A Rainbow to the South

I saw a rainbow the other day on my way home from work.  A real rainbow.  I had to pause and admire it.  It was directly south of me as I stood on Chicago Avenue, outside the Jewel-Osco.  This rainbow was fat and glorious, and it reached straight up into the clouds, a ribbon of color just hanging from the sky.  I was surprised to see it, but I’m always surprised to see rainbows.  I see images of rainbows all the time—I do live in Chicago, after all, home of several famously gay neighborhoods, some of which are decorated festively with rainbows—but it’s rare that I see a real rainbow.  The real ones are much more magical, shimmering elusively in the air.  They lie just out of reach; we can never touch them or find that pot of gold at the bottom.  Rainbows exist for beauty and imagination and to remind us that illusion can be a pleasure and, likewise, pleasure can be an illusion.

The fact that this rainbow stood directly south of me felt apropos.  Just days earlier I delivered an answer to the biggest question I have ever faced: this fall, I will be moving to Texas to start a postdoctoral position at Texas A & M University.  From where I sit right now, Texas is very, very far south.

Why Texas?  The short answer is chance.  I have spent many hours this year thinking about what to do next with my life.  I thought long and hard about science: do I still want to do science?  If not, then what?  But if yes, then what?  I cycled through all sorts of career possibilities.  With some of them, I tried on that career for a spell.  For a while, I was going to teach high school science.  I had lunch with a chemistry teacher whose science fair I had judged in December.  We talked about all sorts of things, including teaching, and at the end of our lunch her advice surprised me.  “It sounds like you do want to teach at the college level,” she said.  “You can always teach high school, but this is like your one shot to be a professor.  You should go for it.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this advice or something similar to it.  But graduate school beat me down, made me question all of my career aspirations, drained me of any ambition, replaced my excitement with bitter cynicism.  The obvious solution was to leave science because clearly science was to blame for all of my misery.  Or was it?  The truth is that yes, science is difficult, but my unhappiness was a multifactorial equation, and I was part of it.  The interesting question was this: if we change part of the equation, what will the result be?

And that’s where Texas comes into the picture.  After lunch with my friend Cheryl the chemistry teacher, I thought long and hard about what a postdoc could be for me.  Clearly it needed to be something other than Graduate School, Part 2.  What if I were more independent, more excited about my work, less scared of my boss?  What if I weren’t in Chicago, with its six brutal months of winter every year?  What if I lived in a place where warm is the default setting, where I almost certainly will not be wearing a wool coat in June?  What if I gave this PhD a chance to really show off?  As I let these questions seep into my brain, it became very clear to me that there were a lot of unknowns and until that moment, I was so convinced that a postdoc would be awful that I wasn’t even willing to consider otherwise.  For all my scientific training, I was unable to see that graduate school, like every experience, is just an experiment.  Change the conditions, get a different result.  It’s that simple.

Finally, I was warmed up to the possibility of a postdoc.  I was still very skeptical, and I certainly wasn’t excited, but I was ready to look and see what I could find.  My friend Josh reminded me to focus on the process, which got me thinking: what do I like about science?  What do I find fascinating?  The answer was simple: I like behavior.  I like flies.  I like molecular biology.  I like experiments.  I like sex.  When I mixed all those things together, I came up with this plan: look for labs that study sexual behavior in fruit flies.  Bingo.

Surprisingly, I found just one lab in the United States that has published a significant number of papers in this area: Hubert Amrein’s lab, located in sunny Durham, North Carolina.  How wonderful!, I thought.  I love Durham!  It’s in the South!  It’s warm!  It’s beautiful!  Nervously, I contacted Dr. Amrein about a position, expecting nothing.  To my surprise, he e-mailed me back quickly and enthusiatically.  One thing led to another, I interviewed with his lab, and boom: job offer.  I was absolutely elated.  The problem was that a week after that, I had a second job offer, this one at the University of Iowa.  It was a great offer, and I was utterly torn between them.

But wait, there was another twist.  Dr. Amrein’s lab was in Durham but it wouldn’t be for much longer, because he had accepted a position at Texas A & M University in College Station, Texas, just a 45-minute car ride from Houston.  Texas?  Seriously?  What?  It was such a bizarre twist, and now my job offer had this totally unknown factor in it: the Texas factor.  What could I possibly think about Texas, having never been there and being filled with all sorts of Northern fears about Texas?  Like, it’s hot.  Really freakin’ hot.  There’s no water—it’s a desert down there, right?  All they eat is beef, corn-fed beef, that they purchased with their oil revenues.  They’ve never even heard of a vegetarian, let alone met one.  Everyone sounds like George W. Bush and they all say “nu-cu-ler” instead of “nu-cleeee-ar,” the way it’s supposed to be pronounced.  And everyone is an evangelical Christian, trying to save the souls of us poor, unbelieving heathens.  God, it sounded like hell.

