holiday food.

so this blog is suffering from school and everything else.

but it is winter holidays!  time to eat everything made with fat and sugar so we can get through the dark months ahead.

to counter that, i have invented:

ridiculously healthy pumpkin muffins

* this is what i made this morning.  bonus points: use all organic ingredients

1 c organic sugar 
1 c organic canned pumpkin (bonus points: get an organic pumpkin from a local farmer and cook and puree it yourself)
2    organic eggs  (bonus points: local)
1/4  c oil
1/4 c water


1    c whole wheat flour
1/2 c white flour
1    t  baking soda
3/4 t  salt
1    t  ground cinnamon
1/4 t  ground nutmeg
1/4 t  ground cloves
1/4 t  ground ginger

minced candied ginger

1.  using an electric mixer, beat eggs with the sugar, pumpkin, oil, and water.

2.  add the dry ingredients to the wet and stir with a spoon until blended.  lumps are ok.  do not use an electric mixer for this step, the whole wheat flour will not be happy with you.  unless i guess you have a stand mixer with some kind of gentle attachment, but i don't.

3.  fill greased or paper-lined muffin cups, portioning out the batter evenly.  if making regular-sized muffins, cups will be about 3/4 full.

4.  top each muffin with some of the candied ginger.

5.  bake at 350F for 15-20 minutes or until a tester inserted into a muffin comes out clean.

yay.  they are yummy.  i would like to look up an ingredient substitute formula and see how they work with molasses, which i think might be even better.  they're like pumpkin pie, except muffins.  spicy, not too sweet.  for moister muffins, either use 100% white flour or more oil.  but then they're not as healthy.

happy (early) birthday to me.

so because he's as much a gadget fan as i am, i got my birthday present a few days after it arrived in the mail, and a few days before my birthday:  a nexus7. 

i have to say, i am loving the thing.  i am on the record (probably, somewhere) as saying tablets are useless, and i'm still divided about his ipad, but the 7" tablet is a great place between a laptop and a phone.  i can get email and actually read the attached documents on it, as well as web.  and google maps are just gorgeous.  it's thin and light and i can hold it in one hand, even with my small hands.

on the other hand, i am now carrying around 3 devices on a regular basis:  my phone, for text messages and email when there is no wifi, the tablet, and my sony reader, which i still see a use case for in the e-ink screen which is nicer on the eyes and the ability to make handwritten notes on articles for class.  if i add my laptop, it goes up to 4.  i don't usually carry my ipod, but this is all getting a little silly.

i never really thought there was a good use for a tablet until i went to japan this summer.  and then i saw how useful it would be to have a device to handle map and be able to show off all your pictures.  and now actually having one, it is being useful in class for looking things up and grabbing the scanned pdfs which are giant images that the reader doesn't like so much.

i am also a fan of these guys.  i finally got one of their wine bottle bags after wanting one forever, and i just got their sleeve for the nexus, which is really nice.

so whee.  stuff.  i guess i'll have to decide what to do on my actual birthday now.

accomplishments.

so about 20 years after i started playing it at a friend's house, i have finally finished loom.

i'm also in my last year (finally!) of my master's program.  whee,

japan trip 2012

japan trip 2012, a set on Flickr.

just got back from a trip to japan for my brother's wedding. here are 33/514 photos *grin*

what's for dinner?

i only get to eat my expensive italian tuna when he's not home.

tuna & pasta

1  5oz  can italian tuna (tonno) packed in olive oil
1 c       uncooked short pasta (elbows, rotini, farfalle, etc)
2 T      pesto (or to taste)
1 c      cut green beans
pine nuts to taste (i like lots of them)
grated parmesan cheese to taste
1-3 T extra virgin olive oil

1.  cook the pasta in water with a little olive oil.  drain the pot thoroughly and return the empty pot to the burner.  turn the burner down to medium.

2.  while the pasta is cooking, toast the pine nuts:  sprinkle them in a single layer on a baking sheet and place in the oven at 350F, shaking until brown.

3.  pout 1-2 T olive oil in the pan with a little oil from the can of tuna.

4.  add the cooked pasta to the oil and stir to coat.  this will probably spit, so be careful.

5.  add the tuna and break up into small chunks and flakes.  stir.

6.  add the green beans and pesto.  stir again to evenly distribute the pesto.

