Kitchen (mis)Adventure: Fresh Hummus, Sad Carrots

There's nothing easier than whipping together a plate of hummus. Well, sure there is, but so it seems. I made the latest batch below late last week with my trusty Osterizer blender (it's older than I am!) and my also trusty copy of How To Cook Everything. I followed Mark Bittman's basic recipe and then added to it as I blended. I ended up using twice the prescribed amount of lemon juice, lots of pepper, and smoked paprika. It still turned out a little on the bland side (sad), but I prefer even bland hummus made fresh to the store-bought kind*. Next time I'll cut back on the tahini, which ended up being too overpowering, and try a couple other things to pack in the flavor -- pine nuts blended in as well? Vinegar? Can you add vinegar to hummus? Something was missing, but what I cannot say. 

We were super busy gallivanting around and adventuring last week, so I didn't get a chance to enjoy my hummus until yesterday afternoon. I pulled out a bag of carrots and started munching away as I worked at the computer. 

Something was off. I knew that the hummus wasn't the most exciting I'd ever made, but there was something... wrong. I chewed and chewed and chewed and frowned and started to feel something sinister and strange as I looked down at the bit of carrot in my hand. It was weathered and shriveled and unhappy. The carrots were stale. I couldn't even remember buying the bag, they'd been sitting in the back of the veggie crisper in the fridge for so long. They tasted like sad, little desiccated pieces of cardboard. There was no life left in those pale and dry roots. I threw them away. SO SAD. 

Speaking of gallivanting, here's a photo from last week. Carlos and Claudia came to visit, and we ended up putting over 150 miles on my car and over 450 miles on a friend's car with all our adventuring, seeing about a quarter of the California coast in the process. Super fun, super exhausting, and super sunburnt and happy. 

Savannah-Chanelle Vineyards, Santa Cruz Mountains, photo by Claudia

* Jason begs to differ. Next time, he can make the hummus.

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Coffee with the Romantics, Late Spring

It's a gloomy Sunday morning in the Santa Cruz mountains, perfect weather for revisiting some of my favorite Spanish Romantics. This morning will belong to the Duke of Rivas and Carolina Coronado -- author of my favorite Don Juan/Dangerous Lover* story, and favorite Romantic feminist**, respectively. We've been having a particularly dry year, so I need to take advantage of all the overcast gloom and doom I can get. BRING ON THE TEMPEST!!! (and by tempest I mean very slight chance of rain).

* I borrow this term from Deborah Lutz's fantastic 2006 text The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seductive Narrative. 

** I find Coronado -- one of a handful of female Romantics who wrote, published, and was active in literary/political circles in 19th century Spain (others being Rosalía de Castro, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda) -- to be especially compelling due to her personal (and physiological) eccentricities. Coronado suffered from chronic catalepsy, and, on various occasions, experienced such violent bouts that she appeared (to those caring for her) to have died. She became obsessed with death, and was particularly terrified of being buried alive. WITH GOOD REASON. As an adolescent, Coronado had a (maybe) imaginary lover named Alberto, to whom she dedicated more than a few poems, and for whom she took a vow of abstinence after his (imaginary) death at sea. She revoked this vow when she married in her early thirties. She would eventually embalm her deceased husband, refusing to bury him, and have various premonitions in which she would predict her own children's' deaths. My kind of spooky, gothic woman. 

Walking with Mr. Coe

Roscoe and I went on a nice, long walk through the neighborhood early this morning. We decided to turn up Love Creek Road in order to stay cool as the morning got warmer, and stuck with it until the road narrowed to a single lane. The Santa Cruz Mountains are full of weird little nooks and crannies -- hollows and gulches -- full of strange tales, abandoned camps, ghosts, memories. Love Creek may be one of the most storied of them all. 

Approaching Love Creek Road, in Ben Lomond.

