Buffet; or Why Danny Can't Overeat

So I recently went to the Golden Corral location in Marysville.

Needless to say I was somewhat horrified and even a little disgusted. Not because of the Golden Corral chain, mind. They provided excellent service and given the high volume of customers at the time, I can find no fault in their food outside of the fact that it is a buffet.

In my opinion, the food was bland, overcooked, drowned in fat, and grossly over salted. The patrons, bless their hard-working hearts, were for the most part grossly overweight or too young to have put on the pounds yet.

I felt traumatized by the experience because sometimes, less is more, and the culture that I've cultivated around myself here in Bellingham is not particularly one of excess. As a college student in the United States, it's by no means poor, but it's not overindulgence, not gluttony.

When we first sat down, I felt markedly out of place for immediately making a beeline for the salad. There was no line. I was the only person getting food from the salad section for at least ten minutes. I could have been happy with simple spring greens and a little fruit and nuts and cheese and a few small pieces of chicken breast meat. That was just enough to constitute a satisfying, if small, meal.

Buffets are the epitome of Americana in that they promote a lifestyle of too much the same way Wal-Mart does. They target themselves at the lower classes, promoting "low prices" while gunning for profits. They're effective at this in that they can create appeal, and in ways there's often no choice or no alternative.

I'm blessed to be in a situation where I have options and to have the education to see the larger systems at work. They make me uncomfortable.

Why Don't We Talk About Sex the Way We Talk About Food?

On Monday night, the Sexual Awareness Center office will be showing the documentary Let's Talk About Sex. While I urge anyone reading this to go to that film showing at 6pm in VU 522, I am not writing this blog post as a representative of that office. Considering we live in a culture that inundates itself with sex, where “sex sells” and “everybody's doing it,” we're awfully reticent to having frank and open discussions about sex and sexuality.

For eight years, we had a Presidential administration that almost exclusively advocated abstinence only sex education,which given rates of sexual abuse, unplanned pregnancy, sexual violence, and sexually transmitted infections (STI), completely ignores the fact that young people are having sex and under an abstinence-only model are having sex unprepared for the consequences of their actions.

The problem though is not merely systemic, it's cultural as well. We don't allow ourselves a space to healthily discuss sex. Within the public domain, we rarely hear about condoms until at least puberty, and even then the focus is on preventing pregnancy with little to no mention of STI prevention. Few parents would be able to overcome their embarrassment to bring up condom use to a teenager beyond surreptitiously leaving a pack bedside and assuming they'll know what to do with it.

Even this discourse completely ignores the range of emotional and social pressures that come along with sex.

About six months ago, I purchased a copy of the Guide to Getting It On by Paul Joannides, an irreverent, comprehensive sex manual that with glossary covers 982 pages. At times it exhibits language that makes me uncomfortable for its misogynistic, heteronormative or culturally-incompetent connotations, but it attempts to be inclusive and is reflective of the idiomatic culture that spawned it, so I would still recommend it for anyone interested about sex.

My favorite part about this guide is not its wide range of sexual positions and detailed descriptions of what to do in bed, for that kind of information I would actually recommend you to a copy of the Kama Sutra or Cosmo, but the way in which this book emphasizes the connection and communication between partners.

Most sex ed that I've encountered deals almost exclusively with the mechanics of conception and rarely STI prevention. This is your basic anatomy. This is how it functions to make a baby. This is everything that can go wrong. If you're going to have sex, use protection or die. What's missing from this approach is pleasure. It tells you nothing about how to make sex better, which comes most strongly from responding to what you and your partner want.

Now, I've been an advocate for good communication skills probably since about the time I became literate. Sexual literacy and communication is no different. A sexual relationship is still, first and foremost, a relationship. Even if it's casual hook-up sex, if only one partner thinks of it that way, problems will occur.

Having sex with another person is intimate. We're trained to keep it behind closed doors both physically and mentally. So acknowledging that you're with another person who has wants and needs and boundaries is the first thing we should be teaching youth.

If your brain is the most important sexual organ, your ears are the second.

Part of what will help make this process of education easier is changing the way we talk about sex. The other day I was at a presentation by Cynthia Morrison from the Washington State Department of Health and a question she asked our scant audience of eight was why do we not talk about sex the way we talk about eating.

