Wednesday, March 24, 2010

R.I.P., Fr. Galdon --

Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Have given their loves, I give my love to you;
Not in a lovers'-knot, not in a ring
Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain-
Semper fidelis, where a secret spring
Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:
Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do:
"Look what I have!--And these are all for you."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay


At the start of every PDC, (Prayer Days for Coeds), Fr. Galdon gives a talk and ends it with this lovely poem.  I remember sitting there across from him, and he opened his hands palm up as he said the last lines of the poem. 


And it was then that I understood what love was.  And it made me cry.  (I still cry every time I read this poem.)


I took his courses, Great Books 1 & 2 in my junior and senior year -- and I loved his class.  He inspired me to teach the way I did -- and to think the way I do.  


"It Pedends!" he would exclaim playfully.  (It Depends.) -- reminding us that everything was about having a point of view and challenging us to HAVE a point of view.


He will be remembered always and he will be missed always.

Monday, March 08, 2010

Blog Post # 801: A good day in the kitchen --

I love shopping for meat.

I love going to the supermarkets and pretending to know what I'm doing when I tell the guys behind the counter that I would like that particular piece of meat and not the one beside it.

Last week, Johann and I found ourselves in the meat section of SM City and we found a really cute pork loin all ready to be marinated and cooked in the oven.

Never mind that we have never roasted a pork loin before.

Never mind that we don't even have a good marinade recipe.

We went ahead and bought it.

I started looking for some nice (read: easy) roast pork recipes and I was drawn to this one:

Balsamic Roasted Pork Loin on AllRecipes.com

What was most appealing was that it only needed 4 ingredients -- one of which was the pork.

The cook and I (mostly our cook, but I was working hard directing her) made the marinade and poured it over our pork loin and left it to marinade overnight.

I was planning to have it for dinner the next day (yesterday, Sunday) so we preheated our oven at 4pm and left it at gas mark 6 for 10 minutes to get it nice and hot.

We sliced some onions and potatoes (by we, I mean the cook) and placed them on the bottom of our pan.

Then we placed our pork loin on top, reduced our oven temp to gas mark 4 (which is about 350 degrees)
 and set our timers for 30 minutes.

Total cooking time was 1 hour but we checked in every 30 minutes just to see if we were going to have a really good dinner or a really bad one.

At 1 hour, I stuck a knife in the middle (I saw this trick on Martha) to test the temperature of the meat -- I wasn't sure what the right temperature felt like but I knew that our meat could stand a bit more cooking.  We let it go for 20 minutes more.

We actually let it rest for about 20 minutes.

At exactly 6 o'clock, we sliced into the meat and nearly wept at how lovely it turned out.

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We piled the onions and potatoes in with the sliced pork and served it like that.  It was a big pile of yummy fat, tender meat and extras. ^_^

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We will definitely try roasting pork again -- maybe with a different marinade.  (We're thinking of making it Chinese style and marinading it in Char Siu sauce.) ^_^

Sunday, March 07, 2010

The cutest thing! (As of 6:56 this morning) XD

I don't know what I was doing browsing through Amazon Japan --

But I stumbled upon the "Hobby Kitchen" line of Bandai and found myself entertained by all the cute gadgets Bandai has made for kids 6 and up.

I found this especially teeth-achingly cute.  (It's not yet 7 in the morning.  Forgive the modifier.)

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It's a mini ice-cream maker.  From the looks of it, it's the size of a single mug serving of ice cream.

I can imagine my two kids sitting at the table grinding the top -- trying to make ice cream for their beloved mother.