The Polyglot

As of 1 am, Wednesday Sept. 1, I have officially submitted all of my Fulbright paperwork through the online application portal.

Next step: campus interviews!

I’m not sure when exactly I’ll need to make the trek northwards to West Laf, but I should be hearing back from Scholarship director Cristy Cornell within the week.

After interviews, I should be notified sometime before January 31, 2011 of either acceptance or rejection by the host country. How my nerves will fair in the meantime, I guess we’ll see.

Now if only I could get my hands on one of those mystic blue diamond-powered see-through-the-sands-of-time hourglasses…

In preparing my statements for the Fulbright scholarship I have been refining what I think about foreign language education and the relationship between cultures. For me, language requires a social context. This got me thinking about why is it that young Europeans are required to learn English, but made wary of the American lifestyle?

Whether this is a result of less-than-stellar diplomacy, an issue from the Freudian subconscious, or an attempt to thwart the homogenization of cultures is unclear.

I am particularly interested in the German attitude toward Americans. Every German citizen that I have ever met has been warm, welcoming, and hospitable; and for the most part has accepted that certain aspects of American culture have become part of German Alltag. But why is it that with our increasingly interconnected societies, the American stereotypes still persist?

The most persistent of these typifications is that of the American diet. I look forward to addressing this topic in my research if selected as a Fulbright scholar.

In the meantime, I am calling out to everyone to help me out. What do you eat on a daily basis? What foods do you remember fondly growing up? What’s a regional specialty where you live?

Invented as a way to make use of staled bread, bread pudding is a dish with roots dating far back into various cultures, most notably British. Unlike its savory counterparts like stuffing and thickening agents, bread pudding was created as a dessert. What was once a recycled dish has now become – and deliciously so – an inseparable favorite of upscale, after-dinner decadence.

Ingredients:

3 cups milk
3 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoons ground cinnamon
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
3 tablespoons rum
1/2 cup raisins
7 (1/2-inch) slices brioche bread, cubed or torn*
4 eggs, beaten
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Directions:

In a large saucepan, add milk, butter, vanilla, cinnamon, brown sugar, rum and raisins and heat until warm. Simmer and stir until sugar dissolves.

Into a large bowl add the cubed bread and pour in the hot milk mixture. Let sit for 30 minutes so the bread absorbs the milk.

Add the beaten eggs to the bread and milk mixture and stir. Pour bread pudding into a buttered 1 1/2-quart baking dish and bake for 50 minutes.

* I couldn’t find brioche bread at my local supermarket so I used pound cake instead. The end result was equally delicious, but required only a 40 minute cooking time.

Abschrift:

“Einzelheiten zu dem Anschlag jetzt live aus Neu-Delhi von Michael Naumann.

Allem scheint es, als soll es sich bei dem Getöteten, um eine Gruppe von Augenärzten gehandelt haben, die in der Provinz Nuristan in Nordafghanistan Dorfbewohner medizinisch versorgt haben. Auf dem Rückweg nach Kabul soll diese Gruppe dann bereits am Donnerstag aufgehalten und beschossen worden sein. Und unter den insgesamt 10 Opfern sei eben auch die eine deutsche Ärztin, so der noch dürftige Informationstand jetzt. Die Taliban haben sich zu dem Anschlag bekannt, aber das muss nicht stimmen, denn in der grenzt Gegenden Badachschan sollen auch bewaffnete Kriminelle unterwegs sein. Und alle Opfer sollen auch ausgeraubt worden sein. In einer ersten Stellungnahme hat sich die deutsche Bundesregierung empört gezeigt über diesen Anschlag. Damit zurück nach Hamburg.”

Translation:

“Details from Michael Naumann about the attack live from New Dehli.

The tomatoes are here! I’ve been waiting for some awesome farmers market tomatoes to make an attempt at some soups and salsas. Here’s my recipe for my first attempt: Thai Tomato Bisque.

Ingredients:

5-6 medium to medium-large red tomatoes, skinned and chopped
1 medium sized white or yellow onion, peeled and chopped
1 inch fresh ginger root, peeled and chopped
2 full stalks of broccoli, florets removed
1 tbsp. fresh cilantro, chopped
1 tbsp. minced garlic
2 tsp. ghee (butter substitutes just fine)
1 jar (4 oz.) Thai Kitchen brand red curry paste
1 can (14 fl oz.) low fat coconut milk
1 flavor packet from Maruchan brand spicy chili flavored ramen noodles
1 tsp. Sriracha brand chili garlic paste
1 tbsp ponzu or soy sauce
1 cube chicken or vegetable bouillon
2 tbsp. canola oil

Directions:

In order to assure proper timing in this recipe, be sure to do any sort of prep work before beginning to cook. It is most important to start off by preparing the broccoli. If you ever buy fresh broccoli, it feels like you get a few florets and all stalk. If you are like me, this seems like a colossal waste of money. I immediately used the florets in a stir fry the day I bought the broccoli, but instead of throwing out the stalks, I decided to hold on to them just for this purpose.

