Jillian Michaels and Robert Frost

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Hannah

Jillian Michaels may be a sadist, but at least there is poetry.

Ok, I should back up. I love my colleagues.  Regardless of how often I get frustrated with my students, I love the teachers and staff that I work with. My job would probably fit more neatly into the 9 daily working hours if I didn’t spend so much time chatting with the people I work with during my planning periods. But I can’t help it.  Our students are too fascinating/ amusing/ infuriating that we have to catch up between teaching.

I don’t really remember how it started, but my teacher-friend Amanda and I started working out together and for the last 25 days we have devotedly been slogging our way through the Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred.  Now, I wish to offer a disclaimer: I HATE workout movies.  I love running, love exercising, love burning off excess energy and having that delightfully exhausted feeling.  But I detest being in a sweaty room while some perky person on TV lambasts my inability to complete complex moves.  However, I got sucked in.  Level one left us tired, but encouraged, Level two left us annoyed as we physically could not maintain plank balance while doing jumping jacks. Level three is leaving us exhausted and sore, which I guess is a good sign.  For a while Amanda and I were using an odd assortment of canned beans and jam jars in place of weights, but we finally graduated on to the real thing.  Occasionally we just hurl ourselves to the carpet in a moment of prostrate submission.

The thing that makes our daily 20 minutes of torture bearable is that we usually mute Jillian and discuss whatever comes to mind. Amanda teaches English and I have a forever unfinished affair with literature so we often end up talking about books.  As Jillian commands us to do Suma squats, rock-star jumps, and shadowboxing we exchange poetic musings, discuss the motif of silence in post-modernism, and quit doing sit-ups to yell “I fall upon the thorns of life/ I bleed!”

Lately we have been on a Robert Frost kick, so I leave you with a painting I did in college and the poem that inspired it.  Read it while you do some static lunges with arm curls and I promise both will be enriched.

“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

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Felix

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Hannah

This winter is shaping up to be long, cold, and snowy.  I can’t really complain because snow days have kept me from having full weeks, and I am getting very good at staying in bed and watching TV.  But the cold weather also just makes me want to sit inside, eat creamy bad for me soups, drink tea, and cuddle with a furry animal while I read a good book.  Unfortunately, we have no such animal, due to the lethal combination of poverty, busy schedules, and allergies. Yet as winter wears on, my roommates and I decided that we had to do something to fulfill this furry creature need.  Thus, as good kind-hearted citizens, we signed up to be kitten foster parents at the humane society.

This means that whenever they have little kittens not yet old enough to be adopted, we keep them and play with them for a couple weeks before turning them over.  Perpetual kittens. Never cats. What is not perfect about this system?  Of course, lots of people want kittens, which means that we have to prove ourselves by taking on a slightly harder challenge.

Which is how we got Felix.  Felix is a couple months old, therefore still very much a kitten, though past the tumbling ball of fuzz stage.  Felix is currently suffering from an eye infection and upper respiratory infection that makes his eyes scary red slits that water and he sneezes and coughs like a coal miner.  He also has a short stub tail that hinders his balance, which means that his sneezes often send him tumbling to the side.  Oh, and did I mention that he might be part mountain lion, as his claws are longer than any kitten should have? We all bear the scars of Felix’s affection.  His contagious illness kept Felix from normal feline interaction at the human society, leaving him starved for attention.  He follows us as we walk through the house, tries to climb into the toilet when we brush our teeth, sleeps on whoever will sit still, sneezes on whatever we are trying to eat, and is generally a precious dripping sneezing ball of perfection.

Here is a video of Felix. I apologize that you don’t get to hear him sneeze, because it really is his best talent. He looks much larger in this video than he really is, as he is curled up next to me as I type this and takes up barely any room.

Foster Cat Number 1: Felix

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Fred et Tania

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Hannah

Last summer I took these engagement photos for some friends in Paris.  The disc got lost, and as I was working on finding a way to get the pictures to them again, I decided to share some.  Portraits were so much more dramatic when I could climb out the window and take them on the roof overlooking the city.

