Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Dad's London Broil

I'm not sure how we started this low-key New Year's Eve tradition, but not being the party types, Victor and I are headed over to my parents' for dinner and some Trivial Pursuit. We're making dinner, actually, a london broil that my dad loves.

Dad's London Broil and Bordelaise Sauce

First get your appropriate hunk of meat...I think I have top sirloin tonight; I know I have used flank steak in the past. Put the meat in a ziplock bag and marinate it overnight in cheap French salad dressing. Really, get a bottle of the generic orange stuff, the kind that is nothing but oil, high fructose corn syrup, and red dye #2.* The sugar will carmelize as the meat cooks, giving the outside a nice crispiness.

I can't take credit for knowing this. Victor picked it up in a restaurant where he worked. Speaking of Victor, this is a meat best cooked on the grill, so he'll be doing that tonight. Frankly, even if it is "unseasonably warm," 40 degrees is a temperature at which I cook inside.

For the sauce:

Finely chop a shallot (As fine as you can...the sucker I chopped today was stronger than an onion, and I couldn't see very well through the tears. I'm lucky I didn't finely chop my thumb.) and saute in a little olive oil. Oh, do this in a saucepan...it is a sauce, after all.

Add two cans of beef broth and about a can's worth of red wine. Victor reminded me last night, as we stood in the wine store, that your sauce is only as good as the wine you use. That may well be, but I'm not wasting a $20 bottle of wine in a sauce. I used a $5 burgundy.

Add a couple of bay leaves and a few sprigs of thyme.

Simmer until the liquid is reduced. This is the part I hate, because it requires patience. Stir and taste periodically, you want the liquid to be hearty and beefy, but with the wine flavor. I ended up adding another few spashes of wine, because a cheap burgundy is apparently not quite so robust...after a good half an hour the sauce still tasted like beef soup.

In the end, I think I reduced the liquid to about half.

To give yourself something to do while the liquid reduces, make a roux with butter (about 2 T) and flour. You can just set it aside if it's done well before the reduction, timing is, thankfully, not of the essence. If it were, of course, I would not be doing this.

When the liquid is finally reduced sufficiently, take out the bay leaves and what's left of the thyme (probably just woody stems) and stir in the roux. (I also removed the bigger hunks of shallot, because I did such a lousy job of fine chopping.)

Stir in 8 oz. of sliced mushrooms, and when they are warm, serve. Because my father is anti-mushroom, I made the sauce up through the roux point, and tonight I'll reheat his separately, adding the mushrooms to ours.

This actually makes a heck of a lot of sauce (4 cups before adding the mushrooms), but we are not an "artfully drizzle a fine line of sauce over the meat" family. We are a "Gimme another piece of bread so I can sop up this up" family.

This dinner is obviously not part of the detox plan. I gave up...getting back on the health food wagon will be a New Year's thing, like getting back to the gym. (The owner e-mailed me today; the 5:30 a.m. hours resume on Monday. They always say January is crowded at gyms, but not, I bet, at 5:30.)

*Yes, red dye #2 is the one that went of the market in 1976 (in the U.S., anyway.) And red dye #3 was pulled in I think the '80's. But that orange color doesn't come from nature, and I was just seeing if you were paying attention.

Speaking of paying attention, I wasn't, so I didn't get anything submitted this time. Others are more on the ball, though, and the Carnival of Recipes #20 is up today.

That's it?

Uh, yeah. It's funny, after almost two years, I'm wishing I'd come up with a better blog title, because none of my banner/design ideas seem to work with the whole Shoes, Ships thing. On the other hand, I do like the oysters.

I think this is brighter, but let me know if it's just too stark.

Best laid plans of mice rats and men woman

So far this week is not what I had in mind. The rats have a respiratory infection working through the group like a cold through a nursery school, and today will be my third vet trip of the week. That also means my third hastily-rearranged work schedule. True, this week at the office is pretty laid back (a lot of people, my direct boss included, are off, and I'm wearing jeans and a sweatshirt), but I still have all the end-of-the-calendar-year stuff to get done. I was hoping to get that done as well as some catch up on those projects that don't have deadlines, but it looks like they'll just have to smolder until they become fires I have to tend.