And yet, Matt had recently moved to Texas, also for work.  He was loving it, but then again, he’s a Southerner.  (Although, to be honest, I don’t know how he pronounces nuclear.  I’ll check and get back to you.)  Once Texas became the home of someone I adore, I started paying more attention to it.  For one thing, the weather in Texas sure looks nice in March.  And I’ve always wanted to live in the South, at least for a little while.  Texas, to my mind, seemed exotic and interesting.  Also, Matt told me today that there are lots of swimming pools in Texas, which is good because I have too many bikinis that I never wear.  I realized that Texas could be a wonderful place to spend a few years as a postdoc.  It could be my next big adventure, in a big beautiful state.

With my two job offers in mind, I proceeded to ignore my decision for a week.  The two offers seemed perfectly balanced; I couldn’t choose between them, and if I chose one, I couldn’t lose.  They were amazing offers, and I wanted to accept both positions.  I knew I couldn’t, but I just wasn’t ready to choose.  Finally, I made a list.  I scribbled down all the things that mattered to me, and I ranked each offer according to these objective criteria.  Then I tallied up the scores and announced the results to myself: I was moving to Texas.

Yes, Texas.  Now that all the hard work is behind me, I’m excited about my new job.  I feel confident that I have what it takes to be successful.  I have this sense of knowing what I’m getting myself into, and knowing what it takes to muddle through the bad times in the lab.  My new boss is very excited about me joining the lab, and I feel hopeful that we will work well together.  But we shall see.  Like the rainbow, these impressions of mine are illusory: the reality may resemble the illusion, but I’ll never find the pot of gold at the bottom.  I hope to be surprised and delighted by what I find  during my next adventure.  I hope they have good grocery stores and farmers’ markets in College Station.  Most of all, I hope I find inspiration.  I’ll take that over a pot of gold any day of the week.

Make It Dirty, Make It Clean

Does unwrapping a banana and slathering it, bite by bite, with peanut butter count as cooking?  If so, then I have been doing a lot of cooking.  If not, then I’ve been doing a lot of uncooking.

Summer is the season of uncooking, and I for one could not be happier.  Between the gloriously warm weather and writing my PhD thesis, I haven’t much time for elaborate cooking plans.  In addition, I’m finding thesis-writing to be strangely exhausting.  It’s almost an exclusively mental exercise, but I find myself physically exhausted after a few hours of serious concentration.  My brain isn’t capable of handling much in the way of recipes right now.

But I love to putter in the kitchen these days, even if I am in a state of Thesis Daze.  The puttering feels wonderfully refreshing after all that time in front of my computer.  It’s a chance to stand up, stretch my legs, fix myself a snack.  My thesis looms so large and unknown in front of me that mundane tasks are tangibly rewarding.  That’s good news, because one mundane task in particular has been giving me trouble, and that’s my sink full of dirty dishes.

Dishes.  I have grown to hate them.  Why is it that after I do all the hard work of feeding myself that I still have to deal with piles of dirty dishes?  Haven’t I done enough?  Can’t I just throw the dirty dishes in the trash with the other stuff I don’t want?  This is, I think, my rebellion after six years of serious home cooking with no dishwasher.  For six years now, I have been washing all my dishes by hand, and I don’t think I can take it any more.  I desperately need either a dishwashing machine or a handsome, hungry man who will let me feed him in exchange for dealing with the mess I make.  Matt is a rather sexy dishwasher and he usually shows up at my door ready to eat, but he’s here far too infrequently to be a reliable solution to my dilemma.  He would be none too pleased with me if I saved up three months’ worth of dirty dishes for him to wash while he visits me!

For now, there is a different man helping me get my kitchen back in order.  His name is Jace Everett, and while I don’t know if he’s a cookin’ man, I do know he’s a singin’ man.  He just put out his second album, Red Revelations, and it is a gem.  You may have heard his song “Bad Things”—it’s the theme song for HBO’s True Blood—and while “Bad Things” has been included as an extra treat on the new album, Jace is so much more than a one-hit wonder.  Red Revelations is lusty, edgy, ironic, and smart.  I’ve listened to it every day since it arrived in my mailbox.  It’s all I really want to hear.  Best of all, it’s the perfect sonic accompaniment to scrubbing all those dirty dishes to shiny wet perfection.

One of my favorite songs on the album is the first track, “Possession.”  It grabbed me the first time I heard it.  I felt like a woman possessed!  The song is about lust, plain and simple.  On the surface, its meaning seems pretty clear: Possession, Why don’t you own me? Name it and claim it babe, I’m your possession.

