PurpleFontGirl

Thanksgiving Baking: Great Aunt Bun's Sweet Rolls

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:37:00 +0000

Another great family recipe... currently rising in the oven!

2 cakes compressed yeast (you MUST find the "active" yeast bricks next to the butter in the grocery store. Active dry packets do NOT taste the same)
1 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup butter
1 tsp salt

Crumble yeast cakes in a little bowl. Add 1 tsp sugar and a little of the milk (warmed, but not too hot). Cream butter, sugar and salt. Add well-beaten eggs and yeast mixture. Add half of the sifted flour and remaining milk, and beat well. Mix in the rest of the flour with your hands.

Knead gently in bowl until smooth Place in a well-greased bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size.

Remove dough from bowl to a floured board, and cut in two. Roll out each piece to 1/4 inch thickness. Cut like a pie into 16 pieces. Roll up each into a croissant shape, beginning at wide end of triangle. Roll tightly, and pull each roll out longer by gently tugging on the ends. Let rise about 1/2 hour.

Bake at 400 for 15 minutes. For a tender crust, brush with melted butter when removing from the oven.

Christmas baking: Pfeffernuesse

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 01:08:00 +0000

After looking all over the web, I haven't found this particular recipe, so I decided to share it after a nice evening of baking. It is my grandmother's recipe, and one of my dad's favorite Christmas cookies. They are very best after they've aged a few weeks (up to a month) in an airtight container... the icing gets really nice and hard, and the cookies are awesome dunked in tea or coffee. They're so good, though, it's hard to make them last that long!

Pfeffernuesse-- Makes about 4 1/2 dozen

1/3 cup unsalted butter, room temp
2 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar
4 eggs

Zest of one lemon
3 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup finely chopped candied lemon peel
1/2 cup finely chopped candied citron
1/4 cup finely chopped candied orange peel
1/2 tsp almond extract

4 cups sifted flour
1 Tbsp cardamom
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground aniseed
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda

Lemon Icing
1 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar
4 to 4 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice

Directions

Cream butter in a large bowl, and beat in powdered sugar in small batches. Add eggs and beat until well blended.
Mix together lemon juice, zest, chopped candied fruits, and almond extract. Add butter and egg mixture and stir until well blended.
Sift together flour, spices, salt and soda to evenly distribute spices. Add butter and fruit mixture, and stir until well blended.
Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour. Grease and flour cookie sheets. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Lightly flour hands and roll into 1-inch balls. You can place them fairly close together on the sheet because they don't really spread. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until barely browned but dry.

The icing is the tricky part. It is not icing so much as a thick, opaque white paste. The best way to do it is to put a dab on top of each of the cookies while they're still pretty hot, and then go back and squish it around with your finger. It's indelicate, but it makes a very nice, tangy sugar crust on top.

The Abundance of Books

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Wed, 14 May 2008 03:35:00 +0000

I have been on a book buying binge recently. Amazon.com's Amazon Prime is a killer, I tell you!

And I am not alone... talking about which book his book club should read next, a friend explained his dilemma:

Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler describes the "abundance of a bookstore" this way (I put the categories into list format):
1. Books You Haven't Read
2. The Books You Needn't Read
3. The Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
4. Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
5. The Books That if You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read but Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
6. The Books You Mean to Read but There Are Others You Must Read First
7. The Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait Till They Are Remaindered
8. The Books Ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
9. Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
10. Books That Everybody's Read So It's as if You Had Read Them, Too

A Thought for Finals

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:11:00 +0000

As painful as this particular retreat was for me, it opened my eyes to the extraordinary amount of time my mind spent in monitoring and evaluating my success or failure, and in making reality match my ideal image of myself. With my newfound awareness, I would notice how there seemed to be an endless tape-loop in my mind that evaluated my progress: "Okay, now I've accomplished this, and this, and this. I'm doing alright." This compulsive internal dialogue is quite normal in a culture that rewards achievement, wealth, beauty and success above all things, and especially in a culture that rewards the achievements of the highly individuated, separate "self under its own power." In this milieu, the internal dialogue is actually a form of self-soothing, of reassuring ourselves that we're really okay. When we can stand back from this compulsive internal dialogue just a bit, we can see the intensity of the craving for solidity and security that drives it.