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Kiss the Earth

Posted on January 16, 2011 by Hannah

My students are currently memorizing French romantic poetry.   To prepare them for this quarter, I spent a class period discussing what defines the French Romantic movement.  One of my colleagues teaches English, and she has the best description to differentiate between the British and American Romantics.  A British Romantic poet, she explains, looks out on a field of daffodils and is inspired. He stands at the edge of the field and composes a poem then returns to his study to edit and perfect his masterpiece.  The American poet also looks out on a field of daffodils. He runs into the field and flings himself into the flowers, rolling around, rubbing the dirt into his hair, chewing on the stems, then he scratches a poem down and walks away. Think Wordsworth vs. Whitman.  I like to add a third distinction, the French Romantic poet.  He looks out on the field of flowers, runs out into it, and dies in a pile of blossoms while another poet looks on and writes a poem full of beautifully ominous metaphors of flowers dying.

I know it is melodramatic, but I love French Romanticism. I love their passion, drama, and love of nature.  And I love being a teacher because it means I get to inflict bestow my loves on my students. Had I lived in the 19th century, I would probably have been a romantic poet, or at least been in love with one.

My students do not all share this love, primarily because of philosophical reasons.   This is one of the poems my freshmen are learning, chosen for its beauty, easy vocabulary, and simplicity.

“To Dawn” Georges Sand

Nature is all that we see,

All that we want, all that we love.

All that we know, all that we believe,

All that we feel in ourselves.

She is beautiful for those who see her,

She is good to those who love her,

She is just when one believes her,

And when one respects her in themself.

Look at the heavens, they see you.

Kiss the earth, she loves you.

The Truth is what we believe

In nature, it is yourself.

Now then, as I expressed to my students as their eyes were widening with a look that said “Be gone from me demon nature loving woman!” this is bad philosophy, but good poetry (in French, a little lame in English).  I also talked with them about why the French poets love nature.  They see in nature what we long for in life: a constant cycle of life rising from death, winter surrendering to spring, a perpetual cycle of rebirth. They are obsessed with the tragedy that we live, love, and then we die. They feel the injustice of this, the sadness, and their poems pay homage to the natural world as lying outside of this cycle. We discussed Lamartine’s poem “The Lake” where a man sits where he used to come with his dead love and he pleads with the lake to “Guard at least the memory . . . that we loved!”  As I teach at a Christian school, we then talked about how even Christians, who take comfort in the resurrection, feel that death is not the original intent: we were meant for life.

And then we went outside and kissed the earth.

In hindsight, this was a poor choice.  One freshmen class begged to go outside and act out their poem and they thought of it as nothing more than a fun way to understand what the French words meant. We yelled Sand’s words and threw ourselves at the ground.  The second freshmen class had a different reaction and I found myself awkwardly kissing the ground alone. That afternoon the Bible teacher let me know that several kids were expressing concerns about their poem’s morality, and Mademoiselle Stone’s spirituality. Obviously, the point of romanticism was missed.  I did clear things up and remind them that Christians can still appreciate God’s creation as a sign of his glory, but we will probably not be kissing the ground any time soon. Their loss.

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Perfection That Could Have Been, or, Team Stone Makes Macarons

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Hannah

In case you are new to my blogging history, I love macarons. In case you are new to macarons, please refer to the above picture of edible perfection. Is there any food more beautiful, more ready to share itself with brilliant colors, more apt to conform to whatever perfect flavor shares its name? No, there is not. Eating macarons is the perfect union of sight and taste uniting in one thing of beauty.  I feel very strongly about these small overpriced French cookies, as was evidenced in my performance at the Macaronathon 2010.

While visiting the states in September, some of my Paris friends gave me a lovely macaron making set and cookbook, which I am ashamed to say I finally got around to using last night.  Both my brothers are about to go back to school, and so Team Stone decided to go out in a bang with a macaron-making extravaganza.  Now, I wish to offer the disclaimer that making these perfect delicacies is quite difficult, labor intensive, and completely new to me, but with the three of us working together we felt sure to succeed.

