zirconium

(1) Lunch (at Rice Paper) and ice cream (at Sebastian Joe's) with M'ris and Timprov. There were a number of "Yep, I'm in Scandosota" moments during this trip: among them was listening to the others discussing reindeer castration while I dug into my Nicollet Avenue Pothole sundae. :-)

(2) There's an interview of me at the Moving Poems Forum.

(3) A few weeks ago, LiAnn Yim posted praise for inkscrawl at her blog.

Lui, peering at the stew: Why is it hairy?

Moi: I think it's the anchovies.

I was a little apprehensive about going to the Chef and I in Nashville's Lenox Village last week. When I bought the Living Social voucher, the word "interactive" hadn't leapt out at me the way it did when I went to the website for more details, and I can get pretty sullen and surly if I'm feeling badgered into more interactivity than I'm in the mood to provide.

But it turned out to be a nice evening, even after I realized I'd totally gotten wrong which Lenox-something the restaurant was located around. (Note to self: do not buy anything via LS before the second cup of coffee. Ever.) The place is more mellow than its website -- I had a lovely sparkling wine (from Cielo winery) with lobster bisque, and halibut with various vegetables. The chef chatted briefly with me about the amuse-gueule (leftover coffee-crusted turkey, brie, and a sliver of scallion), tools for flipping fish, and the economics of serving lamb, but I was mostly left alone to enjoy my food, my notebook, and book in peace, and the room was large enough for the large birthday party behind me to be amusing rather than annoying.


"Thanksgiving in a bite"

(More cell-phone snapshots here)

Other recent eats:
* fried calamari at the Bosco's in Cool Springs, with iced tea
* buffalo cauliflower at Tavern, with a pint of Left Hand Milk Stout and a pint of Mayday Boro Blonde. And they serve cucumber sticks instead of celery. Rawk!
* chicken, stuffing, corn on the cob, and other sides, prepared by Jase. Happiness is comparing Music City Tent & Events warehouse sale acquisitions (*) while sipping a good pinot noir. :D

(* Jase is a party planner. I used to coordinate events for a cathedral. I don't plan to execute anything ambitious in the near future [at least in that vein], but I did leave the sale with what I'd gone for [5 champagne flutes] and then some [4 martini glasses].)

On the writing front: 2 outright rejections, 4 rejections-by-inference, 2 made-it-through-another-round, and 1 stern-talking-to to stop myself from taking on a new and intriguing but poorly remunerative assignment that would tick me off if I actually let it nibble into the time I already can't spare for [lower 4/5 of Workflowy list]. (But because I am a dreamer, it's nonetheless tucked into that bottom 5th. It'll save me from making the same notes again the next time my magpie brain darts in that direction...)

In the meantime, an item in the top 1/5 is to get enough sleep. So it's off to bed, undrafted [x] and unpasted [y] and unstitched [z] notwithstanding.

From paris day 1

Latin Quarter flat, October 2011. Note how the stove, shower, and toilet are adjacent to one another. The price was right for one day and night, though -- I set my stuff down, checked messages, napped, and later headed across the city to Kehilat Gesher to celebrate Simchat Torah.

( more pictures and notes under the cut )

As I waited for various trains, I saw a series of posters campaigning against violence: "School violence, extortion, assault, harassment ... too many young people are victims of violence in their schools, in public transport, in their neighborhood."

From paris day 1

The subject line is from Thoreau's "Conscience Is Instinct Bred in the House." It is an insufferable poem (which is I admit in line with my general opinion of Thoreau) but that line had me giggling.

A snippet from elsewhere: "The poet is not a bag of sugar!" - Wolf Biermann, "The Poet's After-Dinner Speech"

It was a mishap-punctuated week. No lasting harm (AFAIK) was done, though, and my brain apparently likes to pounce on resemblances everywhere:



The sweet potato drippings in my oven formed the head of a flopped-on-the-floor puppy...



leftover pan juices reminded me of the water and paint suspensions used for marbling paper...



...and good things happened as well. A friend from college was in town, so I put together a few snacks, including this salad (roasted beets and pickled lemon). It looked good and tasted great with the sparkling rosé she brought over. (We went to Lockeland Table for dinner; I'm noshing on leftover octopi pizza for breakfast, though it just dawned on me that I had better do something about all the garlic that's now on my breath, since I'm singing this morning. Oops...)

Listening to: the USA Today stream of clips from Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer's "Child Ballads" album (link via my friend Katy). Between that and the severe weather making the sky so very grey, I'm inclined to spend the afternoon working on fairy-tale riffs (but tax prep is calling, calling).

Reading: the Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook. Pages 374-75 provide pleasingly detailed advice on buying fresh shrimp:

When buying shrimp with heads, note that they spoil quicker and that the heads constitute about 35 percent of the shrimp's weight. So if a recipe calls for 2 pounds of headless shrimp, shells on, buy almost 2 3/4 pounds whole shrimp with shells to compensate.

Keep in mind that a shrimp's shell and legs make up about 12 percent of its weight, so if you're using peeled shrimp in a recipe that calls for 2 pounds headless shrimp, shells on, you'll require only 88 percent of that weight, or about 1 3/4 pounds.

