wendy’s posterous

Yesterday I attended an invigorating talk by Van Jones, the founder of Green for All, an organization that simultaneously addresses the issues of lifting people out of poverty and moving America towards a cleaner and more environmentally responsible future (see the Jan 12, 2009 issue of The New Yorker for a great piece by Elizabeth Kolbert about Jones). In Jones' vision of a green collar economy, unemployed people in need of marketable skills will be trained to install solar panels (something already being done by Solar Richmond in the poverty-stricken community of Richmond, CA that currently relies on the polluting Chevron oil refinery for its livelihood), and car companies will be able to keep factory workers employed by manufacturing wind turbines (Jones points out, "It's called General Motors, not General SUV!"). If you have heard Obama mention the green collar economy, it is only because of Jones' efforts.

During the Q & A session, a woman asked Jones a question that had recently been weighing on my mind also: Why are the Democrats having so much trouble pushing through their legislation when the Republicans were able to pass so much controversial legislation without 60 Senate seats? Jones replied simply and seriously, "Because [the Republicans] are assholes." The room packed with Berkeleyans donning their scruffy beards and hiking boots bursted into uproarious laughter. Glen was not so amused when I recounted the punchline to him later in the night.

Jones' response could be taken as a crass comment playing to a hippie, left-wing crowd (as Glen did), but it was laden with truth just as many of Jon Stewart's jokes cleverly shove the obvious truth in our faces. I explained to Glen that the Democrats cared about America enough to compromise with the Republicans and pass legislation that they may not have entirely agreed with because the pros outweighed the cons. In contrast, the Republicans are obstinate and unwilling to see that more good will come out of quickly passing an economic stimulus bill with an emphasis on spending than digging their heels into the ground until the Democrats give in, by which time many more Americans will have lost their jobs and gone homeless or hungry. The Republicans basically gave Obama the cold shoulder when he literally crossed the aisle and attempted to achieve bipartisanship. If there aren't tax cuts in the bill, then the bill can do no good for America.

Here's a question for you: what's the difference between spending and tax cuts? Either way you won't have that $790 billion in your pocket. I don't trust that if you give tax cuts to hapless Americans or greedy corporations, they'll be able to use that money wisely to rescue America from this recession. How does that translate into more job creation than spending money on education, research, and other programs that will prepare Americans for the jobs of the future and support the innovation to bring future prosperity to America?

Jones went on to give an analogy that frankly confused me until he reached the punchline. In paraphrase, he said, "Imagine I walk up to a woman on the street and say, 'Please date me. I will be the best boyfriend you ever had.' The woman replies, 'No! I don't even know you or like you!' What do you think of this situation? It's just strange behavior on my part! Similarly, Obama is going to the Republicans and saying, 'I want to work with you to pass bipartisan legislation,' but the Republicans are responding with, 'Go away! I don't even like you!' Now that is just strange behavior on Obama's part to keep going back to the Republicans! He can't achieve bipartisanship if the Republicans won't have any of it."

I truly hope that the tough passage of the economic stimulus bill does not foreshadow what we'll witness on Capitol Hill for the next four years.

I had always put Travelocity in the same category as Orbitz, Priceline, and Expedia: very reputable online discount travel agency. This may have been true in the past, but apparently Travelocity is now only a source of many headaches, tears, and wasted money. Last weekend our friends spent two hours struggling to book a package deal to Las Vegas offered through Travelocity. I'm not sure what was wrong with the website, but they finally worked it out. Two days ago our friends received an email from Travelocity saying that the flights they had booked were not available and that they would have to pay the difference in airfare plus a few hundred dollars fee to Travelocity for changing their plans. Customer service was extremely unhelpful in resolving the issue, so our friends chose to cancel the package for a refund. Now Travelocity wants to charge them a few hundred dollars as a cancellation fee.

My friends have already called their credit card company to dispute any charges that may come from Travelocity. However, I feel terrible for them because they are insanely busy people, and they've had to waste many hours dealing with this. You can search online to find many more horror stories, including people who have flown internationally to find that Travelocity never actually booked their lodging as expected. Please save yourself the trouble, and stay away from Travelocity!

