domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

I’ve been threatening this cheese-making post for a while, so here we go. A while back, I took it into my head to learn to make cheese, and it seemed that the easiest way to start was with mozzarella. I haven’t done any other cheeses yet, so this may or may not be true, but it is awfully easy to make your own mozzarella. In addition to feeling very proud of yourself for Making Cheese, it’s also very inexpensive (about a pound of cheese can be had from a gallon of milk, which I can get as low as $2–much cheaper than you’d buy cheese at the store) and incredibly delicious.

So here we go. This recipe was cribbed from a dozen places on the internet, but none of them had pictures.

To make the cheese, you’ll need:
A gallon of milk (from the dairy section of the supermarket is fine. Don’t use shelf-stable milk; it’s undergone additional processing that make it not work.)
1/2 tablet rennet
1 tsp cheese salt (I think popcorn salt would be a good substitute)
about 1/2 tsp lipase powder
1 1/2 tsp citric acid
a thermometer

The lipase powder is apparently optional–some recipes have it, some don’t. When I first started researching cheesemaking, I googled for where to buy lipase powder, expecting that there would be an internet shop to buy from. The very first hit, though, was for Grape and Granary, which is about four doors down from where I work. So I have lipase powder. If you’re ordering it and you’re asked if you want mild or strong, go for mild–though G&G has basically everything for cheesemaking, their customer service was, at least when I was there, really shitty, and they wouldn’t give me any guidance as to which sort I wanted. (The guy just shrugged when I asked. I was even more annoyed when I got home and realized that the packages that he was holding were labeled with what sorts of cheese you’d make with it.)

Before you start, get a half cup of cool water and dissolve your citric acid in it. Then get a quarter cup of water and dissolve your rennet in that. Then you’re good to go.

Dump your milk into a large pot and turn the heat to medium. Stick the thermometer in there. Stir the milk as it comes up to 55F. This only takes a couple of minutes, so don’t wander off. When the milk’s at 55, you’re going to mix in your citric acid and lipase powder.

It’ll look like that–the lipase is sort of an unattractive beige, and it floats and doesn’t look like it’s going to mix in well. It’s okay. Keep stirring.

You may notice little white blobs sticking to your spoon. The first time I made cheese, I was convinced that it was the lipase failing to mix in, but then I looked closer and realized that they were nascent cheese curds. Hurrah!

You’re still stirring, right? When the cheese reaches about 80 degrees, it’ll look like the picture above. I’ve given up any hope of color accuracy in that picture in an attempt to show you the texture.

If you skim the spoon over the surface of the milk, you’ll end up with a spoonful of wet, squidgy cheese cuds.

At 90F, you’re going to mix in the rennet.

Almost immediately, your cheese will start to really separate, and you’ll see large islands of cheese surrounded by a pale green-yellow water.

Skimming the spoon over the surface gets you a spoonful of almost-solid cheese.

That’s at about a hundred degrees.

105 degrees, it’s time to take the cheese off the heat. The cheese will be in large, distinct blobs.

Scoop out the cheese curds, allowing as much whey as possible to drain off of them, and transfer them to a microwave-safe bowl. (I used a large Pyrex measuring cup–it holds, I think, about two quarts.)

Drain off as much whey as you can, then stick the cheese in the microwave for a minute. A literal minute. When it comes out, it’ll look much like the cheese above. Drain off the whey, then stick your hands in there and knead the cheese for a minute. It’s sort of awkward kneading, since the cheese isn’t really holding together yet, but just reach in and squish it around.

Drain off the excess whey, then stick the cheese into the microwave for 35 seconds. Knead it again, and, again, drain off the whey.

Into the microwave one last time, again for 35 seconds. Mine looked like the picture above–there was some very milky whey, which I didn’t drain off. When the cheese comes out of the microwave, add your salt, then start kneading the cheese.

It’s a lot easier to knead this time, and all of a sudden, it’ll form a ball. Keep kneading for another minute, then form it into whatever shape you’d like–some people do bite-sized pieces, but I’m lazy and just left it as a large ball.

