Spring Snow

March 30, 2011, 11:15 am.

I pull myself away from schoolwork and get up for my morning "training" (a.k.a. "pathetic huff 'n puff sessions").

Grab my running clothes.

Look out the window.

It's snowing.

I whine.

"What is it?" Sweetie calls.

I whine. "It's snowing."

"Bullshit."

"It's not just snowing. It's really, really snowing."

Sweetie comes to window. Looks out window.



"Bullshit."

"Uh huh. There must be someone on the roof with a snow machine. That's really just confetti."

"Yes." Sweetie returns to his work.

I watch Castle on the treadmill.

Pretty Pastel Marshmallows

After Sweetie's birthday two weeks ago, I restocked on powdered sugar. As far as I knew at the time, I'd be making a second cake for my own birthday and would need it for frosting. Then Mo Diva interfered and planted the idea of pie in my head instead. Which left me with a brand new electric mixer and a big bag of powdered sugar that I had no solid intention of using for another year.

Enter the marketing staff at Kroger, who have been busy switching out the hearts and shamrocks for everything pastel-colored and egg-shaped. I have no need to enter the Seasonal aisle and cough up $6 for jelly beans made "special" by the adornment of a cartoon bunny on the plastic bag, but they make sure I don't have to to be exposed to the peppy post-Lent sugar rush. In one aisle, I ran across gigantic pastel marshmallows. By "gigantic" I do not mean those wimpy campfire things for s'mores. I mean marshmallows of the "I woke up and my pillow was gone" variety...marshmallows a grade-school child would need two hands to hold and eat. IMO, children should not be eating candies that require two hands to hold. But there are apparently parents out there who would buy them and companies who are happy to sell them.


My mother bought me one of these at Disneyland when I was 7. I think it took me a week to eat it. I'm sure by day 3 it was just as sanitary as it was in the wrapper >.>

Anyway, all the solidified sugar stacked around me got me thinking about the sugar that was sitting at home. And then I remembered that Mo Diva also made homemade marshmallows a few weeks ago. So I spun on my heel and found a packet of unflavored gelatin and went on my merry way. Unfortunately, the recipe Mo Diva used needed a lot more than gelatin, like egg whites and corn syrup. Which I was not going to buy, because I would have no use for them other than the immediate project at hand. But after a little Googling, I found a Martha Stewart recipe that required nothing but sugar, water, and gelatin.

-1 packet unflavored gelatin (2 1/2 teaspoons)
-1/3 cup cold water for gelatin, plus 1/4 cup for syrup
-1 cup sugar

In the bowl of an electric mixer, sprinkle gelatin over 1/3 cup cold water. Allow gelatin to soften, about 5 minutes.

In a small saucepan, combine 1/4 cup water and sugar, and stir over medium-high heat until sugar is dissolved. Stop stirring, and place a candy thermometer into sugar water; wipe sides of pan with a wet brush if sugar crystals have splattered up. Boil sugar until temperature reaches the soft-ball stage (238 degrees). Remove syrup from heat; add to softened gelatin. Using the whisk attachment of an electric mixer, hand-stir the mixture a few minutes to cool; place bowl on the mixer stand. Beat on medium high with the whisk attachment until soft peaks form and the marshmallow mixture holds shape, 8 to 10 minutes.

Transfer marshmallow mixture to a large (14-inch) pastry bag fitted with a 1/2 inch (No. 11 Ateco) tip, and use immediately.

This marshmallow substance was meant to be thicker and faster-drying than others for piping cute animal shapes. If I was going to make homemade marshmallows, why not go all the way and try some fancy Peeps?


This is why. When you're only working with a cup of sugar syrup, it is very difficult to get it to just the right stage before taking it off the heat. I was supposed to get it to soft-ball stage, but in the space of some 30 seconds it jumped straight from stringy-not-there-yet to the hard-ball stage. This made whipping it into marshmallow very difficult, and whipping it into a marshmallow fluffy enough to withstand shaping basically impossible. The "peeps" were unceremoniously dismantled and mottled into a big multi-colored block instead (what can I say...I like to keep all of my bottles of food coloring even).