But I think (and this is what I love about Jace’s lyrics) that by making such an offer, the narrator is trying to control his own lust.  Seize control by giving it up?  It seems rather circular, but let’s not get carried away here; it’s just a song.  An even better set of lyrics from “Possession” sounds a little like this: Naked dirty, Naked clean. Make it quick or make a scene.

Or that’s what I thought at first.  Replace “naked” with “make it” and you have the actual lyrics, not the ones my dirty mind filled in for itself.  I use the real lyrics as my clean-up anthem: Make it dirty, make it clean!  It’s not quite as sexy, but it works for me.

Uncooking is much sexier than washing dishes.  As a bonus, there are fewer dishes to wash!  Jace goes well here too, even if I’m making a girly salad with strawberries and a honey-balsamic dressing.  This is exquisite: a palate cleanser featuring crisp greens, juicy red strawberries, and a drizzle of puckery-sweet dressing.  I’ve been lucky enough to get the greens and berries at my farmers’ market.  Local strawberries won’t be around for much longer this season, so I wanted to slip this salad into the recipe archives before it’s too late.

The combination of strawberries and balsamic vinegar is an old Italian trick.  There’s a reason it’s a classic: it is delicious, especially if the strawberries are very sweet or you give them a little help with a sprinkling of sugar.  Either way, the combination heightens the sweet-tart flavors present in both ingredients.  The perfumes burst forth like a summer thunderstorm, but afterward the mouth feels clean and sparkly.  By combining that effect with salad greens, it’s doubly refreshing.  Here I must confess I have an unusual habit: I often prefer to eat my salad after the main course.  It feels more enjoyable to me that way.  My hunger has been sated, and I can better appreciate all the subtle flavors in fresh produce.  If I try to eat a salad before the main course, I’m usually too ravenous to really notice it—it’s just food.  But afterward, a salad can be a work of art.

When one is writing a thesis, it is hard to make time for art, but one still has to eat.  I find it handy to have a salad that, with just a few minutes of uncooking, can be beautiful, unfussy, and very easy to eat.  It gives me hope that I’ll finish this thesis and have enough energy to celebrate at the finish line.

Salad with Crisp Greens, Strawberries, and Honey-Balsamic Dressing

Serves 1

Salads are often an opportunity to trot out your very best ingredients, and this one is no exception.  My friend Shawn Marie shared with me a pour of the fancy balsamic vinegar she picked out at Whole Foods, and it is delightful in the dressing here.  So if you’ve got a high-quality balsamic, don’t hesitate to use it here—you will be amply rewarded.

2-3 crisp leaves of green leaf or Romaine lettuce

5-6 perfect small strawberries

1 tbsp. honey

1 tbsp. best-quality balsamic vinegar

1)  Prep the  lettuce leaves by rinsing, drying, and tearing them into bite-sized pieces.  Prep the strawberries by rinsing them off, drying them gently, slicing off the green tops, and then slicing the berries into thin slices.  Pile the lettuce on a plate and artfully arrange the strawberries over it.

2)  Whisk together the honey and balsamic vinegar.  Drizzle it over the strawberries and lettuce.  You may not want all of it; in which case, save it for another salad later!  Serve the salad, either as a starter course or (the way I like it) as a palate cleanser between the main course and dessert.

Seeking Recommendations

Dear readers, I have upgraded!  Consider this my pilot post written with Windows Live Writer, a program which I hope will solve my blogging woes.  Internet Explorer 8 will not allow me (and, apparently, anyone else) to copy text from a Word document into Blogger.  Weird!  With as many words as I write, it was very clear to me that this was unacceptable.  The wonky formatting on yesterday’s post was a result of using Firefox.  I thought funky Firefox was a better choice than not posting my piece at all.  Still, I was not happy.  Let’s consider today’s post an experiment.  Everything is an experiment when you are a scientist, especially one who is on the cusp of getting three little letters after her name.

I do have an actual purpose for this post, and that is to seek your recommendations regarding a new laptop computer. The Dell I use now is not really my computer; it belongs to my lab.  When I graduate in September(!), I should give it back.  In the meantime, I need to buy myself a computer.  I’m looking for a PC that has a decent amount of space for storing data.  It must come with built-in wireless ability (although I here it’s rare for a new computer not to have this—true?) and not weigh a thousand pounds.  I like the size of my current computer (about 10.5” x 12.5” x 2”) and wouldn’t mind finding something with similar dimensions.  I can be flexible about the price because I firmly believe you get what you pay for, and I will be using this new computer every day for a long time.

Do you have any suggestions for brands or models I should check out?  Which stores have the best service for computer customers?  Any happy stories about recent computer purchases?  Or, on the flip side, are there any warnings you want to offer?  Advice you wish someone had shared with you before you wasted your money on a crappy machine?

I thank you in advance for your words of wisdom!  Have a beautiful day, dear readers.

Toddler Charm

My niece Lydia is possibly the most wonderful thing to ever happen to me.

