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Thursday, December 31, 2009Favorites from 2009Most everyone I know is eager to wrap this year up. Out with the bad, in with hopes for the new, better, best yet, best ever! Amen to that. To close the year out, I’d like to share my favorite discoveries from the last 12 months, in no particular order: LoseIt! This free and handy little iPhone app helped me to lost 35 pounds in the last year by letting me track what I was eating each meal, each day. New items not already in the database are easy to enter into the program, and the last version (still free) has a web interface, as well as the ability to track/encourage friends who are also using LoseIt! to, well, lose it.
Subaru Forester XT. I test-drove the previous version of this car roughly four years back and was disappointed by the stiff, underpowered, distinctly boring experience it offered. The newest evolution, with turbo, is altogether a different beast. The car’s got more room, significant punch, an updated sense of style, and a bunch of new features incorporated in elegant, understated fashion. I love driving this thing so much, I’ve started to pass up frequent flier miles in favor of solitary road trips--just me, my Subaru, my iPod, and my triple shot short Americano. Evernote. My own electronic shoebox, accessible via a browser, desktop application, and iPhone app. Evernote collects text, electronic files, audio recordings, pictures--any little snippet I don’t want to lose track of--and allows me to sort and tag this information easily and sensibly. And it synchronizes all of this stuff in real time, so however I pull up my information, I’m up-to-date. I keep my project notes, recipes, ideas for blog posts, and important PDFs in Evernote for easy, instant access. Ooh, and I can share notebooks with others as well. Nice. Dumb Little Man. I love their intro text: each week we provide a handful of tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane. Thank you, I’ll take more of each, please. Managing Thought. My life coach recommended this book to me, and it’s transformed the way that I work and live. Check it out. Glee. What a great show. I could watch them sing “Don’t Stop Believing” or “Bust a Move” again and again. Oh, wait, I have. Thank you, Hulu! Kindle 2.0. I somewhat covet Honey P.’s Kindle DX, with its oversized screen, but I’m plenty pleased with my own Kindle--a gift from Buck and Jeff for my 40th, and an upgrade from the original Kindle I bought when it first came out. The changes in form and function in the newest edition are worth the new investment, and I continue to love the “read a sample” function that allows me to check out a book without committing to it. Best yet, I can shop, sample, and purchase books from the comfort of my living room. Lululemon Athletica. Yes, yes, it’s pricey, but it’s wonderfully well made, feels good to wear, and makes me want to be a stronger, leaner person than I already am. A dear friend once said that spandex is a privilege, not a right--if you’ve earned it, you deserve a little Lulu. Burt’s Bees Hand Salve. All of the time I spend in the kitchen takes a toll on my hands. This stuff has been fantastic in healing cracks and cuts. And it’s under $10.
So that’s my list! May 2009 leave gracefully, and may 2010 bring more healthy, wealthy, wise, and happy than any of us know what to do with. Sante.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009On My Not Getting Lucky Last Night
I didn’t consciously decide to read the whole thing--at least, not this time. I’d made that resolution earlier this year, and the book sat on the coffee table, ignored, for several months until I gave up on the idea. Then, one day roughly two weeks ago, I pulled the book off the shelf again to read up on bread. I wandered back to the introduction and found myself 100 pages in by the end of the night. I was hooked. One realizes the full value of this work, I think, by progressing through it in the most linear way--page by page from the dedication and table of contents to its glossary. Each chapter provides a wealth of scientific and historical information on its topic, notes on technique, warnings about what not to do, tips on repairing what may go awry, and then specific recipes that become the proving ground for mastering the approach just explained. All, with an understated, decidedly French, wit, and the occasional, inconsequential typo. The result: understanding not only the what and how, but also the underlying why behind what one should do. Last night, I made chicken provencal with 40 cloves of garlic, one of the recipes shared to illustrate the French approach to semi-moist cooking. Imagine a whole chicken, first browned and then pot-roasted in a cup of olive oil, some fresh herbs, and a wealth of garlic. It didn’t come out perfectly by any means--I made a number of adjustments on the fly and produced what Honey P. pronounced to be a very good meal. Being able to do that made me feel more confident of my general skills in the kitchen. More importantly, however, I realized what I needed to do differently, in the future, to properly and confidently prepare a pot roast the French way.
