please, sir, may i have some more?

ok, ok, so i post a lot about custard here.

but i haven't said anything really about custard for DAYS and you can't yet see what's on my work table, and you can't yet see the photo project, and i'm not ready to post the new music i'm working on (nevermind some demure photos that i'm NOT talking about, but you know who you are), and not only is custard easy to make, but it's easy to talk about.

last week i was thinking of making a little dark chocolate mocha number, pure and simple, but then got the bright idea to reserve some of the chocolate base (pre-mocha), mix it with a little caramel milk, whip in an extra egg white and lay that in on top of the heavier, darker mix for a two layer custard thing.

so i did.

lightly sweet in the top layer; dark, rich, and not sweet on the bottom.

good all around.

brasshole.

for easter i polished the candlesticks and the plates at the church, which amazed people in how shiny they were and (i hear) prompted someone to ask if we'd gotten new plates.

no, just cleaned the old ones.

i also cleaned up the baptismal bowl, which nobody will notice but me and God, because it's pewter and therefore not all shiny when it's clean, but what was on it couldn't be described under any circumstances as "patina" but instead grotty filth. and pewter's soft, so the finish damages easily and it had acquired some bad scratches.

now when you're working with antique pieces you don't want to clean them up too much because that diminishes the value of them, but this is a contemporary piece and if someone doesn't clean it up and buff out those scratches now, it isn't going to develop a nice finish over time, you know?

the thing is that the "stuff" of the church should be kept beautiful and shiny. the things in and of themselves aren't important, but what we use in services to worship the Lord should be kept beautiful. it is part of our offering. we do not bring second best.

yesterday i took home the candle snuffers. they needed some polishing. they're not perfect, but now that i've taken on the job (and i told myself i wasn't going to do this) i'll just take home some of the pieces every week or so to maintain them and over time the last of the staining will come out and nobody will remember that they ever were nasty-looking.

ninety.

today we all trooped out to my grandmother's 90th birthday party.

the old girl looks pretty good, eh?

yeah, she does.

cattin' about

neighborcat is a friend of mine.


i used to think she was a stray in need of a place to crash, but it turns out she not only has a home, but she has a very busy social calendar, as well. she comes to my house, gets stoned, does a little light mousing, and has a nap.

and then she leaves.

she has never accepted food from me, although if i put down a saucer of milk, she will drink that.

i know from talking to the neighbors that she eats at some of their houses, and that she hangs out in over a half dozen homes; there are probably more. these days she's very busy cozying up the the men in my neighborhood; as i'm sitting at my desk i see her waiting for guys to come home in the afternoons and when they do, she puts on her pretty face and gets all touchy-feely, way more friendly than she usually is and they bend down and scratch her belly and she happily trots behind them and waits at their front doors for them to let her in.

i'm pretty sure that yesterday i saw her look back and wink at me.

today she was out in the driveway hunting and i couldn't see what she was stalking (she's not very good at it), but there was this moment in which she looked up and saw me watching her and i almost swear i heard her think "do NOT screw this up for me", so i moved quietly behind the window and didn't open it up to get a really clear picture.

ok, got yer back.

basket case

ok, so instead of giving you all the latest pictures of views from my desk -and there are a lot of them, since the fog is burning off and i've been taking pictures all morning- i think i threatened to write about last week's picnic baskets.

see, i have a lot of friends who are artists. and i was with one of them out in her studio recently and i was thinking about some things i've heard artists say about the basket lunches at the macdowell colony and i thought it would be a brilliant idea to make some picnic lunches and bring them to my artist friends when they're working.

and i have this friend who's trying really hard to do a lot of work in a hurry for a showing that's about six weeks away and she's kind of stressed about it. so when she said she was going to retreat to her workroom for a few days, i thought: basket time!

one thing you need to know about me, a thing you might already have guessed, is that one thing i can do (and there are a lot of things i can't do) is pack a picnic lunch. if you're ever road tripping with me, you would be smart to let me handle a lot of the refreshments.

