Futility Now

I blame it on The New York Times.  See what I mean?

Here’s how it looks in process.

First: carmelizing onions.  I’m a real sissy about onions unless they’ve been cooking for about an hour.  This is at about 45 minutes in, just before they’ve really started collapsing.  I can’t extol the virtues of cast iron enough here.

You can get a better sense of what they should look like when they’re finished in this shot:

You can also see a blob of the caramel that’s now the bottom layer, under the tomatoes.  The part you don’t see is the dance that goes scrape out onions, deglaze pan with sherry, make caramel in other, inferior, pan, add caramel to cast iron pan, toss in requisite chopped olives, tomatoes, and — there we go — onions back in.

I had these delicious artisan puff pastry squares courtesy of jmags’s mother (apostrophe feel awkward there?  take it up with you know who).  She was up for a visit on her way to BC and took jmags here, one of my absolute favorites in Portland, and one of the earliest establishments still around on the now-a-bit-much-if-you-ask-me-but-still-better-than-The-Pearl Hawthorne Blvd.

So the squares.  I just cut them up into what S. (when she was very small) called “reptangles” and fit them loosely together, eliminating the need for slits.  You can now see how the caramel drip on the handle has been roasted into a stickier shade of burnt sienna.  It’s quite pretty this way, I think, although once flipped it’s really something to behold.

I have always been a fan of puff pastry in whatever incarnation it has appeared, but this is the first time I’ve really started using it regularly (as in not just for party appetizers, or something).  jmags has been going on about wrapping croissant dough around hot dogs for ages, so I made him a slight variation on the theme by making puff pastry pillows with Cajun sausage from Edelweiss and some cheddar for good measure.

Cutting them lengthwise before crosswise allowed me to fit things together nicely; it also allowed me to see the opalescent cubes of fat scattered throughout the pigflesh.  I fried the links before wrapping and baking them; as one piece bowed back toward its casing in the heat, the fat-square slowly yet inexorably popped out into the pan.  Wow.

Also note: don’t let the cream in the coffee fool you.  This was not my plate.  Even on the weekend, I am a pretty light eater in the morning, and I could only manage one.  But it was glorious.

Last experiment to share: strudel!

Shiitake & portobello mushrooms, goat cheese, garlic, sherry, thyme, and a little lemon just before I wrapped it up in the dough = an ideal dish to offset the cold edge that’s crept into the evenings.

Final note: I know phyllo dough is supposedly vastly superior, but I have essays to grade.  Also, I have had great success with the Pepperidge Farm puff pastry sheets, as well as the Pastaworks variety, but the frozen sheets from Trader Joe’s were a real disappointment.  Even cooked well past the time recommended, they were still doughy, far less fluffy, and oily rather than buttery.

So here it is:

It’s somewhat easy, when you have a nine foot long couch, to bookend it of a Saturday night with your boyfriend, a cocktail or two, and a certain smugness.  This is where I found myself a few weekends ago, and, eyes scanning the wall of books framing the end of the couch (and said boyfriend), I began to comment on our duplicates.  You see, it was just last January that jmags left New York for Portland, bringing his books along with him.

Our initial system of organization (alphabetized by genre) was relatively functional — perhaps especially so when compared to my last grouping strategy, which was by color, and made for some very compelling juxtaposition, but was not so much useful for finding anything — until we rescued his remaining books from what he refers to as the Ancestral Homeland.  But that is for another post.

As it is, our duplicates speak well of our reading habits — double Nietzsche, triple Virgil (two Mandelbaums, one Fitzgerald), etc., with one glaring exception. That would be Nella Larsen’s Passing.  Yes, this book has virtues.  But I greatly dislike it for the melodrama and missing logic of the ending, its general evasiveness, and for being introduced to it in an academic setting as a part of a sequence of books that were dramatically superior.  This is no fault of the book’s, but true nonetheless.  It happens with people, too.

jmags didn’t remember much of anything about it at all, much less why he’d held onto it so long.  And yet here it was, Penguin edition, doubled, on our shelf.  Full of scorn, I decided something should be done about this misallocation of precious space — immediately.

Note: I realize this behavior might be construed as undercutting my claims about melodrama.

So in my last post I was extolling my summer productivity; now, safely into October, I can affirm with at least a bit of smugness that I have continued to be a very busy girl.  Last night, sipping mulled wine and basking in front of the second living-room fire of the season, I reminded myself of this dropped stitch — the documentation part — and, ahem, I am here to pick it back up.  First both in degree of importance and frequency: clay.

It’s vital, I think, to test these things out before committing to them.  Are you a lady who wears glasses?  Clonky 1950s frames to boot?  Then you want to check your tea bowls before they come home to roost, or something.

In August I went to camp: http://www.menucha.org/.  For a week. It was such an indulgence — no cooking, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping (aka drudgery in triplicate by means of compulsiveness).  We had 24hr studio time and home baked bread with every meal.  My course was Ceramics, and there were six or so others happening elsewhere on the grounds.  Near the end of the week we smoke fired our bisqueware in garbage cans out on the well-hosed lawn.  The day felt near as hot as the temp of the trashkilns.  I think my projects emerged successful.

Above is my bird-head whistle and (I think?) a vase.  In the case of the latter, I really just did what the clay told me.  I’ve decided the vigor of that whisper — the clay’s I mean — is a sign that I’m doing something right.  Here, also, are my stones:

They are not perhaps the most impressive of my projects, but I think they were my favorite.  Two pinch pots apiece, joined with a coil, then paddled to silky asymmetrical smoothness, thumbed and coddled, and burnished with terra sigillata.  And lit on fire in a garbage can.

In other news, jmags and I have decided we will probably seek larger quarters in early spring.  I’m so hoping for a yard, where I can brick out a corner for my own trashkiln.

P.S.  I’ve been making strides on the food front, too.  Pics soon.