MORE FOOD

Der te der, what's this? Leftover wild mushroom risotto? Dearie me, I seem to be forming it into golf ball sized forms, and stuffing it with a little piece of mozzarella, oh my goodness.

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Nooo, the dreaded flour-egg-Panko triple threat!

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It spares no fingers!

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Phew, at least someone is making sure we are eating green leafies around here.

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and their steamy stems, too!

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Deep Fried Risotto Alert! At 370 degree F, these turned golden in .6 seconds, but didn't burn like I thought they would, even after about a minute. Probably I just need to fry more things, right? Right??

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Ah yes, our complete tapas meal, "Tuscan" bread from Whole Foods, white-bean/rosemary/garlic spread (thanks Jamie Oliver), Swiss Chard, and a few delectable arancini (the technical term for 'fried leftover risotto balls'). We have blurred the photo to protect the innocent.

From Food

Food photos courtesy of new schnazzy camera!

Christmas Food Blog

We ate so many good things at Christmas, but I only took a few pictures. We arrived four days late due to the Baltimore snowstorm, but started the holiday off right with roast pork in milk curd sauce, an italian dish. The next night was lamb loin, cardoon gratin (too bad I didn't get any pictures, cardoons are wacky - they look like barbed celery, which, not endearing AT ALL) and rosti (a swiss shredded potato cake sauteed in its weight in butter).

Christmas Eve we made lobster ravioli with the remains of a five-pound lobster that a student of my Dad's brought him, in thanks for helping him through a tough job search, and two salads. One was fennel and parsley; the other, a tricolore salad with a buttermilk chive dressing.

Then the GOOSE.

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Take one goose. Stuff some prunes with duck foie gras.

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Now, put those in the goose. Roast your goose, mostly on its side, turning it like one does in a tanning booth for extra golden color. Apply hot water from time to time to keep the pores open and the goose schvitzing.

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Meanwhile, make a mushroom soup using approximately 8 lbs of butter and 1lb of mushrooms. The pomegranate is for scale, and also to go with the roasted butternut squash cubes + cilantro. This was delicious, btw, and sorry, no pictures. Dad made up the recipe.

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Also meanwhile, make some twice-baked potatoes. Paprika, we have decided in the end, is basically sine qua non, even if Mom thinks it looks tacky. Note additional butter on top, after having stirred in 2 sticks of it during the mashing process.

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Ah yes, the goose must now be done.

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Throw in some spinach cooked in butter (of course) for some greenness on the plate, while you're at it. Finish it all off with lemon tart to cut the butter. Ha! Just kidding. There's butter in there too.

From Food

Most of these recipes from Julia Child. The goose was delicious, very very very dark meat. The squash/pomegranate/cilantro was amazing. The buttered mushrooms, potatoes, and spinach - well, let's just say, I've never been happier to be full of butter. Dee-lish. I think the secular Koenker household can take on any Jewish household during Hannukah season in a butter-off, I'm just sayin'.

New Year's Resolutions

1. Bike to work as much as possible.
I basically took the whole fall off, and didn't start again until the car was up in Philly between Christmas and New Year's. Even in the cold and wind of late December it was nice to get some exercise, and the streets were not so scary, as long as I stayed on Fallsway and Guilford.

2. Cook really delicious things more often.
This won't be as hard when Joshua and I are in the same house all the time, but until then, even when he's not around, I want to cook more fun things.

3. Run, climb, and walk Kima a lot. I've been so far mostly successful by biking to work and running on days that I didn't bike.

4. More tricks with Kima. I have all these books, and I have a clicker, and really, the more training the better!

Porcini

I found some porcini at home yesterday that were still good (another package was infested with grubs). So I zipped up to Eddies to get some crimini mushrooms and started this mushroom risotto recipe from Gourmet (via Epicurious). The best part is you can make the leftovers into fried risotto balls with melting mozzarella in the middle.

Mushroom Risotto
yield: Makes 4 to 6 servings
active time: 45 min
total time: 1 hr
This recipe serves 4 as a main course after you set aside 3 cups to make the mushroom and mozzarella arancini or the mushroom risotto cakes.... more ›

ingredients

1 oz (28 g) dried porcini (1 cup)
3 3/4 cups hot water
5 1/4 cups reduced-sodium chicken broth (42 fl oz)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon olive oil
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter
1 small onion, finely chopped (1 cup)
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
3/4 lb fresh cremini mushrooms, trimmed and thinly sliced
1 lb Arborio rice (2 1/3 cups)
2/3 cup dry white wine
1 oz finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano (1/2 cup)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Special equipment: parchment paper (if reserving some risotto for another recipe)
Garnish: Parmigiano-Reggiano shavings

The importance of background music

You all have seen countless video clips with dramatic background music highlighting development issues in Africa. This one's a little different, and a welcome change!

No more running around in the playground when it's cold out!

Kima's tailio got froze again this year. Video is from last year.

Yesho Raz

(Once more)

Origins of Breakdance

It's worth watching the whole 3 and a half minutes.

Grass Fed Beef and Fishy Taste

We had three different steaks on Saturday, two grassfed and one grainfed. The massive thick grassfed steak had a fishy taste most noticeable in the fat. Strong, like the dried fish in Gabon. The meat itself was fine, it seemed, but the grainfed steak was milder (and I suppose more familiar). It was a disconcerting experience. Turns out, though, that grassfed beef has higher Omega-3 levels, and this contributes to the fishiness (as it does in wild fish).

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

Blackberry Pearl 9100 should be able to do everything I need....maybe.

Kima not that dumb

Tried to cut her nails again last night without muzzle or headlock, and she wasn't having any of it. So, back to square one. Or just have the kennel do it this week while she's having a Thanksgiving vacation.

