Paint Dry / Grass Grow

The other night I spent a good amount of time watching paint dry.  And it was pretty exciting.

The problem arose when the paint actually became dry.  The colors dulled and the texture flattened right out.  All those wavy brush strokes that once suggested the swirling storms of a gas giant planet just disappeared.  There was no more contrast; the surface of the planet was barely distinguishable from the surface of the record.

This is my new painting project.  I have a stack of yard sale records, they are round, and I generally think any round thing can become a planet.  Painting planets on round objects is a great project because there is really no skill required, you just glob some paint on and swirl it around in whatever direction you like, and usually it comes out looking planet-y.  In real life, new planets are being discovered in our galaxy all the time.  All of them are round.  And they are all different colors.  Why not paint them?

Maybe someday I'll graduate to using real paints, paints that come in tubes and have names and you have to use special brushes.  If I get good enough maybe I'll paint on canvas.  But what do I need canvas for if I've got records, or brie containers, or jar tops, or just about anything that is a circle?  For now, I'll stick to these various round household objects, and I'll stick to painting them with dollar store poster paints, even if the brush strokes don't exactly hold up.  With a little patience--priming the surface of the record with a bright color, allowing the layers to dry before globbing on more paint--these materials make perfectly acceptable planets.

Incidentally, the poster paint planets project has given me another idea for some wall art: swirl paint globs, photograph up close, print quite large.  This will require a trip to the dollar store, favorable lighting conditions (which the very first examples did not have, as it was night), and wall space to hang the finished art.  I don't have wall space.  Maybe I need to become a real artist?  Maybe I need to get a time machine and/or millions of dollars so that I can go to art school?  (If I got a time machine, would I use it to go back a few years and go to art school instead, or would I sell it to pay for art school now?  If I had millions of dollars, would I spend the money on a time machine?  And when am I going to get a degree in physics?)

I can't start the paint/photography project just yet, not only because of lack of wall space, but because I need to practice the art of finishing art projects.  Nothing will get started until my planet records are on the wall.  Because if I have too many projects going at once, none of them will get done.  This is an oft repeated mistake.  It becomes a toenail-painting situation: too many things to do, so I do none of them.

I liken this to my current seedling situation:

Clearly there are too many beet seedlings here.  How could any of these actually turn into beets if they have no room?  But I love all of them, even the stunted little ones that don't even have their real leaves yet.  I love these beets and I wish I could keep all of them!  And anyway it's not my fault they are so numerous and crowded; they germinated at about 120%, and I don't know how that happened.  How are there more plants than seeds?



Now, if I don't thin the beets, I will have no beets.  Not that I'll have many beets anyway, probably about enough for one jar of pickled beets or one meal featuring a beet side.  Still, that is way better than no beets, which is what happened to my cucumbers last year because I couldn't make myself pluck any of these gorgeous seedlings:

They were just too beautiful.  They were so sturdy even at such a young age, so eager to grow to their fullest potential and create sheer bushels of cucumbers.  Do cucumbers come in bushels?  As the plants grew up and out, little tendrils reached out for the bars of the fire escape, and I helped them climb, and I even tied them gently with cloth.  Then they started to blossom, and some of the blossoms had tiny baby cucumbers!  Alas, there was not enough soil and not enough water to feed all of the tiny babies, and they withered in the unending July heat.  Finally, when the plants had tried and failed to make bushels of tiny cucumbers, and their leaves were just dying of thirst, I cut down half of the plants in the pot.  But it was too late.  There were no cucumbers last year.

Just so, I can't seem to thin out my ideas, that is, to put most of them aside for now so that I can focus my time and energy on just one.  Maybe two.  I used to love the list, and now I resent it.  It's holding me back.  It's overwhelming me with all of its items.

Over the next few weeks, as I settle into a routine with my two new jobs and find out if I will ever have a day off again, I will need to make decisions: which things to pluck and which things to let flourish.  It shouldn't be too difficult.  I'll just choose the easy things....

Just Like Starting Over

Okay, it's time.

Starting over is something I do probably a few times a year. It usually involves making lists of things to do differently, things like, I'm going to floss my teeth and I'm going to those stretches for my hips and, like, some push-ups too. I'll add to the list: “work on story about Rose,” “interview Sage's roommate,” “get rechargeable batteries for audio recorder,” “type up blog post about list.”

The list is empowering. To write down all these things that I am going to do in the near future, and the things that I need to do in order to get the other things done—read Tom Sawyer as character research, join Burlington Writer's Workshop—and then to transfer the list into the dated pages of my weekly planner, it is energizing. Or maybe that is the caffeine consumed while making the list. In any case, the list is amazing. To have things to do! It feels great.  It's just, I have to not give up on the list.

Now, if things had turned out differently, I might be hiking the White Mountains as we speak. There, the list would consist of “wake up,” “put on backpack,” and “walk all day.” For a time this summer, that worked. I met some great people and enjoyed some excellent homemade dehydrated meals. But somehow, a few weeks ago, I found myself alone on a train hurtling up the Hudson River, and my arms were tan and I had blisters on my feet and my hair was tangled up just the way I like it, and I was on that train because I just couldn't walk another step. And I regretted that very much.

