BAGELS

I made bagels a week or two ago. The funnest part was twirling the bagel holes:

yes, that is a little bento sauce container in the background

ready for boiling

they rose a lot in the pot! I should have only done 4 at a time

the finished bagels. They were excellent fresh, though a bit bland.

I've enjoyed making some unusual things! In other news, I have joined Twitter. Follow me @Rachel_Helps if you like, I am mostly using it for video game journalism networking.

Croissants and bentos

I made croissants for the first time. It involved freezing butter, making dough have lots of layers, and overnight rising. In the first batch, I didn't line up both triangles very well and ended up with crab croissants:

The next batch had triangles that were the wrong shape and ended up looking like shrimp. They tasted good at least!

I made a bento using leftover crepe filling in an omelet.  

Adam made delicious apricot ham

the next day's bento was make-your-own-sandwich (bread not shown)

Today I felt really uninspired for bento-making. We need to go grocery shopping... I made a spinach omelet with some toast and then I had no idea what to do with the extra space, and the cottage cheese wasn't secure and probably got all over everything. Not every bento is beautiful, alas.

February bentos

I got back into bento-ing this week! I think it was a combination of not having as many leftovers and getting cherry tomatoes. Seriously, cherry tomatoes go with everything. I don't always make cute lunches, but I always feel nice when I do. Kind of like dressing up or something. 

Kalamata olives with crackers and cheese and tomatoes, salad, and quinoa veggie leftovers. I had never had kalamata olives before, but they are really vinegary! Great on Greek salad with feta cheese.

More quinoa pilau leftovers. The egg salad and tomatoes went with the swiss cheese (hidden under the unleavened bread) as crackery thing topping.

The whole lunch doesn't fit in one bento! Veggies to steam and apples along with red tea went in this lunch. Also: adorable lunch bag I found at a botique here in Spanish Fork.

Leftover corn porridge (polenta) topped with fried onions and tomatoes. Turkey and cheese to go with the rolls. I also sent some apples and cole slaw too. 

Culinary Adventures

Actual rice balls! Not pictured: lots of lettuce to go with the fruit

Adam and I bought a new Prius two days ago. It's really cool, with lots of gadgets (the polar opposite of our Civic, which doesn't even have cruise control). I love the car and am terrified to drive it, and I'm not sure how I feel about being a 2-car house. I wish that buses went out this far so I didn't feel like it was necessary. But now I can go volunteer at the library without driving into work with Adam and picking him up later (said library would try to squeeze me into their busy volunteer schedule. Oh, the joys of living in Utah). And the Prius will be much better for road trips and Ikea trips.

Made it with dried chickpeas

I've been trying to cook every weird thing I have ever wondered if it was possible to cook. Last week we made okonomiyaki and falafel, and yesterday I made hummus (apparently, this is what garbanzo beans are good for). I'm going to try to make miso soup later this week. I've been trying to keep up on reading Japanese, doing yoga, and making myself a real lunch everyday (sometimes I forget to eat lunch... other things are more exciting?). I bought a steam cleaner for the floor, and while it doesn't really pick up much dirt, it feels so wonderfully clean afterwards. I threw out our old mop which was basically a floor-sponge that was grossing us out anyway.

I have some ideas for an Oishinbo-like comic set in Utah, but I'm not sure if I'm good enough at drawing to pull it off. If I do put something together, I'll post it here and you too will be able to relish the joys of comic food writing. :-)

Goals follow-up: Extensive reading!

I've decided that for my goal in keeping up Japanese, I want to read in Japanese every day. This blog has some information on "extensive reading," and it sounds great: read in your target language and if you have to look up lots of words find something easier (the blog is also a great resource for online Japanese stories and how to buy used books in Japanese).

even their readers have a cute mascot

We've ordered more graded readers to help (we have Level 1, Vol. 1, whose five stories I finished this week. It's a great feeling to read a story without looking up tons of words!). I'm thinking I'll reread the stories to get the vocabulary a bit better. If I keep doing updates on this goal I will probably do it over at my failed Japanese language blog (I got really frustrated when youtube took down my 10-second clip of Fruits Basket. It's educational! It's fair use!). 

Also, we planned out this week's meals! We didn't follow the plan exactly but it helped a lot with the "whadya wanna eat tonight?" "I dunno, whadda you wanna eat tonight?" problem.

2011 summarized and thought about

Things I/We Did in 2011:

-Went to Japan, Bear Lake, Minecon, and California

-Raised Koko from puppy to... older puppy

-Themed parties (I know, dorky, but I think they are fun): Japan, Magic: The Gathering, Scrabble (was that this year? I can't remember), and Harry Potter

-Played about 40 hours of Persona 3 and I think I am only halfway through (but I beat Pokemon! And I have spent many hours playing Glitch. And I bought a lot of games... I need to spend less time reading about games and more time playing them.)

-Dropped out of grad school!

