Space Ear

A work by Ryan Agnew, showing for a limited time in our living room.

Bet you can't guess the materials.

It has replaced soup!

We seriously eat this every day now.

Some rice noodles- cook them
Lots of veggies (this week it's been mustard greens and cabbage, but whatever strikes your fancy)- steam, braise or saute them
An egg or 2- either scrambled or omlet-ed, then cut into strips
-OR-
tofu, sauteed

Some coconut milk, Bragg's tamari, and something spicy- recently, the chili sauce that is in the bottle with the rooster on it

Mix it up.

Eat.

E will be sick of this in 3, 2, 1...

My favorite flowers

are ranunculus. But if you ask me in person what my favorite flowers are, I will say peonies, because I can't get my mouth to say ranunculus.

How insanely wonderful is this? Finding things to wear for favorite children and young adult characters would be the most fabulous job ever. For Ramona, or maybe even Ellen Tibbits, these would do nicely. The gang from Harriet the Spy* can wear these. I need to stop looking at these sites so I don't accidentally convince myself that a French '30's school girl uniform is my next look. Or believe that E would ever wear any of this stuff.


*Possibly my favorite book on earth.

Pizza Pizza

Has anyone checked out any of the Wild Goose Collective events? I love the idea of what they are about, but have not yet managed to go to any of their parties. This one, being free (minus the expense of the pizza you make or bring), seems like a good bet. I am assuming it's kid-friendly- surely it is, right?

I think we'll make some kind of gluten-free pizza so I will actually have something to eat and not
make myself sicking by eating the forbidden wheat (I'm another gluten-free girl). After this, maybe my obsession with all things Italian will be over.

Manga

I must have been obsessed with food (nothing new) during a recent library visit, because somehow I came home with 10 or 11 books about food- cookbooks, food-related memoirs, histories of ingredients (including one called, with refreshing simplicity, Milk). My favorite in the pile is Heat, an account by a New Yorker writer who, after bravely inviting chef Mario Batali to dinner (a mutual friend was having a birthday, and our author was cooking), began what turned into a 2 year adventure with Italian food. He works in Mario's kitchen for more than a year (this was supposed to be a 6 week assignment-can you imagine what his wife thought? You'd be right), growing competent in basic kitchen skills, moving up to line cook, pasta cook, and, most successfully, the meat cook (probably there is a more elegant word for it, yes?) and finally takes several increasingly lengthy sojourns to Italy where he apprentices with Mario's first pasta teacher, then a world renowned butcher. Heat is best when talking about what people- farmers, butchers, chefs- go though to get the best to people who may or may not appreciate it, and the seeming hopelessness of the Slow-Fooders against massive ag-giants from all over the world, but also when the writer himself has a food epiphany. One such aha moment comes when he is making polenta, and realizes that the difference between what everyone thinks is polenta- a pretty quick though labor intensive cooking of cornmeal on the stove- and real polenta is that, although the traditional polenta takes hours (!), it does not need you after a certain point, apart from an occasional stir, and that it was a far superior polenta, indeed.

I have never made polenta, but after reading this book, and knowing that it was probably the only thing I could make out of it, decided to try it. I got 3 cups of cornmeal from the co-op (please, BTW, go there if you can- they are not doing well and they need you), came home and put it in a pot with 9 cups of water, a few teaspoons of salt, and got to stirring. The book says that the polenta speaks to you when it doesn't need you anymore, but this polenta was telling me that it was done by no longer sticking to the sides (this after about 30 minutes of stirring a simmering pot), reportedly the classic sign of done-ness in polenta speak. I then put it on a tray where it cooled, and then brushed it with some olive oil and stuck it under the broiler for another 30 minutes. I didn't think it would taste like much- after all, it is just plain old cornmeal- but I should have trusted the Italians know what they're doing because, reader, it was good; golden, crispy outside and chewy inside. A fine vehicle for a sauce, and good on its own, too. Next time I'll try to trust that it can take care of itself and see what happens.

