Stress + Food
Why didn’t anyone tell me grad school was going to be hard? I kind of pictured myself like, discussing theory and then going out for beers with smart people and then having totally ample time to do all the exciting, challenging work that I would naturally produce. I do get to do the theory-discussing and the beer-drinking, but the ample time? Not so much.
But there’s all this paper-grading, and grant-applying, and giving seminars on kung fu movies, and giving seminars on psychoanalysis and The Matrix, and mountains of dense dense reading, and you can’t really have an off day because if you don’t talk a lot or just want to fall asleep, everyone notices because there are 5 people in your class. And apparently because you’re in grad school now, you’re supposed to be a grownup and no one’s going to hold your hand. (Except, in my case, Alex, who is literally holding my hand).
(A bunch of rambly stuff about food after the jump).
Now that I’m here, where I wanted to be a year ago, all I want to do is spend my time looking up recipes for squash soup (to use up Mr. Butternut who’s been sitting on the counter). I kind of want to replicate one that Kevan served us a year ago, which was like the nectar of the gourd gods, but seeing as he’s gallivanting in Fiji, I can’t exactly just email him for the recipe. (I could email him, but if I was gallivanting in Fiji, I probably wouldn’t bring my recipe books.) I don’t want it to be too rich, and a lot of the maple and squash ones are very elaborate (like, roasting the squash with a bunch of spices, pureeing it and then adding it separately to a base that involves making a roux) and seem like they’d really overwhelm the squash and be overly sweet. Now that I’ve read about 800 recipes, I’ll probably just wing it. We’re going to the movies tonight, but I’ll be home tomorrow.
In other food news, the pizza situation in Vancouver is not as dire as I had feared. We already knew about Nat’s, but we finally tried The Flying Wedge , which had been recommended to us and has much more convenient locations. And lo, it was good; seriously, we had pizza with three kinds of sausages, and figs! On pizza! There’s a place down the street from us that does thin crust that we haven’t tried yet.
Speaking of figs, we finally broke down and bought a loaf of (very pricey) Terra fig and anise bread. And it was totally worth it. I don’t even really like anise, but the flavours really balanced gorgeously. Also, the texture? It was crusty and chewy and, man, I wish I was better at writing about food. It, combined with the recent run of Smitten bread posts, has made me want to try my hand at bread-baking. The last time I tried to make bread (not in a bread-maker), I was probably about 13 years old. I’m definitely a better cook now.
Not that I really have time to devote to bread right now. Or even soup.
8 Responses to “Stress + Food”
Jen on 17 Oct 2006 at 9:04 pm #
I was at my parents’ house recently, looking in their fridge (why else would I go there), and found an entire box of fresh figs. I had to ask what they were. I was like, “THIS is a fig? I’ve never seen one before. All I know is Fig Newtons” and then my sister said she said exactly the same thing. They’re decent though. Weirdly mushy. Taste like the inside of a plum.
brenda on 17 Oct 2006 at 10:08 pm #
Alex and I are borderline obsessed with figs, mainly because we’d never had one before (in a non-Newton context), and we like pretentious food.
Kevan on 21 Oct 2006 at 5:09 am #
I have a few recipes on my iPod with me out here, but sadly, that isn’t one of them. I can tell you that it was the Curried Butternut Squash Soup from the Chez Piggy cookbook. http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/item/books-978155209296/1552092968/The+Chez+Piggy+Cookbook?ref=Search+Books%3a+‘chez+piggy’&sterm=chez+piggy+-+Books
The cookbook is seriously worth the money, but alternatively, you could find it, and covertly copy the recipe.
Lemon on 23 Oct 2006 at 5:00 pm #
Are you turning into the awkward TA that stands in front of the lecture hall and gradually stumbles through an explination of Feminism that borrows 90% of it’s exact wording from the assigned reading?
Pleas say no. Please say you can complete a lecture without looking like you need to pass out or throw up. The world needs more TAs who can Teach and Assist and not just Take Adeepbreath.
Jen on 23 Oct 2006 at 8:43 pm #
Ouch. Brenda would never be that kind of T.A., clearly. Have you met her? Also, you spelled ‘explanation’ wrong. Are you one of those students who somehow makes it to university and struts around all pretentious but can’t spell basic words?
brenda on 24 Oct 2006 at 12:34 pm #
Kev: Sweet, thanks. I might just go ahead and order it. Any cookbook with soup that good is probably worth my money.
Dan: Uh, thanks for the vote of confidence. I’m assuming/hoping you’re just projecting your own TA issues, and you don’t actually assume I’m a stuttering incompetent.
Jen: Thanks for the actual vote of confidence.
Lemon on 25 Oct 2006 at 10:06 pm #
I am projecting my own bad TA experiences out into the world like war flashbacks. I’ve had categorically bad TAs in almost all my classes that have had TAs. It becomes so constant that you wonder if there’s something about the position that makes normally competant people, smart people, graduate students to boot, into high-schoolers reading their essay in front of the class.
I was winning my war on my bad spelling/keyboarding until I started beta-testing this Flock browser. It loads multi-media in a quarter the time of Safari and Firefox, but doesn’t give me access to the OS-rooted spell checker that I have come to love and rely-on in Safari.
brenda on 26 Oct 2006 at 8:21 pm #
See, it came out kind of hostile. I don’t actually have to lecture, but I do manage to run a tutorial every week without actually dissolving. TAs are kind of luck of the draw: often people are teaching things that aren’t necessarily in their area. U of T film was the worst because there is no film MA so the TAs were all from English and Theatre, and there’s a lot that doesn’t translate across disciplines.
Also, a friend of Alex’s works for Flock.