This is perhaps one of those "it has soy sauce, therefore it is Asian" recipes from the 1950s, but I don't care; it's the taste of childhood and I have been trying to replicate it with regular rice for years. Today: success!
Make meatballs: mix 1/4 to 1/3 pound ground beef; 1 egg; some garlic power; some ground ginger (this was today's innovation - inspired!) and salt/pepper. Add plain breadcrumbs until the consistency is dry enough to make meatballs. Roll into meatballs and brown in hot oil in a Dutch oven (another innovation today; better liquid-to-meatballs configuration).
Make a sauce of: 2 T cornstarch; 1/8 C sugar; 1 T soy sauce; 1/4 C vinegar (I used cider vinegar)l and 1 C water or broth. I think there could be less cornstarch and possibly less sugar. Stir sauce into meatballs; sauce will bubble up and thicken.
Push meatballs to edges; add 1 green pepper sliced, 1 C soaked basmati rice, and 1 1/2 C water. Simmer until cooked, about 15-20 minutes. Garnish with canned mandarin orange slices.
I think this would be nice with an Asian-inspired slaw of cabbage and carrots with a sesame oil/soy/rice vinegar/ginger dressing.
We are back from San Francisco. I've never taken a "red eye" flight - sure, it saves on another hotel night, but at what price? I slept fitfully for the 3.5 hours of the trip, came home, and slept another 4 or so hours. After being up for 3 or 4 hours, I started to fade again - the burning eyes, the klutzy body (yes, even more so than usual, folks), the spaciness. We are trying to tough it out until about 8 or 9 pm, and then we will try to switch to a slacker version of Euro time, in which we get up around 4 or 5 CDT, which is like noonish for Europe. If we can sleep on the flight (I am seriously pushing OTC remedies for this) we should be more acclimated to Europe when we get there on Wednesday morning.
Other casualties: apparently I neatly folded my beautiful French cashmere scarf and set it down somewhere in the Hilton Hotel, SF. I don't have it anymore, which is really a bummer.
One of our shampoos or lotions or whatever ooked out of its ziploc bag onto the antique linen tablecloth and antique dining room table, leaving a stain on the tablecloth and a new blemish on the table. Really, 20th century chemicals are such clear destroyers of our stuff, it's a wonder why we don't get wise and ban them. I mean, who hasn't spilled nail polish or worse, nail polish remover, on something and ruined it? Or perfume? Or bleach on clothing?
In better news, I think I have finally tweaked my mom's recipe for "Beef and RIce Mandarin" to accommodate non Minute Rice and a non-electric skillet method of cooking. I burned the sucker (gotta get an All Clad Dutch oven one of these days) but the skim from the non-burned part was just right. I'll post the recipe later.
As a reward for finally doing our taxes and learning that we loaned the gubmint a big chunk o' change interest-free for the last year, we treated ourselves yesterday to a portable DVD player. It is sooooo cute - it is my favorite new toy ever! I can curl up in bed and watch my extensive collection of West Wings or something from my collection of foreign films. I SHOULD be watching Polish films to get in the spirit of the trip - we might bring the new toy just for the flights to San Fran!
In all the hotels I've been frequenting lately, I have been a late-night TV junkie. Horrible habit, really: around and around the channels I go. One hundred feeds and nothing to watch. But movies, yeah! I might get through some impressive percentage of B's movie collection with this new gizmo!
(Plus the transformer for AC power sits under a pillow and warms my poor aching back like a heating pad. Therapeutic, eh??)
In the last four weeks, I've been on three campus visits, had a phone interview (and turned down an invitation for a follow-up campus visit), and spent a week with family.
Next it's off to the annual geography conference and then two weeks of the final leg of fieldwork. Then I have a little less than a month to prepare my summer course AND finish my dissertation draft. Then teach for eight weeks, and try to work on getting articles ready for publication.
Somewhere in there we have to decide about our house, depending on what the job market brings. And pack up and move to the next place, wherever that is.
Makes me want to curl up on the sofa with a good 19th century novel, some tea, and a warm fuzzy blanket.
And? My left ear really hurts - what's up with that?
Great article in yesterday's Boston Globe - a sort of a review of current books and scholarship about urban politics and gentrification. The article is by Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia, and challenges the (outdated) notion that gentrification equals well-off whites displacing poor blacks. It's more complicated than that nowadays, more like a mosaic of financial interests, political clout (or lack thereof), public and private entrepreneurship, and local/state/federal investment.
New work includes William Julius Wilson's _There Goes the Neighborhood_, Lance Freeman's _There Goes the Hood_, and Mary Pattilo's _Black on Black_, the latter of which Venkatesh critiques for the "unorthodox methodology" of participant observation, but considers to be a follow-on to WEB DuBois, which is a pretty big compliment. If I should end up in Chicago, or teaching planning, these would be worth reading, and probably worth reading in any case for ideas about civic engagement.