Filoncino Integrale and another LA car chase

Since The Wednesday Chef posted the "no-knead" bread recipe from Jim Lahey, it reminded me of one of my favorite bread books: Dunway's No Need to Knead. The focaccia alone makes the book worth owning but I haven't tried many of the other recipes so that's what I did this weekend.



While many of her recipe's are extremely quick (just check out the subtitle of the book), this is one that is a pseudo-sourdough. It starts with a biga or sponge.

Filoncino Integrale:

Biga:

1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup rye flour
1/2 teaspoon active dry yeast (and right now Costco has 2lb bags of Red Star yeast if you haven't noticed)
1 cup lukewarm water

Mix all of the ingredients in a bowl and cover tightly. Place in a warm location overnight. In the morning, it looks like this:



Dough:

1.25 cups lukewarm water
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 cup of the biga (used nearly all of what I had but not quite all if you like to feed and save starter)
4 cups unbleached bread flour
2 teaspoons salt
3/4 cups whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher or coarse sea salt

Mix the water and the yeast in a large mixing bowl until the yeast is dissolved
Stir in the biga
Add 2.5 cups of the bread flour and the salt and stir until smooth
Add the remaining bread flour and the whole wheat flour and stir until smooth and the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl

Cover the bowl and let rise until doubled in size (~30-45 minutes)

Fold the dough a few times to allow the yeast to rest, cover again and proof a second time for another 30-45 minutes and it looks something like this:



Preheat the oven to 500F and grease a three-loaf baguette pan.
Slowly pour the dough into each slot, stopping to cut the dough in thirds (be very gentle here to not squish the nice bubbles out)
Brush the tops with olive oil and sprinkle with the salt
Allow the loaves to proof for 15-20 minutes (if you were rough with the dough, you will need much more time as I learned the hard way)

Reduce heat to 425F and bake for 20 minutes.

Now I don't own a baguette pan so I tried to form the dough into a single loaf. In doing so I really mashed the dough more than I should have. In retrospect I should have let the loaf proof for at least half an hour. Since I didn't, I suspect the loaf I got was much more dense than if I had followed the directions or given the loaf more time to rise. It does make a great sandwich though!



Here's a close up of the crumb so you can see that it's a bit more dense than one might wish.



Dunaway starts the recipe out by saying that she does not like traditional San Francisco sourdoughs and that this recipe does not aim for that effect despite the use of a biga. My thought was that she might like the French style of sourdough which is much less tart but she never mentions it in her book. I couldn't tell that there was any natural yeast in this bread at all. The crust was pretty tasty though.

The big "advance" that Jim Lahey promotes is baking bread in a large cast iron dutch oven. He claims that this method traps the steam generated by baking similar to brick ovens. Since a little bird suggested I might be getting just such a dutch oven this holiday season, I'll try that with Dunaway's recipes (and try this bread again while giving it more time to proof) and report back.

Azuki and Whole Mung Beans, Crushed and Sauteed

Two nights ago I returned to Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian and completely messed up one of the recipes. I made Chow Ar Ni or azuki and whole mung beans, crushed and sauteed.


You start by hydrating the beans SEPARATELY. Did I read the recipe past this point? No. Why would this matter? Well it turns out that this is really two recipes served together. You have to soak each type of bean separately so that you can prepared them separately.





I soaked them together. And realized my mistake within seconds of adding the water. Instead of tossing it all and starting over again I hybridized the recipes and it turned out really well despite my early mistake. I won't even try to recreate what I did in a new recipe because although it turned out fine, to be honest, the beans take different lengths of time to cook and the azuki beans were a little firm and the mung beans were so soft that they were indeed crushed.


This is my final result:




For the real version, Jaffrey suggests serving the two dishes in a ying yang shape and I suspect it is very attractive given their color contrast.


Chow Ar Ni:

1 cup red azuki beans, picked over, washed and drained
1 cup whole unhulled mung beans treated the same


Azuki bean recipe:


2 tablespoons peanut oil (and it makes a difference in the flavor I think although you can use any veg. oil)
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
3 scallions, white parts and half the tender green part, cut into very, very thin rounds
1 teaspoon chili paste with garlic or 1/2 teaspoon cayenne (I used peri peri for a similar effect)
salt and pepper to taste
2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil


Bring beans to a boil and then simmer until soft (approx. 3 cups of water for 1.5-1.75 hours)
Heat the oil in a wok or large frying pan set over high heat
When hot, add the garlic and scallions and stir-fry rapidly for 30 seconds
Add the beans and stir for another 30 seconds while crushing the beans (not very easy in my case -but if you follow the directions, it should be fine!)
Turn heat to low, add the chili paste, stir, add salt and stir
Keep warm until the mung beans are ready


Mung bean recipe:


2 tablespoons peanut oil
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
3/4 teaspoon salt
black pepper to taste
2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil


Cook the beans as described above (again, they are smaller and so require less time than the azuki)
Combine the peanut oil and garlic in a second pan over high heat
When the garlic begins to brown, add the beans and stir for 30 seconds
Turn heat to low, add the salt and pepper and stir
Add the sesame oil and stir once
Remove from heat


Final prep: (I used more of both of these ingredients than the recipe called for and liked the result)


1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
3 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro


Arrange both bean dishes however you choose
Drizzle with additional sesame oil
Sprinkle with cilantro


Other than the soaking and cooking of the beans (which took virtually no effort or time on my part) these dishes take only a few minutes to put together. If you plan to serve them with rice, get that going well before you start to stir fry anything or the beans will be cold by the time your rice is ready.

