Pasta on the Grill

One of our "go to" summer dinners has become what we call "pasta on the grill". It's basically a roasted tomato sauce, which we started making when we started growing tomatos. Its a fast and easy way to use some of them, and we freeze several jars of it every year to use over the winter. It's simple and delicious and easily varied. I'll give the basic idea here and mention some variations.

Ingredients

• 2-3 pounds of tomatos, whatever kind you have available
• Half a large Vidalia onion, or a single large yellow onion
• 4-5 cloves of garlic
• A small eggplant (we usually use Asian styles)
• A red or yellow pepper
• 1/2 a jalepeño or other hot pepper (optional)
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh herbs (basil, oregano, thyme, whatever)
• Olive oil
• One can tomato paste (optional)

Varying the types of tomatos and onions and herbs will affect the flavor a lot, as will omitting the garlic, which I do from time to time. You can also use zucchini or summer squash in addition to or in place of the eggplant. The jalepeño adds a nice bit of heat, if you like that, or you can use Thai basil or spicy oregano. And so forth.

Directions

Prepare your grill. We have a gas one, so that is easy. I tend to cook this over pretty high heat, but you'll want to experiment with that. (You can also do this in the oven, if you wish. Preheat it to 450F.)

Chop and otherwise prepare the veggies and herbs, and put them in a big bowl. Add the olive oil and stir. You want just enough to coat the veggies. Line a 13x9 disposable aluminum baking pan with foil (for ease of cleanup and re-usability of the pan) and pour the veggies into it. Cover the top with more foil, and put the whole thing onto the grill. Cook until the veggies are tender, roughly 30-45 minutes.

I often find that the sauce is a bit watery at this point. If so, then I pour it into an appropriately sized pot and add some tomato paste---half a can usually suffices, but sometimes I need a full can---and simmer for about 10 minutes, just to cook the paste.

Serve over your favorite pasta.

Shortcakes

We had some friends over the other night, and I made shortcakes, which we had with berries and ice cream and whip cream. Yum! I've made quite a few shortcake recipes over the years, and these were the best I've had. Very sweet and flaky. The recipe I used was one from Epicurious, which can be found here. I'll reproduce it for ease of use.

Ingredients

2 cups flour

1/4 cup sugar

1 tbsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter

1/2 cup milk

1 large egg

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400F. Line a big baking sheet with parchment paper (which keeps the bottoms from getting too crunchy).

Combine the dry ingredients in a big bowl and stir to blend. Cut the butter into 1/2 inch pieces and sprinkle it into the flour, then mix it a bit so the butter gets coated. Now, work the butter into the flour with your fingers. You basically want to pick up the butter pieces and mash them up. (There are other ways to cut butter into flour, too, but that one seems to work best for this recipe.) Keep doing this until the flour looks like a coarse meal. 

Whisk the egg into the milk, and pour that into the flour mixture. Stir until a dough forms, then turn it out onto a floured work surface and knead it just a bit (maybe 6-8 turns) until its smooth. 

Finally, make eight shortcakes, however you like. You can flatten the dough and cut circles with a glass, or cut triangles with a knife, or divide the dough into eight pieces and shape the shortcakes that way.

Put the shortcakes on the baking sheet. Leave a bit of room between them, as they will rise a bit. Bake them for about 12 minutes, until a tester comes out dry.

The Hidden Queer Story Behind "A League of Their Own"

Lesbians playing baseball!? Surely not!

On Narratively.

If sexual desire is coded as male....

If sexual desire is coded as male, women begin to wonder if they are really ever sexual. Do we distrust our passion, thinking it perhaps not our own, but the construction of patriarchal culture? Can women be sexual actors? Can we act on our own behalf? Or are we purely victims, whose efforts must be directed at resisting male depredations in a patriarchal culture? Must our passion await expression for a safer time? When will that time come? Will any of us remember what her passion was? Does exceeding the bounds of femininity – passivity, helplessness, and victimization – make us deeply uncomfortable? Do we fear that if we act on our most deeply felt sexual passion that we will no longer be women? Do we wish, instead, to bind ourselves together into a sisterhood which seeks to curb male lust but does little to promote female pleasure?

Those words were published in 1984, by Carol Vance, in "Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality". That is the introduction to the extraordinary volume Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, which is basically the proceedings of the famous 1982 'Barnard Sex Conference'. But it strikes me, in the midst of #MeToo, in all its various manifestations, that those words could just as well have been written yesterday. There are all kinds of ways in which women's sexual desires are questioned, not just by slut-shamers but also by a certain breed of 'feminist'. Of course, there are all kinds of ways in which (sexual) desire is shaped by culture. But, as the women who contributed to Pleasure and Danger understood, we need to find a way to reconcile that fact with the reality of the desires we have: to allow ourselves to enjoy what we enjoy while simultaneously fighting against the culture that shapes us. There's no contradiction in that.

Fascinating Reflection on Transexuality

My friend Anne Eaton directed me to this fascinating but in some ways deeply puzzling essay by Andrea Long Chu, who is (I take it) a graduate student in Comparative Literature at NYU. It's a lengthy investigation of the fraught, and too little discussed, relationship between identity and desire in the experience of trans women, specifically. Probably, Chu rightly restricts her discussion to that case: the one she knows from the inside. But I strongly suspect that her reflections have something much broader to teach us about gender, and our experience of it. Certainly, as someone who is genderqueer, it rang a lot of bells with me.

Published: The Logical Strength of Compositional Principles

Abstract

This paper investigates a set of issues connected with the so-called conservativeness argument against deflationism. Although I do not defend that argument, I think the discussion of it has raised some interesting questions about whether what I call compositional principles, such as "A conjunction is true iff its conjuncts are true", have substantial content or are in some sense logically trivial. The paper presents a series of results that purport to show that the compositional principles for a first-order language, taken together, have substantial logical strength, amounting to a kind of abstract consistency statement.

Find it on Project Euclid, or download the pre-publication version here.

The paper is a kind of companion to "Disquotationalism and the Compositional Principles" (PDF) and is basically the philosophical side of the paper "Consistency and the Theory of Truth" (here).

The Inadequacy of Sexual Consent?

Earlier today, I fell down one of those Internet rabbit holes reading reflections about the Aziz Ansari story. (I confess to having previously had no idea who he was.) In truth, I jumped in myself, once I realized what was really at stake here, since it's something in which I've been increasingly interested myself over the last couple years. The best piece I read was by Amanda Alcantara, on The Lily. Here's the crucial bit:

[This] story...pushes us beyond the parameters of what we've been saying about consent: That "no means no", or to seek an active "yes". This form of teaching consent focuses on feelings of power during intimacy. It's a response to a request—"will they let me have sex with them?"—rather than seeing sex as something mutual. The question should be, "Do they want to have sex with me?" That is essentially where this conversation lies. Is consenting about "wanting" or about "letting"?

That's almost right, I think. But the real lesson, which seems to run just under the surface of a lot of these discussions, concerns the limitations of the notion of consent. In fact, this is not a new idea. See this piece by Rebecca Traister in The Cut, for example. But perhaps it's an idea who time has come.