As you can see, I got about 19 ounces of cheese from this. It’ll last maybe a week in the fridge, if you can keep yourself from eating it all.

Success with mozzarella was pretty heady. I’m thinking that I’m going to try queso blanco next, and after that I might go crazy and try my hand at halloumi or blue cheese. There will, of course, be pictures.

Have you guys tried cheesemaking? Anyone have any favorite books or recipes to share?

I was going to write a post about making cheese, but instead I was a mature, responsible grownup and finished all of our taxes–more than 24 hours before the deadline! Good job, me.

The cheese post (which is coming, I swear–I’ve even got about half the pictures reformatted and all) will happen in a day or two. In the meantime, have a few poems in celebration of National Poetry Month. Feel free to share your favorites in the comments!



Picnic, Lightning
Billy Collins

It is possible to be struck by a
meteor or a single-engine plane while
reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians
are flattened by safes falling from
rooftops mostly within the panels of
the comics, but still, we know it is
possible, as well as the flash of
summer lightning, the thermos toppling
over, spilling out on the grass.
And we know the message can be
delivered from within. The heart, no
valentine, decides to quit after
lunch, the power shut off like a
switch, or a tiny dark ship is
unmoored into the flow of the body’s
rivers, the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore. This is
what I think about when I shovel
compost into a wheelbarrow, and when
I fill the long flower boxes, then
press into rows the limp roots of red
impatiens — the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth from the
sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then
the soil is full of marvels, bits of
leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam. Then
the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the
clouds a brighter white, and all I
hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone, the small
plants singing with lifted faces, and
the click of the sundial as one hour
sweeps into the next.

Habitation
Margaret Atwood

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

The edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire

Catechism for a Witch’s Child
J.L. Stanley

When they ask to see your gods
your book of prayers
show them lines
drawn delicately with veins
on the underside of a bird’s wing
tell them you believe
in giant sycamores mottled
and stark against a winter sky
and in nights so frozen
stars crack open spilling streams of molten ice to earth
and tell them how you drank
the holy wine of honeysuckle
on a warm spring day
and of the softness
of your mother
who never taught you
death was life’s reward
but who believed in the earth
and the sun
and a million, million light years
of being.

Starfish
Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who say, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

It Could Have Been
Clare Shaw
Last year, Carol Ann Duffy had a piece in The Guardian in which she invited several poets to contribute pieces related to the ongoing war. This was one of them.

Ali, son of Abdul. 16 months.
Rocket on house, Sadr City 16.5.2009.

Ali, but for some detail of history,
this day could have been yours.
It could have been you this morning,
stood at the end of your bed,
eyes still shut, arms held up for your mother,
who makes sun and all things possible,
who could, little Ali, be me.

Tony Edward Shiol, 5 years.
Kidnapped, found strangled, Shikan 12.05.2009.

If God had sneezed or been somehow distracted.
If that ray of light had shifted
and you had landed
with that small, metallic thrill of conception
as I walked down Euston Road,

then this could have been your morning.
It could have been me inhaling
your breath straight from sleep,
the smell of hot lake and woodsmoke, could have been
my tired arm under your neck.

Unnamed baby son of Haider Tariq Sain.
Car bomb, Nawab Street, Baghdad 7.04.2009.

It could have been you
shouting “carry”
at the far top stair of my stairs -

hello stairs
hello breakfast

- your feet in these shoes
which do not contain ants;

Unnamed daughter of Captain Saada Mohammed Ali.
Roadside bomb, Fallujah 20.4.2009.

biting soap
which smells good
but does not taste; watching
the unsteady wonder of bubbles;
throwing water up into the light.

Unnamed child of Haidar, male, aged 4.
Suicide bomber, Baghdad 4.1.2009.

then swimming:
your body held out in my hands;
the pear-shaped
weight of your head
safe away from the pool’s sharp side

Sa’adiya Saddam, aged 8, female.
Shot dead by USA forces. Afak, 7/8 Feb, 2009.

