Styling with Renee Michelle

A quiet Saturday night

2012-01-28T19:08:00.002-05:00

I'm still behind in my work, so I spent the whole day working to get ready for my upcoming conferences. But in the evening, Andrew and I sat down and had dinner together, like we do almost every night. It wasn't anything particularly fancy - I thawed out some homemade tomato soup and made some grilled cheese sandwiches. We ate and listened to Prairie Home Companion, a radio show that's been on the air since I was a child. Since it's set in Minnesota, it connects me to my past, and I'm happy that Andrew enjoys listening to it, even though he didn't grow up with things like Jello salad, bachelor farmer uncles, and blizzards. While we were eating dinner, we watched the hungry geckos** who hang around our kitchen window at night to sup on all the insects attracted by the light of our dining room lamp.

It made me think about my life right now, and how I'm happy with a job I love, sharing a home with my husband. Ten years ago (more or less), I was working as a line cook in Albuquerque, living in a roach-filled apartment. I didn't have quiet Saturday nights, because I always worked weekends and evenings, although I did listen to Prairie Home Companion, because I use my cassette tape recorder to tape record it while I was away every week. I earned a bit above minimum wage, and I couldn't really figure out what to do next with my life. My life is so different, ten years later. And I wonder what my life will look like ten years from now.

** They're not actually geckos (they're anoles), but that's what many people call them here.

2012-01-22T20:20:00.002-05:00

Most of the time I love living a tiny house (350 square feet, remember?) but this week is not one of those times. Andrew is repairing the head gaskets on his motorcycle. This is a big job, and requires many weekends and evenings of work. In the meantime, my living room and kitchen look like this:

The pictures are somewhat poor-quality phone pictures because another lingering annoyance in my life. My work computer (which is also my home computer) is on the fritz. The cursor moves around, on its own, opening folders and changing settings. I've had it in to two repair guys, and it has been diagnosed as (1) a malfunctioning trackpad, (2) a virus, and (3) "nothing is wrong". Diagnosis number (3) was the most recent, but, unfortunately, it is not true. My loaner computer can't process video and audio at all, but it's still nice to be able to do 80% of my work. And the loaner isn't playing nice with my camera, which is why I had to use the phone pictures tonight.

Time off

2012-01-08T22:45:00.007-05:00

The semester starts tomorrow, and since I'm teaching this time around, I'm a little less sure of my time management skills. That is, I'm not quite sure how much time teaching will take, and thus how much will remain for research, cooking dinner, preparing for my upcoming conference, or learning my new voice parts for choir. As a result, I'm been preparing. Our clothes are clean, I'm only behind in one project at work, and I did a lot of pre-cooking for the next few weeks.

I also decided we need to prepare by having fun, so we went kayaking this weekend. My mother-in-law worried about about the danger in kayaking, but I think she's picturing people strapped tightly into narrow boats, shooting down rapids. We were in low-to-the ground plastic two-seated kayaks, gently paddling our way through mangrove forests in water that was four feet deep. Our friends, silhouetted picturesquely below, demonstrate the peacefulness of the activity.

The beauty of the double kayak is that (while I try to do my part) I generally find that my paddling partner is working harder than me, so I get to glide a bit more than I paddle.

Cold

2012-01-05T11:09:00.003-05:00

I'm back in Miami, where we've been living through "cold" weather, which means that it's in the 60's (15-20C) during the day and 40-50F (4-10C) each night. For a northerner, of course, this is still laughably warm, and it's amusing to see everyone pile on their wool sweaters and hats. On the other hand, most of us don't have much warm clothing, and there's no heat in the buildings. It's kind of like when I was in Norway and they had a "heat wave" of 70 F (20C). If you don't get that kind of weather, then the houses and people there just aren't built for it.

In the meantime, I'm dealing with another kind of cold, the kind that lives in your sinuses until all you dream about is when you'll be able to take a deep breath of air through your nose again. Since I was sick over Christmas, I didn't do much cooking. But I did get out of bed to make dessert. While it's not very polished, you can still tell it's a hedgehog, right? It was made with a dark chocolate olive oil cake and Swiss buttercream frosting, so it tasted good, in any case.

Seven courses on St. Stephen's Day

2011-12-26T22:08:00.004-05:00

We are spending this Christmas in Ohio. Our actual family celebration will be near New Year's, so my mother decided that a good way to fill the time was to host a large, formal dinner party, which I volunteered / was drafted to cook. My father (jokingly?) suggested that seven courses was the right number of courses, and my mother requested Italian. Thus, this menu:

The first course was apretivo: prosecco with Campari. The Italians must really like a bitter flavor, because I had to cut the Campari down to one quarter (2 teaspoons per glass of Prosecco) to make it palatable for us. The second course was antipasti, and I can especially recommend this marinated mushroom recipe. You can make it a day ahead, and then just throw it on a plate with some prosciutto, olives, and cheese and you're done.
Another recipe that will make it into my regular party food rotation, goat cheese ravioli with walnut and white wine sauce. We made the ravioli from scratch, which was an insane amount of work, but I think the walnut sauce would taste terrific on fettuccine, even if it was store bought.
The main course was a lamb, beef, and pork stew, served with potatoes and creamed spinach. It must have all been much loved, because no one remembered to take any pictures. The dessert course was panna cotta. I had no idea how easy it is to make panna cotta! (Um, if you're a vegetarian who's willing to work with gelatin, which I now am, because I have totally had it with little lumps of agar agar ruining all my mousses and tortes.) You're simply dissolving sugar and gelatin in a lot of heavy whipping cream. Chill, and you're done. No hot water bath (demanded by creme brulee) and no cooking over a double boiler (required by mousse). I served the panna cotta with strawberries tossed in sugar and a good balsamic vinegar.
To end, a fruit course followed by coffee. Here, a dapper guest enjoys the fruit salad, which was topped with Chambord.
Now we're off to visit friends in Pittsburgh for two days. Hopefully I'll accumulate even more pictures of food there for the blog.

The Mini

2011-12-20T11:33:00.001-05:00

I had to fight long and hard to convince my husband to get a convertible. There are many good reasons not to have one (especially as your only car). They don't hold much cargo. They cost more than a regular car. Long trips are hell for passengers in the back seat. They're not so great in the winter. (That's what I'm told, anyway. How would I know? I live in Miami.)

But after six months of convertible ownership I can firmly state that it is terrific. Driving in a convertible has all the best parts of motorcycling (exposure to the sun and wind, easy parking) and none of the negatives (sweating in all that safety gear, keeping super alert for crazy drivers). Plus I can do my hair, something that's impossible when wearing a helmet to and from work.

Unfortunately for me, my husband gets to pick the next car, which will probably be chosen for its ability to haul a trailer. So this convertible is likely a brief interlude in a lifetime of station wagons.

Mandarinen Quarktorte

2011-12-14T19:27:00.005-05:00

To distract you from aliens whom I may or may not resemble, let us return to the beloved topics of tortes. I wanted to bring an especially delicious cake to my work's end-of-the-semester party. (It was a potluck lunch before a meeting, which is pretty festive for academics.) This is the cake I chose, Mandarin Ricotta Cheese Torte. Officially, it's supposed to use quark, but this is hard to find in the U.S. and I didn't have time to be making dairy products from scratch, so I used a recommended substitution of Ricotta cheese mixed with yogurt.

Here was the result:

Let's see that from another angle:

Notice the excessive height? A height that one might even call precarious? Soon after, the cake slowly crumbled. I will make it again because it was delicious, but when I do I will most certainly use a pan with a larger area, because my structural integrity field was not up to the job.

Although my cake was not stylish, my new Tortenmesser is. It was an unexpected, perfectly selected, early Christmas gift from a torte-eating friend.

I shall treasure it for years to come. It will be useful for both cake serving and any pastry-related battles for which I should be armed. (Check out that blade!).

I've included the recipe (in English!) for anyone who wants it. From Marion's Cookbook.

Mandarin Quark (Cheese) Torte

120g softened butter

120g sugar

1 t. vanilla

150 g flour

10g baking powder

1000g Quark (or about 900 g Ricotta cheese with ½ c. yogurt)

2 T. fresh lemon juice

100g Sugar

400 g whipping cream

3 or 4 packets (That’s most of a box) of unflavored gelatin

600g canned mandarin oranges

Cream the softened butter, 120 g sugar, and 1 t. vanilla. Add the eggs and mix well. In a separate bowl, mix flour and baking powder, then add that to the butter and mix. Grease a 28 cm springform pan, then spread the batter in it. Use a greased spoon to smooth the batter. Bake at 400F for about twenty minutes, until the top spring back when pressed. Let the cake cool.

In the meantime, mix the Quark (or ricotta cheese, thinned with yogurt) with lemon juice and 100g sugar. Whip the cream until stiff peaks form. Fold the two gently together. Now dissolve the gelatin in cold water, probably about ½ c. Quickly mix until there are no lumps, then mix in several spoons of the cheese mixture. Finally, fold the gelatin into the cream. Reserve a few well-drained mandarin oranges for garnish, then fold in the rest of the oranges. Spoon this on top of the cake, then chill for at least an hour. Garnish with oranges before serving.

This and that

2011-12-11T14:47:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I can go the whole weekend and never leave the house; in comparison I was a social butterfly this weekend. Thursday turned into an impromptu date night, and we went to see the new Muppets movie. I highly recommend it if you're a fan of kids movies. (That would be me - the less violence and profanity, the happier I am.) Along with attendance at two parties we also managed to squeeze in a musical, Avenue Q .This musical breaks my low-profanity policy, but it's terrific and it answers the unanswered question, "Are Bert and Ernie gay?"

Today has been a slower day: Andrew is (once again) working on the motorcycle, and I'm planning to do some Christmas shopping. Only nine working days until the Ohio vacation, where I'm supposed to cook Christmas dinner and a multi-course meal for twelve adults. Maybe I'd better start planning...

And... the new glasses. I was going for this look, but Andrew thought they suggested this look.

Not even if she's a Trekkie

2011-12-06T00:05:00.003-05:00

Tonight I had to advise my husband: you may not tell your wife she looks like a space alien. Not even if you think it is a compliment.

(This was prompted by my new glasses; pictures to follow soon.)

Guests: wanted, unwanted, and somewhere in between

2011-12-04T18:51:00.005-05:00

Guests who were wanted: We hosted a Christmas party last night. It made me feel more rooted in Miami. Last year I didn't know enough people to invite to a party, whereas this year we know know enough people that half could decline and we still didn't feel lonely.

I meant to take pictures, I really did. I had never hosted a Christmas party that would take place both inside and outside, and it took some planning to figure out how to construct a room in the garden. (The answer: several strings of lights, a couple of chairs and a lamp, and of course plates and plates of food.) Unfortunately, I had so much fun I forgot about the camera, so you only get an annotated menu:

Rum Punch (Terrific - rum and fresh lime juice are an unbeatable combo, and the nutmeg and bitters raised it from good to stellar.)

Non-alcoholic Punch (I used chamomile tea, white grape juice, and lime juice.)

Chili (to soak up all the Rum)

Extra-thin chocolate chip cookies

Sfratti, walnut-honey Rosh Hashannah cookies (Named for sticks used to evict the Jews. Aside from the dreadful back story, they were excellent.)

Goat-cheese topped apricots (These are the easiest hors d'oeurve I've ever made.)

French onion dip with crackers. (I think I was thirty years old before I discovered that there was a way to make this dip without Lipton soup packets.)

A guest who was unwanted: The success of the party was a welcome diversion from our ongoing battle against a mouse in the house. Since discovering its presence, we had filled holes, boxed up the full contents of the pantry into Tupperware boxes, and had used both no-kill and regular traps, to no avail. In the middle of the night, Andrew heard it chewing again and managed to corner it, where he discovered it was a RAT. Andrew trapped it and carried it halfway across the neighborhood. He then spent the day filling even more holes, and disinfecting the house. I am experiencing equal parts disgust (at the idea of a rat in my kitchen) and gratitude (for a husband who deals with it all).

Guests who are a mixed blessing: This week is Art Basel Miami Beach, which is a international art Show. The show has now spread to other neighborhoods, and the Design District, where we lived, has been overflowing with exhibits, live performances, and other events. This means that we can just walk out of our house and immerse ourselves in interesting art happening all around us. It also means that the traffic in our neighborhood is outrageous, and we must plot alternative routes to and from our house.

We intended to snorkel

2011-11-28T14:16:00.004-05:00

We decided on a non-traditional Thanksgiving this year. Our friend E was in town, with her sister-in-law, and we had reservations to snorkel on Thanksgiving afternoon from a glass-bottomed boat. The glass bottom was for me, since I think snorkeling sounds a bit like a sport, or at the very least, like exercise. Unfortunately, our tour was cancelled, and the rebooked tour the next day was also cancelled. (This was understandable, due to the choppy conditions, but next time I wish they wouldn't wait until we were an hour into the trip to make the decision.)

Instead, we had a picnic in the Everglades, followed the next day by lunch in the Keys.

Andrew slices the bread. The lake in the background was part of the Long Pine Key picnic area. I didn't quite catch why it's named after a Key (island), since it's not one.
The spread: ciabatta bread and vegetable pate, truffle deviled eggs, pickled onions, and fruit. The vegetable pate recipe made a LOT, so we still had the traditional Thanksgiving leftovers.
We could almost reach out and touch this guy, as he was sitting right below the board walk. I've never seen such big alligators in the wild. It was fun and a bit unnerving.
The next day we were in the Keys, enjoying the sunny weather, blue water, and pelicans.
Andrew and E enjoy more than just the weather.

Reason #412 to live in Miami

2011-11-22T22:35:00.002-05:00

People visit you.

In the last year and a half, I've had visits from parents, two aunts, one uncle, a brother with a wife and two kids, and two close friends. That's not bad for someone who can only offer an Aerobed on the living room floor. Even if they mainly come to enjoy the balmy weather and warm seas, I get to see them, and I'm not complaining.

A good friend from DC is visiting Miami this weekend with her sister-in-law. I got to show them my favorite pizza place, Harry's, which has trendy thin-crust pizzas and local Florida beers. (For me: pesto pizza with homemade ricotta and housemade fennel soda). I was so proud that they liked it. After dinner we drove the Mini over the bridge to Miami Beach where they are staying, and they were cheering to see the Miami skyline and neon-lit palm trees. Experiencing your town through visitors' eyes is a great way to appreciate where you live.

It was refreshing to hear such skillful settings in a season that will shortly be dominated by dispiriting dreck.

2011-11-20T20:05:00.003-05:00

That was the final line of my choir's concert review. And I agree that it went just smashingly. I am enjoying the feeling of accomplishment that comes from taking on the challenge of learning to sing again. But now I think I will bask in all the free time I have available, with rehearsals done until the new year.

Singing through a haze

2011-11-18T15:52:00.004-05:00

My choir is singing our fall concerts this weekend, with the first being this evening. I am equal parts exhausted (ten hours of rehearsals plus six hours of commuting to rehearsals) and excited. Last night we rehearsed in the first performance space, a church, which turned out to be a modern building (all cement, glass and wood) which had the acoustics of a Cathedral (because of all the cement, glass, and wood). Singing with the orchestra and soloists makes us sound like an honest to goodness real choir. They hope to put some of the concert on YouTube, so if that happens I'll post a link.