Bond, James Bond please

As much as I hate to admit it, we went to see the latest Bond film tonight and for the first time ever, they have cast a man in the role that looks like he could kill a man with his bare hands even if it does support a face that is perhaps more interesting than traditionally handsome or pretty.

Not only does the man have a body that most women in the audience were lusting after, but the producers wisely subjected Bond to the worst torture a man could imagine during the same scene where they highlighted the man's physical beauty. Just in case any guy in the theater got at all jealous about what his wife/significant other/"just friends" friend might be thinking as they showed him naked and posed in the perfect light to show of his physique, the bad guy comes along and repeatedly hits Bond in the genitals to try and get a password out of him. A little something for the ladies and a little something for the guys to make them not care so much.

It was reminiscent of choosing Meg Ryan for Sleepless in Seattle. The folks in charge said that they wanted a woman to play the role that every man would want but that no woman would mind them wanting.

I sort of feel like this was the reversal of that but to make sure no man would mind, they had to throw in a little ball breaking.

What exactly does this tell you about men? (insert evil cackle here)

knitting the durrow

Okay, we'll save the food for later.

I've been working on the Durrow sweater for Marius. So far I have the body done and have started the first sleeve.

I'm using a cone yarn (thus oiled) so the fabric is a bit open. That will change when I wash it the first time and remove the oil. Here's a close-up of the fabric:

This photo of the sleeve is probably the closest match to the actual color (without the pink undertones). However, I have ripped this sucker out several times and am still a stitch off on the left side.

So instead of ripping it out yet another time I decided I needed a break and so started on another durrow that I'm knitting in the round. You'll have to wait until January to see any photos of it though!

Attention foodies and wanna-bes

How is it that Harold McGee has a blog and there are less than 100 subscribers????!!!??

Go, now, subscribe and learn about your food.

And if you haven't read his book yet you should consider it required reading (not that I'm opinionated or anything). It's geeky, it's about food AND it's really well written.

And I promise both knitting and food in my next entry... really!

what did we do last night?

The only way to celebrate getting the job you really wanted.

HE GOT IT!!!!!

That's all I really needed to say. Ruth and I went to Dr. Bob's for ice cream today but we took photos with her camera so I'll blog about it when I get copies.

Now we just have to figure out Marius' living arrangements in St. George before his semester starts the first week of January!

fashion/garment district photos

Well we're still biting finger nails over Marius' job interview. We were told we would hear today but didn't and so we figure they are still having a hard time reaching Joel.
_________________

However, Jo and I had a great time exploring the fashion district in LA this weekend. So much so that she is now arranging a return with several of her friends from work for early December.

What's so great about this area? Well, we didn't go to any of the clothing or accessory shops in the area. We limited ourselves to the fabric intersection of Maple and 9th. We hit the "mall" first and fell in love with many fabrics. Although we didn't find much at the famous Em-Be's Fabrics , we did right across the hall at Niki's where they even did a burn test for us before we bought.

However, before we could commit to buying any fabric we felt we needed to see as much as possible. As a result our first purchases were beads and findings. Very inexpensive beads and findings at that. The string of agate below was only $20!!!

and a close up of a couple of them...

I also found leather lace super cheap. Each spool below is 100 m and I only paid $14 for each of them. I'll knit them up into a bag like one I did a few years ago with cotton suede tape that may not last much longer. It was space dyed so I used linen stitch. Stay tuned for swatches for the new bag.

When we had finally exhausted the nearby fabric shops (and nearly all of our energy), we returned to Niki's to buy fabric. Jo bought five different fabrics for a fire bird (bird not the car) quilt she's working on and I got this butterfly brocade. Some day it will be a jacket.

While, it wasn't expensive in the grand scheme of things, it was for the garment district. I'm sorry I'm switching names here but when I was double checking store names I realized some people refer to the rodeo drive area as the fashion district. We certainly didn't go on a shopping spree there!

In an attempt to fend off urges to buy it I gave into an evil, evil, man who kept lowering his price on this other fabric until I ended up paying only $2.50/yd. It isn't silk or even part silk like the butterfly fabric but at $2.50/yd. who cares? Not me certainly!

Of course buying it didn't serve it's intended purpose as I clearly went ahead and bought the butterfly fabric as well. Oh well.

Here we are once we finally made it back to Montclair. Notice the ever-present shiny forehead I'm sporting. This time I felt like the activities of the day could actually explain it if nothing else. It was fun and we were exhausted!

urgh and ice cream

Okay, I had no time to even get the photos off of the camera much less shrunk to upload to blogger.

