The joy of soy

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Normally I buy a pint of milk once every two weeks.  I use maybe half of it, on cereal and in occasional baking/cooking projects.  Then I buy a new one and throw the old one away.  Expensive and wasteful.  But what’s to be done?

 

 

Well, there’s soy milk, naturally.  And cashew milk, and almond milk, and all kinds of other things.

 

 

I tried soy milk about two years ago.  I was suspicious of it; I was prepared for it to taste weedy and green and wild, not like milk at all, but like edamame, about which I am not crazy.  And, naturally, I conned myself into thinking it did taste like that, and so it fulfilled my worst expectations.

 

 

But it kept preying on my mind.  So, a few months ago, I bought two waxed-paper cartons of WestSoy soy milk, one vanilla-flavored (which sounded mostly innocuous and less like edamame), the other plain. 

 

 

I find that I like them both.  The vanilla soy milk is delicious on cereal – better than regular milk.  The regular soy milk is also not bad. 

 

 

Soy milk lasts a lot longer in the fridge than regular milk.  You have to shake it up before you use it, but I don’t have a problem with that.  And it’s faintly sweet (at least the WestSoy product is), which is pleasant.  I want to see how it works in baking projects, and mashed potatoes, and sauces, and things like that. Then we’ll see.   (It’s also – supposedly – packed with some botanical equivalent to estrogen, so I will be watching to see if it takes away any of my intense masculinity.)

 

 

My brother-in-law Dwight was a dairy farmer for years.  He and my sister used to leave little nasty notes at restaurants when they were served margarine instead of butter.

 

 

I can only imagine what Dwight might think of soy milk.

 

 

But, hey, you gotta live a little.

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Kidney stones

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Gather round, children.  Momma has some pretty awful news.

 

 

She has a kidney stone.

 

 

I’ve suspected this for some time, actually.  I’ve suffered with a dull ache in my lower back for years, centralized right around where I know my kidney to be.  My doctor insisted I was mistaken, my urine tests were clear, it was just a muscle cramp, blah blah blah.

 

 

Well, now we have X-ray confirmation.

 

 

Eh.  It’s a small stone, apparently, which is why I am not rolling on the floor in agony.  There’s no real treatment, except to increase fluid intake and try to avoid certain foods.  Beer.  Broccoli.  Beets.  Beans.  Bran, for god’s sake!  And those are only the Bs.  (Not to mention that I have increased my consumption of beans and broccoli and bran over the past few years, because they were supposed to be healthy for me.  Go figure.)

 

I looked up the condition online.  Lots of famous people have suffered with kidney stones: Napoleon, Giovanni Gabrieli, Michel de Montaigne, Michelangelo, Billy Graham, Lyndon Johnson.  I’m not sure why this matters, but it makes me feel a little better about the whole thing. (Especially Gabrieli and Montaigne.)

 

 

I do not intend to give up my beloved beans and broccoli and bran, not altogether.  So I am resigned to drinking lots and lots of water.  Lots and lots and lots of water.

 

 

Which reminds me of a funny story:

 

 

In Morocco, we drank mineral water exclusively.  There were three brands: Sidi Harazem and Sidi Ali, which were both flat, and Oulmes, which was sparkling.  As an aesthete, I preferred Oulmes, because the bottles were prettier. 

 

 

One day I was idling in a café with my British friend Austin and reading the legend on the Oulmes bottle.  “Oulmes is naturally carbonated,” I read, “and radioactive –“

 

 

I stopped.  Austin laughed.  “Didn’t you know that?” he said. "The water comes from a hot spring. It’s radioactive lithium, I think.  A friend of mine used to drink the stuff all the time.  He developed kidney stones, and they showed up beautifully on the scans, because they were radioactive too.”

 

 

(I notice, by the way, that the Oulmes website does not mention this.  Hm.  They’re marketing in Europe now.  I wonder if they’re just lying, or if they’re actually bottling non-radioactive water.  Who can say?)

 

 

So, you see, things could be worse.

 

 

At least my kidney stone isn’t radioactive.

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Super Bowl XLVI

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As you are probably aware, New England lost the Super Bowl last weekend.

 

 

Partner retreated into the other room immediately after the end of the game. He does not like losing.  He is a born New Englander, and he is used to losing, but he prefers to win.  The Red Sox have finally broken their losing streak – twice over the last decade - and the Bruins won the Stanley Cup just last year, and the Patriots have won the Super Bowl three times.

