perfect summer dinner

difficulty rating: bottle short of a six pack
you know what's lovely on a summer night? a filling salad and a cooling grown up drink. without further ado i give you creamy greek "chicken" salad and cucumber mojitos:



ingredients:
1 cup kalimata olives, roughly chopped
1 cup feta cheese, crumbled (use low fat if you like)
1 cup cucumber, diced (about 1/2 a long english)
1 cup yellow pepper, diced (about 1 big pepper)
1/4-1/2 cup red or white onion, finely chopped
1 cup tomatoes, chopped (about 2 med)
1/2 cup tatziki sauce (store bought or make your own)
1 pkg veggie chicken pieces, chopped (about 1 1/2 cups, i use superstore brand or yves. you could use real chicken i suppose but i would suggest it be precooked)
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 veggie chicken broth cube
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dill
salt and pepper to taste
1 tsp dried onion flakes
water, to cover

mix "chicken" with spices and lemon juice in a small pot, add water to cover. bring to a boil and simmer on med
in the mean time chop all your veggies and mix with tatziki in a salad bowl.
taste the "chicken, see if it has some flavor yet. if not, mix a drink and go out for a cigarette while you let it stew some more.
drain the "chicken", save the broth if you like. it may need to be watered down somewhat to be drinkable on it's own but it would be great to cook grains in or use as the start for a soup. add the "chicken" to the salad and toss well. leftovers would be good in a wrap.



make a simple syrup by stirring half a cup of sugar and half a cup of water together, bring to a boil to dissolve, then cool. it only takes about 2 min, don't be so lazy. you can make a bigger batch to keep in the cupboard if you like.
throw a few ice cubes in a glass
add a couple sprigs of fresh mint. dried or extract or any other mint flavored thing will not do, it must be fresh.
squeeze in a couple lime slices. you can cheat a bit here and use the bottled stuff if you have to. if you use fresh lime, throw the squeezed fruit into the mix.
add a few slices of cucumber. you could also use whatever fruit you have on hand.
muddle this mess with a spoon. that means kinda mash and bruise it all up to release juice, oils, and flavors
add a couple of ounces white rum
top with soda water
sweeten to taste with simple syrup.
use a straw to avoid chewing leaves and things

there! you just made a super easy, grown up meal and cocktail in about 20 min. packed full of vitamins and protein and flavor, and you can get most of it from the farmer's market this time of year. impress your friends by being all effortless iron chef. relax in the hammock with another mojito, you totally deserve it.

argh with the flies!

so this is a little off-beat from my usual fare but have you ever noticed that bugs come in waves per year? one year it might be a mosquito year, then it might be a fly year, then a spider year, or a beetle year. this has been a fruit fly year. i'm not sure what causes it, probably a combination of life cycles of bugs and plants combined with weather, but i'm not the only one playing battle of the fruit flies right now. i thought at first it was just my sub-standard housekeeping skills, which undoubtedly contribute to the problem, but lots of people with cleaner houses then mine are having the same issues. i can't set a glass of wine or cider down around here for even so long as to go pee without coming back to find 4 fruit flies swimming in it. random note: have you ever found that after fishing out several fruit flies from your drink (carefully to avoid consuming bug bits but not have to pour out your drink every 2 min) that it takes on a sickly sweet smell? concerning... anyways. we're fighting around here by trying to get rid of all dirty dishes and garbage as quickly as possible and in the mean time setting out fly strips and traps. "traps?", you say?....yes traps. if you're fighting the same battle, i advise you to create a few of these and set them up wherever you see the most flies:

it's just a container of some kind topped with a funnel made of a piece of paper and taped in place. you bait it with wine, cider, a piece of fruit, balsamic vinegar, or anything else they've been trying to steal in the bottom of the container. they fly in and are too stupid to find the exit so they drown or die of old age. i'm not usually one for murdering bugs en mass but this has truly gone too far. they are disturbing my quiet after-work drink and invading my cherished fruit and coming in clouds that are making me crazy. this means war! common sense rules still apply, keep your place as clean as possible, even if it's still messy (not the same thing) and don't leave anything out that they like. remember that they will live and breed on damp sponges and dish rags and that vinegar is just as good, if not better, than any toxic chemicals to get rid of that juice spill or counter crumbs. i never thought i'd be so looking forward to winter when they all die! fight bravely for your sanity, my friends, and stay strong! they only each live a week.

