Tocino de Cielo y Tocino de Tierra

My husband and I look for recipes based on what ingredients we have in the house. “What? No lettuce? Guess we can’t make BLTs; oh well, let’s just eat the bacon.”

Bacon is awesome.

Last week we happened to have an overabundance of egg yolks, and I made the mistake of saying that I would make him a chiffon cake. If I say words like “cake” in his presence and don’t start working on it immediately, he will often start chanting at me. “You said you’d bake us a cake. You said you’d bake us a cake. You said you’d bake us a cake!” So to distract him, I started pulling out cookbooks, and he consulted ye olde internet.

The first thing we discovered was that chiffon cake, like sponge cake and pound cake, uses as many egg whites as it does egg yolks. So I put my books away, and leaned over his shoulder. One of the best things he found was a list of recipes to use up extra egg yolks. It had links to recipes that would help you use up one egg yolk (by making homemade mayo or some cheese straws) and recipes that would get rid of a dozen egg yolks for you (Daffodil Cake does not contain any actual flowers, unless you count flours).

After some more searching and narrowing down and calling my mom, I had it down to two recipes: Momofuku’s Crack Pie and Tocino de Cielo.

Momofuku Milk Bar is a bakery in New York City; they charge $44 for one of their Crack Pies (or you can spend $5.25 per slice). This recipe made two pies (if you’re keeping score, that’s $88). It has an oatmeal cookie crust that requires you to bake the cookies beforehand and then crumble them up to make the crust. According to the article on latimes.com, the total time spent making these pies is eleven and a half hours, plus cooling and chilling times. There was no way my husband was going to wait that long.

I glanced at the Tocino de Cielo recipe, didn’t see anywhere that it would take over half a day to make, thought, “eh, I can whip that up in no time,” and my decision was made.

“No time” turned out to be about five hours, but last time I checked, five is less than fourteen.

I’m not a confectioner and I’d never attempted anything like this before, so I was a bit baffled when I looked at the first line of directions. “In a small saucepan, cook ½ cup sugar over medium-low heat and stirring regularly, until it comes to a medium amber color.” I raised my eyebrow. “What?” I thought. “Just the sugar? No... water or anything?” I felt like an idiot standing there stirring half a cup of sugar around in a saucepan, but eventually it started to clump up and get darker. Then I looked like an idiot, because I started jumping around and saying, “It’s amber, it’s amber!” I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to let it get thick or if it needed to stay sugar-consistency, so I probably took it off the heat sooner than necessary.

Next, it called for me to ration the amber sugar into four six ounce ramekins. I don’t have ramekins. I grabbed a jumbo muffin tin out of my cupboard, filled two thirds of the cups, and set it aside.

The next step was heating a cup of water and half a cup of sugar with some orange and lemon zest to two hundred twenty degrees. I don’t have a candy thermometer, so my meat thermometer was going to have to do. I learned that holding the thermometer steady while keeping it in the liquid but not on the bottom of the pan while also not scalding myself on superheated steam (ow!) was pretty difficult.

What was even more difficult was trying to figure out how I was going to get 225 degree liquid down to room temperature so that I could mix in the egg yolks and vanilla, toss it in the pan on top of the amber sugar, and bake it in the oven so that I could let that sit in the refrigerator for two hours before my husband and guests would want to eat it. Half an hour in the cool of the refrigerator did the trick, and the last few steps were completed in a hurry before my sister-in-law came over with my nephew to help start dinner.

We were talking about how we would fit two chickens into my oven when I realized the timer for the Tocino de Cielo had already gone off and I’d forgotten to take them out of the oven. My hands were covered in chicken goo and spices, so my sister-in-law carefully took the 9 by 13 pan out of the oven so that she wouldn’t slosh out any of the water that I’d had to put under the muffin tin.

By the time the chicken was eaten, everything was cleaned up, my kids were in bed, and we were all watching Downton Abbey in the living room, the dessert had been sufficiently cooled. I scraped it onto some plates and served it. “It’s good,” my husband said. “This is soooo sugary!” my brother said. “It doesn’t have any dairy in it, so I can eat it!” my sister-in-law said.

“Want me to tell you what the name means?” I asked. They nodded. “Tocino de Cielo: Bacon from Heaven.”

Mine didn't look nearly as nice as this.

Tocino de Cielo was good, but not as good as bacon. And it didn’t taste like bacon. Maybe since the name “bacon” is already taken in heaven, we’ll have to call it “bacon from earth” when we get there.

Because there’s no way that they won’t have bacon in heaven. It’s awesome.

Ice is Not Nice

Nebraska doesn’t really seem like a very treacherous place, but it is. Especially when it’s icy. This morning I stepped out on my porch, looked at the ground, and said, “Great. Ice.” There wasn’t a ton, but as a Nebraskan and a mother, I know the risks well.

