Pumpkin Soup (based on K's family recipe)

Ingredients:
1/2 medium-sized pumpkin, peeled and chopped into roughly 2-inch chunks
vegetable broth to cover
2 handfuls brown lentils
1/2 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1/2 red pepper, chopped roughly
1 teaspoon cumin
salt (to taste)

Procedure:
In a large stockpot or saucepan, bring pumpkin and vegetable broth to a boil. Add lentils, cumin, and half of the onion and cook until pumpkin is tender. Put in blender or food processor and moosh up. In a small saucepan, sautee remaining onion, garlic, and red peppers until onion is translucent. Add to pureed pumpkin mixture and add broth or water to bring to desired consistency.

Serve hot with a generous tablespoonful of your homemade yogurt, which is not going to waste, especially if you add some to the cornbread you can serve on the side.

The result is not very pretty but it is savory and filling, with a nice creamy, smoky flavor.

Moon Cakes

Oh man, it's Mid-Autumn Festival! I was never in China for this holiday, but I'm awfully fond of it. My first year, I went to a mid-autumn festival party at Smith where I answered a trivia question and won a pair of chopsticks, and there were moon cakes, which I love. Last night a young man of my acquaintance invited me to the Runcible Spoon to study and listen to an Old Time band that plays there every week, and I remember that the moon was huge and bright, but I didn't realize it was already time for the Mid-Autumn festival.

I wish there were someplace I could get a moon cake.

I am not a hippie!

Last night K and I made our second attempt at yogurt. The first time, we tried Laurie Colwin's recipe (as easy as having a baby, she says, but quicker and less painful). Laurie Colwin says not to use skim milk since it's too watery to begin with, but we were using dry milk powder, since it's cheaper, and K reasoned that if we simply increased the proportion of dry milk to water that would make it less watery. Possibly this would have worked, but we also forgot to boil the milk, and then there was the question of incubation.

There are many choices of how to incubate yogurt. You can use a yogurt maker if you have one, but of course we do not. You can wrap it in an old sweater or a baby blanket and stick it in a warm oven. You can put it in a warm water bath over the stove and turn one of the burners on from time to time. You can place it over the pilot light overnight.

That first time, we put the yogurt in glass jars in a baking pan filled with water and left it in the oven overnight (the oven was off). In the morning, we took it out - it had separated and a skin had formed on top (because we hadn't boiled the milk). It looked rather nasty, but we put it in the fridge anyway to see what would happen.

Nothing did. We did not even try that yogurt - it simply looked too hazardous. We ended up pouring it down the sink and resolved that next time we would follow the directions.

Last night we tried a yogurt recipe from the More With Less Cookbook - my standby. It called for a combination of dry and condensed milk and warm water in addition to the starter. To be on the safe side, I also decided to boil the jars. Without tongs, removing the jars from the boiling water was a two person job - I scooped them out with the strainer, and then K used two forks to hold the jar steady while we emptied it and then deposited it on the counter. Miraculously, we managed to avoid scalding ourselves. I poured the yogurt into the jars, screwed on the lids, and put them in a dish of warm water on top of the stove.

We were anxious about turning on the burners under a glass baking dish - I was afraid it might explode. Instead, we heated round after round of water, and each time the water in the dish cooled down, I would bail it out with a cup and pour in fresh hot water. This was a very tiresome procedure and needed to be done every fifteen minutes.

Eventually I grew tired and bored, so I turned the oven on its lowest setting and stuck the jars, still in their warm water bath, in there overnight. I had no idea how hot the lowest setting was, because all the numbers have worn off the knob of our stove and we always have to guess at the temperature, but I figured it couldn't be more than 200 degrees, which was only 80 degrees hotter than the yogurt was supposed to be.

In the morning, I stumbled blearily into the kitchen and removed the yogurt from the oven. It still looked completely watery, but I put it in the fridge anyway.

When I came home this afternoon, I took out one of the jars and examined it. Stirring it with a chopstick, I found that it was somewhat thicker than regular whole milk, but by no means did it have the thick, junket-like consistency of actual yogurt. I poured some into a bowl and tried it.

It's slightly tangy, but much less sour than the store-bought starter. It also has that peculiar canned quality of condensed milk. It's not bad, and hopefully it's not fatal, but I'm not sure what we are going to do with four jars of the stuff.

It's not awful, anyway. I mean, it's not worse than ... uh, it's not the worst part of my day, but we won't go there.

I guess I could always use it in cooking.

Carrot Soup

Perfect for a gray, rainy day like today.