and this artist friend of mine would have been happy enough (all right, overjoyed and overwhelmed) with a nice sandwich, but for the kind of money i'd spend on really nice cold cuts and a few amenities, i could "whip up a little something" that not only would give her several meals, but myself as well.

granted, it's time intensive, but one thing i have a lot of is time and if a thing is worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

one really great thing about chinese cooking is that a lot of the prep can be done way ahead of time, and aside from dishes that must be served NOW, fresh, there are a bazillion little side dishes and picnic foods that are simple to make (if you've got time, see above) and keep well for several days under refrigeration.

and they're only properly served as a collection of little dishes and not, say,  a big bowl of radishes, so when you make them, you have to make a lot of them, even if you're only serving up small portions of each thing. that's where the festivity is: the riot of tastes and colors and textures.

so i got to work.


if you can't follow the sequence of foods in the slideshow, bear in mind that in order to bring all the dishes off at once, there's a considerable amount of multitasking that needs to be done.

so.

start three days ahead of time.

cut the cabbage and salt it, leaving it in the bowl overnight. same with the radishes.
partway peel and slice cucumber, salt it, and set it aside. salting may or may not include sugar. it's a verb.
cut the carrots, and simmer them for hours in that lovely rich master sauce that just happens to be around.
drain cabbage. squeeeeze out as much water as possible!
add the remaining ingredients to the cabbage, put it in a sealed container, and set it aside.
make radish seasoning. set it aside to develop.
unpack and drain tofu. it needs to be pressed before it goes in the soup.
add seasoning to radishes. seal them and set them aside in with the cabbage, in the fridge.
remove carrots from sauce. put 'em away. you know, in the fridge.
strain sauce.
turn right around and simmer the mushrooms in the sauce. let them steep a loooooong time.
squeeze the excess water out of the cucumber slices. sauce them. put them away.
boil and cool eggs.
periodically return to the fridge and toss any dish sitting in a sauce to distribute the liquid evenly.
put the mushrooms away, strain the sauce, and return that to the freezer. you can use it again later.
crack eggshells; let eggs simmer three hours in tea mixture.
make the sesame peanut sauce. put it away to develop overnight.
make two kinds of custard (detailed elsewhere). let it set overnight in the fridge.
put tea eggs away to steep. eighteen hours, two days. whatever.
it's time to get going on the soup!
soak daylilly blooms
cut tofu, mushrooms, cabbage, whatever's going in.
soup is a process; some things go in sooner than others, but they all go in.
beat eggs, cut green onion (these are added to the soup last)
cook noodles. still warm, they go under the peanut sesame sauce.
assemble bean buns.
pack the cold dishes for transport.
simultaneously put the finishing touches on the soup and steam the buns.
pack it all up and out the door with you!

menu:

hot and sour cabbage
soy-dipped radish fans
salt cucumbers
carnelian carrot coins
master sauce mushrooms

peanut-sesame noodles
marbleized tea eggs

hot and sour soup

steamed red bean buns
banana custard with carmelized molasses sauce
dark chocolate coconut custard

black lichee tea

same day, three views

so, like, it's a riot of color out there. you know, if you have an eye for it.

i like the view from my desk, and i keep a gallery of that view over here, but i haven't decided yet if i'm going to post all three of today's pictures.

still, it's a nice view to have from one's desk. it really facilitates the staring-out-the-window-not-doing-anything process.

maybe if you're very nice to me, tomorrow i'll post my latest custard news, or the dispatch from the picnic baskets.

meltdown

i'm always working on something, even if i have little to say here.

ever since snohaus fell in, i've been taking a picture every day of the melt of the last of this year's snow.

no surprise: i took the liberty of stringing them together into a video.

