Ode to a Toaster

THOU still unravish'd bride of breakfast
Thou foster-child of Bagel and Defrost
Able appliance, who canst thus toast
A perfect morsel crispier than sheer moisture lost

Suck it Keats. Who need ramble on the paradoxes of life and art when I have found the perfect toaster? Why expound on the paradox of dynamic life captured in a still vase when the Ideal Bagel hath graced thou'st breakfast plate?

This is my post on toast. 'Tis a toasty post, if you will.

I am still young. I have yet to experience much of the joys and sorrows of life. I have not found the depths of human love or the bitterness of piercing remorse. I live an innocent existence and burn holes in tables for the sake of s'mores.

I fell in love. My heart took off as if my chest were the Audubon. Breathing was so difficult I needed a protocol. I could not peel my eyes away from its sleek lines, shiny facade, and simple user display. Epiphany uncloaked itself in my perfectly toasted bagel.

Hyperbole, you question? Maybe. I care more about this toaster more than any baby I have ever seen. I like this toaster more than I like puppies. Puppies are pretty cool.

(picture from http://www.cuisinart.com/products/toasters/cpt-160.html)

The Cuisinart CPT-160 Metal Classic 2-slice toaster is cooler. It is simple in design. No fancy gadgets; it does not pretend it can reheat your pizza, cook your dinner, and wash the dishes, like other taosters. Nay, it knows that it can toast, and toast it does well. It's peers tell us that number 4 gives brown toast, but 4 in average-toaster speak = "burnt" This toaster does no such thing. Turn it to 4 and your toast is brown. Turn it to six and it is dark. Turn it to 1 and you wasted your time.

Why the declaration of affection? I adore carbs. I love toast. I worship bagels. Even when I was running six miles a day and living off vegetables and lean protein, I still had a toasted bagel every day. When I'm too lazy to cook, I live off toast and peanut butter.

Unfortunately for my diet, I have favored the latter lifestyle as of late. My advisor buying htis toaster for the lab chained me to the bench better than anything else: I'm convinced that I can pick up a dozen bagels at a local shop and move in for days.


Of course, it is also fun to dress toast up a little. Summer in California means all produce is fresh and cheap. I love adding romatina tomatoes and fresh basil to my morning bagel. My roommates STILL call me a food snob even though I have been living off toast for days. I'm not sure how that works.


My current favorite toasted treat is whole-grain bread with fresh avocado, baby heirloom taomatoes, and grated parmesan cheese. Avocados are like butter right now, and they are for once, affordable. Baby heirlooms bring out hidden girlishness. I would dropkick a small dog in a purse, but I happily coo over tiny tomatoes. They are so cute!! Ahem.


Anyway, my lab also thought this was overly fancy, but it took no time, and cost less than a boring sandwich. Better yet, it was filling and vegetarian, allowing omnivore and Berekley to live together in harmony.


Soft breads are sweet, but those toasted
Are sweeter; therefore, ye badass toaster
Toast on.


Favorite breakfast bagel

Poppy seed bagel
plain cream cheese
fresh basil
2-3 romatina tomatoes (cherry or grape also great)

slice tomatoes, tear/chiffon basil.

Toast bagel, spread with cream cheese, lay down tomatoes, top with basil


Avocado toast with baby heirloom tomatoes and Parmesan cheese

Whole grain bread
1 ripe avocado, sliced
1 c baby heirloom tomatoes, halved
fresh basil
parmesan cheese

Toast bread. Lay down avocados, then tomatoes. Sprinkle with basil and cheese.

Vuvuzela Warfare

My mornings have ceased to exist. I scribble this now; dashing off a few lines during a brief moment of peace. It is the breath of calm in a storm Charybdis herself could not comprehend. For the first time in almost a month, there has not been soccer all morning long.

Thank goodness the world cup lasts only a month--much longer and society would devolve into hitting each other with sticks.

This tourney has been full of interesting calls and raging let-downs: it is as if western Europe forgot how to play soccer. Thank goodness for the Spanish, Dutch, and Germans or the cup should be called "Americas and random Asia-Pacific Cup". It is amusing to watch the media turn so quickly on its idols. I guess if you play like a tsetse fly bit you on the ass, the papers have to make news out of something.