So I haven't had the chance to make a nice new blog template for 2005, I haven't gone shopping for fresh vegetables to try out delicious new recipes, I haven't researched the fading health of washed-up celebrities for my dead pool list, and oh crap, I haven't mailed my car insurance payment.

I'm looking forward to a nice bottle of wine on New Year's Eve, and I'll be very surprised if I'm not fast asleep by 12:15.

Detox

As we approached Philadelphia yesterday, I asked my brother "So, is there any place near your house to get a cheesesteak?"

He burst out laughing and said "I knew you were gonna ask that."

I have a reputation...well, several, actually. One of them is for a great love of sandwiches (the perfect food), and another is the need to seek out and try regional culinary specialties when I travel. When Boy lived in Chicago, we had several trips to find particular pizzas, Italian beef sandwiches, and hot dogs with neon green relish. So obviously, Philadelphia=cheesesteak.

Unfortunately, since we ran into heavy I-95 traffic (and got that late start), the cheesesteak didn't mesh with my desired quick turnaround time in the city, and we ended up eating a very late lunch on the way back at a Boston Market in Newark, DE. Next time I will be in charge of planning, and we will have steaks. And perhaps a "water ice."

It is probably just as well I didn't get a steak. After six months or so of near-vegetarianism, the food this weekend...well, let's just say I feel like I oughta detox. Tonight I will check out the cookbook (Mollie Katzen, yay!) I got for Christmas and make a grocery list. For tonight, I guess I'll decide between pizza and Chinese (or appetizers and desserts). Despite all the shopping and cooking I did for the last week and a half, my house is sadly empty of dinnerable food. Detox starts tomorrow.

More on the Polish foods before I skip town

By the way, here's the paluszki:

And my sister posted the lyrics to "The Eight Polish Foods of Christmas."

I'm off work today (last use-it-or-lose-it vacation day of the year), and was hoping to get some web page work done between loads of laundry. Instead I have to go to Philadelphia. If it were my schedule, I'd already be on my way home from Philadelphia, but not everyone subscribes to me "get your ass out of bed and on the road" philosophy...

Oh well. At least I don't have to drive to Norfolk.

The Eight Polish Foods of Christmas*

My grandfather (who passed away a few years ago) was Polish, and this year my grandmother (who is Scots-Irish and claims that she never actually even liked kielbasa) requested a Polish dinner for the family Christmas celebration.

Besides kielbasa, which we would have had anyway (honestly, if for some reason we were having Chinese for a family dinner, we'd still have kielbasa), mom is making golabki (stuffed cabbage), my sister is bringing pierogies, and I'm making mizeria.

What that means is, I got off easy. Mizeria is just cucumbers in sour cream.

I also had to make the not-particularly-Polish key lime pie and some appetizers. Feeling a bit guilty about the mizeria, I decided to see if I could come up with something Polish that didn't involve herring.

I made some vegetable pates (recipes to follow if they go over ok, otherwise we'll just pretend that never happened) and a potato cracker with caraway seeds called paluszki:

3 sticks of butter, softened
2 medium potatoes, cooked and mashed (345 g)
450 grams flour (this was adapted from a Polish recipe, so the ingredients were given by weight, and metric at that. I have a scale, so I did actually weight stuff out. It was about 3 3/4 cups of flour)
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 egg, beaten
Caraway seeds (lots)

Preheat the oven to 425 (farenheit. I had to convert from centigrade, but I won't make you do the math.)

Put the butter and potato in a large bowl, then sift in the flour and salt. (Yeah, I object to sifting, but I didn't want to play too fast and loose with the recipe, since it's a new one.) Mix to a soft dough. I used my hands. This is a very un-Nic-like recipe, by the way.

Turn the dough out onto a "lightly-floured surface" and knead for a few seconds or until smooth. (The recipe said a few seconds...I'm guessing it could also mean "a few kneads." Here is where I got nervous that I was overworking the dough. I don't know what it means to overwork dough, but I'm pretty sure it's bad.)

Cover and chill for 30 minutes. Have a pivo. (Just seeing if you speak Polish, though I was talking about the dough in the first part.)

Roll the dough out on that "light-floured surface" again, and roll to about 8 mm thick. (I had some real quality control issues with my thickness, and for the most part mine were not that thick. I am used to rolling the chrusciki, which springs back on you and you're supposed to be able to read through.)

