I planted some lettuce, caraway and cucumber seeds a few days ago, and all of a sudden they emerged exuberantly from the earth! I’m so proud of them. The picture above is of tiny little lettuce plants.

Yesterday I made an incredibly delicious supper. It went like this: I sauteed some young green garlic in olive oil for a long time, and then I added about 1/3 c coconut milk and some remaining canned tomatoes (perhaps 1/2 c). I had about a half gallon of frozen chickpeas available because I cooked two pounds of dry ones once for hummus some months ago and did not use them all, so I added a couple cups of them to the mixture. I grated in lots of ginger, squeezed in a lime, and liberally sprinkled in coriander, cumin, pepper and tumeric. Then I added a crushed, extremely hot dried pepper*. I cooked some quinoa to go on the side, and ate the whole thing with extremely coarse salt and shredded mint leaves on top. It was delightful and very, very spicy.

*The hot pepper made my evening very adventurous. Many months ago Toby bought a large bag of very hot dried peppers from the market, and shared many of them with me. These peppers are fantastic and quite hot. I have thoughtlessly been crushing them with my bare hands, but I will never ever do it again after the events of last night! After crushing the pepper into the food and covering the pot to simmer for a while, I apparently unknowingly picked my nose because, as I began to do my homework, one of my nostrils began to burn! I tried to wash it off but it’s hard to wash the inside of one’s nose. It went away before too long, though. But then both of my hands began to tingle intensely. This persisted all evening, though when my hands were in motion typing my homework it was hardly noticeable. But when I lay still and tried to fall asleep last night, my skin burned ferociously. It really hurt! I became paranoid that my skin would be permanently damaged, so I returned to the internets to find a remedy. The internets said I should rub my hands with a bit of vegetable oil; I tried that, but it didn’t really help. Somehow I managed to fall asleep (perhaps because I was lightly clutching a towel-wrapped ice pack), and when I woke my hands barely tingled any more. The lesson to take away from all this is that you should probably not coat your skin with capsaicin; it hurts for hours.

Today was a glorious, warm day. Manifolds homework was vastly shorter this week than it has been on every other week, so I managed to spend today doing almost all non-math things. (This never happens.) In the morning I attended the Seattle Cheese Festival and sampled many delightful cheeses from this area and from faraway lands. Then I ate leftovers and strolled around Volunteer Park in Capitol Hill for a long time, stopping by the new location of Molly Moon’s Ice Cream shop on Pine Street on the way back. I did math for a few hours and then attended a late happy hour at Poppy, a very nice restaurant on Broadway, where I dined on eggplant fries. They were delightful.

Finally I will present some cute pictures of the cats. Here is Bea in her favorite place on the windowsill, blocked halfway by Arthur:

Bea again:

And two cute pictures of Arthur, who has matured into a very handsome and elegant cat:

This post is about squash and the delicious bread you can make with it. But first, unrelatedly, here is a recent, pretty picture from my window:

Also unrelatedly, but attractively, here is a dinner I prepared with almost no effort at all: it’s just two types of cabbage (red and savoy) sauteed quickly on high heat with oil and some spices, over rice.

Back in the summer when the getting was good, I took pictures of my market purchases. I freely admit that the winter market is in every way less dazzling than the summer market, but I love it anyway and would like a photographic record of a nice midwinter trip. Thus I give you this: a moderately hulking (yet non-intimidating) ten-pound squash of indeterminate variety, potatoes, golden turnips, a parsnip, impressively crisp and beautiful Fuji apples, and a spriglet of rosemary from one of the plants near my apartment.

The squash was a huge pain to carve, because it was large and hard and my knives are incredibly dull! I long for a high-quality kitchen knife; perhaps I will treat myself to one when I finish this quarter. But that is neither here nor there. I finally managed to chop this one up into four pieces, and refused to divide it further.

I scooped out the seeds, which were curiously large, and lightly oiled the quartered squash. Then I baked it for a long time. I also baked the seeds with what I claim is perfect technique, but they were not remotely tasty. I blame the squash.

