Virtual Light

Why yes, I am reading these out of order. I'm going to try something I did in a couple of posts on the old blog, and examine the opening. So many people in the business emphasize the important of the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter.

I can't find a ton to pick apart in this one. This is the sort of description Gibson absolutely excels at, full of tiny, lyrical touches and fearless language. It gives an impressionist glimpse of the world of the book (in SF, it could be argued that the world functions as a main character), perfectly juxtaposing beauty and decay. It draws you in without apparent effort to see what will become of this man, this place. Unfortunately for the reader, the courier described turns out to be not a character at all, but a plot device.

I used the word fractal in conversation the other day. The book is a bit dated that way. I haven't read Virtual Light before, and I bogged down about three quarters of the way through. In the process, I noticed a couple of patterns that showed up in this one and in Idoru.

Gibson relies strongly on impossibly naive observers. Every main character in both of these books has a fish-out-of-water thing going on. It lets him pile on the descriptions, to be a tourist in his own near-future world, but makes it difficult for the characters to be effective actors and occasionally comes across as ridiculous--Rydell's ignorance on many occasions is simply impossible to buy. They don't seem to have any realistic connections to other people, normal friendships or families. They stand to one side and watch, anchorless, puzzled by everything that is going on around them, which is to say, the plot. The bad guys have a lot more on the ball, though they also tend to be featureless and direly uninteresting.

A general historical amnesia seems to be in play. This book is set in 2005, but everyday things from their own recent past are cast as strange almost beyond belief. It's a sort of reverse time-travel effect, where the pre-industrial character is astonished by cars and vacuum cleaners, but considerably less explicable. Factory-produced cigarettes? Cars that ran on gasoline? RVs? How bizarre! It's heavy-handed to say the least, like none of the main characters ever watch TV. There's a lot of time spent on descriptionss, on stuff, but there is an almost total cultural vacuum (yes, despite the presence of Yamazaki, who is supposed to be studying it). Like Idoru, on the whole this reads like notes for a novel, rather than the completed thing. It gives a glance at things I want it to dig into, then gets distracted by its own surface.

I also realized while reading this just how annoying it can be to use italicized speech for emphasis. A couple of minor characters in Virtual Light speak this way. "I haven't seen your friend before." "That storm was just terrible, wasn't it?" "We're a full-service shop...." I had a critiquer once flag me for overusing emphasis in dialog, and I didn't think at the time that it was that big a deal, but I'm definitely going to be more careful about it in the future. I'm not sure it's ever defensible to give such a distracting characteristic to a character so minor that they are more properly a piece of set-dressing than a person.

The plot is not innovative; it's a straightforward technological McGuffin pursuit, which unfortunately is almost the exact same pattern the next book follows, though Virtual Light has far better action scenes. The stakes seem to be high, but he frequently blows the tension, and the ending is so pat, so literally deus ex machina that I found myself wondering if I was misremembering how much I liked the Neuromancer trilogy.

I'm going to give the third one in this series a miss and move on to something different.

Getting Organized (In Theory)

I had a very odd Sunday: I didn't do anything. D* and the older kids went to church in the morning. It was raining hard. I turned off the air conditioning and opened a lot of windows, listened to the rain and the baby, and read a lot of the Happiness Project archives. In the afternoon I played LEGO with the kids, took videos of L with my phone, and did more reading. The TV didn't go on until after dinner, the air conditioning likewise (if it's too hot the boy can't sleep). I had a bunch of stuff I'd wanted to get to, but nothing really urgent. We'd had lunch guests on Saturday, so the place was reasonably clean already. I don't relax very often; sometimes I wonder if I'm forgetting how.

I enjoyed my reading, not least because I was delighted to find some of my own hard-discovered principles among hers. At least for me, a tidy environment is one sizable component of happiness. Clutter and mess stress me out, and so I am coming to understand that Do it now is an important rule if I don't want to be that way. The important corollary is Do it myself--it's better than either steaming or nagging. It only takes a minute or two to wipe off the stove, to throw away (or recycle) that empty container, to put a book back on the shelf. It makes tackling the major chores easier if the first step doesn't always have to be "declutter the room."

I also like her "spend it out" rule, though I don't think it's a major problem for me--not least because we moved last year, so we've already and recently gone through all of our things and gotten rid of clothes never worn, books never read, and broken objects. Now that we've been here a whole year, I find that I retain this winnowing eye. We have more stuff than can comfortably fit into the space, so I've been shoving some of it into the attic--thinning the book collection, recognizing that the photo albums just won't get updated for a while, since there's nowhere to put them, passing outgrown baby things along promptly--and investing in some storage devices for the rest of it, especially the 10,000 toys we seem to have accumulated.

