I’m getting a lot better at cooking for some reason, I’d like to think it happened naturally but my boyfriend will remind me that 1 out of 2 dishes I made in 2008 was absolutely lousy.

Thanks to Michael Ruhlman’s new book called Ratio I’ve been introduced to the idea of cooking not from recipes but from simple ratios to construct healthy meals based on ingredients on hand.   I initially intended to buy the book as a Christmas gift for someone, but there was only one copy left at the Strand (used book store) . . .  so it turned into a gift for myself.

Some call ratios “a secret decoder ring that frees you from the tyranny of recipes”, and I’m not sure it’s that easy, but a careful study of the ratios and the similarities and differences between them has certainly helped me out.  As a nomad I have to provide food for myself in all sorts of strange situations and it’s much easier to carry around a one page chart of ratios when I’m out shopping or standing in front of the fridge than anything else.  Apparently for $5 I can buy the Ratios iphone app. I don’t have an iphone and I think my brain needs a little arithmetic every now and then, but it’s pretty cool.

The most useful part of the book is the ratio charts: Doughs and Batters, Stocks and Sauces, Meat-Related Ratios, and the Custard Continuum, which take up one page of the book. His writing is quick and to the point. Muffin batter differs from popover batter only because there’s twice as much flour and a hint of baking powder.

How I’ve used the ratios:

The other night my friends got a fantastic donation of eggs from a local farmer so I whipped out the Custard Continuum and we started a very classic Creme Caramel and a quiche based on ingredients found in the fridge.

The creme caramel was incredibly easy to whip together. Just 2 cups milk, 4 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 tsp vanilla extract and 1/4 tsp salt.  I would double the vanilla next time, and we made it richer by using half and half stolen from the school’s cafeteria.

The trick to the whole show was the caramel sauce.  Now I hadn’t read the caramel sauce chapter when I tried this recipe and I didn’t realize that all I had to do was put 1/2 cup sugar in a pan on medium heat and wait (and wait and wait 15 minutes at least) for the sugar to get so hot that it turned into a liquid (sure Puhlman said it, but we doubted that sugar would liquify on it’s own and after 20 minutes of stirring . . . there was a lot of doubt).  My friend Franny was the only one patient enough to keep pushing the sugar around till it finally browned with 2 tbsp butter and a tbsp of cream. I later read that stirring it isn’t actually important, just watch it to make sure it doesn’t burn. We poured the beautiful caramel into the bottom of 6 ramekins, waited for the caramel to cool and then poured the custard in.  After 30 minutes in a water bath at 325 degrees Fahrenheit our little custards were caramel heaven. I’ve never had something so simple and yet so elegant from a home oven.  We flipped them upside down and the caramel sauce ran down the custard. The pictures really don’t do it justice.  Many thanks to Willie, Iris, and our hostess of the evening Franny.

I can’t say enough great things about small independent bus companies that run between Chinatowns through out the country.  I believe this sort of decentralized, small overhead, low but steady profit are the sort of businesses that will continue to be profitable as our economy re-orientates itself towards reality.

My last trip to Oberlin, Ohio was via Greyhound in mid October.  The drive from Cleveland to New York is approximately 8 hours if driven at 70 mph. Riding Greyhound buses in the Midwest steals all the wind (and hope) from my Midwest Loving sails.  It’s always another Erin Cometbus adventure, only I don’t have the wit to weave the terrible mishaps into a best selling zine.  The ride took 14 hours with a 4 hour stop for a replacement bus because the “windshield wiper broke” on our bus (well after the rain had stopped) and cost $69.70.  I’m not including the bizarre story of how I found myself entwined with the passenger next to me when I woke up in Cleveland.

My thoughts on Greyhound are that they do not care about me, when I get to my destination, or if I get to my destination.  Of course, the Chinatown bus staff did not care about me but it cost $70 (up from $45 in 2007) and they cared that I got to my destination as fast as possible.  Despite a severe snow storm for 2 hours followed by steady rain and several stops to deliver passengers to 9 different locations along the route it only took 9 and half hours.  Freaking amazing!