I squished up the squash with my hands and froze it for later use. I ended up with twelve cups of squash mush, which will transform into many loaves of bread! This is a batch I made several weeks ago:

And now I present the recipe, which I got from my mom. She, in turn, got it from her friend Karen. Thanks, Karen! It has persisted as my favorite bread throughout most of my life. The recipe yields two moist, delicious loaves. You can put the loaves in greased pans or you can make freeform loaves on a baking stone (or, presumably, on a greased baking sheet). You can use any type of squash, though I strongly recommend you do it with pumpkin whenever you get the chance. I believe that pumpkin is the most glorious of all winter squashes, because it is richly colored and flavored. I also have had great results with delicata and butternut squash. I think a good rule is this: the more flavorful and creamy your squash is, the better your bread will be. Also, a more colorful squash yields a more beautiful bread. I used delicata squash for the bread in the photo above.

Ingredients:
1 T yeast
1/2 c warm water
2 c cooked squash
1/2 c melted butter
2/3 c sugar
1 tsp salt
1 egg, beaten
About 5 c flour

Instructions:
Dissolve yeast in water. Mix squash, butter, sugar, salt and egg into yeast. Gradually add 2 1/2 c flour, beat well. It should have the consistency of very thick batter. Let rise until double. Then add the rest of the flour. Knead. Let rise 1 hour. Form into loaves, rolls or other shapes, let rise. Lightly brush with additional melted butter, bake at 350° until done (about 10-15 min for small rolls, 30 min for loaves).

I would like to issue an open apology for not writing anything interesting, or even anything boring, for the past week and a half! I also must sheepishly note that I do not have photographs for tonight’s post, which is about some of the neatest foods I’ve ever cooked. Evidently I misplaced my camera, and while I’m confident it’ll turn up in the giant pile of clutter that is my apartment, I do not currently know its location.

Anyway, here is a weirdly excellent Valentine’s Day dinner. File it away for next year.
+ Beet and Squash Lasagna
+ Chocolate Orange Custard
+ Cider

I am very proud to admit that beet and squash lasagna was my brilliant idea. In fact it’s quite similar to the spinach and squash lasagna I wrote about in December, except it’s pink, includes smoked cheese, and lacks béchamel sauce (just because we lacked milk; it would be really good with sauce, too!). The ingredients were as follows:
For the pasta: Eggs, flour, salt, one cooked and pureed beet
For the other layers: Delicata and sweet dumpling squashes, nutmeg, salt, pepper, loads of Parmesan cheese, small cubes of smoked cheese from Estrella Family Creamery

We used incredibly delicious farmer’s market eggs for the pasta, which came out to be pleasantly chewy and delightfully, evenly pink. I think it might be even more attractive with two beets instead of one, but one went a long way. I love to make pasta, even though rolling out the dough is incredibly tedious! It’s completely worth it. And I really can’t believe how beautiful and tasty beet pasta is. You should definitely try it sometime; just use any pasta recipe and include a pureed beet, compensating for the additional moisture with flour.

The squash was also really good. I recommend the following procedure for making a squash filling: cut open the squashes and take out the seeds and pulp, cover with a bit of olive oil, and bake (with the skin on) until they start to get crispy on top. Then take them out, peel away the skin, smoosh up the flesh with your fingers, add a bit of salt and pepper, and grate in an astonishing quantity of nutmeg.

The lasagna ended up looking as if it were made of ham, since the noodles were flat and pink. It also smelled like ham, because of the smoked cheese. It was kind of ridiculous, and also fantastic. I will definitely make this again, with pictures.

The custard was similarly adventurous; it consisted of eggs, half-and-half, sugar, baking chocolate, orange zest and orange juice. The melted chocolate hilariously froze back into hard little drops when we added it to the cold eggs, but re-melted almost all the way when we added the warm milk and cream. I find custard to be truly amazing; I am always shocked when it actually works. This particular batch was very nicely textured, though it could have used a lot more chocolate. Also, the chocolate was weirdly grainy (probably from repeatedly freezing and melting).

The cider was from the market too. I had never tried hard cider, and I think it’s good.

I think it’s neat that lots of the ingredients we used came from local farms, namely: beets, squash, eggs, half-and-half, smoked cheese, cider. I eat really well from the farmer’s market, even now that it’s February. I am afraid of the day my favorite apple stand runs out of fruit, though. It’s drawing near; they sold the last of their Honeycrisps weeks ago and have since exhausted their Braeburns. It’s down to Fujis and Jonagolds. I suppose I will buy semitropical Californian fruit when that day comes, and I will probably enjoy the variety because I’ve eaten apples almost exclusively since the other local fruit ran out in October or so, but I will still be sad. I’m very lucky to love apples so much, since that’s really all the market has had for a long time.

