10 in '10

The weekend before Christmas, I hopped on a bus bound for NYC. I had to cancel last year’s trip at the last minute as a result of the snowpocalypse and feared I might have to abandon this trip as well.

Luckily the snow waited several days and allowed me to enjoy as much of NYC as I could in 24 hours.

(Source: )

—Seth D.

This year I visited three states (AZ, NV, CA) and one country (Guatemala) to which I had never traveled before. At least two of these trips, I’d say, counted as “adventurous.”

GRAND CANYON

I went to the Grand Canyon April 15-18 (shortly before SB1070 made Arizona seem less desirable). I am very scared of heights and not in great shape so the hike halfway into and then out of the canyon - 3,000 feet of elevation change and 4.5 miles each way - was pretty brutal for me. Another hike along the edge was also frankly pretty intimidating though less hard on me physically. We camped out, and it gets very very cold at night.

Lots of photos here.

GUATEMALA

I was in Guatemala in July 7-14. It was an amazing trip although I got cripplingly sick in the midst of a 25-mile backpacking trek through the mountains. Passport photo to prove it:

More photos here. I highly recommend Quetzaltrekkers, the touring company we went out with.

LAS VEGAS

I was in Las Vegas for Netroots Nation. I found the city kind of exhausting.

LOS ANGELES

My friend Michael and I went to Los Angeles Oct. 7-11. Kate Stayman-London can indeed confirm that she saw me there, but here are pictures at two museums I’d never been to before (10 in 10 bonus!):

Cactus garden at the amazing Getty Museum

Giant sloth at the La Brea tar pits museum

It’s really kind of crazy I had never been to California before.

—Seth D.

Here’s what I’ve been reading over the last few months:

The Confidence Man, by Hermann Melville. I love Melville because his narrators don’t realize how funny what they’re describing is; you have to read between the lines of his dense sentences to get what he’s really talking about. The title character wanders around a riverboat on the Mississippi figuring out how to cheat his fellow-passengers out of their money.

How the States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein. Delightful, light-hearted geographical history, flawed mostly by being arranged alphabetically by state so that a lot of information gets repeated. The extent to which misunderstandings, accidents, and grudges shaped the map is fun to learn.

In the Wake of the Plague, by Norman Cantor. A story of the causes and effects of the Black Death in western Europe. Kind of like sitting down to dinner with a well-meaning but rambly professor - full of digressions and occasional contradictions.

Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach. Truly awesome ad highly recommended - explains the history and practice of getting humans ready for space. Wry and tremendously well-written, it mixes profundity with truly exhaustive detail. Lots of discussion of space pooping.

A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchmann. Heavy, dense, utterly fantastic history of 14th century France, focusing on the plague, the Hundred Years War between France and England and the relations among noble families, the monarchy, the Church and the peasantry.

Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Fun but kind of heavy-handed fantasy trilogy, kind of like “The Chronicles of Narnia” if it was militant about atheism instead of religiousness. I enjoyed it but also find this critique by Alyssa Rosenberg pretty dead-on.

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. The devil and his buddies hang out in early-Soviet Moscow, causing chaos and giving a helping hand to a writer jailed for writing a satirical novel about Pontius Pilate. Not dissimilar to The Confidence Man in many ways; weird, dreamlike, often quite funny.

To check in on 10 in 10 in general, I definitely did the best at increasing the number of books I read, but misfired on almost all of the other goals. I plan on doing a status report in the next week or two on the other goals but definitely knocked read-a-book-a-month out of the park.

I’m late to the party on this one, as Honky was published a decade ago. One of my former professors is friends with the author and suggested that I read this. I took my time getting around to it, but once I got started, the book was impossible to put down. I started it on Sunday morning and was done later that day, despite numerous interruptions.

