Virtue

I was going to make a Buffalo post about churches and supportive religious communities today when I went downtown to get my permit (yeah, I'm in college and don't have a permit, nbd), but no sooner did I arrive at the bus stop and sit down than I was visited by something out of a cartoon or Alexander's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day. I sat on the little bench under the bus shelter, and a car drove through a big puddle of nasty scummy water and splashed it all over me! I made noises of distress and anger, but the culprit was long gone. Clearly, this was a sign from the universe. I was not supposed to go downtown today.

So I went home and took a bath instead.

For dinner, I made the most virtuous meal imaginable: Red lentil cauliflower curry. It's a recipe from the Mennonite cookbook Simply in Season, but I had to find it online because I don't own the book. I think the recipe might have been off somehow: the meal tasted fine, but when I served it up, it was just a big bowl of vegetables and not much sauce. When I had this meal before, this was not the result.

Still, it was healthy.

The 5 steps to reading Julie/Julia

Step 1. Start reading Julie/Julia
Step 2. Think about how mean the author is
Step 3. Debate whether or not you should stop reading the book
Step 4. Consider the movie and wish it had just been a film adaptation of My Life in France instead
Step 4. Stop reading Julie/Julia and pick up My Life in France
Step 5. Francelust.

Bike adventures

I haven't had much to do since finishing my work for my first year of college (dear God I'm getting old). After spending far too much time watching Torchwood and hanging around the house, I've taken to riding my bike around town. I wish I could take pictures of my adventures, but my camera is being very strange and refusing to stay on. I was in a basement secondhand store the other day when I discovered this, and it was very frustrating. My camera is kind of old and not very good, but it is a digital camera and I wanted to take pictures of sable hats and pewter tankards. (Like the ones that sing in Beauty and the Beast! It was way cool.) Even though I couldn't photodocument my adventures, they were still nice.

Today I went to the park with my bike and ate my lunch at the zoo. Not in the zoo, mind you--I'm far too cheap for that, and going to the zoo alone doesn't sound as fun as going with people. A nice thing about the Buffalo zoo is that there are some cages that face outward onto the street, so you can casually look in on some animals, decide that you want a better view, and then go in and pay. Tightwad that I am, I just took advantage of the zoo's kindness and ate my lunch outside the buffalo cage. When I was little, Emily and I would hang out at the buffalo cage when we were waiting for Caroline's soccer practices to finish. She would pretend that looking at the animals without paying wasn't allowed, so we alternated standing guard while the other one looked at the buffaloes.

Today, I ate part of my lunch with the buffaloes, then moved to the giraffes. Giraffes always remind me of my old friend Veronica. She isn't super tall, she's actually shorter than I am, but giraffes always remind me of her anyway. I sat on the grass, eating my pineapple, looking at the giraffes and thinking about Veronica and Questionable Content. (Slurrrrp.) It was a nice afternoon.

Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo: the local movement

For my first Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo installment, I'd like to discuss something very dear to my heart: the local movement. I don't mean local foods, although that's also very popular: I mean local businesses. It's not news to anyone that small businesses have it tough these days. Chain restaurants and giant superstores make it hard for a small, family-owned business to survive, especially in the United States.

But not in Buffalo!

In Buffalo, local restaurants have the edge. A few years ago, just a few blocks away from my house, Elmwood Tacos and Subs was so popular that it actually put a Burger King out of business. The majority of restaurants in the city are locally owned and keep money in the local economy (as you can see from the poster above). 

Money! In the local economy! Y'all realize what this means. The citizens of Buffalo are doing their bit to help the city, one sandwich at a time. 

Browned butter brownies for friends and enemies

Hello, my lovely friends! Tonight, I'd like to share with you one of my favorite recipes: browned butter brownies. They are legendary and browning butter, while time-intensive, is a useful and delicious social skill.  For a very helpful step-by-step tutorial, click here.

Potential uses for these brownies: 

1. If you have a mortal enemy and are looking to bump them off in a kindly fashion,
2. If you need to butter someone up before asking them for a large sum of money (oh snap that just happened),
3. If you're trying to seduce a foodie,
4. If you're trying to seduce someone who has a mouth and likes to put food inside it,
5. If you need a present for a teacher or friend,
6. NOMS.

