Monday night dinner

This week's Monday Night Dinner with friends -

wasabi peas, nori strips, and rice crackers
Miso Soup (making dashi is ridiculously easy, particularly compared to making chicken broth let alone beef or pork broth)
Teriyaki Mahi Mahi
Broccoli in Garlic Sauce
Stir fried Miso Eggplant
rice
banana chocolate chip nut muffins

Archipelago is too pretty a word to describe Los Angeles

A peaceful walk up Arizona Ave. tree lined and wide of sidewalk, a few pedestrians on the street and dogs lolling in the yards.

This bus stop along a four lane road with a few feet between traffic and bench, no shade or shelter.

This bus stop along a four lane road next to an offramp from the highway as cars go past at highway speeds, crouching against a 7' painted concrete wall in the dust and broken glass beneath scraggly bushes.

The Getty Center's loveliness, the stone, the austere modernism, the so visibly careful planning, the delightful garden of paths and flowers.

This bus stop waiting with tourists and students, more perhaps than usual because of school vacation, teens alone and in small groups. Watching cars come out of the parking lot, speed off.

This bus stop alone not connected to anything by sidewalks it is only a transfer point by the side of the road from one bus to another, or perhaps to walk into the luxury hotel on a hill by the side of the highway. There is no safe way to access this spot but by car or bus.

A child asleep on my back as we walk home.

Unbranded or not, here we come

I want to live in an unbranded world. Nothing to sell and no one trying to sell it. Where my daughter can grow up and follow her interests and not be told she can only be a princess. I want to live in fellowship with others in a big city networked across cultures and dreams. There's something being sold to a toddler who can't know better, someone getting rich off child psychology. The supermarket is a gauntlet with dangers at eye level, not my eye level but hers and what an enormous amount of disrespect this business must have for me to arrange it like so. I can throw out the TV and unpackage our foods and plan days and years around crafts out of books from the '70s from the library and her friends and mine will still be branded and cultured and we want to keep up and we want to be cool and we'll follow the brands and the trends and the fads and we won't have to buy but we'll want to.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast
lunch: cheesy potato
dinner: one pan baked ziti and brownies

Gourmet before gourmand

I am a picky eater. I try to hide it these days, and to overcome it by will, particularly in social or public settings, but given my own devices I will have, as I did today, a cheesy potato for lunch, or ramen, or pasta with plain tomato meat sauce. I'm much less picky than when I was a child. I have a running list of foods that I recall rejecting entirely as a kid that I now eat, sometimes with gusto. Tomatoes, pickles, olives, eggs, mushrooms, cheese, and broccoli. Thinking about these foods now makes me wonder how I could ever have not liked them.

I like to cook. I quite consciously chose cooking as a hobby in my first apartment out of college, to control what I ate, rather than cede that control to my roommate, and for the frugality of it, for cooking was a one-two wallet saving punch of keeping my food bills down and my entertainment budget low. I enjoyed cooking before that, but trace my real interest and skill at putting together a tasty dinner for two or three people, with something for leftovers at work the next day, to that period just after college.

I would like to think that I've improved as a cook since then. I'm more conscious of the presentation of food, and of balancing a meal between heavy and light, salty and sweet. I'm much more conscious of the origins of my food, the humaneness of the care of the animals who provide my meat, the ways the land on which my food is grown is kept healthy, or not. I have a substantially larger repertoire of dishes than in those first months of cooking dinners on a regular basis, both drawn from my shelves of cookbooks and in the back of my head from repeated experience. I can saute, grill, broil, and char with a blowtorch, make omelettes, get popovers to rise, cut perfect 1/8" cubes of carrot or potato and know when I need to do so (not often), stock a fridge, make chicken stock without getting every pot in the kitchen greasy, and find a ripe peach by its smell. I can host a dinner for 10 (with a little struggle) and have a meal for two or three people, with something for leftovers at work the next day, on the table every night of the week.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: rotibun awesomeness
lunch: misc leftovers
dinner: wonderful french onion soup and beef bourguignon at Le Petite Cafe

Why own books

When moving to Los Angeles, I got rid of about half my books, things I hadn't read in years. We had gotten into a sort of frenzy of discarding material goods, thinking about the approximately dollar-per-pound that it would cost to ship things across the country. We threw away or donated shelves and shelves of books, bags of clothes that had fallen out of rotation, boxes of memorabilia and tchotchkes sitting in the basement.