I didn’t have much to do with her coming into my life. Her parents did all the work on that end of things, and they continue to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to taking care of her. My job, as I see it, is to have as much fun with her as possible. It seems a little unfair that I do no work and I am rewarded with big smiles, laughter, and endearing requests from Lydia to hold her, play with her, help her. I never say no to those requests.

Since I am her aunt, I suppose I am doing my job when I spend time with her. We make up games, play catch together, and tag-team it on the swings: I push, she swings. (Her parents watch us nervously.) Being with Lydia is magical; she casts her little toddler charm on me and I’m a goner. I feel so very blessed by her presence in my life. We get along so well, like we were meant to be together. Ever since Lydia joined our family almost three years ago, I have felt that she was always meant to be with us, like she’s always been with us, but we just didn’t know it until she was born.

Her mom, Amanda, likes to say that Lydia showed signs of being her dad’s daughter early in life. She’s always been opinionated, strong-willed, and independent. You just can’t force her to do something she doesn’t want to do. But I think it’s clear she’s also her mom’s daughter: Lydia is a kind, happy, generous person. Her smile feels like sunshine, and her voice sparkles like Lake Michigan in the morning. I am totally and completely smitten with this child. I couldn’t anticipate feeling this way about her before she was born. I knew I would love her, but my love for her humbles me. I feel small compared to this love.

Last weekend Lydia and her parents made the drive out to Chicago to visit me. It was Lydia’s first visit, although Amanda tells me that Lydia swears she remembers the last visit, the one where she was a bun in the oven. On Friday night, my door buzzer hollered, and I let my guests into the building. Then I bounced down the stairs to meet them. Lydia was ascending the stairs, slowly, one two-footed stair at a time: up left, up right, stop. Up left, up right, stop. She walked ahead of Amanda and Charlie, holding the banister, looking steady, and smiling a toothy grin at me as I came into view. My first thought was the same first thought I have every time I see her: She looks so grown-up! Followed by She’s so beautiful! This niece of mine is quite possibly the most gorgeous little creature I’ve ever seen, with her blonde (“lellow,” she says) curls, round cheeks, and blue eyes framed by long, dark lashes. But what got me was her smile, because it mirrored exactly the way I felt upon seeing her again. So much joy and excitement tucked into that little face! My heart was literally buoyed up by the sight of her, so happy to finally be here, ready for a weekend of trains and big city fun.

Truth be told, we didn’t do much in the way of planning for this trip. My family is not big on elaborate plans, and Lydia’s parents are especially fond of spontaneous plans. When all your plans involve a two-year-old, it’s best to stay flexible and keep things simple. So that’s what we did. On Friday night, after unwinding a bit at my place while Lydia ran across my living room ten thousand times, we went to Dixie Kitchen, one of my favorite Evanston restaurants, for a Cajun dinner. Food is a little tricky with Lydia and Amanda; between the two of them they are gluten-, corn-, and dairy-free. Charlie and I have iron stomachs—we can eat anything. Cajun food provided simple meat-and-vegetable options for our free-eaters and delicious meals for everyone. Before dinner, Lydia received a picture, crayons, and a toy crocodile. She proceeded to feed the crayons to her “dinosaur” and asked us to take down the tricycle which was suspended from the ceiling (campy restaurant décor at its finest). Although there was no tricycle-riding (alas), a fine night was had by all.

The next day, after a morning of shopping at the farmers’ market and Whole Foods, Daphna and Ian met us at my place for a simple lunch of stew and salad. I really wanted to have at least one home-cooked meal with my family while they were here, but coming up with a decent meal to feed us is nothing to sneeze at. I settled on a chickpea and rice stew seasoned with cumin and smoked paprika. This stew is a very nice riff on beans-n-greens. It’s the kind of recipe that belongs in every repertoire. I was inspired by a bag of fresh spinach, thriftiness, and these three fine recipes. The spices and chickpeas give it a faintly exotic edge, but it’s wonderfully homey and comforting at the same time. It’s also one of the first recipes to raise its hand when I ask for a main dish free of gluten, corn, and dairy, but at the same time, it will happily accept additions, such as cheese. I imagine sausage would be delicious here too—the spicy flavors would take kindly to a rich, meaty texture. Make no mistake though: this stew is very good without any extras.

The salad was a fruit salad. Its assembly reminded me of stone soup, where ingredients come from all over the place. At the farmers’ market, we found fresh blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries. Amanda had brought grapes, so we threw some of those in as well, along with a diced mango from my kitchen table. Lydia, my little mango monkey, kept asking for more mango from the fruit salad, so Amanda poked around with the serving spoon, retrieving one piece of mango at a time. Mango is just one of many things Lydia feels strongly about!