 It's a beautiful walk. The steep gulch walls provide near-constant shade for redwoods, moss, and ferns to grow, the road crosses the creek a handful of times, and there are quite a few nice little (and not so little) cabins to ogle at along the way.

Mr. Coe likes this walk especially, I think mainly because it's as close as he can get to going on a hike without hopping in the car and going to a local state park or wildlife reserve. No sidewalk to stick to, lots of stinky spots and bugs and bushes and undergrowth to tromp through right at the edge of the road. 

Roscoe, mountain scout

Though he does have to stay on leash.

"EXCUSE ME, CAN WE CONTINUE PLEASE?"

Love Creek, like most of the San Lorenzo Valley, is full of weird and wonderful signage. Especially "No Trespassing" signs. Like, everywhere. The last house up before the road narrows has an amazing road sign nailed up to a pole in the yard that reads "15 MPH ASSHOLE". I really wanted to take a picture, but was too scared to actually pull out my camera and do so lest I infuriate these people with such aggressive taste in yard decor. 

Love Creek residents like to clearly mark their PRIVATE PROPERTY. 

I didn't notice the sign below until we passed it for the second time on our way back down the creek towards town. I stood there looking at it for a long time, and just couldn't figure it out. What was there to witness? Had the evidence of the (maybe) witnessed event/thing been taken away? Was it the sand bags? Was there a slide? Was there a lot of water? Was it something else entirely? Was it an accident? Was it vandalism? Did it happen at night? Are they mad? Are they sad? Is there a reward?

So many questions.

I'd like to write more about Love Creek in the future; I think it's a super interesting place with a lot of valuable stories to tell. In the mean time, I'll leave a final photo of Roscoe checking out the toy box in the clearing right where the road narrows to pique your interest. 

new books, tarot play, and a nesting bird

I've been doing some spring cleaning, both at home and at the office, and recently took an enormous bag-load of books I no longer wanted* down to Logos Books to sell. I made $50 and took a $20 trade coupon as well, then immediately blew a good amount of it on two new books I scoped out while walking through the store towards the exit. IT'S LIKE LOGOS IS BOOBY-TRAPPED. WITH BOOKS. SPECIFICALLY TAILORED TO PEOPLE JUST LIKE ME. 

Uh, did you know that Jules Verne wrote a gothic novel that was serialized in 1892 in a French magazine entitled The Magazine of Education and Recreation? That it was first translated into English as The Castle of the Carpathians in 1894? That it was "the first book to set a gothic horror story, featuring people who may or may not be dead [emphasis mine], in Transylvania"? And that this purple little paperback is the newest translation in over 100 years? Neither did I, and you know what? I was so bewildered and astonished -- by all of these things -- that I had to buy it. It looks like it would be really fun to read aloud (perhaps as originally intended?) and enjoy with an audience. 

I also bought this book from semiotext(e), Sergio González Rodriguez's The Femicide Machine, on the various converging socio-historical mise-an-scenes and cultural and political apparatuses that have caused the horrific and ongoing disappearances and murders of tens of thousands of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez. Guess what? Neoliberalism, NAFTA, and the war on drugs have a lot to do with it (DUH), as do a breathtaking lack of infrastructure and blatant governmental corruption. The writing isn't the best (and I hope that's due to the translation, sorry Michael Parker-Stainback**, man with a name that sounds made up), but the analysis is certainly thought-provoking and I always appreciate a book (title) that plays it as it lays: the mass murders in Juárez are femicide, plain and simple, and only an intellectual hop-skip-and-a-jump away from genocide. Let's just call a spade a spade. We'll see how it reads out; the text is something I may want to work with when planning for the course I'll be putting together for the fall. 

I've also been messing with a friend's tarot reading. It's private and so I won't go into it -- but don't my cards match the crazy 70's carpeting in my office nicely? Beautiful colors, had to take a photo. 

