Rain, rain, go away

When it rains, they say, it pours. One raindrop opens a crack and suddenly everything rushes in and you find yourself suddenly inundated. This is true with the Good, but is at least equally as true with the Bad. When you find yourself up to your ankles and sinking fast in late work, missed deadlines, debts piling up, and emails that have long gone unanswered, it's easy to get mired down in self-pity and despair.

That's where I found myself yesterday, badness lapping up around my knees and threatening to swallow me whole. Today is better, though, and I haven't decided where to give credit. Maybe it's the good talking-to I gave myself last night, maybe it's the many hours of mindless, but delicious TV I sank into last night (Oh, Bill Compton, you can bite me anytime!), or maybe, just maybe, it was the cookies.

I thought the smell of something delicious baking would cheer me up and went in search of chocolate chips. No luck. I pulled a lot of extraneous foodstuffs out of the cabinets and found, to my shock and surprise, that I had a whole unopened package of rolled oats. You can see where this is going.I pulled out the big yellow baking book and found their recipe for oatmeal cookies. This book is amazing not only because the recipes are really quite delicious, but because they explain how they arrived at the recipe through their testing process. Of course, you all know me well enough by now to know that I just don't follow recipes to the letter. So, I added a spice or two here an there, threw in some vanilla and chopped almonds and ended with a cookie with a delicate flavor balance and crazy texture. I think I over-baked them. Either that or I needed a little extra butter to compensate for the extra dryness of the almonds or something. They were a little dry, a little crunchy, but awfully tasty. Best served warm and without bitterness. Bake these and set your worries aside.

Spiced Oatmeal-Almond-Raisin Cookies
adapted from Baking Illustrated

• 1 1/2 c flour
• 1/2 t baking powder
• 1/2 t freshly grated nutmeg
• 1/4 t ground cardamom
• 1/2 t vanilla extract
• 1/2 t salt
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened but still cool
• 1 c packed light brown sugar
• 1 c granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 3 c old-fashioned rolled oats
• 1/4 c chopped sliced almonds
• 1 c golden raisins

1. Preheat the oven to 350.
2. Mix the flour, baking powder, nutmeg, cardamom, and salt together in a bowl.
3. Mix the oats, raisins, and almonds together in another bowl.
4. Beat the butter until creamy. Add the sugars and beat until fluffy. Beat in the vanilla, then add the eggs one at a time.
5. Stir the flour mixture into the butter and sugar with a rubber spatula (but be sure not to accidentally fling dough all over the kitchen - I did).
6. Stir in the oats, almonds, and raisins. This takes some patience and persistence, but you don't want to leave some cookies high and dry without the good stuff!
7. Roll the dough into large balls - the book suggests two-inch balls, but I did them a wee bit smaller (probably 1 1/2 inches) - and place on prepared baking sheets (lined with parchment, or silpat, or generously buttered) about 2 inches apart. I was able to fit a dozen on each of two half-sheets and made two mondo-cookies on another baking sheet.
8. Bake until the cookie edges turn golden brown, 22-25 minutes (this is where I screwed up - do NOT overbake, as the recipe does indeed warn you). Let cool two minutes on baking sheet, then remove to a wire cooling rack.
9. Try not to eat them all. They go great with a cup of hot tea or a glass of cold milk, if you're into that sort of thing.

Season Straddling

Well, it's happened. The sun has started to set earlier, there's a distinct chill in the morning air, the apples and pears are coming in, and I expect pumpkins to start appearing everywhere I look. Also, school has started.As such, I've decided to stop worrying about it getting cold and just embrace all that Fall has to offer. Tomorrow I teach my first class of the semester, so it seems like the right thing to do, getting used to the season.

BUT. I'm not done with Summer yet. So, I made yet another batch of pesto, threw it over some pasta and cooked up some corn on the cob. I also pan seared some salmon filets and topped them off with a little pesto cream. This was the summery portion of our program:
As part of this Fall-embrace, I'm reminding myself of all the things I like about that peculiar snap in the air. Students lugging backpacks across the Yard and the first tiny white traces of frost. Lucy huffing and puffing while playing outside and little clouds of steam rising from her snout. Hot tea. Pumpkin soup. Butternut Squash.

And so I decided tonight to oh-so-cautiously nose my way into warm-fruit-dessert-season with a very free form pear galette. This is really the one-toe-at-a time way of heading boldly into Fall. Like a coward entering a cold ocean. But the subtlety of the pear's flavor paired with the rich muddy brown sugar is a gentle entree into Pie Season.

