Paper Mode

Crazy Katie - Similar to Paper Mode Katie, but with weirder hair

I'm working on a CHI paper at the moment. Hence my late (2am) nights, crazy days, and lack of response on IM if you aren't Reid, Loren, or Ben. In the past five weeks I've written over 2000 lines of SQL, which isn't bad given I had written almost none prior to five weeks ago. (For those of you who aren't Reid, SQL is a a language for talking to databases and getting information out.)

The bad part is that when I'm this immersed in a project I really am THIS IMMERSED in a project. Example: Last night, when I finally went to bed around 2, I was muttering all night. About what? you may ask. Pie crust. I had to work out a sql query to find the best pie crust at the state fair and then make it. So that I could make awesome pie crust cookies. All while helping with a national election. (The election has to do with the fact that when I'm coding and don't need to think much I turn on West Wing in the background.) So yes. I'm now going certifiably nuts. It didn't help that I was also incredibly hungry all night cause I was dreaming about formulas for pie crust. I think my queries may have worked too...if only I had remembered them, but alas, no. Perhaps tonight?

State Fair: Animals and Pictures of Food

How can you not love the State Fair? In Alaska, the State Fair always meant giant cabbages and rides and winning blue ribbons. In Minnesota, if I've learned anything, it's that the State Fair means Deep-Fried-Things (preferably On-A-Stick).

Tricia is demonstrating the proper excitement to show about "Cheese on a Stick." And who can ignore the draw of "Fresh Fried Fruit On A Stick"?

But the mandatory pictures of every single thing we ate were not on my camera, so I cannot share that with you today.
The Star Tribune gave out Bacon Balm Mmmm tasty!

Sadly this was instead of the map of the fair on a stick with the best food (and newest food-on-a-stick) identified. The lack of such a map made food finding much more difficult than prior years. But the bacon chapstick eased the pain.

I've been to the MN State Fair three times before, but I've never really looked at the animals before. This time I was looking through the eyes of Simon. Alpacas!

Sheep are stupid! They eat their cages.

The lamb lead, it turns out, is a lamb showing competition crossed with a fashion show. The lamb in the foreground is wearing several necklaces. The girl made her own wool dress. She's 13.

This is some breed of chicken called a silkie. I found online where the breed is described as "An oddity of oddities of the poultry and pet world."

And this breed of chicken looks like a teenager who's refusing to cut his hair.

This rabbit looks like my old Himalayan cat.

Join us next time for art and butter at the Fair! Or food. Which ever comes first.

Edit: I'm trying out new blogging software, so for the moment, you can't click on the photos and see larger versions. They can be found in this picasa album. I'm still not sure what I think of the software. I'm looking for a better WYSIWYG editor than blogger provides. Ideas? Anyone?

August (err. July?) Part II

When we left off, we were in Montreal with really tall people, much taller than myself. Following Montreal, Mom and I headed to rural Eastern Ontario to visit my aunt and uncle.

I thought I'd already blogged about this, but apparently the internet ate my blog post. So this is their house. I would like to state for the record that screened porches ARE AWESOME. Particularly in buggy parts of the world. Even more particularly when the bugs like to eat you. (When you is, in fact, an unveiled reference to me.) Yes. I love screened porches. They are not screened in this picture, but were in real life.

We had a lovely 22 hours or so in the pictured house with my aunt and uncle eating lovely food and catching up. Then we were off on the road again.

My grandparents have two homes. A winter home, a condo in the city, and a summer home, a hobby farm or cottage in the country. Seeing as how it was summer, we headed to the farm, which is in the middle of no where. We drove up there and were greeted by my grandparents and a lovely warm dinner.

The next day we did more crazy road tripping as my grandparents needed to go to a funeral and an anniversary party, so we drove about five hours round trip to their condo and then another town. No pictures of that, sorry.

My grandfather loves the farm and maintains two hiking trails on the property. The first is a section of the Bruce Trail, Ontario's version of the Appalachian Trail. The second is a trail that's just on the property called "On Yonder Hill." On day two at the farm, mom and I hiked most of it. Here we are in mosquito protective gear.

