Hibernation 2015 - wherein I discuss stashing food supplies and what I achieved of my pre-hibernation goals, and perhaps, the dreams I will dream during said winter incubation period

I recently got asked to do a Thing in another city, and I very seriously replied that I was, in fact, in hibernation until the end of February. A conservative estimate. In truth, the end of hibernation depends on the end of Snow Season, which is different from the end of Winter. Although the two are not wholly unrelated.

Northern Michigan winters are not something I take lightly. Yes, there are places where winter is worse and/or more persistent. But this is nothing to be sneezed at. Unless you have the flu on top of being trapped in your own house and really we all should have just gotten flu shots. No, I'm not completely cut off from civilization -- see, I have the internet, I have all the civilization I need -- but when your means of getting to the grocery store or anywhere else in town is a tiny compact car, you reevaluate your ability to fight the terror in white.

And damn if road slush didn't nearly do me in the other day. It wasn't even snow! Or ice! Just the goofy slush! Argh.

So I don't travel between Christmas and the start of March. Not if I can help it and certainly not for any distance.

The cupboard shall not run bare.

I have a December through March worry, which becomes a full on January and February neurotic maxim, to always have several days worth of food on hand -- food that can be turned into meals, not just a box of Cheerios and a pound of butter. Shudder. Because we never know when the next big snow is going to hit.

Last year the weather forecasts were dead on. Then again it seemed like we got 2-5" every day last winter, so I guess it's not that hard to predict. But this year they predict 3" we get none. They predict 6" we get none. They predict 5" we get 12." Sigh. And even when a mild 5" fell earlier this week, and I had diligently shoveled out all the requisite paths -- clear sidewalk for school kids, clear steps for mail man, clear driveway for me to get the car out -- I slipped and slid all over the place courtesy of aforementioned slush. So I try to stay off the roads the day of snowfall if I can. (A home office is a brilliant thing.) But if it snows for three days . . . I'm screwed. Or at least stranded.

Which is fine. Because I prepare.

I like to have enough on hand that I could, if needed, wait it out for a week until a clear day afforded me passage to the market that did not land me in the ditch or making new friends and acquaintances of the let's trade insurance information variety. At the very least I can stretch things out by eating rice and kimchi until I realize that I'm not Korean enough -- even in my own mind -- to eat kimchi with every meal. (It should be noted that technically I'm not Korean at all, I just watch too much K-drama and it's been rubbing off on me.)

Read the rest of this post...

The Forgetful Kimchi Hypothesis

Last week, I gathered up some hope from the rubble, and took to heart a suggestion from a magazine that I "send again" by embarking on the final edits of a short story I'd left unfinished for months. It only took me one evening of work to come to the hypothesis that good stories are kimchi.

Kimchi is a spicy Korean food which, while different from sauerkraut in taste, is not so different in production: at its heart, Kimchi is just fermented cabbage. I know, who doesn't see decaying cabbage and think, now there's a metaphor for fiction writing, right? But I hold to my hypothesis: stories are kimchi.

Making kimchi involves chopping and combining raw ingredients including the all important napa cabbage. You combine it with other stuff. Then you wait. You don't touch the kimchi. You don't poke at it or check in on it daily. Traditionally, you put the kimchi in an earthenware jar and bury it in the backyard for months, if not a year, depending on the recipe and the seasonal temperature. The burying is to help provide consistency in temperature, although such jars often are stored above ground in courtyards. Most recipes you'll find on the internet suggest that refrigeration is probably the way to go, yet in Korea "you will still see rows of kimchi jars on top of the flat roofs of apartment buildings in the big cities." [source]

Is my hypothesis that writing is nothing more than a slow fermentation process? That's too simplistic a comparison for what I have in mind.

The drafting of a piece fiction does not need to be slow. The current editing project is a short story I dashed off in an evening because of a looming 8:00 AM workshop deadline. But following that quick trot, gathering ingredients, preparing, chopping, mixing, I received thoughtful feedback, and then I stuck it all in an earthenware jar and buried it in the backyard for about eight months.

The story didn't need months to complete its drafting, but for me to go from the piece's writer to its editor I needed that time. It wasn't about the story, it was about me processing the feedback I'd been given and -- more importantly -- it was about me forgetting the process of writing it.

