New apartment wishlist

Things I want to do in my new place:

• Paint the bathroom walls dark grey
• Paint the bedroom
• Crochet a granny square blanket; decide on color scheme
• Get a nice old desk for a sewing corner
• Carve out an office in the living room
• Create a guestroom out of the broom closet
• Paint stripes in the entryway
• Crochet a few pots of cacti
• Buy a grand old dining table and chairs
• Sew a long table-runner out of my pink fabric
• Make a coffee table from the round carved teak piece from Burma
• Figure out how to rearrange the kitchen area 
• Add this kitchen island for needed extra storage
• Make a giant engineering print of a thing.

Aniseedy tau yew bak

When I returned from Singapore in October, I made a mad dash to the kitchen like never before.   I was melancholic on the plane, poring over every page in Cooking for the President, which counts as the most expensive cookbook I've ever bought.  I threw my homesickness into making food from home.  The dish I chose that frenzied, grief-stricken, homesick day was tau yew bak (soy sauce pork belly).  I had cooked it before.  I also ended up straying from the recipe as usual. I threw in the one spice that spoke to me more than anything else of my mother's interpretation of this dish - star anise. Once it's in my kitchen drawer I slip it in stocks and soups and even stir-fries - a travesty. But this is where the star anise finds its true home, adding a frilly border to the sweet and macho character of the dark soy sauce, the springy bellyness of the pork. 

This marks an end and a beginning

This has been one of those dangerous days.  There have been too many like this one.  It begins with a saunter at the market, the kind I've been doing every weekend mainly to relieve boredom and ennui.  Because here I am, in this lovely city, feeling for three years that it's not as lovely as I'm desperately forcing myself to believe. I have everything I've thought I ever wanted - a proper job, a Ph.D, and I am lost. 

Until now, I was happily cooking and eating, largely in resource-limited circumstances. I managed to do this while on leave in Japan,.  Through trips to Singapore, where I looked at familiar food with new eyes.  And Laos, where lunch was more cosmopolitan than I'd ever eaten. And of course, the US, living through a (ongoing) revolution towards community agriculture, local food, and a broadening palate. Who could ask for more?

I saw it coming about three years ago as I ordered my graduation robes at the university bookstore. I'd just been though a bone-aching Ph.D defense, and I was tired.  I was also preparing to move to 'dream job' location where real life was supposed to begin.  I spotted Molly Wizenberg's memoir on the shelf on my way out.  I'd recognized the name from my blogging days. I proceeded to read three-quarters of the book in one sitting, crying as I kept going back to this one section. The part where Molly goes to Paris and her fieldwork goes mind-numbingly well, but she decides to drop it because all she thinks about is food.  Now if you were to stretch out her epiphanic sojourn in Paris in which she turns back on academia, to approximately ten years, it's about how I feel.  It didn't really start that day in the bookstore, but the year I moved to Switzerland, and fell headlong into cooking two meals a day, everyday, out of the necessity of stretching my partner's salary to cover living expenses in one of the most expensive countries in the world.  I had no way of expecting what would come out of that year. A blog, CSS proficiency, and a yearning to do this - this thing, all day.

In the end I chose graduate school because that was the proper thing to do. The people in my life told me there was no future in blogging or writing about food or whatever I was doing, and I listened to them. There is a whole story in there, too.  The blog petered out and died when I moved away.  I was unable to rescue it from not just a hosting company that suddenly folded without warning, but also the tide of everything else in my life that had insisted on their importance.

And that, I hope, is the end of that era.

Dining on the City of New Orleans

There's something to be said about an overnighter on a train.  Finding your designated room-ette, watching the train pull out of Chicago at dusk, listening to the sounds of other passengers settling in for the night.  And the thing I was waiting for: the opening of the dining car.  Train chugging, I wobbled upstairs, pulled my fair share of heavy compartment doors, and emerged in a little diner.  I was asked to fill the last seat at a four-person table, and the pleasantries began.  Except for the 200-year old man who was hard of hearing and kept barking my last name as a form of address, dinner went as smoothly as the track bumps would allow.  The famed Angus steak failed to appear on our menu, and the iceberg salad was inedible, but the burgers looked good (and tasted good, when I had it for lunch). Feeling over-meated lately, I opted for a vegetarian-tomato-primavera linguine, presented on a blue-rimmed Amtrak melamine.  In spite of one of my companions refusing to leave his safe place of the Korean War and issuing racial stereotypes about me, dining on the train really made the 20-hour journey special.  I could talk about the next day - the stops in Memphis, Jackson, the blur of cotton fields, the backswamps of the Mississippi, but this is a food blog.  Next stop: New Orleans.

Unveiling the masher-massager!

I've been looking for a potato masher for a long time, never satisfied with the usual Oxo with a grid of holes. I came close to getting an avocado masher with a smaller-than-usual metal maze surface, but it was overpriced. My kitchen is filled with classic ware, but I couldn't resist this Chef's Planet one. It looks nothing like a conventional masher and no wonder! I took it home today at 25% off, and guess what I found? It does a great job as a self-massager! It's hardy enough to withstand the pressure, and its vanes are made of durable plastic with smooth, rounded edges. And as you can see from the picture, this device does well on grip.

What a great multiuse tool! I daresay I will get more mileage out of pounding my neck and shoulders than I will pummelling potatoes, if the first day is any indication at all.