Kristin Janz

While thumbing through the Lonely Planet guide to Italy on my new Kindle, Donald found a reference to this book.

From the Publishers Weekly review:

‘Colorful frescoes, metal objects or ceramics are shown in 114 illustrations (95 in color), divided among nine chapters explaining ancient societal attitudes toward sex (“Woman on Top: Women’s Liberation in the First Century A.D”; “Laughing at Taboo Sex in the Suburban Baths”), while subheadings like “Priapus, Protection, and Penetration” offer scholarly and personal anecdotes.’

Since we both write about fantasy worlds inspired by ancient Rome, it would probably be a very useful reference for both of us.

We’ve not yet added it to our wedding registry, though.

(Oh, yeah, in case you didn’t notice on Facebook, Donald and I are engaged now. Yay! It’s very exciting, though a little overwhelming.)

I used to be afraid of eggnog when I was younger. I don’t like either eggs or milk, and as I’m sure you’re all aware, both feature quite prominently. You can get soy eggnog these days, but I doubt that it’s the same thing. And I have weird food issues. Bananas, for instance. My hatred of bananas is, I am certain, more psychological than anything else, and many people (including Donald, who also doesn’t like bananas) have told me that plantains taste nothing like bananas. People who do like bananas say that plantains are gross, and that they taste nothing like bananas. And yet, I can’t bring myself to try one, because they look like bananas.

Eggnog was always the same. I liked chocolate milk, because the chocolate overwhelms the milk flavor. But eggnog? How could it not taste like egg? It says “egg” right in the name!

As I’ve gotten more and more into old-school cocktails, though, I have–cautiously, at first–extended my experiments to cocktails including raw egg. Initially I only tried the ones that used egg white but no yolk (such as the pisco sour, or Ramos gin fizz). Gradually, I worked up my courage enough to try the flip and the coffee cocktail, with their generous portions of whole egg. And you know what? You really can’t taste the egg. Honestly. They’re good cocktails. The egg adds richness and body, but it’s not gross and slimy. Or “eggy”. Not at all. And so, only in the past year or so, I’ve been able to ignore that word “egg” in the name of that favorite seasonal libation, and bring myself to drink eggnog.

Everything is better with alcohol, right?

Last night my roommates and I decided to have a pajama party. It’s sort of a running joke with us. One of my roommates was at a party where she overheard some women talking about an imaginary reality TV show they’d like to see, spoofing “Rock of Love”. From what I understand (I’ve never watched it), “Rock of Love” is about these women who go around bar-hopping trying to pick up random guys? Anyway, the joke was that there should be a show called “Cock Block of Love”, about women who are in their pajamas and ready for bed by 10 pm each night, and my roommate, who was eavesdropping, thought to herself, “Hey! That sounds like our apartment!”

Then, one of us found a retro card with the cover of a 1960s pulp fiction novel called “Pajama Party”, showing three women in various states of pajama-cladness, drinking cocktails and the tag line “Five campus cuties on a no-holds-barred spree!” (I guess they couldn’t fit enough skin on the cover if they put all five of the cuties in the picture? I don’t know.) Of course, the three of us tend to spend most of our time at home reading, writing, playing classical music, or studying; but we do sometimes enjoy a round of cocktails together in our pajamas. So we couldn’t resist putting the card up on our fridge. And we started talking about how we should have a real pajama party. Where we would stay up and eat junk food and watch chick flicks and paint our toenails. And drink cocktails, of course. Since it was mid-December by the time we got around to it, we decided that the most appropriate cocktail was eggnog.

I used the eggnog recipe in Dale DeGroff’s excellent book The Essential Cocktail: 3 eggs, 2 cups whole milk, 1 cup heavy cream, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 oz bourbon, 2 oz rum, freshly grated nutmeg. This was actually only half the recipe, which was supposed to serve 6. I suppose the amount I made does serve 3, if everyone wants seconds. And thirds. And maybe fourths. (If you divide the total amount of alcohol by 3, it is actually less alcohol per person than a typical serving size of alcohol; way more calories and cholesterol, though!)

