Barn Blind

I'm reading Barn Blind, by Jane Smiley, at the moment. I loved her book, A Thousand Acres. In contrast, this one is kind of a slow burner. I'm not quite sure what direction we're taking the story, but feel like I'm in a Faulkner novel, one of those point-of-view novels where the family lives too close together, and everyone is caught up in their own story, missing everyone else's. Like the drama is happening elsewhere, or in retrospect, and we're only getting bits and pieces.

But this wasn't really meant to be a review. The point is, this book has some really outstanding quotes, and I wanted to write them down or pass them on, before I forgot them.

The first is from the point of view of a father who is trying to connect with his eldest daughter, who has just dropped out of college and is kind of at a loose end:
"He thought that the trouble with having a problem child was that the child thought you always wanted to talk about the problem, so that every mention of the weather became an evasion, and every word of praise became an introduction to the child's potential. Axel didn't know what Margaret's potential was. She seemed to him what she always had - a lovely, healthy, laughing girl who looked pretty when she smiled and still hadn't quite grown into her features. He thought she was a late bloomer and was not anxious to force her. It was she, he thought, who met his most conventional greetings with the demand that he not worry about her so that, in spite of himself, he had begun to."

The scene continues with another moment I've definitely experienced, a thought that is hard to put into words, and is summed up here very nicely:  "When she said, 'Well, I'm going to bed,' and got up gracelessly from her chair, and stepped gracelessly past him into the house, he wanted to impart something to her about her nature, about how he had seen her every day since the day she was born, and yet she was still a surprise to him; he wanted to say something about the human mystery of not adding up, something not about what he had learned, but about what there was to learn. He could not. He said, 'Good night.'"

Westworld, the new Dollhouse

I've been out of the blogging habit for a while, but I've missed it. With that in mind, and because I just don't have the time this year for NaNoWriMo - or more importantly, a well-developed, captivating story - I've decided to try another Na thing going on right now. NaBloPoMo apparently means National Blog Posting Month, and the folks who thought it up have helpfully created a list of things to blog about for the month, which I may try to follow. I thought I'd start it off by ignoring their prompt for Friday, which was "Which fall shows should totally be cancelled already?", and instead write about a new show that I love - Westworld.

Westworld  is based on a 1970s movie by Michael Crichton, about a crazy theme park where the engineered creations run amuck. I'll bet you didn't know he did two of those - I didn't! Instead of Jurassic Park's dinosaurs, Westworld is a recreation of the Wild West, and apparently Rome and medieval times, although so far these have only been given the barest of nods in the tv series. Westworld the tv show so far is set in the future, when corporate high rollers can afford to visit this Disneyland of the Wild West, staffed entirely by biologically engineered androids who think that they are actually living there, and that the visitors are "newcomers".

Westworld is produced by JJ Abrams, which of course will immediately make you think - Lost! And it does have some things in common with Lost, namely, a self-contained island world seemingly filled with mysteries that we're offered small glimpses of, and which we hope will be solved by the end of the series, and not be 'solved' by a final season leading up to, "They were dead all along, and the afterlife is just pretty whack."

I think, though, that it has more in common with Joss Whedon's short lived show, Dollhouse. Like Dollhouse, it centers around a girl who basically serves as a projection for whatever scenario that her handlers and their customers would like to play out - in this case, she is a ranch hand's daughter. She is slowly gaining a sense of self and memory, but has to disguise this from her handlers, who see her as less than human (in this case, because she is an android). Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is clearly the modern-day Echo, while her friend Thandie Newton, named Maeve in this show, serves as this show's Priya/Sierra.

HBO has a much better track record than Fox with telling a cohesive, ongoing story, and not cancelling all of their genre shows, so I have high hopes for this show, which mixes futuristic android biotech with the Old West, has a player piano that unobtrusively plays classical versions of Nine Inch Nails and SoundGarden, and boasts a killer cast - besides the two already mentioned, we have Anthony Hopkins as the park owner, Ed Harris as a mysterious Man in Black (this one would be right at home in Stephen King's Gunslinger world, although whether he is Roland or Flagg remains to be seen) and Mary from Psych (Jimmi Simpson) really coming into his own with a great part as a white hat cowboy who is finding out how his ethics play out in the Wild West.

