Archive for Dec 2006

Tue Dec 26 17:11:08 2006

Christmas turned out pretty well -- we went to my parents's on Christmas Day and ate many nice things and unwrapped much loot. My paternal grandmother was also there and it was good to see her, but also a bit worrying as she is now pretty old and completely dotty. Some of the dottiness would be alleviated if she would get a hearing aid, but she flat out refuses to consider one. They are ugly, expensive, and will make her look too old. Yes, because one doesn't want to look "too old" when one is eighty four. No, one would rather constantly look vague and confused and be cut out of all the good convo as people tire of repeating themselves three or four times.

Yup.

Anyway, it was a nice day. My mother served a standing rib roast with fresh-cooked carrots, corn, green beans, chives and sour cream mashed potatoes, hot rolls, the obsequious pickle plate, and (her own delicious recipe) horseradish sauce. I made the dessert -- low fat cheesecake bars straight from the pages of Health magazine. Cheesecake is generally a crowd-pleaser, but I wanted one not too rich and not to sweet and these seemed pretty much perfect. Last week, they seemed like a safe bet as they vanished almost the minute they hit the snack table at work and many of my co-workers clamored for a copy of the recipe. Of course, I had to doctor the Christmas dinner versions a little by adding some unsweetened canned cherries under the top crust of one side (Mom loves cherries) and didn't add enough extra time in for that portion of the top to set properly. Next time, I'll add an extra 5-10 minutes. The bars went over well, regardless, and my mother asked to keep the cherry half. Woot.


Tue Dec 19 15:05:34 2006

Well, I give up. I've written ad re-written two and a half perfectly good posts, but Something Bad keeps happening before they get posted. I will be damned if I will recount my fabulous adventures with macaroons and I've already spent way too much time thinking about my cousin's suicide attempt (probably more than her own equally fucked up parents have).

Anyway, I will no longer be whinging about the library job market. I accepted a job offer a couple weeks ago -- part-time reference and interlibrary loan at twice what I'm currently making per hour. It's with a good library with really nice staff and, even better, it's a consortium library so I am already familiar with many of their practices. I am happy, right?

Well, no. Because today I told that nice library I could not work for it. I got another job offer from a library I had given up on. It's a full time reference position with business normal hours and excellent benefits. Pays less per hour than the part-time job, but I'll still earn in a week what it takes a month to earn at <consortiumlibrary>. Yes, I'll be earning above the poverty line. 'Tis a Christmas miracle. And I should be happy. This new library isn't consortium, but the staff seems kind and the job is perfectly do-able. I just feel really, really, really horrible for giving notice at the first library -- especially as I was supposed to start work there next week. It puts them in a bad spot and gives them no little reason to curse me.

Also, this full time position means a real good-bye to <consortiumlibrary> and <rurallibrary>. And the library cat. Oh. Crap. The library cat.




Fri Dec 08 19:10:33 2006

I baked The Husband a delicious chocolate cake the other day. Used followed the "Classic Chocolate Cake" recipe from Better Homes and Gardens New Baking Book (Meredith Books: 1998) and baked it up in a 13x9 cake pan. The cake came out of the oven very high and springy to the touch and made the whole house smell delightful. You understand, this is one of the reasons I bake -- the delicious odors no candle or home fragrance spray can ever properly emulate. Oh, yes, the lemon meringue candle does smell an awful lot like pie, but the candle scent lacks the ... depth? ... complexity? ... of real baking.

Anyway, I wanted to frost this cake with something like penuche frosting -- easily made, easily applied, and fast to set up. Couldn't actually use penuche frosting, because The Husband doesn't like it, but he does like teh xocolatl so I thought maybe a pourable glaze and (after much futzing) I ended up using Scharffen Berger's "Deep Chocolate Glaze or Ganache" recipe, but with Lindt semisweet baking bars, instead. I stored the cake in the fridge and the glaze went hard like a candy bar, but leaving it out for a few minutes before serving helped it soften up a bit and the glaze and the cake worked well together. The cake was very fluffy and only mildly chocolaty with a good mouth feel, while the glaze was a intense dark explosion on the tongue.

I so want a lemon meringue pie, now.




