Apropos of nothing, I have come across the following proverb from William Blake: “The cut worm forgives the plow.”
I don’t feel the need to belabor the point, but it got me thinking. Who is the plow in my life?
Also, remember the World’s Best Brownies that I crowed about (linked for your convenience)?
Well, throw that recipe out, because I just made the basic brownie recipe from The Joy of Cooking, 1997 edition, and I believe, firmly, that this is the best recipe for brownies ever. I made it with my gluten-free flour blend, reduced the sugar by a smidge because I used bittersweet chocolate, and needed to bake it for much longer than the recipe time, but good lord. These are the best brownies I have ever eaten. Crispy, shiny top, deep chocolate flavor, and the best mouthfeel/chew of any brownie I have perhaps ever had.
Turns out, more sugar + real chocolate = amazing brownies.
Also, kudos to Austin Kleon, an artist/writer I have recently started following again after a dust-up on Twitter caused me to block him in a fury many years ago (the internet makes me sensitive). There is still something about him that rubs me the wrong way, but I am enjoying his lists and (nearly) daily blog. So maybe more of that in this year – short missives instead of a once-monthly tome.
Not pictured: two sleeping dogs and a laptop. And a cocktail.
As I begin this blog post, we are getting ready to fall back, and I have not even thought once about writing for this space in November.
I am, instead, writing a novel over these next 30 days, a novel that will most assuredly be a steaming pile of crap but that’s quite against the point. The point is to put the words down, a minimum of 50,000 of them, to let the characters guide the story and really hope for the best.
Take care, and good luck.
Generally, people participating in National Novel Writing Month advise stockpiling snacks and warning loved ones to lower their expectations appropriate to the challenge that lies ahead.
The 50,000 words is not much more than I write for other people for actual cash money but that writing is completely different. Non-fiction writing, even when it’s about laws in Arizona and online professional development, comes easy to me and always has. This month also marks the completion of a huge non-fiction writing job for me: the entirety of the AZ Dentist website.
If there is something wrong with your mouth, chances are very, very good that I can diagnose you. As a party trick, it’s frankly rather obnoxious.
So to celebrate the light pockets that come with finishing a huge job, while nourishing the family during this crazy month of writing (for those keeping track, it’s the 50,000 words on top of the regular 35,000 I have scheduled for November), there is this easy, cheap, filling, and delicious recipe: Tamale Pie.
I never thought I would give out this recipe, but desperate times call for sharing. This is, after all, mid-term elections on top of everything else, so something that fills you up and makes you feel cared for is the best I can do. It’s delicious, warming to the bones, vegan (without the cheese and sour cream), and loved by most everyone who tries it (minus picky teenagers, but they are old enough to heat up their own mac-n-cheese).
It is ironic and curious that so many of the things I love to eat and make for other people are things that I might not have made for myself. This is especially true for when I make dinner.
I make a distinction between making dinner and cooking. Making dinner is that sometimes-crazy activity that gets slotted between after school, athletics, classes, meetings, and bedtimes. It’s why grocery stores have pre-roasted chickens and pre-made mashed potatoes hot and ready. It’s why you can get a bucket of chicken that will serve four people for less than $20. And it’s why pizza places came up with delivery.
In short, making dinner is often frantic, often unhealthy, and sometimes at my house a bag of chips and a tub of guacamole. And maybe some ice cream. These are the types of dinners that most people rely on during National Novel Writing Month.
Cooking, on the other hand, is that lovely, leisurely thing that I do when I have ample time, beautiful ingredients, and no one to please but myself. It’s when I get to experiment with new tools in the kitchen (like my mandolin, which is a lifesaver if I ever had one), when I lazily leaf through cookbooks and cooking magazines to see what strikes my fancy, or when I head up to the market specifically for that day’s meal (so very European).
Making dinner is like feeding baby birds in the nest: everyone with their mouths open, squawking for food, any food, before they start gnawing on and pecking at each other.
Cooking is a light breeze blowing through an open kitchen window, a glass of bourbon by the stove, and Florence + the Machine in the background.
Somehow, some way, Tamale Pie meets somewhere in the middle. It’s easy, but it smells delicious, is like actual cooking without being terribly complicated, and it freezes well. This is a great way to avoid the greasy bucket of chicken and still get dinner on the table in 30 minutes.
Tamale Pie
Feel free to make adjustments to the spice level and seasoning as you wish. Amounts below are mere suggestions.
Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon chili powder
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 cans beans, rinsed and drained (whatever you have: pinto, kidney, black beans)
1 cup diced tomatoes with juice
1 can of corn, drained (frozen is fine, 2 cups)
1 ¾ polenta (grits work, too – see Recipe Notes)
4 to 6 cups water
¾ teaspoon salt
2 cups Monterey jack cheese, shredded (leave out for vegan version, or use vegan cheese if you are that sort of person)
Method
Preheat oven to 350⁰. Grease and 9″ x 12” glass baking dish (or one of those white Corningware casseroles, the big one) and set aside.
