The French Ingredient

I feel somewhat ambivalent about this memoir. I very much enjoyed the cooking lessons and market tour I took through La Cuisine Paris, the business run by the author. The memoir is ostensibly about her move to Paris for a different job and eventually opening La Cuisine. And yet it felt a little…elementary, maybe? Very much about her mid-western “can do” ethos vs French culture, and less about the specifics of building the business. The French culture was mostly things I already knew from reading and school and basic research in advance of being a tourist there, so maybe I wasn’t the right audience for the memoir or had misplaced expectations. I will say that the tour of the king’s kitchen garden at Versailles was absolutely a highlight of my trip to Paris a decade ago, although I’m not sure it is offered any longer. The macaron lesson was fun, too, though, would recommend.

Finished watching Black Sails. I found the change in costuming for Flint to be fascinating. And the morphing of Silver, both the legend of Long John Silver and who he became and how he manipulated basically everyone. Same for Billy Bones. The pacing was a little slow for my taste but the cinematography was lovely. I am fascinated by how fandom (including academia) has interpreted the various sexual relationships – poly, queer, hetero. I’m kind of curious about whether there is word of god on them, but I haven’t gone looking.

Creative-ish things lately

Did some holiday baking. Candied orange slices and some peel for the first time. Loved the slices but the state of my stove after making them was a sticky mess. Candied some almonds as well.

I saw an Atlas Oscura post on serpentone and thought I’d try it. Almond flour, sugar, egg whites, how hard could it be? Uh… The dough was crumblier and dryer than I expected. I might add less sugar and another egg white next time. My serpentone looked more like The Hungry Caterpillar.

Before baking.

After baking.

It puffed up more than I anticipated (egg whites, I assume). And the peel used for the tongue was inedible. Lesson learned there.

I love frangipane tarts and make them regularly during the winter. Use homemade cranberry sauce at the base, yum, and store-bought crust. Somehow when I bake them for anything other than eating at home, they are less attractive. (Like last Christmas’s poached pears on top.) This year I decided to add candied orange slices…but I should have put them on at the end of baking or after. Tasted fine but looked wonky.

Before.

After.

Also on the creative or crafty front, I tried decoupage of glass vessels. Mostly to repurpose some jars and bottles. I like it.

Need to let them cure then seal them.

My favorite scarf – the one I knitted to match a hat I fell in love with – has been lost. I know where but when I went back to the restaurant, they said no one had turned it in or found it. I think I’ve found the same yarn online and will try to remake it. Meanwhile, I’m making a navy scarf in a simple moss pattern, but the breakage is ridiculous. My fault for not using the yarn sooner, I guess?

The late, lamented scarf. 😭

Recent music

It’s a shame that paper tickets and ticket stubs are no longer a thing. I used to collect them and then put them in a scrapbook of sorts at the end of each year. I very often forget what live performances and even movies I’ve seen now that I lack the physical reminder.

So I’m reminding myself here.

Flamenco by the Royal Opera of Madrid – seen at the Howard Theater. Really enjoyed it, although as usual I could only make out about 10% of the lyrics. Which is to be expected since I can’t tell lyrics in English half the time. (Looking at you, FOB)

The Eagles on their farewell tour. Steely Dan opened, but due to a complete meltdown by Amtrak (a 3:10 delay) I missed it. Got there just in time to hear the full show by the Eagles though. Don Henley has aged very well. Joe Walsh looks pretty dessicated and sounds like a crotchety old stoner when he talks but he still kills on the Stratocaster. Vince Gill did well on some vocals, as did Deacon Frey. The set list was about what you’d expect, I think, and didn’t miss any of the biggest hits. My personal favorite was Heartache Tonight. (I refuse to acknowledge the Michael Buble cover. It’s just wrong.)