It could have been me on that street
with you in my hands
and my hands red and wet
and my face is a shriek
and my voice is a house all on fire

But for geography,
but for biology,
but for the way
things happen,
it could have been

Unnamed female baby of the Abdul-Monim family.
Shot dead, Balal Ruz 22.1.2009.

you falling,
you holding your hand up for kissing.

Some of you may remember that last year, our backyard garden ended up looking more or less like this:

Don’t get me wrong, it was a nice garden, but the yield was rather less than one might hope, especially when one has a family of vegetable lovers who’d quite happily eat nothing but garden-fresh produce all summer. So this year, the goal was to expand the garden.

Maura went up to my mom’s over the weekend, and Nick and I connected with some friends who were willing to give up their Saturday afternoon to help us make our garden more impressive. So Rachel and Andrew came over, and Andrew brought his rototiller. (And that, guys, is some serious friendship–it’s super heavy, and sort of a bitch to move around, and not only did he bring it over, but he also did the vast majority of the actual tilling.)

When we went outside, the yard looked like this:

In addition to still having only a tiny garden, we also have some enormous tree limbs that cast much of the yard in shade, leaves everywhere, and a ton of pollen.

Halfway through, we’d gotten to here:

That’s a shovel handle that’s sticking straight up in the right of the picture. I was so preoccupied at the time that I didn’t even notice it was there until I went to resize the photo. You’ll notice that several tree branches are missing, and that Andrew has heroically tilled a substantial portion of the backyard.

Finally, we had this:

More branches down, the first garden tilled, and second plot created. It’s a bit hard to tell, but in our L-shaped yard, the garden is now almost the size of the vertical line. I managed to do the last pass with the rototiller on the larger plot, and then did the first two passes on the smaller plot. Then I couldn’t turn it fast enough and sort of lost control a little bit, and maybe it sort of ran over some of our woodpile, so Andrew did the last two passes. But still, I worked the rototiller! (And I have bruises to prove it–ow.)

The horizontal line of the L now has a grapevine, and another one will be put in…well, as soon as I get back outside. They won’t fruit this year, but it’s nice to have them.

In addition to all of this, Nick and Rachel cleaned out a huge chunk of the back hill–our yard goes up at the back, and the people who were here before us mostly used it as a dumping ground, so far as we can tell. Scrub, chunks of concrete, plastic… So they cleaned out a ton of that, and Nick burnt a ton of yard waste, also at great personal cost–he has a three-inch-long burn on his arm, and is missing arm hair in several more places. I’m told that the soles of his shoes are also scorched from stomping out bits that got blown out of the pit.

The backyard looks fantastic.

Sunday, we slept until past noon, recovering.

The seedlings that we planted a week or two back are doing really well, despite the fact that one of the cats just doesn’t seem to be able to keep his fat ass off of them. Several types of tomatoes have popped up, as has the fennel, lima beans, and spaghetti squash. I’m so excited! Hopefully we’ll be able to start getting some of the more cold-tolerant plants out there this week.

Also, for those of you who’ve asked, yes, I made mozzarella cheese and it was delicious. Post coming soon about that–the holdup is mostly that there are ten million pictures, and it takes a while to get them all resized and color corrected and posted.

We eat a lot of yogurt here. I eat it with muesli for breakfast every day, and we all eat it as a snack. Maura occasionally takes it in her lunch. The thing, though, is that I tend to like the expensive kind of yogurt–the $3.29 supermarket brand is okay, but what I really crave is the intense, slightly sour tang of Greek yogurt. For those of you who don’t share my craving, Greek yogurt is really expensive. At the cost club, I can buy a pound of it for, I think, about $5. That lasts less than a week–and that’s if I’m the only one eating it, and being restrained in my consumption at that! (No joke, I’d probably happily eat yogurt twice a day. Plus it gets used in pancakes, and salad dressings, and fruit dip, and…)

So when a friend of mine mentioned in her Facebook status that she was making yogurt, and I was intrigued. I’ve always loved the idea of making yogurt, but it sounded really intimidating. She insisted that it was easy, though, and with a bit of prodding, posted her recipe.