Lumen Christi

today i left my darkened house and went up into the woods. i stopped and was very still for a long time before moving again, up and up into the notch and then back down. coming to a living body of water i stopped again to pray, and to wash my face and hands.

i don't know about the rest of you, but i'm a small soul in need of a lot of scrubbing up.

and then down and down and down, off the trail and onto the road, fast and faster, mud kicking up and we always say you know you've had a good day if you come home covered with dirt, smelling bad, and bleeding just a little.

so apparently i'd had a good day even though i was feeling kind of wrung out. but the sun was just sinking beyond the horizon as i racked my bike and i thought i had just enough time to take my new candle and catch the first star.

i had a while to wait yet, but it was warm and sunny here and the breeze blowing was warmer than the standing air because here at the foot of the mountain there's a temperature inversion.

so i'm outside, leaning back on the grass and then standing, waiting, craning my neck to see those first stars, waiting for that one moment, as if i did not know, could not comprehend that Christ will rise, has risen, that one night and this night now and always.

when you're looking for the first stars to appear, you never quite know when or where. for sure you ought to look in the darkest parts of the sky, and out of the sides of your field of vision, where you have the most light receptors, but atmospheric conditions have a lot to do with it, so you never quite know.

where will it be?

and you scan the darkening sky, over and over and there's nothing; nothing and more nothing and then suddenly, as if a great switch had been thrown, you see that one first star. you almost don't believe it; you maybe look away and then look back. but there it is!

and while you're double checking, a second star blinks on. how did you not see it before? and now there are three, four, and they're all coming out, clean and bright and you know the new day has come.


i lit the one new candle i'd brought out with me, raised it up and sang lumen Christi, Christ, the light of the world!

and i carried the new flame into my darkened house and lit new candles in every room.

today i have three things to offer you:

a fanfare for orchestra brass for which i am only giving you an audio link even though sheet music does exist for it if you want it, and two new songs.

cliffs at brandon   listen
Deo gratias           listen    preview sheet music
heal me up            listen    preview sheet music

good friday

my Lord has died.
and after we lay him down,
after the weeping
there's nothing we can do
but return to his house
his father's house
and because it seems impossible
that we will not see him again
because he would want his home well-ordered
i can only go,
fold his tablecloths,
clean his plates,
straighten his candlesticks,
and fish that paperclip out from under the cushion.

i cannot speak, cannot sing, cannot sigh
i am weak
i cannot think, cannot believe that he is gone
gone for good
and i clutch to my heart
the things of his house
as if by the work of my hands
i could make this right.

i would listen to music
or birds
or sing
or something
but instead i strain my ear to hear
is that him?
is that him on the stair?

and i try to remember his face, his voice
every word he said
and later, when i'm done working here
i will go out into the street
looking for him
in every face
of every person that i meet
in every place
for signs of grace
and i will ask:
did you see him?
can you remember what he said?
can you tell me?
can you tell me that he isn't gone?
can you tell me that he isn't dead?

he will come, he will come
i know he will;
i know he must
i've things to polish
and things to dust
i'll make this clean; i'll make this bright
but there's no power in my small hands
to turn a bit of this to right
and yet i'll put things in their place
his dishes clean, my heart made still
his table set, awaiting grace
my Lord will rise;
i know he will.

my mistress' face

well, it's april.


...which means i've clocked the march photos and edited them into a short movie documenting my life at thirteen hour intervals.

more about custard

the thing about custard is that it's  good to eat and so easy to make, if you've the time to let it bake and set.

one thing i have a lot of is time, and cr likes it a lot, so i'm kind of experimenting with custard. hey, if cr's coming for sunday lunch, there might as well be custard along with whatever i rummage from the cupboards.

basically, it's just two cups of milk and three eggs along with a sweetener and maybe a flavoring. you mix it together, toss it in the cups (ok, maybe pour is a better verb), put the cups in a water bath, and bake 'em at about 320° until you can stick in a knife or toothpick in and it comes out clean, somewhere between forty minutes and an hour.

it's not at all fussy about the time of baking, because of the water bath, and it's not very fussy about oven temperature. and you can vary the amount of eggs, or the proportion of  yolk to white; more yolk makes a tenderer, richer custard, and more white will make it stiffer.

