Girl Detective

This week, our box of veggies from Foxtail Farm included the following: broccoli, cauliflower, basil, lettuce, garlic scapes, radishes with greens, green onions, cuke, sugar snap peas and a cabbage.

I grilled the broccoli, then sprinkled it with salt, lemon juice and flax meal, from the recipe in Super Natural Cooking. I also made espresso banana muffins from that book. While it didn’t use any CSA ingredients (no local bananas in MN) they were tasty, and photogenic.

I plan to make cauliflower soup with pesto and barley (subbed for farro, which I couldn’t find at my grocery co-op) with green onion sauce and asparagus from this book as well.

From Mark Bittman’s Food Matters, I made a cabbage salad, using several suggested additions and variations: sugar snaps, radishes, garlic scapes with sesame oil and lime juice as dressing. It keeps for days, and has been a great vehicle for leftover grilled chicken.

I’ll also make Bittman’s tabbouleh, since it’s a kind of catch all for leftover garlic scapes, green onions, radishes, greens and the cuke. I’ll also try his yogurt soup with cuke and radish.

And the sugar snaps will go in salad with the lettuce, or raw out of hand, or dipped in a batch of hummus I plan to make. The boys aren’t eating a lot of this, but my husband and I are eating really healthfully lately.

Nemeses: small trees
are volunteers no longer
victims, you are now

This morning and afternoon, I worked on this side bed. I cleared a blanket of weeds and about a dozen volunteer trees, digging out roots from 18″ and 24″ down, then pruned the peony. Archeology: I found three matchbox cars from previous homeowner(s?).

Here’s how we came to watch The Third Man again. First, my husband G. Grod re-read The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. Then we watched the film adaptation of that book by Robert Altman. Then I insisted on watching The Third Man, because I suspected the endings were similar.

Narrator: Oh, I was going to tell you, wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American. Came all the way here to visit a friend of his. The name was Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him, some sort, I don’t know, some sort of job. Anyway, there he was, poor chap. Happy as a lark and without a cent.

The pleasures of The Third Man are myriad. There’s Joseph Cotton as the ugly American, Trevor Howard as the constabulary, Alida Valli as the femme fatale, and Orson Welles as the dead friend of Cotton, Harry Lime. Add to those amazing black and white shadowed images, evocative zither music, the cuckoo clock speech, the sewer chase and a bitter coda that is indeed referenced not only in Long Goodbye but in many more films, including one of G. Grod’s favorites, Miller’s Crossing. (Aliens? We just watched that, and I can’t think of the reference. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)

We own the 50th anniversary Criterion Collection edition; it has a lovingly restored print as well as great extras. But in 2007 those double-dipping rat bastages at Criterion put out a two-disc Criterion edition that features a commentary by Steven Soderbergh and Tony Gilroy, screenwriter of the Bourne movies. I think I’m going to need that one, too. Hey, I own six editions of Bronte’s Jane Eyre, why not two of The Third Man?

Robert Altman’s Long Goodbye is one of my favorite films by him, and perhaps one of my favorite movies, full stop. Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe is moved in time to 70’s California, where he drifts about pursued by police and a ruthless gangster while trying to find a missing author and figure out what happened to his friend, Terry Lennox. Elliott Gould is Marlowe, and I can’t imagine another in the role. Everything is “OK with me” to Marlowe, even as jaw-dropping things occur around him, like terrible violence and the yogic contortions of a stoned group of young women who live next to him. Look for a non-speaking, uncredited cameo by the future governor of California, who sports a hilarious-looking mustache.

SPOILER: The film’s ending departs from the book, in what seems to be a conscious homage by Altman to Carol Reed’s Third Man. Other similar elements of the two films include a main character who has trouble navigating a strange culture while defending a dead friend of his to the police, and who is shunned by a cat.

This week’s CSA box was more full than last week’s box, with a greater variety of veggies. I’ve included how I’m using them.

Radishes with greens: sliced with salt and butter on a fresh baguette, in a green salad, on a sandwich with goat cheese and spinach, and in Hijiki and Edamame salad from Super Natural Cooking

Turnips with greens: mashed alongside bratwurst

Kohlrabi with greens: thinly sliced into green salad

Lettuce: green salads, of course!

