The latest Rachael Ray recipe I tried, Cheesy Pasta Presto, from Just in Time! was supposed to take only 15 minutes. It took 53!
When you think about it, there’s no way pasta is a 15-minute meal. It takes 15 minutes just to boil the water. And another 10 to cook the pasta.
The good thing was that Cheesy Pasta Presto tastes much better than it sounds.
My story “Looking-Glass Milk” is now available to read online at Scribblers and Ink Spillers, as part of their Crystal Codices series. They initially published this story back in November, charging $1 for a downloadable e-book and $2 plus shipping for a paper book. The print version is still $2, but now the electronic version is free.
This is one of the few science fiction stories I’ve written. Two organic chemists courageously set out to save the lives of an imperiled landing crew, and to discover the answer to a mystery that has perplexed scientists since long before the dawn of space travel….
For any in the audience who are organic chemists (like me), the scientific mystery at the heart of the story is that of biological chirality: why do most chiral natural products on Earth have the same handedness (if you don’t know what this means, and are curious, go read the story, it’s explained there!)? There’s actually a line in the story that references some work that I did as an undergraduate research associate way back in the early 90s. Some chemists at a German university reported that you could get a chemical reaction that usually gives equal amounts of two products that are mirror images of each other to give more of one by doing the reaction in a magnetic field. It was theorized that this might be relevant to the origin of “biological chirality”; that early reactions taking place on Earth before the emergence of even single-celled life forms might have been “pushed” towards one product by the influence of Earth’s magnetic field.
Later, the post-doc involved in the research confessed to doping the reactions with one of the two products, so that it would look like the reaction had given an excess of that material. The whole incident is sort of the “cold fusion” of the organic chemistry world. However, before people knew for sure that the results had been faked, my summer research adviser (John Scheffer at UBC, with whom I later did graduate work) thought it would be a neat project for me to attempt to duplicate the results. (As most of you probably know, when a scientist publishes startling results in a paper, and people aren’t sure whether they believe those results, scientists in that field around the world try to follow the procedures given in the paper, to see whether they get the same results, doing it exactly the same way – if they don’t, there’s obviously a problem, whether it’s deliberate scientific misconduct or sloppy documentation of the original researcher’s work.)
I was not able to duplicate the results (fortunately!), and then the fraud was confessed, and I moved on to something else for the rest of the summer. However, the experience got me thinking about the whole issue of biological chirality, and how it had potentially arisen, and whether organic molecules on other planets would also have all their amino acids and sugars having the same “handedness” … ever since, I’ve wanted to write a science fiction story about this question. And I finally got around to it.
So, Breitmayer et al. in Germany may not have answered the question of why chiral organic molecules here on Earth mostly have the same orientation around the stereogenic centers. But at least they inspired a science fiction story.
Last night I hosted a dinner party. It was me, my boyfriend Donald, my roommates Cory and Aubrey, and my good friend Bob (a former housemate of mine). I did all the cooking, and Bob, who has an extensive wine cellar, brought wine specially selected to accompany the meal.
I was a bit pressed for time this weekend, since I had to pick up a rental car on Saturday afternoon (which is another story). Also I was kind of tired, and didn’t want to have to get up at 5 am to start cooking. So there were only two courses: the main course and the dessert.
All recipes were courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks. The main course was from the Quick Recipe cookbook: pan-seared veal chops with gremolata and lemon spinach. Gremolata is an Italian seasoning, a mixture of parsley, lemon rind and garlic. I mixed the gremolata with extra-virgin olive oil and spooned the mixture over the chops after they were cooked. The chops were pretty big, so I decided I didn’t really need a potato or rice side dish.
I don’t eat veal very often, partly because it’s expensive and partly because these days you have to check with your dinner party guests to make sure they’ll eat it. So it’s a taste I’m not that familiar with. Donald, Aubrey and Cory had actually never tried it before (at least I think that’s what they said). Aubrey thought it tasted quite a lot like beef (not surprisingly, since it’s from the same animal), but that she kept looking at it thinking based on the taste that it would be red, and kept being mildly surprised to find that it was so pork-like in appearance. I guess I think it’s a little beefy, but a little like pork, too (except with the “piggy” flavor, if that makes sense). It’s definitely milder than, say, lamb.
