blerg

I started this post once, trying for a cute opening - something lighthearted. Alas, dear reader, I am not quite lighthearted at the moment. There's nothing serious going on, just a lot of little things adding up to a feeling that can best be summarized á la Liz Lemon: blerg. I have wavered between wallowing in it and trying to buck up and get over myself. (Hopefully you'll forgive a little wallowing? Oh, good.)

So I was just looking through old journal entries, wallowing, wondering how I'd ever - oh, I don't know, find a satisfying career, become a writer, deal with friends leaving for school, write a blog post. Then, solving the latter problem at least, I found an entry with this phrase inherited from the Quakers: way opens.

I've written about this phrase before. It's helped me get through some rough times, most of which are too personal to write up here. It - like "your life is beautiful" - is a good reminder to have written down somewhere, especially when you are in your early-to-mid-twenties and all your friends are figuring out what they want to do with your lives and you feel lost in the wilderness. (I did mention a little wallowing, right? I promise, that's it.) Because, honestly, all I need to do is buck up and a way will open. It may not be the way I planned on - already my life has changed dramatically from the way I envisioned it - but it will be beautiful in its own right.


Moving on, there is another thing I inherited from the Quakers and that is potlucks. There was a while in DC where we had a weekly potluck set up - and sometimes it would only be four people, sometimes it would be many more - but when my friend Josh went off to Israel for grad school, they pretty much ceased. So I took it upon myself to make them happen again. After months of emailing friends and coordinating schedules, we finally managed to get together to share food and company.

I will spare you a discussion on why eating is an important community-building exercise. For now.


I thought to make popovers. What I wound up making was something between a muffin and a scone. They were by all accounts edible, but that is not quite enough for me anymore. So I did what any reasonable person would do: I tried again the very next night. The scent of parmesan and thyme filled my apartment for a second time, and I tried my very best to follow the recipe exactly, not straying one iota from what was written. I did not check on them, except at the fifteen minute mark when I turned down the temperature. They had started to rise! Maybe they will pop yet!

As you can tell, dear reader, they did not. Sigh.

I could try to gloss it over, give you a recipe for some indefinite "parmesan and thyme quickbread," but it's not good enough. Instead you get another story of kitchen failure - and if anyone has any advice for baking popovers, please, let me know!

a confession

Let me tell you a story:

Early Sunday evening, I realized I had not cooked anything worth reporting about the entire weekend. There hadn't been a holiday or potluck to necessitate it, and so I had been too concerned with just hanging out to actually make food. I'll leave it for tomorrow, I thought to myself.

So we fast forward to Monday evening, at the grocery store, where I still have no clue what I will bake, but being under the impression that it will indeed be baking, I grab some eggs and some sugar. I grab Joy of Cooking and open to brownies. Well. How serendipitous. I still have chocolate chips that need to be used up!

I mix everything up, thinking of the delicious brownies that will surely emerge from my oven in twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes later, the brownies still seem somewhat...gooey. Not a problem, I'll just leave them in for a little bit longer while I eat my dinner. Twenty more minutes later, these brownies are still not quite the proper brownie consistency. They taste fine, but to taste them, I had to scoop the almost-brownies out with my finger.

Needless to say, I don't have a recipe for you today. Just a little story about how sometimes things in the kitchen just don't work (I think it was the aluminum foil Joy of Cooking told me to put in the tin, against my better judgment), or about how maybe I just can't cook with chocolate, like that cake I attempted after yoga that was also chocolate-based. And hey, maybe next week I will have some successful brownies for you. Mmm, brownies.

fruits & failures

I've never tried to recreate a food I've had in a restaurant before - something about it seemed out of reach, like that was something I could never even attempt. There is a little cafe at the entrance (such as it is) to Georgetown, called Cafe Tu-Oh-Tu. Mostly they do salads and sandwiches, and I have fallen pretty hard for their pasta salad. It's simple enough: penne pasta, baby spinach, dill, feta, and dressing. As I've eaten there more and more, and gotten more into cooking, I decided one day to work up the courage. "Excuse me," I asked the cashier (a little nervously), "what's in the dressing?"

The list - which I quickly jotted down in my planner outside while C.T. patiently waited - consisted of olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, salt, and pepper. My Friday afternoon stretched in front of me and of course I thought to fill it with cooking. I got a little distracted with the need to clean my kitchen a little beforehand and then settled down into attempting this dressing. I glugged out the remainders of my olive oil into a mixing bowl, gathered spices, cut and juiced lemons. I only had ingredients, but I figured that was fine, the rest was probably to taste anyway. So I poured the lemon juice into the oil and poured spices in willy-nilly.

It sort of came together, but mostly it tasted lemon-y (which, sure, might be because I used two lemons). I thought, well, maybe I'll let it sit in the refrigerator and give the flavors a chance to mesh. And before I knew it, the weekend had come and gone and all of a sudden it was Sunday afternoon. I checked in on my little mixing bowl and found that it had separated. Fine, that seems normal - unfortunately it also tasted not-so-great.

Which is fine, actually - because what this means is that I'm getting more comfortable in the kitchen, more at ease with experimenting. I may need to use recipes for a while longer, but I'm fine with playing around until something clicks and I have something wonderful to eat. This is definitely something I'm excited about, but I had another goal in mind for today's post: Summer Fest 2009. I was already cheating a little, since lemons aren't stone fruits, but a dud recipe (or lack thereof) just won't do. So what I have to offer instead are links to old posts: using this recipe, I made scones with farmer's market blueberries (instead of cheese and chives, just add as many blueberries as you'd like) Sunday morning; and I've been making quesadillas with guacamole a lot lately. I just can't get enough avocado in my life. (Yes, I realize that neither of these are stone fruits, either, though I did learn that blueberries aren't true berries, while avocados are technically large berries. The things the internet can teach you, huh?)