Lastly, I found this sign right outside the entrance to the New Leaf Market in Felton earlier today. HOW NICE AND POLITE AND THOUGHTFUL FOR EVERYONE/BIRD INVOLVED IS THIS SIGN? Mountain people, they're considerate and I like it. 

* I'm very serious about books, and tend to covet and then hoard them, but even I have my limits. Unless a book serves a special purpose, is of a particular subject or genre of interest, was a gift, or has special sentimental value, it's up for elimination from the collection. Case in point: The beautiful little hardcover copy of the I Ching that I bought close to ten years ago... THAT I'VE NEVER USED OR ACTUALLY READ. It's finally gone, and I hope it finds a home with someone who will love it and use it every day very soon. 

** Check out photos of his swanky 60s-fabulous DF apartment at tarde o temprano's site here. It'll kind of make you feel like a creep, but hey, the profile's title is "Closet Voyeur" and there's a mesmerizing video with family photos and old typewriters and it plays swing music.

Kitchen (mis)Adventure: Fracas de quiche

Oh man, it started out as such a good idea and ended up being such a goat-cheesy no-no. I made my first quiche this morning. Consulting Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (my favorite cooking "reference" and not "recipe book", this is relevant, just wait), I pulled out everything in my refrigerator that Mark Bittman told me would likely go well together in a quiche and got to it: steaming broccoli florets, "gently warming" milk on the stove-top, adding dried marjoram to my beaten and room-temperature eggs, chopping up a couple rounds of herbed goat cheese that had been hiding in the back of the fridge, bla bla bla. I was so proud of myself. And the quiche turned out looking pretty good, have a see for yourself down below: 

Pulling it out of the oven, it smelled good, too. Well, at first. And then, just as I put my nose to its surface to better savor the aroma, I was immediately overcome by the most horrendously vivid olfactory memory: 

I loathe foods cooked with goat cheese. Like, the smell/taste/texture of cooked goat cheese kind of makes me gag. Fresh goat cheese -- in a salad, on a cracker, by itself, whatever -- is fine and great and I love it. But all warmed up and cooked with other things and I just think it's really, really gross. 

The problem is, just like this morning, I forget this all the time. I have made the mistake of cooking with goat cheese -- of finding a recipe and being honestly, earnestly, excited about cooking with goat cheese -- more than once. It probably happens every 12-18 months.* Just enough time goes by for me to completely forget about how revolting I find cooked goat cheese, and I don't remember how awful it is until I've used up all the ingredients and the food's been cooked. 6 local, free-range eggs; half a bag of organic broccoli florets; and the last of the also organic milk gone. Not to mention perfectly good goat cheese I would have enjoyed fresh and cold and un-cooked. 

Part of the horror is that I won't let it go to waste. I'll hate it -- and Jason, too, by the way, will hate it -- but we'll eat it all in the end. We'll smother it in hot sauce and hold our noses and agonize and torture ourselves, but I'll make sure we don't throw any of it away.**

Looks like we have just enough for two more servings each. 

In better news, I'm taking the rest of the afternoon to enjoy a couple new books I just bought. WHY NOT: Stephen T. Asma's On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears was on sale, as was Judith Halberstam's Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Some texts that you refer to again and again really are worth just investing in. The Halberstam I've had checked out and repeatedly renewed from the library for YEARS. I'm sure there must be some person part of the campus community who would like to stumble across it at the library again. The Asma I've been reading online through Amazon.com's "Look Inside!" (don't judge me) for quite some time as well. I'm looking forward to having them both to enjoy and reference at leisure, without feeling guilty. The final book is the latest Oxford edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, collected with "Other Tales", which I purchased in order to read a collected short story in particular: "Olalla" (1885). The story was recommended by Carlos, and I aim to read it, contemplate it, and write on it soon. More on that to come. 

* Now that I think of it, the last instance was the "Summer Squash with Baked Eggs" fracas of summer '11. 

** Jason says, by the way, that he would have remembered. Not very helpful unless he's cooking, though.