12.07.06

The Trouble With The Universe

Posted in arrrrgh, domesticity, housekeeping at 10:01 am by Hanne Blank

The trouble with the universe is basically that entropy wins. Any one of us may triumph briefly, but ultimately, entropy can count on victory. Even after all that’s left are cockroaches and gonorrhea and huge plastic highway fast-food signs looming high over the decimated landscape on their gigantic aluminum poles like meaningless flags left on the battlefield after a massacre, entropy will still be on the job, nibbling away at the aluminum and injection-molded plastics and seeing to it that eventually the cockroaches die of gonorrhea and the gonorrhea dies of not having any more cockroaches to live in.

But somehow with houses, entropy seems to happen in bursts.

I have empathy for houses falling apart. I really do. For one thing, I have lived in old houses nearly all my life, so I’m well familiar with cracks in plaster and pipes that make weird noises and floorboards that squeal. But also, I realize that houses are nothing but big boxes that stand outside in the rain and the heat and the sunlight and the snow, and on the inside, people do horrible things like let water fall out of holes in the wall, and cook things, and knock holes in the walls to let the light in from outside (when there is plenty of perfectly good light outside, too, if they’d only go there instead), and breathe, producing endless quantities of water vapor that have to go somewhere.

I mean, if you were a big box and people did all those things to you while making you stand outside with no protection from the elements, you’d get a little out of sorts, too. Maybe sometimes you would have a little tantrum.

Like mine did yesterday morning, when I noticed a small but definite quantity of water dripping from out of the light fixture in the middle of my kitchen. This is not a place from which one likes water to drip, water and electricity being a potentially nasty mixture, but it is a place from which water, if trapped in a space between a ceiling and a floor, does indeed like to drip, since the thing about light fixtures in ceilings is that they represent the presence of at least one and possibly multiple holes already made in said ceiling. Easier to flow through a hole that already exists than it is to erode one, and all that. Very Taoist.

So I turned off the light, shoved a large bowl with a dishtowel in it under the (minor) leak, began the massive freakout process, and called the plumber. The massive freakout process is a thing that goes along with water-related house entropy events, because unlike some other classes of house entropy event — a nonfunctional doorknob, for instance, or peeling paint — I know very little about how to diagnose or fix them and because they are beyond my ken they are additionally beyond my personal immediate control, and thus I become easily convinced that anything that happens may very well truly be the tip of some multi-thousand-dollar iceberg of horrible that has already affected multiple areas of my home and will render me penniless and all but homeless during the extended duration of the period required to make the situation even nominally better.

Note that this is true even when the quantity of water is very small, as in this case, where there was a steady drip for about 3 minutes and a few intermittent kerplops for about five minutes after that and then nothing further.

At my plumber’s advice I tested to see whether it was really a pipe issue (filling the tub partway and letting it drain out, flushing the toilet a few times, running water in the sink). It was not. It was, as my plumber, Karnak the Great, successfully diagnosed over the telephone, a problem of caulk and grout.

So, armed with a charming houseguest who read to me from zir new book whilst I labored, I pulled out some really revolting old caulk, which proved to me that indeed it probably was a caulk issue, since a good foot and a half long section of caulk was not exactly adhered to anything, and was just kind of lying there in the gap between the top rim of the tub and the bottom edge of the tiles on the wall growing interesting slimy molds on it.

In my inspections, however, I also realized that there was an area of tile on the lower wall at the far end of the tub where the grout was cracked.

Well. Grout and tile I know from. I did not catastrophize one bit when it came to the grout and the tile. I went and got my utility knife to scrape out the cracked grout with, so that I could get rid of the bad grout and regrout it. Heck, I even have two different colors of polymerized sanded grout in my basement and a big old jug of acrylic admix. At last, something I could handle on my own! With some luck I could get the rest of the caulk out, recaulk, and fix the grouting all before lunchtime.

I was going to be the Home Repair Messiah. I was going to Save the Day. I was going to be the illicit love child of MacGyver and Bob Vila and get up in there and Fix Stuff. Best of all I was going to do it in front of a hot butch who digs capable femmes with tools.
So I went up to scrape out cracked grout. The grout came out easily, as cracked grout tends to do.

