The idea of order

First things first:

Yes, that is an Orthodox Jewish man with a showercap over his hat to protect it from the rain. Secondly:

I'm no great fan of Martha Stewart, but she's got some darn good cookie recipes. These maple iced oatmeal applesauce cookies went over well with the quizbowl crowd, but I found them too sweet; when I was making them, I balked at the sugar:other stuff ratio, but I foolishly didn't change it (I did, however, substitute whole wheat flour for white). It's a pity, because the soft texture and light applesauce flavor and very low amount of butter are extremely appealing. I plan to tinker with the recipe. Among other things, I'm going to replace some of the sugar with maple syrup and some with more applesauce, adding more whole wheat flour to keep the dough firm enough to bake.

And finally, after a Trader Joe's trip today, there was something much more healthful on the menu:

This zucchini soup and summery relish were made with local zucchini and local heirloom tomatoes from Trader Joe's. Two pounds of zucchini for $1.25 and two heirloom tomatoes for $1.00? Yes, please!

Creamy zucchini-chive soup with corn relish
1.5 lbs zucchini
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup chives, minced
1/2 tsp lemon juice
plain yogurt
1 tomato, heirloom if possible
1 ear corn
1 tbsp basil, minced
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 tbsp feta
salt and pepper to taste

Cut up the zucchini. Put it and the garlic in a pot and cover with water or broth. Bring to a boil and cook just until soft. Drain off all but 2/3 cup liquid and, once it has cooled somewhat, add 3 tablespoons of the chives and puree. Add plain yogurt to taste, and season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Meanwhile, shave the kernels off the ear of corn and core and dice the tomato. Mix together with minced basil, the remaining chives, the apple cider vinegar, the feta, and salt and pepper to taste (easy on the salt, trust me). Serve the cooled soup topped with the relish.

Customer service

I tossed my backpack onto my bed upon returning from lab a couple hours ago, settled down to bake some bread and read some book... and instantly got an automated phone call from a hair salon in Sarasota to confirm "my" appointment for Saturday. Clearly, this is not an appointment I made. When I called the salon to speak to a human rather than a machine and set things straight, the conversation went something like this:

Me: "I received an automated phone call confirming an appointment, but the phone number must be wrong. I don't even live in Florida anymore."
Employee: "Okay, we can cancel it. What's your name?"
Me: "It's not under my name, because I didn't make the appointment. Someone else did, and the phone number was taken down incorrectly."
Employee: "Okay, we don't need your name. Do you remember with which stylist you made the appointment?"
Me: "No, because I didn't make the appointment, but the person who does may need the confirmation. Would it be possible for you to look it up by phone number?"
Employee: [does so] "Okay, Ms. Smith, your appointment is for Sa--"
Me: [loses patience] "No, it's not, because this is not my appointment."

I'm pretty sure this conversation was part of the reason why I ate most of a "lobe" of the world's most chelonian scallion sourdough bread.

Horrible picture, I know.

Events conspired to give this bread way, way too much time in its last, room-temperature proof, so the mini-loaves flattened and melded. Kind of cute, though, don't you think?

Crusty on the outside, fluffy on the inside!

No matter how I try, my sourdough is never as sour as I like it. Don't get me wrong: this was delicious and tangy and crusty. But I want sour, dammit! I used a properly aged starter and gave it a 24-hour fridge period in addition to the other rises and everything. The only thing I didn't do according to what looks like an exemplary recipe was use distilled water for everything. That can't possibly be it, though... can it? The Internet is giving me some excellent tips with which I can troubleshoot my sourdough protocol. I'll just have to try them and feed my friends the results.

Okay, fine, I'll just comfort myself with the best deviled eggs ever. Chives, yogurt, Dijon, and just a sliver of butter make fluffy heaven out of egg yolk, I'm telling you. Plus, of course, the requisite paprika.

