Beckettesque moment, plus chametz

Subtitled, "I can't do this anymore.  I did it some more."

Out of habit more than hope, I checked the Big Giant Pseudology Association's job board, and saw a newly advertised position at a fancy name-brand school.  Most of my job-hunting energy these days is oriented toward non-academic work of various kinds, so I just don't have the strength to deal with the one-year VAP bullshit anymore.  But this job is multi-year, and is in a nice place, so...

My point is that I dashed off an entire application for it in approximately ten minutes.  And then went back to other, more promising stuff.

In other news, I am deeply relieved that Passover is over, because I ran out of potato vodka on the last night, I'm TIRED of matzo,* and I could make myself breakfast tacos this morning.  I am also happy to be drinking lovely wine this evening, although that has nothing to do here or there with Passover.  Because, you know, wine.

* Did you know that Blogger considers 'matzo' the standard spelling?  I tried typing 'matzah,' and it complained of a spelling error.  Apparently, if Blogger were Jewish, it would be Orthodox.

Brief note of thanks: Coffee break!

Thanks again to everyone who offered suggestions on how to beat or whip cream from scratch.  For me, pre-chilling the utensils in the freezer for ten or fifteen minutes made a world of difference.  For sheer entertainment's sake, I whipped the cream this time, instead of thickening it, just because I wanted to. 

Hope your coffee break is as pleasant as mine!

Chili

The downside of a chili party being cancelled because of a fast-spreading stomach bug: I don't get to show off my chili-cooking prowess to my friends until some unspecified date in the future.

The upside, however, is that I got to reacquaint myself with my chili-cooking techniques, as well as experiment with a few small changes to my basic recipe.  All in all, it turned out well, and I anticipate much carnivorous celebration when everyone involved has a settled stomach.

Extension of previous observation: the one real flaw in my technique here is the "one for you, one for me" philosophy of adding a can of beer to the pot of stew.  As I learned to my chagrin tonight, when I pour myself a pint of beer to sip while stirring the chili on the stove, I have a distinct tendency to let my attention drift to the fucking awesome music showcased on another blog, become obsessed with memorizing the lyrics and parsing the harmonies, and then suddenly become aware of a burning smell coming from the kitchen.

RBOC: Teaching and cooking with a head cold

• God forbid I make it through the semester without contracting a head cold.  I love lecturing when I can barely breathe.
• Ditto driving the thirty-mile trek from home to campus.
• Especially when the forecast calls for freezing drizzle overnight, thus likely yielding black ice all over the roads tomorrow morning.
• My stuffed-up sinuses and the headache caused thereby also make it extra-special awesome to plan out my final exam reviews, and to prep tomorrow morning's lesson.
• I could feel this cold coming on yesterday, so at least I had time to prepare with groceries.  I just cooked up a big pot of chicken soup, with an abstemiously small teaspoon (...maybe a heavy teaspoon) of chili powder for sinus kick.  So good.  
• The irony of cooking this soup with a stuffed-up nose is that I can't be bothered by the raw onion, but this is the only recipe I know in which the onion goes into the pot pretty much whole.  It's a missed opportunity to not tear up while chopping an onion, but then again, maybe it's for the best that this soup doesn't require a lot of knife work.
• I went to a party the other day thrown by a couple who have a daunting number of dietary restrictions between them, and I was flummoxed for what to bring.  (The host had suggested I bring something savory.)  I'm really low on savory recipes that don't involve a) meat, b) lots of hot chiles, or c) both A and B, and I was worried I'd be reduced to bringing a bag of bread sticks.  Luckily, after tooling around the internet for a while, I found an excellent vegan recipe the ingredients for which are easily found in Cornstate.  I added my own little touch, and voilà, my biggest crowd-pleaser in years!  To wit:
  
  1.5 lb. Brussels sprouts
  Good olive oil
  Kosher salt
  Freshly ground black pepper
  Mustard oil
  
  Slice the sprouts in half lengthwise.  Toss them with a pleasing amount of salt, pepper, and olive oil.  Pour them onto a cookie sheet and spread them out in a thin layer.  Drizzle a modest amount of mustard oil over them.  (NB: DO NOT bathe the sprouts in this stuff!)  Roast them in the oven at 400º for about half an hour.
• I'm still so pleased with the reception my Brussels sprouts got that for a minute, I actually forgot to feel kvetchy about my head cold.  That minute has now expired.
• Kvetch.

