savory french tarts

difficulty rating: rolling in her grave
this is my new favorite throw-together dinner for the summer. it lends itself to whatever you have on hand and fairly bursts with rich flavor.

decide on a crust-i like puff pastry but i've also used several layers of philo, pre-bought or homemade pie crusts, whatever you've got around that resembles pastry. depending on what it is and if you think it'll go soggy you may want to blind bake it for a few min before adding toppings. sometimes i do this in a pie plate and sometimes just on a cookie sheet depending on how many toppings i'm trying to corral.

layer on some fresh veggies-i like good ripe tomatoes and fresh spinach but i've also used peppers, onions, mushrooms, olives, use whatever you've got that is colourful and tastes great. if you had cooked meats on hand you could add prosciutto or crumbled sausage or something.

be heavy handed with the aromatics-raid the herb garden and throw on a good handful of whatever you have on hand. dill, basil, rosemary, oregano, sage, thyme, or all of the above. fresh is better then dried by a long shot. i don't usually use garlic but i see no reason why you couldn't. roasted would be especially nice. a good grinding of black pepper is nice too.

find some cheese-good strong stuff like chevre or good parmesan or blue, you don't need a ton so use up that little chunk of good stuff left over from your last party. i sometimes add a bit of mozza or other mild cheese as well if i have any.

if it looks really dry and falling apart i sometimes pour a beaten egg over the whole thing to hold it together

layer it all in your crust in whatever order you think is pretty and bake at around 350-375 for some 25 min or until your crust is cooked and your cheese is melted

serve with wine and salad or soup. now you know how to cook like a french peasant!

on strong women

we all know i'm a fairly hardcore feminist. most people who know me would also describe me as a very strong personality. sometimes that's meant as a compliment, sometimes as an insult. our society tends to look down on strength as much as we used to revere it, and far moreso for women then men. when you say the word strength people tend to conjure images of muscles and emotional coldness. they also tend to think of men and not women. somewhere along the way we seem to have forgotten that the genders truly are equal, even as we are different. some of this is evolutionary and biological (women have a higher pain threshold because we have to deal with childbirth) and some of it is cultural (men are often expected for provide the incomes for their families). as we move more into equal rights truly being the norm, we're starting to reclaim the strengths of women that were once accepted, if never celebrated, that have been pushed to the background or frowned upon for the last few hundred years. so what does it mean to be a strong woman? being a child of the computer age, i turned to google for answers and inspiration and you know what i found? disappointment. google shows you the most popular responses. when you're swimming against the stream it often makes you really mad (try googling "courage to heal", the most groundbreaking book on healing from childhood sexual abuse in our lifetimes. nothing but abuse of the authors who have helped so many).
i never had strong female role models as a child but a few things did get set into my mind: just because something is traditionally done by males is no reason females shouldn't do it too; men aren't any better then women, just different; and if i wanted to be happy with who i am i would have to reinvent myself from the ground up. some of this was taught by positive example (my grandmother was one of the first female doctors in canada) and some by negative example (i sure as hell don't want to be like my mother so what shall i be instead?). skip forward a decade or two of struggle and change and personal evolution and we come to me: still very much a work in progress but someone who could never be called weak. interestingly, all of the things that i think define strong women are also the things that get me into trouble the most, how about you?:
intelligence-whether book smarts, intuition, street smarts, or physical intelligence, you'll never find a strong woman who doesn't have a deep cache of wisdom of some type.
passion-having the emotional drive to pursue your interests with enthusiasm is a very rare trait, to the extent that it tends to scare the hell out of people who lack it. nothing of any value was ever achieved without it. it's also the driving force behind loyalty.
honesty-it's often a lot harder then lying, it's also a large part of what makes someone an honorable person.
originality-anyone can go along with the crowd. it's important to know when the crowd is not where you want to be and do something completely different no matter the consequences.
endurance-this applies more to women then men because it's one of our differences. "the courage of women is different then men, deeper and more enduring." accepting the changes in a tribe, in a community, in the attitudes of acceptable behavior, and surviving anyways; a 48 hour long labor followed by a child who will be attached to your skirts for at least 5 or 6 years nonstop; cooking and cleaning for many more people then yourself; the physical demands of our moon cycles; being the moral and emotional center of a family and leading joy by example. these things train endurance into us from a very young age and most men would be completely overwhelmed by them, just as a woman with no training would be completely overwhelmed on a battlefield or a hunting ground.
morality-it's one thing to know that it's bad to steal from your neighbor and kill for reasons other then sustenance. it's a different thing to make the judgment calls when the lines are gray and fuzzy, or when there are no good options at all. sometimes this is the big decisions like triage at a disaster site, sometimes it's the little decisions that keep the household running smoothly and everyone in it healthy and happy. it's how you spend your time, it's what you accept happening around you, it's your self discipline.
competence-look at the strong women around you. everything they do, they do it well, don't they? when they screw something up, they look to learn from the mistake. they're not afraid to try something new because they know they can practice enough to get good at it. they have a careless grace that is rooted in mastery.
i'll tell you an open secret: all grace is rooted in strength. all strength is paid for in pain. physical or emotional, we are tempered by experience. often those lessons are brutal. they make us who we are. the trick is to accept it, to let go. to be in and of the experience and allow it to forge and change your spirit. which brings us to the one we feminists don't like to acknowledge and society likes to believe is the only female virtue:
surrender and tenderness-you cannot be strong without also knowing the ways in which you are weak, and accepting them. you cannot be the master of yourself if you're afraid to be vulnerable with another person. strength is just as much about letting people in and being close and soft and gentle as it is about drawing a hard line and being passionate and smart. this is a spiritual mystery because it must be experienced to be understood. it's the feeling of getting lost in the eyes of the person you love most in the world. it's a mothers fierce protection for her child, and the connection she feels while breastfeeding for the first time. just as strength is paid for in pain, passion and aggression at their most intense, are fed by the tenderness we feel for the things we hold closest to our hearts, and our insistence that they never be taken away.