In other news, I somehow hurt my back and am taking muscle relaxants. Although I am only taking one quarter of the drugs prescribed, I am tired and loopy. My coworkers have intimated that I am not censoring my comments quite as much as I usually do. So far they find this amusing, but I'll be glad when I'm back to my usual self.

On the Sandia mountains

2011-11-15T17:24:00.002-05:00

We were in Albuquerque this past weekend, and, my, is it lovely there. Andrew was ready to move, but the lure of mountains in my back yard is not as great as the lure of warm seas and city skylines for me. I originally planned the trip so that my husband and uncle could go hiking together, thus relieving me of any responsibility to climb anything beyond a couch cushion on the way to the kitchen to get a drink. Unfortunately, various injuries and maladies prevented hiking, and we took the wimpy tourist option of driving up into the Sandias. On the mountain top we enjoyed lovely views and stunted trees:We also encountered a whole herd of the rare mountaintop antenna:
Later we got our fill of red dirt, visiting ruins of Pueblos and churches at Pecos National Historical Park. As my aunt pointed out, the story of the American West is pretty consistent: Native people lived there until missionaries (or soldiers) came and converted (or killed or enslaved) them. It's a rather disheartening story if you think about it too much.
For Andrew, the highlight of our day trip to Santa Fe and points north was a petting zoo. The "zoo" was really a pen of goats, chickens, and an alpaca in the middle of a tiny town. For $2 you could buy a bag of corn and earn the intense (but short-lived) interest of every beast.

I appreciate the less animate animals, such as the Steel Burro.

For even more about the trip, check out dispatches from our reporter on location here and here.

The Glades

2011-11-08T20:14:00.002-05:00

We had lovely weather last weekend (read: finally cool enough that we can put the top down on the car), so we took a drive through the Everglades. Several entrances to the park are less than an hour from our house, so we managed the trip in an afternoon. I'm a bit pressed for time because I'm leaving for a short vacation tomorrow, so I'll let the pictures do the talking.

From a distance, the Everglades kind of look like the Midwest. Flat.

Even slight changes in elevation are a big deal, because they're the difference between dry ground and swamp.

We saw many birds, but I don't know anything about them.

Andrew's straw hat fits again, now that he cut off all his hair.

Living in the past

2011-11-03T11:27:00.003-04:00

I'm having a lot of fun dressing vintage lately. I seem to have hit some magic amount of vintage and vintage-style clothes in my wardrobe such that I can wear the look about half the time. This also means that I've been spending far too much time researching things like how to do your hair in rag curls and whether you can really wear dance shoes outside in rainy weather (they make a lot of inexpensive dance shoes in vintage styles, but many of them have suede soles).

Pity my poor husband, who is the unwilling recipient of all that I learn, and who listens to my debates about whether $110 is too much to pay for a petticoat. (Which of course it is, but there aren't that many petticoat manufacturers around any more, so it's not like I have a lot of options.)

In other news, I took a wonderful weekend trip to DC a few weeks ago. I was in Virginia for work, and extended the trip so that I could visit some of my old friends in DC. It was wonderful to see the fall colors. And to kick leaves. And to be able to wear a sweater. Because I love my job in Miami so much, I keep hoping that my longing for seasons will abate. I hear songs on the radio and think of cider and soup and my heart is struck with a feeling that has no name. Perhaps I will name it Herbssehnsucht, (longing for fall)? In the meantime, I will be happy that it is cool enough that we can sometimes turn off the air conditioner, and I shall look forward to the ten frosty days in Ohio this Christmas.

Rainy day at home

2011-10-17T15:58:00.002-04:00

Mondays are my work at home day this semester. Right now I'm sitting down with a cup of tea and a piece of a new torte, Lingonberry Yogurt Chocolate Torte. This recipe has a feature new to me - the thin bottom layer is shortbread. When you build the cake and cream layers on top of it, it stays stable because the shortbread doesn't get mushy. Trust those Germans to engineer a cake properly.

Weekend projects

2011-10-12T08:55:00.003-04:00

Andrew and I are both a bit behind at work, so we spent a good chunk of the weekend trying to catch up with our paid jobs. But we also found time for projects. Andrew installed a pedal extender on the clutch of our car (Yes, I am that short), while I painted our couch. That's right, I painted the couch.

Last year we bought a white couch from IKEA, primarily chosen because it was the tiniest couch we could find. A year of black cat love, red wine drinking, and a husband who regularly uses the white couch as a tool storage location left the sofa looking quite dingy. Slipcovers cost as much as a new couch, so I painted it.

Research showed that you could use regular water-based paint, mixed with fabric medium. It worked, and it actually looks better than this picture shows. It looks kind of like suede and you can't see any of the stains. Hopefully the new navy blue color will hide evidence of future mishaps as well.

Respite

2011-10-03T09:11:00.002-04:00

Those of you dreading the approaching winter: now is the time to make your Miami travel plans. The temperatures here have dropped the all important three or four degrees. This week we're looking at highs around 85 F (That's in the 30 F for my non-US friends). It's still warm enough to go to the beach (we went twice this weekend, which is a record for us), but it's cool enough to put the top down on the convertible in the evenings.

Along with those two trips to the beach, we also spent Saturday evening listening to strangers tell us their true stories, at Lip Service. People can submit their stories, judges pick the best ones, and then they read them on stage. (Listen to examples here.) Good fun, although they were a bit overwhelming for my sensitive soul. The stories included three deaths and one stabbing. Good thing I always bring a fresh handkerchief to any kind of theater performance.

For bad hair days

2011-09-28T13:18:00.004-04:00

I've been really diving into the 40's and 50's vintage look lately. A few weeks ago I found an online store called Scarf World which filled a hole in my wardrobe. With my latest purchases I own more than two dozen scarves. (And let me point out that collecting scarves is a much more fitting hobby for someone in a tiny apartment than collecting shoes.)

Now I can put these new scarves together with my new knowledge of 40's scarf tying so that I can go to work looking like this.

A Torte Tour

2011-09-18T22:36:00.005-04:00

I don't know how it happened, but I've made three tortes in the last three weeks that never made it to the blog. I did a repeat of of the Eierliquoertorte, which is a flourless chocolate cake topped with cream and filled with lingonberry jam. Once again I was too rushed while preparing for the dinner party where this was served to pipe on the whipped cream. I'm sure this lack of piping is costing me style points in the competition judging.

We received lemons in our veggie share last week, which prompted me to make this Zitronentorte. I modified the recipe a bit, which was a white butter cake layered with a filling of sweetened lemon juice and cornstarch and topped with a powdered sugar glaze. I was looking for something with a bit more panache, so I added lemon zest to the cake, used the lemon juice to make lemon curd, and then folded the lemon curd into whipped cream. If you've never had it, lemon curd is lemon juice cooked with eggs (or egg yolks) and butter. It can be used like a jam, and it is heavenly.
This last cake is my hand-down favorite so far. It's a plain cake (Tortenboden), layered with poached peaches and topped with a mixture of whipped cream, yogurt, and gelatin. The yogurt and cream mixture just the right mix of tang and richness.

(And just in case it appears I eat nothing up cream and butter, here's photographic proof to the contrary: a salad of raw shaved zucchini and Parmesan, topped with lemon dressing. This recipe is definitely a keeper.)

Out on the town

2011-09-10T22:30:00.002-04:00

Saturday night we helped out at a homecoming dance for gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgendered youth, run by a great group called Pridelines. We were told to dress up as if it were our prom.

Actually, when I went to my prom, I wore the poofiest southern-belle dress imaginable. I'd like to think that I've acquired a lot more style since I was seventeen, along with a very handsome husband.

Check it out: Don't Lecture Me!

2011-09-10T10:00:00.004-04:00

If anybody would like to know more about what I do, National Public Radio did a great documentary this week on physics education research. "Don't Lecture Me!" is an hour-long program by American Radio Works which talks about why lecturing is not how we should be teaching. Many leaders in Physics Education research participated, including one of my advisors. Listen here.

Transportation on two wheels

2011-09-08T10:33:00.002-04:00

I might have mentioned this before: I come from a motorcycling family. According to family lore, the first time I was on a motorcycle I was less than a month old. My mother was taking a walk in the woods, carrying me. She reached a steep hill and saw that she would have to struggle up it with me in her arms. My father happened to be nearby on a dirt bike, so he took me in one arm and drove up the hill.

By the time I was 6, I had my own kid-sized helmet. The law stated that children could only ride on the back of street bikes when they could reach the footpegs. So my father (the literal engineer) installed foot pegs, much higher up, that both my brother and I could reach. We used to ride into town, one kid per parent motorcycle.

When I got married, my father immediately started asking when his son-in-law was going to learn to ride. To help persuade my husband, our wedding gift from my parents was a motorcycle.

Andrew took to motorcycling like a fish to water, and it was his main transportation when I moved to Miami and took the car with me. Since he's moved down, he's been stuck doing some repairs to the bike. But it was fixed just in time for our car to go to the shop, so it's our primary mode of transportation this week. I was a passenger earlier this week, but only once (and then I found a carpool). It's fun to be on a bike again, but biking in 90F (32C) in an armored jacket and helmet is unpleasant. I think I'll be waiting until the cool winter months and leave the summer biking to my fanatic husband.

An accounting

2011-08-29T22:08:00.003-04:00

Things that went wrong today:

1. It took the doctor five hours (FIVE!) to give my husband and I our annual physicals.

2. I was unprepared for a meeting.

3. We had a fender bender in the new car.

Things for which I am grateful:

1. We both got a clean bill of health.

2. My coworkers are forgiving people.

3. The accident happened at such a low speed that the airbags didn't deploy.

4. The day is finally over.

Extracurricular activites

2011-08-28T21:17:00.003-04:00

In graduate school, I decided that there was time enough for me to have one, but only one, hobby, and that hobby was cooking. Now that I'm done with graduate school, I can mainly keep a forty-hour work week. As a result of all my newly-found free time, I find myself taking up new hobbies. Last spring I started taking dance classes. (I find it hard to describe what kind of Indian dance it is: click here if you want to see an example.) I need to practice a lot at home to keep up and, if I want, I could take these classes for a decade or so and still be learning new stuff. So it's a challenge.

Dance classes aren't held during the summer, though, because the instructor and lots of the students visit India during summer vacation. With all that free time on my hands, I decided to join a choir. Like the case of the dance class, I've taken on more than I realized. When I heard I needed to audition, I wasn't too worried. But at the audition the woman who went before me sounded like an opera singer. This turned out to be not too far from the truth, as most of the singers majored in music, and some of them are paid opera singers. I was told that my voice is rusty (so true! I haven't sung in ten years) but that I had potential. The very first night we sang Bach in five parts and we sightsang pieces in Hebrew. I've sung in choirs like this before; choirs that hire soloists and sing with orchestras, but the caliber of these singers is astounding. Quite frankly, I can tell that I am one of the worst singers there, but I'm choosing to see this as an opportunity to learn lots, and fast.

In the meantime, something that I'm good at: Bienenstich Kuchen. This translates as bee sting cake, but I don't know the story behind the name. It's plain, eggy cake topped with lots of almonds and filled with vanilla cream. This is officially a kuchen, but I haven't figured out the difference between a Kuchen and a Torte.

Birnentorte

2011-08-22T08:58:00.003-04:00

This week's torte is a pear torte, which I chose because our vegetable share came with a dozen pears this week. The recipe for this torte was not so straightforward, because it was one that expected you to use all packaged foods. It was something along the lines of "While baking a fruit cake base, mix up a packet of vanilla pudding, open two jars of pears, and add water to a packet of glaze."

I think this "fruit cake base" will be a common component in the future - the ingredients are similar to that of a pound cake (equal amounts of butter, sugar, and flour) but it called for more leavening than a typical pound cake (three eggs), so it turned out a bit lighter. Here are the mistakes (let's call them learning opportunities) made with this cake:

1. I accidentally used a too-small pan, and my cake was higher than expected. To compensate, I cut the cake in half horizontally and froze half for another cake.

2. I poached fresh pears in simple syrup and orange juice, which was a great improvement over canned pears. I then brushed some of the leftover liquid on the cake layer before I topped it with the pudding. This is commonly done with French cakes (genoise) but it make the cake almost soggy. I've got to quit thinking these techniques will transfer and just follow the instructions.

3. The glaze, something called Tortenguss, is something you normally buy in a packet. (It's that light red sheen you might be able to see in the picture). I followed a suggestion I found on a German baking forum to make a pectin glaze, but it never set up. I'll need to try adding more pectin.

The beauty of making cakes, though, is that even imperfect ones are pretty darn delicious.

Places I've been: St. Petersburg

2011-08-16T17:30:00.004-04:00

I went to St. Petersburg last weekend. (Alas, it was the Florida version, not the Russian city.)

Previously, St. Petersburg was a destination for us because my cousin and her family lived there. However, soon after we moved to Florida she joined the Foreign Service and moved away. I'm sure it's just coincidence that as soon as her cousin moved within driving distance she fled to the furthest corners of the world.

However, St. Pete is still pretty terrific. It boasts a brand new Dali museum. (To be specific, the building is new but the art is not.) It helps to have a guide when you're looking at Dali - he was a man that crammed an awful lot into each painting. (Example here.)

We also stopped along the way at a state park, formerly the site of the Koresh Unity religious group. They lived communally and. believed in celibacy and reincarnation. Their most interesting belief was that humans lived on the inside of a hollow sphere, and they did science experiments to prove it. Although we arrived too late to view their scientific apparatuses, we did spend quality time with their gopher tortoises.

Andrew enjoyed a lunch which featured his two favorite things: beer and math.

There's also a county park in St. Petersburg with extensive boardwalks. This feature is appreciated because the water is filled with alligators.

Here I am contemplating the swamp, deciding that I could never, ever live in Florida without the two miracle inventions: air conditioning and insect repellent.

Places I've been: Mountain Lake, Minnesota

2011-07-29T14:47:00.003-04:00

My mother grew up near the small town of Mountain Lake, Minnesota (population 2,104). My father was more of a big city boy, living near Windom (population 4600). I don't get a chance to visit very often; this June was the first time since Andrew and I met that I've been to visit. Mountain Lake is misnamed slightly: it has a mountain (although you'd only call it one if you lived in the Plains) and it has a lake, but they're not near each other. And the only reason it now has a lake is because the town used a Works Progress Administration project (during the Depression) to dam a river and make a lake.

My mother has six brothers and sisters who live within driving distance of Mountain Lake, and I got to see them all. (It turns out some of them have been secretly reading my blog, too!) When I imagine living in Mountain Lake, I can see how different my life would be. I'd have to have a different job - there are no physicist jobs around. I'd have to have a different religion, or at least stop going to my type of church - most of the churches are Mennonite, as all of my ancestors were. And I'd have to eat different food - there were no veggies burgers in town. But there would be rewards as well. Many of the houses are built in the early and mid 1900's; they are surrounded by large trees and set near the street. It's easy to walk around town, and it's surprising how often I bump into an uncle or two when I'm wandering around.

