asteroid B612

While I'm at it with the whole chicken thing, here is the long-promised chicken testimonial for why buying all natural foods is just better.

I usually can't afford fancy, all-natural meat, as it is already a bit pricey in its grocery mass-produced variety. But I've found a bit of a way around that with chicken. Often I'll get a whole-chicken fryer (wh. Cook's says is the best for all your chicken needs, but I already knew that, too), cook the whole thing in the crock pot, then we'll eat off the easily carvable meat for a couple of meals. When it starts to get annoying picking off the meat, I boil the carcass with some bay leaves and get lovely chicken broth. The remaining meat comes of quite easily. By that time, I feel like I've got my money's worth out of the bird. I divide the picked meat up in equally distributed containers and pour the broth over it, and freeze these containers. Then for a quick meal, thaw the broth/meat cube, add veggies, and you have yummy chicken soup!

To buy a whole chicken fryer at the grocery is pretty cheap, in fact half as cheap as Whole Foods (but it's about the difference between $3 and $6). So one day I though, "Am I just being a snob about this natural food thing, or is it really better?" Well, when I got to final frozen broth stage, I think the proof is in the pudding. In this picture from my freezer (geez, you think I could've wiped it out before photographing the insides of my freezer!), the top one is the Whole Foods chicken, the bottom one is the grocery store chicken, which has so much fat, it couldn't displace the broth, and completely discolored it! Eeewww!!! I think the end result of the upper container is worth the $3 extra.

My mother-in-law got me a subscription to Cook's Illustrated for Christmas, and I'm loving it. It's great because it doesn't try to outdo itself with snazziness in every issue but tries to perfect the basics in order to get to the snazzy--down to techniques, equipment, and ingredients. For example, they'll offer a recipe for baked chicken with balsamic vinegar, then they'll try 10 different balsamic vinegars giving prices, results, and their favorite after testing. (I was pleased to note that the Whole Foods brand of balsamic vinegar that I use came out on top, beating its much more expensive contenders, and I already had the idea of cooking chicken in balsamic vinegar--it's always tendery and tasty.)

My new favorite recipe from this past year's issues is for an Indian dish: "Chicken Biryani". I've altered it some just for the sake of time and the way I particularly use my ingredients for maximum "stretch" value.

• 
  First cook the rice, throwing in a few cardamom pods, cinnamon stick, ginger piece, whole cloves, and cumin seeds in the water. You can pick out the big chunks in the ends. I personally like leaving in the cardamom and cumin seeds and mixing them in with the rice, for extra bursts of flavor on my plate.
• Sautee onions, minced garlic, chopped fresh mint and cilantro, and fresh jalapeno or jalapeno chiles. (I use the former, because they are growing in my garden, but I think the recipe actually calls for the latter.)
• If you're going to cook whole chicken pieces (wh. should be salted on either side before cooking), set this onion mixture aside; if you're like me and scimp on meat, I mix into the onion mixtures some chicken bits or a chopped up chicken breast and lightly salt as it sautees. To really scimp with the meat, also add thinly sliced cauliflower, wh. is actually really yummy even if you're not being frugal.
• When everything is cooked all the way through. Add the onion mixture back with the meat (if you separated in the first place). And serve the meat mixture over the rice.
• Top with a yogurt garnish, made up of plain yogurt, chopped fresh mint, and some minced garlic all mixed together.

This is the fastest, cheapest incarnation of this recipe that I've come up with, and it's SOOO yummy and flavorful. The yogurt really makes come alive.

If you don't like monochromatic food, try using red peppers.

I think part of the reason I haven't been blogging much lately is that if I sit down to write something, I will probably complain about something. Having a complaining disposition is not only ungrateful and unmindful of God's graces but it is also oppressive to the people around me.