newspaper nails

difficulty level: cut and paste
i don't often bother to do crazy nail art but the literary snob in me couldn't resist this. it's actually a lot easier to do then i thought it would be. impress your friends with your superior skills! boys could certainly get away with this too, you don't have to be limited to black you know. i painted my nails a flat white last night. any light colour works. this is crappy dollar store nail polish that was rather goopy and didn't want to go on evenly. it looked a lot like white-out actually but it turns out that this totally camouflages any streakiness. resist the urge to use actual white-out. it isn't good for you and probably wont work the same way. i wanted to make sure it was really dry before i started the second part of this so i gave it a good 8 or 10 hours. that probably wasn't necessary but i wanted to go to bed anyway.
get some rubbing alcohol or vodka or something with an alcohol content of 40% or higher. pour an ounce or so into a little cup of some kind. cut out little pieces of newspaper (or nice prints and pictures you find in ads. or comics! totally doing that next time) about an inch square or slightly bigger then your nails.

dip a nail in the alcohol for about 30 seconds to soften it slightly. try not to touch the edges of the cup.

press a piece of newspaper down hard onto the nail and hold it there for 30 seconds. don't move it around once it's pressed down and try to keep the pressure even so you don't end up with lighter and darker bits. don't hold down for too long or the paper will stick and leave fibers on your nail. doing this against a table is easiest. using two fingers to press down results in unevenness. it's kinda like when you played with silly putty as a kid.

peel off the paper gently and admire your work! it will be on your skin as well but that washes off easily. let it dry for a few min. repeat for the rest of your fingers. doing just one in a full colour comic and the rest in newsprint would be fun.

put on a thick-ish layer of clear coat. thick-ish because that way the brush wont streak the printing as much.

tah dah! looks kinda punk doesn't it? would look a little more girly if my nails were as long as usual but they were all ratty so i cut them off last night. now i wonder what other silly things i can do to my nails that doesn't require hours of breathing fumes and fidgeting with toothpicks...

cheesy pull apart herb bread

this was tonight's tasty creation, made from whatever i had on hand, to be breakfast tomorrow. i'm kind of amazed i had all of this since tomorrow's payday and i haven't grocery shopped in two weeks. this is put together much like a cinnamon pull-apart bread i made a while back that was AMAZING. you roll out the dough, spread on the filling of your choice (much like making sticky buns) and then cut it into squares, stack them up, place vertically in a loaf pan and when it's done you'll have pre-sliced bread already spread with tasty stuff! you do have to have some kind of fat in the filling to keep the pieces separated but that's pretty easy to do. you can see here i'm mostly relying on the whole-fat cheese. i added the mayo mainly to make it more spreadable. i possibly could have used milk to keep the fat content down but i didn't think of it. this is a treat snack, not a healthy one. you could use whatever cheeses and herbs you have on hand. would work nicely with some minced olives, roasted garlic, sundried tomatoes or spinach in the filling. you can also go the sweet direction and use fruit and brown sugar and butter (remove the garlic powder or i'll laugh at you a lot for not having enough sense to be allowed in a kitchen)

dough:
3/4 cup sourdough starter (or more warm water, i was just trying to use up the starter instead of throwing half out when i fed it)
1/4 cup warm water
1/2 Tbs instant yeast (could have upped to 3/4 Tbs)
1 tsp sugar
1 Tbs garlic powder
1 tsp salt
2 Tbs oil or butter
2 cups flour