While I was stirring, E was making pasta with the pasta maker (did I mention I was a little obsessed this weekend?). She made spaghetti all by herself- I know she's 10 and that doesn't make her some kind of cooking prodigy, but I forget sometimes that she is big and competant. After our seprate projects were done, we made tortelloni, which are kind of like ravioli, but sort of envelope shaped, with a spinach goat cheese filling. We made a bunch that sucked, but eventually some fine motor skills emerged and she said they were pretty good.

Possibly I ended up with all the food books becuase everyone here is sick of soup. Even the people who would drop by to see if I had any on the stove. Even, um, me.

Houseplants- yes or no?

Sometimes they look so, so pretty, sometimes they're fine in kind of a '70's way, and sometimes they just make things look dirty and cluttered. Also, there is the difficulty of keeping them alive, something I am not particularly adept at. B has managed to keep a collection of plants (mostly) thriving for as long as I've known him- some of the plants are older than him-and a friend endowed me with some very lovely specimens that she did not think would survive a road trip to her new home in SF, but they are mostly ghettoized to the top of the refrigerator* . I would really like to find more dignified homes for them, but our flat surfaces are already spoken for. Has anyone had any luck with hanging them in jars? I'm not thinking of a macrame kind of deal, more something reflective of my whole Museum of Natural History aesthetic (naturalist, pre-WW 2 looking). Maybe a tiny shelf for each plant, mixed in on the art wall? I wonder if I could make that happen. Anyone have any thoughts?

I really, reaaly love these- I may have to relocate some books to give a whole flat surface just to charming green things.

A place some people feel is very vulgar.

Upcoming BenCo shows

March 3 Phosporecent @ The Summit
March 6 Jason Isbell with Deer Tick @ Rumba
March 11 Maserati with Brainbow and The Reciever
March 12 Neil Hamburger with Daiquri and Hugs and Kisses @ Circus
March 14 Fiasco with Talk Normal and Guinea Worms @ Bourbon St
March 26 Hammel on Trial @ Rumba
March 26 The Death Set with Team Robespierre and Ninjasonic @ The Summit
March 30 Garotas Suecas @ Rumba

For more info, go to bencopresents.com

I will be at the Maserati and Fiasco (my birthday!) shows for sure- we'll see about the others. Hope to see you there.

So...

...we all know that I am compulsively tidy. Not clean, mind you- you could write your name in the dust on some bookshelves- but things are put away where they belong (and everything has a place where it belongs, even if it is temporarily confused). I even have a low-level sense of guilt about this; I worry that my need for surfaces to be clear has resulted in some degree of angsty-ness for the girl, and unnecessary tension with the boy, that I should be reading Aristotle (it could alternatively be argued that I spend too much time reading, so I guess I'm a bit f-ed) or working at the food pantry. I know that when we have parties and I am obsessively putting everyone's coats on the coat rack, and taking B's glass away when he is still drinking out of it, or when I am spending ridiculous hours arranging books in just the right way, that these are probably not so very healthy. I know that many people consider this sort of thing to be trivial. Anti-feminist, even*.

However. Check this out.

I understand that, according to this study, order means more than having shoes all in one place. It means a general consistency and a fair amount of routine. I get that, and do not claim to have mastered either. I think domestic flexibility is extremely important (our kitchen sink is currently under repair and I have been doing dishes in the tub for the last week- an opportunity for problem solving! and empathy for people in situations different from our own! And I'm allergic to mornings, so there's some built in difficulty there.). And I know many, many families who would consider themselves messy who are all kinds of awesome. Also, of course, fine. But I get a little bit of shite for my need to rid my visible environment of clutter- I have been called rigid, neurotic, retro, bourgeois, and, memorably, a tool of the patriarchy (see * below). A stifler of my child's creativity, even. And these are my friends! So forgive me a little bit of glee in this study.

Discuss.


*I call bullshit on this. I couldn't be more unhappy that domesticity is not considered a worthy art, or a constructive use of time, but I am not interested defending my feminism because some people don't think one can be a thinking person and also bake a cake. Or who think the two are unrelated.