Category Archives: Cooking

Cooking, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Beets, Romans and High Fantasy

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Kate has been trying to reconstruct an amazing beet pureed soup we had at Fika in the American Swedish Institute.  The chef gave us some of his or her ingredients, all of them?  I’m not sure.  But Kate’s done a good job of closing in on it.  It’s delightful, tangy and creamy with a great feel in the mouth.

I’ve spent the Sunday beginning to check my Latin translations against the commentaries and entering notes into the file I’m keeping for the commentary Greg and I may write.  This is fun work, finding better words, puzzling over the thoughts of Ovid scholars.  Once I’ve finished the recheck, I’m going to start reading the Ovid scholarship I’ve collected.

In the afternoon I’ve proceeded with the revision, rewrite of Missing.  I’m well into the first third, adding thicker description, plumping up character development, making the narrative a more coherent whole.  This is fun, too.

Even so, my mind can only take so much fun before the brain that supports its work begins to wear out the rest of my body. That’s where I am now.  Tired. Enough for the day.

 

Art and Culture, Cooking, Great Work, Latin, Third Phase, Writing

Gotta Get Out More

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Beltane                                                                              Early Growth Moon

My docent class is on a 5 day jaunt to Chicago.  Were it not for Kona’s vet visits, I’d be there, too.  This is a full week now since I sent in my resignation to the MIA.  Nada.  Silence.  Nothing.  12 years.  Almost as weird as the weather.  It’s like the Institute has organizational autism.

It’s been a full day with work outside and inside, a quiet evening reading.

Though I can see that the chained mornings and the Latin in the mid-afternoons is very productive, I’m also seeing a desire in myself to get out more.  Kate had to sort of drop kick me into it, but now that she has I realize the path I’ve chosen will increasingly isolate me and us, if we’re not very intentional about getting out.

To that end I signed up us for a fund raiser for CSA Roots, apparently the former Community Design Center with which I did a lot of work in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  This fund-raiser features a hand-crafted, all locally sourced meal at the Heartland Restaurant across from the former site of the St. Paul Farmer’s Market.  Appropriately enough the dinner is on June 21st, the Summer Solstice.

We’re also planning a trip into the American Swedish Institute this week to see the Sami exhibition and eat at the Institutes new restaurant.  Hmmm.  Do most of our activities involve food?  Which by the way is ok since I’ve lost at least 14 pounds on this lower carb diet in addition to increasing the nutrient load of my food consumption and, the point of it, lowering my blood sugar well below levels of concern.

 

 

Cinema and Television, Cooking

Salmon, Chess, Homeland

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Imbolc                                                                  Bloodroot Moon

Kate cooked salmon with a wonderful glaze, cut green beans and a salad with orange, feta cheese, cubed cucumber, lettuce.  All excellent.

We discussed the first, basic aspects of chess tonight.  How to position the board, white on the right, and line up the pieces.  Then a brief lesson in how each piece moves.  The chess set is now on the end of the dining room table.  Kate’s never played.

I like chess because after determining who gets white nothing else involves chance.  It’s complexity appeals to me, too, but because it is complexity contained in space and time, complexity of a finite duration.  It defines well time devoted to the game and time outside the game.  Plus, no tee times.  No golf carts and no slices or hooks.

And, like good video streamers of the second decade of the third millennium we binge watched Homeland, finishing the thirteenth episode tonight with Clair Danes strapped down, medicated and receiving shock treatment–just as she remembers a key clue in the case of Sgt. Brody.  The downside of binge watching current programs is that after you finish you have to wait a year or more for the continuation.

 

Cooking, Family

Putting on the Moves

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Imbolc                                                            Valentine Moon

Well, got in my hour, actually 2, of chess.  Don’t know whether I want to play actual games. The lessons are brain twisters, requiring spatial thinking and logical thinking combined with strategic planning while executing tactical decisions.  A weird sort of fun.  Similar, in fact, to translating Latin.

(Samuel Reshevsky, age 8, defeating several chess masters at once in France, 1920)

Also translated my sentence in Ovid and got post cards out to the grandkids.  Kate made a great supper with a chipolte butter on chicken breasts, our carrots from last fall and salad.  The carrots have a bright color and a sweet, earthy flavor.

Otherwise trucking along.

Cooking, Family

Well Meat, Good Sir

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Winter                                                                                Cold Moon

Back from the Butcher and Boar.  Quite the testosterone joint for a place with no televisions tuned to the game.  In fact, no televisions.  This place is about meat.  Fish, fowl and game.  I had wild boar sausage, a side of fried green tomatoes and spicy greens.  Kate and I shared a sampler of their pickled meats.

To my surprise I liked the Braunschweiger.  It came in a small glass terrine, a paste, and made me think I’d never had good Braunschweiger before.

The place, though, was noisy.  In extremis.  Even for those without impaired hearing it would have been difficult to hold a normal conversation.

The interior is dark wood, lots of mirrors, granite topped tables and sturdy forks, spoons and especially the knives.

The bar, a long one, had almost 100% business type guys sitting ordering from the gray haired bar tender who moved methodically and quietly from patron to patron.  The wait staff is young, good looking men and women in black Butcher and Boar t-shirts.

We decided in the end that it was a nice place to visit, once.  Probably not a return place for us older generation carnivores.

