On the Milwaukee lakefront. A couple hours of perfect bliss on a beautiful summer evening in Milwaukee. Here’s what I ate. (Photos courtesy of our cell phones, but a visual’s a visual.)
I shared this sandwich with my dad, but I got all the peppers. The picture is shitty, but you might be able to tell that the bun was really quite good.
Not a sincere smile in the group, but that’s just because the toasted ravioli was too good for us to want to be bothered for a photo break.
After that, I partook of my sister’s calzone (cheese and spinach), and then we had these parmesan potato chips:
I was very enthusiastic about the Amaretto Puffs:
That custardy cream sauce was quite tasty, but I wish the amaretto had been more apparent in these little lumps of fried dough.
For our second and final dessert (we didn’t have room for the rice balls, after all) we had these pretty sorbetti in frozen hollowed lemons and peaches.
To top it all off, we carried a bag of Koepsell’s away with us. My dad swears this is the best popcorn in the world, and he even sends me their jars of kernels and their coconut oil when I’m at school.
This is exactly the meaning of a festival. Feasting. (The words are pretty closely related, etymologically.) I love taking a day and stepping outside of all health-related dietary considerations, to celebrate. What was I celebrating to-day? Well, being Italian, of course, and being back in Milwaukee! It’s beautiful.
So last night, we were discussing what was to be done about dinner, and I felt strangely invested in the question. I wanted good food, but more than that. I wanted what I wound up terming “a food experience.” What we got, given that the pizza was no longer fresh at 8pm, was more experience than food, but certainly not a disappointment. The Pizza king moved to the corner of Jay Street right across from the courthouse a couple months ago, though I personally had never heard of it before then. Then for taste of Union two weeks ago, they offered free pizza to Union students, which, after a little bit of fretting (isn’t it always like that with me?) I enjoyed. Even when it’s not free, though, the pizza is very reasonably priced, and the guy who runs the place is very personable, though he told us last night that he “doesn’t like people, especially not humans.” We showed up just as they were closing, so he boxed up what was left over and gave it to us, dimming the lights for “atmosphere,” but mostly so that people wouldn’t wander up, thinking they were open.
My pizza had tomatoes and bacon on it, and Joey got a very intense vegetable number of which the pizza guy had said “I mean, they’re all good, but you want to get what’s really good…” I drank a cherry coke.
Filed under: food
Opening a book that was assigned in the French class I’m auditing, I was alarmed to see this first word: “Doukipoudonktan.” Flustered, I just ignored it at the time and kept going. The book was Zazie dans le métro by Raymond Queneau, and with the help of a photocopied excerpt from a scholarly article “Lexique Zazique,” I was later able to decode Queneau’s very modern ideas of French crasis (“Doukipoudonktan” = “D’où qui pue donc tant”) and the abundance of slang (argot) and semi-obscenities that were tripping me up. I didn’t read all of the book. Our professor only assigned us certain chapters, and despite my best intentions to over-achieve in a class for which I am not receiving credit, I only read the book in a morseled way.
The novel is clever, and it’s clever in a way that–as I think–books should be; I suppose it could be described as a type of cleverness that weeds out readers. And I don’t mean this in a snotty way–I don’t care at all which readers are being weeded out. For all I care, it could be the smart, dull, virtuous, or blond readers who just can’t understand what the author is getting at. Exclusion in itself makes things better. Mostly, I need to believe this, because all of my friends at home did, but everyone I’ve met at school out here seems opposed. No one could understand why I wouldn’t bring my football with me to Sprinfest, when I could not assure myself that I would be able to prevent other girls from playing with it. They thought I sounded mean. At any rate, Zazie is much more accessible than that last example; I think that most people would find it entertaining. So I recommend: the book or the movie, Zazie dans le métro. Here’s the movie trailer on YouTube.
Also, during these last few weekends of the school year, we are suffering more than usual here with the knowledge that all of our friends at schools on semester systems have been out for weeks already. So I cherish the weekends especially and, recently, the opportunity to read magazines. I start the minute I get out of class on Friday afternoon. I have a subscription to Vogue from my highschool years that will never expire, and I recently got a subscription to Gourmet from my cousin-once-removed’s school magazine sale.
I also read an occasional New Yorker–I mean to get a subscription–and Women’s Health, and pick up whatever else shamelessly, if it has an interesting topic on the cover. Especially if the something interesting on the cover is a recipe–my weekend magazine reading corresponds nicely to my weekend cooking.
In the May issue of Gourmet, there were two very different recipes that got me excited, both of which I slightly altered and put together as two dishes of my Friday night dinner. From the “Ten-mintue Mains” section, I made their “Open-face Chicken Cordon Bleu.” As the section suggests, it was quite simple. Chicken cutlets with ham and Gruyère on top. I omitted the spinach they prescribed for in between the chicken and ham, since the local grocery store only sells spinach in huge bags, and I don’t make myself salads. I also made the dish from a few pages earlier, “Bacon-and-egg Rice,” but in this case I omitted the chopped scallions, keeping the protein content two the title ingredients. I also grabbed some string beans while I was shopping, and the meal was quite satisfying, both that night and again this morning, when the leftover rice served as a great breakfast.
