The Dumb

Just this today.

 

 

Spicy Ginger Pumpkin Pancakes

You know you want them.

I don't usually hop on the pumpkin bandwagon. It's not that I don't like pumpkin. It's that it's not really pumpkin that is in pumpkin-flavored stuff. I am not a purist in that sense, but I won't generally seek pumpkin-esque things out intentionally. I like cloves and cinnamon year-round, so when fall hits and everyone starts up with their pumpkin this and pumpkin that, I am not so influenced.

But.

I had some leftover pumpkin from my pumpkin chocolate chip scones. And I thought I would try some pancakes because The Child loves pancakes and if I can get actual breakfast into her before school that would be great.

I have only the picture above because we ate them as fast as they came out of the pan and then I was too full to care about taking pictures.

These pancakes could not have been more delicious if they tried. Faintly spicy, studded with crispy candied ginger and tasting very much of pumpkin. Light and fluffy. Delicious with or without maple syrup. Delicious with homemade apple butter. You will want to keep this recipe and make it often, especially my gluten-free friends. They freeze beautifully, and you can even freeze the batter (although the resulting pancakes are less fluffy. Still delicious.). Add more or less spice, use the ginger or don't, fry bacon until it's super crispy and then crumble it into the batter before you fry them up: go crazy. Here is the basic recipe.

Spicy Ginger Pumpkin Pancakes

In a large bowl, mix together the following dry ingredients, adjusting the spices as you see fit:

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (I used the GF flour mix I made)

4 tablespoons sugar (use less if you like)

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

minced crystallized ginger (as much as you like; I ended up with about 4 tablespoons).*

In a separate bowl, mix together the wet ingredients:

1 1/4 cup pumpkin puree (freeze the leftover puree in ice cube trays and pop them in soup as a thickener)

1 1/2 to 2 cups of milk (when combined with the dry ingredients, it should be like thick cake batter)

4 tablespoons melted butter, cooled slightly

2 eggs

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. You don't have to be gentle here, but it's also okay if there are still lumps in the pancakes. I gave the batter a good thrashing with a whisk because lumps drive me crazy, and the pancakes seemed to like it. Use a little less than 1/4 cup of batter per pancake, and cook on one side until the edges are dry and little bubbles form (about 2 minutes, depending on the heat. Figure that your first pancake is going to look awful and just resign yourself to eating that steamy mound of deliciousness right away. It's a sacrifice I am sure you are willing to make). Flip, cook for another minute or two, then serve with syrup, apple butter, wrapped around a sausage, or plain.

This makes about 20-24, 4-inch pancakes. Maybe. I can't actually remember. Plus we ate many, many pancakes and I lost count. But it makes a bunch.

If you have leftovers, cool them all the way then pack them four to a bag in Ziplocs and freeze. YUM.

*You can also use ground ginger, but I like the texture of the crystallized ginger in the pancake. For ground ginger, try 1 teaspoon.

 

The Berlin Wall

Twenty-five years ago today, the Berlin Wall came down.

I don't know what you were doing, but I had quit school the year before and was just about to drop out of community college, too. I was living in a three-bedroom house with six other people and tending bar. I was 18 and clueless as I watched the wall dividing a country come down. It was momentous in the truest sense of the word, and even in my ridiculous 18-year-old stupor I could recognize that things were changing.

I cannot compare the walls that individuals put up with the Berlin Wall, not straight across. The Berlin Wall cast millions into poverty and starvation and allowed others to prosper and move forward. It represented all of the worst parts of humanity - captivity, scarcity, cruelty, discrimination - and embodied the worst characteristics of countries around the globe, specifically apathy, for far too long.

But in a way the walls that we build within separate us from the things and people we need just as if they were made of mortar and brick. A wall prevents us from acting when we see injustice. A wall lets us say, "Well, that's not my problem." It dehumanizes and diminishes anyone on the other side, including the parts of ourselves that are fragile and easily damaged.

I won't say that at 18 I realized that I had built walls and then they magically disintegrated and I lived a fulfilled life. Rather the opposite. It takes a strong person to operate in the world without his or her own personal fortress. Mine has been, at times, impenetrable. But this week in yoga, coincidental to the full moon and the change in the weather which has literally sent me spinning (I am something of a human barometer and am overly affected by moving weather systems, so I often suffer migraines and vertigo when it is especially beautiful or windy outside. It's horribly inconvenient but makes me more reliable by far than most newscasters. But I digress.) we have been talking about courage. The small moments of tremendous courage that it takes sometimes to do even the simplest of things.

Knocking down walls, Berlin or otherwise, requires such bursts of monumental courage, sometimes all at once, and sometimes over a period of years, or a lifetime. The point is that these small moments chip away at the wall and let everything in you shine, within and without. So I continue to chip at my formidable walls with small moments of courage.

What walls are  you chipping away at?

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TEDTalks: From The Sublime To The Ridiculous

So The Child is giving her second TEDTalk next week at the TEDYouth conference in New York. In honor of that, I happened to run across two excellent compilations of the 20 best TEDTalks of all time (most viewed and shared) and ten ridiculous TEDTalks.

