the hypothetical wren

This may look like tomato soup, but it isn’t. Yesterday, I improvised a soup recipe, so as to use up a lot of odds and ends of vegetables that were slowly expiring in the refrigerator. The result was one of the better things I’ve made recently, so here is the closest thing to a formal recipe that I could come up with:

4 medium-sized beets
2 medium sweet potatoes
1/2 head of cauliflower, broken into pieces
3 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1″ piece of ginger, peeled and minced
1 red bell pepper, chopped
2 tablespoons West Indian curry paste (I used this stuff, but I imagine any sort of potent curry paste or powder would work fine)
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp hot paprika
1 tablespoon harissa or other hot chile sauce
3-4 cups vegetable broth
1 can light coconut milk

1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Cut the beets, sweet potatoes and cauliflower into manageable pieces, coat with 2 tbsp olive oil, and roast until soft. (You could do this in advance, even — I actually made this part as a side dish for an earlier meal, and used the leftovers for the soup.) Cool a bit, and place in a large soup pot.

2. In a small pan, heat the remaining olive oil, and saute the ginger and garlic for a few minutes. Add the red bell pepper, and saute until the pepper is soft. Add the curry paste, the spices, and the chile sauce, cook another minute or so. Add to the soup pot.

3. Pour enough vegetable broth into the pot to cover the vegetables and spices. Heat to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer the vegetable mixture for about 20 minutes. Then, using an immersion blender, puree the soup until it is smooth. Add the coconut milk, return to heat, and simmer for another few minutes. The soup is done!

You could top it with plain yogurt, chopped mint and cilantro, toasted nuts, or lots of other things. In case you care, this soup is vegan. The above bowl is my second — it tasted even better as lunch today than it did as last night’s dinner. I’ve had a few cooking disappointments lately — including some very time-intensive but not-so-tasty red mole and squash enchiladas I made last weekend. (The mole sauce was great, but squash was not the most complementary filling.) It’s nice to be able to think up something delicious every once in a while.

In other news, I just bought myself a big birthday present, for my upcoming 34th: a ten-day trip to Belgium (and wherever else in central Europe that I feel like going to, since you can seemingly get everywhere from Brussels) in early January. So many things to eat and drink! The chocolate! The moules frites! SO MANY DELICIOUS TYPES OF BEER! More Tintin souvenirs than anyone really needs! (I don’t think I’ll be adding to my existing collection, pictured below in my newly reorganized bookshelves in my office)

I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to do over there, since I just talked myself into buying the ticket last night, but I’m pretty excited. I’ve been saving up money for another big trip, and it’s a lot cheaper to go to Europe in the fall and winter than it would be in the summer, so I figured this was the best time to go.

(Hmmm…these shoes look like they could use a good polishing. It’s difficult to find polish for red shoes, though, since the dye comes off pretty easily, I’ve found.)

It has been unseasonably warm here in ABQ-land recently. High temperatures are still in the 70s most days, and it hasn’t been freezing at night. I took the above picture on Sunday, at dusk, and, as you can see, it wasn’t cold enough outside to require socks. (This is a good thing, since I’m not a big fan of socks.) I was wearing a scarf, but that was more for looks than utility.

Beyond the Dixon Ticonderoga: a website devoted to brand-name pencils. There’s a surprising diversity of pencil colors and designs out there: I like this one, this one, and, also, this example. Pencil design seems like a challenge: how many design elements can you fit on such a small canvas?

There are times these days when I wish my bike had this feature. The other day, I was riding down Silver, when I encountered a truck that was stopped in the street in such a way that he was blocking the entire lane I was in. The driver was waiting for a car in the oncoming lane, and, since he wasn’t looking in my direction, I figured it would be safer just to stop and wait until he figured out what he was doing, rather than to try and pass the truck on the left. Anyway, I waited, and the other car eventually passed, and Mr. Truck pulled out into traffic. The driver saw me waiting there in the street, and decided that this would be a good moment to unroll his window and launch a diatribe of profanity (of both the gender-specific and gender-neutral variety) at me. I didn’t really know how to respond, so I didn’t. But, I was thinking, Asshole, all I was doing was waiting for you notto block traffic. Any negativity you ascribe to our brief encounter is entirely your own.

ABQ has been getting some notice lately for being a decent place to ride bikes, but, as the above encounter indicates, it’s still no Portland. (Actually, I’m sure that Portland, in reality, isn’t quite the velo-fantasia that people claim — I remember lots of bad drivers from the time I lived there.) As you can see, there are still a lot of angry people in vehicles out there, even in parts of the city that are supposed to be reasonably safe.

I seem to have gone the entire month of October without an entry. Sorry about that — I thought about writing up an entry, but I had a difficult time composing something that didn’t bore even me. The productive parts of my brain, as you may guess, have been elsewhere, engaged in other things.

As you can see by the above picture, I’ve had a lot of reading to do. Most of it has been not very interesting. I always hate to say that, since the topics that these books are about are not boring — European nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, labor in revolutionary France, the building of the modern Irish state — but the tones, techniques, and tropes of contemporary academic writing conspire to make them so. Especially when these books are read in bulk quantities — when I look at this pile of books, I think, please, please, no more learning, please. My brain is no longer receptive to new information.

