Otherwise, I am mostly just relieved that school has started up again. Finally, I'm busy enough to feel I deserve my down time, and now that I have things to procrastinate, I get so much done. I've been reading The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Bradley, and it is a delightful book, all 1,008 pages of it, and it's sending me back to my roots: all the love of paganism that I dropped, and all the medieval fantasies that I moved away from, have come roaring back, and I am so much happier occupying this space in my mind. The more of my mind that is taken up by thinking about the Medieval era, the greater my joy appears to be. Maybe I should write a PhD about that. Hmm... Well, no matter what, I've been cheerfully reading Middle English texts, and memorizing Old English poetry (which is amazingly beautiful, I will not lie, and I just want to put it to music, if it will lend itself to such a task - its meter is stress based rather than syllable based). Other amazing poetry of the moment: Greek tragedy. Take this brief passage from Euripides' Heracles, from the chorus (lines 108-113, translated by William Arrowsmith):
Leaning on our staffs we come
to the vaulted halls and the old man's bed,
our song the dirge of the dying swan
ourselves mere words, ghosts that walk
in the visions of the night,
trembling with age,
trembling to help.
My dear sweet gods, that is lovely. And we got to read the Oresteia, and all three preserved Electras (one of which was the Libation Bearers by Aeschylus, and then the other two are by Euripides and Sophocles - I love these authors, so very much), and then you get to compare then and it's all just beautiful, how different the characters seem when you set them together with their other selves, Orestes the hesitant with Orestes the child with Orestes the matricidal machine. And there are all these beautiful story-arching themes, like the ideas of sleep, death, and waking in the Oresteia, or the animal imagery used to describe all the characters from Agamemnon to his wife Clytaemnestra to their children to his usurper, her lover Aegisthus. And then (oh, and then!) there's Oedipus Rex, which has one of the most heartbreaking endings I have ever read - a father, blinded, polluted beyond measure, holding out his hands to his children, who are also his sisters, and bidding them come and touch him, for he shares their pollution and the cannot see them otherwise. And then Creon obeying the final commands of his king as he forces the selfsame man, having traded his sight for his knowledge, to let go these hands and be exiled. Oedipus' last words in the play are, "Don't take my children from me!" He goes from being a proud and powerful king with everything to a defiled and polluted exile in the course of a very short play, and his character changes so dramatically - starting out calm and kingly, middling frantic and unwilling to acknowledge truth, and finishing humbled, knowing his fate, and yet wishing against all evidence that he could just hang on to what's left of those he loves. But he cannot. Ohh, it is so powerful.
In other news, beyond my little literary bubble, I've more or less stopped making interesting food now that I'm busy all the time (I have school, a tiny amount of work - not even 30 hours a month - a club to help run, a choir to sing in twice a week, and naturally a whole bunch of work to avoid, so I get to do things to procrastinate as well), but fortunately I've stopped wanting to eat interesting food, too. So my main dinner dishes are stews of some sort or scrambled eggs with onion and spinach. BUT! I've been baking my own bread, and it's tasty, and the food I eat tends to be good and cheap. So I'm actually happier, eating these things. Some recipes follow, with explanations and stuff!
Fifteen minute biscuits
Enough whole wheat flour
Fluffy amounts of baking powder
Bit of salt, to your liking
1. Stir these delightful things together, in reasonable-seeming proportions.
Hunk of cool room temperature butter (not necessarily too much - less than you think you'll need)
2. Knead this into the dry mix with your fingers, until it is completely incorporated. It should look like rice in sand. (Appetizing, I know.)
Cold water to make it stick, and absolutely not a drop more.
3. Add the water slowly, stirring as you do - make sure you don't oversaturate. Undersaturate, if anything. Seriously, I promise.
4. Quick as you can, make biscuit-sized balls out of the dough and stick it in an appropriately sized oven for ten minutes (actual oven: heat to 400 degrees F, toaster oven...sent to toast? I don't know what our toaster oven's doing, but it works, whatever it is).
5. Eat hot! That which you do not eat, store as soon as you can, to kep the moisture in. Super fluffy and delicious.
Kate's Bread!