Then a 3×3 inch tile fell out of the wall entirely, into my hand. A cascade of crumbled drywall — not greenboard, not tile backer board, and certainly not concrete sheeting like Durock, which is what you ideally want to have behind wall tiles in any wetroom application — fell out after it. I tugged gently on the tile next to the open hole. It came out too. And the one next to that, and the one next to that, with more crumbled drywall falling out into the tub as I went.

I sighed and prodded the gap in the wall. There was some ugly old mildewy plywood. There was some foil insulation backing visible. There was some non-crumbled drywall if I reached up far enough behind the next course of tiles up. It was, in short, precisely the kind of completely shoddy, corners-cut, miserably patched-together home “improvement” job I have come to expect and despise from the people who previously owned this house.

Clearly the day still needed to be saved, but it was not going to be saved by me. Not when the question had now gone from “can I remove and replace the caulk throughout the tub/shower aread, and the grout around a handful of tiles,” to “I wonder how much of this wall needs to be torn out and rebuilt and retiled?” I lack the experience to know how to assess the level of damage to drywall (see above about having lived mostly in old houses), as well as not knowing how to adequately patch a hole of this kind where it had in the past been filled with a mixture of materials.

So I called one of our neighbors, who conveniently happens to be a shaman in the discipline of combatting house-related entropy, or, as they are also known, an experienced interior contractor. His name amongst his people, I believe, is Dances With Drywall. He is a terrifically sweet and kind guy. He has come to look at it. He was suitably chagrinned at the level of crap construction I unearthed, and happy to do the work for us, whatever it ends up taking to fix it. He will come back and work on fixing it later today.

So. No MacGyver points for me. Minus several million Bob Vila points for the jackasses who did the home “improvement” the last time. But three cheers, and more, for Mr. Nels “Dances With Drywall” Shumacher. And, it must be said, for my psychic plumber.

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12.04.06

Call for Submissions — Essays on Menstruation

Posted in administrative, calls for submissions, making book, publishing, women at 3:10 pm by Hanne Blank

FINALLY, a book that isn’t afraid of a little blood!

Between puberty and menopause, most women spend close to a quarter of their lives dealing with menstruation. But except for coming-of-age stories and the occasional Stephen King novel, all this spilled blood hardly creates a blip on the cultural radar. It’s as if someone has removed it all with a super-duper magic cleanser… ironic, considering what the rest of us go through to get the stains out.

Breakthrough Bleeding is here to change all that. Thoughtful, challenging, political, and maybe even sexy, this collection of essays looks at menstruation from the inside and the outside, a super-maxi size dose of heavy-thinkin’ menstrual mojo.

We are looking for essays and creative nonfiction that analyze, question, and explore all aspects of menstruation and menstruation culture. Potential topics include:

• menstruation and gender – how does menstruation fit into (or conflict with) experiences of gender?
• menstrual products advertising & the “sanitary products” industry
• menstruation, personal relationships, and sex – from phobias to fetishes
• menstrual education – what do we learn and how do we learn it, what do we teach and how to we teach it?
• menstruation as a human rights issue – how are women’s periods dealt with in prisons, shelters, mental institutions, long-term care facilities, and other institutions?
• women who voluntarily/intentionally stop menstruating
• men’s experiences with / attitudes regarding menstruation
• menstruation humor
• menstruation and ridicule/shame
• transmenstruation – what kinds of issues come up around menstruation for intersex, transsexual and transgendered people?
• premature menopause (organic or induced)
• enjoying/appreciating menstruation
• menstruation and/in the workplace
• menstruation through the eyes of Western medicine
• the “menstrual alternatives” movement (e.g. reusable pads/cups/sponges) and its culture
• menstruation in straight vs. queer spheres
• feminist culture and menstruation

GENERAL GUIDELINES:

