maslenitsa

andrey came over yesterday and made the most delicious bliny i have ever had. i was late to the maslenitsa celebration at my own house though, because i suddenly absolutely needed to visit the gym at the end of a week of excess. it was a week of constant, or at least near-constant hunger. i might have to resort to storing great pots of stew in the fridge, so that i can have something less atrocious to eat than hot chocolate and fries and bread and suchlike every four hours when hunger strikes.

this has been an excellent month. i considered giving at least something up for lent, but decided against it. happiness, at the moment, is eight cups of kale, mushroom and sunchoke stew in the fridge, spring break travel to look forward to, and the fact that i might possibly have the sweetest advisor in the history of committee chairs.

travel

in this country, i've mostly traveled alone, except that one glorious trip to atlantic city with sudden casual acquaintances who became something more during the trip: people with whom one could indulge in pillow fights and unrestrained conversation. i think i'd rather travel alone, all things considered, even though this weekend in boston, charlestown, cambridge, salem, hyannis and provincetown wouldn't have been possible without poor john driving great distances in his ancient honda civic he is always so tentative about (because it has some 150,000 miles on it) but which served us beautifully during the trip. the season hadn't yet begun at the cape, and we saw things very differently, john and i, but i may not have been as horrid to travel with as i imagine. or i could have been worse. i rather suspect the latter. anyhow, i insisted upon wandering away on my own, and had enough time to not go batshit crazy having to deal with another human being for a prolonged period of time. if it isn't people i tire of, after a while, it must be their idiosyncrasies or their perspective, as i get to know them better, and after a while, i cannot hide my intolerance. stupid things will set me off, and i will just want to be left alone. i don't think i've worked hard enough to adjust very much.

anyway, the biting cold couldn't keep me from the sun, sand, sea and seagulls. i already knew, even while i was there, that i was going back again. the cape has grown on me since last summer. frightening longing.

culture

on the 14th, i heard the st. petersburg state orchestra, nearly melting into tears, and today, i shall see the sichuan university art troupe play at the anderson center. in this hinterland, there is no dearth of the worlded, all the lovely tunisians, turks, greeks, germans, and asians one can ever want. we don't talk about life so much as meaning. this is the spring of my at-home-ness. i am among my kindred. and we have insinuated ourselves into the great machine we serve.

i think i bored everyone (including myself) to stupor this morning teaching the ghost rider. but at least i am not yet so apathetic that i let it slide, at least i care enough this time around to crib about it. we can only strive to approach the limit, never really pretend that we can truly know.

i might go to albany with nysr. it is, after all, my university new york state is injuring.

performance

i must be getting good at it. zoja asked me if i had ever considered the stage. who needs a stage? we do it every tuesday and thursday for an hour and a half. we do it unceasingly. we do it when we tilt our heads back and arch our backs and close our eyes. we do it every time we are conscious of our posture. we do it unremittingly, and mostly, it is glorious.

we were reading plato last friday and zoja asked if we had ever exulted at our enemy's misfortune, and, naturally, i said, "oh ye-es." hence the stage comment. also because she thought i did a good job pretending to be protarchus, my voice dripping irony. this was followed by a discussion of honesty. am i being honest? am i saying it with such obvious relish for effect? this kid got cornered pretty bad, and everyone had a laugh. i love zoja. she is the person i want to grow into when i am seventy.

there is something essentially fake about me. if you were holden caulfield, you'd call me a phony and give yourself an aneurysm resisting my phoniness. but you would never triumph.

anyway, what has happened is this: i met the department folks and others from uni after what seemed like eons and quite improbably i could not help but think, good lord, i love these people. it was a genuine feeling. i was surprised.

this valentine's day, i gave myself the gift of an add-on graduate certificate and a spring break camping trip to a coastal island off savannah, GA. i won't be traveling alone. i will probably not have access to decent plumbing. but i've never been camping, and i cannot wait.

recipe: green beans and sunchokes

i first had sunchokes at the river bistro: a salmon dish with sweet pea emulsion and roasted sunchokes. beautiful. so when i saw a package of sunchokes at wegmans, i put it in my cart, and thought i'd substitute the knobbly little tubers for potatoes. this is the first time i've cooked with them, and it all came out pretty nice, but i'll be trying more versions of the same dish to see what works best.

ingredients:

12 oz green beans
8 oz sunchokes
half a large red pepper
two medium yellow onions
four fat cloves of garlic
a tablespoonful of whole black peppercorns
a tablespoonful of panch phoron (cumin, coriander, nigella, fenugreek, radhuni, fennel)
a teaspoonful of turmeric

two inches of organic ginger

two chiles de arbol

a handful of coriander leaves

method:

i like to cut everything in smallish pieces so that it all cooks evenly and relatively quickly. this time, i added the beans and the aromatics first to the sizzling-in-oil paanch phoron and whole back peppercorns, put the lid on and let it all cook for about 10 minutes as i chopped up the sunchokes. i wasn't sure if the beans would soften first, or the sunchokes. they turned out perfect though, not too crunchy, not too melty. thank heavens. the trick, i suppose, is cooking at a medium-low heat throughout. but this works only for a dutch oven, i suppose. so anyway, i added the sunchokes after the beans had had time to cook for a while, then let the sunchokes cook for another 5 minutes or so, and then added the turmeric and chiles de arbol. after some vigorous tossing, i added some salt, put the lid back on and let it all cook for a couple of minutes, until they seemed done to me. i always add the coriander after i've turned the heat off, and i'll often let the dish sit for a while in the hot dutch oven. this time around though, i was right famished and took my portion right off the heat, snapped a hurried picture and devoured it with some rice. often my veggies wont be the right consistency for me, and i'd be frustrated, but these, as i said, turned out perfect, and hopefully i'll be able to redo them, so that the taste the same, sometime soon.