For dessert, we had the fresh strawberry tart from the New Best Recipe cookbook. It was the first time I’d made this particular strawberry tart, and maybe only the second time I’ve made one of these (with the tart pastry, the pastry cream, then the fresh raw fruit on top, glazed with melted jelly – red currant, in this case). It looked pretty just after I had assembled it, but serving it out was fairly disastrous. The recipe said to prepare the baked tart shell and pastry cream ahead of time, cool the tart shell to room temperature and chill the pastry cream, and then assemble the tart no more than 30 minutes before serving. However, when I tried to cut it, the tart pastry was so crisp that it shattered under the knife, and was kind of impossible to slice neatly. Also, the pastry cream gooped out around the edges of the cuts. So it was very messy! Bob, who is a more experienced cook than I am, said it’s usually better to put the pastry cream in the shell, then chill that for 30 minutes before topping it with the fruit. He said that the pastry cream will soften up the crust just enough in that time to make it cuttable, but not enough to lose all the delectable crispness.
Despite the appearance of the uneven slices of goopy tart, it was very delicious, and the 5 of us all had seconds, and finished the entire thing in one sitting.
To accompany the veal chops, Bob brought two Burgundies from the same producer, Domaine Francois Lumpp. One white and one red (for the curious, white Burgundy is almost always 100% chardonnay, and red Burgundy is 100% pinot noir). Both were Premier Cru from Givry; the white was the 2002 Crausot (I think Crausot is the vineyard, but maybe I’m wrong; sometimes I forget my wine knowledge) and the red was the 2001 Petit Marole. I liked both wines, though I thought the white was a little too old, and tasted kind of oxidized. But some of the other people liked the white better than the red. Some people actually liked the red better by itself, but the white better with the food. I still liked the red better with the veal, though I agreed that, with the fattier bits of the veal, the white was better. Also, the white was better with the spinach.
To accompany the tart, we had a 1976 Johannisberger Holle Riesling Beerenauslese from the Rheingau in Germany. This was a very sweet white dessert wine (made from Riesling grapes). It was definitely my favorite wine of the evening, with a wonderful balance of sweetness and acidity, and a great flavor profile. It was a fairly decent match for the tart. It worked really well with the strawberries and with the crust, but wasn’t quite sweet enough for the pastry cream.
My next “fancy” dinner will probably be my boyfriend’s birthday dinner that I’m cooking on the 3rd of July (not his actual birthday, but it’s a Saturday, and that’s the important thing). But I had better not say what I’m making, because it’s supposed to be a surprise!
p.s. – Whole Foods did have the veal rib chops I wanted (reduced cruelty “barn-roaming” veal), but they were a little thicker than the recipe called for. I just cooked them a little longer. It worked fine. (I did use a meat thermometer to make sure I got the internal temperature right, rather than relying too heavily on the suggested cooking time.)
Last night, I prepared a Rachael Ray recipe that was supposed to take 60 minutes … and it did! 62 minutes, to be exact. But well within an acceptable margin of error.
The recipe was “Spicy Lentil Stoup”, from Just in Time. It was good, too! A nice, thick soup with plenty of lentils and kale, plus tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, onion, garlic, various spices, and a bit of pancetta, a couple anchovy fillets, and chicken broth to give it flavor.
I think that the 60-minute meals are more likely to be accurate estimates of the time required. They tend to be recipes that require simmering for 25 minutes or so, and where Rachael grossly underestimates the time it will take an average person to sprint through one of her recipes is in prep. I just can’t chop that fast! Not to mention finding the ingredients, mopping up all the liquid that the tomatoes I chopped have released onto the cutting board before I mince the thyme. Etc.
The Spicy Lentil Stoup serves way more than 4, though (and is not really very spicy)! Hopefully Donald will help me to eat lots of it tomorrow night, so that I don’t have to put any of it in the freezer. I’m going to Newport next week for a chemistry conference, so I’m afraid I might not have a chance to finish it (especially since I’m having a dinner party on Saturday night, so I won’t be able to eat it then).
