Single Entity

"You mean we're facebook stalking the wrong person??"

It was hilarious yesterday when my parents realized that I'm dating someone named Alex, not someone named Cory.

For the record, I'm uncomfortably full of homemade bourbon-cherry-peach pie and bourbon ice cream (sense a theme of the night?). Details soon.

It came to me in a delirium of sickness and America’s Next Top Model marathons. The idea hung around for days; I kept coming back to it, fantasizing about it, and refining it. It seemed like the Holy Grail of baking to me where I lay on the couch with cough drops and tissues strewn around me: beer and bacon bread. When I came out of my self-imposed quarantine, I began to strategize more carefully. Eventually I settled on a rye bread recipe to corrupt for my own purposes. I thought that the richness and the coffee and cocoa flavors would complement the bacon. To go along with that, I wanted to find a stout with coffee and smoke flavors and tie all those flavors together. I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for* so I eventually settled on the smoked porter from Stone Brewing Company and Rogue’s chocolate stout.



I used a recipe for Steakhouse Black Bread as a starting point. The recipe as I made it is thus:

Ingredients
1/3 cup coffee, cool-ish
¼ cup Stone smoked porter
¾ cup Rogue chocolate stout (you can mess around with your beers and your combinations. I had no idea what I was doing)
¼ cup whatever molasses was in the cupboard
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup rye flour
2 cups bread flour
1 ½ tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 packet of yeast (about 1 tablespoon)
Some bacon, cooked and torn into bits (use as much as you want. I used a lot)


Directions:
1) Combine dry ingredients and bacon. Mix in wet ingredients.
2) Cover bowl with a towel and let it rise for a couple hours (maybe go run a mile while it rises so you can eat it in good conscience).
3) Preheat the oven to 425° F.
4) Shape bread into loaf (I do this on a pizza peel sprinkled heavily with cornmeal but you can also do it on a baking sheet). Add flour to the outside as you work with it so it doesn’t stick.
5) Make a couple of slashes on top of your loaf with a knife and brush the outside with olive oil or a beaten egg, then let it rise until the oven is ready.
6) If you’re doing this on a baking sheet, pop it in the oven. If you have a baking stone, slide your loaf from the peel to the baking stone. Mine always gets deformed when I do this, but such is life. I’ve also recently discovered that putting a pan of water on the bottom rack of the oven while your bread bakes makes for incredible crust. Do it. Really. Bake for about 35 minutes or until it sounds hollow when tapped (be careful—I burned the top of mine). Garnish with bacon.




And voila! Bacon beer bread. I didn’t love it at first, but then I started cutting really thin slices, and somehow that enabled me to taste all the flavors, and it was almost exactly what I’d hoped and dreamed. A worthwhile experiment.


*I think I’ve been ruined for stout forever, actually. A few weeks ago I tried Deschutes’ Abyss at a Seattle Beer Week event, and it was fantastic. I don’t even really like stouts, but that one single-handedly brought me over to the dark side (ha! Get it? Dark side? Like stouts are dark and normally I drink lighter beers?). I have been pining for it since then, and nothing else lives up to it.

Something I heard today that frustrates me:

"It's arrogant to think that we can affect the ocean. The earth can heal herself, like the air. Mother nature is a force to be reckoned with."

Something I heard today that pleases me:

"Greatest natural disaster in the history of the planet [well, not quite -- Ed.], and it's all gone? The fish are fine? I don't think so... We just don't know that much!"


Strangely, both of these comments came from the same conversation, and from people who agreed with each other. Yes, I was eavesdropping. Well, more correctly, the conversation happened around me. I'll come back to those comments in a minute, but I wanted to talk first about why the "Debate on Global Climate Change" bothers me so much. fyi, that's what it's called now, not "Global Warming." The official name was changed because it was too easy for people to say "Global warming?! Hah! We had a record cold winter this year! And that's global warming?" The truth is that climates are so much more complicated.

Anyway. I wish people would stop arguing about whether climate change is human caused, human aggravated, or just one big natural cycle that we've only seen one side of, and realize that if the end result is an inhospitable planet, it doesn't matter what the cause is. Whether human actions or natural actions drive the average temperature up 30 degrees is irrelevant. The planet will be just fine -- but will we?

So, a month and a bit later [this was started on 9/2, and I'm continuing it now on 10/12], the second half, going back to that very first statement.

