Granola muffins
adopted from nigella lawson’s domestic goddess for Brooklyn kitchens
2 cups granola
1 cup buttermilk
¼ cup neutral oil like veggie (olive oil will taste strongly in a sweet muffin like this)
2 eggs
1 cup of flour
¼ cup of sugar (white or brown to compliment your granola)
preheat your oven to 350° and line a twelve-cup muffin tray with papers or butter the little bins. Measure your buttermilk into a big measuring cup and beat in the eggs and oil. In a big mixing bowl, pour all the liquids over the granola.
to measure flour for baking, stir it with a fork in the bag to loosen, scoop into a measuring cup and level off the top by running the flat side of a butter knife over it. (Unless you are making Cake – then triple sift your flour.) Gently stir the flour and sugar into the granola slop, just enough to combine, over-stirring toughens your muffins. Spoon the batter into the muffin tin and bake for 15 minutes, until the tops are golden brown. Serve with butter and jam or honey. Phenomenal warm but will keep for a day. Freeze if you want to keep them longer.
you don’t tie a red ribbon to someone on fire
Today is World AIDS Day.
And we are not doing well as peoples of the world in many aspects of life. We explode our potentially glorious cities. Some children migrate every night to avoid being kidnapped into soldiering; some men rape refugee girls on their way to gather water outside their camps. While the world is in macroeconomic chaos, those at the micro level are watching the levees break. The sky is falling and sea is boiling, or at least poisoning us with the poisons we poisoned them with.
A plague is upon us.
Despite the apocalypse, reason and hope should drive cash and compassion into the struggle against AIDS. We need the work that empowers the communities most affected by the virus and changes the social factors that drive the epidemic as well as provides for the care of people living with HIV.
The AIDS crisis here and around the world exposes where we have most failed to provide for people’s basic needs: health care, housing, healthy food, education and safe community. And the opportunity to learn about our bodies and to grow in the capacity to have honest, caring relationships- some that are really fucking sexy- that embody the justice we hope to build in the world. Safety nets for when times get hard, and support for when we are struggling.
In honor of the people who have lost their lives as a result of communities and public policies that punish sexuality and drug addiction and abandon people, especially queer people of color, to preventable death, please:
Google search World AIDS Day and your city
then do something, like:
- send in $10 to your local AIDS service organization;
- then donate to your favorite social justice activists, especially feminists working around anti-violence and folks working in addiction/recovery. Your local library full of fiesty, free-speechy librarians is another good place to support;
- sign up to volunteer for soup kitchen this winter. Bonus karma for not at Christmas. Brownies for working with Food Not Bombs.
- read up on racial disparities in health in this country;
- support comprehensive sex ed in the schools in your community; and
- have safe sex with Obama supporters or staffers..or, you know, build the movement and share the love. Read radical poetry in the afterglow.
I guess do that when you are done on-line.
trifle
admittedly, not just any trifle. This is festival trifle. Trifle with Italian Christmas cake, pistachios, cardamom, heavy cream, and apricots soaked in hot sugared liquor (not in the original recipe). make your own panettone for this, and we’ll do our own you-tube video.
as it came to me from Nigella via my favorite kitchen witch:
Here you go love ~ from Nigella’s Feast
4.5 C dried apricots
6 C water
3/4 C superfine sugar
juice of 1 lemon
juice of 1/2 orange or 1 tangerine
6 cardamom pods
1/2 pandoro or 1lb piece of pandoro or panettone
1 C heavy cream
1 C greek or whole milk yogurt
3 Tbs honey
1/4 C pistachios
1/4 C slivered almonds
amaretto if you like
Put apricots, water, sugar, juices in saucepan
Bruise cardamom, add to pan, stir
Bring to boil, turn down, add a few slugs of amaretto and simmer for 30 min
Drain apricots, discarding seeds and pods, put liquid back in pan, boil over high heat 15-20 min to reduce to syrup (to about 1.5 cups) – let cool
Cut pandoro into 1/2 inch wide, long slices. Line bowl with half of long slices, spread half of warm apricots over cake, pour half of suryp over this.
Repeat (placing slices opposite direction) – leave overnight covered with plastic wrap in fridge
Topping: whisk heavy cream till soft peaks, add yogurt and beat to combine – spread over trifle
Drizzle honey, scatter nuts
a morning
The truck out the window reads “good for the earth” in white on blue. It’s small flashing yellow sidelights beaconing in the grey- it’s early morning, the time of school kids starting out on their long walk, the people who open offices, those who open coffee joints, and dawn-lovers like me.
In Manhattan, the bagel cart guys are all ready with huge chargers of coffee and pre-cream-cheesed bagels all in a row. I worry about the Polish guy who supplies my workaday bagel; he has no heater in his 9 foot by 4 foot metal trailer. He takes up most of it, standing close to the steaming coffee, parked outside the moviestar Penelope Cruz’s new clothing line, the flagship store. When I rummage around in my bag for change longer than usual, he tells me to pay him tomorrow or next week. In Brooklyn, the bagel guy hasn’t delivered to this cafe yet.
