She knows, she knows! She sings, she sings!

It might be the Catholic in me that thinks of spring as the start of a new year, or it could be that I usually find out in the spring what will happen in the coming academic year, so it feels like the start of something new, or it could be that a fair number of relationships have begun or ended in the spring. Yet while the start of something new, nothing makes me quite as nostalgic and overcome. Yes, Mez, it is springtime Katie. And these memories led me to read my old opendiary entries (and thought it was a good idea to share them with Andrew?). I've been working on the same  philosophical problems for nine years now. I wish I could have an organic food night to go along with it and that we could all frolic in MoBot for a while.

I posted this in OD on April 1, 2002, and I'm writing a paper on the topic again this semester:

Catch only what you've thrown yourself, all is
mere skill and little gain;
but when you're suddenly the catcher of a ball
thrown by an eternal partner
with accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your center, in an arch
from the great bridgebuilding of God:
what catching then becomes a power--
not yours, a world's.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, cited in the fronticepiece to Gadamer's Truth and Method


It's funny that only this time I realized the emphasis on world, rather than individual, play.

And this Rilke, from The Sonnets to Orpheus, I found for the first time yesterday:
XXI
Spring has returned. The earth resembles
a little girl who has memorized
many poems....For all the trouble
of her long learning, she wins the prize.

Her teacher was strict. We loved the white
in the old man's beard and shaggy eyebrows.
Now, whatever we ask about
the blue and the green, she knows, she knows!

Earth, overjoyed to be out on vacation,
play with the children. We long to catch up,
jubilant Earth. The happiest will win.

What her teacher taught her, the numberless Things,
and what lies hidden in stem and in deep
difficult root, she sings, she sings!

And this, which stings a bit:
VIII
You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,
small friends from a childhood of long ago:
how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,
and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,

spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy,
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.
And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by
and in the fears of the endless year.

Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;
houses surrounded us, solid but untrue--and none
of them ever knew us. What in that world was real?

Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.
Not even the children... But sometimes one,
oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.

March 2011 Daring Baker's Challenge: Yeasted Meringue Coffee Cake

Tada! My first Daring Baker's Challenge. I'd been seeing all my other favorite bloggers participate in the Daring Bakers and was super envious of their creations. I'm not entirely sure why I didn't join before, but I'm glad I finally did. The March 2011 Daring Baker's Challege was hosted by Ria of Ria's Collection and Jamie of Life's a Feast. Ria and Jamie challenged The Daring Bakers to bake a Yeasted Meringue Coffee Cake. So, over Spring Break on the rainiest day in quite some time, I tried my hand at it.

The thing is, though, is that because it was so rainy, I had no desire to go out and buy ingredients. The lucky thing was that I had all of the ingredients for the recipe already at home. The recipe requires we make the sweet yeast dough and meringue and suggests using chocolate and walnuts. The problem was just that combination of pastry and chocolate, of which I am no fan. I know, I know. Everyone loves pain au chocolate and chocolate covered pretzels and these sorts of things, but I find the combination of anything bready and chocolately just meh. And a little blech. Still! I persevered because chocolate and nuts were all I had and was actually quite pleased with how it turned out.

I found the dough quite pleasant to work with. I enjoyed kneading it by hand while watching the rain and taking my mind off schoolwork for a bit. Kneading dough is pretty much one of my all time favorite things. The rhythm is hypnotic and the feeling of shaping something with my own hands is intoxicating.

After the dough has risen, it's rolled out and the filling is added to it. I wasn't too worried about making the meringue, but I was a little worried about how the goodies would stay inside.

Following this, the dough and goodies are rolled into a log and then shaped into a ring. Slits are cut into the sides and the ring proofs for a while before going into the oven.

While the ring was baking, some of the meringue leaked onto the baking sheet. I was worried about it burning, but it was okay. Actually, it formed into delicious caramelized meringue puddles and I ate them all. The cake was quite lovely in presentation and the sun decided to peek out for this last photo.

The verdict? Good. I liked the dough a great deal and am eager to use it again. The meringue was gooey and sweet, but I still couldn't get past the chocolate/dough combination. What a pity! I think I would make it again with some variations because it really is not that difficult and is attractive. I only had one slice, but I left it out at Andrew's house and it was all gone by morning, so someone must have liked it.

For the recipe, visit here, and for more from other Daring Bakers, see here.

2 French dishes, 3 skirts, and 4 pies

This past week was my spring break and I was quite productive. Well, productive for everything but schoolwork. But that's what breaks are for, right? I had missed the previous week's French Friday with Dorie  since I get migraines from aged cheeses and my mom was in town. I decided this week to double up the recipes so I made the Beggar's Linguine that was assigned as well as Marie-Helene's Apple Cake that the group completed before I was a member.

The Beggar's Linguine was an interesting combination of flavors between the savory pistachios and almonds and the sweet figs and raisins. It was a very easy dish to make and took only about ten minutes total. While the linguine finishes cooking, you heat the nuts and fruit in a pan with lots of butter and then toss the cooked linguine in with it. Easy peasy. I probably wouldn't use quite so much butter next time. My only complaint was that it was difficult to get the noodles and the goodies in one bite, so I was either eating a bunch of veeeery buttery noodles or a few pistachios and figs. But if that's the worst thing, then it's not so bad.