It didn't look like much smooshed into a pan and doused with powdered sugar, but it was pretty enough turned out.





Yay me. Of course, I couldn't just leave the blocks of marshmallow like this. For one thing, I should have used a mixture of powdered sugar and cornstarch instead of straight-up sugar, because that crust that formed on the outside from the moisture isn't visually appealing. For another, this tastes like nothing but congealed sugar, because it is nothing but congealed sugar. I whipped in a little vanilla near the end, but it didn't help much. Simple sweets like these need a little kick.




That's better. They would be even better if I used a more distinctive flavor than vanilla in the marshmallow. A few combinations to keep in mind if I want to try again: peppermint extract and semi-sweet chocolate (pepperming patties!); orange juice and dark chocolate; cherry or strawberry extract and white chocolate. One thing I want to work on is getting that chocolate to give way a little and not crack when bitten into. Any tips?

PB&J Pie

Last week, The Food Snob made a peanut butter pie for her coworker's birthday. Her coworker's birthday just happened to be four days before my birthday, and I just happened to be looking for a birthday cake alternative. I love cake, but five days of pokeball cake wears down even the most cocoaphilic of taste buds.

Mo Diva modified her recipe from the one on a jar of Smucker's fudge topping to use a homemade crust, real cream and Reeses candies. I had to un-modify my version back to using store-bought whipped topping to keep it lactose-free, and used a store-bought crust because, well, I'm lazy. And it was my birthday, so I was allowed to be. It was bad enough to spend my birthday morning with she-who-should-not-be-trusted-to-code-security, but I digress.

I located the original recipe, replete with product promotions galore, here on the Smucker's site. It had quite a bit of chocolate (and sugar) in it, of which I had my fill, so I devised a strawberry topping instead to turn it into a PB&J pie. For the record, fruit makes it healthy.

For the pie
-1 cup creamy peanut butter
-1 (8 oz.) container Tofutti Better-than-Cream-Cheese
-1/4 cup sugar
-3/4 container of dairy-free whipped topping
-1 prepared graham cracker crust

For the topping
-16 oz. fresh or frozen strawberries
-1/4 cup sugar

I was supposed to use my new electric mixer to make the pie filling, but I didn't feel like taking it out and cleaning it afterwards. Fortunately, Tofutti is really easy to cream by hand. I mixed together the peanut butter, "cream cheese", and sugar, then folded in the whipped topping to make a fluffy, sticky mass. I heaped it in the crust and stuck it in the fridge to set up.


For the topping, I put the strawberries and sugar in a small pot and boiled it down into a slightly chunky sauce.



There was a minor crisis when the sauce boiled over and burned instantly on the range...apparently one should never leave cooking fruits unattended. I put the topping in a jar in the fridge while waiting for the pie to finish (I didn't pour it directly over the filling, because it would make cutting even messier than usual).

After many hours, I wrangled the first slice out of the pan and topped it with the refrigerated topping.


After a full 24 hours, it cuts a lot cleaner than it looks here. The peanut butter flavor mellows out with time, so I've become much more conservative with the strawberry topping. The crust I bought from the store is really crumbly, but it's just a vehicle for the filling anyway. I am seriously considering making this filling with a little more cream cheese and a little less Cool Whip to put on bagels instead of in pies...then I don't need a special occasion to eat it :D

Birthday Hijinks

I'm 23! The world looks a lot different from when I was 22. For one thing, everyone around me looks younger. For another, I can almost wear bright lipstick without feeling like the 14-year-old Francie putting her hair up to get work illegally in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.



I almost look grown-up, don't I?

I was wearing the aforementioned lipstick because Sweetie and I were heading out for a dual-celebration dinner. Ever since we came back from Japan last year, we've been lamenting the lack of decent restaurants in Indiana. It's all fried or mass-produced, and you can either choose to spend way too much for twice as much food as the average human should consume in one sitting or settle for fast food. But last week Sweetie discovered the existence of an actual, honest-to-goodness Korean BBQ restaurant in Bloomington! We thought nobody would take on the risk of American patrons setting themselves on fire, but thank fate for the high number of East Asian international students.