RBOC: Cooking, jobs, and great music

• I nearly asphyxiated myself on smoke whilst practicing my skills at pan-searing steak.  Even with my oven hood roaring and the windows open, I don't think my apartment has enough ventilation to make searing a practical option.  I would love to hear from readers about other good methods for cooking a nice steak medium rare.  I know the ultimate method is to grill it, but I don't own a grill, and don't want to buy one until I know where I'm living long-term.  Am I kidding myself, or can I make this work without a grill?
• I'm going to try out a spontaneous and improvised red wine-cream-tomato sauce tonight, if I don't lose my nerve.  It's largely motivated by my cheapness: earlier in the week, I opened a bottle of what turned out to be an undistinguished tempranillo, and even though I don't consider it more than barely passable as a beverage, I hate to throw it out.  I throw out really bad or ruined wine, but feel bad about doing that with something that could be useful in the kitchen.  Since I already have some cream on hand, I'm curious to see if I can work out a darker, richer tomato-cream sauce than the usual.  Wish me luck, or offer your own variations on this in the comments!  
• (No white wine ideas, though, please: now that the weather is getting chilly, there will likely be no white wine at chez Koshary until April or May.)
• I have mixed feelings about passing the 1st of November as a job applicant.  On the one hand, it's nice to have sent in that crapton of applications in timely fashion.  (Many pseudology job apps were due by then.)  On the other hand, it now means that I hardly see anything else to apply to, when I scope out the job postings at my various professional association websites.  The t-t jobs will mostly dry up from this point, and be replaced by the limited-term contract jobs that I've been subsisting on for the last few years.  Sigh.
• But: first tiny nibble of interest from one of the jobs I applied to!  Here's hoping that it's the pebble that triggers an avalanche!
• This:
  
  

Selfish but happy

After several weeks of work, including

• a spring break largely dedicated to my writing, 
• a freaking 12-hour work day today, 
• a case of tendonitis bad enough to warrant buying several little doohickies to wear on my arm so I could keep typing and cooking as needed,
• and a serious case of cabin fever from sitting at my desk so damn much,

I completed the first draft of an article and sent it off to the editor for commentary.  Check out that writing meter over there!

Once that was done, I checked in on the family back in Hometown.  It was an almost unstinting parade of human misery, including a truly awful progressive disease, punctuated only by occasional plaintive acknowledgment of how far away from everyone I am.  I swallowed hard and got through the phone calls.

And then I made dinner.  And had a few glasses of wine.  And you know what?  I may be a horrible, selfish asshole, but the plain truth is that I'm still in a good mood as a result of finishing that article draft.  Does it make sense that I feel a little bad about feeling good?

Whatever.  I'm going to finish my wine and eat some lovely food I just cooked.

Diversis sermonibus pertemptatum finitimus

• I've paid off the last of my lingering credit card debt.  The monkey is off my back!  (For now, anyway.)
• The big IRS portion of my tax refund arrived.  Ahhhhh.  Knock on wood, I can actually start to amass some savings to see me through the summer.
• I just picked up Madhur Jaffrey's Quick and Easy Indian Cooking.  I'm excited about experimenting with new recipes, especially ones that don't require a huge amount of effort after the workday.  (I'm going to politely ignore the amount of fat that some of the recipes include, for the moment.)
• Speaking of cooking fat, I was searching for a recipe for chopped chicken liver, which led me to a recipe for schmaltz.  Shudder.  It's entirely possible that I will try that someday just for the tinkery challenge of it – especially with my increasingly greasy and well-seasoned cast iron pan – but it makes me mildly ill just to look at the pictures of the ingredients in process.  I really don't understand how my Ashkenazi ancestors ever lived past the age of 50 in the pre-modern era.
• I sometimes wonder what it felt like to be one of those first proto-Ashkenazim who emigrated so far north of the Mediterranean that they could no longer acquire olive oil for pareve cooking. 
  "Well, the only fat we can even get out here in the boonies is butter.  How are we supposed to cook meat without oil?"
  "I dunno.  You think we could maybe just render animal fat into cooking grease?"
  "Oh, yeeeeccccccch!  That's gross, man!*  But....I guess I don't have any better ideas.  Go get the meat pan — and, uh, maybe some onions just to make this seem a little less nasty."
• Some geeky anti-MOOC brilliance here.  It makes me wish more people tried to formulate ideas in Yoda's (apparently native?) grammar and syntax.  Seem smarter and more insightful, it makes things.