Broccoli: in Broccoli Pesto & Fusilli from 101 Cookbooks

Cauliflower: steamed and pureed, so I can sneak it into tuna salad for Drake and Espresso Banana muffins, probably not for the kids

Snap peas: raw in green salads

Rainbow chard: chopped and used Mark Bittman’s Pan-Cooked Greens with Tofu from Food Matters, along with the radish, turnip and kohlrabi greens, and as part of the pesto in the Broccoli Pesto & Fusilli

Garlic scapes: Garlic Scape Soup (photo above) from Super Natural Cooking. I learned that chive blossoms make a lovely garnish but while technically edible, taste yucky.

This week I did minimal prep for the veg before putting them in the crisper. I removed the greens from the radishes, turnips and kohlrabi, then wrapped those greens, along with the lettuce and chard, loosely in a towel. I didn’t clean and dry them until ready to use, which is recommended in several places on the web, yet I found it promoted wilting rather than prevented it, so I think I’ll be back to washing, spinning dry and bagging my greens with a paper towel next week.

Thus far, the CSA share means I’m working with a greater variety of vegetables at a time, and it’s made me more motivated and creative in seeking out ways to use them.

I’m the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom’s a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose dad’s a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles and single-handedly founded the Enfield Tennis Academy but drinks Wild Turkey at like 5:00 a.m. and pitches over sideways during dawn drills, on the courts, some days, and some days presents with delusions about people’s mouths moving but nothing coming out. (p. 30, Infinite Jest)

I’ve made it to page 63, the first goal for Infinite Summer, and I hope to go all the way. Infinite Jest is challenging, funny, and too heavy to cart around with me, so I may have to get a supplemental book to read when I’m on the go. I was please but unsurprised to find the word “nauseous” used correctly. I’m keeping a list of characters, of year names, and of words to look up. This week, it was “apocope” and “fantods.” Neither, of course, was included in my MMPB dictionary.

Apocope: the loss of one or more sounds from the end of a word, and especially the loss of an unstressed vowel.

Fantods: A state of extreme nervousness or restlessness.

I can review Werner Herzog’s documentary on Antartica, Encounters at the End of the World, in one word: Neat. Extra emphasis on the “n” to denote enthusiasm.

If you’re interested in a bit more information, though, Herzog says in his commentary that he doesn’t set out to make a film about fuzzy penguins. Thank goodness. I hated that movie. There are a few scenes with penguins, but Herzog takes the approach I wished was included in that fuzzy-penguin movie–it focuses on the deviant, weird ones, just as Herzog interviews their human counterparts from McMurdo station. There are scientists who think the Earth is going to regulate humanity right off it, surreal seal sounds, and some brief backstory on Scott and Amundson. But it’s the images, accompanied by Herzog’s inimitable accent, that linger. Good stuff.

Wite-out on the floor
Dries quick, the shape of a fish
Curse you, Guppy boy.

Infinite Summer, here I come, fueled by a blueberry toaster pastry and a double cappuccino.

I wanted to read Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits for several reasons. One, she’s been the subject of a few online kerfuffles, like saying she liked her husband (author Michael Chabon) to change light bulbs so she didn’t have to, and saying she loved him more than her kids. Two, she’s married to Chabon, and I wondered how their writing styles and subjects would differ. Three, I liked the premise: a young NYC stepmother struggles with a difficult stepson, and her grief over her infant’s death of SIDS.

Like Waldman’s online writing, the book veers between too much information and a refreshingly brutal honesty about things like being mad at children. It’s sometimes irritating, sometimes engaging.

My belief was often strained. Emilia eschewed group therapy in the wake of her daughter’s death, but this didn’t adequately explain why she, her doctor, or others didn’t railroad her into individual therapy, which she clearly needed. Her husband Jack’s ex-wife was too cruel to be believable; I would have welcomed some complexity. Her stepson William is presented as a precocious five-year old, but more than once it notes Phillip Pullman’s Amber Spyglass as his favorite book. Amber Spyglass is a YA book for 12 and up. I’ll allow that a real-life adult MIGHT read this violent, complex, sexual book to a 5yo, but for a fictional preschooler, however precocious, to claim it? No way.

And yet, I enjoyed parts of this book, too. Waldman’s crisp writing kept me reading at a quick clip. Emilia is immature and narcissistic, but she’s also smart and interesting. William, the stepson, was a great character, though I was horrified by many of the things he was subjected to, not just the ones his mother complained that Emilia put him through. The details of Central Park were lovingly drawn, and her ethnography of the NYC mommy/kid/nanny culture was fascinating.