Last Friday, I decided to try my hand at making yogurt. If I messed it up, the only thing lost was $2 of milk, which seemed like an okay deal to me. So I hit the store and bought a gallon of milk (which, like I said, ran about two bucks,) and a six-ounce container of unflavored yogurt. (Greek, because that was the only small unflavored one I could find. It cost about a dollar on sale.) (Also, did you catch that? Six ounces of Greek yogurt costs a dollar–if it’s on sale. So expensive!)

I pulled out our largest Club Cookware pot, which is giant and cast iron and one of the many things that we inherited from Nick’s grandmother. It’s also very thick and retains heat really well, which is important for yogurt making.

In went the gallon of 2% milk. The first thing you do is heat the milk to 180, stirring constantly. I ignored the stirring constantly bit, which was a mistake–when I cleaned the pot the next morning, I found that there was a layer of burnt milk at the bottom, and there were a few little brown burnt-milk pieces in my finished yogurt. It didn’t seem to affect the taste at all, but it’s not especially attractive. Also, it’s a major pain in the ass to clean burnt-on milk. Just suck it up and stand there and stir. It only takes about ten minutes.

Once the milk’s hot, turn off the burner and walk away. I came upstairs and watched two episodes of Arrested Development, which we just started and are really enjoying so far. (We’re also watching Battlestar Galactica, but despite having seen it before, I don’t always have the stomach for that kind of drama.)

When you’re done watching television, go check your milk. When it’s cooled to between 110 and 120, you’re good to go. “Go”, in this instance, means dump in the plain yogurt you bought and stir it in. Pretty complicated, eh? After that’s mixed in, you put the lid on the pot and wrap the whole thing up in blankets or winter jackets or whatever–the goal is to keep the contents of the pot warm for as long as possible. If you have an oven with a pilot light, I’d just stick the pot in there. My oven does not have a pilot light, so I wrapped the pot in a hoodie, then pulled an insulated bag over the whole thing.

Go back to the television, or the internet, or whatever it is that you do in the evenings. Do your best to forget about the yogurt, and resist the urge to check on it, since lifting the lid will let heat escape.

In the morning, unwrap your pot and look inside–tada, yogurt! Mine was a bit thin (not too thin, just…on par with cheap supermarket yogurt, really,) and I blame that at least partly on forgetting to close the kitchen windows–it got pretty cold overnight, and when I checked the pot in the morning, everything was stone cold. Luckily, there’s an easy fix.

If your yogurt’s not as thick as you’d like, take a strainer and line it with a clean cloth napkin, some cheesecloth, or a few layers of paper towel. Dump the yogurt into the strainer and let it sit there for an hour or two (an hour gave me about the thickness of Yoplait; two hours gave me a nice, thick, Greek-style yogurt). You might have to do this in batches if your strainer’s not enormous, but it’s worth it.

After 24 hours and maybe 15 minutes of work, I ended up with four pounds of delicious yogurt, and we’ve already eaten over a pound of it, sweetening it just before eating. It’s much tastier than what we’ve been buying, and it’s cheaper and healthier, too. I suspect that yogurt making is going to become a weekly activity–when it’s this easy, it seems silly not to. The cost will go a little further next time, from $3 a batch to $2 a batch, since the next batch can use a cup of yogurt from this batch as starter.

If your family eats yogurt with any regularity, especially if you’re into Greek yogurt, you should definitely try this. In addition to all the stuff I’ve already mentioned, you feel incredibly accomplished. I made yogurt! There are whole factories, entire companies, that are dedicated to it, and I did it all by myself, in my kitchen. Pretty awesome.

Time to start up the garden 2010 filter!