Honky chronicles the childhood of Dalton Conley, a sociologist who is not University Professor at NYU.  Conley grew up in an Avenue D housing project in the 1970s and 1980s, where he was a very rare white kid in a community full of blacks and Latinos.  Perhaps some will think Conley’s insights about race and class are too superficial or too trite.  I’m deeply interested in the sociology of race and class, so his specific insights are not completely new to me.  However, this book is raw and moving and memorable, and I think more folks should read it.  It epitomizes what I love about memoirs: It’s complex, so there’s a thread of laugh-out-loud humor running through even the most tense moments; and it discusses universal principles without straying too far from what the author could know from his own experiences.  In fact, to his credit, Conley explicitly admits that he can’t explain which sociological phenomena were most powerful in shaping his and others’ life chances.  Because Honky introduces sociological concepts in such an easily digesible, jargon-free format, I would definitely add this to the reading list for an undergrad intro to sociology or sociology of race/ethnicity course.

All in all, I strongly recommend Honky for a quick, interesting read.

—Monica Bell

Mom liked this whole meal.  We cleaned every plate!

Course 1: Jicama Pot Stickers with Miso-Black Bean Dipping Sauce

The “pot stickers” are thinly sliced pieces of jicama that were salted and lightly steamed.  They are filled with a mixture of freshly made ricotta (made it per this recipe from Serious Eats, with raw goat milk from a local farm), shrimp, local shoepeg white corn, and scallions.  The dipping sauce is a very simple puree of black beans, miso, and lots of garlic.

This idea was inspired by Jose Andres’ jicama-avocado ravioli from Cafe Atlantico and Hubert Keller’s jicama ravioli described in his cookbook, The Cuisine of Hubert Keller.  Obviously mine are more “rustic” though :)  They look most similar to this version featured on Ye Olde Pompous Vegan blog, though obviously these aren’t vegan.

Course 2: Crab Cake & “Cheesy Bake”

There’s a lot going on with this plate, probably too much, but it all tasted good.

From left to right: (1) We had a portabella-hearts of palm gratin that was more like a casserole.  My mom wanted to see how I’d make a lower-carb version of baked macaroni and cheese.  She was extremely pleased with it.  I got the idea for using hearts of palm for a macaroni replacement from Maria Health, one of my favorite food/healthy lifestyle blogs. (2) is a carrot, roasted grape, and bacon slaw.  I learned about roasting grapes here.  The salad is very simple and very delicious, just with red wine vinegar, Splenda, salt and pepper. (3) Crab cakes! I spotted this awesome recipe by Ellie Krieger for healthy but crispy crab cakes in this month’s Food Network Magazine.  It’s excellent and will become a regular part of my repertoire. The yellow stuff on top is garlic butter. (4) Blackberry-lemon gastrique made with red wine vinegar.  This was nice and tangy, and not overly sweet.  It went really well with the crab cake.

Course 3: Chevon Paprikash with Corn Chowder, Zucchini-Parmesan Pancakes, and Green Tomato-Habanero Chow Chow

This is the messiest-looking plate, but oh well.  I’m not a pro.

I came upon some goat tenderloin chops at the farmers’ market, but I didn’t want to make curried goat and wasn’t sure about some other recipes.  Instead, I decided to make a goat paprikash using really good Hungarian sweet paprika and a little Spanish smoked paprika.  I didn’t add sour cream like a traditional paprikash recipe, but instead served Greek yogurt alongside the dish.  The idea behind this was almost like a fajita - you fold one of the little zucchini pancakes, top it with a couple chunks of goatmeat, then a little yogurt and the very sweet and spicy chow chow (a traditional Southern homemade condiment.)  The zucchini pancakes were partly inspired by a zucchini fritter recipe from this month’s Food Network Magazine and a zucchini pancake recipe from a healthy food blog, but I followed neither recipe completely.

The corn chowder is made with corn from a local farm that my grandmother procured for me a few weeks ago.  Instead of potato, I used pearl onions, chunks of carrot, and hearts of palm for chunkiness and coziness.  To thicken the chowder without adding a bunch of cream, and to intensify the corn flavor, I pureed canned corn and strained it through cheesecloth to make a “corn milk” which, along with some chicken broth and a tiny bit of cream, became the chowder base.