I was reminded strongly of some of Jennifer Weiner’s books. Weiner’s Good in Bed also featured a young Jewish lawyer protagonist who goes through difficulties related to pregnancy. Both books are better written, and tackle darker issues, than the average beach-y chicklit novels they’re often lumped together with.

I wished, though, that Waldman dared venture further into darker territory. As a reader, I felt sorry for Emilia because of her grief, and because the ex-wife was vindictive and the stepson so challenging. But what about the all-too-real possibility of struggling with stepchildren without grief as an excuse for behaving badly? Or, even more transgressive, writing about a parent who dislikes her own biological or adoptive child, as Lionel Shriver did in We Have to Talk about Kevin?

The book had a tidy ending, one I saw far in advance. I think it flinched from some deeper truths. Because of this, I will probably skip Waldman’s latest, the nonfiction Bad Mother, in which she tackles some of the criticisms she’s endured in her volleys with the online public.

My husband G. Grod and I just finished The Wire, Season 1. We’re going to try to watch some movies and tv (Top Chef Masters and Fashion Show) before we start season 2.

My favorite character, of many, I think has to be Omar. Here, then, for others who have or will watch Season 1, are links to Alan Sepinwall’s S1 rewind posts for Wire Newbies, with reader comments:

1. “The Target”
2. “The Detail”
3. “The Buys”
4. “Old Cases”
5. “The Pager”
6. “The Wire”
7. “One Arrest”
8. “Lessons”
9. “Game Day”
10. “The Cost”
11. “The Hunt”
12. “Cleaning Up”
13. “Sentencing”

No spoilers, please. You never know what someone is reading and at what point they’re watching. I can field discussion about S1 details by email, though.

This week’s box from our Community Supported Agriculture share contained the following; I’ve added what I have done or will do (bwa ha ha) with them:

Romaine lettuce: Caesar salad, of course
Spinach: wilted spinach salad with bacon and hard-boiled eggs
Turnips: roasted “croutons” for Caesar salad
Turnip greens: I’ll saute and serve under sushi rice salad
Radishes: thinly sliced on bread with goat cheese, and in sushi rice salad
Radish greens, finely chopped and mixed into sushi rice salad
Scallions: in sushi rice salad, in frittata, on veggie bagel, wherever I can think of
Snap peas: ate ‘em raw
broccoli: make a broccoli and anchovy sauce over spaghetti, from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything
Kale: I’ll saute it with garlic and white beans and serve over gemelli pasta.

Twice I’ve tried to make the Cook’s Country recipe for Black Bottom Cupcakes–chocolate cupcakes with a cheesecake-like filling. Both times the cupcakes burned. The first time I thought it was because I used foiled cupcake liners instead of paper. The second time I wondered if putting all 24 in the oven at the same time was was too much. Both times I was upset; I rarely burn a baked good. I felt like a failure.

Yesterday, I did some research. At Baking Bites, the blogger thought the recipe’s oven temp of 400F too high. She recommended 350. On Smitten Kitchen, I found a different recipe that also recommended 350. I tried 350, and I made a half batch of 12 cupcakes. It took at least 25 minutes for the filling to set, but the outsides did not burn. I am vindicated. The Cook’s recipe burns at 400, works well at 350, and making just one dozen worked well for me. Here is my adjusted recipe.

Black-Bottom Cupcakes, adapted from Cook’s Country

(Do not substitute regular chocolate chips for the miniature chips. Regular chips are much heavier and will sink to the bottom of the cupcakes.)

Makes 12
8 ounces cream cheese , at room temperature
1/4c. + (1/2c + 2Tbl.) sugar
1/8 + 1/4 teaspoon salt
1 large egg white, at room temperature
1 tablespoon plus 3/8 cup sour cream , at room temperature
1/4 scant cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup Dutch-processed cocoa powder
1/2 + 1/8 teaspoons baking soda
2/3 cups water
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Line standard muffin tin with cupcake liners.

2. With electric mixer on medium speed, beat cream cheese, 1/4 cup sugar, and 1/8 teaspoon salt in medium bowl until smooth, about 30 seconds. Beat in egg white and 1 tablespoon sour cream until combined, about 1 minute. Stir in chocolate chips and set aside.

