Stolen Persimmons

The other day I was running and I noticed a smashed persimmon on the sidewalk in my neighborhood, which lo and behold had fallen from a persimmon tree on my neighbor's (unfenced) lawn. There were, in fact, many persimmons on the ground, and I didn't take them but I did take note. Today there were persimmons at the farmers' market, but I couldn't quite justify buying them. There were, after all, FREE persimmons just a few blocks from my apartment. They were FREE, of course, only in the sense that they were small enough to carry and not nailed down, but still, the combination of two persimmon recipes in my Mennonite cookbook and perfectly good persimmons rotting away on my neighbor's lawn rankled, and this afternoon, stymied by my Frege paper, I went over there and took them. After all, the Mennonites say that "Giving someone a persimmon pudding is giving them a gift of love." Surely there could be no wrong in saving these persimmons from the sin of waste. I barely even had to step off the sidewalk! And, since I didn't end up with quite enough pulp to make the pudding in question, I'm probably going to go back tomorrow. Possibly in the dead of night.

But this experience, combined with my making apple butter last week (out of legitimately purchased, not stolen fruit), makes me really want a food mill. A food mill, it seems, can simultaneously mash and strain things. After forty five minutes trying to force persimmons through a fine mesh sieve with a soup spoon, I'm thinking a food mill is just what's needed. Apple butter is so easy (apart from that detail), so cheap, so universally beloved, and so low in sugar compared to other home jamming projects, that I see no reason not to make it every year forever, so a food mill might be a good investment. Or birthday gift.

Last night I went to Amity's for a debate party that turned out to be just me, Amity and her beau and her roommate, and one other HPS student. Cufflinks is in Indianapolis for a wedding (those X-ians sure are marryalish - a word Spellcheck has just approved, though Google does not) so I was able to let loose at during the debates with my liberal commentary. This made me feel excitingly daring - I should have thrown in a few "G.D."s for good measure. The debate itself was less exciting than I would have liked, though I think our guy did a pretty good job and it's nice to see McCain sticking to his strategy of misrepresenting and distorting Obama's record and positions instead of talking about his own. Amity has invited me over for the VP debate as well, which ought to be exciting. Especially if they get Tina Fey to be Palin again.

And Promenade!

I just got finished making pesto from farmers' market basil and garlic, co-op pine nuts, Kroger olive oil and Wal-Mart Parmesan cheese. The cheese may not have come pre-grated from a jar, but it's not the best I've ever had and it makes me think about the futility of combining good ingredients with less-good ones. It seems wasteful. Like mixing $40 French gin with Rose's lime juice (I'm thinking the only drink that would properly make use of fancy gin is a martini - otherwise you may as well drink Seagram's. But I may be wrong.) I also feel bad about using the food processor instead of chopping by hand or using a mortar and pestle like it says to here, but what're you going to do.

The pesto is for tomorrow, when Cufflinks and I are having our friend Scott and his girlfriend over for dinner. Once again, Cufflinks' annoying food issues mean that I can't have everything exactly the way I want it - once again he wants to have mashed potatoes, even though it's in the 80's. I am excited about the wine I got, though - they were having a tasting in the store and it was really good. I like having dinner parties and I like these people, so I am excited. It's really tempting to make the dessert now, but instead I'm writing this and then working on my Frege paper.

On Friday I went with some philosophers and cog sci folks to the drive-in to see Batman. My colleague Matt and his wife and 3 month old baby were there, so a lot of the pre-movie conversation was pretty baby-centric. Babies are so engrossing. Apparently babies can read now - isn't that distressing? Why would you need your baby to be able to read? Can't we just leave the pre-verbal children alone to do their drooly thing for a bit before starting in with the academic pressure? (My colleague's baby can't read, for the record, and they have no plans to start him any time soon. He is therefore doomed.)

Last night Cufflinks and I went to a square dance hosted by the old-time band we see every week at the Runcible Spoon. It was a ton of fun - we danced every dance (well, Cufflinks did - I sat one out) and by the end we were totally experts. Practically every hipsterbilly in town was there including a bunch of little kids with far-out names like Meridian running around on the dance floor. We didn't know anybody there (Josh knows the band only slightly) but that doesn't matter much at a dance.

