inbedwithamosquito.net

Internet, I must confess, the missus and I are fairly private people (in case you hadn’t already garnered from the limited personal information I share here). We’ve both got our qualms about putting our personal info out there on the world wide whatchamacallit. But this endeavor we’re in the midst of is overwhelming and finally reached the point where I wasn’t writing because it was all I had to write about, all I was thinking about. So today, with my missus’ permission, I’m coming out.
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soft horizon, originally uploaded by martha mosquito.

Sometimes life is all about seeing the shells, sometimes it’s about seeing the ocean and sometimes it’s about seeing the beach as a whole. Today has been a definite shell day – focusing in on the minutiae, which don’t seem so small when they loom large. It’s hard to pull back in the middle of this stress and quiet pandemonium about an event that’s happening at the end of July and remember that, in the grand scheme of things, the situation really isn’t as awful as it feels. The details will work out. Will it take time, energy and creative thinking? Yes. Will it seem unfathomable at times? Yes. Will we look back and wish we’d done things differently? Maybe, but maybe not.

There’s always the chance that what seems like a wrench being thrown into the works is actually the trampoline that catapults you higher. (Mixed metaphors, but you get the picture.) Perhaps the creative thinking we’ll need to use to get through this situation will end up making it oh so much better than before.

And the only way through right now is to keep focusing on the shells but keeping the image of the ocean there, in the background, perhaps a bit fuzzy but there. Definitely there, glinting away….

I savor the crunch of the sugar crystals in iced coffee. All winter long I look forward to the point when it will be warm enough to drink an iced coffee - freshly brewed coffee, milk and sugar over ice. Delicious!

Don’t let me be misunderstood, I definitely love coffee in many forms - hot, cold, with milk, without, sweetened and un -  but iced coffee is a creature of its own. In my mind, iced coffee is for warm weather, and only warm weather. While I may dream of it intermittently throughout the colder months, I don’t really want it then.

But today, circumstances converged and I declared it the first of iced coffee! The thermometer hit 70 degrees Fahrenheit, I’m working from home and I took an hour away from the computer to sit in the sunshine. (Ah glorious sunshine…) And while sitting in the sun, it occurred to me that I was feeling warm. Yes, in a sleeveless dress, I was feeling warm. And thirsty, I was feeling thirsty.

Practical people would have reached into their trusty satchel and sipped from their bottle of water. (Which I did.)  Practical people might have deduced that the water had quenched their thirst. (Which I did.) Practical people most likely would not have spent the 5 minute walk to buy and iced coffee thinking up a thirst. (Which I did.) I think we’ve established previously that *I* am not “practical people.” (Well, okay, sometimes I am.)

Ahhhhh… that thirst I thought up - quenched. (crunch crunch crunch)**

*”iced coffee” being the season in which iced coffee can reasonably be consumed based on martha’s rules of iced coffee consumption.

** I won’t bore you today with my thoughts on pre-sweetened iced coffee vs. iced coffee with crunchy sugar granules at the bottom, homemade vs. store bought, “western” vs. thai, espresso vs regular coffee…. I like them all. The kind I’m drinking today happens to be a store-bought, regular coffee with sugar crunching at the bottom. But i’m not a monogamous kinda girl when it comes to coffee…

tea fortunes, originally uploaded by martha mosquito.

I save fortunes. No, that’s a lie, I save the fortunes that strike a chord somewhere inside me, that tell me the future that I want to see. The others I read, think about and throw away. But this one (on the left) still has me thinking some months after I took this picture.

Is it truly possible to enjoy every moment? When I’m absolutely exhausted and at my most vulnerable that’s a hard hard moment to savor. When I’m happy and feeling on top of the world is a much easier moment to enjoy. But what about the moments in between?

