The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

Bake, braise, roast

A few months ago, I decided that I need to develop my skills (a la Napoleon Dynamite). And one skill I decided to focus on was baking: specifically, I wanted to begin baking all the bread that our family ate by the end of winter.

To this end, I picked up a book with a promising title and some very promising endorsements: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. (Mimi had a great post about it too.)The book's premise is simple but intriguing: by mixing a very wet dough and allowing it to rise, unkneaded, then storing it in the refrigerator for up to 14 days, you can have the makings of an easily-shaped and supremely delicious loaf of bread on hand at all times.

I read the first few chapters of the book through several times, then invested in the necessary hardware. An oven thermometer--our newish crappyish stove is notoriously unreliable in most ways. An all-wood pizza peel--the loaves are shaped on top of the peel, then slid deftly onto a preheated pizza stone. I already had the stone (Alton Brown recommends an unglazed quarry tile), so no bucks out of my budget there.

Then almost two weeks ago, I went ahead and mixed. The result was rather unpromisingly gloppy. I didn't have time on the first day to shape & bake, and the book recommended letting the dough rest at least overnight before baking anyway. One thing led to another. Life got in the way. The dough languished for almost a week.

And then on Friday, Joe, Karan, Jac and Mike arrived at our house for a visit. I went into full-on cleaning orgy mode all afternoon (and was duly mocked for it by our so-tender friends). The house was completely clean; I still had an hour before they were due; what to do, what to do? So I dug the well-aged and bubbly dough out of the refrigerator, shaped a rather amateurish-looking boule out of a grapefruit-sized chunk of it, let it rest on a cornmeal-dusted peel, preheated the oven for a full 20 minutes and grinned in glee as the loaf, far from sticking miserably to the peel as I'd expected, glided into place on the pizza stone and proceeded to bake up into quite a delicious and satisfyingly sour end result.

That first loaf took all of a quarter of an hour to disappear after our guests arrived. The second loaf went just as quickly. I wanted to make more dough, but didn't have enough flour; Karan and Joe went on a special grocery run to get more flour.

Anyway, I've now mixed up a second batch and sent Joe and Karan home with half of it.We had a loaf of bread with dinner last night and will probably make another tomorrow. My boules are still not perfectly shaped, but I'm feeling comfortable enough with the basics to start venturing into more complicated (and more whole-grain-oriented) territory.

So. Breadmaking for those with little interest in either bread machines or hand-kneading. Sourdough without fussing with a starter. Real homemade bread with no dough conditioners or preservatives or high fructose corn syrup or what-the-hell-ever. Chalk me up as a total convert.

Also: I bought a special issue of Fine Cooking yesterday... all about roasting! And I put a cookbook called All About Braising, as recommended by Bitten, on hold at the library. Stay tuned for updates!

Also also: the authors of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day have a blog. RAD.

Obsessions old & new

Jim: having our friend Mike build him some frames so he can pull together a photo show (location TBD; anybody know a gallery owner?); his new basement photo studio (pics coming)

Fisher: the Pour le Merit medal (coming his way this Christmas... shhhhh); Rosetta Stone German

Rhys: making dinner all by himself (night before last); Elephant and Piggie; Mr. Putter & Tabby Pour the Tea

Me: the Persian Empire (don't ask); budget cookbooks (I love the More-With-Less Cookbook and just picked up Miserly Meals at the library)

The cats: eating all they can hold, and more, of Atta Cat, the new dirt-freakin-cheap cat food we've been buying (contrary to our expectations, they seem to prefer it to the marginally more middle-class Meow Mix)*

Isn't that the most majestic Photoshop work you've ever seen? What do you suppose that cat is looking at?

Also: interview tomorrow afternoon for the position of moderator of the Portland Junior Spelling Bee. Tell me that would not be the bestest job in the whole wide world.

* I have just learned, via the magic of the Google, that American Nutrition, makers of Atta Cat, also makes a bargain-priced dog food called "Maintain Chunks." Is there some sort of naming award for which I can nominate this product?

