Cooking with cumin

For dinner this week I decided to try a new recipe: Curried Lentil and Spinach Soup. I got it years ago from Epicurious. (Does anyone still use that site?) Here is my version:

Ingredients: • 2 tablespoons olive oil • 1 1/2 cups chopped onion • 1 cup chopped celery • 1 cup chopped peeled carrots • 3 garlic cloves, minced • 1 tablespoon curry powder (preferably Madras-style) • 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger • 1 teaspoon ground cumin • 1 bay leaf • 1/4 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper • 8 cups (or more) water • 1 16-ounce bag dried lentils (about 2 1/2 cups) • 1 6-ounce bag baby spinach leaves  • 1/2 cup plain nonfat yogurt

Heat oil in heavy large pot over medium-high heat. Add next 4 ingredients (onion, celery, carrots, cloves); sauté until golden, about 10 minutes. Stir in curry powder, ginger, cumin, bay leaf, and dried crushed red pepper. Add water and dried lentils; bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer uncovered until lentils are tender, adding more water by 1/2 cupfuls to thin soup, if desired, about 25 minutes. Season soup with salt and pepper. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Chill soup uncovered until cold, then cover and keep refrigerated. Rewarm soup over medium heat, thinning with water if desired before serving.) Ladle soup into bowls. Top each serving with a spoonful of yogurt and a handful of baby spinach.

Personalized place mats and candle by niece KH (Cincinnati, OH).

His and Hers beaded napkin rings by KF (Dresden, GER). Not sold in stores.

I went ahead and used both the curry powder and red pepper (in my case Turkish chili powder). The yogurt and spinach thicken the soup and temper some of the spiciness. I think the recipe could use a little tweaking: I found the lentils undercooked and the vegetables overcooked. Next time I will add the carrot and celery toward the end of the process, after the lentils have mostly softened. And I will add more cumin. You can always add more cumin. Pairs well with crusty bread + spread for you vegans, or crackers and cheese for you vegetarians. I imagine you could go carnivorous with the addition of some sausage.

The Second City for the second time

AAAhhh, what baby faces!

For our first wedding anniversary, Dear Husband and I took a trip to Chicago. We recreated parts of our Denver honeymoon, visiting an art gallery and a botanical garden. We also got all dolled up for dinner at a fancy steak house and a show by The Second City. Most of the comedians you have heard of (and a great many beside) have come through this sketch and improv group. They may be famous, but they're still a casual comedy club, and the guy who took our tickets teased us that we had increased the style quotient considerably that night.

This past weekend I got to hear The Second City's traveling group. No, I haven't traded in DH for another model! A friend of ours ended up with an extra ticket, and I'm sure either of us would have been more than happy to go, but DH had a gig with his band that night. So AS and I had dinner downtown with a church group and then walked over to join the very long line to get into the theater. The place was sold out, though half a row next to me was empty--maybe the snow kept them away? That's a pity, because this "B team" really brought down the house. We were particularly impressed by their ability to make up song lyrics on the spot.

Should have used the flash.

As a sign of the times, perhaps, they opened and closed the show with skits involving gay (male) relationships (and a sketch in the middle involved a gay teen who sings). One improv ended up with a lesbian relationship, but we hope in the future they will be considered suitable subjects for scripted scenes. You can imagine the kind of awkward dialogue between a stereotypical guns-, sports- and alcohol-loving, school-flubbing older brother and his younger brother's stylish (male) prom date. What happens when it's an older sister and her younger sister's (female) date? Or, what do they say if we drop the trope of suave homosexual and knuckle-dragger heterosexual? The gay scenes in the show involved two teens and a gay wedding. Where are the jokes from gay couples who have been committed for decades? Is there a genre of gay nursing home jokes? DH thinks I'm asking too much of a bunch of 20- and 30-somethings, but maybe the tropes will change with the times.

Other favorite skits involved whale singing and a glass of water, a reporter asking a football player increasingly probing questions about his simple faith that God had blessed him with a touchdown, and a local car dealership with one of those dancing fabric "men" whose arms wave in the wind. It was a fun night, and I laughed so hard I gave myself a headache. Great comedy: it hurts so good.