We also noticed there are several more Chinatown bus lines running to more Midwestern locations.

I should also mention that we were the only gringos aboard.  While waiting a man asked me if I knew about the shuttle to Cleveland because as he said some people find it surprising. I bubbled up about how much fun I had last time on the shuttle, we were packed like sardines.  It turns out that was our driver just checking to make sure we were prepared for being dropped off at a Youngstown, Ohio gas station at 1:30 in the morning and scrambling into an unmarked white van to end up at a deserted Chinese strip mall at 2:30 am.  His concern that our fear of the unknown might slow down his ability to deliver us to Cleveland in a timely way is the sort of customer service that makes Chinatown buses fast.

Mathew and I are back on the road after spending the autumn in Brooklyn finishing up some cool projects.  We’re spending the next two weeks at our alma mater, Oberlin College, preparing a presentation for our next project and getting feedback from professors and old friends.  We’ll be living out of our backpacks and staying with friends and family till mid January.

Molly Jean on Traveling Efficiently:
I think a lot of people think living nomadically is very stressful because of all the packing, re-packing and the logistics of trying to find a place to crash each night. It certainly is stressful, but so is life. Traveling involves most of the same chores as keeping a clean house, like making the bed, only it adds the dimension of unknown, “where is the bed I am going make?”

Total time to pack: 2 hours. We each have a hiking backpack filled with about 80 lbs of winter cloths, summer cloths, rain gear, yoga mat, art supplies, laptops, kefir grains, 12′ diameter hot air balloon and film equipment. We’ve been traveling with this arrangement since June.

Total cleaning time: It took me probably 3 hours on and off to clean the bedroom and bathroom where we’d been staying in Brooklyn at a friend’s place (note: Mathew cleaned up the last three times we moved).

Selling time: 1 hour. I posted my bike on craigslist and broke even on what I paid for it on craigslist back in September.  Blessed is the internet. Mat got rid of his bike in a scant 3 minutes our last night thanks to a bike thief in Williamsburg.

Time spent on Travel Logistics:  2-4 hours total.

Ah! The holidays are here.  My favorite podcast, NPR’s Planet Money, did a thought provoking show about the inefficiencies of our current culture of gift giving.   As a giver and receiver you should listen and see what you think of economist Joel Waldfogel’s radical ideas.  Planet Money Podcast November 25th. It’s certainly sparked some heated debates at my dinner table.

Spread the word, slow cooking is back and a really quick way to make amazing meals.

Imagine the scene: It’s 10:30pm on a Wednesday night, my hot boyfriend and I just got home and we’re hungry as cus and want to get fed and go up to bed A.S.A.P.  We’ve got a lentil soup in the fridge from our Monday night cook out and some radishes but we really don’t want to eat lentils for lunch the next day.

The solution to this hairy predicament: barbecue brisket while you sleep! (for tomorrow’s lunch and dinner)

That’s right, Mathew heated up the lentils, made some rice, pickled the radishes and set the table while I threw together some barbecued brisket.  We finished our work at the exact same time and sat down to a good meal.  Total Prep Time: 20 minutes.

Ingredients:

beef brisket (I used 1.5 lbs, but you can do what you wanna do)

1 onion

4 potatoes (I used sweet potatoes and baby red potatoes, any root vegetables would do, or skip the veggies, but you’ve got to use and onion for flavor)

a cup or two of beef broth

paprika

barbecue sauce (soy sauce, brown sugar, ketchup, stewed tomatoes, apple cider vinegar, paprika,  worcestershire sauce)

Preheat oven to 180 degrees F

Step #1 I should of sauteed the onions to give them some of that delicious carmelized flavor, but there just wasn’t time.  Instead I chopped them and threw them in a sturdy pot with a good lid.