November Rain

It's a cold, drizzly day here in Paradise City.* Yesterday was, too, and so I decided to make some bean soup. And because I was feeling unaccountably ambitious (and thrifty!), I decided to start with dried beans rather than the canned variety.

According to Mark Bittman, it is not in fact necessary to soak beans before cooking, either overnight or via the "quick-soak" method (which in practice always leads to my forgetting about the stupid things and letting them boil over). Just pick them over, rinse well, cover with water and simmer away. He even recommends salting them halfway through cooking, rather than waiting to the end to salt as many authors suggest (apparently they believe beans toughen or fall apart or something if you salt them before they're finished). But Bittman says that beans salted before they're completely cooked will absorb the salt better and end up more thoroughly seasoned. If it's good enough for Bittman, it's good enough for me, so... OK.

I had a bag of dried "bean soup mix" from the bulk bins at Winco, containing everything from lentils to split peas to kidney beans to black-eyed peas. After reading Bittman's wisdom on all things leguminous, I sort of wished I had just one type of bean to deal with, since each of these beans takes a very different length of time to cook. But oh well... there was nothing to be done about it.

So I tossed about 3 cups of beans into a pot with plenty of water (I've scorched more than one batch of beans in my time), brought them to a boil, turned the heat down and simmered them, covered, for about half an hour. Then I tossed in a teaspoon or so of salt and simmered them for about 10 more minutes while I did the following:

• chopped 2 peeled carrots and 2 ribs of celery into 1/2" pieces**
• chopped 1 onion fairly finely
• sweated the above for about 5 minutes over med-low heat in 1 Tbsp of oil
• cut 12 oz of smoked sausage into 3/4" pieces
• minced 4 cloves of garlic
• tossed the above into the pan with the veggies and cooked, stirring frequently, until the sausage was beginning to brown around the edges and the whole thing smelled delicious

When the veggies were suitably sweated (wow, that sounds so appealing), I drained the beans and combined them with the veggies and sausage in the Crock-Pot, along with the following:

• a can of diced tomatoes with green chiles
• a can of stewed tomatoes
• 2 cups of chicken broth
• a sprinkling of red pepper flakes
• a few generous shakes of Frank's Red Hot sauce
• a pinch of salt
• a solitary bay leaf, added on top like a little Polynesian raft

The beans, as I had suspected, were cooked to varying degrees of doneness. The kidney beans and black-eyed peas were just tender, while the lentils and split peas were already starting to disintegrate into mush. But I soldiered bravely on anyway...

So I turned the Crock-Pot to Low, put the lid on and got about the business of the day (including wrapping Rhys into the "toga" of his Caesar costume 3 4 5 times, and the last time included pinning the damn thing to his shirt in three places). We trick-or-treated, returned home with a daunting load of candy, and made biscuits to go along with our soup, which was smelling very very tasty by this time.

Rhys wanted to help. "Of course you can, Sweet Child o' Mine,"*** I said. He stirred the cheese into the biscuit dough and helped me "blop" the dough onto the cookie sheet in appropriately-sized blops.

Ten minutes later, dinner was done! The lentils and split peas had vanished into the mass of soup, but they had thickened it very nicely--I think the texture was much better than it would have been had they all hung together. The soup was tasty enough that Fisher and I each had two bowls, and it made enough that we're having leftovers for lunch today (my favorite--yay!).

So the moral of the story is that you don't have to presoak dried beans. This liberating revelation is sure to lead to beans, with their humble but hearty and nutritious character, appearing on our table more frequently. And since I know you're wondering... no, no, I have not noticed any increase in flatulence among the members of our household today. Thank freakin' goodness. There's enough methane toxicity around here as it is...

* Sorry, sorry, sorry. I solemnly swear not to make any more gratuitous GNR references. It was just sort of irresistible.

