Finally, some good soup

Done with presentations for the semester! Now I can sit back and….research/write three papers. Huh, it’s not quite as satisfying as I thought it would be.

I did manage to do some good eating this past weekend though. After my debacle with store-bought French onion soup I was wary of trying it again, but when I saw what was coming out of the pot when the people in front of me ordered the soup at Hope’s Way, I was sold. It’s never properly French onion soup to me unless it has real pieces of onions in it, and this stuff definitely did. It allowed me to spend the rest of my afternoon working on the presentation I gave today, and not feel too glum about it getting dark earlier and earlier. I never used to like soup that much, it was something that I ate when I had to, with as high a ratio of stuff to broth as was possible. I still don’t like to have soup sloshing around in my stomach without anything in there to keep the yaw to a minimum, but it has been added to my list of comfort foods.

Only two days until all the comforts of home!

Hot Potato

This article about megafaunal extinctions in North America is interesting. It sidesteps the controversy about whether the extinctions were caused by overhunting by the Clovis people or the effects of a meteor by proposing (based on mammoth coprolites) that the population decline in mammoths began earlier than either of those things could have been influencing population levels. It will be interesting to see how much this changes the debate.

Being stressed, pressed for time, lazy, and cheap I’ve gotten into making baked potatoes for dinner and eating them with whatever is at hand. I have also discovered that Wegmans sells several kinds of uncured bacon. This is clearly a match made in heaven (or two matches: me and potatoes with delicious things on them and potatoes and delicious things). I have two presentations in the next four days, and baking the potatoes gives me a chance to practice and do work without having to worry that something is going to burn or go wrong while I’m otherwise engaged.

potato + greek-style yogurt + salt + pepper + bacon = perfection!

I’m so over cooking bacon on the stove; I’m not a huge fan of the clean-up. This potato-bacon combo worked out perfectly because I could just pop the bacon in the oven on a non-stick baking sheet for the last 15 minutes of the potato cooking time.

Tomorrow I’m co-presenting at a conference and dinner will be provided. I’ve never eaten proper conference food; when I went to The Pecos Conference in the summer of 2008 Brigitte and I were underprepared for the out-of-the-way location (especially in terms of food) and ended up eating solely granola bars, peanut butter, crackers, my emergency package of pre-cooked pilaf, and whatever we could scrounge at other people’s campfires for two days. I am optimistic that this will not be a repeat of that situation. The accommodations also aren’t tents, which is a little less exciting, but I’m sure a wise choice for what is technically a city (I have a hard time seriously referring to Ithaca as a city). Eating conference food will help me with my goal of getting through ’til next Wednesday without grocery shopping;  I don’t want to be leaving food here to go bad while I’m home for Thanksgiving.

I have actually been willing myself not to think too much about Thanksgiving because I know that it would only serve to make me feel sad about a number of things, including: probably not running enough to be in good shape for the Turkey Trot because of a combination of having a cold for a week and a half and not making time before it gets dark, not having pie right this moment, not having dogs to keep me company when I’m up late working, and so on. Now that it’s only one week away (!) I am allowing myself to imagine sitting in front of the wood-stove, feet propped up to catch the warmth, my stomach filled to the brim, reading a publication completely unrelated to school-work.

Nothing is ever as good as it could be

Reading the Cooking with Dexter column in this weekend’s NYTimes Magazine, I was struck by the author’s description of his son’s sudden choosiness in matters of food.  He says “A lot of parents call this picky eating. I think it was just the birth of that consciousness that, for the rest of his life, will shadow his joys with the knowledge that nothing is ever as good as it could be.”

When I started cooking for myself I had to overcome the barrier of thinking that nothing I could make would ever be as good as it could be, especially in regard to the food I was used to eating at home. My salad dressing still isn’t always as good as my mom’s (how can it be that difficult! there aren’t that many inputs!) but I’ve gotten a better percentage than when I started. But things that aren’t as good as they could be have become an accepted part of the rotation (see: attitudes toward free food), and whenever I do manage to cook or bake something that makes me smile to myself as I eat it, it makes me willing to keep trying.