Cut the dough into strips. Again, I was thinking 1. chrusciki and 2. I'm serving these as crackers. After I was done and went back to the original recipe, I saw that the paluszki supposedly means "little fingers," and the strips are supposed to be about finger-sized. Oh well.

Put the strips on a well-oiled (lots and lots of Pam, in my case) baking sheet, brush with the beaten egg, and sprinkle with caraway seeds. Don't skimp on the seeds; that seems to be where most of the flavor comes from.

Bake until lightly browned, about 12 minutes...9 or 10 if you roll them out too thin, as I did. But that does get it finished faster!

Cool on a wire rack (and they cool faster if you make them too thin, too). The way I cut them, cracker-sized, this made about a 9x13 baking-pan full.

I tested a few of the uglier ones (ragged edges, too thin), and they are kinda tasty, if you like caraway. I'm hoping they will go well with the mushroom pate, and with my great-aunt's authentic Polish beet relish, which from what I understand involves jarred pickled beets and jarred horseradish. To which I say: Go, Prastryjenka ["great-aunt" in Polish, I think]! I knew I had to have inherited my cooking inclinations from somebody.

* The Eight Polish Foods of Christmas is actually a song on a Veggie Tales album; my niece and nephews find it hysterical. I can't find the lyrics, but it does address the fact that many many Polish foods involve meat.

Happy Christmas

It has been one here...very busy cooking and visiting and more cooking. I hope everyone has had a good holiday (or a good day of relaxing with not much to do because everything except 7-11 and Chinese restaurants are closed, if you don't happen to celebrate Christmas).

I have tried out several new recipes, so that oughta be blog fodder for the next week or so, if I can stop doing dishes long enough to type them up.

This makes me miss it even more

The Washington Capitals were a dreadful team in the early seventies, but I was just a little kid just learning to love sports, so I didn't comprehend how bad they were.

I've never given it a lot of thought, but it must have been hell for the players.

For lack of other content, the Caps web page has been posting trips down memory lane this year. This piece on Tommy Williams shows some of the frustration the players felt, but also some of the humor. Talking about his final game:

I wanted to go out in one great blaze of glory. For the last few weeks I’ve been dreaming about that. I wanted to go out like Ted Williams did in Boston. Remember that last game he had? Old Teddy hit a home run that last time up at Fenway Park. A real blaze of glory.

The Bomber didn’t get his blaze. What I ended up with was a 14-2 loss to the Buffalo Sabres. Thank heavens for the safety.

Planes Trains & Automobiles

Hundreds of passengers are stuck at Richmond International Airport, after an airplane edged off a runway Thursday morning and got stuck in the mud.

It is 4 p.m. at Reagan National Airport and the lines of anxious passengers eager to leave Washington are now backed up at the south security checkpoint in a line about 50 people long. Suddenly, there is a small crisis at the checkpoint's lane four.

Federal airline security screener Krista Knieriem had been smoothly moving bags along the conveyor belt as she looked up at a multicolored screen. There had been a delay just moments ago, when she spotted a fork -- a prohibited item -- in someone's carry-on bag; another screener removed it. But now the bags are backed up, and a traveler's sandwich, packed in a plastic takeout box, gets smashed between two bins. Suddenly, tuna salad is tumbling down the belt, as everyone in the vicinity can tell by the odor.

Southern Indiana barely had time to catch its frosty breath after a snowstorm Wednesday morning when a second, heavier gust pummeled the region, shutting down Interstate 64 eastbound from Evansville to the Illinois State line.

"We're still stuck here. It's been about 13 hours," Ken Sabatini, 52, of Leawood, Kan., said Thursday morning. He, his wife and two children were traveling to Cincinnati for Christmas. "It's cold outside and we're doing our best to stay inside the car."

A passenger train traveling through Cincinnati was delayed a couple of hours because of heavy snow, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said. Snow gets between the switches that route trains, he said, and must be cleaned out. The train -- the Cardinal -- was "back underway at restricted speed" because of cold weather and winds, which can affect the rail line's traffic control system, he said.

Only having to drive seven miles to celebrate Christmas in the house where I grew up...priceless.