This year, love is...

"You are totes adorbs." ~Shakespeare

Dear Husband and I had a long-distance relationship the four years I was in college and then the first year of graduate school. The February of my junior year, he surprised me by flying out so we could celebrate Valentine's Day together. (I remember, because I had to leave my MCAT class early on Saturday morning to see him off to the airport.) The other years we celebrated over Spring Break. He called it "Eastern Orthodox Valentine's Day," because Orthodox Christmas and Easter fall later than their Western Christian equivalents. It's a made-up holiday, another excuse for showing each other our love and appreciation, so why not celebrate on the day(s) that work with our schedules?

This year, love is a slow-motion celebration. I had call on Valentine's Day, so DH decided to surprise me with roses, a card, and dinner out a week early--for what he called "Southern Orthodox Valentine's Day." He must have thought I needed a pick-me-up after a difficult week of in-patient pediatric medicine--and he was right. Unfortunately, we discovered that night that our favorite locally owed Thai restaurant has apparently closed. Why else would it be dark at 6:30pm on a Friday night and the phone number disconnected? It's not the first "ethnic" restaurant that has closed in that strip mall; apparently Americana and Italiana do better in this corner of town. So we drove halfway across town to the locally owned Mediterranean restaurant, where we stuffed ourselves with lovely pita and cucumber-tomato salads and brought home enough leftovers for another full meal.

The next night, Dear Husband (a musician) and I (an academic) had tickets to the premiere run of a new play about a musician (Beethoven) and an academic (a fictionalized musicologist from the University who develops ALS). I am afraid I found the script, the set design, and the directing almost but not quite good enough. It doesn't help that I watched Wit over Winter Break, which does academic-discovers-herself-through-illness with more mature humor and philosophizing, or that at least half of the action of this play takes place in Bonn with jokes about how Germans don't have a sense of humor. If you can suspend your disbelief about the marginally competent nurse-boyfriend being able to take a several-months vacation from his hospital job to accompany the defiant-but-really-grieving daughter-girlfriend to care for her workaholic-mother--and if you can ignore the constant refrain of "Master, Master" erupting from the lips of Igor--I mean Anton Schindler, "friend of Beethoven"--you might cry when the pianist plays and the cast sings the "Kyrie" from Beethoven's "Missa solemnis." After that high point, the playwright couldn't leave well enough alone, so there two more scenes that try to tug at your heartstrings, but I felt as if that emotion had been played out by then. Nevertheless, I am glad the company took the risk on a new work, and that we attended.

On Valentine's Day, after I had completed my clinical duties, DH and I attended a presentation about the rest of medical school, taking board exams, and applying to/matching at a residency program. It's an anxiety-inducing revelation that drove my Peds TA and her husband straight to the liquor store last year. We went out to lunch instead, where I anchored my Hot Toddy with a black bean and onion ring burger as big as my face. I promise I'm smiling behind all that. Aren't I?

This year, we did all the expected things to celebrate Valentine's Day, albeit not on the same recognized day on the calendar. They were nice, out-of-the-ordinary things to do for each other, though I wonder if in a year they will mean as much as me cleaning out the cat box and taking out the trash and recycling on a freezing-cold night so DH didn't have to. Or as touched as I was when DH picked out a loaf of whole-grain German Dark Wheat bread with No High Fructose Corn Syrup and 6g Dietary Fiber, since my favorite grocery store closed and I ran out of the local organic bread I had been storing in the freezer. This time next year I will be finalizing my Match rank-order list for residency. I wonder what "love" will mean then?

Rememberlutions, Part 1 of 2

This year, instead of making New Year's resolutions, I'm making "rememberlutions." Rather than promising myself I'm going to clean up my language or spend less time on facebook (ha!), only to fail miserably in record time, the only thing I have to do is write down every good thing I do or that happens to me in 2015. During our Meet N Greet meeting at the start of the spring semester, the members of Grad Study got down and dirty with fabric, ribbon, glitter, patterned scotch tape, and a hot glue gun to decorate old jars. Many people personalized their jars with goofy faces; I went more abstract (below).