I present them both for your time-suck this Saturday. Did these lists get them right? Which talks are missing in either category?

And here is The Child's first talk last year. This year promises to be even better. This was her first public speaking event EVER, and it was broadcast live to millions of people around the world. She put this together in one week.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRp3cFSIA4[/embed]

Hard to believe a year has passed since this talk, and yet here we are.

Throw Back Friday

Because I have never been one to do things in order or the way people tell me to, here is a throwback Friday snap of a friend and I. We were very obviously just risen after what appears to have been quite a shinding. Note the coffee in my friend's hand (she shall remain nameless unless she chooses to step forward. 'tis the interwebs, after all), and the lack of coffee in mine, which certainly accounts for the look on my face (plus also the fact that I am positive I am trying not to vomit. My early 20s were...rough).

In all our glory, here we are, both cautionary tale and advertisement for adventure....have a great weekend!

Swim Ten Strokes

The dog did not get the "fall back" memo, so he poked his cold nose under my hand at 7 a.m. on a day when The Child has no school. Normally this dog will sleep until I am good and ready to rise, but not this day.

Two hours later, there is a cup of coffee in my belly and two pots simmering on the stove, one of homemade meat stock (steak bones and chicken) and another of curry. The Child is sleepy-surfing the interwebs with her own coffee as I sit down to write.

Mondays are list-making days, the time of the week when I sit the week down firmly and tell it how things are going to go. This does not often work, but I persist at any rate, attempting to ignore the siren call of anything other than what I am supposed to be doing. There are corners of the city that have gone as yet unexplored, and although it is blustery and not so nice outside I feel like putting on my boots and walking for miles.

I often write about motivation and persistence. For me, the key has always been to get into a routine: you get up and do certain things because that's just what you do. It's the routine. In Georgia, I did yoga every day because that was the routine: get up, write for an hour and a half, go to yoga, come home, eat lunch and write some more, all done.

Here, we are so uprooted and cattywampus that there is no routine beyond delivering The Child to school every morning at 7:45. At that hour my brain is fusty with poor sleep and I am not ready to write, and there is no yoga to go to, and sometimes I am meeting a contractor or going to a museum training or Something Else Very Important, and then it is 2:45 and time to pick up The Child.

I have not ever been very good at self-discipline.

My father told me the story once of an English Channel swimmer, this old dude whom they interviewed as soon as he hauled his scrawny, exhausted, hypothermic self from the water. They asked him, of course, how he did it. What he said is the thing that got my father through chemo therapy (among other things).

"I told myself," (says he, the swimmer), "that I would just swim ten more strokes. Then after that if I had to, I would quit. So every ten strokes, I would keep saying, well, I guess I can swim ten more. And I strung together ten strokes at a time and got all the way across."

So it's entirely possible that my dad made this up, but its lesson is important. Today, I will swim ten strokes.

What are your ten strokes today?

Intuition: Losing Teeth

Last night I dreamed, again, that I was losing teeth.

A cursory search of the interwebs provides this:

Dreams about losing teeth generally symbolize:

• Representation of anxiety


• A costly compromise or decision


• Radical change


• Starting a new project or phase in your life

Sounds about right.

Or this:

Common teeth symbol meanings

Losing your teeth. Feeling helpless, powerless, overwhelmed.

Baring your teeth Dreamer is preparing to defend or attack. Seeing someone else bare his teeth is a warning.

Being toothless. The toothless person is weak or vulnerable.

Having your teeth pulled. Losing your power or positive public image to someone or something.

Broken or chipped teeth. Public image is tarnished or in question.

Decayed teeth. Your power is being diminished. This could be in the areas of health, business, finances or society. People fighting disease or suffering business losses often dream of decayed teeth.

Braces on teeth You are being groomed or trained. You may be feeling constricted now but this stage will have positive results.

Seeing your teeth as fangs. You are a threat or a drain to someone. Or vice versa, if someone is biting you with fangs.

Biting someone. Something you are doing or saying is hurting another person. You may be reacting in a childish, forceful manner in a particular situation.

Being bitten. Dreamer is feeling threatened or pressured.

I have had teeth dreams since I was very young; usually in the dream I would end up with a mouthful of crumbled teeth, the image so vivid that it was hard to shake for many moments after waking. This feels like that today, and it's a bad, regressive place to be in for me.

I find I have these dreams after I make a decision that goes against my intuition. When I follow my instincts, I am never wrong. Literally, obnoxiously, gloatingly never wrong. Uprooting from one place and starting over AGAIN has made me tentative and mistrustful of that, and I made a stupid decision, one that I knew was wrong, and now I am suffering through the midnight-hours gloating of my sub-conscious.

Instinct is there for a reason. Intuition is a powerful tool. Why I continue to ignore these things after so many years on the planet is beyond me. Some day I will learn.

Updated to add: after another night of sleep and a flying dream, I have come to some conclusions that jibe with my intuition and also potentially solve (or eliminate) the problem. We will see what happens. But the moral of the story is the same. This is the last time when I ignore what I know to be right.

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