black-bottomed cupcakes

Let's keep this simple: these are delicious. They taste similar to cheesecake brownies, only the chocolate part is much more cake like. They're easy to make and store well in an air-tight container. I brought these as the finale to a football party and recommend you do the same!

You can find the recipe here: Black-Bottomed Cupcakes

"Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.


excerpt from Dream Work by Mary Oliver

[photo - view of New York and Massachusetts from the top of Haystack Mountain in Connecticut]

DeVotchKa, Paradise Rock Club, Boston, 3/26/11

This post is long overdue but still worth writing about three months later because, well, it was that good. When I heard that DeVotchKa was coming to Boston, I jumped on the chance to see them again. I had seen them live at the Paradise back in 2008, before all the renovations were done to the venue. I fell in love with them after hearing a friend play their song “The Enemy Guns”—over and over again. I decided I needed to know more, but assuming that “The Enemy Guns” is indicative of their catalog would be shortchanging a band whose sounds carry across all different cultures and continents, slashing borders and mixing them up together in a strange, vibrant mix. That this has been some of their main criticism should also be a sign that there isn’t too much to critique. But if trying to capture and do too much on an album is a fault, then I’ll go down with them.

It might be true that they sweep through such broad musical strokes that it’s a little disorienting as to what you’ll hear next (or what region you’ll next land in), but I for one don’t mind that their sound might not be grounded in one thing. Maybe that is exactly what keeps the music from getting too serious and too heavy. DeVotchKa bring you a sampling of sounds and eras and ask you to indulge for a few minutes in each one. At once you’re hearing about a love torn apart on the front lines of the Mexican War, a modern-day love from afar amidst a dirty subway, and next “come with me” sung in a deep French to the backdrop of the accordion.

You may recognize some of the sounds—pick them apart and you hear European polka music, Mexican mariachi bands, and other somewhat familiar sounds that you can’t quite place. The group is a band of modern-day gypsies traveling with tuba, Theremin, upright bass, violin, accordion, and more. And it’s true that, unless you know what you’re in for, it may be hard to grasp what DeVotchKa are all about, especially on their earlier albums. But live, it all comes together. The sounds mesh, the songs flow into one another, and Nick Urata’s powerful, crooning voice leaves you downright awestruck. In today’s music, a voice that sounds better live than on record is a novelty and to see this whole band live is to see them completely break out of the confines of the recording studio and of a neatly organized album.

DeVotchKa performing "The Clockwise Witness"

"I'll Open the Window" by Anna Swir

Our embrace lasted too long.
We loved right down to the bone.  
I hear the bones grind, I see  
our two skeletons.

Now I am waiting
till you leave, till
the clatter of your shoes
is heard no more. Now, silence.

Tonight I am going to sleep alone  
on the bedclothes of purity.
Aloneness
is the first hygienic measure.  
Aloneness
will enlarge the walls of the room,  
I will open the window
and the large, frosty air will enter,  
healthy as tragedy.
Human thoughts will enter
and human concerns,
misfortune of others, saintliness of others.  
They will converse softly and sternly.

Do not come anymore.  
I am an animal  
very rarely.

mayocoba beans and kale with yogurt cheese

This is a little detox from all of the sugar in that birthday cake. It's easy to make, keeps for a long time, and travels well--the perfect office lunch. So there have been a couple of bean and kale recipes because, well, that's what I've been craving, but I'll be sure to mix that up soon enough.

This is great on its own or served over some brown rice (what I did). Cook a vat of brown rice when you have time and freeze it in sheets in large ziploc bags. You can break off pieces of it whenever you want, ready with just a quick spin in the microwave. 

snowboarder birthday cake

The bar had been set pretty high. Okay, really high. For my birthday this past September, my boyfriend surprised me with an entire swimming pool [cake] (I have been an avid swimmer my entire life. In fact, swimming is really what brought my boyfriend and I together . . . you know, out-of-breath flirtations in between swim sets . . . romantic). This cake was detailed with lane lines, little stick figure swimmers, flags pronouncing things like "Go Jen!" and "#1," and, last but not least, diving blocks made of rice krispy treats. Yes. The bar had been set very high, but I was determined to match it. Snowboarding was the obvious choice and a friend and I had been eying a marshmallow fondant (think edible play-doh) recipe for quite some time. Now, I thought fondant was a bit scary. The pros on TV use the stuff to make some pretty incredible things and I was afraid that little 'ole me in my quaint suburban house might be a little too low-key for such elaborate, edible structures. But then I said, nahhh.

What did I have to lose . . . besides a couple pounds of marshmallows and several pounds of powdered sugar? (I doubled the recipe but still might be exaggerating some here.) I did a whole lot of searching for images of snowboarding cakes and took inspiration from a very impressive professional cake. I don't even want to show you that one because it is so good that you'll be disappointed with my final one. However! In the name of developing ideas and inspiration and maintaining some amount of blog street cred, I thought it important to show how the idea snowballed (hah!). So, I decided I wanted a cake "mountain," I wanted pine trees, I wanted a fresh powder snowboard track, and, if possible, I wanted a nice blue icy look to the base fondant. Easy . . . ?

Greek coffee

Coffee isn't a love. It's a necessity. I much prefer the taste of tea, but sometimes the caffeine just doesn't cut it. When you need a real jolt, there's only one place to turn. Let me first say, I'm no coffee aficionado. On weekends, I might brew a pot of Dunkin' Donuts in my grandparents' old electric coffeemaker with the mismatched pot, obviously from some other set, since it never sits quite right in the machine. I might also venture to Starbucks, but mostly because it's the best atmosphere near work (but not at work) to sit with your laptop. I often get the café misto, because it reads the most like Spanish coffee (dark and strong with steamed milk), but never ends up tasting like it. Maybe partially because you're not sitting with your feet in the sand at a table on the coast of southern Spain. True that.

