Some people eat to live,

and some live to eat.

Any guesses which category I fall into?

Here are some photos of yummy foods I have cooked in the past couple of weeks.




These are strips of chicken breast meat, topped with slices of provolone cheese and salami. I then covered them in plastic wrap and whacked them with a cast iron skillet until they were nice and skinny :)


In the pan -- the cheese and salami got nice and crispy. This was an amazing combination of flavors! I'll definitely make these again -- and they cook in about 5 minutes, with very little oil.


To go along with the chicken, I cooked some lima beans and barley.


Mmmm....



The next evening, I covered the rest of the chicken tenders in a simple batter (seasoned flour + pureed onion and hummus) and fried them in a very minimal amount of oil -- it's actually amazing how little is needed to get a nice brown crust.


Here they are sizzling in the pan.  Smelled wonderful :)  Sorry it's kinda blurry...


Plated.  You can better see the crispy texture.  They were moist and flavorful inside.  TJ's organic chicken strips may be worth the extra dough!



To go along with the chicken, I made creamed potatoes and gravy...




The gravy was sort of an improvisation, which is probably how the first gravy was invented.  I had delicious left-over drippings and fat from the chicken, and leftover flour from the batter.  Put 'em together and voila!


As you can see, the meal also included a "vegetable soup."  We won't delve into that debacle :P



The next week, I decided to be more economical and see how many meals I could get out of one (albeit large) roasting chicken.  I also stocked up on some veggies that were on sale at Schnuck's.  Acorn squash! :)



The bird and some onions, potatoes, and the acorn squash after a couple of hours in the oven (it was a 5 1/2  # bird and needed the time).


After deboning the chicken, I made some stock...




Here's some video of chicken stock boiling.  A simple culinary wonder :)


I used about 1/3 of the stock to make this yummy kale and potato soup.  I cooked the kale in one part of the stock, and heated up the roasted potatoes in the other.  Then I blended the potato portion into a puree and mixed it in with the kale.  It was fantastic!


You can see the potato puree and some remnants of potato skin here:


And I actually even reserved the bones and solid stuff and made a *second* stock overnight in the crock pot, which was too thin for a soup base but was perfect for cooking rice.  Alas, I wanted to stick the rice in the fridge and go to bed, but it was still scorching hot and I was afraid it would spoil the milk or something.
So I gave it a cold water bath :)



Take that, Certeau!  We modern folks still innovate and create new techniques in the kitchen, even with our industrial products.  After 10 minutes sitting submerged in water, the rice was cool and ready for the fridge.


Later in the week, I used another portion of chicken stock and the meat of the acorn squash to make this creamy soup.  A bit of chicken meat and some half-and-half gave it more body.  It tasted like Autumn.  :)


Video... I was a little infatuated by the creamy swirls on top.


What did I do with all the chicken meat, you ask?  Where did that delicious seasoned rice go?  So glad you asked!  I did what all bachelors from the South do when confronted with several ingredients at once: I made a casserole!
And what would a casserole be without a 3-cheese sauce?


Plus some delicious sauteed mushrooms:


Microwave-steamed broccoli (there's really no better way to cook it!)


Spread the rice out on the bottom of a pan, then topped it with the veggies and some of the chicken meat.  You know what's coming next :)




I just love the shape and texture of broccoli...



Cover it all in cheese! Delicious, creamy cheese!  I am your servant, oh dairy gods.

I devoured my casserole in 4 meals :)

The final bit of stock (aside from a portion I put in the freezer) and most of the breast meat went into one of my favorite traditional dishes: chicken and dumplings.  

Here's my dumpling (at an early stage): rolled out buttermilk dough, ready for cutting


After a couple of minutes in the pot of stock, the dumplings begin to puff up.  Don't they look pillowy and soft?  Don't you just want to pluck them out and devour them?  well, DON'T!! They are trying to trick you.  They're just chewy dough at this point, as I discovered the first time I made this dish.  You have to wait until they shrink back down to their original size and start becoming translucent.


Like so:


Finally, for dessert I whipped up a Red Velvet Cake in tandem with Kati's cupcakes.  My laptop - which was open to google chat video of Kati in her kitchen - was just outside this shot :)


Creamed the butter with sugar and brown sugar:


Mixed the cake flour and baking powder and cocoa:


Buttermilk plus red food coloring (reminds me of pepto):


Mix it all together and what do you get?


Some crazily bright red cakes! :)


Then apply homemade cream cheese frosting.  MMMMMM


Ain't that a sweet ending?