How festive!

The pumpkin pie was made by my roommate Aubrey. We were supposed to eat it (or at least some of it) at the pajama party, but we felt too full after drinking all that eggnog! Ditto on the popcorn we’d been planning to make. So we’ll have to try the pumpkin pie today! Looks good, though, doesn’t it?

Clearly Dale DeGroff has been consulting with Rachael Ray on portion size

This is what was left in the bowl (of the theoretical 3 servings) after ladling out an initial cup for everyone.

It was very tasty, almost like a cold latte, with a liquid layer and a thick foam on top (I beat the egg whites separately and folded them in at the end). You couldn’t taste the eggs or milk at all!

We exchanged gifts, only I, um, hadn’t gotten around to buying any yet. (There’s still time!) Cory got me Ted Haigh’s book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, which is very awesome. I’d never even heard of many of these cocktails, and some of the ingredients are almost impossible to find, which is my favorite sort of recipe! And Aubrey got me a beautiful mortar and pestle. I don’t know what I’m going to get for them, now–the bar is set pretty high!

As far as our pajama party went, we watched the movie “Love, Actually”, which I’d never seen (though they had). It was good, though Donald and I had just seen the new Harry Potter movie the day before, and they have some of the same actors, which is always weird.

We didn’t have enough energy for any of our other grand ambitions for the pajama party, like home pedicures or crank-calling Donald upstairs. When the movie was over, we concluded that the best part of a pajama party is getting to go straight to bed afterwards without even having to change.

Donald and I are both working on short stories and novels in imaginary fantasy settings inspired by ancient Rome. This is not a case of being influenced by someone you spend a lot of time with. We’ve known each other less than 2 years, and we both started developing these imaginary worlds when we were in highschool. It was a little spooky when we realized how similar some of the stuff we’d come up with was. Okay, maybe not; we have read a lot of the same books, after all. In any event, we figured we’d better start spending more time together, keep an eye on the competition. Before we knew it, we were dating.

Anyway. Today Donald and I thought it would be fun to prepare an “authentic” ancient Roman dinner. I have several books on Roman cooking, most making liberal use of Apicius (the most famous ancient Roman cookbook author). I’ve found the most accessible and interesting to be Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa’s A Taste of Ancient Rome (translated by Anna Herklotz; original title was A cena da Lucullo). The author is a foodie with an archaeology background, and her goal was to take recipes from Apicius, Cato and other sources and provide a version that a modern cook could follow. The ancient sources tend not to provide a lot of detail. They’ll give the ingredients (most of them), and some vague clues as to preparation. America’s Test Kitchen it ain’t! Giacosa’s versions of the recipes should, theoretically, be doable in a modern kitchen.

They are, sort of. One thing to keep in mind is that the author is European, and originally wrote this in 1986. She substitutes ingredients when giving her versions of the ancient recipes, based on what a modern cook is likely to be able to find. However, what a European cook could find in 1986 is not necessarily the same as what an American cook can find in 2010 (and there’s also a huge difference between what I can get in Boston, and what someone in the midwest would be able to get their hands on). She’ll call for spices like rue and lovage (which I’ve never seen for sale except maybe in an occasional farmers market), and then suggest you use garlic instead of silphium, when even the Romans themselves (after silphium went extinct) started using asafetida. Which is to say: the recipes are usable, but if you’re an experienced cook you can probably get closer to the original flavors by coming up with your own amalgam of her recipe and the English translation of the Apicius (and your own knowledge of cooking, of course).

Donald and I prepared and enjoyed a 3-course dinner: to start, we had assorted olives, focaccia with olive oil and rosemary (purchased, not homemade; my focaccia recipe called for potatoes, and obviously that’s not authentic), and cheese: a soft, ripe goat’s milk cheese (Brunet, from Italy); and a Pecorino Romano (Italian sheep’s milk cheese). Apparently, cows were mostly beasts of burden, and most of the cheese consumed by the Romans was made from sheep and goats. For our main course, we had pork and apple stew. Then, for dessert, we made something called globi, which I’ll describe more later.