the delusion of time

we were recently talking about the silly concept of money and the value of physical objects. main conclusion: money doesn't exist. while we're on the subject of crazy things we take for granted, let me tell you a little story about the delusion of time.
once upon a time (*smirk*) humans did not keep track of hours or minutes or years. we noticed the seasons as the length of day and night changed and grew warm and cold. we worked with those seasons to gather and store what we needed. if something got done today instead of tomorrow it was no matter. when hungry, eat. when tired, sleep. you're a baby until you can walk. you're a child until you reach puberty. you're an elder when you can no longer work as hard as the rest of the tribe but have wisdom to impart instead. seems fairly sensible, doesn't it? time is relative to what you're doing and measured by the movement of the sun and the beating of your heart.
then we started noticing things like the patterns of the stars and started keeping track of years and noticing various cycles. in an effort to understand our world better, we started playing with math and star gazing and really neat theories. we figured out that each day is the same length even though there's more and less light in each depending on the time of year. we noticed the length of the cycle of the seasons and came to all kinds of fun ideas about how the universe was put together because of it. so far so good, these are all naturally occurring cycles, even if none of these are nice round numbers that would make for easy math.
now we start to diverge a bit from the rational. at some point we decided that years and moon phases were not fitting nicely together, math-wise, and we wanted to divide up years and months differently. we also decided we want to divide up the day into more then morning, afternoon, evening, and night. this is where i think we went terribly wrong.
humans have this strange and arrogant desire for control. we also have this notion that just because math makes sense to us as far as explaining things to each other (the whole point of it, btw), it must be a universal truth. because of this, we adjust either our notions of the world, or our systems, until we are sure we totally understand how everything works. if we understand and measure things we can control them, right? *smirk* and if we control them we can change them and we have, MWUAHAHA! ULTIMATE POWER!
so for a system that can make sense in our brains (although the math is...interesting), we divided the year into 12 months for some reason. this is close to the lunar cycles we used to follow, but 13 moons don't fit nicely into a year. 12 doesn't actually fit either but it's a little closer. it used to be 10 but that really made no sense. since the math doesn't work, the months are different lengths. instead of naming the months things like the cold moon and the planting moon and other such things, we named many of them arbitrarily after some dudes who used to have lots of power and various gods. once you name something after someone it must BELONG to them, right? so August(us) wants more days then Jun(ius) and Februalia gets totally shafted, etc. since it still doesn't work we have leap years which almost makes sense. i once tried to create a lunar calender but it was such a headache i have no idea how it used to work. i think it was mostly just that we used to be a little less control freakish and didn't try to reconcile the phases of the moon with the seasons of the year. the sun and moon are two separate entities with separate cycles of their own. why should the math relate to each other from where we stand on earth? i'd actually like to see a round calender with an outer ring for the moon name, then one inside for moon phase, then one for seasons closest to the center. each ring would turn independently...anyways
a bit of math that mostly makes sense is that 365 almost divides evenly into 7, so we have weeks. 4 weeks is almost a lunar cycle but doesn't relate mathematically to months which is why weeks start and stop more or less independently from them. perhaps they were doing this math before we came up with the decimal?
now that we have a silly little system to divide up the year, we feel the need to have more precise control of the day. "i'll meet you at mid-day at the oak tree" is terribly inefficient, you see. in an era before clocks, you had to get good at looking at the sun to determine what point in the day it was. if it's THAT big a deal to wait for someone or something for a little while then we have to track better and have a system we can all relate to. a day is a rotation of the earth. it's a fixed natural amount. we arbitrarily decided that we would divide the day into 24 units (yay for more strange math). enter sun dials. they're easy for people to understand and reasonably precise. at some point we then decided we needed much more control then that. if it makes any sense to divide a day into 24 hours, it must make the same kind of sense to divide an hour in 60 min and a min into 60 seconds. kinda reminds me of the craziness of imperial vs metric measurements.
besides being rather dumb math, the big problem with dividing this much, and making it such a part of our lives, is that we've become slaves to it. yes, it's useful for various science and explaining things to other people, but otherwise how important is it, really? if you have to wait for a friend who's ten min late, is it the end of the world? if you were ten min late to a job interview it would be considered a huge deal. in theory you're being disrespectful by making someone wait. in practice, we're really all being disrespectful to each-other by insisting that not only should every clock in the world be perfectly synchronized, but we should each be perfect at keeping to every bit of a schedule, with no room for real life to interfere.
when was the last time you watched the clock while making love? while sitting on the beach? while dancing to your favorite song? time that keeps close track holds us to an impossible standard. it sucks the joy out of life. it leaves us no room to breathe and remember that we are alive. do you hold your pets to this kind of standard? your garden? your infant? why are we so harsh to each-other?
once upon a time we woke up at dawn, regardless of what a clock would have said. we went to bed when we were tired. we ate when we were hungry. we planted when the ground thawed, we harvested when plants were full grown. we hunted when animals were plentiful or culled the herd when we needed meat for the winter more then we needed to feed all our animals during the cold months. we slept more in the winter because that is the time for renewal. you baked the bread until you could tell it was done. time should be measured by what is done in it.
keeping close track of time has given us many insights and allowed us to share a lot of knowledge with one another. it has also caused us an awful lot of harm. use it when it is needed, but for gods' sake cut each-other some slack! hours and minutes are a human-constructed notion. the important things are those you cannot measure. the times that stand still or rush by. this is where our souls live. this is relativity.

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!