Wax: woot!

Success, dear readers. I filtered the beeswax and am left with something really beautiful:

How'd I do it, you ask? Well, I re-melted the wax that I'd melted into cans:

 Then poured it VERY carefully through cheesecloth I'd rubber-banded to the top of two milk cartons:

and beamed approvingly at the clean results:

I wasn't totally confident the milk cartons could withstand the heat, but they held up just fine. Once the wax solidified I peeled off the carton and weighed the wax blocks: 24 ounces! It's so lovely and I can't wait for the final steps in my project.

Dia de los muertes/day of the dead

The Bay Area has a huge Latino community and I finally got to attend the Dia de los Muertos street festival that's held here annually. It was actually a couple of days early, as the traditional days of celebration are November 1st and 2nd. I've done just a little reading, and it seems like the 1st is all souls day and/or the day to remember dead infants and children; the 2nd is to remember adults who have died.

Families and loved ones make memorial altars and artwork. Much of what we saw were elaborate works made from seeds, flowers, candles, and chalk.

I thought it was super cool that a Girl Scout troop did a memorial for the founder of the Girl Scouts - someone even demonstrated how to cut the Girl Scout logo into the decorative tissue paper!

Even though it's a day of remembrance, if there's an element of sadness it must be saved for when the tourists go home - I saw tons of families, and people dancing and eating and socializing. I had some pretty awesome food, too! The most interesting thing was the pan de muertos helados: ice cream made with some of the bread of the dead, which looked like an eggy sweet loaf kind of like Jewish challah and Portuguese massa. My ice cream was mostly vanilla, perhaps a bit custardy, with bread crumbs in it. Kind of weird, but definitely delicious!

Play with your food: funky soup!

I don't even know what to call this one.. suggestions?

Over the last few years I've been exposed to the idea of sticking spaghetti through uncooked hotdogs or sausages, as a way to amuse kids (or the adults who are feeding them). Well we don't need no kids to play with food!

I cut up some nice-ish sausages and jabbed spaghetti through them:

then I dropped them into soup I made up (canned tomatoes, chopped-up onion, carrot and celery, some spices):

And as expected, they cooked into noodle-sausage goodness!

 

It reheated just fine and made for amusing lunches that week. (well, I was privately amused; I'm not claiming there was general hilarity.)

Occupy Oakland

It's been five years since I moved to Oakland from Portland. When I handed in my driver's license, the woman at the DMV joked, "You're going the wrong way!" I smiled, but my heart wasn't in it - I had by no means come to terms with my geographical change. 

These five years have taught me a lot: primarily, the truth to the saying "wherever you go, there you are" - I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to adapt to my new life. I've also learned that of all the places I could have settled in the Bay Area, Oakland is definitely the best fit for me. It's walkable, has friendly residents, and is full of interesting shops, great food, and wonderful old buildings. My neighborhood is probably the best I'll ever live in, and I appreciate my short commute daily. 

But that's not the message the world hears about Oakland. Instead, we're famous for our crime, our riots, and now our activist movement. 

I won't be at tomorrow's general strike, partly because I've got a ticket to an event, and partly because I'm a coward - I almost expect things to go poorly after dark. Yet if people like me don't go stand up for Oakland, who will? 

I've lived in three cities and Oakland occupies its share of my heart. I hope the demonstrators can keep the peace tomorrow and in the days going forward. Perhaps I'll even make it out to the next demonstration! 

2011:10 + 11

Oops, I missed last month's calendar post. I hope that doesn't mean my brother is still looking at the September image!

October's and November's calendar pages feature pictures taken six months and a quarter of the world away from each other - yet they are certainly autumnal!

Albert Park in Auckland was a great place for people-watching and fresh air after spending the night on a plane. It was very weird to go from spring in the Bay Area to fall in New Zealand, but the temperature was similar, and even though I knew the sun was low in the northern sky, I couldn't get my body to believe it.

Grape vines in real autumn: this was at a winery in Sonoma Valley last November - a bit gray and rainy, just like I like it.

Play with your food: Egg-waffles!

I'm inspired by a couple of recent kitchen sessions to do a new series (by which I mean two posts.. maybe more): Play with your food!

One of my coworkers forwarded me a blog post about cooking eggs on a waffle iron and I was totally thrilled by the idea. It's just silly enough to make for a fun weekend breakfast. Fortunately I had an amenable houseguest this weekend so guess what we did? Science breakfast!

Mix 3 eggs + 2 egg whites in a bowl (because that's what I had handy). Set the waffle iron on lowish - mine has 5 settings and I had it around 1.5. Pour in some egg and cook it! Since we were doing scrambled eggs I first tried cooking with it open, but decided it was better (and more waffle-y) to close the iron as they cooked. I didn't time it, just gave it a few minutes. I thought I might need chopsticks to pull the egg off the iron, but a fork did the trick.

Easy, yummy, and fun!

Waxy progression

Okay! We left off with a pot full of sludge and me full of skepticism. I somehow imagined that the wax would solidify in a tidy ball suspended in the water. I was wrong, but it DID come together:

I took this picture after I'd dislodged the disk and drained the honey-infused water underneath, but you get the idea. It was about an inch thick or so; its bottom was covered with hardened ... stuff. I scraped it off as best I could:

Then I hacked the disk of wax into bits, which took some serious brute strength:

I put the bits in some cans and set the cans in a pot partially full of water.

I also put some water in the cans to help encourage the wax to melt. I'm not sure that was strictly necessary, but it worked!

I added the contents of the smaller can to one of the bigger ones, just for the sake of tidiness.

So now what? The bottom of each can will have an inch of water or so. Then there will be some miscellaneous crap adhering to the bottom of the wax, and then a column of wax. It could probably stand yet another round of filtering before it gets used, but we'll see. I feel like it's definitely come a long way in a couple of days.

I've also done a lot of cooking in the two evenings in the kitchen: mesquite chocolate chip cookies, curried pumpkin coconut soup, muhammara, and a ravioli-broccoli-tomato-cheese bake (because I needed the can the tomatoes were occupying!). I'm a little sick of kitchen projects for the moment, but look for more wax updates in a week or so.