Category: All (-ish)

Postcards from Belarus and California

Is this not the greatest postcard from Belarus you’ve ever seen?  It’s from Dasha, who is a student, a future journalist.  She sincerely wishes me the eternal spring in my heart.
 
This postcard came from my friend Kelly, who was in LA to see the band Heart inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
 

Postcards from Germany and Wisconsin

This appears to be a home-printed postcard.  It’s from Ingrid, in the Paltinate, which is a region in southwest Germany, also called German Tuscany.
 
This postcard is from Laura, who lives on a small island in Wisconsin.  She says, “I’m sending this card not because it’s my favorite, but because it creeps me out and I’d rather have it someplace else.”  Laura made me laugh, because I share her sentiment.  I’ve got it hanging behind another postcard, so I don’t have to look at it. 
 

Potato recipe

So the Lint Project is going along.  Eating mashed potatoes every day has been easier than meditating every day, but I’ve been doing my best to do both.  It occurs to me, that someone might want my mashed potato recipe, so here it is, in all its glory. This is adapted from Cooks Illustrated.

Boil three pounds of skin-on potatoes (of similar size, if possible) in salted water until they are soft.  I check to see if they are soft by fishing out a larger candidate with a spoon, and poking it with a toothpick.  If the toothpick goes all the way through, they are done.

Drain the potatoes in a colander.  Put your potato boiling pot on the counter and get out your ricer.
An aside:  I used to always roll my eyes at mashed potato recipe instructions including references to using a ricer.  I had a potato masher, and why should I spend 20-plus dollars on a rather large kitchen gadget that only did one thing?  Then I made a few batches of for-public consumption mashed potatoes that had bits of unmashed potatoes in them.  And the next thing I knew I was forking over $20-plus dollars for a rather large kitchen gadget that only does one thing.  And let me tell you, that was money well spent.

That said, if you cook your potatoes well and mash enthusiastically, you will be fine.
 

Now before you start the peeling process, get out a stick of butter.  Yes, that’s half a cup. Yes, you are putting that entire stick in the recipe.  Don’t argue with me, here I know what I’m doing.  Get out a small pan and melt the butter (a low setting is best) while you are peeling the potatoes.

To peel the still-hot potatoes, take a fork, stab a potato and use your paring knife to slip off the peel.  Throw the naked potatoes in the ricer, and press, or throw them in the pot, ready for mashing.
 

When you’ve pulled all the skins off (if the potatoes are small and there are many, they will cool down enough so you don’t have to use the fork after awhile) and riced or mashed, pour in your half cup of now-melted butter. You ricer people, now is the time for you to get out your masher and mash in all that delicious butter. Take one cup of cream and pour about one half of cup of the cream in and mash some more.  Add cream a little at a time, until the potatoes reach your favorite consistency.   For me, that’s at about 1/2 cup of cream, but you might like more.  Mash in some salt, not too much, and you are done.

For this project, because I don’t really want to eat a TON of potatoes every day, I portion them into 1/2 cup servings using the smallest jelly jars you can buy in the canning section.  Then I store them in the refrigerator. But first I serve myself up a bowl of delicious, hot, homemade mashed potatoes.

To sum up:

3 lbs potatoes, boiled, peeled and riced/mashed
1/2 cup butter melted and mashed in
1/2 cup to 1 cup cream, mashed in
Salt.

Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Aprons

Okay, there’s a new uniform plan afoot.  The following two pictures are of the Laurel, by Colette Patterns.  I have plans this summer to make two dresses and two tops, but with a cute “small ruffle” variation and no pockets on the dress, and this will comprise the core of my new uniform.  The dresses/shirts will be in the same material, most likely a neutral, and I will get some black pants to wear with the shirts and black leggings to wear with the dresses.  But the exciting part will be that I will also sew a fun apron to wear over the ensemble!

I already wear an apron at work.  Because there are not reliable pockets in womens’ clothing, early on I adopted the basic three-pocket waitress apron to hold my work walkie talkie, keys and a few pens.  But I’ve decided to break out of the boring three-pocket apron and make some very cool ones to go with my uniform.  So I’ve been doing apron research.  You can come along with me.

I love the cherries and the piping on this one.  I’m looking for a full-front apron.
 

Nice bias tape here.
 
