Monkey Monday: epic win triple play edition 28 December 2009 10:39 pm
Posted by Tracy in : baking,dessert,eating,fun,monkeys , 2 commentsSo I’ve been home from the frozen North for almost six hours, and after a bit of relaxing I’m ready to brag about three big huge excellent gastro-culinary adventures: mince pie, figgy pudding/fruitcake, and a truly ridiculous quantity of Indian food.
1. Mince Pie!
We pulled into Saranac Lake with two big bowls of partially-completed baking project. One was mincemeat pie filling, from the recipe in Baking Illustrated
Up past my bedtime again, yep. 25 December 2009 3:38 am
Posted by Tracy in : baking,dessert,family,fun,seasonality , 1 comment so farSo about two and a half hours ago I pulled a pretty rad-looking mincemeat pie out of the oven here at Peter’s parents’ place upstate, and now I’m waiting on Super-Secret XMas Baking Project 2009 (pie turned out to be a fantastic excuse/cover story/source of plausible deniability/diversionary tactic, oh yes). It’s a very good thing I had a nap this afternoon.
But dude! I made a pretty good-looking pie! The crust might be a little crumbly instead of flaky, but y’know what? I’ll take it. Rolling out dough between sheets of wax paper totally worked wonders and I am feeling a bit ninja-like for that bit of trickery, but mostly I am sleepy. Bake faster, mystery treats!
While I’m waiting, I think I’ll make this a Tracyfood Xmas tradition:
Here’s to peace, joy, and figgy puddings for everyone.
-Tracy
Belated Monkey Monday: winter solstice 2009 edition. 22 December 2009 1:48 am
Posted by Tracy in : geekery,health,health at every size,monkeys,politics,random,school,seasonality,sustainability,whoops,writing , 2 commentsSo I know tonight is officially the longest of the year, but I’m also subjectively sure that my longest night of 2009 was last Thursday, when I finally came up with a way to organize my sociology paper into a more-or-less coherent whole. That was at 11 PM, and of course it took a few more hours for the writing to really start to gel. Whee. I ran into a spot of technical difficulties at 2:40 PM the next day, when I had settled on a conclusion and all that was left was cleaning up, cutting the big block quotations down to size, and so on… Google Docs sent me the error message that it couldn’t save my changes, and I noticed it hadn’t been able to do so since 2:15 PM. Eeks. I’m still not sure what caused the choke-up, but I managed to work around it by opening the most recently saved version of the paper in a different web browser, and rescuing the last few paragraphs into it by cut and paste, but the confusion did cost me a bunch of editing. So the final mess ended up way longer than intended, and I may yet revise it to satisfy my obsessive-compulsive superpower, but not today. Today is for the policy portfolio, which I had hoped to have turned in by now, but self-imposed deadlines be danged, sleep is more important.
Here’s my one-page summary of the issue, the stakeholders, and my strategy about what I think should be done about it. Can you dig it? (more…)
Monkey Monday: coming up for air edition 14 December 2009 8:08 am
Posted by Tracy in : events,fangirl,geekery,health at every size,Marion Nestle,news,nyc,politics,school,sustainability,video,work,writing , 3 commentsHey, so it’s finals week from now until my last paper is due on the 23rd (which is an awful deadline and I sincerely hope to be done before then) and in the meantime I’ve been a big slacker which is why I haven’t posted and blah blah blah excuses excuses. Last week was ten thousand kinds of awesome, though.
On Monday morning, I went to an awesome event at The New School, celebrating the NYC FRESH initiative, which had not yet officially passed City Council, although it did on Wednesday. FRESH is Food Retail Expansion to Support Health, and it’s a mix of zoning and tax incentives for full-service grocery stores in certain underserved neighborhoods (Northern Manhattan, the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn and Jamaica, Queens). Not only must the stores devote a certain amount of square footage to fresh produce and other whole foods, they are required to accept EBT and WIC (which is really only common sense if they’re actually going to serve the lower-income communities that food retailers often avoid) and publically, transparently commit to good labor practices, so that people who work at those stores can afford to shop there. So awesome. And (more…)
Something fun to do tonight? 1 December 2009 2:59 pm
Posted by Tracy in : books,events,not even vegetarian,nyc,random,reading,school,vegetarian,writing , add a commentI know, I know, where’s my ridiculous post-Thanksgiving update? (It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost exactly a week since we started all the cooking.) My guess is it’s in the same hiding place as my motivation to work on finals. Anyway, this event should be interesting, if only for the juxtaposition of Anna “if world hunger didn’t motivate you to take my mom’s advice to eat less meat (or none), how about climate change?” Lappé with Julie “did I mention I’m a butcher now?” Powell.
True Story: Nonfiction at KGB – Julie Powell & Anna Lappé
KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street
New York City, NY
December 01, 2009
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Knowledge of this reading was brought to me by Food Sociology classmate Sam Kressler. Thanks Sam! You rock! For more information, check out the full description at KGB Bar’s website. (I just could not bring myself to cut and paste all their text; I may be slow getting back into gear after the long weekend, but that’s just too much cheating.)