Heat oil in a sauté pan over medium heat. Add onions and cook until translucent, about five minutes. Add garlic, chili, and cumin and sauté five minutes more.
Add tomatoes, beans, and corn. Season with salt and pepper and let simmer uncovered while you make the crust.
Bring four cups of salted water to a boil in a large saucepan. Whisk polenta in. Cook over medium heat until boiling. Reduce heat to low and cook until thick, stirring constantly, about ten minutes. If your polenta gets thick but is not yet soft and creamy, add more water and continue to cook.
Taste bean mixture for seasoning and flavor before assembling the dish. If it needs more of anything add it now.
Remove polenta from heat. Pour half of the polenta mixture into the glass baking dish, spreading it halfway up the sides of the dish. Pour bean mixture on top, then pour polenta on top of the beans and spread to cover. You will not use all of the polenta (see below)
Top with shredded cheese and bake for 30 minutes. Let sit for at least five minutes before eating. Ten is better.
Recipe notes
Any combination of beans is delicious. Use whatever you have on hand.
If you don’t have tomatoes, substitute a jar of salsa.
Sharp cheddar is also a great topping.
Pass the sour cream when serving.
If you have leftovers, reheat by adding a little water to whatever you are reheating in and placing the pie on top. The water will lightly steam the polenta as it heats, helping it have a creamier texture the next day.
This recipe makes extra polenta, which should be considered a good thing. Reheat the polenta and add some roasted veggies and a fried egg for an award-winning and sanity-saving dinner for two the following night.
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo mentioned above) challenges people with no prior experience and no good sense to crank out 50,000 words of fiction in 30 short days (1,667 words a day for those keeping track). You may not know this about me, but my fiction writing is crap. However, I see this as a writing exercise, a way to stretch my creative writing muscles and perhaps come up with something different from what I have been doing – a new approach, genre, or entree into something expansive and good.
To kick off this process, I am deconstructing my creative practice and the manner in which I express myself through this blog and in other ways (e.g., cooking, photography, the occasional painting). I am intensely curious about why people do what they do, most specifically in this case creative people. In Imagine, there is a lot of research about how one of the mechanisms of our brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPC), is responsible for impulse control (as well as cognitive function and flexibility). These mechanisms are not quite formed in children and teenagers, which is why we want to push their faces in so much of the time.
In adults, impulse control is perhaps too well-established. We have forgotten how to “dance as if no one is watching.” While everyday people have no real issues with this, for creatives types, this is highly problematic. It is impossible to let go and write paint draw dance sing play if you continually run up against the wall of your own self every time you pick up the instrument of your art.
The good news is that when we take ourselves out of everyday life, not only does our impulse control loosen a wee bit (think the excessive amount of drinking and cavorting that occurs on your average vacation versus everyday life), but we also become more innovative and creative. But you don’t need to fly across the globe to responsibly (and affordably) shut off your impulse control. Novel experiences (get it? NOVEL experiences?) can inspire your brain to lighten up a bit. This could be as simple as walking down a different street or looking at a piece of art. Additionally, boring and mundane tasks allow us to relax a bit in the prefrontal cortex. It is true that some of the best ideas occur in the shower – your brain is not so busy monitoring and dissecting every little piece of sensory input and can relax into new thoughts and ideas.
Side note: The majority of this blog was dictated into my phone on the way down to Virginia from Baltimore to take my mom out to lunch for her 75th birthday. Turns out, long road trips are also a good tool to relax the brain’s firm grip on reality. Just ask Jack Kerouac.
The goal of NaNoWriMo is, of course, a novel at the end, but that’s it. Quantity over quality in this case. Imagine also points out that in terms of quality, the most creative people are also the most prolific, producing vast quantities of insufferable crap for each polished gem. So that is encouraging for two reasons:
It does not have to be good, which releases me from any kind of judgment as far as ability goes, which is nice because I have that creativity-stifling characteristic in spades.
Also, Imagine notes that when you think too much about what you are doing the ideas stop flowing and creativity suffers. This is also positive because in addition to the 50,000 words of the crap novel I am about to write, I also have to write my standard 35,000-50,000 words of non-crap that I actually get paid for. So the goal of 1,667 words every day just has to come, loose and easy.
One of the suggestions the NaNoWriMo people make (presumably for people with full-time jobs and multiple young children running around) is to stock up on snacks and treats with which to fortify yourself. This is not, they say, the month to get fancy or complicated with your nourishment. So in honor of the month, and the deconstruction, again, of my creative practice, I present these amazing morsels that just get better as they sit.
