Laying Plans

It should be no surprise to you who know me that now that I have some free time for the first time in a very long time I am aggressively considering different projects to start. Reading projects, of course, torment me with their endless possibilities -- an effect compounded by a couple of graduation gift cards to Barnes  Noble. Fitness, perennially on the periphery of my mulling-over, is something I want to map onto actual calendar-concrete discipline. And if things come in threes, then my last project for which I have built a fervor is cooking. I have been cooking much more now that school is over, and I would like to have at least some of that cooking contribute to a systematic improvement of some aspect of food prep.

Let this post, then, mark some outlines for these efforts. Mind you, I have pressing issues besides these to address, not the least of which is my expenses and their payment. That said, on with the possibilities.

Books: After four or five days of deliberation, I accepted that the gift cards had burned holes in my pockets and so I traded them in for books on European intellectual and cultural history. Some of the primary stuff was basic authors I've never read like Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill. I also picked up Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History and Dena Goodman's The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. My still half-formed motivation for settling on these books was that when it comes to European history, I'm solid right through the late Middle Ages, and then I effectively check out until World War I. Really, astonishingly long gap that I want to close. And so...where to start? I am reading The Oxford History of the French Revolution, effectively punting the question until I get to other side of its four hundred pages. Updates to come.

Fitness: I did once have this down to a routine, but never in my four years here in New York. Here I really am casting about for ideas. From others, I mean. Step one this week has been getting into the habit of working out on our elliptical machine for a half hour at a time.

Food: I feel the surest sense here of how I want to develop my skills. I make decent salads, but I think that I could really go a lot farther by making my own dressings. I've made a couple vinaigrettes and Caesar dressings, but that's over the course of fours years of cooking. I want to have some salad recipes down cold so I can confidently serve a lot more salads this summer. I've got even more room to grow with breakfast. I can do some pancake variations, crepes, omelets, and hash browns. Just doesn't feel like enough variety. I've been stocking fresh fruit, but there's lots more that I am just not doing at all. Lastly, beans. We have a pantry full of all kinds, but I never use them except for beer-glazed black beans. This is a waste of possibilities.

Let's see how these plans are doing in a week, friends. I'll let you know.