Afternoon coffee (at 7 pm)

hese things always begin with the best of intentions, not to mention quite innocently. I had two objectives this afternoon (oh dear, and I see it's now 7pm. oops):
• Have a cup of coffee and plow through some documentation. And, I prefer having a small snack with my coffee, a croissant, a cookie, a slice of cake...
• Use up the heavy cream I accidentally bought to go in said coffee because I hadn't had coffee yet (the lack of a dilutionary dairy substance being the issue) and so instead of the milk I usually get I got a half litre of very thick, organic cream.

So what did I do? well I tweeted of course, asking for recipes. @HarlanH (data scientist extraordinaire) thoughtfully replied and reminded me of the existence of recipes that aren't for baked goods. Crazy, right? In retrospect, I ought to have just gone with his first thought and done a cream sauce for pasta. Instead, I followed his other recommendation to check out something called Eat Your Books.

As it turns out, Eat Your Books is a handy dandy, plug your cookbooks/magazines/blogs into it-search engine for physical collections. I faintly heard choirs of angels as I poked through the homepage: finally, I can search my cookbooks without pulling each one off the (rather precarious) shelf and flicking through the index, then a handful of recipes trying to find a use for my one stray ingredient! That method works ok for main ingredients, like zucchini, or pork chops, or even chocolate, but not for say, whole vanilla beans, cracked wheat, or, in this case, heavy cream.

I added my top cookbooks with haste. A free subscription only allows 5 resources on your e-shelf: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The Art of French Baking, The Essentials of Baking, The Joy of Cooking and The Pie and Pastry Bible. That covers everything I usually look through, anyway. And lo, five hundred and forty four recipes appeared!

It being me, I didn't really have many other ingredients on hand apart from the standard baking arsenal, so I used the filters to narrow things down to "cakes." The filters are actually quite useful. Frankly, a paid subscription would be worth it, only $25 a year, I think. I would prefer some integration with other services, maybe add things I bought on Amazon, or pull in my "cookbooks" tag from LibraryThing. More so, I would like to be able to search all my physical books digitally. I can always use Google Books, but I don't think I've seen a service that will let me save my books and then search them. I'd love to be wrong about this, so please correct me if that's the case.

Right, so anyway, I wound up with a recipe from the 75th Anniversary Joy for Black Forest Cake. I made it a little easier, just two layers instead of three, and amusingly enough, I had half as much heavy cream as it called for (still plenty). I also had some sweet cherries I preserved in brandy back in cherry season, so that covered cherries and kirsch, and I had the cream, chocolate, just enough eggs (market tomorrow!). So here it is, the result of two hours, a lot of flipping back and forth in the Joy for base recipes, and some impatient refrigeration time.

The grand irony here, of course, is that I just used up all the cream in the cake, and now have nothing to put in my coffee.

How My Time Vanishes

t's not that I'm unaware there are other things I should be doing, it's just that I'd rather be doing something with immediate, tangible results. Presumably this has been part of the appeal of manual labor for this generation that feels stuck and, well, flail-y. So instead of working toward long-term goals, I often find myself taking solace in some small projects around the house and yard.

You're familiar by now with my gardening tribulations, and some of my more notable baking incidents. I also sew, knit, crochet, and macrame, not to mention bind custom books, rewire light fixtures, weave beadwork, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting right now. Sometime last year (!) I picked up a pile of various twines from the hardware store to make a few more plant hangers with. After staring at my old project-to-do list for all that time I finally got fed up with myself and have started crossing things off. (First to be crossed-off was the dress I bought at the vintage shop and modified to fit and bit a little more modern (ruffles had to go)).

The next easiest project was the following collection of macrame plant hangers. When my apartments in Vermont and Arlandria lacked window ledges or sufficient sunlight, I started hanging plants in front of every decent sun-source I could. Phototropic, indeed. Some of these are from years ago when I made my first batch. The more recent ones are more awesome, I think. They're labelled on mouseover...

	Next on my macrame list is a hammock. Anyone have a pattern for a two person cotton twine hammock? I only have a single person sized pattern, not confident about load-bearing capabilities if I double it...

ps. Don't question the table I used to lay these out. It was fast. ish.

The Art of French Baking: Strawberry Frangipane

he Art of French Baking, published by Phaidon, is a beautiful book. The covers are padded and sparkling white, the pages thick and smooth, the photographs well shot and printed, and any cookbook with bookmark ribbons gets a lot of points from me. However, the recipes seem to leave a little something to be desired.

I am an experienced baker. Not an expert, not experimental, and not a chemist, but my pie crusts are tender and flaky, my bread rises and my batters are light and fluffy. Therefore I was somewhat surprised when several recipes from this book did not come together or bake in the way I expected. The instructions are quite brief, which is fine if one already has some technique, but I repeatedly found myself with a dough that didn't hold together despite extra liquid, or choux puffs that simply wouldn't rise (I tried twice in one day), or worse, cookies that burned but didn't bake through.