One of the biggest jobs for a mother is carrying things. Carrying toys, carrying food, carrying children. And ice can make that job very difficult and very hazardous. Slipping on the ice and dropping what you’re carrying can not only injure whatever happened to be in your arms (broken train, goodbye cake, crying child), but it can injure the mother herself. Try carrying all that stuff with a sprained ankle (try doing any other of the million things a mother does with a sprained ankle)!

Aside from the dropped stuff and sprained ankle, your child who is able to walk is also imbued with the foolish notion that they are invincible (don’t worry, this will wear off around age 32 or so, or whenever they have children of their own). They will insist on walking across the ice on their own; there’s no way they’re going to let you carry them, and they will probably also resist your hand to assist them. But they will turn to you to wipe their tears when they fall.

Guess what happens next.

Ice is perilous whether even if you’re not a mother or a small child; be careful out there.

Bag Count: 17

The following is about a project I started some weeks ago. If it looks unfamiliar to you or you’ve forgotten what’s going on, reacquiant yourself.

My bag is starting to look like a bag. Not from the top, I guess.

But when you look at it from the side, you can see that it’s gaining some height.

At the end of last week, I was almost done with the base, and before I started on the sides, I asked my crochet/knitting genius sister-in-law how I should go about making sure that the sides were side-ish instead of looking like an extension of the base. My plan had been just to keep working along the outside of it until it became a bag. She said I should work around once and then only in the front loops.

There are zillions of websites out there for teaching yourself to crochet.
If you need a teacher, my sister-in-law teaches at Yarn Charm and Joann.

This created a little ridge that makes it look like I planned to do it that way all along. You can clearly see where the base ends and the sides start.

Maybe with more work, it’ll really start to look like a bag.

Bag Count: 17

Bag the Bag

Bag Count: 9

Bag Count: 30

Bag Count: 35

Bag Count: 44 

Bag Count: 50 

Bag Count: 57 

Bag Count: 63 

Bag Count: 70 

Bag Count: 80 

Bag Count: 86 

Bag Count: 87 

Bag Count: 88 

Bag Count: 92 

Bag Count: 94 

Bag Count: THE END

Thursday in History: The Rock

Alcatraz.

It sounds cool. It looks mysterious. It has a dark past. It has been the setting of many movies and television shows. It is a 22 acre island in the middle of the San Francisco bay. It was acquired by the government of the United States of America for five thousand dollars in 1846. It was first used as a military base, an arsenal, and a fortress to protect the Bay, and held prisoners starting from the Civil War up until 1963.

A is for Alcatraz.
(Taken from google maps)

On this day in history, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was closed. During its time, there were fourteen escape attempts, including the 1946 “Battle of Alcatraz” in which a correctional officer lost his life.

Officially, no one ever escaped from Alcatraz. Escape, says alcatrazhistory.com, is all in how you define it. “Is it getting out of the cellhouse, reaching the water, making it to land, or reaching land and not getting caught?” Although there are five men on record who are “missing and presumed drowned,” it’s very possible that there could be Alcatraz escapees living among us. During the seventh escape, two of the four men who made it to the water and began to swim away were captured. The third was shot and disappeared beneath the waves, and the fourth was just as gone, so it was assumed that he was just as dead. It turned out he wasn’t when he was caught by corrections officers two days later. Who can say how many of the “missing and presumed” aren’t actually “drowned?”

Pelicans over Alcatraz
photo by Tom Hardin

As intimidating as Alcatraz is, with its prisoners and political protests and daunting landscape, the most interesting thing about it is that its name is so not intimidating. Alcatraz has come to be synonymous with words like “stronghold,” and brings to mind images of lonely, craggy peaks and wind whipping over miles of waves. It was named by Spaniard explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala who was in the Bay Area in 1775, who called it “La Isla de las Alcatraces” because it was covered in alcatraces, an archaic Spanish word for

pelicans.

No wonder they gave it a nickname. “The Rock” is so much more à propos.

Writing Prompt: The Difference

Writing Prompt #717

The first thing I thought when looking at these two photographs was honestly, “More people were wearing white in 2005.” I didn’t miss the tablet in the foreground of the 2013 picture, but the thousand or so smartphones in the background just slipped my notice.

Maybe it’s like how grandparents notice the difference in growth in their grandchildren while the kids’ parents hardly ever do: if you’re right there every second while they’re transitioning into something new, it’s harder to notice a difference.

The two pictures are the same: people standing in a crowd. Probably every single person in that crowd in 2005 had a cell phone in their pocket, it just wasn’t equipped at that time to video the proceedings and share them with everyone else in the world over the internet at that very second.

People today experience every event differently than they used to. In 2005, while eating dinner after my shift in the employee dining room at Ticos, it would never have entered my mind to snap a picture with my phone and send it in a message to all my friends, “YOU ARE JEALOUS OF MY TIACO.” There are some people today who take a picture of everything they eat and share it with the rest of the world. The New York Times and ABC News have both reported on this phenomenon, and restaurant owners’ desire to get their patrons to stop. I can imagine that it drives them absolutely nuts to have an amateur photo shoot going on in their dining room any time they are open for business.