My Uninspiring Diabetes Story

Years ago, when my daughter was first diagnosed with diabetes, I thought that I would like to write a book with her about that experience, about how scary it was at first, and about the tricks that we learned to make it easier and get us through. Diabetes was a shock, to say the least. I wasn’t really aware of it, as a phenomenon, before Bella was diagnosed. I mean, of course I’d heard of it, but I wouldn’t swear with absolute certainty that I knew what it was, or what it meant. It was just another of those diseases – something vague, in the way that other, equally life-transforming diseases, are still vague to me, like muscular dystrophy, or sickle cell anemia, or cystic fibrosis. My grandmother had had diabetes, at the end of her life, but to my mind, it was more a symptom of age than a disease in its own right. She also had rheumatoid arthritis, and hearing aids. All of those things seemed equally likely to happen to my 4-year-old daughter, which is to say, not at all likely to happen.

It was just the two of us when she was little, Bella and I. My parents had never been overly cautious, and my dad’s side of the family, in fact, had been under-ly cautious, if there is such a thing. I remember limping around for weeks in sixth grade with a badly sprained ankle after my cousin and I wrecked a motorcycle that we were riding together down the quarter-mile long, cliff-bordering driveway next to the Poudre River, with no parental supervision at all. Protip: if you are the passenger on a motorcycle, and the driver’s hat blows away, just let it go. But no doctors were involved then, or through the resulting weeks that left me sidelined from gym class. 

I was not at all like that with Bella. She was up to date on all shots and doctor’s appointments, and I consulted baby books and preschool development books with all the fervor of the first time single mom, who’d wanted a daughter for approximately the last 15 years. But I took ear infections and flu and strep throat in stride, and as a single mom, the inconvenience of having to ask Grandma to sit, or stay home and make my boss cranky probably took up more of my thoughts than I would care to admit as she battled what seemed to be a severe case of strep throat. 

She woke up sick one day with what seemed like the flu – vomiting, sore throat, generally not having fun. Having had the flu myself many times as a kid, we waited it out for a few days, and then went to the doctor, who gave us some antibiotics and a diagnosis of strep throat, and sent her home. In three days, she was still sick. We went back. They switched antibiotics. Two days later, she was no better. She couldn’t keep anything down, and as I looked at her, I realized with alarm that she’d begun to look like those pictures of the sorts of children you can ‘adopt’ from foreign countries, the ones that only 10 cents a day can feed.  I packed her into the car and drove her to the emergency room. No ambulance because we’d just been to the doctor two days ago. If it was life-threatening, wasn’t this the kind of thing they would have noticed? I thought she was having a reaction to the antibiotics. I’d never had strep throat. I thought it was the worst childhood illness ever. 

At the emergency room, they dashed her right to the back. They drew her blood, and said, “How long has she had diabetes?” I thought they were confused. They packed us up and sent us to Children’s Hospital and we learned about diabetes. I get squeamish at needles. I thought a home care nurse would probably have to come every day, because obviously I didn’t do things like draw blood or give shots. I majored in English. But in a week, I was checking her sugar six times a day and giving shots with each meal and bedtime. All the nurses were nice, and they were comforting, and it was not as bad as we had thought. We made a drawing of Bella so that she could use it to pick her next injection site. We made diabetic ‘puppy chow’ (cornstarch, Rice Chex, peanut butter, powdered sugar) to avoid nighttime lows. We coped. And we knew that a cure was right around the corner.

Now she’s 13, and a cure is still right around the corner. They can transplant islet cells into your pancreas now. They have created a continuous glucose monitor-insulin pump set that is essentially a closed loop, so that all you would have to do is remember to keep it filled with insulin. Then there are all the ways to cope with diabetes. They have blood sugar sniffing dogs, they have diabetes camp to meet other kids your age who have diabetes. The list goes on. But Bella hasn’t seen any of it. Well, she’s seen camp, but only once, because here in Colorado, they only offer guaranteed financial help once. They tell you that you can lower the cost through fundraising, but I couldn’t sell enough Girl Scout cookies to get to Girl Scout camp as a kid, and nothing has changed since then on that front. One thing I never thought, when we started this journey, was that if a cure was found, if there were great coping strategies to deal, that we’d be left out. Our insurance won’t even cover the best test strips, the kind that take less blood, without a fight now. 