Here's a list of interesting-looking links I gathered from her:

• The Happiness Project
• Unclutterer
• Flylady
• 43 Things
• Work It Mom
• Listography

I asked my mom for a toolbox for Christmas, tired of rummaging through our cardboard box of oddities, hoping I won't stab myself on a rusty screwdriver (which if it isn't a drink, ought to be).

I just realized as I put together the link list--I'm better! I am back to being the me who is energized by having a lot to do, who plans for the future, who wants to accomplish. Whew. One of the things I'm going to put on a list (somewhere) is to buy a sunlamp, so the next dreary spring doesn't knock me for a loop. 

30 Foods Meme - Day 2 - Warm Salad of Thyme-Crusted Tuna

These posts are turning out to be rather widely spaced! We have been very busy this summer, and Ms Greenspan is not doing a prompt every day. For the second day, this was it:

What is one food that you absolutely, completely, totally, and utterly cannot stand?  Answer in haiku, please!

My response:

Delicate pink curls
With too many little legs -
Shrimp make me shudder.

Don't like how they look, don't like their texture, don't care for their taste even in highly processed form.

I do like fish, though, and our farmer's market now has a fishmonger! The prices are high, but it's good fish, and the $$ encourage us to practice portion control with our proteins. On one recent visit I got a piece of tuna for no particular reason. A couple weeks later, we set out to "eat down" the freezer in preparation for a week on vacation, and I had to figure out what to do with it. The internet to the rescue again. A moment of searching, a few minutes of paging through the results, and I had a candidate not only for the tuna but for the bag of arugula I had impulse-purchased that morning: Warm Salad of Thyme-Crusted Tuna.

I also had some corn. Corn season is a brief and glorious thing in New England. Who needs madeleines? The sight of corn in its husk, piled anyhow on counters or spilling from bags and bushels, conjures a lazy afternoon heat, cicada song, my grandparents' patio, the rattle of a pot lid as the water begins to boil, greasy fingers and the sweet crunch of that first bite. My favorite farm (okay, one of my favorites...) puts a sign on theirs:

That's the way to get it. I'm not a particularly devoted locavore, but corn on the cob is one thing I will not bother with from the grocery store.

But, back to the tuna. In practice, this was so easy it falls under the "do I even call it a recipe?" category. Arugula plus slivered basil plus good tomato plus balsamic vinaigrette. Tuna plus generous salt and pepper plus thyme. Cook the latter in a very hot pan until it's as done as you like it (ours not being the freshest, I cooked it through).

Put the latter in proximity to the former, and eat it. Much better than shrimp.

New England Tour 2011: Vermont Cheesemakers Festival

I wish I could remember where I first came across mention of the Vermont Cheesemakers Festival. I do remember thinking "wow, that looks really neat." Last summer it just was not an option -- we were moving, buying a car, having a baby -- but I put it down on my list of things to try to do this year.

And we did! We went! And it was great. Even better, we got to spend the weekend with D*'s awesome sister and her husband, who moved to Burlington last year. I have driven past the city any number of times, but never spent any time there before. It looks like a really great place, and the scenery is jaw-droppingly beautiful.

We drove up on Saturday--the last day of the recent heat wave, and when we got in the temperatures were in the 90s. We unloaded our things and hit the nearest beach. I had no idea there were beaches there, so we weren't prepared, but who needs bathing suits? 

Then back home for dinner and a late bedtime for some very tired children.

Some time in the night a thunderstorm passed through and the temperature finally dropped, leaving Sunday clear and crisp and all around the most beautiful weather possible. After the baby's morning nap, we headed over to Shelburne Farms.

The place. Is. Huge. It goes on and on and on. Beautiful lake views!

Ridiculously large buildings!

 

Cows!

Solar panels!

And, of course, the festival!

I didn't even try to take any pictures of the interior, which was a complete zoo -- a very tasty zoo, a zoo packed with people enjoying themselves to the hilt, but a zoo nevertheless. The two older children were well and truly freaked out by the crowd, and ended up staying outside with their aunt and uncle while D* and I braved the stalls (Mimi in her baby carrier grabbed shirts and loose hair). It was somewhat overwhelming even for us, and after a while we snagged some edibles and joined everyone else for lunch on the grass.

Sans utensils as we were, it was a most primitive repast: hunks ripped off a baguette (from O Bread) with chunks of a soft white cheese (which I think was the Jack from Neighborly, but I might be getting them mixed up). On a beautiful summer day, there is absolutely nothing better than pure, simple foods!

