A phone call to Canon revealed that they don’t accept personal checks, therefore they hadn’t even started processing my camera for repairs. I paid by credit card over the phone, so now there’s hope. Oh, how I miss it. I will never take non-blurry photos for granted again.

I left Paris in February intrigued by what made French macaroons so good. Their texture is the right balance of chewy, creamy, and crunchy, and the flavor can be anything - rose, chocolate, mocha, lemon, raspberry, or something more imaginative. This weekend, a trip to Dessert Studio - where there were no macaroons, but Earl Grey infused gelato with dark chocolate “chantilly” and a fair amount of conversation about desserts - inspired me to give it a try.

Rumors on the web: it’s easy to do, but hard to do right. The first problem is almond flour. Debate rages about whether almond meal as sold in the US is the same as almond flour. Some recipes call for you to pulverize almonds yourself. I bought almond meal and fully intended to process it further in my spice grinder, but I couldn’t find the spice grinder (of course 30 minutes later, when it was too late, I realized it was just hidden behind something on a shelf). So I mixed it with confectioners sugar, as called for in the recipe, and decided to “push the outside of the envelope” as Tom Wolfe and a gaggle of flight test pilots might say. You know a recipe’s good if you can mess around at the edges and still get good results. I used this recipe for the macaroons, but with orange extract rather than raspberry… I also added a drop of the flavoring to the macaroon batter itself, rather than saving all the flavoring for the ganache.

The batter is thick and a little grainy - I have a feeling that my almond meal test is going to crash and burn. Let’s just hope it still tastes good, even if it’s a mile off in texture. Then again, it’s not over yet. The recipe calls for a “makeshift pastry bag,” made of a plastic bag with a corner cut off. I figured I had real pastry bags and tossed my batter into one, but I didn’t use the right decorator tip and it came out in irritating little ribbons, so I took the tip off and just squeezed the batter out of the end of the pastry bag.

That was a little too wide, so my macaroons look like lumps rather than “Hershey’s kisses” as intended… still crossing my fingers that they taste good! Looks can come later. Now they are sitting out on my kitchen table until the outside surfaces harden a bit.

They’re out of the oven… Some look great, some are cracked or misshapen homemade. So much for the perfect smooth rounds from Paris. I tried the smallest one and it was pretty good - I didn’t nail the texture, but I’m hoping the others will be creamier because they are bigger and wouldn’t have dried out so much in the oven. I am letting them cool before filling them and doing the final taste test.

They’re done. It was surprisingly quick to spread the ganache on one cookie, press another onto it, and voila! macaroons. The verdict: close in texture, though not perfect - I do think finer almond flour would help because it’s thick rather than delectably smooth - and not quite right in taste. I think I prefer the macaroons I had in Paris, which stuck to one flavor. The chocolate-orange combination is too heavy and overwhelming, in my opinion. I remember tasting each macaroon at Laduree and delighting in the individual flavor - lemon, mocha, vanilla, each one intense but still delicate. Next time I’m doing plain orange cream with orange, vanilla with vanilla, etc. Maybe even Earl Grey!

I was going off a little bit on a class that was wasting time instead of doing what they were asked to do. My back to the whiteboard, I stood looking out across the class, and in the middle of a sentence, I suddenly saw a huge bird on the window ledge. A defunct air conditioner fills most of that window, leaving less than a foot on either side of it. A metal gate protects children from jumping or being pushed or accidently falling out of this fifth floor window, and the gate is cut to go around the AC unit. Pigeons squeeze under the bottom and around the sides of the gate to roost on the windowsill and nest there. We’ve had eggs and baby birds all spring, though this year we didn’t see them hatch, as they did in a previous year.  I’m looking at the window and lecturing the class, when I see a bird, light brown, tawny, much too big to be a pigeon, and mid-sentence, I realize it’s a hawk! The shade is down part way, further obscuring the view, and the whole bird is larger than the little square of window, but it’s unmistakably a hawk.

Okay, everyone, I want to show you something but you have to be very, very quiet and still and not jump up or shout…

I point them towards the window. They try to be quiet, but there’s a commotion anyway. Kids in the back of the room, who can’t see that section of the window, rush forward. I walk very slowly closer to the window, but the hawk takes off, lands briefly in another window, then flies away. Some of us get one last, momentary look at the whole bird as it soars by - others never glimpsed it at all.

The tension is defused. I send the kids back to work.

*****

I found an apartment to move into in Brooklyn at the end of the month. But as soon as I had that out of the way, talent show rehearsals started, and I did something to my back (posture-while-typing-related), so now my afternoons go roughly like this: Monday - physical therapy, Tuesday - doctor or lab for x-rays/MRI or if I’m lucky, gym, Wednesday - physical therapy, Thursday - leave home at 7, talent show then gym then writing class, home at 11, bed, Friday - time with people I really like. Somewhere in there I have to do things like feed myself, do schoolwork, complete assignments for my class… Running doesn’t make my back worse so I’m sticking to the 10K plan as best I can - it’s marvelous to feel myself getting faster and breathing more smoothly. Anyway, I’m not saying any of this to garner sympathy or over-share, just to explain my neglect of the blog.

I’m reading a fascinating book; here are some bits & pieces. I wish I could fit an Arabic or Greek (classical) class into my schedule and finances. You know, after the French and Spanish classes I want to take. Ha ha.

One of my favorite places to pass by in my old neighborhood, Alphabet City, was the community garden with the big wooden tower with toys hanging here and there within it. Now it seems the tower will be dismantled. What a loss for the neighborhood and the garden, which were both the more interesting for it.