Step #2 I dried the brisket with a paper towel and sprinkled it with salt and paprika.

Step #3 I lightly seared the brisket on both sides in a frying pan on high heat.  The brisket cooks in the oven at 180 degrees F for eight or more hours, so there’s no reason to over do it with the searing.  Sear it just enough to get a good brown color. Put the brisket on top of the onions in the cooking pot.

Step #4 Deglaze the pan.  Turn down the heat on the frying pan and pour in a half cup or more of apple cider vinegar or apple juice or in my case just plain old vinegar (I forgot to buy any when we moved in and we’re moving out in two weeks so it seems pointless to buy a whole bottle of apple cider vinegar). Pour the delicious deglazing liquid in to the cooking pot over the brisket and onion.

Step #5 Pour a cup or two of barbecue sauce (or some other delicious seasoning mix that you concoct) over the brisket.

Step #6 The brisket should be completely submerged in liquid while it cooks so that the meat doesn’t dry out.  Pour beef broth over the brisket until it’s completely submerged in delicious liquids.

Step #7 If you still have room in your pot chop up some potatoes or other vegetables into  chunks (2″ by 2″).  I cut my sweet potatoes really big ( 4″ by 3″) and they weren’t completely cooked. Don’t be a fool like me, chop ‘em small.

Step #8 Put the lid on your pot of soon to be brisket, say a prayer and pop it in the oven at 180 degrees F.

Step #9 Go to bed with your favorite honey, get a good night sleep, wake up and check the oven to find a tender brisket waiting for you.  I cooked my brisket at this temperature for 9 and half hours and it was perfectly tender and delicious.

After cooking I like to slice my brisket into paper thin slices and serve it like a soup with all the delicious sweet spicy broth and potatoes.

For those of you tired of staring at bright LCD or CRT screens that burn your eyes if you forget to blink, take refuge in the latest Personal Projection Unit to come out of Mathew and Molly Inc!  This opaque projector creates a beautifully detailed image of anything you’d like on sheer tracing paper in a dark room with out any of the eye pain.  Unfortunately, it’s only available for pleasure not business.

Mathew and I unleashed a personal opaque projection device at the Perfect Wave Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn last weekend for the show Devil’s Trumpet.

It’s almost impossible to photograph the beauty of this little device.  It’s basically an opaque projector mounted 4 feet above a semi transparent paper screen resting a foot above the viewer. The projector works so simply that it often boggles viewers like myself who are more accustomed to the mystery of digital or film projection. The projector was built for Fernando Renes‘ mutoscope which will be shown in Spain, Paris and Miami Basel next year.

Inside the projection box there are too bright lights that shine on the object to be projected (in this case Mathew and I dangled feathers, prisms, and shells), the light bouncing off the object is bounced off two perfect metallic hemi-spheres and directed down to the paper screen using a small lens.  One viewer proclaimed “Wait . . . the light just takes the image from here . . . to their with out any technology?” I would say that the geometry that guided the placement of the lens and metallic hemispheres in this neat little wooden box is technology. I think Euclid would be proud of us.

Our projection device was whipped up Saturday afternoon for the specific purpose of  providing a personal light show to people listening to binaural beats.  The binaural beats were created by our friends Phil, Tyler and AJ via earmuffs, funnels, tubing and a lot of didgeridoos.

I really hate living alone.  It’s lonely.  However, what’s worse than living alone? Living with people I love, but hating them. “I LOVE YOU BUT YOU HAVEN’T CLEANED THE ZIZZEROID PUMP  IN FIVE WEEKS  YOU SCUM BAG!”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living all over the world it’s that everyone has a different idea of what “home” should be.  The idea that there are “universal rules” for living are almost impossible to pin down.  I once lived in a wooden cube in the middle of a soybean field where it was perfectly acceptable to not do dishes and have rats living in the oatmeal bin, but if anyone messed with the high speed internet they better walk the line.  I once stayed with a vegan friend who made me keep my thermos of kefir (a dairy culture) on the porch. The only universal rule about domestic life is that we all believe our rules are the universal rules. I’ve heard so many friends say “CAN you believe she didn’t use the XYZ method for cleaning the ZiggerPod? LIKE WHO DOES THAT?! I mean EVERYONE KNOWS YOU CAn’t just use a Juuberboob to wash the Ziggerpod!”  All I can think of is “I just learned what a Ziggerpod, how am I to know how to clean it?”