With that said, though, I am tired. I truly do feel weary--both Chris and I do. I think Interminable Summer that is hanging over Louisiana is a contributing factor. The umpteenth day with a heat index of around 90 degrees, 70-90% humidity, and a glaring sun dawns this morning as we come to the close of about the fifth month in a row of this weather. The umpteenth day of constantly feeling damp with sweat, of fighting for the lives of our air conditioners--home and car, of dreading turning on the stove to prepare food, and of trying to think clearly. Well, I guess it's just living in Louisiana folks. Right now the two greatest luxuries in the world I can think of are a washer and dryer and central air. *sigh*

Yesterday, though, was the wonderful blessing of a little respite. Chris took a personal day off, and as I have no outside obligations, I put the books up for a day and took a personal day myself. We got some much needed errands done: opening up two savings accounts at the bank (an "absolutely no touching" one and a "rainy day" one); getting an alignment on Chris's car; going to Target (it's been months!--After admitting to Chris that I had been driving with my knee while talking on the phone so that I could use my other hand to help me talk [gesturing, etc.], he bought me a headset for my cell phone.); sitting at the laundromat doing a major washing (including bedspread); and making and bringing birthday scones to a friend. We also cleaned a bit and watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!". We desperately needed some time together, and though we probably could've used a whole week, we are so thankful the day we had.

I just really haven't been posting that much...no reason in particular except blog malaise, perhaps.

Life is has been busy, and I'm trying to focus more qualitative energy on the little time I have at home and with husband, especially as he endures the hard and difficult task of quitting smoking. I found some herbal teas that seem to help a bit in that arena.

This weekend has felt like 4 rolled up into one. The past two Fridays I've gotten home around 7 p.m., and Chris and I are so tired that we end up watching TV until someone musters up the energy to get up and actually stick a DVD into the player. Popcorn for supper isn't so bad. Because we have an atennae we can now watch TGIF, an event I haven't considered in years and years. Isn't that what jr high schoolers watch because none of them are old enough to drive yet? Anyway, as can be expected, like the rest of TV it's pretty dumb, except for this one show that we just find absolutely hilarious: Complete Savages. I think it's produced by Mel Gibson. A single (widowed?) dad and five pre-teen to teen boys. Many parts of it are the "exaltation of all this is great and wonderful of guy", but more often than not we find ourselves laughing to death despite all that is "sitcom" about it.

This past Saturday instead of sleeping in, I had to get up early to go Hammond (about an hour away) for the Med/Ren conference. The website for Southeastern was so bad that I could NOT find a street address to do a mapquest search to. The best I could was to print out a campus map. So I set out on the road going in the right direction, figuring that I would just stop at a gas station when I thought I should be getting close. I actually ended up calling the cell phone of someone else who was attending and getting some basic directions that I ended up amending towards the end and was very grateful for the campus map which did help in my final stages.

The conference was so-so. It was kind of badly organized, and for about the 60 or so people in attendance, they actually had concurrent sessions! Which means that hardly anyone could be at a given session, since we were too spread out. I was tired and sad and didn't feel like being there. I would've left after my paper, but I had already paid for lunch. So I sat through lunch and a LONG panel discussion, and then left. It's been so hot lately, so I was roasting in my car all the way home.

When I got home mid-afternoon, I desperately needed to study for a midterm on Monday (today) (which I hadn't been studying for due to revising my paper), but I was exhausted and collapsed on the bed.

But then it was time to go a wedding at church to which we were invited on Friday. The wedding was beautiful, and it was fun hanging out with the Hamiltons at the reception. Well, due to an open bar at the reception, I was in no position to study in the evening (besides it was pretty late).

Sunday, we played church bus to various university and OPCers in-town for conventions in addition to our Sunday duties at church. And we had lunch with the family of the Tulane student we pick up for church regularly...they were in town for "parent's weekend". A lovely family.

I, of course, had my nap, and after evening service we finished our church "bus" duties, and I finally began studying for the midterm. I knew if I could do nothing else, just memorize as many dates as I could. Always puts me in good stead for this profs tests. So I flipped through my flashcards a few times this morning on my drive in. And the test, I think, went okay. *sigh*

I'm really looking forward to tomorrow! A day with no obligations (yet).
I'm tired now and dread the drive home...such a drag. So I think I'll go fuel up at the coffee shop.