It’s fashionable to badmouth Nutella, I think. It reminds me about how people talk shit about Obamacare but when each part of it is broken down they love it. So if I call these toasted hazelnut and chocolate biscotti, I bet haters would convert because they are far more delicious than they perhaps have any right to be. They taste like a big spoonful of Nutella, minus the rainforest-killing palm oil and questionable texture.
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, chopped (get fancier if you like; this is what I had in the house)
Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Toast whole hazelnuts in a dry skillet over medium heat until they begin to smell nutty (and maybe brown slightly). Remove from heat and let cool. Rub as much of the papery skin off as you can, then coarsely chop and set aside.
In a medium bowl, combine flours, salt, and baking powder and set aside.
In a large bowl, combine sugars, olive oil, and eggs and mix thoroughly. Use a spatula to add flour, completely incorporating both mixtures.
Add hazelnuts and chopped chocolate and mix completely.
Divide dough into two and place on parchment paper. Shape into six-inch logs that are about three inches wide.
Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes until firm and golden brown.
Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 200 degrees.
Using a serrated knife, slice each log into one-inch slices. Place sliced side down on the parchment paper and bake again until fully crisped, turning over once, for a total of about 30 minutes – maybe more. Some days I slice the biscotti too thick and it takes longer, or I don’t cook them enough the first time and it takes longer. You are looking for a dry texture. They will continue to dry out as they cool. You can even bake for 30 minutes and then turn the oven off, leaving the biscotti in there to continue to dry out.
Let cool thoroughly. Store in airtight container, or give away. You can’t really go wrong.
I certainly have the temperament for it – I am an introvert, and I over think everything. At a minimum I think writers need to be comfortable alone, stuck in their head for substantial periods of time.
#Check
But for as long as I can remember I have been jotting words down on scraps of paper and hoarding them. Sometimes these words come together with periods and commas and semicolons (my favorite form of punctuation. #TotalDork), sometimes they are occasionally formed together on the wings of a poem, and sometimes they remain just fluttering scraps of thought that I save, maybe waiting for their chance.
I have always loved journals and pens and the accoutrement of writers, but bar napkins, receipts, and matchbooks (from back when there were such things readily available) are all a part of the flotsam of my writerly (if not always writer’s) life.
I even remember my first typewriter: an IBM Selectric. I didn’t write much on that beige beast except for papers and other undergraduate work, but I lugged it around with me for years before finally donating it to Goodwill where I am sure it languished on a dusty shelf until someone decided to recycle it.
My behaviors are those of a writer – seclusion, procrastination, and moment- and memory-hoarding.
That writing is tragically hard for me is an unfortunate irony of my chosen profession. Writers complaining of the pain of writing is not unusual and indeed seems to be part of the job description. Every word you put on the page is a reflection of yourself shining glaringly back at yourself, like a mirror that doesn’t really allow for whitewashing of flaws or highlighting of assets. Writing is radical honesty, only self-inflicted.
If I am honest with myself, which I always try to be, writing is the most painful and precious and cutting place I have ever visited because, as a writer, even if I don’t write it down it stays humming around in my brain, and even if I do write it down and never read it, I know it’s there. There are blogs from the early days of Dane’s death that I simply cannot read now. They are raw streams of emotion poured on the page, the very essence of grief distilled in a paragraph or two when keeping it inside was not a viable option.
So there’s that physical pain of writing the truth as I see it.
And then there’s the intellectual pain. Not the mental struggle to choose the right word or really be honest with what I mean to say and not give in to the urge to have some sort of flourish that is not me. Although this can be excruciating, in many cases time, work, and careful attention to words and the craft of assembling them can help with this, as can copious amounts of reading and patience and careful editing.
I am talking about that odious bitch, the Anti-Cheerleader. The constant mental struggle against feelings of inadequacy and doubt.
The clear knowledge that millions of people are writing AT THIS VERY MOMENT, and most of them are doing it better than me. That someone has already said what I am saying, and way better. That somehow, everyone’s thoughts are better than mine, and I am foolish to believe that anyone gives a rat’s ass about what I have to say.
Do you see the trend? The Anti-Cheerleader assures me that I am unworthy, that my work is not worth the price of the ink used to print it out, and that I will never be able to find any value – monetary or otherwise – as a writer. And, finally, that I should not even be calling myself “writer.”
It seems masochistic to willfully undertake something that continually reminds you how bad you are at that thing. And then to tangle your identity (“I am a writer”) all up in that thing? Well, that is certainly madness.
As it is a well-known fact that many artists are batshit crazy, I suppose a tinge of madness comes with the territory. But still.
Every time I sit down to write or I avoid sitting down to write or I read about someone who has sat down to write I am forced to confront all of these feelings over and over again.
But I was born to write.
I was born to the struggle of shaving words onto the page. I was born to turn the things I experience into sentences that mean something, even if they only ever really mean something to me.