3. Whisk remaining sugar, remaining salt, flour, cocoa, and baking soda in large bowl. Make well in center, add remaining sour cream, water, butter, and vanilla and whisk until just combined. Divide batter evenly among cupcake liners and top each batter with 1 rounded tablespoon cream cheese mixture. Bake until tops of cupcakes just begin to crack, 23 to 25 minutes. Cool cupcakes in tin for 10 minutes before transferring to wire rack to cool completely. (Cupcakes can be refrigerated in airtight container for up to 2 days.)

I love the idea of related reading–delving deep into topics that interest me. My reach, however, nearly always exceeds my grasp. After I re-read Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I reserved a number of books from the library: The Escapists by Brian K. Vaughan, Dark Horse Comics’ Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, v. 1-3, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (the latest novel by Chabon’s wife, Ayelet Waldman, whom I’ve read much about, though never read) and The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju, (a well-reviewed non-fiction book from 2008 about the censorship of comics in the fifties after their meteoric rise as a medium in the forties). I doubt if I’ll manage to read all of these before something else jumps to the head of the queue, like the Infinite Summer challenge, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

This week I read all three volumes of Dark Horse Comics’ Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, collecting the six-issue comic-book run of a few years ago. Like Brian K. Vaughan’s The Escapists as well as Chabon’s source novel, the series blends fact and fiction so the reader can either wonder (and possibly research) which parts are “really” real, or just go along for the ride. These books include stories and editorials interweaving comic-book history and material from Chabon’s fictional world, with both new and classic authors and illustrators.

Volume 1 has an introduction by Chabon, and opens with the Escapist’s origin, illustrated by Eric Wight, best known now for his comics work for the television show The O.C. It has an eye-catching cover and clever back-cover parody by award-winning cartoonist Chris Ware. I loved the Luna Moth story written and illustrated by Jim Starlin. My favorite piece, though, was the closing story “The Lady or the Tiger, illustrated by Gene Colan and written and with a preface by Glen David Gold (author of the Kavalier and Clay-esque Carter Beats the Devil).

In Volume 2, the standout was the opening story, done in the style of EC’s horror comics, written by comics vet Marv Wolfman.

Volume 3 has stronger stories than 2, I thought, with Will Eisner’s final work, along with a war tale, a noir mystery, a twisted romance and a closing story about euthanasia.

As with any anthology, the quality varies, and the presence of the work by some legends is sometimes more notable than the actual work here. But this is a top-notch production, with excellent covers, heavy paper and great art. It’s a good companion to Kavalier and Clay, and a lark for fans of Chabon’s book to see his fictive comic-book character in actual comic books.

We received our first half box of vegetables last week from our fall as part of their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. It took all week, but I used it all, including the greens from the radishes and the kohlrabi, and the stems from the kohlrabi and chard. I crammed in three recipes in the last 24 hours: pan-fried greens with tofu last night, frittata with greens for breakfast, and “tabbouleh” for lunch. Taboulleh is in quotes because I had to use couscous instead of bulgur, but it turned out well in any case, and was a perfect vehicle for the odds and ends left in the fridge–salad dressing, radishes and greens, cucumber, olives–all of which I served over the last of our lettuce.

I didn’t have to throw anything away, but many of the greens were looking quite tired yesterday and today. Running out of produce (which I doubt will be an issue as the summer waxes) by using it sooner is a much better problem than using it up at the last minute. Running out means I buy anything else I need from our grocery cooperative. Rushing to use it at the last minute almost ensures having to throw something away. And the thrifty housewife in me (goddess knows where she came from–I didn’t get it from my mother) can’t stand that. So I’ll try to use more produce sooner this week. My veg bin stands empty and waiting.

or, I finally got got.

For years, I’ve heard what a great show The Wire was. It was so great the love for it was even parodied on Stuff White People Like. Anytime it was mentioned, someone was certain to say some variation on “You haven’t seen it? It’s great! You must!”

Since summer is mostly reruns, and since tv critic Alan Sepinwall is helpfully re-watching and posting about season 1 (last summer) and season 2 (this summer), and since my friend The Big Brain finally got his DVDs back from somebody else to lend to me, I started watching. The first episode was good, but it didn’t strike me as having the heroin-like addictive properties others had ascribed to it. So I watched the next episode, then the next. It was about episode three or four that I was hooked like everybody else. I’d come to love this crazy menage of complex characters.

