Culinary Chronicles and Concrete Curbs

By the end of Thursday, I had run out of gas.

My most salient thought throughout Thursday was my strong desire to take a nap. Perhaps the circumstances preventing me from running in the morning were a blessing in disguise. When the time came to go home after work, I made a beeline home, without even stopping to greet friends. I was wiped out.

Before taking a powernap, I whipped up batter for a cake that I would bake after returning from my evening gathering. I would share the cake on Friday night, during a celebration with friends who were beginning our third year together in North Africa.

About an hour before my bedtime on Thursday, when all I really wanted to do was to retire for the day, I moved the batter out of the refrigerator and into a cake pan, placing the cake pan in the pre-heated oven. Setting my watch for fifty minutes, I went into my room and found myself unable to gain much ground on my list of items to do before Friday.

When I returned to the kitchen to inspect the progress of my baked good, I quickly discerned three things:

• First, the oven was at least a hundred degrees too cold.
• Second, my cake had yet to reach full cakehood.
• Third, pools of melted butter had formed atop the partially-baked batter.

After wearily, yet expectantly, waiting nearly an hour for my food-incubating kitchen appliance to metamorphose the batter into a yummy post-dinner foodstuff, these three realities confirmed that truly I had run out of gas. And now, so had my oven.

(Sometimes, when I get really tired, my brain uses unnecessarily large words to communicate simple concepts.)

I supplied a full tank of gas to the oven. Into the oven, once again, went the fledgling cake. As you may recall from a few paragraphs ago, in this drawn-out account of cake-baking, pools of melted butter had formed atop the cake, yet the cake had not completely risen. The cake, when reintroduced to heat, continued to rise, eventually causing the pools of butter to run down the sides of the cake pan into the lower regions of the oven, resulting in boiling butter and large quantities of smoke.

I took appropriate precautions not to let the smoke alarm awaken my roommates and closely monitored the cake until it finally did reach full cakehood. Amazingly, the cake proved to be resilient and received many compliments at dinner the following night.

Fast forward a few hours from Thursday night to Friday morning...

Last year I taught high school. I looked forward to Fridays, because high school teachers, on a rotating basis, brought snacks to share with the high school staff. This year, as a middle school teacher, I return to the high school guidance counselor’s office each Friday as an emeritus high school teacher and snack consumer.

Today the high school carried out its annual Beach Day, the day when our small, but growing, high school conducts various bonding and team building activities at a local beach. As a middle school teacher, I now oppose Beach Day: It caused my high school snack to get deported to the beach.

Here I should note the other culinary reason why each Friday at school is special: It’s Couscous Friday. When a person eats large quantities of couscous, two things can be expected. First, the person will be ridiculously tired an hour later. The medical term for this is “couscous coma”. Second, the person will be curiously hungry an hour after that.

While medical research still needs to be done on this latter phenomenon, it can be said with relative certainty that the emerging from a couscous coma, when coupled with the deportation of high school snack to a local beach, can cause withdrawal symptoms leading to abnormal behavior.

And all of this explains how I wound up sitting in a kindergarten classroom, nonchalantly crafting my own peanut butter, banana and chocolate chip open-faced sandwiches early Friday afternoon. In kindergarten, I also learned how to share, which is why it was necessary for me to make two sandwiches, while each of the other kindergarteners only made one.

I named my sandwiches. The one on the left is “Smiley”. On the right is “Bucktooth”. Bucktooth was tasty. Unfortunately, I then underwent a phenomenon known among elite medical scholars as “Bucktooth coma”…

…and finally, something completely different…

One friend, who deserved to be at Friday night’s celebration of beginning our third year in North Africa together, stayed at school, working tirelessly to weld forms that will allow a concrete curb to be poured around the track where I run each morning—so long as it’s not pouring. I took a picture of him as he was welding some stuff. I’m posting it here, because I think it’s cool.

Rained In

I roused myself out of bed five minutes early this morning, before my electronic rooster uttered a sound. Speeding through my morning routine, I anticipated heading outside, reaching the earthen track around our gutted soccer field, and getting my morning run out of the way soon enough to have a little extra post-exercise time for myself before heading to the office.


As I opened my bedroom door into our living room and kitchen area, I heard the sound of running water. For a few moments, I wondered which of my roommates was doing dishes in the dark. Then I realized the sound was coming through our patio’s screen door: It was raining.



Our soccer field and track are under construction. Hand-dug drainage trenches, waiting to be filled with pipes, lie exposed on the soccer field. The track, waiting to be surfaced, serves as a moat to protect these trenches during the rare occasions when it rains.

Mr. H’s Spies

I enjoy teaching seventh grade English. The students are old enough to ask good questions, yet young enough still to be imaginative.

Our school sits in the countryside, just a few miles from the city limits. Our location entails sundry countryside phenomena, such as frogs and bugs. Bugs, in fact, have already disrupted my class once or twice. Seventh grade girls and countryside critters can be an earsplitting combination.

Last week, I walked around the classroom, checking homework and writing my initials on completed assignments. One of my students asked how I would find out whether or not they had done their homework, in the event of my absence from school. I informed my class that the bugs were my spies, who dutifully let me know whether or not my students have done their homework.

At the end of the same period, I wanted to use a picture of bison as a conversation starter and writing prompt. Unfortunately, several of my spies infiltrated my classroom and derailed my lesson plans. Here I had a conundrum: Should I allow students to kill my spies, thereby eliminating my unfinished-homework detection system; or should I allow my spies to live, thereby inciting a riot of seventh grade girls, jumping up on their chairs and screaming?

I changed their homework assignment from writing about the picture to writing about my spies. Two recommendations from my students struck me as noteworthy:

1) Use butterflies. 2) Put the spies on the ceiling.