My grandmother, who, at this point in her life, doesn't know how to not hurt people with her oh-so-carefully chosen words, said, “You didn't think it through, did you? You didn't know how hard it would be.”

As politely as I could, I told her she was wrong. I thought about it a lot, I said. I knew exactly how hard it would be, and I went anyway, I told her. Then I went upstairs and slept for a very long time.

I came home after a mere 300 miles, and ever since then I have been unable to shake this terrible feeling of failure, this feeling like I never finish anything, like I always quit when things get too difficult. It doesn't matter that everyone I know says, “Wow, 300 miles, that's not nothing.” The point is that 300 is not 1200, and that I set out to do something and I didn't finish it. I'm a quitter. This really puts a damper on the whole summer.

So, while I've been home for several weeks and I've done a few things, some of which even count as being productive, I haven't written anything for this blog. Do Things and Stuff Every Day nearly got shoved in the corner like all of the other projects I've started and never finished. It wasn't going in the right direction anyway, the writing was not of top quality, it was just a bunch of cookie recipes and that was never supposed to be the point. I was going to give up, like I always do, on this little website that nobody reads.

But I've decided instead to start over. I've got heaps of things to write about, I've got tons of projects, so many projects that sometimes I just stand in the middle of the room thinking about my projects, unable to decide which project to work on, and then I paint my toenails. And I think, man, I just painted my toenails instead of doing something productive? But it's okay, because I'm wearing sandals a lot these days so this is something that needed to be done.

I'm feeling better, after weeks of not feeling so, not only because I've moved into my new apartment—some of the best features include bamboo floors, a balcony, and not being my parents' house—but because I have so many things on my list. Some days I have to ride my bike all over town to get everything done: library to print this form, back home because I forgot my bike lock, hardware store for cup hooks, Recycle North for frames and fabric. And of course, one of the most important things to do when unpacking in a new apartment is arranging your art on the walls. Yesterday I put up my planets on the wall above my desk:

And I realized that I needed one more planet for it to look complete. So I painted one:

Success! And I have some much bigger projects coming up, including a custom-built loft bed, a kitchen island or prep table or bar, and a new paint job on my road bike. In the meantime, I'll be painting more planets on other round items, rearranging the kitchen over and over again, planting some fall crops on my south-facing balcony, and going to interviews for jobs I don't actually want to do. (How am I going to get everything on my list done if I have to work five days a week?) I'll still make cookies occasionally, but I think that the cookies of a few months ago were merely excuses for not working on the things I really wanted to be doing—i.e. the more difficult, more rewarding things. I'm starting over on these items; I'm making them less difficult. The list helps. New things are added and old things get crossed off all the time. Yes, this is the way it's supposed to be. This is Productive Amy. I am doing things. And stuff. Every day!

Not the Worst Protein Bars

As you may know, I'm preparing to go on a pretty big hike--that's why the dehydrator has played a big role in my productivity in the last few months, and why I found myself purchasing two big tubs of protein powder, something you would normally never find in my pantry.  I've never really understood why you have to get something from a powder when it's already in plenty of real foods, like good old meat and good old beans, and, as the subway ads say these days, a handful of peanuts.  Why slurp down a kind of strange tasting protein shake when you could just, I don't know, eat some nuts?  Oooo, or crunchy roasted chickpeas!

Well, one reason you might want protein in a powder is if you're going to be hiking through the woods for weeks and weeks, carrying a thirty-pound pack fifteen miles a day.  I'm already going to be carrying a big bag full of gorp (which, of course, stands for Good Old Raisins and Peanuts), and there will be meat in every dinner, and sometimes even beans, but I need all the extra energy I can get.  So at snack time, there will be protein bars.  Homemade protein bars.

Using my two tubs of powder (one whey, one hemp), I made a bunch of different recipes, and, well, they came out okay each time.  I haven't thrown any away or anything.  They're all vacuum-sealed, ready to be packed away in our mail-drop boxes.  They've received good reviews from some friends who have tasted them, in fact, really good reviews, but then there was the one review that was just, "Well, it tastes like a protein bar."

It's true.  It's not that they are bad, they just...they taste like protein bars.  But what did I expect from something that is just a big mess of oats, peanut butter, applesauce, honey, and weird-tasting protein powder?  So, once I got my hands dirty following this recipe, I decided to make it my own by adding some actual sugar.  I can't exactly argue that sugar never killed anyone, but I can say that sugar is not the enemy, and in the case of backpacking 1,300 miles, sugar is most definitely my friend.  It goes hand in hand with protein.

After closely studying almost every granola bar recipe on the internet, I combined them to make this monster, which I am calling:

Chocolate Peanut Butter Whey Protein Bars

aka Not the Worst

1/2 cup brown sugar

2/3 cup peanut butter (crunchy or creamy)

1/3 cup honey

1/2 cup applesauce

2 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 cup cocoa powder (Wait wait wait, I didn't write it down at the time, and now I can't remember if I used 1/4 cup or 1/2 cup, so all I can do is advise you to do what makes sense to you.)

