Thought That Came Unbidden

I can sort of understand what compelled Julie Powell to try to cook her way through Mastering The Art of French Cooking but only sort of. I have no desire to either cook or eat lobster, or to debone a duck. Besides, I’m afflicted with my own version of her quest: to see if I can bake my way through Baking with Julia.

Granted, not all of the recipes in BWJ are actually by Julia Child. In fact, most of them are specialties of the guest bakers she had on her PBS show of the same name.

It’s taking me a while, though, to work my way through the book as I’m hampered by two major factors: a desire to skip the heart attack in my 40s and a lack of willing eating audience.

But, I have found at least one dish popular with the diners I have access to: the galette.

A galette is a simple dough made quickly and meant to be used either the same day or the next morning. It can be used for either savory or sweet filling.

As it’s finally fresh berry season here in the Eastern U.S., I’ve been doing a lot of berry galettes lately. This weekend, I thought I’d try a savory, breakfast specific, galette with eggs and sausage.

It kind of exploded. Despite this, it was tasty.

Galette dough: Baking with Julia Savor the Joys of Baking with America’s Best Bakers by Dorie Greenspan, pp. 371-372

Ingredients

• 3 tablespoons sour cream (or yogurt or buttermilk)
• 1/3 cup (approximately) ice water
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup yellow cornmeal
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 7 tablespoons unsalted butter (cold), cut into 6-8 pieces

Equipment

• Small mixing bowl
• Large mixing bowl
• Fork
• Sharp knife
• Measuring devices: Liquid measuring cup; 1 cup dry measure, 1/4 cup dry measure, tablespoon, teaspoon, 1/2 teaspoon.
• Pastry blender
• Plastic wrap, aluminum foil, or waxed paper

Instructions

Note: Dough must chill at least two hours before it can be used.

1. Stir the sour cream and ice water together in a small bowl and set aside.
2. Put the flour, cornmeal, sugar, and salt in a large bowl and stir with a fork to mix.
3. Drop the butter pieces into the bowl, tossing them once or twice just to coat them with flour.
4. With a pastry blender work the butter intto the flour aiming for pieces that range in size from bread crumbs to small peas. The smaller pieces will make the dough tender. The larger onces will make it flaky.
5. Sprinkle the cold sour cream and water mixture over the dough 1 tablespoon at a time, tossing with a fork to distribute evenly. After you’ve added all of the mixture the dough should be moist enough to stick together when pressed.
6. Divide the dough in half, wrapping each half separately, and press into a disc.
7. Chill for at least 2 hours before attempting to use.

Makes enough for two 8-inch galettes.

Berry galette, IBID, pg. 377

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups fresh berries, rinsed and drained
• 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter (cold)
• 1 to 2 cups flour (for rolling)
• Pastry brush
• 1 tablespoon honey (optional)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400degF.
2. Remove the galette from the refrigerator and unwrap. The dough will be sticky so liberally flour your work surface to keep the dough from tearing.
3. Roll disc evenly to roughly an 11 inch diameter (about 1/4 inch thick)
4. Place drained berries in the middle of the dough circle.
5. Cut the 1 tablespoon butter into small pieces and dot around the berry filling.
6. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon sugar and drizzle honey (optional) over berries.
7. Fold the edges of the dough over the filling so that the resulting dough circle is roughly 8 inches in diameter. This is a loose, soft dough so the edges will pleat naturally and rustically as befits the dish’s origins.
8. Use the pastry brush to dampen the edges of the folded dough with water.
9. Sprinkle 1 teaspoon sugar on dampened dough.
10. Bake for 20-35 minutes or until dough is golden brown.

For best results, eat the same day.

And yes, two galettes have 1/4 pound + 1 tablespoon of butter in them. See what I mean about skipping the heart attack in my 40s?

There is more than a little irony in the fact that I consider myself a catholic consumer of texts both written and visual and I consider myself a feminist, and yet I find women’s stories to be largely uninteresting.

This lack of interest isn’t universal. I’ve found a quite a few stories, novels like Terry Pratchett’s excellent series about budding witch Tiffany Aching (Wee Free Men, Hat Full of Sky, and The Wintersmith), or like Kelley Eskridge’s Solitaire, or Tanya Huff’s Valor series, to name a few, both riveting and well constructed. But mostly, stories about women’s experiences usually dissatisfy, and this dissatisfaction is something I’ve struggled with for a number of years. But I’ve finally realized why.

