As a movie buff, I always stand and salute whenever any of
the “Gold Diggers” movies of the 1930s come on the air. I DVR them and play
them over and over again.
The nice folks at King Arthur Flour, in their most recent
catalog, posted a recipe for pretzel sandwich buns. I made them, and they were very nice, but I
thought: well, why sandwich buns? Why can’t I make nice soft pretzels at home?
I can, as it turns out.
But not a single batch has turned out perfectly yet. Some
have a nice sourdough flavor, but lack consistency. Some are too bready. Some
are too tough.
I’ve made at least four batches so far. They’re all good,
but none has been perfect.
I’m still working on it.
Here’s the best version so far:
Combine –
·2 cups flour (white, or a mix of white and
whole-wheat)
·1 tsp salt
·1 T instant dry yeast
·1 T butter
·A scant cup of warm water
·A pinch of sugar, or a scant teaspoon of honey
Mix, and knead for at least five minutes, using enough extra
flour to make a nice smooth non-sticky dough. Put down in a greased bowl,
covered with a dampened cloth, in a quiet place, for at least an hour
(preferably more), until the dough has doubled. (A longer rise gives a yeastier
flavor, which I like.)
Punch down the dough, divide into eight pieces, and roll
each into a long rope about 15 inches long. Tie into a pretzel shape. Here’s a
video to show you how:
(You can tie a double knot too. But practice a bit first.)
Place your eight pretzel children on a greased surface, cover
with a dampened cloth for 15-30 minutes, and let them rest. While that’s going
on, prepare for the end of the process as follows:
·Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
·Prepare a water bath: a saucepan with about a
quart of water and about ¼ cup baking soda, heated to boiling.
·Also break an egg into a large bowl and beat it.
·Also line a baking sheet with parchment paper,
or (second best) grease a baking sheet heavily.
Carefully drop your unbaked pretzels one or two at a time
(depending on the size of your saucepan) into the boiling-water bath. Flip
after 30 seconds or so. Take out of the boiling water after a minute.
Let the boiled pretzels rest for a few seconds. Give them a
bath in the beaten egg (both sides), place them on the baking sheet, and dust
them with coarse salt. (Coarse sea salt is inexpensive and easily available, at
least locally.)
Bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden-brown.
Cool, and serve with butter or mustard. If there are any
left the next day, reheat them in the microwave for (literally) ten seconds or
so, and they’ll be almost like new.
Still not perfect, I know. Something’s missing.
But I’ll figure it out. I’ve got lots of time on my hands.
When my mother was undergoing cancer treatment in the 1990s,
she went through all kinds of interesting states of mind, way beyond Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross’s measly five. Elisabeth
would have been astounded.
One of the most unexpected was the “I’m gonna tell you what
I think of you before it’s too late” phase. We discovered that Mom was calling
up people from her past and telling them all the things she’d been holding back
for decades: how they’d disappointed or betrayed her, how they weren’t good
enough for their wives/husbands, how they’d made bad decisions. (Myself, I was
surprised that Mom had ever held anything back – she could be a real loudmouth
when she was wanted to be – but apparently she’d kept a lot of opinions back
after all.)
I am my mother’s son. I am full of grudges and unsettled
scores. I am terribly self-righteous, just as she was. I only hope that, as the
cancer treatment weakens me, I don’t succumb to Mom’s let-‘em-have-it mentality
This is why I was bemused by something that showed up on my
Facebook wall a while back: a serious discussion of why you shouldn’t have
enemies. To wit:
·Enemies
take up a lot of your valuable time – whether you’re actually taking revenge,
or just thinking about it. (This is true, and I hate the idea of wasting
time, especially at this point in my life.)
·Your
enemies probably aren’t worth hating as much as you think they are. (Maybe.
Some of mine are pretty loathsome.)
·Most of
the world’s religions tell us to be kind to our enemies.
