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DID YOU KNOW? Since the reopening of the Bay Bridge after Labor Day, a total of 42 crashes have occurred on it. That's more than one crash every other day.
Whenever people admire things that have grown from my garden, I say something like "Oh, I just planted them; God did the rest." This is pretty much true, I think. Well, during the summer I had to water them every day, but Supertyphoon '09 has left the ground moist enough to nurture growth without constant attention.
So apparently God did not get the memo that I am trying to grow leeks, kale, radishes, and peas rather than onion grass and gigantic three-leaf clovers. Perhaps I should have made louder entreaties to Our Lady of Perpetual Weeding. If you go back and look at Ruth's blog from January last year, you can see the result of allowing these onions and clovers to grow unchecked. Yes. That's mostly onion grass. I could probably pickle scallions for the rest of my life if I wanted, if not for the fact that the onion tops don't actually taste very good. On Veteran's Day I came home early to tear out as many as I could, but when I ran downstairs to grab some mustard greens for dinner, my crop was again studded with clovers. It seems like a losing battle. Yet I am encouraged by the words of Thomas Jefferson: the price of produce is constant vigilance.
In happier produce news, my fava beans are really starting to take off, and I did not know that fava flowers are black and white. That's really pretty. I already like fava beans and now their flowers are beautiful and their leaves are delicious. Good job, fava beans. It's unfortunate that you are forever associated with cannibalism. Someone needs to stage a reclamation of the words "fava beans."
Also I was at Berkeley Bowl today picking some things up and I did the thing where you buy a ton of stuff except the one thing you went to get. In this case, the one thing I went to get was actually two things: cheesecloth and thyme, both of which play key roles in preparation of dishes for our annual Lauren-centric Thanksgiving potluck. The cheesecloth is for straining my pomegranate vodka and the thyme is to add to my braised lamb. I forgot both of them. Bad job, Sam.
In other news, Jeff and I went to Portland, Oregon last weekend and this is the iconic picture. I still can't really explain why I went, but it was a great time. It rained a lot so we mainly just drank everything. Everything. Pretty much everything a person can conceivably drink, except fermented horse milk. Mostly coffee. Also we ended up at Powell's City of Books, the Coruscant of bookstores, and I discovered Food Matters, which is pretty much the cookbook that I have always wanted to write. It teaches you how to eat better, for yourself, without being as much of a turd as Michael Pollan generally is. That's pretty cool. Mark Bittman was already one of my idols, and with this he has pretty much cemented his status as my favorite Mark (other candidates: Marc Summers, Marky Mark).
DID YOU KNOW? The total distance flown by all aircraft delivering supplies to Berlin during the Berlin Blockade exceeds the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
I have spent the past few days convinced that I am forgetting something. I keep looking at the dates--10/18, 10/22, 10/26--with the nagging suspicion that I was supposed to remember them for some reason. Yesterday I finally realized that these are not dates that I was supposed to remember, but course numbers from MIT etched in my memory. For example, yesterday, 10.28, was Bioprocess Engineering Lab, one of my favorite classes at MIT, taught by Jean-Francois "Your French Uncle" Hamel. Then I found out that yesterday was also my friend John's birthday. Which he told me last week. Oops.
I went through my computer recently when I was approaching my hard drive capacity and purged a bunch of old pictures. In the process I realized that the overwhelming majority of my old food pictures were totally awful. Trader Joe's goat cheese is an awesome soup topping but not among the most photogenic, and flash doesn't really help with that. So, anyway, I know this picture is not very good, but let me tell you about it.
Yesterday I found a tent on craigslist for $20 and it came with every part and did not smell bad at all. That's pretty awesome. A tent is the only thing I was going to ask for at Christmas this year. A tent and socks. Because I really do need new socks every year; something in the water has made me tragically incompetent at doing laundry since I got to California. In my past three trips to the laundromat, I have 1) forgotten to add soap, 2) exploded a tube of chapstick in the dryer, and 3) spilled half a bottle of detergent in my laundry-toting suitcase. But that's another blog entry. Anyway, so I found this tent on craigslist and went and picked it up. After I expressed surprise that the seller hadn't found anyone to buy it over the two-day interval between my initial inquiry and my arrival at her front door, she just said "Well, you said you wanted it, so I told everyone it was spoken for! I wouldn't sell it to anyone else. That would be downright wrong." I said "You are so nice! I wish anyone else on craigslist felt that way."