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 pound carrots, peeled and sliced into pennies
half an onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3-4 cups vegetable or chicken broth
1 tablespoon fresh ginger, chopped
1 teaspoon garam masala

plain yogurt

Method:
In a large skillet or frying pan, sautee onions, garlic, and carrots in vegetable oil until the onions are translucent. Add 1 3/4 cups broth, ginger, and garam masala and let simmer, covered, until carrots are quite soft - about half an hour. (This might be a good time to read Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism or, if you prefer, the New York Times.)

When the carrots are soft, pour it all into a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Return to saucepan and add as much broth as you like to thin it to the desired consistency - more like soup and less like baby food.

To serve, add a dollop of plain yogurt - the nice sour, creamy note brings it together and brings out the gingerbready flavor of the garam masala. (We happened to have some lying around so I threw it in as a lark, and it worked quite nicely. Nutmeg or cloves would also work, if you have any.)

Stealth Recycling and Return of the Horse

Because we live in an apartment complex, the city refuses to pick up our recycling. This has been a major source of stress for me recently - thinking about throwing tin cans and milk cartons in the recycling gives me a stomachache, but I can't say walking 5 miles to the recycling center with my arms full of garbage appeals, either. I've been getting along okay without a car, and I can't say I wish I had one, generally, not even when I'm schlepping laundry six blocks to the laundromat or carrying groceries from the other side of town, but this recycling thing bugged me. K and I finally decided that, since the city collects our neighbors' recycling at no charge to them, we will simply slip our recycling into their bins each week. When I came back from my run yesterday I found that K had disposed of the month's worth of recycling we'd accumulated, and it was a great load off my mind. Moreover, it makes me kind of happy to get our environmentalism on stealthily like this. Recycling ninjas!

For today's class, the Horse had us read one of his own papers, although as he pointed out, we didn't know it was his - there are apparently three professors here with the same name.

"Of course, one's a violinist and the other's a cardiologist, but you never know, they might be men of many layers," said the Horse. "Anyway. I get their email."

Of course, we did know that it was his paper - it could have been written by no one but him. He writes exactly the way he talks - even in writing, he never finishes a sentence without one or four hyphenated asides and parenthetical clarifications. Possibly he meant that we couldn't know it was his paper until we had ruled out the possibility that our experience of the material world is all a dream, though this is not his position. I wonder what the violinist and the cardiologist would say to these questions.

The Orchestra and Two Loaves of Bread

A very pleasant weekend. Saturday night K. and I stayed in and studied - she prepared for today's Greek test and I started my paper for Philosophy of Language - my first paper in grad school, which makes me nervous. On Sunday, I turned out two loaves of honey whole wheat bread, which came out beautifully - the yeast loved the honey and it rose like mad. Very nice toast.

People are always astonished that I have time to bake bread every week, but it's not really that difficult. I mix and knead, but the yeast does most of the work, after all. I just sit around and read the news or do homework while it's rising and baking. And the people who express astonishment that I have time for this sort of thing also confess to watching VH1 and spending hours on Wikipedia. I get very annoyed, trying to defend the ways in which I spend my time. I feel like Jane in Laurie Colwin's story "The Boyish Lover":

... Jane began to feel embarrassed by her salads, by the dish of pears she kept on the coffee table. The attention Cordy lavished on the details of her life was beginning to make her feel not singled out and appreciated but freakish ... they had passed some point of no return - somewhere where discount pillows and imported strawberry jam cannot meet (Laurie Colwin, The Lone Pilgrim, pp 29-30). (Why yes I am a grad student, why do you ask?)

Anyway. I baked my bread and I started my paper and did all my logic homework for Thursday and then it was time to go to the orchestra. K. and I decided to get dressed up - I even wore gloves, an affectation I hope I was able to carry off. They were merely wrist-length, not opera length or anything like that but needless to say I did not see anybody else wearing gloves. It did keep me from picking apart my fingers during the performance, however; an unexpected boon.

The music was lovely - they did a Samuel Barber symphony which was absolutely thrilling. I'm not much of a girl for the classical music, but it was like magic, the musicians were able to produce such sounds. Then this soprano came out and did some folk songs, which wasn't really so exciting - I don't care for vocal music really (sorry LCA). Finally, they did some Elgar Variations, one of which Value Theory Lad informed me was one of the most beautiful pieces of music in the world.