*Get it?  Get it?  Okay, it's not the best Judeo-German pun ever, but whatever.  It's no worse than half the jokes that Freud published.

Lentil soup FTW

With my cast iron skillet skills very much a work in progress, it's comforting to know that I (usually) know how to get things right with my stock pot.  Lentil soup is one of the top 10 most comforting things in the universe – it's true, go look it up – so it's a great pleasure to be able to whip up a pot of this stuff on yet another cold day brought to you by Endless Winter. 

I try various recipes from time to time, but my favorite to date has been an Indian-style one poached from some newspaper.  (NYT?  Can't remember.)  It was good, but way too bland: "Indian-style," of course, usually means "take away all of the heat, take away the ghee, and throw in a little cinnamon and curry powder."  This recipe wasn't quite that bad out of the box, but I've been tinkering with it to goose up the flavor.  (As we all know, lentils often need a lot of goosing.) 

The one I made today for lunch was so good that I now regret that I couldn't have made a double batch.  I'll need some lead time on that, since part of the key seems to be using homemade chicken stock as a soup base.  My stockpot can only hold one chicken, and one chicken yields about 8 cups of stock, which is pretty much the quantity you need for every recipe.  But man, I'm glad I spent the time yesterday simmering up the stock.  The full key to greatness seems to be using my own stock instead of store-bought broth, and doubling most of the seasonings.

Try it!  Tell me what you think.  (NB: You will never, ever find a more umami low-sodium recipe.  It's not the lowest-fat recipe around, but I'm way warier about salt than fat, for my own health reasons.)

Curried lentil soup, Dr. Koshary-style

2 T. ghee
1 large onion, chopped
5-6 cloves garlic, minced
4 hot chiles of choice, minced
Handfuls of fresh baby spinach leaves, if available
2 tsp. ground ginger
2 T. curry powder
2 tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. ground cumin
2 bay leaves
1 pinch asafetida
1 1/2 C. red lentils, rinsed and drained
8 C. homemade chicken stock (or, if you must, reduced-sodium chicken broth)
1 bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
Juice of 1 lime
Salt and pepper to taste — note that you should not require any salt!

1. Heat the ghee in a heavy stock pot over medium heat.  Add onion and sauté until softened, about 3 to 5 minutes.
2. Add garlic, chiles, and all dry spices, and cook, stirring, for about 5 minutes longer.
3. Stir in lentils and stock and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to low and simmer, partially covered, until the lentils are tender, about 45 minutes.
4. Discard bay leaves.  Stir in cilantro and lime juice.
5. EAT ITTE!

Smoke gets in my eyes

In honor of the steak I cooked tonight:


This was the first steak that I have ever cooked, in fact, and I chose to do it Alton Brown's way: searing the meat on my spiffy new (and goddamn heavy) cast-iron skillet, then transferring it to the oven for a few more minutes to cook the center.  Other than some low-grade smoke inhalation and some slightly watery eyes, I have to admit that it turned out pretty well, even if I can't yet locate any grass-fed beef in Cornstate — even in mighty Corntown!*  When you can't even rely on Trader Joe's, you probably have to call off the search.