Creamy, healthfulish deviled eggs for one
two hardboiled eggs
literally just a sliver of butter, softened
1 tbsp chives
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
1/4 tsp minced garlic
2.5 tbsp plain yogurt, Greek or otherwise (in this case, I favor not-Greek, to thin things out a bit)
salt and pepper to taste
paprika for sprinkling

Slice the eggs neatly in half. Cream together the yogurt, mustard, butter, and egg yolks with a spoon, adding salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the chives and minced garlic. Pile or pipe into the egg white hollows. Presentation note: To get them to stand up straight, cleave a small bit of white off the underside of the half to give a flat surface.

With love and squalor

Today is the day I finally got up the gumption got my lazy butt in gear and moved the stacks of folded clothes from my floor to their temporary home, as long as my home is dresserless. The floor feels so... clean. Except for the fact that I don't own a vacuum (yet) and there were cardboard bits strewn on the carpet during the moving process. It's not too dirty, but it's not preferable.

That scallion ginger sauce nearly did away with my scallions (upcoming recipe will show you what I'm doing with the last of them), but the poor chives are still hanging about, dangling perilously over a precipice below which are the depths of Yellowed, Limp, and Unusable Canyon. What to do, what to do...

Crackers! These use very little butter--only 3 tablespoons for four dozen crackers--and I substituted half the white flour for whole wheat. And then there are the tasty, tasty chives, of course. And I got to those golden beets just in time as well. I based my full meal on this recipe, making crackers topped with golden beets (and one regular that got in my bunch somehow) marinated in dressing, with goat cheese and pistachios, on a kale salad (but just for show, before the cracker got soggy).

Of course, I started out carefully assembling a couple crackers, but then got impatient and ditched the goat cheese and stirred the shredded kale in with the beets; it was the same dressing, so I figured it didn't matter. This was so delicious I ate tomorrow's intended lunch salad portion. Oops.

While my research is proceeding more slowly than a Pleistocene glacier chewing its way down the Eastern seaboard, literarily everything is bouncing right along. I received the Goodreads equivalent of a friend request today, reminding me that while I'd created an account months ago, I'd never actually added books, since I've been using LibraryThing for much longer. Now seemed as good a time as any to get on that. Unfortunately, importing from the .csv I downloaded from LibraryThing didn't go so well*, so my Goodreads account is in no way the accurate reflection that my LibraryThing account is of what I've read, what I want to read, and what I actually own. First-world problems, I know.

The latest book I've added on LibraryThing is the collected short stories of Amy Hempel, which I'd mentioned yesterday. These stories are mind-blowing. She writes in the way I wish I had the talent to write, exposing the reader to the rawest and most painful experiences a person can have, but insidiously such that her stories are all the more powerful. For her characters, happiness and above all stability are not the norm, nor are they expected to be. Sadness and discontent are lived matter-of-factly, and sometimes even affably. It's captivating.

And last but not least, science: Blaser Lab's meeting today was a guest talk on molecular beacons. In and of itself, the concept is great, and it's going (and has gone) some really exciting places for science and medicine. But what got me the most was the joy in the speaker's voice. This wasn't a particularly advanced talk, and he must have given it dozens of times, but his heart was practically pounding out of his chest as he spoke with the rapidity not of boredom-inducing practice, but of joy at communicating his life's work. It's a work he clearly loves. I hope to be lucky enough to speak about my own future career with such ebullience.

*Among the more minor but most frustrating aspects of this is the fact that there is one book, one, that did not import itself. Am I tempted to go through my LibraryThing account book by book to find it? At the risk of admitting moderate mental illness, yes, yes, I am. But maybe when I've actually got Internet in my apartment and don't waste the time I convince myself to spend in the med center library in the evenings on indulging my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Aspirations

Momofuku has been a legendary establishment for me. It's a media darling, I'm sure deservedly so, and when I lived in Florida and Boston, I used to wish I could go there. Of course, now that I live in New York, I'm confronting the sad facts that it's not exactly vegetarian-friendly, and it's way too expensive for my budget, but that doesn't mean I can't employ a little DIY.