Sour Cherry Jam

Today was Strawberry Jam Day, something I'd been looking forward to for weeks. I had finally gotten over my disappointment at not finding any rhubarb, but when I got to the farmers' market I found two stalks, the only ones left, and snapped them up instantly before making my usual recon round. If I had waited, I would have seen that strawberries are SO last season, and there wasn't a one to be found in the whole market. Strawberries are out. Pinstripes sour cherries are in.

I don't know what I'm going to do with the rhubarb.

I bought three pints of sour cherries and spent a good part of the morning pitting them with a paper clip, a trick from the Joy of Cooking. My mum told me that if I follow the directions on the pectin box EXACTLY I will get a proper set, so I used the Sure-Jell recipe, which I think is too sweet, based on the drops that spilled on the counter as I was filling the jars.

The second worst moment came after I'd filled the jars and they were cooling on the counter. I heard one little POP, then another - I was sure the lids were popping because I didn't seal them properly, but then later when I pressed them, they actually had sealed.

The worst moment, however, was just a few minutes ago when I realized I hadn't wiped the jars before putting the lids on. This means they're going to be full of poison bacteria. This is, needless to say, deeply irritating. I guess I'll just keep my beautiful ruby-red jars in a dry place and hope for the best? My mum said they might get moldy, but if so I'll be able to see it, so it should be all right.

Right?

Midwesty!

I'm sitting here in my swelteringly hot, roast-chicken-smelling apartment, willing myself to refrain from eating all the skin off of the chicken before Cufflinks gets here. ("When I said I was trying the recipe that promises the best skin, I meant 'best' in the sense of, uh, 'healthiest'! Because there isn't any!") I'm having a glass of the Clois du Bois Cabernet Sauvignon, which is good, but I wish I'd gone for their delicious Reisling instead because it is hot and sticky and a glass of cold white wine would be nicer than a chambre red.

So there's that.

Today I went to the gym - it's my weight-training day - and as soon as I got there the tornado siren went off, so we were herded into the women's locker room in the basement. It was very warm and it threw me off my precisely-timed schedule, but it gave me a few minutes to read the book I'm teaching from next semester, A Beginner's Guide to the Scientific Method. I'm assisting for Jonathan, the professor with whom I went to Memphis back in February, which is an extremely pleasing result - Jonathan is young, he's smart, he's approachable, and he is really into food and comic books. Added to that he is going to put a lot of emphasis on helping me and JH, my fellow assistant, become better teachers. This sort of hands-on mentorship is just what I need for my first semester in the trenches, and I have very high hopes for the experience.

Today we had our German reading group at the Badger's beautiful house, and it's amazing how different the tone of the group is when Luke is there; last week he couldn't make it and I felt I had done a great job translating, mainly because I had prepared more text than either Mike or Matt. But today Luke challenged me on my translation of almost every sentence. This is fine, as it helps me learn, and next week I will prepare even more rigorously so as to meet with his approval. I have the least German experience of anyone in the group, but I think I'm holding my own.

Peak-Season

Have you seen this? It is cool! It claims that asparagus, collards, peas, spinach, and strawberries are all currently in season here in the Hoosier state, although the only strawberries I've seen at the farmers' market so far were $6 a carton. I'm sorry, I cannot afford to pay six dollars for strawberries at the market when I can get them for a dollar at Walmart (If I were truly ethical I would forgo strawberries altogether rather than buy them from Walmart, but that's not happening) or $2.50 at Kroger.

I'd been hoping to try my hand at preserving this summer, since I love jam so much, and I'd thought of maybe making strawberry-rhubarb preserves, since those are nifty, but when you think of how much the fruit reduces, it's clear that such a project would bankrupt me. I think instead I'll wait until July, when peaches are in season. You can make peach jam, right? I'm not sure I've ever *seen* it, but I don't see why it wouldn't work; store-bought pectin heals all wounds, right?