It’s those moments, the moments that make up the everyday, that I am working on reveling in. When I’m traveling home from work, having worked hard and late I try to pay attention to the city around me, the people in my subway car. I enjoy the fact that I don’t have to drive to and from work. An hour on the subway seems far more manageable than an hour by car to me. I know it would be the reverse for many people. Yet that is what makes it so possible to revel in this life, the life I am living right now. The food I eat, the company I keep, the work I do and the hobbies I love.

I will continue working on enjoying every moment… but for now, in this moment, I am happy to be able to groove on.

A boy, maybe nine, with white blond curly hair, dancing to himself in the stairwell of the train station as our train pulled in. The same boy a few moments later hop-walking in excitement in front of an older woman (his mother?) who I saw on the train. I did not capture his face turned around in excitement to her as his feet in sneakers with mis-matched laces danced on ahead. I did not capture her tired excitement to be with him - home again, perhaps after a tiring business trip, dragging her suitcase behind her but feeding off of his energy.
All credit for the idea, which I definitely took from here: http://www.unphotographable.com/

frozen spring, originally uploaded by martha mosquito.

Today’s 62 degree clammy warmth is only further confusing my mental clock. Yes, it’s the end of February when I typically start to long for the warmer days of summer. Yes, it is 62 degrees today. But yes, indeed, yes, it is supposed to be 43 degrees tomorrow and then snow on Wednesday.

Although the order of the weekend has been serious relaxation (as in: heating up leftovers and gorging on movies, thanks netflix) we did host a friend for a delicious Bengali dinner on Friday night. Chicken curry, dahl and greens: all made from this delicious cookbook: Mangoes and Curry Leaves!

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What’s that grain?, originally uploaded by martha mosquito.

I’ve been experimenting with new grains, as I think I’ve mentioned here before. Coconut flour in a carrot cake? Yes! Quinoa flour in muffins? Delish! Amaranth flour in biscuits? Yum! The most recent addition to our grain library is millet. Comparisons to quinoa abound as millet is also high in protein as well as many of the good vitamins and minerals it takes to keep us going. I was excited because maybe it wouldn’t have the slight bitterness that prevents me from pairing quinoa with a few things. Read the rest of this entry »

Every once in a while, wait, who am I kidding….Almost every day I get a chocolate craving. Usually that craving can be satisfied by a small piece of a yummy chocolate bar (Today’s pick - Chocolove’s Orange Peel in Dark Chocolate. But sometimes my craving is a little more complex. I want chocolate, but I want it warm, and light and moist and fast. Usually it’s 8 pm and I’m in my house clothes, comfortable on the couch and really not willing to cook something intense or go to the store to pick up whatever seems closest to fulfilling my desire. Times like that I turn to Moosewood Restaurant’s Moosewood Cooks at Home and the 6-minute Chocolate Cake. I almost always have the ingredients on hand. I’ll admit, after trying it a few times, I find it much easier to mix it in a bowl than in the pan. So maybe it’s a 10 minute Chocolate Cake. The tip on the website says to line the pan with parchment paper as well if you want it to turn out of the pan – but this cake is so good you’ll be eating it out of the pan with a spoon if the other members of your household aren’t around.

My goal for this weekend is to make this with one of the non-wheat flours I have on hand (amaranth or quinoa) to see how it turns out. My gluten-free friend may just love me if I can get the proportions right. I’ve also always wanted to experiment with honey or molasses instead of sugar – but that’s a project for another time. Oh, and it’s vegan too!

Vegan 6-minute Chocolate Cake

1 ½ cups unbleached white flour
⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
½ cup vegetable oil
1 cup cold water or coffee
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons cider vinegar

Preheat the oven to 375º.

Sift flour, cocoa, soda, salt and sugar together.

Mix oil, cold water and vanilla in a measuring cup.

Pour wet ingredients into the dry and mix until smooth.

Add vinegar and stir quickly. There will be pale swirls in the batter as the baking soda and vinegar react. Stir just until the vinegar is evenly distributed throughout the batter.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes and set aside to cool.

