A School Magazine

I just finished reading my alma mater’s new magazine. There was an impressive amount of self congratulations and boy-is-our-school-the-bomb kind of articles. It’s to be expected. But I’ll admit that the people who were interviewed actually were the bomb. They had published books, started profitable and ground-breaking businesses, received academic honors, lived in challenging locations, and been neighborly, too. And I knew more than one of them. Does that make me the bomb by association? And am I saying ‘the bomb’ because that was in vogue when I attended said establishment?

Because I am discussing reading, or, more truthfully, my alma mater’s poppycock, I tried to become incredibly impartial and decide whether it was a worthwhile read for anybody. Would you want to know what the people who were doing well from my uni were doing? Maybe. If it was compelling writing and the things were truly interesting, not just glorified school fight songs.

So, what is compelling about different people and their interests and their work? Or, more to the point, what is it that makes anything worth reading, because that should transcend interest groups, shouldn’t it? Certainly there’s little question about whether literature, art, architecture and the like are able to inspire people who are from other times, cultures, and belief systems. So, an article extolling the good deeds and results of people – any people, example: those from my alma mater – would necessarily be inspiring to someone who’d never heard of the school or the community if it was excellent.

Aha! Much like most blogs, articles, writings, etc., this magazine will be passed on once, then lost (or recycled) because it does not have that level of depth. It’s full of mildly interesting snippets of people’s stories, printed on heavy glossy paper. But I will continue to read them; they bring me flashes of hope, joy, and recognition – kind of like my picture albums…. Do not despair, as I will soon be back to great literature, worthy to be shared far and wide. (Oh, but I’m going to keep reading the silly blogs, too!)

Crack-arons

Coarse compliments are truly inspiring. What if there was something more compelling than sugar and love in my pastries? But there isn’t. On the other hand, is there anything more compelling than sugar and love? At any rate, when I make a macaron, you can be sure that it is bursting with the best of those.

My housemate had a benefit for “Climb for Kids” at her coffee shop, and she’s going to summit Mt Rainier in August with the organization. She’s doing a lot of training, and this is her fundraiser. Looking through some of my pastry photos, she picked out the macarons as a nice colorful finger food that should go over well. And it did.

But before it went anywhere I had to decide what it would be. Just the other day I found almond milk in the grocery store and have been trying to decide how I can incorporate it into my pastries. Well, if anything should go together it would be almond cream and macarons!

So I set in to make an almond cream. I thought it should act exactly like milk, so I made a rich pastry cream with almond milk. Fantastic! It was looser than I had anticipated, so next time I’ll certainly be sure to make modifications, but not to worry, they will only be improvements. I made two other creams, as well: cherry and mango!

A Tart

Tarts and vicars, the seemingly indelicate pairing, set up quite nicely at a church potluck. But how do tarts and ladies manage? Just yesterday a friend, modest as anything, had her wedding shower, and I brought tarts, complementing the bows and lace as best I could.

Browsing the grocery store in the morning I decided on mangos and cherries as my flavors and set in to make what would become a bridal tart. With a simple sweet pastry shell, following directions perfectly, I began. Then I realized that although I meant to follow a recipe, I had none for my subsequent ideas and began off-roading into gelatin mayhem.

Cherry gelee, mango mousse, and fresh fruit were my objectives and I got them all on board. Using a form of gelatin that was available, but that I had never used before, I forged new trails into pastry knowledge and vision. I also ended up with some pretty stiff gelee! That stuff will not be melting or even sliding without express written consent from Knox.

The mousse was quite delicious and plenty moussey, perfectly mangoey. Knowing what I do now about the gelatin I was using, I would have omitted more. However, the end result was just the kind of texture that my Grandma would consider dreamy.

Now that I had my components I began to hem and haw about how this would actually come together. So I took a walk and set it aside. When I came back I did what you see: a tart shell, its base replete with cherry gelee, set off by a slice of fresh mango, half filled with a swirl of mango mousse, and a tiny salad of diced mango beside a gelee covered cherry on top. Just the thing to eat while trying on lingerie, no?

Truth or I'm not Random

Fifty-one questions later and my ears are ringing with truth! John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale respond to question after question regarding the sciences and Christian faith. I fondly remember my interaction with the Templeton Foundation during graduate studies and am always eager for good discussion at this crossroads. Having read articles by Polkinghorne then, I was happy to see a new book of his, Questions of Truth, at my local library.

I will quote one of my favorite concepts in physics, with Polkinghorne’s response, and then just let you know how blessed I am for this. (FYI, my absolute favorite concept is entropy.)

Uncertainty: What effect would a structured or organized subatomic world have on creation? Or, is everything random? Beale sets the stage by stating that the term ‘random’ is difficult to address, but ‘uncertain’ somehow does a better job. Having often been teased as random myself, and fairly regularly denied that truth, I wonder at this beginning. Here’s Polkinhorne’s reply:

“Modern science has come to recognize that the processes that can give rise to genuine novelty have to be 'at the edge of chaos' where order and disorder, chance and necessity, creatively interlace. Otherwise things are either too rigid for anything really new to happen or too haphazard for novelty to be able to persist. The intrinsic unpredictabilities of quantum mechanics and chaos theory can be seen theologically as gifts of a Creator whose creation is both orderly and open this way.”

Boom. One of the most poetic and uplifting paragraphs I’ve read in a very long time. Stuck and need a change? Edge towards the unknown. Blown around and need a change? Get more structure. This whole ‘make something new’ of anything needs enough sense and enough nonsense to get off the ground. And, my, doesn’t our world fly nicely.

