Biking the Capitol

I bike to work, and I run across huge flowing tracts of tourists, guys who look like they're prepared for the Tour de France, secret service SUVs tailgating each other across town, thousands of folding chairs piled on the mall, new traffic stops in new places every day, and occasionally fellow bikers who will chat as they pedal alongside.


I've been biking the ~6 miles each way for a couple of months now, and feel secure enough about the whole business to invest in a few bike accessories. Being pretty abysmal at any form of decision making, this is a slow process, but I'm heading in the right direction. My bike (a er, Raleigh SC30 (specs), approximately 10 years old by now, and dark green [my colour preferences don't change much]) has collected the following things I find quite necessary to happy cycling:

-A water bottle holder (transferred from my previous bike), which is a bit of a tight fit between the bars of my "girl bike", but holds:

-A small 16 oz water bottle (BPA free, FWIW) from REI, which also comes into work with me and gets hourly refills from the water cooler. Yay hydration.

-A rack over the back wheel (loaned from a friend until I muster up one of my own) upon which I bungee my hulking "purse" which is really more of a satchel and is fairly unique at this point. (see photo). Someday, I might like real saddlebags (panniers) but then there's the issue of carrying something that's clearly a bike bag when I use my bike to go out places. Not terribly fashionable, but socially acceptable.

-Front and back lights, which strobe and are detachable. The back one conveniently clips onto other things, like a belt, or the back of my bag which covers the bracket the light normally sits in. I use at least the rear flasher on overcast days, and the front light going home in the evenings.

-I even went so far as to replace my old helmet, which I had gotten with the bike years ago. A friend who used to work in the REI bike shop told me they should be replaced every three years, and while this may in part be a marketing ploy, 10 years is probably quite enough. I'm self-conscious enough to feel a bit dweeby in a helmet, but heck, even I think the stylish-looking people who don't wear them are incredibly foolish.

-A bike lock (yoinked from a friend) that reaches both wheels and whatever I'm locking on to. I don't leave my bike anywhere sketchy, and most of the time it's right near a police perch, so I don't worry much. Nonetheless, I do want my bike to be there, so I lock it up all the time. It lives in my living room when I'm home, which is a bit awkward, but better than outside.

-I've had a little computer that keeps track of mileage, time and so forth as long as I've had the bike, and it's well worth it. There's nothing like assigning numbers to something to make it more fun! (or to impress coworkers with how far you ride each day)

-And just today I finally found an acceptable pair of shorts to wear. Most bike-specific shorts are rather expensive ($50+) and have schmancy wicking, padding, muscle-supporting technology, all of which is rather more than I really need. So I ended up at American Apparel getting some nice, plain cotton work out shorts.

Despite all the potential for looking like an idiot while biking, I actually feel wonderful about it. I'm not wrecking the environment, I'm getting a decent amount of exercise almost daily, and even if it doesn't make a huge impact on my body, I feel pretty good about myself physically. I don't even feel bad showing up damp and out of breath at work every morning (although I will need to find the shower in my building if I want to continue this summer). Bookending my day with half-hour bike rides makes the 8.5 hours of work more bearable (don't get me wrong here, I like my job, but it's a lot of sitting inside with no window).


View Biking to Georgetown loop in a larger map

<> So yesterday I rode from home to Georgetown, parked, shopped, discovered I had bike grease everywhere, biked the rest of the way across town to the National Gallery Sculpture Garden, listened to jazz until there got to be too many people and not enough picnic to offset the crowd, biked up to Young Chow, biked back down to the Botanic garden and listened to the Army band on the West Front, then biked back home just before dark. A note for the future: biking at dusk bites because all the bugs come out and form clouds over the trail. ~15 miles, casually. < /brag >

These Are My Confessions

Well, really just the one: I kind of, maybe, just a little, but only in some respects, like Martha Stewart. Not like-like, and not like, want-to-be-"BFFs" -like, but one really has to admire the woman. If spending time in jail doesn't cause your massive domestic empire to fold up and hide in a corner, and you pretty much built all that yourself, well.. would that I may someday be so successful (sans the imprisonment thing).

I've been hunting for the book that started it all (according to Amazon, anyway): Entertaining, the 1982 guide to all things party, from hiring help to setting the table and making a bazillion dishes for the guests. For some reason none of the used bookstores I've scoured (a significant number, both in Brattleboro, Vermont and Washington, DC. The links are to my favourites) have it in stock. I think everyone else wants to hang on to it as well. For one thing, it's an emblem of a bygone era, the 1980s. In hindsight (and I'll grant you, I wasn't alive for most of that decade) everything was bright and hopeful, exuberant and jubilant and full of optimism. Nostalgia aside, the book brings that back to us, and gives denizens of this decade and century an opportunity to modify and modernize some very classy parties to fit our own characterless era.