For the most part, stories about men feature characters who do things. They solve crimes¹. They disrupt international terror rings². They tame the wild west³, get the cattle to market⁴, and make the farm work⁵. They fly experimental, AI controlled fighter planes⁶. They lead the free world⁷, explore space⁸, score the winning goal bringing honor back to their school or town⁹, and figure out how to save the company¹⁰.

Stories about women feature characters who spend a lot of time worrying about, trying to repair, or trying to establish relationships with men. Women twist themselves into pretzels to get men interested in relationships. They wonder why men don’t call. They wonder if they should call. They wonder if they called too often, or not often enough. They try to figure out how they can keep the man they’re already in a relationship with interested. They cry over what went wrong with the relationship they have with a man. They wonder if they’re good enough for the man that’s interested in them. They try to change a man they’re interested in. They despair when he won’t change. They struggle with attraction to the “bad boy” when they think they should be interested in the “good, stable guy.”

But for all the celluloid and paper and ink devoted to telling these stories, for all the expenditure of emotional energy, women don’t actually do very much. And even when a woman does things – like running the dive bar on the wrong side of town while making a little extra cash smuggling or catching bail jumpers¹¹, or finding the artifact that turns her into a supernatural being with extraordinary power¹², or serving as a test pilot in one of the Navy’s most elite fighter jet units¹³ – there’s always a man lurking in the background. There’s always the shadow of a relationship around to complicate things, to tell our heroine in either an overt or subtle way that if she keeps acting the way she’s been acting that relationship will either fail or never come to fruition.

One area where this isn’t true, where women do and dare, succeed and fail and have adventures that might “normally” feature a male lead character is science fiction. Military science fiction, space exploration, xenobiology, post-apocalyptic colonization: all of these are sci-fi sub genres in which women play key roles that require them to actually do rather than simply nurture and obsess. But even in sci-fi this isn’t always accepted. Just look at all the fuss around the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Some of the fanboys weren’t happy that the part of Starbuck, an ace pilot, hard drinker, and dare devil with no interest in settling down changed sexes from male to female in the new version.

What stuns me, though, about the limited roles given to women in these fictional texts is that it’s no longer just an issue of overall culture creating an atmosphere in which a contemporary story with a female lead that acts would be unthinkable. Nor is it just that men are the primary creators of texts and they, naturally, write stories about characters who look like and talk like their authors.

No, what stuns me is that women create the bulk of these texts in which female lead characters do nothing but obsess about their relationships. And while it’s true that women create quite a good chunk of the texts in which female lead characters do and strive, these stories don’t represent the bulk of what is written about and for female characters.

Maybe it’s because I’m disconnected from “the average female experience” by my orientation. Or maybe it’s that I’m disconnected from the fixation on relationships because my definition of friendship and loyalty are markedly out of step with modern times.

Or maybe it’s because women really don’t want to do anything but manage their interpersonal relationships.

Regardless of why, it saddens me that if I want to see or read about characters that do something, anything, by and large I will be seeing or reading about men.

Text references

1. Anything by Raymond Chandler or in the film noir genre
2. Bond, James Bond, among many others
3. See: Oater, printed or on film
4. Ibid
5. Ibid
6. Stealth (film)
7. The American President (film) plus just about anything with Jimmy Stewart in it.
8. Star Trek, Star Wars, among others
9. Sports movies are too numerous to mention.
10. Really? You want a reference for this too? How about Wall Street (film)
11. Barb Wire (flim)
12. Witchblade (comic and TV series)
13. Stealth…again

Last week, not quite four months to the day before my forty-first birthday, I got braces. Just a glance at my teeth and the reason why I need braces wouldn’t be obvious. Even a closer look, one that showed you the slight clipping of my right front tooth behind my left front tooth, what dentists in the U.S. call number 8 and number 9, and it still wouldn’t be obvious why I’m spending an obscene amount of money and volunteering for a year or more of periodic dental pain. Nor would it be obvious why I’m happy to be able to do those things.

Ten years ago today I took a header down a set of concrete stairs. Since no one actually saw me do it and I still can’t remember a thing about the incident, I have only speculation to rely upon. Speculation says that I tripped somehow, took the wrought iron railing across my upper teeth and immediately blacked out from the pain, went limp and slid down the concrete steps on my face.

The perfect dentition I’d been born with, the perfect dentition that I’d managed to protect through 18 years of fast pitch softball, ruined in less than a minute. And yet, I’d still say that I’m lucky.

The orthodontia I had to have after the accident wasn’t fun, or complete obviously. Relearning how to chew and eating everything with a knife and fork for upwards of a year wasn’t the best experience I could ever have hoped to have. Not feeling comfortable enough with my mouth to eat an apple like a normal person for over three years was also not how I would have chosen to spend my time. Yet, I wouldn’t trade those experiences in for anything. Why?

