Living and Eating in Walla Walla

I had all these grand expectations that I was going to be cooking up a storm and blogging like a mad lady once I moved to Walla Walla. But I forgot one thing: I am also working a full-time job for the first time in two years (not that being a student and working 20 hours a week wasn’t time consuming, but it’s different). I am also settling into a new town and a new life, one in which, frankly, I don’t know anyone and have been going through the gamut of emotional reactions to starting anew. All of this to say, oops. Sorry! I promised, and I didn’t deliver.

This unexpected busy-ness is compounded by the fact that I’ve been having a bit of a disastrous time in the kitchen. Adjusting to the electric stove is proving trickier than I expected. And things have been turning out, if not bad tasting, decidedly un-photogenic. And uninteresting. And certainly not worth sharing. I have even (gasp!) wondered if I wanted to keep doing this blog, instead of just cooking for myself (and, yeah, for myself, because I don’t even have a dog to feed these days). No need for alarm, though. As Miss Crystal reminded me last weekend, when I visited her in Portland, I just have to ease up and give myself time to settle in and get used to this new life o’ mine. Then I’m sure I’ll be back in fine form, and concocting all kinds of things I can’t wait to share.

Michael Pollan at TED

I’ve talked about Michael Pollan here before. I consider his books some of the most life-changing books I’ve read, and sometimes I feel like I’m on a little personal mission to get everyone in the world to read them. This TED video is a great introduction to his ideas, and to the idea of truly sustainable farming. I grinned the whole time I watched it.

I hope that you’ll pass this video along. Share it with everyone you know! This one is definitely an idea worth spreading.

UPDATE: WordPress won’t let me embed the video from TED, for reasons I can’t quite fathom. You can watch it on the TED website for now. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to embed it when I have more time.

UPDATE AGAIN: The video is available through the YouTubes, which I can embed, so here you go:

National Carrot Day Song

Dinner’s not quite ready yet, but to tide you over, here’s a lovely little song about carrots. Hilarious.

No food, but some other stuff

Yikes, I have, once again, broken my once-a-week posting rule in the flurry and bustle of finals. I’ve been eating pasta and Boboli with leftovers and nothing impressive enough for the blog. (Well, there was that pork tenderloin Mr. X made last weekend, but I was too tired to take pictures and write about it.

Sadly, I’m not even sure when I’m going to be able to get back to you all with actual foodstuffs. The next two weeks are going to be mad busy: finishing the MySQL/PHP database project, doing a bunch of LC and Dewey classification, finishing up a presentation on our new OPAC for user instruction, and, you know, trying to figure out what the crap I’m going to do this summer. Actually, there are some good developments potentially maybe in the works, but all that stuff belongs on the other blog, and you guys don’t care about the library stuff. You care about the food, so I’ll get right to it.

Bad blogger, bad, bad blogger

I don’t know where the rest of December went, or the first week of January, at that. I was in San Diego, blissfully enjoying 60 degree weather and brunches on the back patio, and somehow, in the midst of all the delicious holiday food and friends and family and, did I mention, 60 degree weather, I didn’t sit down to share any of it with you, my probably-no-longer-so-faithful readers. I mean, I even brought my digital camera apparatus with me and everything, but not once did I get around to uploading pictures and writing out a simple recipe. I have failed at this whole blogging thing, it seems.

But now it is a New Year and I’m re-invigorated and yes, I do have lots to share. There was a lot of baking around the holidays, of course, including some new favorites and some old favorites and a not that great chocolate chip cookie recipe, which, well, I guess I won’t share. And tonight…tonight I’m making pot roast. One of my not-a-New-Years-resolution things I’m going to try to do this year is re-committing to my previous posting regularity, and sharing something here at least once a week.

Come back later today and there will be food.  I promise.

The Atlantic, Some Lobsters, and Beer in a Can

I finally visited the Cape for the first time, after over four years of living in Massachusetts. I grew up on the Pacific and always considered myself an ocean lover, a beach goer, someone who had to live near large bodies of salt water. And yes, Boston is technically near a large body of salt water, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. I so rarely see the Atlantic, and when I do it’s usually in some half-assed way: I’m looking at a bay or harbor or some crap. This weekend was the first time I found myself looking at the unhampered, unimpeded Atlantic Ocean. And I got to tell ya something: It was a little disappointing.

Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed my weekend in Chatham. It was glorious to spend an entire day at the beach, to experience truly perfect summer weather (no humidity!), to actually get a suntan and wear a bathing suit. And best of all: I had my first real lobster experience. Lobster ravioli from Trader Joe’s just doesn’t count. No, this weekend we bought live lobsters and threw them into a vat of boiling water and then pulled their innards out of their shells to devour. Yes, yes we did. And I loved it.

8 Random Things

There has been no food this week. No time for cooking. We’ve been subsisting off toast and brie and white wine over here as Crystal frantically packed her entire life in preparation for a move to Spain that, well, hasn’t quite happened yet. Talk about being in limbo–she’s just waiting for the Spanish Consulate to approve her visa. She had to cancel her Thursday afternoon flight and there is still a vast amount of uncertainty about when she will be able to move. This week has been busy and overwhelming and not a little emotionally exhausting, so frankly, I haven’t been anywhere near an unprepared food product.

