A Break From a Break

You may have noticed that I have missed what should have been my last three entries. The first few days weren’t entirely my fault: I got really sick. The kind of sick where getting up from the couch requires leaning against various pieces of furniture and you have to sleep cradling a box of tissues like a faceless, rectangular teddy bear. Any of my family members/former roommates/boyfriend can tell you that I am not one of those people who gets sick and then still goes on about their lives like everything is normal. When I’m sick I’m sick. I like to say that too, several times a day, elongating the “i” and adding a dramatic sigh to remind anyone in my vicinity of my weakened condition: Matt, the cats, houseplants, contestants on the Price is Right. I honestly do think that I get sicker than other people, but nobody believes me. Just like I get more tired than other people and hungrier than other people. The point is I can’t do much when I’m sick, so I didn’t write a blog entry.

              After the Great Plague of June 4-6, Matt and I went to New York to go to the Governor’s Ball Music Festival. We had been planning this trip for a while and I was a little nervous. I’m not really a music festival person. I mean, I had never been to one before but I was fairly certain it wasn’t really going to be my thing. Like I said, I get more tired than other people so standing around for three days from 12 in the afternoon to 11 at night wasn’t exactly something I was looking forward to. Also, I’m just not cool enough to go to a music festival. Once in college my friends and I decided to have the stereotypical college spring break and we drove down to Daytona Beach. I ended up spending the week visiting my friend’s grandmother’s retirement village, going for long runs, and being annoyed when a girl in a pot leaf bikini spilled vodka punch on my cardigan in the elevator. And there’s this little problem: I am not a music person. Yup, I’m admitting it on the internet for everyone to read. I like music. I listen to music when I drive in the car and occasionally at home I turn on a Pandora station while I do the dishes or get ready to go out. But I’m not a music person. All of my CDs melted when my dad left my car in a sunny spot while I studied abroad in 2008 and that was the last time I owned full albums of music. I have six songs on my ipod. I know you think I’m exaggerating, but I have six songs on my ipod. The rest of the space is taken up by podcasts. I don’t scour record stores for new bands, I only read Rolling Stone when an actor is on the cover, and occasionally, I hear popular Beatles songs that are totally new to me. The most stressful question anyone can ask me: what kind of music do you like? You might as well ask me: How many mathematical formulas do you remember from Algebra II? I’m just going to stare at you and then nervously mutter something about logarithms, probably for both questions. (Side note: Wouldn’t The Logarhythms be a great name for a band that only performs songs about math? This is what I mean about me not being cool enough for a music festival.) I like a lot of things: food, television, books, running, cats, crafts, so I feel okay saying I’m just not that into music.

              But regardless of these things, I decided to go to the festival. It was the most money I’ve ever spent on one thing that didn’t involve aviation/providing me somewhere to live. I didn’t really want to go, but Matt wanted to and I wanted to go to New York. I didn’t know that many of the bands, but I was really excited that a Korean BBQ food truck I had seen on the Food Network was going to be there. I decided to go in with a good attitude.

              The first day was the worst day of anything that I have ever done in my life. The festival was outdoors and the website declared it would be going on no matter what the weather did. Even if it tropical storm Andrea-ed, which is what it did. It rained the entire day. Not just occasional sprinkle, it poured so intensely that within minutes of being at the festival my hands were pruney like I’d just gotten out of long bath. It was cold. There was mud up to my ankles. I’d decided it was a good idea to bring a giant bag which I ended up having to carry underneath my poncho for seven hours which was both inconvenient and embarrassing, nobody else brought a shoulder bag full of granola bars and extra socks. The entire inside of the porta-potty bathrooms were covered in mud. During the second to last show, Feist, the rain was so bad that their equipment shorted out and they had to stop playing, I was secretly relived we finally got to leave.  

Don't be fooled by the apparent protection from the poncho and umbrella, everything I was wearing was completely soaked by the time the first day was over.

              I can’t say much about the second day because I spent most of it at the Museum of Modern Art. After the frustration and aquatic-ness of the first day, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to get back to the festival grounds. I gave my ticket to my friend Chase and instead hung out in New York by myself. I ate dumplings, walked through Central Park, and saw Starry Night. It was the best.