Instead, for today's post I feel the need to gloat. I dragged (yes, much arm twisting was involved here folks) Joanne to Handel's Homemade Ice Cream stand last night. While there, we noticed that they had posted a list of the 10 best ice cream places in the U.S. since they were ranked number one. I must admit that their hot fudge is pretty good but they are many places and so not so very deserving of a good gloat. However, second on the list is Dr. Bob's ice cream. Now they are deserving of a gloat. They were closed last night, today and tomorrow but I promise a full report with photos on Tuesday when they are open again. They have an entire line of ice cream that uses Scharffen Berger Chocolate AND the only place where you can get an ice cream cone with their ice cream is in the next town over. Yeah baby!

Oh, yeah. We also find out if Marius got the job in St. George tomorrow (we think). Keep your fingers crossed!

Fashion District

Joanne, a friend from college, is visiting this weekend from Flagstaff.

We were supposed to go camping in Joshua Tree but (again, always with the buts) it's peak season there so there wasn't a campsite to be found.

Instead we went to the Fashion District in LA. An obvious alternative to rock climbing eh? We hit every fabric, bead and notion shop within five block of the 9th and Maple intersection and spent way more money than we should have.

I didn't want to lug our SLR around with us but I'll take photos of everything tomorrow and post them.

If you've never been and you do anything that involves fabric, you need to go.

Running out of fingernails to chew

So Marius wrote a quick email to the folks in St. George.

It turns out that they can't reach Joel, our Ph.D. advisor. Those of you who are at all familiar with Joel are groaning right about now. The man is notoriously difficult to reach much less get a response from unless you are standing in front of him.

It's funny. For a job that I would almost be happy if Marius didn't get, and that I was certain just yesterday he would get, I'm very nervous. He really wants this job and in his heart of hearts is really hoping that I don't get a position someplace else. I don't mind this since he is willing to take my ambitions into consideration and WILL leave if I get a great job someplace else. Since it is so important to him though, I hope this comes through even if he ultimately leaves it for me.

We've been told that he will hear from them on Monday regardless of their success at reaching Joel (who knows what that means, that they'll call to let him know they're still having problems?). Keep your fingers crossed folks.

cooking with intention photos

We had enough of the black-eyed peas and Swiss chard left over last week that I was able to take a photo of it. Don't be afraid, the photo was taken the night after I made the meal. It's hard to tell with the contrast of the chard but those black-eyed peas really are pink. It was a very girly looking dish that tasted really good. This photo is of the only left-overs and they were gone by lunch the following day.





And I used the cream I bought during my frustrating shopping trip yesterday, but not in the way I originally planned. For various reasons we decided we needed mushrooms last night. I don't know if the rest of you feel this way about mushrooms but Marius and I periodically have cravings for them. Normally I just dump them in a pan with some olive oil but since I signed on for the cook-along, it seemed like doing something else with them was required.




I had a huge bag of dried shiitake [sic] mushrooms I had bought a while ago at an Asian supermarket in the City of Industry so I reconstituted them and used that water to cook some really nice fettuccine I got at Whole Foods.







All of this super nice pasta you hear me mention is all the fault of reading Heat. Buford starts repeating Mario Batali's thing about how sauce should be a condiment to your pasta if you have really good pasta. Me, I've always drowned the pasta in sauce so I wanted to give the sauce as condiment approach a try. But I figured, a little sauce wasn't going to be good on crappy pasta. Not that I know good pasta but the book gives some descriptors (surface like sandpaper or a cat's tongue) and I found something at the store that matched.


Very scientific of me, I know.


I made the cream and butter sauce from Hazan's book which is just a cup of heavy whipping cream heated with 2 tablespoons of "good" butter until it thickens. You turn off the heat and cook the pasta and at this point I threw the largely softened mushrooms into the sauce hoping they would absorb some of it. That worked so well that I had considerably less sauce than before so I topped it off a bit and heated it again (fortunately the dried mushrooms could take it) and then added the cooked pasta. You toss it until coated and then add 2/3 a cup of Parmesan cheese (or more if you're me) and pinches of salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste and toss again.





And a close up:



I know some of you are sitting there wondering if I've lost my mind using shi(i)take mushrooms in an alfredo sauce. If it makes you happier, call it fusion cooking or some such nonsense. All I know is it tasted great and it definitely satisfied our mushroom craving. A tasty heart attack on a plate that is ready in about ten minutes. It turns out that super nice pasta (or at least super nice fettuccine) cooks in about four minutes. Next time I'll use chicken and put lemon zest in as all of the cooks seem to be doing these days.

pet peeve #1

I was at the supermarket (to get cream for the linguine obviously) when I discovered a new pet peeve. Since I'm supposed to be blogging every day, I figure 3x a day will make everyone so much happier -don't you agree? So I'll share.

