Seminar Cookie Update!

There were cookies at seminar.  Apparently last week's announcement was a garbled interpretation of a new university policy regarding the purchase of food for meetings, seminars, classes, etc.  This is to save what money remains in the budgets, not because the money has already run out.  (Although that must not be too far in the future given the rumors on campus.)

But there were cookies, at least for this week, and they were greatly appreciated because today's speaker chose to read his presentation.  This is unheard of for a scientific presentation in our department, so there was much twittering and awkwardness in the audience.  And while the subject matter held the promise of a very interesting presentation, the speaker's somewhat dramatic reading  with little eye contact with the audience didn't quite capture all of our attention and some of the audience began nodding their heads.  And I wasn't certain what the protocol was for alerting the very senior faculty member sitting beside me that he was on the verge of slumping over in his chair.  Do I nudge him?  Do tap his arm?  What if he jerks awake and feels embarrassed about it?  Poor soul, I would have offered him a cookie but I had already eaten mine.   

Sign o' the times

Forget what the talking heads say about the current economic meltdown, I've got a new indicator for our current economy. Last week, during our weekly departmental seminar, the seminar chairman passed on an announcement regarding the long-held tradition of having cookies at seminar. The departmental budget has shrunk to the extent that, unless people donate money, there will be no more cookies offered at seminar.

I've weathered several other budget crunches at Virginia Tech, but we've never had to cut out the seminar cookies before now.  It's a sad, sad state of affairs when we can't even afford two $2.50 packs of Kroger-brand cookies once a week.

Even worse, those cookies are an absolute necessity at seminar. I've made it through many a less than scintillating presentation by rationing a bite of cookie over the 60 minutes. Sometimes even the cookies can't save me from falling asleep, but that trick has kept me from making a fool of myself (or worse, drooling in public) on multiple occasions.  And I know I'm not the only one who depends on those cookies for the very same reason.

We have seminar this afternoon.....sans cookies.  God help us.

Coffee cake

And I do mean coffee cake, as in there's coffee in both the cake and the glaze. This is an easy recipe for a great snack cake for a mid-afternoon pick up.

Coffee Cake

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup instant coffee dissolved in 2/3 cup water
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Coffee Glaze: Dissolve 3 tablespoons instant coffee in 3 tablespoons of milk. Add 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar and stir until smooth.

In a large bowl, beat butter, sugar, and eggs with a mixer until fluffy. Mix together flour, cinnamon, baking powder, and baking soda; add to butter mixture and beat until well blended. Add coffee and stir until well blended. Spread batter evenly in a greased 9x13 inch baking pan. Bake in a 350 degree oven until center springs back when lightly pressed, about 50 minutes (but check after 30 minutes). While hot, sprinkle 1/2 cup of chocolate chips on top of cake and spread the chocolate evenly when the chips have melted. Pour the glaze on top of melted chocolate. Glaze will harden if left to set for a couple of hours, which gives the cake a nice crunchy top. Glaze will soften if stored airtight, making the cake very moist, but this doesn't detract from the cake in anyway. Assuming you had any leftover cake to store.

Who says you can't drink your coffee and eat it, too?

Dirt Therapy

Most people who know me understand that I'm a gardener. They might suspect I really enjoy gardening, but they probably don't fully understand how addicted I am to playing in the dirt.  There is something intensely therapeutic for me to dig a hole, baby a plant, and watch it flower and fruit.  It kills me to go on vacation during the middle of the summer because I might miss a the bloom on a particular plant, or I fret over whether my tomatoes will die from lack of water in my absence.  


Like many gardeners, I didn't plan to become a crazy plant person.    

While I was deep in the midst of my doctoral research (circa 2003), I came to the conclusion that either I find some form of stress relief or I was going to go stark raving mad. And it looked very likely that I would take people with me to this side of crazy during the process.  Seemingly overnight I decided that gardening would be a good idea.  (Maybe because I couldn't imagine some inoffensive shasta daisies demanding that I reorganize the tables in Chapter 4 of my dissertation again, or the basil asking me for the upteenth time if I had run the analysis on the field data yet.)  Steve, who was my boyfriend at the time, graciously let me plow up a strip of his backyard along the side fence. And he even volunteered to run the ancient workhorse tiller we borrowed from his neighbor to break up all that old sod and hardpacked soil.  By August that year I had enormous Rudbeckia, staggeringly tall lion's ears, and some very tasty tomatoes.  Did playing in the dirt work as stress relief for me? Yes, gardening was an enormously helpful distraction from my PhD.  Does Steve regret giving me free rein in his yard? Years later I have greatly expanded that first little strip of a garden to a large percentage of the backyard, but I have my degree, I have not committed homicide, and Steve and I are happily married.