There are a few things I'm hoping to be able to put in my jar (like getting my first journal article published), the rest will be surprises. As it is, I've deposited the first slip of paper: Getting an O for Outstanding in Family Medicine, my last rotation in the fall semester. By the end of the year I may have forgotten that it took 6 weeks to get that grade; but I'll remember what it was!

Click here to see what went into my jar.

Scrub-a-Dub-Dub

If the white coat is one of the most iconic symbols of clinical medicine, another must be scrubs. The stereotypical scrubs are thin, cotton-based, light blue, and unisex (like those on the left), but there is now a whole industry devoted to designing more comfortable and more stylish scrubs. These tops and bottoms are found not just in the OR but in the ED, on nurses, and on docs and med students pulling a night shift in the hospital. They are also preferred by clinicians who take serious reports that ties, white coats, and long sleeves are germ carriers.



I've got a couple basic pairs from my medical school, but for Christmas I asked my parents-in-law for a gift certificate to a local scrub shop so I could stock up before my ob/gyn and surgery rotations. Because I really wanted scrubs with some "give" in them, I chose a brand called "wonder flex" that is waaay more comfortable than my old scrubs. They are sassy purple with pink trim but kind of boxy, so I also picked out a feminine pair from Koi in navy. The top has a princess waist and a drawstring with little flower beads. I hope the surgeons don't take me less seriously when I wear them.

In addition, I got a discount from this purchase, so I went back for another top. The shopwoman pointed out the shirt to the right. At first I didn't want to get it, because patterned scrubs are associated with nurses, but then I realized how silly that was, so I gave in to the floral design. A wise Christian woman once said, "Life is too short not to have nice things," and my medical career is too long not to have nice scrubs. I mean, scrubs aren't really "clothes," but I feel more dressed in pieces like these. I look forward to wearing them. Thank you, MH and GH!

Don't burn the bacon!

If you use the internet with any frequency, you are probably familiar with Pusheen, a plump gray cat with tiny paws and a striped tail. He has many emotions, but one of the web's favorite is "laziness." Amazingly, Pusheen gets even lazier when he meets a sloth:

I have also recently met a sloth, but he had the opposite effect on me as on Pusheen: this sloth is inspiring me to greater activity...in the kitchen! My youngest brother wanted to exchange gifts by local artists this Christmas, so at my farmers/holiday market I purchased him a book about French impressionists re-purposed as a drawing journal. He bought me Henri the Chef, a dapper sloth in an apron having a minor culinary disaster. I got the painting matted and framed, and it now hangs in our kitchen, reminding us not to forget whatever is cooking on the stove.

Henri comes from the series Sloths Are Bad at Things by artist Megan Jones. Click the series title to go to the tumblr for images of sloths failing at fishing, reporting, selling flowers, and playing tennis. You can find more of Megan's whimsical art if you click here and purchase some of it here.

Tingle the Senses

For Christmas my parents bought us tickets to "Spectacle Obscura," a sort of Gothic burlesque vaudeville performance of acrobatics, aerial arts, and magic tricks. The show was held in an old church that had been re-purposed into a clothing boutique downstairs and a cabaret upstairs, complete with chiquely mismatched furniture, ironic historical furnishings (paintings, old books, wall sconces), and wet bar. Natch. The center of the room had been cleared for a tall, four-legged stand from which various apparatuses could be suspended: ropes, scarves, hula hoop, etc. My only complaint was that the building was drafty and cold, such that I ended up wearing the stiff tablecloth "throw blanket" from our settee for warmth.

E., N., and me. One of us had recently gotten a haircut.

Photography was permitted without flash, but the room was so dark and the performers always in motion, so they were hard to capture on film. They were quite talented and enjoyable to watch. Even the magician was good--until his closing act, when a conceit for involving the audience was poorly planned and nearly backfired. In the car on the way home we agreed that the "volunteer" was a confederate, but we still couldn't figure out how the trick had been performed.

Contortionist. Later she "jumped rope" with her arms--
i.e. rotated them completely in their sockets. It hurt just to watch.

From this photo you can see how high this acrobat was.
Also the flying couch suspended from the ceiling.