Lucebumps

A few years ago, several hours into a drive from Burlington, VT to Wilmington, NC, I had one of those half-crazy ideas that form when you are alone in the car for extended periods of time, which despite actually being sort of insane, at the time seem really, really spectacular. My idea was to write a blog in which every week I would read a Goosebumps novel and then write an entirely serious synopsis and review of the novel. I would call my creation: Lucebumps. For pretty much all of the Mid-Atlantic states I thought this was the greatest idea anyone had ever thought of. It would be so funny! And weird! And nostalgic! Have you noticed that everyone is really into nostalgia these days? You can’t get through an entire day without somehow encountering Kelly Kapowski somewhere. But by the time I got to North Carolina, I was pretty much over it. Did I really want to waste time reading a Goosebumps novel every week? Have you ever gone back and actually read a Goosebumps novel? They don’t exactly hold up. So I ended up scrapping the idea. But recently someone told me that someone else actually did this. I found the blog and read a few entries, and it’s pretty good and the blog itself seems fairly successful. Damn it. That could have been me! Lucebumps could have taken the world by storm. Or at least the world of mock reviews of 90s children’s book series by storm.  Has anyone done the Babysitter’s Club? Boxcar Children? Sweet Valley High? Is there anything left for me? Anything besides Babysitter’s Club Little Sister. Even as a kid I thought those books were boring and repetitive. I get it, your parents are divorced, you have two pairs of glasses, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn to use contractions, Karen.

So when Netflix recently put out the first season of the Goosebumps TV show, I thought: perfect. Now I can just spend twenty minutes watching an episode instead of the hour to hour and a half it would take me to read one of the books. Plus the TV show is Canadian which, if I’ve learned anything from watching hours and hours of Degrassi in high school, it’s definitely better than American TV. I watched the show as a kid, but I don’t remember much except the opening sequence when RL Stine’s briefcase falls open and all his papers go everywhere, because as a kid it really stressed me out. I always wished they would then show another clip of him successfully gathering and reorganizing the papers neatly into his briefcase, but I guess that wasn’t really the vibe they were going for. Anyway, now for your reading pleasure here is my totally serious review of Goosebumps Season 1 Episode 6: The Phantom of the Auditorium: 

As soon as the episode begins, I already feel a tremor of terror as the contents of R L Stine’s briefcase float over a sleepy seaside town and turn into the iconic Goosebumps “G”. The G floats over the town’s mysterious happenings: most notably an innocuous-looking golden retriever who, when he turns to look at the camera, displays glowing yellow eyes that look as though they have been created in MS Paint. Convincing, no, but terrifying, yes. If I came home to find my cat’s eyes had been replaced by two dimensionless blobs of floating yellow pixels, I would definitely be freaked out.

The episode begins with quick flashes of smoke, lightening, and the image of a man in a cape and white mask twirling in front of the camera. I think the twirling man is supposed to be menacing, but I just can’t seem to get panicked about anyone who is twirling. Don’t worry though, because a few seconds later the eyes of a blonde girl pop open and we realize it was all a dream. Classic Goosebumps.

After the main character, Brooke, wakes up from her frightening dream of a phantom doing what seems to be an amateur ballet routine, she heads off to play rehearsal. Her school is performing a play called “The Phantom” which has a plot that when described, seems shockingly close to the famous Broadway musical “The Phantom of the Opera” but for copyright purposes is not “The Phantom of the Opera.” Brooke has been cast as the lead, Esmeralda. Her friend Corey congratulates her for this, but another girl, Tina, rolls her eyes. Corey accuses Tina of being jealous that she was only cast as an understudy. But Tina assures him that she would never want to be cast as the lead role in this play because this play is cursed.  She explains how her grandfather told her that many years ago the school attempted to put it on, but on opening night the boy who was supposed to play the phantom disappeared and was never seen again. Tina is obviously not happy that the school has chosen to do that play again, what with its sordid history. So why did you sign up to be in the play, Tina? Just to drone on about curses? While everyone is busy ignoring Tina’s story, suddenly a gloved hand reaches out from behind the curtain a grabs Brooke around the neck! The music swells and the scene cuts off and if this was 1994, you better believe there would have been a 1-2 minutes commercial break where you were just sweating wondering what was going to happen to Brooke. But luckily this is 2013 and I only had to wait one second to find out it was Zeke, The floppy haired class clown who is playing the Phantom. Poor Corey, I thought he was going to be the love interest, but obviously he can’t compete with a boy with hair this floppy in the early 90s.

