Peg Duthie's Blog, page 44

vidi vrai de Paris

"Roman numerals probably retarded the progress of mathematics for centuries." - Fred C. Hess, Ed.D., CHEMISTRY MADE SIMPLE (Doubleday, 1955)

(On the previous page: "Don't be frightened by numbers. Mathematicians have helped us greatly by giving us numbers that are very easy to work with.")

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colors and learning curves

The third time is confirmation, methinks: no matter what color is in the jar (Voodoo Blue, Atomic Turquoise) or how much bleach I've used, my hair will turn into a deep, vivid green. I'm not complaining: it happens to match my glasses and eyeliner. There are worse superpowers to have.

What I need, though, is to cultivate a gracious way of handling St. Patrick's Day jokes while steering the chitchat into other directions. (March 17 coincides with a sad anniversary in my personal history.) I wonder if there's an economist or Nobel laureate I could make the green in honor of...

Oho, here we go: Joseph Bienaimé Caventou. French. Pharmacist. Co-isolated chlorophyll and caffeine. Caventou, you're my man!

(When you can't berate them, make their eyes glaze over. Heh.)



From Flower Confidential's section on Multi Color, a flower-painting factory:

"We can glitter anything," he said, moving cheerfully past the roses.

The chapter in general ("...a rose the color of blueberries. Actually, it's hard to compare this blue to any color you'd find in nature. It was more of a Las Vegas blue, a sequin-and-glitter blue. A blue you'd find in nail polish or gumballs, but not in a garden. Peter had hundreds of these blue roses...") reminded me of the the daisies that are doctored with shoe polish to pass for black-eyed Susans during the Preakness Stakes.



The window for Rhysling nominations will remain open until Saturday, February 22. My eligible poems can be viewed via this Google Doc until then.


I was thinking of baking a gingerbread Washington pie (from my Complete American Jewish Cookbook) in honor of the holiday, but we ate a a lot of dessert last night, and there are some savories higher on the list (specifically turnip cake and artichoke quiche). Also on this week's agenda: finetune 600 endnotes; relearn how to play poker; reacquaint myself with riding a bike (temperatures are supposed to reach 64 F this week); work on a birthday gift. Onward!

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more on Brillat-Savarin

This one's for the lawyers... ;-)

He often took his manuscript [of Physiologie du Goût] to court. In fact, it was in idle moments in the halls of justice that he wrote most of it. His other companion, besides his manuscript, was his dog, who went under the uncompromising name of Ida. She followed him everywhere and sat on the bench next to him both in the courtroom and in his favorite Café Lemblin. [His biographer] Monselet relates that during the hunting season the judge's presence was sometimes pungent. This was due to his habit of shooting small game birds and then carrying them around for days in the capacious pockets of his Prince Albert-like coat. As the birds became higher, his neighbors on the judicial bench became more uncomfortable, understandably enough.


-- Samuel Chamberlain, Bouquet de France

I also finally finished Amy Stewart's Flower Confidential last night (it seemed appropriate to do so on V-day), and then I turned to my Southern Living handbook to see if it had anything to say about building cold frames. (We have two window frames, one with the glass still intact. I shall probably turn them into cold frame lids eventually -- but right now it would be an elaborate variation of procrastination. Back to reading about bisphosphonates and selective estrogen receptor modulators...)

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from Samuel Chamberlain's BOUQUET DE FRANCE (1952)

(aka what I was reading during dinner tonight)

The poularde, of course, is a young hen who has been forced by the cruelty of man to submit to an ovariotomy, so that she can be fattened more easily. Thus relieved of a myriad worrisome details, these placid hens avoid domestic cares completely. Indifferent to the chatter of the young, the rivalry of other females, and the philandering inconstancy of the male, she may devote her entire time to the pleasant business of fattening herself on the best corn. More than one critic has reflected upon this bit of skilled alteration which results in such subtle refinements of taste. Capons have suffered similar indignities with resultant plumpness and freedom from vagrant thoughts. One meditative gastronome has come up with the disquieting query: Do cannibals breed eunuchs for their choicest feasts?

[dinner tonight was hot chicken from Pepperfire, accompanied by a glass of Los Dos grenache+syrah :-) ]

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filling things

A cookbook I bought last year suggested baking eggs in avocado halves as an easy breakfast. The results were meh, but now I know what doesn't work for us (at least with this oven, which runs cooler and slower than those of typical test kitchens, based on other adjustments I've had to make to other recipes).

On the upside, the carrot wontons I made two nights ago turned out fine. I ground up a handful of carrots and seasoned them with sesame oil and black pepper...



I spooned the filling into the wonton wrappers left over from the last time I made a batch of potstickers, and then steamed the lot:



I also made a decent goulash out of leftover turkey, rice, and corn (adding tomatoes, onion, cayenne, and the leftover carrot mixture). This morning I fried pancakes because we were out of bread.

This week's bathtub reading has been issue 139 of the Paris Review (1996). From the intro to an interview of A.R. Ammons:

For most of the next decade [1950s] he worked as a sales executive in his father-in-law's biological glass company on the southern New Jersey shore. Ammons published Ommateum, his first book of poems, with Dorrance, a vanity press, in 1955; a mere sixteen copies were sold in the next five years. (A copy today would fetch two thousand dollars.)

Bedtime reading has included bits of Anthony Glyn's The Seine. I am enchanted by this sentence: "Saint Seigne tried hard; it wasn't his fault that he was turned into a river-god."

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results

This seems to be the healthiest of the tulip bulbs I moved to indoor containers. It is keeping me company as I edit.

The BYM was given permission yesterday to start putting weight on his leg. Progress!

The BYM has ordered me to refrain from cooking raw anchovies at home in the future -- understandably, since the aroma lingered in the kitchen long after I'd baked them, hauled out the garbage, etc. (and he said he could smell them even before he entered the house). Oh well. The dog was hyper-happy about the experiment (even though I refused to drop the fish-heads on the floor), and the leftovers added oomph to the Chinese spinach I pulverized today to use as a green pasta sauce.

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looking at the sunny-side-up side of things...

(It's been a gray, gray day.)

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dreaming of good fortune

a slip on the tongue...



slivers of memory:
grapefruit soda
and mellow Malbecs



time to step back
a step away away from the wreck
there being so much
to learn about breathing
before the next dive

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Candlemas Day

Christmas cactus
greeting February shadows
with flame-bright silks



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Candlemas eve

Candlemas eve
coaxing old tulips
toward the new season

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