It was splendid, but it would have been even nicer if I weren't so socially awkward - I was stuck talking to Value Theory Lad, and I found myself just saying all kinds of inane things. I would really like to be friends with this fellow, but that certainly won't happen unless I learn how to converse like a normal person. There must be a book I can read. Something.

Farmers' Market

LET IT BE KNOWN:

I AM NOT GOING TO LAW SCHOOL. No matter what else happens, even if academia doesn't work out, I will not go to law school. It's not as though those are the only two choices, people. There's a whole world out there.

The Fall Festival

Last night I went with a bunch of other philosophy students to the Irish Lion for Happy Hour. This was Susan's idea - one more reason to love Susan, who is beginning her dissertation on Chinese philosophy. The Irish Lion is actually where I had my first meal in Bloomington, back when I came to visit, and so it is a scene of pleasant memories although not the ideal venue for this sort of social event, as we had to sit at tables and there were so many of us we broke off into two groups. Whenever this happens, I always feel I am in the wrong place. I ended up next to this chap who's quite polite and probably very smart, but who is very fussy - as K. says, you can imagine him painstakingly arranging things on his desk and explaining why everything must be ordered the way it is. My love for Percy Weasley notwithstanding, I do not find this sort of thing endearing.

However, towards the end of the dinner, Susan and Value Theory Lad came over to our end of the table, and I managed to invite Susan to go with me to a screening of Serenity next week. (I knew Susan would be into Firefly. It's so satisfying when I'm right. And she probably won't mind if I go dressed as Kaylee.) And Value Theory Lad issued a general invitation to go to the orchestra tomorrow night, which I will probably do, because Value Theory Lad + Free Music sounds like a good plan to me. I wonder if people get dressed up for this sort of thing. I wonder if I can wear one of my many pairs of gloves.

I was reluctant to go home and read philosophy, so I asked whether anybody had any interesting plans for the rest of the evening. Luke suggested we go to a fall festival in the next town over - there would, he assured us, be funnel cake, and local color to appreciate ironically. This sounded like just the thing to me, and so off we went.

Luke's an interesting cat; I quite enjoy him. He's the departmental Beau Brummell: lanky and languorous, immaculately dressed, I can easily picture him at the Drones, playing cricket with dinner rolls. Apparently he goes every year to an event called Hell House, a sort of Christian haunted house that they do around Halloween to show kids that the wages of sin is death: there's a room where you go to the funeral of a gay man who died of AIDS and an abortion room and I don't know what-all. Luke finds this extremely amusing. I think it sounds distressing, but I'm probably going to end up going; it sounds like it will be an outing.

On this occasion, happily, there were no scenes of eternal damnation - merely rustic charm and unhealthy food, of which I did not partake. Some of the boys bought funnel cake and ate it, and we walked around the fall festival for a bit. Luke tried to get me to go down the super slide, but as I pointed out, that was $2 that could instead be spent on delicious beer.

"I'm convinced," said Mike, and we spun on our heels and headed to Luke's house, stopping on the way to pick up some local beer from a liquor store.

We sat in the yard and Luke piled a mountain of kindling onto the fire pit and before long there was a towering blaze. "I'm the fire guy," he drawled, pleased with himself. A log rolled off the fire, sending off lots of sparks into the parched grass.

"Nice work, fire guy," said Mike. "I'm not fire safety guy," Luke retorted scornfully.

So we sat by the fire and drank our nice, cold beers and talked. We discussed what we'd be doing if not becoming academics - rock star was a popular choice. Value Theory Lad and Luke both want to go to Hollywood. I would be a librarian or a comic book artist, or both.

It was nice, sitting outside with a beer in my hand and a fire crackling, surrounded by these people who are now that much closer to becoming my colleagues and friends. It was the sort of thing I know I ought to be doing, and enjoying. Yet somehow it was not right, or not enough, and I was cold and lonely.

Sic Transit Gloria

Some years ago, this university was a powerhouse of logic. Then Jon Barwise died and Anil Gupta (with whom I have had dinner!) went to Pittsburgh and now Indiana can only dream of its former glory. They are actually a little bitter about it. Especially the Badger.

Today in Set Theory the Badger barked, "I was lucky enough to attend a university where logic was considered to be everything. Unlike this university, where logic is NOTHING!"

I was warned about this before I came. But it turns out they really meant it.

What I Am Doing Here

"So, are you going to drop out?" Value Theory Lad asked me the other day. It was sort of out of the blue, but it came shortly after a pronounced bout of internal What-Am-I-Doing-Here anxiety, so I figured Value Theory Lad was just being perspicacious. Perhaps it is something they learn in Value Theory.*

"I don't know," I replied glumly. "Maybe." Then I realized he'd been joking. Now he looked a little distressed.

