What kind of filling do you think is in the middle?

The Venn Piagram!

A geeky math joke, I know. But it makes me excited for Thanksgiving.

YOLO of the Month: February

Thanks to the magic of deal sites like Groupon and HomeRun, it's a little easier to YOLO these days, or at least get inspired to do so. Maura found a deal for a sourdough breadmaking class, so over President's Day weekend we headed up to the city so we could master one of San Francisco's most famous foods. 

The workshop took place in the back kitchen of this amazing panaderia, La Victoria, in the Mission.  Their tamales are amazing. But we weren't there to make tamales (unfortunately), and the workshop wasn't actually run by the proprietors of La Victoria (unfortunately). The workshop instructor (who never introduced himself, so I'm not sure of his name) is a bread expert who rents out the kitchen for these workshops and for his bread business. 

First step to breakmaking: combine water and flour. Next step, do something to the dough. Our instructor was clearly an amazing baker who knew a LOT about the science of breadmaking. However, he seemed to lack what we in the education world call "pedagogical content knowledge"--the knowledge not just of a subject itself, but of how to effectively teach the subject. He answered most questions with, "Well, whatever you do will really effect how the bread turns out" but with little detail as to what kind of effect that might be. 

Still, we made cute little loaves. 

I really do enjoy baking and have even taken my own forays into breadmaking. I don't do it very often because it's so time-consuming, but I can imagine myself getting more into it. I was hoping this workshop might help me out with that. But the more I listened to our instructor, the more I realized I should stick to easy baking. When he told us that a good loaf of bread should take about 24 hours to make, kneading once every half hour or so, that was enough to let me know that artisanal breadmaking is probably not the right-fit hobby for my lifestyle.

I baked my bread the following day--it first had to rise in the fridge and then on the counter. I'm not sure what happened because even following the instructions as precisely as I could the top still burned (the baking instructions weren't written down, so I had to rely on the notes Maura took on her phone). And, as Sarah noted, the inside "looks like real bread." So that's a good sign, right? It tasted like real (slightly-burned, not at all sourdough) bread too, so I guess I did indeed succeed in the goal of the workshop. If it had been amazing (not that they gave us a recipe or anything), I might have reconsidered dropping my breadmaking career. But given that I can get pretty delicious bread for relatively cheap at my local supermarket, I think this was the end.

Month of YOLO: January, Part 2

After a weekend of adventuring in LA, the obvious California destination for the following weekend was Lake Tahoe. Five teachers, one cabin, lots of fun.

Again, the weekend involved a lot of gastronomical delights, most importantly Fred's Steak. Also not too shabby was the sampler of wines from Trevor's uncle's cellar. I'm not gonna say I can tell the difference between a $100 bottle of wine and a $10 bottle, but the expensive bottles tasted pretty good. One of the best quotes of the weekend: "I just drank an eighteen-dollar bill!"

The original plan to go skiing, but napping was a more attractive activity. Still, we did find the energy to YOLO at Squaw Valley.

This picture is just one in an ongoing series of Maura and me at high elevations:

I used this picture in a warmup on proportional reasoning in class a few weeks ago. The kids were really confused about how four of their math teachers ended up in Squaw Valley (and in a giant chair, no less) together.

For those unfamiliar with Olympic history, Squaw Valley was home to the 1960 Winter Olympics. The memories still remain at the Olympic "museum." 

Of course, Olympic memorabilia calls for Olympic reenactments. First, Kieran savors the gold.

The 1968 Olympics, complete with the confused Australian silver medalist. 

Pulling a Tonya Harding. 

Finally, some views from the top of the mountain

Acorn Squash

Sometimes Sarah and I buy produce that we don't get around to using before it goes bad. And sometimes we buy produce and completely forget about it. This used to be an acorn squash. Then it imploded into itself. It wasn't gross, just kind of weird. (The butternut squash is there for scale)

Yolo of the Month: September #1

Somehow in my life of doing nothing but teaching, I've found time for a few out-of-the-ordinary adventures. First up: eating. Every couple of months, a group called SF Food Wars hosts a cooking compeition based around some theme. Attendees get to sample the entries and vote for their favorites. September's theme: salsa. So we spent a lovely Sunday afternoon outside the Ferry Building dipping chips into 23 different types of deliciousness.

The first plate (clockwise from the blue corn chips): "Peas and Hominy Salsa," "Peach-o de gallo," "Salsa La Cabana" (very tomato-y), "Ow-wesome Habanero Salsa."