Brown butter browniesModified from Alice Medrich, published in Bon Appetit, Feb. 2011Makes 16 brownies

• INGREDIENTS
• 2½ sticks of unsalted butter (Don’t freak out! You’ll only really use half of it.)

• 1 cup sugar

• ¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder (you’d be amazed at how much difference there is in cocoa powders; get a good quality one)

• ¼ teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 2 teaspoons water

• 2 large eggs, cold

• 1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

• 1 cup walnuts, lightly toasted

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 325 F.

1. Line an 8×8-inch baking pan with aluminum foil, pressing it into the corners of the pan and leaving a couple inches of overhang. (You’re going to use this to lift the brownies out later. Genius! This is what you get for using recipes written by real professionals.) Rub a little butter over the foil to grease it.

1. Melt and brown butter, as described above.

1. While the butter is still in the early stages of cooking, combine the sugar, cocoa and salt in a fairly heatproof bowl.

1. Have a second heatproof cup or bowl ready. When the milk solids are beautifully browned, either pour or scoop out ½ cup (8 tablespoons) of the butter into that cup, being careful to keep all the browned bits with you in the pan. Then all at once dump the butter from the pan into the bowl with the cocoa mixture. Scrape in all the browned bits stuck to the pan, unless they’re burnt. Add the vanilla and water, and stir to blend. It will come together like rough concrete. The mixture should be fairly hot; let cool for 5 minutes. (You get to keep the extra butter for other uses; store in fridge.)

1. Beat in one of the eggs vigorously. It will look horrible. The butter will probably separate out of the cocoa/sugar mass, and it will start to make you very sad. About now, you will be cursing. Beat in the second egg, though, and watch it all come back together. Egg saves the day!

1. When your mixture looks shiny and uniform, add the flour and stir until blended. The recipe continues: “Beat vigorously 60 strokes.” And seriously, they’re not kidding. As you work it, the gluten will develop in the flour and make it firmer and tougher. Just take a breath, hold on and crank it.

1. Stir in the nuts, and scrape the batter into the baking pan. Bake 25 minutes, or until a toothpick in the center comes out not quite clean (there should be a few moist crumbs sticking to it). Cool the pan on a rack, then lift the brownies out with the foil. Cut into four strips, and quarter those to make 16 brownies.

Pictures to follow. 

Moving forward

It's been a while since my last post, because my Kinesiology final took up all of my spare time and thought. I was working stage crew for the grad students' spring event Tuesday through Thursday, and I kept my notes and Sci Fi textbook (Trail Guide to the Body, the perfect textbook for any anatomy student)with me the whole time. I used my little squeeze flashlight to study during breaks.

Working stage crew was very fun; I was in charge of sound and got to play with projections too, which was interesting. Dance Production is required for my major, and I was surprised by how much fun I had. I've never been terribly tech-savvy, but now I know how to use a sound board, and thanks to Jazz Ensemble, I know how to set one up too. I've been filing this information under "Technology," a file which was previously close to empty. Plus I got a little tiny crew bear!

I only had my Kinesiology final to take, and since it wasn't done through the registrar, I took it on Friday so I could go home today. My parents should be here in about an hour, and I'm sitting in my packed-up room on my stripped bed and trying really hard not to muse over the past year. As Emily (not my sister) so aptly put it, "You can't live you life looking backwards, or you'll fall over and trip," so I'm trying to keep moving forward. I still have two assignments left: a Sci Fi final that's half done and my Comp manifesto, in which I have to describe my beliefs as a choreographer using any medium other than dance. Then next weekend we're taking Caroline to Baltimore, so I'd better get used to moving boxes.

Better post to come later, and keep an eye out for a feature coming soon: Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo, a feature in which I post things I love about my hometown (with pictures)! I'll be taking the old bike up and down the town to prove to Alice that Buffalo is not the hellhole that I may have accidentally indicated it was.