I’ve mentioned America’s Test Kitchen a few times, and how their cooking time estimates are usually more reliable than Rachael Ray’s. On Monday, I prepared Grilled Tuna and Bok Choy with Soy-Ginger Glaze from The Quick Recipe. Estimated time, 45 minutes. Actual time, 52 minutes. But that includes the time it took me to run back into the house and splash water in my eyes when the glaze dripped down onto the coals and turned into some potent tear gas that could have been used as crowd control.
That recipe was also tasty. Though the grilling part gets busy, when you have 4 tuna steaks and 8 pieces of bok choy on the grill all at once. And I couldn’t figure out how to keep the bok choy leaves from turning into charred shreds like the newspaper I used to light the coals. The cookbook said to squirt water on them occasionally “to prevent them from drying out”, but it didn’t really seem to help all that much. Besides, I had to keep glazing the tuna, and flipping it periodically (and chasing the tuna pieces around the grill with the spatula). And splashing water on my eyes.
Whole Foods apparently hasn’t gotten the memo that America’s Test Kitchen recommends grilling tuna steaks at least 1 1/2 inches thick if you want rare tuna, because I couldn’t find anything thicker than about 1 inch.
Okay, I guess I unfairly accused the old lady down the street from my boyfriend of stealing his cookies. The postal service returned them to me as undeliverable.
I do have an unfortunate habit of jumping to the conclusion that people have stolen stuff of mine (or borrowed it without asking), and then finding out in an hour or so that the item in question is actually right where I last left it, maybe hidden by a stray paper or two.
Can I complain about the US Postal Service, though? I’ve lost track of the amount of mail that’s been delivered to my address, but is addressed to people who haven’t lived here in at least 10 years. Or that isn’t supposed to come to this street address at all (it’s supposed to go to another house on our street, or even another house 1 or 2 streets over). Not to mention all the times they’ve lost letters, magazines, credit card statements and Amazon packages addressed correctly to me and my roommates.
The one time I wish they would just drop off the package at the address written on the box, they have to suddenly start following protocol and making sure the person whose name is on the box actually lives there. Though clearly, they’re not on the ball enough to think to themselves, “Hmm, there’s a Donald Crankshaw who lives on this street, just a few houses down … maybe this package is really for him.”
Grrr!
This story requires some background information. For Christmas this past year, one of the presents I gave my boyfriend Donald was a 6-month membership in the Cookie-of-the-Month club. This entailed me baking cookies once a month, and then either giving them to him or mailing them if I wasn’t going to see him soon enough (cause who wants stale cookies?).
This was not my idea. I stole it from my roommate’s sister. I’m not sure I’d do it again, especially since I also gave this gift to my brother-in-law on the west coast (assuming that neither Donald nor my brother-in-law would want to eat an entire batch of cookies on their own). Postage is more than you’d think, especially to the west coast.
In any case, I just baked the last batch of cookies (chocolate chip) last weekend, and mailed them off on Monday. However, when I got to the post office, I realized that I could not remember my boyfriend’s mailing address.
This might seem weird, but I don’t really mail him that many things, and he currently lives a half hour drive away, and I don’t have a car, so I’ve only been to his place once (and he’s lived there less than 6 months). Also, I don’t have a cell phone, so I couldn’t call him from the post office.
So I guessed. Unfortunately, as I realized when I got back to my office and called Donald from my office phone, I guessed wrong. However, I knew which wrong address I’d sent the cookies to (another house on the same block), so Donald said he would walk over and let them know that he would be receiving a package at that address, addressed to him.
Well, he went over twice, and the old lady who answered the door both times claimed that the package never showed up! Hmm….
I hope she ate them, at least. I’d hate to think they’d gone entirely to waste.
For years, I’ve been a devotee of the sadly-out-of-print book Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century (Paul Harrington and Laura Moorhead). I learned about the book from a friend, and managed to find my own copy at a used book store (and pay far too much money for it). It’s served me well, and while I wouldn’t say I’ve tried all 275 drink classics described therein … well, to admit how many I have tried might reveal more about my drinking habits than I’d care to confess.
