Tag: garden

Sharlotka, radish salad, and doing my best

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova1 Comment

This Thanksgiving we had the usual American Thanksgiving foods (turkey stuffed with apples, plum sauce because I’m allergic to cranberries, and stuffing, recently introduced by my magnificent and magnificently American boyfriend/partner Cory). We also had radish salad made from radishes I grew in our garden and sharlotka, an apple sponge cake.

Radishes

First I will tell you about the radishes. I grew them myself, planted as a bit of an afterthought in the pumpkin patch because they do well in the shade and therefore do well with pumpkins. Under my grandmother’s advisement I left the hose out in the sun for a bit and watered them with warm water. They did shockingly well; we are now enjoying my second round of picked radishes and there are still plenty left for a third. The exact seed mixes I used are here and here (referral links, so I get a small commission).

I grew regular pink radishes, purple radishes, daikon radishes, watermelon radishes, and black radishes. All the exotic radishes had less intense flavor than I was expecting: the daikon radishes were a bit like watered down regular radishes, the black radishes were a bit like turnips with a radish flavor, and the purple radishes had a bit of an onion-like flavor—nonetheless all radishes, maybe more tolerable than the usual radishes (I like the usual radishes, I just can’t eat too many at once). I dragged the radishes from Boston to a friend’s wedding in LA and then to South Carolina to my family (my bag/”personal item” was mostly radishes, my laptop, and a pair of heels). Here’s more or less what the radishes looked like, minus a few radishes because we’d already started to eat them.

My mom made some of the black and purple radishes into a gorgeous, delicious salad (left) and the daikon radishes into another gorgeous, delicious salad (right):

We all thought the salad was very special and delicious especially because the radishes were fresh and also because we could probably taste that I remembered to water them every day (amazing).

Sharlotka

My mom also made sharlotka (шарлотка), Russian/Eastern European/former Soviet Union apple sponge cake distantly descended from the English charlotte (sharlotka translates to little Charlotte). It’s a really cozy comfort food kind of cake, light and moist with a sweet crunchy crust and with apples inside baked just so they’re soft but barely still crunchy.

Here’s our family’s recipe, for my own reference and maybe for yours too—

  • apples
  • 4 eggs
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 big cup flour (“big cup” meaning 250 ml—mom says “technically a cup is 200 ml”)

Chop up unpeeled apples and put them on the bottom of your baking dish. In the mixer, add the eggs first and beat until they are white. Then add the sugar, then add the flour. Bake at 375 F for about 35 minutes, though it’s hard to tell for sure how long. You’ll know it’s done by the color of the crust. You can also touch the crust: it shouldn’t give too much.

Here’s the process:

Here’s how it turns out:

Doing my best

The radishes were particularly special to me because they were a very proud and successful accomplishment requiring months of sustained effort.

One of the lessons/epiphanies I learned (or just drilled into myself with some but not a lot of success) this year is about doing my best. My whole childhood my parents encouraged me to do my best, and especially as it applied to school whatever my grades were was fine with them as long as the grades actually reflected my best. Clearly that worked out but this year, when I was practicing for my driver’s license, aka driving, I decided that actually doing my best is not usually such a good approach.

When a person is driving, for example, they probably shouldn’t be doing their best. Ideally, a person should have such a reserve of skill and experience and muscle memory that their best is completely unnecessary, to such an extent that they could even be a bit distracted or upset and still be a decent driver. (They might even be thinking about the concept of doing their best, and they should have enough buffer to not run a red light or a stop sign. Should.)

And then I thought that probably this applies to most of the rest of the things I do. If I’m coding, for example, I can put on a movie and my code will be just as bug-free as it is usually, because I’ve been coding for 18 years and because I learned in undergrad how to add safeguards to make my code as bug-free as possible. Sometimes I work a lot harder—when I’m implementing a new algorithm or when I need to solve a particularly challenging problem or when I’m chasing one of those dumb four-hour bugs. But even then it’s something I’ve done a lot, and I’m comfortable with it.

I’ve noticed this year that ideally, if I have the necessary skills to do my work, and if I have not overextended myself, and if I am working in a healthy, sustainable way, I should not need to do my best. If I find that I am doing my best that is something to investigate. It might be that I am learning a new skill, which happens often and is not a bad thing but requires extra caution to avoid errors. It might be that I have too much on my plate, which means I need to try to find balance, and soon, and probably need to find partners to share my work with, otherwise delegate, or evaluate my priorities. Or it might mean that I am working on a short-term but very important project, in which case I just need to survive until it is over and make sure I am doing at least the minimum to maintain my health. (Our Cell paper, for example, was a time when I absolutely did my best, but it was not sustainable.) That kind of effort, at least for me, is how I’ve usually done everything but it only works in short bursts, and carefully.