And as a matter of fact, I'm headed back there this weekend. I have a conference in Omaha, Nebraska next week, which puts me only four hours' drive away from my grandmother and her 90th birthday party. I'm supposed to be a surprise visitor, because I had already said I wouldn't come before I realized how close I would be. But I don't think this post will ruin the surprise - my grandmother does not know how to work a computer.

So, while I'm gone, some other impressions of southwest Minnesota:

Since I've last been there, they went and got all modern: there are wind farms everywhere.
The good ole Green Giant in Blue earth - we used to visit him on our way to our grandparents. (For non-Americans, the Green Giant was/is a icon of a brand of frozen and canned vegetables)

A new cooking challenge: Tortes

2011-07-25T15:24:00.004-04:00

Remember how I wanted to learn to cook Indian, so I promised to make it once a week last year? That failed. I managed to cook quite a few Indian dishes, but few of them appeared on the blog because they just weren't that spectacular. Andrew and I would eat them, and they were moderately tasty, but nothing that I wanted to encouraged other people to make. As a result, I've put that project on hold until I can take some proper lessons from someone who knows how to make proper Indian food.

Instead, I introduce my new cooking challenge: tortes. For some reason (perhaps centuries of national animosity?), the French bakery where I trained rarely made tortes. So I can whip up pate a choux, buttercream, and eclairs in my sleep, but I can't make a proper German cake. My trip last year to Muenchen reminded me how terrific these layered cakes, concoctions of cream, fruit, and nuts, really are. The introductory contestant is the Eierlikoertorte, from a recipe shared by a colleague, who has much more experience with German baking, as he is (1) German and (2) bakes more professionally than I do.

Eierlikoer is a cordial made of cream, eggs, and alcohol. Because I live in Miami, I couldn't buy the typical Northern European brands, but it turns out the Venezuelans like it too. The end result was a flourless cake (just almonds, chocolate, and lots of eggs), layered with a lingonberry jam and topped with whipped cream and more egg liquor. It was a smashing success.

P.S. Does anyone know how to include foreign characters, like umlauts, in blogger posts? I think this project will require heavy use of them.

How many of me?

2011-07-23T17:14:00.003-04:00

I was taking a break from a day-long cook-a-thon (pictures tomorrow, I promise), when I saw this website: http://ww2.howmanyofme.com/.

It uses census data from 2000 to tell you how many people in the U.S. have your name. There's a grand total of 1 of me, although there are at least 308 people in the U.S. have my husband's combination of first and last name. The fun part of my situation is that there's never any doubt who authored my papers. The not-so-fun part is that every time I'm asked to give my name on the phone, I have to stifle a little groan. It's guaranteed that I'll have to spell every name, usually twice. And then (unless it's legally binding) I'll just go along with whatever the caller thinks I said. Last week someone put an 'f' in my last name.

Wednesday is now the day to prod people

2011-07-15T17:06:00.005-04:00

Too much of my job here involves getting people to do things they don't want to do. Graduate students get back to me, and bosses return my emails. But there are other people in my work life who either can't or won't do the things I'd like them to do. I suspect that this is due to the fact that I live in Miami. Procrastinating is just the complete immersion into Miami Time (which is closely related to Cuban Time)

For example, I've been here over a year, and it took me until this week to get a working key to the graduate student office. That room requires electronic access, which means someone had to input my ID number into a computer somewhere, and someone else had to input my ID number into the door reader itself. It took me months to even figure out who was responsible for these tasks, and then uncountable numbers of emails and phone calls. This was such an effort that I actually listed "Get key card access to the graduate student office" as one of my professional goals during my first-year employment review.

I have regular reminders in my calendar so that I remember to bug all the people I need to bug. Today it occurred to me that it would be more efficient to designate one day as "The day to prod". So now, every Wednesday morning, I'm going to go down the list and gently agitate each person who's supposed to be doing something for me.

If you deep fry your salad is it still healthy?

2011-07-11T17:10:00.004-04:00

I had a dinner party this weekend, and once again failed to take pictures. So you'll have to use your imagination a bit for this post. I've been trying a new strategy for dinner parties. I plan fewer courses (three or four) and I choose one item to be a showstopper, which is often something I've never made before. If I end up with extra prep time, as I have lately, I'll try to throw together an amuse bouche with whatever's lying around. Thus, the menu this weekend was:

Amuse bouche: Watermelon soup with ginger

Salad: Summer Salad with fried soft-boiled eggs

Main: Ratautouille

Dessert: Blueberry Clafoutis
Unless you studied those recipes, it will not be obvious that the salad was the most time-consuming (but amazing!) of those recipes. The salad was relatively straightforward: greens, nuts, apricots, and herbs. The dressing was quite nice (although infusing oil by cooking it with lemon zest was not worth the time). The egg that topped the salad, though, made it something worth remembering. It was a complex preparation. First, I soft-boiled the eggs and then chilled them. After peeling, they were double dipped in a crumb mixture, and then deep fried right before they were placed on the salad. I think it's the closest thing a vegetarian will ever get to a Scotch egg.

Everything else on the menu was made from a recipe I knew well. The clafoutis, a baked product that I only discovered last year, is so easy: fruit in a pie tin covered in a pancake-like batter and baked. It's so much easier than pie, but allows me the same opportunity for showcasing summer fruit. The only hitch is I can't figure out how to pronounce 'clafoutis'. Does someone out there speak French?

Born in 1921

2011-07-09T10:05:00.004-04:00

My grandmother Ruby is 90 years old today. There's so much of her life that I can't even imagine. She gave birth to eight children, lived on a farm that didn't have running water until after my mother was born, and raised and cooked most of the food her family of ten needed. As a result, today I have seven aunts and uncles that love me, and in a few weeks they'll all be getting together to celebrate nine decades. I won't be there, so here's my good wishes. Happy 90th, Grandma!

How do you make cat socks?

2011-07-08T13:55:00.004-04:00

I need some engineering and design help. You may recall that Phi the cat, suffering from an eye injury, has been exploring the finer points of haberdashery with her cone:

She's been stuck in this cone for two months, and I feel terrible about it. She's so much happier without it, when she can bathe and run around and eat out of a bowl. But in order to take it off permanently, I need to prevent her from scratching her eye. She only has claws on the back paws, so I made her these socks:

The socks are made of tube sock material, and I sewed some extra elastic around the tops. She can't shake them off, but they only stay on a few hours before she pulls out of them. Does anyone have any ideas? Should I tape on the socks? Dip her feet in rubber? All suggestions are welcomed, short of stuffing her. We're rather fond of Phi.

New wheels

2011-07-05T15:26:00.002-04:00

The fish-mobile (otherwise known as a '95 Ford station wagon) has been making some funny noises lately. I had always hoped that it would get us through graduate school, and now that Andrew and I are both graduated and gainfully employed, I decided I couldn't ask for much more. Andrew could have kept repairing it, but the allure of a more fun, more reliable car was too great for me to ignore.

We used the long Fourth of July weekend to go new(er)-car shopping. It was a draining experience for me, because I am loath to part with money. You can call me frugal or you can call me a cheapskate, but even though I wanted to treat myself to a car, I was scared by the actual amount of money that I'd be required to part with. I take after my parents - you may recall that it took them ten years to buy a house, while a furnace purchasetook two years. In exasperation, my husband declared that if everyone was like me (and my family), the entire world economy would collapse. Which is true, but the garage sale economy would skyrocket.

Eventually, though, we made a decision. The fish station wagon is gone to a (better?) place, and we've got a new (to us) car:

I think it's just the car for a childless couple in Miami.

Places I’ve been: Bar Harbor

2011-06-23T12:07:00.003-04:00

I’ve been travelling so much this spring that I’ve fallen a bit behind in my blogging. I enjoy trying to capture on paper the feel of a place when I visit, so this week I’ll be going back to all the places I’ve missed telling you about.

Although I this post is titled Bar Harbor, it’s really about the college I stay at there. My Maine conference is always held at a little college within walking distance of the town of Bar Harbor. The College of the Atlantic on a beautiful, wooded campus where about 80 students all study Human Ecology, the one and only major they offer. The week-long conference is held in the summer, when maybe three students remain to work the dining hall and manage the dorms. What’s interesting to me, as a person who thinks a lot about environments (and particularly how they affect how people think and learn), is how much you can learn about the philosophy of the students and their school even when no one is there.

While they have one room that can seat the whole student body, there aren’t many classrooms. Although students study the same major, they’re supposed to create personalized classes with their professors. So most of the rooms are sort of friendly meetings rooms where students and a professor can meet and talk.

The communal focus on sustainability is everywhere, and it’s quite interesting to see how a whole institution can really think about sustainability beyond recycling. Of course they recycle extensively and the end of every meal, you scrape your scraps into the compost barrel and place your compostable napkins in a another barrel. You’re forced to think about how much food we waste when you see what’s left after every meal. The food scraps are taken to this enormous silo-like device, where they turn into compost which is used in the large on-site gardens. The human waste makes its way into the ecosystem through composting toilets which generate electricity. You want to know what a composting toilet is? It’s basically a deep hole in the ground, engineered to direct waste and smells away from you. It’s a pretty fancy duct system, though, because they are used in multi-story buildings. I wonder whether these choices represent what we will soon all become accustomed to as we attempt to institutionalize changes to our lives that produce less waste, or whether they will go down it history as good but quirky ideas that never go mainstream.

Drama Queen

2011-06-21T15:35:00.002-04:00

Remember the girl in college, the one who always had boyfriend problems, or needed to talk to you about how her parents totally didn't get her and had cut off her allowance, or she was failing her trig class? Remember all the perpetual drama? I have become that girl. It appears that this blog has just become a long list of things that are going wrong. In actuality, I have a great life. I now live with my husband, full-time. I have a cat who still loves her life, even if she does walk around with the cone of shame. I love my job and I live in a city full of interesting food and people.

Nonetheless, it was one more thing to add the list when we went to work yesterday (Andrew has a new job!) and found that our car window had been smashed and the GPS stolen. Bleh. The police were kind enough to point out that we really shouldn't leave electronics visible, which I had kind of figured out by that point. One lost morning of work, though, and we had a new window. And maybe we'll be lucky enough, when we're trying to buy a replacement GPS on eBay, that we'll actually buy our very own GPS back again.

I guess we should have made an offering somewhere

2011-06-18T21:34:00.003-04:00

My cousin, a frequent international traveller, maintains that smooth travel is more likely to occur when you make regular prayers and sacrifices to the Magical Flying Pony Unicorn Gods of Travel. This is apparently a piece of nonsense I should have been paying more attention to before this trip. I've been away for home for not quite three weeks, and my husband for four. In that time:

-We've had rental car trouble. They wouldn't rent him the car, it had to be replaced by a new one in Ohio, Andrew got a ticket, and he had to have a decent-sized fight about the bill when he returned.

-As previously discussed, we had to cancel all the credit cards. (And the cat had to spend the whole vacation in a cone.) From the amount of complaining she's been doing, she clearly feels that she is suffering beyond the limits of the Geneva Conventions.

-On my way to a conference in Maine (right after my family vacation) I got hit with a double whammy of bad weather and mechanical failure, which resulted in an overnight in Philadelphia. I learned the lesson that once the airline has your suitcase en route, they're not giving it back. So I was late to the conference, and arrived looking a bit rumpled on top of it.

-The motorcycle developed an oil leak somewhere in South Carolina.

-On my way back from the conference, another flight was cancelled. I was confident that this time, just like last time, I would get a hotel voucher, because both flight cancellations were due to mechanical difficulties. I was informed, however, that the situation had not been officially labelled a "mechanical failure" but rather an "inability to get the aircraft from one location to another." Read those words again: an "inability to get the aircraft from one location to another" means the airplane couldn't fly because it couldn't fly.

So I thought I'd be at home tonight, cuddling the cat and drinking wine with my husband. Instead I'm in Maine, eating takeout pizza and writing you all. In spite of it all, it's been a good trip. I took part in a brilliant conference, visited practically every relative I have, and drank a whole lot of beer. Life isn't too bad.

Weather worries

2011-05-30T11:15:00.003-04:00

I'm leaving town for a few weeks. I'll be all over the place - Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Maine. The key thing to note from that list is that all of those place are in the North. Packing appropriate clothing is proving to be a challenge. To prove my point, here is some data:

Average high next week in...

Miami - 88F

Wisconsin - 75 F

Maine - 65 F

Average low next week in...

Miami - 78F

Wisconsin - 60 F

Maine - 50 F

The key thing to note is that in Maine (in June) it will be significantly colder than it ever is in Miami (in January). So what I need is clothes that keep me winter-warm without appearing to keep me warm, as that will invite ridicule from my Northern colleagues. So wearing boots and big puffy coats in Maine in June would be ridiculous, but it's what I would actually like to do. At the very least, I think I need a hat. Since the only hats you can buy in Miami right now are big straw ones, I'm thinking about having a wool hat shipped super-quick to my destination. And I will immediately commence with my high-calorie diet to bulk up for the cold weather.

Reflections on credit

2011-05-27T19:14:00.004-04:00

For the past week I've lived on an all-cash basis. Because I was waiting for my credit and debit cards to be replaced, I was forced to raid my stash of emergency funds (aka hurricane cash and my mother's pocketbook). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this affected almost every move I made. It's not too big of a deal to buy gas with cash, but I did have to check how much money I currently possessed before I made every purchase. And because I was traveling, I couldn't decide I needed a snack on the airplane or, more importantly, pay for a hotel room. Hotels don't take cash anymore (which is why you should always travel with a boss who has a credit card).

I've heard advice from money managers that if you want to curtail your spending, you should cut up all your credits cards (except maybe one emergency card) and live on an all-cash basis. I can see that this makes one aware of exactly where money is going, but I don't think it's a process that works for me. I was hyper-aware of where I spent my money this week, and because I'm such an incredibly frugal person (bordering on a cheapskate) I was troubled whenever I had to spend any money at all. Logically, I know that we have money to put gas in our car, and I know that going out to eat once a week is in the budget. But when it actually comes to spend that money, it causes me grief. My credit card is my way of buffering myself from the pain of spending. In fact, if that old trope "I make all the money and my spouse spends it all" actually turns out to be true at some time in our married life, it would be a good thing.

So, the good news is I now have credit cards. The bad news is I had to use them to torture my cat. Today she gave blood, received an infusion of fluids, got a shot of steroids, and had a lot of things poured into her injured eye. On top of all that, she has to wear an unstylish sweater and headgear combo.

Kafkaesque

2011-05-20T09:00:00.005-04:00

Preface for those of you who didn't do a degree in German Lit: Kafka was an Czech author (who wrote in German). He is probably most well-known to high schoolers everywhere for his short story, "The Metamorphosis," in which a man wakes up and finds he has been transformed into a bug. His work frequently had themes of persecution and people (futilely) struggling against bureaucracy.

Before Andrew began his trip on Tuesday, he took time to go and exchange his Maryland license for a Florida one. After all, the law says you should do it within 30 days of moving here, and this would start establishing his residency. We were surprised that the driver's license he was given was just a piece of paper, a "temporary" license that would be replaced by a proper card that would be mailed. The temporary license was a printed piece of paper, empty of photo ID, seals, or stamps, and looks like something that you could make using Word, in about three minutes. Most damningly, the paper said it was titled, "temporary permit" (This is usually what teens get in the U.S. when they're learning to drive, under supervision of experienced drivers.) When I had gone through this process, I had immediately received a card, so this was unexpected. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Andrew is a permanent resident? It was not explained, and Department's website makes no mention of these temporary licenses. We didn't worry too long, because he still had his passport for photo I.D.