Forgetting is the most important part. When I take an idea from concept to plot to details to words on a page, I am wrapped up in all of it. I know what I meant to write even if it's not what I actually wrote. At the time of creation, I read what I've written and I anticipate my own next moves. I'm unsurprised. I'm unenthusiastic. I'm too in touch with the process of creation. So I have to take the time to forget everything save the vaguest sense of what the story was about.

Eight months after writing the short story, I hauled the jar back inside and revised. I got more feedback. I was much, much closer to being happy with the story. I'd resolved some of my own craft short comings. I'd figured out which parts of the story were too light, and which too weighty. Then I put it back in an earthenware jar and buried it in the backyard for eighteen months. Eighteen.

This is not to say that I did not write during that year and a half. I just wrote other things. I filled other earthenware jars until my folder of Word Docs looked like a Korean courtyard. And on the eighteenth month when I opened this particular jar, I'd forgotten everything about drafting the piece. Finally I could read it as a reader would, as an editor would. Things which the creator in me thought were "necessary" to describe the world were readily apparent as flotsam to be skimmed off. The story found a new opening place. The first five pages were cut and the information therein condensed into a paragraph. The dispersal of information regarding the character's motivation was restructured. The main speculative element was previously nebulous to the reader -- as the writer I'd understood how it worked just fine -- so its description was reworked, condensed. Would you like some kimchi? It's ready.

I understand writing quickly. I think that deadline driven writing is superb, but then again, deadlines are my main source of inspiration. My advice -- if we must boil this down to advice -- is to write fast and edit slow. Give yourself time to forget so that you can meet your story again as a stranger. Play that game TV couples like to engage in, the let's-put-the-past-behind-us-and-pretend-this-is-the-first-time-we-ever-met game. You know the one, where they smile bittersweet smiles at each other and attempt to pick each other up for the first time in spite of their insider information.

Of course, no advice should be treated as sacrosanct. All writers write differently. Yet I am always astounded by those who begin rewriting a piece almost as soon as they've drafted it, those who can go from workshop to second draft within a week, if not a day. Not astounded because they're "doing it wrong" but that they're able to do so all. My memory is by no means a steel trap, but it needs a stretch of time before it can forget a story well enough to allow me to read it afresh, read it like a reader and not like its creator.

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More thoughts from other people: "Do You Practice Creative Contemplation?" an interesting essay on patience and listening, and while it poo-poos on NaNoWriMo, the mother of all deadlines, I believe that a NaNoWriMo draft, taken with a kimchi recipe approach, is potentially quite serviceable, so I'll cut the essayist a break.

Hurricane Finger Food

As Hurricane Sandy smacks down into the eastern seaboard of the United States, I can't help my overwhelming urge for finger foods. Snacky-snacks. Should I go out and buy chips and salsa? Should I make peanut butter cookies? Banana bread?

There's a rational reason behind this desire: should the power go out, I'd need foodstuffs that do not require heat to prepare or refrigeration to keep.

There's an irrational reason too: Hurricane Sandy is the best reality TV of the season. All consuming drama. Infinite outcome possibilities. Occurring in real time. With chance of interactivity should the storm reach where you live. This sort of drama needs snacks.

Or at the very least we can all tweet #HurricaneSandy again and again.

I thought that, seeing as I'm hunkered down in the Midwest, that the hurricane posed no issue for me. Then I saw the Weather Channel's map of "likely power outages" (not me) and "possible power outages" (holy crap, that's me!) and I decided it couldn't hurt to take a trip to the store, stock up on essential snack food, get some fresh batteries, and fill a couple pitchers with drinking water.

They've not said if the power outages are possible all the way as far inland as Chicago and Wisconsin because of the winds alone (they're gonna be doozies) or if it's going to be because of rolling outages and demands on the grid. I remember all too well the rolling blackout of 2003 that darkened New York to Detroit. That was actually the first time in my life I'd ever seen a "brown out" before the blackout. My mother later told me that "brown outs" were common when she was a kid -- the television, which was on at the time,  got dim, then came back, then dimmed to almost nothing, then came back, then ... nothing. Four days worth of nothing.