Craving a new smartphone

The Pearl has been good to me, and fits in most any pocket, but recently has begun to slow down. Nifty new apps are available for faster, bigger, nicer smartphones. But those won't fit in my pocket!!

Please note this is not a ploy for any holiday gift giving, just befuddlement. Would it not be cool to have Evernote on my phone? Or Epicurious? Or be able to implement one of those auto-shut-off-when-phone-senses-it's-in-a-car dealios? Or map all my Africa travel down to the clinic level?

Advertisers are so damn good at creating a need. Curse you and your slick Flash popups!

Update

I think it's been about 80 million years since I last posted. Lots of things going on.

- I returned to Baltimore to get my Nigerian visa and promptly got a big ol' fever, which was probably not really the swine flu, but was enough like the swine flu that I wasn't able to go to Nigeria, even though
- I did in fact receive my Nigerian visa in time.

- USAID made me a job offer that was pretty dang awesome.

- Nick and Johanna had their baby! Oscar.

- CCP made a counter offer in order to keep me in Baltimore. And I'm taking it. Despite all my professional heroes telling me to take the USAID job, because it will be good for my career, etc. Basically, it boils down to: a) I can get a lot of similar job experience at CCP and b) I don't have to commute in order to do that and c) all things being thus more or less equal, sort of kind of, I would rather spend those 3 hours with Joshua, Kima, and my other interests rather than on the MARC train with my New Yorkers. I'm sure I will regret at some points not taking on the badassness of the USAID job, but hey, that's the breaks. The feeling that I have now, after taking this counter offer (read: promotion!) is, I would say, "happiness", whereas the feeling I had after waking up thinking I would take the USAID job I would have to classify as "sad, and putting career ahead of family, for maybe some not super good reasons".

So you know everything works out.

Second:
I have been reading 'quirky' and 'indie' wedding blogs like a maniac and using Evernote to file all the ideas I can steal from them. I don't think I will blog much about the wedding planning. It's pretty boring. Not that we will have a boring wedding, no sirree, but who wants to see the sausage being made?

Third:
Joshua and I took Kima for a walk at Jerusalem Mills and we let her off leash (which *gasp*, illegal!) and hullo, it was totally fine. This dog just wants to cuddle, she is not liable to run off after anything, because I am the most interesting thing to her. To the point that when cutting her nails later that evening, she freaked out in Joshua's chokehold, and came over to me, all "Mom, I'm scared, he's scaring me, don't let him squeeze me like that!" and just LET ME cut her nails, no trouble at all. Good doggie!!

Oh, Nigeria

Nigeria embassy wouldn't give me a visa here in Dakar, because I do not have a Senegalese residency permit. A small Nigerian offered to take me to the Police Whatsit to get said permit, quickly, and without them asking me all the usual annoying questions. I declined. Lagos doesn't offer visas on arrival, and it's illegal to send one's passport back to the states to get a visa (or with someone else, for that matter).

So either I:
a) go back to the states a bit early from Dakar, get my visa, and return to Nigeria within a week or
b) ef Nigeria and stay in Dakar to do more work here or
c) ef Nigeria and go home to regularly scheduled programming.

Much depends on how much it will cost to change my flights, and whether or not my collaborators on the Nigeria workshop are willing to let me bail.

Also, two men are up in my ceiling draining water that has been gurgling up there for a couple days. Looks kinda messy in there.

Downtime

In Dakar for a two week needs assessment to set up our newest biggest project, delivering nets and promoting their use globally - or at least, just in Senegal to start with. Lots of meetings already, everyone touching on the same issues (routine distribution not working, out of nets, procurement is hard, need more communication to increase use of nets, help help help us). But today is a bit slow as some meetings have just been canceled, so I am waiting for a caesar salad in my room and catching up on the little tasks, like writing an invitation letter to the private sector, so that they can attend a meeting where we are likely going to tell them we're not subsidizing their operations in this project, unlike the previous project. Hoping that the Nigerian Embassy guy wasn't really serious when he said he could reject my visa application because I am not a resident in Senegal.

The caesar salad came without any dressing. This hotel has been open only three months. Yesterday my soft-boiled egg was perfect - today the yolk was still raw, but they insisted it was soft-boiled. "You know oeuf en coquotte? C'est comme ca". No, really, it's not. For some reason this made me really pissed.

CRS is helping us out with vehicles, sample letters, putting our Chief of Party ad in the paper - being completely wonderful. And we're getting fairly good information, but nothing too detailed, from our interview so far. As one member of the Global Fund CCM said this morning, "Quelquechose nous echappe". Hopefully by the end of these two weeks we'll have captured it.

Yes We Can!

From Anna in Dar.

Favorite line from Global Fund Round 7 proposal

from translated English version:

"Once these CBOs and NGOs are well rehabilitated and equipped, they could, during discussions and home visits, advocate, at the same time, for other health problems such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and diseases linked to fecal peril."

Engaged Engaged Engaged

So, the other weekend, on a bike ride, during lunch, Joshua asked if I would marry him!

And I said "Holy crap!"

But no, he was serious, and I said, "But we've never lived in the same city."

He admitted this was true but that it didn't have any bearing on his wanting to marry me, and also that he would move to Baltimore in May, if I was so set on us living in the same place, jeez louise.

I thought about this for a little while. Until dinnertime, actually, when we discussed the logistics of the whole thing some more, and also some non-logistical things.

And then said yes. :)

New bed

Even before I had finished laying it down, Kima curled up on the new bedroom rug and was all, jeez it took you long enough to get me another bed upstairs, jeez!

From Kima

Help Adam make an album in Mali!