Of course, I'm brokenhearted that the US lost to Ghana again. Bigger issues lie at hand, however. Both fans and players in the US must learn consistency. 1) the US team must learn that there are NINETY minutes to a soccer game and one must play in ALL of them. 2) Fans should remember that there is this sport that the rest of the world watches. It involves athletes who aren't fat guys in some form of spandex, and they don't swing sticks or grab each other. (Note: I am a huge baseball and football fan. Golf not so much.)

On a different note: the infamous vuvuzela could be the answer to world peace. Give warring governments a bunch of these violent kazoos. Eventually one set of politicians will hemorrhage in the ears. The most complicated of treatises is suddenly self-resolving.

The South Africans (and Chinese who actually mass produce this newfangled trumpet) have inspired me to incorporate the stadium horn into my every-day life. I aim to hire a professional vuvuzelaist.

Imagine: it is time to wake up. Instead of somnolently hitting "snooze" and turning over, I'm blasted by the drone of Fitzwilliam, blaring his purple vuvuzela. I furiously awaken, sympathetic nervous system shot into high gear. From under my covers I pull out a second plastic vuvuzela. I use it not to make noise, but as a giant orange stick; I chase Fitzwilliam around my house. Fitzy, unable to perform AND sprint away from a pissed-off 23 yr old, will have to abandon his noise making schemes. Fates are decided by a full-scale combat. Crouching trumpet, hidden grad student. All before breakfast.

It gets better. Fitzwilliam will play his loudest concerto every time I'm stuck in traffic or next to some 'badass' junky car blaring rap music so loud the S.A. fault shook. Best of all--every time some uppity teenager has to talk on the phone about her shopping trips before prom, Fitzy will save my day. Meanwhile, my hearing would slowly go to shit.

I still dream of coming up with a vuvuzela shaped dessert. Perhaps I could make thin cookies and shape them into tiny trumpets. Perhaps I could take ice cream cones and turn them into vuvuzela cones. Perhaps I will try these things when I actually have time to clean up a kitchen coated in sugar. Yet, I do not kid: just wait for the latter recipe.

What I have managed to do, however, is make ice cream. I bought myself an ice cream maker as a congrats gift for snagging a fellowhip I bitched about immensely in the fall. Ice cream is quite simple to make. Although I am terrified of scalding milk or scrambling egg yolks, in reality making a rich ice cream base takes less than a batch of cookies dough.


Naturally, my first inclination was to add alcohol. Surprisingly I resisted the urge the first few times. Eventually however, I caved in.

Hence, Bailey's-chip ice cream. (pictures to come) The pale background with tiny chocolate chips makes a round scoop look almost like an edible soccer ball. Ok, it is a bit cheesy. I don't care. I merely hope my pants still fit after this ice cream binge. Besides, a scoop of this stuff in one's morning coffee while screaming at the television is better than beating people with plastic sticks.


Bailey's-chip ice cream

5 lg egg yolks
0.75 c sugar
2 c whole milk
1.25 c heavy cream
pinch salt
1/4 c Bailey's
1 c MINI chocolate chips

Whisk together yolks, salt, and sugar until mixture is pale, yellow, and thick.

Combine milk and cream. Heat until the edges bubble. Don't let boil. Remove from heat.

Temper yolks: add about 1 c of hot milk mixture to the yolk mixture, whisk briskly. Now that yolks are used to hot dairy, add yolks into the milk-cream and whisk.

Slowly cook over low heat until thermometer reads 170 F. Turn off heat. Mix will continue to heat until 175-180, depending on the pot. Stuff should coat the back of a spoon, and a line drawn down the back should hold.

Strain through a fine sieve (important! keeps mix silky). Chill in fridge, about three hours. Add Bailey's.

Pour into ice cream maker, follow directions. In the last 10 min of churning, add chocolate.

Once stuff is done it will be soft. If you can wait, put it in a container and let it age in the freezer for a couple hours. However, it is really good straight out of the machine.

Teddy bear campfires and kitchen tables

Ah, summer; a glorious release for the free spirit. Although I know I will eventually grow up and have a job that does not change with the seasons, I fiercely cling to the concept of summer vacation. The timbre has changed slightly: summer no longer signifies a chance to intern across the country, take up Polish, or backpack across Costa Rica. Yet, now summer is both a chance to be productive in lab and enjoy a flexible schedule. The undergrads are gone and class no longer dictates my experiment schedule. Best of all, extended sunlight dissipates long-day blues.