The place is called Mama's Restaurant, and according to Yelpers it's somewhere everyone should go before they die, right after "gaining carnal knowledge of a woman" and "getting a driver's license," in that order. I have never done the former, but I have the latter, so I guess you can say I skipped a grade. Anyway, the restaurant is right on 10th and the Bypass, next door to Sweetie's dentist, in a nook I used to drive right by on my way to work. It's nothing impressive on the outside, but it's clean and spacious on the inside. We requested seating in the BBQ area, which 10 minutes after opening was already occupied by rowdy groups of students speaking Chinese.

I knew it would be costly before going in, so I brought along the cash gift my grandmother sent for my birthday. My grandmother enabled us to go to Japan last year courtesy of my graduation gift, and she enabled us to eat well in New York over New Years too. Essentially, my grandmother is the sole reason we ever leave the apartment :p Thanks to her, I didn't have to sweat over the prices on the menu when we selected a plate of bulgogi and a plate of spicy marinated chicken for about $16 each. I'd be doing plenty of sweating over the grill soon enough anyway.



The restaurant we visited in Kyoto had gas-operated grills, so I was surprised when a man came out carting a tub of flaming charcoal. Really flaming. I was also surprised that they didn't give us lard to grease the grill, but come to think of it leaping flames + grease + patrons downing copious amounts of soju = a lawyer's worst nightmare. Instead, they changed the plate whenever it started looking like this:


I'm not a big fan of my meats being covered in ash, and it was sometimes frustrating to scrape it off of those pans. The taste was great, and I wish I had the recipe for some of those marinades and side dishes, but I can only give the restaurant 4 out of 5 stars because of the sticky non-greased grills. I'd be happy to go back again and sit in the non-BBQ section, where they can serve me my yummy meats pre-cooked and we can leave without smelling like chain-smokers. But I would only recommend the BBQ section if you've never experienced table-top cooking before and have limited options.

After Mama's we stopped at Best Buy because they were out of Pokemon White when we went last week, and Sweetie is due his birthday present. They were still out of stock, so we spent some time trying the demos around the store. We played with the 3DS, which is neat but not impressive enough to buy (it's not "3D" like you'd expect in Imax theaters, but more like the difference between watching a cartoon and live-action on a flat screen). And then Sweetie did something one should never, ever do: touch the Wii-mote on display with your bare hands. I have never seen such a thick, white substance on an electronic before, or such interesting expressions cross Sweetie's face. So instead of going straight home, we walked next door to Barnes 'n Noble to use their restroom, and he spent 10 minutes scalding the skin off his palms. Then we looked at some board games and language learning programs, but didn't buy anything because $45 for dinner already puts us close to mental-breakdown territory.

I finished my celebratory day with a slice of PB&J Pie.


Recipe to come tomorrow, because I have to run and read some papers before class right now. Bis morgen.

Weak

Yesterday was the first day of spring, and hence (a) the occasion for a new blog color scheme and (b) the first day of the year with run-worthy weather. In late afternoon, I donned my running clothes and tripped over to the park to scuttle around in circles.

Circa 4:45pm, my respiratory and circulatory systems would be represented by a cake that looks like this:


And about 10 minutes later, that cake would have looked like this:


For a more graphic analogy, imagine that my tiny out-of-shape heart is one of these:


And the dirt track around that park is one of these:


Aww, I'm sure Minnie and Mr. Squiggles will be the best of friends.

Basically, I made it to about half a mile before my internal organs collapsed in on themselves. I don't remember having that hard of a time exercising since the timed miles in sixth grade. After that, I joined the middle school track team and started jogging by myself through high school, so I forgot exactly what anaerobic respiration flooding my system with lactic acid feels like.

I didn't think I was in too terrible shape, either. Sure, I spent the last week playing video games and eating through a giant pokeball cake, but I've been walking my miles on the treadmill and lifting my 5-pound free-weights. Apparently, 40 leisurely minutes to the latest episode of Bones doesn't keep one in cross-country shape.