Dessert: Trio of Angel Food Cake Sweets

I baked a sugar-free angel food cake last week and morphed it into three desserts. From left to right: Rosemary-scented local peaches and sweetened freshly made ricotta over angel food cake; Banana-pecan bread pudding topped with homemade banana chips (this was supposed to be topped with sugar-free marshmallow and banana-pecan streusel, but I forgot the marshallow and ruined the streusel); Snickers trifle, which is dark chocolate pudding layered with angel food cake, homemade sticky caramel, and peanuts that I roasted and seasoned myself.  It’s topped with Cool Whip, more peanuts, more caramel, and a sweet cherry (sadly, my mom had never had a real cherry.  She’d only had those nasty bright red ones from the jar. Yuck.).

We shared all three desserts.  Mom liked all of them, but she seemed to be least interested in the bread pudding.  She didn’t think it was sweet enough (it probably would have been perfect with a big sweet marshmallow on top.)  She loved the rosemary with the peaches, but wished the peaches had more syrup to go with the cake.  I think she was right about that.  I didn’t like the peach dessert much at all, but I LOVED the bread pudding.  I could have eaten that all night long even without the marshmallow.  Snickers trifle was loved by both of us.

—Seth D.

Prepared with Michelle for our recently married friends Zach Teutsch and Becca Rosen and Zach’s sister Nomi. In Jewish tradition, it’s a mitzvah to cook a feast for a new couple in the days after the wedding, and I never let a chance at a mitzvah pass by.

The tofu did not cook up nearly as nicely as I had hoped; I should have taken it out of the freezer earlier. The spice mix and the succotash salsa turned out great.

Served over brown rice with coconut milk, with a salad and some asparagus and a slice of Zach’s homemade bread on the side. Beverage is Michelle’s home-brewed bock, a dark malty beer.

Recipe via this awesome book, which I hope to cook from a lot this summer.

—Seth D.

On the surface, this is a book about the travel and research that writer Susan Orlean had to do in the course of reporting a long New Yorker article about John LaRoche, an oddball accused of illegally stealing rare orchids from a Florida swamp. But it turns into a sharply observed, digressive explorations on the following themes:

• People are weird.
• Nature is weird.
• Orchids, in particular, are weird, and historically inspire obsession.
• Florida is weird.
• The act of being a writer and the odd balance between distance and intimacy that being a writer forces you to accomplish is weird, and a little sad.
• People who are obsessive about rare, difficult things are weird, a little sad and utterly delightful.

Orlean is an excellent writer and loves to paint pictures with long lists and catalogs of details and examples. Her life in Florida is odd and lonely; she’s subject to the whims of the people she covers, particularly LaRoche but also a bevy of orchid growers, Seminoles and various Florida miscreants. The history of orchid hunting she provides here is great, too - colorful and dark and striking.

Orlean is not just the author, but also a great character - an engaged narrator with a lot of personality.

“I’m actually pretty tough…and when my toughness runs out I can rely on a certain willful obliviousness o keep me going.”

To pull an example of Orlean’s eye for the weird and delightful: when orchid grower and orchid judge Howard Bronstein comes across an orchid of a variety named for him, and calls it “a terrific Howard Bronstein” and one of the best Howard Bronsteins he’s ever come across.

Recommended by Michael Rose, after my childlike delight when Orlean, a prolific and fun Twitterer, follow-friday’ed me.

—Monica Bell

With mom, as usual.

Course 1: Watermelon Three Ways.

Left: frothy cucumber-watermelon gazpacho

Center: arugula salad with caramelized watermelon, warm almond-crusted goat cheese medallions, and orange-infused balsamic reduction

Right:  watermelon salsa (with tomato, jicama, avocado, onion, jalapeno, and basil) served with thinly sliced summer squash

Course 2: Jalapeno-Cheddar Biscuits with Tomato Gazpacho Aspic, Candied Turkey Bacon, and Egg.

I got the aspic idea from Emeril, but I added too much gelatin. The biscuits are low-carb, made from Carbquik biscuit mix plus my own seasonings.  This tasted really good, but unfortunately I didn’t do a good job of plating it or taking the photo.

Course 3: Poached Halibut with Summer Vegetables in Lemon-Chamomile Broth.

The “summer vegetables” are asparagus, kohlrabi, golden beets, and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.  The halibut is sprinkled with crushed pink peppercorns.

