Girl Detective

Project Runway Season 5 starts tonight on US television. This is the show’s last season on Bravo, and the network is acting rather pouty; Bravo did hardly any marketing for the season, then dumped a ton of info at their site a few days ago, including a list of the challenges and guest judges. Part of the joy of watching has been the weekly surprise of what the challenge is, and who will be sitting with judges Michael Kors, Nina Garcia, and Heidi Klum.

So while Bravo is messing with the marketing, mentor Tim Gunn talked to Time magazine and answered some questions. My favorite comments:

Pear-shaped women should make friends with their shoulders. Not wear shoulder pads, but rather avoid tanks and sleeveless tops. Wear things that cover the shoulder to visually balance the look from head to toe.

Worse shoe trend? Crocs–”they look like plastic hooves.”

And, finally, on the comfort excuse: “If you’re going to dress like you just got out of bed, please, stay in bed.”

For more PR news and nattering, visit Project Rungay and Blogging Project Runway.

Last week, the New York Times ran an article on the pursuit of the “perfect” chocolate chip cookie, and included a recipe adapted from chocolatier Jacques Torres (Link from ALoTT5MA). It touched on people’s obsessions with the cookie, as well as things that can be done to tinker with the classic, back-of-the-Nestle-bag recipe.

Torres, for example, refrigerates his dough for 36 hours before baking. Food scientist Shirley Corriher, author of the excellent Cookwise and the upcoming Bakewise, laughed when she heard this, and said it was a clever way to dry out the dough and bind the flour and butter, thus creating a better-textured thick cookie that’s crisp on the outside and chewy in the middle.

Of course, I tried this recipe. I happened to have both cake and bread flour in the pantry, since those were the two types specified, rather than the more easily found all purpose. I used Guittard semi-sweet chips (which my grocery co-op sells in bulk), rather than spending $20+ on either of the chocolates the recipe called for, here and here. And because the timing was inconvenient, I made one batch about 31 hours after refrigeration, and the other about 47. The latter batch browned more nicely and turned out better. The earlier batch tasted more like sugar cookies (albeit very good ones) with chocolate chips. The latter batch tasted like excellent chocolate chip cookies. Even so, I probably won’t make this recipe again. The two special flours, plus the long refrigeration time are inconvenient. Even worse, I thought, was how difficult it was to scoop out the refrigerated dough. I tried letting it warm a bit, but that produced the lightest cookies in the bunch.

Instead, I’m returning to what has been my go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe for about three years, Pam (not Pamela!) Anderson’s Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies. Making the dough is easy (though use unbleached all purpose; there’s no reason for bleached). Rather than refrigerating the dough, she says to scoop out dough balls, freeze them for at least 30 minutes, then bake first at 400F, then finish at 350F. It has a few more steps than the back-of-the-bag recipe, but it’s well worth it. The cookie, as promised, delivers puff, crisp, and chew. It browns nicely without having to wait 36 HOURS! as in the Torres recipe. Also, it’s a marvelous vehicle for experimentation with additions other than chocolate chips or chunks. I’ve even added some oats and wheat bran before with excellent results. Further, the dough balls can be refrigerated for a long time. I’ve made a batch after thirty minutes, then another weeks later. This is a versatile recipe with a few weird twists that produces great results without long waits, specialty flours, or expensive chocolate.

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies by Pam Anderson from USA Weekend

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
2 large eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
3/4 tsp. salt
14 Tbs. butter (2 sticks minus 2 Tbs.), cut into chunks
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 Tbs. flavorless oil, such as vegetable or canola
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips or 8 ounces good-quality bittersweet or semisweet chocolate cut into 1/4-inch chunks, about 1 1/2 cup
OR
1 cup each chocolate chunks or chips and 1 cup toasted nuts (pecans, walnuts, unsalted peanuts or macadamias)

Hot tip: If you have a 3/4-cup measuring cup, it’s the only one you’ll need. The sugars measure 3/4 cup each, the chip quantity is 1 1/2 cups (3/4 cup times 2), and the flour is 2 1/4 cups (3/4 cup times 3).

