Geography

Entries from Tucson

Notes · · Tucson

Feb 02, 2017

The calls are coming from inside the house.

Photos · · Tucson

Apron

Girl Power apron hanging on the patio of Café Colère

Girl Power at Café Colère

Words · · Tucson

Mulligrubs

plural noun · mul·li·grubs · ˈməlēˌgrəbzˈ
1 : a despondent, sullen, or ill-tempered mood : sulks, blues. 2 : a griping of the intestines : colic.

Mullygrubs

Recipes · · Tucson

Baked Coconut Rice Pudding with Owl Sounds

If you are like me, you have been in bed all day listening to the rain and wondering if the owl that was out in the carport last night will come back tonight. Hoo! Hoo! 

I do hope he or she will return to chant his or her woodsy mantra behind curtains of midtown rain again tonight. The sound of the rain and the sound of an owl together is oddly delicous. I know this now. I describe it as odd only perhaps because I had never thought of the two together. But I cannot be the only one to have not thought of it, right? I am sure many others have not either. The makers of the white noise app on my phone, for example. It offers over thirty different kinds of rain sounds. There is even a shih-tzu snoring option, but no owl in the rain. I am certain if any of the developers involved in that project knew how wonderful that is to listen to, it would be an in-app purchase.

It is not.

If the owl does not come back this evening, I think I will want to put on an oversized sweater and listen to something with woodwinds because there is comfort in that also.

Anyhow, if some chilly weekends you find yourself snowbound or just preferring to stay inside. Where I live it snows at most a couple hours each year. That is hardly enough to snowbind anyone. One way to break the monotony and warm the house up a bit is to cook something.

Why, you could make a big pot of rice right now.

You probably will not eat it, but did you know you can work up quite an appetite doing nothing all day long? It is true. So go ahead and eat it if you like. If you do not that is fine also because for all you know next weekend it may be raining even more and you will be back in bed hoping for another owl and thinking about how hungry you feel.

If that happens, you will probably be thinking: Well I cannot make another pot of rice.

What if you had some baking to do? Why not make a baked rice pudding with all that rice you did not eat all week? Here, I will help.

Baked Coconut Rice Pudding with Owl Sounds

  • 1-2 cups cooked rice
  • 1 can evaporated milk
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1/2 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
  • cinnamon
  • nutmeg

Preheat oven to 325 F.
Mix together eggs, evaporated milk, salt, sugar, and vanilla.
Coat a 9-inch baking dish with butter or cooking spray.
Cover the bottom of the baking dish with one cup of the rice. Pour in the milk and egg mixture. The mixture should just cover the rice. If there's room and there's a lot of liquid, add more rice until the two are even. Distribute the coconut evenly over the top.
Sprinkle with cinnamon and nutmeg.
Bake for 90 minutes.

After that amount of time has passed, test your pudding for readiness by poking it with something pointy, such as a toothpick. If that comes out clean, you are good to go. If you think you will enjoy it more if you wait until the coconut on top toasts a bit more, leave it in a while longer because as with so many things in life you will definitely enjoy it more with a toasty coconut top.

Links · · Tucson

Almodóvar on Faking It

Do things ever happen in your life and in order to get by without giving up hope or losing your cool you “fake it till you make it?” Then, in the middle of doing that, does something else happen? And does it make you think: Well, my coping strategy for things like this has been to fake it, but I'm already just rolling with the punches as it is and now this all is beginning to feel more like a dance piece choreographed by a calculus professor than an article in Popular Psychology.

Of course they do. Of course it does.

Some of us are better at faking it in the roles we're in and we have to create for ourselves to get by. That is what I took away from an article that has been sitting in a stack of things on the nightstand to get around to reading since Hiram passed it to me last month. The stack is tall enough now that it was probably interfering with my sleep so I was about to throw the piece out with the rest of the mess without looking at it. Pedro’s pensive gaze in the accompanying photo wouldn’t let me though. 

Mr. Almodóvar, too, was watching his mother, Francisca Caballero, who died in 1999, as he grew up in the La Mancha region of Spain and agreed that many of his characters were inspired by her. “She had the capacity to fake things, fake things in order to solve problems,” he said, explaining that as opposed to the men in his family, the women “would resolve situations with the greatest naturalism, with the greatest ease, they would just fake that certain things were happening in order to protect us as children, and they did it with the greatest conviction.”

He added, “Life is filled with these miniature plays, scenarios, where people are forced to act or fake, and women are naturally born actresses.”

Julie Bloom, “Pedro Almodóvar and His ‘Cinema of Women’,” New York Times, December 2, 2016

Making tall stacks of all the things to get around to reading is, of course, a completely different coping mechanism.  

Cineclub · · Tucson

Song of Love

Un chant d'amour. Dir. Jean Genet. 1950

There's so much beauty packed into these twenty five minutes. And seeing it tonight for the first time, its influence on generations of visual artists is obvious if you have seen a music video or purchased underwear in the last thirty years.

The film was banned and eventually deemed obscene by the Supreme Court. I think the standard for obscenity has changed since then, but if at the time obscenity was any depiction that leaves you desiring intimacy with a strong, hairy-chested man of mediterranean descent, I think this film is deliciously obscene. 

I imagine these days the justification for banning the film would probably be more for its depictions of smoking than sex.

Notes · · Tucson

On Mindfulness

There's a lot going on in the world so something that it's easy to forget is that if you are right now eating Nutella on your toast and you suddenly have an itch to scratch in your pajamas eventually you will have some explaining to do.