First things first, I guess. Meatfest was a success–we assembled my fire pit, which is just like this, only woodburning. Then we roasted a truly ridiculous number of sausages (off the top of my head, I think we had Hungarian hots, chorizo, sweet Italian sausage, cheddarwurst, Serbian sausage, bratwurst, and probably at least one other kind that I’m forgetting.) Then we had s’mores, and then we had cigars. It was basically awesome.

The weekend-long meatfest continued the next day when we played badminton, sang karaoke, and ate some really phenomenal ribs. They were ripped straight out of Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking, which is one of my comfort books. When I’m sad and depressed and the world is a bad place, I read Home Cooking, More Home Cooking, Lord of the Rings, and The Doomsday Book. Apparently, I find food and death cheering. Go figure.

Anyhow, the ribs marinated for a day and a half in half a cup of olive oil, half a cup of soy sauce, a quarter cup of rice vinegar, half a cup of lemon juice, a quarter cup of honey, a little sweet chili sauce, and about three heads of garlic. (That’s per rack, should you be doing this at home. You don’t have to bother peeling the garlic–just slice it a few times so that you’ve got a lot of exposed garlic flesh and toss it in.)

On the second day, they got wrapped in foil, topped with a little of the marinade, and baked at 300F for four hours. Before we ate them, we dragged them through some more marinade (fresh, obviously). They were incredible. I don’t like most barbeque sauces, because I think that they taste like corn syrup and red dye, and this neatly avoided that while still giving the ribs that nice, saucey feel you expect from delicious ribs. I’m told that some people munched on some of the rib bones, too, though I didn’t go quite that far.

Meatfest concluded on Sunday–no friends that day, but Nick, Maura, and I went out to my parents’ house, where they promptly grilled some steak for supper.

To be honest, I’m pretty sure that I’d be okay not eating meat again for a few weeks. Not that that’ll happen, just that it could.

To balance all the meat, we decided today that we’d head over to the garden center at Home Depot and pick up some seeds! I also bought two of those little seed starter things that has a plastic lid. Last year we waited on starting seeds until pretty late, and we didn’t start getting any sort of crop until late August. This year we’re starting them earlier and keeping them inside for a while, and faced with the option of cleaning up dirt every time the cats knocked over my little peat pots or buying a crappy plastic tray that has a lid and can be taped down on a chair or something…well, obviously I went for the latter. I hate cleaning; you guys know that.

This year’s garden is shaping up to be quite ambitious. Last year I flipped a couple of pallets and filled them with dirt to form a sort-of raised bed. This year, I think that I’m just digging holes in the ground and adding nice soil and hoping for the best. Last year’s beds will get used too, of course, but this will let me spread things out and hopefully get a bit more variety.

How much variety? Well, like I said last year, I have a brown thumb–not as deadly as a black thumb, but it’s a good bet that half of anything I start will die. That said, this is the seed list from today’s shop:

Watermelon (Orange Tendersweet–apparently these can grow up to 35 pounds, which is insane and obviously will not happen as long as they’re in my care.) (Because Maura will eat them well before that.)
Peas (Sugar snap, edible pod)
Spaghetti squash
Carrots (Kaleidoscope mix and sweet treat hybrids. Looks like we’ll get red, white, and purple from the mix and fat, short carrots from the sweet treats. Technically you’re not meant to start these in pots, but I did it last year and it was just fine, so whatever.)
Mesclun mix (Ashley lettuce, salad bowl lettuce, red salad bowl lettuce, arugula, corn salad, endive, radicchio, and chervil. I’m hoping to find a largish planter that I can grow this in.)
Lima beans! (Fresh lima beans are dreamy.)
Swiss chard (Rhubarb chard, so pretty red stems.)
Greencrop beans (I’m hoping to get enough to make dilly beans in my new pressure canner.)
Spinach (Baby’s leaf hybrid)
Fennel (Which I’m newly keen on.)
Eggplant (The packet has a mix of applegreens, rosa biancas, millionaire hybrids and snowy hybrids. I love eggplant and have had luck growing it before, so I’m really excited about this.)
Sweet corn (Two kinds–sweet perfection hybrid and ruby queen hybrid. The ruby queens, as you may have guessed from the name, will be red! If, that is, we can get them to grow.)
Tomatoes (Super sweet 100 hybrid and best boy hybrids.)