Out comes the quirky acting teacher (we know she is quirky because she’s wearing a flowy neck scarf) who tells everyone to stop fooling around. But then Corey starts literally sinking into the floor. She ignores this as she continues to explain the plot of the production, even though Corey is waving his arms frantically as him and his chair are being lowered into the stage. She finally notices and explains that that must be the old trapdoor they build for the first production of the Phantom, which nobody has used or apparently even noticed, for the last 70 years. After saving Corey she dismisses play rehearsal, even though nobody has actually done anything yet besides complain about curses and get sucked into the stage.

After rehearsal Brooke and Zeke decide to check out that old trapdoor, despite the fact that their quirky drama teacher has strictly warned them against it. The pair get on the trapdoor, flip the switch and are taken down to what seems to be the school’s basement, but Zeke tells Brooke it’s “Definitely not the basement” because apparently either Brooke isn’t the first girl Zeke has convinced to go with him down to the basement, or he is unusually gifted at calculating depth. With that mop of Backstreet Boy hair, I’m guessing the former.

In the sub-basement, Zeke and Brooke run into Emile, a shadowy figure who tells them he is the night janitor. He tells the kids to go back upstairs and warns them never to take the trapdoor elevator down here again, it’s too dangerous. The warning is meant to be creepy, but is actually entirely logical because it looks like the most dangerous elevator you could possibly ride on, it’s just a hydraulic lift with no guardrail that goes through a hole in the floor two stories down.

As the week progresses, strange things start happening.  Brooke finds a skull mask hanging in her locker with a note that says “STAY AWAY ESMERELDA.” A new boy named Brian nobody has ever met before joins the cast like two days before opening night. A phantom swings down during rehearsal and assaults Brooke and drops a giant door on stage painted with the words “STAY AWAY ESMERELDA” in blood, which everyone seems pretty unconcerned about and blames on Zeke, which gets him kicked out of the play after they find a bucket of red paint in his locker. The kids ask the janitor to ask Emile, the night janitor, to come clean up the mess and the janitor informs them there is no night janitor. Outraged at the injustice of being kicked out of play, and intent of figuring out the identity of Emile, Brooke, Zeke and the random new boy who just showed up in the play two days before opening night but nobody seems suspicious about, go back to the sub-basement to investigate. There they find Emile, dressed all in his phantom costume who chases them around the basement, in the process they discover his secret lair, he’s been living in the sub-basement! They escape through the trapdoor and call the police, who inform them that Emile is just a homeless man whose been living in the school’s basement illegally and he must have been pulling all those pranks to make sure nobody found out he lived down there. NO BIG DEAL. He just tried to drop a door on a 14-year old girl and has been living illegally in the basement of a middle school dressed in a phantom costume for apparently no reason, since it turns out he has no affiliation with the play whatsoever. School and the play continue as usual, despite, of course, Tina, who is still harking on about the “curse.” Seriously, Tina, it’s getting old. Go join the volleyball team or something.

On opening night, Brooke delivers her lines on stage and waits for Zeke to appear as the phantom, but on the trapdoor we see that Zeke has been knocked out and a new phantom has taken his place. But who is it?! The new phantom appears on stage and gives an impromptu speech about how he has waited 70 years to play this part, but he never got his chance until this very night. Breaking the fourth wall much, man? Get it together, this is a professional middle school production of The Phantom. (Not affiliated with the hit Broadway musical Phantom of the Opera.) Then the phantom disappears through the trapdoor and as the curtain goes down, everyone rushes to Zeke to congratulate him on his amazing performance. Zeke is undeterred by the fact that he did not actually perform, and accepts their compliments with gratitude, failing to explain to anyone that an unknown masked man knocked him out and did the performance for him. But whatever, why ruin his chances to get more ladies into the sub-basement now that he knows there’s a homeless man’s empty bedroom set down there.

As the cast exits the stage, Brooke notices something on the floor. She picks up an old yearbook from the year 1927 and flips to a page advertising for a production of The Phantom. Under the list of cast members there a picture of the new kid, Brian. He was supposed to play the phantom.

This episode was actually a lot more complicated than I thought it would be and I have to admit, I wasn’t sure it would be Brian the whole time. I suspected Tina. I’m still confused why a homeless man living in the basement of a middle school went through the trouble of leaving cryptic Phantom-related warnings to keep the kids from going in the sub-basement, why he framed Zeke for his crime, or why he owned a full, adult-sized phantom costume, but maybe it’s asking too much for the plot to actually make sense. Some of the episodes I saw before took themselves a little less seriously and I wish this episode had the same types of tongue-in-cheek jokes aimed at an older set of viewers. (For example in one of the episodes Matt and I watched yesterday a teenage girl yelled at her dad when he accused her of going through a phase that “life is a phase I’m going through!”) It’s been fun, even though taking extensive notes on an episode of Goosebumps is probably the silliest thing I’ve done to date. Next week maybe I’ll tackle the Babysitter’s Club Movie.

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).