All respect to the illustrious Mr. Brown, but I don't recall him mentioning in that episode ("Steak Your Claim," if you're keeping track):

• that my skillet would come out of its oven pre-heating already smoking a bit.
• Or that applying the steak to the super-heated skillet would cause such huge billows of smoke that I would lose 50% of my usual visibility within my apartment, thereby encouraging me to open every window for emergency ventilation, in the middle of a windy snowstorm.
• Or that the steak would leave such a stubborn imprint on my thoroughly seasoned skillet that it would shred the paper towels I used to scour the bottom with oil and salt, thereby encouraging me to re-season the pan after dinner amid fears that I have somehow removed the seasoning that I have been patiently building for a week and a half with greasy, greasy breakfasts and dinners.  Oh, well.  Cast-iron cookware is a lifetime investment, I'm told, and regularly re-seasoning is just part of the game.

*Clearly, I have succumbed to the inevitable, and now think of the major regional city in the center of Cornstate as Corntown.

Verschiedene Themen ohne Kohärenz.

• Have you ever tried plugging a deeply idiomatic expression into Google Translate, just to see if you could make it work in other languages?  It's a pleasing thought exercise in precise language, since the program seems totally ignorant of even mildly idiomatic phrase.  You have to keep refining the phrase as you think out the exact nuance in minimally referential Standard English.  "Random bullets of crap" takes some real effort.  And, since I can't actually read German, I can only wonder how close to the mark I got here.
• Dude, the deadline for submitting abstracts to the Big Giant Pseudology Conference is mere weeks away now!  Where has my fool head been about this?  I need to get on the stick, and fast.  I had pretensions of organizing my own panel this year, but that collapsed pretty fast: I'm at a point in my writing and research in which there is no particularly salient concept around which to build a conference panel.  I'd better humble myself and just send in a regular abstract, and hope that it gets accepted.  I'll have to go one way or the other, if I get any nibbles in next year's job cycle, so it would be nice to add a line to the CV as I trudge back into battle.
• I'm getting faster at grading essays, but it still makes my head hurt.  
• It also makes my soul hurt to see smart kids with good ideas have to take a low grade because their writing is just that abysmal.  How the f is it possible for someone to be more than halfway through college at a pretty good school, and utterly incapable of putting together a coherent paragraph?  I really want to help them shape up in this regard, since I can already dimly glimpse the gemstones underneath all the dirt.
• Although my soul is unaffected by this, I'm also annoyed to see vacuous, thoughtless students avoid answering straightforward questions by trying to drown me in verbose bullshit.  Kid, do not flatter yourself that you can bamboozle me.  I read motherfucking pseudology for breakfast, punk.  You'd do better to write an under-length paper acknowledging that you don't yet understand the material and you're just going to give it your best shot than to give me a full-length paper full of awkward sentence constructions and bloviation.  
• It's also not encouraging to see that some of the worst offenders in this last regard are close to earning degrees in writing-oriented majors.  I'm trying to remember that we all have less-than-optimal students at times, lest I be tempted to march across campus to their advisors' offices and wave the incomprehensible writing in their faces.  Lord knows I wouldn't want to be held responsible for the mediocrity of some pseudology students, once I'd given my best efforts to teach them something.
• The more I consult with friends about this, the more I am convinced that hard-anodized aluminum non-stick pans and I simply do not get along.  (Traditionally, I'm a stainless steel guy, except for a trusty old glass baking pan.)  A number of people have recommended that I learn to work with cast iron, saying it's not as finicky to maintain as I fear, and that it does a really good job cooking all sorts of dishes.  I've never used cast iron in my life, but the evidence suggests that I cannot get aluminum non-stick to work for me.  Any readers out there care to comment on the relative merits of cast iron, enameled or plain?

Shpilkes

I've just finished cooking my dinner, leftovers of which should last through the week.  (The quality has yet to be determined, and I'm a little doubtful about the charred layer of what should have been my braising reduction, but never mind.)  I've more-or-less finished up a project I have to do submit tomorrow, and both sets of notes for tomorrow's classes seem to be in order.

So why do I have shpilkes?  It would seem that I'm suffering a mild attack of antsiness waiting to hear from my dining companion of last evening.  I know it's too early for her to text me back after my little "Had a great time last night" gesture of good textiquette.  But...I kinda dig her.  And apparently I no longer have much cool when it comes to going out with women who make a good impression on me.  It has taken a larger act of will than I would like to admit not to replicate that horrifying scene from Swingers.



