Rooting for Roots

The same weekend I went to bike class, I saw The Brave One, which I don’t recommend, due to a ghastly amount of violence and gore, improbable actions by main characters, and an unsatisfying ending.

Saturday evening, Tom got a DVD that I could tell right away was not my kind of thing.

“Is this a war movie?”

“No, history.”

“History of what?”

“War.”

I went home and got my book (Ayelet Waldman’s novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits; not awful, not fantastic) and brought it back to Tom’s, and we had a companionable evening of movie-watching and reading.

On Sunday, I made three dishes from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone: Baked Spanish Rice, Southern Style Black-Eyed Peas (once recommended by Lisa C.), and Tomato Sauce with Dried Mushrooms.

The mushrooms in question were dried porcini, and as before and despite my best efforts, they ended up a bit gritty, which is annoying, but the black-eyed peas are good, and the Spanish rice is wonderfully deep shades of red and orange and very good. I will definitely make that again.

I have had Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for a long time and have always loved it—it’s such a nice big book, hardcover, with really good paper and pleasing line drawings. It turns out, after all these years, that it also has the instructions inside it for how to make many tasty things to eat. But I liked it even before I knew that. It’s like a big witch’s book, with all the secrets in it.

I just came upon Deborah Madison’s advice to use a mortar to grind up dried herbs right before you use them and tried it that day. It made the herb flavors much more intense, and when the pasta sauce was cooking, the smell was enough to make one nearly faint with pleasure.

Hammett will have his annual visit to Dr. Press tomorrow. I love him very much, and sometimes marvel that in this vast universe, there should be this one tiny soul who likes to sit in the bathtub—when I come home from work, he very often comes out of the bathroom to greet me—and nap next to the laundry basket. He likes to sit on a little table by the living room window and keep an eye on things.

Just the merest speck, in the greater scheme of things, but with a whole personality and world view his very own.

It has been just over a year since Thelonious died.

The couple of weeks before the anniversary, I was very aware of what I was doing the year before: buying tens of cans of cat food hoping she would like one of them, administering medications, cleaning what seemed like gallons of diarrhea off the floor near the litter box.

There was another sad anniversary the day before that, that of the untimely death of my dear Aunt Netta, three years ago. I called my uncle that day to tell him I remembered what day it was and that I was thinking of him.

Now that I am using index shifting on the Marin, as mentioned, its various symptoms have disappeared. I took it to Freewheel so Dan could fine-tune the shifting and move the brake levers a bit closer in.

It’s touching that he labored for years to make the friction shifting work, knowing it was nearly a lost cause, without ever saying, “Why don’t you just use index shifting like everyone else?” I thanked him for his self-restraint, and for all the time he put in on the friction shifting. He is really a sweet fellow and an excellent mechanic.

This weekend I organized my recipes and cooking-related notes, which took the better part of Saturday. In the late afternoon, I went to Rainbow and then made butter cookies with lemon frosting, and ginger cookies, which are like shortbread. There are no eggs in them, just flour, butter, sugar, a bit of salt, and fresh ginger, powdered ginger, and candied ginger.

Today I made smoky Mexican black beans, and a new recipe from 366, Caribbean Rice Pilaf, which requires annatto oil, which you make by heating annatto seeds in canola oil, and then straining the seeds out. The result is deep orange and very pretty.

I also made penne with sun-dried tomato cream sauce, using a recipe given to me by my friend Amy’s son Mike. I sent him a card afterwards telling him how tasty it was.

I cubed beets and a couple of different kinds of sweet potatoes so I can have Mexican Black Beans with Steamed Medley of Root Vegetables, Nearly Unseen Beneath a Sturdy Protective Roof of Avocado Wedges.

I read Deborah Eisenberg’s collection of short stories Twilight of the Superheroes not long ago, and now am going to read everything she’s ever written. I finished Under the 82^nd Airborne and am now in the middle of All Around Atlantis. She can be tremendously droll, though she does not write comedy per se. She is really an excellent writer.