Inspiration, frustration, and yummy food May 20, 2008
Posted by midnightzimadreams in Elections 2008, Food, Superfluous musings.1 comment so far
Barack Obama was at the Portland waterfront this weekend and we weren’t able to see him because we had a class at that time. He won Oregon tonight and gave a very inspirational speech. It was not only well written and delivered, but it was full of so much positive energy, I couldn’t help but picking up some of his excitement and smiles.
I can’t pretend to go into some in-depth, pundit-worthy analysis, but I am frustrated that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been so negative and the candidate herself continues to bring up some outlandish claims about how if you add these and such states and you subtract those other ones, she’s really in the lead! Ha! Seriously! There are democratic party rules in place that she agreed to. Everyone just play by the rules, please!!! What is this spin and cherry-picking when one finds oneself cornered? It’s really not flattering to her and it certainly helps to exacerbate the negative tension between Obama and Clinton supporters.
We went to a concert last night, mostly teens and twenty-somethings. When it finished at 11 p.m. on a Monday night, there were young Obama supporters handing out buttons, selling T-shirts and waving banners right at the club’s exit. That’s how you do 11th hour campaigning! That and with a 75,000-strong laudatory throng, the biggest rally of the election season thus far, in an outdoor venue on a sunny Sunday.
Not to say Hillary supporters are stying out of the limelight in Portland – there are the diligent ones on the bridges waving huge signs every morning, there were the last minute small-scale rallies and this morning an older gentleman on the bus with a home-made, laminated poster (which is good, protected it from the drizzling rain) of Hillary on the backdrop of some newspaper cutout and a watch/clock graphic on the other side. Didn’t look at it too closely, but I was glad to see that Hillary supporters were still taking the race seriously last minute. I also, with some sadness, noticed how most people on the bus looked at his poster but remained completely unperturbed. I wondered if it was because they were Obama supporters smirking at his fruitless effort in an Obama stronghold area, or if they were just apathetic. Either way it was a bit disappointing to observe.
I find this idea, engendered by a pundit on CNN today, rather intriguing – that Obama should ask Chelsea Clinton to head his outreach to young voters. That would help bridge the gap that her mom’s been digging between Obama supporters and Clinton ones.
But enough politics. I thrive on it every evening and morning with CNN, the NYTimes, NPR, and The Economist coverage. It’s hard for me to spew back my opinion in just a single blog entry.
Wanted to plug this great web site ranking the Portland street food carts: http://foodcartsportland.com/ – yummo!
Nostalgia for a type of writing art April 24, 2008
Posted by midnightzimadreams in Food, Grad school, Media, Reminiscing, Superfluous musings, Work, Writing.add a comment
Took my lunch at a nearby mall, as I often do, a few days ago. I like to go there because there’s a Starbucks on the top floor that I like and if I’ve brought food from home I can either get a coffee and sit there to read my book or go to the food court, not buy anything and sit, read, and eat my packed lunch. Of course, if spring would come around, I would start eating my lunch in the park outside the office. 
I digress.
What’s also nice about going to that mall is that frequently there is something going on outside in the town square (a festival or protest with a whole bunch of horse-mounted policemen patrolling) or in the mall itself. So this particular afternoon there were several perishable food sculptures in the small fountain and plant area in the mall. I saw them from the second floor and was on my way out by then, but I wanted to take a picture of them and talk to the slew of junior-high-aged students standing around them… and I wanted to write a blog about it and partner it with some photos. The next day I went back, this time with a camera, and while I didn’t take pictures (I had lunch and then went shopping with a coupon that was expiring, leaving me next to no time to get back to the office after my long break), I did look at one of signs and it turns out they are world hunger awareness projects, like a competition for sculptors who arranged canned food, spaghetti and boxes of Crisco into: two giant robots boxing inside a rink, an oversized monopoly board with dice, etc., a humongous red apple with a curled worm coming out of it, and a crusie ship.
I guess my pangs of nostalgia for journalism surface when I see something cool like that, especially given the world food crisis that’s all over the news lately. This would be a story of how some local companies (well “local” being relative) like Whole Foods partnered to do this competition and raise awareness.
It’s strange because I don’t have a strong desire to go back to journalism. It is a dying art and the pay is pretty deadly too. But at the same time I am worried I don’t have a niche yet. The comfortable feeling of writing features is starting to stir up again and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
At least there are steps being taken toward the grad school path, which is helping me breathe easier – GRE class starts this weekend! Yay!