Hope this one hangs around for a bit.  Guess I'll find out by this time next week.

ETA: And man, I really hope I'm better at chatting her up than at making gravy.  Tonight's dinner was a serious gravy fail.

Home sick :(

For the first time since I-don't-know-when, I stayed home from school today on account of illness.  It is certainly the first time I have ever done so as a professor.  Maybe it's just my machismo kicking in, but I feel disappointed in myself that I allowed a virus to afflict my sinuses.  I hate getting sick in the middle of things.  It always gives me tremendous anxiety to plan out a semester's syllabus and work in little points here and there where I know I'll have leeway to contract things a bit, if we lose a day or two.  It makes me anxious because I don't want to be the reason for the missed class session.  It feels unprofessional to me.  And yes, I recognize it's insane to think that way about a cold virus.

But anyway, I was already having a little trouble talking yesterday, as my throat closed up and my sinuses went on the fritz.  Apparently, this is one of those slow-acting viruses that just teases you for a few days before really hitting you.  It's the same one that made me bust out the chicken soup mentioned in my last post.  Well, after my colleagues all said to me, "Why don't you just go home?" rather than attend a meeting, I took off. 

On the way home, I stopped by the grocery store to pick up ingredients for some dishes I planned to cook.  As soon as I got to the store and pulled out my list, I nixed the whole thing.  Since my list was on my iPhone, I switched from Notes to Dropbox: I realized it would be easier to shop for groceries if I kept my recipes accessible.  I felt so crappy at this point that I just got the ingredients for another pot of chicken soup. 

When I got home and set about making the soup, I found that my throat tickle had progressed to a full-blown cough.  There was no way I could lecture like this, and I felt so bedraggled yesterday morning that I actually worried about being incapable of driving safely to work.  Head held low, I emailed my students to cancel the class for today.

I hope this day of mild rest and soupy indulgence do something good for me.  I can't really call off any more school days, since this is the last week of classes and I need to administer the evaluations surveys.  It'd look pretty bad if I sidestepped those.

Coughing.  Guess I'd better squeeze another lemon for juice and heat up a bowl of soup.  I have to nuke this fucking bug so I'm functional tomorrow.  Sigh/cough.

Dragging

Dude.  The last few weeks have been so tiring for me.  Really, the entire month of November kicked my ass.  First I was preparing for the Big Giant Pseudology Conference.  Then I actually attended the BGPC.  Then I endured a week in Hometown.  (Virtually back to back!)  Then I had to get my ass back into gear for the following school week.

Inevitably, all that travel and stress has given me a cold to further enervate me.  Could be worse, though: it's not one of those colds that wallops you, but only saps some of your energy and desire to talk.  As you all know, it's hard not to talk when you're the professor.  Luckily, I have constant access to orange juice and the most potent panacæa* yet discovered: my grandmother's chicken soup recipe.  In an effort to ratchet up the sinus-clearing and throat-healing powers of this formidable soup, I added two tablespoons of cayenne pepper.  Perhaps the soup could have done just fine with only one tablespoon, but it sure cleared my sinuses. 

I'm down to a single remaining week of class, and then there'll be exam week and grading.  I feel like I may have to be carried to work on a stretcher for sheer exhaustion.  You know how sometimes you feel too weak to lift your limbs to do your class prep, even when you're perfectly healthy?  I'm reaching that point now, and my nose and throat are still misbehaving.

But on the plus side of things, part of my exhaustion comes from

• having enjoyed my best BGPC ever, replete with networking, good meals, and a renewed sense that my colleagues take me seriously as a scholar;
• having done some things that needed to be done in Hometown, unpleasant as they may have been;
• somehow keeping my classes running, although I admit this part has suffered as a result of the first two accomplishments.

I am amused to observe that, as personal as all this stuff is, it's structural at a larger level: every one of my colleagues at CBU agrees with me that our asses are dragging as we approach the end of semester.  We all have different stories, but they all have the same conclusion.  Perhaps I really have joined the club in some way.

*I love typing those fiddly letters and diacritics.  Don't you?