Mon Dec 04 23:56:19 2006

Made fruitcake over the weekend. Fruitcake being Dad's December cake selection. I'd never made fruitcake before and was, as usual when faced with a new recipe, a little nervous in the kitchen. It was not that I worried my technique would suck and I would ruin the cake, but rather that the cake would suck all on its own -- merely by being fruitcake. I don't really know what my father is expecting from his fruitcake and I worry that what I have baked is not what he wants. Certainly, the four loaves I baked look much more like tea bread than the candy-like fruitcakes I see at the market or the dense marzipan enrobed bricks I saw in England (where fruitcake is a normal celebratory cake and not a seasonal aberration).

My loaves are currently mellowing in the bottom drawer of the fridge -- all brushed with brandy and wrapped in layers of brandy-soaked cheesecloth and aluminum foil. Every time I open the fridge, I look at them and think you bastards had better taste good. It is going to be a long three weeks. Yes, I know they should mellow for five, but three will have to do for (at least) one loaf as there no time to bake fruitcake before Thanksgiving and I plan on giving Dad (at least) one loaf for Christmas. One of my fellow reference librarian claims to adore fruitcake so I may give her one, as well. I myself can probably manage half a loaf. Obviously, I will be taste testing these the week before I give them away -- in time to buy a professionally prepared one if these turn not so good.

I used King Arthur Flour Co's "Our Favorite Fruitcake" recipe with four cups of the Dried Fruit Blend/Fruitcake Fruit rather than the Fruitcake Fruits blend. That was completely my mistake -- I saw Fruitcake Fruit and didn't think twice -- so the cake may be more "real" fruit-y and less candied fruit than my father anticipates. The Dried Fruit Blend is really yummy, though. I keep nibbling it straight out of the bag. Bet it would be good stirred into my hot breakfast Kashi.

The recipe was very easy to follow and I don't doubt my loaves are edible ... I just worry they're not the fruitcake of my dad's dreams. Oh well, soak them with enough brandy and no-one may care!




Fri Dec 01 10:30:28 2006

Right now, I am feeling all righteous and granola girlie. I just finished roasting and pureeing three leftover sugar pumpkins. I split each of the three-ish pound pumpkins in half, removed the stem and gooey bits, put them skin side up in a stoneware pan, and baked them in a 375°F oven for an hour and fifteen-ish minutes each. The rinds came out of the oven all burnt and wrinkly, but the pumpkin flesh was properly soft and pulpy. I ran the flesh through Mom's Cuisinart and then bagged it (two cups to a bag ... which is the same as in a can, I think). It was an easy after work job -- the messiest part was getting the puree into the bag as I didn't have a funnel on hand. Now the freezer has four happy little bags of puree waiting for me to do something with them before they get burnt like their neighbors The Brown Bananas That Never Became Bread.

I don't usually have pumpkins on hand this late in the season. Usually, they have all become jack-o-lanterns or deer chow by now. But, since we were hosting Thanksgiving, I wanted to do something festive with our swanky new planter/mailbox post and invested in extra pumpkins. I lined the top of the planter box with a bed of straw, then stuck a nice squat Rouge Vif d'Estampes (sometimes called "Cinderella") pumpkin in the middle flanked with some warty green and yellow pear-shaped gourds. I piled the three sugar pumpkins at the base of the post and, yes, it was all quite positively autumnal.

The warty gourds are inedible as they are covered in some shiny substance, but the "Cinderella" pumpkin should be fine for eating ... if I can figure out what to do with it. I could, probably, bake and puree it like the smaller sugar pumpkins, but it deserves a fancier fate. But what? While I'm pondering that great mystery, I think I'll just move it onto the shelves in the basement and pretend I'm root cellaring or some such shit.

And, you know, it's World AIDS Day. Again. Hurrah. According to the AIDS Epidemic Update @ UNAIDS:

"An estimated one quarter of people living with HIV do not know that they have been infected with the virus (Glynn and Rhodes, 2005), which complicates the HIV response. Persons unaware of their infection are unlikely to access appropriate treatment and care services until relatively late in the progression of AIDS disease, which limits the effectiveness of treatment. They are also less likely to take precautions to avoid transmitting HIV to others. Potentially, individuals who are unaware of their HIV-infected status may account for 54%-70% of all new sexually transmitted HIV infections in the United States of America (Marks et al., 2006)."

Go get tested, already.




last updated: Sat 17 Nov 2007 08:19:03 AM EST