Foodsicles

Lentil Recipe

Do not use any measuring utensils. Freemeasure!

I made this tonight for us to eat and it was veery eazy. It was tasty too, especially with the plain yogurt I just made yesterday. The recipe originally called for leeks but instead I substituted it with chives and celery.

Ingredients:

2 stalks of celery
A bunch of chives. They are weeds in our garden!
2 cloves of garlic
some cumin
some salt
some black pepper
Lentils (half a bag is what I used)

1. In a separate bowl or pot, rinse lentils then soak them so there's just a bit of water covering them.

2. Mince garlic and chop up the celery and chives.

3. Add a generous amount of olive oil to a pot (a Dutch oven/ceramic pot is what the recipe called for and we happened to have one from the Asian grocery store so I used it but I'm sure a steel pot would work fine) and saute the celery and chives briefly, until the celery begins to look a little translucent on the outside and the chives are soft. Then, add the garlic and saute until garlic smell is wafting everywhere.

3. Add cumin, salt, black pepper. The original recipe called for 1 1/2 tsp cumin and then I stopped paying any attention at all so I don't know how much salt and pepper was supposed to be added. Stay on the side of too little cumin rather than too much, otherwise it will be bitter like a thrice divorced man. Oh, and the recipe actually wanted cayenne but I didn't have that so I substituted black pepper instead. Be generous with the pepper.

4. Drain lentils and add to the pot with celery, chives, spices. Add in water (here's where it pays off to measure I guess, because my lentils were a little watery) to however many cups of lentils you originally used. There are directions on the bag usually. Otherwise, just freemeasure and take chances, make mistakes, get messy! Ms. Frizzle, anyone?

5. Add salt and a bay leaf* then let it all simmer for however long it takes until the lentils soften.

6. Optionally, as you taste it while it cooks, add lemon juice if you want some piquancy. Kelly didn't like it with the lemon juice so it's really just to taste but I thought it was much better when I squeezed some in.

7. Eat! Alone, with rice, with yogurt, with bread.

*I'm convinced this does nothing but placebo the shit out of the dish, kind of like that stone in stone soup

While I'm at it, I might as well put the CRAZY EASY yogurt recipe up.

Yogurt

You will need:
A half gallon of milk (i use 2% because whole is too much and skim is nasty ass)
2-3 Tbsp starter yogurt, plain is better
A food thermometer


1. Put yo milk in a pot. Turn the stove on to medium heat and slowly heat the milk up, stirring gently to avoid milk depositing on the bottom of the pot as a film. You want the milk to reach 185 degrees.

2. Fill your sink with cold water. Once the milk has reached approx 185 deg, immerse the pot in the cold water and cool the milk until 120 deg.

3. Once it has reached that temperature, take out the pot and whisk in your 2-3 Tbsp of starter yogurt. Can be store bought, I got the kind with low fat not no fat. I also wasn't too careful when measuring. The key is to thoroughly incorporate the yogurt into your milk, although even that I didn't do too meticulously. Huh. Apparently do whatever you want and it works.

4. After you've added the starter yogurt, pour the warm milk+yogurt mixture into jars. Doesn't really matter if you use Ball canning jars all legitimate like or a giant clean pickle jar. Just seal it.

5. Turn on your oven light and place the jars of yogurt in there for 10-11 hours. The longer you keep them there the thicker the yogurt will be, supposedly.

6. EAT ON EVERYTHING

Click click

I don't know how common this is but sometimes I find myself doing an emotional turtle/snail/hermit crab and take perverse satisfaction out of the fact that I'm sealing myself hermetically into this little shell. It's really comfortable, and I like it in here thank you very much. Keep Out. Since this can't only be a melodramatic post about metaphorical shells I will include a picture of Costa Rica at sunset.

Which has the added benefit of kicking mopiness in the ass and reminding me that there are inherently beautiful things in the world that can't be exhausted. Someday soon I will make a post about Costa Rica but today I'm just gonna clean some more, read some more, make a to do list, and go to bed.

Totally Normal

I've been stopping to smell almost every single lilac tree I can physically approach. White ones, purple ones, pink ones, almost-blue ones. Sometimes I smell some that aren't actually lilacs, which are then either equally good smelling or really, really stinky--life's a crapshoot! Smelling all these makes me feel strangely wealthy, like I'm rich in scents. Also, how lucky we are that pollinators like smells that humans appreciate too; otherwise, maybe every flower, not just some, would smell like corpses.

These were pictures that I took when I volunteered at the Arb yesterday (was it really yesterday? seems oddly long ago). I love volunteering there, though it has been almost too beautiful to be true the past two times. I love being out under the blue sky, hot sun, and occasional red-tailed hawk. Red-tailed hawks are huge!! They are actually like the size of a small sedan. For mice. There's a pair of red-tailed hawks who have a nest in a grove of pine trees near the Native Plant Garden, which is where I work. When I was little, that pine tree grove always reminded me of Bridge to Terabitha, that part where Leslie (is that her name? Or was that his name?) pretends she is a queen of a kingdom and the pine grove is the sacred place. 