All Wet

My alarm serenaded me early this morning. I planned to run a few miles before school—something I hope to be disciplined to maintain throughout the school year.

I purchased a dehumidifier for my room nearly a month ago. My bedroom is sort of a self-contained area, attached to a private bathroom. The bathroom has a ventilation fan, but other than that, it provides no pathway for moisture to escape, except for into my bedroom. Shortly after moving into my room at the start of 2006, I had major problems with mold attacking both closets in my bedroom, largely due to lingering moisture. The dehumidifier was part of my strategy for helping that not to happen again.

Last night I picked out clothes to wear and laid them near my dehumidifier. This morning, shortly after the “Flight of the Bumblebee” jumpstarted my day in all its cheesy-cell-phone-ring-midi-file glory, I got up, walked over to the clothes I would wear during my run, and planted my sock-swaddled foot smack into a puddle.

This was not good. The goal of a dehumidifier is to remove the moisture from my room and collect it into the pan that accompanied it and its $250 price tag. The dehumidifier should most definitely NOT be quaffing water out of the air and spewing it back onto my floor. My dehumidifier had been very, very naughty. I gave it a timeout, and it seems to have learned its lesson.

So I went outside and discovered that a cloud had engulfed the compound overnight. The fog limited visibility to perhaps half a football field. I know, because I ran around our football field, and I could only see about half of it.

What really made me misty today, though, was the untimely death of Steve Irwin, the “Crocodile Hunter”, who had an ill-fated encounter with a stingray during the filming of an ocean documentary.

At the end of the day I did laundry, while also instigating a flurry of activity in my kitchen. I made pasta for myself and a cake to share with others. (Yes, men can occasionally multi-task.) I started my load of wash first. By the time to take the cake out of the oven, I figured my clothes would be ready to throw in the dryer. Nope. The washer got stuck in the soak cycle. I changed washers. When I returned to put my laundry in the dryer, the driers were all full, leaving my clothes—fitting, for this day—all wet.

Advanced Meteorology: Soupiness Index

I hope the folks at The Weather Channel won’t mind my using this graphic:

Notice that yesterday’s low notched a scant degree Fahrenheit less than the average high.

I have tried to come up with an appropriate adjective for these conditions. The word hot fails to describe it; muggy falls short; drippy captures the humidity, but lets the heat escape.

My suggestion: soupy. It’s soupy outside. Downright soupy.

By the end of yesterday, the soupiness of the weather had so sapped my strength, when I woke up in the middle of the night, I discovered that I had been drooling.

You know it’s soupy when that happens.

Say HELLO to my Little Friend!

Shortly after returning to North Africa a few weeks ago, I got reacquainted with my favorite route for stress-relief running. I pushed myself a bit harder than perhaps was wise and could sense, upon returning to my apartment complex, that my blood sugar was low. I was pretty pale.

Since I had just returned from summer vacation, and since several others still had not returned, groceries were in short supply throughout the apartment complex. Desperate to get some sugar into my bloodstream, I went to the home of the junior telemarketer pictured above, where I asked her parents if they could spare a banana. They graciously gave me a banana and about half a liter of Kool-Aid.

Now, whenever I return from a run, my friend promptly greets me with, “Do you need a banana?”

Yesterday I engaged my friend in conversation as I approached my building on the way home from work. (She often stands in front of the main entrance to my apartment building and forbids me from going inside.)

Apparently the friend who took this aerial photograph almost captured a better picture of our near-daily chat—but I sat down on the concrete step just before she could push the button on her camera. Actually, I had made a conscious decision to sit down to talk with her, because I feel strongly against talking down to children.

I’m pretty sure the above picture is of the pizza man calling to confirm my order.

We have a Winner!

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Thank you for your numerous frog-name suggestions. The votes have been tallied, and now it’s time to christen our amphibian friend.

First, before the name is revealed, please take a few moments to contemplate the following question (which I stole from the frog jokes section of AllAboutFrogs.ORG)…

What’s red and green and goes 175 miles (282 kilometers) an hour?

Keep this question in mind as I reveal the runners-up in the frog-naming contest. Notice that each of the names incorporates a few of your suggestions into a new frog name mixture:

The Third Runner-Up combines submissions from Shannon, drh’s dad and mamaket:

Juliet, the Buff Toad

The Second Runner-Up is the “Frog Next Door”, concocted from submissions by Abdul Muhib and bazeblog:

Jiran “Jay” Fun Guss

By the way, if you are interested in learning how to say “frog” in languages around the world, click here. If you are looking for the sound a froggy makes, click here.

The First Runner-Up is a fusion of ideas from Christy Canner and Adam Wilson:

Prince Fancyback Humperdink McCroaker

I should note here that, if the Winning Frog Name is unable to complete its term as…uh…the frog name, the First Runner-Up will be called upon to complete the Winning Frog Name’s…oh, never mind.

Before the Winning Frog Name is revealed, you may enjoy perusing some other pet frog names and funny frog names.

You will recall that our frog is camouflaged to blend in with its surroundings on the compound, especially at night. You will also recall that all three runners-up names blended at least two of the names you submitted.

Undoubtedly, you are still pondering the answer to the earlier question, “What’s red and green and goes 175 miles (282 kilometers) an hour?” The answer to that question is, “A frog in a blender.”

Hence, our Winning Frog Name is [drum roll, please]…

BLENDERFROG!

If all this discourse on frogs has made you hungry, check out this recipe for frog bread.

As a friend of mine once said, “Oh how I love frog legs. Oh, how I love frog legs—because they make me jump.”

Thanks for participating. Good night, everybody.