• NONFICTION only.
• NO fiction, poetry, or memoir. (This means that unless there is a specific reason for it to be in your piece, we do not want to hear about when you got your first period or how bad your PMS is. This is not a collection of first-person narratives.)
• Submissions should be between 1500 and 5000 words in length.
• TWO (2) copies of your submission will be required.
• Hard copy (paper copy) submissions ONLY. No electronic or emailed submissions will be considered.
• Typed or computer printed ONLY.
• Formatting: 12-point type in some generic traditional font (Times, Georgia, Geneva, Courier, etc.), one-inch margins, double spaced. Please include all italics, boldface, blockquotes, section breaks, etc.
• References, if any, may be either footnote or endnote according to author preference and should use Chicago Manual of Style format. No inline references please.
• Please number your pages
• Each submission should be accompanied by a cover sheet that contains ONLY the following data: Author Name, Pseudonym (if used), Title of Submission, Author mailing address, Author e-mail address, and Author telephone number.
• The author’s name or pseudonym should NOT appear anywhere on the submission itself.
• Each submission should be accompanied by a single business-sized self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE, with first class letter postage already affixed). Submissions from outside the USA do not require the SASE.
• Please DO NOT send additional cover letters with your submission,, only the cover sheet as indicated above.
• Please DO NOT send your only copy/copies of your work.
• NOTE: Manuscripts will not be returned. Manuscripts not chosen for the book will simply be recycled.

SUBMISSIONS ADDRESS:
Send all submissions to the following address

Breakthrough Bleeding – SUBMISSIONS
C/o Hanne Blank, Editor
44 E. 26th Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218 USA

COMPENSATION:
Writers whose work is included in the book will receive a cash honorarium (amount TBD) and two copies of the book.

DEADLINE:
Deadline for all submissions is March 20, 2007.

Writers will be informed of editorial decisions no later than June 1, 2007.

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12.03.06

Duck Pho

Posted in cooking, good things, how to at 7:30 pm by Hanne Blank

So what do you do with all that duck stock you made?

Well, you can make soup!  Many kinds of soup.  But it is particularly nice, I think, for pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup.  The soul of the bowl, with pho, is the broth.  And now that you’ve got a nice rich duck stock to work with, you might as well, no?

Take 2 quarts of stock and put them in a pot.  Add a good sized bundle of green onions (trimmed) and a thumb-sized hunk of ginger root that has been peeled and cut into coins.  Then pop in a small piece of star anise, an inch-long section of cinnamon stick (the Vietnamese kind if you’ve got it), some whole coriander seed (if you don’t have whole coriander, a light sprinkling of the ground kind is fine), a couple of whole cloves, and a half teaspoon-ish quantity of sweet fennel seed.  A healthy shot of nam pla (fish sauce) will salt and season at the same time.  Cover and simmer for an hour, strain, then hold at a low simmer until ready to serve.
When you are getting ready to make and serve your pho, take two cooked duck breasts (I don’t add the breasts to the cassoulet, so I used those) and slice them thinly.  If you have any leftover other meats — fish, thinly sliced steak, tofu, tempeh, seitan, whatever you have around that needs to be used — cut them into bite-sized bits and set them aside, too.   If you have leftover Asian dumplings, those can go in, too, particularly the won ton sort, and pot stickers work too (but not the steamed buns like gai bao). You’ll also want some sort of vegetable component.  Mung bean sprouts and Thai basil and cilantro are traditional; a chiffonade of romaine lettuce is very nice, or if you enjoy bitter greens like endive that’s good also.

Last, cook up some noodles.  Thin rice noodles are traditional; thin egg vermicelli are also good.  Whatever sort of Asian noodle you like is fine, really.  Cook them according to package directions and drain them.
Then assemble your bowl of pho.  Noodles first, then non-vegetable toppings, then broth, and don’t forget to leave room for veggies.

Delicious and light and savory.  A pound of noodles, two quarts of broth, and two duck breasts will serve 4.  Finish the bowl by squeezing in a healthy wedge of lime (or two, if you’re like me and you really like lime) over the top of it all.  It also helps the duck go further, and since duck is a little on the expensive side, why not?

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Cassoulet, Day 2, Part 1

Posted in cooking, good things, how to at 4:07 pm by Hanne Blank

Assembling a cassoulet is embarrassingly simple.

