Golfing (kind of)

Ok, I take it back...all the things I've said about golf in my life and how incredibly boring it seems. At least, I think I do--I have yet to play an actual round of real golf. And based on my performance today at the driving range, I think it will be quite awhile before I'm ready for anything like a real game of golf! Especially the kind where there are other golfers behind me who need to wait for me to finish the hole before they can get there. I can't even finish mini-golf in time to avoid upsetting families with children, generally, and I can hit the ball every time when it comes to mini-golf.

This is me. Notice how my club is coming down about two inches behind the ball.

This is also me. I feel like I look cool in this photo, until I realize that the ball is really not very far away and didn't go much further than that. But hey, at least I hit it, right?

I need to work on these digressions...the moral of the story was that I had fun, even though I was really, really terrible. Luckily Henry came with to give me some lessons, because until today, I had never held real golf clubs. And it definitely showed! I think I missed my first 10-15 swings completely. By the end of the day, though, I had showed some pretty significant improvement: I was hitting the ball once every five or six swings! (Yes, I know. That's still sad. But I have to get excited about the small things, especially when it comes to me and athletics.) And I hit four in a row once without missing. As long as I ignored all the serious golfers around us and just concentrated on our group (most of who also missed the ball a lot), it was a lot of fun.

We did take some videos, but I'm going to have to do some messing with them to make them show up right side up. Hopefully we'll be doing this again soon, with another few women from work who weren't able to come today!

Book Reviews: The Lightning Thief and Eat, Pray, Love"

I finished two books yesterday. I ended up along on an "adventure" with Henry as he played some very geeky card games with his friends, so I made him stop so I could get another book to read when I finished my library book.

I got Eat, Pray, Love from the library on a friend's recommendation. The book is basically about a woman who goes through a very painful divorce and decides to find peace with herself by travelling and searching out three important aspects she needs in her life: pleasure, discipline and balance. It was an interesting story; the author spent four months in Italy learning Italian and eating, four months in India meditating and learning traditional Hindu yoga, and four months in Bali studying with a medicine man, healer and learning to live in society with people again. There were some really interesting ideas in this book, and I really liked the premise. There are also some great one-liners of wisdom that I took away. On the negative side, the author herself drove me up the wall. I don't think I really fully understood that in the book about a depressed woman trying to find herself would be full of a lot (for lack of a better word) whining. There would be long spells when I could sympathize with her and find her story interesting, but every so often it just reminded me a little too much of a teenaged girl crying because she didn't have a date for Friday night. All in all, I have mixed feelings, but I'm glad I read it. It's a good travel read, and provides an interesting introduction to some ideas that normal Americans don't usually have a ton of exposure to--like yoga and traditional Bali life.

At my emergency stop, I found that the best book I could find in Best Buy was The Lightning Thief. It's a kids book and has the simplicity of a kids book, but it was entertaining. The story is about a kid who learns by being chased by monsters that he's the son of one of the Greek gods, who are still very much alive and involved in the world. It then follows his training and quests. It can be a little cheesy (in particular, some of the jokes are a little groan-worthy!) but if you take it as a kids book, it's a good read. It's also a very fast one--I think I finished it in three hours or under. There's not a lot I can say about the book without giving away important parts of the story, but I liked it enough that I'll be seeking out the next books in the series.

Tomorrow I'm going to be holding real (not mini) golf clubs for the first time. After Steamboat Willie got called out for mocking golf as a dumb game when she had never played it, we planned a group outing of a bunch of people from work to a driving range. Most of us have either never golfed before or are terrible, so I'll be in good company. My goal by the end of the evening is to be able to actually connect with the ball most of the time when I swing...I'm pretty sure my first few shots are going to miss entirely!

Garden part 2

I finally had a little bit more time in my garden last night, after getting my butt kicked in kickboxing. I only had about an hour before it got dark, but I managed to get my raspberry bushes planted, as well as seeds for broccoli and cauliflower.

I did my best to try to find anything that has sprouted from my last planting session, and as far as I can tell I must have planted a whole lot of weeds and not much else. I'm  hoping that they're just slower than I think they should be to come up, but we'll see what happens!

My goal is to finish planting the seeds and plants that I have this weekend, if there's a day with nice weather: that will be the garlic, asparagus, squash, green beans and possibly the strawberry plants.

Rent, jazz, baseball and food experiments

It's 11:15 and I think this is the earliest I've really had the opportunity to sit down for a few minutes all week. It's been an incredibly busy week--fun, but very busy.