I was walking around the produce section (of a major chain that shall remain nameless since I'd rather you all imagine me at the local farmers' markets or at least at Trader Joe's) where they have set up t.v.'s playing videos about the produce. Primarily they have some guy showing you how to cook things in a way that you could never duplicate given your lack of note taking material but that's okay since you're really shopping and are only barely paying attention.

Today the video was to entice you into playing with root vegetables. It's autumn and most of us start thinking about squash, meat and root vegetables as a good idea so it makes sense. They had lovely images of things that I immediately thought would make great dinner material (clearly the purpose of the video). I go to look for said root vegetables.

Do I find them?

Of course not.

They don't have a single root vegetable for sale that they don't carry year round (meaning carrots and potatoes).

WTF! Here they are, clearly paying a great deal to reach my subconscious and insinuate the thought to buy what they want me to buy (and quite successfully I must say again) and yet they don't have the friggin' stuff for sale! If I weren't going out of town this weekend, I'd just realize it was fate reminding me how much better the farmers' markets are. But I will be going out of town this weekend so I wasn't even left with that solace.

Hence, this is now a new pet peeve. Supermarkets take note. If you don't have the stuff for sale, don't try and convince me to buy it. It only results in me associating your store with serious frustration.

Seriously.

cooking with intention gone awry

So last night I had some very high-end (non-machine extruded) linguine that I planned to serve with Hazan's cream and prosciutto sauce. But when I went to start dinner I discovered that while we had nearly all of the ingredients we had no cream. Given that we both take cream with our coffee and we drink coffee every day, this was a bit of a surprise.

So we just broke out the standard comfort food of pasta carbonara. If you haven't tried it with whole wheat spaghetti, I suggest you do. The flavor really accentuates the simple sauce. I never make it with regular pasta these days because the whole wheat is so much better. I have to admit that I don't follow a recipe for carbonara. I just throw olive oil, garlic and bacon into a pan to heat, add the cooked spaghetti and toss, crack 2-3 eggs on top and toss and then add a ton of chopped fresh parsley and toss. Only once or twice have the eggs cooked too fast and ended up as bits of egg with noodle as opposed to sauce.

If I have a chance to get to the store before this evening, I'll cook up the linguine tonight and post photos of it all.

elections

I am very grumpy today. Not with blogger but with the state of California.

When I moved from Santa Barbara at the end of the summer, I sent in my change of address form to the DMV and checked the box to change my voter registration. I never received a new voter card or anything which made it virtually impossible for me to vote yesterday. I was told I could have driven back up to Santa Barbara and probably voted but who is going to drive for six hours to vote? I'm not that much of a patriot.

However, the election went exactly as most expected for the state so I suppose I can take comfort in the fact that scary propositions were all shot down. However a few propositions I was in favor of also went down.

I honestly believe that if California doesn't dump a ton of money into alternative fuel research, no one else will. The whole accountability thing was a red herring since NSF isn't expected to produce specific results. They are expected to keep track of the research they fund and to not continue to fund unproductive research programs. Most folks would agree that that's reasonable and there was nothing said to indicate the new research program in California would not have done likewise. Sadly the state fell prey to the huge advertising campaign funded by the oil companies claiming that it would raise gas prices. This is in spite of the fact that FactCheck.org did an independent analysis showing that if it did raise prices, it would be so minimal as to not have an effect on the state budget or consumers.

Maybe next time.

Philadelphia and the Main Line

I had so much fun visiting Bryn Mawr again. It's always nice to find out that the students from your alma mater are as intelligent and motivated as you remember.

I gave a math heavy lecture on applying game theory to ecology in the morning. Given that I had only arrived the evening before and it was 6am PST (9am EST) it went rather well. Students asked good questions and there may even be one that ultimately wants to do similar research in grad school (the ultimate compliment). I then had a chance to eat lunch with some undergrads in my old dorm and talk about getting into grad school, being a female scientist and all of that fun stuff.

In the afternoon I gave a seminar on my dissertation research and nearly every one seemed to enjoy it and find it interesting. I also had an opportunity to reconnect with an old acquaintance who was the only other ecologist Bryn Mawr produced during the 90's. She is there for the year teaching classes for a faculty member on sabbatical for the year.

The next day my parents drove up from D.C. and we spent the day in Philadelphia's art museums. Here I am at the Gates of Hell at the Rodin Museum. This is a project that Rodin worked on his entire life. The only reason it looks the way it does today is because he died and wasn't able to keep working on it. His studio used to store it wrapped in wet cloth so that he could continue messing with it.

Next is my father and me inside the museum in front of the Burghers of Calais. This was a commission from Calais who expected the figures to be depicted in a very heroic manner. They were very upset when they saw the finished product as Rodin's style was to show real emotion. Each man in the piece is based on one of his friends whom he had read the story of the siege of Calais and then chose one of the men to model for Rodin.

We also made it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art right down the road but we found out that the art my father was interested in seeing again had been a temporary visiting display and the pieces were no longer there. Instead we had a nice time wandering around looking at the great impressionist collection they have there. Here I am with my mother in front of "the pond."