7.  add the toasted pine nuts, only to warm them up.  since they are already toasted, they will burn quickly (about 30 seconds).

8.  spoon onto plates and sprinkle grated cheese on top.

summer.

so, the solstice was 2 days ago.  and today is the 3rd consecutive day of  >90F degree weather.  welcome to summer indeed.

we have scored free tickets from his boss to a phillies game tomorrow.  neither of us have ever been to a professional/MLB baseball game.  come to think of it, i'm not sure i've ever been to a professional sports game period.  all i know is that you're supposed to eat hot dogs and beer, which is ok with me.  as long as the hot dogs aren't full of cancerous chemicals and mystery meat.  100% beef is good.

and hey, the tickets were free, so if we decide baseball sucks as much in person as it does on tv, we can just go home.

the peppers are coming!

i was quite suprised to see that my pepper plant survived the winter. these are hot lemon peppers, which make awesome salsa.

technical difficulties.

conversation with barclaycard customer support:

me: your website isn't letting me log in; i keep getting an error page

barclaycard guy: oh i think it's a system upgrade, oh my screen just froze, oh my screen just went black and now i can't see anything

me: so i guess it's a problem on your end, then.

good thing i was just trying to check if the card had been charged for a passport renewal and not trying to pay my bill.

the passport is necessary because we are going to japan in a month and a half for my brother's wedding.  whee?

what's for dinner?

just in time for memorial day, a new turkey burger recipe.  i made it up last night.  makes 2 burgers.

1 egg
8-10oz 93/7 ground turkey (depending if you want quarter pound burgers or 5oz burgers.  if you use 10oz, up the following spices slightly)
1/2 t kosher salt
1 t fresh ground black pepper
3 springs fresh parsley, chopped
1 t extra virgin olive oil

1.  beat the egg until all the white is incorporated into the yolk.

2.  mash the egg and ground turkey together until you have uniform consistency.  use your hands if you're not squeamish about raw meat like me.

3.  add the salt and pepper.  the kosher salt will start to dissolve almost immediately, so mix well and uniformly.

4.  mix in the parsley.

5.  mix in the olive oil  (this increases the fat content and keeps the burgers moist, but in a healthy way).

6.  divide the meat mixture into two portions and form into patties.  i suppose you could also divide it into 4 portions and make sliders.

7.  grill/broil/fry.  

eat.  yay!  they were yummy last night.  i ended up with little fat burgers because the potato rolls i bought were smallish in diameter.  these would probably be good with a white beer or a not-crazy-hoppy ipa.  the burgers are lighter in flavour than either roast turkey or burgers made with beef, so probably a lightish red wine, like a pinot noir would work too.  a sharp cheese would give you room to use a more robust wine, but i don't like cheeseburgers.

finally.

so, 11 years after i graduated with my bachelor's, the framed diploma is finally up on my wall. cream paper, all in latin, with a real red wax seal. i know it's silly, but i do feel proud looking at it. and it motivates me to stick it out and finish up my master's next year. hopefully that diploma won't have to wait 11 years to go up. and after that... well, still hoping for a ph.d. somewhere, somehow.

city living.

another craving appeased! we have found a local bakery. this one is jewish, not french, which means we've traded baguettes for bagels. but yay fresh bread not full of chemicals to make it last weeks in trucks and on shelves. they also supply some of the local restaurants around here. and, with points over the suburbs, it's in walking distance.

more holidays.

welcome to the festival of crumbs. seriously. the amount of crumbs matza makes is unbelievable. maybe this year it's just crispier or something. since we moved, the supermarket is carrying a new israeli brand i have never heard of. it's good, just... crumby.

unfortunately, i don't have a passover recipe to post here. between school and basic dietary restrictions, my cooking gets pretty minimal during passover. we eat a lot of peanut butter.

is it worth it to vacuum now, or should i just wait for the end of the week and get rid of all the crumbs at once?

settling in.

well. things do feel a bit settled these days. the apartment is starting to feel like home. shopping and laundry routines are still fucked up, but i'm not sure they could be anything else. communting to school is settling into a routine too... i'm there every day of the week this semester, and i've gotten the train schedules down pretty well.

i have missed living in the city. it is so awesome to be able to walk or take the subway everywhere we need to go. seriously. we've gotten rid of one of the cars too (*sniff* farewell, vw golf).