On Sunday morning, we met in the kitchen, this time for a homestyle breakfast prepared by Amanda. While she made French toast* and bacon, Lydia discovered my high heels and realized what great fun it would be to wear them. The problem, though, is that if you’ve recently learned how to walk, putting on a pair of heels is verrrrry tricky. Sometimes she sat down, put them on, and let me stand her up. Other times she’d sort of bend over so that she could brace herself with her hands, put the shoes on, and then push herself up to standing. Either way, she would end up on her feet and announce, “I’m wearing high heels!” Indeed! Then she would clomp around my apartment, as pleased as can be, making all sorts of racket. I only hope my downstairs neighbor will forgive me—I forgot to warn him there’d be a toddler in my apartment on Sunday morning! In between high heel sessions, there was plenty of time for tickling, Slinky, and pulling every item off the front of my refrigerator. I miss Lydia terribly now.

Sometimes I think about Lydia as a teenager, and it freaks me out. I’m not ready for her to be that grown-up. I think about her facing all sorts of scary things, like mean kids, peer pressure, sex, and drugs, and I wish I could just snuggle her against my hip and keep her there forever, safe and protected. It’s a great relief to me that even after not seeing her for six months, she is almost the same child I kissed good-bye in December. Now she’s shed her bulky diaper (hurray for potty-training!) and her gait has lost the slight waddle that newly bipedal toddlers show. She’s got a mouthful of teeth and a bigger vocabulary, including her favorite question, why? She understands so much now! But when I see her in a cluster of other kids, like when she was playing in the water-splurting thing at the Lincoln Park Zoo, I realize how very tiny she is and how we have so much more time to enjoy together before she’ll want to pretend she’s not related to us old fogies. Seeing her in my high heels, her baby feet dwarfed by those giant grown-up shoes, made me laugh again and again. Is there anything more symbolic of childhood than playing dress-up in your mom’s (or aunt’s) shoes? Is there anything more adorable than my Lydia wearing heels? I doubt it.

In her two-year-old way, Lydia reminds me once again that ours is a special bond. From her I discover what it means to be learning everything for the first time. From me she discovers what it means to be a woman with no kids and no husband, someone who can focus all of her attention on Lydia when they are together. I’m a sort of alternate reality to the family life that Lydia experiences every day: I’m family, but I’m not a mama. I own all sorts of cool grown-up toys, like high heels and swizzle sticks, but I’d rather play with Lydia when she’s around. I don’t wear a wedding ring, but I have a “boyfriend,” whatever THAT means. The whole thing is just very confusing when you’re tiny. I have a lot to teach my Lydia, but for now I think we’ll just take our time.

* For those of you who are curious, yes, Amanda did make dairy- and gluten-free French toast, which was pretty amazing. She found a gluten-free bread in the freezer section at Whole Foods. For the custard, she used eggs and Odwalla’s Mango Tango, a fruit smoothie thickened with banana pureé. I think the Mango Tango worked quite well in place of milk, and it’s awfully tasty on its own. I may have to replace the jug they left behind…

Lydia’s Stew (or Chickpea and Rice Stew)

Serves 4-6, depending on what else is on the menu

Lydia loves to slurp soup broth, so I thought a nice brothy stew would be perfect for lunch. She liked this broth, but she absolutely LOVED the basmati rice that Daphna cooked for us to eat with the stew. At the end of the meal, there may have been more rice on her shirt than in her belly, but no matter: lunch was a success!

A word about the greens: I like spinach best here, with the leaves thinly sliced and the stems finely chopped. But my brother found a handsome bunch of kale at the farmers’ market, so that’s what we used last weekend. He prepped the kale by removing the stems and tearing the leaves into bite-sized pieces. Really, I think most hearty greens will work here—just choose one you like and go with that.

Several cups of basmati rice

4 cups vegetable stock

2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

2 medium onions, chopped

2 tsp. smoked paprika

2 tsp. cumin seeds

A shake or two of red chile pepper flakes (I left these out for Lydia’s sake, but I’d definitely keep them in when cooking for adult palates)

4 cloves of garlic, chopped

4 cups or more of chopped or bite-sized greens (see headnote)

2 15-oz. cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed

Salt and pepper to taste

Cheese, such as feta, for serving

Hot sauce, for serving (this one’s for Charlie)

1) Get the rice going: prepare it according to the package’s instructions.

2) While the rice cooks, prepare the stew. Heat the stock over low heat. Pour the olive oil into a separate soup pot and heat over medium-low heat. Add the onions and sauté for several minutes until softened. Add the paprika, cumin, red chile pepper flakes, and garlic, and cook for another minute.

3) Add the greens to the onion sauté and let them cook for 30-60 seconds, stirring frequently, to wilt them into the pot. Pour the warm stock over the greens and bring everything to a boil. Turn down the heat and let the stew simmer, covered, for about 10 minutes.