That evening when we got back to the hotel we alarmed to hear an employee apologizing to a guest for being unable to find a dinner reservation before 9:30 for that evening at any of the local restaurants. My dad is not a night owl and cannot handle eating late. So we went back to our rooms and I flipped through the hotel guide and started calling around. On the first try I got a reservation for 6:30 (a bit early for me but just fine for my dad) at a place called Savona. I had never heard of the place, nor had my parents. The description in their little ad looked fine though so we headed out... and hit the jackpot!!!!

This place is fantastic. If you are in the area and can afford a rather expensive meal (entrees ranged from $30-50 and there weren't many bottles of wine for under $100, although we did find one that was good), go to eat at this place. Below is the only photo I have of us there because we were too busy eating to think of photographing the food. I had a venison steak with a mushroom flan, a currant and chestnut risotto and wilted brussel sprout leaves. It was excellent. It was incredible. It tasted wonderful and interesting at the same time. And I am a bit jaded when it comes to good restaurants as I have found that many do not deserve their reputations so that is saying something. My mother had a dover sole that was perfect and felt very indulgent and my father had lobster that was good but he learned he wasn't a big fan of gnocchi that was the base for the dish. For desert we split a serving of chocolate four-ways which consisted of coconut white hot chocolate, raspberry and chocolate swirled panna cotta with raspberry foam, vanilla sugar cookie and 64Valrhona gelato sandwich and (my favorite) a dark chocolate and hazelnut creme brulee. I will dream about this food.

mail order husband?

Okay, this is cheating a little bit since my flight back from Philly got in late this evening and I have no energy to really post.



I'm not sure if Summers is still reading my blog but I had been promising her a S. African mail order husband for about a year now. Don't get excited Summers, he isn't in the U.S. yet (although you will be the first to know when he is). I just wanted to post a little teaser. This photo is from years ago when we were living in Oak Park, IL and Jaco visited us en route to Chile from where his plane to Antarctica departs (he's a meteorologist for an adventure company that supports trips to Antarctica -did I tell you?). His only flaw is that he spends half the year down there every year. Otherwise he is a good and charming man who knows how to treat a woman. Still interested?

the happy parents to be

Here is my college roommate and her husband Farooq. Let's hope they like the baby stuff I got! I'll try and get pictures from Jen once the baby is around to actually model the stuff.

Needless to say, I am also knitting up a storm for this kid. Fortunately Jen isn't due until after the holidays so I have a prayer of getting it all done along with my holiday knitting.

Oh and I've changed the nablopomo symbol for Jeanette. While this one implies an equally violent fate, it seemed better suited given that I'm and ecologist and all (and really dislike handguns).

And just in case anyone missed the irony, earlier today (meaning less than half an hour ago!) I complained about how I had been posting every day but blogger dated the posts for the day I started writing each one so it looked like I had posted three times on Wednesday. What do I do? I go insane and post three times on Saturday morning. Eh, I'm still stuck in the hotel outside of Philly waiting for my parents to drive up from D.C. to visit so what else am I going to do, work or something?

St. George and the two body problem

So this is a post I wrote just before going out of town so that I could upload it in case of limited internet access. However, looking it over, there really isn't anything I feel should be changed and it's what's going on in my life right now. So having figured out the issue with blogger dating posts, this should come up as being posted today instead of yet another Wednesday post.

Most folks don't realize that something like 90% of all female PhDs chose people with PhDs as their life partners. This number is much lower for male PhDs (this implies that there must be many more male PhDs than I ever met but the pattern does seem to hold true based on my own experience). This makes finding tenure-track positions that much harder because you have to find two in the same geographic area when finding one can often be difficult enough. To some extent I'm fortunate as Marius has no interest in a position that requires research. While those jobs are not necessarily any easier to come by, it is much easier to find a position that requires research and a position that doesn't in the same town compared to trying to find two research positions.

Last weekend Marius and I made a frantic drive out to southern Utah so that he would be on time for a job interview he had out there at Dixie State College (yes, that's really their name and no, they don't think it's funny -the area used to grow cotton, badly which is why they don't any more but they kept the name).

I was completely freaked out to be honest. I have heard stories about how Utah Mormons can be a rather exclusive group out of fear that their children might grow up to marry non-Mormons. When I posted to some of my list groups about it, I heard more of the same. We have no problems with Mormons but we don't enjoy the thought of being ostracized from the community we live in because of our faith (or lack thereof). Of course the whole reason he applied for the job is because St. George (where Dixie State is located) is less than an hour from Zion and Bryce.

He rocked his interview and I fully expect him to get a phone call on November 10th with a job offer. Fortunately he also asked the hr guy he had to interact with some pointed questions about the community and got really great reassuring answers. In addition, the pay isn't bad, the benefits are unusually excellent and the cost of living is much lower than any place we've ever lived. Plus, they will happily offer me a job the next time they get funding for one.

BUT (and you knew that was coming didn't you?) they have no money to facilitate research. I don't need much since my research is funded externally but I do need a greenhouse and grants don't generally cover construction of buildings.