Also, on a side note, I hate bugs right now. I had to duck out of one of my house’s famous Porch Parties early this evening, to nurse four huge mosquito bites with Cortaid, and I HATE EARWIGS! Why did they have to call them that? Am I the only one to whom the name always suggests grotesquely vivid images?
Anyway, till next time.
Filed under: food
Tomorrow is the last day of classes before spring break, making to-day the last day of Monday classes (for me, Latin and German) Consequently, our German professor, in the true spirit of language teachers all throughout the Western world, invited us to bring some food to class, and have a casual last day. So I, with my final handful of edits for my sophomore project still hanging over my head (I’ll do that tonight, I swear!), headed over to the campus store after Latin class to find something to bring: a brownie mix, and a jar of Maraschino cherries. The only thing better than brownies (aside, as far as I’m concerned, from most other pastries or sweets) is easy brownies, with cherries. It was only pointed out to me afterwards by a Mitwohnerin who is also in my class that the choice was felicitously in theme, with its resemblance to German Black Forest cake.
Strange thing about the house I live in, though: the laundry machines are in the kitchen. This not only limits our counter space (I would call it “negligible”), but it also sometimes creates an interesting mixture of smells from the two different activities. And to-day I was washing my whites. But, surprisingly, the smell of bleach (which I generally enjoy) is not at all offensive when layered with the smell of chocolate (which I always prefer to the taste).
And it’s wonderful. While my friends are hectic with last-minute paper writing (yes, I have one paper to write, but plenty of time–why worry?), I am catching up on my email, baking brownies, and spot-bleaching t-shirts. And all of this because I’m used to taking four classes per trimester, but with my sophomore project winding up before the last week of the term (all but those edits…) I have suddenly found myself with an unwontedly low workload. On top of which, I only have two exams, both on the first day of the examination period, meaning that I will have a nice, long spring break. I’ll hang around here for a couple days cooking, then I’ll go visit my friend at another school, and finally I’ll trek down to Maryland with my boyfriend, with the main motivation on my part of spending a few precious hours in my favorite town, Annapolis.
And after all of that, I’ll come back here and dive into five courses (including one audit) for the spring term. But even that will be good in its own way. The courses themselves are exciting to me, every one: German Drama, Greek Comedy, Latin Reading, French (nineteenth and twentieth century literature), and finally–finally–English poetry. Fine, then: I’m inclined to be positive to-day. I’m happy, I’m wearing baggy jeans, and now I’m hungry.
Yesterday my school, which doesn’t give us the day off for Marten Luther King Jr. Day, much less snow days, was gradually slowed to a stop by enormous quantities of beautiful beautiful snow. Officially, the only cancellation made by the school was to close down the administrative offices at noon and to close down some of the food kiosks in the Campus Center. Classes were held underneath the gathering two feet of snow that distorted the shapes of all familiar landmarks around campus, and buried smaller things like benches, bushes and cars.
I had a morning class: Latin. Our teacher offered some Catullus in the spirit of the day, and though I was sleepy, I was happy to be there. I walked through the snow to class that morning, starting out by walking to a less-frequented section of Campus near the President’s house, in order to get my forms from the registrar for classes next term. The campus had the deserted feeling that it usually has before the very early classes held on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. But then when I walked past the chapels into the central quad, I saw students walking around, as usual, but incumbered by the snow, making slow progress with their eyes squinting into the snow. Everything was obscured by whiteness, but underneath that, everything was also as usual.
Walking into the campus center, no one would have guessed that the paths outside were barely passable. Everyone was there, clubs had set up at tables seeking membership and money. There were few free seats at the tables in the common area. It was warm, and the light seemed very yellow after the white snow. This makes my list of things I love about my school.
But no one really did anything, all day. We all sat in the house together, doing nothing. Cooking. I had never watched pasta sauce being made from scratch before. I knew that a lot went into sauce, but I was surprised when a basic recipe required that the sauce be simmered for an hour and a half. I learned that I seem to like my pasta on the raw side of al dente. I had already baked enough to last us all day. I took a long nap, and then I took longer to wake up. It was a great Valentine’s Day, I said, my favorite.
Filed under: food
I had an idea, and without going into details, the most important part was that I bake some pound cake in my new loaf pan (glass, with a plastic lid, from Target), and take it on a train along with some fresh strawberries and sugar on a train. Then when I get to where I’m going, I pound the strawberries up with the sugar to make a sort of sauce for the pound cake. No whipped cream, unless we actually whip cream. I thought about conveying all of this in a canvas bag. It strikes me as quite romantic. I hope to do it in the spring. Which leaves me with two problems: when are strawberries in season? I somehow have a notion that it’s late summer, rather than spring, but I don’t actually know. Also, I don’t have a pound cake recipe. If anyone could help me out on either of those points, I’d appreciate it.
I also realized last night that I have a great dearth of poetry books here at school. I don’t have my well-loved Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, nor an anthology of any description. I only have Les Amours de Ronsard, Browning’s The Ring and The Book, The Canterbury Tales, and a little volume of obscure Milton.
Whereas what I do have is almost all of the dictionaries I own. I made an Amazon list for the curious.
The books people can’t be without can be quite telling, of course. I must search for some good examples of this. To be continued…