4) Add the chickpeas, bring the stew to a bubble, cover, and simmer for another 10 minutes. The goal here is to make the chickpeas nice and tender, so taste one and if it isn’t soft and silky, simmer for a few more minutes. Repeat until the chickpeas are perfect. Taste the stew and adjust the seasonings with salt and/or pepper.

5) Scoop the rice into bowls and top with the stew. Serve alongside any additions, such as cheese or hot sauce.

On Lunch, Skybound and with Wheat Berries

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Greetings from an eastbound CTA train, dear reader! I’m aboard the Blue Line, enjoying a dusky Chicago skyline and looking forward to a night of sleeping in my own bed. I have completed my interview circuit and now I have a week to decide between two job offers.

I am of course grateful to have two awesome positions on the table, but more than that, I’m grateful I won’t be traveling anywhere for at least a month (hopefully longer, but I’ll try not to be greedy here). Traveling is exhausting; traveling for job interviews is strange sort of exhaustion. I’ve found that as long as I am “on,” I don’t feel the exhaustion at all. But as soon as I’m left alone, I collapse in a heap on the hotel bed, utterly spent by the sheer effort it takes to be pleasant, enthusiastic, and brilliant. My postdoc interviews have had this lovely break between late afternoon and dinner during which I get dropped off at a hotel and I can crawl into bed for a nice nap. Right before that, I strip off all my fancy interview clothes: high heels(!), stockings, skirt, conservative little sweater. My whole body breathes a sigh of relief and for a few blissful hours, we forget about science and trying to impress people. I wake up later, drunk with sleep, but refreshed and ready to rock and roll.

In science, we have a saying from Louis Pasteur that comes in handy: Chance favors the prepared mind. I think it’s also applicable to traveling. It’s important to plan wisely when trying to catch a plane. One never knows when she’ll be stranded in the Eastern Iowa Airport for three hours with nary a homemade crumb to eat, forced to suffer bad cheese quesadillas at a bar where not even a single salad is vegetarian. (I’m not bitter, really!) Traveling is hard on us control freaks because we give up so much of the thing that makes us tick: predictability. Who knows if the plane will be on time, if the weather will be favorable for airborne cruising, if the person sitting next to us on the plane will have a few cracks in his windshield? If I were a praying sort of person, I would pray that my god work these things out for me ahead of time, but instead, I just pack a lunch and know that even if everything else goes wrong, at least my noontime meal will be good.

As misfortune would have it though, an airborne lunch presents its own difficulties. My entire repertoire of soups is off-limits, unless I measure out an itty-bitty three-ounce portion to conform to TSA regulations on liquids. Anything else worth considering must taste good at room temperature; otherwise lunch will be disappointing. Lunch must not require refrigeration or else I can count on a rather unpleasant visit to the emergency room later that day. No meal is worth that.

So what’s left? In a word: salad. When I travel, salad is my friend. It doesn’t mind if it has to sit in my bag for a few hours. It won’t complain if it gets tossed around a bit on the journey. The flavors wait patiently for me to dig my fork into them. It easily passes TSA inspection, unlike my laptop computer which was swabbed for chemicals on my way to North Carolina last week. I don’t even know what I would have done if they’d confiscated that! But my salad didn’t even get a second glance, which made my belly happy. It would have been a much less pleasant trip if they’d taken my salad away, especially since my super-early morning made my belly grumble by about 11 AM.

Right before a trip, I am usually running around like a maniac, trying to get ten thousand things done before I leave. A salad that can be prepped well ahead of time is my traveling dream. How about a salad that keeps so well in the fridge that it can be dinner one night and—almost without thinking—a skybound-lunch the next day? Dear reader, I give you the recipe for an almost-magical wheat berry salad, courtesy of Vegetarian Times. It was featured in an article on make-ahead foods that keep and travel well. My heart pounds in excitement just thinking about this recipe! It features a jumble of unusual ingredients: chewy wheat berries, herbally crunchy fennel, salty olives, plump sweet raisins, creamy cheese, and the almost Cheez-It®-like flavor of roasted pistashios. (Surely I’m not the only one who thinks pistashios taste like Cheez-Its®?) If you’re fancy, you can serve the salad over a bed of crisp greens, but I have found that this salad is great even without the greens or the cheese. It’s a salad that tries to cover all its flavor bases, and it could have been a horrible clash of tastes, but somehow, it works. Magically, it works.

Even though I don’t plan to board any more planes for a while, I plan to make this salad all summer long. Maybe when I make my next bowlful, I’ll use that time to contemplate which lab I should join. If the salad helps me make that decision, I’ll declare it magical indeed.