Quite simply: I am lucky to be alive.

The emergency room doctor who treated me expressed astonishment that I hadn’t broken my nose and in the same breath told me how lucky I was that I hadn’t snapped my neck either. An amazing, awesome number of possibilities, ranging from full body paralysis to death, await you if you break your neck in just the wrong place. Yet, I managed to walk, albeit slowly, up those same stairs later that day and sit down on my couch.

Tens years later and despite life’s daily frustrations, despite the non-profit management follies that often fill me up to my back teeth with frustration and suppressed rage, despite my natural bent to see the dark cloud around the sliver lining, I relish every single minute I’ve had in the past 10 years and I’m thankful for every one I may have in the future.

Baseball always makes me think of summer, of the quintessential American experience of green grass, the murmuring of the crowd punctuated by the shrieks of happy children all with the smell of grilling meat backed by the fleeting hoppy undertone of beer floats through the air.

Normally it takes at least until Memorial Day for that image to really fill in, like an old tube TV warming up to the point where the picture is being received at full strength. Given that we had three days this year in the first week in April in DC that were +25degF above average, I’m not surprised I’m already seeing that picture in full color complete with sounds and smells.

And now that baseball season is fully under way (did we start in Japan again this year? wait, “opening day” was one game? at night? on a Sunday? WTF?), I thought I’d take a stab at explaining the complicated math behind how a lifelong fan roots for the season to proceed.

Most people who follow a sport are fans of a specific team, and in any given contest where that team is playing, a fan will always hope that their team wins. In baseball, for me, this team is the New York Yankees, and it has always been the New York Yankees. Why is fairly simple.

It doesn’t have anything to do with back-to-back-to-back World Series wins from 1998 to 2000 as some bitter Red Sox fan accused me of in September 2001 as we strode past vendors selling “Yankees Suck!” t-shirts outside Fenway where the Red Sox were getting ready to play the Texas Rangers.

It doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the baseball they play, which is and has been admittedly amazing. It doesn’t have anything do with the team’s history or uniforms or the fact that they beat the crap out of my step-father’s beloved Dodgers in the 1978 championship.

No, it has to do with the simple fact that my aunt and my uncle rooted for the Yankees when I was a kid. And if they Yankees were good enough for them, they were good enough for me. Why they rooted for the Yankees probably has a lot to do with Washington DC’s repeated abandonment by the Senators and the fact that the only other American league alternative wasthe Baltimore Orioles (nee the St. Louis Browns), but that’s a completely different story.

This is how the fan calculus begins: You root for your team. Which means, manifestly, you are rooting against anyone who is playing your team. And its in the rooting against that things get complicated.

Rivalries, natural or media created, exist in all sports. Yankees vs. Red Sox, Cubs vs. Atlanta, Washington Redskins vs. Dallas Cowboys, Boston Celtics vs. LA Lakers, New York Knicks vs. Washington Bullets, Celtic vs. Rangers, Manchester United vs. everyone: the sport is immaterial. Because rivalries exist, this means that as a dedicated fan of a particular team, there are times when you will root against another team.

To put it another way, you’re rooting for whomever is playing your rival at that time. So, as a Yankee fan, I’m rooting for the Yankees and for whatever team is playing the Red Sox. It’s these rivalries that inform the rest of the complicated math any fan does, ranking each team in proximity of loathing to the team you follow.

Take the American League: 14 teams spread across three divisions, and I can tell you exactly who I’d root for in any given match up just based on a team’s history against “my” team, that team’s record in the post-season, the team’s overall relevance to the game of baseball as a whole, and, honestly, how big a team’s reputation is for being, corporately, assholes.

In an Oakland A’s vs. LA Angels match-up, for example, the fan calculus works like this: Oakland…long history as an incubator team for a lot of good players. Scrappy, plays good, honest baseball. As recently as 5 years ago you could get really good seats to a mid-week day game for under $20 a piece in Oakland. LA Angels…Is that the Los Angeles Angels who used to be the California Angels? No, wait, they’re the Los Angeles Angels at Anaheim now. Yeah, corporately the name change puts them well into the asshole category. Plus, their stadium is more of an amusement park than a stadium which means despite recent play-off appearances, neither the team nor the team’s fans take the game seriously.

Yep, it calculates out to rooting for Oakland.

It seems hard but when you’ve been doing it for 30+ years, it’s almost like breathing.

