I can’t take credit for this one, I stole it out of a newspaper years ago. But it’s yummers:

Roasted Asparagus Salad:

+ young (thin!) asparagus stalks
+ goat cheese (don’t skimp on the quality here), at room temperature
+ 1 lemon (juiced, and grate the rind for zest)
+ meaty, thick-cut bacon (optional for the veggie version – otherwise plan on about 1 strip per serving)
+ olive oil, salt and pepper

1. Preheat oven to something hot, maybe 400 or so.
2. Cook bacon. Crumble and set aside.
3. Wash asparagus and break off the tough part of the stalks at the bottom. Pat dry and place in a roasting pan. Drizzle with olive oil and salt and pepper generously.
4. Put in the oven to roast until tender-crisp, about 7 minutes (check often)
5. Meanwhile, combine equal parts olive oil and lemon juice. Crumble goat cheese and set aside.
6. When the asparagus comes out, transfer to serving plate, drizzle the lemon/oil mixture over asparagus, top with bacon, goat cheese and lemon zest, and serve promptly.

Try this and you’ll never boil asparagus again.

total number of books i’ve owned: good god. a thousand? two thousand? while the installation of new bookshelves last week did require that we reorganize all of the books currently residing in the apartment, (alphabetize the fiction by author, and develop the jen-and-andy-decimal system for non-fiction and theatre) i don’t have the heart to try and count them now. but baby, i ripped through those babysitters’ club series when i was a kid. i kept a regular pace of 2-3 books a week for all of my grade school and junior high school years, so those must have added up pretty fast.

last book I bought: used copy of reading lolita in tehran. the “i’m a memoir so coherent through-lines don’t’ apply to me” approach is more than a little annoying, but i can’t get over how fascinating the subject matter is.

last book i read: still half-heartedly working through will of the world, a shakespeare biography andy’s dad gave us, and ouch. i didn’t think it possible to write such a boring book about such an interesting person. guess i’ll stick to my glossy full-color shakespeare in love misconceptions instead.

last book i finished: the time traveler’s wife see below.

5 books that mean a lot to me:

zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance i’m especially attached to the particular edition i have, which i inherited from my father and have since loaned out to many friends. there’s something about the physical presence of a book that has been read so many times the cover is falling off that pleases me.

alice in wonderland the alice in wonderland tale is one that is ripe for telling and re-telling, and i’ve loved nearly every version of it i’ve encountered, from jeff noon’s hipster remix alice to the excellently acrobatic lookingglass alice production mounted recently by lookingglass theatre in chicago.

the time traveler’s wife so, so beautiful, in brutal, gritty sort of way.

the hobbit i didn’t grow up with the hobbit and lord of the rings like most kids; but about five years ago (long before the movies) my friend nick discovered that i hadn’t read them and arrived the next day on my doorstep with four much-loved paperback editions and said, “don’t give them back till you’ve read them.” i read them all that summer after college, living on my own up in san francisco, and they were such a treat, i couldn’t believe they’d been waiting for me all these years and i had just finally discovered them. andy and i have since read all of them aloud to one another, and i have pleasant memories of long summer afternoons spent in the park with andy (who does all the voices better than i ever could hear them in my head), but more than anything they recapture for me cool, foggy san francisco days, sitting on the beach at the end of golden gate park, digging my feet into cold sand and sitting on driftwood while strands of summer fog drifted by.

east of the moon and west of the sun specifically, the edition with the kay nielson illustrations (out of print but available from rare-book collectors). it’s this amazing collection of norwegian mythology that we used to read when i was a kid, and the stories and illustrations, although i haven’t read them in years, still haunt me. need an escapist afternoon? look this one up at the public library and find a big, comfy chair in a corner somewhere.

i’ve realized the sad truth: chicago doesn’t have a spring. we leap directly from winter (which lasts until the final week of may) straight into summer. two weeks ago i was still bringing my tomato plants in at night to keep them from freezing; this week the temperatures are hovering around 90 with humidity to spare. mini skirts and tube tops evidently leap from the closet shelves of their own accord; chicago doesn’t know what to do with all the exposed winter-white flesh.

i’m not really filing a complaint, however. summer is here, and that means…free time, and that means…projects! sometime last winter i picked up knitting as a way to keep my hands busy when i’m calling shows, or on the train, and it’s a lovely meditative thing to do when i get home from work before going to bed. i wasn’t quite prepared for the ferocity with which i have taken to the hobby. now i can’t watch television or call a show or really sit still without something to work in my hands. each new project has to be harder than the last, with new tricks – last week it was intarsia and fair isle, this week it was cables. i’m not saying a don’t knit plenty of ugly, mishappen things, mind you, but i am getting better at the tricky stuff.

the difficult thing is that since knitting has long been the domain of the frumpy and has only recently been reclaimed by the crafty, hipster crowd, is that there is a shitload of ugly acrylic yarns and dumpy frumpy sweaters patterns out there. the challenge is finding the cool patterns, or devising them myself. it’s even harder to come up with projects when it’s 90 degrees out – i’m discovering that most knit things go with cold weather. which is okay, really, since chicago is hat-and-mittens weather for 9 months of the year, but does seem a little crazy to be up to my elbows in winter-weight wool right now. on the other hand, i’m just not brave enough to go out in public wearing a bikini knit by these fallible hands. one loose thread, and zip! the project that carried me through the winter was making gifts for my two pregnant co-workers: baby blankets and little hats. there were supposed to be matching booties as well, but my attempts at booties ended with one sock sized for a cat, and a second that would last into the preschool years, so i threw in the towel on that one.