Meme: Michael Pollan's 12 Commandments

I recently read Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire, which was really good - I learned a great deal about apples, tulips, weed, and potatoes. I'm looking forward to reading his other books as well.

Michael Pollan gets a lot of press from Serious Eats, a food blog I read regularly. Today there was a link to Pollan's 12 Commandments. I have to say, some of them are pretty tough for me.

1. "Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Grandma, you read this blog - what sorts of things do you think this means? Blue yogurt from a squeeze tube? Saffron foam? Scorpions? I have eaten only the last of these, and I stand by that decision, but on the whole I expect my grandmothers would recognize what I eat as food even if they might not enjoy it.

2. "Avoid foods containing ingredients you can't pronounce." Yeah, I violate this one, in one particular way - I eat vegan margarine. I got into the habit when I was staying with my aunt and uncle in Northern California and I just like it. I know it's wrong. Feel free to shun me. I'm also not great at prononciation in general - nicoise olives are out, I'm afraid.

3. "Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot." Except for honey - the honey buried with the Pharaohs is still technically edible.

4. "Avoid food products that carry health claims." What about oatmeal? The Quaker Oats canister sings the praises of whole grains and heart disease. But in general I agree with this one - food is neither medicine nor poison.

5. "Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle." The middle is where they keep peanut butter, jam, pasta, beans, and flour. I need those things.

6. "Better yet, buy food somewhere else: the farmers' market or CSA." This one I do.

7. "Pay more, eat less." Okay, so here's where it gets really tricky. Krista and I are, I am proud to say, on the USDA's Thrifty Food Plan (note: that link is to a PDF file). That means that this month I am supposed to spend $33.60 on my food. (It's based on age and sex.) This is the cheapest food plan the USDA has, and it's my goal to stay as close to it as possible.

8. "Eat a wide variety of species." I'm not sure what this means exactly but I don't think I'm doing it. There's not really all that much variety to be had out here. I did have bison the other day, on a pizza.

9. "Eat food from animals that eat grass." I don't buy beef, and chickens don't eat grass. Neither do lentils.

10. "Cook, and if you can, grow some of your own food." I do cook, but my apartment is too dark for even a windowsill basil plant. This makes me really sad.

11. "Eat meals and eat them only at tables." That I do.

12. "Eat deliberately, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure." This is the most important, and it can be hard - I tend to mindlessly graze, and there's never anyone to eat with, especially now that Krista's gone. But now I'm going to have a turkey burger and some baked yam fries (from a Serious Eats recipe!) and some local spinach, and I will eat it with pleasure.

Summertime

So after my very brief slacking off time (last Wednesday afternoon through this Monday, inclusive), I have begun the summer semester. I am only taking one class and, as we will not be learning how to say at any point, es ist für Babys. I really did not mean to sign up for German for Reading Knowledge, as the idea of only learning one aspect of a language strikes me as stupid and wrong. Speaking, listening, reading, writing - these are the tasks involved in learning a language. We are only learning ONE of these. What a waste of time! I don't have any burning wish to go to Germany to talk to anybody but my Tante Claudia and her family, but still. Plus it's a language-learning style that's completely alien to me. Normally when I learn a language, I memorize hundreds of vocabulary words and a few verb conjugations, then automatically pick up a sense of the grammatical structures and sentence patterns. This is what I've been doing since high school, when I learned how to learn Spanish. But all we're doing in this class is learning to recognize grammar structures and translating text. This is not how I roll. And I do not like to roll in ways other than the ways to which I am accustomed. I am not flexible that way.

On Monday I am having a dinner party. This was sort of unexpected - I had promised my beau that I'd roast him a chicken to celebrate the end of exams, and it got put off for awhile, and then he asked if we could invite this couple we sometimes socialize with, Amity and Tawrin (Amity's the one who has the splendid dinner parties) and then I suggested we make a thing of it and invite Kari and the Werewolf, too. The trouble is that my beau is the world's fussiest eater, and apart from the chicken he might not eat anything I would make. He balked at roasted potatoes, for instance, and suggested that he make mashed potatoes using his mother's recipe, instead. I feel that this is a very heavy dinner for this time of year. He also wants to make No-Bake Cookies for dessert, and I am hoping I can convince him that these are not a proper dessert for a dinner party and I will make a pie as well, or pots de creme, or something. Then he can have No-Bake Cookies and the rest of us can have something else. Feel free to chime in with suggestions!