The squashes are also running low at the market, which is similarly sad. But potatoes, cabbage, carrots and beets are plentiful, and there will always be Estrella Family Creamery cheese. I am excited for summer at the market, but I am happy to eat roots for the time being!

Math is good lately, though certainly still hard and stressful. We just did the Riemann Mapping Theorem in complex analysis and everyone in the class learned the proof really well because we all suspect it’ll be on the midterm. In algebra we have been studying modules for several weeks, and I like them more than I expected to. We started vector fields in manifolds class and I still don’t understand them fully, but did a lot of good work with my classmates this weekend and am much more comfortable with them than I was mere days ago.

Tomorrow I have no school, so I will celebrate with pancakes and, hopefully, a proof of Reeb’s Theorem: if M is a compact smooth n-manifold that admits a Morse function with precisely two critical points, then M is homeomorphic to the n-sphere Sⁿ!

Pasta Ingredients: flour, eggs, water, spinach
Other Ingredients: milk, butter, flour, mushrooms, olive oil, Parmesan cheese, pumpkin
Edit: The full recipe is now transcribed!

Toby and I made an amazing lasagna yesterday, completely from scratch. We used a Mark Bittman recipe for the pasta and approximated another Mark Bittman recipe for the lasagna. I love making pasta; it’s incredibly satisfying and delicious. Also, the kitchen smells like eggs for hours afterwards. This particular pasta contained a lot of spinach, and hence was extremely green in hue.

Speaking of eggs, I poked two small holes in one of the eggs and successfully used my breath to force the contents of the egg outside the shell without breaking it! I had never tried that before; it was kind of cool.

The mushrooms were amazing. We got two kinds from the U-District market: hedgehogs and black trumpets. I sauteed them in butter, olive oil and rosemary. The pumpkin was also incredibly good: it came from the market too, and it was richly orange and flavorful. I squished it up into a smooth-ish puree with my hands, which was enjoyable in the way that squishing wet sand through one’s fingers is enjoyable. (Except perhaps even more so.)

Here is the first layer: pasta, pumpkin, mushrooms, cheese, béchamel sauce. It repeated thrice.

Here are all the layers, topped with another half-layer of pasta, cheese and béchamel. The snowy stuff is the cheese.

This is the finished product. It was really good.

I made some unusually soupy cranberry sauce for a side dish. It was also delicious, though it could have used a bit more texture.

Mmm, cranberries. I should stock up on them before the holiday season is over.

Vacation is great. On Thursday I successfully shopped for striped sweaters, and then ate Crackly Spongy Bread with Gruyère cheese for supper. In the evening I watched an episode of the worst TV show ever (some fifteen-year-old British sitcom, I guess; Dustin had it for some reason) and slept for a long, long time.

On Friday I lunched on more Crackly Spongy Bread, this time with assorted cheeses and rosemary, and then visited the Henry Art Gallery for the first time. This museum locates itself on the UW campus and is free for people affiliated with the university. There were lots of weird video exhibits and also a really beautiful set of giant photographs called On the Beach. The pictures were oddly serene, even as they made the subjects look impossibly tiny against huge expanses of water. I might go back to look at the exhibit again.

Then I patronized a Wallingford ice cream shop called Molly Moon’s, even though it was wet and moderately cold outside. The ice cream (coffee flavored, with hot fudge) was delicious and I will definitely be back!

The evening consisted of two incredibly crusty pizzas, which I deemed a great success. One might even have been a little too crispy, which isn’t something I’d ever have expected to say. Amazing!

Today was similarly spectacular. I visited the U-District market even though I’m leaving for Minnesota in four days (gosh!), and I bought lots of brussels sprouts. Then I had the best lunch ever at a popular, tiny establishment called Thai Tom. It’s just about twice as big as Al’s Breakfast in Minneapolis — which is to say, they have bar seating at the counter and then about four small tables lined against the wall — and the chefs cook with lots of flames and oil right in front of you. I got yellow curry with tofu (and without the fish sauce), and with four (out of five) spiciness stars. It was really delicious. It was the kind of curry I used to make all the time, except way better. I am newly inspired to make amazing, spicy yellow curry!

Tonight I helped to stuff some delicata squashes with mushrooms and rice, and also made potato-leek soup. There is leftover mushroomy rice, which pleases me greatly!