"It's just," I went on, "what am I doing here? Philosophy? Where did that come from? I have no real reason to think I'm any good at it, and I'll never find a job, and there is no philosophical logic nowadays ... sometimes I think I'm just here because I couldn't think of anything better to do, and that's a terrible reason."

"Maybe it's not," Value Theory Lad replied. "Maybe if there's nothing else you'd rather be doing, that just shows it's what you're meant to do. I mean, that's what they say about musicians - you don't become a musician because you want to; you become a musician because there's nothing else you can do. Or political leaders - you don't want to elect a leader who really wants to be a leader, who has that as their life's goal."

I was unconvinced.

"Anyway," said Value Theory Lad, "The last two fellowship students before you both dropped out and now one of them is teaching yoga. So you should hang in there for awhile or the fellowship committee will really get discouraged."

*Note to non-philosophers: Value Theory is a branch of philosophy which includes Ethics and Aesthetics. More information about Value Theory can be found on the internet.

The Bacon Digression

I absolutely adore my epistemology professor, the Horse. The Horse is perhaps the handsomest man I have seen so far here in the Hoosier State (and he is from Montreal) and he is simply hilarious - he never seems to be listening to a word anyone says, but just sort of rolls his head around and pulls on his lower lip and gazes into nowhere when spoken to. The Horse almost never finishes a sentence, which makes it very hard to take notes in his class.

Today I was in the lounge drinking a cup of tea and the Horse came in. "I'm worried that you'll peak too soon," he said, apropos of nothing, in his delightful rumbling, scratchy, nasal voice. "I mean, you'll peak really early and then ... and we want you to kind of -" he made a gradual swooping motion with his hand - "what's that you're drinking? Is that tea? Well, that's okay then. I was ... I was being facetious ... I guess you can't tell, okay, see you later." Then he trotted off.

Today in class he was talking about Descartes' requirement that we must rule out the possibility that we're dreaming before we can truly say we know things about the world around us. He said, "Of course in everyday life we're perfectly justified in saying that we know where the nearest hospital is, or who we are, or where you can get a flatbread with what R.J. Apple referred to as 'the Beluga of bacon' ... 'the Beluga of bacon,'" he repeated, almost dreamily. "It's this bacon called 'nueske's' and you can get it at a place called 'Trulli's' which is on ... is it 10th and 3rd? No - it's - it's 10th and the overpass - Trulli's - " and he wrote "Trulli's" and "nueske's" on the board. "Or you can get it at a place called the Butcher's Block. It is the caviar of bacons.

"Once," he went on, "we were in Memphis - I think it was Memphis - walking down the street and we were suddenly - beguiled by this smell of bacon and it drew us in to this little hole in the wall where we had this bacon, and you can actually get it here in Bloomington. Where was I?"

"You were talking about the Cartesian requirement," I prompted him. And he was off again, galloping away in another direction.

In

You're not supposed to choose a grad school based on your hope of working with one specific professor, they told me. He or she* might move on to greener pastures (ahem, JC I am looking at you), or it might turn out that you don't work very well with this person after all. I pretty much ignored this advice, and I came out here with the notion that I would be working with the Badger, our resident logician. (I am calling him that because he is badgerlike and probably Google searches his own name from time to time, because don't we all, and he doesn't need to read what I say about him.)

The Badger is extremely terrifying, a quality I appreciate in a professor. He has very courtly manners but always seems to be shouting. He calls me "ma'am." His photograph on the faculty faceboard in the lounge shows him from behind, looking out the window, and probably brooding. I feel a subdued wish to have him tell me how to run my life, and for this reason it is probably for the best that the Badger is not my adviser ... yet.

Therefore I am pleased when the Badger appears to take an interest in me - when he says things like, 'as one logician to another' or offers to let me read the drafts of a paper he's working on, or invites me to participate in a Philosophy of Mathematics discussion group. Because of this last, I am reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It is every bit as long and confusing as the Philosophical Investigations, but without the classic thought exercises and compelling metaphors. Not to mention, who is more dreamy:

or

I thought so.

