Light and Momentary

Speaking of anchovies

Yesterday the NYT published a recipe for caramelized shallot pasta, and I said to myself, "I am cooking this for dinner tonight." It is not hard: in a nice heavy-bottomed pan, caramelize six thinly sliced fat shallots by cooking them in olive oil for 15-20 minutes. The author wants you to put in 5 cloves of sliced garlic at the beginning of the cooking time, but I added mine midway through. I prefer browned shallots to browned garlic. Take a teaspoon of red pepper flakes and A WHOLE CAN of savory umami goodness (a.k.a. anchovies); drain and stir through the hot fat until they dissolve into a golden cloud of flavor enhancement. You don't even have to chop them. Have your anchovies mostly disappeared into the fat? Scrape a 6-ounce can of tomato paste into the pan and cook it for a couple of minutes. (The author cautioned me to stir it constantly so it wouldn't scorch, but things caramelize more readily if you're not stirring them constantly, and caramelized tomato paste is a blessing from the Lord. I did not stir constantly.)

Leave half of this mixture in your nice heavy-bottomed pan and save the other half for another use, such as smearing it on your face so you can bathe in that aroma of JOY and DELIGHT and did I mention UMAMI? (Or putting it on your eggs, one of the two.) While your salted water comes to a boil and your pasta starts cooking*, chop the heck out of a small bunch of parsley and another clove of garlic and put them on the table in a small bowl. When the pasta is a notch more al dente than your preferred degree of al dente, scoop up a generous mugful of the cooking water and stir it into the remaining shallot/anchovy/tomato paste mixture. Drain the pasta and let it finish cooking in the sauce. Sprinkle with garlic-parsley at the table.

Serve with a nice capacious utensil, such as a shovel, because you will want to get a lot of it into your mouth very quickly.

*The recipe calls for 10 ounces of pasta. If you are making a pound, scale up the sauce/pasta water quantities -- only scoop out a quarter of the sauce to save for later, and toss in another half-mugful of water.

How to make beef stew

Yesterday morning I was thinking about the warmest coziest dinner I could possibly make, and I knew I wanted beef stew over mashed potatoes. Would you like a recipe for the warmest coziest dinner? Here you go.

Coat the bottom of your Instant Pot with olive oil and turn it to sauté mode. While the oil heats, put about 3 tablespoons of flour into a plastic bag, along with a pinch of salt, a half-dozen grinds of black pepper, and a bunch of smoked paprika. Shake it all together and chuck your beef cubes into the bag. (For last night's batch of beef stew, I used 1.3 lbs of cubed stew beef.) Shake the bag some more, making sure that the flour gets into all the places where the beef cubes are stuck together. 

If you're using about the same amount of beef I was, tip half of the floury cubes into the hot fat. You need the beef cubes to fit in an uncrowded single layer so they brown instead of steaming; you'll want to work in batches. Chop your veggies while the beef is browning: mince a large onion and two ribs of celery, cut 3 fat carrots into skinny batons about the length of your pinkie finger, and slice up five cloves of garlic. I found that the time required for chopping (with a little help from Joe, who said, "Would you like me to chop the onion so it doesn't irritate your eyes?") allowed me to get both batches of beef cubes browned up and removed to a bowl.

Next I poured in a half-glass of red wine, scraped up the delicious fond, and added a little more oil in which to brown the veggies. Into the pot went the onions, celery, and carrots, but not the garlic. You'll have better stew if your veggies get browned and not just softened, but garlic will burn in the time it takes the other veggies to brown. Once they're most of the way to brown, pitch in the garlic slices.