this week i made two experimentals.

the first is a banana number with a caramelized molasses sauce.

i happened to have had a perfectly ripe banana and it turns out that cr likes banana cream, so into the freezer with the banana.

i've never worked with a frozen banana before; i knew that it would never again recover a state suitable for eating, but i was surprised about what the freeze/thaw did to it!

first of all, i had to keep taking it out of the freezer to play with it, because a frozen banana has an interesting, fun feel to it that i found irresistible.

but then when i set it out to thaw so i could USE it, what i had was basically a long thin black bag of smoosh and i was wondering what the most practical method for opening the container and pouring out the smoosh would be.

aha! i thought, glancing around me. scissors!

so i cut it open at one end, and simply poured the smoosh into the blender. from there is was business as usual, except that instead of caramelizing just the sugar, i put molasses in with that.



and then last night i made a little dark chocolate coconut number; i substituted a can of coconut milk for some of the regular milk. you have to melt the chocolate into whatever you're using for your base, so that takes a little extra time and care. you don't want it to scald, but you do want the chocolate completely melted and mixed in.

use good chocolate. it always pays in the end.

once the chocolate was melted and mixed and a little vanilla and a tiny bit of honey (gives it a little fruity tang) added, i had to wait for the thing to be cool enough to add the eggs, because if you add eggs into a mixture that's too hot they just cook, and that'd be no good.

so. into the water bath, and into the oven.

waitwaitwaitwaitwait.

the house smells divine. it smells divine because of all the lunch basket cooking, but i'm not talking about that yet.

but add the smell of chocolate custard baking to all that, and -whoa, nellie!-

this right here is what heaven must smell like.

start to finish

a few weeks ago cr gave me this candle for my project and i don't think she really meant for me to return it to her finished, but sometimes that's how things turn out, you know?

i know that when i hand it back to her tomorrow or monday or some other day she'll tell me that it's not what she meant, but i'm pretty sure this is how it's supposed to go.

some of you have mentioned to me that the process is interesting to you, so i've included here a slideshow of this candle from start to finish, and also an animated gif showing it all the way around.

signs and miracles

miraculous sign of the coming of the King?



no, it's just where i left my fork on the plate.

true miracle:

down and back

so i know it's been a week, but here are my road pictures from my quick jaunt to virginia and back.

stranger in a strange land

i felt so out of place on the jersey turnpike. i mean, i know how to change lanes aggressively in heavy traffic and all that, but where i'm from we customarily use the directional signal to indicate intent of a future action.

on the jersey turnpike (and in new jersey in general, apparently) there are two common practices regarding the directional, used with roughly equal frequency.

the first and easiest to perform is that the directional is simply not used, not ever, unless it is accidentally switched on while texting and then it is not turned off until the driver crosses over into pennsylvania.

the second and more entertaining form is that in which the driver uses the directional signal to announce a fait accompli. "hello", they seem to say. "i have just gotten in front of you."

i wonder if perhaps culturally one does not use the directional to signal intent because this represents a challenge to other drivers who perceive that defensive action must be taken in order to prevent you from changing lanes.

maybe it's unfair to even speculate on that, because the whole time i was in new jersey people just went ahead and let me change lanes even though i had signaled that i wished to do so. of course, i think i mentioned that i'm perfectly capable of driving aggressively in heavy traffic.

another thing that marks me as a foreigner on that road (aside from my car, which is um, less common in new jersey than it is at home, and my plates, which are definitely from away) is that i cheerfully let people into my lane if it appears to me that they wish to come over.