To be fair, when I'm running outside I naturally speed up. It doesn't feel shameful to bring the treadmill down to 5mph if 6 is too strenuous, but it makes me feel silly to shuffle slowly along beside the ridiculously fit college boys and elderly Korean ladies appraising me from head to toe while power-walking. Not to mention the need to put on a show of strength for those large dogs straining their leashes to nip at me. So while I would usually feel the teensiest twinge and hop off to stretch out, in public I pushed to cover distances that were reasonably respectable.

Obviously, I need to work on my stamina. But not today, because that lactic acid is still pooling on my muscles. Today I have to write a group paper that we weren't told was due on Wednesday until midnight last night. That instructor is my favorite person on the planet right now -.-

An Immodest Proposal

Earlier this month, a columnist for the student newspaper at my university wrote a piece about how much more harm the FDA does than it prevents. All that boggling bureaucracy, he asserted, kills people. Drugs that could save lives take too long to reach the populace. The pharmaceutical companies lose billions to those inane regulations. If only the government took its fingers out of the food and drug pies, health care would be affordable to all, the quality of patient care would skyrocket, and unicorns would dance with the leprechauns at the end of the free market rainbow.

I may sound like I'm being sarcastic, but actually I agree with this columnist 100%. As a biology major and sometimes self-appointed science expert, I have always been a staunch adherent to the principles of natural selection. Dismantling the FDA would ultimately lead to a stronger, smarter, and more resilient human species.

Here's how it works. The FDA currently forces all those pesky tests and standards on the packaged food and pharmaceutical companies. If we take quality assurance out at the knees, the factories could churn out more foods and medicines more quickly. Those products will probably have higher levels of contaminants. Now, people with weak immune systems have had their lives artificially lengthened by modern medicine. When they eat those uninspected fruit snacks, the pathogens will test their mettle. If they survive, they will be deemed worthy of producing the next generation of humans. If not, their genes were worthless anyway.

Also, when new products enter the market, they won't have to go through all those levels of research, modeling, animal testing, clinical trials, blah blah blah. Cancer patients won't have to wait years for an experimental drug to be approved, but can just jump head-first into a vat of magic potions if someone has the inkling it will make their ailments disappear.

Chances are, that magic potion is a bunch of baloney and will kill them faster. Now, you soft-hearted types might think this is a bad thing. But honestly, cancer is just the natural order of things. It is what people in less enlightened eras deemed "death by old age"...you live, your telomeres deteriorate, you mutate, and you die. A lot of cancers have some component of genetic predisposition--hence why the life insurance reapers salesman make you indicate your family history on those forms. Imagine if all those people who contracted cancers just died straightaway. We wouldn't have to waste billions in NSF grants trying to find cures. Families wouldn't have to give hospitals their life savings for treatments. All that money could go towards extending the reach of human excellence...like founding colonies on Mars and building more gadgets that can make phone calls AND play music. Plus, all those little kids with leukemia wouldn't live to pass on their diseased heritage to future generations.

The same concept applies to old people. They can't work or reproduce, which makes them societal dead-weight. Younger people can Google up the risks of certain drugs or stories of people who became ill after eating imported spinach. But old people don't have Internet access. Their decreased mental capacity and tiny bank accounts will lead them to just purchase the cheapest product on the market. Without the FDA, these products will most likely be the most dangerous, and will pick off the dead-weight for us. It's like antelope leaving the old sick ones behind while they flee from lions. Old people buy medicine more often, so they would die first and let the rest of us know which bottles to avoid.

The American public has been brainwashed into believing that the FDA exists for the common good. Fools. The FDA is an outmoded institution that stands in the way of human progress. Evolution only occurs if the unfit die early. If we want to survive the Zombie Apocalypse, we need to pare down the number of individuals who would be susceptible to the Zombie virus. We need to make sure the majority are people who do not need medicine, who can digest everything, and who have the smarts to build and operate Zombie-warding technologies. The first step is to abolish the FDA. Then we can tackle the hospital system, emergency services, and law enforcement. Eventually, it will just be us against the wolves, and the future of humanity will be decided by the survival of the fittest.