About 2 cups shower-temperature water
1-3 teaspoons active dry yeast (instant works too)
1. Pour water into a large mixing bowl. Sprinkle yeast on top and allow to sit for a few minutes (no more than five).
1/3 to 1/2 cup canola oil
At least 1/3 cup brown sugar, more if you want a sweeter loaf
Salt!!! (no more than 1 teaspoon)
2. Add these things to the mixture, sugar first (stir a bit and let the yeast get going) and then oil.
5-7 cups whole wheat flour
3. Start with five. Stir it all together, and if it's a little rough or sticky, that's probably okay. You don't want it to be dry and stiff. The wetter (and not soupy) the better.
4. Dump the mixture out onto a floured counter, flour your hands, and knead. Adding flour as necessary (or if you don't want more flour but need to unstick your hands, get your hands wet), knead for ten minutes. This is important - during this time you're helping the flour's proteins develop so that your loaf can stay together, and also you're giving your bread a grain.
5. When you're done kneading, place ball of bread in a greased bowl and allow to rise for one hour (or until the ball has doubled in size).
6. After that hour, degas the ball, cut it in half, and shape it into loaves. I don't use pans, you're welcome to. These loaves are actually a little small for a conventional sized bread pan. Make sure that whatever surface you finally rest the shaped pre-loaves on is greased (either with more canola oil or, if you're not feeding vegan people like I am, butter).
7. Allow to rise for at least thirty minutes, or until they are about the size you want them to be.
8. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
9. When it's preheated, pop them in, and allow them to bake for 35-40 minutes.
10. When they come out, all smelling delicious and stuff, don't forget to let them rest for a few minutes (probably about ten) under a cloth, and then remove them from the pan and bag them. It is important to preserve some moisture in these loaves, as it's easy to make these pretty dry. One thing you can do to wetten them up a bit is to substitute some milk for the water initially. But, I'm lactose intolerant and can't exactly afford soy milk, so. My bread is milk-free.
This bread makes EXCELLENT toast, and tastes nutty and sweet on its own. Bad for sandwiches - I would suggest milked bread for that kind of thing. Milk adds proteins and makes bread more elastic.
Cheese Rind Soup (better than it sounds, I promise) - serves four, or so
1 medium large onion
1. Chop the onion into the right size of pieces. Put in a pot on medium heat with enough canola oil. Saute.
3 decent-sized carrots
1 medium large potato
2 (ish) cloves garlic
1-2 teaspoons Herbes du Provence
2. While the onions sizzle, chop the potato and carrots into appropriately sized eating chunks. Then make garlic into your favorite spicing size (I cut mine up really fine) and add to the now clear onions. Allow to cook for about 30 seconds, stirring as you do, to make sure they don't burn. Then add the rest of your veggies and the herbes to provence.
2 liters of water (give or take - I might take a bit, actually), boiled
1-2 square inches'-worth of Romano or Parmesan cheese rind
3. Saute the veggies for a while, stirring. When the potatoes are more or less fully cooked, add the water to the mixture, so that it covers it and then adds about half the depth of the vegetables in water on top of that. Plop in the cheese rind after that.
1 head broccoli
1 14 oz can kidney (or other) beans (drained and washed; or, like I did, some random and large quantity of dried kidney beans which had been adequately soaked and boiled - to do this, soak for at least six hours, and boil for about an hour and a half)
4. While your soup is getting more and more fragrant and boiling away, cut up the broccoli into bits of a size you'd like to find in your spoon. I included some of the stem, but you don't have to if you don't want to (it's good!). Add to the boiling water. Add the kidney beans when you do.
Some frozen peas (optional)
Chard or other dark green thing (also optional), chopped as you want.
5. Boil until you're happy with the consistency of the potatoes. Mash them a bit, if you want. Then add your peas and chard and allow the peas to thaw and the chard to wither.
6. Serve this dish hot with some lovely bread. Add salt and pepper to taste, and as the soup is actually fairly light, you can add a small blob of butter to each bowl, just to deepen the flavor.
Alright, my lovelies, it's 12:32 AM here, and I'd like to read more of Mists of Avalon before I pass out. Happy cooking, and for gods' sakes, read some Greek tragedy!
Love,
Kate