Course 4: Two Desserts.

Top: chocolate peanut butter fudge protein pie. The crust is made from Fiber One, and the filling is virtually sugar-free, fat-free, high-protein, and relatively low in carbs. It’s garnished with a miniature sugar-free Reese’s Cup.

Bottom: red velvet flourless protein pancakes with fat-free no-sugar-added cream cheese “syrup” and toasted chopped pecans. The pancakes are made from fat-free cottage cheese, whey protein powder, eggs, and baking powder, with a little cocoa and red food coloring (maybe I’ll try coloring them with beet juice one day? As much as I love artificial health foods, red food coloring creeps me out just a bit.) Anyway, I got the basic protein pancake recipe from mariahealth.blogspot.com, but I added the red velvet elements on my own.

That was June dinner.  This one was more successful than normal: Mom ate every morsel that I served her.  This was especially surprising because I went out on a limb with some of my choices. I felt pretty good about it.

—Monica Bell

Alliteration much?

Anyway, I kept it a little simpler than usual this go-round.  May was an insanely busy month, but we squeezed in the May dinner on May 31, Memorial Day.  My mom has some sort of issue with Mexican food: She’s never tried it, but she’s decided she hates it nonetheless.  The closest she’s gotten is a Taco Bell burrito, which she actually liked.  Mom is particularly leery of refried beans and guacamole.  This meal was my opportunity to broaden her horizons, even though most of my creations are not remotely authentic.  And one of them was completely inspired by India. Whatever.

Appetizer 1: Guacamole and Habanero Salsa Verde with Toasted Low-Carb Flatbread Triangles

Probably the most authentic dish? The guacamole is just guacamole - avocado, lemon and lime juices, tomato, onion, jalapeno, a touch of Splenda, and a little garlic powder because I like garlic in everything.  I’d never made salsa verde before, but it was a simple preparation: tomatillo, cilantro, fresh garlic, 1 habanero, and a touch of Splenda to cut the sourness of the tomatillo.  The “chips” are baked with chili powder, garlic powder, salt, and lime. This was a huge hit, especially the guacamole.

Appetizer 2: Tamarind-Mango Lassi with Salted Chili-Lime Mango Skewers

Yeah … so a mango lassi is not quite Mexican, but it tasted great.  Here’s how a lassi made its way onto my Mexico-inspired menu: I have tamarind concentrate at home and had planned to make a tamarind agua fresca.  But I forgot to bring it with me, and the grocery store near her house only had real tamarind pods.  I didn’t know the best technique to get enough tamarind paste out of the pods to make a richly flavored agua fresca.  So I combined the tamarind I could clean with mango, vanilla Greek yogurt, Splenda, and milk to make a lassi.  Mom had never had a mango lassi, but she LOVED this.  I also thought it was quite tasty.  The tamarind asserted itself just enough that the drink tasted more special than your average mango lassi.  

Mom was not as much of a fan of the mango marinated in salt, Splenda, chili powder, and lime juice, so I ate most of it.  I accidentally added a bit too much salt for her palate.

Entree: Roasted Chile Rellenos with Poached Shrimp and Eggplant and Oaxacan Mole Rojo

You can’t see this all that well, but I stuffed two roasted poblano peppers with my own fat-free version of refried beans, fat-free cream cheese, and eggplant.  Traditional chile rellenos are battered and fried.  To bring some of that crunchiness, I tried a new technique of pureeing black beans and baking it at a low temperature until it became crispy, then I used it like croutons on top of the chiles (whole black beans would have been a better call.) For protein, I poached shrimp with lots of lemon, lime, and red pepper to mimic a ceviche (these shrimp weren’t of good enough quality for a real ceviche, in my opinion.) The star of the plate was the fake mole sauce. I cheated by using chipotles in adobo sauce as a base, then adding tomato, raisins, walnuts, dark chocolate cocoa powder, and bread in a blender.  Gorgeous, delicious sauce, but it’s definitely not a real mole.  The whole plate is sprinkled with cilantro leaves.