** No, I didn't measure. Shut up.

*** Yeah, I lied. Sorry, again.

Fritter fritter

Naturally, with such a lofty set of goals at hand, I've been ISO some high-quality forms of time-wasting. And since it's a holiday weekend, no one is around to play Scrabulous with me... and since rain is threatening, I can't go putter outside... so I stole this book meme from Rachel instead.

One Hundred Novels, sorta, but not really

So you're supposed to embolden the titles of the books you've read, italicize those of the ones you mean to read and underline the titles of the ones you particularly loved, thereby giving your HTML markup buttons a thorough workout. And for some reason there were only 98 books on this list, so I'm adding two to the end, 'cause, y'know, I can, w' apostrophes flyin'. And because I cannot resist the urge to annotate every book with a parenthetical maundering, I'm going to break this up into chunks and return to it, as a dog returneth to its vomit*, another day.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (I am interested in how this came to be the first book on the list.)

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Oh hells yeah.)

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (One of a very few classics I was supposed to read in high school, and didn't, and went back to read years later. And to my surprise, I quite enjoyed it. Especially the line "Reader, I married him," which is infinitely flexible and lends itself to a zillion funny variations.)

4. Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (Half-bolded because I only read the first one. Jim and Fisher each got much more out of them than did I.)

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (I recently heard the sad story of the untimely death of my friend Jen's finch, who was, you guessed it, named Atticus.)

6. The Bible (Yes, even the long rambly begats and the downright weird parts of Daniel.)

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (Started, never finished; would like this to fall into the Jane Eyre category someday.)

8. 1984 - George Orwell (The original list had this as "Nineteen Eighty Four," which bugged me in all kinds of inexplicable ways.)

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (yes, all three)

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (See Jane Eyre...)

11. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott (This constant companion of my innocent girlhood was the boys' nightly read-aloud when we were in California last week. There is little cuter in this world than a couple of floppy-mopped punk-ass little boys hanging on every word of the description of Jo's first clumsy encounter with Laurie Laurence at the dance.)

12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (I *heart* the name Tess.)

13. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (Jim really liked the movie. I haven't seen it.)

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (OK, this is REALLY bugging me, even more than "Nineteen Eighty Four." Why are we glomming all Shakespeare's works--tragedies and comedies and sonnets and miscellaneous lawsuit-related smidgens--into one big inelegant glumph that sounds like something no sane person would ever take in hand and attempt? I'm not even going to favor this with a boldness or an italicization, though I will allow that Midsummer Night's Dream is one of my most favoritest things ever, and Puck's "If we spirits have offended..." speech brings tears to my eyes Every. Freakin. Time.)

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (My mom adored this book, and I would very much like to read it.)

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (So The Hobbit gets its own separate entry from Lord of the Rings, and yet every jot and tittle from Shakespeare's pen gets lumped together? Whatevs.)

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (Ought I to have heard of this book?)

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (I am still, after almost twenty years, a little in love with Holden Caulfield.)

19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (Started reading it kinda to get other people who'd read and loved it off my back, and ending up being far more affected and impressed by it than I'd expected to.)

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot (See, once again, Jane Eyre...)

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (The whole southern belle thing kind of leaves me cold. Haven't seen the movie, either.)

22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (The other night, I spent quite some time trying--ineffectively, I think--to convince Jim that he should read this fan-freakin-tastic book. It's probably ten years since I last read it... time to pick it up and encounter the creepy eyes of the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg sign once again.)

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (I can tell that I am an ignorant slut because Dickens kinda leaves me cold.)

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (If I ever have enough time on my hands to consider embarking on reading this book, I will probably be suffering from some horrible bed-confining terminal illness and not really inclined to spend my last precious months in the company of Tolstoy anyway.)

25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Now this, my friends, is literature.)

*See? See? I wasn't lying in #6 when I said I'd read the whole thing. Thank goodness for lengthy and unutterably dull sermons that allowed plenty of time to read the primary source instead. (Wanna argue about the Amalekites?)

Compelled, yet uncompelling

It's Wednesday, I feel like crap and yet I feel compelled to blog about remarkably uncompelling things.