Off for a family history tour in the evening. In which Grandma decides to wear the Obama/Biden button I gave her,

we see the house she grew up in,

I decide to buy a house overlooking Georgian Bay

and we see a rainbow during our picnic.

The next day was basically taken up by mom doing yard work, then falling off a ladder, and then dealing with the after effects of her falling off a ladder. (And I got to ride an electric commuter bike.) Then we drove home over the next few days.

But that's boring, so I'll end here with delicious wild black raspberries.

August

Well, it's the middle of August. I've gotten a handful of cherry tomatoes and harvested three full size tomatoes this morning, some of which went on my breakfast tomato sandwich, the first of the season. (Er...this was a week ago.) (Also, I was proud that my morning breakfast was 98% local food. All local except for about 1/4 teaspoon of sugar...) The beans are apparently not dead, but they're starting to grow and I have some zucchinis coming soon.

Where, you might ask, have I been? Well, dear readers (all five of you - Mom, Reid, Erin, Simon, & Ivan- If there are more, please let yourself be known!), I have been on vacation and then sequestered in my office or in a corn field in Iowa. So I give you pictorial & literary proof of my travels.

I flew to visit my parents and brother in early July and embarked on a five state, two province, 2400 mile road trip with my mom to visit relatives & Simon.

Exhibit A: In which my mom and I crash (not literally) at Simon's house and I get to meet Ivan and spread bacony joy. If you are confused, I am in fact Simon P. In most situations, I do not come prepared with bacon. Although I just discovered bacon chapstick exists, so that may change. Here, Simon and Ivan, of simonandivan.blogspot.com fame, attempt to chip off pieces of bacon caramel. (The image is blurred to protect Simon's bacon-hating privacy)

Exhibit B: In which my mom and I go to Parliament Hill in Ottawa and at the Changing of the Guards, they play La Marseillaise (among other tunes) and not O Canada!

Exhibit C: In which mom and I go to Montreal,

Obviously this is me in Montreal. Can't you see that everyone around me is speaking French?

eat bagels (with and without cheese),

and see the native Montreal people, who are apparently quite tall during the Just For Laughs Festival.

Part Two coming soon...

Garden Update

4 big tomatoes + lots of flowers

16 cherry tomatoes + lots of flowers

6 zucchini blooms

I think today will be a 180oz of water day. The plants weren't droopy when I got home and I set up the bean trellis, tied up some of the tomatoes, and spread some fertilizer. I can just about taste those tomatoes...

Picture Post

I've been busy lately. Here are some pictures.

My first (cherry) tomatoes! I currently have 14 tomatoes growing, with lots more buds on the way. In addition, between last night and this morning, my zucchini plant has flowered as well. So now I am conflicted as to whether I should stuff and fry the squash blossoms or wait for the zucchinis. My poor plants have had their water dosage upped as well. They have been getting 120 oz of water a day. Yesterday we had a high of 94. They looked very droopy and sad when I got home, so they ended up with 240 oz of water yesterday. Today they've already had 120 oz, so hopefully they won't be too droopy by the time I get home. (High is currently 94 and rising)
This weekend I was invited to go to the performance of the Ramsey's Braggarts Morris Men. There's a very complicated story as to why I was invited, but I'll save that. Watching made me miss dancing, and I think I'm going to go check out the dance scene later this summer.

After the dance performances, all the dancers and watchers got on the trolley that goes between Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun. It was made especially fun by the fact that all the dancers were singing songs, some of which had multiple parts. There was even a round.

Yesterday they began digging up our street. Or the end of our street really. We were notified about this last week and the construction will go until October. They've closed the standard entrance to the street and made the street two way instead of one way as it usually is. Apparently they have to dig down 20 feet and move some pipes around. 

Container Gardening

I have WAY too much growing on our tiny little communal balcony. Here's a glimpse:


Tomatoes (large), yellow cherry tomatoes, yellow pear cherry tomatoes, Kentucky Wonder beans, Zucchini, leaf lettuce, spinach, basil, and carrots

Plus we have two orphan tomato plants and two of the neighbors basil plants. Mmm. Can't wait for some veggies.