I suspect dogs do not have this shadowing of their joys.

Of course there are some things that I won’t begin to try to imitate. The way my grandmother makes frosting for the Gerard birthday cake, for example. Cory turns his nose up at any other kind, but the way she makes it is somehow inimitable, I suspect because it’s in some (totally un-guessable) way technically “wrong.”  I’m still afraid to make pastry cream without my mother present for trouble-shooting, and I am not at all  comfortable slow smoking a hunk of pork as my dad is.

Thanks to my newly recovered sense of taste, I’m actually hungry again, so I’ll be making this lasagna (by way of Hae-Joon) this afternoon.

I think I’m going to see Revanche tonight. Hopefully it’s good; if it’s not I can comfort myself with the knowledge that I’ve somehow “edified” myself by seeing a foreign film with subtitles. Right?

Cold Food

Somehow I picked up a cold over the weekend. I’m not very good with the whole “feed a cold, starve a fever” thing, mostly because I like the way the alliteration of “feed a fever” sounds much better. I also lose much of my appetite if my sense of taste is maimed. The only things I typically feel like eating are very spicy  or very salty. This means it was a good thing that I had a jar of Rogan Josh sauce sitting around. When one has a cold, one is not in the mood to make any sort of curry from scratch. I had originally intended to make Greek-ish lamb meatballs, but I decided that spicy lamb meatballs would be much better, so this recipe is kind of a mash up.

Cheater’s Rogan Josh

-1 jar of rogan josh
-3/4 lb ground lamb
-1/4 cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
-1/2 onion, finely chopped
-1 clove garlic, minced
-cumin
-2 large potatoes
-some vegetables (I used a handful of already cooked green beans I had left over)
whatever spices you want to doctor up the store-bought sauce with

1. Wash and cube the potatoes and then boil them until they are almost entirely cooked, but not to the point of falling apart.

2. Mix the lamb, onion, parsley, garlic, cumin, and some olive oil in a mixing bowl and form into meatballs of a desirable size.

3. Put olive oil in a large pan and cook the meatballs until they are browned, then add the sauce, whatever spices you want, and the potatoes. My sauce was fairly thick, so I put a little water in the jar to get the last of it out and added that too. If your veggies aren’t cooked you can add them at the beginning. Mine were already cooked and I didn’t want them falling apart, so I just added them close to the end so they’d warm up

4. Simmer until the meatballs and potatoes are cooked through. The extra water allowed me to simmer for longer without reducing the sauce too much, although it really doesn’t take long at all.

5. Serve with rice or naan.

Tonight I had French onion soup that I bought at the store (shameful, I know) and it was so not as good as my mom’s. She made it twice this summer and both times it was such a highlight. The first time she left it in the refrigerator for me at Cape Cod when I went up for a weekend with Taty. Of course it rained most of the time we were there, but the soup was a perfect lunch on a rainy Saturday.  Looking at rain over a large body of water while eating soup is one of the coziest things I can imagine. The second time she made it when we had a full house of guests (and it also happened to be chilly and rainy). An afternoon of (attempted)tennis and swimming with Hae-Joon and David seemed much more manageable after French onion soup and a beer, even on a gloomy day. It’s sad to grow up and move away and not have your mom there to make you fantastic soup when you aren’t feeling well.

Free Food

I am a great believer in taking advantage of free food wherever it can be found (within reason of course). This week I did not have to make dinner for myself until today, thanks to receptions following talks I was going to attend anyway on Monday and Tuesday, and the weekly archaeology dinner on Wednesday. The important thing about free food is to never set your standards too high. It’s free, there should be no inherent expectation of quality. This way, when it does turn out to be passable, or even good, it’s a pleasant surprise, which is always preferable to an unpleasant surprise. In some ways I apply this philosophy to life, though this is probably not a good idea.

This has absolutely nothing to do with food (except maybe dog treats), but today I got sucked into the wormhole that is youtube videos of ‘talking’ animals.

It all started with a husky that says “I love you.”