By now the only thing I absolutely demand from my habitats are running water, a bit of privacy, lighting to see what I’m doing, access to food, and a comfortable temperature and sound level for sleeping.  These necessities are worth squabbling over, but dirty dishes are not.  Sometimes it’s easy to forget that these necessities are the root cause of most domestic fights.  I once yelled at Mathew for 10 minutes over his laundry bag and then we went on the roof to talk about it and I realized I just missed having natural sunlight in our bedroom.

Last winter Mathew and I were living in a pretty awesome place which met all of the above necessities, but I still wanted to kill him (not really, but you know how it feels at the time).  It turns out Mathew didn’t know I did chores unless he saw me doing them.  The fact is I usually squeeze in those little chores during odd times of the day when I’m not around Mathew, so he never actually saw me working to keep the house tidy, he just saw the somewhat mediocre results of my cleaning efforts.

So one evening I created this handy dandy little chore chart to document what chores I’d done.  When he came home he could see which chores I’d done and would know that it’s his turn to do them.  The plan was to have a pure 50-50 split for domestic work. After I do a chore I pull the white tab to Mat’s side and once he’s done he pulls it to my side (the side with the pink dot).  The next day I came home to see that almost all of the tabs were pulled to my side indicating he had cleaned the whole house.  He smirked at me with the sort of petty “BooYAh” grin he reserves for childish competitive games.

Now there are many ways to make a chore chart.  I’ve been to all sorts of summer camps with different crafty chore charts and wheels. And honestly, I think those campy chore charts deserve a place in adult homes.  Like how am I to remember that Mathew did the dishes last?  I worked all day inventing a gigantic squeegee, I’m not thinking about petty dish fights.   I’m also a big fan of David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done.” One of the most important lessons from his book for me was that if I crowd my head with tons of tiny things to remember like “appointment at 4 p.m., mat has to do trash, i have to do XYZ”, then I’m less likely to have time to think on a higher level about challenges I’m facing.  There’s no point crowding the brain with facts that are better recorded with pen and paper on a calendar or on a chart.

Here’s a chorechart from a community house in Kansas City, Missouri.  While it’s totally beautiful and has a nice edge to it, it didn’t really work.  As an expert in chore charts, I would say it’s to vague and assumes that there are universal standards of cleanliness. What does it mean to be in charge of keeping the bathroom clean?  If it was up to Mathew that would mean the toilet flushes and their are good books to read.  I break chore charts down in to every specific task that has to be done so that it’s completely clear what needs to be done. It’s also nice to give each activity equal weight on the chart so that even the tiniest chore gets done. Also . . . I freaking love crossing things off the list. It feels so good to pull that tab to Mathew’s side of the chore chart and say “your turn to wipe the hair out of the sink.” It’s also dangerous to have a rotational wheel sometimes if it’s not clear when the chores will be rotated next.  It’s easy for the chore wheel to lose it’s respect and purpose if it’s not spun regularly.

The other problem with this chore chart is that it’s not competitive. I know I’m a big love machine, but I really think that adding some element of competition helps big babies buck up and do their own dishes to save face.  For a chore wheel with more than two people it seems like every time one person gets a chore done they should be able to take the chore responsibility out of their arena and into someone elses to (1) visually display that they’re doing the chores and (2) to show the other housemates that they need to step up their game.

While chore wheels are crucial, I will say that large mega disasters (like a house fire, food fight, anonymous explosion, etc) should be cleaned up together as a community with lots and lots of good jams.