What I'm reading

These days I've been doing a lot of reading about food. Checked out from the library I have Food Matters by Mark Bittman and A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg. In addition, I'm also in the process of reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.

A Homemade Life is a collection of stories and recipes. The stories are memories and the recipes are the associated tastes and foods of those stories. Molly started as a blogger (http://orangette.blogspot.com) though due to the book and her husband's pizza restaurant, hasn't been blogging much lately. But reading her stories today made me go back in the archives, and, following a couple of links, I found this gem: Shortbread Waffles. I'm making those this weekend FOR SURE!. Mmm.

A Homemade Life, in some ways, could be my story. She sees things very much the way I do, so while my family, friends, and obsession with a country may be different (her's France, mine England-where food is not the forefront mostly) our ideas about food are much the same.

Here are some passages from the book:
"Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things. I like the way the knife claps when it meets the cutting board. I like the haze of sweet air that hovers over a hot cake as it sits, cooling, on the counter. I like the way a strip of orange peel looks on an empty plate. But what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall. When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that's what we're often responding to: that something else behind the fork or the spoon, the familiar story that food tells."

"Every girl needs a little incubating from time to time, especially when she's about to become someone's wife. She needs ten days with her mother, a solid supply of baguette sandwiches, some well-aged cheese, a lot of chocolate, and some old-fashioned, fat-rippled, devil-may-care eating, which, for future reference, is immensely fortifying."

How could you not love a book like that? Especially when each chapter is attached to a recipe like Custard-Filled Corn Bread or Vanilla Bean Buttermilk Cake with Glazed Oranges and Creme Fraiche. Molly even manages to make her recipe for Stewed Prunes with Citrus and Cinnamon sound appealing...and that's a feat.

Go find a copy and immerse yourself in it. My copy came to me courtesy of the public library, but I may have to go and buy one soon. It's back to the book for me though, I need to read about pickling. And then it will be on to my next tome: Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. I need to get some pancetta or bacon made this summer to participate in Ruhlman's BLT challenge.

FLICKR pictures

I haven't written much about the hiking trip yet, but I finally got all my pictures uploaded. They can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kp_kyak/sets/72157617798644085/

If you're patient, my next task is actually labeling them all, so they make some sense.

Obsessions

I'm a strange person. For many reasons, but one of them is the way I treat new things. If I download some new music on iTunes, say the semester of choir music, I almost instantly become very attached to one of the pieces. I listen to it multiple times in a row, multiple times a day, for a few weeks. Then I've worn it out and go on to a new thing.

The thing could be a book, a piece of music, a musical artist or composer, a food, a blog, or a tv show. Recently some of these obsessions have been the song Popular from Wicked (music), Unicornis Captivatur by Ola Gjeilo (music), chocolate milkshakes, Hungry Monkey by Matthew Amster-Burton (book - but his blog Roots and Grubs is a previous obsession), and The Girl Who Ate Everything by Robyn Lee (blog).

The music obsessions are the easiest and are usually cured with $.99 on iTunes and about 4-8 listens per day, usually on the bus. The blogs are the hardest because I can spend whole weekends going through archived posts. The book obsessions are odd, because usually I'll only read the book once, but then I'll reference it a lot and tell other people about it. Or, in the case of Hungry Monkey, I read it, then cook from it, tell people about it, AND watch all the press about it. (Tonight I made Yeasted Waffles with candied bacon a la Joy the Baker)

But one of the interesting side effects of this is that encountering the obsession at a later date brings back strong memories of the time of the obsession. Hearing Stan Rogers or Da Vinci's Notebook brings me back to my dorm room in college, Gordon Lightfoot and the Cambridge Singers remind me of my parents' house, and Kate Rusby of spring break in 2004 wandering around Europe. Nachos and ice cream sundaes are spring semester Senior year of college. Madeleine L'Engle with the spring of Junior year of High School when I read 30 of her books in a month for a "research project" at school.

So that's a little insight into me...