I do have small protests about the Berkeley summer. For one, it isn't actually summer. Being close to the Bay is meteorological thorazine: it assuages the bad, yet it numbs variation to a humdrum, flat line. I flat out refused to bike to work one day in May because it was freezing cold and raining. After four years in the hot sun I refused to be pathetically cold and wet just days away from June. In the worlds of a friend, "Yep, here you never quite put the pants away."

Climatic quibbling aside, I will be sad when summer ends. My roommate David celebrated his birthday in early June, so fellow roommate Maddie and I took him to dinner to celebrate the continued survival of his autonomic nervous system.

Sitcom-worthy chaos ensued before we picked a restaurant, and an hour of disoriented banter led us to a cozy table at a swanking Sicilian trattoria. The scrumptious Italian meal far outclassed us madcap graduate students, but we headed home afterwards the traditional birthday necessities of cake and candles.


I had made a Kahlua chocolate-swirl cheesecake for the occasion. Cheesecakes require three strict criteria: gradual temperature changes, even thermal distribution, and not too much air. These three culminate into one golden-custard rule: patience. Patience and I do not always get along. So, the cheesecake was a little cracked. No one cared, it was decadently creamy.

As we futilely tried to cram more calories into our overwhelmed stomachs, Maddie started playing with the candles. All of us are a touch pyro, so a slender match sending delicate drops of wax sliding down the curvy sides of a candle was fascinating. Yet life, like candlewax, is a slippery slope. One candle grew to two, to three, to all of them. This progression ended in a tiny bonfire on the plate: match sticks fueled by birthday wax.


Biological research is every day life for us, but the importance of NOT lighting fires INSIDE THE HOUSE is too difficult to grasp. Proudly, I brilliantly thought to roast mini-marshmallows (I always have a stock for making homemade fondant).


Which brings me to a recipe as idiotic as it is delicious: indoor teddy graham s'mores. Chocolate chips and teddy graham bears were on hand from the cheesecake. Mini marshmallows set aflame and waved around to loo like tiny sugar meteors quickly melt the chocolate and make adorable morsels.

the aftermath? Fortunately for us, (and to the chagrin of Smokey the Bear programs everywhere) we did not burn down the house. Unfortunately for us, we failed to understand that plates conduct heat. And wood burns with heat and oxygen. And our kitchen, like the rest of the atmosphere, is full of oxygen. so when the plate was lifted, there was a nice burned spot on the table. Oh well. Sandpaper and varnish is a well-worth chaser for such a delicious adventure.


Teddy Graham S'mores

Teddy grahams
Chocolate Chips
Mini-marshmallows

Step 1: light fire inside house
Step 2: don't think about it
Step 3: roast marshmallows
Step 4: put marshmallow on bear with chocolate chip on it
Step 5: pop in mouth, continue not thinking about it.

Repeat. They are tiny little bears.

lipophilicity in San Francisco

In the search for life's meaning there comes a time to bow to the cliche and carpe diem. Why? Some days you wake up and Indiana Jones is your soundtrack. Some days tantalizing possibilities beckon through your curtains like sirens to Ulysses. Some days excitement replaces the plasma coursing through your veins. Some days you have to get apple-bacon maple doughnuts in San Francisco.

Stereotypical, I know. Yet another reference to how much I like bacon. Yet I had heard of these mythical creatures since coming to Berkeley. Friends and food snobs alike had described this breakfast chimera of sweet and savory. United by a common dedication to fat, the bacon doughnut is proof that sometimes two lower-class foods can combine to attain 'gourmet' status at three dollars a pop. My roommate David and I had to experience this first had. It was the perfect excuse to invade the city.

Wandering around SF was a pleasure in itself. Dynamo Donuts is a tiny nook hidden in the Mission, a district of SanFran known for it's Latino sabor. Within five minutes David, born and raised in Mexico City, was scheming with me as to how we could schlep pounds of chicharron and mangos around the city. Murals covered buildings, suggesting that a young Siquieros was hiding behind a nearby shop counter. We strolled through the idyllic weather, assured that today would be a new echelon of wonderful.

