Music and Cats

At the University District Farmers Market.

Berry season! What could be better? The photo above is from the Queen Anne Farmers’ Market a couple of weeks ago, when raspberries reigned, and blues were the berries in waiting. Now the shady, silvery bloom of ripe blueberries has replaced raspberries’ flushed pink in the flats of the local market vendors.

I haven’t yet made blueberry preserves or chutney (their time will come!), but on a couple of recent weekend mornings, I’ve baked plump, dusky blueberries into small, tender, fragrant pancakes.

These pancakes are adapted from The New Basics Cookbook’s New Basic Blueberry Pancakes. If you want to make the original version, use 100% all-purpose flour, add 1/4 teaspoon salt to the dry ingredients, and reduce the blueberries to 3/4 cup. I can’t imagine why you’d want to do any of those things, but it’s up to you.

Beyond Basic Blueberry Pancakes
makes about 18 3-inch pancakes

1/2 cup whole grain red wheat flour
1/2 cup emmer flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg (a microplane works perfectly for grating nutmeg)
3/4 cup milk
6 tablespoons heavy cream
3 tablespoons brown sugar, packed
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon lemon zest (use that microplane to get just the yellow zest)
1 cup (or even a few more) fresh blueberries

In a large bowl, stir together the flour(s), baking powder and spices. In a second bowl, combine the milk, cream, brown sugar, butter, egg, vanilla and lemon zest. (By the way, the original recipe calls for 3/4 cup half-and-half and 6 tablespoons milk; we just happened to have heavy cream instead.) Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients, and mix until batter just comes together. Leave a few lumps; they’ll take care of themselves. Fold in the blueberries. Let the batter rest for 20 minutes. (While the batter will sit quietly for that amount of time, anyone waiting for these pancakes may not.)

Do you know how to cook pancakes? If so, you might be bored reading about heating a griddle to medium-low, using 1/4 cup of batter for each pancake, flipping when the bubbles begin to pop on the top. If not, you should know that the griddle is the right temperature when a water droplet will skitter lightly across its surface, that you’ll be happy these pancakes are small when you try to turn them (large, blueberry-laden cakes being not so easy to flip), and that they’ll take about two minutes on each side to cook to a nice golden brown.

Made with exquisitely fresh ingredients — flours from Bluebird Grains Farm, raw milk and cream from Sea Breeze Farm, an egg from Skagit River Ranch, and blueberries from Jessie’s berries — and with a lightly spiced hint of sweetness, these pancakes were so luscious that they needed no topping. Oh, you could give them a light glaze of butter, or a drizzle of maple syrup, but that really is unnecessary.

If you make these as an early-morning breakfast for yourself and your beloved, you may find that you’ll have a few leftovers (which will make a fine snack later on in the day). On a day when you sleep late, have nothing but a latte in the morning, and finally cook pancakes for brunch at almost noon, this recipe will serve two quite nicely.

(Note to my family: By the time you arrive, we’ll have a griddle large enough to cook 7 or 8 of these pancakes at once. This is just the thing to do with some of those blueberries we’ll be picking.)

I have never claimed that this blog is about architecture. However, I am an architect, and once upon a time I wrote fairly frequently about buildings I designed, the construction site in which I lived, and the sad state of housing for the less fortunate in this country.

A couple of months ago, The Architect, who writes the blog Maison Camy about the construction of the house he designed, linked to Music and Cats, which he described as being “really about architecture.” When I read this, I laughed… sad, wistful laughter.

Recently, I haven’t written much about architecture. Why not? Because I’ve been so damn busy being an architect. I miss writing about architecture. I’m going to get back to it soon, I promise.

But in the meantime, I’ll share something that has been clogging up the inboxes of architects this week. Annie Choi’s “open letter” was published a while back in Pidgin, the grad school journal of the Princeton School of Architecture. I don’t know who started it zinging its way around the Internets, but I’m glad they did. This letter made me laugh, too… the sort of laughter that comes with painful recognition. Not everyone is laughing; Ms. Choi has received hate mail from some architects. As she notes, “not all architects understand irony or humor”… which is sad, because sometimes that’s the only thing that gets an architect throught the day… and night.

Once, a long time ago in the days of yore, I had a friend who was studying architecture to become, presumably, an architect. This friend introduced me to other friends, who were also studying architecture. Then these friends had other friends who were architects - real architects doing real architecture like designing luxury condos that look a lot like glass dildos. And these real architects knew other real architects and now the only people I know are architects. And they all design glass dildos that I will never work or live in and serve only to obstruct my view of New Jersey.

Do not get me wrong, architects. I like you as a person. I think you are nice, smell good most of the time, and I like your glasses. You have crazy hair, and if you are lucky, most of it is on your head. But I do not care about architecture. It is true. This is what I do care about:

* burritos
* hedgehogs
* coffee

As you can see, architecture is not on the list. I believe that architecture falls somewhere between toenail fungus and invasive colonoscopy in the list of things that interest me.