It really is kind of awe-inspiring under there. And the pine forests up north even more so.

Anyway, the first day I volunteered I scared a nest of baby rabbits whereupon one ran away and got snatched up by the hawk. WHOOSH. I almost peed myself in excitement. Actually, I was dehydrated, but I would've if I could've. It felt perfectly right for the hawk to catch that rabbit, despite my admittedly non-natural interference (I wasn't actively trying to feed the hawk, I was pulling weeds and scared them out from ten feet away). The hawk took the rabbit up to a tree, plucked out its fur and probably some skin, then took it back to its nest to feed baby hawks. Hawklings. Stephen Hawkling har har. It was so right and oddly beautiful. Then I picked up a queen bumblebee. The takeaway message was: we miss so much of what we're looking at. I hope to look up and around and down a bit more, engaging all my senses, so I don't pick up the weird buzzing clump of grass or put my hand literally two inches from a baby rabbit and startle both of us nearly equally. So I see the muskrat in the water (I did! On my walk, which I will talk about in a moment), the oriole in the tree, the bug on my bed, the person in front of me. The beauty all around.

I went on a run this afternoon but it was so lovely later in the evening that I had to get out of the apartment. I went down for a walk along the lake, which was perfectly calm and perfectly stinky at times. Walking helped and on the way back a breeze dissipated the smell somewhat. The sky looked like:
<------THAT. That that that. Birds were doing their evening chorus (I heard a robin that sounded unbelievably pretty, I always thought robins would speak in fat, British voices). Voices from people in the park having fun floated over and several fishermen were out standing enjoying the evening. I saw one catch a bluegill! Almost went over to ask him if that's what it was but then I figured he probably wanted the peace and quiet of the evening so I would respect that. It's nice to enjoy someone else's enjoyment. I saw Grandmother Muskrat, or at least one of her many iterations, which stupidly made me overjoyed and almost feel like it was a good luck omen for the rest of my life.



Which, admittedly, has some rough bits in it. It's so hard to look forward without looking back and regretting the past. I know it's not proactive and it's too late to change anything now, but applying for medical schools makes me realize how much I didn't do right through college; that's just the plain fact of it. It's hard to face the fact that you may believe yourself to have qualities you want to show to the world and bring to the world, that make the meeting better for both, but it's nearly impossible to even get introduced. So that's one thing I've been struggling with. It's so important to keep going forward. There's also the whole what's going to happen to me and Scott when the summer's over thing, a big Thing which despite my best efforts continues to sit in my mind like an obnoxious elephant taking a dump. I think is coming out to color all of our interactions, the way I see us, and everything important. Sometimes I honestly don't know anything at all. 

But the only thing to do is keep on keeping on. Which I only just recently learned were lyrics from a Bob Dylan song. Actually, that's not right. I don't intend to keep on keeping on, because applying the same exact actions to life wouldn't change anything. I intend to keep on changing...on. Changing on? Remembering things that were once important to me (my god I was the most monumental nerd on the face of this earth providing, of course, those other earths that were terraformed by SPACE WARRIORS didn't have humans, duhhhhhhh), like reading lots of books including story books. Or hardcore doodling. Or...whatever. Remembering those as well as finding new things and refining, focusing in, on other old things like why exactly I want to go into medicine and working my ass off for it. To end with neither a bang, nor a whimper, but a cliche (so maybe a whimper)--life is just too fucking short. 

Amen. 

saturday

there's this certain point of time right between being tipsy and full on drunk where i will stand in a bar and look at the people around me and see a different species, almost, engaged in their daily or nightly behavior of talking, leaning wobbly into each other, laughing into each others' faces while their eyes don't really see anything. i feel like an alien come to earth: hell-o we are he-re to -ob-serve earth-ling. don't worry, it's not a lonesome or scary or discomforting feeling at all. if anything, it's fascinating and detached. plus i'm self aware enough to realize that i've done the same exact things. there are plenty of times where i talk to people the whole night and by the end of the night remember exactly nothing of what was said, though i do remember the tunnel of focusing on their faces, their smiling words, their flirtatious movements. sometimes i want to shout "IT'S JUST A DANCE" and then we'll wake up, join hands, make a ring and clap for the performances. othertimes i'm happy enough to just keep dancing my part too.