Today I gave my Hildegard paper. It went well. I was pleased with the final revisions I had made (up through last night even).

Before my paper I found that my Latin professor died yesterday after being ill for such a long time--the one for whom I wrote the Hildegard paper last spring. I know I complained a lot about medieval Latin class. One thing should be clear, though, what I was frustrated with was my own incompetence with Latin and the frustration that is just medieval Latin sometimes.

If anything was good, it was my professor. He was so learned, so caring, and held each of his students in high regard. He was encouraging, approachable, and deeply calm. He made Latin seem so simple, and what I love of the language I largely owe to him. When I heard the news I was very sad, but I think that he has found his eternal rest.

We have some family members who live their life in the business sector. We love them dearly, but sometimes when we expect the casual intonation of familial greetings, we get phrases that take us aback and that provide general amusement. For instance, has a family member ever called you to "confirm your call"?

It was recently suggested to me to read Strunk & White's Elements of Style on an annual basis. While I am in the painful process of revising a paper, I will do anything. In an effort to overcome "reviser's block", I picked up my copy this morning and started perusing.

Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. People in business say that tone cartridges are in short supply, that they have updated the next shipment of these cartridges, and that they will finalize their recommendations at the next meeting of the board. They are speaking a language familiar and dear to them. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; executives walk among toner cartridges, caparisoned like knights. We should tolerate them--every person of spirit wants to ride a white horse. (Elements of Style, 4th ed., 82.)

This paragraph made me laugh out loud.*

*In my effort to have a little sport with another sector of society, I, in no way, intend to demean, to belittle, or to make light of in any way their valuable contribution to society--she said portentously.

I am a monster; I really am.

Deep down inside of me a little monster growls when he doesn't get caffeine pronto, or the degrees outside feels over 90 (in the middle of October!), for instance. Or somebody forgot to take out the garbage (it's never my fault).

My monster needs a lot of attending to, and if he doesn't get the proper maintenance at the proper time, he drags himself to his feet and roars his rebellion.

(All monsters take masculine pronouns, you know.)

He's a silly monster really. He needs to be tamed, and it takes more than weak little me to tame him.

UPDATE: The monster also doesn't like it when certain computer apparati don't work. Whoop! Better go! The monster wants a drink of water.

I am in the process of doing some polishing on the Hildegard paper for the conference this weekend. I had gotten it worked up as best I could, reworking it a fair amount since its initial incarnation as a term paper for the bane of my life Medieval Latin class last spring. In fact, I was starting to feel a little proud of how good I was getting at rewriting my own work--until I asked a professor to read it through for me.

Somehow I can't seem to get over the initial shock of seeing my work come back to me in pieces. ("Oh, my poor baby, let me coddle your shattered shards!") But in the end, it is always so much better. I am also realizing that this isn't necessarily a reflection of the worth of my work (or me, though I do my best to keep the two distinguished).

The background for such sensitivity towards my writing is based on my days as a deluded lower-classman in college. One day I woke up in my fourth (of five) year and realized that all this time I didn't really know what a thesis was! For nearly the majority of my college career I had been fooling myself into thinking that I knew how to write until the day I realized that, well, quite simply, that I didn't.

Writing is a craft. It is not something that is learned like one's multiplication tables, existing in defined parameters which one need only master. Writing is like building a ship. (Bear with me, now, we're on a Horatio Hornblower kick.) We start out learning how to build a raft--the 5 Paragraph Essay. Eventually we may move on to the row boat--perhaps the SIP. To think that we can jump from a row boat to a frigate is simply unrealistic. And as the boats become bigger, the boat-builder enlists more help. The wood tempers over time, and so do our words.

Because I have launched a row-boat, I think I can write, as if I have reached a moment of arrival, and perhaps it is not inappropriate to think of it as arriving, but only at a landmark along a long path.

I hope I never outgrow the sense of needing another's eyes to remeasure my planks. Learning how to write is an unfolding that I have barely begun to grasp. It is more than subjects and verbs and direct objects placed neatly in a row, rather it is conversation that exists along various stages of completion but always in a state of incompletion, for I will never have the final word.