The Piece of Paper

Spring Break is almost at an end, and my stress levels are the same as they were before the "staycation." Judging from the condition of my skin, they could be even higher. Why? Because my break has been sapped by the things that will happen after the break: midterm papers due, new busy-work assignments from she-who-should-not-be-trusted-to-code-security-for-bank-accounts, ironing out course schedules for future semesters, and the prospect of going back to work on Monday and building a passable search feature from databases so badly formed that its creators must have been trying to make retrieval impossible.

When I'm feeling tired and grumpy, as is often the case, I question whether that Piece of Paper with the two masters on it is worth it. We've already established that what the paper represents is worth practically nil, since 90% of my mandatory courses just exercise my existing smarts and don't develop new ones. There are some gems, of course, but mostly I'm just treading water in Microsoft Access or the same lectures on elementary statistics I heard as a college freshman. I read the outdated, content-flimsy assignments so that I can earn the good opinion of the professors, on which my grades are based. And I go through the motions of paper-writing, pretending that the words in them have even the slightest bit of relevance to my future activities as a professional.

The thing is, I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for the program. I'd spoken to enough graduates to know that you could sleep-walk through your year and come out with a certificate just as shiny as the gung-ho Type-As'. My highest expectation was that they would allow me enough free time to develop a useful skill set outside of the classroom.

Unfortunately, this places a lot of pressure on me to do just that. I don't have an advisor to keep me on track or even a solid idea of what I have do to make sure I'll be able to pay off my federal loans. Around every corner people tell me the job market is impossible to break into and I have to do a lot more than just take classes to survive...but no one can tell me for certain what that "lot" is. Working part-time? Maybe. Internships? Depends. I can't even articulate what my job title will be. It could be anything from Head of Collections to Systems Analyst. Frankly, it might not even exist yet.

All this is putting my stability-loving personality under high duress. Sometimes I'm tempted to mentally time-warp back to the 1950s and let Sweetie take care of everything while I sweep the floors and bake cupcakes. But we're not in the 1950s, and with all the liberties and rights I get for living in the 21st century comes a certain level of responsibility to take care of myself. Besides, Sweetie has been bouncing around the intention to join either law enforcement or the military after getting his degree. If something happened to him, where would that leave me? Throwing myself at other rich men for support? Heck no. My bra size isn't big enough to pull it off.

When you get down to it, I'm just venting. I will get that Piece of Paper, and I will make sure that Piece of Paper earns me a job that can get me my little cottage and a Kitchen Aid standing mixer. And then I will have future Spring Breaks on other continents, where self-important professors and basic-principle-breaking databases can't touch me.

Light Bulb Blather

In case you've been living under a rock, which as far as I know only I do, you know that the 100 watt incandescent light bulb will be phased out over the next year. The biggest tangible casualty of the new regulations is the Easy Bake oven, which will have to be redesigned with a *gasp* actual heating coil instead of running off of the byproduct of something that was originally intended to produce light.

Now, if you're a sane person, you would read this and say, "So what?" and move on with life. But apparently, most of the country is not sane. The illegalization of 100 watt bulbs has thrown the United States as it is represented electronically into an indignant tizzy. People say they're going straight to the store and stocking up so they can deliberately waste their money and the earth's resources as they please. How dare the government take away their freedom to burn their fingers off trying to change a bulb! It's communism! It's fascism! It's whatever else means "bad," because I can't tell the difference between political ideologies!

This is the sort of reaction people generally save for things that actually matter. But it seems we have a lot of pent up rage doesn't have anywhere to go now that the economy is stabilizing and there are no juicy stories about the president shaking hands with the leaders of other countries instead of leaping on them in a red-white-and-blue frenzy and gobbling them up whole. Either people are emotionally dependent on the brand of their light bulbs, or they have cabin fever from being shut up all winter and need some dire threat to freedoms to funnel it towards.

Consider what life would be like if the media focused coverage on every product that went off the market due to new trends and regulations. I haven't seen too many lead-based paints, books printed on high-acid paper, or candies dyed with Red No. 2 on the shelves lately. I also don't see screaming headlines about the death of the 6-DD-battery-powered boom-box. Just switch on the television to HGTV or some cop show and listen to all the ways they can identify when a building was constructed or what model the car must have been based on new codes implemented in such-and-such year. But lightbulbs, well, that's just going too far!

