I received an e-mail today from my little brother, who is working at a summer camp in Georgia. His only correspondence to me over the past six weeks, aside from a brief phone call, was the message “The south is fucked up” and this picture:
More information about his camp is available here.
Categories: Ephemera, Funny
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While I was in Sweden, my cousin Sarah made this homemade donut recipe that she’s been generous enough to share. -D
Sarah’s Swedish Donuts
- 1 dl milk
- 25g dry yeast
- 4 ½ dl white flour
- 50g margarine
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 ½ tsp cardamom
Filling:
- Vanilla cream or applesauce
Warm the milk until it’s about 104°, don’t heat the milk to hot or the yeast will die. Pour the milk into a big bowl and add the yeast. Add 3 dl of the flour. Melt the margarine and mix well with the sugar, the egg, the cardamom and the vanilla sugar in a separate bowl. Then pour into the big bowl and add the rest of the flour. Pour out the dough on the counter and knead very well, add more flour when needed.
Cut the dough in half and put the other half back in the bowl. Roll out the dough until thin. Use a tortellini maker or something similar to make light marks on half of the dough. Then put small cliques of vanilla cream in the center of the markings and gently pull the other half of the rolled out dough over. Then use the tortellini maker to press out round donuts where the bumps of filling stick up. It’s crucial that you use a tortellini maker or something similar because it closes the dough around it so it won’t split in two. Continue this procedure until the dough is finished.
Heat the oil in the deep-fryer to about 360° and put in a couple donuts at a time. They will float to the surface and when turned brown you flip them over and fry them on the other side. When done roll them immediately in sugar.
Smaklig måltid!
Note: The milk temperature is in Celsius, the deep-fryer (I assume made in the US) is in Farenheit
Categories: Food, Travel
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My last night in Sweden, my little cousin wrote this guest post that I’m just getting around to putting up. Better late than never, I suppose. -D
It’s great having David here! Even though he doesn’t do much shopping and dishing, which happened to be my two favorite things, we have a lot of fun together. He’s leaving tomorrow and he missed all his chances to hang out with my regulated hottie friends such as Natalie and Josefine. If he would have come a week earlier he would have been here for the party of the year, the 080808, which is arranged yearly by Stockholm for the younger public. This year it was set on Sweden’s Time Square, Stureplan, with 30.000 wild dancing Swedes, world known Djs such as Axwell and a 500 foot long bar! He really missed something I tell you that, especially the ridiculously long bar and the hot 20 year old blonde gazelles.
David’s done all the major sightings in Stockholm. I went with them to Skansen and fed him the way through, this is what we bought (that David mostly ate): 4 Swedish cinnamon buns, 2 sugar buns, 1 huge sugar bun filled with applesauce, 2 of my favorite lollipops with taste of sugar and chestnut, Swedish hard candy “polkagris” and a Swedish waffle with whip cream and jam. Sarah does not do sighting but she does do lunch and dessert, and therefore took David to places that blew his brains out with original Swedish awesomeness. It wouldn’t surprise me if he actually gained a pound or two. David gave me a reason to pig out which I rarely ever do since the size 4 became the new 2 and the 2 the new 0. It’s hard to get in to clubs and bars when you’re under aged so when your contacts call you and say they can get you in that night you show up. It was unfortunate for David that he never was in the mood for Swedish partying, since I was told to hook him up with a natural Swedish blonde? We also went on a daytrip to an old fishing village in the Swedish archipelago called Vaxholm. Some of my friends have summerhouses or live on the islands around Vaxholm and during the summer it’s tradition to do lunch in Vaxholm. David and I went to the chocolate store and I astonished him with my egocentric and arrogant ways of chocolate… Anyways it has been a blast having him here and I wish my other American relatives would get their butts on a plane and come here. I miss him already and can’t wait to see him soon in Chicago again.
Thank you for coming!
“Tack för att du kom!”
XOXO – Sarah Ross
Categories: Travel
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Megan McArdle writes:
The real problem with investment bankers goes deeper, and is the problem of the entire upper middle class: we have come to believe that complying with the rules produces excellent results as by some natural law. In school, if you do your work, teacher gives you an A. It comes to seem like a sort of a natural law: if you have a good education and work hard, the universe is supposed to reward you. After school, the upper middle class gravitates towards careers with very well defined advancement hierarchies: medicine, law, finance, consulting, where this subtle belief is constantly reinforced.
