perky to a fault
my first subtitle
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By the way, the Netflix movie that is currently sitting on our coffee table is The Reader, another solemn movie about historic Germany. We’re surmising that The White Ribbon will make The Reader seem lighter by comparison.
1 By “we,” I mean “Marc.”
the bread making adventure
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On Saturday, we picked a recipe (the buttermilk bread from The All New Good Housekeeping Cook Book1) and headed off to procure the ingredients. We were kneading the bread when we realized that we had misread the directions: the bread needed to rise for one hour twice, not just rise for one hour. We had dinner plans with friends, and there was no way that we were going to be able to let it rise twice and bake it before we had to leave. There was some mad googling (surely other people had been faced with this conundrum before!), and then we put the bread dough in the refrigerator.
I got it out in the morning and wasn’t sure that it was going to rise, so I put it in the oven on warm to help it along. The “warm” setting is apparently warmer than I thought, and it might have started to bake. So we panicked and took it out and tried to let it rise on the oven. It rose some, but it certainly did not double in size, but, because I am impatient,2 I put it in the oven.
The loaf came out kind of small, which was probably a combination of the inappropriate rising and the fact that we used whole wheat flour instead of white … but the bread tasted good, which is clearly the most important part.
1My folks gave me this cookbook when I got my first apartment in college, and it is really a great beginner’s cookbook. It has a lot of handy basic information about ingredients, and it had a photo-illustrated section on making yeast bread. Definitely a winner.
2Not the most desirable quality when baking bread.
veggie fail
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Well, my decision to adopt a vegetarian diet for the month of October lasted less than three days. We went to a gastropub last night for dinner, and, since there was nary a veggie burger in sight, I had a pork sandwich. Sigh. (At least it was a good pork sandwich …)
Saturday morning coffee challenge
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We headed to Starbucks this morning for the VIA coffee challenge. Marc was successful in identifying which tiny cup help the instant coffee; I was not. I then suggested that we spend the rest of the day visiting Starbucks all over Manhattan and taking the tasting challenge — eventually I would be able to discern the difference between the two, and think of all the free coffee! — but that idea was vetoed.
LA schmap
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One of the pictures that Marc & I took while we were in Los Angeles this summer was chosen for inclusion in the LA schmap! Check it out!
purse gourd
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Marc found out he passed the Illinois bar yesterday, so we went out to celebrate. We finally made our way to the Mars Bar (which was not nearly as exciting as we had anticipated it might be), I might have purchased falafel with pocket change, and this morning I found a gourd in my purse.
It was clearly a good night.
Happy World Vegetarian Day!
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Today is World Vegetarian Day, which kicks off Vegetarian Awareness Month. In deference to this, I’m going to make a concerted effort to keep a vegetarian diet during October.
As most of you know, I vegetarian for a number of years. (And then China happened. For those of you unfamiliar with the demise of my vegetarianism, the Chinese put meat in everything. Even in the tofu.) I always felt better as a vegetarian: I got sick less, I felt stronger, everything generally seemed to work better.
It’s also much better for the environment to eat lower on the food chain, and I think everyone could stand to be more green these days. Furthermore, it’s cheaper, which is welcome in this economic climate.
For a little veg*n inspiration, try:
- the VeganMoFo flickr group
- Fat Free Vegan Kitchen
- What the Hell Does a Pink Haired Girl Eat?
- or either of the best vegan cookbooks out there: Vegan with a Vengeance or
Veganomicon
making friends is hard
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Making friends has never been hard for me. Two of my very best friends I made in preschool, when it was as easy as one of them and I noticing that our names were similar. (“Your name is Cate? My name is Katie! We MUST be friends!”) Those friends are still two of my nearest and dearest to this day.
Making friends in college was almost as easy: I joined a sorority. I don’t want to hear anything about “buying friends” — joining a sorority just makes it easier to find good friends. Other girls have already narrowed down the pool to a group who share their interests and values, and then planned social events make it easy to find your besties amongst that group.
It still wasn’t hard for me to find friends in law school. There weren’t that many people in our class, and like kinds of people tended to gravitate together.
Here in New York, though, it’s a bit more difficult to make friends. I don’t have a job, so I don’t meet people there, and it’s hard to figure out where to meet other girl friends. I go to classes at the gym, but the students seem to change with each class, and, anyway, it’s kind of hard to strike up a conversation with someone while you’re tangled up in yoga position.
I got on the mailing list for the young alum club of my sorority, and tonight I met some of the girls for dinner. The premise sounded simple enough: I was going to meet four other girls for dinner and drinks. I didn’t realize, however, until I was there, that I wouldn’t know how to find them. Just in case you weren’t sure, looking for specific strangers in a large, crowded bar is a little difficult. I spent a good thirty minutes sitting at the bar by myself, looking around like I had gotten stood up, and checking my phone constantly in a desperate bid to look occupied. (Instead, I’m sure I just looked desperate.)
The story had a happy ending though: I found them and had a lovely dinner.
the dance detention
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My brother called this story from our hometown newspaper to my attention. In short, the story reports that students who elected to buy their tickets to the Homecoming dance at the door were issued detention for their failure to plan ahead and buy them ahead of time. Seriously. They were given detention for deciding to attend a school-sponsored event. Not cool enough to get a date until just before the dance? No problem … if you don’t mind detention. One would think that the administration should be drumming up ways to encourage students to engage with the school instead of handing out punishment for punishment’s sake.
This story was just too ridiculous not to share.
return of the dog walker
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I saw this lady again today. She was on the corner of Bleecker and Thompson, on hand on her hip, as she ogled this enormous dog that looked like a cross between a Great Dane and a Dalmatian. The woman who was in charge of the large beast was paused on the sidewalk, wrapped up in a phone call, oblivious to the intensity of the dog walker’s stare. I kind of wanted to hang around and see if the dog walker approached the woman to offer or services or if she relied on her shirt to do the talking, but, alas, I was on my way home from a poorly conceived trip to the gym with a fever and in a hurry to return home.