(He also said in the invitation that there would be "drinking, maybe some smoking, maybe some games" at the party, and now I will have to tell the guests that no, there is no smoking in the apartment, please. Also that the only games we have are chess and Set - not even a deck of cards or a game of Scruples.)

Krista's mother and father and elder sister and younger brother are all here for a visit. Tomorrow they're going to go down to Chicago for the youngest sister's graduation. In the meantime I feel very out-of-place in my apartment - I've been keeping out of the way, but other people's families are so insular and take up so much space, literal and figurative. I will miss Krista over the summer but it will be exciting to have the apartment all to myself.

Upcoming plans include a Futurama marathon at someone's house tomorrow, farmer's market on Saturday, dinner party on Monday, IU's last home baseball game on Tuesday (peanuts, a flask of bourbon, and possibly necking under the bleachers - maybe I can compromise on the No-Bake Cookies), and a soup kitchen shift on Wednesday. Plus I've been to the gym every day this week! Summer is off to a good start.

Reach for the stars

On Wednesday, just as I turned the corner into the last leg of my run, SClub7's song "Reach for the Stars" came on my iPod, giving me exactly the jump-start I needed to finish my run in stride. That 99 cents is now officially worth it.

I'm now done with everything (unless Joan decides to make me redo my Tarski paper, heaven forbid) and it's clear that vacation does not suit me. It's nice not to feel like I have to be doing philosophy, but I really don't know what to do with myself. This morning I went for a run and got caught in the rain. Now it's still raining and I can't think of anything to do besides read or watch more Heroes. I mean, what are you supposed to do with leisure? I can't even go for a walk. I wish I still played with toys.

Also I want to buy ingredients to make chicken with green sauce and fish tacos (they have a lot of the same ingredients, and I picked up some tomatillos at the Asian grocery store yesterday) but a) it's raining and b) we're in need of many heavy staple items (flour, vegetable oil) and I know I won't be able to carry everything. I'd make Cufflinks drive me but he's in Missouri for his father's graduation. Krista's sister is coming to stay with us tomorrow (when did I find out about this? Oh, about ten minutes ago) and I want to cook as usual, but I really don't want to cook for three people when probably two of them won't notice what they eat. (This was a source of tension when Krista last had a guest - they ate my pasta alla puttanesca but nary a word of praise, nary a yummy sound.) It makes me feel (irrationally, I know) resentful. So I'm not sure what I'll be doing. Maybe I'll make chicken with green sauce and then make lots of leading remarks about how I don't think it's poison.

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.

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.)

The G.D.

First, you should really go make this and eat it, as soon as possible. It is amazing like the Mets.

Second, and unrelated to food, here is an interpersonal relations question. Last night Cufflinks and I were watching Road to Brazil and I used the word "goddamn" in conversation, as I occasionally do, possibly as a result of reading a lot of Salinger in my formative years. I try not to swear in front of Cufflinks because of his extreme religiousity, but I guess I don't think of what he referred to as "the G.D." as serious swearing. I guess this is because when I was younger and was considering incorporating swears into my vocabulary, my father told me that profanity was okay, but scatological swears were not.

Cufflinks said that he wasn't okay with "the G.D." and I apologized, but it rankled a bit. On the one hand, we are supposed to say when something bothers us so we can talk it out. This is a good policy that has been serving us fairly well, considering what an odd match we are, each of us finding all of the other's values anathema and appalling. So on that count, I am glad he said it bothered him, because now I will know not to do it again.

But on the other hand, I feel that Cufflinks should not be allowed to tell me what words I can and can't use. It feels a little infantilizing. Not to mention, now I'm worried that the other Batman-and-Robin-style non-swears I use in his presence, like "Holy cats!" might also be unacceptable. I don't know how I should react to this. My inclination is to say he can't tell me what to do, but I'll voluntarily refrain from using expressions that offend him - this I realize is not a consistent position. Thoughts?

