Home sweet Twins

I went a little out of budget today getting gosh gifts for the folks I love back home. And then bought $30 on apples to make cran-applesauce. Which is what I'm doing right now, listening to Taylor Swift. About JDate...I've been dissapointed. I'm used to getting chased. But I'm in Blairstown, not Baltimore (despite still being the #1 Baltimore hipster on Google). My desires are pretty specific (I'll e-mail you what's on my profile, mama!), and the population of Jews is sparse. However, I'm willing to wait, and seek, and go on dates. And I know the guys must be afraid of rejection, but I find it really easy to say "yes!" Seriously, I'll give almost anyone a first date! Gas is cheap and my hopes are high! Come on, Jews of Jersey, what's taking you?

How many blueberries?

I survived my first foray into canning as an adult a few weeks ago. My co-worker/friend Christine and I, along with fellow co-worker Nancy, all picked wild blueberries in some harrowing mosquitoes off of the Appalachian Trail. I also canned some Shiro plums (read: the very pretty bright-yellow Japanese variety) with lemon. More pectin as thickener next time, but overall it was a very pleasing experience. We picked for 4.5 hours, yielding 18 jars of what I am calling "Wild Organic Free-Range Blueberry Jam" from the hills of the Delaware River Valley. Truly a feat considering how tiny the wild berries were, I think. I also deemed it was time this month to invest in a new climbing harness, a tent, sleeping bag, and pad of my own. I paid all of this month's bills already, and October will be lean for me to save up for my Association for Experiential Education conference in the beginning of November, which will be around $750, we think.

Zero to jam in twelve minutes.

Baltimore has been drop-dead sexy this week. Everything is in bloom, everyone's shed their ugly clunky boots for sexy strappy sandals and peep-toes. The weather has been great for the dumpster collective and my room-mate, Gabriella, brought home a bunch of blackberries. I added a pouch of cherry vegetarian gel mix, some bueberries, strawberries, pomegranite juice, and some domino organic sugar (my roommate and I are addicted to the stuff), seived those blackberries and threw it in a jar, this morning I woke up and I gotta say Gab and I are pretty damn excited about the stuff. If you've never tried Domino organic sugar, you should give it a go. It's pretty, a pale parchment color, and tastes not like chemical sweeteners but instead like something that did come from a sugar cane (amazing!). It's not that much more costly than regular sugar, and I find that I can use less of it since it adds a little flavor of its own, you don't want to make things sickeningly sweet with it, you want to find a balance. Anyway, that's my product recommendation of the day: Organic Domino Unbleached Sugar. I finally am starting to feel optimistic--I really think that it will all work out, that if I keep applying to these jobs, I'll get enough call-backs and interviews to really find a place for myself for the next year. And I gotta say that I am really looking forward to working some place other than MICA, to learn about a new campus culture and group of students. Not to mention to find a new city to spread my wings in.

Domestic drudgery? I think not.

Photos of yesterday's domestic deliciousness with Sima, and photos of my lovely curtains in a bargain-bin cotton-lycra uhpolstery fabric my mom found at JoAnn's. If you know me, you know that this moddish floral print is myself in textile form. And the Pink Lady organic apples at Whole Foods were on sale and are AMAZING (fresh from Washington). Enjoy!

Betty Page-Crocker

I've been able to cook more in the past two days than I did all the rest of second semester in my apartment in the Commons. It's definitley a time issue, but it's not just that. I didn't feel the need to cook as much because I got the face-time and emotional appreciation from my residents and socializing with them, not, like in previous semesters, from my classmates who I fed. Which, once again, goes back to oxytocin thing. Why do I produce oxytocin when I cook? Is it because it reminds me of being close to my mom, and my body remembers that cooking = feeling loved? It's funny that after a whole semester thinking about work, art, love, cooking, and domesticity, I find myself equally as distant from any sort of solution. After all, as the wonderful Kristine Woods always says, you have to have an opinion in your art, you have to have a point of view. If you're making art that doesn't offend anyone, then it's probably not resonating super-strong with anyone either. I feel really strongly about feeding people, about empowering people with information, about being nurturing and enabling. And part of that may be because I was raised as a girl in America, but I'm good at it, and I love it. And it just shows how much an inherent part of myself feeding and nurturing people is, that even now that I don't have any obligations to my old residents, and there's no reason for me to feed my room-mates, I do. I can't NOT do these things. Go figure.

Today was amazing.