I thought that the hard part was learning how to deal with diabetes, and how to someday beat it, but it turns out the hard part is that it’s a fight. It’s a constant fight that never ends, and you’re always underprepared. You fight your kid, because the reality sinks in around age 11 that she’s not going to be done with finger sticks, or having to wear a cyborg implement that the substitute teacher will insist is an MP3 player, or random shooting pain in the night from a surprise injection any time soon. You fight with the insurance because of all the things they drag their feet at covering, and the school because they don’t always follow the doctor’s orders, and most of them really wish that you would just come and do all the things, and the world because if there is a cure, even a potential cure, why isn’t your kid first in line, and yourself, because you can’t make that happen, and you can’t always dash over to school if you work an hour away, and all the other diabetes parents have rearranged their lives to make that happen, at least the good ones, the ones with blogs, and diabetes dogs, the ones who send their kids to camp. It turns out that diabetes is just a way to magnify your own failure. And the sad thing is, this isn’t even the only chronic illness you’ll experience. Husbands get sick. Parents get sick. You will get sick. You thought it was a war you could win, but it was just a series of battles in a larger whole, and you’re not sure you’re on the winning side. 

So, I’m not going to write an inspiring story about diabetes. I’m really giving up hope that there is one to tell. I guess the best you can hope for is to make it through like anything, the same way you do with the 40,000 other problems of life. But I wish people would stop Walking for Diabetes and Biking for Diabetes, and pretending there’s some big happy future where we all find a cure. That makes it sound like a game you can win. But it’s not. It’s just a great big River of Suck, and it keeps running on and on and on.

Sweet and Sour Chicken

This week's challenge was 'food you hated as a kid'. I had to go to my husband for this one, because personally, I continue to hate cauliflower and scallops, and in fact find that there are more tastes that have gone the other way for me - i.e. I used to like them and now do not - dark chocolate, Hostess snowballs, etc. So, after Dan failed to convince me that he really used to hate chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes, we went for Chinese food. That is, I made it - not that we called it a night and went out for Chinese food. That wouldn't have been bad either, but less conducive to cooking blogs.

So, without further ado, here is the recipe that I used:

Sweet and Sour Chicken

Batter
3/4 cup flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
1 cup lager beer

Sauce
1/2 cup chicken stock
3 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp rice vinegar
2 tbsp ketchup
1 tbsp honey
1/2 tsp ginger
1 tsp cornstarch, dissolved in 1 tbsp. cold water

4 chicken breasts, cut into small pieces for dipping
vegetable oil, for deep frying
1/2 cup flour
2 tbsp cashews
1/2 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
6 green onions, chopped
1/2 cup canned pineapple chunks, drained

To make batter, sift flour, baking powder and salt into a large bowl. Make a well in the center, add 1/2 cup of beer and whisk, gradually adding the remaining beer. Let stand 30 minutes.

To make sauce, stir sauce ingredients except cornstarch in saucepan over low heat until honey is melted. Stir in dissolved cornstarch and bring to a simmer. Cook, stirring often, until just thickened.

At this point, the sauce refused to thicken for me, and I put in a little flour. Unfortunately, I put it in too quickly and it formed lumps, which I had to strain out later. Don't do that.

Preheat oven to 200F. Fill a wok halfway with oil and heat it. Place the flour in a bowl. In batches, toss the chicken in the flour, then coat in batter and add to hot oil. Deep fry for about 3 minutes. Transfer the chicken to a baking sheet lined with paper towels and keep warm in the oven.

I didn't have as much cooking oil as I expected, and ended up pan frying instead of deep frying, which took longer. Also, the coating got a little flaky, and some of it fell off. As a result, my husband and I purchased a deep fryer that night, so next time we can do it in style, and hopefully make chicken that tastes just like a Chinese restaurant. Or closer, anyway!