I decided on macarons aux framboises et chocolat (raspberry macarons with chocolate ganache) and started on the ganache. Ganache is heaven. Go make some now and be happy, as one can be nothing but deliriously content when mixing dark chocolate, heavy cream, and butter.Next we tackled the simultaneous processes of whipping eggs, simmering syrup, and making the almond paste/ raspberry mixture.  We might be the last people on world to own a Kitchenaid mixer, which would have greatly expedited this process that instead involved all 6 team stone hands working together to avoid scorching the syrup or over whipping the eggs.  This endeavor was briefly interrupted when I spilled red food coloring, dying the counter crimson. Cue bleach, red hands, and lots of soap.  Counter returned to normalcy though hands remain red.Next came the “macaronnage” or the actual combining of the meringue and the almond mixture. And finally, the puffing out of the perfect macaron rounds. This took all three Stone children with Zach replenishing the pastry bag and catching drips, me squeezing diligently each round, and Lyman standing by with paper towels to do damage control.  Lyman has enacted this role most of our lives, come to think of it. He’s pretty good at cleaning up after his older siblings’ messes.

After waiting for the macarons to dry for an hour and then baking them for 13 minutes, I removed these perfect rounds from the oven.  Aren’t they pretty? And then disaster struck.  There have been many moments where I have hung my head in culinary shame: the pumpkin pancake incident of my childhood, the squash soup that tasted like baby food, the apple piecrust in college that was so hard even my boyfriend rejected it. But this – of this moment I am least proud. For in a moment of pure stupidity, I covered the baking sheets not with parchment paper, but with wax paper, which promptly melted into ALL of my 100+  macaron rounds. After almost an hour of scraping, Team Stone managed to salvage about 10 mutilated macarons before cutting our losses. This was truly tragic because the pieces I rescued tasted fantastic! There was even brief discussion (and experimentation by the brothers) about the possibility of just adding extra chocolate ganache and eating the rounds of wax paper stuck to each macaron. This plan was abandoned after discussions of the repercussions of paper products on the digestive track. But still, we had a giant bowl of wonderful chocolate ganache, and you can’t dispose of that! After experimenting on several vehicles for Chocolate Heaven we settled on pretzels dotted liberally in ganache and chilled. Team Stone is resourceful.

For those who want the recipe, here it is, and I really feel it would have been a success if not for the wax paper mishap:

Ganache of Sinful Perfection:

1 bag dark chocolate chips

7/8 cups heavy cream

Half-ish stick butter

Melt chocolate, stir in cream and butter.  Let sit/ refrigerate till thick.

Macarons That Could Have Been:

200 grams almond powder

200 grams powdered sugar

5 egg whites, divided in half

1/3 cup water

200 grams sugar

Raspberry extract

Red food coloring

  1. Combine almond powder, powdered sugar, and half egg whites. Add flavor and color.
  2. Beat other egg whites till that moment just short of meringue-ness.
  3. Heat water and sugar till a syrup forms and the mixture is 110 degrees Celsius.
  4. Add syrup to almost-meringue stuff and beat till meringue-ness is completed and cooled.
  5. Slowly use a spatula to combine this to the almond mixture. (This is the macaronnage!)
  6. Pipe onto PARCHMENT PAPER on a cookie sheet in quarter size rounds about ½ inch apart.  Let set one hour to firm then back at 300 degrees F for 15 minutes. Remove parchment paper quickly to stop cooking.
  7. Remove from paper and make sandwiches with your delicious ganache!
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New Year’s Resolutions . . . Retroactively.

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Hannah

I am horrible at New Year’s resolutions. Inevitably I make it till about February first until I get sidetracked.  Several years ago I realized that I was always making the same resolutions because I can never carry them through to the next year.  I decided to just embrace making the same resolution every year as a mark of persistence and tradition. Thus, I floss.  Please don’t misunderstand – I take dental hygiene very seriously.  But I always forget to floss, or run out of floss, or get sidetracked, etc. But by making this resolution the past 4 years, I now floss on a semi regular basis.  My resolve was beginning to wan, but January 1st renewed my vigor. I will hopefully make it to next year. Teeth are a rare commodity in Kentucky, and I intend to take good care of mine.

But as I was thinking over this past year, I realized that I did resolutely make improvements to my life.  So here are my retroactive New Year’s resolutions, the best decisions I have made in the past year.

Cursive: My handwriting has always been barely legible, but time in France proved cured. The elementary children I taught routinely critiqued my handwriting, as their perfect script had been beat into them by years of rulers, grid paper, and colored pens. Finally I caved and made the transition to cursive, from which I will never return.  It is more beautiful.  Why should we not seek to live more beautiful lives in all the little details?  My students now complain, as handwriting is a lost art in the states.  But I just inform them that they will have to learn. This has produced various degrees of success and attempts on their part.