Last night on a late-night adventure to the Wal-Mart in Port Covington, Baltimore, the roomies and I got some neccessities, food, etc., and I went ahead and purchased the lovely Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins rom-com I.Q. (1994). I started watching it last night, fell asleep, and finished it this morning with freshly made dried-cherry chocolate-chip popular muffins (variation on the typical Betty Crocker 1969 popular muffins recipe, of my own creation). Once I finally got rolling, some scrambled eggs and another muffin later, and got the roommates up and running, we took a long-awaited trip to Fells Point, in Baltimore. We took the 13 bus all the way to Wolfe and Fleet Streets, where we were just a couple blocks from our final destinations. Bought cheap bread at H&S bakery outlet, got cilantro and queso fresco at a mexican market, bought fresh tortillas at a tortilleria. It was pretty amazing, there was a lot of bonding with the new girls. I also got a pack of rainbow light Nat Shermans for special occasions. They're lovely, really beautiful, wonderfully packaged. The girls are pretty open, and that's great for me. The day was full of inside-jokes, insights and explainations, and getting out of the MICA bubble. We finished up as the sun went down, Dominique took tons of photos, Ally ogled the mexicanos. A great day all-in-all, if not particularly productive. But, now that I was dooced, I'm not really as obliged to others. I get to be myself for myself. And while that's really nice right now, I can't say I don't miss my residents.

Well-adjusted? who?

I'm doing some more packing, then heading back to the new place for a coffee-doughnut-Scrabble-Top Gun date. Moving sucks, but the new Sonic, playing Zelda, all these things pretty much rock my socks. I'm going to be okay. Of course, the more time that passes, the less consequence my actions have, the less it makes sense me resigning, the more bizarre and surreal my situation becomes. Which is, generally, where I stop thinking, defrost some butter, and make cupcakes.

And then, we made cupcakes!

As promised to Lisa of Pittsburgh Needs Eated fame, my latest cooking exploit was the other night making Magnolia Vanilla Vanilla  cupcakes from the recipes posted on recipelink.com.  We halved everything due to my only having one muffin tin instead of two, (it being college and all)  but here it goes: Magnolia Vanilla Vanilla Cupcakes Makes about 2 dozen cupcakes (depending on the size of your cupcake papers and muffin tins) CUPCAKES: 1 1/2 cups self-rising flour 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened 2 cups sugar 4 large eggs, at room temperature 1 cup milk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line two 12-cup muffin tins with cupcake papers. In a small bowl, combine the flours. Set aside. In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, cream the butter until smooth. Add the sugar gradually and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the dry ingredients in three parts, alternating with the milk and vanilla. With each addition, beat until the ingredients are incorporated but do not overbeat. Using a rubber spatula, scrape down the batter in the bowl to make sure the ingredients are well blended. Carefully spoon the batter into the cupcake liners, filling them about three-quarters full. Bake for 20–25 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted in the center of the cupcake comes out clean. Cool the cupcakes in the tins for 15 minutes. Remove from the tins and cool completely on a wire rack before icing. At the bakery we ice the cupcakes with either Vanilla Buttercream or Chocolate Buttercream. And then the frosting: The vanilla buttercream we use at the bakery is technically not a buttercream but actually an old-fashioned confectioners’ sugar and butter frosting. Be sure to beat the icing for the amount of time called for in the recipe to achieve the desired creamy texture. Makes enough for one 2-layer 9-inch cake or 2 dozen cupcakes* 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened 6 to 8 cups confectioners’ sugar 1/2 cup milk 2 teaspoons vanilla extract Place the butter in a large mixing bowl. Add 4 cups of the sugar and then the milk and vanilla. On the medium speed of an electric mixer, beat until smooth and creamy, about 3-5 minutes. Gradually add the remaining sugar, 1 cup at a time, beating well after each addition (about 2 minutes), until the icing is thick enough to be of good spreading consistency. You may not need to add all of the sugar. If desired, add a few drops of food coloring and mix thoroughly. (Use and store the icing at room temperature because icing will set if chilled.) Icing can be stored in an airtight container for up to 3 days. The result was a frosting that was a little on the sweet side for someone like me who generally makes a cream cheese icing, but the cake was not overly sweet, the organic sugar was a well-made substitution for the much-cheaper Sav-A-Lot white sugar and gave a less chemicall-y aftertaste than the Sav-A-Lot variety as well. Anyway, the cake was pretty transcendent, though the batter is a little thick, and I had to buy 5 lbs of self-rising flour for the less than a cup that I ended up using. But, for someone who has never baked cupcakes from scratch (gasp! horror!), this was relatively painless and pretty rewarding. How rewarding, you might ask? Better than going all the way to NYC and standing in line for hours for the same thing! I don't know if I'll go free-range on the eggs next time, as it hurt my wallet pretty bad.