To all those who vehemently oppose the move to less inefficient lighting: it is indeed your freedom of choice to pour your own cash down the drain. Men in black coats will not come to take your bulbs from you. If you want to put on a really strong and united front, you can go into your kitchen and rip out the dangerously government-supported fluorescent fixtures, replace your Energy Star refrigerator with one from the 1960s, and heat your dinner in a fire-wood stove to stamp your carbon footprint firmly into the ground.

Pokeball Cake

You wouldn't know it from my activity level, but it's spring break! Unfortunately, the only thing "break"-like about it is the break-neck speed with which it is passing while I get no rest. I spent the weekend worrying over school projects, most of yesterday at work failing to manipulate DOM elements, and tomorrow I'll be conducting surveys at the public library.

And today, well, today my soul was temporarily signed over to someone else. Someone who, for a period of one week, will be the same age as me, and who takes his "birthday hours" very seriously. The average individual's birthday starts at 12am on the calendar day of the anniversary of their birth. This individual's birthday starts after I wake up, after I eat breakfast, and after I design a poster for the aforementioned surveys tomorrow. His birthday does not begin until I am both physically and mentally accounted for, and he retains the right to pause it at any time. In sum, this means his birthday began at 1:30pm Tuesday and will end sometime on Thursday.

Activities that DO count as Sweetie's birthday:
-Playing Donkey Kong Country
-Watching the original Dragonball series
-Eating cake

Activities that do NOT count as Sweetie's birthday:
-Showering
-Calling maintenance about a broken garbage disposal and a door falling off its hinges
-Fixing his birthday lunch and birthday dinner
-Baking and decorating that cake
-Taking naps

Well, on the bright side his birthday needs to last for a while, because it will take us that long to finish the cake featured in both of the above lists.


This is a pokeball cake. It is the only cake I have ever baked completely from scratch that resembles a cake in every dimension. It looks like a cake, tastes like a cake, and even sits like a rock in the pit of your stomach like a cake (as I type, Sweetie is trying to sleep off a sugar-induced tummy-ache...high praise indeed from someone who usually takes two bites of my baked goods and says, "It tastes like flour.")


The cake itself is chocolate, following Ina Garten's recipe from the Food Network. I couldn't resist making it a teensy bit more healthy by using half white whole wheat flour and decreasing the sugar by a half cup, but it is still decidedly a cake. I baked it on Monday night and froze it because I read that would help minimize crumbs in the icing, but in hind sight, the author of that tip did not guarantee that it would make up for a complete lack of skill with a butter knife.

For the frosting, I sacrificed $25 at Target for a real-life electric mixer and made an impromptu buttercream icing of 1 stick margarine, half a bag of powdered sugar, a dribble of lemon juice and enough soy milk to form a creamy tooth-decaying mixture. I scooped out a bit and flavored it with cocoa powder for the filling, and tinted the rest with gels for the outside. The black band came from a pre-packaged tube, because I didn't want to empty the entire box of food coloring to make it.


Because my frosting had a lot less butter than most recipes (that amount of sugar is usually mixed with at least 2 sticks), it dried out nicely even as the cake under it thawed. The cake itself was a bit dry, partially because of the whole wheat flour and partially because I baked it in 9" rounds instead of 8". But the flavor was nice and rich without being cloyingly sweet, which left room for the super-sugariness of the frosting.


But Sweetie doesn't care about the content of any of the above paragraphs, because when you get right down to it it's a pokeball cake. I could have made it from a mix and a can of Coke and he probably wouldn't have noticed. His primary concern is the fact that someone made him a pokeball cake, he ate a pokeball cake, and he has the photographs to prove it. Well, that and whether he'll be able to fix that lamp his father built, after the pokeball cake's contents caused me to bounce off the walls and knock into it. In the interest of keeping our things intact, perhaps I should consider a nice cheese platter for my own birthday celebration next week.

Trains!

I don't watch Mad Men, but if it's anything like this commercial for my beloved high speed rail, I might some day.

Mad Men On Trains from Rich Sommer