I'll leave you with the cake...


...as I get back to work :P



Ciao y'all!

Final semester & Epiphanies

If I manage to somehow secure a grant for my dissertation fieldwork to begin this summer, this will be my last semester of classes. Ever. !

Of course, I could take a class here and there after my fieldwork, when I'm back on campus to write up. But those would likely be audited... I'm pretty sure this semester's classes will satisfy my credit hour requirements. If I "take" classes in the future, it will probably be just sitting in on a colleague's course to learn about a new subfield or for pedagogical purposes. It's also quite possible (probably far too likely, in fact) that I won't get any grants from the last cycle of applications, which means I will have to return next semester and resubmit grants. I'm not sure what the credit hour situation will be; I think the funding would be there through a TAship, but for various important benefits (insurance, metro pass) I would need to be a full-time student.

Regardless of what the future may hold, the classes I selected this semester are unusually fitting (so far, and in light of what the syllabi promise). I'm TA'ing a class that matches my regional / thematic research focus very well, Indigenous Peoples and Movements of Latin America -- and I'll get to deliver a lecture on Maya literacy movements in Guatemala. The two classes that I'm taking normally are on Anthropology & Existentialism, which explores the root questions that led to the rise of our discipline and that continue to underlie our investigations today, and a class called Human Nature in Minds and Cultures, which actually approaches a lot of the same questions about identity (what is essential? what is existential?) but from a very, very different perspective grounded in experimental psychology and some slightly more cautious variety of evolutionary psychology. My fourth class, which I'm putting together myself in collaboration with one of my committee members, is tentatively called "The Anthropology of Remembering" or alternately as "Memory, History, Identity." I would combine both titles if I could find a clever way to do it. For this class, I'm basically trying to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of memory/remembering that will give me a foundation in memory studies -- and a helpful new angle to consider my research (and proposals).

The great thing about all 3 of these classes is that they overlap considerably -- which is doubly wonderful because they're also directly relevant to my research interests. This means that I get to spend my last semester focusing on research development (while calling it "class work".) And at the same time, the reading selections are well outside of the kinds of stuff I have been reading for the past year or so, which means I get to stretch my grey matter in some new or seldom visited directions. In the past two weeks, I've digested the results of psychological experiments that detect the innateness of perceptions of animacy and intentionality (e.g., when we see an object hit another object and set it in motion, do we perceive a motive in this action? Was the initial object operating of its own accord?); had a crash overview of post-Enlightenment German philosophy (and now I'm trying to understand Heidegger. They say his idea is optimistic but I keep seeing nihilism peeking through the door); considered "stone age sociology" and the seriously disappointing limitations of the archaeological record; understood the foundational principles of studies in artificial intelligence just well enough to decide that they're fundamentally flawed, but not well enough to fix them; and revisted (for the third time) funerary canibalism among the Wari' of Brazil. I have also slowly and deliberately made my way through a couple of great edited anthologies on memory - one at the social level, primarily from anthropological perspectives, and the other a review of Sir Frederic Bartlett's contemporary impact on memory studies (mostly individual, but I have a couple of chapters to go and they may engage the individual-to-social transmission question).

The more I delve into this "memory studies" stuff, the more I realize it's pretty darn close to what I envisioned cultural anthropology to be when I first switched over from archaeology. I wanted to understand where ideas are born and how they're communicated and changed. The brief foray into family planning in Thailand was primarily my "fix the world" moment, which naturally failed: there are no easy answers. Population control is an epic failure and a violation of the most basic human rights, while family planning is a fantastic product of rationality and compassion with the potential to allow people to pursue 'modern' consumer lifestyles without sacrificing parenthood. That's basically my thesis, in a nutshell. Perhaps I'll delve into greater detail in a later post -- I have to talk about this stuff to a bunch of strangers this weekend, anyway.

My path from environmental/social policy research in Thailand to alternative knowledge production in Guatemala isn't too hard to explain. The more I read about memory studies (and realize how we re-interpret reality and selectively reconstruct our memories/pasts in order to preserve our sense of self and our vision of our future), the easier it becomes to see the linkages between my past research interests and where I am now. It began with an epiphany. Two epiphanies, actually.

I use the word "epiphany" in two ways: first there's the typical epistemological epiphany, which is probably identical to mainstream uses of the word. These are the epiphanies of sudden comprehension, like the moment when I learned what multiplication and division were (I can still remember it clear as day -- I was sitting with Drew Wilson under one of those triangle-shaped wooden obstacles on the middle school playground. He had learned it from his older brother and tried to explain it to me, and suddenly it just 'clicked' and I understood. Do they still wait until 4th grade to teach this stuff???). I get smaller epistemological epiphanies all the time when I'm learning a new language, and the various parts of grammar 'click' into place. Hurray for order in the universe!