This sauce, you see, is actually as delicious as it sounds (and as it is described). As you can see, I served it with an assortment of soba, grapefruit, steamed beet greens with a squeeze of lime, steamed carrots, and soybeans (edamame's more mature version). The combination of grapefruit and beet greens was a little too bitter; next time, I'll use oranges or a sweeter green, like bok choy. Otherwise... A+. Now, for an excuse to make crack pie...

Oh, and this was the view of last night's sunset from the window of my new apartment. Totally gratuitous.

Déjeuner sur l'herbe

I can do without most Independence Day traditions, but eating en plein air is not one of them. Last Fourth of July, I made a picnic that included Moroccan carrot salad. This Fourth of July, I had a solo picnic lunch in the courtyard of my new building that included a layered purple carrot salad.

This is what purple carrots look like! They don't taste any
different (at least not to my untrained palate), but they are
aesthetically pleasing and no more expensive than regulars.

This is a peeled purple carrot.

Mandolined purple carrots, ready to be dressed.

I let the carrots sit in a shallot and tarragon vinaigrette while I made a pesto of lemon juice, sunflower seeds, chives, and carrot greens (after verifying in a cookbook (no Internet, remember?) that carrot greens aren't poisonous or disgusting or some such). I made a sort of layered dip using the carrots, pesto, and some goat cheese.

Of course, if there's a dip, there must be a chip, so I made some with the last farmers market potato, baking them in the oven rather than frying them.

These are easy to make, but only if you have a slicer. Only the
most seasoned of professionals could make slices this uniformly
thin without the aid of a slicing apparatus.

And then I took everything outside to eat. While I was chowing down, Gustav Holst’s Brook Green Suite came up on my iPod, and I was nearly bowled over by one of those vaunted “sudden rushes of nostalgia” that you read about in bad novels and worse food blogs (no delusions of grandeur here!). We played that piece in orchestra in middle and high school over and over. Life wasn’t actually simpler back then, but I was young enough to think it was, so I suppose my nostalgia was for that delusion; ignorance was, in quite a few ways, bliss. 

Oh, and I was wrong yesterday when I posted a picture of cats and said it was adorable. Compared to this, those cats look like Newt Gingrich.

Oven-baked potato chips


Thinly slice a potato using a mandoline or other slicing apparatus. Soak the slices in cold water for 10 to 15 minutes, drain, lightly salt the slices, and let them sit for another 5 minutes. Pat them dry and toss them in olive oil or spray them with olive oil spray. Sprinkle with pepper, other herbs or spices, and additional salt if necessary. Bake at 425 F for 15 minutes, rotating halfway through and removing any smaller or thinner slices that are done before the larger ones.

Carrot green pesto
Food process one very large bunch of carrot greens with 1/4 cup chives, 1/2 cup sunflower seeds, the juice and zest of a lemon, 1/4 cup olive oil, and 2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste.

Favaritism and e-scape-ism

This is how I feel about The Man Died: There's a reason A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch isn't five times its actual length. Sure, Wole Soyinka hands out pertinent pearls of wisdom right and left, and it's heartrending to read about the sufferings of Nigeria's political prisoners, and it's crucial that a record of the human rights violations by the government be set down. Even the greatest of insights, however, becomes old hat after two hundred pages or so, and being glad that Soyinka survived to publicize the atrocities committed against him and thousands upon thousands of others only sustains a certain amount of interest in the actual prose. Yeah, I hate to say it, but after 200 pages, I was blasé in the face of Soyinka's incredible fortitude and incredible suffering. Perhaps I made a mistake reading it all in one go, because those segments I enjoyed the most were those immediately subsequent to a lengthy reading break. Overall, I'm glad I read it, but installments would definitely have been the way to go. I also recently finished An Unfortunate Woman, Richard Brautigan's last novel. It's amazing that something so witty and quirky also, in retrospect, is a clear presage to Brautigan's suicide. I'd recommend picking this up. After reading this story at the recommendation of a friend, I'm a little enamored of Amy Hempel, so her collected stories are next, followed by Walter Benjamin for Children. I am absolutely gleeful that both Bobst and the NYUPL have both those books. Choices, choices!