Recently, however, The Drinks Bible has been shoved rudely from its pedestal by a new cocktail cookbook, Dale DeGroff’s The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks, which I received as a Christmas present from the thoughtful parents of my teetotalling boyfriend. Each book contains cocktail recipes that the other has left out. However, they both provide recipes for the essential classics (the Martini, the Manhattan, the Mojito, and many drinks that do not begin with the letter M). For the most part, I’ve found that I prefer DeGroff’s version of a cocktail to Harrington’s. Harrington’s recipes are sometimes so sour as to be almost undrinkable. I occasionally do find DeGroff’s just a little too sweet, but overall, the flavor profiles of the drinks are more interesting. And it’s a better cocktail cookbook for right now; Harrington’s is a bit out of date in terms of what ingredients you’ll actually be able to find at even the best-stocked liquor store, these days; DeGroff’s is more mindful of this issue, and also includes newer products (like the ginger liqueur Domaine de Canton) that may not have been available when Harrington’s book came out.
Be that as it may, I just got around to trying DeGroff’s recipe for one of my favorite cocktails, the Aviation. And I found that I like the Drinks Bible version much better.
The recipe DeGroff provides calls for 2 oz gin, 3/4 oz maraschino liqueur and 1/2 oz lemon juice. Harrington’s recipe is 1 1/2 oz gin, 1/2 oz maraschino and 3/4 oz lemon juice. I found DeGroff’s recipe too alcoholic, and out of balance with the tartness that I think this drink needs from the lemon juice.
This might just be me, though; I do like my drinks more sour than most people. But if someone wanted a sweeter Aviation, I’d probably recommend keeping Harrington’s proportions, and just increasing the maraschino up to 3/4 oz (though I haven’t tried that yet, to be honest).
It’s also possible that I’d think differently with a different gin. I used Tanqueray, which I usually prefer because it has a stronger juniper flavor than Bombay Sapphire, and I find that Bombay Sapphire with tonic tastes too much like Sprite (though it’s not quite as Sprite-like as Tanqueray Ten and tonic – shudder!). Perhaps Bombay Sapphire or a milder gin would work better in DeGroff’s recipe.
A nice variation, which I got when I ordered an Aviation at Clio Restaurant, is to use Meyer lemon juice in place of ordinary lemon juice.
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Two of my Clarion West classmates, An Owomoyela and Pam Rentz, have stories out right now in online magazines, so if you’re looking for something to read, check them out!
An’s story, “Jessamine”, is in Reflection’s Edge. Pam’s story, “Estelle Makes the Casino Run” is in Innsmouth Free Press.
I just finished reading the 2nd Edition of Coach’s Midnight Diner, an anthology of “hardboiled horror, crime, and paranormal fiction with a Christian slant”.
I was mostly reading it because my boyfriend has a story in the anthology. But I’d heard of this anthology before. I remembered being impressed by their submission guidelines. Most Christian magazines and anthologies are way less forgiving of profanity, sex and violence in the stories they publish than, say, the authors of the Bible (to pick a completely random example). So I was heartened to read that it wasn’t really an issue for them; I think the guidelines said something along the lines of “God’s not a pussy, and neither are we.”
They’ve, um, changed it since to something less crude. (“This is not Guidposts or your Sunday School quarterly.”) But I still approve. The first anthology they put out was subtitled “The Jesus vs. Cthulhu Edition”, further evidence that the editors have a sense of humor.
The one I read was “The Back From the Dead Edition.” Some of my favorite stories: “Flowers for Shelly”, by Greg Mitchell, was possibly the most memorable story in the anthology, with the best description I’ve ever read of a first person narrator who turns into a mindless zombie during the zombie apocalypse. Jerry Gordon’s “9th Ward” was also memorably creepy, very short, but with a twist ending that I didn’t see coming. I’d be amiss not to mention Donald’s story (for which he used the byline D.S. Crankshaw), “The Office of Second Chances.” I don’t claim to be offering an objective opinion here, but it was one of my favorite stories in the anthology; it’s probably the most humorous story, with its send-ups of action/thriller cliches and Lovecraftian horrors from beyond time. I also liked Maggie Stiefvater’s “The Denial” (about a demon who falls in love with a human woman, and finds some kind of redemption), Daniel G. Keohane’s “Box” (about a victim of child trafficking) and “Small Accidents of God”, by Virginia Hernandez (a teenage girl is unnerved by the menacing shadows she can see hovering around other people, and hopes that “getting the Spirit” will make them go away).