Even the modern version of the pork and apple stew recipe called for garum and defrutum. For garum, the ubiquitous Roman fish sauce, I was going to substitute Vietnamese fish sauce. But when we started cooking, I realized I was almost out. So I ended up using anchovy paste diluted with a bit of Worcestershire Sauce. While not exactly authentic, I think it’s reasonable to imagine that Worcestershire Sauce was inspired by garum, since anchovies are a major component of both, and Britain was under Roman occupation for a while. Defrutum is reduced grape must, a product of winemaking. The closest we could get for this was grape juice concentrate from a winemaking store. (You don’t want concentrated Welch’s, because that’s from an entirely different sort of grape, the Concord grape, native to eastern North America. To Concord, Massachusetts, in fact.)

The dessert globi were made from equal parts ricotta cheese and flour mixed together, formed into balls, and deep-fried in olive oil. We were actually supposed to use lard, but forgot to buy any. Then you drench them with honey and sprinkle with poppy seeds. In appearance, the finished dish actually reminded me of an Indian dessert, gulab jamun. This is made from concentrated milk mixed with flour and deep-fried in ghee, or clarified butter; the finished fried balls are then (in India) soaked in rosewater-flavored sugar syrup. I didn’t think our globi tasted much like gulab jamun, though. In fact, I think I liked them better. We used whole wheat flour for our globi (though the Romans did have white), so the balls were quite dense, and you couldn’t really taste or detect the cheese. But then, soaked in honey, they basically ended up tasting like chunks of hearty bread drenched with honey.

The pork stew was also very tasty. It called for “Matian apples” (at least Apicius calls for them), but we used Braeburn instead (it was the best we could do at Whole Foods; it’s possible that we should have used Granny Smiths though, because the Braeburns completely fell apart in the stew). The meat was a mixture of cubed pork butt and ground pork meatballs flavored with fresh cilantro and garum; the stew also had onions (it called for leeks, but amazingly we couldn’t find any that didn’t suck), “defrutum”, more “garum”, red wine vinegar, honey, cumin, pepper, more cilantro, and fresh mint. Oh, and some chicken stock to keep it from drying out and burning. The grape juice concentrate, which is very dark red, ends up making the stew very dark and quite sweet, but as long as you don’t mind sweet main courses (which I don’t!), it’s good.

We decided that reclining at the table would be too much work, and Donald doesn’t like wine. (I could have gotten some, but he probably would have told me I needed to mix it with water in order to be authentic.) We did eschew the use of forks, which were not used as eating utensils until the 1500s.

It was a good dinner, and a lot of fun to prepare. We might do it again sometime. We still have 375 mL of wine grape juice concentrate, after all.

This is from a couple of months back, so some of you may already have seen it. It’s an opinion piece on the Guardian technology blog by Canadian science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who’s also involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I found it a thought-provoking, rationally argued, and also quite sobering examination of the effect that the internet has had and will continue to have on copyright issues, and the incredibly short-sighted, naive, and even dangerous legislative responses pushed by lobbyists from the entertainment industry (if you think threats to free speech are dangerous).

His argument is basically that attempts to stop illegal copying of music, movies and e-books are doomed to fail, despite attempts to hold internet service providers liable for illegal downloads, or legal action against suspected infringers. As he says:

“Hard drives won’t magically get bulkier but hold fewer bits and cost more. Networks won’t be harder to use. PCs won’t be slower. People won’t stop learning to type ‘Toy Story 3 bittorrent’ into Google. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something – generally some kind of unworkable magic anti-copying beans that they swear, this time, will really work.”

Highly recommended.

For all you scientists, a satirical response to a new NSF requirement for grantees. Brought to my attention by my sister Lisa, an archaeology PhD student.