When I successfully studied for and got my driver’s license, I did not do my best. First, my dad taught me how to drive stick shift and then I didn’t sign up for a road test and then I went to college and then a decade went by. Then I practiced on my and my partner’s first car, a 2001 Highlander that made sounds I recorded and sent to my dad every week, with my licensed and very brave partner in the passenger seat directing me around very narrow Cambridge streets where side mirrors go to hospice. Then when the Highlander failed its inspection I scheduled lessons, more or less once a week, and I showed up. I took the commuter rail and then the orange line or the red line and I arrived at the designated place at the designated time with the designated amount of cash, somehow never late (though I did forget the cash once and a kind and very smart coworker who unlike me still carries cash lent me the money), and I drove around for 45 minutes with my brave and patient instructor who had and used an instructor brake, and I did that more or less every week. I was terrible at it, then great at it, then terrible again, then more or less okay more or less consistently. I scheduled my road test, did pretty poorly, and somehow passed. This kind of workflow is new to me. I didn’t do my best—I allocated the time, I showed up, and I did the work, a little every week, and then I looked back and I saw that the goal was achieved.

The same thing happened with the radishes. I planted them, I watered them every day, I reluctantly (with Cory’s help and insistence) culled them when I had to, and then some months later I had radishes—and then I had radishes again, and there are still more that might grow even bigger, more radishes than I know what to do with.

What happens when a person does their best

As evidence that doing your best is a bad idea, here is our gingerbread house, which we made in earnest as a family:

The Summer of Shit

Unrelatedly I am reminded all of a sudden that there was one summer recently but pre-pandemic when, no joke, a bird pooped in my eye on two separate occasions (two separate birds, presumably, but I can’t be sure). I wear glasses (all the time, or I’d walk into a pole (with my luck a pole from which a bird is just taking off)), so that means the bird would have needed to aim so precisely between my glasses and my eye, at just the right angle, just slightly closer to my eye than to my glasses. Twice.

I remember one of the incidents was under a stoplight, which is probably why I had trouble noticing them while learning to drive. Something about repressed trauma.

An Early Resolution

Since my driver’s license/radishes revelation I have been trying to apply some kind of sustainable, gradual-progress type of workflow to all my work. It is very different from how I usually or naturally work, which is in short, passionate bursts followed by long periods of burn-out. (Of course, because my work is tangential to public health and the pandemic specifically I don’t always get to work sustainably, but I am trying when I can. (Not trying my best, though—as just established that is not the goal.))

Gradual, sustainable progress requires difficult planning and facing reality, the former of which I enjoy and the latter of which I do not: breaking a goal into small steps, being realistic about how much I can get done and prioritizing my goals accordingly, and doing those steps bit by bit every day or every week, with or without passion, efficiently during the day rather than in happy bursts of hyperfocused all-nighters. I haven’t entirely gotten the hang of it, or figured out how exactly it works for me specifically: do I, for example, work on one project on Mondays and Wednesdays and a different project on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Do I let myself follow my interests, so long as I make a bit of progress on each of my active projects every week? Or do I work on each project a little every day, perhaps optimized by the type of work I do best in the morning, afternoon, or early evening? Maybe, since school worked so well for me, I should break my day into two-hour “class periods,” giving each project a class period and stopping when the time runs out?

(So far, it’s looked like working on whichever of my active projects I’m most excited about at the moment, switching when I get stuck, and getting unstuck during the semi-rest/not thinking about it of working on the other project, like epiphanies showing up in the shower but instead more like epiphanies showing up while I’m working on something that is at the moment more fun.)

Figuring out a productive, happy, sustainable workflow is one of my goals for the remainder of the year and for the year to come—or in other words, to do the work I care about in a productive, happy, sustainable way and learn how to do that as I go.

Reaching

This is my favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. She’s reaching for something in the water—reaching quickly, judging by her hair. She’s definitely not going to get whatever she is reaching for, because she is a statue, and every time I see her she is still reaching. I like the motion captured in her body and her hair and I like that the water is also a part of the sculpture, and that the reflection of her hand is also part of the sculpture.

The Fates

This is my grandmother’s favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. The three fates: one spinning the thread of life, one directing it, and one cutting it.