So now I've determined that I'll just need to reinterpret and double check the recipe for logic before I start anything. Make sure the oven temperature doesn't seem oddly high, that the wet and dry proportions make sense and that I can adjust here and there. Or at least I can make the recipes with frosting and cover up all the little problems!

Today I needed to use up the last of a flat of strawberries from market, and the Strawberry Frangipane looked pretty easy. It's just egg yolks, sugar, ground almonds and strawberries. Nothing can go wrong! Well, nothing except my being short an egg. Sigh. So I just eased back on the other ingredients. The batter was thicker than I was expected and didn't exactly pour between the strawberries, but it did melt around them once in the oven. Then it was just a matter of keeping an eye on it until the top was the perfect shade of done... except when I cut into it, the inside was not at all done. Not even a little. Back into the oven it goes.

I'm fairly fed up at this point, having never had so much trouble with recipes before. Perhaps it's partially my fault, but with every recipe coming from the same book it seems unlikely that this is entirely on me. I really want to love The Art of French Baking, but it's not living up to my expectations. You all know what the lesson is here, right?

Here's a quick list of the things I've made from this book:

• Sweet orange croquettes- excellent
• Babas au rhum- pretty good, not as fluffy as I'd like.
• Pate a choux puffs with pastry creme- total fail, no puff to be had, more like cookies. I have done these successfully in the past with a Martha Stewart recipe!
• Petit fours with chocolate ganache and sprinkles- worked well in mini muffin tins
• Duchesse petits fours- Dough didn't even slightly hold together and overcooked too quickly
• Orange gateau, I think- I have a vague memory of using a pineapple, too. dunno.
• Sweet slices- basically sugar cookies, oven temp was also too high
• Strawberry Frangipane- Ha. Maybe once it's baked for three times the suggested time!

Book review: Feynman's Rainbow

hen I started reading Feynman's Rainbow, all I knew about it was that it was on my to-read stack as a result of being a recent gift, and of course the title. I mean, heck, it includes "Feynman," what could go wrong? I had forgotten the other reference point that came with it: Leonard Mlodinow was also a writer for Star Trek. This finally occurred to me somewhere later in the book when he mentions his writing hobby and desire to become a screenwriter.

Most of the memoir/biography is about Mlodinow's time at Caltech in the 1980s, when he was unsure as to his worth as a physicist (and human being, since these things tend to devolve quickly into total failure of confidence). Supposedly, Rainbow is more about Feynman than Mlodinow, hence "biography," but I found it to be more focused on the author's soul-searching and interactions with many other characters at Caltech. Sure, there are big block quotes from his conversations with Feynman, but they're more anecdotal than anything else. That makes me think that the book rides on the famous physicist's name, but survives on the actual content.

Double rainbow over Marlboro College, 2006

And it was rather compelling content, too. Perhaps that's just because I feel like I'm in a similar, confusing, in-between place where I'm not terribly confident in my abilities. Still, Mlodinow's writing was engaging and he explained the related physics in straight-forward terms, just to fill the reader in on context.

While the book's title comes from a particular section on finding what is beautiful and amazing to you and then following that sense to your life's work, I particularly appreciated this quotation from Feynman:

I have to think I have a little bit better chance than the other guys, for some reason. I know in my heart that it is likely false, and likely the particular attitude I'm taking with it was thought of by others. I don't care; I fool myself into thinking I have an extra chance. That I have something to contribute. Otherwise I may as well wait for him to do it, whoever it is. 

A Bountiful Update

gnoring the many iterations of the issues mentioned in the previous post that came up in the process of attempting to put together this post, here's a few more recent photos of one part of my garden. Somewhat recent. A few are from as early as March, when the bulbs had just started blooming, others are from mid-June, when the veg really started getting bushy.

I may regret hosting these photos on my own domain in a week or two when I find a longterm solution, but heck, I wanted to get posts up. The next post might just go back to using Picasa for sanity's sake. The entire blog may move as well, to make it easier to reference various directories.

...But this is a gardening post, and I digress.

These are dated photos, so just know there's more growth, plus a second bed of veg not to mention a third bed of herbs. As soon as it's not so terribly hot the stack of bricks (all found in the yard) will become a small patio...

Technical Testing Tribulations

ay back in November I finally staked my claim on a corner of the internet by registering and hosting a website under my name. I had stalled for almost a full year, thinking there was too much I would want to research before pinning down a registrar/host. Turns out that was the easy part (once I realised I didn't need a slew of dedicated servers in the former Soviet Bloc).

After choosing DreamHost at the recommendation of a friend and a popular website (Lifehacker, who recently re-affirmed DreamHost's dominance), all I had to do was learn how to code an entire website. And not just any website, one that would display a photographic portfolio dynamically and interactively and [buzzword] and [so on]. Ok, so I haven't quite gotten to that part yet, but the site exists and is a decent placeholder.

The holdup is that I'm the sort of person who can't just throw up something pre-fabricated and call it a day, I have to learn how to code the entire thing myself, learn databases and cascading stylesheets, from scratch. Maybe once I've done that I could take an easier route, but without understanding the background it seems too much like cheating. Besides, most of the point was giving myself opportunity to learn, given that my photos probably aren't going to start flying off the shelves (there are some up, but they, too, are placeholders).

