Light and Momentary

Updates from Gladlyville

Hi, friends, how is it going? I am back in the classroom and it is mostly really good to be there. I have expended a lot of energy over the past 18 months attempting to make enthusiastic video recordings for my students, and now I can just settle into the real-time real enthusiasm mode. I'm a fan. I think the students are too.

Gladlyville U is handling COVID well, I think-- about 2/3 of students are fully vaccinated and still more have received at least one dose. About 5/6 of employees are fully vaccinated. Masks are required in indoor spaces on campus, and people on campus are much more cooperative about mask-wearing than people off campus. Our local COVID numbers are rising, but not in a way that suggests to me that returning students are causing a spike. 

My ferocious COVID anxiety has largely abated. This afternoon a student emailed to ask if she could attend class today via Zoom because her roommate had just been identified as a close contact for another COVID-positive student, and I called the dean of students to see if I could encourage her to come to class after all (answer: yes). This is a pretty marked shift from my attitude earlier in the pandemic, but it feels good to be less worried and I was genuinely glad to see her at her desk. This has been a bad stretch for people with OCD-ish tendencies, and I'm relieved that my hypervigilant brain seems to be standing down at last.

We are down to two kids at home again. It's quiet. Grocery bills are down. The youngest kids are adjusting to being in school 5 days a week. The college-aged kids are adjusting to living on their own again. So far so good on the adjustment front, I think. Three of us saw Alex in Chicago over the weekend. I miss that boy.

Not all the news is rosy here in our half-red/half-blue/half-vaccinated county. I have a friend from church who has been adamant about the evils of vaccine mandates; her sister is a committed anti-masker. Both of their parents have been in the hospital for a week now, felled by COVID pneumonia. Yesterday her mom coded: her kidneys stopped working and the resulting electrolyte imbalance stopped her heart. She did respond to the resuscitation efforts; now she's on dialysis and a ventilator. All over the country there are so many preventable tragedies unfurling. I do not understand.

An improvisational apple upside-down cake

Tonight at the CSA pickup I decided to buy the last half-bushel of organic apples. As I was leaving I ran into the friend who was planning to come over a little later and play games. "Maybe I'll make you an apple cake," I told him, and I went home and did just that. It turned out really well, so I am writing down what I did.

I preheated the oven to 350 and melted a stick of butter in my 9-inch (I think it's 9 inches) cast-iron skillet. We were out of brown sugar, so I poured in a quarter-cup of the dark corn syrup lurking in our pantry. We have an apple peeler-corer-slicer that gives us thin-sliced apples in a trice. I ran two apples through it and cut the resulting rounds into quarters, which I tossed into the butter. I sprinkled salt over them, along with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and a wee pinch of cloves. I tossed the apple slices in the liquid for a few minutes and turned off the heat. 

Next I melted another stick of butter in a mixing bowl and added a cup of sugar. When it was cool enough not to scramble my eggs, I added two eggs and a quarter-teaspoon of salt. I was riffing on a recipe that called for 175 grams of flour, but my quick search for upside-down cake recipes had turned up complaints about soggy cake. In hopes of avoiding soggy cake, I used 50 grams of almond meal and 125 grams of flour, to which I added a teaspoon of baking powder along with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, cloves, and allspice.

Once I had stirred this together, I poured it over the apples and popped it into the oven. It tested done after 35 minutes. I pulled it out and let it cool for five minutes, whereupon I turned it out onto a pretty plate. I served it forth to enthusiastic eaters, almost all of whom asked for seconds. If you are looking for a quick and easy dessert as we head into apple season, here you go.