Das Baby

I like this line: ''Everyone,'' he said inaccurately, ''loves rice pudding.'' Oh the effect of a well-placed adverb!

So in addition to Runaways I have now become a fan of Heroes, which can be watched for free from Netflix. Since when were they allowed to show stuff like that on network TV, though? Goodness gracious, it's so gorey! But after the first episode, which I found a bit dull, it's been one cliffhanger after another and I just keep watching them. Also Hiro is adorable.

I had my first epic bread baking failure this weekend. I was trying to make Pilgrim's bread, a hearty multigrain bread I've made several times before, but I discovered too late that I didn't have enough flour and it died. This makes me really sad, and I felt so guilty for throwing out the horrible dough, especially with the food shortage and everything. Wasting all that flour was not cool. I know everyone has the odd kitchen disaster - Laurie Colwin has a whole chapter on disasters in Home Cooking - but it still bums me out.

I'm big on making things from scratch, but there are three convenience foods I find absolutely miraculous: Jiffy corn muffin mix, Kroger baking mix, and instant pudding. The Jiffy mix, especially, was a revelation - 47 cents, an egg, and 1/3 cup milk and you can have hot corn muffins for tea whenever you feel like it! The Kroger mix makes very presentable pancakes and biscuits (other stuff, too, like waffles, which I've never tried because I don't have a waffle iron) and instant pudding is fat free if you use skim milk, takes ten minutes start to finish, and is an excellent source of calcium! I mean, I like baked rice pudding with milk and rice and eggs (the Joy of Cooking recipe is my fave so far), but when I just want something sweet and easy, stovetop pudding from a box is the way to go.

One more paper to turn in and I'm on summer vacation! At least until Monday when I start my German class. To prepare myself, I am reading Gitta geht zum Buhne, which my mum got at a flea market in Germany (I think). Gitta has just gone to a super fancy dress store where she bought the prettiest dress. My favorite part so far is when the mother says she doesn't need a new dress because she has a perfectly good one, and one of the sisters says, "Mother, you've had that dress since I was a baby!" I like that because my favorite word in German is the word for "baby": Das Baby. That cracks me up.

Runaways

I often go on a comic book binge around exam time, and this year my obsession is with Runaways. Yes, it's Marvel. Yes, it was made after 1992. Yes, they have done the coloring on a computer so it's full of gradations. But I do not care, I love it madly, especially because after the first few issues they start in with all the references to 80's-era Marvel, which is great - they make fun of Cloak and Dagger (one of the characters calls Dagger out on her ludicrously skanky outfit, which was great) and Power Pack (Julie Power is now living in LA, apparently, trying to break into show business). Plus, it's currently being written by Joss Whedon. What's not to love?

Typecast:

Saturday night: reading "Existentialism is a Humanism" on the couch, barefoot and wearing an ancient, holey men's sweater, and drinking instant coffee.

I'd rather be watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, though.

Multifruit Povidel

K and I are both very frugal and subsist largely on bulk dried beans and legumes, but we each have our moments of indulgence where food is concerned. In K's case this is usually cheese: she'll occasionally buy a wedge of brie or this weird, chalky cheese with ginger and mango in it. Me, I'm a huge fan of nice jam. I bake all our bread of course, and to my mind, nice bread requires nice jam. So I get currant jelly or strawberry-rhubarb or blood orange preserves, or just nice, low-sugar raspberry or strawberry jams, and they make me happy.

On a recent trip to the supermarket I saw that one of the jams I'd never tried was on sale - something called Multifruit Povidel. I took it home and spread it on a warm, fresh slice of Pilgrim's Bread and it was awful - really it doesn't qualify as jam at all. Closer inspection of the label revealed that it was rose-hip flavor and also from Poland. Now, the Poles make good logicians but when it comes to food, I'll pass on the pirogies and what-have-you - that stuff is gross. The Multifruit Povidel has been on the door ever since, next to the large jar of store-brand strawberry jam we bought back when economizing on jam seemed like a good idea (that was probably September; I wonder if there's even jam in there still or just mold).