(And if you're asking yourself why I keep the guy around, here's an example: he may have gotten us an invitation to a Kentucky Derby party somewhere down South a friend's house, where the women all wear big hats and where he will wear a seersucker suit if we go. Big hats! Seersucker! Mint juleps? I don't even know! The kid's all right, is what I'm sayin'.)

Shang huo

When I was in China (all my stories start that way), I remember once coming upon my friend Fang Ge spitting blood into the flowerbeds outside the teachers' dormitory. Alarmed, I asked him what had happened. He replied that he had eaten too much pork or bananas recently and was suffering from a touch of shang huo - an excess of internal heat. It has to do with the balance of ying and yang, I believe. I thought this was ridiculous, and my friend Xiaoxue (whose mother was a doctor) and I used to argue about it. Basically my argument boiled down to, "If there were such a thing as shang huo, we would know about it in the West." (There are, in fact, westerners who regulate their diet in terms of ying and yang, but these are people on macrobiotic diets, i.e. chumps.)

The other day, quite out of the blue and almost without precedent, I found myself craving Chinese food. I don't, on the whole, look back on most Chinese food with longing, but mostly because I got so sick of it, not because it was bad. I found myself thinking of my weekend breakfasts in Beijing: a hot glass of sweet soymilk, and a deep fried dough stick or a zongzi. On weekday mornings I would go to the dorm cafeteria for a bowl of noodles and a steamed bun filled with sweet yellow ... stuff. Anyway, today I found myself near the good international grocery store and I spent a good half hour just looking. I love this place; they've got everything from ghee to queso fresco and prawn flavored rice porridge. After much deliberation, I got some snow peas, dumpling shells (so I can make scrambled egg and tomato dumplings, my favorite), chicken and vegetable dumplings, steamed buns stuffed with red bean paste, and a mango.

I took it all home and sliced up the mango for my afternoon snack, and to my surprise I found I felt guilty about devouring it - there's not much better for you than mango, but I felt like I was eating cream cheese frosting with a spoon. I guess I must have internalized some of Xiaoxue's warnings. If I start breaking out or bleeding from the gums, I guess I'll owe China an apology.

Merely some incoherent ravings about food.

Meat! Oh, warm and savory animal tissue! Tonight I cooked meat for the first time all semester; I really shouldn't go shopping when I'm feeling out of it, because the other day I came home with a pound of reduced-price frozen turkey, ground up in a tube. I used it to make Asian Turkey Burgers, which were a very delicious vehicle for ketchup, that most delectable of sauces.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 egg white
• 2 tablespoon soy sauce
• 3/4 cup dry bread crumbs
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 16 ounces ground turkey
  

In a bowl, combine the first seven ingredients. Crumble turkey over mixture and mix just until combined. Shape into four patties. Cook in a nonstick skillet coated with nonstick cooking spray until no longer pink.

Last week I bought some of those new pepper Triscuits and they were gone within 24 hours; K and I simply demolished them. This week they were out - pepper Triscuits are a craze sweeping the nation apparently - so I got fire roasted tomato instead, which were half-off but not quite the taste sensation of the pepper ones.

Another thing that's revolutionized my life in the kitchen lately is Jiffy cornbread mix. I always bake bread on Sundays, but we often run out, and when that happens I supplement our starch supply with biscuits - made from Kroger baking mix - or cornbread, made from scratch using the recipe in the More With Less Cookbook. Now, however, I have tried the Jiffy mix and I will never go back. It's just 37 cents a box, and all it takes is an egg and 1/3 of a cup of milk! You can have warm corn muffins for tea whenever you want! Revelation!

And oh, man, ORANGE JUICE! This is the first time we've had orange juice, all frozen and condensed - brought me back to my childhood. Good stuff! I've been getting a little crazy with the groceries lately - I bought all this name-brand stuff: Triscuits, Honeymaid Graham crackers (they're SO much better than the store-brand though), Minute Maid orange juice, Kraft cheese. I really need to cut back a bit - next week, no fancy stuff! Maybe name-brand raisins, but that's it!