From then on, the next talking dog or cat was only a click away, and generally at under a minute a piece they seemed like a fairly harmless pass-time. Not so. Even now as I read about dendroecology I’m thinking of how I could train Moshi to say “I love you,” and how I would try not to think about how he would be talking to the treat in my hand.

My favorite talking animal video remains a singing rabbit, largely because I can’t even count how many times I watched this with Erika, laughing uncontrollably.

Lentil season has begun!

Lentils used to be one of my food prejudices, but a change in palate, as well as attempts to keep my grocery bill in check, have given me a new appreciation of the humble legume. I kind of like the cold lentil salad iteration, but I really prefer them in Indian-style dal. This also has the benefits of being very quick, warm, and filling. I usually eat it with some sort of bread like naan, but rice is good too. This makes 3-4 small servings but could easily be doubled. I find that it’s filling enough that I don’t want to eat a huge amount. Here’s the simple recipe that I usually start with– there are all sorts of other things you could add:

1 cup of red lentils
3 cups of water
1/8 tsp turmeric
1/2 Tbsp ginger, peeled and chopped
1/2 tomato, diced
1/4 tsp red chili powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 onion, sliced very thin
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
oil

-Look over the lentils and make sure there isn’t any random stuff in there. I have not yet found anything weird in my lentils but every recipe I’ve read recommends checking and I’m too much of a nervous Nelly not to.

-Put the lentils, water, turmeric, and ginger in a pot and boil for 15-20 minutes. Make sure the pot doesn’t boil over.

-Add the tomato, chili powder, and salt and cook for another 10 minutes.

-Cook the onion and garlic in the oil in a small pan until the onions are brown and crispy.

-Top the finished dal portions with the onion/garlic mixture and serve.

I have my camera back, but this is another dish that doesn’t photograph very attractively in the hands of someone like me. Clearly I need to start following Taty’s lead and making food based on the possibilities for attractive presentation.

Here I’m going to make a highly tenuous segue between lentils and people who may have eaten lentils: the individuals who were ritually killed and buried in the cemetery at Ur.

When I learned about Ur, the theory was that the attendants who were buried with the royalty had been poisoned. Now they know that they were killed by a sharp instrument driven into their heads. This makes it much harder to imagine a peaceful process. As willing as one may be to be killed and buried for the sake of a grand and important ritual, having a pointy thing poked into one’s skull is not peaceful. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago has a slideshow of some of the material recovered from the tombs. They aren’t the best photographs I’ve seen of the treasure, but for the really good ones you’d probably have to buy Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur which has (presumably) all the good stuff.

Broccoli, Lasagna, and Uluburun

This week has been somewhat stressful, but thankfully it’s almost over. Tomorrow will consist of work in the morning and then a relatively more relaxing trip up to the Geneva area to help out with a coring location search. After tromping around for a while and possibly coring, I’ll get my weekly quota of “culture” by seeing the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg with the Js (referring to the first letter of the names of my fellow first-year grad students in archaeology).

Living in a suburban wasteland (which could have been far worse) for a while has made me even more appreciative of the bazillion events that happen every day on a university campus. Next week I get to see George Bass, ‘the father of underwater archaeology,’ speak–three times. One of those times is followed by a reception. The chance to listen to one of the directors of the Uluburun excavation, combined with free Mediterranean food? I am so there. The pictures of the artifacts recovered from Uluburun are worth a look; some of the material was recently part of an exhibit on trade and diplomacy during the bronze age at the Met, which I saw and quite enjoyed. There is definitely something to be said for devoting an afternoon to a single museum exhibit.

After eating terribly for most of the weekend (tsk tsk, goldfish, pumpkin seeds, an apple, two carrots, and a beer to not make for a balanced dinner) I had the sudden urge to make lasagna on Tuesday. Since I did not get this urge until I was already quite hungry (this week has been full of minor poor choices) I made some broccoli with turmeric and garlic to hold myself.