Summertime Wheat Berry Salad
Adapted from Vegetarian Times
Makes 4-6 main-dish servings

1 1/2 cups cooked wheat berries, cool or at room temperature (start with 1/2 cup dried wheat berries)
1 15-oz. can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
1 small bulb fennel, sliced as thinly as you can manage
1/4 cup raisins
1-2 shallots, finely chopped
8 olives, any kind (pick your favorite; I like Kalamata olives), pits removed and coarsely chopped

For serving:
Several cups of chopped greens, such as spinach or Romaine lettuce
4-6 oz. cheese (pick your favorite), chopped into large dice (I use ~1 oz. per serving)
1/4 cup roasted pistashios, or more to taste, coarsely chopped
4 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
4 tbsp. honey

1) In a large bowl, toss together the wheat berries, chickpeas, fennel, raisins, shallots, and olives. Refrigerate this mixture if you aren’t serving the salad at this time. Otherwise…
2) When you’re ready to serve the salad, plate the greens. Pile a large spoonful or two of the wheat berry mix on top of the greens. Scatter some diced cheese and pistashios over that.
3) Whisk together the balsamic vinegar and honey. Drizzle some of this sweet-and-tangy dressing over the salad and serve.

*Travel version: Prepare a single serving as directed above but place the ingredients in a travel-ready container. This mixture will keep well at room temperature for a few hours, but I’m sure it’s better if “room temperature” isn’t disgustingly hot.

One Snazzy Batch

I didn’t mean to throw a party the day before my first job interview this month, but that’s what happened. And it turned out to be just what I needed.

The truth is that I just wanted a friend to listen to my job talk because it felt like it wasn’t ready for the big time. It was hard to find any time to work on it! I needed a way of delivering it that would convey the enthusiasm I felt when this story was still fresh and exciting. Even if I felt stressed and ragged, I wanted my story to be beautiful. Hoping to find just a single person to listen to my talk, I e-mailed a bunch of my friends and much to my surprise, they all said they were willing and able to help. So I invited them all over to my place and baked a batch of cookies. We made tea and gossipped for a while, then we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. I talked, they listened. When my tongue tripped over its own words, they waited patiently while I untangled the mess. If something didn’t make sense, we dissected the problem until it did make sense. A friendly argument broke out, and I couldn’t have been more pleased. For a scientist, there’s nothing better than listening to other people become passionately engaged in your work. Conflict never sounded so good.

Best of all, my friends took my talk and my ideas and they made them better. Clearer. Simpler. More precise. They saw where I stood and pointed out the path toward my destination. It was remarkable. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more impressed with my friends than I was that afternoon. Their criticism was an act of kindness and generosity—it was one of the nicest things anyone has ever given me. I’ve never felt so supported, so buoyed by other people’s cheerful advice. Such love! Such warm fuzziness! If I thought before that leaving Chicago was going to be hard, I think now it might be one of the toughest moves I’ve made yet.

Because they are fabulous, my friends probably would have cheered me on even without cookies, but I like to think the cookies helped. These cookies were particularly fabulous, if I may be so immodest about my baking. The recipe is one I’d bookmarked long ago from the February 2008 issue of Bon Appétit. It appeared in an article about whole-grain baking (oh yes!), and I swear every time I looked at it I’d see these words appear: “Rose-Anne, you must bake these cookies immediately. Get thee to the kitchen!” Of course I did what I always do with new recipes: I waited a year and then jotted down the ingredients on my shopping list. An eager beaver I am not, but I do have a sharp memory for cookie recipes.

The recipe in question is for Whole Wheat S’More Cookies, but my version was a little more like Whole Wheat Less-Is-More Cookies because I left out the marshmallows. Those fluffy campfire companions are usually not vegetarian because they’re made with gelatin, so I feel a bit funny about eating them. I try to be consistent in my vegetarianism, but quite frankly, if I’m going to break my own rules, I’d rather do it for Cajun food or the best chicken dinner I’ve ever had (Brick Roasted Chicken with Roasted Baby Carrots, Broccolini, Mashed Potatoes, and Preserved Lemon Pan Sauce, Villa Creek, Paso Robles, California, eaten with my favorite carnivore). I don’t feel deprived not eating marshmallows. I prefer setting them on fire to eating them anyway. Besides, aren’t the chocolate and the graham cracker the best parts of a s’more?

The best part about leaving out the marshmallows is that the ratio of cookie to tidbits is perfect. In this case, the tidbits are milk chocolate chips and walnuts, an underused combination, in my opinion. Dark chocolate gets all the love and all the praise, but I love a good milk chocolate—sweet and friendly, tasty alone or in a whole-grain cookie.