Candice and Morgan take their first bite. The verdict: keep moving so we can taste everything. Twice.

Some of the teams, including "Macho Madness" (with the mustaches), who were probably the cutest team; "Salsa en Fuego," made completely with veggies purchased from the Ferry Building Farmer's Market the day before; "Team Bodacious Beetliciousness" (whose salsa wasn't my favorite, but it was pretty and I liked their idea); and "Eat This Mexican," the winners of the people's choice award. They got my vote.

Sarah liked the Eat This salsa so much that she asked for a t-shirt. She recognized greatness before they were announced as the winners. The guys were also kind enough to package up a tupperware of their delicious creation for us to take home.

I never knew that it would be possible to completely stuff myself on chips and salsa. Here we are surrounded by our graveyard of empty plates and salsa cups. Morgan's face reflects our conflict of wanting to eat more, but not really being able to stomach it (pun intended).

Yolo of the Month: August

There's a mindset that I'm able to get in--particularly when traveling--of wanting to and then actually following through on doing whatever suits my fancy. I think it comes in part from knowing you have a limited amount of time and wanting to pack in as much as possible, but there's also that emotional state of just feeling very free. Maura calls this "yolo"-- "You Only Live Once." I think I discovered it for the first time when I was in New Zealand. There were so many places and experiences I ended up in because I'd just decided "Why not?" And those turned out to be some of the best, or at least some of the most memorable.

It's been a long time since I've felt like that in a place I actually live. When I came back from NZ I vowed that I'd embark on more "staycations" and do all the touristy things you always say you're going to do, but then never get around to because you're too busy doing all the things you have to do. I've gotten a little better, but last weekend truly lived up to the yolo spirit.

Almost the best part was that it started like any weekend, with Friday Night Ritual of couch time and a very lazy Saturday morning. It's like I was already back in the school year (also because I was at school until like 5pm on Friday. UGH). On Saturday, my friend Dave suggested we go to the De Young to see the Birth of Impressionism exhibit. How very cultured. I was slightly concerned about getting tickets--other people I knew who have gone bought their tickets way in advance. But this is where we stumbled upon stroke of luck #1 for the day. (Actually, this was stroke of luck #2. #1 was finding a parking spot on a Saturday in Golden Gate Park, and #1.5 was that said parking spot was right outside the lawn bowling club. Who knew?) When we got to the De Young, two women came up to us asking if we were going to the Impressionist exhibit. They had planned to see it, they explained, but couldn't find parking so decided to come another time. Did we want their tickets? Obviously, yes. This was even more exciting because it turned out that the exhibit was completely sold out. Score.

The exhibit was fantastic. Very well put together. I had to secretly thank Ms. Giles and the PHS Humanities team that I actually recognized a lot of the paintings and the history behind the birth of Impressionism. "Ah yes," I said to myself (and to no one else because I didn't want to sound pretentious), "I remember the internal struggle of Edouard Manet as he wanted so desperately to be accepted by the Academie des Beaux-Arts..." Another important sighting at the De Young was a man wearing everyone's favorite wolf shirt, unfortunately (fortunately?) in what I think was a non-ironic way.

From the De Young, we consulted Dave's former-gourmet-chef friend's list of top eats in SF and found the Arizmendi Bakery, a cousin of Berkeley's Cheeseboard. The pizza was in my opinion equivalent, and now I know I don't have to drive to the East Bay for such deliciousness.

It was late afternoon, but we were on a roll so we decided to hit up the fortune cookie factory in Chinatown, an adventure we'd been talking about for awhile. And it's an adventure indeed--a small little shop tucked away in a seedy looking back alley. We walked past the alley twice before we actually found it. Inside was a cramped little operation, definitely more factory than shop. There's a genius machine that squirts out batter into little round molds then rotates them through an oven until a woman picks the warm cookies up one at a time, sticks in a fortune and folds them in half. Very impressive.

My fortune was eerily accurate: "Take time in the upcoming week for much needed relaxation." This could not be more true as I was about to embark on my first week back at school after an extremely refreshing summer. HOW DID YOU KNOW, FORTUNE COOKIE?!?!

As Dave and I were driving back to drop him off at home, he told me to make an extra turn. "There's one more place I want to go." He'd heard about Pirate Cat Radio Cafe on Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations," and wanted to try their Maple Bacon Latte. Yes, it's made with bacon fat and obviously it's delicious.