And so the epic trip began. This trip involves, 4500 miles, four travelers, seven destinations, two countries, and planes, automobiles, and a motorcycle. A key component was the rental car, which he would pick up in DC and use for the next month. So when Andrew arrived in DC, the first order of business was to pick up the rental car which he had reserved in April. At the car rental company, he whipped out his brand new Florida driver's license, and the rental company said, "No, we don't think so." Repeated calls to their headquarters confirmed that it happens all the time that people arrive with these temporary licenses, and they're just left high and dry. No car rental companies will accept them.

What to do? For twelve hours, while he waited for his parents' plane to arrive from England, he debated. Back in Florida, I researched. He could go out and buy a junker car. (Why not? It's not much more than renting a car for a month.) I could fly up there and rent the car for them. (It's good we didn't do that, since my license was stolen the next day...) The best option appeared to be flying everyone out to Ohio, and then borrowing a car from my parents. (I'm thirty-five and still begging my parents to use their car...) In the end, we were saved by a coincidence. A few months ago, Andrew had sent his British license to his parents and asked them to renew it. When they arrived in D.C., we found that they had brought it with them. The rental company wouldn't accept a document from Florida, but they had no problem with one from the U.K.

Upon reflection, I realize this isn't a Kafka story, because it has a happy ending.

(And special thanks to the friends N&S who loaned A a car for the first day!)

"All we want are the facts, ma'am"

2011-05-18T21:17:00.002-04:00

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of radio shows from the 40's through 60's. I especially like the detective dramas, like Johnny Dollar, Dragnet, and Broadway is my Beat. Sometimes I'm suspicious of how realistic they really were, even though I know shows like Dragnet aimed for authenticity. For example, the victims always remember so much: "Oh, he was 5'9", maybe 5'10", and had brown hair. Medium build, and a scar over his left eye." I was convinced that I'd never remember details like that, and unfortunately (that's some foreshadowing for you) I got my chance to try out my memory today.

I had taken the cat to the vet and was driving out of the driveway, and this women motioned for me to roll down my window to ask a question. She needed a lift, just a few blocks, could I help her out, her car had been stolen recently. She needed to find her sister, did I work at the vet, boy had she had a terrible day. She talked fast, always moving around, adjusting the shopping bag she was carrying. I was juggling a cat (secured in a pillowcase, as she always is for trips), trying to figure out where she wanted to go, and mentally calculating whether she was crazy. I mean that literally, she reminded me of someone I knew who has schizophrenia; that guy wasn't ever dangerous, but he did need a lot of guidance. The whole event lasted maybe two minutes. Suddenly she saw where she needed to get out, and even offered to pay me gas money. Nice touch, that.

When I got home, I realized she had managed to slip her hand behind my seat, open my purse, and rob me of my wallet. I'm sort of grateful that she didn't steal the cell phone as well, because that made it easier to call and cancel every credit and bank card.

Now, I am no Dragnet victim. I couldn't tell you her hair color, her build, anything. I had my eyes on the road, after all, and I was looking for the hotel she said she needed to get to. In the end, it didn't matter that I couldn't describe her because the police didn't care. I filled out a form at the station, waited an hour, and then they assigned me a case number and sent me home without having anyone talk to me.

(My life has been full of drama lately. Today was Dragnet, but later this week I'll treat you to Kafka.)

Food trends (at my house)

2011-05-17T20:28:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago, I was bored at work. There was a convergence of exams to be taken, exams to be graded, and grant proposals to write. These events occupied both graduate students and faculty, but they left this postdoc (who didn't need to do any of those) a little bored. Officially my work is rather self-directed, so I shouldn't ever be bored. If I've got free time, I can find a new project. But in practical terms, I can only start so many self-directed projects before I need to interact with my co-workers.

Well, the time of boredom has officially ended. The summer semester has started, so I once again have meetings to attend, papers to edit, and feedback on my research to digest. In terms of demands on my time, I've left the desert and am now in the middle of New York City. As a result, I haven't been giving proper attention to the blog and you're all going to have to make do with some quick pictures of some of the food I've been cooking lately.

First, I seem to have become addicted to spaghetti carbonara. As a vegetarian, I've never really appreciated this dish, which is traditionally made by frying up some pancetta, then tossing it with hot pasta, a raw egg, Parmesan cheese, and black pepper. The heat of the pasta gently cooks the egg and cheese into a creamy sauce. I recently decided to try a vegetarian version that doesn't simply omit the meat, but attempts to add strong, new flavors by adding smoked tempeh (i.e "fake bacon"), butter, and capers. I've never before seen the need for fake meat, but this dish has me reconsidering. For the record, I've eaten it 5 times in the last 10 days.

We had friends over for dinner last week, and I used the excuse to try some new things. First, I found a recipe for watermelon soup, which is basically pureed watermelon, ginger, mint, and white wine (I left out the feta). It was a lovely light start to a summer meal and I would highly recommend it.

The main course was a beet pizza, topped with provolone, figs, and greens. I thought it was a little odd. The flavors blended well, but if I were craving pizza, this would not fit the bill. Still, the guests enjoyed it, so it wasn't a total loss.What's been on your dinner table lately?

Pittsburgh

2011-05-03T22:05:00.009-04:00

So, what does Pittsburgh look like? It's a lot like Cleveland. You can tell that these were both big, booming manufacturing towns that flourished in the early twentieth century. They also both suffer from the same perpetual overcast skies.

Pittsburgh had a lot of money at one point (much of it from Andrew Carnegie) and a good portion went to educational endeavors. This explains my visit to the Cathedral of Learning, an enormous 42-story building that is a cross between a Gothic Cathedral and a skyscraper.

The inside really does look like a cathedral, although instead of singing hymns, you have study hall there. It looks like great fun to study here, except that tourists are always walking by, talking loudly.

Several dozen rooms in the Cathedral are classrooms. Each one is sponsored by one ethnic group of Philadelphia. (Except the Latin American room, which is sad. Wales, which is not even a independent country, gets its own classroom. But the entire continents-spanning regian of Latin America has to cram into one room.)

To the left, you can see a typical example: the Greek room, with marble facings, a decorated ceiling, and my friend M (she's not a permanent feature of the Greek room.)

We also spent some time food shopping at small ethnic stores, so I could stock up on things that are difficult to find in Miami. High quality Asian groceries are hard to find, which explains the nori and bean curd skin knots. Varieties of looseleaf tea are rather rare, which I attribute to the preponderance of Cuban coffee.

(Cathedral of Learning exterior photo by Piotrus)

New glasses

2011-04-29T17:04:00.002-04:00

I got a new pair of glasses. What do you think? I acquired this, my second set of vintage frames, at a flea market in Seattle. Then they sat around for almost a year before I sent them off to get some lenses put in. Everyone knows I'm a missionary for Internet eyeglasses, right? This pair cost me $15 for the frame and $30 for the lenses. (Of course, if you're willing to buy new frames, you can get frame plus lenses, at many places, for about $20).

****

I'm off this weekend in Pittsburgh, visiting M (otherwise known as the lady in the red hat who married us). In packing, I've encountered yet another travel problem: what kind of outfit can get you from 85F to 40F? (That's 29C to 4C for my international readers.) Instead of glasses that automatically get dark when you go outside into the sunlight, I need lightweight trousers that grow a layer of insulation when I step off the plane.

Minor catastrophes

2011-04-27T11:30:00.002-04:00

I have recently had the opportunity to do comparative grossness analysis. I can conclusively state that I find fleas to be more disgusting than sewage. You never know where fleas are going to appear next - on your pillow? on your dinner plate? - but you know exactly where sewage is (all over the bathroom floor and filling the tub) and what to do about it (call the landlord, stat).

It is awfully nice to have Andrew around. I forgot that being in a partnership means not only lovey-dovey stuff but also having a person to share the load when minor catastrophes occur. Just as we got the fleas under control (in physicist terms, I'd say we're in a steady-state situation), our drains backed up again. Hence the sewage filling the bathroom. This is the second time this has happened in the past year, and it's because a large banyan tree (you know, those enormous, strangling fig trees) found the drain pipe and discovered a rich food source. Its roots clog the pipe and so it will have to come down. The resulting situation was yucky but the landlord got a plumber in quickly with a temporary fix, so we have running (and draining) water again.

I really do love old houses, and I'm glad we live in a house that's been around since the 1920's. Our house is full of character (i.e. rooms that aren't quite square and ceilings that aren't quite level), and I enjoy that. But I also enjoy having a landlord who deals with all the mishaps associated with an old house.

Food for a celebration!

2011-04-20T22:24:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow my marriage goes from part-time to full-time again, because Andrew is moving to Miami. What would you do in preparation of such a momentous occasion? I cook. After all, my husband has been eating pasta with jarred tomato sauce and tofu for the past year; he deserves a good meal.

I decided to make something I'd never made before - lasagna with homemade noodles. Lasagna is already so much work, with the cooking of the tomato sauce, the making of the bechamel sauce, and the assembling of the lasagna, that I can never summon the energy. But this time I decided to buy myself a bit of time by using ricotta instead of bechamel. Plus, I have this new toy that makes noodle creation much easier, three pasta attachments for the Kitchen Aid mixer. I can't make noodles much faster than I could with my hand-cranked pasta maker, but it does take much less physical effort.

I had some of the lasagna tonight. I was surprised that using homemade noodles didn't radically change the lasagna, because homemade fettuccine is orders of magnitude better than dry fettuccine. But by making the noodles myself, I was able to make the much thinner than store bought, allowing for more delicate layers. The lasagna pictured, although only about an inch and a half thick, is six layers.

As an aside, when I tell people that my husband will be moving in this week, most of them have been very excited for me. At my dance class (Did I mention I've started taking a dance class?), the reception was rather subdued, and we moved on to other topics. Later one women mentioned that her husband works on a ship (and so is away from home for months at a time) and the other has a husband who runs a business in India. He just returned for a visit after being a way for two years. No wonder they weren't impressed by my paltry one-year separation.

The kindness of others

2011-04-17T18:55:00.002-04:00

I stopped to get gas on my way to church. After filling up, I tried to start the car, but there was no power whatsoever. This is a reoccurring problem with our car. Every few months, enough corrosion builds up on the battery terminals so that the connections are broken. Andrew keeps tools in the car to deal with this, so I called him and he started to talk me through the process. As soon as I put up the hood, though, three gas station employees came over to help. One guy brought the baking soda and water, one guy cleaned the battery, and one guy taught me Spanish for dimples: "camanance." I was on my way ten minutes later and all my grumpiness about my capricious car was gone.

Later in the day I decided to go the beach. In summer, Miami's weather can be pretty variable, so I checked the weather report before I left. When I get there, though, I enjoyed fifteen minutes of sun before the showers started. (I was thus reminded that 10% chance of rain means that one out of ten times you'll be unlucky.) I tried to wait out the rain in the car, but after an hour I gave up. I headed home to deal with my laundry (which I dry on a laundry rack outside), where I expected to do a lot of rewashing. However, I once again benefited from the kindness of others. One of my neighbors had tucked my laundry rack under the awning, and the clothes were almost dry.

This could have been a rotten day, but instead I'm feeling pretty good about people in general.

Saturday lunch

2011-04-16T12:53:00.003-04:00

One thing I appreciate about my vegetable buying club is that it tries to group veggies by cuisine. Sometimes we'll get mushrooms and Chinese cabbage and Japanese sweet potatoes, and then it's easy to see we'll be eating Asian that week. This week we got carrots and celery and parsley, which felt very French to me. I had leftover cooked lentils in the fridge, which led to this terrific lunch: warm lentil salad with fried eggs. I'll definitely be making this again.

Unintended knowledge

2011-04-12T20:19:00.005-04:00

The vacuuming and chemical applications continue unabated. The cat has been banished to the bathroom for the week so that the attacks of the fleas on the furniture and the fleas on the cat can take place on separate fronts.

In the meantime, I am grateful for any distractions, so let me pose a question to all of you. A coworker recently remarked that my extensive knowledge of all things motorcycle related seemed incongruent with the rest of my interests. It's true, and I think it is an accident due to my upbringing. If you were hauled to years of motorcycle races and treated to decades of discussions of motorcycle purchases, trades, and repairs; and if you too had relatives who requested motorcycle cameras, motorcycle underwear (yes, it exists), and motorcycle armored jackets, you too would know a lot about motorcycles. I did my best to avoid learning: I spent many weekends reading in a tent or pop-up camper, while my mother, father, and brother all competed in trials motorcycle races.

So my question to you is: what subject do you have knowledge about, simply due to the family you born into, or the people that were born into yours?

Highs and lows

2011-04-09T19:45:00.002-04:00

Andrew passed. His committee asked him loads of questions, but requested only minor corrections. So it seems extremely likely that he'll be able to move down at the end of the month as planned.

I'm so glad that I was there, and I almost equally happy to be home after a week away. Unfortunately, I walked into a situation common to Southern Florida: a house crawling with fleas. I won't go into details, but visible bugs and visible blood is not a good combination. It's been a long day of pesticides, flea baths, and endless cleaning. The cat and I are both pretty worn out, and success is not yet guaranteed.

I changed my mind.

2011-04-05T21:27:00.002-04:00

I've decided that, actually, I'd really like to see Andrew's defense. And I have a sneaking suspicion that in spite of his protestations, he'd like to have me there. So I bought a ticket this afternoon,and I'm flying out of Orlando straight from my conference. I'll be there for about 36 hours, and it's so worth it.

Travel

2011-04-03T19:41:00.005-04:00

I'm only one day into my latest conference and I can tell that I'm just burned out a little. I like travel in moderation, but my current schedule is too much for me: six conferences in six months, plus three other trips. Conferences are only nominally about formally presenting research; they are also about getting informal feedback on your research, telling people about your new wild and crazy ideas, and hearing about what everyone else is doing. I'm thinking about ways to scale back my expectations for this event, because I have upcoming conferences that I think will be more important.

If I wanted to complain about my crazy travel schedule to my husband, though, I'm not sure I'd get a lot of sympathy. Once he's done with his dissertation defense and moving to Miami, he's embarking on extensive tour of America. It combines his graduation, a trip with his parents to Ohio and Toronto, then a family reunion. All in all, he'll travel 4500 miles (that's 7200 kilometers) in three weeks, divided between a rental car and a motorcycle.

This is what the route looks like:

Größere Kartenansicht

Summer is here

2011-04-02T10:20:00.002-04:00

I am loathe to admit it, but I think summer has arrived in Miami. I know that those of you still in the grips of cold wet rain, or even snow, can not sympathize with my sinking feelings, but they're still there. Somehow, I think I had associated hurricane season (June-November) with summer, and so I had expected the dry season to last for another month. But all the signs are present: I've had the air conditioner on every night, and the almost daily downpours have begun.

Today, I'm headed to Orlando for a conference. It's not going to be any cooler there, but since we'll probably never emerge from the climate-controlled conference center, it probably doesn't matter much. I expect this conference to be low-key; I don't have many responsibilities, and it's a new conference for me (science teachers instead of physicists or physics teachers) so my goal is simply to better understand the kind of research that's done in this field.