 

 

But not this year.

 

 

Here’s the thing: New England teams are not terribly attractive to the rest of the nation.  When the Patriots last lost the Super Bowl, the Onion headlined: “Patriots' Season Perfect For Rest Of Nation.”

 

 

We are hated, we know.  When our teams lose, we have to put up with a lot of gloating by fans of the other teams, who now feel that their hatred is justified.

 

 

And now we sulk in defeat.

 

 

But you just wait!  We’ll be back.

 

 

And as a recent issue of the Onion so cleverly put it, in a piece written just before the playoffs: “NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS: Opponents may think they're not what they were when they were younger, but have they considered Tom Brady might get even more handsome with gray hair?”

 

 

(He will, you know.)

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Salt

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Food has gotten very fancy. 

 

 

My mother never in her life used pure vanilla extract; imitation vanilla extract was good enough for her.  But nowadays?  If you’re not using pure vanilla extract – and Madagascar vanilla at that – you’d better just slit your throat.

 

 

(Unless, of course, you purchase fresh vanilla beans and scrape the seeds into your project.  In this case, we will grudgingly allow you to continue.)

 

 

Remember when Apollonia and I were arguing over oils, and vinegars?  Olive oil, vegetable oil, sesame oil, walnut oil, almond oil.  Balsamic vinegar, white vinegar, cider vinegar –

 

 

And now: salt.

 

 

Salt is interesting.  Mom used Morton’s exclusively: “When it rains, it pours.”  Nowadays, of course, we know that there are so many interesting Salts of the World: the grey salt they harvest on the Ile de Re in France, the pink salt from the Himalayas.

 

 

I have purchased both of these.

 

 

They both taste – mneh – like salt. 

 

 

It would be lovely to pretend that they are Ubersalzen, that they have magical flavors not possessed by other salts. 

 

 

It wouldn’t be true.  They are – um – salty.

 

 

But the Ile de Re salt is grey, and is raked up from the sand, from the ocean, by people in France!

 

 

And the Himalayan salt is up in the mountains, from an ocean that dried up over 200 million years ago! 

 

 

And it’s pink!

 

 

(Well, it might be from Pakistan.  Not really from the Himalayas.)

 

 

(And I paid $1.99 – plus tax – for two ounces of the Himalayan salt.  That’s roughly $16/pound.  Mighty steep!)

 

 

It’s not the (salty) taste nor the packaging: it’s the mental imagery.  It’s the lovely image of those people on l’Ile de Re in their funny hats, raking salt on the seashore, and the quiet chilly bed of pink! salt lying so high up in the Himalayas.

 

 

I had some pink Himalayan salt on my mashed potatoes this evening.  It was spectacular.  It was completely different from any other condiment I might have used.

 

 

Who are you to deny it?

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The painting over the sofa

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I was reading a little vignette about a writer I’d never heard of, Nathan Englander, in the Financial Times a few days ago.  He is evidently an up-and-coming genius of 42.

 

 

I have decided that I don’t like him.

 

 

The FT often does something like the Proust questionnaire with certain celebrities.  They ask them questions from a list: What’s your favorite virtue?  What do you most dislike about yourself? If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?  (New York Magazine does it, James Lipton does it on “Inside the Actors Studio,” everyone does it.  If the interviewee is intelligent or witty or (insh’allah) both, the results can be a lot of fun.  If not, it can be excruciating.)

 

 

Mister Englander tends toward the excruciating.  His answers are leaden and pompous: he mentions that he finds writing “all-consuming” in the same breath that he claims to take exactly 49 minutes to brush his teeth.  He is trying too hard.

 

 

This answer especially brought me up short:

 

 

If you could own any painting, what would it be?

“Guernica.”  I remember being taken to say goodbye to it in New York by my mum.

 

 

Dear Jesus.  Can you imagine “Guernica” hanging over your sofa?  How charming to come home after a hard day of work and sit down in the living room in front of a Cubist painting of lightbulbs and corpses and mutilated cattle.

 

 

I’d find it a little unnerving.

 

 

I asked myself the same question, and the answer came to me easily.  And the painting lives right now the road from me, too.

