I hate being in my apartment alone. Every creak of the floorboards or slam of the front door sends me scurrying to the kitchen for some sort of self-defense weapon. And don’t even get me started on having to kill bugs. So, when I moved back after winter break nearly a week before my roommate, I had to find ways to keep myself occupied. Otherwise, my imagination would run wild, turning the snowman across the street into a lurking kidnapper with a propensity for unsuspecting five-foot-tall girls.
Growing up, I was an incredibly picky eater. When we would go out for dinner, my brother would order some sort of fancy beef dish no one could pronounce… and I would get a grilled chicken breast. When I went vegetarian at the beginning of my freshman year, I had to completely reevaluate the way I approached food. I had to abandon the brisket and meat bourekas of my Eastern European ancestors and find a new cuisine to fall in love with. To my family’s surprise (and my father’s chagrin), this was Indian food.
After my brother and I were sent home from college in March, my mom quickly realized that she now had five mouths to feed, including a vegetarian (me) and a teenage boy (not me).
For the first installment of a Moosewood Mess, I started out with dessert because it seemed like a relatively easy first step — something very much within my comfort zone. I invited my friends for the inaugural Moosewood Meal, which only ramped up the pressure. I felt like I couldn’t disappoint them, but I also didn’t want to make something overly complicated and ruin everything before it even started. That brought me to Chocolate Cranberry Crunch bars and chocolate sugar cookies.
When I first looked at the recipes, they seemed to be idiot-proof. However, it appears I’m an idiot.
$147 and a big shopping cart were basically my Saturday afternoon in a nutshell. Five large, packed grocery bags wobbled back and forth inside the cart as I meandered my way to the bus stop. The bus came before I was there, so I had to run uphill and unload my cargo onto the decently occupied vehicle. I left the cart on the road; if you found one stranded around the Ithaca Mall, it could have been me. I apologize.
Part 1 — Amelia Clute and French Macarons
French macarons are only scary if you actually care about doing it well. Let me elaborate — you would have to try extremely hard to produce a legitimately inedible macaron. Almost any combination of almond flour, sugar and meringue will give you an extremely tasty pastry. So why are macarons touted as one of the most difficult, fussy and intimidating challenges in the culinary world? Simply put, it is because we place too much emphasis on aesthetics without asking ourselves if we actually enjoy what we’ve created.
The 40-acre farm in Hawai’i which I called home for the fall of 2017 was riddled with homemade signage. Pieces of wood were painted to remind that there was “no toilet” and to “use tree! ,” to teach you “proper poopage” in a compost toilet and to tell you to “Get naked!” in the shower. There was also less informational signage that reinforced some important life lessons like “be with the flow” and to “eat your food like water, and your water like air.” One of these signs hung in a particularly prominent place next to the picnic tables at which we ate. It was framed by bunches of ripening plantains and written with a washed out orange and pink paint.
Have you have wondered where your food comes from, or how it got on your plate? Have you ever been upset upon hearing how much water was used to process those veggies or that steak? Have you ever thought, “Hey, I could do a better job than that?” Well, this is your call to action.
Katie Go ’22 YouTube channel currently has 8.1 million views, over 243 videos and over 127,000 subscribers. She started out making DIY videos for costumes, gifts and school supplies but eventually moved into lifestyle content, and once she was accepted to Cornell, videos about what life is like in Ithaca.
It’s been two years since Mitski graced us with Puberty 2, a deep, thoughtful and powerful album that was so mesmerizing words will never do it justice. The Japanese-American artist has grown increasingly louder over the years, and now with her newest album, Be the Cowboy, she is louder than ever, making listeners feel emotions they didn’t know they were capable of. In the past, Mitski has consistently kept a rather slow, mostly acoustic and melancholic sound (save for the few bursts of lyrical and emotional impacts, i.e. the chorus in “Your Best American Girl”). In addition to keeping a consistent sound, Mitski keeps her lyrical style the same: emotional, deeply sad and lonesome lyrics that very often hit home and have listeners in tears just one song into her albums.
Mitski has never been scared to bare it all and be vulnerable, because it’s human. Women are too often told that being powerful and independent means that we have to meet certain superhuman expectations, such as immunity to negative emotions and heartbreak, as well as coldheartedness, all while being sexy.
I’ve never made a New Years resolution. My aversion to them stems from my awareness that I’ve never stuck to a goal like “read more!” before, and that I’m not starting now. Following a call from my doctor about my triglyceride levels this January, I finally agreed to eat vegetables and engage in the dreaded activity called cardio. But other than that, I’ve attacked 2018 the same way that I’ve approached each prior year. That is, with ambitious dreams that I break down into exactly zero actionable steps and then abandon.