Point-Counterpoint

From today's Lean Plate Club, an often-repeated holiday health tip:

Snack before parties. A little food in your stomach -- say a glass of skim milk and a banana, or a cup of vegetable soup -- before the festivities you can help "delay the impulse to run to the food at parties," said Leslie Bonci, director of sports nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh.

From e-mail from a friend this afternoon:

Do not have a snack before going to a party in an effort to control your eating. The whole point of going to a Christmas party is to eat other people's food for free. Lots of it. Hello?

My life in a tree

When I moved out of my parents' house, my mother gave me a box of Christmas tree ornaments. In the box were any that were "mine": the ones she made from my nursery mobile (the cow and the moon, the dish and the spoon), the cardboard train that had been attached to a childhood present, the Shrinky-Dinks I'd made with the girl down the street. I also have the ornaments Mom gave me every Christmas, and I realized as I hung them this year that it's my biography on the tree. There's a painter, because as a child I wanted to be an artist. There's a koala bear, from when I thought they were the coolest animal on earth, and an ice skater from the year I learned to skate. There's a camera, a cheeseburger (the pre-almost-a-vegetarian Nic), and from just a few years ago, Santa riding a bike. I have a yellow lab ornament, and a lizard, and a beagle (and rats, yes. Them too.)

When we kids moved out, my parents ended up with a whole new Christmas decorating theme: hand-blown glass rather than cardboard and glitter. Class instead of kitsch. We joked that that was why my mother gave us our ornaments...secretly she'd been wanting the pretty tree.

I like mine the way it is, though, on chapter 35.

I'm an Oompa Loompa

I spent the entire weekend making confections. Yesterday was the family baking (and frying...I got home last night, first thing Victor said was "You need a shower."), today was a double batch of truffles.

Know what I want for dinner? Salt.

Don't stop the carnival

Somehow I'd managed to miss the Carnival of Recipes phenomenon until just recently. At Victor's urging, I submitted beigli and chrusciki to Carnival # 18, and then I spent mucho time when I was home Wednesday going back through past Carnivals bookmarking things to try. And in this week there are one..two...three...a bunch...of recipes that sound really good, including some that may keep me from becoming a vegetarian. (Mmmmmm, steak and blue cheese, a combination I find hard to resist.)

That also reminded me, I meant to write down the soup I made the other day. Nothing fancy, and by "made," I of course mean "assembled." If I open more than one can, it counts as cooking, right?

Sweet potato & black bean soup:

Diced onion (I used about a half a large one, because by the time I got the first half diced, I was tearing up.)
A heaping teaspoon of jarred minced garlic

Saute the onion and garlic in olive oil in a pot big enough to hold soup.

Add a can of diced tomatoes with liquid, and a can of black beans with some of the liquid drained off the top (the bean liquid just looks unappetizing to me. It's too cloudy.)

Add one or two sweet potatoes, diced into 1/2 inch pieces. (I used two that were on the small side, but the ratio was a little too tilted toward the potato. One large potato would have been better, I think.)

Add roasted vegetable broth until potatoes are covered.

Season with chili powder and ground ginger. (Yeah. Here was my line of thinking...I won't claim it was "logic"...I have heard that ginger and garlic are good for head colds. Now I suspect that fresh ginger is what people mean, but I didn't have fresh ginger. I figured the ground kind couldn't hurt. Well, actually, it could have made the soup revolting, but then I'd have ordered a pizza. But it worked, using maybe six shakes of the chili powder and two of the ginger.)

Cover and simmer until the potatoes are tender.

It didn't help my head at all, but it was a fine dinner.

Christmas pun

I upgraded today from "I feel like crap" to "I can't really justify staying home wrapped in fleece yet another day." I had second thoughts when I got to work and saw 14 voicemail messages (four from the same person...and oh, darn, I didn't get a chance to call her back today. Funny how leaving me the same freakin' message every two hours puts you at the bottom of my to-do list!)

Sorry, I got cranky.