Books: This past year has been one of reading, as I need good books to live and leaving school meant I needed to choose them. No one ever regrets reading more.

Eggplant, figs, kale, and leeks: Who knew that the first was good in everything, the second actually has a form outside of a Newton, the third is occasionally tolerable, and the fourth is divine? Brave the produce section, choose wholly on looks, and be surprised!

Family: Living back in Kentucky means more time with my family, and that will be one of the treasures of this past year.

Big Southern Hair: I spent years doing the “my hair is kind of curly so I will never brush it and just have crazy hair that dries as I go about my day” thing. But that was college/ Paris and this is Kentucky with a Big Girl Job.  Cue return to curlers.  They are in my blood and now that I have resumed my place of giant hair, I will never go back.

Cleanliness: I have never been a slob, but living entirely on my own brought out a truly organized neat person. I may have only had 10 square meters to call my own in Paris but there was a dish sponge and a surface sponge, a dish-towel and a hand towel, but they Did. Not. Mix. Ever.

I suppose I should now make a list of all the decisions that I don’t want to repeat from this past year. I’ll floss instead.

 

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White Christmas

Posted on December 26, 2010 by Hannah

This year Kentucky had a white Christmas for the first time since I was in middle school. Something about snow endows Christmas with a legitimacy that is completely irrational as Christ’ birth almost certainly came with no snow in sight.  Maybe I have been indoctrinated by Hallmark movies, old holiday ballads, or greeting cards that show stone cottages buried under white blankets with nothing but candles in the windows and a thin curl of smoke giving evidence to the Christmas happening inside.  Whatever the case, I have bought in to the idea that true Christmases are white.

I think the real reason we like snowy Christmases is because the snow traps us, extracts us from our busy lives and forces us to snuggle inside with the ones we love, the ones we have spent months shopping for, miles traveling to, and then within hours are ready to escape. But the snow forces us to stop and stay awhile. It captures the spirit of Christmas and holds us still till we pay attention. And so we dream of white Christmases.

Today my family took family photos in the snowstorm.  Here is my white Christmas. We are considering making the final picture the album cover for when we release our Christmas CD, which will be carols Stone family style, i.e. sung to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun” or the Gilligans Island theme. Another key element of the family photo session was my mom and I trying to get our boots in as many photos as possible.

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Bethany’s Pumpkin Muffins

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Hannah

Once upon a time not so very long ago, I lived in the frozen arctic tundra known as Michigan. This was not so very bad because I lived in a magical house known as The Ramp with 3 perfect roommates. The house was old and drafty, probably infested with mice, inhabited briefly by a raccoon, frequented by deer that we illegally fed with a salt block, and full of perfect nooks and crannies for reading and thinking. My roommates and I were like a family.  We took first day of school pictures, Christmas card pictures, and graduation pictures, launching ourselves from the blue namesake of our house. There was Bethany, who could fix anything and owned an impressive number of BBC miniseries, Jaimi who bestowed our house with great kleos (for those who didn’t go to a crazy classical college, kleos is the Greek idea of glory and honor) from her many campus honors and provided the puzzles and games, me, who cleaned and stacked everyone’s shoes on the stairs, and Little Elyse who strolled about with her violin and whose diminutive size provided her as the unit by which we measured snowfall and icicles.  That winter the snow rested .5 Elyse almost the entire winter and sometimes icicles would reach 1 Elyse. But inside our snug little house we were happy.

This winter Kentucky has not gotten the memo about not being Michigan.  We have had one snow and ice storm after another. The other day I looked out my window and found that an icicle that was at least .5 Elyse hung from the roof. I have continued running, despite the slick roads, and it feels a lot like college runs, only lacking in Bethany’s bitter presence beside me, griping about why she has been dragged out of bed to run in the snow.  Maybe it is this weather that has me missing that perfect senior year, but whatever the case, I have been reliving some of our best moments and some of our best recipes.