Original Recipe available online here: http://www.moosewoodrestaurant.com/recipes_archive.html#53

dinner, originally uploaded by martha mosquito.

My plan was that I was going to write more about food here. The food I cook, the food I eat, my love for food. You know what happens to plans, don’t you? And you can clearly see where my plan went with the recent photos of cats. Not that I haven’t been cooking and eating, oh I have, my dears, I have. I’m the first to admit I’ve been a little crazed with the cooking. A few things I’ve cooked in the past couple of weeks:

Banana Quinoa muffins (and pumpkin ones too)
Barbeque Chipotle Turkey
Spicy Twice-Baked Potatoes
Amaranth biscuits (oh the biscuits, the light flaky biscuits)
Turkey Sausage Arugula and Manchego Quiche
Sherry Mushroom sauce for noodles
A whole Bengali meal (I think I posted about this but can’t check right now)
Pumpkin Chocolate chip cookies

I’m exploring new grains and experimenting more with alternatives to oil and eggs (flax seed anyone?) and find myself memorizing new substitutions. 2 1/2 tbsp ground flax seed mixed briskly with 3 tbsp water substitutes for one egg. It changes the texture but depending on the recipe that change works out fantastically to my advantage.

All that to say that I have a new plan - my new plan is to post one recipe a week. Since I established before that I’m near incapable of following a recipe exactly, they’ll all be slight modifications of wherever I originally found them, but I’ll be sure to include that as well in case you’re intrigued by the recipes from that cookbook.

At least one recipe a week…. Starting tomorrow.

Some days just suck, originally uploaded by martha mosquito.

For this poor cat, it’s been a pretty horrid year so far. While I was away the missus noticed one morning that Z didn’t come running for food. When the missus searched for her she had a huge lump on her neck and really wasn’t interested in food.

Vet visit one - she has an abscess, probably from an infected bite or scratch and she gets put on an antibioitic. A couple of days after I come home the abscess bursts while the missus is giving Z a pill. It’s gross and disgusting but looks like it’s just a quarter-size patch of matted hair on her neck. After consultation with the vet via phone, we determine we’ll just hold out for our next scheduled visit two days later.

Vet visit two - They go to cut away the hair and discover that there’s a long open wound (at least an inch and a half long) which is still draining. She gets bandaged up and we have to take her back two days later and drop her off to have the wound cleaned, surgically closed with a drain inserted and the bandage changed. We’re sent home with her in an elizabethan collar around her neck to stop her from scratching. She is completely and totally cowed by it.

Vet visit three - We drop her off early early in the morning and wait until the afternoon when they call to tell us we can pick her up. When they call they say they weren’t able to close it because they can’t put a drain in because of where it is. We pick her up and are scheduled to bring her back two days later and drop her off for surgery. She comes home without the e-collar but with a big bandage tightly wrapped around her neck.

Vet visit four - We drop her off early in the morning and wait for them to call and tell us we can pick her up. When they call they say surgery went well, she’s got to come back in two weeks to get the stitches out and oh, by the way, if we have another cat we should keep them totally separate for those two weeks. I pause, totally separate? Yes. In a one bedroom apartment with doors that don’t really close…. Sigh. We take her home and on the way stop and buy a large wire dog crate so Z can be kept separate but we can stay sane. She’s stuck in there for another week and a half. She doesn’t mind it most of the time but likes to complain loudly at 6 am.

Meanwhile our other cat is having more and more frequent asthma attacks so we’re starting him on medication for that. And it’s all put into very clear perspective by some friends who were desperately seeking one of their dogs who had run away. The most firm lead they have had was on a stray dog found dead…

Oh yes, and the missus and I are also trying to deal with work, feeding ourselves and we had a house guest in the middle of all that…. It’s been a busy time, but even in the midst of all of this, the mid-winter blues have not managed to suck away the colors yet. I’ll just keep on keeping on. You do the same.