Anyway, tomorrow is the office holiday party, which I'm not really thrilled about. There is something disturbingly junior-high-ish about the seat-saving and who gets to eat with the cool kids, and I'm sucky at small talk. But I can't skip it. Last year, when the big big boss made his speech, he managed to mangle a dirty joke and insult several employees by name. It was all anyone talked about until New Years, then it was all anyone talked about when the people who were on vacation came back after New Years. I'm pretty sure the gossip didn't die down until mid-February, and at every big meeting through the year it came up if Mr. Big spoke. People not in attendance would ask "Did Mr. Big tell any jokes?" New hires had to be filled in on the story. Sometimes the insulted parties would be brought in for verification. Around October this year people started whispering about it again...think Mr. Big will give another speech?

That ten, maybe twenty minutes of bad, maybe inebriated, holiday speech lost us more productivity than every natural disaster, political tumoil, and business snafu I've seen in 13 years.

So anyway, I can't skip the party and risk not being there to witness another spectacle.

This is another holiday re-run, but it, unlike the office party, puts me in a jolly mood:

Get it? Get it???

Say it out loud...peas on Earth. Gouda wheel. Two men.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

(I'm on medication now, y'know.)

Death Sofa

I had the measles when I was in college. (Apparently the vaccine in use when I was a baby wore out.) At first I just had what I thought was the flu, until I got a rash. My mother frowned, said "It looks like the measles," and sent me to the doctor. When I called for an appointment, the nurse said "Nobody gets measles any more." I went in anyway, and spent an hour and a half in the waiting room, feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. I still remember this: my eyes and head hurt so much I couldn't stand to read, and 90 minutes is a long time to just sit in a crowded waiting room.

The physican's assistant examined me and said "I don't think you have the measles." A doctor said "Measles is pretty unusual." Then another doctor came it, took one quick look at the rash on my chest and said "Oh yeah, you have the measles. You haven't been around anyone else, have you?"

When the technican came in to draw my blood (to verify the diagnosis...they compared the antibodies to another blood draw a few weeks later to confirm it really was measles. I think I was even reported to the CDC.), she wore a full Tyvek suit and a face shield. When they let me leave, they gave me a surgical mask and told me to take the fire stairs to exit the building. I've always wondered if any of the 300 other patients in the waiting room that morning ever got it, too.

I went home and moaned to the dog about how crappy I felt. (I am a big baby when I'm sick, as I have mentioned before.) My brother was in junior high then; when he got home, I started whining to him. He ignored me to go call mom (as a latchkey child, he had to check in every afternoon), and I heard him say "How's Nic? Apparently, she's on her death sofa."

The Death Sofa became a family joke.

I decided to take to the Death Sofa (which is actually a Death Loveseat...if it weren't so damn cold in the basement, I'd consider the Death Recliner so I could watch some tv) today. I have piles upon piles of work to get done before December 31, but the last few days I've been working at about 60% capacity. I'm reading reports without comprehension. I'm having to look up conversion formulas I know by heart. I'm hoping that a day of real rest, coupled with the antibiotic kicking in, will bring me closer to normal when I do go back to work tomorrow. But for now, I still feel like crap.

And why am I writing this?

Because when I whine to the dog, she leaves the room.

Kaopectate can help that

There was a piece in the Sunday Post about how to blog, and it included a hint to avoid the "dreaded 'blogorrhea' -- aka incessant prattle about your jerk boss or second-rate love life." (I am actually looking at the paper version of the paper, and I'm on the laptop, so I'm not linking. You know how to search.)

I spent the afternoon lying on the sofa looking at my Christmas tree. (A few years ago, when my dad and I went to cut down the tree, we saw a young couple arguing amid the pines. "We aren't here to get your tree," the woman was yelling. "We aren't here to get my tree. We're here to get our tree." I wonder about them every year...like I wonder if they are divorced yet. Of course, some differences can't be overcome...can a Douglas Fir person live with a Blue Spruce?)

I'm a White Pine person...I like the soft needles, even if they are a little yellowish. And this year we (although I suspect Victor doesn't give all the rats' asses) went with these fine mylar icicle-tinsel thingys instead of the big silver garland. The garland covers up the ornaments too much, but these mylar things looked too small to be worth anything. In the dim light, though, they do a nice job of reflecting the colored tree lights and it looks pretty and sparkly.