This last weekend I went to Eau Claire to visit my old college roommate, who I haven't seen in probably two years. It was great to see her but strange to be back in Eau Claire. I suddenly didn't fit in at a lot of the places I used to love to go, and I was surprised at how much worse my old apartment in the "student ghetto" looked after a few years of perspective. It was also good to be back; Eau Claire has a great arts scene that I've missed. The Twin Cities definitely has a lot of arts opportunities, but most of them are farther away, a LOT more expensive, and generally both. We took advantage of the weekend to see a jazz concert and the musical Rent (as put on by the Eau Clare Children's Theater...odd). I was honestly surprised at how much I liked Rent--from the things I'd been told, I expected to spend a large part of the time frustrated with starving artists. Instead, I found the play to be a lot more about trying to live with impending death. Depressing, but much less frustrating as a member of the audience. The music was good and the play was not watered down or performed by children, although I was a little nervous when I realized that the play was being put on by a children's theater. It was a great busy weekend.

Tuesday I got my first experience at Target Field, which was pretty darn awesome. My brother, sister and I took my oldest nephew to the game, and I'm pretty sure nobody in the ballpark was having a better time for a lot of that game than my nephew.

 It was nice to have somebody to cheer with me, even if he was only five! The Twins didn't play great--their pitcher was fantastic, but I wasn't impressed with the offense. If you're facing a pitcher who is walking in runs and giving up more runs with wild pitches, I feel like you should be able to get your offense going to build on their runs--not so last night. In spite of that, it was a good experience. The ballpark is beautiful and, thanks to my very generous brother, I got to sit in some fantastic seats. It was a perfect night for baseball weather-wise, AND it was just wonderful to get back to baseball. And the ballpark has tacos and gelato. I'm not really sure what more you can ask for.

Finally...I've been seriously falling behind on my food experiments. This is partly because I've been crazy busy this month, and partly because my last several experiments have flopped miserably. My spicy Asian peanut butter cookies from last week were not much of an exception...I liked them and a few other people did, but in general they did not go over well. They aren't a normal cookie, and with so many strong flavors a lot of people found different flavors they didn't like. I adapted it from this recipe according to what I had on hand. Feel free to make these if you are adventurous, and try them with some good vanilla ice cream. Like I said, I really enjoyed them--but don't expect a normal peanut butter cookie!

Spicy Asian-Inspired Peanut Butter Cookies 
My version, as adapted from the one I link to above. This made me between 2-3 dozen cookies. Also, I think I could have left out the cayenne pepper without compromising the taste at all. I never tasted the pepper, but after a few bites a slow burn started that you could feel rather than taste. Weird for a cookie, too hot for a lot of people and since it didn't add any noticeable flavor, not particularly important to me.

Ingredients

• 1 stick butter (room temperature)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup dark brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt (scant)
• zest of one lemon (make sure the zest is very small!)
• 1.25 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 cup chunky peanut butter
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Directions

1. Sift together the flour, spices, baking powder and baking soda.
2. In another bowl, beat the butter, sugars and lemon zest until light and smooth but not fluffy. Add the peanut butter and vanilla, and blend until smooth. Add the egg and combine.
3. Add the flour mix to the peanut butter mix, mixing just until combined and no flour streaks appear.
4. Chill the dough until firm.
5. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
6. Grease cookie sheets and create balls about 1.25 inches across for cookies. On the cookie sheet, flatten each ball slightly with a fork.
7. Bake for about 10-12 minutes; let cool slightly before removing from the pan.

Books: Scheherazade Goes West

I bought Scherezade Goes West as an impulse buy at Half Price Books a few months ago. I was interested by the idea of a book by an Eastern Muslim women who had spent a lot of time in the West talking about the challenges she faced travelling in the West and the differences she saw. After wading through my library books, I picked this up. It was absolutely not what I expected, but I still enjoyed it.

The biggest change that I found from what I expected when I picked the book up was that it is much more focused than I expected on feminism in the East and West. I still found it very interesting and full of things I had no idea about, but I'm a little disappointed that it didn't have a bigger picture. I learned a lot about Muslim culture (mostly in Morocco, which is where the author lives) and about its recent history with women. I also learned a lot of traditional stories that were told about Muslim women and got to understand a lot more about the Thousand and One Nights, which are stories that I love and have been reading since I was little. (Even if you don't think you know them, you probably do: Aladdin, Sindbad and Ali Baba are all characters from Scherezade's stories. Side note--they are absolutely worth reading, but you'll have to get them in several volumes. Above I have a link to just the first volume, as the only complete set I saw on Amazon was $2500 dollars, and even I don't love my books that much.) Throughout the narrative, the author's points and observations are held together by her struggle to understand Scherezade, harems and their different perceptions in the East and West.