I couldn't bear to throw the Povidel away, though. That's just not the way I roll. Krista's a very good sport and generally doesn't care about food, but after awhile she started expressing a desire to get another jar of jam. But we can't do that until we finish the Povidel, and since it can't be used on bread another method must be found. Hence, Surprise Muffins.

The Surprise Muffins came from Krista's Betty Crocker cookbook - they're just plain muffins with a boop of jam in the center. You're supposed to bite into them and find that Surprise! they're full of multifruit povidel! In fact, there's an additional surprise, which is that they're not that bad, especially warm - the povidel's texture is nicer hot. I put very generous boops and used up half the jar. We're going to do this thing. There's a jar of Smucker's in the cupboard waiting for us.


(Okay I lied: my list of food luxuries is actually pretty long: I buy name-brand graham crackers, Minute Maid orange juice, Triscuits when they're on sale (the black pepper kind are soooo good), fair trade coffee and cage-free eggs. All of these are luxuries. But they're so much nicer than the store-brand versions - I especially notice this in the case of coffee. Kroger ground coffee just can't compare to fresh ground, French roast coffee.)

Baby, take my hand.

Tonight is the department's end-of-year bash at our chair's house. I remember the beginning-of-year bash at this same professor's house back in September - sitting on the porch with a bunch of people I didn't really know yet. Now I know some of them a bit better. One of them is my beau. One has shared an apartment with me for eight months. I've had drinks with them, and classes, and conversations.

I'm listening to "Don't Fear the Reaper," which I would say is the Official Song of my first year of graduate school. We listened to it around the campfire at Luke's Halloween party and my sisters and I twisted to it on Christmas night while cleaning up after the party.

A lot of the time I wish I could either up and leave this place or hit reset and try this year again, because in some ways (mainly socially) I kind of messed everything up. I made some bad decisions and I made some changes a bit too late. But neither of those is really an option (especially the latter) and anyway, the lilacs are in bloom, and it's hard to hate someplace that smells so darn good.

Yes We Can

I remember watching Obama speak at the Democratic National Convention back in 2004 and writing in my journal that I would vote for him for president some day. And now I have. It's nice when I'm right.

The Indiana primary isn't until May 6, but Obama campaign workers have been hawking this early voting thing and I figured why wait? They set up a temporary clerk's office in the Student Union and today people can go there and cast in-person absentee ballots. It crossed my mind that this would be a very clever scheme for some undercover McCain operatives - get all the Democratic college kids to cast fake ballots before they leave town for the summer, then swoop in for the kill at the actual primary. But this, I think, is fairly unlikely.

There was a long line at the polls this morning, and when I left it had grown longer still. There are also shuttles taking people to other polling places a couple of times a day, every day this week. It's really heartening to see such turnout, and it was also nice to see, as I signed out, the long list of D's on the signout sheet. The Dems are voting early in Indiana; let's hope it's enough.

I read a good piece on Obama recently in Commonweal, in which the author - I forget who it was - pointed out that speaking well is often a sign of thinking well, and that it will be much easier for McCain to dismiss Obama's rhetoric than to match it. Certain people I could name have said that Obama is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, or as Cufflinks put it, that he says nothing at all but he says it really well. Whatever. I'm rereading this speech, and I feel the same way I did back in college when Obama gave me a glimpse of my America. I don't care that it's just talk - every time I see a chalking on the sidewalk that says "Yes We Can" it puts a spring in my step. So they're just words; well, this country was built on words. We're going to take America back. This is going to be great.

Wine

In other news, I am completely incapable of opening a bottle of wine. Last time I tried (I needed a bit of red wine for Laurie Colwin's beef stew recipe, which was disappointing, but did you know they sell $3 bottles of wine nowadays? Crazy) I actually broke our good bottle opener. Tonight when I tried to open the wine for the risotto I found I simply do not know how to use a corkscrew. Krista tried to help me - one of us would hold the bottle and the other would pull - but to no avail. I eventually managed to shove the broken cork down into the bottle, allowing me to pour the wine out, with bits of cork floating in it that did little to mitigate the awesome deliciousness of my risotto. But a better solution will have to be found.