.Stephen Cope. Yoga and the Search for the True Self.

Delicious

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:05:00 +0000

But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder if it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of 'passing emotion' and to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open.

.E.M. Forster. Howard's End.

Meditations at Lagunitas

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:34:00 +0000

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

.Robert Hass.

Atonement

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 07:33:00 +0000

"The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him." Ian McEwan.

I supplemented the widely sweeping pans of the camera during the film with McEwan's lovely prose, nearly from memory. If you can do that, you should see the movie. If you haven't, you should read the novel.

Grad School, Much?

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 06:44:00 +0000

Coser's analysis of Simmel here is perfectly fitting for so much of first semester of grad school:

"Modern man finds himself in a deeply problematical situation: he is surrounded by a multiplicity of cultural elements, which, although they are not meaningless to him, are not fundamentally meaningful either. They oppress the individual because he cannot fully assimilate them. But he cannot reject them because they belong at least potentially to the sphere of his own cultural development."

See? It's structural! Occasionally, there are flashes of very deep meaning. Even if they come in the form of secondary sources cross-referenced from undergrad.

Question of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:37:00 +0000

Do you wonder where the self resides
Is it in your head or between your sides?
And who will be the one who will decide
Its true location?

.Andrew Bird. Darkmatter.

Too tired

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 03:11:00 +0000

to make the link between what we spoke about in Social Stratification today and this cartoon, but it feels apropos.

Home Sweet Home

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 04:22:00 +0000

There are only two stories. The one about home and the one about leaving home.

.Salman Rushdie.

Sometimes, I question whether they aren't actually one and the same.

It's Turning

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:44:00 +0000

I spent the morning and early afternoon curled in a leather armchair in the back corner of Diesel, reading the novel of the moment and sipping my habitual iced coffee with cream. It is the first weekend that the crowd has included undergrads, and the air reverberated with their early gripes about Virgil and Intro to Electrical Engineering and their hushed gossip. When I rode my bike back home in the mid-afternoon heat, a warm breeze ruffled my skirt and tickled my thighs, yet something felt distinctly different this afternoon from others. It is the feeling of summer's end.

Insignificant

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 02:38:00 +0000

Back from 3 weeks of vacation, with lots of spectacular nature moments: a break I totally needed. Experiencing such dramatic scenery is so refreshing. Centering. Humbling.

Back safely in my apartment, in this major metropolitan area, I was chatting with a friend about the experience. As I gushed on and on about how much I love the West, I joked that it was time to return East, where nature isn't so breathtaking, and it's easier to feel important. "We have history," he wryly replied, "and tall buildings, to make you feel meaningless."

As I strolled through The Yard on my way to a meeting yesterday morning, these words came back to me. So true.

Julia's a Charmer

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:26:00 +0000

Omelettes are such fun to make when you toss them off, as shown here. A fresh green salad, a glass of white wine, and an omelette make a lunch worth waiting the 30 seconds it takes to make one, and I say fie to those oenophilic spoilsports who insist that wine goes with neither eggs nor salads. Wine is essential with anything! Particularly omelettes for lunch.

.Julia Child. How to Cook.

A link to remember

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 21:01:00 +0000

The Minimalist Meals in 10 Minutes or Less.

Welcome to Boston

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 00:59:00 +0000

Today was my first full day in Massachusetts. I spent the morning getting lost again and again by car, while trying to run some errands. But as a result I made peace with the U-turn and bought a box of Jello Pudding Pops with French on it, so it was not all in vain.