Thomas Keller says in the introduction of “Ad Hoc at Home” that, if a recipe comes out perfectly the first time you make it, you’ve probably just gotten lucky. No luck last night, but a whole lot of learning going on.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009And I’ve Decided That Close Enough, Is EnoughBread. The staff of life. The time and experience that goes in to baking great, great bread, significant. And the places where one can get great, great bread--few and far between. But by no means non-existent. So forgive me, if this seems to be my taking the path of least resistance, but Zingerman’s does it better than I ever will, and that’s a blessed relief: http://www.zingermans.com/Category.aspx?Category=bread
One big order each month saves me from the vagaries of babysitting my starter, and all the notes I get from Toni at Z’s telling me how much she misses me ... no fear, Toni, I’ve come home. And while you’re at it, I’ll take one of the Georgia Reuben sandwich kits for two, worth every penny.
A Little Closer
I’d written last week about my attempts to make sourdough bread using red cabbage starter. Tried to make a second batch of starter, no dice--maybe because the inner leaves of the cabbage don’t have enough wild yeast on them? Possibly. I went to Madeleine Kamman’s book The Making of a Cook (subject of another blog post) instead and made a starter using yeast and cumin. After four days, I had a happy, healthy levain for my dough. I followed her instructions precisely and after the first rising was thrilled to see how well the dough was behaving. It rose beautifully, doubling in bulk in a little less than two hours. The hang-up, olive oil. Specifically, her recipe calls for two tablespoons of it to coat the bowl and the dough itself to prevent dehydration. It’s one tablespoon too much--as I punched the dough down and kneaded it again for the second and third risings, I found it developing pockets and folds where the extra oil made the dough’s surface too slick to to be reincorporated into the larger mass. The result, sourdough baguettes that look, in places, like layered pastry. The taste was pretty good (the cumin comes through faintly), so I know I’m on the right track. My starter will be ready for use again by Friday morning--keep your fingers crossed, I’d love to serve some homemade bread with the lunchtime chowder. Sante. My Dream to Travel
My dream to travel the world ... my dream to travel the world ... I wonder if I sounded a little like George Bailey back then, excited and wide-eyed and determined--at 30, I hadn’t been much of anywhere. Unlike George, however, I eventually managed to leave. As far as travel goes, it’s been a great 10 years. I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time in Europe: England (London and Oxford), France (Paris, Provence, Burgundy, Normandy, Brittany), Prague, and numerous towns, villages, and cities across Germany. And Mexico (Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas). I’ve also made it to three or four ports of call in Alaska, two islands in Hawaii, Montreal, and a bunch of cities in over 32 of our 48 contiguous states for work or play, either of which inevitably involves the other. I can’t recall if I was expecting to find or to lose myself in the going--to be honest, I’d all but forgotten that I had this particular dream, in the process of living it. But I think did a little bit of both, finding and losing. I’ve enjoyed so much of what I’ve experienced--the sights, the cultures, the food, the people, the landscapes. And I think I also learned what it means to truly be home. The Dinesen quote that I love (and the one for which this blog is named) continues to resonate: “The cure for everything is salt ... tears, sweat, and the sea.” This coming fall, we’ll be touring the Baltic (Amsterdam, Stockholm, Tallin, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, and Copenhagen), a trip that Honey P. and I have been talking about for some time. We’ll also be returning to my favorite city of all, Paris, for a glorious week! Eventually, I’d like to spend time in Italy, Australia, South America, and certain parts of Africa and the Far East. All in good time.
We live in a time when travel is tainted by the threat of danger and the loss of dignity. These, coupled with general road fatigue, have made me over time a crankier, less gracious, and less grateful traveler. Kirsten, if you’re reading this, thank you for reminding me how important it was to me to find the territory ahead.
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