We were correct. Bacon doughnuts give surreal a new name. Dali, wax your mustache and sit down, because bacon gives a salty surprise to the sweet fried dough, while apple and maple sing like blue jays in a coffee commercial. It defied every diet on the planet, and I did not care. That doughnut was Motown happiness on a plate.


What, then could be a proper chaser to such divinity? The city never fails. We waddled back towards Humphrey Slocombe. One of a handful of fancy-pants-all-organic-ice cream shops, all with too many adjectives, the chefs twine intriguing and delicious into one creamy, irresistible scoop. Our weapon of choice? Secret Breakfast: cornflakes and bourbon.


Bacon donut, check. Cornflake bourbon ice cream, check. Nunchucks in case we were attacked by angry nutritionists, check. Incapable of eating for the next several hours, we walked over to the MOMA for a little modern art. The next hours we mused over installations and paintings, some which merited awe, and others that drew ill-suppressed giggling. Wandering past these manifestations of artistic thought instills a pensive contentment; it makes one feel like a better human than that frumpy Babbit who rolls out of bed in plaid PJs every other day of the week. I took added satisfaction that I got my art-fix with too much bacon, bourbon, and doughnut rolling around my stomach. I can only imagine what would've happened if I was also lugging around pounds of fruit and Mexican sausage in my purse...

The rest of the day followed a symphonic scheme. We had a quick third movement scherzo of salami, pancetta, and prociutto from the best in charcuterie, Boccalone's. We then wandered up to Coit Tower, in hopes of finding both a fantastic view and a way to burn off colossal quantities of fat. The day ended with a west-coast Pacific sunset, drinks, and interesting people. We chatted up a man taking pictures of his girlfriend "Hell, I'm not even a tourist. I'm just Asian, I f*cking love taking pictures," and a young man who told us he flew F18s for the Navy, "Actually I thought I would tell you I worked as a chef in Napa--figured after hearing that crap you'd believe anything." We talked about sneaking flasks to baseball games and the genius of Carl Sagan.


Honestly, if I heard someone else tell me this story, I'd hate him/her a little. Perhaps some are impervious to jealousy, but I certainly am not. What do I suggest? Go buy some bourbon cornflake ice cream. Even if jealousy persists, the ice cream is so cold the tongue is too frozen to do anything other than enjoy.

What recipe would complement such a day? Ironically, I went vegetarian. Perhaps a herbivorous day is a karmic response. Perhaps my body was simply crying out for dark greens. Perhaps the subsequent sweet potato fontina pizza buried under peppery arugula is delicious any day.


Hubris aside, it is a great pizza. Fontina cheese does not merely melt. Nay, it sheds the confines of society and relaxes into creamy luxury. Sweet potatoes give a nice color and sweetness, and they have more beta carotene than carrots, double win. Arugula is to fontina as scandal is to politics: each has a following separately, but in reality the two are inextricable. It is more fun that way. A drizzle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar on top and my friends feel validated in calling me a food snob. even though it took the same amount of time as an overglorified pasta dish.

Sweet potato fontina pizza with arugula

Favorite pizza dough (when I'm lazy I just pick up fresh dough from my local Trader Joes or grocery store)
Olive oil *
2 c Fontina, grated
1 small sweet potato, sliced as thin as possible
2 c Arugula
Parmesan cheese, balsamic vinegar, olive oil

Brush crust with oil. Sprinkle cheese on top of crust. Lay down potato slices to create a thin layer. Bake at 375 until cheese bubbles and potatoes are more or less tender. Pile on Arugula. Drizzle oil and vinegar on top, grate Parmesan over everything to garnish.

* If I'm feeling less lazy, I'll carmelize an onion: slice a small sweet onion, saute in olive oil until soft and translucent, add a splash of balsamic vinegar and water, let simmer until onions are really soft. Put that on the crust, drizzle olive oil on top.

Ethical hamsters and raspberry chili salmon

Some days the spirit simply refuses to listen to the logical. I find these are the days I disappear from the world with a book, reveling in literary escapism, or insist on playing on the swings when I'm two hours late for work. Tonight I unfathomably refuse sleep and strangely want to write something with the word "lugubriously" in it.

Fortunately, I have no personal need for such a modifier. Of course I adore the little adverb--it flourishes its connotation so well. Truly, onomatopoeia is not limited to monosyllabic interjections from comic books. Yet still, this has nothing to do with hamsters.