One of the largest things that turned me off about this book is unfortunately something that give feminism a bad name; far too much of it was focused on the ways that men enslave and entrap women. Many of her observations were probably accurate to a degree--she looked at the different ridiculous expectations that women are held to (or hold themselves to) from wearing a veil in the East to wearing a size 4 in the West. However, she had a bad habit of continually blaming those restrictions specifically on men, rather than looking at society as a whole. If you can overlook this, though, Scheherezade Goes West is a really interesting, easy to read introduction to the differences between Eastern Muslim and traditional Western roles and views of women. I'm very glad I read it and I would recommend it, but I do very much wish that it had contrained more information about how an Eastern Muslim woman, brought up in such a different culture, perceived the Western world and the misconceptions that she found on both sides.

Gardening...a beginning!

I hardly went inside yesterday. It was beautiful outside and I got my first Minnesota sunburn of the season. It was wonderful.

Last year, Henry and I dug a garden outside his house for me to plant. I had been whining for awhile about how I wanted one and wished I could cultivate the deck in my apartment, and I think he finally got sick of hearing it! Either way, this spring I uncovered a huge patch of black dirt waiting for me.

After many, many phone calls to my mom trying to figure out what exactly I should be doing, I planted my first seeds yesterday. I had no idea what I should be planting this early (really, I wouldn't have thought I should be planting anything at the beginning of April, if it was up to me!), but I figured out that there was actually quite a lot of things I should be planting. Yesterday, I took care of my snap peas, carrots, onions and potatoes.

Tomorrow, I'm planning on adding broccoli and cauliflower, and in another week or so I'll plant my squash in a pot to get it started. I don't think I'll actually be able to say I've achieved my goal of planting a garden for another month of so (when it's warm enough to put in the peppers, tomatoes and strawberries) but I have a good start!

The Minnesota: Video Games Live

I know that it makes me a world-class geek that I went to listen to the Minnesota Orchestra playing video game music, but in the long run, I'm pretty ok with it. I got Henry tickets for Christmas to this performance, since he's always raving about the music in his favorite video games and I've been wanting to go to the orchestra for awhile. Seemed like a win-win situation! And I have to say that I was impressed.

My sister told me that a lot of composers love playing video game music because they don't have to cater to students who aren't very good at music--they can write music specifically for professionals and make it as hard as they want. A lot of that came through--the music was HARD and very good. Some of the pieces were familiar...from old arcade games that I used to play on my computer to Mario. Others I had never heard, but they were impressively evocative and often really beautiful. The performance was a part of a tour from a few video games composers who are trying to show people that even though they may not take video games seriously, they shouldn't discount the music and art involved as juvenile. For all that, it was still definitely a pops concert--every so often a costumed character would show up, and there were always video game images playing in the background. A few times, members of the audience participated in the show by playing a game while the orchestra played.

All in all, I'm glad I went. Geeky or not, it was a fun night and I heard a lot of great music.

Bon Jovi Concert :)

Thursday Steamboat Willie and I, along with two other good friends (with much better seats!) went to the Bon Jovi concert. We were in the nosebleeds, but it was still worth it--although I wish we had waited to get tickets, so we could have also ended up with the free better tickets that the other two got! I forgot how much fun those concerts are--I'm pretty sure that even for somebody who isn't terribly interested in their music, it would still be a lot of fun. If you do like their music, it's all the better--they put on a good show, usually around two and a half to three hours of just them.

I'd heard some complaints about this tour from Bon Jovi before we went--people who were upset that he didn't play much of his old music, which is all that a lot of people go for. My experience was definitely not that--he played a good mixture. He also played a lot of songs that I hadn't heard before, but that made Steamboat Willie absolutely ecstatic! She'd already been to 9 Bon Jovi concerts (yeah...she really has!) and heard some of her favorite more obscure songs for the first time live. 

Some of my favorite parts of Bon Jovi concerts:

• Well...the music is a pretty obviouis one. He puts on a very good show, plays a lot of songs and obviously loves to perform.
• Watching Jon Bon Jovi dance. He has almost the same lack of skill that I do, but he is much more exuberant about it! (here's a decent example on youtube!)
• Counting mullets and/or bad 80s outfits. This time, we didn't see any mullets and were severely disappointed. Usually, it's a good game!
• Watching weird performance tricks. This time, the drummer played a couple songs on what looked like a birdhouse and the keyboardist stood in between two keyboards and played one with each hand.