Someone’s smoking outside, leaning on the bench and the big window under the awning. I’ve quit. It’s freezing from the thin sheets of black ice water on all the concrete. It’s sort of raining; the Hasidic women carry black umbrellas. The January weather comes in through the open door into the golden inside. The tabletops are sunflower colored vinyl, two with green block prints of garlic bulbs tumbling in and out of wavering brown grasses. The coffee is organically grown, fair trade, bottomless cup. The woman’s voice through the speakers sings in Hindi then there’s soft chanting over lingering cords on mystical instruments.
The smoker is a woman, red-haired long-haired woman who strides past the door in a scarlet velvet coat wrapping her waist and swirling around her boot tops.
he said
broadcast on npr, rudy giuliani just said:
the best way to achieve peace is through overwhelming strength.
go ahead, laugh until you cry until you laugh.
(ummm, i don’t want to link to them, but check out: w w w . peace through strength pac.com/Home.aspx)
day by day poetry
i keep a Skybright Studio canvas pad propped up on the table against the world map. It has a hot pink cover with a distant lighthouse under a full moon seen through sparse trees rendered in white lines and smudges; it is 16 x 20 inches. I write impulsive poems on it in sharpie marker. They often come from bits of conversation. It started in the fall sometime, and it is now full. Below is part of the resulting poem, annotated with links. Visually, it is beautiful on the pad, haiku format one to each sheet, but a ribbon like that would make the blog space too long so the lines are longer here:
she would ask, did you have one big love? What does love mean to you now?
she was radicalized around ideas of nation states & nationalism in high school English Lit class where she learned
America is a constructed country
American, an invented identity
with myths & traditions made in patchwork & whole cloth
the latest experiment
i get paid what i got paid in dc but now i live in new york.
i’m choking on it.
he was angry, when she asked if he had slept with a prostitute
after he said he had lived next door to a brothel.
residual feelings, she called them; like semi-sticky dust leftovers of love
“writing is like marriage—one should not commit one’s self until one is amazed at one’s luck”
even our complex, artful, deranged & joyful sexuality seems hopeless in the maw of this poverty, war & isolation
a fundamental human challenge
you are here; you are an agent of change; you are the butterfly effect
a flock of greckles in your face; a hawk circling far away
a pink plastic flamingo, an origami piece crane, and a hummingbird—
all in the same sky
i’ve only slept with 9 people, she said.
But how do i count the 6 dyke orgy in high school, or
that play-party where 20 people fucked the prince
while me & another femme pet him—how do i count that? She took the prince home the next night.
i count that
well, dunk me in buttermilk & call me a biscuit—
you’ve got grits, kid.
i like being part of a grand history. like she said: i cross the police line &
join the past 2 decades of AIDS activists
“writing saved me from the sin & inconvenience of violence”
bran muffins
now, if you are bravely still reading, you will get a treat. oh, these muffins are yummy, pretty, and- as far as well-meaning home baking goes- good for you. It is a tweaked recipe from Nikki & David Goldbeck’s American Wholefoods Cuisine.
in a small bowl, measure out 2-3 tablespoons of wheat germ. Using a microplane or patience and a good knife, zest a lemon into it. Stir in 2 tablespoons of sugar.
pour 1 cup of buttermilk in a large liquid measure. Add 1/4 cup of honey, 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil. Whisk one egg in a bowl and add that to the measuring cup too.
sift together, 3 times, 1 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour) with 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder, 1 1/2 of baking soda, and a 1/2 teaspoon of salt. add the final sifting to 2 tablespoons of wheat germ and 1/2 a cup of bran measured into a big mixing bowl.
gently make a well in the flour mix, and add the liquid ingredients to the dry. stir until just combined with a wooden spoon.
oil a muffin try- medium, twelve muffins. pour the batter into the tin cups, and sprinkle the lemony sugary wheat germ over the tops. bake for 15 to 20 minutes.
brilliant
golden raisins, toasted sesame seeds, ginger…all good possible additions
quick curried peanut sauce for many veggies
chop one medium yellow sweet onion, and smash, peel, and mince a few cloves of garlic. Peel and mince a half inch of fresh ginger.
sauté the onions and garlic in olive oil until the onions are translucent. Stir in the ginger along with a teaspoon of curry powder and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Stir in about three teaspoons of sesame oil and three tablespoons of Braggs or tamari sauce.
glop in a cup of peanut butter, and whisk in boiling hot water in a thin stream to bring the mixture to a saucey consistency.
prepare the veggies of your choice: fairy tale eggplant sliced in half and roasted; purple potatoes halved, par boiled and fried; steamed baby artichokes; bell pepper and broccoli sauté; string beans. What’s in season?