Mix flour, baking powder and baking soda in a medium bowl; set aside. Mix eggs, vanilla and salt in a small bowl; set aside. Microwave butter on high power until just melted but not hot, 30 to 45 seconds; set aside. Mix brown and granulated sugars in a large bowl. Add butter and oil; stir until smooth. Add egg mixture and stir until smooth and creamy. Add dry ingredients and stir until smooth. Stir in chocolate and optional nuts. Using a 1 1/2-ounce (3 Tbs.) ice cream scoop, spoon 16 dough balls onto a pan that will fit in your freezer. (Don’t worry if the dough balls are crowded. They pull apart when frozen.) Freeze until dough is hard, about 30 minutes. (Once dough balls are frozen, they can be stored in freezer bags up to 3 months and baked as desired.)

Meanwhile, adjust oven rack to upper middle position and heat oven to 400 degrees. Working in half batches, place 8 frozen dough balls onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Bake until set, but not brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees. Continue to bake until cookies are golden-brown around the edges and lightly brown on the top, about 10 minutes longer. Let cookies cool on cookie sheet. Repeat, preheating oven to 400 degrees again before baking second batch.

Cookies can be stored in an airtight container up to 5 days.

Servings: 16 large cookies.

ADDED LATER: Boing Boing discusses Ideas in Food’s experiment with vacuum sealing the NYT recipe’s dough, which significantly reduced the 36-hour refrigeration. The vacuum-sealed dough looked much different than what I’d made, which was significantly lighter in color. And the cookies looked different also. Theirs were browner, but high in the middle and thin on the edges. Mine (see above) were a uniform 1/4 inch from center to edge.

Full disclosure: Jeff is a friend of mine, and his blog Velcrometer inspired me to start my own in 2002. I’m going to say positive things about A TV Guide to Life no matter what. Fortunately, Jeff made that pretty easy by writing a clever, funny, entertaining book.

Reality check: A TV Guide to Life will not change yours. It is not profound and deep. It contrasts life on TV and so-called real life. It had chapters with titles from TV theme songs, divided into several shorter subtopics. It’s eminently readable in short bursts–in other words, to follow a heavy read, for a distracted parent, at a boring job, or even in the bathroom.

We all know how to do CPR from watching TV, right? Except that in CPR classes, they claim that doctors and lifeguards always get it wrong on TV. They do it with their hands out in front of them rhythmically pressing on the victim’s sternum lightly enough to not even get out of breath. But then the Red Cross tells you that you have to have your arms straight down under you, resting the weight of your entire upper body on the victim’s chest and using only the heel of your hands, while you fling the force of your head and shoulders into the victim’s chest cavity with each compression. Which sounds really painful for the victim, not to mention tiring for you. And then they tell you not to actually do that to your classmates upon whom you’re practicing, and when you ask why it’s done differently on TV, they say it’s because if you do it correctly, you’ll break the person’s ribs. And this is the right way to do it?

Jeff’s encyclopedic knowledge of TV is both impressive and frightening. I didn’t watch half of the shows he mentioned. But I’d _heard_ of almost all of them, and was familiar with enough of them to enjoy the anecdotes even if I’d not watched a show.

If you’re a fan of 24 (which Jeff knows well since he is the Television without Pity recapper for that show), there’s lots to love. Ditto for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Law and Order(s), Dr. Who, Lost, hospital shows, cop shows, sci-fi shows and many more.

Buy this book; Jeff is a good guy with a cool wife and a cute kid. Read it now. Because if you don’t, it won’t be nearly as easy to recall recent developments on the shows you love once the new season starts in the fall.

Day before yesterday, 4yo Drake woke at 2:30 am crying.

“I dreamed bugs were all over my feet, Mom!” he wailed.

I checked the bed, and assured him that they were in his dream, not in real life. “And Daisy and Duckie are ducks (referring to some of his loveys), and they eat bugs, so they’ll protect you.”

“BUT THEY’RE NOT REAL, MOM!”

I pause, think. “But neither are the bugs in your dream, honey.”

He pauses, thinks. “Oh, OK.” Turns over and shuts his eyes.

This morning, 3am, 2yo Guppy started to yell. I stumbled into his room.

“Drake’s being really mean to me, Mom!”

I, figuring this need not be dignified with an answer, placated him with a drink of water, and returned to my bed. What, it’s not enough that I have to endure their fights all day, but I have to deal with bad-dream versions, too? Oy. And poor Guppy doesn’t even get a break from his younger-sibling torment in his dreams.

Three on a Match, another film from TCM’s series, “Forbidden Hollywood vol. 2“, with then-subversive pre-decency-code movies. As with Night Nurse, there’s not a great deal to scandalize by modern standards: women singing suggestively to each other in a reform school, adultery, drunkenness and implied drug use, and child neglect. Also, one of the characters meets a particularly bad end.