But on the last day of the festival, I decided I was going to have a good time. I was prepared this time: I ditched the mom bag, my muddy shoes had dried off enough to wear them again, and most importantly, I snuck in a hip flask of vodka. The ground was still muddy, but I was with three of my best friends from college, we had a view of Manhattan, and I even actually knew some of the bands that were playing. Plus, we ate the Korean tacos and dear god, that was worth the entire ticket price. Then Kayne played and even I love Kayne. His show was amazing, but what’s more amazing is the way he got everyone excited about the performance: purposely starting twenty minutes late while flashing an image on the screen above the stage of his face every few minutes. He was even in a good mood, someone accidentally hit him with a glow stick and he didn’t storm off the stage or anything. As we walked home through Harlem that night I felt tired and muddy, but also proud of myself. I made it through the musical festival. Just like when I get sick, I often let myself wallow in being unhappy doing things I don’t necessarily want to be doing instead of having a good attitude. Governor’s Ball will probably be my first and last music festival, but I’m glad I did it once. And now I can tell my kids I saw Kanye West in the middle of a marijuana saturated mudpit in a crowd of thousands of people, shoved up against my boyfriend and a very drunk Australian man attempting an American accent. And thanks to the state of the porta-potties, my squatting muscles have never been stronger. 

Much happier (and drier) friends on Day 3

History in the Baking

Last summer I accidentally got really into reading historic cookbooks. I know, that’s totally happened to you too, right? You just start by lightly browsing some 15th century French macaroon recipes and suddenly you find yourself ordering volume after volume of household management guides from the turn of the century and Googling the average temperature of double chambered wood-burning stoves. Haha, just kidding, I’m a freak. But what makes it even weirder is that despite my affinity for these cookbooks, I’ve never actually cooked anything from them. That’s right, I just flip through and admire the recipes like a sad single lady on the J. Crew wedding dress website thinking, “Maybe one day.” (I’ve never done that, shut up).

I decided to cook something from Eliza Acton’s cookbook Modern Cookery which was first published in 1849. Acton is sort of a hero of mine, she wrote the first cookbook that listed out ingredients and measurements in the recipe and she was one of the first cooks who tested recipes specifically for the cookbook rather than just collecting a series of recipes she already knew. She also was a poet and often wrote poems about cooking. I bet if Acton was alive today, she would have a kick ass food blog.

I started my process by picking out a recipe from Acton’s not-so-brief cookbook. There are probably over 1,000 recipes in this book. She has an entire chapter devoted to mutton. I picked a sponge cake because it only had four ingredients and all of them were already in my kitchen: flour, sugar, eggs, and a lemon. That’s all. She had two recipes for sponge cake, one was a large sponge cake and the other was a small sponge cake, which in parenthesis she noted was “very good,” so on the basis of only having two people to feed and Acton’s confident recommendation of her own cooking, I went with the small one.

All four of my ingredients.

            The first thing I noticed was that there was a list of ingredients, but this particular recipe had no measurements. The recipe stated that the sugar should be “equal to the five eggs” and the flour should be “equal to about three of the eggs.” I thought this was weird at first until I really thought about it. We are used to having our eggs from the grocery store where they come in a neat little pack, all in perfectly equal sizes. But I’ve seen the eggs my friend Chrissy’s chickens lay, and they are not always exactly the same size. So in 1849, if you were baking, your eggs would probably be of different sizes, so it would make sense to measure your recipes according to the size of the eggs rather than a standardized measurement. Luckily, I happened to have a scale (let's pretend for the sake of authenticity that it is not digital) because measuring cups wouldn't be invented for another 47 years in 1896. Although I wasn’t entirely sure if this meant with shells or without, but I ended up weighing them with their shells because it was neater and I like the way eggs look all in a bowl like I just collected them from my backyard instead of where I actually collected them, which was Trader Joe’s. 

The flour ended up being about 1 1/8 cup (or hedgehog as the case may be). The sugar came out to about 1 1/2 cup.

