No Sleep Schedule

Night before last, I stayed up late ruining a beet reduction sauce. I guess I thought that a fair amount of starch would strip out of the chopped-up beets and precipitate into the liquid, but that didn't really happen. The beets really kept their form and the liquid didn't thicken up much. So when I tried to reduce it, there was nothing left, really. Hard to explain. The water and wine and sautéed onions and carrots were all in there, but there was just shockingly little left after evaporating the water off. It smelled and tasted good and everything, but...
So I repeated a few cycles of this and then fell asleep in a chair at 4am, waiting. Thankfully the roommates turned off the burner. In the morning I decided to get some starch in there to thicken it up by any means necessary. So I cut off a little bit of potato and sliced in into the saucepan, with the idea being that potato disintegrates pretty well and the starch from that could lend some texture to the sauce. It was going pretty well at first, but then at some point I left it alone for 15 minutes (not a problem pre-potato) and when I checked on it, it was black and hardened and required steel wool.

sigh.

So I'm going to try it again, this time pressing juice out of the beets more before introducing it to the mix, and maybe trying xantham gum instead of potato. Consulting my new, trusty list of farmers' markets, at least six of which are within reasonable biking distance to me or the metro, I think I'm headed to West Hollywood today.

I kind of fell in love with beets in France, actually. Staying away from meat isn't that hard, but when trying to avoid dairy and eggs over there, it's easy to fall into eating only fruit and bread at home and salad and fries in restaurants. but the french are really big on beets, usually cut into little wriggly worm shapes, with a little vinaigrette, sometimes a little corn. Beets are astounding in that they kind of taste like dirt, but in the best possible way.

In other news, it might be a good time to visit me, because I am beta-testing a couple of recipes for dessert breads this week. I need to put in some work ahead of time, because there is a Roller Derby bout on Saturday, and I am baking a pumpkin bread and a zucchini-walnut bread for the Sirens, my friend Amber's team. Actually, two loaves would probably be enough for both teams. Maybe they'll share. Though actually, that's unlikely, since I baked the Sirens brownies for their scrimmage last week (I bake something or other for them every time) and left them at the track with a note and they never saw them! Which means that someone stole them! Which means that my brownies are worth committing crimes for!

For those of you who have asked questions about it, Roller Derby is kind of hard to explain. I mean the rules are simple enough, but the mood of the games and the culture that surrounds it is kind of hard to outline precisely. It's also easy to misunderstand, so please go here and read a little about the game, its role as an event somewhere between sport and spectacle, some of the practical difficulties in presenting a DIY sport to the public, being taken seriously as athletes, etc. It's articulate and has a good perspective.

One of the most alluring things about the Derby Dolls is ...they need a lot of help! It's a mostly-punkrock event that turns out 1200 people, so there is always a project to work on. Lately it's been acoustic treatment of the room, setting up the scoreboard, putting together a rented sound system and planning out a permanent one.
It's been over a year since I worked on live sound for an event, and once you've spent years working to be good at something, you naturally miss it. I don't mix the bands at Derby Dolls events, but still. Projects, projects, projects.