Lights

Brookgreen Gardens is a magical place to spend Thanksgiving, because it is when they are in the midst of decorating for Christmas and you get to see their progress from day to day. They put up every conceivable kind of light in every color, including lights in glass bubbles floating in fountains. It’s an enormous, unimaginable effort by many volunteers. My favorites are these string lights hanging from a small forest of oaks and a few other trees at the edges:

Butterflies

I was talking with a volunteer who told me that the paths in the gardens were originally shaped like a butterfly, proboscis and antennae and all, and butterflies are special in the gardens. Then he pointed out to me that the ceiling was covered in butterflies glowing gold in the lights. He had put them all up the previous day. Apparently there were monarchs before but they switched them out. My photos absolutely do not capture the overwhelmingness of the quantity of butterflies, but this is what they look like:

New Fruits

We didn’t get to spend Rosh Hashanah together so we marked one of our family traditions for the new year (which we do sometimes on Rosh Hashanah, sometimes on the calendar new year, and sometimes both) both late and early over Thanksgiving: trying some new fruit.

This year’s new fruit was a kiwano melon. We spent a few days admiring its exterior (we didn’t google it so as not to spoil the surprise). We were very surprised when we cut it open that it was bright green. It was like a sweet-sour cucumber:

I dragged it along with a bunch of mangos, avocados, a papaya, dragon fruit, and four varieties of persimmon in a trash bag together with my radishes as a carry-on when I realized in LA that I had a carry-on for my flight to South Carolina, that I wanted to use that free space for fruit, and California had more exciting fruit than the non-Florida East Coast.

Here is a kiwano melon and a dragon fruit:

Ocean

And here is the ocean on the beach, and a bird flying over the ocean on the beach.

Gratitude

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for:

  • sharlotka
  • an excellent crop of radishes
  • a garden for my radishes, and for our other crops, and all the crops that grew
  • my mom, who made the radish salads and the sharlotka
  • my grandmother, who taught my mom how to make sharlotka
  • my dad and my brother, who in addition to being wonderful also give the sharlotka and the radishes and the radish salad their whole purpose (my dad loves radishes, and my brother loves food)
  • my family abroad
  • my partner Cory
  • our housemate
  • Cory’s family
  • all our friends
  • and our health and survival
  • the covid vaccines
  • modern medicine—oh, especially modern medicine
  • that I get to do work I’m passionate about, and that I get to choose what I work on, and that I get to chase ideas down rabbit holes, and that, though I would of course prefer it be more money, I get paid money to fuck around and find out, irrespective of whether or not I actually end up finding out anything of value
  • my dissertation committee
  • my mentors and coworkers
  • the people who made my career and my life possible, at various stages
  • my growing ability to apply sustained, sustainable effort towards a goal and achieve it
  • and my progress in no longer doing my best, when possible
  • our Cell paper (omg!)
  • my driver’s license (yay!)
  • new fruits and new experiences
  • no bird poop in my eye yet this year

Happy Thanksgiving!

Salem Decorates Itself for Halloween

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova1 Comment

I first knew it was October when we were walking down Essex Street to go to the farmer’s market and a guy dressed as something spooky from a movie I hadn’t seen switched faster than I think I know how to from completely statue-still to reaching his hand out at me. (I screamed and he felt so bad but it was perfect.)

Living in or near Salem for Halloween is bizarre. My train commute gets absurdly crowded. You can’t park in town. You can’t drive through town. Random people start parking and sometimes sleeping in their cars on our street. Crowds are everyone. In October, we actually go downtown less.

We and all our neighbors are getting dressed up, and we and all our neighbors are hyped for trick-or-treaters. We of course absolutely do all the tourist things. We go to the awesome weird Halloween museums. We go to the awesome weird Halloween shops. I think everyone in Salem loves Halloween. Someone asked my friend who works in a spooky shop what happens to Salem the rest of the year, as if we all go sleep or hide somewhere. Everything stays more or less the same. Someone in our neighborhood has a giant skeleton in their yard, about a story tall, which we think they must have bought without considering where they would store it. The skeleton stays out year-round; for holidays, it gets dressed up in relevant outfits but it’s still a skeleton. Salem is like that. We still love the spooky shops, year-round. We still go to the spooky museums, year-round. Graveyards are peaceful in all seasons. The spooky arts festivals are in the summer, too. I don’t think anyone could stand it here if they didn’t like Halloween—or pumpkins or spiders or witches or bats or black cats or spiderwebs or graveyards or Tarot readings or incense or pretty and expensive rocks.