One thing that the anthology got me thinking about is whether there can even be such a thing as Christian horror. I’m not talking about the window dressing of horror, the zombies and demons and serial killers and such. What I mean is that many critics seem to be arguing that one of the essential features of horror fiction is, at its core, a sense that everything is meaningless. That there’s no underlying purpose to our lives, or to life in general; or if there is, then the mind behind that purpose (if there is such a mind) does not wish us well. Most Christians would agree, I think, that this worldview is antithetical to the essential doctrines of Christianity.
I realize that Coach’s Midnight Diner doesn’t limit itself to horror fiction. But having read the anthology didn’t do much to convince me that there is such a thing as Christian horror. Most of the best stories were neither horror, nor particularly Christian (I don’t mean that they were anti-Christian, just that Christianity wasn’t relevant to the story). Some were one, but not the other. Even stories with horrific or frightening elements often ended on too much of a redemptive note to seem true to the grim and hopeless horror aesthetic.
I think one of the reasons I especially liked “Flowers for Shelly”, though, is that it did a better job than any of the other stories at walking the line between Christian faith (the first person narrator who turns into a zombie is a devout Christian, and of course there’s the question of how God could allow a zombie apocalypse to happen to good people), and grim hopelessness (perhaps there’s a purpose, but the zombified protagonist isn’t going to find out what it is). It’s also a bleakly funny story.
Of course, on the other hand, the Bible itself can be pretty horrific, and not just in window trappings (“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit,” as the author of Ecclesiastes tells us). I’d argue that if you read the entire book, the horrific bits are just local minima (to use a scientific analogy); overall, there’s a purpose. Not necessarily for individual lives, though. People die without ever seeing the redemption that they’d hoped for.
So I guess I don’t have an answer to my own question. One thing I do know, though; every so often while I’m typing up a blog post, it auto-saves and tells me how many words I’ve written so far; and for an awfully long time while I was writing this post, the word count was 666.
On Sunday afternoon we had one of the most intense storms I’ve seen since moving to Boston. I was in church during the height of the storm (I’m sure there’s a cliche in there somewhere), but on the bus ride home, once we got into Arlington I started seeing trees down everywhere. One had fallen right on top of someone’s parked car.
The picture above is of the end of the one-way street I live on. Note how a tree has fallen and blocked the entire street, dragging a power line down with it.
My roommates told me that an even bigger tree fell over on the next street. They could hear the Public Works department sawing at it for over an hour after the storm ended, but by the time I got home, most of it had been cleared away. Here’s a picture of the part of the tree that was still standing.
It seems that Arlington was particularly hard hit by the storm, for some reason. Though not as hard hit as southern New Hampshire, which reportedly had a tornado! (The Boston area had a tornado watch, but I don’t think we actually had any tornadoes in Massachusetts.) They had most of the trees cleared off of residential streets by nightfall, but the bike path was still blocked by several downed trees on my Monday morning commute to work. I wish I’d thought to take my camera along. I had to carry my bike over two fallen trees just on the stretch between Lake Street and where it opens up by the soccer fields before Alewife. One of the trees was a willow that must have been at least 18 inches in diameter where it split. I could see the jagged trunk left behind; it broke off about 30 feet above the ground.
I assumed that these trees fell because of the strong winds, but my roommates think it’s because they were struck by lightning. I didn’t see any burn marks, though, and I was under the impression that if the upper limbs of a tree fell off because of a lightning strike, you’d see scorch marks. But I guess I don’t really know enough about it.
I’ve decided that my paranoia about riding my bike in thunderstorms is probably justified. Even if it’s just the 10-minute ride home. After seeing what the bike path looked like on Monday morning.
My roommates said that our cat didn’t like the thunderstorm, and kept meowing at them as if she wanted them to make the noise stop. When that didn’t work, she went and hid under my bed for a few hours.