Beeting a Dead Horse, Turning 40, and Other Inexplicable Things

Over the past week, readers of this blog have made many excellent beet puns. Out of some sort of misplaced intellectual pride, I wanted to make one, myself, but realized that the good ones had already been taken, and further efforts would be misplaced: beeting a dead horse.

Never mind. I can, theoretically, do whatever I want now because I turned forty today. My friend Sue Spilecki, poet and essayist, once started an essay with the sentence, "Forty is a dangerous age." I can't remember exactly how she phrased the next sentence, something about how, having reached that age, one is finally free to "tell the world to fuck off."

In fact, I don't think I've ever had much trouble telling the world to fuck off, but I've realized lately that sometimes it's better to take a nap than to try to force myself to go to the gym. I believe that's comparably liberating, for someone who occasionally pushes herself too hard. There's a time not to push oneself, a time not to try to do or to understand things.

Because turning forty seems to require some kind of taking stock of life, I thought I'd write about beets and how they can be used in soup stock. (I still haven't given up the beet puns. And anyway, someone asked my opinion on making vegetable stock.) In thinking about it, I realized the process of making stock is like taking stock, like learning a language, like quite a few other things I've been doing lately. One takes pieces--of vegetables, if making stock, but also of a strange language, of memories and information--and does one's best to put them together. At first, they bump up against each other because they're next to each other, but they don't connect or relate to each other. After a while--sometimes a long while--something happens to them. They meld together and form a cohesive whole that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

That's the plan, anyway. I know how to make good soup stock, but pieces will be pieces. Sometimes they don't come together into anything cohesive or coherent. Today in the ceramics studio, I struggled to form little pieces of clay into a bowl. Usually, I can do this. Today I was very distracted. I had just learned about the bombings at the Boston Marathon, maybe an hour and a mile away from me. As I thought about the beginning the day, which had been filled with astonishing connections and love in the form of birthday wishes, and then the afternoon of human atrocities, the pieces would not come together.

I didn't make stock. And I don't know what to say about this strange, very happy, very sad day. What I'll say is this, by Julien Jacob. The words of this song don't exist in any language; Jacob makes them up based on his emotions. They are, in some ways, senseless, but they come together to make more sense--a greater whole than parts--than many things.

A Fifth of The Way There

I missed the disco era. When I think of things I've missed in my life, I must say I don't feel too bad about this one. Possibly, I don't know any better. Possibly, it's never too late for disco.  Really. Disco seems to have taken on Cool Vintage status, just the timeless classic to mix into a new song (by Phoenix, for example--not new, but newer than the disco era). Of course, the disco era saw some mixing in of timeless classics, too.

Right. Where were we? ("A Fifth of Beethoven" always makes me think, "Oh, Toto, we're really, really not in Kansas anymore, are we?") I'm not sure whether I should apologize for putting you through that musical experience--a particularly awkward one after "Take Five." Bear with me.

Last week, several readers asked me for more under-five-minute recipes. I thought about doling out five more, but realized the key to these is in the building blocks. You need to find yourself a few "timeless" foods--relatively shelf-stable things that take little to no time to prepare. Once you have these, you can mix them into each other, or with other, ready-made foods and seasonings (like hummus, or gochujang).

One of mine: beets. If you have a beet and a small piece of fresh ginger, you can either cut the beet into matchsticks or grate it coarsely. Put it in a bowl with a little minced or grated ginger and microwave for 1-3 minutes. It should be crisp-tender, not fully cooked. If you want to, you can add any of the following: soy sauce, rice vinegar, dark sesame oil, hot sesame oil, salt. This is good with kimchee and rice. (How do you make rice in under five minutes? Cook multiple servings of it on a not-so-busy day. Divide it into individual servings and freeze. Reheat as needed. Or buy fully-cooked, ready-in-ninety-microwaved-seconds rice.)

This works just as well with carrots, turnips or rutabegas if you don't have beets (or don't care for them). You can omit the ginger and flavor it any way you'd like--with grated Parmesan cheese; with olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper; with walnuts, raisins and goat cheese; with za'atar. You can go anywhere in flavoring this dish. At least I think so.

Personally, I feel that beets can take me farther than disco can, but that's just the kind of person I am. I'm also the kind of person who wonders, possibly too often, about what takes us where. I wonder about that on different levels, and find comfort in all the cliches about the journey being the destination. We might not know where we are, but we're getting there.

