Adventures of Late

I've been enjoying the lovely almost-springtimeyness! It's delicious. Saturday, I went to my African dance class. I've been going, off and on, for almost five years. I love the live drummers, and the random assortment of people forming a community, and the crazy ways we move our bodies. They have a bunch of classes, for good prices. www.rdtutah.org.

In keeping with the theme, I guess, a friend and I went to Peery's Egyptian Theater in Ogden to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo that evening. They are the South African group who recorded with Paul Simon on his Graceland album. Really good.

Add a fun family get together, and the weekend was complete.

And, just for kicks, an ode to Spring, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, for you today.

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

A Day

Yesterday was a lovely day. I got off work, I went shopping--$5 shirt sale at Downeast Outfitters. And I came home, and got my summer clothes box out of storage. I swapped my business-casual for capri pants and chacos (Spring! Almost here!) and made delicious chicken pot pie with puff pastry. MMMM. Cleaned my kitchen and fridge, with tv noise to entertain me: Henry Louis Gates' PBS special about ancestry and family history, and then Ugly Betty, you know, for balance.

Sometimes, just coming home from work and enjoying the day can be incredible.

Dia de Nacimiento

I've always been a little ambivalent about birthday celebrations. You know, the whole extra pressure of "Please come. And you really have to, because it's my birthday." It's just awkward, so that the enjoyment of the day is tinged with flavors of guilt and manipulation, to be dramatic about it.

Up to now, my favorite birthday was 3 friends making me chicken pot pie and bringing me yellow and orange tulips. People who love me, delicious food, and flowers. All I need. Small, low-pressure, minimal center-of-attention-ness.

This charming ideal of mine was thrown out the window this year in favor of an all-me, all-the time weekend, which has by now taken on a little smidge of the "okay, now can we pay attention to someone else please?" I have incredibly kind friends. Here's what we did:

Friday (the big day) at work, my co-worker brought this incredibly fancy fruit tart from Gourmandise to celebrate. This was only the beginning of the sugar rush.

That night we had dinner at Mazza, a delicious middle-eastern place. "We" would be a group of some of the awesome people I've gotten to know in Salt Lake: Spencer, Dan, Nate, Thomas, Tricia, Chris, Ben, Gretchen, Erik, Matt, Kandis. We had to wait a couple hours for a table, but had a lot of fun and I think people liked the new culinary adventure.

We headed back to the house, and a few more friends joined us--Melissa, Holly, Annie, Denise and her friend Tyler. Denise had made incredible tres leches cake, enjoyed by all. Much hilarity and a little bit of singing ensued. Also, a couple of us bought tickets to U2 in June which is going to be wicked awesome. Yay! This great party left me rather hyper, with a sleep-deprivation hangover to suffer through on Saturday.

My Me-Me-Me weekend continued with a scary snowy drive to Provo, where my sister Lisa treated me to a Spring Spa treatment at Acaydia beauty school. We got these mango back treatments, kind of like a facial for your back. Though my smooth skin is really only going to be appreciated by me, rest assured, my back has been exfoliated, massaged, hot-toweled, scrubbed, painted with various pampering substances, and hot-toweled some more. Being high-maintenance is kinda fun. But I'll keep my feet on the ground and probably not go for the Elase cellu-electro-dermabrasion.

Lisa and I went to a small Olsen family gathering for my Grandma Jean Olsen, who turned 84 on Saturday. She definitely deserves attention for her hard work, her good life, and 5 boys she raised with my late Grandpa. Good to see them all.
When you look at the amount of time I spent with my aging grandmother versus the amount of time people spent on me, I become a very bad person.

More snowy driving! Hurried dessert making! A little bit of time with my sixteen-year-old brother Andy, who was texting and playing computer games during most of it. Interspersed with his monosyllabic responses: "k. yeah. no." were the only two full sentences I believe he spoke. "How do you spell 'consistent'?" For a text message. And a little while later, "How do you spell 'doofus?'" I love teenagers.

At this point, I was pretty exhausted, but no stopping! More partying with a posse of girls I have known at least since high school and their significant others, supposedly to celebrate my friend Danny finally finishing the California Bar Exam. But sneakily, they morphed it into a birthday surprise for me. Very sweet and kind of them, and I hope they never do it again :) Definitely where the guilt started.

And today, after staying home and missing most of church hiding in the dark with a headache, I taught Relief Society, then went to Bountiful for yet another birthday dinner. After this week, I will be diabetic, I am sure. My grandma had invited me and my cousin Jamie, who also had a birthday this week, and her brother Kurtis and family for a delicious grandma pot roast dinner. We played a game called "What's yours like?" afterwards--very, very funny especially with my grandpa who overthinks everything. Good times.

Now I've just gotta fix the huge ding in my windshield, thanks to the big rock on the snow driving day, and of course listen to my new Glee soundtrack. (Why does it make me so happy? It just does!)