I was flying by the seat of my pants on this one, but it was surprisingly yummy.  Mom really enjoyed the fake mole, the shrimp and (gasp!) the refried beans.  She wasn’t a huge fan of the chile relleno as an entity though - we couldn’t figure out whether it was the pepper itself, the eggplant, the cilantro, or something else that was the problem.  I wound up eating the second pepper myself.

Dessert: Mexican Chocolate Protein Frosty

No photo, but Mom loves my protein frosties and this one was no exception.  I made a chocolate protein frosty with fat-free cottage cheese, sugar-free syrups, dark chocolate cocoa powder, chocolate sugar-free/fat-free instant pudding mix, and chocolate whey protein, but added a “Mexican” spin with vanilla flavoring, lots of cinnamon, nutmeg, and raisins.  Mom knew something was different about the flavor, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.  Doesn’t matter; she enjoyed it anyway.

I’d originally planned to top this with a horchata-flavored whipped cream, but life got in the way.

There’s good news. Mom told my stepdad, a Mexican food fan who used to live in San Antonio, that she’s willing to try a Mexican restaurant now. Mission accomplished.

Mediterranean salmon on top of quinoa salad with sauteed mushrooms and asparagus.

Beware of burning the quinoa - it cooks fast! I added chopped tomatoes, onions, chick peas, lemon, evoo & red wine vinegar to quinoa.

Delicious & healthy!

- Seth D.

I had already seen the movie this book is based on. Is that cheating?

Anyway, it’s exceptionally good. It’s short and beautifully written and very sad, a story about a butler who is so deferential and married to his idea of who he is that he can’t even realize how heartbreaking his story is. You see, through what he’s actually saying, how much emotion he must be suppressing in the effort to maintain this sort of proper distance from everything in his life.

“it came to be a crucial matter of principle…that I did not appear in anything less from my full and proper role.”

It actually reads pretty fast. I recommend it — or, in keeping with another theme, the Oscar-nominated movie.

Recommended by Mike Gallaher.

—Seth D.

So, I am not a good exerciser. I think I am probably the furthest behind of anybody who is still keeping track and unless I kick it up, I will not break 100 for the year. On the other hand, that is probably 60 times more than I have exercised in any given year for the previous 30 years of my life. And I think the incentive to keep track has not only made me exercise more, but also has made me more likely to do the healthier things in life and not do the unhealthier things.

However, one thing I have done that is a pretty big step for me, not only in terms of exercise but also in terms of just being a competent functional person and in terms of doing things that I was too lazy or scared to do before: I finally at age 31 learned to ride a bike.

This is me, on a bike, which I could not do until March.

I took a totally awesome class with the Washington Area Bike Association (WABA) in March. It was $10 for four hours, counting bike rental, and the instructors were awesome; the class was about 15 people from teenage to nearly senior, and we were all riding by the end.

Bi-cycle! Bi-cycle!

These photos are from the second time I ever rode a bike. I borrowed Michelle’s roommate’s bike and we went to the parking lot behind the zoo late on a lovely Sunday. I remembered how to do it pretty well, as the old saying would suggest. I didn’t quite get the hang of turning by the end of that class I took, but I could do it consistently (though found it a little terrifying) after about half an hour. 

Nervous!

Hopefully I’ll be able to do it well enough at the end of the summer to actually go places on a bike.

i watched a serious man on friday night.  i didn’t think it was very funny(maybe the dry humor was a bit too dry), and i thought it was very slow moving.  it also seemed really long.  it was so boring and long, i forgot to take a picture of the netflix dvd before i sent it off.

maybe i’m not cultured enough to appreciate oscar-level movies, but i wasn’t impressed by a serious man. 

Pardon the delay with April’s book, the first of May was Derby, after all.

This was recommended to me by a professor at Georgetown. I think he gave us advance excerpts to read in class, and so it was rewarding to finally read the whole thing.

It’s an investigation into immigration, and tells about the changing face of immigrants in our country, and takes the time highlight the positive contributions they’re making to our society.

Definitely worth a read, especially right now.

I watched the Hurt Locker. I really dislike war movies, bit watched it for the sake of the contest.