Ugh. So if I went out there I'd have to give up my research program. I don't talk about it much here on the blog but I derive a great deal of satisfaction from my research and feel that I am making a significant contribution to the field of plant ecology every time I design a new experiment. Most plant ecologists don't consider the fact that plants can interact directly with each other (i.e. plants communicate with each other using chemicals instead of sounds) and so there are big gaps in our understanding of plants that I am working to fill. There are only two other people remotely interested in the topic in the U.S. and three labs working on the topic outside of this country. To give it all up would create some hard core regrets sadly.

So, if Marius is offered the job, we've agreed he can accept it (assuming they pay him enough and all that) and I can spend the next 18 months looking for a job that will allow me to continue with my research. If I get one and there are opportunities for Marius to teach in the same area, we will both move out to where ever the new job is. If I don't get one in the next 18 months, I will have tried my best and I will move out to St. George and teach. This isn't giving up lightly. If I don't get a job that I want in the next 18 months, it's unlikely that I ever will. And it isn't that I dislike teaching, I love it. I just also love my research. Even if I ultimately move out to Utah, it isn't all bad. It's hard to complain when the view outside of your windows looks like this:

and there are five-ten state and national parks within a 30 minute drive. Yes, there are much worse things in life.

grumpy with blogger

Okay, so I have been posting while out of town. Before I left I started some posts and saved them in the off chance that I didn't have a connection at my hotel but could steal a few minutes on a college computer to upload a post.

When I discovered I had a real connection where I was staying I opened up those posts, rewrote them dramatically, and then posted them. What I didn't realize until just now is that blogger dates the posts for the day and time that I started them as saved drafts!!!! So despite blogging every day, it just looks like I went a bit insane on Wednesday and posted three times. Grrr...

Oh well, I'll still try to post every day despite not appearing to rise to the challenge.

cooking with intention

Carolyn over at curlypurl had a nice idea that I was sort of coming to privately, a cook-along. The idea is to increase the amount of real cooking one does for ones family (I'm taking this to mean lacking in prepared foods -those prepared by someone else that is). Now I try to do this already but last month I really got going on this idea particularly trying to incorporate more creative vegetarian meals into our dinner cycle. So for now I will be trying to increase the nights that I don't just make an omelet or a pizza for dinner and I will be inflicting the story of those meals on you all.

Neither of us are vegetarian but I was at a bookstore and found Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian while looking for a good pumpkin curry recipe. This is a fabulous book. I have now made five meals out of it and we have LOVED four of them. The fifth was a chili recipe that is fine but nothing special or worth noticing even. I haven't even made it out of the legume section but even Marius has liked everything and he used to expect meat every night of the week.

So far my favorite recipes have been the ones using black-eyed peas. Maybe it's a southern thing (how many of you knew that I was originally from the south?) but I think these are the most under-rated legume on the market. They aren't trendy. You can't even find organic ones at Whole Foods. But they are awfully tasty. Tonight I made the black-eyed peas with swiss chard and sauteed some chicken with garlic, lemon zest, tomatoes, and parsley. This is officially the first time I have cooked swiss chard so of course I used the red stuff which resulted in pink black-eyed peas. It's such a pretty vegetable, how could I not? After cooking the beans you add the chard and cook it for another half an hour with a bit of salt. Once everything is nice and soft (and the water has cooked down which takes about 3x as long as Jaffrey says unless you raise the heat), you add lemon juice and olive oil and then heat more olive oil in a separate pan with a dried red chili and finely chopped garlic and onions. This then is added to the bean-chard mix and tossed.

I don't have photos of the meal since Marius ate it all but I'll try and keep evidence of these meals in the future. We still have left-over chili but it's in the fridge in single serving containers and isn't very photogenic at this point. Next week I'll experiment with mung beans since you can find organic ones at Whole Foods in the bulk section so I now have two pounds in my kitchen.

the things we do for our alma mater

Okay, this is going to have to be a wimpy post. I have just arrived in Philly to visit my alma mater. I left California at a time that I would have likely been going to sleep at the last time I was on the campus of my alma mater (with the exception of the last reunion).

On top of it all, I have promised my beloved former department not one but two lectures on my research. One of which is scheduled for 9am EST. That is 6am PST!!!! What the hell was I thinking? Fortunately there is a place to buy good coffee on campus and I will avail myself of that repeatedly I am certain.

The good news is that I can hit the bookstore just in time to buy Bryn Mawr College baby gear for my college roommates' soon to exist 90% certain that it's a girl baby. I really do feel for this child. She will have a pair of amazing and very intelligent parents but might experience just a little bit of pressure to attend a seven sisters college. Not that I can blame her mother. We loved (and hated) our years at Bryn Mawr. I think it did amazing things for both of us and I feel that I had a much better college experience than my friends who attended big co-ed state universities. I actually feel that more girls/women should consider single sex colleges. I went because it was the best school to which I was accepted and I was worried about the whole all-female thing. It turns out it was one of the best things life decided for me although the year I spent in Israel just after graduation did a great deal to help me put my hard core, Bryn Mawr nourished ambition into perspective. I'm not sure that I would be a biologist today if it weren't for Bryn Mawr and the professors I had there.