In other news, Andrew defends on Thursday. I can't be there, but my parents are driving from Ohio to attend, so he'll have ample family support. I'm sure it will all go well, but keep your fingers crossed for him.

The end is nigh

2011-03-27T19:02:00.003-04:00

Andrew will only be living in Maryland for one more month and his landlady wanted to take some pictures of the room to post in an advertisement for a new boarder. This meant he had to clean up a bit. I think this may have been the first time he had vacuumed since he moved in, because his landlady was so astounded that she sent me a picture of the blessed event.

Studying happy people

2011-03-26T12:27:00.003-04:00

Today's another working weekend for me. I'm headed to a conference in early April and I must have a poster and paper ready to present there. I make it a high priority to limit my working hours; in academia (like being self-employed), it's easy for your work to expand to fill all possible time. This weekend is one of those times it can't be avoided,but I think it all evens out. I don't complain too much about academia's flexible working hours when I'm using them to take a three-day weekend...

I am very happy to be doing the work I'm doing right now, and not just because it pays better than graduate school. In graduate school I spent four years studying people (teaching assistants) who often weren't very happy about what they were doing. They had good, often valid reasons for why they were unhappy, so I'm not blaming them. And I know that studying ineffective situations and unhappy people can lead to effective remedies. Nonetheless, it was often wearing to analyze mainly negative interviews. At my new university many things are going well, and my job centers on reporting on and explaining why they're going well. So I've spent the last few weeks talking to people who tell me how much they like their class and how much they're learning in it. It's an absoute joy to be using the thesaurus to find synonyms for "enthusiasm" and "friendship" instead of "concern" and "worries."

Learning to be a more effective woman in physics

2011-03-25T09:34:00.004-04:00

Where I have been? To Dallas. Only for the weekend, but I'm using it as an excuse for the lack of posting in the past few weeks. I was in Dallas for the American Physical Society Convention. The APS is big enough that it has two big conventions every year (and many small ones); I've never been before, because I hang out with the physics teachers more often. But 8000 physicists were converging on Dallas, and this year I had to experience it. One evening we played "Spot the Nerds" which involved identifying physicist clusters from the general population of downtown Dallas. It too easy when they left on the badges, but there were also clues like gender ratios (Ten men and one women? Physicists.) or not-quite-right fashion choices.

I was really there for a workshop being held before the conference. Because of the aforementioned gender ratios, some women scientists can use a little extra help negotiating the predominantly male culture of their workplace, and the APS offers workshops to train women in physics in communication and negotiation skills. And boy did I learn a lot.

Before I go any further, let me make a few disclaimers: I don't think poor communication or negotiation skills are special to women, and I bet many men could benefit from lessons like these. I'm equally sure there are women who wouldn't need a workshop like this. But I will say that the advice and techniques resonated with most every woman in the room.

First off, I was surprised in that women needed to be convinced that negotiation was important. I heard women say, "I trust my employer; he's a nice guy." and "I don't care about money" and "I should be grateful for a good job and not ask for too much money." The organizers' (terrific) answer to this was: you need to ask for the money and resources that you need to do a great job, because that benefits your university as much as it benefits you. (This was particularly meaningful to women raised in countries where it's not acceptable to ask for things for yourself, but it is encouraged to work toward the greater good of a group.) Next, we learned the important mantra, "Thanks for telling me that. I'll think about it and get back to you." This is for when someone tears you down, suggests something unexpected or inappropriate, or otherwise engages your emotions in a way that you can no longer function effectively. Get out, get a break, and then you can restrategize. I learned how to stride into a room, look someone in the eye, and avoid prefacing what I say with "I think" or "just". I learned how to sit at a table and take up space so that when I speak, I'm noticed. (Can you tell that an acting professor was one of the instructors?).

Most importantly, I learned two lessons. One is, go into a meeting and have a clear understanding of one thing (and only one thing) that you want that person to do for you. Second, when I go to negotiate or argue a point with someone, it's not simply enough to have my list of reasons why it's a good idea to do it my way. Reasons are good, but there are dozens of other tactics: appealing to morals, establishing common interests, bribing, begging, threatening, etc. Many of them won't be appropriate in your setting, but you have choices (effective choices!) beyond simply restating your reasons and hoping someone will eventually see the wisdom in them.

Now, if only I had some conflicts to resolve at work...

Erdbeeren

2011-03-09T18:38:00.003-05:00

Strawberry season here lasts from December to about April. So today, after work, I headed to the you-pick place to get some very fresh berries. I should have brought strawberry-picking clothes. It's surprisingly difficult to navigate a strawberry patch in heels and stockings.

When we eat crepes tomorrow for dinner (to belatedly celebrate pancake day), you can bet that a great number will contain Nutella and these berries.

The gleaming skyline of Miami

2011-03-07T18:47:00.002-05:00

I survived the DC trip. I learned lots, I was exhausted when it was over, and I will be taking a break from that research for a bit to recover and assimilate all the feedback I got on my research.

This trip was my first time back to DC since I left. I found myself trying to think carefully about my love for DC and my growing appreciation for Miami. I lived in DC for ten years (split into two different periods, mind you) and I love it. I appreciate the diversity of people, the culture, the museums, the public transportation, and the food. However, it is unlikely that Andrew and I will end up living there, because of our particular career choices. In comparison, Miami is currently a temporary stop: a post-doc position generally lasts two to three years. But it's not completely impossible that such a job turns into a permanent relocation.

So I often think about what it would be like to live in Miami all the time. If I quantified my feelings (is this something everybody does? Or just scientists?), I would say I'm about 85% happy with Miami. Many universities are located is small, or small-ish towns, and I am much happier in a city. I like living in a city large enough to have a gleaming skyline, and one that has good restaurants (even if they feature meat-heavy menus). I love seeing sunshine almost every single day of the year and living in a diverse community. However, I miss two things, and I miss them quite a bit: usable public transportation and the changing of the seasons. Miami does have public transportation, but not much of it goes to my university, which is far inland from Miami proper. As a result, I had to choose between living in a neighborhood I liked, near to the heart of the city, and living in a more suburban-y area, near the university. I chose the walkable neighborhood and the car commute.

I know that some people (my father and uncle, ahem) mock me for missing winter. But the changing of seasons is an integral part of my culture as I know it. The changing seasons tell me to eat different foods, wear different clothes, and engage in different activities. You picnic in the park in the summer, and you curl up with a good book in the winter. But in southern Florida nothing changes. It's a little sad to imagine planting a garden without any of the plants I love from my childhood - lilacs, irises, and daffodils, for example. And it's equally hard to wrap my mind around a life where I'll never want to eat stew or mulled wine, because it always feels like August.

I love my work here, though, and (as I mentioned) I'm 85% happy. Research shows that humans tend to rationalize things so that their likes and dislikes align with the decisions they've already made. So I'm pretty likely to only get happier with Miami as time goes on.

P.S. Tomorrow is Pancake Tuesday! Don't forget to make yourself some pancakes and live it up before Lent. (Regardless of your religion, everybody can get behind eating pancakes, can't they?)

ZPD

2011-02-23T23:22:00.004-05:00

Although the vacation provided a welcome respite, the last two months have been stressful for me and Andrew. I've been preparing for a work trip to DC, which happens next week. I'll be so grateful when it's over, because although it's very useful for me professionally (I'm learning more about how to write grants, and I'll be giving a talk to my old research group), I'm doing things that aren't familiar to me. In education talk, I'm in my Zone of Proximal Development, which is the place in where you're on the border of the skills and knowledge you know, and where you need experience with other people and activities to proceed. It's also the place where you learn. But all this learning is exhausting, I tell you.

Andrew's a bit stressed out because, well, he's madly writing a dissertation. And he's gotten sick three times in the last two months, which is more illness that he's experienced in the past two years.

I don't want to complain too much. I have a good job, my husband will be living with me in nine weeks, and I ate homemade spaghetti for dinner. Life could be much worse.

What I learned on my summer (okay, winter) vacation

2011-02-22T21:52:00.003-05:00

Where have I been? Well, I've been on vacation. My whole family come to visit me. (Just the parents and brother and his family, thank goodness. I don't know what I'd if my 10 aunts, 8 uncles, and 16 cousins came to town.)

We rented a condo in Miami Beach, because our house is too tiny. At one point, Andrew was trying to convince me that all eight of us could stay in our 350 square foot apartment, and he and I would sleep in a tent outside. Luckily, I know a foolish idea when I hear one. Our apartment, so cozy when two are sharing it, seems positively bursting when four people even try to all sit in the living room.

Anyhow, we had a great time. My report on will be brief, alas, because I'm madly preparing for a work trip to DC next week. However, I do have time for a list of what I learned during my summer vacation.

1. That's my nephew. I learned that he can eat at least four clementines in a morning, probably more if he can convince someone to give them to him.

2. I learned that Florida strawberries are really, really good. My niece loved picking strawberries, and I loved filling my freezer. I might go back and get more, because boy-oh-boy are local strawberries different than those berries you buy in the plastic packages at the supermarket.
3. Miami Beach is gorgeous. Even though we were staying only 20 minutes from my real home, waking up to this view really made it feel like we were on vacation.
4. I learned the four-year-olds can, and will, color on any paper they can find. My niece made many pictures, as well as hand-colored valentines, one for me and one for my cat (who came along for the vacation).
5. There's great gelato in Miami! We ate gelato four times last week, and it reminded me of our trip to Rome. Actually, Miami Beach did remind me of our trip to Rome, what with all the restaurants whose tables spilled out into the pedestrian shopping area, the crazy-expensive clothing stores, and the parade of beautiful people.
More vacation pictures soon, hopefully.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood...

2011-01-27T14:45:00.006-05:00

That's the first line of the opening song from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, a children's show that I very much enjoyed as a kid. And this is the introduction to my neighborhood, made especially for those who will never get a chance to visit me in Miami.

I live in the Design District, which is in between Midtown (aka Wynwood in the sign) and Little Haiti.

My neighborhood is filled with houses built in the early twentieth century, many of which are built with a porous rock called coral rock. I can't find any good references to coral rock, so maybe that's not the real name. But it does look like coral. There's a mix of one- and two-story houses and many have red tile roofs. The house below is pretty typical, except for the enormous eight-foot tall angels guarding the front door. Aren't they incredible?
The design district is full of people who are hipper than you or me. Lots of building sport murals.
This is on the main road through the neighborhood. It's art, but I don't know anything more about it. It's been there since we moved in, and it looks pretty permanent, but it doesn't look polished, the way civic art usually does. Maybe it's the chain link fence around it that gives me the raw art vibe.
We have lots of furniture shops. Lots. And you will find nothing from the Colonial, Victorian, or Arts and Crafts styles here. It's all trendy - mainly white and streamlined. Leather, glass and plastic are welcomed. You don't see a lot of tapestry, I must say.
Here's my favorite part of the tour. When we moved in, my landlord told us how to get to the store: Walk down three blocks, cross the railroad tracks, and then go through the hole in the fence. The store's on the other side." And there's really a hole cut in the fence. To go around the fence would be a detour of a dozen or so blocks, so everyone uses the hole. Sometimes there's even traffic, and I have to wait for people to pass through before it's my turn.

And since we live near Little Haiti, we see signs in Creole and murals of Obama.

Have I convinced anyone to come for a visit?

This and that

2011-01-22T15:34:00.002-05:00

It's a quiet cool day today, which makes it perfect for lots of cooking. We're having our first guests over for dinner tonight. I don't know why I waited so long to start inviting people over, except that I somehow thought that I should "know" people better before I invited them. But recently it occurred to me that inviting people over would allow me to get to know people. And cooking at Christmas reminded me how much I enjoy doing big, elaborate cooking for people.

Andrew's been in and out of the house all day. He only arrived last night, but has plenty of car repair planned during his stay here. If there's one thing I've learned since meeting him, it's that there's always one more thing you can repair or tune up on a car or motorcycle. It occasionally drives me crazy to lose whole weekends to car repair (you'll recall that we're a one car family, although we live in a very walkable neighborhood). However, I do appreciate that our car, aged sixteen years, has never been un-driveable.

I've been consumed with two problems since I got back from Jacksonville. One is personal and one is business, but neither is tragic. First, our refrigerator isn't quite working, and it took me several days to determine that for certain. The landlord has been great about this, and has had the repairman out twice. The freezer is working fine, and it appears to be a leak in the seal between the door and the fridge compartment. While parts are being ordered, I'm able to keep things sufficiently cold by rotating jugs of ice between the fridge and the freezer.

At work, I've been struggling with a challenge. Presenting my ongoing research at the conference last week made me realize that I'm trying to make new kinds of claims with my data that I haven't done in the past. In particular, I'm trying to see if I can use video data, which is best at telling you details about a particular moment, to talk about larger patterns in students' behavior. It's frustrating to be so stuck, but it's also nice to have a challenge. I've set myself a deadline: if I can't say anything meaningful by April, I'll move on to a new project. But in the meantime I'm reading lots and discussing lots with people who might have good ideas.

I've had some good news too. Andrew has picked a committee and set a defense date (April 7th!). This means he almost certainly will have moved down here by this summer, and that makes me very, very happy.

Getting to know you

2011-01-08T17:23:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow I'm off to Jacksonville, Florida for a conference. (Note for those less familiar with U.S. geography: this conference is in my state, but it's at the northernmost point and I'm at the southernmost point. That makes it a seven-hour drive, so I'm flying.) I'm especially looking forward to this conference. Since moving to Miami last summer, I've been trying to make friends, but that takes times. And it's rare now that I get to spend time with old friends, the ones you have a shared history with. I've been going to these conferences twice a year for five years now, and so while it is work to prepare talks and attend meetings, it's also great fun to catch up with people I've known for quite a while.

I've had some difficulty figuring out how to make friends since I moved here. My coworkers are great, but I know I need non-work friends too. I'm not much of a joiner - my hobbies of cooking and reading are generally solitary, and I couldn't find a club or organization I really want to join. In the fall, though, it occurred to me that church might be the thing. An old high school friend is active in the Unitarian Universalist Church, and I've attended them in the past. Unitarians provide religion for the non-religious (atheists and pagans welcome), and the church that we joined has an extremely liberal definition of "young" for those who participate in the "young adult" group. (Basically, anyone who's not retired seems to turn up.) I've met lots of people, and lots of people I'd like to get to know better. (That's my definition of a potential friend, I guess.) Tonight I'm off to volunteer with some of them at a fundraiser. I think I'll be bussing tables, which is the work I tried to get away from by earning my PhD, but it's all for a good cause.

Back and forth

2011-01-05T09:55:00.002-05:00

Andrew and I have our airport routine down pat. He always leaves on Tuesdays on the 7am flight, because that's cheap and gets him to school at Maryland by midday. So yesterday we woke up before 5am, and I drove him to the airport. It works out pretty well, because then he sleeps on the whole flight to Maryland, and I have enough time to go back home and sleep for a few more hours before heading to work. Yesterday I had driven back home, had something to eat, and was crawling, gratefully, back to bed at 6am. The phone rang and Andrew said, "It turns out my flight is tomorrow. Can you come pick me up?" I should have told him to wait at the airport until tomorrow, but I'm awfully fond of the boy. So I drove back and picked him up and then today we woke up at 5am to do it again. This time he actually flew away.