RBOC: I'm drunk right now

• Pouring equal parts bourbon and Vernor's ginger ale over ice yields one potent fucking drink.  I'm sipping on my second one now, and I'm already kinda lit.
• I have achieved this week what has seemed nigh-impossible of late: I have managed to cook my own lunch to bring to work for the entire week.  Usually, I drop the ball on either Monday or Wednesday evening, in preparation for the fucking Intro to Libel and Slander course.  Today, though, I stopped by the grocery store in Tinytown to see if the offerings were any better than at the grocery store in the painfully anonymous suburb in which I live, and found not only some handsome bulbs of garlic, but also a 3 for $5 special on bunches of fresh basil leaves.  I am inordinately proud of myself that I have a travel pack of 3-cheese tortellini and basil-spiked tomato sauce ready to tote to work tomorrow morning.
• To explain the above, I am slowly deducing that Tinytown, despite its diminutive size and relative isolation, has a better grocery store than my anonymous suburb.  (Lest you think I'm kidding about the anonymity, I checked: there are towns with the same name as my suburb in more than a quarter of the United States.)  The high proportion of over-educated (and, one might even say, snooty) CBU professors seems to have impelled the grocery store to carry a decent selection of fresh vegetables and herbs, including an impressive number of organically grown produce for a town in which almost everyone I see in a car seems to be smoking and/or advertising their membership in the National Rifle Association.  When I confirmed that the basil wasn't on special because it was about to expire, I jumped on the deal.  I may give up shopping at my local grocery store entirely, if I can buy better-quality produce in Tinytown right on my route from work to home.  (Especially since my local stopped carrying Soyrizo.  Motherfuckers.)
• Life back in Hometown kind of sucks right now.  I'd be a lot more sober right now if I didn't have to dread going back to Hometown in a few weeks' time.  I've heard enough bad news since Monday to last me for quite a while.
• Oh, hey!  Did I mention that I'll be flying to Hometown from Cornstate a mere 36 hours after I return to Cornstate from the Big Giant Pseudology Conference?  Or that I have a conference paper to write for said conference that I have only drafted in rough form?  Or that I'm (tremble) going to spend an entire (godawful) week in Hometown before I can escape back to Cornstate?  Or that the World is Ending during my visit?  (Okay, that last part doesn't really apply to anyone except me and perhaps one or two other close relatives.)
• Spanish Prof suggested months ago that she and Fie Upon This Quiet Life and I all get shitfaced together at an opportune moment.  Has she acted upon this suggestion yet?  Nooooooooo.  In fairness, however, she herself observed that she was "drunk as hell" when she said that.  I choose to live in hope.  And, at the moment, in hiccups.

RRBOC (Really RBOC!)

• One of my students has a pair of shoes more awesome than anything that I own.  It eats me up with envy.  I don't want to give him a swelled head or cross any lines of appropriate professor-student relationship, but I'm dying to know where he found those shoes.  I'm also scandalized to think that his shoes might cost four times what I'd spend on a pair.
• Speaking again of footwear, I continue to despise this godawful trend of wearing black socks and shower sandals.  I have yet to see anyone wearing this who doesn't look like zi just escaped from an insane asylum.  I am utterly baffled that any person in possession of hir full faculties would ever think of putting on such items together, much less walking out of doors like that.  It actually makes those running shoes with toes look reasonable, even stylish.
• Crickets keep making ill-advised incursions into my garage when I come home in the evening.  They don't seem to realize that they are cutting themselves from their friends and family by hopping in there.  They probably neither realize nor care how much it irritates me when they start chirping in there, and the walls and cement floor magnify the sound half a bajillion times when I'm trying to sleep.
• It always shakes me a little when a student tells me that they can't attend one thing or another because a hugely traumatic event has befallen them.  I was such a blissfully ignorant college student, I now see.  There are so many awful things that can happen out of the blue that can throw a student totally off-track for a semester or more.  Had I even been aware of them all, I might have become an insomniac by my sophomore year.
• I used a BB&B 20%-off coupon as a flimsy pretext to treat myself to a new roasting pan, a small saucepan, and a rice cooker.  I am excited.  (I suck at cooking rice.)  I briefly considered going hog-wild and getting a pressure cooker too, but I don't yet have a clear idea what I'd do with the thing, and the trustworthy models all seem to be at least $100. 
• I think I'm going to use the book contract as a reason to host my first house party in years.  It'll be my first time to have colleagues over to my place.  Maybe I should buy a coffee table ahead of that?  And maybe put up the wall art that I've had leaning against a wall for months now?  And Christ, I should probably at least unpack that freaking vacuum cleaner that has sat unopened as a makeshift end table for way too long now.