Neither pet hamster in my current lab is definitively lugubrious. There are two, cis and trans, and they are strictly pets. The closest either gets to being an experiment is running over my desk and nibbling at my lab notebook. The cute little bastards do what hamsters do best: eat, pee, and look adorable.

I was coddling Cis while an experiment ran one day before I was unhappily reminded that I had ethics class in twenty minutes. (ironically, Trans has become incorrigibly fat and bites. Love may be blind, but hamsters merely warrant fascination, which can most certainly discriminate.)

I just rambled about the ebb and flow of daily life, so I needn't bore you further on the matter. Allow me to present figure 1 instead:


Thus, you can imagine the appeal of sitting through the antiquated mumblings of a nice (yet ancient) professor on a topic that is inevitably oversimplified or overcomplicated. I joked to the lab "might as well as take the hamster with me for company."

Let me tell you, there comes a strange pleasure in showing up to a class on scientific ethics late, holding a 2 L flask with a hamster sloshing around inside. Ethics. hamster.

It wasn't as bad as it could have been. I did not show up to a vegan rally with a T-bone steak. Yet, the look on a friend post-doc's face when I sauntered in, tiny rodent cruising around the roomy glassware-turned-hamsterflask. suggested that I hide from the PETA Gestapo for a little while. I practiced as much discretion as a hamster in a flask will allow, and placed it at the feet of a bewildered classmate before promptly falling asleep.

I woke up halfway through class and played with Cis. She was having the time of her life. Imagine, your meager existence confined to a hamster cage! Makes one wonder about self-posing microcosms and loss of perspective. New smells, too much food, all of these strangers; why go back home? I nearly had an issue when runaway hamster jumped off my lap and scurried towards the 52 pairs of feet connected to students re-learning why James Watson is an utter bastard. Fortunately, my neighbor and I scooped her up.

Do not mistake me-- I think ethics are exceedingly important, interesting, and necessary for mental development in science. Ethics in fish are also very important. It is an amusingly awkward segway, but I did recently start reading about environmentally sound choices of fish. For some fish, it is best to buy farmed, while for others wild caught is better. Furthermore, although many 'pescatarians' suggest that eating fish is less of a crime against animals, eating certain kinds of fish can actually be quite damaging to both species and ecosystem.

Anyway, it's cool, you should check out the list before heading out to sushi:

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx

That being said, I was cool enough to buy a lot of Alaskan salmon from Costco, because Costco makes you forget you live on under 30K a year. My current fast and easy fish dish I happily made up a few months ago. Chili garlic sauce that I bought on a whim at the store for 2 dollars mixed with raspberry jam left over from a cake, splashed with some OJ makes an interesting sweet-spicy combination that compliments the meaty fish. Caramelizing some shallot or onion beforehand makes the entire thing very easy, healthy, and interesting.

I love to serve a small portion of fish with a mountain of spinach and arugula--that way I can be too lazy to prepare some sort of carb, and I can pretend I'm Popeye. Yet seriously, they provide a very nice canvas for the simple flavors at play. The colors even contrast so nicely that people think you are a far better cook than you are. I made this for a friend, and he thought he was special or something for such a meal. Little did he know I just knew I had to cook the fish, and it would take less time than making anything else. Buahahaha. Ethical? Delicious.



Raspberry chili salmon

Salmon: could be a slice of fillet, or even a salmon steak.
Salt, pepper
1/2 onion, diced finely

2 large spoonfuls of seedless raspberry jam
1/2 spoonful of chili garlic sauce
healthy splash oj

Pat dry salmon. Season with salt and peper. Heat some olive oil in a pan, sear fish over high eat, a few minutes on each side. Hint-- for fish, it will slide on the skillet when that side is done. If it doesn't move, don't poke it. Take fish, wrap in tin foil to make a loose packet, and pop in a 300 oven while you make sauce.

Pour olive oil into pan. Add onions, turn heat down, and cook until onions are tender and verging on carmelized. Add remaining ingredients, stir to mix. Let simmer down and allow onion to get really soft.

Pull fish out of oven every 10 min to ensure it is not over done. Hint-- fish is done when flesh is flaky, but does not look dry. If fish is still undercooked (deep pink in center, not flaking) just pop in microwave for 30 seconds and so. (Real fancy, eh?)

Plate salmon on bed of greens. Spoon sauce over fish.