Cooking, Holidays, Writing

The Hours Before Christmas

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Winter                                                                       Moon of the Winter Solstice

Went out today to pick up the bound copies of Missing.  Fun to see the thick, maybe 4 inches, copy of my work over the last year, year and a half.  It has what Kinko’s calls a comb binding which consists of a round linked spiral of plastic wound through closely space holes punched in the left margin.   This will allow each of my beta readers to have their own copy that they can mark up as much as they want.  A lot, I hope.  Not sure why but I really feel different about this process.  Better.

Then over to the Festival grocery store for a few items we needed.  It closed at 4 today and I was there at 3:15 pm.  The mood was jolly.  A very nice Christmas surprise.  When I walked in, a guy my age, white hair with a ponytail and beard, black leather Harley jacket pushed a cart out toward me.  “There you go.”  A small gesture, kind.  But so in keeping with the season that it left me smiling the whole time I was in the store.

Back home where Kate cooked tenderloin fillets, potatoes and green beans.  A festive supper.  And a good one.

Now Christmas eve has almost come to an end.  We plan to go see Abraham Lincoln tomorrow and eat Chinese.  Jewish solidarity.

Cooking, Writing

A Quiet Sunday

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Samhain                                                                       Thanksgiving Moon

A quiet Sunday.  Up about 7 with the dogs.  Breakfast, oatmeal and a banana.  Downstairs to write my first pass on the assignment for the mythology class.  After that over to Festival.  Back.  Had two more pieces of pizza for lunch.  I said it was quiet day.

Started the soup, a thirteen-bean soup.  I soaked the beans over night, rinsed them, a bit foamy, added 5 quarts of water (I know. A lot of soup.) and a smoked turkey leg (replacing a ham-hock.  Less fatty, still smoky), brought it up to a boil, down to simmer for 3 hours.  Took a nap.

Got the ingredients for the  last thirty minutes of the soup together:  2 quarts tomatoes, chili powder, dried garlic flakes (ours), an onion, 2 cups worth.  This red onion made me back away from the counter, chemical warfare.  Damn effective.  All into the pot.  Boil again.  Wait.

It’s done.  Cooling.  Supper tonight.  And for many other nights.  A lot of it, most of it, will go in the freezer.  Tired of eating meat, fatty things, over indulgence.  Don’t like it but I do it anyhow.  A puzzle.

Now.  Edit the writing assignment.  250 words is a very tight capsule.  Got to squeeze information in sideways.

Cooking, Holidays

Festival(s)

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Samhain                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Over to Festival…the supermarket.  Listened to music of a festival, Christmas.  Singing along to Rudolf as I plucked brown rice, persimmons and smoked turkey legs out of their temporary places and put them in my cart.  Thanksgiving is over; let the shopping begin.

It is, as always, a pleasure to shop for groceries.  Bright store, well stocked, interesting selections and…Christmas music.  Brought me right out of Thebes and into the good ole heartland of the U.S. of A.

Gonna make a soup now, eat some pizza leftovers and then get to work on Jason and Medea.

Commentary on Religion, Cooking, Myth and Story

Meat

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Fall                                                              Fallowturn Moon

Sat down to supper tonight.  Beef.  Rare.  Kate’s a great hand with the steak. Always gets it right.  As I cut through a piece, the course I’m taking on mythology flashed to mind.  Just before I ate supper, as a happenstance, I listened to a lecture on ritual and religion.  A major part of Greek rituals was sacrifice.

The sacrifice was usually an animal and, though piglets, pigs, chickens, sheep and goats could be offered, the very best was cow, a bull or an ox, the bigger the better.  Last week we learned about Prometheus and his deception of Zeus which involved wrapping thigh bones in glistening fat and offering them to the gods while the humans kept the meat for themselves.  Professor Struck suggested in this case the myth served to justify the odd habit of giving the gods the least of the sacrifice.  Could be.

A more cogent argument this week, from anthropology, about why sacrifice animals at all.  The sacrifice, commanded by the gods, offsets, according to this line of thought, the blood guilt humans experience when killing and eating animals.  This makes sense to me.

Now, we don’t have the ritual context, not even the native american habit of thanking the animal for the gift of their life.  My rationale has always involved anthropology; that is, we humans are built as omnivores and as apex predator we eat at the top of the food chain.  No blood guilt, just animal nature.

Probably no more defensible than the gods made me do it.

Cooking, Garden, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Head and Hands

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Lugnasa                                                                      Autumn Moon

Worked my head into a fuzzy place today.  Just couldn’t go further, so I worked out.  That always helps.

Tomorrow is a Latin morning with my tutor at 11:00 AM.  Before I meet with him, I have to review my Ovid, the last of the Philemon and Baucis, 14 verses.  I reviewed the Aeneid this afternoon, 9 verses there.  This crop, in both authors, was difficult.

This weekend is a garden weekend.  The orchard, shoring up a leaning apple tree.  It’s a Zestar and we had two apples from it today.  Boy, are they good.  I plan to harvest the tree before we begin the shoring up.  These are mostly bagged and, for some reason, the squirrels have left them alone.  Maybe they’re honeycrisp connoiseurs?

We’re going to prepare for winter pruning, decide the remaining tasks before the cold and get on the priority ones.

There’s one more soup to make, a winter vegetable that will use our onions, leeks, carrots and tomatoes at least.  Our frozen soups. pot pies and vegetables have begun to use up the available space in our freezer so one task is to clean out the old and the no longer desirable to make room.  That will happen over the weekend, too.