A few weeks ago I finally convinced Glen to buy wild Pacific salmon. We rarely cook fish at home because I refuse to buy farmed fish, which is not nearly as healthy to eat as wild fish. (All Atlantic salmon is farmed because the wild population was overfished to the point that it can no longer be commercially fished.) After bringing home a couple lovely fillets from Trader Joe's, I forgot about them in the refrigerator for almost a week. I then threw them into the freezer until a couple days ago when I finally had time to cook dinner for just the two of us. Needless to say, the salmon was gross despite my best efforts to drown it in fresh herbs and lemon. I redeemed the dinner by quickly whipping up some scallion pancakes from scratch. I should really make them more often because they are so easy to make. The only bummer is trying to scrape the sticky dough off the counter afterwards--my counter is still covered in it.

I just put together a video of my nephew taken in mid-January. I tried to include all of the cute things that he does without making the video too long. Clearly I still need to learn how to hold the camera more steady while chasing him around. I hope you enjoy it!

I'm loving the boxes of fruits and veggies from our new farm share, Eatwell. This week we received navel oranges, a pomelo grapefruit, beets, daikon, arugula, spinach, lettuce, parsley, red kale, bok choy, and my favorite, butternut squash. I made risotto with last week's butternut squash and soup (sans cream for a healthier version) with this week's. Our friends who also subscribe to Eatwell made delicious butternut squash muffins topped a sour cream icing and orange zest. I hope I get another butternut squash in my next box so that I can try using it in another way.

My brother and sister-in-law gave me a subscription to Cooking Light for my birthday, and I've really been enjoying the healthy yet tasty recipes that often incorporate my farm share veggies. A friend gave me a popover pan that sat in its box for years until I discovered multiple popover recipes in this month's issue. Since I have never had "real" popovers before, I'm not sure how they are supposed to taste. Are they supposed to have subtle flavors, or are mine particularly bland despite the fresh herbs I loaded into them? Regardless of the taste I've been very pleased that my popovers have actually popped over. I'll keep experimenting.

This weekend I couldn't resist photographing the veggies as I was washing them in preparation for a dinner party. The gnocchi with spinach, garlic, pine nuts, and parmesan was a hit (the recipe is also from this month's issue). Gnocchi is by far my favorite pasta, in part because it's fun to watch them bob to the surface of the boiling water when they have cooked through.

Have I mentioned before how much I love my dishwasher? No rinsing required (as for most relatively new dishwashers), and mine has a garbage disposal so I don't even need to scrape food chunks off my dirty dishes. It is so great to be able to host a dinner party and have all my dishes cleaned before I go to bed--and with only five minutes of effort.

To answer the environmental question of whether hand-washing or machine washing saves more water, I have to say that it depends on your habits. My dishwasher uses 7 gallons of water per load. Because I don't rinse my dishes and I always pack in as many dishes as possible, this is pretty water efficient. However, when I wash by hand, I don't turn on the faucet unless I am actively rinsing a dish--yes, I turn off the faucet in-between every dish as I am scrubbing them or putting them on the drying rack. Thus, for me it's a toss-up. If you just let the water run, then you are wasting a lot of water by hand-washing. If you run the dishwasher when it's only partly full or you rinse your dishes, then you are wasting a lot of water by machine washing. If you prefer hand-washing, I suggest trying to save water by scrubbing all of your dishes with the faucet off and then turning on the faucet to rinse the soap off of them all. If you prefer machine washing, I suggest not rinsing your dishes to see if your dishwasher can do the job--I've found that only rice and oatmeal really cake on without pre-soaking. And if you place your dishes into the racks smartly rather than randomly, you can pack in almost twice as many dishes.

               

Click here to download:

Butternut_squash_how_I_love_th.zip (21289 KB)

At dinner last night I extolled the deliciousness of Edy's cappucino chip frozen yogurt to my home-grown Californian friends. In response to the confused looks on their faces, I corrected myself, "Sorry. I meant Dreyer's, not Edy's." Why is the exact same ice cream sold as Dreyer's on the West Coast and Edy's on the East Coast. I wikipedia-ed "Dreyer's" and was delighted that I had guessed correctly. Without cheating, can you guess? As a hint, I think only East Coasters will know the right answer.

I was shocked to hear last night that my friends grew up hearing the jingle, "Bring out the Best Foods, and bring out the best!" That just sounds wrong! Apparently Best Foods and Hellman's started out as two separate mayonnaise companies, and rather than confuse loyal customers, Best Foods decided to keep the West Coast and East Coast names when it acquired Hellman's. Edy's just stole another move from the Best Foods (now owned by Unilever) playbook and decreased the size of their ice cream containers from 1.75 quarts (already down from 2 quarts) to 1.5 quarts without changing the price (actually, I'd argue the prices are higher now than a few years ago). Your mayonnaise jars went from 32 ounces to 30 ounces a couple years ago with no change in price. I'm not as upset about losing a few spoonfuls of mayonnaise as being robbed of a full cup of ice cream.