1. Sore throat. Ecch. How can having a sore throat make the rest of you feel awful too? I just want to go to bed, but I don't think that's an option. [Checks.] Nope.
2. Grey. Grey weather, grey mood; grey is the color of disappointment and I'm feeling remarkably disappointed today.
3. All I ask is one day of non-rain. One day when I can actually go outside. Even just for a little while. I mean, this is Portland, and I knew what I was in for, but still... WTF, weather?
4. Why am I listening to this incredibly freaking depressing music? ("Terrible Canyons of Static" by godspeed you! black emperor if for some reason you wanted to know. I'm at the part with the violin/xylophone/reverby guitar solo and I just feel like ripping my wrists open with my teeth. But my god it is beautiful.) But it looks like Teddybears is coming up next on the Party Shuffle (Everybody do the Party Shuffle! Take it to the left... move it to the right...) and that should take care of the whole depressing music thing.
5. I came up with a new beginning for The Book; not a completely new beginning, just a better opening. If only, if only I would write it. Not quite as straightforward, a little bit more imagery-ridden... hell, it'll probably suck but I should write it down anyway just in case.
6. Our book club's most recent book was Jane Eyre, which I was supposed to read in high school but managed to evade, and gosh darn if it wasn't actually a pretty freaking awesome read. Except I bought this edition (the Penguin "Red Classic"), with a creepy pink chick-lit cover and quotes from romance writers all over it, and it spoiled the vibe a teeny bit. Best part, though: the writeups of other "Red Classics" at the back which managed to make Wuthering Heights, Lolita and A Spy in the House of Love all sound kind of uniformly tripely chick-littish, which is awesome in its own marketing-department-on-steroids way.
7. I need an MP3 of the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?". Does anyone have one to share?
8. What should I write my next photo column about? Actually, the next one will be on why you should be shooting RAW instead of JPEG. How about after that? Srsly, I would love to do one on Naughty Photos (for married people only, you evil-thinkers! Gosh!) but I think that idea will get ye olde editorial kibosh.
9. I was so good at our book club meeting. I had one, and only one, glass of wine--a delicious Kathryn Kennedy Santa Cruz Mountains 2004 Syrah--and it was delicious. I thought I was friendly but not overbearingly chatty. But I am still thinking maybe the two new ladies in the club did not like me so much, and I'm not sure why. Alas.
10. And now, for your viewing pleasure, a picture of the lovely Princess Ella von Smella Bella.
    

And how is your week?

Books are for nerds.

And, apparently, reading books to your children is for nerdy parents.

All the cool parents will now be farming out their dreary drudgerous reading-aloud duties to the Tag Reading System, a new wonder device from your good friends at LeapFrog. This "substitute-parent reading system" consists of a handheld remote-control-looking device that works with a library of "Tag-enabled" books to... well, read each page out loud to Junior so Mommy can spend her valuable time managing her investment portfolio or cruising Match.com instead.

Since just reading a book is no longer enough to hold children's interest in the Wired Age, Tag also features "leveled learning activities that adjust automatically to [each child's] own pace." Oh, and just so you can make sure your little ones are on track with their NCLB-approved learning goals, Tag also connects to "a personalized LeapFrog Learning Path" and monitors the reading skills they've mastered and those in which they continue to lag.

Of course, you could just sit down with little Jayden and Mackenzie and... I don't know, read to them? Ask them to read to you so you can hear how they're doing?

Also disheartening: the Tag "library" currently consists of one dreary purpose-written phonics reader called "Ozzie and Mack," a SpongeBob book and sixteen others, including "Walter the Farting Dog." (To be fair, it also includes "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" and "The Little Engine that Could.") And it's aimed at four- to eight-year-olds. My six- and eight-year-old would be bored out of their skulls by this collection of "literature;" we're currently finishing up The Thieves of Ostia and looking forward to embarking on The Hobbit next. Oh, and lest you think I'm just an anti-audiobook snobbish sort, we're also listening to A Little History of the World on CD in the car. The kids are freakin' riveted.