1 cup protein powder (I used French Vanilla flavored whey protein, which is probably why it tasted so weird.  I would try flavorless if I were you.)

3 cups rolled oats

2/3 cup wheat germ

1 cup chocolate chips

1-ish cup rice cereal (or not, if you think the texture would be weird.  I think it was okay.)  (Also I'm sorry this recipe is a disaster so far.)

other things you might want to throw in there, like nuts and seeds and things

Combine sugar, peanut butter, honey, applesauce, and vanilla in a bowl and mix well.  Stir in cocoa powder until combined and then stir in protein powder.  By now you should have a fairly thick brown goop.

Now, why not throw in some flax seeds?

I never know how much flax to put in things, so I just go with a handful.  Now stir in oats and wheat germ, chocolate chips, rice cereal if you so desire, nuts, bolts, kitchen sinks, whatever you think should be in these crazy bars.  Of course, you can't add in too much dry stuff without changing the amount of wet stuff.  So be careful.  I just stuck with the flax seeds and rice cereal for my optional ingredient.

Roll the goop out on a cookie sheet covered in parchment paper.  Here is the best way to do this, invented by none other than my favorite hiking partner (the guy who is carrying the four-pound tent):

I love parchment paper so much, I should, I don't know, write it an ode or something...

Anyway, these get baked at 350 degrees until they get nice.  About 15 minutes, probably.  Then they cool, then they get cut into neat little bars.  And guess what?  They are not the worst!

Okay, obviously I wouldn't have gone through all the trouble to take those pictures and write up this recipe if I thought these actually sucked.  I realize that it sounds like I hate them.  I don't.  I think they taste better than a lot of those expensive store-bought protein bars out there, and they have ingredients I can actually pronounce, which is a plus.  And I think they are going to do the job--that is, keeping my tummy full on the trail.

Now I will share the recipe for the ones I made with hemp protein.  I was halfway through the recipe when I opened up the tub of powder for the first time and realized it was green.  Again, what did I expect?  So the bars came out kind of green, but I liked it, because they kind of ended up looking like those bars whose names contain words like Paleo.  Whatever that is.

One thing that you'll need to know for this recipe is that the egg substitute that I used is as follows: two tablespoons water, one tablespoon oil, and 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, all beaten together.  I wonder if this is even needed--maybe I could have just added a bit more applesauce and honey--but it seemed fun so I tried it. 

The Ones with Hemp Protein

aka The Best

3/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup applesauce

1/2 cup honey

1 egg substitute

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup hemp protein powder

1/2 cup wheat germ

2 cups rolled oats

1/4 cup flour (because my dough seemed too sticky, I added about this much whole wheat)

1/2 cup chocolate chips

3/4 cup raisins

1/2 cup any kind of nuts you want

Combine the brown sugar, applesauce, honey, egg substitute, and vanilla, then stir in the protein powder until combined.  Then you can add the rest of your dry ingredients.  This is almost exactly like that other recipe and I don't feel like typing it all out.  350 degrees, these seemed to need to bake a little longer.

And they tasted great!  I think it was because I was moving away from the chocolatey sweet recipes and into the fruit and nut side of things.  The raisins pair very well with the hemp, and I used peanuts and chocolate chips just because that's like, classic granola bar.  And because that's what I had in the cupboard.

My protein powder is all used up now, all two pounds of it, and I have many neat little packages of bars ready to be mailed to various post offices in Appalachia.  And when I feel a little peckish after hiking a few miles in the sweet sweet quiet of the woods, I'll sit down on a rock and pull out a protein bar--maybe a chocolate one, maybe one with hemp, maybe one of those pumpkin ones I made a while back--and I'll let it replenish my energy.  And what I'll probably be thinking, even if it's the batch of hemp ones where I forgot the vanilla, what I'll most likely be thinking is, this is the best.

New Rules

There is a new rule in our household, and it is as follows: frozen cubes of Greek yogurt must always be on hand, especially in the summer, for blending up with fruit and/or chocolate whenever we might fancy a tasty cool treat.  We've been considering this new rule for a few months now, ever since someone at work gave us a recipe that instructed to spoon Greek yogurt into an ice cube tray and freeze it, then blend it with some banana and peanut butter, then sprinkle chocolate chips on top.  We got as far as the frozen yogurt cubes, then learned that the blender had died of old age, and so the cubes stayed in their little baggies in the freezer for weeks on end.