While the idea of being able to share your life with the world would appeal to some, it makes others of us uncomfortable. Maybe it’s an extrovert/introvert thing. My life is my life, and I like to keep it private. I don’t let anyone but my friends see what I post on my facebook and Google+ accounts, and every friend is someone I have met in person and am actually friends with (or have been friends with in the past). I am not someone who wants to share every minute detail of their life with complete strangers. Maybe if I were someone who felt alive in the spotlight, who thrived on the attention of others, I would be really excited about having a smart phone so that I could snap a picture of my toenails every time I painted them a different color. And I would get six billion twitter followers and be the most popular girl in school.

I feel like a lot of the people who are social media obsessed forget about the fact that there are actual people to interact with who are sitting right next to them, in person. It seems to me that many people are more concerned about how many friends they have on facebook than how many friends they have who would sit down and have a long conversation about nothing with them.

An alien who last visited earth in 2005 wouldn’t recognize those of us in 2013. And it wouldn’t just be because “last time I saw you you were only this big; you’ve grown so much!” We’d be so involved in taking a picture of the spaceship and sharing it with our twitter followers that we would miss the interaction entirely.

(Apparently, these are not two pictures of the same event after all. The one from 2005 was at the funeral of Pope John Paul II, while the one from 2013 was at the announcement of Pope Francis' election. In the picture below, one taken at the announcement of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, you can see tons of cameras and a dude with a camcorder. But my opinions on social media still stand. These people cheering in 2005 wanted to document the event to remember it themselves. Those in 2013 may have been doing the same, but in 2005 there was a greater chance of those pictures being shown to someone else in person instead of just posted on instagram.)

Announcement of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005

Apocalypse Preparedness Skills

There is a ton of speculation in this day and age about the apocalypse. The idea of the “apocalypse” is the same for most people: a lack of the kind of civilization that we enjoy now. No phones, internet, electricity, running water, etc. Some versions of the apocalypse involve zombies, others have aliens asserting their will over humanity. Mostly, they have characters with dirty faces struggling to survive when they have lost everything that they know.

How would you survive an apocalypse?

Let’s say that the world’s governments have collapsed and there’s no electricity to power the dairy coolers at the grocery store. Maybe there was an earthquake or a massive fire that razed most of the buildings in the city where you live. There’s no water to hydrate during your daily run, much less to take your daily shower. Even if there weren’t any zombies or aliens or humans mutated into insane aggression, how would you get what you need? And I’m not asking how you would tweet about it (with no internet and no charge on your iPhone). How would you live? How would you eat? How would you keep warm? How would you protect yourself (and your family) from possible zombies, aliens, or humans mutated into insane aggression?

I was thinking about it this weekend as I carried headless chickens from the granary to my grandparents’ basement. What skills would one absolutely need to survive? What skills have we lost that we’ll have a hard time trying to teach ourselves? How are we supposed to shoot zombies if there’s no one making ammunition to resupply the non-zombies?

My husband is nearly an Eagle Scout, so I’m confident that he’d be able to teach me and my daughters about how to light a fire. So we’ve got that heat/cooking thing covered. He’s also done a lot of hunting with his family, so as long as we could find or make a weapon, and there was still game about, we’d be pretty well covered in that department, too. And this weekend, I learned how to butcher chickens, so I’d know how to take apart a bird in order to fulfill the eating needs of my family.

In the event of an apocalypse, you’re not going to need extra cash or your smart phone. You’re going to need food, water, and shelter, and the skills to meet those needs.

Are you ready for it?

The Stench

My brother and I have noses that have been described as “large and sensitive.” I don’t like harsh or overpowering (or as I like to call them, “loud”) smells. I appreciate being in “tobacco free” areas like schools or hospitals that are clear of all the stinky smells of cigarette smoke. I like to breathe in a nice lungful of fresh, non-gross smelling air.

There’s always somebody willing to rain stench on my nose-parade.

Who taught the class on drenching oneself in cologne? Did the collective mind of young adult males decide in 2003 that Axe body spray was not only their spokes-smell, but that everyone was required to be dipped in a vat of it before leaving the house?

From The Oatmeal's The 10 Types of Crappy Interviewees

This is not a joke. The other day I was breathing happily and suddenly got a snortful of cologne, and it was at least a minute before I identified the culprit. Light may travel faster than sound, but gentlemen, smell travels faster than light.

And yes, I suppose it is better to smell like an entire can of body spray than ooze the funk of the gunk between your toes, but I am asking on behalf of the sensitive nose community: can you find a happy medium? Everything in moderation. Maybe take a shower before you put your cologne on instead of taking a shower in the cologne. Then you wouldn’t have to use as much. You can bequeath that vat to your children. And your children’s children.

And then the people of the world can breathe easy once again.