The lasagna I made is neither particularly innovative nor particularly difficult, but was comforting nonetheless. I used ground bison and a bunch of spinach for my non-cheese filling, but one could just as easily do it with all spinach and some other veggies (in fact I did this once or twice when I was sharing with veggies). Other than that, I essentially followed the recipe on the back of the no-boil lasagna noodle box.

My mom often makes this broccoli recipe, which she got from a Julie Sahni cookbook. It’s not any more difficult that ‘regular’ broccoli, and it’s much more interesting. Be warned that the turmeric will stain things it comes into contact with a bright yellow though, so be careful of wearing a white shirt and cooking.

[Can you tell I've made this mistake on too many occasions to count? I basically don't allow myself to buy anything more expensive than a basic white undershirt because it's too dangerous.]

 

Savory French Toast

Despite having a well-known sweet tooth, for the most part I like my sweets in small doses and in situations when I know it will be acceptable to soar for a few minutes on the sugar and then immediately feel like taking a nap. French toast was one of the first things I learned how to make for myself, and also the iteration of breakfast eggs that I often like the most because it isn’t too egg-y. The traditional french toast that one eats with maple syrup is good, but not really appropriate if I want to stay awake after eating it. If I want it for lunch or brunch and have a lot of reading to do in the afternoon it is even less appropriate. A few months ago I made my first version of savory french toast, with pesto and extra Parmesan, and it was kind of a revelation (I say ‘kind of’ because who wants to say they had a food revelation? It makes me sound like a really objectionable type of person). This is the version I made for lunch today:

2 eggs
three small slices of sourdough bread
chopped rosemary
chopped thyme
grated Pecorino-Romano cheese
salt
pepper
a little bit of butter

-In a shallow bowl mix together the eggs, thyme, rosemary, salt, pepper, and some cheese with a fork until combined.

-Soak the bread slices in the egg mixture until it is all absorbed.

-Melt the butter in a frying pan and cook the slices until one side is golden and then flip and repeat on the other side.

-Put some more grated cheese on top before eating.

So satisfying!

I think I’ve been leaning toward lighter things recently because that chicken/bacon/whatever-it-is crock pot stuff ended up being super filling, and I was eating it almost every day for lunch. I still have quite a bit of it, but I’m thinking I might freeze it for a little while until I’m prepared to eat it again. This always happens to me with crock pot meals: there’s too much, I get tired of it, so I freeze it and come back to it later.

Happiness List

-getting a much-needed Bangs trim

-new library card (this will definitely allow my procrastination to become more high-brow than newsy, if I so desire)

-hearing a three-piece bluegrass band play on the Commons as I walked home (and looking forward to seeing a band play tomorrow)

-feeling excited about the writing I have to do

-reading back issues of the New Yorker while riding the bus

-seeing shibas going for walks

-solitary grocery shopping after 9pm on a week-night

-crossing things off my ever-changing, rollover to-do list

-tomorrow is Friday!

Pumpkin seeds!

When I am working on something very intensely, or trying to, snacking helps me stay focused. Usually I have some sort of raw vegetable or cheesy cracker, but since I came back from Sunday’s pumpkin carving event with about two cups of seeds I figured I’d go the roasted pumpkin seed route. I have to do one of my least favorite things this week: write a personal statement. I’m hoping these tidbits will keep me on track.

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

2c pumpkin seeds, rinsed of pulpy bits
salt
oil/butter
rosemary garlic seasoning (or whatever else you could want)

-Toss the seeds with enough oil or butter to coat and salt to taste.
-Spread the seeds in one layer on a baking sheet and sprinkle the seasoning on top.
-Put in the oven at 400 and bake for about 40 minutes, or until they seem done

I’ve been reading the book that came out of the Mannahatta Project in dribs and drabs before I fall asleep. Aside from the fact that the book happens to be very attractive and printed on crisp, thick paper (I’m a sucker for books with nicely textured paper) the contents are supremely neat. A lot of it is on the web page and in interactive form, like the map that lets you fade together the 1609 and 2009 versions of Manhattan, zooming in and out, as well as see what wildlife was likely there 400 years ago. I know that I could spend hours just looking around, and I should definitely get back to writing that personal statement instead.