            After I weighed out the ingredients, the recipe said to “Rasp on some lumps of well-refined sugar the rind of a fine sound lemon, and scrape off the part which has imbibed the essence, or crush the lumps to powder.” (I told you Acton was a poet). I had no idea what this meant, so I tried Googling the phrase “rasp lemons” which just led me to the exact same recipe I was using on Google Books. In the end I interpreted “Rasp on some lumps of well-refined sugar the rind of a fine sound lemon, and scrape off the part which has imbibed the essence” as “zest” and hoped for the best. 

Is this rasping? Who knows.

            Next the recipe wanted me to separate the eggs, which I did, and then it wanted me to beat the yolks for ten minutes. By hand. I was trying to be authentic, so I decided I would actually do it by hand and without watching TV even though I could have watched 1/3 of an episode of The Nanny in that time, and I bet The Nanny was on TV somewhere. I gave up after 6 minutes. Apparently every housewife of the 1840s was a secret bodybuilder because that’s all my arms could take. Yesterday I lifted a 30 pound barbell 40 times at the gym but beating eggs for ten minutes put me to shame. I did cheat a little on the historic front though, but not without still attempting to be authentic: I listened to a Pandora station based upon the 1850 hit song “Camptown Races.” It was the weirdest Pandora station I’ve ever created, a strange mix of old Irish love ballads, Johnny Cash, Nat King Cole, and Disney sing-along songs.

            I combined the eggs and the sugar, which was already rasped with lemon, because the recipe told me to, “strew in the sugar gradually, and beat them well together.” Then it instructed me to “whisk the whites to quite a solid froth,” which I did so happily, with no time limit I gave myself a break and only whisked for 3 or 4 minutes. Then I combined the whites and the egg mixture and then finally added the flour.

The KitchenAid is sad that electric mixers won't be invented until 1885.

            I buttered a cake pan at Acton’s suggestion, although the practical person in me who has worked in a cake bakery wanted so badly to put down parchment paper. (I know they had parchment then because Harry Potter uses it and they don’t even have electricity.) But I was trying to do what Acton said. I went to set the oven but her only suggestion was the bake the cake for an hour in a “moderately hot” oven, which strangely enough was not a pre-set on my oven. I went with 350 degrees, since that seemed pretty moderate to me, but I knew an hour would be way too much so I set my timer for thirty minutes. It occurred to me as I placed the cake in the hot oven that there was no baking soda in it, and I wondered if it would rise. It then also occurred to me that was probably why beating the eggs for so long was important and maybe I should have toughed out the last four minutes but my arm really hurt and it was too late now. 

The robot timer helped me keep track of baking time even though he was not invented in 1849.

         After 30 minutes the cake was baked perfectly but it had, as I’d suspected, not risen very much in the oven. But I cut myself a slice and threw some strawberries on there. By itself, the cake tasted a little bland, very dense, a little gummy, not nearly as sweet as we might eat cake today, especially since the recipe didn’t come with any icing suggestions, but not awful. If I had been allowed to use my KitchenAid, I would have made some fresh whipped cream, but my arm wasn’t feeling up to any more beating, so I just ate it with the strawberries and with their added sweetness it was pretty good.  

I love that cooking is always evolving but because it must constantly be reproduced, we keep records of the dishes we are leaving behind. Matt and I watched an episode of Seinfeld yesterday in which George complains that every restaurant in New York is suddenly serving pesto and “where was pesto ten years ago?” It’s funny because that joke could be replaced with a different food every ten years or so. (Where was coconut water ten years ago? Or maybe Acton would say “Where were mutton cutlets ten years ago?”) For me, cooking from a historic cookbook is like using instructions to create a physical piece of history, like pulling a dinner through a time machine. When I ate a bite of my cake, it was fun to imagine another 25 year old woman like me making and tasting this same thing over a hundred years ago. I wonder if we’d have anything in common, and if maybe we could swap recipes over a cup of coffee, ice our whisking arms, and catch an episode of The Nanny. 

"Let them eat sponge cake"-Marie Antoinette, after her creative writing workshop told her she should be more specific.