Three schoolmates meet up as adults. One is a showgirl, another a secretary, and the other a depressed rich man’s wife. Each takes on some of the details of the others’ lives as they strive for the life each thinks she wants. The title refers to the superstition that it was bad luck to light three cigarettes off one match, and that the third was marked for death. Originally a myth of WWI, it was instead invented by a match manufacturer.

This wasn’t a good film. It was poorly directed with clumsy newspaper montages to mark the passage of time, and it had a heavy-handed didactic message. But it was worth it to see another example of what was once transgressive at the movies, for an underused bottle-blonde Bette Davis, and a young, handsome Humphrey Bogart in his first gangster role.

At Pages Turned, SPF writes about books read and un-, the latter of which includes Lin Enger’s (brother of Leif) Undiscovered Country, and Daniel Wrobleski’s Story of Edgar Sawtelle, both inspired by Hamlet. The former is set in Minnesota, the latter in MN’s next-door state WI.

And while I was searching for possible productions of Love’s Labor’s Lost, I came across this information on this upcoming, far-away production of Hamlet. (Be sure to read down to see who plays Claudius.) Shall we all go, if only in our dreams?

We are not just what we eat but how we eat. The cultivation and consumption of our meals are activities as distinctively human as walking, talking, loving, and praying. Learning to regard the meal not merely as something that fills our bellies and helps us grow, but as the consummate exercise of beings carnal and earthbound yet upwardly and outwardly drawn, is a crucial step in the restoration of culture. The suggestion that the inculcation of such values might be an essential part of an adequate education ought to resonate beyond the confines of the doctrinaire Left.

At the American Conservative, “Food for Thought,” an argument that slow food and agricultural reform are not just trendy theories of the left.

Link from The Morning News.

I was fortunate enough to receive a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share last week and the week before, when a friend of a friend couldn’t pick it up. I just finished the last of the vegetables today, polishing off a white bean and garlic scape dip with kohlrabi matchsticks. It’s been a great learning experience to receive these boxes of local seasonal produce. It’s required thought, preparation (a LOT of lettuce washing; thank Gaia for the salad spinner), research, and trying new things, like sauteed radish and kohlrabi greens. But we ate the whole box of food.

And it was good.

Triptychs showing a packaged food from Germany, a closeup of the product on the packaging, and what the food looks like in real life.

Not for the weak of stomach. Or probably for the vegetarians out there. For example, “Fleischsalat” is what it sounds like. *shudder*

Link from The Morning News.

Already, the departing tide of his day had taken him far from his betrothed and any thoughts of her. As usual, though, from time to time throughout the day’s voyage he saw in the distance the most beautiful mermaid, sunning herself on a rock, plashing into the sea and rising up again. Against the sun her smoothed head looked like a paper silhouette. It must be said that the creature did not resemble [his betrothed], nor, however, was she mythical in her appearance. Even at a distance, Peter recognized her. He would be seeing her that evening, along with his despicable best friend, the writer Jonathan Speedwell.

Beginner’s Greek, the first novel by James Collins, was recommended by Entertainment Weekly, New York Times and the National Book Critics’ Circle blog (here and here.) It’s an odd book at first, because of its mannered prose and mix of characters and situations both believable and un-. Yet it quickly won me over as I realized it was an old-fashioned novel mixing social satire, romance, concerns about money and social status, heroes, villains, fate, and free will. I was reminded strongly of the novels of Jane Austen. It’s funny and sweet without being saccharine, with some dark shadows for contrast. I enjoyed it a great deal.

I took 4yo Drake to Wall E last weekend. I told him if he got scared we could leave; last year we left Ratatouille early on. This year things went much better. He got scared toward the end, but agreed to stay when I promised him Wall E would be OK. He thought Eve the robot was really cute, and he laughed aloud (as I did) many times, during both the short movie about the magician and the feature film.

I loved this film. The visuals and wordless story were so transporting that I often forgot I was in a theater, much less watching an animated film. The two lead robots are charming; the plot about fat/wasteful humans is on the obvious side, but not obnoxiously so.

We saw an afternoon show. There were many families there, and part of what made the experience enjoyable was listening to the kid commentary along the way. One girl summed it up well as the credits began to roll, “That was a GOOD movie!”

Discovered later, from link at The Morning News, a very sweet story about Pixar and Wall E. (Note: link fixed; thanks Becca!)