Marie-Helene's Apple Cake was also quite lovely. It was surprisingly chilly and rainy out compared to the weather we'd been having, so one last wintery dessert seemed fitting. I didn't have any rum, so I substituted brandy, which seemed to have worked well. The cake developed a custardy consistency, but wasn't very heavy or dense. I think next time I might try it in a six-inch pan so it is even denser. It also reminded me of the gobs of Apfelkuchen I ate in Germany.



Since it was break, I also got some sewing done. I started with this tutorial with some Anna Maria Horner Little Folks voile that I'd gotten on sale. I don't love the fit since it's a little too voluminous, so I might go back and tailor it later.

I made some adjustments and wished that I'd started with the Kona cotton that I used for the next and saved the voile for when I had a better sense of what I was doing. Oh well. I liked the way this one turned out. The fabric isn't extraordinary quality, but it's comfortable and lightweight.

Finally I made this one using some Amy Butler fabric I'd squirreled away last spring. I made a happy accident with my measurements and had to use two panels for the main skirt instead of one and I think it was quite fortunate that I did. The skirt is a teeny bit shorter than I'm comfortable with, but it's growing on me (figuratively).

Since tomorrow is Pi Day, I've been in the kitchen all evening making four strawberry rhubarb pies. It's still too early for rhubarb, so I used frozen, but the strawberries were delicious and on extraordinary sale. Pictures of those later. Huzzah spring!

Here and there is born a Saint Theresa...

"Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed."

Middlemarch, George Eliot

Short Ribs in Red Wine and Port

For this week's FFwD we made Short Ribs in Red Wine and Port. This is the third time I've made braised short ribs in the past three months, which means I must like them. I was disappointed with this rendition, though, but it was mostly my fault and a series of unfortunate events, not a problem with the recipe. The problem started when I decided to buy the short ribs from the grocery store instead of the butcher where I'd gotten them previously. The ribs were sliced surprisingly thin, but I decided to gamble with them. That was a half mistake. The preparation was not unlike the ways I'd done it previously, save the cut of the meat, so I felt very confident with the recipe. The previous times I'd made them, I hadn't refrigerated it overnight and had just used a fat separator for the sauce, but I found scraping the chilled fat off much easier this time. I had pancetta left over from last week and thought I'd make pancetta green beans again. I waited to check the quality of the pancetta until I was about to put it in the pan, only to discover it was pretty moldy. Definite mistake, but luckily green beans taste just fine plain. Then, as I was pulling the pan of ribs out from under the broiler just as we were about to eat, the potholder slipped, I caught the handle with my bare hand and instinctively threw the pan down onto the oven door. Big mistake. It was quite painful and I ended up with a sizable blister on the heel of my hand, but it doesn't hurt anymore. Luckily Andrew was standing next to me when this happened and managed to scrape the meat back into the pan, so dinner was at least salvaged.

So, there we go. It plated up pretty nicely. I had seen a lot of recipes for short ribs that used polenta rather than potatoes, and I thought it'd be a nice change of place. The weird thing was the polenta didn't have much flavor, but still manged to be unpleasant, so I didn't eat more than two forkfuls of mine. the meat was delicious, but I wish there had been a little more to it. I was not very crazy about the gremolata at all. I hate cilantro, so I used parsley instead but I think it was the orange zest that threw it off. It just overpowered the flavor of the meat. Oh well. So, I still think this is an excellent recipe, but I'd use a better cut and potatoes next time while skipping the gremolata. I did actually appreciate that it took two days to make since I usually have mornings off but don't get home from school until the evening, so I like to be able to make something in the morning and finish it quickly later. 

I also used this wine for the sauce and for drinking. I came across it in the store and immediately had to have it since "The Thinker" appealed to me as a philosophy grad student and Alexander Calder is one of my all-time favorite artists. Plus the wine was half off. I've had better, but it was still nice.

Spring is already here in Atlanta. It's hard to believe, but it's true. Huzzah!

Oh, this too

A Few of My Favorite Things

One of my bad habits (is it actually bad? I'm not sure) is having an excessive number of browser tabs open. Since I now have a 24in monitor, the problem has only increased. Right now I have 24 tabs open, for example. The thing is is that most of these are links I've found on other blogs that I want to show people and always forget. So, I'm going to share them with you so that I can clean up my clutter and only feel moderately guilty about passing it on.

One of the best things I've seen lately is this series of photographs from Irina Werning. She takes old photographs and has the subjects reenact the scene. They're just too good. Here're some favorites:

Swiss photographer Corrine Vionnet realized that most tourists take photographs of famous sites from the same spot, so she layered hundreds of photos on top of each other to demonstrate this. The results are uncanny. Why the consistency? Do we take photos from angles based on photographs we have seen before such that we are already conditioned to see things in a certain way? Do we intuitively know which angles are optimal? I'm less inclined to agree with the latter. What you might notice in these photos is that they are all good shots, but none especially interesting (Actually, almost all place the image precisely in the center, which is one thing a photography class teaches you not to do at the beginning). They capture the landmarks, but in a sort of matter of fact sort of way. I don't mean this an an elitist way as if tourists ought to be better photographers, but I'm mesmerized by fundamental sameness. I think, too, there's a fundamental sameness in how people travel. Why do we photograph the landmarks anyway? I have my own photos of the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum, too, but I think I'm ambivalent about those.

More later, I guess.