-Wrote about six articles for Deseret Connect

-Got to know my ward better somehow

-Decided to insist on tall jeans! If it's not long enough I don't want it!

-Attempted Christmas baking for the first time. It is a lot of butter and a lot of work.

-My husband's company was acquired by Autodesk. Holy taxes, complicated things.

Bear Lake's library is quaint; their raspberries imported.

little Koko!

Pretty much grown up?

How I think I have changed?:

-Mixed feeling about having children. I'd like to try it, but honestly some parents and children really scare me. Also I have decided not to stress out about being pregnant or not.

-I care more about cooking and housekeeping. These are things I will be doing a lot in the future, and dangit, I might as well get good at some of it, or find a way to get machines to do it for me (thank you, bread maker).

-I'm an elitist about some things. I don't have to tell everyone what I'm thinking about their taste in reading or music, but I am okay with thinking that some things are better than others. 

-I think I'm less abrasive with others. If I think someone's diet is stupid, I don't usually say anything (although... is sugar really that bad for us?). But if someone asks me my opinion on something, I will be gently truthful!

Some library books are gorgeous

Things I'm trying to do this year:
-I would like to post to my video game blog twice a week, or at the very least once. I want to write posts about psychology research on video games, and I want to do an analysis of all the video game post mortems I can find.
-Read more manga! Seriously if I am reading a good manga I feel like I'm on vacation. It is a luxury I want to indulge more! I recommend Oishinbo, an 80s manga about foodies.

this is a matter of life and death!

-My husband made a goal to either walk Koko for 30 minutes or play DDR for 30 minutes. I think it's a good goal! I guess I would like to do either or both of those things every day, and maybe do some more youtube yoga videos.
-I want to at least plan dinner in advance each week. It makes me less stressed out about preparing food. I would also like to make a few really gourmet bentos this year (for Acius, or maybe for a summer picnic or something).
-I want to beat some video games! My favorite part of playing a game seems to be the beginning but beating a game is also very satisfying. But I don't want to keep playing a game I don't like... I just have a hard time starting sometimes, and then afterwards I think "why don't I do this more often instead of checking facebook all the time?"
-I would like to keep up on my Japanese language learning somehow, but I don't have a good plan. Even if I made some sort of schedule I doubt I would keep it;;... but maybe I can try scheduling an hour a day to study.
-I still have some vague dream of making a video game with Acius, so work on that somehow?

Grad School Postmortem

Okay. I dropped out of graduate school. I was really sick of working on my thesis (seriously. I would get stomachaches and things). I was to the point where I was worrying about it all the time and procrastinating all the time and then when I did work on it it felt like I wasn't going anywhere. I thought about it a bit, and I decided that for the things I think would be really awesome to do in my life (be a video game journalist, make a video game, be a freelancer, be a mom), I don't need an MA. I would need an MA to teach composition, and I don't like teaching composition. It was a good experience to finish all the coursework for the degree--learning about feminism and aesthetics has been really helpful to how I criticize books and video games. But in the end I don't really need a master's degree in English.

So I'd like to do a postmortem kind of thing and maybe if you ever write a thesis you can avoid the mistakes I made.

Mistakes I Made:

-I was distracted with taking Japanese my last year in coursework. I liked studying Japanese a lot more than working on my thesis, which maybe says something about what I should have gotten a degree in.

-I sat on drafts. Early on in the drafting I pestered my adviser too much and he chastised me. Ever since, I was worried that I was bothering him. I would finish the things he told me to do and then try to anticipate what the next revision would be, instead of sending him back a draft quickly and waiting for a response. I should have worried less about being a bother and more about getting my tuition money's worth of feedback.

-I chose a professor on my committee who I had never worked with before, and she turned out to be kind of scary and have more sway over my other two professors than I thought she would. I wish I had had a professor on my committee that I felt better friends with--someone that I could have complained to a little but would also have been able to explain the weirdness of thesis-dom. I also would have liked someone on my committee who had read either House of Leaves or Portal. As it was, I felt like I could say anything about the works and no one would care whether or not my analysis rang true.


Frustrations with my Adviser (who is a nice person and a scholar and this isn't meant in a mean way, more as a retrospective, "I wish this had been different" way):

-Sometimes I would meet with him and he wouldn't have looked at my latest draft. Once he told me to make changes I had already made. This combined with my habit of sitting on drafts was frustrating.

-He had a vision for my thesis revision procedure that he didn't share with me from the beginning. Each time he gave me feedback, I was thinking "I'll do this and then it will be done," whilst he was thinking something like "after she reorganizes it, I'll tell her to reintegrate secondary criticism." When I found this out I was upset that our communication hadn't been clearer.


It was bad enough writing papers for one professor, but writing one for three was too much for my politically-anxious mind. I probably could have gone on and graduated, but I feel a lot better now for having made this decision. I feel like I can focus on what I want to do and not what I have to do. I have a plan for dinner every day this week and a cleaning schedule. I want to learn CSS and Javascript. Life is just better now.