From Salon, a celebration of all things bacon:

Anthony Bourdain has called bacon the “gateway protein” for its astounding ability to lure vegetarians back to the carnivorous fold

Link from The Morning News
An earlier post with the same title

From the LA Times review of Mark Bauerlein’s Dumbest Generation:

The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace…

This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the “pull of immaturity.” Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, “[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age.”

From “The Burden of the Humanities” by Wilfred M. McClay at The Wilson Quarterly:

Lamentations about the sad state of the humanities in modern America have a familiar, indeed almost ritualistic, quality about them. The humanities are among those unquestionably nice endeavors, like animal shelters and ­tree-­planting projects, about which nice people invariably say nice things. But there gets to be something vaguely annoying about all this cloying uplift. One longs for the moral clarity of a swift kick in the ­rear.

Both articles were linked from Arts & Letters Daily, and both reflect on questions I wrote about in an earlier post on education and classics. Bauerlein’s book implies that people read too little. McClay’s piece suggests there’s peril in reading too much.

There can hardly be a simple answer, but I find the proliferation of articles on these questions interesting. There’s a clear dissatisfaction with the current state of education. Is it just this generation’s “woe is us” lament, or if there is actually a qualitative difference?

I approached Disney’s Enchanted, a mix of live action and animation, with low expectations. Few reviews were glowing, until the DVD review in Entertainment Weekly convinced me to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised.

Amy Adams voices, then plays, Giselle, a beautiful girl who speaks to animals. She is not a princess, though she is set to become one after she meets the prince, voiced and played with tongue in cheek by the handsome James Marsden. His stepmother, the evil queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), is determined not to give up the crown, so she sends Giselle down a well to NYC, where the action becomes live. There she meets Patrick Dempsey, a divorce lawyer, and wacky hijinks ensue.

For Disney, it might even be considered transgressive. The film pokes, albeit gently, at the Disney princess paradigm. Giselle isn’t a princess, and the prince is rather dim, in contrast to his smile. The cartoon characters have simple views of life: they fall in love in a day, live in countries just beyond the forest, and burst into song on a regular basis. There is a very funny scene when Giselle calls up animals in NYC to help her clean Dempsey’s apartment. Instead of the cutesy wood animals of the animated section (or the Snow White scene to which it pays homage), she summons cockroaches, pigeons (one of the them one legged) and rats. She sings a “Happy Working Song” while they clean, including a shot of toothbrushes used to clean the toilet. (That three songs from the film were nominated for Oscars, including this one, was silly. There must have been better songs in other movies that got passed over for this trifle.) There’s further winking in the casting. Dempsey’s girlfriend is played by Idina Menzel, who voiced the princess in Hercules. The women who voiced Ariel in the Little Mermaid is his secretary, and the woman who voiced Belle in Beauty and the Beast also has a cameo.

This could easily have been trifling and saccharine. Yet Dempsey’s charm, Marsden’s ironic prince, Sarandon’s campy queen, and Adams’ charming heroine, combine to make this quite good. My 4yo son Drake watched half of it with us. The July 4 fireworks woke and upset him. Any innuendo went over his head, and while the queen frightened him, he really liked Pip the chipmunk, so it was a good parentally guided viewing.

My friend The Big Brain lent me an advance copy of Burnout, the newest graphic novel from the DC Minx line, for young adults. The Minx books have gotten a lot of praise, and I’m in the minority (for example, praise at Boing Boing); I hate them. I think they’re full of young-adult novel cliches that were tired at least a decade ago. I could do a plot summary, but I think a cliche summary will function just as well:

Teenage protagonist was abandoned by father
Mother is in relationship with abusive, alcoholic jerk
Jerk has a hottie son whom protagonist has crush on
Hottie has a secret, which protagonist learns
Minimum of other characters (dog, best friend, and best friend’s uncle)
Hottie comes to bad end; protagonist and mother escape to new life

Perhaps the only difference between this story and the typical teenage problem novels of the 80s and 90s (which I quoted Michael Cart about, here) is that there is an ambiguous, not-happy ending. To me, this was a by the numbers YA book with OK art.

Better choices? Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Yes, they’re more serious. But they’re also really good. Gray Horses by Hope Larson, and Runaways by Brian K. Vaughan have good, believable female protagonists. And for good YA novels, check out the Printz award winners.

At The Edge of the American West, a Cookie Monster clip from The Colbert Report: Stephen Colbert is upset that cookies are no longer the number one snack of children in the US. He blames Cookie Monster, who comes to defend himself. Letter of the Day on Sesame Street, his appearance on NPR, and now this; Cookie is definitely my favorite monster.