Ooooo, welcome back!

Oh my, it's been a while since I posted to my blog.  Rest assured, I did make it back from San Francisco and we had a lovely trip.  Then the whole holiday season arrived, interspersed with various bouts of ear infections and stomach flu, followed by a desperate need to catch up on house cleaning and actual work at work.  Now it's mid-January and I can focus on more important things, like posting to a blog that no one actually reads.  

I suppose some people would read this if I actually told anyone about it, but I don't think I can take that kind of pressure right now.  I worry that my blog is inadequate.  It isn't ripe yet, it needs more time to rise, and it might fall if I take it out of the oven too soon.  (Why all the cooking metaphors???  It's a blog, not a souffle!).  But mostly I haven't told anyone about my blog because I don't know how interested anyone would be in reading about my vain attempts to clean up the disaster zone of the basement, how I've already ordered seeds for my garden even though it's only mid-January and it's 2 degrees outside today, or I'm going to go insane if Ally asks me to read "The Icky Sticky Anteater" one more time.

I know....I'll start posting pictures.  That'll capture their attention and keep them slavishly returning for more.  (ha!)

Sittin' on the dock of the Bay....

So here we are, several days after Barack Obama's historic win for the presidency of the United States, and I'm struck by the difference between my parents' generation and that of my own.  I have the impression that older generations are astounded that we've elected an African-American to be our president.  My parents and grandparents saw much of the long, hard, and frequently violent struggle for equal rights for minorities.  I don't suppose they ever thought it would be possible for a black man to reach the highest office given the prevailing attitudes and political climate even 30 years ago.  Whereas my generation never doubted that we would have a non-white president some day, but we'd like to know why it took so long. 

As for the title of this post, we're off to San Francisco tomorrow morning for a little bit of work and a lot of fun 'n games!

End of the Season

The weekend forecast for the New River Valley is for low temperatures near freezing Saturday and Sunday nights.  Sigh, the garden season has come to its end.  I'll be picking all the remaining tomatoes, tomatillos, sweet peppers, and basil on Saturday.  Most of the plants have already died back, but my pineapple sage (Salvia elegans), with its brilliant scarlet blooms and delicious scent, is still going strong and I'll be sad to see it bite the dust.  My lion's ear (Leonotis leonurus) never bloomed this year, but it started growing tall and forming buds at the start of October.  I've been delusional in thinking that it, and that last late cosmo, might bloom before frost.  At least the curious spiky bud balls of the lion's ear will make an intriguing addition to the vase of coleus cuttings that I plan to take.  I had half a dozen different types of coleus in various pots this year.  Coleus is one of my favorite foliage plants, especially the very brightly colored ones or those with duck-foot leaves.  I often take cuttings to root throughout the summer, but I never recognized that they make a beautiful bouquet until just a couple of days ago.  I prefer pottery vases that hide the stringy roots that develop in the water.  If I'm going to root coleus, I might as well use them as a substitute for cut flowers.

Another chore for this Saturday will be moving the potted plants back indoors for the winter.  I'll have to set up a table in the basement for the gazillion amaryllis (amarylli?) bulbs I've kept over the years or started from seed.  Then there's the 4 foot tall dwarf banana, a Musa zebrina 'Rojo', I think....there wasn't a tag with it when my husband gave it to me for Easter 5-6 years ago.  It's done very well this summer and has 4 large pseudostems in the pot along with 2-3 smaller pups at the base.  At this point the banana has become just another member of the family and I hate the thought of losing it.  

What was I thinking when I decided to start all those different packs of basil varieties???  I had lime, lemon, cinnamon, blue spice, globe, and Red Rubin basil.  I think I had been enthralled with the idea of all those different flavors and scents and wanted to try them all at once, but in the end I never really used them, even though I had dozens of plants.  The lemon basil consistently reminded me of the smell of furniture polish each time I popped a leaf in my mouth.   At least the bees seemed to appreciate all the basil flowers, and the 4 x 4 foot patch of alternating purple and green basil I transplanted in the corner of the back yard was very pretty in late summer.  Next year I think I might just stick with the Genovese basil for pesto and an ornamental red variety for color.  Well, maybe just another couple of blue spice basil plants for variety.....oh wait, that's exactly how things got started this past spring.