(Via David Carnoy at CNET's NewsBlog.)

(Miguel Helft at the NYT thinks Tag sounds dandy.)

The Woods

A music video for a song by Polly Paulusma, stop-motion animated by Rima Staines.

If you could put your own artistic stamp on a folk- or fairytale, which one would it be?

Which versions of the old stories do you read to your children: Grimms/Perrault, Susan Jeffers or Walt Disney?

(Via Bioephemera.)

Another gem from the "duh" department

This just in:

Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading (NYT)

You don't even have to read the article to know what it's going to say. I mean. Isn't that kind of like a headline saying "Study Links Increase In Wet-Hairedness to a Decline in Umbrella Use?" "Scientists: More Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wounds Equal Spike in Suicide Rate?"

And you probably also know what I feel about "testing" and "test scores" and "No Child Left Behind." (Quick summary: yuck, bleah, puke.) But even as a dyed-in-the-wool anti-tester, I can predict that when Fisher finally takes his first government-mandated fill-in-the-bubble test 40 months from now, he's going to kick ass on the reading ("language arts") part. Why? Because he reads. He reads at the breakfast table ("Fisher, put down Harry Potter and the Vincible Enemy and finish your cinna-mini crunch!"). He reads in the car ("Mama, I'm not feeling so gooood..."). He reads in the bathroom (*flush*). He reads in bed ("Fisher, it's eleven-forty-five. You can finish the book in the morning."). Nobody makes  him read. Nobody dangles dire threats about the consequences of unreadingness over his head. (Though, shamefully, we have been known to threaten him with taking away books for the rest of the day if he doesn't get off his $@%! lazy @$$! and help out around the house a little.) He just reads.

Rhys, though not quite a full-fledged reader yet, lives a similarly book-absorbed existence. He especially likes Calvin & Hobbes (though I'm not sure what percentage of the jokes are wasted on him), nonfiction books about cats ("Mama, do you think a Sphinx cat is ugly? I think it's ugly.") and especially the Elephant and Piggie books by Mo Willems (author of the Pigeon books, e.g., Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!). Elephant and Piggie are, natch, an elephant (grey and with an uncanny resemblance to Papa) and a pig (pink and irrepressible) whose super-easy-reader adventures comprise a flawless blend of kid-friendliness and parentally-appreciated irony. And the facial expressions are incomparable.

But of course our kids are all about the books. They live in a freakin' library, for gosh sakes. The living room wall is lined with books. Cookbooks teeter against the dining room wall (I really really need to fix that bookcase). Books spill from the shelves in their room and stack up on either side of the Parental Bed and ohmygosh let's not even talk about the boxes of books in the basement.

So this is what got me. The study in the Times compared, at its extremes, children growing up in homes with more than 100 books and children growing up in homes with fewer than ten books.

Fewer than 10. Jesus H. Pantsuit. I think there are more than ten books stacked on my nightstand. There are more than ten books on my library hold list. There are more than ten books at the foot of the boys' bed every night. (Not when we put them to bed--no, when they go to bed all is a model of tidiness. They get out of bed and retrieve books after Mama and Papa retire for some wine-drinking grownup time.)

No wonder these poor media-addled kids are floundering in a world where their accomplishment is measured based on their ability to correctly darken a series of bubbles. There are fewer than ten books in their houses.

Where's Dolly Parton when America really, really, really needs her?

Pick nine, only nine

From the NYT Lede blog:

The president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, is trying to encourage more of her citizenry to read books by giving boxes of as many as nine books to 400,000 poor families, according to The Economist. The big question, of course, is which nine books, exactly? The London-based weekly newsmagazine said Chile’s selected titles, like “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger and “Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, were “unexceptionable fare.”

How about you? If you had to fill a box with nine books that everyone ought to have, what would they be? What if you had to pick just one work of literature?

Wow. Nine and only nine. What a concept! Should one go for the lofty and cerebral? The literary and timeless? The uproariously funny?