After fortifying ourselves, we dove back into the fray, this time for proper shopping. On reflection, I think was a good approach: an initial tasting swing, and then a second to focus on picking up the ones I liked the best. If you ever get a chance to go to this event, be prepared to spend money! And bring a cooler, which I managed to forget even after I put it on my list of things to pack. After some agonizing, I ended up with four kinds of cheese (mostly cheddars, which I hoped would travel well), some shortbread cookies, chocolate, apple butter, and a second baguette. I didn't really taste any of the wines, but D* sampled a few and proclaimed them all to be on the sweet side.

After that, we took a ride on a tractor-drawn wagon up to the Farm Barn so the kids could see the animals, of which they have many -- sheep, goats, pigs, donkeys, chickens.

We had another snack. (I was worried that they wouldn't have any milk available for JJ but hello... dairy farm? Duh!) L helped to milk a goat, and took part in the chicken roundup, when they put the birds into the barn for the evening. It may have been the cutest thing I have ever seen, a dozen children very seriously surrounding chickens and clapping their hands to herd them.

She also found an egg! We took a gander at the cheesemaking operation, which is pretty straightforward really, and relaxed in the grass before catching the last cart ride back to the festival and our cars.

In the morning it was time to head back to Boston with our swag. I would not at all mind making this into a tradition!

30 Foods Meme - Day 1

I have never done one of these meme things, but this one sounds like fun, and the first one elicits a very easy response. I will take a shot at playing along.

What is the best recipe that a parent taught you to make?

There are different ways one could take that. My mother is not one of nature's cooks (my father is not in this picture at all). She kept us fed on a tight budget, and my childhood palate was perfectly all right with macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, and things based on Cream of X soup. Vegetables were frozen, garlic was powdered, and going out to eat meant Perkins. Her own parents ate much the same way. It's the way a lot of Americans eat. It wasn't until I reached adulthood that I started to realize what a world of food there was (perhaps ironically, due to a cookbook she got me when D* and I first moved in together); I reached college without ever having eaten Chinese food, without having had real butter, and I still remember picking up a bunch of fresh asparagus for the first time.

So when it comes to recipes that a parent taught me to make, well, there's a pretty slim selection. If anything, it's actually gone in the other direction; my mom has recently started learning to cook because she's become vegetarian, and occasionally wants to cook for others, which means something other than frozen cheese pizzas. Some of these dishes have reached my grandparents' table, which has acquired more dietary restrictions as they age.

I have acquired a couple of recipes from my in-laws, but nothing that really fits the bill here. Which leaves me with only one thing, something we made straight through my childhood, in all of the apartments and houses we lived in, through good times and (lots of) bad. I made it for my college roommates. I still make it in exactly the same way.

The Toll House cookie. I know that small fortunes have been invested in a search for the perfect cookie, and entire books have been written on the topic. As far as I'm concerned, that money has all been wasted. There is no better chocolate chip cookie. I make them big, and underbake them slightly so they're chewy all through, and there is nothing out there that will ever take their place. I know the recipe by heart.

2 1/4 c all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 c butter, softened*
3/4 c sugar
3/4 brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 package chocolate chips**

1. Preheat the oven to 375.
2. Mix the dry ingredients together.
3. Cream the butter with the two sugars.
4. Add the eggs and beat until well incorporated.
5. Mix in the vanilla.
6. Mix in the dry ingredients slowly, just until incorporated.
7. Mix in the chips.
8. Drop onto a cookie sheet in large spoonfuls. Bake anywhere from 9-12 minutes, depending on how big they are and how you like the edges done.
9. Allow to cook on the sheet for a few minutes, then remove to a rack to finish cooling.

* I use salted butter, but stick to something like Land O Lakes, which has relatively mild salt content. For regular table use I prefer Kate's of Maine and Kerrygold, but those are too salty for cookies.

** I don't hold with walnuts in chocolate chip cookies, but if you do, go right ahead.

So there you have it, my very first meme.

Swiss Chard, Leek, and Gruyere Quiche (via Nutmeg Nanny)

My recent addiction to Tastespotting is paying dividends in the form of a burgeoning bookmark file, and a whole other place to look when I am Out of Ideas. This particular recipe was the result of a huge bunch of farmer's market chard taking up almost my entire vegetable drawer, and no particular idea how to use it. Thank goodness for search boxes, which led me to this blog post and a blog I'd never seen before. The Internet just goes on forever.

Generally speaking, I don't do quiche. I like to cook, but I am lazy, and quiche involves that whole crust thing. When I wrote down my week's menu plan, I put this down as a frittata instead. Then I thought, It's a Sunday afternoon. You have time. You've been scrambling for weeks, it's time to slow down. When are you going to have another chance to do this? So I got together the ingredients for the dough.