Or maybe I'm just brain addled. I went to the doctor today and I do have a sinus infection, and a pretty nasty one at that. I'm not real big on going to the doctor...I'm sort of guy-like in that respect. First I wait (well, I whine a lot, but that's all) for a month or two to see if the symptoms go away. If they don't, I figure that whatever it is isn't fatal, so there's no point going to the doctor. After eight weeks of whining, though, people's sympathy turns to hostility.

Anyway, the lack of sympathy, the crushing fatigue (I was requiring a nap after taking a shower), and the fact that my face hurt every time I blinked finally got me in. I left with antibiotic pills the size of my fist and steroids to spray up my nose. I'm not so keen on drugs, either, not in spite of working in the drug world, but because of it. I spend all day researching adverse drug reactions, so I know what those pills are going to do to me...you're seeing it already. Blogorrhea.

Record grandma's recipes for posterity

I can't even remember exactly how I got there, but I ran across a nifty site today: American Cookbook Project from the Smithsonian Institution's traveling exhibition Key Ingredients: America by Food.

I have a feeling it is just getting off the ground, because there are only 141 stories/recipes so far. That's what, the size of one of those little spiral-bound church cookbooks?

I love those cookbooks. I really love the ones that include a bit of personal or organizational lore, making them social history as well as food. And that's the aim of this project:

The American Cookbook Project is a forum for sharing food stories. People from across the country are invited to share their favorite recipes and memories associated with this dish. This is not simply an online cookbook but a collection of memories and recollections of great meals from the past.

Once I've talked to the family to make sure I have the history right, I may submit beigli and chrusciki. How else will any of us end up in the Smithsonian?

Although...this is one of the things I love about reading other peoples' family recipes, seeing how many things are really universal...I was browsing the Eastern European secition and found Yugoslavian pastries called Hrstule that look a lot like chrusciki.

Maybe I can still be first with beigli, or with that fruit salad with those little marshmallows.

It helps, to a point

But I can't quite shake the It's Sunday night and I haven't started my homework and I don't want to go to school tomorrow because I'm not ready for that test and all the other kids hate me and I'm scared of the teacher feeling.

I hope it snows eight feet by morning.

Grab bag

We have a holiday grab bag gift exchange at the office. I'm looking for something in the $20 range, and for a minute I thought I had it:

Unwind from a stressful day at the office with this all-in-one massage station. Four soothing, cordless massagers merge into one compact, handheld design, letting you choose the perfect massage to relieve tension.

Perfect for anyone in my group, I thought.

But then when viewed at a certain angle:

...it didn't seem so appropriate for work.

Thinking maybe I needed to get my mind out of the gutter, I called Victor over. When he burst out laughing before I even had a chance to ask, I knew I better keep looking.

Today

was Tuesday squared, or maybe cubed.

I can't really vent about it, because the situations are a little too identifying, and the last thing I need is to be caught bitching about work on the Internet. There was a point today where I did pull out my mortgage statement and say to myself "Actually, Nicole, you do need this job." (This being the version without the modifiers. One thing I thought about today was that my language goes to...pot...when I get...angry. I'm trying to control that. Because for the time being, I do want to keep this job.)

Anyway.

This to shall pass. Tonight maybe I'll address some cards, tomorrow I'll finish my shopping, and Sunday I'll go cut down a tree. I need a little Christmas.

With that in mind...thank you, Helen, for the "I Believe" picture that now graces the sidebar, and the post that went with it.

Did I send them one?

Christmas cards have started coming in. I keep a pretty good sized Christmas card list...anybody who sends me one gets one back, and I don't bother to quit sending them until I get the card returned with an undeliverable address. Cards are nice.

Earlier this year I was in an Arbitron ratings survey, and every few weeks I get a phone survey about what radio station I listen to. (No, I am not suffering from short attention spanitis...this is related.) Something apparently wasn't anonymous, because I started getting mail from my station. (Which I thought was kind of funny, since I keep reporting to all the surveys how much I listen to them...but it's flattering to know they want to keep me. And for some reason, the fact that I listen to an all-news station makes it even funnier to me.)

Anyway, today I got their Christmas card.

I wonder if it would end up posted in the lobby if I sent one back to them?

Rainy days and Tuesdays

Victor posted a list of list of excuses for missing work the other day. I wish I had thought to use one of them today.