We also have some seeds from a friend of Nick’s. She sent:

Peppers (A mix of red, yellow, and purple sweet peppers.)
Red beefsteak tomatoes
Absinthe tomatoes
Yellow romas
A tomato mix of various sorts
Hot banana peppers

I’m crazy excited for the (potential) glut of tomatoes. I also left a few tomatoes rot in the garden last year, so hopefully we’ll have some volunteers, as well. At some point when the frosts have stopped, we’ll hit the garden center again and pick up rosemary, thyme, and basil–my luck starting herbs from seed is bad to the point of worthlessness. I’ve literally never managed it. We’ll probably grab a few more tomatoes, too, because it’s nice to have some that start giving fruit in late June or early July, and the store’s plants tend to be hardier than mine.

People who have specific knowledge about any of the above are welcome (and encouraged!) to pipe up about it–Livia? Tracy? Amanda and Andrew?

I think we’ll get most of the seeds in dirt this week. This year, I’m going to be all wild and crazy and find some way to mark what I’m planting. Last year, we just stuck things in the ground and hoped that some of them would grow. It was sort of exciting to be guessing what we were growing! The things that we thought for weeks were [crappy and stunted] melons turned out to be [failed] cucumbers. The excitement around here never ends.

Yeah, so, the whole month of March somehow just disappeared! I have no idea what happened there. Actually, that’s a lie, I know exactly what happened: Maura got sick, I got sick, Maura and I got sick at the same time, Maura got sick and then I got sick, I got sick, Maura got sick again, I got sick again. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that literally every week for the last five weeks, either Maura or I has been sick. I’m ready for this month to be over. (And yes, I realize that five weeks is more than a month, but I’ve convinced myself that when March is over, the plague will go away. Please don’t make me question that right now.)

I’ve heard that the internet hates large blocks of text, so instead, I give you a list.

• Vajazzling. We’ve all heard about that by now, right? I know that the comeback is “I do it for me, to feel good about my lady parts.” You know what? If you need to stick cheap plastic rhinestones to your genitals in order to “feel good about them”, maybe you should look into therapy. They’re pretty much there to make you feel good–maybe you’re doing it wrong. (Pro tip: it takes more than Tab A, Slot B for most people. Just sayin’.)

• Author websites that are at, like, Angelfire. I had a website on Angelfire once! In 1997. It costs ten bucks a year for a domain redirect, and it looks way more professional. If you’re one of my authors and you lack the ten bucks and/or the technical skill to set up a redirect, email me and I’ll do it for you. Seriously. (If you’re not one of my authors, I’m not giving you ten bucks, but I will walk you through setting up a redirect, if you want. Email me. It may take a few days, but it’ll happen.)
• Being sick. My sick days for the year are already gone. This happened last year, too, when I got pneumonia and spent a week laying in bed and feeling sorry for myself.
• The tenses of lay. I’ve had it explained to me by at least half a dozen really smart, clever people, and Nick actually made me a chart at one point. I still can’t get it right. It’s my big failing as an editor. (I can, for the record, get “lain” right. But that’s the only one.)
• This trend in the YA market of paranormal-whatever-as-a-metaphor-for-abstinence/way of making abstinence sexier. Yes, I know that Stephanie Meyer made ten billionty dollars, but one, you’re not Stephanie Meyer, and two, Twilight was a shitty book. Popular, yes, but Nickelback were popular for a while, too.
• Owl City’s video for Vanilla Twilight. Half of the video is people standing gawping, open mouthed, at the sky. The other half of the video is the clouds in the sky forming into a…a giant vulva with magical light and colors coming out of its vagina? Seriously, someone tell me what I’m missing, because I’m clearly not getting it. Also, Owl City guy, go have a shower. And a haircut. And you kids get off my damn lawn, you hear me?
• My chronic overuse of the word awesome. I say it way too often, but it’s such an easy shortcut! And so easy to use sarcastically, which, you know, is a bonus. I also say fascinating too often, but there’s so much neat stuff out there that it’s hard not to. (Related: did you see the news about finding a new species of ancient human? Both awesome and fascinating.)
• Messing with medication. The dose of Seroquel I was on was keeping me stable, but making me gain an alarming amount of weight (almost 40 pounds in the last year) and also turning me into a zombie. The dose that I’ve dropped to is keeping me mostly stable and not making me a zombie, but it’s also taken away my ability to stop thinking long enough to fall asleep. This blog post? Written at four in the morning. I get up at eight for work. Bad job.
• The pinkification of random products. What the hell is the point? It’s a cable–special for girls. Are the grey cables problematic in some way? It’s a cable. You plug it in and then by the time you look at it again, it’s grey from dust anyhow. Also, who uses wired connections anymore?
• Hats. You look stupid in that hat. Yes, you. Yes, that hat you’re wearing right now. And the one you were wearing earlier. And the one before that. And that stupid trucker cap. Sadly, I have married a hat-loving man, and I have a hat-loving daughter and hat-loving friends. Just say no, guys!