Stevie Nicks and Billy Joel. The pre-show PA music could have been a set list lifted straight from a high school dance in 1990. Seriously. I forget how much I like Stevie Nicks and how many of her songs I know…until it’s pointed out to me. Loved the Free Falling cover with video of Tom Petty and Billy Joel coming out to sing his part in Stop Dragging My heart Around. Closing with Landslide and a montage of Christie McVie photos seemed appropriate. Billy Joel’s set list was what you’d expect, I think, plus a bit that you might not: the first verse of Start Me Up, part of an Italian opera aria sung by backup vocalist, etc. His intro of Vienna was something like, “This next song is from an album I did in 1977. It has a lot of hits. This song isn’t one of them.” My favorites were An Innocent Man and We Didn’t Start the Fire, the latter mostly because of nostalgia. (Shout out to Mr. R., the history teacher who used the song as a lesson and made us add lines/lyrics with historical updates.)

Today’s musical inquiry – Carin Leon, who was in town last night also. (There should be acute accents over the I and O but once again I fail at the keyboard command for that.)

Summer travels

I didn’t travel or take time off much this summer until the end. Went to Pittsburgh for Picklesburgh, which was relocated within the city, ostensibly for crowd control and safety but it was as much of a crush of humanity as bridge versions. Great people watching if you had a space in the shade staked out.

At the end of August I drove to Maine, meeting up with a friend. We both worked remotely and did a little bit of tourism. Had the obligatory lobster at the Porthole in Portland, an excellent donut at Holy Donut, margaritas as Taco Escobarr, and whoopie pie ice cream. Best overall meal from start to finish was at Empire. Loved the Portland Museum of Art, enjoyed a craft festival and weird museum, drove to Ogunquit for lunch and to walk Marginal Way.

Headed south only to detour to Cape Cod…because why not since I had my laptop and could work from there. Visited the Whydah Pirate Museum, toured a working organic cranberry farm, fell in love with the Almond Joy latte at Three Fins Coffee.

How do the hydrangeas grow so giant on the Cape? And in Maine to some degree, but gigantic bunches everywhere on the Cape.

The drive home was not a delight – three different accidents that closed 84, 83, and 695/83. I’d visit Portland again but maybe fly. And the Cape, too, but that requires driving IMO.

Picklesburgh

Portland pier – dinner view

Fun, kitschy museum of oddities

Human Structures (24 Figures Connected) by Jonathan Borofsky at PMA’s sculpture garden

Hydrangeas everywhere! Giant blooms, these were the size of my head!

Sunset after an overcast day

Recent reads?

Eh, not much.

I borrowed an edition of selected prose of Fernando Pessoa from the library, along with a collection of poetry by Luis Camoes (there’s a tilde over the o and an acute accent over the i but I don’t know how to do them using my keyboard). I enjoyed the poetry, which had the English next to the Portuguese, but really struggled with the metaphors in translation; my Portuguese is still extremely rudimentary. For the Pessoa, some of the prose intrigued me but other was just nah. I struggle in part with the heteronym idea – fundamentally, are they just a bunch of pseudonyms like Mark Twain and Samuel Clements? Were they indicators of mental illness and multiple personalities? (The introduction alluded to this possibility for Pessoa based on some of his behavior.) It doesn’t really matter in the end. I can appreciate some of the work, enough that I’ve put his Book of Disquiet on my to read list.

Ilona Andrews is another former autobuy that I’m slowly letting go of. I still read the books, but not as autobuys and from the library if possible. Magic Claims was fine, I guess.

Picked up a couple of books of Mary Oliver’s poetry at the library yesterday.

In terms of watching things…not much there either. I finally watched the new season of Ted Lasso. It was disappointing overall. It felt like several possible interesting threads were abandoned, and like a bunch of storylines regressed or were wasted.

Just started watching Good Omens, in part because of the uproar that GO fans are in following the end of season 2.

Haven’t seen Barbie or Oppenheimer, mostly because I feel like everyone I know who has seen them has told me enough about them that I don’t feel like I’m missing much. Also, Nolan’s films seldom work for me.

Recent simple pleasure is the maritozzi from Doppio Pasticceria . They use chocolate cream and the brioche is faintly orange blossom flavored. (I love orange blossom, which I did not know until I had it in several dishes in Sevilla and Granada, including the Flor de Azafran gelato at La Fiorentina in Sevilla.)