Thanks to my friend Blogenheimer for the heads up.

The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
As is the razor’s edge invisible…

Love’s Labor’s Lost is a bizarre and entertaining play to read. The King of Navarre and three friends vow to study for three years and eschew the company of women. Then the princess of France shows up with three friends. She wants to bargain for war funds and the property of Aquitaine. The King must meet with her, and the men’s strict vow is immediately undone; they fall hopelessly in love with the bewildered women. The men profess romantic love and attempt to trick, charm and woo the women, who see through their schemes. The women toy with the infatuated men, there are plays within a play, then a messenger arrives with sad news for the princess. A typical comedy would end with four (or more) weddings. Instead, LLL ends with a death, and no marriages.

There is an abundance of playful language, puns and malapropism. The play progresses from the men’s idealistic vows of chastity and intellectual study, to their idealization of the women. It becomes grounded in reality, though, with death. The men’s view of women as either goddess or whore is ridiculed, and the women are complex, capable and intelligent. It’s easy to see why many scholars believe this is a proto-feminist text.

I read this play in anticipation of a production of it I hoped to attend. Alas, life intervened, and I wasn’t able to see the play. My dear friend Thalia, instrumental in my adult approach to the Bard, taught me that reading the plays was a two-dimensional endeavor. Reading the play without seeing it performed is not a complete experience. Plays were, and are, meant to be performed and interpreted on stage. The film of LLL is poorly reviewed, so I won’t seek it out. I’ll wait for a production, and hope it’s not too long distant from my reading. For now, I’ll imagine that I could attend this one in the fall, with this geek-fan-favorite actor as Berowne.

Joshua Gans at Game Theorist (”Musings on economics and child rearing”) blogging about disciplining his youngest child:

When it comes down to it, this blog is a censored version of my parenting life. It is not and I do not claim it to be a full record. And when it comes to Child No.3, who is soon to turn 4, the terrible twos have seemed to lasted well beyond what one would have hoped.

Same here at Girl Detective. I try not to gripe about the daily grind; if I do I try to make it humorous. But my husband G. Grod and I have struggled with discipline issues, too. Gans’ post is long, but I found it worthwhile itself, and for the Slate article it linked to on timeouts. Both are matter-of-fact about dealing with kids. Gans candidly calls his struggles “the war” and the Slate piece mentioned, more than once, the desire of a parent to hit a child when things escalate.

Before I had kids, I didn’t believe I ever would, or even would want to, hit a child. (All you parents of multiple kids may now take a break to laugh your heads off.) As with most (all?) of my pre-parenting “I nevers,” this got proved wrong pretty quickly. Parenting books say things like “model the behavior you want” and “don’t lose your temper.” Good ideas in theory, but much harder in practice. And frequently not effective, even if done “correctly.”

Both the Gans entry and the Slate piece are refreshing in their realism. The Slate piece points out that most people misunderstand the purpose of timeouts, and offers these useful guidelines:

1. brief
2. immediate
3. done in isolation from others,
4. administered calmly…and without repeated warnings

(Mostly unrelated, other than they all interested me)

When to wear sunscreen? Almost always. (Sheesh. Next they’ll tell us to wear it to bed.) (Link from The Morning News)

How to store bread? Only for a day or two, loosely in plastic, or in ceramic.

You can too wash mushrooms!

Josh Whedon’s internet comedy, Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, is coming July 15, 2008. (Preview here. Link from Everybody Loves Saturday Night)

Heh heh.

19

Created by OnePlusYou

(Link from Mommy Tracks)

So how is it that I can’t manage my not-quite 5yo and my 2yo?

I Watch Stuff has the trailer for the movie adaptation of Kate DiCamillo’s Newbery-award winning book, The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread.

I was surprised how cutesy this preview looked. The book is quite dark, even violent at times. DiCamillo is an advocate of not writing down to kids; she trusts her readers with stories that include life’s difficulties and injustices, as well as hope and redemption. I hope that this adaptation is more true to the book than the preview indicates.

Correction added later: The animation for the Despereaux movie is not done by the same team who did the bizarrely beautiful Triplets of Belleville. (Thanks to Camille of Book Moot for giving me the heads up that this had changed.) The directors previously worked on Flushed Away, Seabiscuit and Pleasantville. Check out the cast of voice talent, though. It’s impressive.