You need a great huge pot or pan with a lid, and all of it, including the lid, has to be able to  go in the oven. This is the one I have, it’s fabulous and worth every (considerable) penny, but I have made happy cassoulets in everything from Corelleware to cast iron Dutch ovens to a big Chinese clay pot.  So it doesn’t much matter what you’re gonna cook it in.  There ain’t no such thing as a “cassoulet pot.”  (Of course I believe that there isn’t any such thing as a paella pan or a tarte tatin pan or a pommes Anna pan either, because I make them all in varying sizes of cast iron pans.  My kitchen is small and I just don’t have room or patience for 9000 fussy singlepurpose pans.  Who does?  I don’t know these people.)

Drain your beans. You remember the beans. You put them in to soak last night. Those.  Drain them.  Put them into the baking dish.

Next, put your faux-confit duck parts in, nestled down into the beans.  Ditto with your pork bits.  Chop your sausage(s) into portion-sized chunks and put those in.  Peel and halve a couple of small onions and put them in, and maybe a few small turnips if you have them, or a couple-four carrots.  Definitely throw in a handful of peeled whole garlic cloves.  Tuck in a bay leaf, and if you have some fresh thyme, tie a few sprigs together with kitchen twine and pop that in too.  It is a nice touch to take one of those halved onions and stick a few whole cloves in it before you throw it in, but it’s not necessary.
Pour in about a quart and a half of poultry stock if you have it or water if you don’t (it certainly isn’t going to suffer for flavor regardless of which you use).  The beans should be covered to the depth of about an inch of liquid.

Cover the pan and put it in a moderate (350 degrees F) oven.  Leave it in there at 350 F for an hour and a half, then reduce the heat to 250 degrees F.  Leave it for another hour or two, then remove the lid.  Move the meat bits around so that the parts that have been out of the liquid get a chance to be in the liquid, etc.

Return to the oven, uncovered, to let some of the liquid cook off.  As it cooks it’ll form a delicious crust on top.  Great battles have erupted between the kinds of people who have great battles about these things over the issue of how often this crust should be broken and pushed down into the bubbling beany goodness below.  Frankly I fail to detect any significant difference no matter how often or how rarely I do it, so I don’t worry about it one bit.  But I do, a few times over the course of the day that a cassoulet spends in my oven, give it a stir/redistribution of goodies.

Let it cook until it’s done.  It’s done when you want to eat it, as long as when you want to eat it coincides with at least 4-5 hours of oven time after you turned the heat down. If it gets too dry, add more stock or water. It shouldn’t be too soupy, unless you like that.

Eat.  With a green salad (you need some greens with this, and some vinegar, to balance the richness out).  Some crusty bread is nice to sop up the juice with.  Beer, or cider, or a red wine you like that isn’t too sweet, or just cold good water.

If you must have dessert, fruit is the way to go, and maybe a small quantity of very dark bitter chocolate.

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12.02.06

Cassoulet, Day 1

Posted in cooking, domesticity, how to at 10:56 pm by Hanne Blank

Cassoulet can, of course, be made in ways that do not turn it into a multi-day process. But if you have the time, it seems it is always best when you do it over at least two days. Or so think I.

I have no time or patience for picky-eater French foodie wars over what exactly ought or ought not go into a cassoulet. Like most dishes I cook, it’s peasant food. What goes into cassoulet? Whatever you have that seems like it will work. Why? Because peasants don’t have huge wodges of spare cash sitting around so they can go to some gourmet grocery store and buy exactly the correct sort of saucisson or tinned duck confit. Anyone who says you have to do that is full of it, and won’t be getting any of my cassoulet, that’s for damn sure.

So what is a cassoulet? It’s a long-cooking savory casserole based on some sort of white beans and various sorts of meat, usually duck, pork, and lamb, but sometimes other things. My favorite cassoulets have duck, garlicky sausage of some sort, and some kind of smoked meat, either smoked turkey or pork usually. The one I am making right now will have faux-confit of duck, garlic turkey kielbasa, and smoked pork shank.

