Wednesday, 27 November 2002
food, food, glorious food
Had a delightful time cooking in Sally's kitchen yesterday, and drove home feeling thankful for many things...not the least of which was the amazing smell of the still-hot food in my car. (To view larger versions of the photos below, simply click on the small ones.)
This is a not-very-good picture of Sally & Eric's beautiful cobblestone house out in Marion, NY. It doesn't do the house credit...I took it when it was already getting dark, through my car window, so it's dark and blurry. :-( But it is a lovely house. I arrived late, mostly because I'm an idiot. First, I went to an unfamiliar grocery store to buy my supplies, thinking that since it was on the way, it would save time. (Ha! Took me 20 minutes to find the pecans...) Then, as I cruised down I-90 singing to the oldies station, I blew right past the exit, and had to keep going in order to turn around. But I got there.
As noted previously, I had three items on my cooking agenda...the fabulous sweet potato & turnip gratin from Epicurious that we first tried last year, a classic pecan pie, and a maple pecan pumpkin pie. All turned out beautifully.
The gratin is described by the recipe author like this: "The cream and butter make this so delicious your guests will lie in bed and remember it happily all year long. You only serve this kind of dish once in a very long while, so the caloric intake is moderated." Words cannot describe how fabulous this is. Even confirmed turnip-haters like myself cannot resist it. (Really, what wouldn't taste good after being baked for 90 minutes in heavy cream, butter, and imported parmesan?) This is the finished product moments after it came out of the oven.
I decided against the epicurious recipe for the pecan pie, opting instead for the recipe on the Karo syrup bottle. The epicurious recipe had chopped pecans in the filling, and whole ones on top. The Karo recipe called for 1-1/2 cups of whole pecans in the filling--since it's the pecans I love, I decided to go this route and have the pie be mostly pecans with sugar and fat to bind them together. The picture shows the completed pecan pie, with the uncooked pumpkin pie ready to go in the oven. The pumpkin pie has maple flavoring and chopped pecans in it; tomorrow before dinner I'll top it with maple-flavored whipped cream and whole pecans.
let it snow!
Woke up this morning to this beautiful view out my front windows. (Click on the picture for a larger version.) We've been alternating bright sunshine with brief flurries all day, so everything's still sugar-coated.
I do love the way the world looks when it's covered with fresh-fallen snow. Clean, bright, picture-book pretty. A good day to build a snowman with the boys, and then come inside for hot chocolate.
voice
On the phone this morning, talking about blogs (what else? well, plenty, actually), Halley said "it's all about voice."
Still working on my voice, I think. Personal, professional, exuberant, cautious, wide-ranging, focused...where's the right balance? What's a not-yet-tenured professor to do? ;-)
women bloggers
Thursday's NYTimes has an article on women and blogging: Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?). Features Jeneane Sessum and Elaine Kalilily, as well as BlogSisters.
I took a look at my own blogroll. Out of twenty-four blogs (not counting group-authored blogs), six are by women. That's 25%. Pretty close to the % of women in professional computer positions in 2001 (28%, down from 36% in 1990).
But those raw numbers are not a clear indicator of my blog reading habits. Of those twenty-four I count seven that I always read, and that have a significant imact on my own thinking and writing. Of those, three are by men, and four are by women. And as my blogroll has morphed over the past few weeks, I have added more women, and dropped more men. Not because of their gender...but because of their voice.
The article puts it this way:
People who track blogs hate to make generalizations, but many acknowledged that female bloggers often have more of an inward focus, keeping personal diaries about their daily lives.If that is the case, the Venus-Mars divide has made its way into Blogville. Women want to talk about their personal lives. Men want to talk about anything but. So far the people who have received the most publicity (often courtesy of male journalists) appear to be the latter.
I think this is close to the mark, but not exactly right. The "inward focus" rings true, but the "personal diaries" does not. The women whose blogs I read seem to speak with more of a personal and recognizable voice. But what they write goes far beyond a personal diary. They write about research, about law, about information architecture, about copyright, about gender, and about blogs themselves. But they write about them with grace and style, with a voice that is unmistakably theirs, unmistakably personal. I like that.