 

 

About ten blocks away from our apartment, in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, hangs a painting by a Dutch landscapist named Salomon van Ruysdael called “The Ferry Boat.”  It was painted in 1645, and it looks as fresh today as it ever did.  I always spend a few minutes with it when we visit the RISD Museum.

 

 

The above image doesn’t capture all of the detail, but it will give you the general impression.  First: the soft colors, especially the pale blue sky and drifting dark clouds, and the dark green foliage, and the gray water.  Then the composition: the trees leaning right, the clouds leaning left, the church in the center (or just off-center) pointing straight up, the sailboats just a little askew.

 

 

It is perfect peace.  It is a country morning, and the day will be mostly sunny; the clouds are a little dark, so it might rain a bit later, but it will certainly clear up again.

 

 

Now this part you’ll have to take on faith.  You can’t really see the faces of the people on shore or on the ferryboat, but if you could, they would surprise you: they are grotesque little figures, some of them grimacing and leering.  The first time I took a really close look in the museum, I nearly jumped back.

 

 

I love the painting even more for that.  It’s perfectly serene, an ideal landscape for over the sofa.  And it has hidden secrets that it only reveals if you look at it closely.

 

 

And, if I really worked at it, I could probably steal it and bring it home.

 

 

Perfect.

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For Sunday: "Mad World," by Tears For Fears

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This is a necessary song.  I never heard it before a few years ago, and I am desperately sorry I hadn’t heard it earlier; it’s been around since the 1980s.  It rose to prominence after being featured in the movie “Donnie Darko,” apparently.  Well, hell, who cares.  It’s a great song.  And this is a great (and creepy) little video. 

 

 

The dancing!  The skinny man clutching the window pane!  The birthday party!

 

 

Kids: it’s a mad world.

 

 

 

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The pioneer way

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The other day I found myself thinking about homemade baked goods.  So, that evening, after half an hour on the treadmill at the Boston Sports Club, I popped down to the supermarket and bought a pack of Betty Crocker Rainbow Chocolate Candy Cookie Mix.  Approximately forty-five minutes later, Partner and I were sharing a nice plate of warm homemade cookies.

 

 

Yes, I know, “homemade” is one thing, and “from scratch” is another.  I do lots of baking from scratch: pancakes, banana bread, real homebaked bread, pies, pound cake, genoise, fruitcake.  But sometimes I just want it quickly, and I don’t want to fool around.

 

 

I am just WASPy enough to feel vaguely guilty about this.  My grandmother, after all, was a Washington Pioneer, born in Washington Territory six months before statehood in 1889.  Grandma grew up in a shack, and did everything from scratch, or not at all.  

 

Even when I bake “from scratch,” I still use an electric oven.  I don’t fire up a wood-burning stove.  I don’t gather eggs from the backyard, or churn my own butter.  I don’t have the right ingredients to capture the distinctive flavor of the Betty Crocker Rainbow Chocolate Candy Cookie, like carnauba wax and soy lecithin and beeswax.  (I kid you not, they’re listed right there on the packet.)

 

 

I do not think Grandma Williams brewed up her own carnauba wax.  Her cookies were very good nonetheless.

 

 

Would Grandma have turned up her nose at my instant quickie cookie-dough mix? I think not.  She did not, after all, turn up her nose at electricity and automobiles and indoor plumbing when they came along.  She was very conscious of time-saving and labor-saving devices; she had eleven kids, and she seemed always to have a house full of people, all of whom expected to be fed on schedule.

 

 

She needed all the help she could get.

 

 

As do I.

 

 

So: Grandma Williams and I are both pioneer women in our way, aren’t we?

 

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Recipe: Huguenot torte

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The following is an indispensable recipe, good for using up apples that are maybe a little past their prime.  You could also use pears, I think, though I've never tried it.  And certainly you could use walnuts instead of pecans. I’ve reduced the amount of sugar in the original recipe (New York Times, 1965), and I often use wildly different proportions than those given here.  Feel free to use a lot more chopped apple and a lot more ground nuts (my last torte used about 1 ½ cups apple and almost two cups of pecans).

 

 

 

It’s different.  It’s not a pie, or a cake, or brownies, or cookies.  It is its own creature.  It is somewhere between meringue and crumble and pecan pie.  It evolves during the baking process: if you open the oven door about fifteen minutes after putting it in, you’ll see it has risen considerably (emphasizing the importance of using a dish at least two inches deep).  At some point it collapses inward, and slumps, and becomes gooey and interesting.  Take it out when it’s almost (but not quite) burnt around the edges, and it has a nice uniform brown bubbly crust on top.  My oven’s fast, so this only takes about thirty-five minutes; yours may take longer.