congratulations go out to my mom, who graduated from college today, completing a degree she started when she was 17. she put many of her plans on hold in order to put my dad through law school, to raise three children, to care for her mother-in-law, to pay for her kids’ college educations, and i am so pleased for her that she’s finally had time to devote herself to this accomplishment. some parents spin their wheels when the last child leave home, churning reluctantly toward retirement; my mother reinvented herself as a student, a thinker, a friend and peer in her academic community. she graduated today with Honors (her straight-A GPA puts all her kids to shame) and as English student of the year. we all hope/pretend our moms don’t read our blogs, but if you are reading this, then know that i’m very, very proud of you.

we have reached burn-out for the theatre season, which fortunately ends in another 3 weeks because i no longer have any drive to work at all. serious props go to andy, who went on for the lead in Anarchist last weekend with about 24 hours’ notice when joe tore a ligament in his foot. it probably took a year off his live in nervous anticipation, but he kicked some serious ass. our apartment still hasn’t recovered from the 72-hours of continuous rehearsal/performance; dirty laundry is draped every-which-where, the dining room furniture is still arranged as a model of the set, there are no groceries or clean dishes. this is what happens when we work on the same show, kids.

i also had the good fortune to see andy play aguecheek in twelth night, and romeo in r&j this past week with his educational shakespeare troupe. these roles cause him considerably less duress since he’s been playing them for 9 months now, and he’s excellent in both. about 10 minutes into r&j on tuesday morning, the dimmers (things that make the stage lights go bright and dark) started overheating, causing an unpleasant phenomenon where the lights blink off, and back on and back off with christmas-tree regularity. naturally, 300 high school students were compelled to scream “the lights are off!” every time this happened until i climbed over some kids, went up to the booth where i found their stage manager fretting and repeating “it’s not my fault i don’t know.” nice guy, but not a stage manager. fortunately, he was quite amenable to letting me take over. i won’t bore you all with all the techno-babble, so the succinct version is that we couldn’t cool the overheating equipment sufficiently, and the theatre has no overhead work lights, so we had to stop the show, turn off the malfunctioning equipment entirely, and set up some portable halogens on tripods i found in the loft. the remaining 2/3 of the show was lovely under the stark glow of halogen foot lights – ghostly and timeless.

alright, i did the ugly task, i finished my reunion classbook page (24 before the last-we-really-mean-it-deadline), just because all of you folks did one and so i was afraid i’d feel left out later. seriously, i can’t think of a faster route to a total anxiety attack than trying to put down on paper a 8″x11″ synopsis of the past 5 years of my life. talk about keeping up with the joneses – no marriage prospects on the immediate horizon, no kids, no graduate degrees, no significant savings or investments or much else to account for the past five years. oh, i’ve been working, and working hard. but my path just took a bit more meandering than some. i’m counting on the fact that people who don’t know anything about theatre think that what i do is somehow glamorous. i won’t burst that bubble just yet.

today: a brilliant discovery! when i’m in the theatre i can hijack wireless internet from the apartment complex next door. now i can surf the web when i’m supposed to be paying attention in rehearsal. like right now.

monday this week was the day that chicago bloomed. the trees had been holding their breath for days, a hazy suggestion of color about them, and then monday, poof! chicago re-discovered the color green.

as punishment for us all getting so optimistic and breaking out the flip flops on monday, today it is snowing. we dragged all my window boxes and flower pots indoors last night to keep the peonies from freezing. now our bathroom has become an impromptu hothouse. zeke lurks forlornly in the hallway; there is nothing he loves more than nibbling on forbidden flowers.

so the CTA voted yesterday on how exactly they intend to screw commuters starting in July. it looks like I’m going to get by; they were threatening to stop running the evanston line after 10pm (which would strand me at work an average of 4-5 nights/week, leaving me the unpleasant options of 1) quitting my job, 2) buying a car and moving to a crappier apartment so we could afford said car, or 3) sleeping on the green room couch a lot), but it looks like I’ll just have to wait a longer time for the train at night. well, okay, I’ll deal. but what about all the people who live on one of the 54 bus routes that they’ve canceled? how the fuck are poor people supposed to get to work?

what infuriates me is that the CTA is actively trying to find ways to decrease the number of riders and to encourage people to “seek alternate forms of transportation.” what? public transit IS the alternate form of transportation. you can’t ride a bike when it’s 10 degrees below 0. you can’t walk across an entire city. the city of chicago is now encouraging people to drive their cars? that is fucked up and deeply short-sighted.

this year’s birthday tally started out weak early in the day, but it ended pretty strong:

Ripped a hole in elbow of my favorite shirt: -1
Poured a glass of milk to go with my breakfast, took a big gulp; said milk was sour and tasted of old sneakers: -1
Beautiful, sunny spring day in Chicago: +1
Chelsea made me birthday cupcakes: +1
Birthday haikus: +1
Have to work 10am-midnight on birthday: -1
Ripped the Friday crossword a new one on the train on the way to work: +1
Saturday night dinner at my favorite French crepery, and drinks with friends afterward: +1
The fluted baking pans, canned salmon and recipe for Salmon Loaf my grandmother sent me: +1 (for sheer amusement value)

watch out…i’ll be regifting that can of salmon to one of you when you least expect it…

holy crap, i’m twenty-seven years old.

well, the late-twenties have arrived. now what?