Summer is half over and I have not gone to the beach. It’s scheduled for the end of the month. I’m tired of people and want to run away. I won’t, because the bank stubbornly requires that I pay my mortgage and I need a job for that. But if I win the $1.5 billion lottery, that could change. 😛

Drabbles

Working on thinning my library. Yes, I liked that book when I read it five years ago, but will I ever read it again? Reconsidering series and old autobuys on the shelves as well.

Skimmed Bujold’s Cryoburn, which I remember liking but not loving and kept because it was part of the series. Now I’m kind of ~meh~ about the book itself but love the Aftermaths. And also LMB’s emphatic statement: “A drabble is a story in exactly 100 words.”

Edited 1/9/23 when I saw the wonky font, which is not how it appeared in the app.

Candles

I generally visit churches only for weddings and funerals, and to admire the artisans’ work when in Europe. I do not believe. But my grandmother did…at least when she was younger – I don’t remember her as churchy or religious but I’m told that the massive aneurysm she suffered in her 40s changed her personality and behavior.

Still, here’s a candle lit for her on the right, wherever she may be, since she lives in memory now.

Random Babble

2022 has been off to a mediocre start on all fronts.

I’m not getting a lot of new reading done: I pick books up and read the same 10 pages repeatedly because very little is sinking in. I tried a newish Ann Aguirre rom-com-ish book that I saw recommended on Twitter, but the h/h irritated me, so it went back to the library. I’m reading Caste (a tangent on that later) slowly, based on the recommendation of a friend who generally gives good non-fiction recs. And I finished Noor, an Africanfuturist novel by Nnedi Okorafor: I liked it and have a lot of jumbled thoughts about it, both in terms of setting and sense of place (great) and also its themes about technology, capitalism, humanity, and othering. I’m going to check out Okorafor’s other work.

I’m about 60 pages into Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. Fair or not, I would not have picked this book up without the recommendation of a friend because the Oprah Book Club label became a giant red flag for me following James Frey’s Million Little Pieces memoir “embellishments”. Anyway, I’m…enjoying is not the right word exactly for Caste, but it is engrossing certainly. I have, as usual, had a moment early on when I struggled not to be distracted, but that’s about me rather than Wilkerson’s writing or her thesis. My tangent moment: she states that Americans don’t have grammar classes but recognize SVO rules of English and the difference between 1st and 3rd person by absorbing the information implicitly, and are much the same about caste in action; my first thought was that both of those things were explicitly taught in English classes when I was a child attending public school. Was that not common? Is it no longer the case? Regardless, it was a rhetorical device that I needed to accept as device and keep moving.

Shutterfly recently reminded me that ten years ago I was in Barcelona. I remember that trip fondly, but not the red sweater I wore for three days because my luggage was lost. I had not flipped through my photos of the Sagrada Familia (absolutely the most gorgeous and least oppressive cathedral I’ve visited) or Parc Guell in a while; time to revisit. I miss international travel. My passport is renewed. I am ready…sort of.

FTHC was released last week. I like the album but would not say that I love it unreservedly. I’d heard a few of the songs live during Frank Turner’s acoustic tour last fall, as well as what had been released bit by bit. “Farewell to My City” is really sticking with me right now, in part because I’m struggling with decisions to be made about where I am going to be for the next few years for a variety of reasons, financial, social, environmental, practical. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. Or inertia will.

Our mandatory return to the office has been pushed back again to June. I’m a little surprised by this, in part because pre-pandemic telework was pretty rationed, and the longer we work from home the harder it will be to argue that our work cannot be done effectively from remote locations.

My at-home espresso experiment seems to be working out fine. I miss chatting with the Starbucks baristas in my neighborhood, but the home espresso machine has had a visible impact on my monthly food/eating out budget. The union-busting activities plus announced price hike in light of the 30% profit increase reported by Starbucks have made keeping my resolution easier. Do I think they have increased labor and material costs? Sure. But I also think that a lot of the inflation consumers are seeing is not inflated costs being passed on but inflated corporate profits for CEOs and shareholders. On a related note, I’m side-eyeing Amazon’s increase, along with Netflix’s, although the comparison is not entirely apples to apples.

Wrapping up 2020

I’ve done a summary post of the books I read, places I visited, etc., for the last couple of years. 2020 has very little to recommend for itself looking back. The early months were pretty good, but later not so much.