Ring out the Old, Ring in the...Bacteria?

A friend and I have been worrying, lately. I mean really worrying. We're very flexible. We don't care what the topic is; we can feel anxious about anything. Luckily, we can be a reality check for each other. My friend can say, "That's a crazy worry, isn't it? That's not actually going to happen...?" And I can say, "Yes." She does the same for me.

During one such reality check, a few days ago, I found myself saying, "All the evidence I have points to things going well. But I have no definitive proof of that." Even in the midst of my anxiety, I realized how ridiculous those thoughts are. What we think of as "proof" is, in many cases, an interpretation. Not always, of course, but often enough, it's how we see the evidence as much as what it is. My friend suggested we try something: for the next two hours, we'd frame everything--every thought, every anxious worry, every hairball the cats threw up, anything that happened--positively. We  began by believing we could do that, no problem.

It worked. It worked so well, I decided to extend the two-hour trial period and make it a new year's resolution: practice optimism.

I started my practice with yogurt. I've wanted to try making yogurt at home for a long, long time, but occasional bouts of quasi-germaphobia cause me to forgo most home-fermentation projects. Leave milk unrefrigerated? For the express purpose of growing bacteria? What if mine grows the wrong kind of bacteria? What if it grows a special, deadly kind of bacteria, which nobody's warned yogurt-makers about because these bacteria are unique to my house and very new in the world (maybe they've only just begun mutating and multiplying on my counter tops)? And then I feed the deadly-bacteria yogurt to ten friends, and...

The positive outlook here is, of course, why would yogurt grow the wrong kind of bacteria when there is a time-tested procedure to make the right ones grow? Yogurt-making is easy. You scald some milk, let it cool to "just warm" (the technical term for 110-115*F), thoroughly mix in some already-made yogurt, and let the stuff incubate in a warm place for four to twelve hours. People do this every day, all over the world, no problem. Having mostly adopted this outlook, I decided to try making my own yogurt, if for no other reason that as a culinary form of my new year's resolution.

It worked. I admit, I'm still working with the thought that it's not going to kill me, but it's delicious. (I flavored the yogurt with fresh bay leaves.)

Since the word "yogurt" comes from a Turkish verb (meaning "to thicken"), I had to turn to Mozart's Piano Concerto in A Major (Alla Turca). Here is Glenn Gould making the "Turkish March" sound much more march-like than usual.

But Mozart is good for optimism, too. He was profoundly optimistic, if I'm remembering his biography correctly. He--or his music--inspires "Mozart Optimism," the belief, clung to by parents, that listening to Mozart makes children smarter. I'm not a parent, but I did follow a version of this belief when I was in college. I listened to Mozart before each and every exam. Whether this practice made me smarter, I don't know, but it did do something to my mind. It calmed any anxiety I had, and made me feel positive that I'd do well on the exam. It was as much a kind of mental training as studying for the exam was, as much a practice of optimism as making yogurt is.

I have a lot of Mozart phrases in my head. (I took a lot of exams in college.) They're musical mantras I can call to mind when I need to focus, or to calm down. I believe they demonstrate the power of positive thinking, as well as the brilliance of Mozart.

I ate the homemade yogurt with a soup I made by sauteing a generous teaspoon of whole cumin seeds, two fresh bay leaves,  a small onion, diced, and three cloves of garlic, minced, in olive oil over low heat (covered) while I peeled a carrot and two beets, then cut them, and two potatoes, into roughly chickpea-sized dice. I added some sprouted chickpeas to the onion, garlic and spices--I had about a cup of sprouted chickpeas left over from another cooking project--dumped in about four cups of water, turned up the heat to medium and left the soup alone for ten minutes. Then I added the vegetables, a teaspoon of ground coriander, salt, freshly-ground black pepper, and cooked the soup for about another ten minutes. At that point, I added a bunch of flat-leaf parsley, chopped.

This is a very flexible soup recipe that doesn't require any kind of ingredient-measuring. Even when I'm not training my mind to be more positive, I know it will always turn out well. It will for you, too--no problem! You can change the vegetables if there are others you like better, but I think the beets are important. Hot-pink soup does a lot for a positive outlook on gloomy winter days.