To celebrate I decided to buy a cookbook on Amazon because they are pretty cheap on Amazon. I am between two likely overhyped new releases: Ad Hoc at Home and Momofuku. Generally I am not about cooking from recipes--to be honest I still haven't made anything from my signed copy of Barefoot Contessa at Home--but the reviews of these cookbooks seem to suggest that they will not only provide you with new recipes, but also generally improve your cooking, and also make you a better person. People are like, "I got a job because of Thomas Keller's essay on kosher salt!"
So I was pretty settled on Ad Hoc after reading that it provides you with lots of condiment recipes--oh, condiments!--until I found out that the Amazon page for Momofuku has this recipe for ginger-scallion sauce. Although I was skeptical that the listed proportion of ginger, scallions, and oil would even combine into a sauce, IT DID, and it was delicious, and I still have enough ginger for 3 more preparations of the sauce because I have never really had to estimate a half cup of ginger by eye before. I mixed it with some buckwheat noodles and served it with pickled beans and carrots, scallions, chicory, fried brussels sprouts, and wine grapes. All of those were awesome except the raw scallions, which kind of served as a dramatic foil to highlight how much the sauce improved the taste of scallions.
Anyway, now I am once again torn between the two books; maybe I should give Thomas Keller's chicken with dumplings recipe a try. The best line there is "Once the dumplings have cooled, trim any uneven edges with scissors." Oh, Tom, that's why my friend Nghi pays $300 for lunch cooked by you, but skips free brunch cooked by me because he wants to go listen to Oprah.
On the subject of eating, I am going to be Julia Child for Halloween this year and I really don't know if I can wait another 24 hours to totter around in my sensible skirt and pearls. Sam's Mom wondered somewhat disapprovingly*, "Why don't you go as Bobby Flay?" For real, Sam's Mom, who wants to be Bobby Flay? Also I can't make tamales.
* but maybe I'm projecting
DID YOU KNOW? Marvel released a special comic book during fashion week in which Tim Gunn becomes Iron Man.
I am writing an e-mail to someone commenting on how much I like his pants and I went on wikipedia just to make sure I had the spelling correct. It turns out that the word is spelled lederhosen (leather trousers). I had always thought it was liederhosen (song trousers). You know, the trousers that you wear when you go out and sing in the mountains with your cows. I think this misconception arose because I was almost forced to wear a pair during the concert scene of The Sound of Music, but was able to avoid that fate by arguing that 1) there is only a 30 second window for a costume change after the preceding scene, and 2) Captain Von Trapp would have probably chosen something that chafes less as he hikes over the Swiss Alps to avoid Nazi persecution. Then they would have become leiderhosen (sadness trousers)--a misspelling also cleared up by the wikipedia article.
The inaugural Radke lab camping trip actually turned out really well! We went down to the beach at Point Reyes national seashore, hiked two miles, and stayed overnight near the beach. We played light-up Frisbee in the dark and accidentally chased deer. I kind of ended up being the planner by default, so I was pretty proud that everything turned out fine without anyone starving or getting attacked by a cougar. "The soup was a really good idea!" "It was your idea, Clay."
Except for one tent being totally stank, it was all shaping up to be a great excursion until around 4 AM on Sunday night, when a storm blew in a few hours ahead of schedule. I fortuitously awoke to hear the first rain drops and pulled my shoes into the tent, but the quantity of water dumped on us over the next five hours made this a sort of "Ze goggles! Zey do nothing!" moment.
So yeah, rain. Lots of rain. And I had such great plans involving oatmeal, too (I get more excited about oatmeal than most people in this world do). Unfortunately the secret waterproof pocket in Ian's backpack that I stuck my cell phone into did not turn out to be as secret or waterproof as I thought, so I returned from my trip to discover that my cell phone was completely out of commission (and only a few days after I marveled to Mitra how strong it was still going after three years). More precisely, I arrived home to discover that my phone was out of commission and my housekeys were lost. After about an hour of stress eating granola bars and contemplating the technical challenges involved in a climb from the back porch over my roof and into my open bedroom window (less steep than Half Dome, but without cables; wet shingles, not dry granite), I was finally able to wedge the back window open with my gardening knife and hop through into a soaked fetal position on the kitchen floor.
If you google "cell phone water damage" you'll find a lot of hits that suggest things like alcohol, dehydrators, ovens, hammers. Whatever. Well, you know, I work in a chemical engineering laboratory. I soaked that sucker in isopropanol, heated it to 40 C overnight, pulled vacuum on it, stuck it in a dessicator for three days. Nothing. He's dead, Jim. Finally on Friday I admitted defeat and headed down to the Verizon store downtown to grab a new one. And as frustrated as the untimely loss of my good old phone left me, I was excited to change my ringtone to No One Receiving.