But now we have a shiny new food processor, the one that whipped up my potatoes, processed the tomato sauce I'll tell you about in a bit, and in the future may even provide black bean burgers, hummus, or pesto.  So the other night it occurred to us to finally take out those yogurt cubes and blend them with the extra goo from a kind of failed fruit leather attempt (it didn't dry evenly; it's too crispy on the edges and too soft in the middle, still tastes good but it's just not right).  I don't have pictures of any of this, it was just too exciting to stop and get the camera.  In our eagerness, we did probably almost break the food processor, since the yogurt cubes were pretty big and, well, frozen.  And we didn't consider that since they lived in the freezer for such a long time, they might just taste like it.  The other things that have been living in the freezer for a while include a few bags of scraps ready for compost, which I haven't gotten around to dropping off at the farmers' market (how unproductive of me!), an opened box of soft pretzel bites, and some sliced bananas that maybe a while ago we were planning on using for something.  Who knows.

So the other night we enjoyed strawberry banana frozen yogurt with chocolate syrup drizzled on top, and aside from the slight freezer taste, it was excellent.  Now we have a new rule about always having frozen yogurt forever.  The new rule also stipulates that the yogurt must not be frozen for more than two or three weeks, and that it could perhaps sometimes be vanilla flavored, for a little extra sweetness, and maybe the cubes should be a little smaller next time, and we should take them out of the freezer about fifteen minutes before we plan to blend it all up, so that nothing gets broken.

Because if my food processor is broken, how will I ever make tomato sauce the right consistency for dehydrating into Tomato Sauce Leather?

You may be able to tell from the pictures that this is one of the messier projects I've been working on lately.  I added a can of whole peeled tomatoes to my sauce (here is the recipe that inspired me, but I used one can whole and one can crushed), and as I "shredded" them with my fingers, as instructed, juices and seeds spurted across the kitchen, all over the stove and behind it, and of course all over me.  Then, as it began to heat up, a giant sauce bubble exploded and burned my hand, and the smaller bubbles were splashing onto everything within a three foot radius.  It was terrible.  The simmering sauce was destroying my kitchen.  I needed to construct something to protect the stove and innocent bystanders:

So innovative, I know.  Anyway it's way less expensive than something like this, and though it isn't as cute, I think it was probably more effective than these, since the point is for more steam to escape, rather than collect and condense on the lid.  Surely all the kitchens of yore must have had some sort of apparatus for guarding against splatters, but not even an apparatus, just a cylinder, or something more cone shaped, sloping outwards, tall and wide to catch all the debris from bubble explosions great and small.  But all of my different searches online turned up the screens or the lid holders, no cylinders.  "Sauce guard," "pot protector," "splatter guard," everything.  I was on my own.

Speaking of the kitchens of yore, isn't your grandmother supposed to teach you how to make sauce?  I guess she would if you asked her, I mean, she wouldn't force you, and maybe it's just if you're Italian, which I'm not.  But I have lived with an Italian for several years now.  He has not taught me how to make sauce, but he did offer some helpful tips: dump in a bunch of water, then simmer your sauce forever, or until it reaches your desired thickness.  On the topic of adding sugar, he shrugged his shoulders.  When I asked him to have a taste and judge the salt content, he said, "You put carrots and celery?  Huh."  It needed more salt.

Did my sauce even compare to that of his childhood?  Would the grandmothers approve?  Shrug.  I did add a little raw sugar, but I don't think that my taste is refined enough to tell the difference.  All I know is that I thought the sauce was damn good.  I would totally eat it on my pasta all the time, which is what we're going to do on the trail, since I dehydrated all of it.  I really want to share my recipe, but again, it does not involve very precise measurements, and I can't figure out how to make it a link that you click on, so that it's not taking up space in this post.  Oh, this complicated blogging stuff!  Maybe I say something like, leave a comment if you'd like the recipe?  I should be encouraging people besides my mom to leave comments, shouldn't I?  Someday I'll figure this out...

And I take back all of the mean stuff I said about the internet (well, some of it, anyway).  The internet is a great resource for finding out whether or not you should add sugar to your sauce, and of course for finding a sauce recipe in the first place, if you don't have an Italian grandmother and your live-in Italian wants you to figure it out for yourself.  Like the other night when I made beef stroganoff, yelling the whole time, "This is all wrong!  You have to help me!  I need you to cut my mushrooms!  I have no idea what I'm doing!"  He just reassured me that I was probably doing fine, and he wouldn't cut up my mushrooms because he had been cutting stuff up at work all day.  When I finally got everything simmering in the broth, I realized I hadn't even started the water for the egg noodles.  What a disaster!

But that's the point.  It was somewhat of a disaster, but eventually I got it all together and it came out great (I used way less sour cream than that recipe calls for).  Now I have the experience of beef stroganoff stored in my head and in my hands, which means next time I'll glance at a recipe to remind myself of the basics, but now I know what consistency to shoot for with the sauce, and what the meat looks like when it's done, and that my knife skills are not so good, so I need to prep all my vegetables before starting to saute anything.  Frantically chopping mushrooms while the onions turn brown is dangerous.  You should probably never be frantically doing anything with a giant chef's knife.