This is beautiful.
 
I like the pinafore look here and the fun pockets.
 
Kind of minimalist.
 
Very schoolmarm.
 
This princess seaming is great.
 
Very bright!
 
Very mod!
 
I love the bottom of these, and the chevrons.
 
Another good princess-seamed bias tape candidate.
 
So 1930’s cute.  But would probably make my hips look very substantial.
 
Here are the two books these came from.
 

What are your favorites?

Essay: Movie Listings

Back in the day—and this was long, long ago, say two or three years—I could plan my trip to the movie theater in 30 seconds or less.  I simply opened to the “movie listings” page in the relevant section of my newspaper, scanned the listings from all the theaters, checked the times and decided if I did or did not want to see a movie at that time.  I did this regularly, from 1989—the time I began attending movies without my parents—until the end of the first decade of our new century.
At that point, Regal Cinemas, the main provider of first-run movies in Portland, Oregon, pulled its daily listings from the newspaper.

I understood why.  Regal has a full, robust (and also rather difficult-to-navigate)
website.  The number of subscribers to the newspaper has been declining for years.  Smartphones had begun to appear and it was easier for consumers to be able to access movie information through a phone.  I also thought at the time that Regal was a good five to ten years ahead of themselves.  There are still a lot of
people who are not interested in navigating the internet to find their movie
selections.  Why cut out a potential segment of the movie-going public?
I don’t particularly like Regal as a company, and work hard to avoid seeing movies at their theaters, so I only missed the presence of their movie listings now and again.  But that was the tipping point.  From that point on, my checking of movie listings would straddle two formats: the newspaper, for a quick easy look, and then, if necessary, a follow up on the theater website.  One website became multiple websites as more and more theaters stopped using the newspaper to advertise their flicks.
Now, instead of spending 30 seconds scanning the listings, I click on seven different movie theater websites.  Within some of those websites, I also have to
click on multiple pages as some web designer has deemed it important that each
theater take up its own page, or that every movie in the theater system—even
ones in other cities—is listed in a long list.
Regal’s website is particularly bad.  Instead of giving me a grid of all the Portland
movies which was what I had in the paper, I get to scroll through each theater.  This sounds easy enough, but because Regal specializes in the multiplex, all the movies at a particulartheater don’t fit on one web screen and regular scrolling jumps from theater to theater.  I must then employ a combination technique of pulling the screen back and forth with the mouse to read each movie listed in the theater and then scrolling to the next one.  It’s actually an improvement from earlier in the year, when it was difficult to navigate to the individual movie theater listings.  But it’s still miles away from having all the information on one page.
The thing about all this is not that it is a massive pain that frustrates me and keeps people away from the movies.  That’s annoying, for sure.  And really, the amount of “trouble” it causes me is minimal and falls squarely into the “first world problem” category.  What I feel each Friday, as I take five to ten minutes to do something that used to take 30 seconds, is a sense of frustration and loss.  Five years ago, I had no idea that the movie listings would disappear from the  newspaper.  I didn’t know to appreciate the convenience of that feature.  To paraphrase Cinderella, that metal band from the 80s, I didn’t know what I had until it was gone.  The movie listings went away because technology improved in a way that made the movie theater owners abandon something they had done for decades.
What other technological changes are in store for us in the coming years?  And will they all come in the guise of making our lives “easier” while actually making things more difficult?  I’m guessing the answer is yes.

Three sentence movie reviews: Take This Waltz

I liked this movie for the building tension, and for the good performances by all the leads and especially the presence of Sarah Silverman.*  But what I really like about this movie is that it didn’t end where I thought it would, but kept going, giving me a very different ending than I expected.  Michelle Williams was not exactly a likable character, but her performance was very much worth watching.

Cost:  $1.00 from Videorama’s $1.00 Thursday
Where watched:  At home.

*There is a post-swim session shower scene in the movie that is pretty much spot-on depicting the realities of post-swim showers.  It has a lot of nudity in it (including Sliverman and Williams), but the nudity is of the “everyday” variety, not the much idealized women’s locker room scene that opens the movie Carrie.  If you are female, the locker room scene in Carrie is totally worth watching just for laughs.  It is very much the male fantasy of what happens in the women’s  locker rooms.  Take this Waltz is the reality.