In happier news, this weekend is set up to be MEATFEST 2010. Friday night is a sausage and bacon roast over my new firepit; Saturday is spareribs. There’ll be karaoke and cigars, and I’m told that people will be wearing hats. More importantly, there’ll be pictures. It’ll be epic.

Maura and I made incredible pasta for supper tonight. Mushrooms were on sale last week, and I’d bought a pound and a half of them. The initial plan was just to sautee them and eat them on toast–which, a little embarrassingly, is maybe my favorite thing to do with mushrooms–but they were starting to look slimy and we needed supper.

The pasta pot went on the stove right away. Maura set to work cleaning and chopping the mushrooms, and I cut up four pieces of bacon and tossed it into a hot skillet. When the fat had rendered out, a chopped shallot and five cloves of slivered garlic were added. A minute or two later, Maura started adding mushrooms.

We bumped up the heat to medium high, and Maura stirred the mushrooms while they browned a little. Once the mushrooms were brown and the shallots were soft, we tossed a knob of butter into the pan. When it melted, we added about three tablespoons of flour to make a roux. Into that went about a quarter cup (maybe a bit more–a small can would probably be perfect) of tomato paste, a cup of white wine, a cup of chicken broth, and some thyme. It all got stirred together until we had a skillet full of mushrooms in a slightly thickened broth, then we left it sit on low.

As soon as the pasta was cooked, we dished it into bowls and topped it with the sauce. We added a little parmesan, but it was, I think, unnecessary–the sauce was delicious on its own. The best part is that I only ate half of my bowl, so I’ve got leftovers for lunch on Friday!

So good, even the cat tried to eat it!

Maura, about three months ago, discovered ice skating. Ever since then, she’s been begging (and begging, and begging) for me to take her skating. She, like little kids everywhere, was totally convinced that the moment she set foot on the ice, she’d be like a ballerina in skates. (Note: she has also tried to be a ballerina without skates. Maybe predictably, that didn’t go so well, either.)

So last night I finally sucked it up and took her to Kent State’s ice rink–public skate from 5:30-7:30, ridiculously expensive for two people. She can run around on skates just fine, it turns out, so long as you don’t try to put her on the ice. Put her on the ice, and she’s like a just-born four-legged creature, tangling its legs and falling over. And falling over again. And falling over some more. She was totally delighted, though, and now I’m wondering if it’d be worth it to invest $95 in skating lessons for her–there’s a session starting in mid-March that she could probably join, and it might be nice for her to have something to do once a week.