Here's my stab at a list, which I'm sure I'll revise mentally many many times, especially immediately after posting it:

1. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond does an excellent job of explaining European world dominance and historical patterns from a science-based, non-racist perspective... and is a lively good read to boot. Really, if I could get the ideas from only one book widely disseminated planet-wide, it would have to be this one.
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez goes all over the place in a gorgeous, profane, heartbreakingly beautiful sprawl, yet is tightly written enough that not one word, one spectral appearance is wasted.
3. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is really more like "the one book people should read so they can really Understand My Unique Temperament," but, yeah. 'S good.
4. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Some people have complained that this book is depressing; I would argue, rather, that the truth (about the selfish nature of our evolutionary impulses) will set us free.
5. How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, because everybody should know about cooking and enjoying good food. (Also now available in a vegetarian version! Because meatless can be delicious, oh yes it can, and that's quite enough from the peanut gallery, Mr. Beloved Sweetie.)
6. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams in a convenient omnibus edition containing all five novels in the series. Who else could deal with life's philosophical quandaries so deftly, and with such a deliciously absurd British flair?
7. Gardner's Art Through the Ages in the edition and binding of your choice. 'Cause nobody loves a philistine.
8. Material World by Peter Menzel, for an appreciation of the similarities and differences throughout the human family. Also, looking at the photos of the possessions of the family in bullet-riddled Sarajevo makes your own too-small, cluttered, even funny-smelling surroundings seem positively palatial in comparison. Also, what you learn from this book is that the contentedest-looking people in the whole world live in Iceland.
9. The Oxford English Dictionary, or at least one of its sturdy smaller siblings, such as the American Heritage Dictionary (my favorite: pretty pictures!). Precision in word choice is the beginning of precision in understanding. Or something.

And you? I'm so tempted to tag here, despite my fear of calling anyone out by name, but rest assured that this is one in upon which I most heartily encourage y'all to weigh.

Also: I have joined the Powell's Partner Program (P-P-P-hat!) and am now linking to their inventory items exclusively in new posts. I'll go back and update the old ones someday, maybe, if I get time and the inclination, so probably not. Anyway, just remember that you can keep two hapless unschooled children from being completely unprepared for the future... as long as you Shop Pic-Dem (tm)!

Here we go, WriMo

Signed up once again for National Novel Writing Month. Am full aware that this signing up has no chance of resulting in a brand-new 50K-word novel, but am hopeful that it will help motivate me to add substantial chunks to one or more existing novels.

(In case you can't tell, The Book is giving me fits again. I'm thinking it may need to be knocked off its pedestal for a while so I can dwell on other, potentially easier to write projects. Like the unnamed changeling story... that one's pretty fun.)

Also: yesterday I bought--and read in full by bedtime--Graham Joyce's The Facts of Life. A wonderful novel, inexplicably shelved in the fantasy section despite having little in the way of fantastical element (yeah, there are ghosts... but where aren't there ghosts?), proving once again that it's a rare and precious male author who can write female characters well. The blurb on the back, though, is wholly misleading. It makes it sound as though the book is the story of a young boy growing up in a crazy spirit-touched family, which it is, in part; but there's no single outstanding protagonist, and the boy is in large part a foil for the complex family dynamics going on around him. The book is also the story of Joyce's hometown of Coventry, its destruction in the Blitz and its by-half-measures and ultimately unfulfilling rebuilding. The city itself serves as a metaphor for the family at the heart of the story, torn apart and changed by war yet firmly resilient in the face of destruction and shifting moral values. Awesome book (and winner of the 2003 World Fantasy Award... rock on, Graham!), super-highly recommended.

Also also: while Karan was here last week, she helped me (well, she forced me just a little bit) to completely reorganize and re-store all my stamps. Which resulted in me making some cards the other day, for the first time since we moved; which resulted in my feeling happy, creatively satisfied and motivated to make more cards. Thanks, Karan! You rock! (And Jim says he's going to put up my shelves today, perhaps. We shall see.)