filling:
1 cup shredded cheese (i used half low-fat cheddar, half coriander gouda but whatever)
3 Tbs half-fat mayo
1/4 cup chopped fresh herbs (i used rosemary, thyme, dill, sage, oregano, and basil since that's what's available in the garden right now)
1 Tbs dijon mustard
1/3 cup cream cheese (i used mostly light plain and a bit of tomato-basil that was left over)
1/2 tsp chili pepper flakes

mix the starter, water, yeast, and sugar. let sit for a few min to get all bubbly
add the salt, garlic, and oil, stir briefly, then mix in flour. i suggest starting with 1 1/2 cups and adding more as needed to make a soft dough that's not too sticky. warning: making it too dry when you used sourdough starter makes it take AGES to rise
while it's rising mix all ingredients for filling and adjust to taste, you may need to warm for 30 seconds in the microwave.
let dough rise in a warm place until doubled in size, then stretch/roll out on a floured counter to about 1/8-1/4" thick. mine ended up being about 18" square, give or take.
spread the filling evenly on the dough, then cut into little 2-3" squares. they don't have to be perfect.
grease your loaf pan, then create little stacks of squares. i usually do about 4. hold the pan at an angle so you can put in the stacks without them falling over too much
let rise in a warm place again until doubled in size, then bake at 350 for about 25-30 min or until golden brown.
mine actually took overnight to rise but i think that's because the yeast i added was fighting with the yeast in my sourdough starter and both were inhibited by the fat in the filling. next time i may skip the starter or skip the yeast and plan better but this was still herby cheesy flavorful goodness!

the story of imaginary money

i'm practicing my storytelling skills. can i tell you a story?
once upon a time people bartered for everything. if you needed an object you couldn't produce yourself, or needed help doing something you couldn't do alone, you had to not only find someone who had the skills or good you needed, but also arrange to trade them for something that they needed. there wasn't any money. if you raised chickens but didn't have enough land to grow grain, then you might trade some chickens or eggs to your neighbor who had more grain then he needed but no eggs or meat. large portions of the world still operate this way and there is a revival happening in our own society of trading goods and skills instead of money.
at some point, someone decided that this was a bit cumbersome so why don't we use items that are worth more but are smaller and easier to carry, store, protect, etc and have a standard that says about how much each item is "worth" in terms of, say, gold or silver. gold and silver have value of their own, of course. you can make things out of them and they have useful scientific traits such as conductivity, etc. they're also shiny and pretty and rare, so people like them. they're easy to carry around and can be standardized fairly easily. so far so good. you cannot eat gold and you're adding another step in the transaction process but you also don't have to carry chickens around and if the person with the grain doesn't want any more chickens, you have something else they will value. you can just go trade your chickens to someone else for gold and take your gold to the guy with the grain.
somewhere along the line people decided that gold was too inconvenient as well, so maybe we should store all that gold somewhere safe, and instead of carting it around, we'll get a little note from the guy who's holding onto it, saying how much we have. then we can trade the notes and whoever has the note can go to the guy who holds the gold and get it back anytime he likes, right? well, so far ok as long as the guy holding the gold can be trusted by everyone (uh...huh). people also decided that maybe that guy can just hold onto our notes and keep track of how much everyone has so they can't be stolen or lost or anything, right? we'll pay him a little percentage to take care of them for us.
we were using the notes for so long that we kinda forgot the gold existed, since no one had taken any out in so long. eventually the guys holding the gold, and the guys in charge of them, decided that there wasn't enough notes for everything they needed and that the gold wasn't really important anymore. the gold that represented the chickens and the grains, remember? they started printing more notes then there was gold to back it up. or chickens. or grains. so now the notes are representing, what exactly? if you said stupidity, you're correct! and not just a few more notes. a LOT more notes. and they didn't tell anyone. no one knew for a long time. by the time anyone found out they figured it didn't matter anymore.
moving on we enter the computer age! the guy holding the (not enough) gold doesn't have to keep paper records anymore of who has how much, he can just write it down on a computer and then it takes up less space and can bring up the info more easily. computers never have errors or anything, right? no more wondering if that is a number 7 or a number 9! everyone has perfect typing skills too, right? and they couldn't be affected by power outages or hackers or...hmmm, is this really a good idea, guys? now instead of chickens and grain, or an hour of skilled labor, we have a bunch of 1's and 0's on a computer somewhere. as you can imagine, that made it really easy to also create bigger numbers that have no physical things to back them up. a LOT bigger numbers.
while the banks are busily creating money that has nothing at all to back it up, they can now lend you some! if you promise to pay it back in a certain amount of time and give them a percentage more then what you borrowed, and give them rights to take something physical of yours if you don't pay them back their 1's and 0's that have nothing physical to back them up. wait a second....
now not just the banks want in on this lending of 1's and 0's for the exchange of more of them and possibly your physical stuff too. other people want to get in on that. guys like visa and mastercard. they're buddies with the banks and they back each-other up to try to sound like this is all totally normal and legit. they'll lend you smaller amounts of this pretend money, and usually you don't have to agree that they can take your house or whatever, but you have to pay them back a pretty large percentage more then what you borrowed. you can also only borrow from them if they can check with their buddies and make sure you usually pay things back. they like it when you do so really slowly so they get a bigger cut.
people are impatient. they like being able to buy things now instead of waiting to save up. it's considered the norm that you'll borrow at least some money, especially for big things like a house. let this go long enough and it all seems so normal and ok that now you have to check with all these guys in order to do lots of things, like rent an apartment (which you don't own), or get some jobs (that you need to pay those guys). if you've never borrowed anything from any of these guys, that's almost as bad as borrowing and not paying them back. if you've never worked with their... interesting... businesses, then they don't want anything to do with you. they're kinda like cliquey 14 year old girls shunning the new kid.
since the banks are the ones who lend the money for buying big things like land (why can you "own" land but you can't "own" air?), and it takes ages to pay them back, the banks are the ones who currently "own" most of the land, since it's their imaginary money that paid for your right to live on it, not the blood and sweat you put into it or the fact that it is your primary source of survival resources. and all land is "owned" by someone, right?
anyone else confused? really makes me long for something clean and real and honest. until i can "buy" some land of my own to care for and have it care for me, want to trade my fresh baked bread for an hour of swing dance lessons?