Travel:

• Terceira in February (highly recommend)
• Pittsburgh for hockey (first week of March, just pre-lockdown)
• Antietam/western MD for a weekend in July
• Cape Cod for an isolated and quiet trip in September

Music:

• Online only – several Frank Turner shows, not much else.

Movies/TV:

• Can’t remember if I saw anything in the theater early on.
• Signed up briefly for Disney+ in order to see Hamilton and the first season of The Mandalorian.
• A lot of Netflix, including Schitt’s Creek (meh), Derry Girls (like it), and Bridgerton (not sure I’d bother with future seasons/series).
• Currently watching the new season of The Expanse on Amazon. I love Chrisjen Avasarala as a character.

Reading:

I finished 33 books. The highlights were Megan Whalen Turner’s The Return of the King and Ben Aaronovitch’s False Value. There are two former autobuy authors who finally tipped over the edge for me to not even being library borrows, and a lot of ~meh~ mixed in. I tried a couple of self-published works from writers I’ve found via fandom(s); sometimes the original fic works for me and sometimes not, which is perhaps a function of the canon and backstory in fandom that requires more work to establish in original fiction. I’ve been letting myself read Obama’s memoir in bits and pieces, as a comfort, so I started in 2020 but it will finish as a 2021 read. (It’ll be a highlight, I’m pretty sure.)

Books I’m looking forward to in 2021:

• Anna K. by Jenny Lee, a YA retelling of Anna Karenina. I haven’t read Anna Karenina since high school and my memory of it is such that I’m curious to read a YA adaptation.
• We Own This City by Justin Fenton. Non-fiction account of the Baltimore City Police Gun Trace Task Force, whose members have been federally indicted for a variety of crimes, including racketeering, drug dealing, and illegal searches and seizures.
• The new installment in Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton Yukon series.
• What Abigail Did That Summer, a novella in the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch.

Entertainment

Channel surfing this evening, I ran across two older movies:  Miss Congeniality and Star Trek (2009).  I had forgotten that a young Chris Hemsworth had his big movie debut (but not overall debut) in the ST reboot.  And I’m reminded that the Chris Pine version of Kirk is not an improvement or equal even to Shatner’s.  Ugh.   But Karl Urban’s Bones is terribly pretty.  Twenty years after the fact, I have mixed feelings about Miss Congeniality still, but still watch it when I run across it, like The Princess Bride and any/all of the Harry Potter movies.

I ordered a Portuguese-English dictionary and a conversational grammar book.  Duolingo is not cutting in.  At some point, I may sign up for lessons online.

Work remains a little less than ideal.  We have no idea when we may reopen.  Even if there is an official reopening, the lack of public transportation and lingering health/childcare issues will probably mean that a large chunk of time will still be spent teleworking.  (I do not want to drive into DC every day but also do not want to get onto a a bus or train.)  We are working at a pace >35% over last year but with fewer people.  It’s not sustainable.  Everyone is stressed out.  Our best (IMO) contractor gave notice: he’s moving to a different contract with better benefits.  I’m happy for him – he’s very thoughtful and methodical and diligent, and he is early in his career, so this is a good move for him.  But it kinda leaves us in the lurch – which was a known risk that everyone ignores – because he’s got a lot of expertise that no one else in the group has; I come closest but would be the first person to say that is NOT my area of expertise and I don’t have the bandwidth (or interest) to become an expert.

ETA:  While I was out for a walk on Sunday, I ran into the owner of a couple of small, local businesses.  He was prepping for the lunch carry out at one of them.  One has reopened and the other has not.  The reopened business does carry out only right now, and is focused on sandwiches, burgers, milkshakes, some alcohol.  He said that business is down but enough to scrape along.  The business that has not reopened for carry out offers cheese plates and some sandwiches, but relies more on the bar (seriously, their Pink Cadillac is my favorite).  So it is more dependent on foot traffic and people hanging out.  He mentioned that he might not reopen the other one, which is a reasonable business decisions.  But I’m totally bummed on a personal level since I kinda like that food better, but also because it means the bartenders will likely be out of work.  One was getting ready to limit her hours (school/professional reasons!) but a couple others depend on that job as primary income 😦