The fact is that we can affect the world. Any one who says that we can't is, in my mind, delusional. When western Europe first really began exploring the seas around North America (for once, I'm skipping the Vikings here -- I don't know what the written records are for them on the subjects I'm about to talk about), when people were first coming over the Nova Scotia and the that vicinity, many were coming to fish, live in camps for a summer, and then return back to Europe. They were fishing for cod, and the stories tell of lowering baskets from the ships into the sea, and pulling them up full of thousands of pounds of fish, fish almost the size of a man.

Today? The cod fishery is almost dead. I'm afraid I can't cite sources for you just now. Truthfully, it was almost dead in about 1900. Same thing with the whales, really. My ancestors stopped being whalers and became plumbers instead because the bottom fell out of the whaling industry, both because whales were going extinct and because whale goods (oil and baleen) were being replaced by other options.

Another iconic story is the "pea-soup fog" of London. That smog has more or less gone away with the introduction of atmospheric pollution regulations.

Alright. I don't want to give a ton of examples. The simple thing is that we have the power to change the world, for good or ill, and it will matter for us in the long run. A significant portion of the world's protein comes from the ocean. What happens if we destroy the ecology of the ocean? I'll be understated, and say say something really really bad.

This rant doesn't really have an end. I'm going to impose an end on it, here, because otherwise I'll just keep saving it to rant about later on. So, in deference to publication, just think about the little things we can do to not entirely destroy our world.

Thanks.

is not quite enough. I long for something more than just a room. I want a space that I control, where I can paint, put holes in the walls, leave the lights on all night if I want. A place where I live for more than a few months. I want to live somewhere where I am not required to have a roommate (not that I don't love mine). I want to live somewhere knowing that if I put something down, it will stay there until I move it.

This is not to say that I am unhappy with where I live, any of the places. It is a reaction to the fact that I didn't live in the same house for more than two weeks in a row until I went to college. A reaction to the fact that even at school, there are strong limits in how your space can be used, the fact that you live in the same room with another person, the fact that the school makes you take everything off the floor and any lights off the wall before going away for breaks. I want to have more than just a room.

I generally consider myself a bad feminist. Biased language? Get over it. Offended when someone holds a door open for you? That's just common courtesy. I only really care about things like equal pay and equal opportunity laws, but still with the healthy understanding that men and women have different bodies and different abilities. Some professions are significantly male because they need (usually) upper body strength that most women don't have. And you know what, I'm okay with the fact that women don't drafted. When you figure that many countries don't consider women prisoners of war, and that a hell of a lot of horrible things are likely to happen to those women before they die, I'm okay with some gender bias in the military. (Mind you, I am *not* okay with a sexuality bias. There've been gay people in the military as long as there's been a military. Get your panties out of a twist and relax.) Mostly, I believe that people are people, regardless of gender, sexuality, color, any of that.

However, there does come a point when I get mad. When I cannot stand to see what some people on this world do.

I recently was introduced to the story of a Turkish girl whose body was found earlier this year. She was 16. Her father had buried her -- alive -- because she had male friends. How is it possible that there exists a place where it is right and good to kill your child because of her friends? I try to be understanding to the world at large, but this is beyond me. It makes me feel like a helpless idealist again, instead of a somewhat cynical devil's advocate. This is one place where I cannot see the other side of the picture.

To quote the blog where I found this,

According to this moral code, it is more honorable to torture and kill your own child than to allow your adolescent female child to talk to boys. More honorable to tie her up, put her in hole, and pile dirt over her head while she pleads and weeps.

It makes me sad for the world.

This has been a weekend of awesome! In addition to doing lots of schoolwork, I have:

1) Made a dress (see left -- like the red one, but longer). As of Friday night, it was cut. As of Saturday night, it is 100% done, and all the seams are finished.








2) Finished a dress. Or, more accurately, saved a dress. What I had: a dress that I'd made that I really liked -- except for the HUGE clown-like sleeves, which resulted partially from seamstress error (dur, if I remove 3" of width from the garment, I need to remove it from the sleeve too!), and partially from the 1970's pattern (see left). Yes, those were some puffy sleeves. So I removed them and made it sleeveless. Success!







3) I also mended some jeans, and fixed my stapler. Sweet.

If I'd remembered that the shuttle into town ran on Saturday, not Sunday, I'd have the thread a lining for another dress, plus thread to attach some patches to a jacket. How did I manage to leave home with *no* white thread? It's an utter mystery.