Without going into any detail...I'm glad the VP was out when I marched down the hall to express my frustration, and after anger turned to tears (hormones, I think; I'm eating chocolate-covered peanut butter-filled pretzels, too) I'm glad my office has a door.

I was able to smile, at least, at a Christmas present from a friendly coworker that is now safety tucked in an unobtrusive niche on my desk:

Quote of the day

Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.

~Joseph Campbell

The Rat Who Ate Christmas

Beigli and Chrusciki

Holiday re-runs are a tradition...It's a Wonderful Life. The Grinch. The movie with the kid and the Red Ryder BB gun.

I'm not trying to place myself among the classics, but a couple of last year's posts have been generating a fair number of hits and some e-mail lately, so I'm going to repost the recipes for beigli and chrusciki in the extended entry.

Now, most of my recipes are so simple that a child, or a monkey, or even a childish monkey could successfully make them. I gotta say: beigli and chrusciki do not fall into that category. Both doughs are tricky...you need to know how they feel, and adjust ingredients accordingly. Apparently it depends on the humidity and the temperature and how Jupiter has aligned with Mars and so on. I don't make the pastry; that falls to my mother and my sister. I'm more of a finisher...tying the chruscikis, rolling the beigli.

Interestingly, the requests for/memories of chrusciki outnumbers the e-mails about beigli by a wide margin. Which makes me wonder...do the Hungarian families do a better job of writing down recipes than the Polish families, so the great-grandchildren aren't turning to the internet to find them? Is chrusciki more of a Christmas tradition? Did I mangle the spelling of beigli?

(Speaking of beigli...I can't speak of it. I can't get the Hungarian pronunciation quite right. There's a woman at work from Hungary, and while she said they taste just like the ones she had back home, every time she says the word it sounds different from what I say. She is polite enough not to cringe when she hears me try to say it, though.)

Anyway, we'll be making these (in volume) in a couple weeks, but here are the recipes for the Google searchers:

Beigli

For the filling:

1 1/2 cups water
3 1/2 cups sugar
5 cups ground walnuts
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
grated rind of two small lemons

Boil water and sugar to form a syrup (about five minutes). Stir in nuts, spices, and lemon rind and allow to cool. (We generally do this the night before.)

Apricot preserves (about 18 ounces)
Raisins (about 1 pound)

For the dough:

6 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon salt
3 sticks butter
3 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 3/4 teaspoons yeast
1/2 cup milk, warmed

Also

Egg whites

Sift together flour, sugar, and salt. Cut in butter. Lightly beat eggs and mix in vanilla. Dissolve yeast in warm milk. Add egg mixture and yeast mixture and knead into soft dough. Cut into six equal pieces and let rest for 30 minutes. (Despite the yeast, the dough doesn't really rise, and it really is only supposed to rest half an hour, or so my great-aunt says.)

Roll dough as for a pie crust and spread lightly with apricot preserves. Spread a thin layer of the nut filling and sprinkle with raisins. Roll as for a jelly roll, tucking the ends under when complete. ("Lightly" and "thin" are, of course, relative. My nth cousin rolls her crust thicker and spreads the filling lighter; it looks nicer when it's cut but I like the taste of the filling better than the crust. And her crust still cracks.)

Brush with egg whites and pierce the dough several times with a fork or toothpick (or it will explode). Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, brushing with egg white a second time halfway through the baking.

Cool beigli on a rack. The crust often cracks; as the beigli cools gently push it back together. The filling will hold it together (the filling, when it comes out of the oven, is like molten lava,but stickier.). When cool, wrap in plastic wrap and foil and store in a refrigerator or freezer. This recipe makes six beigli.

Chrusciki

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks
3 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon grated lemon peel
1 1/2 teaspoons almond extract (or Amaretto)
5 tablespoons sour cream
1 quart of oil for frying
Powdered sugar

Sift together flour and salt. Beat eggs, sugar, lemon peel, and almond extract until thick. Add sour cream. Stir in flour and salt mixture. Knead until pliable.

Cover dough and let stand one hour.

Roll out dough (about one-third at a time) onto a floured work surface. Roll very thin ("so you can read through it," according to my grandfather). Cut into strips (about 1" by 3") and cut a slit in the center of each strip. Pass one end of the strip through the slit (it makes a bow tie-looking shape).