Assuming you deep fried in a pan, pour all but 2 tbsp of oil from the wok and return to high heat. (Or, if you have considerably less oil in the pan, as I did, leave it there) Add the cashews and stir fry 30 seconds. Transfer to baking sheet. Add red pepper and stir fry 2 minutes, or until crisp-tender. Add green onions and pineapple and stir fry 1 minute.

I served the sauce on the side, but put the cashews and veggies in with the chicken, because we wanted Chinese restaurant sweet and sour chicken, which you dip in the sauce. It turned out like this:

 What do you think, readers? If you were forced to cook something now that you hated as a kid, what would it be? How have your tastes changed as you've gotten older? Do you love more things you once hated, or hate more things you once loved?

Cranberry Cookie Crumble - brought to you by the letter C

Today's recipe is not actually one of the 'recipe of the week' posts. Or at least not one of the current ones. I am all caught up on my recipes for this year, but less so on my blogging, so I decided to work my way backwards from last year's list, since they are all new to me too, and having a surprise ingredient/theme is a little like being on Iron Chef and thus makes cooking (more) fun. So, today's ingredient is cranberries.

I just so happened to have some cranberries in the freezer, from Thanksgiving, of course, so I rescued it from the shelf and looked through a few cookbooks in search of the favorite Thanksgiving recipe. I said no to anything too Thanksgiving-y, and to cranberry bread, muffins, scones, etc. - which are similarly ubiquitous and uninspiring. That led me to this recipe, from Nancy Baggett's book Simply Sensational Cookies: She calls it Shortcut Cranberry Crumb Bars. I don't, because for me, at least, it didn't really resolve itself into bars. That leads me to today's cooking lesson.

If you think that what you are cooking may be at all gooey, waxed paper is never, ever a good substitute for foil. I've made this mistake before, but that didn't stop me from making it again today. Unless you enjoy your cookies/crumble with a thin paper shell that is as hard to separate from the final project as the rind on a wheel of brie, leave your ingredients on the counter, hop in your car, and go buy foil. Or grease the pan and go without. Don't use waxed paper. You'll regret it. Having said that, if you consider the finished product a crumble, write off one end that you have to decimate to properly get at the middle, and dig it out slowly with a metal spatula, you can manage to separate it from the paper. It's just not what I would recommend to the more informed reader.

Cranberry Cookie Crumble

2 1/4 cups fresh or frozen (thawed) cranberries, chopped
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup orange marmelade
1 16-18 oz package of refrigerated sugar cookie dough (Bigger is better here. If you can, go for the 18 oz)
1 1/3 cups rolled oats
1/4 cup butter, melted

1 tsp ground cinnamon
confectioner's sugar for garnish

Heat oven to 350F. Line a 9x13" baking pan with foil. Or don't line it and use nonstick spray.

Mix berries, sugar and marmalade in a medium, nonreactive saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring, until it boils. Lower the heat and boil gently for three minutes. Set the filling aside to cool.

Break up the dough into a large mixing bowl. Mix with oats, butter and cinnamon, using mixer on lowest speed. Spread half the mixture into the baking dish. Lay a piece of waxed paper on the mix and press down firmly all over to make your layer nice and even, making sure it covers the entire bottom of the pan. (This was a very good use of waxed paper. I'm going to do this to all my cookie bars in the future.)

Bake about 10 minutes (or 13 to 15, presumably if you don't live in a high altitude where things cook faster) until the dough is just browned at the edges but not baked through. Let cool 15 minutes.

Spread the filling over the dough evenly. Put the rest of the crumb mixture evenly over the top, and pat it down lightly. Bake about 22 minutes longer, or until the filling is bubbly and the crumb top is lightly browned.

Set aside on a wire rack and let cool. Refrigerate for one hour before cutting if you plan to try to make them into cookie bars. Otherwise, why wait? Dig in!

Sprinkle with confectioner's sugar before serving.