In other news, these are scapes:

They taste like the Valium-plied love child of garlic and onions. What they really are is the shoot at the top of the garlic, that thing that turns into a woody stem as the garlic matures. I made them into a sauce with yogurt, rice wine vinegar, and lemon juice, and I used that to make a new potato and fava bean salad, topped with feta, chopped almonds, and a sprinkling of chives.

Christ, this picture is awful.

Fresh fava beans are palate-charmingly delicious, but I'm glad I was making them for one. I forgot to take pictures before I shelled them, but the gist is that they come in long pods about the thickness of a man's thumb. In those pods are the beans encased in leathery capsules that are nestled in spongy white stuff. They have to be extracted from all that packaging, after which you're left with a pile of bright green beans and a much larger pile of detritus. This gives you a pictorial idea of the process. This has some information as to why you shouldn't eat fava beans if you have glucose-6-phosphatase deficiency. This is just adorable.

The King said, very gravely

What he said, of course, is "begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end, then stop." So here goes*.

Apartment: moved into, such as it were. I'm lacking such things as Internet (thus a daily foray to the medical center to check my e-mail and such), chairs, and a dresser; those will all arrive with Andy in just over two weeks. But what I have is an excellent amount of space, and a comfortable and non-twin double-long bed, and an intriguing amount of solitude. I'm liking it, except for the fact that there's nobody to help me put sunscreen on my back. Why is that pertinent, you ask? I'll tell you!

This is the view of Manhattan from the Governors Island ferry; I went there to see a performance of In C. Predictably, it was fantastic. I lay in the grass (protecting my back from an even worse sunburn) and closed my eyes and thought of England just sort of let an hour's worth of music happen to me. The island itself was lovely, pastoral with an antebellum tinge to it. It's hard to believe it's just an eight-minute ferry ride from the insanity that is Manhattan.

The guy directing the performance (and playing the toy
piano) was described as "Liberace's final protégé."

Manhattan has its perks, though. Example: the Union Square Greenmarket, which has burst into full flower. I set out to go grocery shopping today with a list of recipes and necessary ingredients, but the variety of produce was bewitching, and I ditched my plans for more fresh (and more expensive) options. Purchased: fresh fava beans, a massive amount of scallions and chives ($1 per forearm-sized bundle), radishes, carrots, golden beets, a few baby new potatoes, and kale. Problematically, I'm going to have to figure out how to use all these things while they're still fresh; please, please help yourself to scallions and chives if you like! I started in on things with cinnamon-sugar radish chips:

OVERLY DRAMATIC RADISH SHOT

These have an intriguing nutty and slightly spicy flavor. Unfortunately, since they have to be baked in a single layer, they were kind of a pain in the neck to make. Imagine laying out individual very thin slices of radish. For dinner, I had a radish green and caramelized onion gratin that I did not photograph. It was, and here is where I apologize for tooting my own horn, delicious (and very quichelike).

Radish green and caramelized onion gratin
1 large bunch radish greens, chopped
1 large onion
1 clove garlic, minced
chives
salt and pepper to taste
fresh basil leaves, chiffonade(d? Is that a verb)
1 egg
1/3 cup plain yogurt
1 ounce goat cheese

Slice the onion thinly and caramelize it. Just before it's done, add the garlic and radish greens and cook until the greens are thoroughly wilted. After it's cool enough to handle, squeeze as much water as possible out of the mixture. Stir the egg, yogurt, and goat cheese together until smooth and creamy; thin with a little milk or water if it appears too thick. Stir in the radish green mixture, the chives, and the basil, then season to taste with salt and pepper. You can also omit the basil and add a pinch of nutmeg. Bake in a greased glass dish at 325 until just set; this should not take very long. Let cool slightly before cutting in and serving.

*I'll be omitting from the narrative details about my ridiculously blistered feet (there is, it turns out, such a thing as too much walking) and shower curtain-buying excursion.