So with the help of the internet, and the help (by not helping) of my fiance who has always done most of the cooking, I was able to make a kick-ass meal and some kick ass sauce.  I guess I just have to use the internet sparingly, and combine it with my own knowledge and experience to make kick-ass stuff.  It's basically the same as looking through your grandmother's recipe box, it just doesn't have that personal touch.  You're still going to alter the recipe to your own specifications, and you're still going to screw up once in a while.  And when you have a problem that neither the internet or the grandmas have a solution for, you're going to have to just use your head:

Which I think I'm pretty good at.  If I do say so myself.

Fluffy Buns: Know your Dough

The internet is making us stupid.  We all know this.  It's not just because we spend precious hours rotting our brains by watching funny cat videos and scrolling through novelty Twitter accounts and Facebook pictures of other people's vacations.  It's because we just don't need to remember things anymore.  If you want to know about astronomy or history or techniques of frying an egg, you just type it into Google, and chances are you won't even have to finish the phrase.  Among the first that come up when you type "how to" are "tie a tie," "make french toast," and "boil eggs."

This reminds me of something I learned in school, yes, school, which is a place where I went for a while and afterward they gave me this thing...

...which actually I'm quite proud of.  Anyway one day in a class called "Can Poetry Save the Earth: Ways of Reading in Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics," I learned about a legend of the Egyptian king Thamus: when the god Thoth offered the gift of writing for Thamus to give to his people, claiming it would improve their memories and make them wiser, the king rejected the gift, insisting it would do the opposite:

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

Socrates uses this to illustrate his criticisms of writing in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus.  If these ancient philosophers were around today, surely they would be arguing against Wikipedia and WebMD, which allow us to lose touch with our memories--no need to recall what we discussed in history class, we can just type it into the search bar--and our bodies--don't need to listen to what your body wants, the internet will tell you what supplements to swallow and all the things that are going to kill you, like gluten and egg yolks.

But if you are going to eat the deadly bread and eggs, it's not like you have to remember how to make french toast.  You just type it in and do exactly what the page says.  You don't have to internalize the process, to really know what the egg-soaked bread is supposed to feel like in your hands, to keep the heat down a little lower because last time you burned your hand or set off the smoke alarm, to put cinnamon in your egg goo because you know it will taste pretty bland if you don't; it's easier to just follow someone else's instructions.  You don't need to remember from within yourself how to make french toast.

Okay, my example is not that great.  But take bread.  Baking bread at home.  Not many people I know do it.  Because why spend hours making bread at home, bread that is going to go stale tomorrow probably, when you can go buy any variety your heart desires at the supermarket, and if you want something nice, go to that fancy bakery or the farmer's market.  See, it's the same thing with the seeds; making it yourself is special.  Kneading the dough with your hands, sprinkling on more flour or a little more water to get it to the consistency you want, not to mention knowing that you didn't put any chemical preservatives in it, which, alas, is why it won't last a whole week.  Making bread is something you really have to learn with your hands, not just with your brain and your words.

The recipe will tell you: one cup warm water, one package active dry yeast, however much salt, three cups flour.  And how long to knead it, and to let it rise until it is doubled in size, punch the dough, let it rise again, whatever.  But how to explain in words that perfect consistency, the point where you know you've added just enough flour even though it's not the amount the recipe said, where you know if you knead one more time you are just going to wreck it.  Is this what they talk about in culinary school?  How to feel your dough, listen to it, know it?

I'm not going to culinary school, no way, but I'm starting to know my dough.  I know why previous bread attempts have failed, and I know how to make the most of future dough experiments.  I feel this confident because I actually made the dough for some successful burger buns:

They came out soft and fluffy, just the way the bread that surrounds a nice juicy burger should be.  And I'm not going to tell you the recipe.  There are three reasons why I can't tell you: one, because I don't remember the exact measurements of the ingredients; two, because the words "soft, smooth dough" aren't adequate for telling you how that feels when you press it onto a lightly floured surface; and three, because I wasn't there for the dividing and the baking of these buns.  That task was carried out by my expert burger maker, who may or may not have ignored my anxious text messages while I was at work, away from my precious dough: "How is the dough??  Has it risen??" "Make sure to flatten the dough balls and then let them rise until they double again!" "Are they okay?" "How are they??"

They were fine.  He sprinkled corn meal over the baking sheet, flattened the dough balls and let them rise again, and baked them at a temperature which I forgot to specify.  And when I got home, there were beautiful soft fresh buns, just golden on top, so fluffy in the middle.  The perfect buns, from a dough that I kneaded with my own hands, from a recipe that I didn't exactly invent myself but altered as I pleased, because when you have a little bit of dough instinct, you can basically do what you want.