Okay, this is the weird part. Nigella Lawson's How To Eat, the cookbook that taught me to be confident when I wing it with a stew, has a recipe for a beef stew with anchovies. I came across this recipe in early 1999, when I thought anchovies were nothing more than acts of violence against innocent pizzas, so it was a leap of faith for me to try the recipe. But she's right: if you sauté a finely chopped anchovy or three, the bits disappear into the hot fat, leaving only a subtle and pleasing bass note that goes beautifully with beef. Anchovies are the reason why people like Worcestershire sauce. Anchovies are OUR FRIENDS (I mean, okay, I know we don't usually eat our friends but there's a first time for everything), and I have kept them in my kitchen ever since. If you have whole anchovies, chop a few of them very finely and add them with the onions. If you have anchovy paste (worth keeping on hand), add a squeeze after the vegetables are browned. 

But last night I couldn't find any anchovies, and I was bummed until it dawned on me that fish sauce would probably work, since anchovies are also the reason that Thai food tastes like Thai food. I tipped in about a tablespoonful and immediately regretted it. "YOU BROKE THE BEEF STEW," exclaimed my inner worrywart as she smelled the steaming fish sauce. I reminded myself that fish sauce always smells like Rancid Death Potion to my unsophisticated nose, but also it always seems to work out in the end.

This is also where I poured in a generous glass of wine, and about 3 tablespoons of tomato paste, and a little bit of water (like maybe a half-cup, or maybe a little more). If I'd had good beef broth on hand I would have used a cup or two of that instead of a bit of water, but (a) I did not have any, and (b) stews are flexible, so flexible, and (c) anchovies are a powerful but subtle flavor booster so I wasn't worried about having a bland stew. I dumped the beef cubes back into the pot along with the liquid that had accumulated in their dish while they waited for me. 

At this point all you have to do is seal up your Instant Pot and put it on the Meat/Stew setting for 30 minutes.

While the Instant Pot magic is happening, choose your starch and set your table. I wound up serving the stew over buttered egg noodles because I didn't really want to make mashed potatoes at that point. I served this meal to joyous shouts of acclaim, so I recommend it for your consideration the next time you are searching for a cozy winter dinner.

Be sure to tell me whether you like the anchovies!

Angels Unawares

Our van gets cranky in bad weather. There's a leak somewhere, it seems, and when we get a lot of precipitation we get weird electrical problems. The headlights stay on when you switch them off. The dashboard warning lights flicker on and off randomly. The van thinks the sliding doors are open even when they're not. All of this nonsense drains the battery, and then we go out to start the van up and it's dead.

A couple of weeks ago we were in the path of the giant storm that drenched the Midwest. I played for 4:00 Mass, and I wasn't entirely surprised when I went out into the sleet and discovered that the van wouldn't start. It clicked at me sadly, and I switched it off and thought about my options. 

Probably Elwood would not be excited about coming to give me a jump in the dark and in the sleet, I thought to myself. Probably the thing to do was to get an Uber home and then sort out the van in the morning. I was in the middle of explaining via text when someone knocked on my window. He was holding a portable battery charger.

Of all the parking spaces in the giant lot, he had chosen the one next to me. Of all the times he could have left the church, he arrived at his vehicle just as I was trying to start mine. Of all the things he could have kept in his trunk, he had a portable battery charger. And when he heard that woeful click-click-click, he said to himself, "Even though it's dark and sleeting and I don't know that woman, I'm going to help her out." 

"For a minute I wondered if you were an ANGEL of the LORD," I told him earnestly as I listened to the happy hum of my engine.

That night I was finishing the rosary in bed, thinking through the list of all the people I include in my daily prayers. WAS I FORGETTING ANYONE? WHAT IF I FORGOT SOMEONE? An image popped into my head: the man's face above the charger, seen dimly through the window. And I thought about how I am surrounded by that great cloud of witnesses. I thought about the angelic protection and the saintly intercession that shield and enfold me whether or not I can see them, whether it is a calm and trusting kind of day or a white-knuckle clenchy-teeth kind of day. I am hemmed in behind and before, I thought. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.