 

 

It’s especially nice warm.  Let it sit about fifteen minutes after it comes out of the oven, and serve it with ice cream or whipped cream or Cool Whip or whatever you like.   It’s difficult to serve in neat square pieces, but that’s okay; as one food blogger wisely states, “that’s its nature.”

 

 

 

Huguenot Torte

·       2 eggs

·       1/2 teaspoon salt

·       1 1/4 cups sugar

·       1 cup peeled and chopped apples

·       1 cup ground pecans

·       1 teaspoon vanilla

·       4 tablespoons flour

·       2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

 

 

1.     Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

2.     Beat the eggs and salt with a rotary beater until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the sugar.

3.     Fold in the apples and pecans. Add the vanilla, flour and baking powder; fold and mix until blended.

4.     Pour into a well-greased baking pan (8-by-12 or 9-by-9 inches, and at least 2 inches deep). Bake for 35-45 minutes, or until sunken and crusty.

 

Serve room-temperature or warm, with whipped cream or ice cream, or both. 

 

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For Groundhog Day: Richard Eberhart's "The Groundhog," performed by college students

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What to give you for Groundhog Day?  I wanted very much to share a clip of Rudy Vallee and Robert Morse singing the “Groundhog Song” from the movie version of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” but all I could find on YouTube were audio recordings of Rudy and Robert, and tons of really awful college / neighborhood productions of the same. 

 

 

So nerts to that.

 

 

Then, by chance, up floated another idea.

 

 

I met Richard Eberhart at a poetry reading in the 1980s, and shook his hand, and told him how much I loved this poem, and he smiled and thanked me. 

 

 

I still love it. 

 

 

Below is a link to a video of a group of (I assume) college kids, somewhere, reading the poem (badly) and acting it out and generally murdering it.  Imagine!  The best poem ever written about a dead groundhog!

 

 

I like to think that Eberhart (who died in 2005) would have enjoyed it.

 

 

Happy Groundhog Day.

 

 

(Postscript: if you want to read the poem as it was actually written, try this link.)

 

 

 

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James Joyce: free at last!

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I love James Joyce.  I prize the facsimile 1922 edition of “Ulysses” I bought in Limerick in 2008 (hey, it’s paperback, but it’s from the Auld Sod, so phfffft.)  I have tried to read “Finnegans Wake” so many times that I’ve lost count.  (I can recite bits of it, mostly from the first fifteen pages.)

 

 

What I love best is the play of his language: the way he bounces words off one another, sound and meaning, even between languages (“Finnegans Wake” has dozens of languages in it).  And, given that I automatically absorb doggerel and nonsense, I have absorbed lots of odd bits of Joyce, which rattle pleasantly around inside my empty head:

 

 

-        What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat? Incomplete.

-        Hush! Caution! Echoland!

-        and yes I said yes I will Yes.

-        I am the light of the homestead, I am the dreamery creamery butter.

-        Kaw kave kankury kake.

-        Gee each owe tea eye smells fish.  That’s U.

 

 

Read them aloud: they are perfect little bits of poetry, as mad as anything by Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, and as satisfying, and as perfect.

 

 

Usually we discuss James Joyce in June, when Bloomsday rolls around.  But Joyceans are celebrating at the moment for yet another reason.  On January 1, 2012, the EU has lifted copyright restrictions on the works Joyce published during his lifetime: “Dubliners,” “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” “Ulysses,” and “Finnegans Wake,” along with some (minor) works of poetry and drama.  (There are still some posthumously published things and some manuscripts, ferociously guarded by the James Joyce Estate, led by James’s pigheaded grandson Stephen, but unless you’re a Joyce scholar – and God knows I am not – you can live without them.)

 

 

So: you can now run along the beach, swinging your breeches in the air, singing “We’re a capital couple, are Bloom and I, he brightens the earth, I polish the sky,” without worrying that Stephen Joyce and his lawyers are going to descend upon you like the Disney Corporation and sue the living bejeezus out of you.

 

 

It is freedom.

 

 

And freedom is what Joyce is all about.

 

 

Now all together:

 

 

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...” 

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