Minnesota Melting Pot Class

Monday was my ethnic Minnesota foods class with Kevin Ryan, and it was once again a great class. We learned to make a Hmong stew, a Somalian chicken stew, juicy lucys, Swedish meatballs and a Norwegian apple cake. The class was a lot of fun, the food was incredible, and I felt like I learned a lot so--yesterday I tried to make the jucy lucys. They seemed to be the easiest recipe in the class and whenever I wait for a long time to make the recipes I've learned in a class, I always seem to forget some key steps.

At least, so I thought. After the jucy lucys, I think it might just be that I lack some important skills! I made them inside (which may have been my first mistake) because it was a little too windy for the grill. And they ended up charred on the outside (rather than seared a nice brown) and missing a lot of pieces of hamburger which are still stuck fast to the bottom of my pan. What I learned from this is that it probably is important to use the high-fat hamburger that he asked for, rather than the much leaner ground buffalo that I had in the freezer! So, in another week or so I'll try it again and see if I can improve with the correct hamburger and either a grill or a much cooler pan.

Juicy Lucys
Ideally, this is supposed to be over a grill. Inside, he said to use a very hot pan to sear the meat on the outside. He also said the hot pan is more likely to cook the meat pretty quickly so the cheese doesn't bleed out.

Ingredients
4 slices good quality white sandwich bread
1/2 cup whole milk
1.5 teaspoons garlic powder
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
3 pounds 85% ground beef
About 12 1" squares cheese, 1/4-1/2 inch thick
8 hamburger buns

Directions

1. Rip the sandwich bread into small pieces and mash with milk and spices in a small bowl until it makes a paste.
2. Mix in hamburger until well mixed. Try not to mash the hamburger too much, or it may become stiff.
3. Form hamburger patties around about 3 squares of cheese, making sure that the patty is evenly distributed on around the cheese and an even thickness.
4. Cook over the grill or in a hot pan with no oil until done. Try not to burn to a crisp like I did!

Red Pepper Bagel Sandwiches...finally!

After a week of alternately being busy and fighting with an unpleasant case of food poisoning, I'm finally ready to write about my last vegetarian experiment. And since I made it on Monday, it's about time! I'm really torn between French and Mexican food for this month's experiment. I had every intention of working with French food, so I can really use the cookbook I got from my sister for Chistmas and do some good experimenting. I've heard that this guy wrote some of the best cookbooks for learning French food, which definitely interests me. Also, I've never really eaten much French food, and I'd like to have a general idea of what's going on when I head over to France this fall. But, a lot of the food that really appeals to me in the book is a little beyond my level of need at the moment...as much as I would like to cook a 3 pound chicken every week, I really don't need that much food! And I LOVE Mexican food an unnatural amount. So, I'll do some pondering and hopefully come up with an idea before I go grocery shopping!

I made roasted red pepper bagel sandwiches for my experiment this week, and they were surprisingly both a lot better and a lot more filling than I expected. I made them from a recipe from Cooking Light magazine and followed it pretty close, but did make a few changes. First, I served it on a normal sized bagel--I was looking for dinner, not appetizers! The first time I made them, I did include the garlic cloves. When I made them again for lunches at work, I left that part out so I wouldn't kill everyone around me with the garlic smell! My only objection to these is using the canned roasted red peppers--they're convenient, which is wonderful, but I had a hard time getting over how slimy they looked and felt pulling them out of the jar. They tasted great, but each time I took I bite I was expecting a mouth full of slime.

Roasted Red Pepper Bagel Sandwiches
My version. These are great, quick and surprisingly filling.

Ingredients

• Plain bagels
• Fat free cream cheese
• 1 jar roasted red peppers (or roast your own to get around the slimy look!)
• 1 clove garlic, minced (optional--when I did this, I used a whole clove on one sandwich and it was good and spicy!)
• Black pepper

Directions

1. Toast the bagel.
2. Meanwhile, combine enough cream cheese for 1 bagel (about 2 big spoonfulls), minced garlic and black pepper and whip them together until well mixed.
3. Coat both sides of the bagel with the cream cheese mix.
4. Add the red pepper.

It's really that fast and simple, and tastes a lot better than I expected with the simple ingredients. Yum.

Happy Easter to everyone tomorrow! Enjoy your jellybeans and deviled eggs :)