this is another point of time, when i am between being sober and full on tipsy. when i think these strange existential thoughts that make me wonder if anyone else thinks them to or if i am, irrevocably, different from the rest in some fundamental way and will i ever find my people? there is someone who i talk to like this, but to whom i can't be like this in real life: we're both constrained by some aspect of the real world when we interact there but over the internet, we can be as revealing or as free as we choose. and i wish that we could be like that in real life but i accept that we never really will be--and maybe what would be, in reality, would be tainted in a way by the constraints of person to person interaction, all those million variables we read, adjust to, have no control over. sometimes i wonder though.

there's the memory of a green glow stick around my head, crazy epileptic white lights, a pitcher on a table, my friend's lovely glasses, a wooden table, smoke in the air, a bathroom, balloons. sometimes there's a monologue in my head that names all these discrete things while i try to take their meaningful, realistic, sum in the real world.

it is past my bedtime as can be clearly seen through these incoherent existential ramblings, which are best served cold without an internet to hear

scribble scribble

i'd like to go to a place exposed in low tide, some huge expanse of beach that disappears at high tide. that way you can see a landscape change dramatically in a natural way in a human's time.

i'd like to see the white cliffs of dover because the color white is few and far between in geologic things. geologic things bigger than a pebble or a white sand beach where the beach is flat and the grains are tiny.

bits & pieces -

cathedral pine forest

plant a tree that you'll never see? thinking down to posterity

write more

why why why why why

running in the rain with your mouth wide open

getting so tired that you'll fall asleep immediately

it's you and me madly

so many things.

reading:  http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130422-feeling-ill-swallow-a-parasite/ which is fascinating as all get go and i think i just made that phrase up. my favorite noteworthy thought in that article came from this quote "While on the plane, I decided to play a game and pretend that it’s caused by the loss of something rather than the addition of something.” i like this because it makes you realize that pretty much everything can be reframed, and once it's reframed it's no longer quite the same thing--the thought cascades it leads to are very different. 

second favorite quote being "Pig whipworm is very kosher."

today was day numero uno of trying out this washing hair with apple cider vinegar business. in the shower the smell made me confused as to whether i was showering or eating and reflexively i began to think about salad. short-term conclusion -- my hair feels softer but smells weirder. 

things i didn't do today: finish that application. BUT i made significant progress & will finish tomorrow. finish stats homework. BUT i did part of it yesterday. make bread. no BUTs for that one. not enough time. 

things i did do: get sources for my epic 12-page paper-to-be. whenever i think of not yet produced works of creativity i think of this one quotation i read somewhere once upon a time, about how some carver was so good that when he looked at a piece of wood or stone he saw the statue inside waiting to come out; yet another example of reframing, because in that case he was looking at what he needed to chip away to reveal something instead of carving something out of something else. 

biked to picnic point and walked to the very tip which they have denuded so there are only a few trees left and instead implanted a fancy amphitheater named after the illustrious ebling family. felt grateful that at least i could walk & see things & listen to music & move my fingers. 

foooood. all i want to think about is food. 

l;kjpoi

you know what a really tasty combination is? muenster cheese and figs, in the same bite. flavor overlap yummmumuumum muu muu.

i'm thinking about why my apartment's most appealing place to be isn't the spacious living room but instead the little table right in the entrance where you can hear the constant white noise whirring of the refrigerator (it drives me crazy, subtly); maybe it's because this table is right underneath a light and essentially the center of the apartment, so people naturally gravitate towards it because of physical pleasingness. that makes me wonder whether there's truth to feng shui and consequently, if there's truth to any of the other semi-mystic semi-scientific schools of thought out there.

what would i research if i could research anything?

• cancer. 'nuff said
• our guts (i kind of want to be a GI doctor...our guts are like entirely different organisms living within us!! they're (a) actually epithelial cells and therefore exterior space in a way (b) innervated by a DISTINCT NERVOUS SYSTEM, the enteric, which communicates with the CNS/PNS but is its own system (c) producers of a lot of hormones with systemic effects (d) actually quite closely tied to mental health and emotional health (d) full of microbes who live commensally with us and whose therapies we're just beginning to consider -- like a biome inside us! (e) involved in a lot of disease processes. the downsides being they're smelly and gross.
• behavioral economics
• positive psychology
• the effects of physical space on mental qualities...like why do people tend to sit next to those pillars near the terrace? what makes people group in certain ways?
• food science & food security
• when people are in a room experiencing the same phenomenon, like a movie, i want to scan everyone's brains all at once and see what's happening and if there are any emergent similarities
• how scientifically effective traditional medicine therapies are
• music and the brain
• NOT history 

i think my next food project to make is kimchi.

random thought from the film festival yesterday: sensory deprivation is a really powerful tool, bc ppl get desperate for some sensory stimulus & will eagerly latch onto and have positive emotions for any stimulus that comes along. absence is a thing too, just like how in music rests are just as important as notes--it can be an emphasis for what fills it or follows it.