Free Solo

I watched Free Solo with Joe and Pete tonight, and holy cow, it was kind of stressful. I mean, I knew the ending: he doesn't get eaten by the eels at this time. I read the NYT coverage of the story when he made the ascent. But! Whoa! The degree of exposure just did not come through on the page the way it does on the screen.

My boys are plotting their next outdoor climbing trips. I am thinking more about the workings of Alex Honnold's brain. The world is a wide strange place, is it not?

The wrong shall fail, the right prevail

"I think you should take a break from Twitter," I said to my 20yo today. Twitter is aboil with speculation about what happens next with Iran, and there's a limit to the number of times one can dive into churning overheated cauldrons of speculation and division before one's sanity becomes a little wobbly.

(Did I take my own advice, though? I did not. That is probably an Epiphany resolution waiting to happen.)

I am not sure which bit of Twitter disaster-mongering made me think of I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day, or what prompted me to look up the story behind the carol. Do you know it? 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's wife died in terrible circumstances: she set herself on fire and he was not able to help her put it out before she was burned too badly to survive. In the attempt to save her he was burned so badly himself that he couldn't attend her funeral. He is pictured with a beard in later life because he grew it out to cover his burn scars. This was in 1861. And if 2020 is getting you down, what with the depth of our political divisions and the rampant willingness to defend grave evil as necessity, maybe there's a little solace in contemplating 1861. 

In 1863 Longfellow was still grieving his wife's death when his son Charley enlisted in the army against his wishes. Charley Longfellow was shot in the back in November, and in early December his father brought him home. That Christmas Day inspired his poem, which we know as a Christmas carol: 

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said:
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!”

I am sharing it here on the tenth day of Christmas, in the event that you might also need a little hope.

Purge-atory

My outsides are covered in dust and my innards are marinating in grumpiness. I am continuing the battle against entropy, friends, and right at this moment my progress is feeling like a Pyrrhic victory. But you would still like to hear about it, wouldn't you? I thought you might.

Yesterday I took down all of the question-mark outerwear items from their hooks and piled them up in the office floor. Question-mark coats are the ones that people wear occasionally, like if they're going on the Boy Scout ski trip, or maybe they aren't quite the right fit or the right material or maybe they have a broken zipper or maybe their SOLE REASON for EXISTENCE is to taunt you with the first-worldliness of your problems. The question-mark coats sat there in the floor for a day, while rising discontent flowed through my innards like a mephitic and corrosive variety of lava.

Tonight I went through them with Elwood and we divvied them up: this pile should live on the coat hooks for easy access, this pile should live in the basement for occasional use, this pile should be donated, this last one requires repair before it can meet its destiny. Elwood and I had a disagreement about donating coats; he says that they are most likely to get cut up for rags or wind up in a landfill. I think, myself, that this is an excellent time of year to be donating clean and functional coats in the frozen Midwest. But I don't have any hard data about the eventual destinies of Goodwill coats. Any thoughts or links? And does anyone else with multiple older children find that coats have a weird tendency to multiply? It's perplexing.

Another lingering office issue: the printers. Today after much gnashing of teeth I got the all-in-one printer functioning again. Unfortunately, it isn't happy on the circuit where it used to live. Every time it gets jiggled, it seems to reset the circuit. Which is also where the modem/router are plugged in. Which means that using the printer usually results in the disruption of internet service. Which is problematic for wireless printing, and which also makes me wonder if it's, like, a warning of a massive electrical fire waiting to happen. Next step: find a new home for the printer. It's too bad I can't hang it from a coat hook, now that I have some extra space there.

Because I did not have enough accumulated frustration at this point, I tackled the worst of the basement clutter next. The basement, you guys -- it's been like a slow descent into hoarder hell. The camping gear can't fit in the camping closet, but there was a lot of wishful thinking about the actual size of the camping closet -- like if things were near the camping closet, maybe that would count as fitting inside. (News flash: it does not count.) There is this appalling little nest of teenager-size hiking boots. I don't know where they all came from. It's like the footwear version of the snacking-after-midnight Gremlins, in that scene where they all jumped into the swimming pool. 