So in the meantime I've just been using the web export feature in Adobe Lightroom (a god-send for those of us who like cataloging, integration with other applications and services and powerful but simple tools). The problem I'm leading up to is that I'd like to stop hosting the photos I use in blog posts on Picasa and move them all over to a dedicated storage folder on my website. Heck, someday I should move this blog there, too.

The problem is that to use a photo in a post, I need to have a link to the .jpg file that will never change, or at least use a relative link to just "/kitten.jpg" rather than "http:// blah/folderA/section56/kitten.jpg" and so on. So that's one solution. But I also need the photo to link to a gallery view on my website, so that the clicker can browse through other photos from my blog, and also use spiffy navigation controls to browse by keyword or just mosey back through other parts of my portfolio.

I'm not going to list how much of that I have no idea how to accomplish, because it's too overwhelming. But, I've written an entire blogpost about it now, so that will hopefully motivate me.

Oh, and the reason there are random photos of pie here is because they're hosted on my website, just... not very sophisticatedly.

Garden Variety Anxiety

uch to my dismay, Twitter has trained me to only have witty, entertaining thoughts in 140 character spans. This makes writing blog posts a humorless and rambly process, especially if I don't crank out a post immediately when inspiration strikes (whaBAM).

So now here I am, three weeks after starting an ambitious yard rehabilitation project (it's impossible to phrase that in any clever or alliterative manner. Cookie to anyone who can) trying to remember what I wanted to say about it.

I guess the first thing would be "hire a dang landscaper with a backhoe," if you can. The yard I'm working with is (according to Zillow.com) 0.13 acres, maybe half of it taken up by the house, but with a good sized front yard and considerable backyard. When we moved in, all but maybe, maybe 20% of the backyard was either underwater or overgrown. I wouldn't want to lose the topsoil by having heavy machinery rip out the overgrowth, but regrading would be easier, nay-doable with something more efficient than a shovel.




Anyway, having thrown my back out doing too much of that by hand (and the upcoming birthday doesn't make me feel younger, either), I'm going to wait for it to actually rain again before reevaluating the drainage situation. I improvised a rain garden with existing daylilies and added irises, bee balm and a willow stick which will hopefully sprout (they always do when I don't want them to...) and a little slope and dip for water to accumulate in.





Mostly, the rest of the work is ripping out vines (english ivy, poison ivy, virginia creeper, roses, that variegated purple flowering thing and whatever else) and hopefully getting grass to grow. The new lawn needs to be tilled and aerated, but there are so many roots and bricks (which is great, I'm planning a patio, too, but at 30+ bricks randomly strewn around the yard under the grass...) I'm not sure a rototiller is a good idea.  So for the moment, turning over a new garden bed, an existing one and getting my seedlings in will take top priority.



After all of that, I'm (understandably, I hope) anxious about getting everything to grow. The addition of (free!) composted horse manure that I lugged up from Lorton (yes, by myself, in contractor bags, in my little honda) should be enough to improve the soil and feed the plants. For exciting realtime updates, just follow the hashtag: #gardenvarietyanxiety. ¹

1. Note that because twitter is stupid, the hashtag isn't searchable. Yet.

Photos of phood: Nougatine Pastry Crisps

ood lord.
I haven't posted since the holidays! The horror! Much didn't happen, then much did happen, and now I've got several drafted posts to get out and need to decide which go first. So instead, here's a couple photos of the most recent baking incident.

Earlier this month I had a request for palmiers as a birthday gift, so I [somewhat foolishly] bought a log of Amish butter from the local butcher. Foolish because 1) I neglected to notice that this was *salted* butter, something I never use and 2) it will always smell like butcher shop to me. Also probably 3) 2lbs of butter was more than I needed and more expensive than the perfectly good Cabot at home, but heck. Anyway, I had half left over and the fastest way to get rid of butter is in a 1lb butter package in pastry, SO:

Made puff pastry dough. ... only then did I go through a few recipes and realise that everything called for ingredients I didn't have (and I try to bake only with things on-hand, otherwise it would become a huge expense very quickly), fruit and cream and whatnot. Palmiers really only use butter, flour and sugar, which makes them very convenient. Eventually I found a recipe for an assembled dessert from the Ritz involving sort of a pastry sandwich around a cream/fruit filling from the Pie and Pastry Bible (I know, I know, big surprise, I'm using the book again).

The pastry discs are simply slabs of the dough rolled out thin and baked between cookie sheets to keep them flat. However, the secret (or not) addition is the nougatine crumble which tops them. I doubled the original recipe for this (figuring it can go on yogurt and stuff, too) and got a nice sheet of almond filled crunchy caramel. With a crumbled spoonful of this sprinkled on top, the pastry rounds become cookies with slightly chewy caramel and nutty almonds on top. Easy enough, attractive, and so flakey you can barely pick one up.

Merry Christmoose!

Here's a selection of photos from things done in the days betwixt holidays this last month. Some crafty stuff, some baking stuff, some decorations... A decently festive month, indeed.

Click for bigger and explanations.