This is the recipe I had finally settled on, after clicking through a bunch of different pages, none of which instructed to proof the yeast.  I think I was drawn to this recipe because of the vagueness of the instructions: "Mix all of the dough ingredients...to make a soft, smooth dough."  Okay, sure.  So, I proofed my yeast in the one cup lukewarm water, but actually some of the water was half and half because I had seen a recipe that called for milk and I liked how that sounded, and the sugar, of course, mixed in there for the yeast to eat, but definitely not a quarter cup.  Who needs a quarter cup?  Once it was nice and foamy, I added the egg and salt and then the flour, a half cup at a time, and I don't remember if I counted.  I just know I definitely didn't get to three, and already my dough was too dry, and my heart sank; surely this dough would fail, like those other buns I tried, the dense ones where I didn't proof the yeast, and it was horrible because I could see the yeast granules still intact as I kneaded it, what was I thinking, I'll never be able to make good dough.  But I took a deep breath, sprinkled on some extra water, and soon I had what must have been the "soft, smooth dough" required for fluffy buns.  Oh, those magical fluffy buns!

So that's as close as I'm going to get to giving you a fluffy bun recipe.  I can't tell you how to do it, you just have to go for it.  You have to make some bad dough before you make some good. Then you'll learn from it, and you'll remember it, not just with your head but with your hands.  You'll rely not on recipes or "external marks," but on your "remembrance from within."  Your bread might not last a week, but try storing it in a paper bag, see if that helps.  Anyway, when it starts to get stale you can just make french toast with it--don't look up a recipe, just whisk up some eggs with some milk, sweeten it, dip the bread in, and slap it on a hot buttered skillet, I know you can remember that.  And remember, "soft, smooth dough" for those fluffy buns.  But you're not going to know it until you feel it--go ahead, get your hands doughy!

Next post: taste your dough.  (Or your sauce, or your chili.)  (And then dehydrate it.)

Sowing the Seeds of...

Spring is here, it seems.  We've turned the clocks ahead (or stopped subtracting an hour from the oven clock that broke last year) and our spirits are a little brighter with the longer daylight hours.  And it says so on the calendar, it says that it's spring!  And while outside, it isn't all that green yet, inside, that plant we don't know the name of is starting to get new little branches.

I took that picture a few weeks ago, actually.  Now that little guy looks like this...

and there is even a new one just poking through the base of his stem:

How magical!  And I have been very productive, most days.  The only thing I haven't done is write about it.  It strikes me as somewhat amusing that I'm so behind on my productivity blog.  Let me show you some projects I've done recently:

Camp Cup Cozy

Just your basic repurposing project, using an insulated Big Y bag and sewing a cylinder.  Now I won't burn my fingers off when I pour boiling water over my ramen!  Pictured above is a delicious meal of beef flavored ramen with mixed vegetables and ground beef, which I had dehydrated myself.  The meat and veggies need to rehydrate for longer than the ramen needs to cook (and there's nothing worse than overcooked noodles, in my opinion) so I just cooked them for a few minutes in the cup before adding the ramen and more hot water.  Of course, it will taste better by the campfire.

Homemade Pumpkin Spice Protein Bars

I think these came out okay.  I got the recipe from this website, and I also made the chocolate chip ones, but I think I will do another batch before posting my official recipe.

Successfully Sealed Granola (Bars)

The cranberry-coconut-sunflower-seed-chocolate-chip granola bars I made in early February are still delicious, if not totally crushed by the vacuum sealing process.  But there is nothing wrong with eating handfuls of crushed granola bars on the trail.  Or dumping it into your oatmeal.  Or pouring the crumbs into your mouth and then licking the inside of the bag.  Opening a sealed bag does not count as something particularly productive, of course, but maybe this blog isn't so much about productivity as it is about showing off my successful recipes.

And if you were wondering how those turkey burgers came out, the ones with the homemade buns, well, they were really good.  The buns, they were okay.  Against my better judgement, I used a recipe that instructed to mix the yeast with the dry ingredients before adding the wet.  So they didn't rise very well, and they were very dense.  With a burger bun, you kind of don't want dense, because then all your stuff slides out the back when you take a bite.  Next time, I'll get it right, like with the pizza dough I made the other day, which I kneaded by hand and which rose beautifully.  Just remember, APY.  Always Proof Yeast.  Refer to this site, especially to the comment by Bobolink that begins, "Oh, I meant to say...."

Other things, like reading tons of books, and walking through the park, and going for a bike ride, yes, one single bike ride so far this year, and it was so wonderful, and as my bike friend and I parted ways, all those weeks ago on our bikes, we said, Let's do this all the time, let's always ride bikes, let's ride around and around the park all day long in the sun forever and ever.  And I definitely haven't ridden my bike since then.  Walking, on the other hand, is something I do all the time now.  Now that the clocks are turned ahead and it's not dark out when my dog's preferred companion gets home from work, all three of us can walk around the park and Cobi won't be confused that it's that girl who lives with him holding his leash.

So, yes, it is spring, and perhaps one of the most important things I've done in the last few weeks has been:

Planting Seeds with Carolyn

Planting day was a very exciting day for us.  We had been looking forward to it since last month, when we started talking about which seeds to plant and what to plant them in, and about south-facing windows and recycled or repurposed containers for the rooftop garden on Riverside Drive where these seedlings would grow and flourish.  I gushed about how wonderful it is to carefully place the tiny seeds in the soil, to gently water them and really you expect nothing, because how could a whole plant be trapped inside that tiny little vessel and how could your own clumsy hands be the ones to bring it forth, but then they grow, tiny little sprouts with tiny little unfurling leaves, and they keep growing because the sun keeps shining and your somewhat clumsy hands keep watering them.  Or, in the rooftop garden, the automatic irrigation system waters them.