i just don't really get the suburbs. i mean, ok, kind of i do. you can have a yard and a decent garden. but other than that... why would you want to have to drive everywhere? and have houses all clumped together in one place, and shopping clumped together somewhere else, and traffic, and commuting, and school buses...? i guess i'm not a very good american.

it seems moderately pertinent among the horrific election rhetoric. the vision of what it means to be american is under the microscope these days, although only implicitly. but since 9/11 and the wars, the language of attack and defense and the accusations of "unpatriotic" have been flying. part of the traditional vision is, of course, the house with the yard and the cars and the white picket fence. i'm just not sure it should be. it's a selfish and expensive way to life, and with the economy and the environment being in the state they are, it seems like we ought to be looking forward towards what's new, not backwards. but that's scarier and harder.

noooooooooo.

what would be the point??

education inflation.

so, there's this big push to get more people to go to college. and concommittant with that is the cry that college degrees are becoming worthless because too many people are getting them (i've already posted elsewhere about the push to outsource entry-level job training to educational insititutions, so i won't rehash my opinions on that).

and yet... it seems as though the conversation is a bit one-sided. or at least, those mostly partaking of the conversation are coming from a specific, possibly skewed context.

less than one-third of american adults over 25 have an undergraduate degree. and this is a high, recently passing the 30% mark, as the article notes.*

i dunno. maybe if we actually started thinking about education as education, and took a wider look at where we actually are, the conversation might change. with less than one third of the population having even undergraduate degrees, i don't think that increasing that number will have a huge economic effect any time soon. approaching 50%, then i could see the panic.

although, reflecting... apparently the majority of jobs out there don't require a degree since the majority of adults don't have one. i mean, unemployment isn't that high. on the other hand, assuming we get more people in the workforce with critical thinking skills, even those jobs can theoretically be done better.

on yet another hand, if the majority of the workforce is kept from getting a higher education, and especially an education specializing in teaching them how to think instead of just how to manipulate a widget, that keeps the power in the hands of those who already have it. hmm...

well. full disclosure. i also come from a context where i would never have guessed that the attainment rate is only about 30% for the country (i thought it was higher).

*i tried to find the actual data, but the link for the 2011 report only goes to an "about" page. since the article only says "more than 30%" i'm taking that as journalist-speak for "30.01%-32.99%" on the assumption that "one third!" would have made a better headline if they could have used it. the 2009 report says that 28% have completed undergraduate degrees.

a little creepy.

i think i'm going to have to stop shopping at target.

on the other hand, what's interesting about this is that i hate shopping so much, everything is a conscious decision. what cereal do i want this week? what orange juice? which store is the least hassle to buy socks? i compulsively read labels.

i wonder what my shopping habit reward is.

the deceit of fruit.

i just ate an orange.

i shouldn't have been able to eat that orange; i bought it 2 weeks ago. but it was actually still underripe. i washed it, peeled it, and then had to wash my hands again because they were covered with wax.

as far as i can tell, most apples and citrus fruit sold in u.s. supermarkets is waxed.

i remember the first time a british friend went shopping with me. he exclaimed at the size and shininess of the apples. i said, "oh, they're covered in wax."

the fruit gets waxed for 2 reasons. 1) to keep it looking nice. wax seals the pores in the skin and smooths it out, making the fruit look shiny, uniform, and therefore attractive. and 2) to keep it from spoiling (or as in the case of my orange, from even getting ripe). because fruit is picked so far away from its selling location, it gets waxed to prevent air from carrying molds and bacteria into the fruit and spoiling it.

1) is the one that bothers me more. i can understand needing to wax fruit because it needs to be shipped from florida or california or washington to the other side of the country. but waxing the fruit changes the perception of what fruit should look like. we only see huge, over-irrigated, underripe, shiny, gleaming fruit. i have no idea what a non-industrial-farmed orange looks like. i do know what real apples are supposed to look like because we had 2 apple trees in our backyard when i was a kid.

but our food is as carefully curated for appearance as works of art in a museum. not only is this weird, but it makes us even more ignorant of what we eat, what we put in our bodies. the huge, waxed orange moves me just a little further from one reality into another one where appearance is carefully controlled and manufactured.

hm.

oh, and happy new year.