Perhaps if you didn’t talk about it so much, I would be more interested. When you point to a glass cylinder and say proudly, hey my office designed that, I giggle and say it looks like a bong. You turn your head in disgust and shame. You think, obviously she does not understand. What does she know? She is just a writer. She is no architect. She respects vowels, not glass cocks. And then you say now I am designing a lifestyle center, and I ask what is that, and you say it is a place that offers goods and services and retail opportunities and I say you mean like a mall and you say no. It is a lifestyle center. I say it sounds like a mall. I am from the Valley, bitch. I know malls.

Architects, I will not lie, you confuse me. You work sixty, eighty hours a week and yet you are always poor. Why aren’t you buying me a drink? Where is your bounty of riches? Maybe you spent it on merlot. Maybe you spent it on hookers and blow. I cannot be sure. It is a mystery. I will leave that to the scientists to figure out.

Architects love to discuss how much sleep they have gotten. One will say how he was at the studio until five in the morning, only to return again two hours later. Then another will say, oh that is nothing. I haven’t slept in a week. And then another will say, guess what, I have never slept ever. My dear architects, the measure of how hard you’ve worked and how much you’ve accomplished is not related to the number of hours you have not slept. Have you heard of Rem Koolhaas? He is a famous architect. I know this because you tell me he is a famous architect. I hear that Rem Koolhaas is always sleeping. He is, I presume, sleeping right now. And I hear he gets shit done. And I also hear that in a stunning move, he is making a building that looks not like a glass cock, but like a concrete vagina. When you sleep more, you get vagina. You can all take a lesson from Rem Koolhaas.

Life is hard for me, please understand. Architects are an important part of my existence. They call me at eleven at night and say they just got off work, am I hungry? Listen, it is practically midnight. I ate hours ago. So long ago that, in fact, I am hungry again. So yes, I will go. Then I will go and there will be other architects talking about AutoCAD shortcuts and something about electric panels and can you believe that is all I did today, what a drag. I look around the table at the poor, tired, and hungry, and think to myself, I have but only one bullet left in the gun. Who will I choose?

I have a friend who is a doctor. He gives me drugs. I enjoy them. I have a friend who is a lawyer. He helped me sue my landlord. My architect friends have given me nothing. No drugs, no medical advice, and they don’t know how to spell subpoena. One architect friend figured out that my apartment was one hundred and eighty seven square feet. That was nice. Thanks for that.

I suppose one could ask what someone like me brings to architects like yourselves. I bring cheer. I yell at architects when they start talking about architecture. I force them to discuss far more interesting topics, like turkey eggs. Why do we eat chicken eggs, but not turkey eggs? They are bigger. And people really like turkey. See? I am not afraid to ask the tough questions.

So, dear architects, I will stick around, for only a little while. I hope that one day some of you will become doctors and lawyers or will figure out my taxes. And we will laugh at the days when you spent the entire evening talking about some European you’ve never met who designed a building you will never see because you are too busy working on something that will never get built. But even if that day doesn’t arrive, give me a call anyway, I am free.

Yours truly,
Annie Choi

Well. At least she likes my glasses.

So, you wanna get dinner tonight after work? Hey, it’s Friday, so I’ll get off early… let’s make it ten-thirty, OK?

Sometimes, you don’t have to pet Sasha to make him purr. Just get close, and talk to him in a low voice. And watch his paws. Even if you can’t feel his chest vibrating or hear his rumbling, his large, tufted paws tell the tale. Stretch, relax… stretch… relax. That’s one happy cat.

Where can you find more happy kitty paws? Aboard the Friday Ark, and at Weekend Cat Blogging at A Byootaful Life.

Your mom makes you come to the farmers market. It’s not much fun, until you run into the balloon man. He is wearing a silly balloon hat, and funny yellow glasses. He makes a long balloon sword for your older brother, and then he asks you what you’d like. You are shy, and will not speak to him… not a word. That’s fine, the balloon man tells you, he’ll make a surprise for you.

The first balloon the balloon man blows up is long and straight. It doesn’t look like anything special, but when the balloon man hands it to you, you hold on to it tightly.

The balloon man blows up another long balloon, and then he begins to twist it. He bends the ends and twists the middle again and look! It’s a monkey, and the balloon man slides it right down onto the balloon you’re holding. Cool!

You would be happy with your orange monkey, but the balloon man isn’t finished. His green balloon becomes… a flower? No… palm fronds! Your monkey is climbing a palm tree!

And, to finish things off, the balloon man gives your monkey what every curious monkey must have: a pair of shiny black marker eyes!

The balloon man has finished his work, and guess what? It may be a monkey in a palm tree, but it still works pretty well as a weapon when your brother attacks with his balloon sword.

Have you seen the balloon man? He’s making monkeys and swords, flowers and dogs at the Queen Anne Farmers’ Market. I can’t promise he’ll be around every Thursday afternoon until October 4, 3 - 7 p.m., at the corner of Crockett Street and 1st Avenue West, but the Market will be there.