Everyone decorates for Halloween, but the truth is, for the most part, Salem decorates itself.

The gorgeous foliage? That’s just how it is here. The graveyards and cemeteries everywhere? That’s just how it is here.

The pumpkins growing in the front yard? We didn’t plant them. The spiderwebs outside our house? We didn’t plant them either. That guy dressed up as a clown? He’s an actual clown; it’s not his fault you’re terrified of him.

Speaking of pumpkins we didn’t plant—here are the pumpkins we didn’t plant. They appeared over the summer and took over the front of the house. We had to trim them to keep them off the flowers our housemate had actually planned and planted. They grew gorgeously twined around our spooky little library. We think a pumpkin must have fallen off the porch last year and planted itself. We don’t know where they came from.

Importantly, bees sleep in the pumpkin flowers.

And later, at harvest time. See if you can guess which pumpkins aren’t real pumpkins.

It’s not just us—here’s a gourd I found growing in front of a neighbor’s house.

And here are the pumpkins we did plant.

They are all either already soup or going to be soup.

I planted radishes with them and the radishes also grew happily; here are the radishes.

And here is fall foliage in the cemetery.

Here are Halloween decorations in our neighborhood at night, on my walk home from the commuter rail.

Here is the Salem Night Faire.

Happy Halloween!

Freaky Mushroom Abominations/Friends/Food

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova3 Comments

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get up to 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!

Mushrooms!

Growing oyster mushrooms was a very happy highlight of spring 2018, which I suppose was the first spring and second semester of my PhD. I decided to share some of that happiness with our current not-travelling, working-from-home selves and ordered another oyster mushroom growing kit, this time pink and apparently larger. In celebration and anticipation I want to share with you my photos and notes from the first time around.

Our first kit was an impulse buy at Whole Foods. Nowadays (and back then, too, which was nice because I got to share the experience with my family in Pennsylvania) you can buy it online—this link leads to options to buy the mini, the “normal”-sized, and the pink normal-sized kits. Our first mushroom kit, which is in all of the below photos, was apparently the cheaper mini kit—which is wild to think about because it was not small at all. Like I said I just ordered the larger pink mushroom kit and am very excited.

Oyster mushrooms are named Pleurotus ostreatus, sideways-growing oyster. The Pleurotus genus also includes tree mushrooms. Here are some interesting facts about P. ostreatus from Wikipedia (species article and genus article):

  • “The oyster mushroom is one of the few species of carnivorous mushroom, having been known to eat bacteria and tiny worms called nematodes.”
  • “It was first cultivated in Germany as a subsistence measure during World War I.”
  • “Pleurotus fungi have been used in mycoremediation (fungus-based bioremediation) of pollutants such as petroleum and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.”
  • “Oyster mushrooms contain Lovastatin, a form of cholesterol lowering statin.”

Anyway, here is our journey—

March 18, 1:18 pm

We got an oyster mushroom farm from Whole Foods. I’m very very excited about them so I am going to give the company some free advertising and update you on their lives when there is progress. So far we have soaked them in water. Hope they are cozy and moist.

March 21, 1:08 pm

Update: mushroom farm is beginning to look unwholesome.

March 23, 12:06 am

Mushroom update:

“Why did we let this abomination into our home?”

–Cory

March 23, 11:22 am

Morning mushroom update.

March 24, 3:55 pm

Mushrooms! They’re getting big. I suspect we will harvest them soon.

March 30, 12:21 am

We harvested and cooked them according to the mushroom taco recipe that came with the box. They tasted absolutely amazing—a worthy end to a lovely adventure.

Mushroom update: we ate them. They were immensely flavorful and delicious. The most flavorful mushrooms I’ve ever eaten.

April 29, 1:54 pm

Supposedly you should be able to grow a second or even third crop of mushrooms from each box. We didn’t, in large part (entirely) because I forgot about them. We did get one additional mushroom, entirely on accident. We ate him.

The oyster mushroom box, which I forgot about, has sprouted a surprise friend, whom we plan to eat today.

And now I get to wait for a package in the mail, which is fun and exciting, and then I get to wait for mushrooms to grow, which is fun and exciting in a similar but longer-lasting and alive and therefore more rewarding way, especially as they build on progress from previous days, with the important bonus that we get to eat them at the end.

Soon: round 2, larger and in pink!—excited, clearly.

To happy fungal adventures!!!!