President Obama got on air and made a very calm, very presidential, very rambling statement that people need to follow evacuation orders so that the first responders we have in place won't be unnecessarily put in harm's way. Reading between the lines: don't be selfish.

New Jersey's governor -- and I know very little about New Jersey's governor but this statement fits with everything I know of him -- says simply: "Don't be stupid. Get out."

Their concern is well founded. My New Yorker friend reposted this link to a Hurricane Irene cartoon today on Facebook. The fear among public officials, weather forecasters, and FEMA is always that when we predict a bad storm and it doesn't happen, that the next prediction will be seen as crying wolf.

Of course, all it takes is looking at the water mark in Battery Park. Today, four hours before the storm makes landfall, the water mark is only an inch below its height during Irene.

I'm not terribly worried for me, but being prepared never hurts.

Prepared. Like buying tortilla chips.

Twitter abounds with pictures of people's preparedness bounty. Namely beer. Practical for multiple reasons -- passing the time and, should the power go out, having all that cold beer filling the fridge will help keep the entire contents from rapid spoilage. (Not that we need more reasons for beer.)

Prepared. Like laying in supplies of brie and water crackers, Swiss Roll Cakes and salsa.

Prepared. Like checking the flashlight, finding it dead, then being responsible and purchasing new batteries for it, only to put in said new batteries and have the light bulb pop and die. So I have no flashlight. The good news is that I have plenty of candles and those at least give off heat -- important for someone looking to be prepared for a Midwestern windstorm and/or winter. Unfortunately, they also give off scent.

Scented candles: ready to stink up blackouts in pastel colors and high class holders. And banana bread (it's cooling on the rack). Yep. We're prepared.

Pepper Confidential

There's always plenty to choose from in August at the farmer's market in Michigan. I walked off with peppers, summer squash, a pound of green beans, celery, tomatoes, more tomatoes, peaches, and blueberries -- I was completely weighed down by the time I left and I think I spent only $17 or $18 on the lot of it.

The table I grabbed the summer squash from was running a pick-3 deal and so I grabbed some adorable tomatoes that looked like baby watermelons and then looked around for something else to get.  My options were, unfortunately, limited.

They had green beans, but I already had a pound of them in my bag. They had okra, which I won't eat unless it's breaded and fried. They had more tomatoes, but I'd already made a collection of red, green, orange and yellow tomatoes and, geez, there's only so many tomatoes a girl can take on even when she likes tomatoes.

So I grabbed a tub of peppers. Peppers are always useful, I thought.

Except I have no idea what kind of peppers I actually grabbed.

At the time, I only saw their tops and stems. And in the past I've purchased these translucent-ish somewhat green almost purple bell peppers at farmer's market. I thought I was getting those. When I got home and pulled them out of the bag and saw their entire shape ... I don't think I got bell peppers.

But what the hell are these things? No two of them are shaped alike. And I'm a little bit nervous to expose their secret peppery identities by just chomping down on one.

Edited to add: I poked around on the internet and found a visual guide to peppers which has led me to believe that these are in fact banana peppers. Great. Now I have to figure out what to do with like seven of them.

Corn Kernels, Corn Kernels Everywhere.

The corn chowder experiment was simultaneously success and ... not such a success. I chose to make corn chowder -- something I can't ever remember eating -- because it called for five ears of corn; no other recipe I found would use up that much corn as quickly and since waiting much longer would send my prior purchase of five ears of corn into the territory of Everclear Pure Grain Alcohol I decided that it was time to try corn chowder.

My mother loves Michigan sweetcorn. When I was a child she would coo and aw over it when she made it. If she saw a roadside stand on a country road in the month of July she'd make my father pull over. In my mind the best part of it wasn't the eating but the husking. My mother would set up a brown paper bag on the front steps of our house and bring out the ears of corn still in their green husks on a giant platter and we'd pull away the tight green leaves and send corn silk flying everywhere. The next morning I'd go out to play and there'd still be corn silk on the walk.

It was little wonder my mother never let us husk the corn in her kitchen, but I have no such luxury in my current apartment. Instead I tried my best to be careful and peeled off the husks over my kitchen trashcan. The cat, ever fascinated by this cooking-thing that takes my attention away from her, came to sit beside the trashcan and watch me. Most of the corn silk made it into the trashcan. I managed to sweep up that that floated away, but I have no idea what happened to all the corn silk that settled on the cat.

