hope everyone has a happy (and very lazy) holiday season!!!

I have seen the future

The finding aid for the records of the 1939/40 New York World's Fair is finally online!!! All 685 pages of it. Also, 12,000 photographs from the records are being digitalized and will be available for viewing on the Digital Gallery. The photographs are organized in an A-Z run by subject and so far only a few of the A's are up. You can view such exciting photographs as Donald Ackerman dressed up like Satan, purchasing a ticket for the fair. I am consistently surprised at how completely weird people were in 1939/1940!


And for more Worlds Fair fun, click the link below to watch a video about the collection.

Treasures of The New York Public Library Video Series
The New York World's Fair, 1939–40

Pressing pear cider

The Seige of Boston, 1776

Maine

Food Thoughts I

On Sunday nights, I usually like to make a big pot of something delicious that I can dip into throughout the week. Last Sunday I made a Wild and Brown Rice Pilaf with Butternut Squash and Cranberries. I'm posting about it for two reasons. One is because it seems like a very Thanksgiving friendly dish, especially for vegetarians. The second reason, is that even though this dish turned out very good, through no fault of its own it wasn't satisfying to me. I was thinking about this dish and realized that it was indicative of how I view cooking and my enjoyment of food.

Often, I unwittingly do a lot of preparation before I cook anything. I read food blogs and do my shopping at a variety of places based on where the best of a particular item can be found. But it is the cooking itself is what I most look forward to. After a long day, it's nice to shift the mental clutter aside and focus on the simple and tangible details of making a meal. Many ashrams and yoga/spiritual centers have suggested guidelines for mealtime prep. There is the belief that emotions and energy of the cook will affect the food they make and even infuse it. There are some yoga retreats where the staff run through a few postures before cooking and some ashrams where the meals are prepared in contemplative silence.

This seems intuitive. Meals made with love and care have always tasted the best to me even if the preparation and ingredients are simple. The butternut squash pilaf I made on Sunday night was not satisfying to me to make or in some ways to eat. To backtrack, I feel like my weekend was spent eating as much food as possible; the cold weather throws all good intentions out the window. Saturday night, we went to Red Hook for our friend Annie's annual Thanksgiving for Friends dinner party. Sunday I had the best grilled cheese I've ever had at Ditch Plains and then later for dinner, Betsy made kale chips with roasted garlic, an amazing chicken and white bean soup and then cookie dough for dessert.

By the time it came for me to make the pilaf I was full and tired and it was late but I wanted to have something for lunch the next day. I quickly chopped up the ingredients and threw them in the pot and then read my book until it was ready. Taking it off the stove, I didn't even taste it but threw the pot on top of a pot holder in the refrigerator and went to bed. So while it turned out very delicious, it lacked that something, and tasted more like something bought at Whole Foods then something homemade. I will definitely make it again, with more care and attention and see if it tastes better.

Willard Suitcase Exhibit

If I was Margaret, I would've felt like a fly in a spider web too.

The art of losing isn't hard to master

Recently, on a trip to Maine, I did the impressive feat of leaving behind almost everything I had brought. The first night I was there, we stayed at my friend Nick's parent's house in Harpswell. We had been to a party the night before at a house at the very tip of the peninsula. The long walk we took to the house and the cold mist from the ocean, near on both sides but unseen in the starless night, warranted bundling up. When we got back to his parent's house I tossed my coat onto a chair in the bedroom, fell asleep and in the flurry of morning activity, left it there.

We had already driven two hours north to Corinna's parents before I realized it was gone. We were going to help her father stack wood and I brought in my travel bag so I could change out of my dress into jeans and long underwear and layers of shirts. Needless to say, after the activity of the day and a long dinner, my travel bag had migrated to an forgotten spot behind the front door and was also left behind. Sometimes I really amaze myself.

I have often wished for the super power of being able to clap my hands and have a thin, impermeable beam of light rise up from the missing object. Or travel to the World of Lost Things in Netherland where Peter Pan could help my find that lost sock, earring, book.

When I was a teenager, I lost my passport during a trip to Holland. After many days of anxiously waiting, I received a call that my passport had been recovered. I took a tram to an address way on the outskirts of Amsterdam. There in an innocuous, square, government building I found a room bursting with stacks of passports, piles of worn leather wallets and a whole wall full of dangling keys. And this was just the anteroom! It was a veritable world of lost things. I wonder how many objects find their way to their owners and what remains there still.

Snack Time

Edamame pods + olive oil + garlic + grated parmesan + bread crumbs = !!!

ACT UP!

A couple of nights ago I went to a talk at Columbia by Ann Cvetkovich on "Oral History, AIDS Activism and Archives of Feelings", hosted by the Oral History Master of Arts program. The talk ended up being primarily about Cvetkovich's current project which is interviewing women who were involved in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). It was timely for me as for the past two months I have been working on archival material of an AIDS activist organization including processing video footage, some of which includes ACT UP members and actions.

AIDS activism is singular to study because it's the only time in history people mobilized, through activism, to fight a health crisis, along with all the politics, prejudice and bureaucracy that came with it. ACT UP in particular did direct action from political funerals, or infiltrating the nightly news and the Stock Exchange. Cvetkovich focused her talk on the ACT UP Oral History Project which I have found to be a fascinating resource. Gregg Bordowitz's interview gives a good idea of the fear and anger many were feeling at the start of this crisis.

* On a side note I am really interested in the Oral History program. Talking to students afterwards, I found of that this is the first year it's been in existence and that's why I had never heard of it. But the classes sound interesting and most of the students seemed to be pleased with the program so far. And I already have my thesis topic! So I guess just now I just have to finish this OTHER degree first...

The Selby

Lately I've had an unhealthy love/hate relationship relationship with The Selby. Seriously, I now go on it multiple times a day. Some profiles seem to have the sole focus of showing off one's worldly possessions but other profiles are really wonderful vehicles for people to share how they construct their environments and choose to live.

Here are some of my favorites
I love this country house and how the couple has such a playfulness with antique objects.


This house is an old butcher shop in Brooklyn that has totally kept it's 19th Century character. I think if I lived here I'd feel like I was a character in Sons and Lovers. I like that they show it as a work in progress.


Another Brooklyn dwelling + tippee!

If you like pretty pictures...

Betsy has a website now. She takes awesome photographs, so check it out!
* I 'designed' it for one of my classes this summer. This means I bumbled around on Dreamweaver and created something that looked kinda pretty (and got me an A!) but wouldn't actually work on any browser. Dan Bedford, because he is an expert, made it into a real site.

Hansel and Gretel had the right idea

I never understood before why some pasta recipes called for adding breadcrumbs to the dish. To me this seemed like gilding the lily but the cooler weather seemed to warrant pasta and perhaps the extra bit of something else so I thought I'd give it a try.

Pasta de Sardines
I decided to make my own version of this classic dish for Mary before we went to go see Ms. Atkins perform at the Bowery. I caramelized onions and then added garlic and half a tin of sardines that I mashed with a wooden spoon to make more of a sauce. Then I added hot pepper and currents and let the flavors mingle on low heat for a few minutes. Then I threw this on top of hot pasta with the rest of the sardines and added breadcrumbs and pine nuts. I loved how the breadcrumbs clung to the pasta and gave the dish an interesting texture. Mary thought it was weird, but I really liked it. I'm definitely pro-breadcrumb now and spent the rest of the weekend sprinkling them on everything.