So thank you to the universe at large, and thank you to each of the people who celebrated with me, and I will begin immediately planning nice things for your birthdays so we can even up the score. I have a lot to live up to after this.

Random Recipes

My favorite salad, created by dipping random things into Brianna's poppyseed salad dressing until I had the perfect mix:

Romaine lettuce
Avocados, cut in chunks
Oranges, peeled, sectioned, cut in chunks
String cheese, pulled into thick strings and cut in thirds (Really. String cheese is better than all other kinds of cheese for this)
Brianna's Poppyseed dressing

Delicious.


Pasta with butter and parmesan cheese is always a classic quick meal. Lately I've been enjoying a glammed-up version involving angel hair, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, chopped garlic (from a jar) and shredded parmesan. Mmmm.

Fun stuff on TV!

I've been enjoying all the lovely offerings of online television lately. Very few snowstorms equals not great snowshoeing outdoors, and a combination of procrastinating schoolwork as well as getting food poisoning, and then recovering, and then getting a cold, and then recovering, has led me to the wilds of Hulu.

I love 3o Rock! Psych is fun, Glee is awesome and a tad crude, The Office isn't as funny as it used to be, Community is is sorta funny, especially Troy and Abed. Wow, suddenly my life sounds very, very lame. Oh well. I can admit that I like TV, and it's not automatically an instrument of the Devil :)

But what I really want to tell you about is PBS.org. They have interesting programs, including Masterpiece Theater. There's a great new version of Emma available right now. So good! The Gwyneth Paltrow version is an Olsen family classic, but I definitely rank this one up there. They rotate availability, so get it while it's hot!

Middle Eastern Film Fest

I'm a big believer in being a tourist in my hometown, so I try to find unique events in the area. Since I went to Jordan and Israel in the fall, I thought I'd take in the Middle Eastern Film Festival hosted by the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. They show a film every couple weeks, and I've gone twice.

Wednesday I saw "Dunia--Kiss me not on the eyes," an Egyptian film. It's about a woman who is a literature graduate student and aspiring dancer, and the intersections of her life with her professor, who is blinded by attackers after speaking against the censorship of "A Thousand and One Nights", her husband, who after their marriage tries to curtail her activities, and her friends, who are trying to establish more freedom for themselves and their daughters despite the limitations placed on them not by men but by older generations of women. Definitely a message movie, but needed, and enjoyable.

A few weeks ago I saw "Lemon Tree," which was a little lighter and had some sweet and funny moments. A Palestinian widow is trying to protect her lemon orchard, right on the border of Israel and the West Bank, from being cut down after the Israeli defense minister moves in right across the way. It's her story of fighting back and re-entering life, and about the similarities of people on opposite sides of the conflict. I really enjoyed it and now I'd like to see "The Syrian Bride," with the same actress and director. The actress, Hiam Abbass, is also in "The Visitor" which came out last year in the US.

Future movies: On Monday, March 8, 2010 at 7pm, the U of U is screening "Waltz with Bashir," and animated documentary about individuals coming through the 1982 Lebanon War. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and other awards. This one is at the Fort Douglas Theater, 245 S. Fort Douglas Boulevard

The last film in the series is playing Wed. March 17 at 6pm in the UMFA auditorium. It's "Persepolis," the story of a girl growing up in Iran, based on a graphic novel. It was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar but lost to Ratatouille. http://umfa.utah.edu/calendar

Girl Scout Cookie Day!

Today is the day I've waited for, when chocolate mint crispiness and toasted coconut caramel joy are delivered to my workplace in tiny, overpriced boxes. Special thanks to my sister Jenny for introducing me to Samoas during high school and converting me from my previous dislike of coconut to my current enjoyment of the stuff. She was was also the creative force behind another chocolate coconut treat that got us through the Samoa-free months of the year. The procedure is as follows:

1) Bake a 9x13 pan of brownies.

2) Frost with a can of German chocolate (coconut pecan) frosting.

3) Hide it.


The final step may only be necessary if you live in a big family, but stashing them to eat later only adds to their deliciousness.

As a final note, here is one of my favorite coconut-themed recipes. I didn't think I liked rice pudding either, until I made this. I cook some any time I have milk I need to use up.

Coconut Rice Pudding

1/2 C rice
2 C milk
2 C coconut milk
1/3 C sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Wash the rice in several changes of water and put in a pot. Add milk and coconut milk and slowly bring to a boil, stirring as needed to prevent burning. Lower the heat and simmer for 1 hour or until it has thickened to a pudding consistency. Add sugar and vanilla and cook 5 more minutes. Serve warm or cold, for dessert or breakfast, especially good served with mangoes.


Rinsing the rice washes off a starch layer they add in processing to keep it from getting too sticky. I use lite coconut milk because the regular stuff is like a layer of shortening with some milk on top. It's in all supermarkets I've seen, in the Asian aisle. The original recipe is on the back of the yellow package of Golden Star brand jasmine rice. I think it's best using jasmine rice, but it's still great with normal short or long grain rice.

Happy cooking.