To make it up to you, oh faithful readers, I’ll play a little game. My old coworker, who writes excellent and entertaining bits over at Must Be Motherhood, passed along this meme: Share eight random things about yourself. Well ok.

8. I own a pair of shoes I’ve never, ever worn but can’t bring myself to throw away. They are beautiful but so uncomfortable that even slipping them on for a second hurts. Walking around in them is unimaginable. They’ve been in my closet now for seven years. I don’t  know why I still have them.

7. I love photographs of my hands. When I was young and dreamed of being a photographer I took a whole series of photographs of my hands. I find them strangely compelling.

6. I’ve probably only read about 60 percent of the 500+ books I own. And I keep books I didn’t even really like that much. I always claim it’s because they might be useful for a paper someday.  (And, like my former coworker, I can’t stop reading a book once I’ve started, even if I don’t like it. It does feel morally wrong!)

5. I am usually starving when I wake up in the morning, now matter how late I ate the night before. And I mean starving. Stomach shouting in protest, near-nausea, weak, and inevitably grumpy starving. That is about the only time of day I am ever that hungry.

4. I am much more of a traditionalist than I ever thought I’d be.

3. My family (all 57 million members of the extended version included) mean the world to me. The hardest thing about living in Boston is being far away from them. I sometimes have a hard time understanding people who aren’t close to their families.

2. I never thought I was a gym person, and in fact almost never exercised when I was younger. Now, if I don’t go four or five times a week I feel antsy and unwell. I have no idea how this happened.

1. I have a hard time admitting that I want to move back to California. I didn’t want to be that girl, but I just miss it too much.

Well, that was fun. And in turn? I’m passing it along to the few people I know who read this blog on a regular basis: Lisa, Brilynn, Mr. X, and Miss Crystal (now that you have a blog of your own, it’s time you joined in the fun and games).

I promise I’ll start cooking again this week, once the house is cleaned and there’s time for a grocery store trip again. Once I’ve slept.

And another thing! Tortillas…

I could kick myself for forgetting my camera the afternoon my aunt Maggie and I walked down to Sombrero’s to get the only burrito I ate during my San Diego adventure. How I managed to get out of there with only one burrito in my belly I will never know, but I did realize one major thing that is wrong with all these Boston taquerias. It’s not just that they put rice in their burritos. It’s not the lettuce (although I have major issues with that), or the lack of tortilla steaming. It’s the dang tortillas themselves!

Burritos in San Diego come wrapped in the most perfect Platonic ideal of tortillas I’ve ever seen. They are so floury your hands are coated in a thin powder of fine white flour dust when you’re done. They are super soft and almost buttery, but they still have some bite, some heft to them. They are a dream. A dream, I tell you! I’m not sure how it’s done, really. My homemade tortillas don’t even come close. Sometimes I suspect there’s a little abuelita in the back of every taqueria, making those things by hand. But I doubt it. However, they make me want a little abuelita in my kitchen, making them for me, because they are unparalleled in their wonderfulness. Sigh.

My Sombrero’s burrito? Even though Sombrero’s isn’t really the best of the best, and I would have preferred El Indio, or Roberto’s, or Alberto’s, or any one of the ‘bertos’, that carne asada still far surpassed anything I’ve had outside the city limits. I could weep for its memory.

(Another weird aside: We never called them taquerias in San Diego when I was growing up. I never even heard that word until I moved to Santa Cruz. I don’t remember what we called them, except maybe taco stands.)

Because Who Doesn’t Like Talking About Themselves

Lisa over at La Mia Cucina, one of my daily reads, posted a fun and highly informative interview on Monday, and then asked her readers to join in the fun. Anyone interested could declare themselves, and she would send five questions to them in exchange for them doing the same for others. Passing on the chain of sharing, so to speak. I loved reading about how Lisa wanted to be an ichthyologist when she was younger (really? Sharks?) and since I love answering random questions, and thought it would be a fun way to get to know some of my other readers (if you exist…) I had to sign myself up.

Lisa promptly sent me five questions this morning. And here for your voyeuristic and entertainment edification, my answers:

Michael Pollan and Allandale Farms

I recently had a life-changing experience. Well, it wasn’t so much AN experience as several of them, in quick succession. And they were experiences as much as sitting on a couch reading can really be an experience. But I feel that my head has been turned around, and something that was only minimally important to me before has become a serious kitchen priority. And that something is organic.

I guess you could say all of this started in late January, when Michael Pollan published an article in the New York Times. “Unhappy Meals” made the rounds pretty quickly and inspired much conversation. Of course, I read it and instantly forwarded it to Crystal. It was one of those articles that made me think, “Everyone needs to read this!” But I long ago learned that I can’t make people read anything, no matter how important I think it is. I stopped harping on people about it, and it was mostly forgotten.

A few weeks ago, I read Don’t Eat This Book, Morgan Spurlock’s elaboration on Super Size Me. Nothing particularly revelatory in there. After all, I did read Fast Food Nation. Twice. But it had the effect of focusing my attention, like a magnifying glass catching the sun and setting things on fire. I could feel it. I was going to become obsessed.