On Friday I did a shift at the soup kitchen and they actually let me do stuff! I got to chop up a million eggplants (and then that night I went home and made eggplant parmesan, yum) and make salads! Eric, the guy in charge, pointed me in the direction of some bags of wilted lettuce and said he didn't like to stifle people's creativity, so just have at. There's a limit to what you can accomplish with wilted iceberg lettuce and carrot sticks, but I had fun. TWO shifts next week because I'm on Spring Break, and I'm totally looking forward to them.

Rolled out of Indiana in the back of a pickup truck

I am pleased to report that the Midsouth Philosophy Conference was a total success. We left Indiana on Thursday afternoon – I went with Jonathan, a junior professor in my department who does experimental philosophy and cognitive science, and Sharon, who’s really nice – technically she’s a firstyear like me, but she already has her Master’s. I spent most of the trip sleeping in the backseat. We stopped for dinner in Nashville, at the Loveless Café, where we had fried chicken, amazingly good sweet potatoes, and biscuits with sausage gravy, preserves, and sorghum. Sorghum’s pretty tasty – it’s like molasses only milder – but sausage gravy is terrifying, all white and lumpy. It heralds one’s immanent demise.

We stayed at Jonathan’s parents’ house in the Memphis suburbs. They were very hospitable – we got in around eleven and they were still up, and Jonathan’s mum was taking chocolate chip cookies out of the oven as we arrived. The next morning we slept in and when we woke up there were fresh orange blossom muffins, orange juice, and coffee.

The conference itself was very educational and went a long way towards demystifying the whole conference thing for me. Paul Boghossian gave the keynote address, which was on the naturalization of meaning. It would have been right in my wheelhouse if only I’d been able to hear him. Alas, it was one of only two talks in my area during the whole conference.

After the keynote, we all split up and went to different talks. I made the very poor decision of going to a talk on “Ironic Racial Humor” because race is interesting and I’d never heard of the philosophy of humor. (Apparently it’s a branch of aesthetics.) Honestly? I was hoping there’d be jokes. But as it turns out the only joke in the philosophy of humor is that there are no jokes in the philosophy of humor, except for this one. Which isn’t very funny. I found this talk, in which the speaker argued that “ironic racial humor” can somehow fight racism, actually kind of racist. It presupposed that it’s black people’s job to educate white people, and completely ignored the possibility that other black people might find such humor affirming or, you know, funny.

As a matter of fact, the talks given by my fellow Hoosiers were by far the best I attended. This may have been partially due to my poor choice of talks, although apart from the ironic racial humor talk, they all sounded like interesting ideas. But I went to a talk by a fellow who claimed that desire satisfaction is the only requirement for well being (then what is well being? Why, it’s what you get when your desires are satisfied! It cannot be cashed out in any other way! So the child molester who successfully molests children has well being, as does the person whose only desire is that there is a non-prime number of atoms in the universe (as long as that’s the case, whether or not he knows it’s the case), as does the person hooked up to the experience-machine. LAME.)

I would actually love to go on in this vein, criticizing the talks I attended, but it occurs to me that this is poor form, so I’ll stop. Suffice it to say that I could totally submit a paper to this conference, and next year I shall. This is something I can do.

Other highlights included a mighty nice pulled pork sandwich, cheese grits, talks on experimental philosophy, extended mind, and Kierkegaard, and a long, intense banter session with the Werewolf which culminated in one careless comment from me that brought our fragile rapport down like a house of cards. Just when I think the Werewolf and I have turned a corner, it turns out that we haven’t. It’s honestly weird to like and respect someone so much and yet be utterly unable to get along with him.

On Saturday Jonathan’s parents hosted a big party for the conference-goers, where those who were inclined watched the basketball game and the rest of us sat around the kitchen table and gossiped about our colleagues. We talked to a very congenial philosopher of logic from Mississippi who gave us tips on departmental politics and who made fun of me for my fangirlish love for Wittgenstein and Graham Priest. It was very entertaining.