No matter what criminologists say about broken-window syndrome, it is a real issue for flat surfaces in houses inhabited by large families. Once somebody leaves a thing on a previously clear coffee table or what have you, it becomes fair game for anybody to set a thing there. But as of tonight the basement table is clear. The school supplies that had mysteriously migrated from the school supply shelf are back where they belong. The comic books that live in the basement are reshelved. The sleeping pads are neatly bungeed together, standing in a corner out of the way. The Nerf guns that had been spread out across the table during involved pre-Christmas discussions about which ones to pass along to a younger cousin -- back in their bin. The climbing gear has its own shelf space now instead of living on/near the basement table. This last was an Undertaking that left me with cobwebby hair and eyelashes and a less-than-sunny* disposition, but it's a past-tense Undertaking now.

*what's the opposite of sunny? thunderhead-y? typhoon-y?

OKAY, thanks for reading if you made it this far. I feel better having written it down. Does it say something about my priorities if I write the blog post about having cobwebs in my eyelashes before I take the shower that will remove the cobwebs from my eyelashes? It might say something about my priorities, I'm thinking.

Onward

You guys, 2019 was SO HARD. The first part of it (Jan/Feb/early March) was hard because of work. I was pretty much working at maximum capacity, which was a tough thing to sustain. The second part of it (late March/April/May) was hard because my anxiety was out of control. It did not make any sense to be so worried that the provost would overturn the tenure recommendation from my department and my college. It made even less sense to fret that the president would reject the provost's recommendation. But fret I did. It was weirdly isolating to be so anxious about something so irrational, and also weirdly exhausting. 

Summer was a little better. I started seeing a counselor, to whom I could say, "Whoa, this anxiety is totally out of control and it's kind of eating my life." I submitted my first NIH grant, but instead of giving myself permission to call it good after that, I spent a lot of the summer feeling too burned out to write and also incapable of saying, "Huh, it would be totally fine if I didn't write anything right now.

And then came The Troubles, which remain unresolved, and another hard thing which I will tell you about at some point but not right now. Anyway: not sorry to see the last of 2019.

On the first day of 2020 I smote the disorder in the downstairs bathroom. It was a nightmare in there. It's a tiny space, and so things just kept getting shoved into the available storage until it was all overflowing and disorganized. I emptied out every inch of storage space, and cleaned the smeared and speckled shelves, and threw away the things we don't need, and put the things we do need into sensible places alongside other similar things.

I've been going in there all day long to admire the fruit of my labors.

This evening I went climbing with Pete and Joe, and they assigned me to climb a 60-foot 5.10 route for Weakness Wednesday. I had tried this route a couple of times before, and bailed in the middle. I was not sanguine about my odds of finishing this route, you guys. My impression the last time I tried it was that it's a bunch of stuff near the edge of my abilities, all strung together, for 60 vertical feet. But the boys said, "You can do it, Mom!" 

Pete wants me to cut to the chase here, to say "And so I did it!" Which is true, but also incomplete. It leaves out the times that I bit back the inner voice saying "can't do it don't wanna let me down NOW," and kept climbing. It leaves out the times that I bellowed STUCK down from an increasing number of feet above Joe's head, and then figured out the way forward even though it seemed improbable. 

I was going to be pleased if I got a little further than my last attempt. It's at the edge of what I can do, or that's how I remembered it. But it appears that the edge of what I can do has shifted from where it used to be. Even though I needed takes* to rest and shake it out, I kept climbing instead of giving up. And do you know, if you keep climbing for long enough, eventually you get to the top.

*Takes = supported rests, where you sit in your rope sling while your belayer keeps you from plummeting to your death below.

So maybe that's a good theme to consider for 2020: order, persistence, and a reasonable degree of courage. I feel like that combo can get a person through a lot of things.