Here’s a picture from farther uptown:

Cameraphone pix are my new postcards. People don’t seem able to receive them, though. I miss my little Canon, which is still in the shop. Fix it quickly, camera doctors! Then again, my regular camera can’t email them… I went to the gym on the east side today, ran a crazy speed interval workout - I am getting faster already! (but an hour later I get a massive stomachache) - then walked across the park by the reservoir and saw the cherry trees, the ground beneath them blanketed with pink petals, and watched the sun setting silver-gold across the water, and listened to this song on repeat:

Here Comes the Sun Again (M. Ward)

Kingdoms and queens they all bow down to you,
Branches and ranch hands are bowin' too
And I've taken off my straw hat for you, singing
Here comes the sun again

The leaves on the trees they all call out your name,
Chrome on the freight line shines the same
And the stars in their cars roll their tops down for you singing,
Here comes the sun again

Oh but if you're gonna stay show some mercy today
Blow a little breeze on my face

Snow banks drift down the hillside for you,
Slides inside sandy river before the day is through,
And before evenin' falls I may find myself there too, singing
Here comes the sun again

Forget presidential politics and go vote for your favorite education weblog over at Ed in ‘08.  There are a LOT of candidates.

The Whitney Biennial is one of my favorite things about living in New York.  I make my plans to see it with a sense of anticipation. Honestly, I’ve never seen a show at that museum - Biennial or not - that I haven’t found interesting. Lots of people have a hard time with contemporary art, and there’s plenty of it that I find ugly (but not in an enlightening way), meaningless, trying too hard to be meaningful, or just weird. I have little patience for sculpture or video installation, but I go and look at it all anyway, because next to the 10 foot brick of rainbow colored snot you might see something that startles. I still remember my favorite pieces from past shows like they are old friends - except I only met them once, for a few minutes.

This year’s show wasn’t my favorite. I don’t know if it’s the times or just my particular context for seeing right now, but it felt a little darker than previous years. There were fewer pieces that made me laugh or think, wow, that artist really had fun making that. There was a lot of deconstruction, a lot of odd materials used in ways a mile shy of beautiful - though, of course, beauty is not always the point. There were a lot of explorations of physical space, but they felt more damaged and painful than previous installation pieces that I recall.

Still, a few pieces stood out for me. My hands-down favorites were two photographs by Melanie Schiff, Reflecting Pool (which looks nice on her website but was arresting in real life) and Water Birth, which you can see on the Biennial’s artist page. My photographer friend Alex likes to poke fun at me for my conservative tastes in art, and I guess she’s right: I like photography and painting best, and probably fairly formal stuff within those media, and yes, I do like things that are beautiful. Schiff commented about her art that she tries to make photographs that resonate the way a sad song does: it’s not about your experience, but you feel it’s about you all the same. It’s a nice image and these two photographs, in particular, I think succeed in that.

Roe Etheridge’s photographs also caught my eye. Each was quite different from the next - I recognized the boats from Mumbai harbor from my own travels, a photograph of the sun setting behind trees, all aglow and orange, was strikingly beautiful, but it was the erotic photograph of a young woman in a captain’s hat that got us talking. My friend felt it was exploitative, the oversized captain’s hat combined with the hearts on the bikini, the waiflike model. I’m not so sure. I see what she means, but to me this woman is not necessarily submitting to someone else’s fantasy. The camera’s gaze still feels gentle to me, fond of this young woman.

Briefly: Pheobe Washburn clearly has fun making her pieces, room-sized sculptures that are half-machine, half-ecosystem, half…. well, they have many halves. Similarly, Alice Konitz made us laugh with her multi-piece imaginary auction of a trip to an undeveloped strip of LA freeway. James Welling’s chromogenic prints of mesh arranged in the contours of the human body are simple and sensual. Finally, we spent several minutes reading the pixelated letters in one of Shannon Ebner’s pieces, which seemed to be fragments of reflection or poetry about war and power, which were, upon further reading, palindromic, which were, upon closer examination of the photographs, spelled out using concrete blocks.

Tomorrow: Tribeca Film Festival. It’s good to live in New York in spring.

My camera’s in the shop, hence the lack of visuals lately. The cake is chocolate butter cake, with lightly mint-flavored buttercream frosting, for the last day of LEGO robotics tomorrow. I couldn’t stay true to the NXT colors, no one wants to eat grey! Yuck.

I have agreed to organize a talent show, a.k.a., “M.S. 999X Idol / So You Think You Can Dance?” This was on my never list pretty much since I started teaching. Maybe it’s because there’s no possible way I can ever be asked to do it again that I suddenly feel liberated to give it a try. Maybe it’s because the kids want it and I want something fun for them, since this year’s been kinda rough on everyone. Maybe it’s because if I have to watch the darn thing, I want to make sure it’s watch-able (control freak: yes). Auditions in two weeks, kiddies.

I can’t go - I have to run from the last session of robotics down to my writing class - but that doesn’t mean YOU can’t. Sure, the economy’s not doing so hot, but to spend trazillions of dollars on data-management systems that barely function, near-monthly assessments, and reorganization after reorganization - and then to demand that schools find the money to cut out of our budgets for things like supplies, enrichment programs, custodial services (the very nice man who sweeps my floors is looking at losing his job), you name it… well. This is not okay. Get out there and show ‘em.

Thursday, May 1, 2008 - 4 pm - Bronx Courthouse Steps (161st St., near Yankee Stadium)