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By rachel, April 21, 2010 2:11 pm

It’s not uncommon for people to say to us when they meet us for the first time: “Rachel and Micah… are you guys Jewish?” We were asked again recently last week at a party where we met many new acquaintances and I find it very amusing.  Micah does have Jewish heritage in his family and has Jewish facial features, we both have Old Testament names, and somehow we get prompted with this question frequently. We usually both laugh in response and say: “We get that question all the time!” and then inform them that we are not in fact Jewish.

Which leads me to think: why would people ask us this particular question, whether or not we are affiliated with a particular religion? It’s sort of odd, don’t you think? People don’t ask black people when they learn their names: “So… do you celebrate Kwanzaa?” Or if you meet a couple named Mary and Joseph, do you ever confirm if they are Christians or not in your next question to them?

One possible explanation was that Judaism, at least on the west coast, is distinctive and culturally interesting. I certainly don’t mind the assumption and in my experience, Judaism is a very interesting religion with equally intriguing customs and holidays. People hear our names, see Micah’s features, and ask an earnest question.

In any case, it’s both amusing and puzzling to me.

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By rachel, February 23, 2010 11:55 am

…at least that’s how I’ve personally felt this winter. Five days of intense work leaving me begging, pleading, and crying into Friday’s lap. Perhaps not that dramatically, but that’s how I feel most Fridays of late, even if I don’t show it.

I’m proud of myself, because even through this intense work time, I’ve still managed to keep exercising consistently via running and two indoor soccer teams, as well as keep up a regular (3-6 days / week) yoga practice. *BIG KNOCK ON WOOD* and thus far, I’ve managed to stay healthy *AGAIN BIG KNOCK ON WOOD* So these things I will take as positive signs that I am having success in taking an active role in managing my stress. Some weeks have been easier than others, but I’m definitely making improved overall progress on coping with the difficulties, (or should I say privileges?) that come with leading a very full life.

This last weekend, Micah and I got away to Willamette Pass to ski on a beautiful sunny and clear day. Some of the snow had obviously been machine made and felt like shuffleboard sand, but it didn’t spoil our fun whatsoever. There was hardly anyone else up there skiing, which made it seem as if we had the whole resort to ourselves. We even got to play around on a ski slalom course and I got to ski off the terrain park jumps, so we felt like Olympians and both wished that we had the opportunity to be on our high school’s ski teams back in the day. Although catching a ski edge on one of those gates at high speeds… woo damn, that could hurt!

On Sunday we enjoyed more clear sunny weather. I went to yoga and came back and planted our first spring garden… and I even did this without a shirt on, just a sports top, soaking in as much sunshine as possible. We lost track of time and realized that we had 25 minutes to shower and get to the Hult Center to watch the puppet musical, Avenue Q. It was hilarious, inappropriate and very funny. Later that evening, we bbq’d a chicken on our deck and enjoyed the rest of the early spring day. We’re in the process of merging our long and short term goals together which is harder than either of us thought it would be, but definitely worth the process.

Time to go focus again.

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By rachel, December 22, 2009 11:48 am

Sam Bond’s Garage 1, originally uploaded by rachemicah.

Holiday caroling was epic this year! I had a great group of brave and lively singers and three musicians who gave graciously of their free time to get together for six hours total and rehearse holiday music before the event. Brendan (banjo), Dylan (drums), and Micah (bass clarinet), you guys rock. No, really (haha!)

Everyone gradually made their way over to our house. We ate, drank, and enjoyed some festive holiday mixers.

Then we had a short rehearsal of a small repertoire of holiday songs:

1. Christmas is All Around (from Love Actually)

2. Deck the Halls

3. Féliz Navidad

4. Jingle Bells

5. Joy to the World (Three Dog Night)

6. Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah

7. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

8. Let It Snow

9. Walking in a Winter Wonderland

10. We Wish You a Merry Christmas

We were fortunate to avoid the rain the entire time while caroling and because the pellet stove made our house so hot, some people opted for scarves or just light jackets.  We hit the streets of Whiteaker and our first stop was PRI (Pizza Research Institute), but they already had a music act playing that evening.  We crossed the street to Olive Juice / El Pinche Taco / Eugene Glass Menagerie and sang to an appreciative group there.

(I’ll put a picture here when I get the pictures from Shinae, our photographer.)

Next we traveled on to Sam Bond’s Garage and fortunately the bands that night were between sets.  A heard a few people say: “Wow, that’s a lot of people” and “Oh, we have a real audience now”.  The crowd at Sam Bond’s loved us, especially our rendition of “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night (I have my uncle to thank for the inspiration of adding this song to holiday caroling!)