I caved!

i couldn't do it anymore. after 3 months, i washed my hair. at the two month mark where i last posted about it, i was doing pretty well. since then it went steadily downhill until it was greasy and weighted down and felt rough and terrible. i haven't worn my hair down in at least two weeks. even if no one else could see the difference, it was driving me crazy! what is the point of having waist-length fiery red hair if you have it pulled up in a bun every day? i feel kinda bad that the experiment failed. part of this was testing what my body is capable of on it's own and it makes me a bit sad to know that i'm not at all happy with the results. i suppose that's a bit unreasonable since mammals never exist in a vacuum and we all need food and water and warmth to survive. in order to be happy and healthy we also need other things, like shampoo :P, or at least i do. lots of other people have done fine with this for years and years and i don't doubt that it works for them wonderfully. i'm glad that i tried this since i did learn some things and readjusted my attitudes and challenged myself. i'm also glad that i can go to lush tomorrow and buy minimally packaged, environmentally friendly, wonderful smelling shampoo. moving towards even more sustainablility, i'll be trying out making soap on friday and from there maybe solid hair care so look forward to a blog entry about that no matter how it turns out.

slut shaming starts early

i was watching some dance clips on youtube the other day and came across 2 i found thought provoking. the first has 7 year olds dancing to "single ladies" in a very energetic and sexual manner:

the second group looks about 11-13 maybe and that had an even more visceral response for me since i found it both beautiful and attractive:

while they are undoubtedly talented, several people immediately found it disturbing to see anything sexual done by girls this young and objected to both their costumes and their movements. i admit that initially it threw me a bit as well, but why should it? their dance is empowering and life affirming. if an adult finds it arousing, the fault is not with the 7 year old! somewhere along the way we seem to have forgotten that we are sexual creatures FROM BIRTH. finding something attractive does not mean you would ever abuse that child. finding their aesthetic and movements beautiful is not inappropriate. there seems to be a lot of blaming the parents and coaches for allowing free-thinking young girls to dress and act in a way they find positive. have we really started slut shaming this early? if you found those videos disturbing, i suggest taking off your society-approved-judgment hat for a moment, put on your artist-seeing-talent-and-beauty hat, and try again. i know i couldn't do what these girls are doing and i have 4 years of formal dance training. their costumes are appropriate to the number they're performing and allow you to see their body movements. if it helps, think of the 7 year olds as playing dress-up and the 11 year olds testing the waters of womanhood. then try to remember how you felt at those ages. if you were mentally and physically healthy, you were not dead from the waist down until puberty. children deserve credit to not only make their own decisions and stand by them, but to own their bodies, their sexuality, and their emotions as full humans taking on responsibilities as they are capable. we do them a disservice by insisting they be cut off from all sexuality until we arbitrarily decide they're ready for it (or decide as adults they WE'RE ready for them to be sexual). sexuality does not just mean having sex. it has to do with how we see ourselves in our bodies, our genders, how we react to other people, our personal power, and many other factors. if you've ever assumed that a baby wearing pink is a girl and wearing blue must be a boy, you have participated in this. wouldn't it be a lot healthier to answer sexual questions as they're asked, allow kids to test the waters of their actions, and blame pedophiles for child abuse instead of kids who like to dance, or the parents and coaches who encourage them?