Hiati

What is the plural of hiatus? Hiatuses? How inelegant. Well, now that dyslexic Haitians everywhere dislike me, I'll continue.

What a better way to return to my forlorn blog than to ramble irritatingly on the cycles of life? CS Lewis snuck in a very apt quotation on the undulations of humanity in his The Screwtape Letters, but I don't remember it. Go read it yourself, it's short. Yet Lewis is right: our lives graph a series of oscillations. Energy levels, general luck, latest interests, my alcohol intake--not sure the identity of the function dictating my life-waves, but they most certainly propagate.

Things increasing as a function of time: (dy/dx >0)
Obsession with Tango
Obsession with Bacon

Hiati: (dy/dx < 0)
Blogging
Dancing on kitchen furniture instead of studying (ok, not really)

So life goes. Yet, amidst such fluctuation, some things stay constant. Perhaps it is these zero order life parameters that equate to crap like 'character'. I find such conjectures disturbing, as that may correlate my identity my popcorn air-popper, but compared to Dorian Gray or Rasputin, it's quite innocuous.

My constants:
Flirting with narcolepsy
Cooking with alcohol

Narcolepsy I have accepted. My latest favorite story happened on a Friday night of NCAA basketball games. I eagerly waited my experiments to fail so I could dash to the nearset sports bar while deluding myself that my bracket would not inevitably crumble under the avalanche of upsets that pelted the tournament this year. Later I was to join friends to go to the city for a much-needed wholesome evening of tequila, music, and borderline-inappropriate dancing.

Hence you can imagine my surprise when I end up texting my friends at 3am, "Sorry, fell asleep in a box of packing peanuts. Will explain later."

Not much of a surprise, actually. Sleeping is one of the few things I do better than almost anyone (devoid of a severe medical condition or tranquilizer addiction). After basketball and beer a few of us ended up at my house for more beer. One roommate just had a birthday. Clearly, her friends like her better than other friends like anyone else, because a veritable torrent of boxes had flooded our porch for a good week. One of them was half filed with styrofoam S-shaped peanuts. Drunk grad students + packing peanuts = indoor snow party. Obsession with fitting into small spaces + box = me sitting in a box of packaging material. My friends promptly proceeded to pile more peanuts on top and take pictures to ensure I never live a dignified existence.


It was in this setting that I made a fascinating discovery: packing peanuts are extremely comfortable. Lots of cush for the tush, while the insulating properties of styrofoam make it a wonderfully ghetto blanket. Outfitted as such, consciousness gave in to napping--rendering my eloquent 3am message.

Cooking with alcohol is pretty standard. I have been trying in vain to come up with a good whiskey brownie recipe. Don't get me wrong, the brownies always come out great--it is just that the whiskey inevitably fades into obscurity. So, I present instead the base recipe for the brownies: feel free to add coffee liquor, beer, scotch-- whatever you like to give it something extra. Whiskey caramel is a favorite touch of mine.

The batter is a great basic. Derived mostly from melted chocolate, it satisfies better than sissy cocoa-powder analogues. Also, I get the thing in the oven in under 30 minutes, giving me plenty of time to fall asleep in boxes before it burns. The topping shown is a bailey's ganache. Be wary, however, these suckers are very rich.

Brownies a la basic

2 eggs, lightly beaten
3/4 c white sugar
6 oz melted chocolate (I nuke mine at 30 s intervals on defrost, stirring in between)
1/2 c flour
3/4 t baking powser
1/2 t salt
1 stick butter, melted
2 T liquor/vanilla

Frosting:
1 c chocolate
1/2 c cream
1 T bailey's (a different liquor works as well)

Oven to 350

Combine eggs, sugar, and melted chocolate (careful if chocolate is hot to not scramble eggs!). Combine flour, salt, and b. powder in a separate bowl. Add flour mix to chocolate mix in three parts, stirring to combine. Stir in liquor. Pour into greased pan and bake for 30 min, or just until tester comes out clean.

Frosting:
Heat cream to a simmer, pour over chocolate. Let stand 2 min. Stir until smooth. Stir in bailey's (or other liquor). Let cool until semi-set, spatula over brownies.