Could you imagine my obnoxiously anal yet flighty mind trying to make it in a career outside of academia?

Better not.

nabloporno

Ack! I'm not sure if I can manage it but I'm going to try and take up the National Blog Posting Month (or nablopomo) challenge. Why in the world would I want to commit to this when I have ten job applications to submit, three manuscripts I'm working on, two lectures to prepare for this friday AND I will be out of town for at least two long weekends and possibly four?

Who knows. I'm insane, that's why. I will probably fail miserably but I figure it might be entertaining for my friends to watch me fail miserably if nothing else.

At least this one counts for day 1.

Big Sur and our Anniversary

Friday was our fifth anniversary and so we went to Big Sur to celebrate. Of course we didn't realize that everyone gets married in October and so Big Sur was experiencing its prime wedding season. We were thinking that we wouldn't have a problem finding a room or a campsite. We were wrong. Why is it that so many of my travel stories include that sentence?

On the way up we made the obligatory stop to check out the elephant seals (and ground squirrels that are there to check out the tourists) along the coast.

By the time the sun was setting on Saturday we had made our way completely through Big Sur and had found that there was nothing available. Every campsite was full and even the hotels that charge a minimum of $900/night were fully booked.

But we got lucky. Gary, at Big Sur Lodge, had taken a reservation 90 minutes before we showed up from a woman who did not provide a credit card to hold the room and promised to arrive within ten minutes of her call. Since she hadn't arrived by the time we got there, Gary called the Big Sur restaurants to see if she had stopped for a meal and, when he couldn't find her, he released her room to us. While we were filling out the paper work, three other groups arrived hoping for a room. We literally got the last spot in all of Big Sur and Gary called around to verify that for us and the other people who arrived later.

Big Sur Lodge isn't on the ocean but it is in one of the state parks with some lovely trails and a small waterfall. After spending a night in front of the fireplace we got up bright and early to try and beat the wedding guests to the trails. We largely succeeded.

On Sunday we drove up to Marina to visit a friend of Marius' and have lunch at English Ales, yeah, that's right, we had "lunch." English Ales is a microbrewery that has been around a little bit longer than we've been married that makes a wonderful and tasty variety of beer that you can find throughout California. We needed to try the sampler of course. It arrived in a set of little 4 oz. glass steins that I had to largely consume so that Marius could continue driving. I thought the sacrifice was rather big of me.

That night we were able to find a campsite and then hiked down to the beach just after dawn.

The weather was lovely although it was a bit overcast at times. Even with all of the people that were in the area, Big Sur is large enough that we were largely alone for most of the time. We just have to go back again when the wedding crowd doesn't make it impossible to get a shower.

political content may not be appropriate for all ages

I have to vent. I don't know how many of you were aware of this but the Bush appointed deputy commisioner at the FDA and then later Bush appointed commissioner of the FDA (now ex of both positions thank god) is on my sh*tlist and has been for many years.

His name is Lester Crawford. He is a man who wrote books suggesting that women suffering from PMS or menopause should help their medical situations by praying more. I have no problem if you feel that prayer helps you to improve your personal well being. I have serious problems with people telling women that they don't pray enough when they are suffering from a medical condition (except perhaps when they can't provide any other form of treatment). This is the man who was in charge of the continued fiasco concerning Plan B (morning after pill). For those that did not keep up with that issue: Plan B had been up for approval as an over the counter drug for years. Congress approved his appointment on the condition that a decision be made concerning the status of Plan B. Congress did not require that he approve it for sale as an over-the-counter drug despite the fact that the FDA's external review committee determined that it was the safest drug to be evaluated by the FDA in decades. Once he was appointed he claimed that they could not make a decision due to a law forbidding drugs to have two different statuses (stati?) since he wanted to make it available as an over-the-counter drug only to women who were not minors.

Oh and did you know that he is a veterinarian by training? Yes he also has a degree in pharmacology but still...

Shortly after he was appointed to head the FDA he resigned. There was much gossip about the reasons why. It would appear that we now know why.

Yup. On top of it all, the man is a bona fide crook. There is no evidence that he profited from his crime which makes him a stupid crook.




Fiber related content. I have just cast on the back of Durrow for the third time. Not once has it been the fault of the pattern. The first time I switched sizes half way through working it and had just finished it when I noticed this. The second time was today when I realized that my gauge had grown significantly since the first time I knit it. Fortunately it's a quick knit. Of course, by the time I finish the back, I could have been nearly done withe sweater if I had been paying attention.

My Yixing Teapots

Thuy asked me to put up photos of my pots. So here they are (minus one as it is very delicately carved on the outside and I have yet to take a photo of it that allows you to see the carving).