Today's lunchtime reading was a couple of sections of yesterday's New York Times. I was struck by two mentions of historians brought to tears, both within Dan Barry's article about the Jackie Clarke collection in Ireland. In the first, Barry speculates on prize artifacts that would have changed Sinead McCoole's initially low expectations of the collection:

Was it the fabric flower, called a cockade, that Wolfe Tone -- Wolfe Tone! -- wore affixed to his hat when he was captured while leading a failed rebellion against the English in 1798? When Ms. McCoole showed the cockade to a scholar friend steeped in that era, the scholar began to weep.

The other immediately reminded me of how difficult it can be to define and observe the scope of academic projects (...and, really, projects in any sphere, but as you might guess, scope comes up a lot in academic publishing):

Often, as Ms. McCoole set out to begin another wearying day of academic mining, one of the fish shop's employees, Smokey Gorman, would give her a cryptic greeting: "And you haven’t even gotten to the roof yet." For a while she thought this meant that Mr. Gorman might have spent too much time in the smokehouse, but Mrs. Clarke eventually told her that Mr. Gorman was referring to some "modern stuff" that he once helped Jackie Clarke carry to a storeroom built onto the roof.

One day, with the end of her papered tunnel in sight, Ms. McCoole went to that room on the roof, where loads of bundles were wrapped in relatively recent copies of the local newspaper. Inconsequential modern stuff, she thought. But when she opened a bundle or two, she found rare political pamphlets and newspapers dating to the 17th and 18th centuries.

"Instead of being euphoric, I cried for two days," Ms. McCoole said. “I cried and I cried and I cried. It was just more things to do. I knew the job hadn't ended."

But when she recovered Ms. McCoole realized that she was immersed in something very rare and wonderful, a feeling now validated by other scholars.

The subject line's from Nikki Giovanni's "I am Jazz," which is in Bicycles: Love Poems, which I am reading tonight because my e-book loan expires in a couple of days.

I am cooking: "Company Carrots" (recipe from Charleston Receipts Repeats), a riff on parmesan black pepper coleslaw (because both parmesan and cabbage were on sale at the supermarket), and pork chops.

I am listening to TFS's "Blackest Crow," via Nathalie. Sxip Shirley: "The girls started singing 'The Blackest Crow' and it was like a mute volume hit the party. The party went SILENT and people listened to the women sing and it felt like that...LISTENING TO THE WOMEN SING."

Back to the stove, back to the knife, back to the pen and the paring life... ;-)

[I will probably be posting a fair bit about Charleston here over the next two weeks, because: work will be riding my tail, which means I won't be doing much in the way of extracurriculars; I need to organize my notes and snapshots anyway; some tweeps may be heading there next month for the Family Circle Cup (women's tennis); and I hope to go back in 2014 to see some tennis (there's also a challenger-level tournament there) and visit more Revolutionary War-related sites (including getting a drink at McCrady's, which I didn't manage back in November. George Washington attended a banquet there).]

I learned two new English words while reading Madeleine Kamman's introduction to oysters in The New Making of a Cook (p. 668): midden and iodic. I also learned about the claires for French-farmed oysters: "fattening ponds watered by the regular tides and in which the oysters develop to their market size."

Anyway, I was looking this up because I was revising an old poem about oysters, and this in turn reminded me of the great meal I had at Fleet Landing back in December, on my last morning in Charleston. I'd decided that I wanted to try she-crab soup before I left town, preferably someplace where I could also treat myself to a platter of good oysters, and a local oysterman on Yelp recommended Fleet Landing.

The soup and the shellfish were both wonderful, and so was the view from my seat:



( more photos under the cut )

Tonight's dinner was stuffed peppers, in consultation with this southernfood.about.comrecipe and the 13th edition of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. The goal was mainly to use the last of a jar of pasta sauce.

I was attempting to follow the Townsend-Vickery match during much of the prep and cooking, so it was a good thing that the ingredients involved did not require precision. (Ironically, it's also one of the few times I can remember the amount of filling being just right for the shells -- I usually make too much -- with just enough room for the tomato sauce.)

What actually happened:

* Earlier in the afternoon, I'd cooked several cups of barley in the rice cooker.
* I cut the tops off of two green peppers and minced the edible parts of the tops.
* I set a pot of water to boil. I immersed the cleaned-out bells in the water for about two minutes, then covered it and turned the heat down to simmer. Officially, I should have taken them out after five minutes, but what with the tennis, I left them in a while longer.
* Sautéed the minced tops with half a minced onion and half a package of ground beef. (My cast iron pan was well greased, so I didn't add any oil.)
* Poured maybe 1/4 cup of what the BYM calls "that weird Worcestshire sauce" into a bowl. (It's a Taiwanese brand -- Wan Ja Shan -- and tastes weaker than the ones we're used to. I'd meant to splash in only a tablespoon or so, but since it isn't very Worcestshirey, I didn't bother pouring any out.) Mixed it with one large egg.
* Ladled in about half of the beef-veg mixture (putting the rest in the fridge). Mixed in a couple of cups of the barley (putting the rest in the fridge). Spooned it all into the peppers. Put the peppers in the still-greasy cast iron pan and spooned tomato sauce on top.
* Preheated the oven to 325 F (convection) and set the timer for 40 minutes.
* Turned off oven when the timer beeped. Left the peppers in and continued watching tennis. Was just about to put them away when the BYM got home.

The BYM's comments: "Tasty. ...I like barley. ...It's like crunching on little frog eyeballs only not really crunchy." :-)

Autobiography

Rain spits on Nashville
as I blur butter into sugar.
So much sweetness
starts out from grease and grit.

- pld