The next caroling recipients were the customers and wait staff at our beloved Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen and Blues Joint.  This was especially fun and meaningful, as Ted “Papa” Lee himself died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack just one month ago and the whole community has been saddened deeply by the loss of him.  We’ve been long time customers and it was fun to bring some holiday cheer to the familiar wait staff faces in his family run restaurant.  Papa himself was a prominent local musician and I think he would have loved our caroling so much.  He probably would have joined in too!

We walked across the street to Tiny’s Tavern.  We played it safe and stayed outside of the tavern, especially since we had adorable three year old Margo with us.  Here is a video of our funky performance of Deck the Halls outside of Tiny’s:

(For some reason, the videos won’t embed from YouTube, so click here on the link to view the video of Deck the Halls: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wi6yJAXNYk

After saying no to many offers for hits of weed, we wandered our way up 4th Ave to a few houses.  By that time it was 9:15 p.m. and a few people had put their children to sleep, had gone to parties elsewhere and weren’t home, or just flat out turned us down for caroling.  We did get to sing for a few lucky residents and here is a video of us belting out Féliz Navidad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRBR01lz96w

Not long after that, we wandered home, festive, exhausted, and happy.   A few of us played Apples to Apples afterwards and munched on the leftover party snacks and sipped the leftover dranks.  I was so happy and pleased that so many people came and had such a good time caroling.  A big festive shout out to those who came, to the awesome caroling band, and to Shinae, for taking all of the pictures and videos and participating while jet lagged from a recent flight back from Korea.  This year’s holiday caroling was all I could ever hope for and more and I’m so glad that other people could enjoy and share the holiday cheer. 

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By rachel, December 15, 2009 10:20 pm

Santas, originally uploaded by rachemicah.

The halls are decked this time of year in the RacheMicah household.

More festive photos here!

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By rachel, December 10, 2009 1:50 pm

I’m feeling better, just with a few lingering and minor cold symptoms.  The school term is done and the holidays have already begun. All three Thanksgivings in Corvallis, Hood River, and Hermiston were awesome and just the familial and gastronomic tonic I needed to get rested and refreshed before the last big push of the term.  Today I’ve gone to yoga, eaten breakfast, stared at the walls, and wasted a chunk of time on the couch and on the internet.  It’s a divine change of pace!

Last weekend we had guests in our house for a long weekend, from Thursday for the victorious Civil War 2009 game and for the 8th annual Llamasgiving.  Chris created quite the tailgate party and Katie and Derek and their family and friends joined us for an orange and green pre-game festival in the cold:

(I don’t know why Katie isn’t doing that silly O-S-U hand gesture instead, but we’ll take an Oregon O from a Beaver fan any day!  )

It was a nerve-rackingly close game, but the Ducks won and they/we are going to the Rose Bowl!  We’ve been trying since Tuesday to get tickets to no avail, but we haven’t given up hope of Pasadena for New Year’s yet…

K & D stayed the night and the next day we went to the dog park to run the doggles around.  Lucky made a new friend in Katie and Derek’s 8 month old puppy, Riddick, and they played to exhaustion… perfect for two laboradors!

Kat and Justin showed up on Saturday and they agreed to come to our 10 p.m. indoor soccer game and then we all treated ourselves to a hot tub session afterwards.  The temps that weekend, and currently, are in the teens, so some nice hot water felt great.

Sunday was Llamasgiving and Erin and Adam decorated their house so festively.  Everyone made such delicious food… it was all so tasty.

This year for holiday caroling, I’ve set up a small instrument ensemble to carry the melody for the singers.  The caroling band had a gig session after dinner: Dylan on percussion, Micah on bass clarinet, Brendan on banjo, and I sang and played the egg shaker.

Caroling is gonna rawk this year thanks to these three.  Thanks doods!  The practice sessions in preparation have been so fun.

I have a mountainous list of tasks that I want to do during this holiday break and every day I’m gonna practice yoga and read every day in addition to all of the fun and busy tasks that are swimming in my “you-have-time-off-so-you-can-do-this-and-this-and-this-and-this” head. 

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By rachel, November 21, 2009 9:48 am

This is the second year in three years that I have been sick the weekend before my birthday. I’m really frustrated and depressed about this. This year in particular with all the h1n1 crap going around, I have been taking exceptional care of myself. I’ve been getting lots of sleep, running, playing soccer, and practicing yoga, taking mega doses of vitamin c, and not letting things stress me out in general. I have taken care of myself at the expense of my productivity at work and at home and guess what? I got sick anyway.

It’s just a bad head cold and a horribly inflamed throat and yeah it will go away. But it feels like crap now, so much so that it’s hard to sleep, which is precisely what I need to feel better.