The question was mostly meant to address language use in a sex positive culture. Consider for a moment the slang used for masturbation. Jacking off, beating one out, spanking the monkey, choking the chicken, ad nauseum, I would go on, but doesn't this list seem rather violent, and it only really talks about male masturbation. Or for another matter, what does it mean that some of the worst insults are related to body parts?

I like to eat standing in the kitchen as I'm making food for other people. Sitting down is a rarity.

I like to fuck in bed, being penetrated while on top, riding my partner.

Okay, so you wouldn't exactly talk about sex the way you talk about eating and I apologize if that last sentence gave any of you far too graphic mental images of me, but the language we use is important. I would rather hear about spicy, succulent, delicate, aromatic, tasty things in bed than I would this pseudo-violent harder, faster, aren't-I-such-a-good-little-bitch, use me, rhetoric we most often ascribe to sex. 


Can you imagine if it were the other way around? You're a bad apple, I'm going to have to take a bite out of you and swallow you whole. 


Yeah... this is still a developing series of thoughts.

French Bead

So my friend Cara texted me earlier asking for the amazing delicious bread recipe I use so I figured I might as well share with more than just her. Simple french bread has become my go-to potluck contribution because it's not as hard as one might think and it's pretty cheap to boot.

There's something impressive about making a staple like bread from scratch that a lot of people really appreciate. It's tasty, it's useful, why not know how to make it?

The recipe I give below is inexact at best, but that's generally my philosophy with cooking. You improvise with what's available and play around with tastes depending on what you like. Even if it doesn't turn out perfectly, you know better for next time, which for someone not formally trained in the kitchen is the most rewarding way through the learning curve.

If you want spiced bread you can add things like rosemary or sage directly to the dough. Or I've successfully added whole cloves of garlic right before rolling the halves into tubes to make this into garlic bread.

I'll edit this post after finals to add some pictures of my handiwork (like a true culinary blogger!)

In all honesty, I'm just using this recipe http://allrecipes.com/recipe/french-bread/Detail.aspx following some of the suggestions from the comments and using what I've learned from friends. And even then I don't actually measure exactly most of the time anyways. A tablespoon is usually pretty close to a generous sprinkling straight from the can or a small palmful.

Ingredients:

So reduce the initial flour to 5 cups, though have a 6th cup ready if it's too sticky as you try to knead and as you're rolling it out.
2 packages of yeast or about 1 1/2 tablespoons
~2 teaspoons salt
~tablespoon butter or suitable vegan substitute (mostly for flavor)
2 cups warm water (hot from the tap is good enough)
1 tablespoon cornmeal
a couple tablespoons sugar

Directions:

Remove rings and bracelets unless you don't mind them covered in flour/dough!

Mix the yeast with the sugar and water and let sit for about ten minutes until it looks naturally frothy.

In a large bowl mix the salt, butter and flour together, stir in the water until it resembles dough.

If the dough is super sticky add a little bit of that extra flour. you want it to be moist and malleable, but not super tough to work with. I think a good rule of thumb is you want it to stick to itself, but not to you.

Once you have a dough that you can sort of form into a ball, dump onto a lightly floured surface.

Knead for about 8-10 minutes though I generally just knead for about three kickass songs. You want this to be "smooth and elastic."

Place the dough in a bowl lightly greased with olive oil, cover and let rise somewhere warm until about doubled. About an hour or two (watch a movie maybe?)

Punch the dough down and split in two. I never actually let the dough rest for 10 minutes after, but it probably wouldn't hurt if you do.

With a lightly floured rolling pin or something similar on a lightly floured surface, roll out each half of the dough into a large rectangle. The long (or short, I guess it doesn't matter) side should be just a little shorter than your baking sheet. Roll the flat from this side. Seal the outer edge with water and kind of squeeze the ends into a bread-like taper. These should be about as big around as a roll of wrapping paper or something similar.

At this step I usually also add a second kneading to the dough, rolling it out halfway then tri-folding (like you would a pamphlet) the flats and re-rolling out the rest of the way

Sprinkle the cornmeal on your baking sheet and place your two loaves seam side down. This prevents the bread from sticking.

With a sharp knife, make four diagonal slashes on each loaf. Cover with a damp cloth/paper towel and let rise until doubled (depending on how warm it is, half an hour to an hour)

Preheat the oven to 375*F placing a small/medium bake-proof bowl filled with water on the lowest rack (The steam from this makes the crust chewy and great without having to deal with brushing the loaves).

Bake the loaves for 35-40 minutes or until crust is golden brown.

Cool and enjoy!