I did find my own copy of Hors d'Oeuvres, which is equally sumptuous and dreamy. I think juxtaposing that style of opulence in decor and food presentation with a contemporary minimalism could be very gratifying. The best part of this book is not that Martha presents themed party menus or very tasty and precise recipes, but that everything is a bit mix and match. Because my guests are so often vegetarian or vegan, I need to be on my toes with modifications. Miniature tarts and sandwiches, small bites of fruit and cheese, roasted tortellini (the pictures in Hors d'Oeuvres inspired me to make my first tortellini from scratch) are all conveniently alterable. There's usually two parts to a recipe: the filling and the base. If, for example, I really like the salmon mousse tartlets, but can't serve salmon, I can replace it with herb mayonnaise and cucumbers, a sprig of dill on top. The first menu even begins with highly interchangeable tea sandwiches (p. 19).

This is also the book that led me to discover how few people in the States know what a pain de mie pan is. I even made a bet with a friend that Sur La Table wouldn't have one, or know what it was. Someone still owes me a cookie.

All of this is actually leading up to the fact that I made a recipe from Martha Stewart Living (May 2009) for dinner last night and it was very tasty. It did, however, fulfill my butter limit for the week, so I guess I'll be having dry toast for a while. The recipe was Brioche French Toast with Roasted Asparagus and Orange Beurre Blanc (image and recipe from MarthaStewart.com). As usual, I had about half the required ingredients, but I think it came out just as well anyway. I substituted smaller amounts of vermouth, soymilk, blood orange juice and onions for dry white wine, heavy cream (which I also left out of the beurre blanc altogether), more orange juice and shallots. And I made the brioche from scratch that morning, from a recipe in my new Beard's Bread Book for brioche loaf (not to be confused with little brioche buns). Very tasty bread, and it adds to the egginess of the dish without oversoaking the slices. Plus it smelled great in the pan as it was cooking. And I like asparagus.

Moths and coincidences.

Yesterday I found this moth lying against the curb on the sidewalk in Dupont. I thought he was gone from this world, and tried to at least move him to a happy resting place in the grass just over the curb, but as I slid the magazine under him he flapped and jumped an inch in the air before coming down to rest again. It took about five minutes to get him to hold still on my magazine, and then, as I went to lower him onto the grass, he took off and flew away across traffic to some rooftop. I never thought I'd see one of these in downtown dc. The distance from one wingtip to the other was maybe 5 inches.

Then, a block away, as we walked to the corner to cross the street, I noticed a man who looked a bit familiar. There being a lot of people in DC, I assumed he was just another face, but after 30 seconds of awkward and mutual staring, he said "Marlboro? ...Elli??" Yup, I managed to be on the one street corner in the whole city where I could run into the former Marlboro Math Fellow who came from England to teach for two years. He just happened to be in DC after leaving VT and before going on wherever else in the world he was going. It's a very very small world, sometimes.

Photos of phood

This morning started out with slightly frenetic whipping of eggs, cream and mascarpone, followed by some folding and chilling, all of which led to this evening, when I laid out the strawberries and added lemon glaze... I'm pretty pleased with the results, but I'm very nervous that the nut crust will do its usual thing and refuse to dislodge itself from the confines of the pie plate. ah well. It will still be very, very tasty. Unfortunately I wont know until we get to the brunch party tomorrow. Impatience.

And wouldn't it be nice if I could include a digital taste in posts about food? Like scratch and sniff.

And then dinner tonight (after a batch of banana bread to take over to friends) is about to be fresh pasta with spinach, tofu, and green garlic pesto. Fresh pasta is wonderful, but it's very difficult to roll out by hand. The dough is quite stiff, and pressing down firmly enough with a rolling pin to get the sheet thin enough to make reasonable sized pasta is enough to make my carpal tunnel twinge.
And while I was out earlier I bought (extravagantly) a very clean, plastic covered jacketed copy of James Beard's bread book from Capitol Hill Books (staffed by an appropriately grumpy old guy and piled to the ceiling, literally, with books. Including the bathroom.). I'm pretty excited about it.