To make matters worse, this year is the first year that there has actually been enough snow near the time of my birthday to go skiing (there usually isn’t, much to my disappointment). Micah had a whole weekend planned for us to go hit the slopes in honor of my birthday, such a rare early winter treat! Now that I’m sick, that’s not possible. And damn is that frustrating and depressing. I had to ask him to stop exclaiming the weather news from the paper “wow, 12″ of new snow just last night!” cuz it was bummin’ me out.

So now we’ll watch the Ducks play Arizona tonight and I’ll be laid up, drugged up, and trying to get over this crap. Sounds like much more fun that skiing, doesn’t it.

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By rachel, November 7, 2009 11:41 pm

I’ve been experimenting with bread making the past 6 weeks and here are my working notes and conclusions from the flour-based fermentation arts:

1. Make your own bread.

Bread is easy to make. Most people would be better served by making their bread rather than buying it at the store.  A surprising amount of bread is made with ingredients that nobody knows how to pronounce and cheaply and unnecessarily sweetened with high fructose corn syrup.  Personally, like being able to know what’s in my food and making bread with 4 simple ingredients makes that possible.  Bread making is satisfying and requires minimal, simple, and inexpensive ingredients and some well-coordinated time investment on a week night or a weekend evening. That said…

2. Buy good bread if you don’t have time to make it.

If you know you’re not going to have time to make bread or if you are traveling for the weekend, by all means buy yourself a quality loaf at your local grocery store or bread artisan bakery. After all, if you are not a baker, your time is being invested elsewise in society and someone else is being paid to provide the service of making quality bread. Min/max your time and accept the fact that others are paid make tasty bits from flour, water, yeast, and salt while you provide your contributive task to society.  But before you rush off to the store to buy bread, thinking that you don’t have time to make your own, have a look at a bread recipe to see just how easy, fun, and satisfying bread making can be.  And if you do decide to buy bread, support bakeries who use simple, pronounceable, quality ingredients and who clearly love baking bread.  You’re eating it, after all.

3. Make some sourdough.

Sourdough is a pain in the ass. The most ancient way of making bread is highly unpredictable and takes for-fricking-ever; more than 24 hours in some cases.  You would think that basic, non-conflicting sage advice for sourdough making could be found in quality bread making books or on the internet… nope.  Sourdough starters the world over have different types of wild yeast, all of which require different rising times, proofing times, mixing methods, flour blends, temperature requirements, etc.  I’ve tried different combinations of these methods and I’ve failed twice to make a good sourdough loaf with a homemade starter; we’ll see how loaf 3.0 turns out tomorrow. Loaf 3.0 is from a San Fransisco starter that Dylan ordered online and shared with me. He has pieced together a recipe that works for him here and also took pity on me or got sick of answering the same questions over and over and thusly created a handy dandy graphic for me to follow to dehydrate the starter before using (because the starter came in the mail at 166% hydration… don’t ask, I can’t tell you.)  If I fail this time, I’m temporarily quitting sourdough for awhile and turning my efforts to ciabatta and foccacia breads.

So why should you bother making sourdough at all?  Because making sourdough makes you appreciate just how easy bread made with regular active dry yeast really is. Non-sourdough bread recipes which once seemed daunting and time consuming will now seem simplistic in comparison to sourdough. For example, I once thought bagels were too difficult to ever attempt again; now I look forward to making them when I can and I feel confident that they can be made in 1-2 hours on a Saturday morning, not just for special occasions.  Three cheers for active dry yeast!

Now go make some bread!

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By rachel, October 31, 2009 10:25 am

Llama O’ Laterns! Test post from WordPress test.

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By rachel, October 26, 2009 9:41 am

Presto! A kegerator!, originally uploaded by rachemicah.

At long last we have converted my old dorm fridge into a beer kegerator! Last week we purchased a conversion kit from BeverageFactory.com, Micah did the conversion with minimal help from me, and presto, a kegerator! Micah and Matt took the keg and had it filled with Ninkasi Brewery Sleigher (clever name for a winter beer, methinks!)

It is surprisingly satisfying to be able to pull your own pints in your own home. The most exciting part about having a kegerator is that we can now get back into homebrewing without having to bottle the beer at the end; a process that is a giant royal pain in the tuckus. Racking homebrew from a carboy to a cornie keg is much easier.

Also our leftover grapes mash (skins, seeds, and stems) somehow magically converted into grappa this weekend! I’m not sure how that process happened or where, but it makes a beautiful tasty product!

And with that, wine season is over for us until next year when we get to taste what we made this year. If it turns out half as good as the grappa did, we will be very pleased.