52 Weeks of Cooking start now!

Inspired by Reddit's subreddit 52 Weeks of Cooking, I plan to post a new recipe here each week, as my blog lies fallow and sadly neglected. Actually, I plan to post more than one recipe each week, as I have wanted to do the 52 week cooking challenge for quite a while now, and may try to catch up on last year's posts in between waiting for this week's.

This week, the theme is egg. Eggs are not a favorite of mine, although I suspect they may be like ham - something that I hate in theory but love in several forms (chip chop ham, for instance - though if you are not in Pittsburgh, good luck finding a deli counter guy who knows what that is and doesn't give you a really weird look when you ask for it!). I love eggs benedict, and 'dip eggs', which may be sunny-side up, but which I think of as being cooked on the second side just a bit also, all the better to dip your buttery toast into.

After extensive 'research' (looking through cookbooks for a recipe that is not something I do everyday, seems reasonably photogenic, and most of all, tasty), I settled on The Flavor Thesaurus' egg and coconut entry recipe, with a few variations. Here is what I did, in a nutshell:

Coconut Egg Custard

4 eggs - whisk them. 1/2 cup sugar - whisk it in. 1 cup coconut milk - whisk it in. Sprinkle a little flaked coconut in. Put a little more on top.
Bake it in a 300 degree F. oven, in ramekins inside of a cake pan or similar, with ramekins sitting inside of cake pan with water about halfway up the side of the ramekins. (in the cake pan, outside of the ramekins)
Recipe says it takes 40 minutes, but it took me about 50.
When it finishes baking (you can insert clean knife into top of ramekin), sprinkle a little more coconut on top for garnish. My husband liked his with whipped cream, I didn't put any on mine. It's best slightly warm.

Do you have a favorite egg recipe? Or are you, like me, a little on the fence about eggs?

"Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do"...rereading The Great Gatsby

I know, it's been ages since I posted, but I just reread this, and felt like I had something to say about it. So then I thought, 'why not say it on my blog?' And now here I am! Long time no see, blog readers!

When I first read this story, I viewed it as a tragic tale of star-crossed lovers. Poor Gatsby. Poor Daisy. Why couldn't they be together? Why couldn't Daisy have just stayed strong and admitted that she loved him? Coming to it now, in the span of years - well, just a few years longer than the span between Daisy and Gatsby's first and second meetings - now, it seems like a cautionary tale, one about how you can mess up your life when you are young, if you aren't careful, of how sometimes there are no good choices, and sometimes, if you haven't grown up, you make all the wrong decisions grasping after some ideal of what life is supposed to be.

If you haven't read this yet, and you are reading it for pleasure, go away and read it. Don't read this, as it will be full of spoilers. Ok, you've been warned.

When Daisy was 18, and a spoiled rich girl without plans, she met a young, poor officer, and fell in love. But being a rich girl, marrying a poor boy wasn't 'the thing to do', so he told her to wait - after the war, he would make his fortune and come back for her. But she didn't wait. This is where every reviewer I've read online finds fault with her. And I did too, when I was younger. I still hope I would've waited, in her place. But then I think, we're being too modern here, folks. Remember, women's lib came after Daisy. All the women she knew that she identified with - well, they had no marketable skills. They don't even take care of their own children. To deviate from the model she saw before her - dutiful, idle wife dressing up in pretty clothes - well, what would she have done instead? Daisy wasn't a brave girl. When she tried to be, the night before her wedding, she had her 'friend', Jordan, the voice of her place in society, of convention, around to tell her that it would never work out. To wait for Gatsby, while it might have seemed emotionally right, conventionally, it wasn't the right thing to do. She would've lost touch with her friends, her family...and what if he hadn't come back rich? Again, she had no marketable skills. What could she have done to help him? (Arguably, plenty - but not in Daisy's mind! She wasn't reading Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan - the women around her did certain things and the men did others. To think of breaking free from that pattern would not even have occurred to her!)

So Daisy gets married and she hopes for the best. The best doesn't happen. Her husband cheats constantly. Except that he does seem fond of her, in a Don and Betty Draper way (you'll have to excuse me here - I never got beyond the second season of Mad Men - so little time, so many movies on Netflix.) . Life goes on. They meet with friends. They sit out in the garden and birdwatch. He buys her jewelry, takes her to Europe, etc. Life is in some kind of stasis.

