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.

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.

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.