Happy New Year!

2011-01-03T10:07:00.004-05:00

My New Year's Eve was filled with a bit more drama than I normally prefer. I like celebrating New Year's Eve even in a low-key way, but since I've met Andrew our celebrations for this holiday have been hit or miss. The weekend trip to Chicago to visit my cousin? Terrific. The night in Wales when we forgot to buy sparkling wine and Andrew spent the evening trying to find a a single spot in the room to place the TV aerial (antenna) so that we could see some sort of celebration on the TV? Not so great. (Wales is a lovely country. But it's pretty dead on New Year's Eve.)

This year I planned our evening well in advance, determined to have a proper celebration. I bought tickets to a musical and made reservations afterward at our favorite Indian restaurant. The drama crept in, though, because of the car. Our car needed a new half-axle and Andrew thought it would take about a day to do it. Just to be sure, we blocked off three full days, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, when we wouldn't need the car. I worked from home, and he promised that the car would be done by Friday evening so we could drive to the theater. Unfortunately, the car repair didn't go as smoothly as hoped, and on Friday afternoon my living room was filled with tools and car parts. I was ready to cancel everything, since it seemed like it would be difficult to get taxis on New Year's Eve and the we had not chosen our destinations for ease of bus access.

In the end, the car was finished thirty minutes before we needed to leave. (Well done, Andrew!) We saw Beauty and the Beast, the musical (which earns an less-than-enthusiastic endorsement from me), had a great dinner, and managed to be home before midnight. That last part was important, because the Miami population celebrates with both fireworks (European-style) and gunfire (Afghan-style). I had heard of occasional deaths from all the celebratory gunfire, and wanted no part of that.

Highlights from my Christmas holiday in Ohio

2010-12-28T01:28:00.002-05:00

1. Waking up at 3am last Tuesday and standing in a cold, snowy field with my parents and husband to see the full eclipse of the moon. I believe that every single day we were in Ohio it was cloudy, but the skies happened to clear at that hour. I thought it was incredibly cool that my parents would wake from a dead sleep and look at the moon with me.

2. Decorating the table. My father and I designed this one together.

3. Discovering that my husband knows how to draw. We colored with my niece and nephew for an afternoon. We were there with paper and pencils and then he just produced recognizable scenes on the page. This is something I’ve never been able to do, so I’m rather in awe.

4. Reading. I love reading, and whenever I go on vacation I’m reminded that I want to do it more. I read to my niece and nephew, I read my own books, and now (thanks to Andrew) I’ve got a Kindle so I can read even more.

5. Cooking a four course English Christmas dinner: Welsh rabbit, standing rib roast roast with onion gravy, roast potatoes and vegetables, and a boiled pudding with custard sauce. I learned that Welsh rabbit is actually cheese sauce on toast and that boiled puddings (which are just cakes that are steamed rather than baked) are deliciously moist and just as easy to make as regular cakes.

6. Reveling in winter. I appreciate many aspects of Miami, but I really miss the changing seasons. I soaked in the winter feeling as much as possible, which meant taking a walk in the woods while the snow was falling and drinking Gluehwein.

A styling car!

2010-12-12T13:10:00.005-05:00

Chicago: Days 3 and 4

2010-12-05T23:54:00.003-05:00

Sorry about the long radio silence. Work has hit me hard, and it's not going to let up until I take my Christmas vacation. I thus present an abbreviated version of our last two days in 'my kind of town, Chicago'.

It turns out that Andrew didn't ever remember visiting a zoo during his childhood. His whole family loves animals, so I guess they were too busy visiting the animals at wildlife preserves, model farms, parks, and beaches to make it to a zoo. So we visited one of the last free zoos still around in America - Lincoln Park Zoo. It was a small-ish but excellent zoo. The unseasonably warm weather that we had enjoyed the previous days had disappeared (and since I had accidentally left my winter coat in storage) I waddled around wearing two shirts, two sweaters, and two jackets. I was not exactly an icon of style, but I mainly stayed warm.

That night we had dinner a restaurant which was exclusively vegetarian. When travelling, we're often lucky enough to find vegetarian restaurants that cater to the foodie crowd, or high-end restaurants that serve vegetarian prix fixe menus. It seems a bit cruel of fate to give me a decent job so that I can afford to go to restaurants like this but plunk me in a city like Miami that would never support such a restaurant. In any case, Green Zebra served a great meal. We had a panna cotta, which I've never had because I didn't know they could be made without gelatin. The waiter assured me that it was done with agar, so I may be trying that myself one of these days. We also had a lovely potato soup with smoked sunchokes and a pasta in brown butter. These dishes, of course, made me vow to buy a smoker and learn how to make brown butter sauce.

During our final day we squeezed in a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. I love this art museum, and have visited many times. But this time we only had a few hours and Andrew had never seen anything there. So we availed ourselves of the "If you only have an hour, see these twelve paintings" insert in the guidebook. I felt like the epitome of a tourist, checking off the paintings: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks? Check. American Gothic? Check. Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte? Seen it, moving on. But sometimes it just turns out that way.

Then we were off to the airport and to our respective homes. And those were our four days in the town that Billy Sunday couldn't shut down.

Chicago: Day 2

2010-11-21T20:20:00.004-05:00

The last little bit of my vacation disappeared when I ate the last kernel of the Garrett's popcorn on Friday. I had rationed it, to make the vacation last, but I guess it's time to admit it's over. Luckily, we've got Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations approaching.

On Day 2, we took a boat tour on the Chicago River, led by the Chicago Architectural Foundation. Andrew enjoyed it much more than I expected he would, as evidenced by the fifty plus photos we have of random skyscrapers. I learned lots of history, none of which I can remember right now, and I got thoroughly chilled, a sensation I can still remember distinctly.

Dinner was ethiopian (Thanks, Tim - Ras Dashen was terrific!) and I discovered that Ethiopian beer is orders of magnitude better than Ethiopian wine. They had several authentic beers, all of them a chocolate-y, port style, which goes perfectly with spicy veggie purees. We ended the evening with Billy Elliot, a musical based on the movie. It's set in northern England (county Durham) and their accents were spot-on (not that I could tell - I asked Andrew afterwards). It was a terrific show, but it reminded me once again of the perils of wearing eye makeup to the theater. Even happy shows have a tear-jerker song or two, and then I'm left looking like Tammy Faye Bakker.

Chicago: Day 1

2010-11-18T08:26:00.004-05:00

I was lucky enough to have ended up in a hipster neighborhood (Wicker Park) filled with vintage shops. I didn't do this on purpose (a disclaimer I must make, as my husband may have thought that this was a carefully-laid plan to spend all our money). I spent most of the first day puttering around, ducking into shops. I emerged with a renewed resolution to wear more vintage clothes, and more hats.

After that, I headed downtown to meet Andrew for dinner, because he was still busy doing conference things during the day. On the way, I made sure to stop for one of the iconic tastes of Chicago- Garrett popcorn. In particular, the Chicago mix is my favorite - a blend of cheese and caramel popcorn. Trust me, it's better than it sounds.

I had some time to kill, so I spent an hour at the Bean (aka the Cloud Gate). Almost everyone who walks by it has the urge to walk right up to the sculpture and make faces or goof around, which makes for exceptional people watching.

Then, on our way to dinner, Andrew and I discovered a good reason to come back in a few weeks, to see some live theater:

Our dinner turned into more of an adventure than I expected. I had set my sights on Ethiopian food, because there is no Ethiopian in all of southern Florida. I had left my list of recommended restaurants back at my room, so we relied on the guidebook, which placed three different Ethiopian restaurants within a few blocks of each other. Unfortunately, the guidebook was seven years old, and not one of these three restaurants still existed. Despairing, we ended up at an Indian restaurant, the Standard India Restaurant. The food was uniformly great, but the best part was the host. He was extremely personable, wandering around and checking in on each table repeatedly. We learned that he was a law professor and a director at a director at a global company. His family runs the restaurant, and he's a helps out (in his spare time?).

Andrew and I have been eating Indian together since we met, and to me it's a romantic food because our favorite restaurant catered our wedding. I've been a bit melancholy because that restaurant (Udupi, for all you former UMders) has closed, and I felt like a little part of my life was gone. But I guess I can have hope that I'll still continue to have new Indian food experiences.

Sleeping in style

2010-11-16T19:07:00.002-05:00

Chicago. I loved it. As a sort of belated trip journal, I'm going to post each of the remaining days this week.

****

When I was a kid, we never stayed in motels. If we didn't have a relative who lived in the location of interest, we used something called Mennonite Your Way. This was a sort of organization where you submitted your name to a directory, indicating that you were willing to host people who needed to stay in your area. In return, when you were planning to visit somewhere, you'd call or write a letter and ask if the host if they could offer shelter. I think there was generally a bed or fold-out couch for my parents, but usually we kids ended up on the floor. You weren't supposed to pay anything, although you could bring a small gift. As the name suggests, this was intended for Mennonites, and since my parents had both been raised Mennonite, that seemed to be good enough. Throughout my childhood we had all kinds of interesting people stay at our house, and I thought it was perfectly normal to have complete strangers (but only Mennonite strangers!) drop by your house.

This option is no longer available to me, so I now use something called Airbnb. This isn't quite free, but it's along the same principle. When I was planning my trip to Chicago, I looked up who hosts there. The options vary - sometimes there's just a place on the floor, sometimes a couch or bed, or even multiple bedrooms - and prices vary accordingly. I used this in New York and plan to use it again at Thanksgiving. I couldn't have asked for a better experience in Chicago - my host was a young electrical engineer, who says he can often cover a good portion of his rent doing this. He made us breakfast one day, and offered good tourist advice. And I paid $35 a night for a room with no set check-out time and a genial host. It's the hipster's Mennonite Your Way.

2010-11-09T20:36:00.005-05:00

My life has been a bit over-vegetabled lately. I've joined a vegetable buying club, where someone buys organic veggies in bulk, and distributes them each week. It's sort of like a CSA (community supported agriculture), but you can cancel at anytime and you're not limited to the produce of one farm, or even one region. The produce is much higher quality than what I can get at the grocery store, and they give you so much that I split the share with a colleague. This week, because I'm going away for four days, I've been trying to eat my week's veggies in just two days. It's turned into an experiment to test how much produce one can eat without upsetting the digestive system. Today I've managed to eat a pomegranate, a persimmon, collard greens, half a (small) watermelon, spinach, half an onion, two poblano peppers, and a half a pint of cherry tomatoes. Oof.

This hasn't hampered my Indian cooking too much, although I only managed one Indian dish this week: spinach pakoras. You mix fresh spinach into a batter and fry up patties. The most interesting part is that this recipe forced to buy chickpea flour (available at your local Indian grocery), which I would somehow like to start using more, because it's so much healthier than wheat flour.

Cooler weather

2010-11-06T21:18:00.003-04:00

Today was cool, in the 60s (the mid teens, Centigrade). I'll admit that this is not exactly winter weather for most of the world, but I was able to wear a jacket. We also turned off the air-conditioner, a rare occurrence since moving to Miami in May.

My landlord had built a tiny fire in a makeshift fire bowl. It was lovely to sit by the fire with my wine and a book, and also reassuring. I've been wondering if I can survive in a place that doesn't have winter. Now I know that if I can have a few chilly days (and luckily, I'm easily chilled), I won't feel like I live in perpetual summer.

I'll also get the chance to experience some winter weather next week, when I spend a few days in Chicago. I haven't had Veteran's Day off since high school, but my university designates it an official holiday. So I'm making it a long weekend and flying up to Chicago, where Andrew will be attending a conference. Chicago is one of my favorite cities. I've visited many times, so there aren't lots of "must-sees" that I haven't seen. This frees me up to do other things. I'm going to take a river tour of the city run by the architectural society, and I'm going to do some vintage shopping. I also hope to find some Ethiopian food, one of the few cuisines that South Florida doesn't offer.

Speaking of cuisine, the latest attempts on Indian food had mixed results. Palak paneer (spinach and cheese) is definitely a keeper, because it's so easy. You puree the onions, garlic, and spices in the food processor, then fry it. Add the pureed spinach and cook, then add the paneer before serving. On the other hand, the pudding I made was odd and too heavy. I'm used to American puddings, in which milk is thickened with flour and maybe eggs. The Indian pudding was made by boiling down the milk until it was one-fourth the volume, with a handful of rice to thicken. I had to stand and stir the milk for a half an hour while it boiled down, and then at the end I had basically made evaporated milk. Next time I'll just buy a can of sweetened condensed milk and call it dessert. Or better yet, I'll make cake.

Trick or Treat!

2010-10-31T19:31:00.009-04:00

We celebrated Halloween last night, at a costume party. Andrew worked on his costume all day. Can you tell what he is?

I was a godess, Athena to be exact. She's the goddess of war and wisdom. I couldn't find an owl to perch on my shoulder, so I'm a bit heavier on the war than on the wisdom part.

I hope you were all duly impressed by Andrew's costume, because the other guests were. He won the prize. Sadly, there is no place for the tree costume in our tiny home, so it's already been, erm, composted.

Upgrading

2010-10-25T22:52:00.002-04:00

When I finished graduate school and got a post-doc position, my salary approximately doubled. The thought of this increase is one of the things that got me through the six or seven years of graduate school. We've tried to remain frugal, because while the our income increased we now have two households to support. But I have allowed myself a few indulgences. First off, I upgraded the quality of gin I drink, and I've started buying sparkling water (which I love, but how could I justify paying good money for water and air?).

I think I've added one more indulgence to the list. I've been a newspaper reader for decades. Even when I was a poverty-stricken chef-in-training in Albuquerque who couldn't afford a subscription, my uncle and aunt would save their papers for me. I'd pick them up each week and ration them out, reading one each day, exactly one week late, so that I could have a paper every day. Living in DC spoiled me, I know, because the Washington Post is a terrific paper. Even now, when Andrew comes to visit, instead of flowers he brings me a copy of the Post. The Miami Herald is, unfortunately, a pale imitation. I mean, it has two sports sections, almost no business news, and I've already mentioned the plastic surgery column. So I've been supplementing with a weekly New York times. The Sunday Times costs a whopping $6 an issue, which is more than I like to pay for a lunch. But it comes so jam-packed with readable material that I can work on it all week, and the only side effect is that it makes me want to move to New York.

And so I ask, if you had a bit of extra money to spend on one new, regular indulgence, what would it be?

Practice makes perfect

2010-10-21T14:08:00.006-04:00

This is going to sound obvious, but sometimes the best way for me to improve my cooking is to just keep doing it. In graduate school, I decided that I'd like to make really good chocolate mousse, so I just kept making it, week after week, until it was consistently just right. (After all, even poorly executed chocolate mousse is no great hardship to eat.)

When I moved to Miami, I inadvertently improved my pasta making skills. I liked eating homemade pasta, no one (aka my husband) was around to ask for variety, so I just ate fresh pasta and marinara sauce every night. I've discovered that I can make a large batch at once and freeze individual portions, so it's not as much work as it seems. And since I've made the dough a dozen times, I know exactly what the texture should be, how long it needs to be kneaded in the mixer, and even how to simultaneously feed dough into pasta machine, turn the crank, and pull it out (without growing a third arm).