THEN - who should appear but her high school boyfriend! Ok, we don't know whether she went to high school, but lets think about this. She was 18 years old back then. Gatsby really was her first love. She did love him a lot back then. If he had asked her to marry him immediately, and not to wait, of course she would have. In her mind, only circumstances ever kept them apart. And now, here he is. Now that 8 years have passed, and she has a daughter and an unhappy marriage. But still, a marriage. What WOULD the right thing to do be here? What would you do, as a grown, married, adult, if your high school boyfriend showed up with the house of your dreams and a scrapbook full of photos of you, and promised to give you everything he couldn't the first time?

This is where Daisy seems so young to me. Because for a moment, this looks like the right thing to do to her. She indulges it. She wants to escape from this more adult life she's been living. Forget the part about them being rich, callous and blase. That may be true. But also, it looks to me like a quarterlife crisis. She is married, and that's kind of rocky. She has a daughter that she's not quite sure what to do with. Can't they just dress up in their high school clothes and pretend to be 18 again? Because that's what she really appears to want to do. When Gatsby asks her to confront her husband, then it is forcefully brought home to her - they AREN'T kids anymore. She must feel some obligation to her family, at least to her daughter, if not to her husband - and then her husband reminds her of all the things they have been through together. Would you leave your husband for your high school boyfriend, at that point? I wouldn't. (Not that I would, in any case - sorry high school boyfriend - you were a nice guy! But it was a LONG time ago, and I kind of love my family - yes, even the big one with the moustache - thankfully NOTHING like Daisy's husband!)

The book seems to present Myrtle, not just as a counterpart love story - Tom cheats, Daisy cheats, etc. - but as - well, what WOULD Daisy's life have been like if she had married Gatsby instead of Tom? Would he have been driven to make all the money? Or would she have become a Myrtle, trapped in poverty, but desperate to live in high society - hating her husband and her circumstances. I feel like, as a modern person, it's hard to have sympathy for Myrtle. You want to say, "Dude, poverty's not so bad. There's a lot of stuff I want right now, but it's not driving me to drink and run into the street or anything." But imagine, for a minute, that the women around you don't work. They don't teach you that you grow up and get a job. They teach you that if you are pretty, you will grow up and get married. Then, your husband will make the money, and you, if you have done everything right, will live this certain kind of life. Everyone you know lives this same kind of life. They go to parties. They fence on the lawn. They have tea. That's what they do. All of your friends do it. They don't work. If you were to go out and get a job - well, silly you - women don't have JOBS - well unless you're a nanny. Or a maid. But we don't associate with those guys. I would argue that, to a girl in Daisy's class in the 1920s, that's as if a modern woman were to say, "It's ok if we're poor. I'll just go work in a sweatshop." That's about the level of social prestige among her friends she would continue to have if she were going out to work. Daisy doesn't know anyone at all who is a family member or peer who works. To her, it just isn't done. In the same way that you or I, we don't say, it's ok if I can't buy my own clothes, I'll just spin some thread and make my own (and if you can do that, I am in total awe of you. But I can't!). It is something that is almost inconceivable to her. While she doesn't appear to have made up her mind to be totally conventional and satisfied with her life (like Jordan), she doesn't want to end up like Myrtle either. Not knowing an alternative, all she really knows how to do is 'go along to get along'.

So, except for her bad driving and total disregard for hit and run accidents, I feel more sympathetic to Daisy this time around. She seems like she's just trying to do the right thing, and she hasn't yet figured out what the right thing is, and she sure doesn't have a good example around to follow, in any of her friends or, presumably, her parents, who pushed her into this life to start with and presumably live in much the same way. And Gatsby - well, I like him -- he's idealistic and sentimental, and honest (if you overlook the mob ties), and he certainly goes for what he wants...but he's kind of a creeper too, isn't he? Unhealthily attached to his teenage years.

 It was interesting, reading it again. What do you think? Was Gatsby and Daisy's love affair tragic, or just an unfortunate series of mistakes? What books have you read again that seemed completely different the second time around?