Too many books. Becca and I took a Great Books program together in college and not only still had copies of some of those classics, but still had doubles. Out went the Aeneid, the Odyssey, Dante. Out went garage sale purchases of modern fiction, music history, beadmaking guides, few of which I had ever actually read. We went from bookshelves in every room and boxes in the basement to two large shelves worth, and those not even full.

Since then, I've occasionally felt a loss out of proportion to the books as mere material things. Particularly the books that I had read, these were an externalized part of my memory. I have tried to abide by an informal rule in the past couple years to only buy books I have already read. Buying books on recommendation, on spec, resulted in the giant piles of unread books we had around the house, and hid the gems from my past that contain ideas that had become a part of myself. I have a bookshelf of science fiction, much of it first read when I was a teenager, and am not only able to pick up a book and glance at a favorite passage as the fancy strikes, but I can glance across the spines and remember who I was and, intellectually, where I come from, at least in part.

Being a heavy library user, and consumer of more ephemeral media like newspapers, magazines, websites, podcasts, TV, and movies even at the peak of my book collection, those spines represented only a small fragment of the ideas flowing into my life (from media. Forget trying to create physical representations of  all the conversations I draw intellectual sustenance from). But they are something. A persistent, visual, neat reminder of my books, emphasis on the "my". I wish I had a similarly persistent externalized memory of the rest of my intellectual environment.

It would be the reverse of that scene in The Neverending Story II in which the little boy main character, under the sway of the evil witch (Oh, gender roles of Hollywood! Oh, humanity!), trades wishes for memories, and as each wish is made a memory leaves him and turns into a giant swirly marble, collecting in the witch's crystal ball.

I want for myself those marbles, each marked with a memory, that I can run my fingers through, turn over, sort into piles, put on shelves, juggle and put in a pocket. Barring that, I'll own books.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: toast with butter and honey
lunch: hot dog fried rice
dinner: spaghetti and meat sauce, with friends
dessert: chocolate walnut banana bread

A big box of tools

In anticipation of this summer's Tinkering School camp that I'm involved with at the reDiscover Center, I am acquiring tools, materials, and books to help me teach seven to nine year olds about making stuff. Right now, I'm in a kick about woodworking. Band saws and drill presses are out, but I've found a few books about teaching carpentry to kids that encourages the use of hand tools and real wood (as well as a ton of books that are more about crafts and more on the popsicle stick and white glue level). The best of these so far is Woodworking with Kids, by Richard Starr, from around 1980. He recommends things like having the kids mark where they want to cut their 2x4, clamp down the wood, pick out the saw, then have an adult start the cut to the point where the blade is safely in the groove. On his advice I went to a couple garage sales this weekend looking for clamps, saws, hammers (8 oz and 12 oz the better for little hands to swing), and t-squares. So now I have a big box of tools, none of them more expensive than a dollar, that are going need some scrubbing, derusting, and sharpening. What fun!

The age of my self-image

I'm often surprised when I look in mirrors. Not every time, not typical mirror watching, the fogged up mirror I wipe to shave or holding Miriam and pointing to the dada in the reflection off a car window. But sustained mirror looking, like at the barber's, or surprise mirror glances in an elevator or passing shop window. I am surprised at how bad my posture looks, or how bald I really am. The surprise comes from the disconnect between my actual image and my self-image. There is an inherent bias towards the past to in self-images. I have iconic photos of myself, photos I remember triply: the occasion, the image, and memories of looking at the image. All of these are past, some a decade or more past. Looking at the kid pictures and the teenage pictures, the college pictures, I recognize myself in the image but don't identify with it. But the wedding photos look like who I think I am now, who I see when I close my eyes or am chatting with an acquaintance and imagining what I look like to my conversational partner. Which is not what I actually look like. Close, but five years fewer moles and pores and wrinkles.

Which is in contrast to the long running joke that I've been 30-something in outlook and demeanor for at least that long.