Reality check

I have an op-ed coming out in tomorrow's Philadelphia Inquirer that covers some of this ground. It's up online here.

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Last night I did something I hadn't done in almost two years. I made lasagna for dinner. I used the recipe I reverse engineered from my favorite restaurant in Albano Laziale.  That's nice, I hear you thinking, glad it is back in your rotation. What I want to say back is, "nice? nice? It's a miracle." 

The lasagna is that good? Well, it is, but it's the preparation that's the miracle, or rather that I can undertake it. 

I use a homemade tomato sauce, which requires dicing onions and mincing garlic and opening cans of San Marzano tomatoes. I brown Italian sausage. Grate Parmesan. Hand knead dough for fresh pasta. And make béchamel sauce, which means briskly stirring to emulsify the sauce. From start to sitting down at the table it takes about four and half hours.

But recently I couldn't: dice things, open those cans, break up the sausage in the pan, knead the dough or stir the sauce to emulsify it. Some tasks on that list were merely very difficult (dicing was glacially slow) and some were just impossible. Stirring that sauce.

It was a bit like the frog dropped in a pot of cold water, slowly being heated. Things almost imperceptibly got difficult. My handwriting got smaller. Writing on the blackboard for an hour got harder. Then it was a problem to get through an entire problem. It became tough to cut a sandwich in half. Folding my socks was a challenge. So was tying my shoes. And stirring. I couldn't make a quick pan sauce. (I know, I know, first world problems.) Then it was folding flour in to make a cake (more first world problems.) Then it was stirring my tea. That was a problem. I was in hot water.

Like that frog, for the longest while I kept adapting, or at least not noticing. Adapting my wardrobe, choosing blouses that did not need buttoning (or ironing, yep, I still iron stuff). Adapting my approach to research, dictating more, typing less. Not noticing that I wasn't making lasagna on a winter Sunday afternoon. Or choosing to have yogurt for lunch instead of a sandwich. 

This is not a bid for sympathy. It's a grounding in reality, in what can be at stake in scientific research that on the surface seems quirky (lizard saliva or getting a tranquilized rabbit's ears to perk up) or esoteric (using singular value decomposition to help assign atomic charges to atoms in a molecule.²) Or that is supported by the government, or was done by someone in the US from another country. 

Some of that research can be life changing. (Both the lizard saliva and the pop-up bunny ears research was.¹) And some of it will not be. We try as researchers to follow trails that will be productive, but not every line will lead to immediate results, some will not lead to results at all. We are exploring the universe, not following well-trod paths to known destinations.  There will be dead-ends. This is not fraud or waste. It's how research works.

The drug I take, that allows me to dice onions and emulsify a sauce, that makes it possible to care for myself and continue to work was developed in part by a scientist here on a visa at the NIH. The reality is that without it, I would be disabled and unemployed. Thanks to NIH funding (and medical insurance), I have access to a life-altering therapy. It's not a cure, but it is a miracle. Other people deserve their miracles, too. 

But Trump and Musk cry, "Fraud! Waste!" and say the NIH is a disaster. Their cuts to indirect costs will save each household less than the cost of 2 months of Netflix (about $30), and cost some people their lives. 

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1. A study on lizard saliva led to Ozempic, the bunny ears to a Nobel prize. Rabbits that had had Parkinsonism induced chemically had their droopy ears almost instantly perk-up when L-DOPA was administered. L-DOPA is still the gold standard for relieving many of the motor symptoms of Parkinson's. And as miraculous as it is, it is not perfect, so I am still rather personally invested in ongoing research.

2. That bit about singular value decomposition and charges might seem esoteric, but is my work and is used today in in silico drug design, including therapies for Parkinson's. 

Photo is of an earlier lasagna, circa 2022.

St. Hildegard’s cookies

"Take one whole nutmeg, add equal amounts of cinnamon and a pinch of cloves, grind it together until it forms a fine powder; add the flour and a little water. Make small cookies and eat these often. They will reduce the bad humors, enrich the blood, and fortify the nerves.” — Hildegard of Bingen, Physica, Book 1, XXI. Nutmeg

I gave a day of reflection on Hildegard of Bingen at a local retreat house. One of the conferences was on Hildegard’s Physica where she recommends mint for the digestion and spicy cookies to fortify the nerves. I sent retreatants home with tea and ginger snaps. 