There's also what I call an 'emotional epiphany', which is what happens to you when a statistic becomes a real, recognizable emotive force. I tear up whenever I think about children not receiving toys for their birthday or christmas because I can remember visiting a cousin's house when I was little, and my mom telling me not to tease him for not having many toys because his parents couldn't afford to buy him many. The thought of teasing him hadn't even crossed my mind, but neither had the realization that kids just like me could - and often did - go without toys. Call me a materialist or a slave to consumerism if you want, but I find it deeply unsettling and *sad* for any kid to go without some toys - especially Legos, because you can rebuild them into as many different toys as you can imagine. Whenever I adopted a family from the Angel Tree in undergrad, I would buy the kids Legos instead of army men; they could then build army men or race cards or knights and dragons or robots... :)

Another example of an emotional epiphany was the moment in the Holocaust Museum in DC when I stepped into the room full of shoes...
I had heard murmurs, whispers about this room while waiting in line for a ticket; so I was partly prepared. But when I arrived and walked onto the little bridge...
I think the reason it hit me was because shoes are so mundane. There's nothing beautiful or ceremonial about a pile of shoes. We don't look at them and think of commemorating the dead. Yet the jarring cognitive dissonance of seeing an enormous pile of shoes and realizing that each pair represented a victim... that these dinky old leather shoes are all that remains... that these were human lives, each one a world, full of experience and knowledge and love and imperfection.

Reduced to shoes. Fucking shoes.


...


Walking over those piles of shoes made the Holocaust real and meaningful for me in a way that no film or story or historical facts had ever done.* The shoes - in all their mundane, material concreteness - turned the statistics into lives. That emotional epiphany left me a total wreck for about twenty minutes as I bumbled around in the corners of the last exhibition room before stepping back out into the wide, open entrance to meet the rest of my party. Even now I'm surprised at how strongly I react to the memory... gods, how can we kill innocents so readily?

*In retrospect, the stories and historical 'facts' were certainly necessary for the particular trigger to have any effect. Any artifact without context is virtually meaningless; it has no value apart from intrinsic material. Context is what separates the Holocaust exhibit from the shoe rack by the front door.


Hmm...well, as I said, there were two epiphanies that led me from Thailand to Guatemala. But I think I've written enough for one post. I'm feeling drained now... it will be good to sleep.
The only line from the Bard I've ever particularly cared for:

"Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, the death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast."

Amen.

Stay tuned for the story of the two epiphanies, as well as various kitchen productions from the past week :)

New (re)solutions for a new year

A few days into 2009, while visiting Kati in Michigan, I decided on my resolutions for 2009. There were several important differences in the 2009 resolution-making process, compared to historical precedents. Typically I've either resolved to (a) stop biting my nails, (b) hide my shyness around girls, or (c) get "fit." These have all invariably failed. My finger nails are *only* safe for the 2-3 months each summer that I'm in Guatemala (where my hands never feel clean enough for me to stick them in my mouth -- funny how my consciousness kicks in to preserve my health but not my nails' appearance). I'm still shy, even around Kati sometimes -- it's just my personality, I suppose. And 2008 was definitely a less active year than... pretty much any year before it. While I started off with plans to work out 2-3 times a week and play racquetball and yadda yadda... I ended up glued to my desk chair working on proposals for most of the year. Proposals are the devil.

While fitness plays a role in my 2009 catalog of resolutions, it's actually a minor addition alongside more important subtractions. I'm giving up caffeine, specifically as a routine part of my daily diet. I plan to reserve caffeinated coffee, etc., for times when I really need it -- like finals week, or one of those days when I have a lot of work to do and just don't feel energetic enough to get through it. Those are the times when caffeine reveals its beautiful, divine nature. Mmm, sweet coffee, nectar of life.
But drinking caffeinated coffee every day, in every cuppa joe -- that's just overkill. Sacrilegious, one might say. And I'm pretty sure that caffeine + stressful workloads = Doc's failing memory :P So I'm detoxing, going cold turkey for a few weeks, and refraining from buying any caffeinated coffee for home. If I need it as a pick-me-up, I'll buy it one cup at a time elsewhere (which incidentally ensures that I won't enjoy it as much as when I brew it at home). However the idea is to eliminate caffeine as an *element of my diet*, and reserve it only for very special occasions.