I'm the Worst

Proof of blog-planning/strawberry-eating

I know I'm horrible for missing today's post but it was supposed to be about baking, and Matt told me that he wasn't going to be home all night and I got scared I would eat an entire cake by myself. (How do food bloggers not do that every day?) Hold onto your bonnets until tomorrow because I'm doing some historic baking. And I don't mean "historic" in a superlative sense like "This baking is going to be so good, it'll be historic." Although I am now going to bring that expression into circulation, I mean I'm literally baking from a historic cookbook and it's going to be ace-high (A 19th century slang word for "awesome" that I just looked up which I am also bringing back into circulation).

Waking up at Noon and Watching Reality TV All Day

Guys, it’ been a rough day. Last night Matt and I went out to the bar to watch some basketball game or something. (I’m a really big sports fan). I mostly concentrated on drinking beer and wondering how many French fries it is polite to take from a friend who said, “you can have some of my French fries if you want.” (That means I can just have all of them? Because that's how many I want.) I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do a thing for today. I have been getting up early every day because it just feels like I should and because I’m used to it, but I realized taking a break means that I am totally allowed to sleep as late as I want and then watch TV all day and that can be my thing. So that’s what I did. I slept until noon and now I am watching reality TV. I chose the reunion show of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, which is a little confusing for me because I’ve never actually seen The Real Housewives of New Jersey, but it’s alright. I made a pickle and cheese sandwich on sourdough, I’m wearing pajamas shorts. Normally in a situation like this, I would feel incredibly guilty, like I should be writing or reading or looking for jobs or sitting upright, but today I am letting the power of the break be my spirit guide and embracing it. And let me tell you, it’s pretty great. Once I let myself just enjoy relaxing without feeling like I had to be doing anything else I felt calmer, less worried. As I stared at Theresa’s strange proceeding hairline (it seems to get closer to her eyes with every shot) I wasn’t frantically trying to plan my entire life in my head like I usually do during every waking moment. Maybe The Real Housewives of New Jersey and sandwiches are my yoga?

Watching the Entire Season of Arrested Development in Two Days

Despite what creator Mitch Hurwitz suggested when the entire new season of Arrested Development appeared on Netflix all at once last Sunday, Matt and I decided to just watch the entire thing in two days. I was happy with our decision, it was pretty great. It was rainy, there was beer, there was pizza, there was a giant bowl of popcorn, there were cookies, there were elastic waistbands all around.  It was at times a little tiring and my brain felt like it was going to explode. The season is set up so that the same story is told from all the characters’ perspectives, which meant that ten or so episodes deep you started to forget if something happening onscreen was something you already knew from previous episodes and had forgotten or something you were going to find out in later episodes.  But in general, I’m glad we defied Mitch Hurwitz because that’s how we have learned to digest good television: by the box set or clicking through lists on Netflix. I like watching an entire season of something all at once: like reading a book cover to cover in one sitting. Netflix and box sets have made watching television such a different experience from the way it used to be. Waiting eagerly for an episode week to week is good, too. It gives you something to look forward to after school or work, it builds suspense, but I prefer the all at once method. I don’t regret spending entire days in the world of blue meth dealing, or vampire slaying, Texas high school football, or, let’s be honest, creekside teenage melodrama. I want to spend an entire weekend thinking about if it’s really possible to dissolve an entire body in a bathtub full of acid. I want to contemplate for a few days if I could pull off Buffy’s floral dress and combat boot combo. I like watching as Matt slowly morphs into Larry David mode after a few hours of Curb Your Enthusiasm, monologuing when someone parks incorrectly and insisting I use a coaster, challenging my respect for wood. It satisfies the same need for complete immersion into a different world that I crave from books.  I’ve never been a chapter a night reader, either.

I’ve always heard people describe why they love characters and plot lines on weekly TV shows as “because we invite them into our home once a week,” but with the option to now watch television episodes as many at a time that we want, the relationship has become even more intimate than a friend or neighbor who drops by every once and awhile for a quick story and a cup of coffee. Now my relationship with television shows is like that good friend from summer camp who you only get to see for a few weeks a year, but in those weeks you do everything together, you stay up all night telling each other every single thing about yourselves. Different people may be partial to each relationship, but for me it’s the camp friend, which is a metaphor but also probably why I always really loved summer camp.

That is to say that I really loved the way Arrested Development came out and wouldn’t be opposed to more TV shows doing this in the future. As long as we don’t run out of popcorn and nobody makes me wear real pants.