Musicologist Claude V. Palisca wrote the following about the era of music history we call the Baroque (roughly 1600-1750):

Behind the traits that mark music as baroque, then, are their reaon for being: the passions, or as they were more often called then, the affections. Affections are not the same as emotions. A 16th c poetic critic, Lorenzo Giacomini, defined an affection as “a spiritual movement or operation of the mind in which it is attracted or repelled by an object it has come to know.” He described it as a result of an imbalance in the animal spirits and vapors that flow continually throughout the body. An abundance of thin and agile spirits disposes a person to joyous affections, while torpid and impure vapors prepare the way for sorrow and fear. External and internal sensations stimulate the bodily mechanism to alter the state of the spirits. This activity is felt as a ‘movement of the affections,’ and the resulting state of imbalance is the affection. Once this state is reached, the body and mind tend to remain in the same affection until some new stimulus produces an alteration of the combination of vapors. Affection and passion are two terms for the same process, the former describing it from the point of view of the body, the latter from the standpoint of the mind. The alteration of the blood and spirits affects the body, while the mind passively suffers the disturbance. (In Baroque Music, 2d ed., Prentice-Hall, 1981)

In the late 16th/early 17th c. certain musicians, poets, scholars, and generally interested people were reading treatises by and about the Greeks concerning music. What struck them was how much power the Greeks said music had. Plato, in The Republic said that when educating the future citizens of the republic, they shouldn't listen to certain kinds of music, because it would make them bad people (or conversely, listening to good music would make them good people).

How these 17th c Italians saw this was more than just how we pose the problem concerning "today's youth" and listening to violent lyrics. If we are to read Paliscia's explanation properly, it's clear that they saw a real, physical process, as powerful as listening to the right music could actually make a sick person well. Music: the social panacea!

It became their task to recreate the music of the Greeks so that they could recreate the power they saw that the Greeks had. In their studies they saw that most of the music consisted of a single vocal line with instrumental accompaniment. So they started writing music that way. They also observed that the Greek plays were actually sung. Hence, the birth of opera in 1600-07, with the story of Orpheus, the god who used the power of music to enter Hades.

This past Thursday evening, this is the story I told my class. I'm astounded every time I go over the birth of opera how much faith this group of Florentines had in the power of music--how thoroughly it could affect an actual physical change and how much they wanted to recreate this power.

What the Greeks did, we'll never know fully. I do know that the past lives in the past, and what of the past lives in the present is necessarily reinvented by those who live in the present.

We had a late night last night and were awakened to a symphony of alarm clocks that lasted longer than usual this morning. I managed to make it to school in decent amount of time and had a good day. As the day progressed, though, last night's effects stole upon me and weariness won out.

Following my last class, I went to October's scheduled MARIS event, which was looking at a display of facsimiles of medieval manuscripts which are housed in the special collections library. Always nice to remember what we had. As I was walking over with a prof of mine, I glanced down at my shirt and realized that this morning's coffee had left its mark. My prof made sympathetic noises and chalked it up to "occupational hazard". Too true.

When I came back to my office, I knew that occupational hazard or not, I needed more of the caffeinated liquid. I also thought that I would make the most of my walk over to the coffee shop and stop by the Kinko's to get this unit's installments of articles bound for one of my classes (so much easier to keep things in order that way). But upon further inspection I realized that I missing a few articles. Deducing that a quick trip to the library would remedy the situation, I resolved to go over before coffee. Dragging my weary head over there, I got all the way to the reserve desk before I realized that I had forgotten my keys inside my office. What a bother! Not knowing how long my prof would still be on campus, I opted for skipping photocopying for catching him and his key to my office.

Standing in front of my desk I thought, "What do I do now?" When all else fails, start cleaning the desk. I straightened up my desk area, and when I was done, the answer lay plainly in front of me: Go home. It was so obvious, why hadn't I seen it before? So I packed my bags and came home...pausing to gas up on coffee, of course.