It’s the start of the semester for me tomorrow, so I’m in need of something to fortify the nerves with. I’m on Zoom to start, while students await test results. Next week — back in person!

St. Hildegard’s cookies

1 3/4 c sugar
3/4 c butter
1/4 c molasses
1 egg
2 c flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
extra sugar for rolling

Beat sugar and butter until fluffy. Add molasses and beat until well blended. Add egg, beat on low to combine. Add flour, baking soda, salt and spices to batter and blend well. Chill dough, covered, for at least 1 hour.

Roll dough into 1 1/4 inch balls. Roll the balls in extra sugar. Place 2 inches apart on baking sheet lined with parchment. Bake at 375F for 8-10 minutes. Cookies should just be brown around the edges. Cool on a rack, cookies will firm up as they cool. Store in airtight container or freeze.

Squid, skunks and Jesuits

I'm working on an essay for Nature Chemistry about weird pandemic cooking, prompted by my experiments with ikasumi (squid ink). The Boy and I modified my dad's recipe for seeded rolls to bake charcoal black versions. They looked burned, are black through and through and taste...just fine. 
 

And shades of the Food Babe, who was all about the beaver butt that definitely isn't in your vanilla ice cream. Squid ink (which doesn't come from squids, but from their relatives the cuttlefish) is basically melanin rich snot that the cuttlefish squirts out its behind. 

It's richly ironic that the chef Jamie Oliver went on Colbert and said there's beaver butt excretions (i.e. castoreum) in vanilla ice cream (again there's not) but who has recipes for black ink pasta on his web site. Are you really going to eat something with squid snot in it?  Castoreum has always been expensive and rare -  in Roman times you had to be careful not to buy counterfeit castoreum. 

Fun fact of the day, one of the smellier components of skunk spray is an approved food flavoring in both the US and the EU. Vile at high concentrations, at low concentrations it tastes and smells of onion and garlic. 

Also - a 17th century Jesuit wrote home after an encounter with a couple of skunks that he thought he knew what Catherine of Siena's stench of sin might smell like.

Pandemic pasta proofs

There is a fabulous investigative piece on the bucatini shortage (did you notice?) by Rachel Handler in Grub Street. It's a great read.

Bucatini gets its name from the Italian for hole, buco. It's basically spaghetti with a hole drilled through it. (That's not actually how it's made, I realize. It's extruded with the hole built in, but I am enjoying the image of special drill bits hollowing out thick spaghetti and given the pandemic, I'm letting my imagination run rampant, since I can't.) Anyway, Handler suggests the appeal of bucatini is how much sauce each strand can take up, about 200% more she asserts than its thinner, topological genus zero counterpart, "due to math."

I wondered about that math, so I did it. The surface area of a cylinder is π x d x h. Where π  is π  (3.1415928....) and d is the diameter of the cylinder and h the height (not Planck's constant, the first thing. I think of when I see h in an equation). For a 260 mm length of bucatini with an outer diameter of 2.9 mm and an inner diameter of 0,8 mm, the surface area of the outside is 2370 mm² and inside is 650 mm². For the same length of spaghetti, it's 1570 mm². So assuming the sauce penetrates to the center of the tube, the bucatini has 192% of the spaghetti's surface for sauce. Or about only about 100% more. Math!

Now, of course, I want to know how much the sauce does penetrate down the center shaft. Will there be bucatini at the grocery store tomorrow? Stay tuned for further pandemic pasta proofs.

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Photo is from Wikimedia by Popo le Chien and is used under a Creative Commons license.

Objects with a topological genus of zero have no holes in them, e.g. a solid sphere. Objects with one hole — bucatini, donuts and coffee mugs — are genus one. This is the source of the mathematical joke that to a topologist, a donut and a coffee mug are the same.

Reading Rahner

I was working on an essay about praying the everyday, and (misquoted) Karl Rahner, SJ. My editor caught it, but it drove me to pull Rahner's The Need and the Blessing of Prayer off the shelf to find the full context. The chapter entitled "Prayer in the Everyday" is beautiful. If I'd re-read it before writing my own piece, I'd have been tempted to write simply.

Go read Rahner's "Prayer in the Everyday". The End.

"What can be of more astonishing exaltedness than the voice of the Spirit which makes the eternities quake and fills the abysses of God" when it carries our small, timid prayers to the very throne of God. "So that the earth's weeping is heard in the innermost chambers" of that place God built for himself. There is much to weep about in the current moment, and much to appreciate about Rahner's exhortation to simply "pray in the everyday; pray the everyday." in these times where one day blurs into the next.

What else am I reading? I just finished The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman who embedded himself in the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) in the 1990s. The melding of theory and praxis made me think about chemistry training, where you need to be able to see the dance of the atoms in your head, but also have the knowledge in your hands. 

I'm reading Mexican Gothic, a novel set in the mountains of Mexico, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I spent a summer living with my grandfather and his wife in a small town in the mountains outside Oaxaca, and the novel reminds me of my sense of dislocation. It's dark and 50s-ish and it glows. There's also some chemistry sprinkled here and there:

“She was certain she’d heard about how these most civilized Victorians had been killing themselves in this way, the fungi chomping on the paste in the wall, causing unseen chemical reactions. She couldn’t remember the name of the fungus that had been the culprit—Latin names danced at the tip of her tongue, brevicaule—but she thought she had the facts right.”

Which has me reading William R. Cullen and Ronald Bentley's "The toxicity of trimethylarsine: an urban myth" (J. Environ. Monit., 2005, 7, 11-15).

But whatever you're reading, put it down for a minute and read John Lewis' last words to us. 

"Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way." 

Amen. 

The ratio

"The ratio" on Twitter is the ratio of replies to likes: when replies far outpace likes, the tweet is radioactive. The ratio here is the time it takes to prepare dinner to the time it takes to eat it. It's been running between 4 and 5. In large part this is because we've been making more things from scratch than I usually do. Loaves of bread, tortillas, pizza sauce, pasta. Things I often buy without a second thought.

I've been doing more from scratch for a lot of reasons. It's given me family time, cooking alongside Crash has been a delight. I've learned new recipes and new techniques from him, including a great chickpea stew. It's been some alone time as well, a time off Zoom and my email and all the management I've been doing for classes and colleagues. It's been contemplative time, kneading a ball of pasta for 8 minutes is deeply prayerful, at least for me. It's a way to leave loaves of bread and boxes of pasta on the grocery store shelf for those who need them.

It's a reminder, too, of what it takes to put food on the table, not just the cost in dollars, but the cost in time. A homemade loaf of bread costs me just 80 cents, far less than what a similar loaf would cost in the store, and not quite half the cost of a loaf of sliced white bread costs at the Acme here. But thrifty cooking takes time and energy, both of which I am privileged to have.

My awareness is all well and good, but as Pope Francis notes in Laudato Si', the goal is "to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it."[19] I'm not suffering when I bake my own bread, but if the experience doesn't lead me to discover what I can do about the reality of hunger in my own community, in my own nation, then the awareness, painful or not, is for naught.

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The ten most needed items at Philadelphia food banks. More than 200,000 children in Philadelphia go hungry. Roughly 80% of adults who are food insecure are working, 25% are senior citizens. Hunger is linked to our society's unwillingness to pay a living wage to those who work.

Only the trees work...

The dies for the cookie press in the handy stand my father

made to hold them.

Spritz cookies have been a Christmas tradition in my house as long as I can remember, pressed out of a bronze-colored cookie press. I loved looking at the dies when I was young, wondering what shapes each would make. My mother always made Christmas trees and wreaths, but what I wanted to try was the camel.

"No," she would say, "the camel doesn't work. Trees and wreaths." And so we made wreaths with cinnamon holly berries and  trees sprinkled with green sugar and colorful nonpareils as ornaments. (In those days a silver dragée star was placed on top of the trees, but the combination of  my more minimalist Christmas tendencies and the end of the semester exhaustion has led me to abandon that part of the tradition.)

Before we sold my parents' house this summer, we packed up what people wanted from the kitchen. What did I want? Not the Kitchen Aid mixer, but the camel die for the cookie press!  Because I was going to make those camels I'd desired all these years. So I put the handy stand my dad had made to hold the dies (a miniature version of what he used to hold his radial arm saw blades) in one of the boxes I was shipping home

Fast forward to Christmas Eve morning. Crash was arriving from DC and was down for cookie baking, spritz on the list. I made the dough and dug out the cookie press, put the camel die in and...a shapeless blob of dough appeared on the sheet. Three tries later... Ok, maybe using my mother's press was sweet and nostalgic, but not practical. Switched the die and loaded my cookie press. Nope, nope nope. Maybe I should chill the dough. No go. Different cookie sheet? No. Cookie sheet too warm? too cold? Is this sounding like a Bon Appetit video? Finally, I tried the tree. Boom, two dozen trees appeared on the tray.

The camel doesn't work.

Funneling memories

Last week, I pulled out the cheap green funnels I bought at Ikea to re-fill the olive oil bottle, a bridge between here and Rome, where the apartment held an identical pair and where I watched the woman in the cafe next to the market pull out hers to re-fill a bottle of olive oil. I felt connected to cooks in across times and places, and wondered at the memories these very inexpensive utilitarian items held.

Holiday cooking always ends up using nearly every utensil, bowl, pot and pan in my kitchen. Memories cling to so many of them, nearer the surface than usual.

There are the orange Tupperware measuring cups my mother bought me when I started graduate school. The choice that year was orange or avocado green, and when the kitchen is crowded, I'm grateful for the way the orange cups pop on my dark countertops 

The year Tom and I were married, he bought me a sturdy set of glass bowls, a nested dozen. Not all have survived the ensuing decades, the largest shattered and the smallest vanished, and perhaps there's a metaphor to be found in there, but mostly I'm looking for the right sized bowl for Crash to use for the apples he is slicing.

The torus shaped glass pitcher, bought to celebrate a milestone for Math Man. It had us talking shapes at the dinner table: what else is topologically equivalent to a one-holed torus? A landscape with an underground tunnel? For a moment, the glass seems to flow in the sun, the top rim opening like a blossom and stretching to enclose the table with kids and friends and even the cat. With a tunnel at its core. I want to cling to more than the memories.
 

Cosmopolitan lemonade

As I made a pitcher of lemonade this afternoon, barely sweetened and tinged pink with a dash of cranberry juice, I thought of my maternal grandmother/

She died in 1967, a few days after my youngest brother was born.  I was inconsolable, as much from the shock that no one had told me she was that ill as from the loss.  As a parent looking backward in time, I feel for my father, who broke the news to me as gently as he could, while trying to juggle a wife and newborn in the hospital almost an hour's drive away, the care of 4 other kids and working full time at a job an hour in the other direction — in the days before paternity leave.

My most vivid memory of my grandmother is from a summer's visit to Long Island.  She took me — then a slip of a 6 year old from rural Illinois — to New York City. We saw the Empire State Building and went to see the Statue of Liberty.  I remember tired legs, but not the view.  Did we climb to the crown? 

And she made pink lemonade, a heretofore unknown-to-me beverage, from scratch. The sharp sweet smell of the lemons and the blush of the grenadine she swirled in.  The waffled aluminum ice trays with their levers that cracked the ice loose, leaving behind a smattering of chips. I can still remember how sophisticated and well-traveled I felt, sipping from a glass on her back kitchen stoop with a mint leaf floating on top.

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What I made, I learned by peeking in my mother's 1950s cookbook, is perhaps more properly called a shrub than an "ade," the difference (according to Betty Crocker) being the use of sparkling water as the base.  As I sit in my study listening to the trees rustle and birds twittering and sipping a cranberry shrub, I might still feel ever so slightly cosmopolitan.

  

A real presence

Loaf of Hackney Wild, ready to be slashed and put in the oven

Crash is home for a couple of weeks, between a spring  and the start of the summer Shakespeare season.  He brings with him new break baking skills — honed in a London bakery.  I've been enviously admiring his photos of crispy sourdough loaves from afar, and dutifully keeping his Atlantic crossing starter alive, so was excited to get to give it a fly this weekend.

This is not a recipe for quick bread, you start three or four days ahead of time.  A leaven is made from the mother starter.  And fed up for a few days. Finally, in goes the flour and water. The dough is stretched and turned, again and again over 5 hours.  Then into a basket it goes overnight, to be baked after Mass this morning, where the gospel took up the story of the disciples who had walked to Emmaus, and who had recognized Christ in the breaking of the bread. And where three young members of the parish received the Eucharist for the first time.

It was hard to wait to bake this bread, harder still to wait for it to cool once it came out of the oven.  When I had asked one of the young First Communicants if she had been excited, she told that she could not wait, and told her siblings (and parents!) that they had to be out the door early. "I was afraid I wouldn't get there in time, that I would miss communion." She had, I thought, a well developed practical theology of the Real Presence going, she knew what she desired and it wasn't the dress or the party or the relatives. It was God incarnate.

The week before I'd been sitting in the pews before the vigil Mass began, taking a short walk to Emmaus myself, when the unmistakable smell of fresh bread insinuated itself into my meditations.  I looked up to find a young man in suit, with what I suspect was a still warm loaf of bread wrapped in foil, in search of someone in the congregation to give it to.

There is bread here, and a God we come to know in the breaking of bread with each other.

A lens on the sacred and the daily

There are no unsacred places;

There are only sacred places

And desecrated places.
— Wendell Berry

There's a meme on Facebook these days, a challenge to post one black and white photograph a day for a week, a glimpse of your day.  I've been enjoying seeing the world through the eyes of various friends. The incredible photo of a bumblebee on a sunflower, one petal folded over like a sunshade.  A sky that looked like rippled silk. Mugs holding hands.

These are apples in the sous vide, seen from above, with a bit of spice and brown sugar.  Simmer at 70^oC for a couple of hours, then chill. 

I spent a good chunk of Saturday cooking ahead for the week (and the month), along with organizing the results of the monthly major shop.

Blood Feuds: The Great Bryn Mawr Bake Off

"Can you search to find what to substitute for glucose syrup?" I asked Crash.  Corn syrup, as it turns out. "It's cool to find a use for corn syrup besides making blood." he mused.

Math Man likes eclairs.  For Father's Day I bought him a book of fancy eclairs (or rather a book of eclair recipes) to browse, and promised to make him some.  The Egg has been home for a few days between a summer of math research and the start of his senior year and binge watching the Great British Baking Show.  Crash is also here for a few weeks between a stint in England and his next stage management gig, and thought to stretch his cooking repertoire beyond Budget Bytes and blood. Hence the eclairs.

Raspberry and chocolate, it still looked like Macbeth in the kitchen yesterday. (See below)

This afternoon we had The Egg making bread, Crash making choux for the eclairs (from Tom's mom's recipe after the book's recipe failed us) and me making braised short ribs for The Egg's departure dinner.  It was a lot like an episode of the Great British Baking Show.  Right down to Chris fanning the chocolate glazed eclairs with the baking sheet.

Factoring in change

The balance of my life is shifting again, neither Crash nor the Egg will be home this summer, one is doing math research on the east coast, the other stage managing a production of Macbeth in the west.  The last time Math Man and I had no children at home in a summer, we'd been married less than a year.  This coming fall we'll have been married for a quarter of a century. So it's been a long time, and things are shifting.

One marker of the shift is the pizza dough recipe, posted at the moment for easy Lenten reference on the hood of the stove.  It has pencilled in amounts  for 1 crust, a version for 2 (the standard recipe), for 4, for 6.  I've made it just for me, living solo, for us as a couple, for a family including teenaged boys, enough for snacks for a party of hungry teens.

It's such a tangible marker, the size of the ball of dough under my hands as I knead it before a quick rise. Like a family, it's a living, ever changing thing.  Growing and shrinking in turns, many possibilities caught in its web of proteins.  I miss the substantial feel of the larger ball, but take heart in knowing that the dough is rising in other places, too.

The hardest part of teaching

Crash is home from WJU, thoroughly soaked in Greek.  He's adding to his cooking repertoire in return for tutoring me in Greek, this week learning to stretch the dough for my thin crust pizza.  (My crust is surely not as thin as Stratoz' or my great-grandmother's strudel, you can't quite read the paper through it!)

As we put together the pizzas, I kept wanting to show (do!) rather than coach.  I would hand the spoon back, or give him back the grated parmesan cheese or...until finally Crash popped out with, "The hardest part of teaching is letting someone else do the fun part."

Yep.  My respect for my parents grows ever deeper.

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My general chemistry students aren't likely to believe that I actually enjoy working out a hard problem, and it's hard to coach them through it instead of just indulging in the doing myself.  But it's true.

I return it all....

Crash went back to Wonderful Jesuit University this week.  Math Man was at the national math meeting (which to balance out the MLA on the East Coast was held on the West Coast).  Driving distances for me is tough as I'm still booted (my foot, not the car), so I sent him back by train and UPS.  (To be clear, Crash went by train, a large box of his stuff, including the two pillows he grabbed to prop up my foot on the way home, went via UPS.)

As I put him on the train, a line from Ignatius' Suscipe ran through my head, id tibi totum restituo — to You I return it all.  I stood there watching him go up the steps of the train, the conductor looked at me and said, "He'll be fine."  True, but I pray these words somewhat differently these days.  It's one thing to offer to return my (intangible) gifts, I don't have to watch them vanish down the tracks.  It's quite another to offer to return what I nourished inside of me and kept safe under my pinions.

I miss his company in the kitchen, he's a companionable and serious cook, but he's still finding time to bake.  Read his tale of baking Jesuit bread (Wernersville's Brother's bread from the Secrets of Jesuit Bread Baking) at his Jesuit school....

Culinary shifts

The Boy has noticed some changes in the household now that Crash is away at WJU. The laundry has decreased and the variety of possibilities for dinner has increased.

When I was growing up in a large family, my mother rotated through a fairly small set of dinner menus (roast chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans or meatloaf, mashed potatoes and spinach...you get the drift). No fussy presentations, no fancy sauces. Think Midwest, 60s, farm (though we didn't live on a farm and my mother grew up on Long Island).

As far as Crash is concerned, food is fuel and/or background for interesting conversation — and should arrive on the table with as little fuss (or spice) as possible. He's a solid and conscientious cook. He would have fit right in at the table when I was growing up (metaphorically anyway, physically, there was no more room on the deacon's benches that the kids used instead of chairs), though his palate has admittedly grown a bit more adventuresome over the last couple of years. Still, I suspect last night's dinner would not have been to his taste.

Hot Spinach and Chicken Sandwiches

One loaf of Brother's Bread (see note below)

3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
leaf spinach (fresh or frozen, we used frozen)

2 large bone-in chicken breasts, skin on
seasoning (pepper, orange rind, salt and ginger)
1 cup of chicken stock
2 tsp flour

Pat chicken breasts dry. Season skin liberally. Place chicken in an oven proof skillet. Bake oven at 400F for 30 minutes, reduce heat to 350F and cook until juices run clear (internal temperature of 165F). Remove from oven, take chicken from pan, and let rest for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, stir flour into drippings in pan, heat briefly while stirring. Slowly add the the chicken stock, scraping up any baked on bits and making a smooth sauce.

Remove most of skin and bones from the chicken and slice thinly.

In another skillet, melt butter in olive oil. Saute garlic in olive oil/butter mixture, then stir in spinach. Cook until spinach is tender.

To serve, place two slices bread on a plate, cover with chicken and spinach, then ladle about 1/4 cup of sauce over the top. Serve hot.

As we say around here, this one is a keeper.

Notes:
Brother's Bread is a single rise loaf from The Secrets of Jesuit Breadbaking, and comes from Wernersville's kitchens. My dad gave me the book years before I ever ventured to the Jesuit Center on an 8-day retreat, and the bread is one of my boys' favorites. I know the recipe by heart: (2 1/4 cups of water, 1 tbsp yeast....)
A good substitute would be a sturdy white bread or large loaf of Italian bread or good torpedo rolls.

Felix Culpa: Accidental Chicken

We had friends to dinner last night, my dad is visiting from California and the boys are on spring break. Fresh bread was on the menu. The Boy and my dad have been experimenting with sourdough bread (my dad brought some starter with a 250 year old pedigree along with him). The Boy suggested Accidental Chicken (recipe here) for the main course, easy to prep ahead of time and great over rice or with some of the terrific sourdough that was coming out of the oven.

With eight people for dinner, including two growing teens, I quintupled the recipe, then doubled it again, as my guys really like the sauce. The sauce has a tendency to foam, so even in my 6 quart Dutch oven, the sauce rapidly boiled over. I turned it down to low simmer just as the guests knocked at the door. Distracted, I failed to set the timer for 15 minutes. We chatted in the kitchen, then retreated to the sun room.

All the while the accidental chicken was accidentally simmering away. Forty minutes later.....I returned to the kitchen, realized I'd left the heat under the pot and held my breath as I lifted the lid, visions of ordering in Chinese food dancing before my eyes. It was amazing, fork tender in a rich sauce. We enjoyed it over rice, sopping up the extra sauce with the bread. Next time I'll let it simmer on purpose and serve it as hot sandwiches on home baked rolls. With coleslaw?

UPDATE: H/T to Cindy for Felix culpa - O happy fault

Asparagus Fingers

"Can someone with asparagus fingers give me a hand with the steamer?" called The Boy from the kitchen. Years ago one of my nieces watched my dad pick up a pot from the stove without a hot mitt and wondered if he had "asparagus fingers." A synthetic organic chemist, handling hot equipment was par for the course for my dad, no need for asbestos gloves!

The Boy had another school project going in the kitchen, though at least this time it did not involve animal intestines and our kitchen now has such essentials as counters and running water back on line. He read Daughter of Heaven for his English class. Its subtitle, A Memoir with Earthly Recipes, explains a lot about why he picked this particular memoir to read.

He made enough steamed sponge cake for his class as part of his oral presentation. To steam it he had to lower a filled pan into a pot of boiling water with a steamer at the bottom. With only a quarter inch to spare between cake pan and pot this meant having a high tolerance for heat and some ingenuity. We ended up lowering the pan down with a sling made of cooking twine.

There was a bit left over for the sous chef - it's pretty good with a dusting of powdered sugar and tea!

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Photo is from Muffet at Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Crash course: buttons and books

Crash added two skills to his growing repertoire this weekend. He can now sew a button back on, which meant learning how to thread a needle and how to tie off the thread at start and finish. He even took the advanced course, learning to sew on a coat button (you need to wrap the thread under the button to create enough space between the button and coat to fit the other flap).

He also learned how to bind a simple folio - a skill that any historian should have, no? He was fascinated to see how a book went together (he and a group of friends created a medieval bestiary as part of a project for their humanities class), from sewing the folio (more practice in threading needles), to creating the covers, the flyleaves and the spine. He wondered about how you make a large book, so we looked at the techniques for sewing together multiple folios.

I wonder what other practical skills I need to teach him before he heads off to college?
He can cook a respectable number of things from scratch, though he laments being in a family of cooks, where the ability to make a cake from scratch is considered "basic" not "advanced."

What happened to sugar cube replicas of the Forum?

UPDATE: Today this page has gotten hundreds of hits...and I can't figure out why! Would any of the visitors like to let me know? The Boy and I are terribly curious!

The Boy has been working on a project for Latin class for the last couple of weeks. It's due tomorrow, and he just finished putting the finishing touches on it. Remember making those sugar cube models of pyramids and other classical buildings when you were in school? The Boy was having none of that. Instead he found The Classical Cookbook on my shelves and picked out the most complicated (non-lead based) recipe he could find. [Warning: violation of the seven motifs of disgust ban forthcoming.] This involved finding such things as fish sauce and animal intestines (cleaned and preserved in salt, these are otherwise known as natural sausage casings).

He managed all of this on his own, including the calling around to find the sausage casings. Tonight he needed to grind the meat and put it all together. Did I mention that our kitchen was demolished about 2 weeks ago? I suspect the Romans had better plumbing than I currently have in my kitchen (not hard, as I have none at the moment). And all the useful equipment is packed away, requiring serious improvisation (just what did the Romans use to fill their sausage casings I wonder?).

The Boy requested my help. Why, I wondered aloud. He never needs my help on school stuff. "Because you're adventurous." "So are you!" I shot back. The "I've never made sausage" plea did not play with me, I've never made it either. Why could he not need me to help him artfully arrange photos on a poster or glue little trees to a sugar cube creation? Why, oh why, was I dealing with raw pork and a tangle of scraggly casings — without benefit of running water, counters or a pastry bag?

I have to admit he was right, there was no way to do this solo with the equipment we had on hand. It needed two sets of hands.

We did it. We are adventuresome. We are able to improvise. We laughed a lot. They look great. I hope his Latin class enjoys the fruits of our labors.