Scraping by

It's been a rough week on me, although I was mostly satisfied with the classroom results.  I have to get myself into physical as well as mental shape to handle the workload here, since there's just so damn much to do.  I'm about one lesson ahead of the students, if that much, in all three of my classes.  Likely to remain so, except for the odd week when we tackle a reading I know particularly well.

To my surprise, I'm not doing as poorly as I feared I would at Intro to Libel and Slander.  It's kind of amazing to me to see that, indeed, I know more about this stuff than my students do.  (I honestly didn't quite believe that, given how much of the course is predicated on relatively simple scientific concepts that one could easily encounter in high school.)  It blows my mind that I'm able to explain this stuff as well as I have done so far.  Sure hope I can keep this up.  I worry I'm going to hit the wall in another few lessons, but we'll see.  But at the moment, I sound more or less like a competent libeler to my students.

The week ended on something of a low note for us new faculty members: the first paycheck finally came in.  That should be good news, but it was complicated by the form: the initial paycheck for a new employee at CBU is always issued on paper, rather than by direct deposit.  It seems that a lot of new hires have not yet had their mailboxes squared away in their departments – how could this be? I couldn't tell you – and thus they literally did not receive their paychecks.  Seriously, CBU?  You couldn't actually ensure that your employees got paid?  I'd have almost expected such neglect at Ghosttown U., but this was a shock to me.  Luckily, I was not one of these unfortunate souls, and got my pay.

At least, I got my base pay.  The moving reimbursements seem to have been roundly delayed, for no good reason that anyone will admit to us.  I personally handed over my form to the next person in the bureaucratic process ten days before payday.  For those of us who not only had to carry credit card balances during our time of non-employment but also had to move house, it's a real hardship to wait even longer for that cash.

But hey, who am I to complain?  At least I got a proper paycheck, and at least it was for the legally mandatory sum.  One of my colleagues suffered the indignity of a clerical error on hir paycheck, so that instead of hir actual salary installment, it was for $300.  After months of no pay, that must seem almost worse than nothing at all — like adding insult to injury.  Sure hope they work that shit out for hir fast.  Rent was due today, after all.

On the plus side, I finally got to act on (one half of) Grumpy Rumblings' advice, and bought myself a cheaply priced used microwave oven.  Assuming it works decently, I'll never find a cheaper one, so I'm pleased.  Oddly enough, its previous owner is the previous occupant of my new office.  Small college in a small town, these things are bound to happen, I suppose.  (You can tell Tinytown is tiny from the fact that the used furniture dealer could recall the microwave's last owner by name.)  I can reheat things without resorting to my regular oven, now!  I'm still debating whether or not to spring for a toaster oven, too.  It's obviously money I don't want to spend, and it would take up countertop space.  But, on the other hand, it's probably an easier and cleaner way to toast bread and heat up things that tend to drip.  I'll think about it.

Oh yeah, money: after talking over the matter with my financial consultants/parental units, it looks like I went a little too gung-ho with saving for retirement.  I decided to throw a full 10% of my base pay into my 403(b), since I've only had one for a year now, and I feel the need to make up for all those years that I had no savings at all.  But, like I mention above, I'm carrying credit card debt from the summer.  A lot, in fact, since I had to buy a relatively large number of household appliances and goods that I had not previously owned for many years.  Those are abnormal and, FSM willin', one-time costs that I won't have to factor in on a regular basis, but the damage is done.  Given the thousands of dollars I had to put on plastic, I might have made a miscalculation in sacrificing 10% of my pay.  As Nicole and Maggie will likely concur, I really need to pay down that credit card debt as fast as reasonably possible, and only then worry about socking away the maximum in my 403(b).  I'm a little embarrassed that I couldn't/didn't figure that out for myself, and a bit annoyed that it might take a few weeks (or months?) before I can alter that arrangement with the Payroll Office.