Heat the oil in a heavy pot to 370 degrees. Fry chrusciki three at a time, turning once, until light golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Sprinkle with powdered sugar while warm.

Sunrise, Sunset

I call this one Sunset Over Sears, from the Grocery Store Parking Lot, with Thumb.

Actually, it might be my index finger...yeah, I think it is.

Two observations: I'm dangerous with a new toy like a camera phone, and there's a good reason I'm not up for any weblog awards.

They're talking about talking!

I heard it on the way home:

NHL, NHLPA to resume bargaining talks next Thursday in Toronto

Buzzzzzz

I just had two donuts and a "cup" (which was no 8 ounces) of full-strength coffee.

My usual breakfast is half-caffeine coffee and much less sugar. Much less.

I'm vibrating.

In about twenty minutes, I'm sure I'll be dead asleep.

After I pulled out of the donut shop (I had to take a box to work, to celebrate the completion of a project) I got stuck behind a bus. I almost made it around the bus, except some...ok, I'm sure it's just that it was early and the guy wasn't really paying attention, he didn't actually see me and my turn signal and think "Ha, little gold car, I'm going to floor it now so that when you are 3/4 in the center lane I can make you swerve madly back behind the bus to avoid being crushed like roadkill under my SUV"...anyway, stuck behind the bus (which was loading every commuter in the state of Maryland), after my heart slowed back down and I finished hurling every explative I know (and a few I made up) at the speeding SUV, I tried to distract myself by appreciating the pretty sunrise. And then I remembered my new toy, the camera on my phone.

World AIDS Day 2004...continued

World AIDS Day 2004: The "Have you heard me today?" campaign from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.

The World AIDS Day page from the National AIDS Trust in the United Kingdom.

The Australian government's World AIDS Day campaign.

The U.S Health and Human Services World AIDS Day page (and events around the U.S.)

The focus this year is on women and girls. From the AIDS Epidemic Update 2004 from UNAIDS:

The AIDS epidemic is affecting women and girls in increasing numbers. Globally, just under half of all people living with HIV are female. In most regions, an increasing proportion of people living with HIV are women and girls, and that proportion is continuing to grow, particularly in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Women and girls make up almost 57% of adults living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, three quarters of all women with HIV worldwide live in that region. According to recent population-based household surveys, adult women in sub-Saharan Africa are up to 1.3 times more likely to be infected with HIV than their male counterparts (UNAIDS, 2004). This unevenness is greatest among young women aged 15–24 years, who are about three times more likely to be infected than young men of the same age.

And in the U.S.:

However, heterosexual intercourse accounts for most HIV diagnoses among women, and there are strong indications that the main risk factor for many women acquiring HIV is the often-undisclosed risk behaviour of their male partners. Recent research in a low-income area of New York City, for example, has shown that women were more than twice as likely to be infected by a husband or steady boyfriend than by casual sex partners.

And more disturbing than big numbers (from this WHO press release):

Violence against women is widespread: estimates suggest that between one in three and one in five women globally have been physically and sexually assaulted by intimate partners in their lifetime. Studies from Rwanda, South Africa and the United Republic of Tanzania show up to three-fold increases in risk of HIV among women who have experienced violence compared to those who have not. Studies also suggest that for many young women, the first sexual encounter is coerced or unwanted. The risk of HIV transmission increases when sex is forced, especially for girls and young women because their vaginal tracts are immature and tear easily.

"Violence against women can not be tolerated at any level," said Dr Peter Piot, UNAIDS Executive Director. "The fear of violence prevents many women from accessing HIV information, from getting testing and seeking treatment. If we want to get ahead of the epidemic we must put women at the heart of the AIDS response."

Violence against women and girls in its different forms increases women's vulnerability to HIV infection and undermines AIDS control efforts. For millions of women, violence and the fear of violence is a daily reality and increasingly, so is AIDS. Women in every culture around the world face violence, most often at the hands of their partners and within the so-called safety of their homes and families.

In the face of all this, what can one person do?

Well, with what you have, in the time you have, in the place you are, you can...

...know your HIV status and encourage others to get tested.

...support HIV/AIDS education and service organizations.

...click on one of those links above and be aware of what's going on in the world.