How green are new energy-efficient fuels? March 2, 2008
Posted by midnightzimadreams in Energy efficiency, Food, Life, Science.add a comment
Recently CNN had a special on green energy and how it wasn’t so green after all – exploring its impact on agriculture and the fact that it exacerbates the worldwide food shortage, burns up coal and oil in the process of its production (for the tractors farmers drive to raise the corn and other crops that make alternative fuels). Can’t find that one but I did read a similar message article in The Economist… it’s interesting and it makes you think. Should we be a little more thoughtful, slower in deploying massive experiments, etc. – i.e. how do we know that the mounds of “alternative” fuels we are coming up with are not in fact worse and less energy-efficient than the very ones we are trying to replace?
Two-in-one: Vocabulary builder and philanthropy vehicle March 2, 2008
Posted by midnightzimadreams in Food, Grad school, Life.add a comment
This is fun, great for wanna-be GRE test takers (or SAT or TOEFL or… take your pick of a vocabulary-demanding, future-determining test). Obviously I have a dire need for this exercise, plus it has a very intriguing bonus – rice donations to poor corners of the world via the UN World Food Programme. Check it out!
Tofurky November 27, 2007
Posted by midnightzimadreams in Family, Food, Life.add a comment
We’ve never been much for turkey. Not that we don’t have those in Bulgaria, we do… they’re just not a main meal the way chicken or fish or even sheep are. I think we fell into the U.S. holidays just as unnoticeably as we fell out of the Bulgarian ones… and it happened overnight. Even the very first year we were probably having trouble with observing Easter according to the Orthodox calendar vs. the commercial one (i.e. the differences between U.S. and Bulgarian holidays were even present for holidays the two had in common).
This year was a nice one. Nate was with me. And although he has spent previous Thanksgivings at my parents’ he’d yet to cook there. This year he made a Tofurky. My sister isn’t a vegetarian anymore, not to say that she would have eaten a tofu-turkey anyhow. The carnivore thing didn’t stop her from abstaining from the real Turkey. (Like I said, we’ve never really been big on that particular bird in my family.)
We had friends over and everything felt – for the most part – cozy and comfortable. I like times like that around the big wooden table in the dining area.
Nate gave the most face-redding Thanksgiving – it’s unique to his family (so far as I know) to go around the table and everyone to share one thing they are grateful for. He suggested we do the same (even our U.S. friends were caught a little bit off guard, although they did say grace) and he said he was grateful for me. I still can’t get past that warm feeling. (Blushing brings a lot of blood up into one’s face – I didn’t realize how much – and that really picked up my temperature.)
Food October 7, 2007
Posted by midnightzimadreams in Food, Reminiscing.add a comment
I love fall food. Pumpkins, asparagus and apples. OK, asparagus perhaps don’t really say “fall” to most, but Iron Chef is on and that’s the current secret ingredient. The tree crowns outside our third-floor all-wide and half-ceiling tall windows are still rich green but traces of rust visible on a few branches across the street. The sky has been gray and sad all day – and for many days before, for that matter. It’s raining again, or rather – still. Rain here is wetter, not like Seattle rain. Seattle rain is just for show and reputation.
When the weather is like this, it makes me want to cook. Not that I am good at it, but I do enjoy it. I master a few things only and keep shifting those through a short-listed menu for months. I used to be really good at cooking bean stew when I was in my early teens and my family ate a lot of that one fall. Another time, my mother taught me how to make a yummy coffee cake and though I was never a huge fan of it in large quantities, we ate tons of it in different variations – with extra coco, with walnuts inside, without walnuts, with powdered sugar on top, without powdered sugar on top, filled with raisins, without raisins, with the coco and vanilla swirled in different shapes inside, etc.
An added bonus of cooking when the weather is grim is that the heat from the oven and stove top keep the home cozy. But it is also the weather that hinders my plans.
If it wasn’t so nasty outside, I might actually have considered a trip to the grocery store this afternoon to get the ingredients for something interesting to prepare out of one of the vegetarian cook books we have in possession. Another deterrent too is how busy the store is on a Sunday afternoon. We also have tons of food at home (just probably not enough variety for someone as inexperienced as me in the kitchen to prepare a steamy home-made yum). Oh, and I’ve been snacking ever since I started watching Iron Chef an episode and a half ago – which makes for a content stomach and an unmotivated cook.