Conflict of interest

Not to sound schizophrenic, but I have a choice here, and I'm of two minds about it (and they keep fighting. In my head). On the one hand, I could be making money (in theory) off this blog. I could monetize, I could use the $100 Google AdWords coupon they sent me (and look into AdSense, too), I could sell something, I could even put a Paypal donation button on here.

Or I could do none of those things, appealing in part because then I have to do none of those things (I'm not lazy, I just like to conserve time). I could have a beautiful, ad-free blog, affix this lovely ad-free blog sticker to myself (er, I mean, the blog) and skip about on my moral and ethical high ground.



I don't really want to expect revenue from my readers, or plague them with advertisements, or, in general, be a sellout. As a librarian, the point of blogging (and life) is to share information with people who need it (even if they don't know they need it. mwahaha.) I realise that just putting up a couple ads and such isn't really demanding anything more from readers than the rest of the internet does, but heck, I don't want to be the rest of the internet. I want my motives for writing to be pure and simple (not that this seems to generate frequent updates).

On the other other hand, I'm kinda broke.

The conclusion I've come to is that as soon as I stop procrastinating and set things up, I'll do a trial run of Attempting To Make Money With My Blog. Comments and thoughts on this whole thing would be appreciated. I'm likely over-thinking it. I'm also trying out partial syndication, so people who get my blog in a feed reader will need to click through to get the full post. Again, thoughts appreciated.

EDIT: That was a dumb idea. "Short" syndication publishes a fragment, doesn't append so much as an ellipses, and therefore doesn't let the reader know that there's more to be had just one click away. If I could get a "read more" link in there it would be fine. Heck, I say, to heck with that.

There's a Calvin and Hobbes strip that illustrates how I feel about the internet, which I wont post here because I'm sure it would incur all kinds of copyright wrath. It's the one where Calvin is standing outside staring at the stars and he yells "I'M SIGNIFICANT!" pauses, then says "...screamed the dust speck."

Tuesday Night Dinner, part III

I'm not actually sure where this recipe came from. I think it was clipped from a Better Homes and Gardens magazine by Wortklauberlein. It was originally for bread crumb, spinach and feta burgers, but I had only one of those ingredients, so some modifications were made. Because I was making it up a bit as I went along, I changed all the original measurements and uhm... it's a whole different recipe now.

Veggie Burgers

~1-2 cups cooked black eyed peas
1 cup spinach (frozen or fresh)
2 eggs
2 tbl olive oil
2 tsp dill (fresh always better)
1 tsp oregano
a pinch or two of sage
Salt and pepper to taste, and any other herbs/spices

1. Mush up the black eyed peas to rough texture.
2. Mix everything else in, makes sure there's enough egg to coat the ingredients and hold them together. Hold back on the spinach or peas if it seems like a stretch.
3. Heat up a cast iron pan with some oil, use the same pan the sweet potatoes were done in, if using in the same meal.
4. Drop large spoonfuls of the mixture into the pan and let cook. Flatten a bit with the back of a spatula to make sure all the egg is cooked and turn over once they hold together. They're never going to be very solid, but they do hold together.
5. Serve with Asparagus Pesto.

I added the black eyed peas not just because I didn't have any bread crumbs handy, but because they're protein, and the meal needed some. I just moved the starch aspect over to the sweet potatoes instead. I suspect that other beans could be substituted. When in doubt, try something different.

Tuesday Night Dinner, part II

For the main course, I made asparagus pesto over some veggie burgers. The pesto, first:

This recipe came from the New York Times, very timely, just as I was considering what to do with some overly aged asparagus in the refrigerator drawer. As usual, I modified it to fit what I had around, and it was drastically different from the original. It turned out a little damp at first, but reabsorbed the liquid as it cooled and behaved very well on the burgers.

Asparagus Pesto
Some asparagus, perhaps a bunch
2-3 tbl olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon (or to taste)
Fresh ground pepper
"21 seasoning salute"
Few pinches salt, to taste.

1. Wash and cut the asparagus into small inch long pieces. Boil a pot of water and drop the pieces in, cooking until they are bright green, no longer. Drain and rinse in cool water, then add to the container of a food processor.

2. Add the lemon juice, pepper, 21 seasoning salute, if you have it, or other spices. The 21 seasoning salute is a Trader Joe's mix that's especially tasty on popcorn, but can easily be replaced with fresh garlic and whatever else strikes your fancy. I used it purely for the garlic, as I was otherwise fresh out. Salt, too, then blend.

3. That's it! Set aside for later use, reheat it in a saucepan or microwave if you need to. Serve on pretty much anything.