The calculus gets strange and complicated when you have loyalties across league lines. TGF is a life-long Cubs fan and over the years I’ve grown to know and have deep affection for the Cubbies. Sports-wise, the worst thing that could ever happen to us is a Yankees/Cubs World Series. I also, for reasons I can’t quite explain, have a deep affection for both the Philadelphia Phillies and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Because DC is now favored with a National league team, and because two of the other teams I’d care to see succeed are in the same league, there are several times a season when I am, as I have been this week, conflicted about which team I’d like to see victorious.

The great thing about rooting for a sports team, though, no matter what their reputation, no matter how much they might lean toward choking in the end, any team can beat any other team on any given day^.*

^* Variously attributed to Yogi Berra and some NFL commissioner I couldn’t be bothered to look up his name (what, it’s football…I really don’t care.)

I need a new job. Because I need a new job, I’ve been slowly, surely, digging my way back into the want ads. Unfortunately, not much has changed during my most recent stint in the non-profit ghetto.

Employers still seem to want to hire across discipline lines and they place ads that reflect this, like this one from Washingtonpostjobs.com:

Summary: The manager of graphic and Web design will report directly to the vice president of public affairs and will work with all departments such as media outreach, education and marketing, membership, public affairs and legislative affairs. He or she will provide exceptional and professional print designs for all external and internal communications from conceptualization to completion. This individual will be in charge of design and appearance of 15+ Web sites, which include issue-specific and consumer-related sites. The ability to successfully manage dozens of open projects and ensuring timely and accurate delivery is a must.

There are a couple of things misleading about this description, one of which is the title. “Manager” implies just that, management of other staff actually undertaking tasks. It’s reasonable to expect a Manager to have at least a vague idea of standards and practices in the various disciplines she’s overseeing. But this isn’t really a management position, it’s an implementation position.

“He or she will provide exceptional and professional print designs for all external and internal communications from conceptualization to completion” is the sentence that tells you that this person will actually be working with Adobe InDesign or Quark Express to layout print publications as well as all of the ancillary tasks – like getting bids from printers, choosing paper, arranging for print runs – that go along with print materials. This isn’t just a print designer job, though. No, these people want someone multi talented to “…be in charge of design and appearance of 15+ Web sites…,” responsibilities which use a completely different skillset than the one used by a print designer.

The presence of both of these responsibilities in the same job description tells me one of two things: either they have two full-time jobs but only want to pay one salary, or they have no idea what skills are required for either set of responsibilities. And truthfully, no matter how much I need a new job, I’m entirely too old for either of those possibilities.

The other thing I’m too old for is the ridiculous double standard of job hunting: you as the candidate have to be not only highly qualified but you have to be creative, original, and memorable with your cover letter and resume. Oh, and you have to be letter perfect while you’re doing it. But while you’re being letter perfect, potential employers get way with things like “Candidate will be in charges of new medias stratergies.”

I know it’s useless, particularly in this economy, to gripe about double standards in the employment game, but how do you expect me to take you seriously when you can’t even proofread your own ad? And I don’t want to hear any bull shit about transcription errors, either; all online job sites allow the employers to post their own ads directly so any mistakes are a direct result of inattention in the employer’s shop. But none of this is really what I’ve been concentrating on lately.

One of the side effects of working in the non-profit ghetto is that my “professional” wardrobe largely consists of jeans and thermal overshirts. It’s kind of hard, after all, when you pay your employees at least 20% below market rate to expect them to come to work in $200 suits and $65 shirts every day.

But since I’ve got a formal event to go to in a couple of weeks, and since I need to get out in the world and start interviewing for a better quality job, I went out and bought a suit. None of this short jacket, no real pockets crap. No, an actual, honest to goodness suit, sadly not the one pictured. You’d think in as conservative and overdressed a town as DC it would be fairly easy to buy a suit. While it wasn’t as hard as I expected, it was a learning experience.

My buying trip started at Jos. A Bank, a men’s clothier with a fairly long history. Even though its current incarnation only goes back to 1905, one of the founding members of Bank is related to the tailor who sewed Lincoln’s assassination coat (OK, so the tailor thought it was just going to be another night at the theater).

Unfortunately, the staff at Jos. A. Bank isn’t quite equipped to handle a woman buying for herself. That is the only thing I can conclude based on the absolute lack of service I got in the 25 minutes I wandered around the store. It didn’t take me much longer than that to find a retailer willing to treat my needs seriously. I’m also fairly lucky in that stature wise clothes for an average American man fit me. And now, thanks to a friendly salesman, I know what size suit I need to buy, it will be a lot easier for me in the future when I need to find decently looking business or formal clothes.