Which made it all the more difficult when something bad happened last night to one of them (no spoilers here, I swear). But that didn’t stop me from wanting to blaze right into the next episode–I find it difficult to restrict myself to just one episode a night, since they’re almost a full hour long.

I’m two-thirds through season one, and I’m here to tell you: if you haven’t seen The Wire, it’s great. You must!

I buy more books than I can read, and more dvds than I can watch. But dvds of television shows are especially difficult. They seem like they’ll be fun, easy and enjoyable, yet they actually require sustained attention. Then, when I lapse, I feel the need to go back to the beginning and start again, consuming even more time.

In 2002, ABC released a dvd set of Sports Night, Aaron Sorkin’s half-hour comedy that ran for two seasons before he decided to focus on The West Wing. I’d seen the episodes before, taping them on VHS from some rerun marathon. G. Grod and I started watching them again on DVD but stopped somewhere in season 1. Then Shout Factory announced last year that they’d do a 10th anniversary collection, with better quality transfers and extras. Did I buy it even though I already had the set from six years ago that I hadn’t finished?

What do you think?

I was encouraged because tv critic Alan Sepinwall is re-watching and posting about the episodes during summer reruns. (So far he’s done “Pilot” and “Apology“) Because of that, and because I’ve set up a semi-regular watching schedule with friends, I stand a chance of watching all the episodes again.

If you didn’t catch Sports Night in any of its go ’rounds, I recommend it highly. It’s about the crew of a third-rate sports show on a low-rated network. The banter is fast and funny, and the characters quickly endear themselves. It’s one of the few shows that many argue never jumped the shark. (Perhaps its secret was that Ted McGinley was in the cast from the get go, not brought in later.) If you like Sorkin’s writing (The American President, A Few Good Men, The West Wing), or if you just like good television, check it out.

It’s been nearly a month since 5yo Drake’s preschool ended, but our summer activities just began. I registered both boys for swim lessons. Drake had fun; 3yo Guppy did not. Drake also started a summer day camp at one of the local parks today.

Bigger changes are afoot, though. Drake, previously a very picky eater, ate arugula last night. He LIKED it! And Guppy got up in the middle of the night to get his own cup of water, rather than crying for me to do it. Then today Guppy used the restroom, unprompted, twice.

I’m under no illusions that things will progress in a linear manner, but it IS nice to have some positive change.

A friend recommended Your Three-Year Old: Friend or Enemy? by Louise Bates Ames and Frances L. Ilg to me when Drake was three, Guppy was one and I was losing my mind. Time passed, things with Drake became a little less fraught, and I didn’t get around to it. But with some of the recent, frequent struggles with the previously agreeable Guppy, I decided to look up this book. I hadn’t forgotten its memorable, and apt title.

This is an honest book, as its title might suggest, though the authors are quick to answer the title’s question at the end of the first chapter: your three year old, despite evidence to the contrary, is not your enemy. It covers child development, comparing three and three and a half year olds to two and four year olds, while also acknowledging that all kids are individuals and on similar but different timetables. Three and a half, they note (the age that Guppy is closest to) is extremely difficult. Tantrums are normal, and struggles with basic routines like getting dressed, meal times and bed times are constant sources of conflict.

First published in 1985, it’s somewhat dated, but the basics still apply. Note, however, this is NOT for parents looking for detailed science, and it might offend some attachment and homeschooling families. The authors offer no magic advice, just sympathy with a dose of realism. They recommend getting support from babysitters and daycare providers so parents and kids get a much needed break from one another. Distraction at this age, is better than discipline. Above all, they note, is just getting through the day with both parent and kid as unfrazzled as possible.

Today, for instance, I signed the boys up for swim classes. 5yo Drake went off with his teachers, but 3yo Guppy got in the pool with his group, but stopped, refused to go farther, and kept hollering for me. I tried to convince him to join the other kids, as did two of the instructors. Then I gave up, and got a refund for the class. He’ll probably be ready some other time, but it wasn’t this morning. It certainly wasn’t worth a power struggle over something that’s supposed to be fun.

A French film that didn’t get much box office love during its limited release last year, Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne) is mysterious and compelling. Dr. Alex Beck is a widower, and on the 8th anniversary of his wife’s death, he receives an email suggesting he’s still alive. When he tries to find out more, bad things happen to him and those around him. A great rental if you like dark, stylish thrillers. A US remake is in the works, according to IMDB.