This last one needs some scrutiny. Certainly Jesus tells us
to love our enemies. But the God of the Old Testament certainly didn’t mess
around with anyone who got in his way. And many modern Christians seem to act
as if they loathe whole squadrons of people.
“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” was one of the first
televised Peanuts specials, and one of the best. Here are a few selected scenes
dealing with Linus’s misguided belief in the Great Pumpkin (who will only rise
from the most sincere pumpkin patch in the world), and Sally’s reaction when
she realized that she’s wasted her whole Halloween evening.
My father’s radiation therapy in the mid-1970s was really
brutal. It scorched his entire torso, and it did no good anyway, as his cancer
was far too advanced.
My mother’s 1990s chemotherapy in the 1990s was much milder.
She was only nauseous a few times. Taxol made her hair fall out, which really
stunned her; I think it was the worst thing about the treatment for her. But
the chemo extended her life considerably, without much affecting her quality of
life.
And now it’s twenty years later, and I’m doing a tandem
combination of radiation and chemotherapy. The radiation is directed straight
at my left tonsil; after the first few treatments, I haven’t noticed many ill
effects, apart from a little neck soreness/stiffness. The first few chemo
treatments were similarly mild (apart from a little nausea and fatigue).
When I go in for radiation, I lie on the table and let the
nurses fasten on my Radiation Mask:
They also give me a plastic hoop to grip with both hands, so
I don’t flail my arms too much. The treatment is about ten minutes long; the
machine makes all kinds of space-age humming and beeping noises. Then the
attendant comes in and unbuckles me.
My mind wanders during the treatment. Early on, I found
myself thinking about the plastic hoop. It’s ridged, and slightly flexible –
When the attendant came in to unbuckle me, I handed her the
hoop and said: “This is a dog toy, isn’t it?”
She chuckled. “Yep. The medical version costs a
hundred and fifty dollars. I bought that one at Petco for seven ninety-five.”
File this one under “health care costs,” and “high-tech
medicine,” and probably under “human ingenuity.”
Pity the poor dog going without his toy. But it’s in the
name of medicine, after all.
(Note: this is a rewrite of a blog I wrote back in 2011,
with maybe a few updates, in the light of recent events.)
Both my parents smoked. I have distinct memories of sitting
in the front seat of our family car, with my father in the driver’s seat on my
left and my mother sitting to my right, both of them puffing away, the ashtray
overflowing. I couldn’t breathe. I finally spoke up about it when I was about
nine or ten years, and it actually inspired my mother to quit smoking.
This, however, didn’t stop me from taking up the habit
myself. I got a free sample of Lucky Strikes at Fenway Park in 1983; I smoked
one or two of them; soon after I was in Morocco, and smoking a pack a day; soon
after that I was in Tunisia and smoking two packs a day.
I kept this up until 1998. Remembering the family proclivity
for cancer, I resolved to quite when I was forty, and I managed it, just a few
months shy of my forty-first birthday.
I have been reasonably healthy on and off since.
And now, fifteen years later, I discover that I have throat cancer,
the main risk factor for which is – ahem – smoking.
Go figure.
I freely acknowledge that it’s my own fault. I knew there
were bad genes on both sides of the family, and I knew that smoking could only
be bad for me. But I kept it up for fourteen years.
Foolish, naturally. Most of those fourteen years between ’84
and ‘98, I was just smoking out of habit; I even (as do most smokers) kept it
up while I was sick with colds and the flu. I even smoked at meals. I was smelly
and utterly obnoxious, and probably nearly burned myself to death more than
once. I realize that now.
But I remember one beautiful morning in Tunis, before I developed
my two-pack-a-day habit. I left the house around 8am, bought a pack of local
cigarettes, lit up, and –
For a long time I only knew the Visigoth crowns
from a poem by Elinor
Wylie, which a friend recently quoted to me:
I cannot give you the Metropolitan
Tower; I cannot give you heaven; Nor the nine Visigoth crowns in the Cluny
Museum; Nor happiness, even.