Yes, planting day was a very big deal.  This would be my second year with a garden if I hadn't decided to trek through the wilderness for most of the growing season, and this is Carolyn's first year planting her own seedlings.  I was excited to do some vicarious gardening, and she was convinced that I was the container gardening expert because of my fire escape garden last year:

Garden Before..

Garden After...

But why start from seed, asked Carolyn's boyfriend, worried, perhaps, about the responsibility, about the mess, about all the work it would take to coax these delicate things into living.  The seeds are, after all, living at his apartment, with its dry heat, under a not-so-south-facing window near some books that we did protect with plastic, but, even so, what if one of the little paper cups were to tear or topple over, strewing soil everywhere, and what if he and Carolyn are busy at work, or out of town, what will happen if they go dry?  Why go through all this hassle when, in a few short weeks, you can go to the farmers market and buy neat plastic trays of seedlings grown by professionals, all ready for transplant right into the automatic irrigation system in the rooftop garden?

Because.  It is special.  To watch a pepper seed sprout and grow leaves and then the leaves multiply and then that first flower which lifts its little head and opens to reveal a round green bulb which fattens with the rain and sun and it grows and ripens into a pepper, and then the plant is just covered with these peppers, and there are hundreds of tiny seeds trapped inside that red and green and yellow flesh, seeds just like the tiny one that you just stuck in the dirt two months ago.  It was one seed and now it is hundreds.  It is amazing.

Because, and this is the even more corny part, but I believe it, this makes us think about what the earth is made of, and what life is about--not just your life as an actor or a hair stylist or a bank teller or a cook, or my life as a writer, but, like, actual life, like living, and what it means to be alive and breathe air and walk on the ground and hold a handful of dark soil.  You're bigger than the plant in your garden, probably, and you feel powerful because you made it grow, but it's a part of something that's bigger than you, and who's to say that plant didn't make you grow it?  Okay, that's a different story, but when you think about all of it, the circle of life, the planet, the universe, and everything, it transports you out of this crazy city where everything is just the commute to work, the screeching of train tracks, the rent is too damn high, and taxicabs and coffee, and everyone trying to be somewhere more important than where you are so get out of their way, please, now.

So, in the quiet of David's apartment while he was working, we planted the seeds.  Peppers, broccoli, kale, and calendula (because I have a million calendula seeds and they look so cool).

And Carolyn is nervous that they might not grow.  She's nervous about the dryness in the apartment, about how she won't be able to water them twice a day, about whether or not they're getting enough sun.  So I told her, they're plants and they're smart and they'll find a way.  They'll grow because they really want to grow, and if conditions are really so bad that they can't grow, then maybe they'll hold off for a little while, until conditions improve.  All you can do is just write it in your garden journal and think about how to do it better next time.  Anyway you have to get on the subway and go to work, don't be late, but wasn't it great that for a little while, that one day, you got your hands dirty, pressing those tiny seeds into newspaper cups full of soil, and didn't you love the dirt under your fingernails, how it made you feel closer to nature?  I think the seeds will grow.  Maybe I'm overconfident, but, I really think they will, I mean, they have to.  I think the seeds will grow because, honestly, we just love them.

PO TAY TOES

Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew!

Or, of course, dehydrate them.  Which I totally did last week.

First we had to buy a food processor, which I'll tell you about in a moment.  While I waited for it to come in the mail, I dehydrated some lean ground turkey and some carrots, peas, corn, and green beans.  I did those  according to the instructions at www.backpackingchef.com, and they came out just fine.  I bought some nice yellow potatoes at the farmers' market in Grand Army Plaza, on one of those nice sunny days where it actually ends up snowing halfway through your pleasant walk around the park, and maybe the jeans you were wearing were a little too thin and you end up almost freezing your legs off, and then the next day it's sunny and 50 degrees somehow.  And I talked endlessly about my potato plans.

My potato "bark," as Chef Glen calls it on his website and in his wonderful e-book, was going to come out awesome, I was quite sure.  Way more awesome than the potato cubes I tried to dehydrate a while back.  I didn't cut them small enough, not even close, and after probably twelve hours in the dehydrator, a ton of them were still soft in the middle.  And they didn't look very appetizing.  I put them in a jar anyway, just to see what happened.  Now they look like this:

Not so nice.  I won't be trying to dry potato chunks again, not unless I'm slicing them to chip-thickness, which is to say very thin, which is to say, I need a mandoline, which is another kitchen gadget I don't want to purchase right before moving out of here.  Plus, I don't want a crappy one.  I want a nice one that isn't going to dull after I slice up a few cucumbers and peppers and potatoes.  To chip-thickness.  So.  I'll be saving my pennies.  Anyway, why dry sliced potatoes when you can make potato bark?!  For convenient use in many backpacking meals!