I'll tell you one thing I have learned: Coffee is just as much of an art, if not more so, than tea. There. I said it. But it didn't dawn on me until a couple of Greek friends, Angeliki and Jorge, painstakingly instilled in me their brewing process.

"After Visiting Hours" by Leon Weinmann

All unnecessary weight is eliminated. . . . Even the brain cells needed for song are lost and replaced seasonally in some birds.
—All the Birds of North America, p. 63

At midnight, in the sunroom of the ward,
when you’re locked in your pajamas, stupid
with heartbreak, and your throat a frozen stream,
you’ll read how birds in winter lose their minds,
or lose that part that urges them to sing—
each glad cell dying in the blood, until
they know no love but the sparse, sterile seed,
the bitter pills that fatten and preserve
their hearts against this thoughtless cold, this dark.
And yet they seem at peace with this: they love,
they turn away from love, they wait for love
to come for them again, and trusting, sing
the song they knew was gone for good—I knew
you’d come back, I knew it, I knew you’d come.

farro risotto with rancho gordo beans

For my birthday, my incredible friend ordered five pounds of Rancho Gordo beans for me, along with the Rancho Gordo Heirloom Beans cookbook. While I put the beans in their awesomely packaged bags on display in my kitchen, I couldn't decide what recipe merited the addition of these spectacular specimens. Four months later, it hit me, thanks to Smitten Kitchen (one of my all-time favorite blogs) and my love of risotto. 

I took Deb's recipe for barley risotto with beans and greens and used that as a base with a couple twists of my own. First, same incredible friend who gifted me the beans also bought each of us a bag of farro. We had been looking high and low for that elusive grain and once I had it in my hands, I knew I needed to do something with it as soon as possible. So instead of barley, like the recipe originally called for, I used farro.

birdwatching in winter

I've always loved a snow storm. I get excited at the thought of it happening. The bigger and more threatening the satellite image, the better. I revel at the idea of staying inside all day (I intentionally chose to leave out that part about shoveling). Well, I got my wish (a few times over actually), and in between periodically checking work e-mails, I snuck outside because there was an absolute feast going on at the bird feeder.

First, let me tell you a bit about this place. The house I live in abuts a town forest that, while not huge, is connected to other reservations and protected areas that accounts for some significant space (at least around these parts). Every once in a while (though, sadly, more often as of late) you'll spot deer or a coyote. At night in summer you can hear squealing fisher cats on their hunts (or see one moseying around your front lawn). What I most enjoy, though, are the birds. My grandparents always fed them. My grandfather kept the bird feeder full at all times (a huge, triple-barrel one, no less) and the birdbath full of fresh water. My grandmother scattered raisins around the yard and sang to the robins from her kitchen window as they hopped around snatching them up.

welcome to you and welcome to me

Hi all. This is my first foray into the world of blogging, and it's about time...not to say that blogging is something that has been constantly on my mind. Quite the opposite. The idea hit me smack in the face while sitting at my seven-year-old, overheating, overprocessing, pink-line-down-the-middle-of-the-screen Dell laptop somehow managing to properly view my favorite blogs (a list that I would be happy to share at a later time). The idea of creating my own barely fluttered through my head until I smacked it away like a mosquito and went on trying to come up with some other, more practical idea of expressing myself and showing myself to the world (a bit scary!). I abandoned the stresses of all that "thinking" for the necessity of shoveling out the back parking spot. This is barely a necessity, but in the world of suburbia and too many cars per house with street parking restrictions in winter, a third parking spot out back is really a luxury. If you want to carve out a spot from three winter storm's worth of snow, it's necessary to take your mind off the back-breaking work. It was freezing cold, but sunny, and I had just filled the bird feeder and the birds were jotting around and singing. It was truly beautiful. And so I thought of the blog title "birds in winter." Well, so did someone else, apparently, but the thought to record this strange life of mine didn't leave me. Maybe people would be semi-interested in a 20-something living in and keeping up her grandparents' house, feeding birds, planting gardens, cooking and baking to her heart's content while pretending she lived in the city--attending some small-venue music shows and trying to keep up on the newest new music, walking to shops and restaurants for the sake of walking to shops and restaurants (because you can walk there, and that attribute is lost in suburban living), being a part of a swim team in Cambridge, MA, and finding those corner spots that the locals know for being the best. That whole paragraph should end with at least one question mark (better, a few), because I'm honestly not sure how interesting this would be to anyone else, but it's worth a shot. You at least get an idea of where this name came from. At first, honestly, I had no idea where "slick" came from. It just seemed to roll off my tongue, with "suburban." But it's funny how those things just happen, because the play on "city slicker" and "suburbanite" was perfect. Enough of that. What's the point? Well, I hope to use this as an outlet to share some of my favorite recipes and cooking endeavors, new and old bands and songs that have wooed me, gardening trials and tribulations (once it's no longer -1°F outside), crafts and little design projects I do, some beautiful swims and races I compete in, along with a whole slew of other things that I'll think of as I do them. I hope you find it somewhat interesting, maybe even useful. Feel free to leave comments, too. I hope for this to be interactive and fun. Until soon city slickers and suburban dwellers!