I haven't yet figured out why the exact same bread is sold as Arnold (East Coast), Oroweat (West Coast), and Brownberry (Midwest). The bread manufacturing company is a Mexican firm called, Grupo Bimbo. Bimbo is actually a cute white teddy bear that I first came across in Costa Rica (see my photo), but that name would not be good for marketing in the United States. Grupo Bimbo is such a large bread manufacturer that, according to wikipedia, in Latin American countries a loaf of bread is often called "pan bimbo" just like tissues are called "Kleenex" in America. Apparently Grupo Bimbo soon will be re-branding all of its bread in the United States as Oroweat so that it can gain better national advertising with Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, etc.

Enough useless information for today! Back to my research...

Wednesday was such a horrible day for me. I took some soil extract samples (meaning, I had shaken up soil with some liquid and then filtered out the soil to keep only the liquid extract) out of the refrigerator to analyze them for their nitrogen content. In the past I had always either analyzed my samples within days of extracting them or stored them in the freezer room. For some reason I had left these samples from December in the refrigerator room. How gross does your food get after it's been in your fridge for a month? Of course I found little floaty, filamentous groups of bacteria growing in my samples, living off the nitrogen in them so that any data I got from the samples were meaningless. I spent the afternoon beating my head against the wall wondering why I hadn't frozen my samples and imploring a post-doc in the lab to figure out a way for me to rescue the data. Unfortunately, all of his ideas ended with, "...but if you were a good scientist, you would just throw out the data."

I am a good scientist who in her frustration with herself left her cell phone, wallet, and house keys on her desk when she went home for the evening. I keep my subway fare card separately in my purse to avoid demagnetizing it, so I got halfway home before realizing my mistake. At that point it didn't make sense to go back to lab, so I begged money from a fellow subway passenger to pay the fare for the second half of my commute on the light rail. I wasn't sure when Glen would get home so to keep warm in the chilly evening breeze I walked to all of our nearby friends' places. After completing a 45 minute loop to empty apartments, I caught a glimpse of light shining through the slits of our mini-blinded living room window. Glen had also had a bad day at work, so after dinner we cheered ourselves up with Dreyer's cappucino chip frozen yogurt (excellent!).

Thursday I went to school dreading my scheduled meeting with my adviser. How do I tell her that I ruined critical samples for my project? I decided to keep my mouth shut about it and hope that those data didn't come up in the meeting. Hallelujah! Without any prompting from me, my adviser decided to scale back the scope of my project so that those nitrogen data were no longer needed. Ironically I had originally wanted to do the smaller project but increased the scope to please my adviser, who is well known for taking insane numbers of samples of everything.

To top off a great day, I dropped by my favorite clothing store, Banana Republic, on my way home from school to just browse the sale racks. A couple months ago I had bought a basic purple sweater there for half price. Thursday morning as I was deciding what to wear, I regretted not buying the same sweater in black. Hallelujah! The first thing I found on the sale rack was the black sweater in my size (just two left in any size and color!) for 85% off. I know it makes me sound very superficial to let a clothing purchase make me so happy, but I started Thursday on such a low that I was looking for anything to improve my mood. Picking up a new farm share box filled with exciting fruits and veggies and enjoying a delicious sushi dinner with friends were less superficial and just as fantastic highlights of my day.

Skiing is so tiring that I cannot do it for two days in a row. Glen and I have found that snowshoeing is a great inexpensive snow activity to follow a ski day, so we and our friend, Judy, broke off from the rest of the group to head out to Echo Lake. In the parking lot, we ran into a family that had this great tool for effortlessly making perfectly spherical and not-too-painfully-dense snowballs. Glen (or rather, his face) did not appreciate my obsession with making snowballs and my inability to accurately throw the snowballs to targets below the shoulders.

             

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Fun_in_the_snow.zip (16505 KB)

While the ski slopes were great this past weekend, spending time with friends was even better. The women creamed the men in a couple rounds of Cranium despite their amazing ability to recognize terrible sculptures and drawings by my husband. Can you guess what's depicted in these photos? The clue for each of these is "thing."

     

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What_is_this.zip (8058 KB)