One of the most important parts of using any recipe is being able to make it do what you want, with what you have. If I ran out to the store every time I was missing an ingredient, I would never have time left to spend in the kitchen. So, it's best to substitute where possible, adjust to the amounts you have in stock, and not let yourself be too rigid in following directions.

Tuesday Night Dinner, part I

You may or may not have seen my tweet last night describing my dinner:

@ekl1773 Made strawberry whole wheat scones, cinnamon sweet potatoes, spinach and blackeyed pea burgers with asparagus pesto. Pleased with self.

The scone, burger and pesto recipes all came to me at once, opportunely. The sweet potatoes I made up on the spot to go with everything else, partially because I didn't have the "herb seasoned stuffing mix" called for in the burger recipe (and the horror of buying such a thing instead of working with a loaf... perhaps I'll post my stuffing recipe someday).

Cinnamon Sweet Potatoes

A couple small (1' diameter) sweet potatoes
Cinnamon
Cardamom
Olive Oil

1. Clean the potatoes and slice into thin slices, less than a quarter inch thick.

2. Drizzle a couple tablespoons of olive oil around the bottom of a cast iron pan and heat up.

3. Add potatoes to the pan and stir to coat, being careful not to break the slices. Spread them out and let cook. Sprinkle with a teaspoon or so of cinnamon and an 1/8 teaspoon of cardamom, just enough to put a dash on each slice. Stir and try to flip most of them over, sprinkle the other side as well. Add a little more olive as necessary.

4. Cook until soft, slightly browned on the edges, but not mushy. Serve immediately.

Caramel corn

I'm going to post a few recipes over the next couple of days, because I have a small backlog piling up here. And why post them all at once when I can spread them over several posts and not overload you all at once? Cooking and baking are things I do to procrastinate, even to avoid writing blog entries, say, so I figure, heck, I'll turn that sucker right back on itself and show it who's boss. Uhm, by which I mean, me?

First up, we have Caramel Corn. I made this for work a few weeks back and it was quite a success. The recipe could easily be halved if you don't have a ginormous bowl around. I found it in the Joy of Cooking, 75th anniversary edition. I've only got three copies of the Joy so far, and I'd like at least four, maybe six... My other two are both from circa 1950, one from a used book store and one that was my Grandmother's (I'm very happy to have the latter, as well as her recipe box!). You see where my interest in cooking and booking overlap here: collecting cookbooks is a fantastic hobby. A bunch of mine are in my LibraryThing collection.

Caramel Corn

3/4 cups unpopped popcorn
corn/canola oil
1.5 tbl unsalted butter
1.5 cups light brown sugar
6 tbl H2O

1. To pop the popcorn, put a few (three) kernels in the bottom of a large pot (needs to hold 6 cups of popped popcorn) and just cover them with a layer of the oil, making sure it's distributed evenly across the bottom of the pot. Turn heat to high and wait for the oil to heat up. When all three kernels have popped (watch out for spraying hot oil), pour in the rest of the popcorn and put a lid on it. While waiting for it to pop, hold both pot handles and shake the kernels to make sure all of them are exposed to the heat and none of them stay in one place long enough to burn. It is possible to do this just above the burner so the oil keeps getting hotter. This process took me a few tries to learn, so you might want to try a smaller batch, first. The balance of heat and oil is delicate; too much direct heat and it burns, too much oil and it's greasy. You can also caramelize "airpop" popcorn, but I haven't tried it. Remove from heat when popping slows.

2. Lightly salt the top of the popcorn in the pot, then pour into large bowl and salt again, toss to coat.

3. To make the caramel, melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the sugar and water. Heat should be mediumish, whatever it takes to create just some loose bubbles around the edges of the sugar. Put a lid on for a few minutes to let the steam wash any sugar crystals off the sides of the pan. Cook to 234F, the "soft ball stage."

4. Carefully and slowly, pour the caramel over the popcorn, stirring as you go. Try not to get it on the sides of bowl, but cover as much popcorn surface area as you can initially, as it cools fast. Keep stirring until the caramel stops moving to new kernels.

5. Spread the popcorn out on cookie sheets to cool. Once it's at a comfortable temperature to handle, break the bunches of popcorn apart with your fingers, down to bits an inch big or smaller.

6. When completely cool, pack it up in bags, containers, or put it back in the bowl and share with party guests. I consider this recipe seriously easy and seriously tasty. Would make good party munchies along with my spicy caramel almonds recipe (which I'll have to find again...).

Dancing on the head of a pin