So I was thinking that I'd like to get better at Indian cooking. I love to eat Indian, but cooking a meal always seems like an all-day affair. Partly that's because when I like Indian buffets - I want the bread, and the raita, and a couple of curries, and some rice and dal. And then I'm too tired to eat what I've made. But it might also be that I'm just not sufficiently familiar with Indian cuisine, and that I could get faster with practice. So I've vowed to make two Indian dishes a week, which will conveniently make up my school lunches. (And I can keep eating pasta for dinner every night.)

This week's attempts were aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower) and eggplant cashew rice. They were both good, but the eggplant rice was better, because it had a range of textures. I always think of Indian food being quite heavy, but if you stay away from both paneer and cream-sauce dishes, as I did this week, it turns out that you don't get enough calories. I've been hungry every afternoon. I guess a little more ghee wouldn't go amiss.

Growing pains

2010-10-13T18:05:00.002-04:00

My new academic home feels different than my old campus, and that's not just due to the palm trees and fountains here. It's also because Florida International University is, so to speak, a young whippersnapper.The university was founded in the 1970s, and it was about twenty years ago that it was classified as a Doctoral/Research University. (This is a classification that tells you about the primary focus of the university - whether it's teaching, a lot of research and what kinds of degrees it offers - associate's, bachelor's, or PhDs.) The physics department here only started offering doctoral degrees a few years ago.

Compared to other American universities, which may have been around a hundred or so years, thirty-something is pretty young. You can tell we're still growing because they're constructing a half a dozen buildings at once. We're always short classrooms, which means the classroom nearest to my office has classes most days from 8am to 8pm. Because 90% of the students commute, they can't study together in their dorm rooms, and there's not enough places to meet in the library and student union. So students meet outside in walkways, and sometimes in hallways, to work.

Parking is one of the most serious deficiencies. Because I have a faculty parking permit, I'm lucky enough to get a parking space as long as I arrive before 11am. Students that want a convenient spot try to arrive around 8am. If you arrive at 9am or 10, there's really only one solution, and it's a very civilized one. You join a queue. In each parking lot, at the exit door on each floor, a line of cars waits. When a student who's leaving emerges from the door, the first car follows that student to their parking space and takes their place. Then the whole queue advances one car length. It still means that you have to wait dozens of minutes, but now instead of cruising all over campus, you can conveniently read (or text) from the comfort of your car while you wait.

Fall

2010-10-04T20:35:00.003-04:00

I know, in my head, that Miami has two seasons, rainy and dry. And I think I'm starting to understand, for real, that that means it's always going to be summer. Since I moved here in May the days have been humid and daily high is in the low 90's F (low 30s C). Now the temperatures have dropped to the mid-80s F (high 20s C), and I have been informed that this is fall.

Fall - real fall, when the air gets crisp and you can wear a jacket and kick leaves as you walk down the street - is my favorite season. I'm going to miss it quite a bit this year. I've managed to schedule some winter weather for myself, with a long weekend in Chicago in November and a Christmas week in Ohio. But there will be no leaves crunching beneath my feet nor any impetus to start cooking with pumpkins and apples.

The most unusual "fall" experience I've had in Miami? I had to walk through the Christmas display at Home Depot to get to the garden section where I was buying some seedlings for my herb garden.

Andrew thinks we should get a Christmas palm instead of a Christmas pine tree this year.

Mostly Miami

2010-09-18T14:20:00.003-04:00

A continuing examination of the unique culture and customs of this Southern Florida city.

Miami time. When you're on Miami time, that means things don't start on time. This is one of the things about this Latin city that wounds my German soul. I was warned early on that I should show up to parties at least 30 minutes after the start time. This is not natural for me; right now I deal with it by getting ready to go, and the parking myself on the couch for 30 minutes to wait until I'm allowed to leave. This even applies to more planned events, in my experience. This week I went to my first concert at my new university which was, presumably, not the first concert ever stage there. The performers were excellent, and the hall was beautiful. But the organizers didn't seem quite so, well, organized. When I bought my ticket a half an hour before the concert started, they told me that they were running a little late with the soundcheck and that the house wasn't yet open. They opened the door ten minutes before the start, but they were still figuring out who should collect the tickets and where this should be done.

People kiss when arriving and leaving events. (Not at work, thank goodness.) This takes more coordination than one might expect, because I haven't quite figured out whether the on-the-cheek kind of kiss or the more in-the-air kind of kiss, and which people I'm supposed to kiss.

They eat late. I'm originally from the Midwest, where we eat the evening meal around 6pm. (What we call that evening meal is a whole other story.) When I lived in DC, it seemed like restaurants would get crowded around 7 -9pm. So, when I wanted to make a reservation at a nice restaurant for our anniversary, I reserved several weeks early, to get the 8pm time I wanted on a Friday night. I needn't have worried: when we arrived, the restaurant was mostly empty, and it wasn't until 10 pm, when we were leaving, that it was getting full.

****

I was going to spend the weekend thrifting and hanging out at the beach, but my plans changed quite suddenly today. At 1pm I figured out that the car was overheating, and Andrew helped me diagnose a malfunctioning radiator fan. At 2pm he bought a plane ticket, and he'll be arriving tonight for a two-day visit. This seems just a little absurd to me, but it's actually cheaper to fly him in than to take the car to the mechanic.

Naples

2010-09-11T18:43:00.005-04:00

Last week I had a birthday, and as a gift to you all I arranged for a national holiday so that everyone could have the day off. You're welcome.

Andrew usually plans a day trip for my birthday. This year he had mixed success: both of the restaurants he had researched turned out to be closed and we had some car trouble. So the food was nothing extraordinary, but the serious clanking noise we heard turned out to be a piece of nonessential metal that had rusted off and gotten stuck in the wheel well. I was really glad that Andrew was around to take off the wheel and examine the situation. If it had happened on one of the weeks that he lives in Maryland, I would have had to use the ignore-it-and-hope-it-isn't-serious or the enrich-a-mechanic-being-paid-on-time-and-a-half approach. However, this year's birthday trip was quite a success when compared to last year, when we got stuck in traffic before getting on the Bay Bridge. We sat in traffic for a few hours, ate our picnic lunch in the car, and then turned around and went home. On top of that, I returned my gift from Andrew.

This year we drove to Naples, which is a town on the west coast of Florida and not (sadly) the Italian city known for pizza. I had heard that beaches on the west side of Florida were beautiful, and the sand did not disappoint. It was white, very soft, and the beaches were shallow and very long. Not that many people were around, and there were loads of shells for the beachcombers.

We saw a rainbow on our way home. It feels like Florida has an unusually large number of rainbows. I've seen at least a dozen since I moved here, but I can't figure out why there would be more here. Are the rainbows easier to spot because it's so flat here? Is it because the rainshowers are so isolated? Scientists, please help me figure this out.

the new look

2010-09-02T19:58:00.004-04:00

I gave myself a haircut last night.

This morning, when I style it, I thought it evoked a flapper bob.

Later, I realized I had turned myself into a Romulan.

Stormy weather

2010-08-30T18:22:00.003-04:00

I don't want to tempt fate, but I've completed my hurricane preparations. That doesn't mean that I'll be happy if one hits, but I can't really think of more to do. The number one thing you need in a hurricane, I'm told? Cash. The ATM's won't work, of course, and neither will the credit card readers. So if you need water or gas, cash will be your friend.

Thus, I've stashed a bit of cash. (Go ahead, burglars, you'll never guess where I hid it.) I bought two collapsible water containers and if a storm threatens I'll fill them up. I've purchased emergency cat rations (otherwise known as dry cat food), since the frozen cat food could thaw and decay. I've squirreled away food for me too: I wanted stuff I wouldn't have to heat up and that would last as long as possible, so when the power goes out I'll be eating vegetarian soup and whole wheat matzoh (good until 2013!). The landlord says he'll take care of the windows, and if we have to evacuate but can't get up Interstate 95, the cat and I have reservations at a pet-friendly evacuation center.

I wonder what I've forgotten...

Be my guest

2010-08-24T22:52:00.003-04:00

I recently attended a pig roast in Ohio, hosted by my parents. Don't ask me why a vegetarian spends hundreds of dollars and hours of travel time to watch people eat pork; it can't be rationally explained. All I can say is that I enjoy seeing all of the guests, although this is tempered by watching my husband eat a meal composed entirely of pork (including the eyeball).

My parents moved into a new, larger home a few years ago, which has provided the space for two offices as well as two guest rooms. I have thus discovered that my mother has a knack for provisioning guest rooms. She makes sure that each room has a nightstand with a lamp and alarm clock, which provides a level of comfort above and beyond the overhead light. Towels are laid out and there's an empty dresser for your stuff. This year she also set out a few books that might make interesting bedtime reading and I loved that. I have an aunt in Georgia who always puts fresh flowers and snacks in her guest rooms. I appreciate all the thought these people making their guests comfortable, and I can't wait until I have a home big enough to provide the same courtesies.

The Keys

2010-08-12T14:25:00.009-04:00

I'd rate Key West an excellent weekend getaway. We spent last weekend there and I was pleasantly surprised at how much we enjoyed it, even though I don't fall into any of the targeted demographics: gay, party animal, or beach bum. I prefer to vacation in big cities for long vacations, but I can appreciate a beach town for a few days.

We left early Saturday morning. Although it seems like Miami is as far south as you can get on the mainland of the US, it still takes an hour or so to really get to the bottom. Then you join the queue of cars headed south, because there's just one road that connects the 40 or so islands that are car-accessible. This road happens to be U.S. Route 1, which is the easternmost north-south highway in the US. It ran through my old home of College Park, as well, so it's nice to see it again. Route 1 is mostly two lane, running across islands and long bridges, until it ends (or begins, depending on your point of view).

Once we arrived, we had lunch. I had done research before I left, as always behooves a vegetarian foodie, so we ate well. Sadly, the picture on the left was my plate when I was done with my meal. I hate wasting food, so that picture was taken with great sadness. I don't quite understand how European restaurants (yes, I'm talking to you, Amsterdam) manage to serve small servings at steep prices and American restaurants manage to serve heaping servings at cheap prices. Wait, I worked as a waitress long enough to know where the savings are coming from...

Next, we were off to a butterfly house. My favorite type of butterfly was the one you see in the upper lefthand corner: the black and white one. It fits with my aesthetic, although it seems a bit unfair to expect butterflies to be monochromatic.

Andrew's pick for animal of the day was probably these quail. They were running around on the floor inside the butterfly house. I honestly didn't know that the U.S. had ground-dwelling birds; I would have thought that the native predators would have prevented there survival.

I also added to my new collection of tropical fruit pictures - bananas! I didn't know that such a large, striking bloom was involved. We photographed this one in the garden at Ernest Hemingway's house.

More from exotic Miami

2010-08-06T17:34:00.003-04:00

Today I'll continue my report on the less-familiar aspects of Miami. As soon as I moved here I thought that Miami felt quite different than the other (numerous) places I've lived in the U.S. It can take quite a bit of thought, though, to pin down exactly what feels different, but here's a start:

1. All the windows have decorative grilles over them. I live in what is called a "transitioning" neighborhood, which means we have well-appointed houses and fancy art galleries quite near to convenience stores that accept food stamps. So I did wonder if the grilles were for safety. They are, but from hurricanes rather than people. They're made so that you can slip wood in between the grille and the window during hurricanes, which looks like a lot less work than boarding up your windows.

2. The summer is "off-season." Sure, summer is still the hottest part of the year. But the growing season actually takes place from October-April, when it's not so hot. And since all the tourists visit in the winter, summer is the time to snag deals at restaurants and hotels.

3. Miami has a reputation for a strong focus on bodily beauty. This does appear to be true. I especially enjoy the weekly plastic surgery advice column in the paper.

Exploring Florida

2010-08-02T22:55:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to start exploring Florida beyond its beaches. Since it is the height of summer, many of the tourist attractions, such as the Everglades, are out. I have heard horror stories of the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes in the Everglades this time of year and I have no desire to confirm them. Sad to say, there was a reason so many swamps in Florida were drained, and while I'm happy that swamps still exist, I'll be waiting until cooler weather to go visit them.

The first stop on our day trip was for the purpose of fortifying ourselves with frozen custard. The verdict: not bad, but not amazing. In the past I done all of my local food research using Chowhound, but the southern Florida section of said website is rather new and this limits my ability to locate really terrific food.

The primary goal of our trip was to visit a historic lighthouse a few hours north of Miami. In one of the gardens there I saw something I had never before seen: pineapples. I knew they grew low to the ground but somehow I never imagine that the immature versions would be such tiny, perfect versions of the full-size pineapple. Each of the fruits pictured here are about four inches long. They seem so exotic to me.
Here is the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse. It's not very tall, but since Florida is very flat we had a good view from the top. Our guide had lots of historical tidbits to feed us. The one that stuck with me, perhaps because it was so sad, was the fact that at one point in the nineteenth century, all the Native American tribes indigenous to the area were wiped out, either due to disease, war, or deportation. The tribes that are now in Florida originally came from Georgia and Alabama.
This weekend we're going to Key West, which I expect to offer less in the way of history and more in the way of fruity cocktails.

An even tinier house

2010-07-26T16:55:00.004-04:00

Those of you who saw our old house may remember that it was cozy. 425 square feet of coziness, to be exact, and about 75 square feet weren't usable by anyone over four feet because the ceiling sloped. Well, I decided that we could live even more efficiently. Our new house has 350 square feet (32.5 square meters for my metric readers). The new apartment feels much smaller because we lost almost all of the (extensive) closet space that we used to have. In order to make this workable, we had to (1) purge and (2) hide stuff. We disposed of a lot of furniture before we moved to Miami, but we also ended up putting stuff in storage. Our stored belongings are things we really wanted to keep, mainly tools and camping gear, but not things that we needed for daily living. Andrew kept trying to convince me that we could just leave all the boxes in the living room and walk through the piles (maybe we could have built furniture using packed boxes?) but I'm a woman who needs lots of empty space. After a few months of arranging and decorating, I am ready to reveal the beta version of our Miami home.

The living room:

The kitchen, also known as the other side of the living room:

And let's take a closer look at that lamp. Why, it's covered in paper cocktail umbrellas! Just like this one. (I have a feeling that people are going to either love or hate this lamp.)

The bedroom has, as of yet, been untouched by the Wand of Style. Suggestions are appreciated.

Portland: coffee, food carts, and conferences

2010-07-25T18:04:00.003-04:00

I spent last week at a conference in Portland. I especially enjoyed seeing all of my work friends this time, perhaps because I haven't been socializing much since I moved to Miami. I also appreciate my job more after talking to other postdocs; I was reminded that some jobs can require more adjustments than others. I don't want to sound too Pollyannish (there's nothing more boring than a happy blogger), but I really like my work and the people I work with.

Portland has always been one of my favorite cities, and it did not disappoint. I made multiple trips to an outstanding coffeehouse. I didn't have time to stop at the chocolate shops that everyone was raving about, but I did have many lunches at the food carts that cluster at certain parking lots and parks. (This makes me officially hip, I believe.) Oh, and did I mention the beer? A microbrewery in the area, Deschutes, supplies a lot of the local restaurants, and one night we also had a beer flight at Deschutes where I had a beer that tasted exactly like lychees. (It was not a fruit beer. You'll have to trust me that it was great.)