"You know, we can buy potato flakes," said my life-long hiking partner.  "We can buy the ones that are a hundred percent potato.  Like, nothing but potato."

No!  Just, no way!  Why would I buy potato flakes for assembling backpacking meals, when I could spend all my time and energy making my own potato flakes?  I mean really, you could buy buckets and buckets of any type of dehydrated food you wanted, and you could be pretty sure that it wouldn't have any white fuzzy bits, and maybe it wouldn't even be that expensive.  But where's the fun in that?  Where's the productivity?

But yes, I did feel like I was spending all my time and energy on these potatoes, maybe because I decided to make them right after a particularly exhausting ten-hour shift, maybe because of all the mistakes I made along the way.  The first one, of course, being that I didn't measure anything.

Well, I measured the cup of beef broth that I used in the mash--you can't use butter and milk because it won't dehydrate well--and I measured out the Worcestershire sauce I was using to give it a little bit of a shepherd's pie flavoring when it all came together in the end.  But I didn't weigh out the 2.5 pounds of potatoes that Chef Glen calls for in his recipe, in fact I probably used quite a bit more.  Nor did I realize that one cup of beef broth is 8 ounces, not the 16 called for in the recipe.  I was tired, okay?  I just wanted to get this potato goop into the dehydrator.

Before you spread it on the trays, though, you have to blend it up so it gets extra goopy.  You will notice on the Backpacking Chef website a picture of a nice pourable liquid potato.  It looks so convenient, so easy to spread.  So I popped my beefy mash into the fridge to cool off a little before scooping it into the food processor.  Another mistake.  I think this processor is not the correct device to use for this recipe.  In fact, there is a warning in the instruction booklet: Do not puree or mash starchy vegetables like potatoes. They will be overprocessed in a second and turn gummy.  Yes, I read this warning before I even started the project.  And I ignored it.

Here are my overprocessed, gummy potatoes:

As you can see, they will not pour.  Honestly, though, they didn't look all that nasty.  Just, whipped, is all.  Because I kept on whipping them up.  Even though I knew they would be overprocessed in one single second, I just kept pulsing the machine and dumping in more broth, hoping to make liquid potato.  It was not so.  And of course, all of the mash wouldn't fit in the processor at once, so I did this over and over and over with each blob.

I began to spread the whipped up 'taters very thinly on my dehydrator trays, which of course are annoyingly round, because I do not have the fancy $300 Excalibur (saving my pennies).  I use parchment paper for these sorts of jobs, and each time, I have to cut it into a donut shape.  Anyway so I covered all five trays, and then realized that I hadn't even used up a third of my potato whip.  The paper was crinkling from the moisture and it was impossible to spread the stuff evenly.  And I had a terrible stomachache.

But you know, a dehydrator really can't do anything but dehydrate the crap you put in it, so, lo and behold, a few hours later, my thin sheets of potato whip were getting crispy.  I flipped them over, passed out, then woke up at 5am to break up the sheets and put them into bags.  Potato flakes!  That is, flakes of 100% potato with no weird preservatives and crap, except I guess whatever is in the broth.  Or, potato bark, invented by the Backpacking Chef and almost totally screwed up by me!  (I don't have pictures of them in flake form.  It was 5am.)

Having a bag of actual flakes of potato renewed my confidence, so I spread out the rest of the goo on the trays, much more thickly in order to use it up.  Once again, like magic, the goo turned into crispy sheets, and I crushed it up and asked my campfire expert to do the first recipe test.  A handful of ground turkey, a handful of dried vegetables, and a double handful of potato with equal parts water made a nice little stew over the campfire that is our gas stove.  Okay, well, it suffered a little in the seasoning department, since I didn't put nearly enough beef broth and Worcestershire, so when I packaged up the appropriately sized meals...

...I made sure to mark them Needs seasoning / hot sauce!!

Shouldn't be a problem.  Last time I went backpacking with this hot sauce addicted guy who I live with, we were eating out of the same pot, and I made him hold onto his Cholula bottle and shake it onto his individual spoonfuls, so that my own bites would be safely un-spicy.  But it seems he's influenced me in certain ways over the years.  I can handle a few jalapeno slices with seeds, and when I make tuna salad I squeeze in a little sriracha.  Not to mention all the other stuff: the IPAs, the Minecraft, the portobello burgers, pepperoni pizza, the idea of having chickens and goats in the backyard and getting your hands dirty, and, of course, backpacking--all these things I didn't much care for in the past.  I like a lot of things now, and I like that I like them.  This time around, out in the woods, we're going to be cooking up my homemade shepherd's pie, and I'm going to be carrying a bottle of something spicy.  And we're going to go ahead and stir it right in.

Well, in any case, it's five meals down, about thirty to go, that is if we want to be eating homemade half the nights we're out there.  Got to be done by mid-May.  Do you think I can do it??