At which point our three-year-old ambled over and said, "Wet," in that particularly forlorn tone he uses on these occasions. In this case, wet meant a diaper blowout of proportions that required immediate laundry and bathing. So this almost became a frittata after all, but I got it together, made the dough (with 6yo's assistance), etc., etc. Grumbling to myself the while.

And it was absolutely worth it. I am a quiche convert. This may become a weekend "thing" now. I am going to reprint the recipe here because I made so many changes, mainly due to my not having a deep-dish tart pan, and partly due to the aforementioned laziness.

Swiss Chard, Leek, and Gruyere Quiche

2 1/2 Tbsp all-purpose flour
1/2 recipe Flaky Tart Dough (it's Martha, you can't go wrong; cutting the recipe in half worked fine)
5 large eggs
1 cup whole milk
1 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp dried thyme
2 heaping cups torn Swiss chard leaves
1/2 cup Gruyere cheese
1 leek, sliced thinly

1. Make and chill the tart dough. After chilling, on a lightly floured work surface, roll dough into a 16-inch round. With a dry pastry brush, sweep off any excess flour; fit dough into a tart pan with a removable bottom, gently pressing it into the sides. Using a sharp knife, trim the dough evenly with the edge of the pan. Cover with plastic wrap; chill tart shell until firm, about 20 minutes.

2. Preheat Oven to 375 degrees

3. Line the tart dough with a sheet of parchment paper and fill with pie weights (or dried beans, or whatever). Transfer to oven and bake until light brown, about 25 minutes. Remove weights and parchment paper and continue baking until golden brown, about 5 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack; let cool completely.

4. Whisk 1 egg and 2 1/2 Tbsp flour until smooth. Add the remaining eggs and continue mixing until well blended.
Add milk, salt, pepper, and thyme; mix until well combined.

5. Sauté leeks in olive oil until soft. Add the chard and cook until just wilted. Allow to cool, then add to the egg mixture. Pour it all into your cooled tart shell. (You may want to put the tart on a baking pan in case of leaks.)

6. Bake until filling is slightly firm and crust is a deep golden brown, 40 to 50 minutes.

7. Transfer quiche to a wire rack to cool until set, about 20 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

The two of us polished off almost the entire thing for dinner, with a side of soup; it would serve four for lunch or with a more substantial set of side dishes (or daintier appetites!).

Crab Cakes with Lemon Aioli (Williams Sonoma Comfort Food)

Crab twice in one weekend? Don't mind if I do! This recipe had been intended as our Father's Day showpiece, but then D* came down with something, so we had it a week later. It was no worse for the wait.

New England, of course, is known for lobster, but I maintain that whoever first plucked one from the briny deep, looked into those eyestalks and said, "Hey! Dinner!" must have been really hungry. I can take or leave them in shelled form, and shell-on prefer to keep my distance. Crab, on the other hand, I would happily eat every week (if I could afford it), and if a menu has crab cakes on it, you can safely bet the house that you know what my order will be.

Once a year or so I take a stab at making them myself; the results have been tasty, but lacking in visual appeal as they invariably fall apart. This has been my best attempt to date, and I suspect it's because they don't mess around trying to be "light." A teaspoon of oil and a nonstick pan just won't cut it in the adhesive department

 

They were a trifle too wet, but next time I will know to drain my crab better. 

Lemon Aioli

1 c mayonnaise

Finely grated zest of one lemon

2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

1 clove garlic, minced

salt and pepper to taste

Crab Cakes

1 lb lump crabmeat

3/4 c panko or other breadcrumbs, divided

1 large egg, beaten

1 Tbsp Dijon mustard

2 tsp Worcestershire Sauce

1/4 tsp hot pepper sauce

1 Tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley

1/2 c canola oil for frying

lemon wedges for serving

1. To make the aioli, mix together the mayonnaise, zest, juice, and garilc. Season with salt and pepper. Set aside 1/4 cup of the aioli; cover and refrigerate the remaining 3/4 c until serving. 

2. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment. Pick over the crab meat for shells and cartilage (there's always one tiny little piece). In a bowl, mix together 1/4 c of the panko, 1/4 c aioli, egg, mustard, Worcestershire, hot pepper sauce, and parsley. Add the crabmeat and mix gently to combine. 

3. Divide the mixture into 8 equal portions and shape into thick cakes. Spread the remaining 3/4 c panko in a shallow dish. Coat the cakes evenly with the panko. Transfer to the prepared baking sheet. Refrigerate for 15 minutes. 

4. In a large frying pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add the cakes and cook until the undersides are golden brown, 2-3 minutes. Turn and cook another 2 minutes. Transfer to paper towels to drain briefly. 

5. Serve the cakes at once with lemon wedges and the remaining aioli on the side.

4 servings