Laura, Cowboys, and Me

Not long ago I was looking for a good snack to take on a trip. I spent about an hour roaming around Whole Foods and came up empty handed. Nothing looked good enough. The truth was I wanted something that I make and I wanted it to last and not be packaged and so forth. But I didn’t want to show up in NYC and have to roam around for an hour if I really needed something to eat and was feeling as picky as I was that night.

So I went home and complained to my roommate that nobody does it like me and I was leaving the next day and had no idea what to do. Listening to my sorry tale, she said, "Sounds like you should make Cowboy Cookies." She gave me her Laura Bush's Cowboy Cookies recipe and I concurred. That’s just what I should make. It had chocolate, a variety of nuts, oats, and seemed like it would last.

But then I looked at the recipe again and saw there was cinnamon (yuck), tons of sugar (yikes), heaps of additions (huh, back to the store?) and balked. Not to mention that the only other time I’d been in the presence of cowboy cookies was at a Christmas event years before and they were sweet, tiny lumps of brick – I remember these things. Then I set in and made it my way. If you’ve read my spinach dip blog you’ve got to know this is the way it would be.

I took out: all cinnamon, ½ the salt (because I use salted butter), a cup of sugar, a cup of coconut, a cup of chocolate chips, and a cup of oats. I substituted the pecans with walnuts. I added a bit of nutmeg, and rolled each cookie in slivered almonds.

Let’s put it this way, all throughout my trip to NYC I kept wishing I would just get hungry enough to eat a cookie. Of course the city was far too exciting and there was plenty of food everywhere and, lo, and behold, they were gone!

lol

So, I just read a joke book. But it’s not that kind of joke book, it’s the kind a scholar might write, but it was written by a journalist. Anyhow. Just so you know, it was funny… enough. You can read it in an hour and get a couple laughs, but you may as well just read a joke book.

Apparently joking around isn’t new. Jim Holt's Stop Me if You've Heard This traced certain jokes back through the Middle Ages to way back, which just get revived for contemporary audiences, inserting new figures. His treatise on why people make jokes and what’s funny was no more involved or convincing than my university French professor’s musings. We talked about obsession, philosophy, and humor in my French classes. Holt talked about Freud, philosophy, and humor, which didn’t yield too different of results.

Do we laugh because something’s funny? Well, usually, if it’s not because the left frontal lobe of our brain is being zapped. But there’s plenty of laughing that has nothing to do with humor, even if we say a jolly person is in good humor we don’t need that person to crack jokes to be so. But I’ve laughed out loud in pure shock – in a French class, no less.

One of the bits I particularly appreciated was Holt’s mention of how different people enjoy various styles of humor. I am particularly fond of witticisms, but not so into puns. Even though they’re so close! Somehow, perhaps due to all that American Puritanism, sexual jokes aren’t that amusing to me, in fact I often find I agree with G. Legman that “telling a dirty joke is tantamount to verbal rape.” And that really isn’t funny. The aggressive nature of many put-down jokes makes me feel rather agelastic.

So the irony may be that I think religious jokes are really, really funny. (Even the most outrageous ones that Holt cited, not to mention the innocuous ones I know.) Apparently Freud’s biggest collection of jokes regarded Jews, symbolizing his personal ambivalence, so I guess this opens me up to all kinds of interesting subconscious possibilities. Poppycock!

A rose by any other name...

The other day my banker had a pastry question for me. He and his colleagues had been discussing the difference between muffins and cupcakes. “What is the difference?” he asked.

After a fairly long and expectant pause I answered, “Frosting.” “Oh, no,” he responded, “we’ve actually had muffins with icing on them.”

In a perfect world this would be an easy question to answer. Muffins are more or less quick breads in cup forms, should have healthy things like bananas and bran in them, and be suitable for breakfast. Cupcakes are pretty much cake in cup form, should have sweet things like chocolate and vanilla in them, and be suitable for birthday parties.

As I checked through these things in my head before answering, I realized that Americans put n’importe quoi* in their foods, completely obscuring all delineations. Haven’t we all had cake as dense as bread and bread as light as cake? Take Carrot Cake and Carrot Muffins, for example. Maybe throw some nuts in the muffin? And definitely put icing on the cake. But what if you didn’t? What is the difference? And then there’s the epitome of absurdity – chocolate muffins. Maybe somebody is fooled by that misnomer, but certainly not me!

All that to say, this morning I made a pancake recipe into muffins. But they were too light, so it must have been cake, but there wasn’t any sugar, so, huh, what was it? It was breakfast.

Ah, a rose by any other name….

*Any old thing, usually done to suit a fancy, to be difficult, or out of stupidity. Said in exasperation.

Savory Recipes

When I decide to make something that I haven’t made before, or at least not recently, I pull out three different cookbooks and start comparing recipes. That sounds normal, right? But then, what if I look in the fridge and see a lot of spinach? Well, I take down my favorite cookbook and search for spinach in the index. Boy, do I love indexes.

Say I see spinach dip and decide that’s what I want; next I branch out finding multiple recipes for spinach dip. Here’s the catch. I never choose one. Usually I’m combining two recipes and adding the bell pepper I found behind the spinach which wasn’t even put with spinach on the spinach side dish recipes.

So, I use approximately 30% of a recipe at any given time and am always amazed at how well those crazy vegetables go together, which, according to my books, have never been combined before! When I am wildly successful I admit to wishing I’d measured more closely, remembered each spice and written it immediately. But I suppose my current system leaves me space to stumble once again into marvelous spinach dip my own way. Plus, we know I’d only use 30% of what I wrote, anyhow!