When Partner
and I were in Paris last October, I noticed that the Cluny Museum was very close to our
hotel. We went there on our last full day in Paris. It’s an old
building with a Roman foundation; there are lots of old relics from the days when Paris was called Lutetia. As you
ascend through the building, you find all manner of other works of art: later
Roman, Dark Ages, Holy Roman Empire, medieval France.
And among those works of art are the Visigoth crowns.
They are not big
chunky Burger-King style crowns in the Halloween-costume sense. They are delicate
circlets encrusted with sapphires and pearls and other polished stones, festooned
with slender strands of gold. (I counted only eight of them, and was a little disappointed.
Then I learned that the ninth, the crown of King Suinthila, was stolen in 1921
and has never been found again.)
They were never
meant to be worn; they were to be hung above a church's altar, as a symbol of royalty.
With a little modification, however, they would look like something an Elf
might have worn in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.
“Metropolis”
is one of my favorite movies. It’s a wild science-fiction romp from 1927; it’s
silent, but you can now see it with its original musical score, which is very
expressive.
Here’s the plot: the city of Metropolis is divided between
the lofty towers of the rich and powerful and the dark underground cities of
the workers. A woman named Maria (played luminously by Brigitte Helm) is preaching
to the workers and telling them to expect a “mediator.” The dictator of
Metropolis, in an attempt to stop Maria, asks crazy Doctor Rotwang to create a
evil robot replica of Maria; the robot proceeds a) to stir up all kinds of
discord in the underground cities, and b) to dance at Yoshiwara, the hippest
nightclub in the tower city, and drive all the upscale men insane with lust.
This is the false Maria’s dance. It’s beyond amazing. (Just
so you know: the young man in bed is the true Maria’s boyfriend (who also
happens to be the dictator’s son),
having visions of the Apocalypse.)
Providence is full of Ivy. Brown University is Ivy League,
after all, and there’s English
ivy (Hedera helix) growing all over the place. A friend of mine, freshly arrived in Providence from Montana, plucked some ivy leaves off the wall and mailed them to her family and
friends in Billings, to underline the reality of where she
was.
Ivy wants to go up, away from the ground, against gravity. There’s a nearby building with two ivy tendrils curling up its walls like arms outspread. And up up up they go!
I always think of my mother when I see ivy. When my father
built our new house in the early 1960s, my mother decided that she liked ivy,
and planted shoots of it all along the north side of the house and along the
roadside.
Those shoots were stubborn. They didn’t die, but they didn’t
grow. A few leaves stuck out of the ground, year after year. And then, after
five years or so –
They exploded.
The entire north side of the house was engulfed with ivy.
And do you know what ivy does to the side of a house, especially one with
wooden shingles? It chews it up, om nom nom. If you try to pull the ivy down,
you rip away half of the wooden shingles at the same time, and you reveal the
dark mottling that the ivy has produced on its way up the wall.
Mom got her wish, and how! But she wasn’t happy that her plan
had gone beyond expectations. She managed to
get most of it off the shingles, and she repainted, but she couldn’t get the
ivy off the brickwork. This picture, taken in May 1971, shows the ivy covering
the exposed brickwork:
It looks nice, doesn’t it? Nice rhododendrons in front of
the house, and a nice ivy-covered chimney.
But Mom was watching that ivy every moment, to make sure it
didn’t leap onto the wooden shingles again.
To bury our heads in the covers and sleep for another hour,
or two, or ten.
To call in sick to work for a day, or a week, or a couple of
years.
In a word: when something which is (presumably)
overpoweringly powerful requests your presence, to be able to say “no.”
Best of all, I think, was the late Rue McClanahan’s comment
on the TV show “Maude”
many years ago (I paraphrase, probably badly): “When it’s my time to die, I’m
going to be somewhere else.”
I want to be elsewhere when it’s my time too, if that’s at
all possible.