The Pirate Cat Radio Cafe is exactly what the name implies--a pirate radio station. Such a weird little operation. The cafe only had enough seats for the two of us because there was a band, the Hypnotist Collectors, about to play for a radio broadcast. And they were really good. We stayed and listened to their whole set. Was this all part of the Yolo Gods' master plan? Dave's fortune cookie says yes.

As we were leaving, we thanked the band, who promptly offered us one of their CDs and invited us to the show they were playing that night. Why not? So much for going home on a Saturday to write lesson plans. The concert was in some boutique hotel that I never would have pegged as a hipster enclave. I'm sure this is not its regular clientele, but I loved the juxtaposition of upscale lounge and consciously-unshowered wannabe counterculturists.

In the morning, there was more yolo-ing to be done. I'd heard about the walking tours of San Francisco and now after three years of living here I finally got around to doing one.
The Mission murals I'd hoped for wasn't happening this weekend, so the Castro seemed like a good second option. Current and future visitors: I cannot recommend these tours enough. The tours are run by volunteer guides sponsored by the SF Library and the SF Parks Trust. And they're free. At least on my tour, our guide was extremely interesting, knowledgeable, and excited about this job. I especially appreciated the combination of history and architecture. Now I look at every building in San Francisco trying to identify which type of Victorian it is. I also now have some background on streets and sights I've seen over and over. I love knowing that the Walgreens on the corner played an important role in the AIDS crisis, or that the hardware store used to be a theater. So many little things you walk by and don't notice--you can't help but wonder what else you're missing.

A few more stops in SF before finally getting back to reality. All were just places one might stumble upon, including some Mission murals (sans tour guide) and thrift shops (scavenging for future Halloween costumes and/or my transition into the hipster aesthetic). Most exciting was the Levi's Workshop, a space on Valencia that Levi's rented out for the summer as basically an open art studio. It's all focused on printmaking and they have a couple of different old printing presses and a big screenprinting area. During the week, it's used by artists-in-residence and other more-creative-than-me kinds of people, but on Sundays they open it up for the public to use. Unfortunately it was all booked up for the day, but they did have an opening for the following Sunday. See future blog posts for the fruits of my typesetting ambitions. It was pretty amazing--just a place for people from the community to learn about these art forms and actually try out the heavy machinery.

One of the most amazing weekends I've had in a long time, and that includes my recent weekend in Quito. How is it that I don't do this more often? It's not like any of the agenda items were difficult to find or were special occasions. I guess it just takes the right mindset, and it doesn't hurt to have an activity partner who encourages your adventurous side.

I should have bought a bag of fortune cookies at the factory to see where they would take me next.

Delicious Things and Not-So-Delicious Things

It took a REALLY long time to upload, sort, edit, caption, etc. all 1023 photos from Ecuador (and that's after deleting about 100 on the plane ride home). But finally I'm getting to a place where I can post them.

Let's start with the most important: food and drink. We learned from a fellow traveler who lives in Japan that most Japanese vacation photos are pictures of food. I do not have 1023 pictures of food (we ate a lot, but not THAT much), but I do have enough to make an album.

The highlights:
-Humitas, a delicious corn paste steamed in the husk. Kind of like tamale dough, but sweeter and fluffier. So delicious.
-Cuy AKA guinea pig. We had a hard time finding it in Quito, but finally found a very marketed-to-tourists place where we were able to successfully indulge. Given my penchant for eating strange animals, this was kind of a must-do activity. Analysis: it was so fried that it's hard to know what it actually tasted like. There was also so little meat that it was hard to know what it actually tasted like. I am fine with this.
-Kallari chocolates, which may indeed be the best chocolate in the world.

Enjoy album #1. More to come.

(Click on the slide show for access to the album and corresponding captions)

Ecuador, in Brief

No time to write about everything (using the free internet at our hostel), but here's a quick rundown of the highlights so far. All will be more interesting once accompanied by pictures:

-People (and animal) watching at the Otovalo market
-'Mi Otavalito' where we had lunch in Otovalo to the dulcet tunes of a mariachi band playing 'The Sound of Silence'
-Tianguez, a restaurant in the bottom of the Monastery of San Francisco. Best dish: humitas, which are ground corn steamed in the husk. They're like the dough (is what what you call it?) for tamales, but fluffier and sweeter
-Live music in the streets of Old Town Quito on Saturday night
-Live music in a church courtyard in Old Town on Saturday night. We were promptly pulled in to join the party and offered two kinds of alcohol (including a bright blue concoction in an old water bottle). Was it rude to decline?
-'La Ronda,' a street in Old Town where restaurants serve food and drinks out their doors and everoyne just walks around. We did sample the alcohol there: canelazo, sort of a hot cider with cane sugar alcohol, and vino herbivo, sort of a mulled wine sangria
-Mountain biking down the Cotopaxi volcano, with an altitude change of about 1000m. Yes, I did fall.
-Ginger tea on our bike ride
-Taking the 'Transhemisferico' bus to 'La Mitad del Mundo,' the Equator marker and Ecuadorean Disney Land. Then taking lots of pictures standing on the Equator line.
-'Museo Inti-Nan,' the museum on the real Equator about 200m away (supposedly). You know it's the real one because (1) they tell you that a GPS says so and (2) they make water go down a drain in different directions on either side of their line. Obviously, the 'museum' also included exhibits of shrunken heads and guinea pigs that deemed us to have good energy.
-Eating a guinea pig. Tastes like really salty chicken.

Tomorrow we leave for the Galapagos. More highlights to come...

Comida Guatemalteca

Obviously there is much else to write about Guatemala, but since most topics of interest necessitate accompanying pictures, I'll wait until I get home to blog about that.

People have been asking what the comida tipica is here, and I'm not sure I've actually gotten a good handle on that. My host family has been hosting students for 15+ years, so they definitely serve me food that is a little more kind to American tastes and digestive preferences. For breakfast, there are corn flakes and then some sort of toast (regular toast, French toast) and a fresh banana. The best part, however, is the daily freshly squeezed jugo de naranja. I am pretty sure my host mother gets up at least an hour and a half before the rest of us to cook it all.

Lunch is the main meal of the day, so it usually includes meat. For my host family, that has meant everything from delicious chicken to not-so-delicious hot dogs. There´s usually rice and some sort of sauce, and always tortillas. Dinner is smaller and at my house it usually involves some combination of eggs, beans, and tortillas. We have hot drinks (tea or instant coffee) with breakfast and dinner and a cold drink (horchata or some kool-aid-ish drink) at lunch. By the end of the day, I'm stuffed. Other American students I've talked to seem to have somewhat different meals. Others have more eggs and beans and rice, although the common thread is always tortillas.

Although I love having three meals a day cooked for me, it means I haven't had much of an opportunity to explore food on my own. Everyday I walk through the market area of town where I can smell fresh tortillas, frying platanos, and all kinds of delicious sauces. I'm not scared to try street food (the only time it has ever done me wrong was when I chipped my tooth on Kenyan peanut brittle), but I'm usually too full from all the delicious food my host family serves.

Coming up when I can post pictures: a chocolate-making extravaganza in which our heroine samples, pounds and dries her own drinking chocolate bars.

If It Walks Like a Kumara...

About a year and a half ago, you may remember I found a magical surprise at one of the local markets: golden kiwifruit. For that treat I had to make an exception in my attempt to at locivore-ism. Also in that post, I made a list of other food products that I would gladly give up some food miles to taste once again. Amazingly, I've actually been able to find some of those food items. I found Tim Tams at Cost Plus and then Target carried them for awhile (although only in limited flavors not including my beloved dark chocolate or latte). I also discovered that they sell Spy Valley sauvingnon blanc just down the street at BevMo and that a restaurant in SF run by "Two Aussies & a Kiwi" has Monteith's available now and then. For some more challenging items, I received a lovely holiday care package from the cousins containing Vegemite (um, thanks?) and some delicious feijoa lollies (actually thanks!).

Most of the foods on my list are processed, so they're not that difficult to get if I really put my mind to it. However, there is one elusive vegetable that I figured I'd just have to wait on until I can make it back South. Then by some miracle I noticed something out of the ordinary at the Asian grocery store where we get our produce. There it was, kind of reddish skin with the lumpy shape.



And a sign that said "Japanese sweet yam." Obviously I have no idea what a Japanese sweet yam is, but of course I bought one. Upon cutting and roasting, I don't think I can 100% say for sure that it's a kumara, but it definitely tasted delicious and kumara-like. The only answer is to continue buying them and using my Edmond's cookbook to make sure I'm eating real Kiwi fare.

Still Life with Cookies

Sarah and I love our desserts. And we love the New York Times. So when the NYT came out with a recipe for the "perfect" chocolate chip cookie, we really had no other option than to take on the baking challenge.