My next Herculean task was getting the corn off the cob.

Cutting corn off the cob looks so easy when they do it on Top Chef. Even under pressure and pressed for time they simply go woosh, woosh, woosh with the knife and the corn kernels are in the bowl. That is not how it actually works.

Corn kernels, corn kernels everywhere.

I thought I got them all but this morning I found one in the cat food bowl.

The little buggers do not fall simply to the board, they ping around everywhere. It's less like cutting a vegetable and more like releasing several hundred little springs. Cutting around a soft spot on the cob I cam across a handy little trick: slice off only the bottom half of the cob, then turn it upside down and do the other half so that the kernels don't have as much air time before hitting the board.

Sadly, I was already on the third ear of corn when I figured this out and even then it wasn't perfect so I stole a technique from my field hockey days. In field hockey when you're receiving a pass you tilt your stick forward, leaving the head of the stick on the ground and pushing the handle away from your body so that the ball is trapped by the acute angle of stick and ground. This is extremely important because if the angle is obtuse the ball (more often than not) rolls up your stick like it's a ramp. I've seen a girl get a black eye this way. Okay, okay, I gave a girl a black eye this way but it really wasn't my fault she had bad technique. Back to the corn cob: using the same principle I decided that as I sliced kernels off the bottom half of the cob I would tilt it at an angle making the distance between board and cob even shorter. It might not have been the best for "kitchen safety" but it was much, much better for kernel bombardment.

The chowder itself came out of the Better Homes & Gardens big-ass giant cookbook. You know the one I'm talking about. It's got a red plaid cover on it to look like a table cloth and though it's been updated that table cloth motif hasn't changed in 60 years. I call it the cooking bible because it lays down all the rules about everything, every basic that all other cooking books assume you know. I'm willing to bet that there's one in your kitchen that someone bought you when you (a) got married or (b) moved out on your own.

After all this process, you have to remember that I've never tried corn chowder. The verdict? Well ... it's okay. It tastes fine but I don't think vegetable chowders are my thing. Now clam chowder? Bring it on!

The last ingredient to go in the pot is three strips of crispy, crumbled up bacon. And let me say this, everything does indeed taste better with bacon.

Julie & Julia

I saw the film Julie & Julia today. It was sweet and funny until almost the very end. Meryl Streep was great -- so was Amy Adams although Streep outshined her. See, I had to go see it because it's about this woman turning thirty, feeling lost, and finding a way to ground herself through cooking her way through all 500+ recipes in Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, oh and then she blogs about it. So I ran out to see it the day it came out, even went by myself because I didn't want to wait to scrounge up someone to go with me.

I was ready to laugh, to smile, to maybe even cry a little. But most of all I was ready to feel inspired. I even had a grocery list in my purse so that I could return home and immediately continue with my cooking experiments. (I'm not doing too badly, btw, though I think my stir fry is becoming consistently worse.) Instead I left feeling rather devastated.

Nora Ephron (director and screenwriter) did a great job of establishing Julia Child as a lovable character. We really came to adore her and we went for the Julie's adoration hook, line and sinker. And then -- Bam! -- "Julia hates my blog ... she thinks it's disrespectful or something."

Oh the pain and the bewilderment. Putting people on pedestals is always dangerous to do, but it turns out that it's much, much easier to deal with them toppling off those pedestals than it is when they take a swipe at you from them. When they topple off you know they're human. When they take a swipe at you there's gravity helping to land a blow even harder.

I went to the store feeling sick and distraught. Sure, the character Julie pulls it together by the end of the film. Even leaves a gift on the shine of the Julia Child. But in the few minutes between the turn in the film and the credits rolling I had not pulled it together yet.

Still I shopped. Buying green peppers, an onion, and chicken broth to make corn chowder with the ears of corn that are quickly rotting in my crisper bin. I've never made corn chowder before but I'm eager to try it because it's new ... and because it'll use up all the corn quickly, before it gets any closer to Everclear. Also into my basket went talapia and a bottle of red wine. The fish is for tomorrow. The wine is to console my soul.

I'll let you know how the chowder goes.