After the agitation of driving in circles all morning, this evening, I decided to go for a long walk, and just be. No iPod. No real place to go. I had a scoop of Coconut Butterfinger ice cream at Christina's, and looked in the windows of the billion furniture stores on Mass Ave, and ended up on a bench by the river to finish Philip Roth's Everyman and watch the sunset. As rowers sculled by and the water sparkled in the fading light, I read the following:

"Why do you laugh sometimes at what I say," she asked him the second time he took her out to dinner, "why do you laugh when I'm being perfectly serious?" "Because you charm me so and you're so unaware of your charm." "There's so much to learn," she said while he accompanied her home in the taxi; when he replied softly, without a trace of the urgency he felt, "I'll teach you," she had to cover her face with her hands. "I'm blushing. I blush," she said. "Who doesn't?" he told her, and he believed that she'd blushed because she thought he was referring not to the subject of their conversation--all the art she'd never seen--but to sexual ardor, as indeed he was. He wasn't thinking in the taxi of showing her the Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum but of her long fingers and her wide mouth, though soon enough he'd take her not just to the Metropolitan but to the Modern, the Frick, and the Guggenheim. He remembered her removing her bathing suit out of sight in the dunes. He remembered them, later in the afternoon, swimming back together across the bay. He remembered how everything about this candid, unaffected woman was so unpredictably exciting. He remembered the nobility of her straightness. Against her own grain, she sparkled. He recalled telling her, "I can't live without you," and Phoebe's replying, "Nobody has ever said that to me before," and his admitting, "I've never said it before myself."

For a moment, this broke my resolve to just be, because if I am honest, I have to admit--I want that so badly.

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:15:00 +0000

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assur'd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

-- John Donne

Two good things I've read recently

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 03:51:00 +0000

I've been hitting the collected nonfiction of Joan Didion pretty hard recently... good stuff:

With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan Baker took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.

.On Self-Respect.

And, quoted in the preface of William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged, Herbert Gans:

The vacuum that is created when no recommendations are attached to a policy proposal can easily be filled by undesirable solutions and the report's conclusions can be conveniently misinterpreted.

Pretty

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:48:00 +0000

There were concert halls in Europe to which Father Booty would soon return, opera houses where music molded entire audiences into a single grieving or celebrating heart, and where the applause rang like a downpour...

But could they feel as they did here? Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty-half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows. With passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one...

and

They were falling back into familiarity, into common ground, into the dirty gray. Just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation, composite of contradictions, easy principles, arguing about what they half believed in or even what they didn't believe in at all, desiring comfort as much as raw austerity, authenticity as much as playacting, desiring the cosiness of family as much as to abandon it forever. Cheese and chocolate they wanted, but also to kick all these bloody foreign things out. A wild daring love to bicycle them into the sky, but also a rice and dal love blessed by the unexciting feel of everyday, its surprises safely enmeshed in something solidly familiar like marrying the daughter or son of your father's best friend and grumbling about the cost of potatoes, the cost of onions. Every single contraction history or opportunity might make available to them, every contradiction they were heir to, they desired. But only as much, of course, as they desired purity and a lack of contradiction.

.Kiran Desai. The Inheritance of Loss.

Huh.

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:40:00 +0000

On my way to work today, a song I have listened to probably a thousand times played on my iPod... for some reason, though, it seemed like I actually heard the lyrics for the first time:

I guess we're all the same, we walk our days looking for a little more fire
And we all sometimes have to sit on our hands
We try to hold ourselves together
We try to talk about the weather
When all we really want to do is take each other by the throat and say

Won't you dream my dream with me
Don't you leave it here drying on my pillow
Won't you just soak a little up for me
Won't you give it just a safe place to go
It just needs a little safe place to go

.Kris Delmhorst. Moscow Song.

Don't worry, I'm not going to strangle anyone. But this struck me as a particularly pretty sentiment in the unseasonably pretty morning, as I walked past the office buildings and construction sites of the city.

Making faces in the two way mirror

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 18:45:00 +0000

This is a really interesting paragraph from a generally interesting article (entitled Babes in the Woods) by Catilin Flanagan in this month's Atlantic:

The primary engine of MySpace's stupendous growth isn't the Internet or the additional opportunities for cattiness it provides, but the fathomless narcissism of the young. There's no more ardent devotee of a MySpace profile than its creator, lovingly adjusting the lighting on the perfect self-portrait, changing the song that serenades it, the graphics that surround it. The page can speak broadly to others, but others are almost beside the point; every profile is a sonnet to the self. Today's girls spend hours looking at their MySpace profiles, fiddling and tinkering with them—much as I once sat in front of my vanity mirror, holding my hair up and letting it fall, smiling one way and then the other. For girls, the powerful need to be alone in their bedrooms—dreaming, writing in diaries, looking at themselves in the mirror—is married to a kind of exhibitionism. Why was I trying out my hair so many different ways, if not to calculate its potential effect on others? The Internet makes it possible to combine these two opposed desires: to be alone trying something out and to be exposed in public for everyone to see. A decade from now, a large group of parents may be telling anyone who will listen that this is a very dangerous combination indeed.

