TracyFood

Up past my bedtime again, yep. 25 December 2009 3:38 am

Posted by Tracy in : baking, dessert, family, fun, seasonality , Comments

So 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 , Comments

So 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: winter squash goodness and more. 2 November 2009 9:47 am

Posted by Tracy in : books, cooking, eating, health at every size, kitchen mishaps, monkeys, nyc, reading, seasonality, winter squash , Comments

Fun fact! In some dialects of English (but not mine), the word “pumpkin” is used to refer to all winter squash, not just the orange hard-skinned kinds used to make pies and jack-o-lanterns (and other tasty things, some of which I will be describing later in this post). In my experience, this is mostly a Southern Hemisphere/British usage, but I welcome a more substantial analysis than my touchy-feely “I think this is how it works.” Meanwhile, in this Northern Hemisphere, between Halloween and the end of Daylight Savings Time it’s officially winter in my brain, and for the past week or so I have been marking the changing season by eating lots of winter squash, including pumpkin. Yum.

For starters, (more…)

Recipe: Russian Dressing 29 September 2009 10:51 am

Posted by Tracy in : books, cooking, recipes, salad, seasonality , Comments

It’s fall, gentle readers. I am reluctant to admit it after such a weird summer, much of it cold and wet. But the sun barely shone into my food sociology class at 5 PM yesterday, and not just because it was overcast. The days are now shorter than the nights in this hemisphere, and that’s that. Still, I’ve been craving salad, perhaps because I haven’t eaten it much the past season what with the weird weather and salad-meister Peter being across the country. So last week I made this dressing, since although salad is one of my summer foods I wanted something a little richer and autumnal than my standard vinaigrette. I worked from a recipe in my beloved Moosewood New Classics, kinda like Tracy Granola is based on New Classics, only perhaps even more so — for both recipes, I open the cookbook to the original recipe’s page, then change almost every ingredient’s measurement to my personal tastes. All of which is to say, please, tweak my version to your heart’s content. For more food for thought about how cookbooks are written and how that may not have much relation to how they’re used, check out Rachel Laudan’s recent-ish post about Julia Child, Elizabeth David, and other visions of French food. I liked it very much. And now, on with the recipe. (more…)

Gastro-culinary highlights of the long weekend. 23 September 2009 3:33 pm

Posted by Tracy in : breakfast, consumerism, cookies, dessert, eating, events, fish, food snobbery, not even vegetarian, nyc, restaurants, seasonality, summer, sundance, travel, vegetarian , Comments

For the purposes of this post, the long weekend ended about fifteen minutes ago, because I’m a big slacker. Peter and I got up unholy early on Friday morning for a visit to the not-yet-frozen north, by which I mean his parents’ cabin on Osgood Pond, which is in Paul Smiths, NY, outside Saranac Lake, not far past Lake Placid — and if you haven’t heard of any of those places, that’s okay: the whole point of this expedition was to hang out with friends on a nice mini-vacation in the middle of nowhere.

In my opinion, we succeeded mightily. There was paddling — both canoe and Adirondack guide boat — and relaxing in front of a wood-burning stove, both with and without games. Also there was tasty food. (more…)