I love words. I love the way they look on the page. I love the way they sound when they are spoken. I love the way they connect to each other and disconnect from each other and connect the people who read them with an invisible thread.
I love trying to figure out which word is exactly the right one, even if the word is simple and small and not flowery and worth 50 cents on the SAT.
Language matters, and it happens to be the currency in which I traffic.
For me, food is like this, too.
Food connects people in ways that even language cannot. I have been fascinated by food since I was young, especially the ways in which it brings people together. Aside from having to eat to sustain life, special moments are marked with food, and that food becomes the shared experience upon which lives are built.
But, as with writing, there are millions of people cooking better than I am. And developing better recipes. And just in general knowing more that I do, latecomer as I am to the whole business of cooking and eating, and with no formal training or work in the back of the house.
Writing + Food = Food Writing, which also = Nearly Paralyzing Feelings Of Inadequacy
And then there is this:
“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
Hell, YEAH, it is.
Because there is ALWAYS someone who is better. Who knows more. Is funnier. Has tighter abs. Better hair. Whatever. Name it. Someone is better.
Which can be, I suppose, a bit of relief. There is no such thing as “the best.” Maybe it might be “the best right at this moment..whoops…not anymore,” or “the best for you with what you had at the time.”
I say this “can be” a bit of relief because most days, if I am being honest (which I always try to be), that doesn’t really help. I still feel like a huckster and a fraud selling skills which, if I actually possess them, are ephemeral and difficult to regulate and duplicate.
Then some days, quite accidentally, there is a shining bit of joy, when the Sunshiney Rays Of Competence dart through the Clouds of Self-Doubt And Despair with a crepuscular golden light.
Today is not that day.
My particular friend Khristian works with a lovely woman, Linar, who you all just WISH would teach your kids someday. Seriously. Her classroom (and her manner with the children and pretty much every person who crosses her path) is so lovely and loving and supportive that every time I see her, even my introverted self leans a little closer. Linar gave Khristian a bottle of rosewater, and he turned it over to me. I promised her a recipe using that, so here it is. Pistachios and rosewater is a classic combination, and macarons have been my archnemesis.
Turns out, they remain my archnemesis.
While the macaron flavor was delicious, they did not rise on glorious feet. The filling tasted like a mouthful of flowers, even though I was very sparing. Some might like it; for me, it was overly perfumed and not pleasant.
This is not the end that I expected to have, but there it is. It is important, I think, to discuss the hard parts, the failure, in cooking. It’s easy enough to make something look delicious; that’s only so much smoke, mirrors, and microwaved tampons.
Failure isn’t pretty, but it’s necessary. If you must fail – and rest assured, you must – fail forward.
For the curious, here’s the recipe. I would advise you make these at your own risk, and if you do, let me know how it goes.
Pistachio Macarons With Rosewater Filling
Ingredients
Macarons
1/2 cup finely ground pistachios
1/2 cup finely ground almond meal
1 cup powdered sugar
3 egg whites
1/2 cup sugar
Filling
2 egg whites
1/2 cup sugar
5 tablespoons butter, softened
1-2 teaspoons rosewater (less or more, to taste)
Method
Line two baking sheets with silpat mat or parchment paper. Set aside.
In a large bowl, sift ground pistachios, almond flour, and powdered sugar. Set aside.
In the bowl of a stand mixer with the whip attachment, whip egg whites until they begin to gain volume and become bubbly. When this happens, slowly add sugar until fully incorporated and egg whites are thick and holding soft peaks.
Add egg white mixture to nuts mixture and fold in vigorously with a spatula until thoroughly incorporated.
Place macaron batter in a piping bag fitted with a round tip (or use a large freezer bag with the end snipped off) and pipe into circles onto silpat (which may have guides on them already). Bang cookie sheet on the counter to settle the batter (just a couple good whacks) then let macarons sit for 30 minutes to an hour. The macarons need to dry and form a skin, of sorts, in order to get a good lift while baking and have visible “feet” (the frilly part on the bottom of the cookie).
When the top of the macarons are dry to the touch, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Bake for nine to 12 minutes or until they are crisp outside. Cool completely before removing from silpat and filling.
To make the filling, combine egg whites and sugar in a metal bowl and set over a pan of simmering water, beating with a hand mixer until it thickens and is hot to the touch. Remove bowl from water and, still mixing, add butter one tablespoon at a time, mixing until incorporated.
Continue to beat this mixture until it thickens and has the texture of light frosting. Add rosewater to taste and stir to combine.
Pipe a circle of frosting on the flat part of one macaron, and top with another.
Recipe Notes
I do not use food coloring, but if you do, the macarons can be colored with two drops of green, and the filling can be colored with one or two drops of red.
Macarons should be stored at room temperature and eaten within a day or two. They also freeze well.