While I enjoyed the beauties of Portland, however, the cat had to remain at home. When I'm away, a four-year-old neighbor takes care of Phi. Her parents have discouraged me from paying her, so I'm left to the only other compensation tool I know: food. This has been an interesting challenge, as I want the food to appeal to a small girl, yet be enjoyable for her parents (who do most of the work, I presume). So this time I went heavy on the pink and the sprinkles, but also took the time to make French buttercream and genoise. While I was at it, I made a smaller version for me, so everybody will eat well this week. (If anyone has more suggestions for baked goods that would wow a four-year-old, please send them my way.)

As American as...

2010-07-03T22:14:00.003-04:00

I was invited to an early Independence Day party. We were encouraged to bring dishes with a patriotic theme, and people went all out. There was a roast chicken, with a little gravestone that said "R.I.P. Senator Robert Byrd." There was a huge plate of red, white and blue sushi (the rice was died), arranged in the shape of the flag. Numerous flag-decorated cakes, cobblers, and pies made appearances. Oh, and we can't forget the Fox News Kool-aid. (Drink the Kool-aid!)

I wanted to make an apple pie, but I was concerned that there would be an overabundance of desserts. So I made a savory apple pie. I had to make up my own recipe, because I couldn't find any that had all the ingredients I wanted to use. The pie was well received (= I didn't have any leftovers to take home) so I'll be making it again. Here's my abbreviated recipe.

I made enough pie crust a double 9" pie. While the dough chilled, I slowly cooked two thinly sliced Vidalia onions. I wanted most of the water to cook out and for them to get dark and soft. I added a few pinches of salt and pepper and a teaspoon each of thyme and sage. Then I peeled and sliced three Granny Smith apples, tossed them with 2 tablespoons of flour, and a bit of sugar and thyme. Lastly, I sliced 8 oz of sharp cheddar. I layered first the onions and then the apples in the pie crust, then topped them with the cheddar and the second crust. A bit of egg wash, and 45 minutes later I got this:

Happy Independence Day!

In a galaxy far, far away

2010-06-28T18:19:00.002-04:00

I’ve been neglecting this poor blog for a while. There are always excuses, of course, but the nice thing is that if you’re too busy to write stuff on the blog, it often means that you’re doing interesting things that you can eventually write about.

I’ve spent the past week in Seattle. This city is beautiful, and about as far (both geographically and culturally) as you can get from Miami. I’ve never flown from one corner of the US to the other, and I hope I won’t often have to do it. There came a point on the trip, when I had already flown five hours, and yet I still had two and a half hours left, when I thought, “How can I still be in the same country?” Wikipedia claims that they are, respectively, the northern-most and southern-most major cities in the Continental U.S., and that doesn’t include the fact that you also have to travel east across three time zones.

Seattle has presented a great contrast to Miami. Here in Seattle, someone thought that my sandals, which have a low heel, might prevent me from walking to lunch. After all, most everyone else is wearing clogs or Teva-style shoes. In Miami, my clothes are two understated: my heels are too low and my skirts are too long. I definitely don’t wear enough jewelry. Seattle also reminds me that Miami is really, really flat. It’s not just Mount Rainier, which rises majestically in the distance (at least, it does on the days when it’s not raining), it’s also that most roads wind around, up and down over the hills. They all seem happy about the warm weather here, because it recently topped 75 degrees, after nine months of cooler weather. I don’t think we go below 80F in Miami in June.

The more alternative attitudes shouldn’t catch me by surprise, and yet they do. I went to a street fair yesterday and bought some kettle corn. They explained that they had salted popcorn and a sweet and salt corn. I said I was in the mood for salted popcorn, and the seller replied, “Isn’t it great how our body just knows what it needs.” They just don’t talk like that on the East Coast – we don’t get in touch with our bodies. We just take them to the gym. On the other hand, it’s nice to be in a place where eating vegetarian doesn’t get you weird looks. (Yes, it really is proving harder to be a vegetarian in Miami that it was in Germany.)

I’m here to work on a project for work. Due to unforeseen circumstances, it’s not been as rewarding as I hoped. Still, it’s great to have a week of cool weather, and to spend time with my former advisor, who’s working on this project. Plus, I get to take a field trip to a wind farm at the end, and that just sounds like science nerd nirvana.

The marvels and mysteries of Miami

2010-06-10T15:16:00.003-04:00

A marvel: the beaches

I grew up in the Midwest. Sure, we had beaches. We had the Great Lakes, which provided us with sand dunes and waves and a place to splash around. But the beaches here amaze me. I'm used to water that is green, or maybe brown. And, unlike the water that comes out of the faucet, the water in the Great Lakes (or any of the 10,000 in Minnesota) is opaque. In Miami, the water is turquoise, right up until you walk into it, at which point it is clear. This blows my mind. I feel like I'm in some version of a Hollywood beach, because I didn't know until now that it was possible to see your feet when you're chest-deep in the water. And fish! You can see little schools of fish swimming around your feet. Too cool.

A mystery: They sell a lot of stuff at intersections here.

That is, when you pull up to a red light, people walk through the stopped cars, offering cold water, flowers, and shrimp. The other things they sell are bags of citrus fruit - limes and lemons. The lemons, though, appear to have all the zest removed. I've been puzzled by this, and have discussed it with many people. Removing the zest makes fruit go bad more quickly, and lemon zest is a pretty useful ingredient. I know now what's going on, though. Any guesses? (Answer at the bottom.)

A marvel: the dragonflies

Around campus, I can walk through what can only be called swarms of dragonflies. I'm not a big fan of bugs (as almost everyone knows) but dragonflies might be my favorite bug. They're beautiful, they don't bite you, and they don't give you the plague. The combination of palm trees and dragonflies makes me feel like I've stepped back into the Paleozoic era.

A mystery: why more people don't die in car accidents here

The columnist Dave Barry always joked about the terrible drivers in Miami. I know that lots of people claim they have bad drivers in their city, so I've been busy comparing this to DC. I can't yet tell if there are more bad drivers here, but they do seem to be bad for a different reason. In DC, aggressive driving is the norm. There was a lot of honking and a lot of tailgating. People were bad drivers because they were important and they had somewhere to be. Here, people are bad drivers because they're just not paying attention too much. So the car drifts in the lane a bit, or they pull out in front of you - they're not trying to be mean, they just aren't too worried about their driving. I'm still working on adapting to this new attitude. I honked at someone the other day, and somehow felt like I had been extremely rude. The guy hurriedly backed up out of the lane, and I realized that car honks are quite rare here. I'm still adapting.

***The secret is, they're not actually lemons. They're oranges, and they've been peeled by a machine, and then bagged. This makes them easy to eat, although I think it also means that you have to eat a huge bag of oranges before they spoil.

Vacation retrospective, the UK version

2010-06-03T18:08:00.003-04:00

When we were on vacation last month, I didn't have much Internet access and so I couldn't put record quite as much as I had hoped to. Here's the first in a series of posts to remedy that.

Andrew's family's favorite place to vacation is in Wales. It's only a few hours' drive from their house, but offers a very different landscape compared to the Midlands, where they live. My previous visit occurred in December, so I tend to think of Wales as a cold, empty place. In the spring and summer, though, it fills up with vacationers, and the shops and various attractions are open. For us, the principle attractions were the beach (although it was still cold enough that I wore a hat and gloves) and fish and chip shops. The fish and chip shops provide all things deep fried, so I believe my options included a veggie burger or pineapple rings, both battered and fried.

One of our day trips included a trip to Puffin Island. In the picture below, Andrew's father gazes hopefully (but fruitlessly) toward Puffin Island, which appeared to have no puffins on the day we visited.

We had extraordinarily good weather for the UK. It was generally warm and sunny, and we all enjoyed it immensely. I especially appreciated this when we got to Germany, where it was unseasonably cool.
The crowning event of our week was a trip to the opera with Andrew's parents. The tickets were a gift from them, and I found it quite a novel experience to attend opera with parents. My parents, although they did their best to introduce me to many types of music when I was a child, had no special love for opera. In fact, I believe my father offered to pay for my voice lessons only on the condition that I promised never to sing opera. So, it was a great gift. Thanks, G & F!

My new campus

2010-05-28T13:16:00.002-04:00

The campus where I now work is very, very pretty. My previous campus had great columned brick buildings, lots of green space, and trees galore. It felt like exactly what a campus should be: elegant, serious, and a bit ponderous. The feeling at my new campus can be summed up in one word: lush. There are a dozen small ponds, many with fountains. There are gazebos and winding paths, shaded study areas and plant life everywhere.
It's also filled with wildlife. Ducks and ducklings are most noticeable right now, but I've also seen turtles, dragonflies, geckos, and birds of all sorts.
Sometimes, as the golf carts zip by me, I think this must be what it feels like when you stay at a tropical resort. But hopefully such resorts have a few more slushy drinks and a few fewer meetings.

Miami

2010-05-23T14:35:00.003-04:00

Yesterday it was really hammered home to me that I no longer live in DC. We were running around to thrift stores looking for furniture, when we stopped at a random Greek place for lunch. (My current eating-out rule is "No Cuban." This eliminates half of the options, but I haven't yet figured out which Cuban places, if any, are going to have vegetarian menu choices.) In spite of the fact that half the restaurant was filled up with a private party, we still had a nice lunch while looking out over the river that ran along the back of the restaurant. The two-for-one drink special helped a bit too. (A second, free glass of prosecco? Why, yes, I think I will.) Then the birthday party started getting going, and that's when we realized that the guests really were Greek. The cranked up the music and started yelling "Opa." There was a group dance, a la "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and dishes were smashed on the tile floor. The waitress helped lead the dancing and smashing, so I assume the restaurant didn't mind. It was an unforgettable lunch.

This may be stating the obvious, but Miami feels like a foreign country sometimes. Our neighborhood, built in the 1920's, is filled with small-ish houses set close together. Most have an enclosed yard, and the plant life is verdant. It feels very green here. When I step outside, I always disturb geckos, which seem to have a prolific population here. Our neighborhood is known for two things: great restaurants and art galleries that are so posh that you might need an appointment to get in. I won't need any of those appointments, as my postdoc salary does not cover the purchase of $4000 vases. If you walk a few blocks in the other direction, though, it's a wasteland where boarded-up buildings and convenience stores proliferate. As we drive around, I notice that it's common for the atmosphere to cycle rapidly from yuppie-ish to not-quite-ghetto and back again. There are huge numbers of boarded-up businesses around. I don't know if this is due to the current economic crisis, which hit Florida especially hard, or if it's always been like this.

The cat thinks she has died and gone to heaven. She's a little old lady who has retired and moved to Florida, and it's everything she ever wanted. She'd happily spend all day in the garden, sitting under a bush and napping. She watches the geckos, and the big tropical plants provide some protection from the regular rainstorms.

My commute to work is longer than I'd like: Google maps predicted a 20 minute drive, which I thought would realistically take 30. It's taking closer to 45 minutes, which is mostly done on freeways with four or five lanes of traffic in each direction. For someone who dislikes driving it's quite exhausting, but I'm hoping it'll get better. I need to experiment with different routes and different timing. Unfortunately, buses aren't an option at this university - only one route goes from downtown Miami to the university, and it would take me over an hour each way. The whole university is really geared towards commuters, whether those commuters are faculty or students.

Andrew will be here staying here in Miami for five more days, so we're using that time setting up the house. He can put up pictures and curtain rods faster than I can, so I'd like to get that all done before he leaves. Then I'll start exploring Miami. I can tell there's a lot to see here, as soon as I get settled.

A week in the UK

2010-05-16T08:50:00.003-04:00

Our new apartment is full up to the top with boxes. Clearly some stuff will have to go. While I deal with all the unpacking, I have a guest post of sorts: my mother-in-law chronicled our week in England and Wales. Check out the pictures and excellent commentary at The Stochastic Gardener. Note how many pictures show me I walking in the great outdoors. Even my mother-in-law knows what a rare event this is, so documentary evidence was collected.

Coming and going

2010-05-12T09:49:00.003-04:00

I'm typing this post in an empty house: it contains a computer, the few boxes of things Andrew will be keeping in Maryland, and an unsuspecting cat who will soon be inside a pillowcase, riding on my lap for three days. The upcoming trip seems straight forward enough. We get on I-95 in DC, and then we just keep driving on I-95 until it deadends at the bottom of Florida. Then we're there.

I'm happy (and pleasantly surprised) that everything has gone so smoothly up to this point. Sunday night we were returning from a day trip to see castles in the Alps foothills (the tourist must-see Neuschwanstein, for those who know your castles) when I read a message board at the central train station announcing the closure of the Munich airport. The volcano again. My heart sunk and I immediately started mapping out all the things we would need to do if we were stuck in Munich for the next week. Luckily, the airport reopened the next morning. Airplanes were flying, but much of the airspace over the Atlantic had been closed, so our flight was rerouted to go up over Iceland and then down Canada. This lengthened our trip considerably, so we arrived in DC six hours later than expected. I will forever have a special place in my heart for the friend (aka Mr D. the pig butcherer) who drove up to the airport twice - once for the flight we weren't on, and once to pick us up on the midnight flight.

The last two days in Munich were perfect. We had sunny afternoons, and we took full advantage of them. The first day we rented bikes, which allowed us to cycle to a palace for a tour and then to the English Gardens, Munich's version of Central Park. We had lunch in a huge Biergarten, where Andrew discovered that a liter mug of beer really is a great deal of beer. The next day we took the train two hours south to visit Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau, the castles inhabited and built by Mad King Ludwig. These castles are visited by every tourist that enters Germany, and thus I have now visited them three times. I hope and pray that was my last time. But they are an interesting part of history, Neuschwanstein is the fairytale version of a castle (it's the one copied by Walt Disney) and the surroundings, in the foothills of the Alps, are gorgeous. Plus, it was an excuse to eat apple strudel and drink beer while enjoying the sunshine in the mountains, so I can't complain too much.

Now, the next trip begins. Next stop, Miami.

Wir haben München erreiccht.

2010-05-07T05:01:00.002-04:00

The good news is that I can still understand almost everything that I read or hear in German. This was a nice surprise, because I hadn't spoken the language in over ten years. The bad news is that my grammar, when speaking, is atrocious. Andrew is continually impressed that I can lead us around, and hold conversations with shopkeepers, and translate the television shows we watch. And I'm glad I can do those things too, but I with I didn't sound quite so much like a blithering idiot when I talk to people.

We have been lucky enough to time our trip so that we are here during asparagus season. Asparagus season is a nig deal in Germany, because the white asparagus (considered the most delectable) is only available for a week or two. I let the vegetable seller talk me into buying two kilos of white asparagus (that's about five pouds for two people), so we've been eating it almost every night. Each stalk is more than an inch thick - they are so big that Andrew can only eat three for dinner. But with potatoes and Hollandaise sauce it's a meal fit for a king (or a PhD).

The weather has been cold and rainy, so we've been spending a lot of time in museums and coffeeshops. That's not all bad, as there's a lot of cake I want to eat while I'm here. I've made a resolution to learn how to make the multi-layer fruit and cream cakes that are popular here.