recipe: kale, oyster mushrooms, leeks and baby corn

ingredients:

8 oz kale greens
1 oz dried oyster mushrooms
4 oz baby corn
one leek
one medium yellow onion
two fat cloves of garlic
one plump tomato
quarter of a large red pepper
one tablespoonful of whole black peppercorns
one teaspoonful of cumin
half a teaspoon of mustard seeds
one teaspoonful of turmeric
three chiles de arboles
two inches of ginger

method:

hot dutch oven, oil, sizzling cumin and whole black peppercorns, and popping mustard seeds. before the spices burn, bung in the baby corn, leek, onion, tomato, chiles de arboles and red pepper, toss vigorously, turn the heat down and put the lid on for everything to soften and sweat. after about 5 mins, add kale, ginger, turmeric, and finally salt and have the greens wilt a little. this whole process takes about 15-20 minutes and yields at least three to four servings of delicious goodness that keeps the belly full and the hunger pangs every three and a half hours at bay thanks to all that fiber. i think i am going to start putting kale in everything now. next up sunchokes and green beans, probably with soy chunks thrown in for good measure.

recipe: chicken and kale

wegmans always inspires me to buy at least one or two items i've never cooked with before. on this run i got a lovely curly-green bunch of kale. apparently one can substitute it for spinach in most recipes. i've had saag-chicken in restaurants, which is essentially cubes of chicken and in a cheesy-yoghurty mash of spicy spinach, and i thought i could make something that approximated that, but was lighter and did not require me to pulp the greens. it turned out wonderful, and kale's my new favourite GLV! next time i am going to try it with mushrooms and soy chunks. can't wait.

i was craving something meaty and hearty and so i ended up using three ingredients i'd given up cooking with: garlic (four fat cloves), chicken (tenders, the smallest package, a pound?) and store bought simmer sauce (robert rothschild farm's spicy moroccan sauce). apart from these the recipe calls for:

a large onion (i like the yellow ones)
half a large red pepper
about 8 oz kale
about a tablespoonful of whole black peppercorns
a teaspoonful of cumin
two plump tomatoes
half a teaspoon of turmeric
two inches of ginger
a handful of coriander leaves
half a cup of yoghurt (i like plain greek yoghurt for this: thick, creamy, and none of those artificial thickeners and stabilisers or flavours they like to put in the other yoghurts)

i like to do my chopping and dicing all together in the beginning and set everything aside in a large salad bowl. i'll heat the oil and let the cumin and whole black peppercorns sizzle in it for a bit, and then drop all the aromatic vegetables into my dutch oven, toss everything together and cover the pot with its heavy iron lid to let the onion, garlic, tomato and red pepper sweat and soften. in the meantime, i'll chop the tenders into bite-sized pieces. this is when i'll realise that some marinating in lemon juice, salt and turmeric would have made the meat more flavoursome.

however by this time one can only shrug off the thought and throw the meat into the sweating veggies and hope the spices will eventually penetrate everything evenly. after the meat's seared, it's time to add the kale, turmeric and ginger, give it all a vigorous toss, and add the salt so that the greens give up their lovely juices and wilt down. i think it was at this point that i emptied the bottle of the simmer sauce into the mix to add more body and flavour. not a bad impulse, that. i always add the yoghurt and coriander after i've switched off the heat. the yoghurt requires some vigorous mixing in, otherwise one is left with unseemly little lumps that refuse to dissolve into the curry.

and that's basically it. in the pictures, i've already mixed everything with plain white rice made in my brand new rice-cooker, so one can't really tell what the actual dish looks like. it doesn't look like much, but i'm going to try this again, perhaps without the simmer sauce, and see how it goes. i suppose garlic and chicken are pretty good for the soul once in a while.

it tasted even better the next day:

i really, really like teaching worldlit

my enthusiasm is not catchy, and i talk too fast, enunciating nothing in my mongrel shifty accent, but i am so glad to be teaching world literature this semester. i don't think anything can fire me up as much as explaining something as rudimentary as the planetariness of the novel form, the embeddedness of literary culture within systems of economic exchange, the transference and interference of forms, devices, motifs. i love it. 

it's superbowl night

the housemates are hooting downstairs around the giant telly. earlier i made spinach and feta, and then was persuaded to play a couple of games of chinese checkers. i called to thank someone for a rather nice gesture. enough social interaction for a day, right? i wish it weren't so cold out that the thought of a walk inspires no energy at all. a walk would be nice right about now. frankly, this chronic failure to sustain interest is getting to be quite a drag. tomorrow i have a couple of viewings scheduled, a studio and a single bedroom. yesterday i was advised against living alone again. needy, is what he said he found everyone. lately, either my expectations have increased, or people have just gotten too busy to care about incidental friends. well he was right about one thing. lately everyone bores us. best to keep to our fencing lessons, the incessant reading of completely irrelevant things, games, tv shows and suchlike. sundays are terribly dissatisfying anyway. 

the most dispassionate person ever

in a pinch, i can furnish this or that, but why bother to regulate the shifts in mood, why bother at all to entertain. the sun has set on so many fruitless days spent just dropping out of it all. the luxury to stop and stare. one picks up things casually along the way. the way is almost always meandering. it's alright, a lack of intensity will not kill anyone.

this has been a good week. calm and steady. i'm home.