Pleasingly, I did not fall over. I hadn’t skated in probably fifteen years, so I was sort of paranoid–fifteen years ago, I was much smaller and more limber than I am now. My first go around the rink, I was sure my feet were going to fall off, and then I realized that it was because my skates were too small. Duh, self. I got a size larger, and was able to do things like go in a straight line, turn around, and spin three or four times in a circle before getting dizzy enough that I had to stop. Maura was terribly, hilariously impressed. I got on the ice without falling over: “Wow, mommy, that’s some good skating you’re doing!” I stopped without crashing into a wall: “Wow, mommy, that’s some good skating you’re doing!” I skated ten feet in front of her and turned around to tow her: “Wow, mommy, that’s some good skating you’re doing!” It was pretty adorable.

Of course, having been home for several hours, I’m now feeling the effects of both the initial too-small skates and the surprising difficulty of towing one’s eighty-pound child around the ice for an hour and a half. Ow, my ankles.

When we got home, Maura went to bed and I decided that what I needed more than anything else was pesto pasta and sauteed eggplant. As I was eating, I remembered that I promised Jules I’d post a recipe for eggplant sometime, so here we go.

This is the thing about the eggplant recipe I’m about to give you: it’s not pretty. I mean really, it’s unattractive. That’s why there’s no picture. (Also, I was too lazy to get the camera, but not the point.) Nick and I call this eggplant sludge–it’s very, very tasty, but…well. Sludgy.

Anyhow. Heat some olive oil in a skillet, and add a thinly-sliced onion. Cook that over low for a while. While the onion is cooking, take your eggplant and peel it. Cut it into slabs, then lay them out and salt them quite heavily. Let them sit for about ten minutes to draw out some of the bitterness, then rinse them off and cut them into cubes. Add them to the pan.

Here, I peel about two heads (yes, heads) of garlic, chop off the bottoms, and add them to the pan. If you are not totally wild about garlic, you can use less garlic than I do. A lot less garlic than I do. Throw the garlic in.

Eggplant soaks up oil–make sure that there’s still a little in the bottom of the pan, else this will stick and you’ll never get your pan clean. (Here, never means maybe someday, but not until you’ve spent many hours cursing and chipping away at the gunk on the bottom of the pan.)

This is the part of the recipe where you can do whatever you want. Add a tablespoon or two of lemon juice to the pan. Then figure out what else you have in the cupboard that’d about to go off. I suggest roasted peppers of any color, mushrooms, spinach, and/or tomatoes. Chop them and add them to the pan, then let it cook until the eggplant is very, very soft and browned. You can dump this over pasta or rice and call it a day.

Definitely not health food–I wasn’t joking when I said that eggplant soaks up oil–but delicious.

So the other day I was looking at sheets on Amazon, and I found not sheets, but these pillows. I’ve always wanted to try gel pillows, but didn’t want to pay eleventy-two dollars for them, so it was super exciting to realize that these were only $25.

I bought them (and had free two-day shipping thanks to a trial of Amazon Prime) and guys, these pillows are awesome. If you like down pillows but don’t like pokey feather bits, you totally want to buy these. They’re fairly soft, but substantial, and they more or less stay where you put them–it’s not the sort of thing where you put your head down, and then all the feathers navigate away from your head, and then ten minutes later you’re resting your head on two layers of fabric and have giant feather-piles on either side of your head. (It’s not just me who has that happen, right?)

Anyhow, if you are looking for pillows, you could do worse than buying those ones.

Also, I didn’t technically buy this, but maple sugar from Marx Foods is totally my new favorite thing. The nice people at Marx Foods sent my friend Livia a box of exciting samples of things from their store, and because she is lovely, she passed some of those things on to me. Maple sugar is, so far, the only one I’ve used, but holy crap, it’s delicious. Maple toast? Yes, please. It’s also delicious on pancakes, which is nice, because I don’t really like soggy pancakes, so syrup is sometimes an issue for me. I will also admit to eating it directly out of the packet, because it’s just that tasty. I suspect I’m going to have to order some of it when my packet runs out, because yum.

Who else has recently bought stuff that turned out to be somewhat unexpectedly awesome?