*On the subject of "he or she," I read an interesting article yesterday in Bitch about gender-neutral pronouns, as an alternative to the clunky "he or she", the "ungrammatical" singular "they", or the sexist "his." Although I am, on the whole, supportive of attempts to make our language as inclusive as possible (for instance, I supported Smith College's decision to change "she" to "the student" in our school constitution), I cannot get behind these gender neutral pronouns. No one uses words like "zie," "per," or "hirself," and speaking as a linguist, rather than a feminist, they should not be made to. New words are introduced into English all the time, but as a rule they are not these sorts of words. Pronouns are structural, and while new pronouns can evolve naturally (the article points out that "they," "them," and "their" were originally from Scandinavian) they cannot be introduced artificially.

That said, if I should meet somebody who really wants to be addressed using gender-neutral pronouns, I'd probably give it the old college try, because I am nice like that.

THINGS I LOVE:

1. The way my subconscious mind is busy cranking out answers to things even when I am not paying attention: I tried to take a nap this afternoon but was shaken from a doze when I figured out how to do one of the proofs on my set theory homework.
2. The skin that forms on top of milk when you heat it
3. Baked lentils with cheese
4. Watching due South
5. Reading Laurie Colwin with a cup of cocoa -- I mean, reading Kant. Yes.
   

The Bells Are Ringing

I like the bells that I can hear from my bedroom. On the hour, they play a 16-note melody, and this fills me with satisfaction because 16 is the perfect square of a perfect square, and four is the number of sides of a square, and so I hear those sixteen BONGs every hour on the hour and it's pleasant. But I HATE hearing the twelve BONGs at quarter till, especially since they end on an open note, and it just keeps on being open for fifteen minutes, unresolved, and it makes me tense. And I also hate lying in bed, unable to sleep, and being able to time my insomnia in fifteen-minute units.

Went for a run today. It was hard going, but I pressed on. I love the Bryan Park run, because I can go straight through or I can break in the middle and use the exercise equipment, as I did today. Is playing on the jungle gym (excuse me: the "horizontal ladder") really working my arms? I don't know; but it's fun.

Midwestern Weekend

I'm kind of compulsive, and sometimes this is good and sometimes it is bad. I always wish that I could put my need to stick to a schedule to good use, for instance, by ritualizing exercise so that I have to go for a five-mile run every Monday at 8 a.m., but this rarely works. Instead these rituals only seem to develop for activities which, though pleasant, are inconvenient when they cease to be optional. For instance, whether I need anything or not, I have to walk half a mile and back to the grocery store on Saturday morning, and when House comes back on next week I will have to go to the Student Union and hope I can commandeer one of the TVs near the Burger King. (There's never more than one person there at that time in the evening, and there are two TVs, so this should be do-able, but it irritates me that I don't have a choice in this matter. I actually bought a television exclusively to watch House and schlepped it all the way out here to the Midwest, but was, when it came to the point, too cheap to spring for cable, so it doesn't get any channels. It just sits in the living room and makes the place look lowbrow.)

For better or for worse, I have also developed a ritual of getting up early on Sundays and baking bread. This is a good thing, because I love having fresh bread, and store bought bread is either really expensive or not very good. And it's such fun to choose a different recipe each week and purchase small quantities of various flours at the Sahara Mart, and the kneading, and the thrill of watching it rise, and the pleasant, homey scent of baking bread. (This last only applies when I am not also scheduled to set the apartment on fire.)

This week's bread is a high-protein whole wheat loaf, made with soy flour. Since K and I eat so little meat (though we do drink more milk than you'd expect of 20something grad students), I felt the extra protein would not go amiss. I had a slice today for lunch, along with a bowl of Laurie Colwin's black bean soup, and it was quite good - nice crumb, good crust, and a pleasant wheaty flavor. But what I am really craving is sourdough: a daunting prospect.

Laurie Colwin has this to say about sourdough starters: "What with stirring them or using them once a week and taking them out for an airing and keeping them in the right place in the fridge... who needs a sourdough starter? You might as well get a dog." She gives a recipe in Home Cooking but states that the results were mixed and no one really liked it. (I love this about Home Cooking, that it includes recipes that don't really work and encourages the reader to have a bash anyway, but in this case it's not very helpful.) K's copy of The Joy of Cooking recommends undertaking a starter if you are "adventurous, persistent, and leisurely." I am not accustomed to having a recipe make demands on my character like this.

Anyway the only kind of sandwich K and I ever have is peanut butter and jelly, which would be rather nasty on sourdough bread, although I have an ongoing desire to roast a chicken. A cold chicken sandwich on sourdough would be very nice. I need a roasting rack and possibly a baster before this can happen, however.

In the meantime, I am enjoying polenta with black bean and corn salsa. Learning to cook is fun.