So now I’m back in Bloomington, way behind on everything and planning to eat nothing but raw spinach and brown rice for a month, charged up and freshly determined that this philosophy thing is something I can by God own.

Their biscuits would make you cry

My last two soups have not been winners. A few weeks ago I made an acorn squash soup with apples and caramelized onions - and doesn't that sound good? But it was sort of icky. And yesterday I made "Winter Pesto Soup" which had me suspicious from the beginning because basil is not a winter food, but I tried it anyway and it, too, is kind of odd. I blame the red potatoes - I left the skins on, and they're kind of biting, and the potatoes themselves have an odd, waxy quality. Very disappointing.

On Thursday I am leaving for Memphis for the Midsouth Philosophy Conference, where several of my colleagues (including Kari and the Werewolf) will be giving talks. I am not giving a talk, but I am going along for the ride because I have never been to Memphis or to a philosophy conference. The university gives us $300 a year to go to conferences, which is pretty sweet - I reckon it'll take care of gas and conference registration. As for lodging, we're staying at the home of a professor's parents, which will be nifty - I love seeing other people's houses. And Jonathan - the professor in question, who is from Memphis - has alluded to biscuits and gravy and other southern delicacies.

Oh, man, when I was in China I used to crave biscuits. My roommate, Bai Kunning, would wax rhapsodic over the biscuits at Popeye's - "Tamen de biscuits hui rang ni ku," she would say - "Their biscuits would make you cry."

In the meantime, I have to finish part one of Transcendence of the Ego, plus a bunch of soggy metaethics on lurve. The Metaethics of Lurve. Conceptual Analysis of Lurve. Stupid Frankfurt. And then I have to start my paper on perverse desires, which may actually be kind of fun. If I can ever actually start writing on it.

My toes are numb

It is ten degrees out and I had to go to the laundromat, because I haven't done laundry in, oh, three weeks or so and it is becoming a problem. I had so much laundry and the laundromat is so far away I could only manage to carry my darks, so after classes today I will have to go back and do my whites, which is a total drag. Carrying all my clothes seven blocks to the laundromat in ten-degree weather is making me REALLY wish I had a car. Maybe a 1971 Buick Riviera.

Yesterday I made a loaf of Laurie Colwin's long-rise whole wheat bread. It rose all day while I was in class and then after a short second rise it was ready to bake. It came out of the oven just in time for dinner, and K and I had a cozy, if somewhat austere, meal of bean soup and warm, crusty bread. This bread makes me happy because it uses three kinds of flour (the more flours a bread involves, the happier I am), one of which is a stone-ground wheat from a local mill, which I got at the farmers' market this fall. I am looking forward to the farmers' market starting up again ... I am getting ready for spring.

I think this week I will buy some sort of meat, maybe a chicken.

Bulgar is no friend of mine

Holy cajolery, I am hungry. For dinner tonight I had Bulgar Pilaf and steamed broccoli, which is every bit as grim as it sounds. I know I deserve what I get for cooking something called Bulgar Pilaf, but still. I even tried to make it more palatable with a little margarine, but it didn't help.
The best part is, I still have POUNDS of it left for the rest of the week!

Slightly more successful was last night's Tomato Macaroni Pie, which is not actually a pie, just macaroni and a can of tomatoes, sprinkled with cheese and baked in a pie dish. Kind of Midwesterny but wholesome and tasty.

Today was my second day of classes. I am very excited about JW's Philosophy of Language class. It is clear that, unless suitably restrained, I am going to be That Girl and answer every question she asks, often without raising my hand. I tried super hard today to only answer every third question or so, but there's nothing more painful than long silences when the teacher asks a question, and it's so tempting to just fill that silence with speech, be it well thought out and accurate or simply off-the-cuff blither.

Also exciting: my Sartre class, which is taught by a nifty old Continental philosopher whom I really like. He's very animated and funny, and super excited about Sartre, so that's all good.

Man, if there's one thing I love, it's being back in my routine. Break was nice and all, but this semester is going to be swell.