The thing this doesn’t tell you is that cassoulets are alchemical and magically wonderful. Somehow, in long slow cooking, all the various things you’ve put in the dish turn into something that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. It is worth making a cassoulet at least once, just to know that you, all by yourself, can turn some fairly humble ingredients into something that utterly delicious.

So here’s how you do it.

Soak a pound of dry white beans of your choice. I’m using cannellini because they’re what I’ve got in the house. These’ll soak overnight, so just get them soaking and set them aside and forget about them.

Faux Confit:

This is not a real confit because a real confit requires long salting/brining followed by a whole bunch of other mishegoss. Confits of poultry are a method of preserving the poultry. You can look it up if you’re curious. Since you do not need to preserve the poultry you can simply make a fake confit, which will taste amazing and add its wonderfulness to your cassoulet the next day.

Take a medium-sized clean duck and joint it (remove wings and legs). Set the legs aside. Trim the end joint off of the wings and put wingtips in your stockpot with some water, a couple of onions, a few ribs of celery, a couple of carrots, a bayleaf or two, and put it on a very low simmer. You can toss the neck in there too. Set the rest of the wings aside. Cover the legs and wings and refrigerate them for now.
Skin the remainder of the duck carcass, being careful to remove all of the fatty layer beneath the skin. Be sure to get the extra skin at the neck, but avoid the glands, ditto the fatty deposits near the tail. Dice the skin and fat and place in a large heavy deep frying pan (I use my 18-inch cast iron skillet for this) and place over medium heat to render the fat. Dice an onion, too, and toss that in to the rendering fat, along with a healthy handful of peeled whole garlic cloves. Render until the skin has given up all its fat and all the garlic cloves and onion bits are a beautiful even dark brown (but not burned!). Remove the skin bits and onions and garlic with a slotted spoon and drain them on a thick layer of paper toweling. (Incidentally, the skin bits are crunchy and delicious with some coarse salt, if you are so inclined, and you really should try them at least once. Some people find them addictive. The ghost of my gall bladder weeps bitter tears if I eat more than about 2 of the delectable crispy little things, but it’s great while it lasts.)

While the duck fat is rendering, remove the breast meat and tenderloins from the duck carcass. It is possible to remove breast and tenderloin in one piece, but I rarely bother — I cook up the tenderloins as a snack, saving the breasts for the faux-confit. Place the breasts (and tenderloins, if not immediately cooking them) in with the legs and wings and salt generously with some kosher salt, then wrap up and put back in the fridge to keep them from getting to salmonella-friendly temperatures.

As for the carcass, which you have now successfully denuded of skin and useful chunks of meat, toss it in the stock pot. Do not let the stock boil — nothing higher than a low simmer — or it will become cloudy.

Once you have strained the solids out of the rendered duck fat, heat it over a low medium flame, then add the duck meat. Legs go in the center of the pan, wings and breasts around the outsides. Reduce the flame to low, just enough to make the fat simmer lightly, and cook the meat slowly in the fat, turning after 15 minutes, then waiting 15 more. Then braise the meat in the hot fat further for about 30 minutes on a side. It should develop a delightful crust.

Remove the meat from the fat when it is done and allow to cool somewhat, then refrigerate. You may, if you wish, strain the fat and refrigerate it so you can use it later to fry potatoes in (they sound more highfalutin’ if you call them pommes sarlandaises but by any other name, good stout russet potatoes sliced into pinkie-thick discs and fried until nutty brown in duck fat, then salted and served alongside a roast meat and a green salad are a fabulous thing).
As for the stock, let it simmer for an hour or two, then strain out the solids. Let it cool, then pour into suitable containers and refrigerate or freeze (depending on whether or not you plan to use it for the cassoulet — I find that cassoulet made with duck stock is too rich for me, I prefer it made with a thoroughly defatted chicken stock).

So. That’s Day 1.

And yes, I presume you already know how to butcher and skin poultry. If you don’t know, I believe The Joy of Cooking still has instructions. It’s not hard. And since you’re going to dice the skin up anyway it doesn’t matter much if you do a hatchet job. Use sharp knives, they’re safer than dull ones. Be brave. It’s worth it.

More tomorrow.

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