Quarantine: The Commute

It is never a good sign, when you are driving home from a long day at work, to realize that there are four helicopters hovering overhead.  I saw them above and at first tried to pretend that they were really to the left of where my road was going, but soon enough reality invaded this fantasy and I was stuck making the slow choice, along with all other traffic, of turning left or right instead of continuing straight.  I was in a part of Philadelphia that I didn’t know much about other than I didn’t really want to be there, lost, after dark, even in a locked vehicle.  But after choosing to go right, I didn’t have any decisions to make, since we were all moving an inch to the hour down twisting semi-residential streets.

I decided to call my husband, a Philadelphia native, to see if he could help me navigate.  My thinking was that he could look at where I was on his “find my phone” feature and then yell directions at me, like “For the love of god, don’t go down that street!”  Or maybe:  “Turn left!  Left!  No, the other left!”  Etc.  Strangely enough, however, Sean wasn’t so keen on this idea.  He reminded me that our car had a garmin navigator and suggested that I use it.  But forcing me to make a dangerous U-turn only to take me back to the main road still closed off by police and ambulances and mayhem sounded like just the thing our garmin would do.  (We often fight, garmin and I.)

 

Sean then told me to choose the address of his workplace in the garmin and then once I had headed in that direction for many miles, click my ruby slippers and tell garmin I want to go home.  This is what I did, even though this entailed driving white-knuckled in the middle lane of a seven-lane highway, trying to figure out how to get to the left lane to make a left turn while garmin got increasingly disappointed in me.

 

At one point too I heard a ding from the Subaru dashboard, upon which a message came up that said something along the lines of, “It has now been two hours since you put your key in the ignition!”  Thanks for pointing that out, car; time flies when you are having fun.

 

Cheesecakes

I am generally a serviceable cook, in that I can follow a recipe and have whatever I’m making (mostly) turn out.  There are exceptions to this rule, however, one being pie (damn you, pie crust!), and the other being cheesecakes.  I would say 3 out of 5 cheesecakes I make turn out perfectly, and the other 2 end up edible but nothing you’d serve to someone proudly.

(Which reminds me:  years ago in my twenties I made a cheesecake for a book group I was in, and it turned out an absolute disaster.  However, since I was in my twenties, it didn’t really occur to me NOT to bring it, and to, say, pick something up at a bakery on my way there.  Instead I brought the brick of a gloppy cheesecake to the meeting and served it miserably.  I think I was hoping that it wasn’t as bad as it so obviously was.  It’s something that now appears in my head from time to time:  why did I bring that cheesecake?)

 

A couple of months ago I kept reading about the Basque cheesecake that you cook at a high temperature for a short amount of time and it gets all blackened on the outside.  This appealed to me so much that I even got a special little six-inch pan to make it in.  I used a recipe from the blog, The Little Epicurean.  This one is more of a basque-esque cheesecake, since she very wisely added a crust made from ‘nilla wafers.  (I mean, is not the crust the best part?  I think if I got served a crust-less cheesecake I’d cry a little.)  Anyway, this was one of my 3 out of 5’s:  it was a beautiful little thing with an almost feathery texture.  I recommend.

 

I’ve been eyeing a recipe for a mocha cheesecake in my New York Times cookbook, and will make it someday, even though I don’t really like chocolate in my cheesecake or cheesecake in my chocolate.  Amanda Hesser’s description of this cake however – how she thought it was too rich, but her husband got angry when she threw out the last piece, so she included it in the book as a peace offering – means that I will have to try it at some point. 

 

Instead I saw a recipe saved on my Instagram site from the website Kitchn for a sweet potato cheesecake.  It was a modestly sized cheesecake – it only called for 3 boxes of cheese, as compared to the 5 required for the mocha cheesecake – so I gave it a whirl.  My cheesecake fairy godmother had gone on break, though, for this cake was not at all magical.  First there was a grand canyon of a crack running across the top, despite all the different things they have you do to prevent this happening.  And the cheesecake itself was fine, except that here and there were little nodules of cream cheese and occasionally even of sweet potato.  My guess is I did not let the cheese soften enough before mixing.  The crust was great, but I will not be saving this recipe.

 

My college friend and I were texting not too long ago about baking, and she mentioned some cheesecake I used to make that, apparently, was very good, yet I have zero memory of repeatedly making a good cheesecake around the time we lived together in Boston!  It’s a mystery.  I think there was a ricotta cheesecake in one of the Moosewood cookbooks that I made from time to time, so surely this must be it?  But she thinks it was not ricotta.  It’s a cheesecake mystery.

The Basque Cheesecake:

it's supposed to look like this!

 

 

She Ain't Never Caught A Rabbit

Now that the weather is cold, Maple loves to go for a walk.  And she loves even more to go on a walk through the forest.  We take her on a 3.5 mile forest walk once or twice a week and she gets so excited about it.  She starts tracking the minute we get out of the car, and being a stubborn girl, it is very hard to get her to move on when she has found herself an interesting scent.  When she is really serious about a scent, she does this thing where she’ll stand on three legs, but kind of leans down on her folded right front elbow – it makes her nose closer to the scent.

She thinks she should be allowed to drink from the creek whenever she is thirsty, and if that isn’t allowed, any muddy puddle will do.  Once after a big rain storm there was a spring burbling up from the ground where she got a fresh drink, and now she finds and checks out that spot each time we pass it by, although it has long gone dry.

 

She loves to say hello to any dog we pass, and loves even more to say hello to people.  She’ll immediately show her belly to any person who looks her way.  And what she likes even more is if someone we pass has met her before and says, “Hello, Maple!”  She’s an extrovert in a family of introverts.

 

She is a mostly very sweet and funny girl, who doesn’t so much want to please us, as she wants us to be pleased with what she has already decided to do.  Perhaps that’s a hound dog trait? 

 

She IS a friend of mine.