A sample:

“I will store all data on at least one, and possibly up to 50, hard drives in my lab. The directory structure will be custom, not self-explanatory, and in no way documented or described. Students working with the data will be encouraged to make their own copies and modify them as they please, in order to ensure that no one can ever figure out what the actual real raw data is.”

I just connected my blog to Facebook, so whenever I post something to my blog, all my Facebook friends can see it on my Wall.

Donald helped. I’m not that good with technology.

p.s. – It doesn’t seem to be working though, because I don’t see this on Facebook yet. I think I might have accidentally deleted an essential widget.

Stay tuned!

I’m always excited to try a new vegetable, and I’d been noticing cardoons for sale at Russo’s, where I buy most of my groceries. Cardoons look sort of like a big bunch of celery, though they’re actually more closely related to artichokes and thistles. Apparently the ancient Romans ate them fairly often; Apicius has several recipes (the ancient Romans also had mayonnaise, but that’s a different post!).

Well, let me tell you, they’re a whole heck of a lot of work to prepare! First you have to separate the stalks, like you would with a bunch of celery. Only the stalks are about 4 times as big as celery stalks. Then you have to trim the leaves off each stalk with a paring knife, and remove the strings from the bigger stalks. Only then can you cut them into eating-sized pieces, and cook them.

I only found one recipe for cardoons, though I haven’t looked through all my cookbooks yet. Stewed cardoons, from Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates. You boil the cardoons first in salted water with a bit of lemon juice, then stew them for an additional 20 minutes with canned tomatoes, olives, sauteed onions and garlic, and other herbs.

They were fine. Not delicious enough to warrant all that work, though! I suppose it’s just as well, because I don’t seem to have a lot of recipes for them, and I hate making the same recipe over and over again. If Joy of Cooking didn’t have some additional options, and it turned out I really loved cardoons, I was going to have to resort to Apicius.

On the other hand, the main dish I prepared that evening was pina colada shrimp, from one of the Rachael Ray cookbooks: seared shrimp in a coconut milk sauce with fresh pineapple, tossed with shredded coconut, served over jasmine rice. Stewed cardoons in tomatoes might sound like an odd accompaniment, but the tomato mingled nicely with the coconut around the edges to give a flavor reminiscent of a Brazilian moqueca (a seafood stew with tomatoes and coconut milk). And that is a very good thing!

On a completely different note, people who follow my blog might have noticed that I haven’t been posting much lately. They may also have noticed a precipitous decline in my posting frequency right around the time I joined Facebook. Hmmm…. I do have a few things I want to write about–interesting conversations and panels at the World Fantasy Convention, good books and magazines I’ve been reading–but it takes a lot of time to actually write a thoughtful post about something, rather than just rambling on about what I cooked for dinner earlier in the week, so those are all works in progress.

In writing news, I’ve been working on rewriting an older story that has not yet found a home, about this guy who starts turning into a tree. I think the new version is working much better. But it’s frustrating. I spent several days plodding through a new scene, only to realize towards the end that the scene was totally wrong and I needed to throw the whole thing out. Blah.

I’m also working on a novelette/novella (not sure how long it will end up) that’s a complete rewrite of another older story, this one about a swordswoman in a fantasy world without magic (or, at least, no more magic than our world), in an Empire that’s vaguely reminiscent of what you might imagine if a Chinese-influenced Mongolian Empire settled in European Russia, became decadent, and took over most of Europe and Asia (at least, that’s what I was aiming for). With some 18th century technology, but only rudimentary handguns. It’s also not-so-vaguely inspired by The Three Musketeers. Someone in one of my writers groups went so far as to call it Dumas pastiche. Or “When Athos Met D’Artagnan.” (There’s a romantic subplot, but don’t expect it to end well–again on a different note, will I start to write stories with happier romances now that I’ve been in one myself for the last year and a half? Or do I still have too much angst and bitterness to work out before I can get to those? Is this also something I should perhaps be pondering on Facebook rather than on my blog for the entire world to read? Questions, questions!)