Aside from the fact that perfection is no easy task in general, the NYT likes to make things difficult (difficulty always increases the levels of erudition). No cracker-toffee recipes there. So just in case you haven't read over the recipe yet, I'd like to point out that it not only requires fancy (and expensive) chocolate, but two kinds of flour (neither of which is all-purpose) and coarse salt. These just aren't ingredients we have in our pantry. Even worse, there is a 24-hour chilling time, so you lose out on the instant gratification aspect of chocolate cookies that comes from a 10-minute baking time. Can these cookies really be perfect if there's no melted chocolate by the time I'm done licking the beaters and doing the dishes?

The answer is yes.



They were the perfect combination of a crunchy crispy outside shell, with warm gooiness on the inside. 70% cacao does make a difference, especially when melty. Very much worth the time.

As a side note, however, they only had this godlike quality when fresh out of the oven. The extras that we made and didn't eat until the next day were still good, but had lost the crunchy/chewy dichotomy. They tasted more like regular cookies that one might make with all-purpose flour and Toll-House chocolate chips. The good news is that we froze some of the dough, and the freshly baked cookies from that batch were as good as the originals. Lesson learned: only bake a few cookies at a time (or eat a lot of cookies at a time).

If you're interested in trying the recipe yourself (because you probably have cake flour and bread flour that you need to use up), I highly recommend pairing the recipe with the instructions from Baker's Banter, one of my favorite baking blogs. They have interesting commentary, as well as step-by-step pictures so you know if you're doing it right.

In the end, the cookies can really only be described as works of art. So here we present to you "Still Life with Cookies." Original painting coming soon, so start deciding on your auction price.




--------------------------

(You may be wondering why this recipe was posted in July and I'm writing at about it at nearly six months later. The answer is that I'm pretty behind on everything in life, blog posts included. So expect a lot of miscellaneous pictures to show up in the next week or so. Or maybe never.)

Cookies!

As was mentioned in one of the comments on a previous post, I seem to have left cookies out of my list of things I've cooked this summer. It's not so much that I am any good at baking cookies, but more that it's a specialty of the house where I've been living. Bill, who is generously letting Mark and me house-sit, is a often known as "The Cookie Guy"--and with good reason. We learned very early on in our supervisory group that he will never go anywhere without little ziploc baggies of freshly baked cookies. They are the most delicious and memorable calling card ever. He brought them for everyone in our supervisory not just at weekly meetings, but whenever he would come out to Mission to observe, and pretty much whenever he would stop by Stanford (it was not unusual to find a bag in my mailbox). Other recipients include the guy who runs classes at the Mac store, the mail carrier, and a waitress at one of their favorite restaurants.

It should be noted that these aren't just something off the back of some Tollhouse chocolate chips (not that those aren't delicious). No, this recipe took six years to prefect and makes about 90 cookies per batch. Of course the specifics are too special to post here, but let's just say that the base calls for semi-sweet chocolate, white chocolate, and toffee chips. Additional ingredient combinations are numerous and continue to be experimented with.



So when I got the keys to the house, I also got a copy of the recipe and the metaphoric keys to the KitchenAid mixer and the "cookie cabinet," an entire section of the kitchen literally overflowing with every kind of cookie filling your mind can fathom. The recipe wasn't so much permission to bake these cookies, but a mandate to keep the kitchen smelling delicious all summer.



I've even taken to carrying around cookies with me when go to friends' houses or other places. One of my favorite memories from this summer was when I got home from Costa Rica, and Mark asked me--on the car ride from the airport--"Will you bake cookies when we get home? I haven't had any in two weeks because you've been gone..." I might be turning into Bill. But there could be worse things.

Ah, Summer

So you would think that with absolutely nothing to do, I would have taken the time to update this blog with all the things that happened in that last ridiculous quarter at Stanford--our trip to Angel Island, my students letters to math, the final days of teaching, reflections on my students, Oprah's graduation speech, my teaching plans for next year, etc. etc. But why would I do that when I can do all the things summer is meant for?

In the past two weeks, I've been taking advantage of living in suburbia (my extremely generous supervisor is letting me and an another STEPpie house-sit). So I've taken some bike rides, visited the library, read on a lounge chair in the sun, gone swimming, and just sat out on the deck watching the hummingbirds.

And then there's the cooking. I kind of feel like I'm playing housewife because my roommate works everyday, and I've been doing a lot of cooking for us. We have a fabulous kitchen, plus a garden with fresh herbs, rhubarb, squash, tomatoes, and beans.

Rhubarb muffins:


Baking powder biscuits:


Mushroom asparagus tart:


Asparagus chive quiche:


And proof that I really have too much time on my hands, homemade hamburger buns:


Don't worry, my roommate has fallen into his traditional gender role and does the grilling:


I could get used to this teacher summer thing.