Things I'll miss about Bloomington

• All my dear friends. I had Elevensies with Suz and Brad yesterday. There were some brief remarks about how at a certain level of familiarity with friends, there's no problem with taking a forkful of someone else's Eggs Benedict even though you have syrup on your fork, or with drinking someone else's coffee, or dipping your home fry in their hollandaise sauce. In this category I would also put entering someone's house with just a knock and not having to wait for someone to open the door, borrowing cherished books or DVDs, inviting oneself to dinner, that sort of thing. I'm not looking forward to having to start all over in a new place, and it also seems like the older I get the longer it takes to establish this familiarity with people.
• My quiet and jungle-like neighborhood. No where else have I walked past butterfly bushes or day lilies taller than me.
• Working in a castle on a beautiful campus with so much green space.
• The comparatively long growing season and comparatively mild winter.
• Certain aspects of my job, mostly my co-workers. I'll miss debating with Margaret about whether co-workers should be hyphenated or not. (I would say yes because otherwise the word looks like it could be pronounced "cow-orkers," and who knows what a cow orker is?)
• The really high-quality undergraduates who are grateful for the advantages they've had in life and don't expect to get anything except through their own effort and hard work.
• Bloomington has a sort of quirky feel to it that I'm not sure exists many other places. Also, lots of bluegrass.
  

Moving is so much work, the most I've been cooking lately is pasta or beans and rice. Plus, I've been trying to loose some Idaho potato pounds I took home as a souvenir from our trip out west last month. I think Idaho sends the rest of the country its reject potatoes and keeps all the best ones for itself. I really can't describe how much better Idaho potatoes are, it's almost like a completely different food. The flip side is that I've completely lost interest in eating our inferior french fries.

Harper and I went for a walk this morning, it's beautiful and clear, a nice omen to the start of my weeklong workshop for teachers, which goes from this afternoon through Saturday morning. I'm not nervous or in any way mentally agitated about this at all. This is probably due to a combination of that I have no mental agitation to spare from moving, and also because I've done this workshop before and so many other events like it (35!) in the last two years that I know what could go wrong and how to handle problems as they come up. Last year it was mostly being really bored for many hours a day, punctuated by periods of running errands and putting out fires. However, as I officially leave the job in two weeks, I think I'll care less about the fires.

There's a dog in our neighborhood who always barks VERY aggressively at Harper whenever he's outside when we walk by. Today we were walking by as he and his owner pulled up. He was wearing a pink cone of shame. Heh heh.

On a related note, anyone who hasn't seen Up yet should do so immediately.

Cookie Backslide

Chris actually preferred my status quo cookies, the ones that are slightly gooey, mushy, a little greasy. So, I thought I'd try to adjust the Chocolate Chip Cookie #10 to make them a little chewier for him. I compared the #10 to the Nestle Toll House recipe, and the only difference, really, is that #10 calls for two egg yolks instead of two whole eggs, and the cooking time is longer but slower, since it's at the same temperature but all the cookies are in there at the same time (lowering the temperature of the oven). I thought I'd change the egg thing, adding one whole egg and one egg yolk instead of two egg yolks, just to see what happened. It was really unsuccessful. As you can see, they all melted together into a cookie glob. Very greasy.

It could be the eggs that did it. Or, it could be that my baking soda is flat and that's why the cookies didn't rise. But I think it went wrong from the beginning. I think I over-melted the butter. I sort of forgot about it in the microwave and by the time it beeped the butter was foaming, and the milk solids separated from the liquid. The butter and sugar just never creamed right even though I was beating it for something like 10 minutes, and it all went downhill from there.

I think in the future I'll not melt the butter. Actually, I don't know why it called for the butter to be melted in the first place; Alton kept making a big deal about how to properly cream something the butter CAN'T be melted. So it would seem to me that melting the butter is the WRONG thing to do, even if I hadn't over melted it. Hmmmm....

Grilled Pineapple with Rosemary

I got Suz the "hot" new cookbook called the Flavor Bible. I, er, bought her the present a week before I wrapped it so I could, ah, do some "quality testing." It was pretty cool, it lists just about every edible ingredient and then the flavors that go best with those ingredients. I looked up pineapple and lo and behold, there was all this talk of rosemary. I thought it was just hooey, but I tried it and it was great. All I did was cut up the fresh pineapple, chop up some fresh rosemary and sprinkle it on top, then broil (or grill) until get browned in spots. Couldn't be easier, but it seems impressive, so you get lots of points with guests. You can't really taste the rosemary, it's not very strong, but it really mellows the sweetness of the pineapple.

Harper and I saw a rainbow on our walk today. (This picture is similar, although not exact. It was a pretty impressive rainbow.) I've decided that rainbows are the few things in real life that actually resemble children's drawings.

I'm choosing to interpret the rainbow and the monarch butterfly caterpillar I also saw today as good omens for house hunting, which begins tomorrow.

Cheese Straws

Going to a potluck barbecue. I had some puff pastry in the freezer that I've been needing to use up + It's strawberry season again (the market smelled so gooood) = I thought to make something for the potluck with puff pastry and strawberries. And then I tasted the strawberries. I'm not sharing. They're all for me. So I made these instead. My friends need never know....

From the Gourmet cookbook, that giant yellow behemoth:

Ingredients:

• 1 sheet frozen puff pastry (from a 17 1/4-ounce package), thawed
• 1 large egg, beaten with 2 tablespoons water
• 1 cup finely grated extra-sharp Cheddar (about 4 ounces)
• Course sea salt (I don't think table salt would work at all. Use course salt or nothing.)

1. Put a rack in the middle of the oven; preheat to 425.
2. Generously butter two baking sheets (I used my silicon sheets and skipped the butter)
3. roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface with a lightly floured rolling pin into a 14-by-12-inch rectangle. Cut crosswise in half to form two 12-by-7-inch rectangles. Brush both with the egg wash. Sprinkle cheese evenly over one rectangle and top the other rectangle, egg wash side down. Press firmly on the pastry to force out any air pockets, then roll out gently to make the layers adhere (it should end up about 12.5 by 7.5 inches). Brush the pastry with the egg wash and sprinkle with course salt.
4. With a pastry wheel, pizza cutter, or sharp knife, cut pastry crosswise into twenty-four 1/2-inch pieces. Twist each strip two or three times and place on the baking sheet, pushing down the edges to keep the strip twisted. Put 12 strips on the sheet.
5. Bake until golden, about 10 to 12 minutes, then let cool for a couple minutes on the sheet.
6. Meanwhile, prepare the rest of the strips for the other baking sheet and bake when the first batch is done.
7. Loose baked strips with a metal spatula (I could just pick them up from the silicon) and cool on a rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.

RESULTS: These might be all for me, too.