Categories: Business and Economics, Careers
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When I started reading this, I thought “wow, I have a dream like this all the time.” Then I found out that’s what he was talking about. Sometimes it’s nice to know you’re not alone.
Categories: Uncategorized
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The news that Kim’s dream of making genuine Italian food available in the capital has been realised comes as North Korea threatens to test-launch a rocket which the US believes is capable of striking America.
Via Marginal Revolution.
Categories: Ephemera, Food, Politics
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February 25, 2009 4:56 pm
February 23, 2009 1:40 am
There’s a point shortly after smart, idealistic, motivated young people graduate college that they realize that, in fact, what the world is missing is not their particular great ideas and passion for driving change, but in fact it’s a complicated place where the ability of one person to make a difference is, for the most part, fairly limited. My sister has just hit that point in her career:
Somewhere in the last four months, my framework for teaching changed. I’m no longer teaching within the context of ending educational inequality. I don’t think about the achievement gap. “Our nation’s greatest injustice,” is not what keeps me going. I know that half of the elementary school students growing up in low-income communities won’t graduate from high school, but I don’t think about them anymore. I think about the 22 second graders sitting in front of me waiting to hear what happens to Pinduli.
When this happens, the best ones narrow their focus, retrench, and try again. The jaded quit and spend time finding themselves, maybe in Africa or graduate school. The least fortunate make the terrible decision to go to law school.
Categories: Careers, Education
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Friday night I had friends over for dinner (this is not the same as a dinner party for reasons that are too complicated to get into). The Dinner Impossible challenge: two guests were vegetarian, one would only eat fish, and another gets stomach aches from spicy food. I also wanted to accomplish the entire meal in only two hours of cooking time, and spending less than $50.
Because of the two vegetarians, I decided to use asian vegetables and flavors in pulling together most of the meal. I can’t stand vegetarian menus that sacrifice flavor in the hope of simulating meat. There’s a restaurant near my house that boasts of their ability to do this, but I think most of it turns out poorly and I’d take an ethnic restaurant that uses veggies or tofu instead of animal proteins any day.
The menu in brief, with more details below:
- Course 1: Kale and Lime Soup
- Course 2: Asian Stuffed Cremini Mushroom and Sauteed Portabello
- Course 3: Vegetable or Salmon Stir Fry
- Course 4: HomeMade Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream with Fresh Chocolate Chip Cookie
Course One: I wanted a simple, vegetarian soup that I could make without much effort. I thought about a mushroom soup, which I have some experience with, but decided that later courses would already have too many mushrooms, and this wasn’t Iron Chef. Instead, I opted for a Kale and Lime Soup from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, garnished with a slice of lime. It generally got positive reviews, though my guests thought it could have used some more kick. Unfortunately, I left out the jalepeno from the recipe which may have solved this some.
Course Two: Mushrooms make great appetizers and cook quick, but most stuffed mushroom recipes use cheese and italian flavors, which didn’t fit in will with the rest of the menu. I modified this recipe for Asian Stuffed Mushrooms from Eupicurian instead, using medium-sized White Mushrooms replacing the peppers (which I didn’t have) with carrots and changing around the ratios for the other ingredients which seem more like guidelines than rules. I popped them in the oven when I served the soup and served each guest one mushroom garnished with two slices of sauteed portabello.
Course Three: For the entree, I made a stir fry, starting by heating the aromatics (garlic and ginger) in oil, then stirring in the slower cooking ingredients (onions, broccoli, zuchini), some leafy vegetables (bok choi, scallions), adding some liquid (a stir fry sauce I found at the grocery store), and cooking for a few more minutes. It would have gone great with a side of rice, but a friend brought Pasta Salad so I didn’t think we needed more starch. For the carnivores in the room, I quickly sauteed a piece of salmon in a separate pan to toss on the stir fry.
Course Four: By far my strongest course was the dessert, shown below. Before anyone came over, I made homemade Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream and chocolate chip cookies, which combined took about 10 minutes of work. I put the ice cream in the freezer to harden and served each in a cup with a cookie, a sprig of mint from my herb garden, and slice of cake courtesy of my guests.
 Home Made Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream My ice cream maker has quickly become my favorite kitchen appliance. Making ice cream is fast, easy, and tastes orders of magnitude better than anything in a store. Plus, the ingredients tend to keep for a few weeks, so I can leave them in the fridge/pantry without worrying about them going bad.
Categories: Food
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December 9, 2008 12:55 am
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