The cookies were very popular with my friends: between six of us, we ate more than a dozen. And these aren’t dainty little cookies, either. While they aren’t the behemoths I told you about last week, they’re hearty and a little rustic, which is just the way I like them. Ammie loved them so much that she jotted down the recipe and started making plans with herself to bake a batch that same night. (That Ammie—she’s such an ambitious cook.) These cookies have an unusually cakelike texture—due, I think, to the fact that the dough is made more like that of a muffin than a cookie. Rather than creaming butter into sugar, you melt the butter and stir it into a mixture of eggs, buttermilk(!), molasses, and vanilla. This buttery blend is then combined with the dry ingredients, in go the chocolate chips and walnuts, and you’re ready to drop and bake. That small amount of work gives you one snazzy batch of cookies, perfect for bribing friends or calming yourself down before stepping out of your comfort zone and onto the job market.

Whole Wheat Less-Is-More Cookies or Whole Wheat Cookies with Walnuts and Milk Chocolate Chips
Adapted from Bon Appétit
Makes a lot of cookies—more than three dozen

Like I said above, these cookies have a delicious cakelike texture. They’re soft with just a hint of crunch on the bottoms. And the flavor is fabulous: rich but subtle, vanilla sugar sweetness combined with sassy chocolate and wholesome walnuts. I really like them. To seal the deal, I’ll just tell you that they travel well too. I packed two in my lunch to be eaten while on a plane to North Carolina, but I ended up eating them as a pre-dinner snack in my hotel room. They were so good that I thought to myself, I should eat cookies before dinner every day. Doesn’t that sound nice?

3 c. whole wheat flour or white whole wheat flour (I used the latter, but I’m curious about using hearty whole wheat flour. If anyone does, report back with your results!)
1 1/2 c. light brown sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
2 large eggs
1/2 c. buttermilk
1 tbsp. molasses
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 c. (one stick) salted butter, melted and cooled slightly
1 1/2 c. milk chocolate chips (about 9 ounces says Bon Appétit. I like Ghirardelli brand here)
3/4 c. coarsely chopped walnuts

1) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a few cookie sheets with parchment paper.
2) In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda. In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs, buttermilk, molasses, and vanilla extract. Whisk in the melted butter.
3) Pour the egg mixture into the flour mixture and stir to combine. Stir in the chocolate chips and chopped walnuts.
4) Use a tablespoon to drop rounded spoonfuls of dough onto the prepared cookie sheets, leaving about 3 inches between cookies. Bake the cookies one sheet at a time for about 15 minutes or until cookies are golden brown around the edges and dry to the touch but still slightly soft. Place the cookie sheet on a wire rack and let the cookies cool on their sheet for about 10 minutes. Transfer the cookies directly to racks to continue cooling. Eat, preferably with a mug of tea and a gaggle of friends.

PS For those of you who love vegan cookies, Ammie made a vegan version of this cookie. In fact, she beat me to the punch, telling all her readers about it yesterday! Her enthusiasm about this recipe makes me happy. I hope you'll hop on over to her site to check out her version, made with a banana and almond milk. (And I hope she saved me a cookie...)

The Happy List

On days when I’m feeling particularly misanthropic, like today, I find it useful to make a happy list. Except for gelato, the happy list is the most effective known cure for misanthropy. And if writing this happy list doesn’t help, you can find me at the gelato place down the street.

* Two pounds of Bing cherries: fresh, red, perfect.

* German butterball potatoes, fresh from the farmer’s market, sliced, tossed in garlic oil, 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika, salt, and pepper, then roasted at 450 degrees F for 25 minutes. Oh baby. It’s like Germany meets Spain, and these potatoes are their love child. Delicious.

* My new yoga mat! So squishy, so comfortable. It lets me perform perfect warrior poses with nary a slip of the feet. I’ve never been so sore after doing yoga as I am with this mat. I can’t believe I did yoga for seven years without a mat. Now that I have one, it’s a brand-new day.

* Addictive Peanut Butter Granola, in my belly or delivered to Shannon’s doorstep. Please note that when making edible gifts for other people, it’s important to make a batch for yourself so that you don’t eat the gift.

* My treehouse apartment with its tree all sexy and greened up with spring rain and sunshine. I’m going to miss this place when I leave in the fall.

* A delicious new cookbook borrowed from the library, Olives & Oranges: Recipes and Flavor Secrets from Italy, Spain, Cyprus, & Beyond by Sara Jenkins and Mindy Fox. I want to eat everything in this book. Where’s my personal chef when I need him?

* Mango, fresh and sweet as candy. I’ve finally figured out how to tell if a mango is ripe! My life is infinitely better because of it.

* My 2-year-old niece, who wants to plant mango trees in her garden…in Michigan.

* Finally, two job interviews this month. Finally. I can’t believe this is really happening.

So what's on your happy list today?

* * *

Dear readers, I have an announcement to make. Due to my interview schedule this month, I won’t be able to meet you here on Mondays like I usually do. Instead, I’m thinking Wednesday is a good day for us to chat. So I’ll see you back here in a week, hopefully with something delicious to share. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other!