Weekend Wrap-Up

Weekends that don’t include travel, socializing, or mountains of schoolwork are often cooking bonanzas for me. This weekend included:

1) One improvised rice-vegetable-venison sausage stew.
Highlights:included venison and sweet potatoes (evidence that I’m a black girl with roots in rural Mississippi), had a bunch of curry and cumin (not sure what that’s evidence of), and maybe included too much rice. I dunno – I like the veggies cooked with rice dishes, think of them as hearty pilafs, but they never go quite like they should. Something always gets too mushy, sometimes the veggies, sometimes the rice.
Verdict: Tasty, but the texture was off

2) Crockpot Veggie-Sausage Stew.
Was heavily adapted from this recipe. Based on my cooking choices, you would think it was November in Minnesota, not summer in California.
Highlights: Cooked with my lovely lover boy. Used big-ass chunks of potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, and beans. Accidentally left for too long in the crock pot, but still perfect.
Verdict: Texture and consistency dead on – I think the trick was not trying to do too much with it. So good I actually noted the changes and stuck it in the recipe binder. You know, cuz now I have one of those.

3) Rosemary Bread:
Tried this guy’s recipe for bread. Pretty standard stuff, but different in that he specifies not to preheat the oven to a roaring 400-something degrees. I was doubtful, but I would suggest giving his page a gander as to why he suggests sliding the bread into a cold oven. Now that I’ve done it, I wouldn’t go back unless I was trying to make baguettes (which I would never try to make unless I secretly wanted to make bread pudding).
Highlights: Experimented with adding milk, an egg, more yeast, and some rosemary. Did you see that?! I futzed with the yeast content for a recipe! I’m a crazy woman!
Verdict: De-lish.

4) Earl-Grey Tea Ice Cream
Highlights: Actually followed the recipe exactly. Was not totally successful on the custard making front – I think the egg started scrambling or something, but I took it off the heat when the bits started to appear. Then, when I put it in the old ice cream maker, I watched it churn for twenty minutes to no avail – the canister wasn’t frozen enough and the custard wasn’t cold enough. Good news is that throwing the canister back in the freezer for about seven hours (while the custard mixture hung out in the fridge continuing to chill) worked just fine.
Verdict: This shit is good. I should have just made a gallon of this on Friday and skipped all the other stuff.

hot, dark, salty shame

Since starting grad school, I have had more time (in comparison to teaching at least) and less money. For me, this meant having both the opportunity and the impetus to delve into cooking. Nothing crazy – no maniacal tramps through entire cookbooks or anything, no delicate souffles or complicated truffle-oil infused what-nots – mostly savory, hearty, southern fare. Lots of beans, cabbage, and cheap cuts of meat. Through all this I’ve tried to buy ingredients only – no bread just wheat and yeast, no jars of sauce, just canned tomatoes and spices and such. I love it – it’s fun and delicious and even when it’s not delicious, the self-righteousness tastes good enough to make up for it. For some reason, everything I cook ends up either a green, muted red, or beige. And has garlic.

I buy organic when the price and my bank account agree, and I go to farmer’s markets and pick up mysterious “heritage” vegetables sometimes. I’m a dilettante foodie.

But then there is my other life. My life where my cravings drive me to the processed and the improbably hued. Where all I want are these.

Oh heavens – I mean really. As much as I love me some artisanal cheese with home-baked wheat bread, I would gleefully run past a goat herder to put those in my face. I don’t know what’s in them, but they are the one thing I eat without even beginning to consider reading the ingredients list. And let me be clear – I’m talking about nachos with the processed cheese product, not nachos with melted chedder or pepper jack or anything else recognizable as cheese before 1963.

There is nothing deep or relevatory about this entry. I just mostly like eating whole and healthy, but I also love nachos that you buy in a bowling alley or movie theater.

The Ever-Lurker

I moved to California a bit less than two years ago to start my new life as a grad student – which also meant starting my new life as someone who spends a hell of a lot of time online. Before I even came out here, I consumed a lot of my news through newsvine (which recently seemed to descend into some sort of hellish netherworld of trolldom, at least to my eyes) and was both compelled and repulsed by the user comments. I mean, that’s the draw of newsvine and lots more such sites – you not only get information, but you get to interact with a bunch of people. You get to see how lots of your compatriots see the world – it’s fascinating stuff to the dilletante sociologist.

But lots of people don’t. People like myself show up, lurk, enjoy themselves, and then let themselves out through the back. In some article (I can’t find the damn site), the writer noted that a majority of participants in the multiplayer-role-world-of-halo-type-action don’t actually engage in online play in the total community. Instead they either play the computer or only each other. So there are lurkers all over, and the question is: if commenting and forming relationships is so awesome, why do so many of us lurk? Now, the article that I mentioned sans citation is one about trolls, and yes, trolls are a problem and a half – but that’s not where this is going.

Beyond the ever present threat that a committed asshole will pull you into a deathspiral of a conversation, there is the interesting phenomena of community. Communities have languages and ways of doing things. When a person joins a community in real time (think first day in a new school), they start by hanging back and being quiet and eventually they find out how things are done and they start doing them too. If they don’t like how things are done generally, they can find their own niche of peeps (think Magic/theater kids table in the cafeteria) where they do like how things are done.

The thing about commenting on blogs is that gaining fluency in the local way of doing things takes much more effort. There is nowhere to pull someone aside and ask “so . . . what is _____ all about? what do you mean by HAES?” People’s irritation with such behavior is what leads to the creation of lengthy FAQ pages. These are very good ideas, but they make it clear to the reader that the community has little time and interest for n00bs who don’t invest time and energy in figuring out what’s up. The things is though – this is very very different from how people generally join communities. Normally they join as apprentices to someone who is an expert (the newbie who tags along with their experienced friend) or they scatter their inquiries among their new peers in real time (pulling aside a coworker “Where do I find the ____” pulling aside another coworker “How do I ____”). But online you can’t really pull people aside casually.

Putting that aside – once the reader figures out how things happen in that little sector of cyberspace, they have little recourse to shift and change it. Comments are an open forum. There aren’t places they can carve out (like the parking lot or the smoking lounge). This leaves the sub-communities of readers always exposed. This may be good in the short term for discourse, but with nowhere to retreat to, dissenting voices have little opportunity to strengthen.

I don’t have a solution to all this. I’m an inveterate lurker, and what did I do? Started my own little blog. I don’t have solutions, but then I’m not certain that it’s a problem. Lurkers are just a symptom of the limitations of online discourse. That there are limitations to online discourse is a given – there are limitations and affordances in all forums – rather than worrying about fixing those limitations, I think that exploring and understanding them is probably a better use of time.