Divine Urination

Violets are blue
Roses are red
When it rains a lot
I get really wet.
~My roommates

Rain. The world reacts to few things with such a diversity of sentiment than it does to rain. Rain breathes life into barren austerity; it wipes out entire existences. It is the exhilarating drop-splash stimulating the body, and the dreary miasma blotting out happiness in a mundane world. Hemmingway, meet ee cummings.

My feelings directly reflect the rainy context. If I can stay inside in my PJs and drink warm tea while the rain patters on the window, rain is perfect. If I can dance a slow Argentine tango in the warm summer rain, I'm in love. If I am reduced to doubling my commute to work on the bus because God hasn't stopped peeing on Berkeley for a week, rain is Xanax-proof.

Actually, it is not that bad. Taking the bus instead of biking is fine, except for the time lost and the crazies met. Some crazies are fun: I've enjoyed a couple blues concerts on the bus and people ranting about racists when the door doesn't open. There are people who stare: both in the "If I keep looking at you, you might decide to sleep with me," and "I wonder how much I can get selling her internal organs on ebay?" One day I'll have the balls to stare back and figure out how much I could make auctioning off their internal organs. Who knew the things you could deduce by staring?

Apparently rain is the Bay area's version of winter. I cannot complain: I do not like cold. Rain evaporates without leaving dirty streets, it doesn't carve the shivering void in my viscera that ice does, and a hard shell and umbrella beats fifteen sweaters and snow boots. Yet, for a girl who spent four years in Phoenix, multiple days of rain in a row blows my neural circuitry. You must understand: Phoenix gets 8 hours of rain a year. The drainage system is the atmosphere, and people drive as if velociraptors were falling from the sky.

Yet here, it rains all the time. There is no core-shaking thunder or eye dazzling lightning. It is almost as if the rain was a normal part of life, and not some outside force trying scare the shit out of me. Imagine that.

So, I continue to adjust. The first rain when I came back home from my first year college, my mother nearly called a therapist. I guess I would too if my 20 year old daughter was singing and dancing in the downpour. I must squash my inner Arizonian and refrain from building any arks under such a leaky sky. Besides, I don't think you can make an ark out of Priuses, and I know I'll get an army of angry hippies if I try to use wood. Perhaps one can make a soy titanic. The Tofutanic! Oh wait... it sank.

Anyway, rain evokes varied emotions, and I find them more intense than those drummed up by other meteorological phenomena. Rain makes me crave the contentedness of hot cocoa and a soft blanket; it unleashes a torrent of energy that courses through my nerves like broken dam; it saps the world of color and leaves my soul drab and grey. Yet, at the end of the day, there is always a perfect response: milk and cookies.

Why not soup? Or tea? Hot chocolate spiked with too much peppermint schnapps? Those are expected. Perfect milk and cookies bring both spark to a dull day and comfort to a harried soul. It reminds us that five years old is always the perfect age, and brings out all positive connotations of rain. Not to mention that I feel 'all grown-up' since I can now make my own milk and cookies, so I don't need my mother to yell at me for leaving wet clothes on the chair and offer me warm morsels of buttery paradise.

However, I am not five years old. So I can do milk and cookies my way! I present one of my first cookie recipes: Irish-chocolate chocolate chip cookies, and grown up milk.



The cookie has a healthy splash of Baileys, which blends with the cocoa in a spiced-up childhood way. The added fat makes the cookies very moist, but the extra liquid keeps them from being particularly chewy (which you can fix by adding less baileys or a touch of corn syrup, which I dislike...) but trust me, these cookies lack nothing. They pair perfectly with milk blended with Kahlua and Baileys. If that doesn't make your day brighter, I suggest you move to the surface of the sun.

Baileys chocolate chocolate-chip cookies
2.25 c flour
.5 c white sugar
.5 c brown sugar, lightly packed
2 eggs, room temp
2 sticks butter, room temp
.5 c cocoa
1 t baking soda
1.25 t salt
1/3 c baileys, scant
2 c chocolate chips

Sift dry ingredients: flour, soda, salt, and cocoa in a bowl, set aside.
Cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs. Beat in Baileys. Slowly beat or fold in dry ingredients, 1/3 at a time. Fold in chocolate chips. Batter will be wetter than normal.

Drop by generous spoonfulls on a baking sheet. Bake for 12 min at 375 until cookies just barely bake (the tops should almost look browner than the cocoa). Let cool.