"foreigner", they will perhaps say. but i was born in new jersey and they can't take that away from me.

i wonder, though, how fast one has to be going to get pulled over for speeding on the new jersey turnpike? the whole time i was on it, the flow of densely-packed traffic was scooting along at about 85 MPH, except for when passing a state trooper, in which case the speed across all four lanes instantly decreased to 60 for about two seconds.

who, exactly, is going to be fooled by that?

and yet incredible as it seems, people WERE getting stopped for speeding. maybe the officers just pick drivers at random from the huge crowd going by? or maybe they set their sights on that one guy trying to go even faster than that by weaving from lane to lane?

i didn't see a lot of those guys; it was pretty much wall-to-wall cars.

there's a beauty in it, though: kind of an organic flow. packed traffic, nearly bumper to bumper and moving along smoothly like some huge and dangerous ballet.

intermission

i have a few things to say about the trip out and back, but for now:

promise

twenty-five years ago i made a promise to the god-in-whom-i-did-not-yet-believe.

as far as i'm concerned if you make a promise, you keep it whether or not the person to whom you made it exists.

if you are making promises to people who in your mind don't exist that's your lookout and maybe you ought to have a nice long talk with yourself or whomever you talk to about such things, but if you're going to make promises, you should keep them.

in order for me to keep my promise this year AND for me to be where i wish to be -at home- on palm sunday, it leaves me with no real choice except to toss my bags in the car tomorrow and drive to washington, DC, a city that while very beautiful gives me the heebie-jeebies.

and then on wednesday having discharged my obligation i will put my bags back in the car and drive home. ten hours' drive each way.

it'll be fun, i'm sure.

fall of the house

if you've been following the story, you know that i've spent a lot of time this winter building first the snow cave:

invasion of the mole people
into the hole
into the hole again
keep digging

and then, after the thaw, building snohaus, which took a lot of hours over a lot of days.

the thing about building anything out of snow is that it's ephemeral. you can work and work and make it beautiful and smooth and square your lines and then one day the sun will come out and you know you've seen the last of winter; there will be no more snow for the year.

it's kind of a nice way to mark the coming of spring, but it's not for the faint of heart. you have to be willing to watch your beautiful creation melt and collapse.

not very bright

i'm sure i wasn't the only one to receive this unusually well-written comment from "mike":

Hello. My wife and I bought our house about 6 months ago. It was a foreclosure and we were able to get a great deal on it. We also took advantage of the 8K tax credit so that definitely helped. We did an extensive remodeling job and now I want to refinance to cut the term to a 20 or 15 year loan. Does anyone know any good sites for mortgage information? Thanks!

well, "mike", you might could visit your banker and talk about refinancing options, or maybe you could google that. it seems to me there's no shortage of websites clamoring for attention on this topic.

what's interesting to me about your spam-of-non-sequitur is that you don't seem to provide me with any links of your own, so i have to assume your goal is to casually wander into people's blogs with that golly-gee-and-what's-all-this shiny baby face you have and get people to go google it for themselves.

maybe you're testing to see which of your spams produce hits on google, and maybe you're trying to create buzz for your "legitimate" "business", but by your friendly and personal tone i can just tell that you, regular guy, really think highly of our financially astute blogging and need our advice.

of course we want to jump in for you and run searches that match your "needs" and report back to you in our blogs which sites we recommend! of course we all want to be friendly and helpful and we'll all rush right out to do your googling for you and then post links and talk amongst ourselves about what sites we would definitely recommend to you and your lovely "wife".

so.

since i'm so kind-hearted, "mike", i've come up with a few things that i think you and your "wife" will find useful:

use your tax credit!
foreclosure deals!
refinance now!

"mike", the possibilities are nearly endless! there's so much good "information" out there, but i've really given it a lot of thought and come up with my three best options for you.

"mike", i hope this "helps".

Is being found as hard as being lost?

it can be.

in one sense, it's easier to get lost and often harder to find your way back, and harder to manage to be found by the rescue team.

in another sense, you kind of relinquish control when you get lost, or sometimes you're really, really lost and don't entirely want to be found, in which case it is much harder to be found than it is to be lost.

i've been lost in the woods, lost in my life, lost metaphorically, lost in the discussion, lost in thought, and sometimes what's hard is not the being found, but adjusting to the aftermath.

lost can resonate in your soul for years.

the last time i was lost it was two days ago and i still haven't gotten my legs under me fully.

Ask me anything