November 2005 Archives
Of course I'm always looking for diversions and there are so few legitimate ones at that. But this morning I found PandaCam at the National Zoo trained on Mei Xiang and her new cub, Tai Shan. I love me some bears.
I've done a large turkey several years in a row just to prove to myself that I could. I'm still saying that Alton Brown's suggestion of a 24-hour brine for the turkey is the best way to go. My mother may have made fun of me but she ate the damn thing and was pleasantly surprised that I was able to do it, I think.
This year, it's just Jeff and me. Cooking Thanksgiving for two is more challenging then at first glance because it is just so easy to say "fuck it" and have pizza. But we decided it was still Thanksgiving so I'm trying out a turkey breast in the slow cooker, Jeff's Mom's stuffing, roasted parsnips and sweet potatoes, and some ginger squash soup I made last weekend. Sounds peaceful and relaxing to me.
Hey, guess what? I'm in graduate school! Ta-DA! Of course the whole decline and destruction of the blog has been mostly due to my otherwise engaging academic pursuits which, for anyone who’ll give me half a second, already knew. Believe me, I'm as bored and annoyed dropping it into every conversation as everyone is hearing it. Unfortunately, I do nothing else so it is all I have to talk about.
That being said, I'm coming to the end. I'm starting down the path of my final three classes and will be done in the early Spring which, as far as I'm concerned, isn't nearly quick enough. I mean, at the end of winter, does anyone really ever say, "wow, that was the QUICKEST winter EVER"? No, everyone simply wants to shoot themselves in February because it’s been the longest fucking winter on record and not even good drugs can hold off the creeping insidiousness of Seasonal Affective Disorder. But I'm sure it's a jolly ding-dong time to be in the final mad dash of a graduate degree. You know how graduating seniors feel in those final months before May? They're totally worthless piles of non-productive anxiety and excitement. That's about where I am right now, faced with two major upcoming holidays and a long, cold, snowy season. I'm thrilled, let me tell you.
But I'm also weirdly smart and only recently figured out that my consecutive six-week classes need not necessarily be consecutive so starting next week, I'm overlapping the first week of my upcoming classes (typically slow with the general getting teams formed, understanding the syllabus, and scheduling out the term projects) with my last week of the current class (typically slow with no participating requirements, discussion questions, and final touches on projects and papers). Had I been doing this from the beginning, I'd have been done in October. But hope springs eternal by this overlapping, I'm shaving off three weeks of school, getting me done in March instead of April. I may melt my tiny brain in the process but by God, I'll be done in March and that is all that matters.
I am in no way any kind of food snob and my cooking skills still mark me as an amateur which I'm fine with. I am getting comfortable with trying some new things, working through my fear of self-poisoning, and really just enjoying the discovery that some cooking isn't really as hard as I've imagined it would be.
Case in point, salmon, which I love. If someone told me that four nice pieces of salmon on a bed of spinach and chopped mushrooms in the microwave for nine minutes gets what appears to be a top-quality and snazzy meal, I'd have said they were crazy. But it is true. I've done it twice now, once with an orange juice and Dijon mustard sauce and once with a teriyaki sauce and both times, it came out perfect.
Who knew the microwave was good for anything but heating up leftovers and water?
In an attempt to completly sabotage my Health Care Infrastructure course this weekend, I put off my very important presentation on the VA Health Care system to take a side trip down the cooking trail. By the end of the weekend, I'd wound my way through the current issue of Everyday Food and managed to make a big pot of roasted red pepper soup, four delicious salmon fillets in an orange juice and dijon mustard sauce, roasted parsnips and sweet potatoes, and eight rice and bean burritos that promptly got frozen for later use.
At least if I flunk out of school, I won't starve.
Why yes, in fact, that was Jeff, Nikki, and myself wedged into the corner audience viewing box of "MARTHA!" during her Halloween show on Monday, having our two seconds of screen time at the seven minute mark as far as the Tivo goes. The tickets indicated we must come in extravagant costume and so we came up with the Three Blind "But Very Tidy" Mice. We had brooms and dust pans instead of white canes. We also had cans of Easy Cheese and fortuitously, after sitting around for several hours we were so damn hungry, Jeff finally popped his top and we were sucking down creamy heaven right there in the shining light of The Homemaker Goddess, Martha The Blessed Holy Mother of All Good Things. Of course that other group dressed as the three blind mice still had their tails (we had bloody gauze pads taped to our asses), had cat-ears instead of mouse-ears, and just weren't as full-out fun as our group. That's why when Martha and Wes were setting up the dining room segment of the show, she looked over at us, pointed and smiled. The world kind of shimmered at that moment.
The bigger secret is that Cameron Matheson who was the guest soap star on the show really does have, as he feared, the skinniest calves. Luckily he's a whole hunka love to look at so it's all good.