Also, it’s snowing! I know it’ll be gone when I wake up, but I like to watch it out the window tonight.

… I will be completely done with my first quarter of grad school. Gosh!

Until then, though, I won’t be doing much besides math. I mention this publicly just so no one is surprised when I don’t update until 10 December.

But you should definitely come back here in a week, or maybe a week and two days, to see all the amazing food I will have made once vacation starts! It will include, but certainly not be limited to, the following:

And happy December! I love December most of all. It’s beginning to feel a lot like April here, but I can make it till later this month. Then I will be in Minnesota, where the winters are reasonable.

By now Thanksgiving break is nearly over and I’m nearly ready to tackle the final ten days of my first quarter of grad school. I spent all of the time between my birthday and last Wednesday doing math (except for occasional bread-baking and market-visiting), so I really enjoyed the holiday.

The break has been really nice. After class on Wednesday I helped to make a soup of beets, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes and delicata squash. Then I celebrated Thanksgiving with a spectacular meal at Dustin’s family’s house. Yesterday I cooked a multitude of dishes and visited the Fremont Troll for the first time, and today I ate at a tofu restaurant in the International District and also saw Milk. I recommend the movie very highly.

Tomorrow I’ll go to the Ballard market and do some math, and then my Last Ten Days will commence. Gosh!

Yesterday’s market haul: An obscene number of apples (for pie!), a pumpkin, six huge beets and their leaves, chanterelles, garlic, Concord grapes, kiwis, Gouda cheese, “Black Creek Buttery” cheddar cheese, and a little pizza for lunch!

Oh, and I had espresso for the first time in three years. I enjoyed it.

Yesterday’s supper was pasta topped with the following: chanterelles, garlic, grapes, beet greens, and a basil flower. (Somehow my basil plant produced an attractive and tasty flower, even though the days are short and cloudy lately.)

I also made some nice bread loaves to bring to a Halloween party yesterday. Someone else brought Brie, so it was perfect! I also learned some stuff about complex analysis yesterday, though I’m still worried about tomorrow’s test.

The answer to the puzzle is that yes, it’s possible to shrink the circle to a point without intersecting the threaded line. So if we were sewing in 4-space, we’d have to design new needles. Fortunately no one sews in 4-space.

A puzzle for you: Suppose you have a line and a circle in four-dimensional space, with the line sticking through the circle like an infinitely long thread through the eye of a needle. Can you smoothly shrink the circle until it is just a point, without ever breaking the circle and without ever intersecting the line?

I finished my first midterm test! It was in manifolds class and I am pleased with it. I had two days to complete three questions plus a possible extra-credit question, and I didn’t do much else for those two days. In particular, I didn’t do my algebra homework — but that’s okay, since we get one free late assignment and I hadn’t used mine yet.

The questions were interesting and I’m quite proud of one of my solutions; I think I hit that one right on the nose. It’s funny that I’m so happy about that one because it’s the one I was most confused about right up until yesterday evening. But eventually I saw the light and it all worked out perfectly! I definitely had reasonable ideas about the other two problems, but I think I failed to show a couple parts in sufficiently rigorous detail.

Then I celebrated with delicious food, including a second beautiful pain d’epi in all its crusty splendor. Did you know that beets are spectacular when sauteed in butter? They’re wonderful anyway, but this preparation elevates them to higher levels of delectability. I think I need to buy twice my normal supply of beets tomorrow and try this method out myself. I also hope to purchase a pumpkin, some kiwis and a decent supply of Concord grapes. Then I will attend a Halloween party, hopefully not in costume as the Liouville Theorem.

I have a complex analysis test on Monday that I’m much less excited about. But then there’s just Election Day, which will consist of pie and ice cream and, I claim, much celebration!

I voted today. Thanks, John McCain! (In case you didn’t hear: he sent me an absentee ballot request, which made it really easy for me to vote against him.)

Last night I stayed at school until 12:45 AM, and then was back about eight hours later this morning. It was crazy. One of the problems (for algebra class) was really long, and between about six of us we got a nice solution. Each of us contributed at least one substantive piece of the proof. It was exciting. Eventually we let p float and obtained a contradiction, as directed.

I celebrated Friday by baking my very first pain d’epi, which was deformed but delicious. I ate it instantly, so I didn’t have time to photograph it. My supper consisted of that and a big tasty pile of cooked squash, carrots and cauliflower.