Busy

Very busy lately. I am working a lot and getting stuff done, but it feels like not at the rate I need in order not to fall behind. Whatever. I’m doing what I can, and hope it’s enough. It usually is.

Transcribed an interview the other day. It takes about three times the length of the audio to transcribe. It’s a weird space, listening to voices at half speed, typing furiously, becoming a channel of language. It takes intense concentration but it doesn’t make me anxious, which is the kind of work I like.

Am coming to the conclusion that I can’t eat anything outside of home without getting sick. And when I do eat at home, I feel GREAT. Like today, because last night I made sweet potato and black bean chili. I would post a recipe but it’s so basic that I don’t think it warrants an explanation. But here are the ingredients I used this time.

two small onions
cumin
dried chili peppers (should have used jalapeño)
tomatoes
1 can black beans
large sweet potato
TVP reconstituted in mushroom broth

lime
yogurt
grated cheese
salsa verde

Update: I ate a cupcake, and now I feel ill. I’ll never learn.

Food, health, environment

The Economist just came out with this great article about a study that just came out in the New England Journal of Medicine. The article illustrates how an improvement in environment (specifically connected to availability of fresh food) translated into a lower rate of chronic diet-based disease in a group of low-income women. I would say more but I have to go read about the deportation of young Slovakian women to death camps in WWII.

Banana bread

This recipe was a little bit spectacular at dinner last night. There was amazing arroz con leche, too, whose recipe I hope to soon possess.

INGREDIENTS

• 4 overly ripe bananas, smashed (mine were unapologetically black)
• 1/3 cup melted butter
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• Pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour (about half whole wheat, half white)
• 1/4 cup broken up walnuts
• 1/4 cup finely chopped up bittersweet chocolate

METHOD

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). With a wooden spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, mix. Pour mixture into a buttered and floured 4×8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve.

Postmodernity and food

I just finished an incredibly interesting sociological article on anorexia and class. Now my thoughts are wandering around, and if I don’t jot them down I won’t be able to get on to my next reading.

• postmodernism is no longer giving credence to the metanarrative of class structures, for instance. we see the results of this in the emergence of high-end restaurants that serve gourmet poutine, or diners that serve squash-filled ravioli alongside macaroni and cheese.
• the position of the educated, intellectual types is no longer to be fiercely scientific and classically oriented by a good, solid career (that’s too modern, too square), but instead to embrace yoga and breastfeeding and organic food, to be part of the creative class, to be eclectic.
• the hipster is to our time what the flâneur and the dandy where in nascent modern times. his appropriation of working class symbols and habits like drinking PBR beer and sporting a carefully selected Salvation Army wardrobe while going to McGill and living in an expensive Mile End apartment (both paid in full by affluent parents) is a clear indication that he breathes and exhibits postmodernism much in same the way the dandy did in transforming and imagining the tumultuous modern period he faced.

I wonder if I can make this my second paper for theory class, using myself as the hipster. I’m a great figure for this, as in my case you can point to many of the aspects that make our world postmodern: I am female (the modern dandy was male), I come from a mish-mash of class backgrounds, I am at home in a foreign place, and I am as likely to eat at a greasy spoon as I am to eat a homemade organic salad with sprouts I grew myself.

Actually, I’m sort of apprehensive that this might just mean I’m late modern. And that would be so much less cool.

Senses and sensibility

M. brought back some desserts from this place the other day. As endorphins started sloshing around in my veins in response to the sumptuousness of the chocolates, I started wondering why richness and gratification of the senses is so often associated with decadence and sin. I suppose it has its roots in Christianity’s condemnation of the body and the preoccupation with its appetites. The connection is even embedded in our language, with carnal pertaining to the flesh as well as that which is “not spiritual; merely human; temporal; worldly”. Likewise, sensual is derived from the word senses, and is used to describe something that is “worldly; materialistic; irreligious”. It is borne of, and in turn portrays and perpetuates, the belief in a dual world in which the spirit or soul must be divorced from the immoral functions and desires of the body in order to achieve moral purity. In this world, the soul must reject the senses—the medium of the base, evil world—in order to foster spiritual, otherworldly good. If memory serves from my comparative religion courses, Christianity was injected with this doctrine by Saint Augustine, who in his conversion to Christianity brought with him the Manichaean cosmological struggle between good and evil.

At any rate, the rejection of my Catholic upbringing involves doing away with this mortification of the body. (More complicated still is the on-going attempt to liberate myself of its secular counterpart, Cartesian dualism, but that’s a topic for another day.) I like the idea of good as in delicious translating into good as in positive. It’s important to inhabit one’s body attentively in order to live healthily. Nature is wise, and thus what is gratifying is for our own nourishment and is ultimately positive. In the world we live in today this statement must be qualified, but not to the extent that the fundamental idea is subverted. Moreover, embracement of the senses can be positive if it doesn’t translate into the other extreme—an impulse borne of the dichotomy it repudiates—of extravagant indulgence. Sex must be safe and sensible. Food must be balanced, nourishing, and serve the purpose of fueling the body, which the body must in turn honour and fulfill with movement, with creative labour. Like a plant coexists in its ecosystem giving and taking, so must we act sustainably in relation to our own bodies. (And with our own ecosystem, too, but that is also a subject to be tackled some other day.)

Lactic acid

My entire body aches from spinning yesterday. I didn’t know hand muscles could hurt.

I want to be this woman.

Sweet potato chili

olive oil
onion
garlic
cumin
chili pepper flakes
sweet potato
diced tomato
tomato paste
tvp
kidney beans
braggs

minced raw onion
sliced spring onion
cheese
cilantro

Tuesday morning brunch

chopped cherry tomatoes
minced garlic
olive oil
salt

orange pepper julienne
sliced cremini mushrooms
chopped red onion
sautéed in olive oil
deglaze with Bragg’s at the end

polenta made with spinach and mozzarella, chilled in a mold and cut into triangles
pan fry in olive oil, chili pepper flakes, dried oregano and basil

sauté onion with cumin
black beans simmered till tender
mash with lard and Bragg’s

kombucha

Serves two people (mandatory!) while playing Juan Luis Guerra and Manu Chao during a snow storm (preferred).

soba, anyone?

I recently moved and found myself needing to stock up on food all by myself for the first time. I quickly became aware of how eclectic my personal cuisine is. The first basics to make it into my pantry and fridge were vegetables, spices, eggs, soymilk, granola, and all sorts of grains and beans. But today I realized that I was in serious need of some Asian basics, so I made my way over to a little Chinese market and picked up oolong tea, soba noodles, soy sauce, coconut milk, Sriracha, seasame oil, and had to stop because I had reached the number of things I told myself I’d buy. (Shopping for food is like gambling for me and I have to give myself a limit, otherwise I’d grossly overdo it.)

Macro tofu

Macrobiotic Tofu Sandwiches
7-grain bread, lettuce, nayonaise, Dijon mustard, fried tofu, carmelized onions (soy sauce, apple cider vinegar), dill pickles