Post-midterm short post! 8 May 2007 11:33 pm
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,books,cooking,school , trackbackReaders who managed to make it all the way through yesterday’s Monkey Monday ramblings might be glad to hear that the ant situation is more or less under control in the kitchen, and also that tonight’s dinner was a very successful implementation of my brilliant plan to use the leftover curried apple-carrot soup as sauce for fried tofu and rice. Yum. I garnished said stir-fry with cilantro from the Urban Farm, where this afternoon’s midterm only made me flail a teeny little bit (fruit tree identification and soil microorganisms are hard, can I go plant something?) but I stumbled into another delicious use for it in conversation with a classmate as we were leaving: tomato-lime soup. So I know what’s for dinner tomorrow, and better still, it’s reminded me to look at all those Sundance recipes that still need converting to official TracyFood status. Yay for getting back to old projects!
In other news, mostly of the “stories you should read because I’m not writing a very long post so you have time to look at other things” persuasion, holy crap am I not going to culinary school. What’s really freaky is that it wasn’t super-long ago that Mom’s Special Clipping Service sent me another New York Times article about how some restaurants were breaking out the real benefits packages for cooks… the newer piece only serves to confirm what I already knew: self-taught kitchen geekery is just fine for me, thanks all the same; I’m still recovering from my first and maybe last insanely intense male-dominated educational experience. But I digress. To get back to Mom’s Clipping Service and the New York Times for a minute, they had a piece in the most recent magazine about the now 25-year-old Silver Palate cookbook and its sequels, and I just noticed that Salon does too. Ezra Klein remarks on the social class implications of the Silver Palate books here, and generally makes me want to revisit Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? since my notes on that book only mention that the Silver Palate appears on p. 151 (that’s what I get for waiting until the book is due at the library before finishing it, I guess.)
Speaking of books and social class, something I forgot to mention in yesterday’s quick “guess what I read over the weekend” update was one thing I liked very much about David Mas Masumoto’s Epitaph for a Peach — it’s written in a way that recognizes and acknowledges the author’s social and economic privilege. Bravo to that, and also to the continued success of my mystery cucurbit starts. Are they spaghetti squash or cucumbers? Only time will tell. And now I must sleep.