What is a yixing teapot? It's a pot made from clay found only in Yixing, China. It comes in different colors and different textures but the main characteristic for which tea drinkers seek it out is that the clay is very porous. Many claim that the clay acts as a sort of filter. I'm not sure about that but I do know that if you take a tea and drink it in a normal glazed cup and then pour the tea into a cup made from the clay, it does taste subtly different. People talk about old teapots having sorbed so much tea over the years that tea leaves are no longer needed to brew a pot of tea in them. Since most people suggest that antique pots be sterilized before use I have a hard time believing the story but it's a nice one.

They are traditionally used to brew oolong teas. Tea leaves are often oxidized or fermented when the are harvested. Green teas are not oxidized at all, while black teas are completely oxidized. Oolongs are any tea that falls between green and black teas. I tend to prefer those closer to black teas but there are many excellent oolongs that are very close to green.

First up is my sad broken pot. You can see the crack in the lid and the glue on the side of the dragon head. What you can't really make out from the picture is that the lid doesn't quite fit into its opening anymore. It used to fit perfectly to the point that it wouldn't fall out when you poured tea.







Below is the same pot from straight on. You could almost pretend that it isn't broken except for the poorly fitting lid and the funny looking eye on the left (the crack runs through the glaze of the eye).














Next is the now infamous pot from my mother (see earlier post about my move). Very cute but not very functional and machine made.














I didn't mention that my father also gave buying me a teapot a shot when he was in China on business. It was a complete surprise for me so I didn't have the chance to warn him that they tend to cost more than your average teapot. He suffered a rather severe case of sticker shock. Still, while this isn't a very well made pot, it is at least partially done by hand and it took a couple of years before I saw similar ones for sale in the United States. It does have a flaw in it that prevents it from being used but we won't tell my Dad that given all of the effort he went through to bring it to me.




















And the last one is my very first teapot. I had recently discovered single estate teas (and you can too) and oolongs when my local tea shop (which happens to be one of the finest in this country) had their annual yixing teapot fest. Since these are the pots in which you traditionally brew oolong I felt that I needed one. For an inexpensive pot, this is a remarkably well done locust and if Marius hadn't packed it full of wet leaves during one of our moves, I'd still be using it to brew tea (it grew mold by the time we unpacked it).

More information on toxins: produce

Since folks seemed to enjoy getting the link to the Skin Deep data base I wanted to quickly post a link to a new study the EWG did on the presence of pesticides in and on store bought produce.

The idea is to provide information on those items most likely (and least likely) to hurt you if you don't buy organic. My peaches and apples will all be organic from here on out or I won't eat them. 96% of all fruit tested had detectable pesticide residues AFTER WASHING!!!!

Yikes.

neighbors can be a bad word sometimes

Last week I was walking to the gym in our complex when I heard very young kittens screaming. They were wandering out of a neighbor's patio area (fenced off) and so I shouted to try and get the woman's attention inside. I figured they were hers.

Nope. Not hers. Their mother just showed up a few weeks before and gave birth to them. They were screaming because the woman hadn't seen their mother in a few days and so she figured that the thing had been killed. She made a big fuss about how she is always calling animal control and how every cat within a twenty mile radius comes to give birth on her patio. So I asked her if she was going to call animal control seeing as how the kittens were going to just continue screaming and she had made it very clear how annoying this was.

She responded with something along the lines of "I suppose I should," sighed and then vanished from the window. I called up again to ask if she was going to call. Her entire manor suggested that she hadn't vanished to go to the phone and make the call. The same woman came back and replied "no, she probably won't." As if she were talking about another person!

Pissed off, I picked them up and drove them to the animal shelter figuring that if they were killed there, at least they wouldn't die slowly and painfully.

What is it with some people? All she had to do was pick up the phone and someone would have come to get the animals that were annoying her so much.

So yesterday I'm walking in from my car and I see her standing next to her car with the hood up. She is clearly having car problems and is on the phone giving detailed directions to someone on how to call AAA for her. If it hadn't been for the welfare of the animals, I'd feel guilty that I was somehow enabling this odd behavior. WTF?

I can wear nail polish again!

Okay, I'm jumping the gun here because phthalates are just the tip of the iceberg, but it's progress. They haven't mentioned a word about removing toluene.

"Powered by EWG's Skin Deep database, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and thousands of concerned consumers like you pressured Orly International, OPI Products, and Sally Hansen to remove a toxic chemical from nail polish. The ingredient, dibutyl phthalate (DBP), has been linked to birth defects, is banned from use in cosmetics in Europe and is considered a reproductive toxin by the state of California."

If you haven't looked at the Skin Deep database, you should. You can look up any cosmetic or personal care product you use and find out to which toxins you are exposing yourself. Getting phthalates removed from nail polish is huge because it generally isn't identifiable in a list of ingredients and you have to contact the manufacturer to find out if one of the ingredients listed contains the toxin. They will often tell you that their products contain less than the legal amount but when you are using umpteen products that all contain toxins, you can imagine that there might be an issue.

Even many "organic" products contain preservatives that have been linked to breast cancer so it's best to be as informed as possible.