In conclusion, I hate chores, but making them competitive, linked to ones status in the home, and fun to do together can make the wheels of civil society spin a little easier.

I’m a huge fan of Edward Tufte’s work on the visual displays of quantitative information, and nothing makes me happier than a new nomagram.  Jessica Prentice, Maggie Gosselin and Sarah Klein have just released the  most practical nomagram ever.  It’s a simple wheel that relates time of year with available local foods in the New York Metro area and local foods that are available year round.  The test of any good nomagram of course is the ease with which a five year old can understand it, the Local Foods Wheel definitely passes the test; it is easily understood without explanation and beautiful enough to touch.

I now use the Local Foods Wheel in conjunction with my Meal Planning Grid (see my previous blog post) to determine what dishes to make each week. I’d like to think that I know what foods are seasonal to where I live without looking, but I don’t.  Major thanks to Jessica, Maggie and Sarah for making this beautiful and cheap (only $13) new nomagram.

Ladies, yeah ladies. I’m talking to the ones with out glitter. What’s with that? It’s about time we all just accepted that we look better encrusted in glitter and rhinestones, for better or worse.

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of doing the makeup styling for Suspiciuos Package and Cherie Lily for a sweat dripping performance at Zebulon.  If you haven’t seen them yet, cake yourself in glitter, squeeze into a leotard and go sweat out your pain with them.  Cherie performs tomorrow night at the Highline ballroom and it’s guaranteed to get your heart beating.

If you were at the Girls after party in Bushwick you might of been surrounded by beautiful people in glitter and bright colors;  I made those people so shiny. Check out Todd P’s admiration for the power of my glitter.

The other week I attended Just Food’s cooking class entitled “Slow Food for the Urban Kitchen.”  I’m currently living and working in an urban area, specifically Brooklyn, NY, so it was great to get advice on how to make nourishing food without quitting my job and chaining myself to the kitchen.  Jessica Prentice of Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley led the class and made beef stew before our very eyes.

I really appreciated Jessica’s emphasis on finding cooking methods that work for one’s quirks. For example, if you hate cutting onions and it makes you so angry you scream and cry, which makes you the leave the house and just freaking buy pizza, than help yourself enjoy cooking and by all means buy something a little more expensive which doesn’t cause severe eye irritation like leeks or shallots.  I liked her point about making the cooking process manageable so that it becomes a part of the rhythm of life instead of a much dreaded chore.  I for one always bring friends over to keep me company while I cook or listen to my favorite podcasts (like Planet Money OMG I love thoughtful economic reporting).  Cooking from scratch can is nourishing and always cheaper, the trick is to adapt recipes to your preferences.

I joined the  Weston A Price Foundation about a year ago which introduced me to the nutritional value of using broth in my cooking, but I haven’t lived anywhere with a crock pot this year so I haven’t bothered.  I move on average every two months and I’ll be darned if I’m lugging an electric crockpot on a Chinatown bus anytime soon. Lucky for me Jessica pointed out that an oven set at 210 degrees F is just as good as a crockpot, though not quite as fire safe for long periods (friends . . . I promise I won’t have another house fire).  I’ve already made 3 batches of bone broth using this method. It’s incredible.  I browned the bones in a skillet, set them in a big old pot with some aromatics and sautéed vegetables, set a lid on it, and left it in the oven for 48 hours.  The house smelled like home cooked heaven and the broth made some fantastic minestrone, lentils, and various stews.

This oven as crock pot trick is also a great solution to cooking beans perfectly.  When beans are simmered on the stove it’s easy for them to get mangled from occasional stirred. More importantly though, who wants to stay home and watch the beans simmer?  Dried beans are way cheaper than canned bans in my neighborhood so I prefer to use them.  I just set the beans in a pot with a lid in the oven at 210 degrees F and as long as I’m back in 2 or 4 hours those beans are perfectly tender.