In the essay, Flanagan covers everything from Perverted Justice and To Catch a Predator to Myspace and Club Penguin. While the tone is certainly concerned, it's not as hysterical as some treatments of the subject. Worth a read, if you happen to subscribe.

Kindling Flames Posts

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:37:00 +0000

For reference, links to posts on Kindlingflames, my grad program's blog.

Posts:
8/7/2006: Steamy Young Kozol
4/10/2006: Too Esoteric for Words?
3/20/2006: The Teacher/Policymaker Divide
3/15/2006: Marx's Efforts at Amhearst
3/14/2006: The "Right" Take on Higher Ed
3/13/2006: GWU to Ill Student: Withdraw or Face the Consequences
1/22/2006: Reverse Gender Gap, Continued
1/19/2006: I'll Admit, I'm Surprised
1/10/2006: Vocational Education Enigma
10/19/2005: NAEP 4th Grade Data Trends By Race
10/19/2005: Spinning Again, Spinning
9/28/2005: Proud of Their F
9/12/2005: Battle Metaphor: Revisited
8/29/2005: What Does Average Joe Know?
8/26/2005: Focus on HBCUs

Places I left comments:
10/4/2005: Merit Pay for Teachers
11/7/2005: Million Dollar Question
1/3/2006: The Bell Curve Rises Again
1/6/2006: Right Plan, Wrong Reason
1/6/2006: FL Supreme Court Takes Away Choice
2/22/2006: A Different Type of Portfolio Assessment
3/16/2006: Testing and NCLB
5/22/2006: JennyD and NOST: Vouchers and Social Justice
5/24/2006: How Do We Educate Everyone?
12/6/2006: Brown v. Board for the 21st Century
12/17/2006: Tough Choice? You Bet!

Funny in the news

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:08:00 +0000

Okay, so today two "news" articles have made me laugh out loud. First, Slate reports on the "Meatlifting" epidemic. Now that pseudophedrine is behind the pharmacy counter in many states, home meth chefs have been replaced by "aspirational meatlifters" as the scourge of the grocery industry. Who are they? Gainfully employed women between the ages of 35 and 54, who think that every once in awhile they deserve the filet mignon, and are willing to shove it into their purse.

Second, the NYT home and garden section has a hilarious vignette of "MTV’s Real World with a slovenly cast of Democratic power brokers," Rep. George Miller's (D-Calif.) Capitol Hill crash pad. Apparently Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is known to kill rats with his bare hands, but they make Senator Schumer (D-NY) take care of the mice.

Russian Debutante

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 16:01:00 +0000

Just started reading my first for-fun book of the holiday season... The Russian Debutante's Handbook. I'm not very far in, but this paragraph, from one of the first pages, portends good things. "Janus-faced sandwich"? Delightful!

Meanwhile, in the cluttered back office, junior clerk Vladimir Girshkin-the immigrant's immigrant, the expatriate's expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times-was going at it with the morning's first double-cured-spicy-soppressata-and-avocado sandwich. How Vladimir loved the unforgiving hardness of the soppressata and the fatty undertow of the tender avocado! The proliferation of this kind of Janus-faced sandwich, as far as he was concerned, was the best thing about Manhattan in the summer of 1993.

Home as Art

noreply@blogger.com (NMD) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 04:05:00 +0000

Really interesting article in NYT today about Rick Lowe, an artist living in Houston. His work with young single mothers, artists, and low-income renters boarders on urban renewal, and gentrification of a low-income neighborhood is following his work. Will be interesting to see whether the project (and its multi-constiutency coalition) can work to maintain some diversity in the neighborhood in the future. I liked the quote:

“We can approach our lives as artists, each and every one of us,” he said. “It’s a choice people have. You don’t have to make houses the way people always have. If you choose to, you can make every action a creative act.”