Proof

I didn't go grocery shopping this week, since we're leaving for break soon. That means K and I are having a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches and pasta. Or, actually, I'm having pasta; pasta isn't one of K's categories. It's always surprising to me what foods surprise her: penne with tomato sauce out of a jar, spinach omelettes. I had a spinach omelette for dinner last night and she said she'd never heard of such a thing, and looked very dubious about whether it would even work. I have to say, I need to learn some new staple dishes, though, because I'm so sick of baked lentils with cheese and red beans and rice. When I get back to school next month I'm going to learn to cook some new stuff. Trouble is, I can't imagine what sorts of stuff that might be. Beans and lentils, probably. It is to weep.

One of my favorite things in the whole world, when all is said and done, is struggling through a really difficult proof. The hours spent "moving symbols around on the page" as Fred called it dismissively; trying every approach, and running into dead ends, and trying again. I love drifting off to sleep and being hit with a possible answer, as if by a brick, and leaping up to wright it down and have another bash. I love writing on the blackboard in the lounge and pacing and getting frustrated. I love when I'm just about to give up and I move one symbol and the answer is right there, it was there all along.

"How's that going?" K asked me last night as I was working on my set theory, a thin layer of dust obscuring my features.
"Still hopeless," I said gloomily. Then I looked back down at what I was doing. "Unless - did I just solve it?!" I went back over what I had done. It looked - and still does after a good night's rest - correct. I did it.

Those moments are what makes it worthwhile.

Better Homes and Gardens

After nearly three months in the Hoosier state, I have finally bought a couch. It folds out into a bed, even, so if you want to come visit me, you will no longer have to sleep on the floor.

Doesn't it look homey, with the lamp and the plant and the Chagall? It's rather intimidating to own something so large and heavy, but I already have a bed, so in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. I can never move now. Not that I'd be able to find something so well-located again, anyway.

I've been sick for going on two weeks, which meant no homemade bread this past week. On Sunday, my breadmaking day, I was too sick to even contemplate mixing, let alone kneading. I have, however, been having a lot of fun with soups. I tried Laurie Colwin's curried broccoli soup, which was pretty good and fairly easy to make, plus a ridiculously easy sweet potato soup: Bake some sweet potatoes until soft. Let cool a little and then peel, then put them in the food processor with a quantity of chicken or vegetable broth. Season with red pepper, cloves, and ginger. Very soothing.

As soon as my cough goes away and I can eat delicious dairy products again, I'm going to make some roasted autumn vegetable soup using one of the recipes I got last week at the Farmers' Market. The recipe sounds rather unhealthy so I'm going to make some alterations. I'll see how it goes.

Happy Hour at the Irish Lion last night with a bunch of people from the department. The Lion is not an ideal venue for this sort of thing because one sits at long tables and I invariably end up with a bunch of non-talkers. I rallied as best I could and brought out one of my favorite conversation starters: what was the first album you ever bought by yourself? (Mine was Jagged Little Pill, by Alanis Morisette, I think.) (Confidential to CLA: note carefully the "by yourself" part.) This was a very musical crowd and so that was quite effective.

Tonight I've got mountains of epistemology to go through. Maybe I will do it while sitting on my couch.

Found Poetry

I love the Horse's digressions so much I have recently begun making note of them in the margins of my notes. They form a lovely sort of Dadaist poetry.
gators/garters
hockey without a mask
bizarro hair
platform shoes in Venice...
KISS - forget about it -
I know he has a long tongue, but ...
firemen's outfits
in Italy
fabulous airlines

I have made the plunge and ordered two posters for our living room. I almost chose this one but decided it would be a bit odd to have the same art as my parents, so instead I (unknowingly) chose the Chagall my sister Floss has in her room at school and a Klimt I thought was nice. This will hopefully make our space look more lived-in.

Made a rather tasty vinegar chicken tonight - my mother's suggestion. It was extremely vinegary and delicious - I added extra vinegar and now I'm all parched. K's making scones in her bird apron and it's all nicely domestic. Time to do some set theory.

(This nicely sums up my thoughts on the recent Dumbledore situation. Let's not forget the context of the question JKR was answering: does Dumbledore find love? )