Similarly, I'm all but returning to my teetotaler days: for 2009, I'm adopting a one-drink minimum & maximum policy. In some contexts, this will actually be an increase -- as in all the times my cohort buddies invite me out but I decline because of a stack of work on my desk. In others, such as Joe's parties, it will be a definite decrease. :) This resolution was borne from my realization that I don't actually enjoy intoxication; I get most of the pleasure from being around my friends when they're having a good time. Drinking itself usually gives me mild heartburn (and makes me crave caffeine), and it greatly dulls my senses -- so what's the point? Still, it's important to be social and all. :)

As for fitness, I'm not going to try and set a quota of hours to meet or anything like that. Rather, I've resolved to find activities that I enjoy doing that just happen to get my heart rate up. The fact is, I hate running and always will -- but if I can find another exercise that I actually *enjoy*, then there's a greater chance I'll do it with enough regularity to ensure that I live to see 40. :P So far, based on one trip to the fitness center in my apartment complex, I can conclude that running on a treadmill is more enjoyable for me. I appreciate the controlled environment, particularly the absence of cold air that would burn my respiratory system. Ugh. I think I'll enjoy the cycling machine too, if I can get it to work properly and give me some resistance. It's too bad we don't have a rowing machine. I think I nearly killed myself on the one at Millsaps -- I got so focused on how many knots I was pulling, I didn't realize what a vigorous workout it was. It's also nice to have more upper-body conditioning from a workout other than weightlifting, which makes me feel vain and pathetic. If we have to go out of our way to arbitrarily lift weights to build showy muscles, what purpose do the muscles have, aside from aesthetics? I think I'd be better off finding a sport I enjoy. Something a bit more active than chasing / wrestling with Szasz -- though gods know he needs to exercise too, the little meow mix vacuum.

Apart from the differences in content of my 2009 (re)solutions for better living, there has been a most important difference in the context of their origin. I think we often fail in our resolutions because January 1 is pretty much identical to December 31, and we immediately fall back into our routines. But I spent the first 9 days of the new year visiting a friend, more fully immersed in her Lebenswelt than falling back into my own. Instead of my usual routine of sleeping in, drinking a big cup of coffee, spending 1 1/2 hours reading news websites and then squandering most of the day on half-assed attempts to read or write, I woke up far earlier (most days) than I would have liked, and because Kati has a real *house*, I got to help out with the sorts of activities that we apartment-dwellers miss out on. I also learned a lot of new recipes and cooking techniques, and was introduced to some ingredients that I've shied away from in the past -- lots of brans and oats and organic things :) It's safe to say that starting the new year in a different place, experiencing other ways of doing some things, was a positive influence for making and keeping to my resolutions.

In the spirit of renewed experimentation with food, I checked out the Golden Grocer near my apartment. Their website isn't so hot, but it's your typical local food co-op sort of place, with organic products and veggie and vegan stuff. Most importantly, they have a more complete set of bulk bin ingredients than Dierberg's, and they're obviously much more convenient for me to get to. Rice and other grains, couscous, nuts, etc. They also have big jars of herbs and loose leaf teas that you can scoop into for much lower prices than buying herbs individually. I bought some 'Get Smart' tea, another item in my quest for staving off senility, and a big tub of delicious Brown Cow Maple syrup yogurt, the best stuff ever. I also bought a 10-grain bread mix, to try my hand at baking bread at home without any fancy equipment -- just two hands and an electric oven (which I still prefer for baking. You can keep your gas!)

Here's what my beautiful loaf looked like after 3+ hours of rising in various positions, just before I put her in the oven:


I forgot to take a picture when it was fresh out of the oven, but here's what it looked like after I'd already devoured half :

Mmm :) It's good stuff! I added a couple of tablespoons of honey to the dough, to give it a little touch of sweetness. It was perfect -- though I think next time I may try it with maple syrup (I know, I should give it a rest, but it's sooooo good. Try it in your coffee!)

In case you'd like to try it yourself, here's the manufacturer's link: http://www.bobsredmill.com/product.php?productid=3754
Of course, you could make bread from scratch without a " mix," but seeing how I only have 3 kinds of flour on hand in my pantry, and no yeast (the mix comes with a packet), this was a MUCH cheaper option for the short run :)

Well, I have 3 more list items to accomplish before I can go to bed, and I have to wake up early enough tomorrow to make it to the Meso lab for an inauguration viewing party. So I'll end this post and save some early impressions of classes for next time.

Szasz says good night: