"How to" of the day

Wikipedia can be time-consuming, but WikiHow is scary. Anyone can post anything. About a week ago, while I was avoiding some loathsome task, I idly clicked on an innocent-looking link in Google which invited me to personalize my Google homepage. I liked that idea. I kept some of their suggestions, and ditched most of them, like sports. (Although I now have the World Cup results at the ready.) It was handy to have New York Times headlines, Rochester weather, Doonesbury, the BBC, and so on. I also liked "Word of the Day" and the "How-to" feature of the day. Although I've had "How to" on my homepage for about a week, I hadn't looked at it. Today there were three links. The first two were "how to survive being lost in the woods for three days" (unlikely that I will ever need this advice)and how to leave someone for good (not going to touch that one). The third one caught my eye: how to make yogurt. This was something that I hadn't done in a number of decades.

This was a slow Sunday morning. John has been in New York since Thursday morning for his 35th reunion (Columbia University, 1971, B.A. in English). I kept myself pretty busy. Saturday morning started with a variety of household activities, followed by a couple of hours at the Market, mostly spent at Java Joe's. Janet Irwin came this morning. The subject of James ("the Godfather of Soul") Brown came up, because I was trying to convince her to come to the show of Eastman Theatre at 8 PM.



She had seen him in Boston, many years ago. I hadn't, but we began to talk about other Sixties music icons we'd seen in concert. A discussion of Woodstock (1969) ensued, during which Janet asked me how far Woodstock was from Poughkeepsie. I said that the Woodstock festival had not actually taken place in Woodstock, but rather in White Lake, New York. "Oh" Janet said "I know that, because it was on my mother's cousin's farm." I couldn't believe that I've known Janet for decades and just found out that she's the second cousin of the most accidentally famous New York farmers, Max Yasgur. (It had never before occurred to me that Max Yasgur was Jewish.)



Around 5:30, I met Birthday Girl Margaret Spevak and her husband Jeff , the Storms, and some other people at the bar at 2Vine. On our way to the Eastman Theatre, we stopped at Java's on Gibbs Street to have some coffee and to hear a Hungarian jazz group, Djabe. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see them perform very much, because they were so late setting up. I suspect that their fingers were frozen; it was about 55°F, damp and sort of windy. Not very June-like weather.

James Brown is 73 years old. His energy level was inconsistent, but at that age, most people don't even have an energy level. He sparkled, and his hair glistened. I'm not going to say any more about the concert, because you should just read Frank De Blase's Jazz Festival blog in City Newspaper. (See "Never saw it comin'.") It's more than a good piece of writing; you'll be on the edge of your chair as Frank describes his close call during the show. Not that you didn't already know that journalism is a dangerous field.

So I stayed up past my bedtime, drinking wine, talking incessantly, listening to music, and drinking more coffee back at Java's. We never did run into Margaret or Jeff Spevak later, and I hope that the rest of her birthday was as good as the earlier part. I suspect that it was. The Storms walked me to my car which was parked by Spot Coffee. On the way, we stopped in to see the tired proprietors of a beautiful new stringed instrument store on East Avenue. The store was so great it made me wish I were a musician. It's called Bernunzio's and it actually has a creative and well-designed urban window display. This is something you don't see the United States very much, outside of large East Coast and West Coast cities.

Too much audio and visual stimulation. So I got up later than I expected, and rushed around trying to get a few things done before picking John up at the airport around noon. The afternoon was sort of a blur, but I do remember going back several times to the WikiHow thing on making yogurt. I thought it would be worth seeing if I could re-create the Greek yogurt that we get from the incredibly annoying 19th Ward Food Buying Club. We actually had a yogurt maker at one time in the distant past; it may have been a wedding present, and it may have gone to the Salvation Army sometime in the late 70s. It was just plain ugly. I knew what to use, though. Years ago, Janet gave us a gift of a plate warmer. It's basically a giant heating pad that folds into numerous baffles; the whole thing is covered with a screaming golden yellow acetate pillowcase of sorts, and you layer the plates in the folds. This is not a dumb thing to own in a climate like this. In the dead of winter, it's pointless to put hot food onto dishes just off the shelf; it will be cold before you get it to the table.

I followed the WikiHow instructions, and realized that I'd read them elsewhere. I pulled out the Goldbeck's vegetarian cookbook, published in 1983, and I think the instructions are identical. Not that the WikiHow author credits the Goldbecks, of course. I think this must be the WikiWay. Of course, recipes can't be copyrighted. So here we have the stages of my first batch of yogurt that I've made in at least 2 1/2 decades. You can go to WikiHow and read all the boring instructions. This photo demonstrates my home-engineered yogurt incubator.



The only thermometer I could find was on an old refrigerator magnet that I bought in Kansas City, Missouri about 10 years ago. I laid it on top of the plastic wrap. The catch was that it only went up to 120°F, and I think the heat exceeded that. No matter. It's a nice refrigerator magnet.


The whole thing was covered up with one of my favorite linen dish towels which we bought some time in the 90s at the National Trust gift shop at Stonehenge. Someday I am going to photograph my linen dishtowel collection. (Consider yourself warned.)



I wish I could remember what time I started the process. We went to see Blazing Saddles at the Dryden tonight, and by the time we got home, the yogurt seemed ready. Tomorrow, when it is cooled, all will be revealed.

True confession: I never actually had seen a Mel Brooks movie before, and neither had John. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it, and it was pretty interesting. I can see why my father and my sister were Mel Brooks fans. Blazing Saddles isn't a bad update on Marx Brothers anarchy, and it's very 1974. I was glad that Jim Healy had urged us to see it.

Sopa de Ajo

I had sopa de ajo only once, in Cuzco, Peru, in March, 1999. Haven't a clue why I've never made it. I came home tonight after having saved $200 + by not buying a printer for photos. We went to Rowe Photo, intending to support a local business, but quickly realized it would be one more machine to maintain. Enough. I'll do what Jordan suggested and get prints via email. So, having chickened out of buying a printer, I decided to make something simple but different, like garlic soup.



The reason I have no photos of Peru is that BJ's Wholesale Club destroyed several rolls in processing. The remaining ones weren't very good. The young woman behind the counter apologized and said cheerfully "We'll, let's hope they weren't your once-in-a-lifetime trip to Venice." "No" I said, teeth gritted, "my once-in-a-lifetime trip to Peru." Almost more wounding than the loss of the photos was her insinuation that I might never make that trip again. Seven years ago, I still thought of myself as a young person, not a middle-aged woman who might not, in fact, hike Macchu Picchu the next time around, if there was a next time. It's absurd that I sometimes remember that tattoo'ed counter clerk in her red smock when I'm travelling, and the thought crosses my mind that I just might not make it back to Innsbruck or Budapest in this lifetime. There are a lot of places I haven't been.

I flew from Lima to Cuzco on Aero Peruana, I think. They went out of business shortly thereafter. It was quite a process. Curt, who teaches at UR but for whom the Maryknoll Mission in Lima is home, took me to the airport to lead me through the Kafkaesque twists and turns of departure taxes and "inspections." It was pre-September 11, 2001, and there was more screening when flying internally in Peru than flying internationally from the US. When I was in the final line, a little old Peruvian lady (grandmother type in flowered shirtwaist dress) asked me if I would carry on this little extra suitcase for her. I regretted, but no, senora. She went to the redheaded young British man behind me. "Hey, do you speak Spanish? She's asking me something" he said. I laughed and said "You won't believe this. She's actually asking you to take this extra suitcase on board for her." He was amused. "Can you please tell her 'Not bloody likely, Madam' for me?" Sure, I said, and explained, en espanol, that one should never take on board equipaje that belonged to others. Though I hadn't needed to translate for her; she got the drift. She scowled and moved down the line. Curt later told me that she certainly found a sucker to take the bag on, probably for good compensation.

I ran into the redheaded British guy the next evening walking aound the Plaza de las Armas. He was in Lima for three months, living alone in an apartment and working twelve hours a day working on securing some multinational conglomerate's computer systems. Guzman had been in jail for years, but foreign investment was still coming in slowly and unsteadily. I was impressed that he'd come up to Cuzco and Macchu Picchu on his own, instead of hanging out drinking the weekend away at the Hard Rock Cafe in Miraflores.

The next day I went to Macchu Picchu by train. I was suffering badly from the headache caused by soroche, altitude sickness. I was dragged onto the train at 6 am, feeling as though an iron band was being tightened about my forehead. A French woman looked at me, slumped in the seat, handed me a large square lozenge and said "Vite, mettez cela sous la langue." I did as ordered, and realized, as I put it under my tongue, that I wouldn't have cared at that moment if it had been cyanide. It wasn't, though. It was glucose, and ten minutes later, the headache was gone and I felt like Popeye after a fresh can of spinach. It was a scary train ride, but I was glad to be on the train and not on the 20-minute helicopter from Cuzco.



This is not a good place if you have a fear of heights. I spent the day with a British family. The parents were my age, and the 22-year-old son was taking a term off from Cambridge to do an internship in Sao Paolo. They'd just come from Bolivia and were traveling around Peru for a week. They came in handy at several points when I didn't want to look at the thousand or so foot drop. I closed my eyes and let them lead me over some of what they cheerfully called "the more harrowing bits."

We were having such a good time we very nearly missed the train back, and that would have been a problem. That evening, we had sopa de ajo at a restaurant, where we snickered at two Japanese girls who were taking turns videotaping each other eating dinner. It's probably on their blog somewhere.

This is my best memory of the sopa de ajo. It was a damp autumn evening, and the soup was great.

1 head (yes) garlic
1 T olive oil
wine or vegetable bouillon
canned crushed tomatoes
fresh sage
fresh thyme
salt, pepper, chipotle pepper sauce
one egg per person

Heat the oil in a deep saute pan and put in the chopped garlic. Cook until soft but not brown. Add maybe two or four cups of liquid (wine or water) and cover. Cook covered, low fire, until the garlic is very soft. Add the tomatoes, herbs, salt, pepper. Forget it for a half hour, simmering. Blend, or use a hand-held blender stick (in Italy they are called mini-pimer)until the garlic is pretty invisible. Or if you are lucky enough to have a chinoise, even better. A food mill would work but is too messy to clean.

Taste the soup. You may need a pinch of sugar, or more chipotle pepper sauce. It should be thinner than canned tomato soup.

To serve: five minutes before showtime, carefully drop from a cup in each of the four corners of the pan (if a round pan can have corners), one egg for each serving. Simmer until the white is fully poached and the yolk is heated and beginning to set, but not hard. Scoop the egg out with the same utensil you'd use for poached eggs and surround it with the soup. Garnish with olive-oil brushed toasted croutons and sprigs of fresh thyme. I served it with grilled asparagus and carrots. Et voila.
Bonus: when I took off the purple rubber bands from the asparagus John bought at the market, they said "Product of Peru." What are the odds?

Java Joe's Next Generation and the rest of Sunday

Sunday, May 7 was Java Joe's official grand opening.  A gospel group, Voices of Clouds, performed.  Here's Joe's father, with John disappearing into the cafe to get some coffee.


It was a perfect spring day, although a little cool for plant buying. So we arrived at 9, because Joe

asked us to get there early. The mayor wasn't coming until 9:30. That was fine, since it gave us time to watch the band set up and to hang out.

Mayor Duffy had already been to two events by the time he showed at Joe's at 9:30 and he was remarkably energetic. He stayed for quite a while before he had to go to his next gig. Hard work on a Sunday morning. Here he is with Charlie Reaves, Dana Miller, Joe and Maria.

And of course he schmoozed with Joe's father.


JudieLynn McAvinney came by with her two new dogs and they were well-photographed. Josanne and Charlie look as though they are ready to adopt.

Jordan had a crepe with Nutella and fruit.
Margaret was hard at work, first on juice, then as barista (this is a good skill to have before going off to college, Margaret).

John had a few cups of coffee and then went shopping for a birthday present for Lucinda.

I thought she'd be horrified despite her love of poodles. But she loved it. The new pet is named Chanelope (rhymes with Penelope) and will last forever, according to the woman John bought it from. This is one of the many advantages of a dog topiary over a real dog.

We finally dragged ourselves away and went to The Gables to meet the new resident director. After that, we visited Sara in her new home, a Victorian house on Rowley Street with great light and high ceilings. Then we went to Highland Park before is it contaminated by the annual Lilac Festival booths and crowds. The magnolias were almost over. I'd never noticed the yellow one before. Some of the pink ones were enormous.


The lilacs are worth the visit. There are 1200 or so of them. Here is John, hiding in a giant pale purple bush.



It was a close-to-perfect Sunday. At 7 we went to the Dryden to see A Night at the Opera which I hadn't seen in decades.
Subversive, anarchistic. No wonder they had revival success in the late Sixties.

El jardin, 5 de mayo

Phil dropped by this morning to pick up his motorcycle and I photographed him with the forsythia.



He had to do some maintenance but was soon on his way to campus.



Since I was out and about with the camera I thought I'd take some photos of the garden. We closed on the house on May 12, 1991 so in a week it will be the 15th anniversary of our owning 296 Melrose Street.

The rhododendron is an annoying pale pink-beige but before the flowers open the color is saturated and satisfying.



The kwanzan cherry is next to a variegated olive. Pi the cat and Honey the dog are buried under it.



I like the grape hyacinths better than the real ones which are too aggressive and large. The forget-me-nots last pretty well in the shade.




To the right of the front door there is a terrific white lilac. It is just behind a deep purple one that's not quite in bloom.



The line-up between our house and the driveway: white dogwood,lilac, flowering quince. Marilyn's cherry tree is to the right.

Wisteria

The first time I was conscious of the wisteria plant was the spring of 1971. I was living in Nice, and on the other side of the Route de Fabron there was a winding dirt road leading to a farmhouse. It was lined with an ancient stone wall, covered with wisteria. Behind it were mimosa trees that hung over the wisteria and the road.



I planted one in 1981 in front of our first house on Rosedale Street in Rochester and it bloomed madly the first year. It still blooms. We sold the house in 1983 when we planned to move to Japan to teach English. Which we didn't do. We moved to Aldine Street in the Nineteenth Ward instead, and planted a redbud tree and a wisteria. The redbud is magnificent. The wisteria never bloomed, and I was told my first one had been beginner's luck.

We moved to Melrose Street in 1991 but it was not until 2003 that I asked Adair to buy a wisteria. I'd decided if this one didn't flower I'd dig it up and forget it. The first year it had three flowers. Last year it was respectable. This is the wisteria against Marilyn and Cy's garage, with one of their lilacs in the background.

chick pea soup

It sounded odd. I make every other kind of bean soup, but never chick pea. I had just come across a cache of dried garbanzos. A massive amount of hummus? too much, and too short a refrigerator life, once prepared. So I googled "chick pea masala" and came up with some soups. But that's not what I made. All I did was soak chick peas overnight, changing water several times. Boiled the chick peas in fresh water until soft. This took about an hour. Added a couple of chopped carrots, onions, celery, and two mashed cloves of garlic. Cooked until vegetables were soft. Added 4 cubes vegetable bouillon, salt, pepper, a teaspoon of cumin. When it was done I pureed about half in the blender and added it back to the pot. (You can see there are still whole chick peas.) Finally, stir in the juice of half a lemon.

This cooks.com recipe is probably better but more ambitious. I'll make it sometime. But will probably use cubed cooked sweet potato in place of the acorn squash...easier.

Sponge cake

I never considered making a sponge cake. It seemed like a lot of work to go through for not much bang. However, when I was growing up, it seemed like sponge cake (and its next-of-kind angel food and jelly roll) were the burden of all Jewish women. You baked a sponge cake for any occasion. Jelly rolls, infinitely more harrowing to assemble, were for serious illness, or post-funeral.

I couldn't put my hands on my mother's recipe, and my Passover cookbook had some ridiculous ground walnut cake instead of sponge cake. That's like leaving the mac and cheese out of The Joy of Cooking. Who needs books? I googled, and this one sounded right.
Sponge cake
and it was fine.

The hard part was that I'd bought matzo meal instead of matzo cake meal. I pulverized it in the Cuisinart until it looked fine enough. Here's the batter:



I also was short on lemon juice so I added some Caravella orangecello originale. I would have used limoncello, but I was out of that too. Against my better judgment I substituted 1 cup of Splenda for one of the two cups of sugar. We'll see tomorrow if that makes a difference in taste.

The recipe does not tell you that after you beat the egg yolks, and before you beat the egg whites, you have to wash the beaters. I've known since I could crawl that egg whites won't beat properly if there's a drop of fat in them (or so I was told), but I wonder if the average about.com reader is aware of this. Just one of the many dangers of getting recipes off the web. You also have to cool it by turning it upside down IMMEDIATELY. Within a minute of removing it from the oven, it will sink like a souffle in a cold draft if it's not upside down. My mother always used a soda bottle. I used what was handy, a Beaujolais-Villages.



It takes forever to cool, and then you have to saw it out of the aluminum tube pan with a thin knife. My mother had at least two of these tube pans, and there is one still in her apartment, which I will take home. You never know who will need a battered tube cake pan.



Tomorrow I will make one to ship to my niece in California. She has a thing for sponge cake, apparently, and my mother used to send her one every year.

Hot chocolate

The first time I had European hot chocolate was in 1996, at Wedel in Warsaw with Ewa and John. This was a place Ewa went to when she was a student at the University of Warsaw. The room was pink, white and sort of run down. I went back there a year ago, in March of 2005, and it was pretty gentrified. The chocolate was the same, thick and dark, even though the place is now owned by some multinational conglomerate and not the Wedel family. It's at ul. Szpitalna 8, and is in my top fifty (as yet unwritten) list of things to do in Warsaw.



So in 1997 I went to Spain and a student told me to go to the Chocolateria San Gines. There are probably better places to go for chocolate than this because it's in Frommer's and Fodor's and god knows what else. There can be a line around the block. The chocolate is served with churros, long, greasy, repellent doughnuts which are dipped in the chocolate. Add a cigarette to the mix and it's all pretty hazardous to your health.



So this hot chocolate is pretty easy to make.

for about 4 servings:
2 cups skim milk or soy milk
1 heaping teaspoon cornstarch
sugar to taste
chocolate chips
1 Tablespoon cocoa
1/2 tsp vanilla
chocolate liqueur

Dissolve the cornstarch in a little water and add to the milk. Whisk until it begins to thicken. Add sugar, a teaspoon at a time. Add some chocolate chips, or semi-sweet baking chocolate. Whisk until dissolved. When it is thickened, add chocolate, vanilla, liqueur to taste. You can add Cointreau or Kahlua, too. Not too much.



I made this for Jordan on Saturday. We came here after the Market and we went over the recipe pretty thoroughly. He had this chocolate for the first time in February, 2005 in Siena, and I forgot to ask Donna for the name of the shop where we had ciocolatte calda and panforte. However, I googled "caffe Siena panforte" and it came up: Nannini. This photo is of Jordan (wearing Federico's leather jacket) and he really liked this hot chocolate.

Chocolate pudding

So. I bought a 3 pound bag of chocolate chips at BJ's Wholesale Club, and it will take several years to use it up. I think the original thought was to create Italian hot chocolate which is thickened with corn starch and served in small cups. However, Phil was lobbying for Chocolate Chip Pie. It's one of the most revolting recipes I've ever read. I offered the Hot Chocolate. Phil rejected it because he said you can't have a slice of hot chocolate. I downgraded to Chocolate Pudding. Sara, who made the mistake of being out of the room at a time (okay, so this isn't a democracy) feels cheated. Phil liked the CP idea so much that I said what the hell. (This is NOT going down well with Sara.)



To make chocolate pudding, mix about 1/2 cup sugar with 3 Tablespoons cornstarch. Add a cup of skim milk and whisk well until there are no lumps. Begin to heat over low fire. Add another 2 cups of milk or soymilk, about 4 big tablespoons of Hershey's cocoa (dark is good), and whisk well. It will thicken. Don't let it alone and answer the phone, and don't get impatient and turn the fire up. Check it to see if it needs sugar, but first add a small pinch of salt, and maybe 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla, or Kahlua. if you think it needs to be thicker (it should more than coat a spoon) whish 1/4 cup milk with one very well-beaten egg, or better yet, 1/4 cup eggbeaters. Whisk in slowly over an even lower fire, or off the fire, so you don't get the pudding equivalent of egg drop soup. Curdled egg is not good in pudding.
Pour in cups and chill 20-30 minutes. Serve with sour cream or low-fat vanilla ice cream.