The results of this experiment were delectable as dessert, but will be breathtaking for as pre-teaching breakfast. Wish me luck tomorrow and, next time you need to fortify yourself and start to ease into the new season, make one of these puppies.
Early Fall Pear Galette

Ingredients

• leftover pie dough (2 1/2 c flour, 2 cups butter, pinch salt, 4 T ice water)
• two pears, quartered, cored, and sliced thin
• 3 T dark brown sugar
• 6 vanilla wafers, crushed
• 1 T butter
• 1 T granulated sugar

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 425.
2. Roll out the pie dough until it's (VERY) roughly circular, about 10" in diameter.
3. Sprinkle the crushed vanilla wafers around the middle of the dough. They absorb some of the liquid from the fruit and add a layer of crunch and some substance to the floor of the galette.
4. Arrange the pear slices in a roughly spiral pattern. It doesn't really matter how you arrange the slices, but if you take a little effort (I took a TINY bit of effort), it will be prettier.
5. Sprinkle the brown sugar over the fruit more or less evenly.
6. Fold the edges of the dough over about two inches to create the crust.
7. Pop the galette into the oven for about 30 minutes.
8. Melt the butter.
9. When the crust begins to brown, brush the top crust with butter and sprinkle granulated sugar on top. This gives a little more crunch and sweetness as well as encouraging the crust to brown.
10. Bake about 15 more minutes (for a total of about 45 minutes, I think. Though to be honest I didn't time mine.)

Slice and serve warm with ice cream or whipped cream. I chose Caramel Pecan from Emack & Bolio's. It was a good choice.

Also, if I were more committed to the Fall Thing, I would have added some spice to the sugar - maybe ginger and/or cinnamon? Is this the sort of thing you would be tempted to add cardamom to? I think I have a passionate love for cardamom, but have actually never cooked with it myself. A little citrusy tang might also not help. Maybe a squeeze of lemon or even just lemon zest? What do you all think?

Holidays again

It's getting to be Holiday time again, and though this one promises to be different from any other so far (Wedding, anyone?), the same thoughts I always have have already started running through my work-weary brain. Nostalgia for holidays past with pets past running around Christmas Trees past, the residual memory of the smell of a particular dish that we'll never eat again, precisely, the wish that some family members were still with us and that some disagreements had never happened. All this is bundled together with the hope of good things to come, of new families evolving out of the old one, and with the hope that these holidays will be different, but will also be exactly the same as all the others.

These thoughts are all hitting me at a time when I actually do have a little free time on my hands and when I am beginning to feel old creative urges that I haven't indulged in at least a couple of years. It may be time to create again and to try to get myself back to a happy, productive energy that also allows me that creative outlet. I'm taking film home. I'm envisioning a collection of still lifes (lives?) taken around my house. Maybe also some scenic shots, but I want to do something a little more rigorously artistic. Whatever that means.

Writing is what I always wanted to do, but I worry about the influence of all this academia. Clearly, A.S. Byatt manages all right. I just need to find that balance (does it only come with rejecting, wholesale, the theories we're meant to internalize here?) and then find a story. And time and space in which to write.

Tomorrow it's the long trip home, flying in to Chicago with its serpentine suburban culs de sac, then proceeding South over the neatly parceled patchwork of rural Indiana. This time it will be in grey-greens, beiges, and browns, very different from the gold and green of the summer.

(written in the Barker Center; internal soundtrack: Joni Mitchell. You know the one.)

More news

Delinquent blogging leads me to need to do another news digest with previews of coming attractions. In no particular order.

1. The new semester starts tomorrow.
2. In order to make it to campus in time to organize myself, I have to leave my house by about 7:45 AM. EVERY DAY. Does. Not. Compute.
3. We finally filed for Dan's Green Card. Thus commences the waiting game. No, we still haven't seen the movie.
4. Dan starts work tomorrow!
5. In August, I baked Franzbrötchen!
6. Last week sometime I baked chocolate rolls.
7. I also cooked the inaugural Butternut Squash of the season.
8. We have Besuch from Deutschland!
9. My work status currently SUCKS. But will be okay.
10. We got pluots in our Boston Organics box this week! What the hell are those!?
11. I learned the German word for quince. Quitte.
    

Trailing spouses

This post on Jezebel and the article on CNN that it refers to are really interesting. The idea of trailing spouses is one I've been thinking about a lot lately. I'm on a career path at the moment that is likely going to force me to move around for a while at least (at least until I get tenure or give up). I worry about my young man finding a job that is equally satisfying and demanding and that might not be very flexible, location-wise. I worry about us having difficulty deciding who will "trail" (though I think that term is really irritating) and who will lead (or whatever).

The other problem with this analysis of the problem is the vaguely sexist idea that it's the woman's own fault for choosing a more flexible career. Like it's her own damned fault? That's a little difficult for me to swallow.

Anyway, this is one of the many things I worry about heading into marriage. It's funny to be thinking about all these issues concretely (since the Hitching is just around the corner) instead of just theoretically. Very very very strange.