Meanwhile, I'd better keep a sharp eye on my expenses, since I'll be halfway through September before I can pay any more large bills.

Trouble in belly

Groan.  As if I didn't feel bad enough already, I managed to start off the new year by poisoning myself with my cooking.  I'm reasonably sure that the culprit was the catfish I made last night – it was still good, on paper at least, and I bought local stuff – although it's a toss-up whether the larger issue was the freshness of the fish or the dreadfulness of my cookery.  I tried my hand, on a whim, at dredging it in flour and preparing it in something like Southern style.  It all went so badly, though: the butter burned in the pan, the seasoned flour I prepared had no flavor to speak of, even though I added enough cayenne to make me choke on the fumes, and the thicker parts of the filets didn't even cook through by the time the ends were burning and filling my kitchen with noxious smoke.  (On a side note: if that mess didn't set off my smoke detector, then it may be non-operative.  Hmm.) 

My guts have been causing me to whine out loud all day long, even though I live alone and there is no one to hear me bitching.  Remind me never to let fish sit in the fridge overnight before cooking it — at least, not while I'm living in Ghosttown, which seems incapable of getting truly fresh seafood in the supermarkets.  Ow.

On the plus side, I've just cooked up a beautiful pot of Indian-style lentils with spinach, which is already making me feel (a tiny bit) better.  Now that my grumpy belly is newly filled with lentil soup and red wine, I have several multimedia observations to make.

First, meaning no offense either to singer or to fan, I'm having trouble getting into Florence and the Machine.  Leaving aside the lyrics (hit or miss, with me) and her voice (undoubtably strong and beautiful, but disturbingly close to Celine Dion), I find myself unsettled by Florence Welch's gestures.  The things she does with her arms when she's not even singing, you know?  Tragically, she keeps reminding me of this bit of Cold Comfort Farm:



Sorta takes the wind out of Flo's sails, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, if you want a groovy live performance with great vocals, how about this?

Drunken Master Chicken

I've been eating out a little more than I should lately, mostly out of laziness about cooking at home.  I decided to focus on my cooking skills this evening to unwind from a long day at work, since that third class of the day makes me want to bang all of my students' heads on their desks.  (Is there some device that expedites this process for the busy professor?)  Anyway, I had bought some chicken breasts, and I've recreated my usual kitchen-sink-style spice cabinet in my new place, so that seemed the thing to work on. 

The last time I cooked chicken breasts, I tried for a nice soy-lime marinade, and only half-succeeded: too salty, too acidic, and not enough depth of flavor.  I was puzzling over what else I could add to dilute the negative qualities of the soy sauce and the lime juice, and after a while a brilliant idea struck me: WHISKEY.  A few internet searches later, I had an idea what I would do.  And, I am pleased to announce, my latest improvisatory recipe was wildly successful!

Behold, DRUNKEN MASTER CHICKEN!!!

1.5 pounds or so of chicken
soy sauce (don't go overboard here)
lime juice (don't go overboard here, either)
1 tbsp. allspice
1 tbsp. ground ginger
rye whiskey (what the fuck, go a little overboard here!)
green onions
garlic cloves (overboard!)
spinach or other greens

Mix the green onions, garlic, spices, lime juice, soy sauce, and whiskey together in a bowl wide enough to marinate all the chicken at once.  Trim the fat and gristle from the chicken and marinate it for at least an hour, turning it over halfway through.  After marination, cook it in a big frying pan with a lid, along with the spinach.  Once everything is laid out in the pan, cover it and check it every five minutes or so.  You want all the veggies and chicken to steam a bit more than they fry, so the moisture isn't all boiled off.  Thick pieces of chicken, like split breasts, may take about half an hour of this, being turned over now and then, before they're cooked all the way through.

Serve with either a glass of the same whiskey used in the marinade, or a red wine light enough to let you savor the delicate balance of the marinade/glaze.