Milk: In a normal glass, add 1 shot Baileys, 1 shot Kahlua, and fill with cold milk.

Deck the halls with cheerful lunatics

I felt like singing "I will survive" at the top of my lungs friday afternoon as I walked out of my final exam. No more science for two whole weeks. I could now vainly attempt to re-acclimate to society and pretend to be normal! Merry Christmas indeed.

Too bad society is not normal. In fact, society is terrifying. Forget Homeland Secuirty: the average highway has more terrorists driving than the CIA should allow. I'd like to see Bin Laden flee from the army of SUV driving soccer moms barelling down the I 10 in search of last minute presents. We must notify Obama that a torture far more sinister than water boarding persists far closer than Guantanamo: Christmas shopping.

I left the night vision goggles and sniper scope at home. Of course I didn't need night vision goggles, that would be silly. However, I could've used more than a scope on the highway. James Bond has nothing on Phoenix. Evade the bludger SUVs, skirt the barely moving Buicks, don't forget to exit. Jason Bourne can drive through tiny European streets with people shooting at him. Who gives? I can ninja from the West to East valley in under an hour.

Yet, the highway is the easy part. I cannot stand traffic, and as I got into the first of many lines trying to find a parking spot, I yearned for a paper bag and some chocolate pudding. It was worse than Lord of the Flies. Every car for itself, just trying to park and happy to be alive.

If the parking lot is a frying pan, a shopping mall is a bonfire to be recokoned with. Screaming children. Stressed out Santas. Irritating teenagers who refuse to talk in normal octaves. Harried mothers. Armies of old men asleep on chairs, waiting for their wives. Phalanxes of families looking for their spears and shields. No statin would bring down my blood pressure.

I do confess: I am to crowds as a cat is to thunderstorms. I don't mind performing in front of them, and I'm not phased by public speaking. However, actually assimilating into the Borg puts me on edge. My sister laughs at her sibling who usually can handle inordinate amounts of stress but has to be talked off a ledge every time she gets near a Macy's.

This is not new. It is nearly tradition, actually. Every year my wonderful parents ask what I need for Christmas. Every year I need new clothing. Every year I have to try on clothing. Every year the legions of clothing overwhelm me, and my mother finds me curled up in a dressing room, hiding from reality. The upside to this is that I've figured out which stores have the best napping spaces. Finally, every year my family resuscitates their daughter, who proceeds to rant about indoctrinated materialism and consumer whores. Fortunately, before said daughter decides to join an ashram in the Himalayas and live off wheat grass, it is time for lunch.


Of course, the antidote to post-shopping paralysis is comfort food. However, I was desperate to avoid my devolving holiday diet of sugar, fat, and beer. So, at the suggestion of my mother, I came up with a winter soup using up some left over turkey sausage and kale. It apparently also echoes of the kale soup at the Olive Garden, although I'm sure this is much healthier.

Kale screams comfort to me: it is one of the few greens I like to eat wilted or in soup- it is so sturdy it doesn't feel slimy at all. It lends a heartiness that almost makes me understand how vegetarians are not constantly starving. Turkey sausage is by no means vegetarian, but it is low in fat and full of flavor, so you needn't add a bunch of spices to the thing, nor drain out rendered grease. It is incredibly fast to make. I add a little whole milk, potatoes, and onions to make an easy winter soup that would soothe a cat pushed into a bathtub by an entire mall full of menacing shoppers.


Sausage and Kale Soup: Shopping Antidote

1 lb hot italian turkey sausage, either removed from casing or cut into 3/4 in pieces
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 onion, diced
1 head of kale, rinsed and roughly chopped
3 small red potatoes, or two small normal ones, diced
salt/pepper
optional seasonings: paprika, dried rosemary, fennel seed
3 cans chicken broth or stock
2 c whole milk

Cook sausage, onions, garlic, and potatoes in a bit of olive oil in a large soup pot over med-high heat. Once sausage is browned and potatoes are less like rocks, add kale and let cook down a few more minutes. Season. Add chicken broth, and stir to deglaze pan. Bring to a boil. Bring down to a simmer and cook for 10 more min. Keep heat low and add milk. Stir occasionally until soup is just ready to simmer again.

Beans can be thrown in if you like that sort of thing. One can of white beans or garbanzos could be thrown in with the stock, giving more body to the dish.