The ladies of the Ramp were constantly cooking and entertaining, as there really isn’t much else to do in Hillsdale Michigan during the winter.  We were avid readers of Real Simple and would get on kicks where we would make the same thing over and over.  For a while it as homemade popcorn, then black beans, then there was a long stretch of coconut macaroons and seven layer bars, with a brief stint over Christmas of white chocolate gingerbread and sour cream cranberry scones.  A plate of one of these things would be made, a BBC miniseries turned on, and an evening spent in peace.

One of our best recipes, one that we revisited over and over, was Bethany’s Pumpkin Muffins. The perfect treat for a winter or fall evening, these are the easiest thing ever to make.  So over Christmas break, make up a batch of these muffins, turn on a period miniseries, and enjoy winter.

COMBINE:

-1 box spice cake mix

-1 can pumpkin

  1. Pour into greased or paper lined muffin tins.
  2. Bake at 350 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
  3. We never got around to it, but in theory you could add chocolate chips or peeled cubed apples for something extra.

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Grading

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Hannah

Over the past month, work has taken so much time that blogging has been shoved to the side. The weeks between Thanksgiving break and Christmas break passed in a whirlwind of testing, grading, and charging through lectures and notes to get it all in.  Yesterday I graded the last final and can at last put the semester behind me.  I both love and hate grading.  I hate that it has to be done, that there is never enough time to really get ahead, and that some kids just do so poorly, despite how much I adore them.  But I love when a student makes me laugh as I am trudging through their test with my red pen.

Often I invite their humor, as they can get away with a lot if it is written in French. One student wrote an essay in which he referred to someone as an “intelligent derrière” and even though his attempt to translate the profane American phrase should have been inappropriate, it was such a hysterical translation that I let it slide. What should have been a little vulgar now read “smart bottom.”

My mother recently gave me a floral pattern shirt.  By floral, think “camouflage on a nursing home couch” floral. I was determined to wear it, and after turning back the sleeves to reveal striped cuffs, and covering it with a blue sweater, I found the over all effect to be very Anthropologie, which is basically old lady clothes that we are tricked into finding stylish by the huge price tag.  I explained to my freshmen my feelings on the shirt (in French, of course) and it happened to fall on a day where they were taking a quiz on clothing vocabulary.  For a point of extra credit they were allowed to write how they felt about my shirt in French on the back.  Here were some of the responses I received (translated from their rudimentary French into equally rudimentary English):

“Your shirt ugly but you cool so it works.” (Verbs are still coming slowly)

“Zach loves Multi-colored shirts and Miss Stone.”

“You wear blue sweater – it is good. No sweater – it is bad.”

“I LOVE FRENCH CLASS AND THE GRANDMOTHER SHIRT!!!”

Grading finals gave me more reasons to smile.  To start off, there were my French III kids who had to write a rather lengthy essay to introduce themselves to an imaginary French family.  They had to introduce their families, (everyone’s parents are apparently lawyers), tell what they like to do (everyone – without exception – enjoys skiing more than anything else because “faire du ski” is their favorite verb) and one kid just gave detailed driving directions on how to get to our school as he had run out of other vocabulary.

My French IV finals showed me that we have some historical issues to work through.  They students had to give one paragraph responses to some quotes from French literature, poetry, and philosophy that we have read this semester. The quote that caused the most problems was Rousseau’s “Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains.”  Here were some of the answers I received (same translation principle) to explain the significance.

“We can see here that France took the idea of freedom being important from America and our revolution.”

“Rousseau is saying that man is born into original sin.”

“We are free – but not!”

Of course, since it is a Presbyterian school, most answers for my students do come back to us all being born in original sin and predestined one way or the other. I tried reminding them that Rousseau was in fact not only not a Calvinist, he wasn’t even a Christian, but they gave me that all knowing high school look of  “That’s what you think!”  I am interested to see what happens when we hit existentialism.

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Tomato Tart

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Hannah

If you can still acquire heirloom tomatoes, run out and buy a couple and come back to make this amazing roasted garlic – tomato – cheese tart. On my last journey to the farmer’s market a couple weeks ago a grabbed a couple of those impossibly beautiful tomatoes and the result was delectable. The tomato man helped me pick out a blend of heirlooms to give me the perfect blend of sweet and tart.  I kind of just love the endearing ugliness of heirloom tomatoes.

[Insert picture of finished tart here. Unfortunately I devoured it before such a photo could be taken. Take this as a good sign].

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