The small bright spot on the horizon is that this is my last semester of taking classes. I was telling someone the other day that I never want to take four classes during the same semester that I have to teach three classes (even though I’m only auditing two of the classes, and the three classes I teach are different sections of the same class). And then I realized that my problem was solved, without any effort on my part, since I will have to attend class no more, after umpteen years of college.

I went to Denver last weekend, for an impromptu two-day vacation, buying a plane ticket at the lastest last minute that I’ve ever made a decision at. I could do this because the cost to fly up there was cheap ($112 or so, amazing for a ticket bought six hours before takeoff) and because my dad was going to be there for a conference, so I already had a place to stay.

The hotel issue is important, since the city was packed on Saturday and Sunday. There was the World Series, of course, but there were other things going on: a hockey game, a football game (on Monday), an anti-war protest, some sort of bike event that brought a lot of people dressed as bananas to downtown, and, oh yes, a conference that attracted thousands of geologists to the city. I was looking at hotel rates right before I left, just in case something happened with the room I was planning on staying in, and average hotel rooms in normally non-flashy, mild-mannered corporate hotel chains downtown were going for $500 to $600 each, which I believe is a record. Parking, too, was overpriced, but this wasn’t a problem I had to deal with.

Despite the fact that they are located in the same time zone, in adjacent states, Denver and Albuquerque are completely different places. The feel of each city, determined by the built and natural environments that characterize each, is very different. The first thing I notice when I get to the central part of Denver is, this is where the brick houses with pointy roofs and more than one story live. Also, trees. ABQ is missing some — no, make it a lot of that. There are valid historical and environmental reasons for this, of course, which I am too tired to really go into right now, but it’s always surprising to me just how different the two places are. (This may be less apparent if you drive between the two places, since you have to pass through Greater Suburbia to get to the centers of both cities — the outskirts of each, at least, are alike in the way such places are alike everywhere in the U.S. It’s the centers that seem very different, which becomes more apparent when you fly.)

Theoretically, I thought that I might be able to get some research done while I was up there. I achieved one thing on my to-do list — getting a Denver Public Library card, so that I can remotely access some of their research databases — but, once I got there, I gave up on getting anything done, save walking around, observing, and taking some pictures. I’ve been so busy since school started that I haven’t had many chances to relax, so, once I got out of ABQ, I gave up on my ideas of being productive.

So, I walked around, watched a lot of people, did some quick surveys of the neighborhood /area I’m in the process of writing another paper about, ate a lot of meals with my dad, drank some good seasonal beer, and generally had a good time.

Some observations:

Everyone seemed to be in a very good mood. Denver takes its sports very seriously, and I expected people to be a bit dour, since the Rockies were down 2-0 on Saturday afternoon (a situation that, as you know, did not improve over the next several days). Yet, I think most people in Colorado never expected them to get to the World Series, like, ever, so people seemed content to just enjoy the moment, even though the Rockies ended up losing pretty badly.

My plane from ABQ to Denver should have been named the Sports Fan Express. There were logos everywhere to be seen: on hats, on shiny nylon jackets, on t-shirts, you name it. I was sitting next to a big Packers fan who somehow got routed through ABQ on his way to the game. He showed me all of the good-luck charms he brought with him — his lucky Packers troll doll, a plastic helmet, some coins he’d owned through several championship seasons, and other amulets and tokens of football-fan brujeria. However, he did not have the expected cheesehead hat, since, he said, “those aren’t very lucky.”

I was looking at some of the new condo/apartment/”loft” buildings going up in downtown, and I noticed a difference, based on apartment price, in the way each building uses its ground floor and sidewalk space. The more expensive the apartment, the less each building is designed to interact with passersby. One new apartment building, where units began in the “low” $1 million range, had no signs, entrances, or other items on the ground floor to indicate whether it was an office building, a place to live, or just a large, unfriendy hunk of concrete and brushed stainless steel. The benches on the sidewalks out front faced away from the building, towards the parked cars on the street. If they faced inward, this would make the sidewalk more of a public, friendly space — people sitting on these benches could interact with people walking by. Yet, placed as they are, the chances that there will ever be people sitting on these benches is low — who wants to sit and watch a parked car. Many of these higher-end buildings seem designed so that you will want to walk by them as quickly as possible — they’re for people who want the status of living in the city without actually having to interact with it. I don’t think this is a particularly worthy goal.

Given the higher land and labor costs in Denver, how is it that coffee — from local and chain places alike — ends up being consistently cheaper than it is at certain establishments in ABQ? I drank a lot of coffee while I was up there — it’s the fuel for wandering around aimlessly on autumn weekends, after all — and I don’t think any of the cups I bought were as much as a small cup of coffee from the Satellite. The cup pictured above, from the Tattered Cover coffee bar, for example, was only $1.45 — it would have been at least 50 cents more, had it been served to me by a barista wearing a black uniform. (The setting for the above photo is the small smoking patio outside the bookstore.)

Some more photos from this weekend:

Benches inside Union Station. No one was waiting for a train this afternoon — it was just me and the guy buffing the floors inside there on Sunday.

Part of the sign of the Fontius Building, on the 16th Street Mall. Since this building was just purchased by a developer, who knows how long this sign will remain up.

Abandoned tobacco — tobacco for the quality people — on Curtis Street.