Bring a medium saucepan with about 1 in of water to a boil. Using a potato peeler, take two 6-in. stalks of broccoli, florets and any leaves removed, and shave the entirety of the stalk into long, thin pieces (yes, the whole stalk is edible). You may choose to discard the outermost shavings. Steam these broccoli slices in the saucepan until tender, but not mushy. Drain broccoli, return to pan, and set aside, removed from the heat source. Pour some ponzu or soy sauce over them and lightly pepper them.

Heat canola oil in a large frying pan or wok on medium high heat. Brown garlic until fragrant (1 min) and then throw in ginger and onion, cooking until slightly tender (3 min). Add in the ghee and turn up the heat to quickly caramelize the onions and ginger, stirring often (1 min). Reduce heat and mix in the chicken or vegetable bouillon, the spice packet from the spicy chili ramen noodles, one-half (2 oz.) of the Thai Kitchen red curry paste, and the Sriracha chili garlic paste (1 min). Add in the freshly chopped tomatoes and mix well. To skin tomatoes, simply parboil them for a minute and the skins peel right off. I personally left the skins on for nutritional benefit, but I did find a few rough pieces in the final soup.

Boil this mixture on medium high heat for around 10 minutes, cooking off a significant portion of the water until you are left with a thicker sauce (consistency of thick spaghetti sauce). Remove from heat and let cool (2 min). Shake the can of coconut milk well and open. Use spoon to stir and make sure it is well mixed. Coconut milk naturally separates, so leaving it near the stove to warm slightly will help it mix more easily.

Ladle half of the soup base and half the can of coconut milk into a blender and puree. Pour into a separate pot. Perform the same with the remaining half of the soup base. Be very cautious when blending hot liquids; be sure to periodically release the steam from the blender. If the soup is too thick, you can add anywhere from 1/2 to 1 cup of water or your favorite chicken/vegetable stock.

Now add both the cilantro and the drained broccoli slices to the soup. Mix and serve warm.

While not a true-to-form Thai dish, this soup fuses together the spiciness of the Thai red curry with the savoriness of creamy tomato soup. Enjoy this alongside any other Thai inspired dish or a simple, yet delicious grilled cheese.

Notes:

Because bouillon, ponzu/soy sauce, chili garlic paste, and ramen spice packets contain quite a bit of salt, I did not add extra salt to this dish. If you omit any of these ingredients, be sure to taste and salt if necessary. If using canned tomatoes instead of fresh, be sure to buy only ones with “no sodium added.”

I sent a message last week to my and my classmates’ most beloved German professor from Purdue, Dr. Chris Reid. A visiting professor, Dr. Reid taught “German 342: 18th Century to Present” to a class of around ten. The combination of the material, atmosphere, and dynamic made the class very enjoyable. We shared in deep philosophical conversations, often losing track of where we started, but Dr. Reid always had the knack to drive even tangential topics back home. I still think back even today about our compare/contrast of Rothko and Kinkade paintings – decidedly not as disparate as on first glance.

Needing some career/future guidance, Reid helped me get the ball rolling, looking at some prestigious scholarships and fellowships to teach abroad. Maybe a stroke of fate or coincidence, the name Fulbright came up – a scholarship I have contemplated before.

The Fulbright scholarship is program “[s]ponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs [... that] provides funding for students, scholars, teachers, and professionals to undertake graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and teaching in elementary and secondary schools.”

I am curious about the competitiveness of the scholarship, but I am supercharged about the prospect of teaching and living abroad; just thinking about the experience of culture and language gets my blood rushing, mind racing.

I speak tomorrow with Cristy Cornell, National and International Scholarships Coordinator at Purdue University, to learn more about the Fulbright program and application process. In the meantime I will try to keep my nerves at bay.

Wish me luck!

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Welkom to my newly revamped site!

Anyone who has visited my domain over the past two years probably can tell you it’s been many different things: occasionally amusing, perhaps hard to follow, definitely scatterbrained. This Wiederspiegelung of my creative side and outlet for hilarious internet memes has suddenly taken on a deeper meaning, representing more than my inability to keep one website theme; it’s my proverbial, electronic soul search.

I never understood why “what do you want to be when you grow up?” is the one question we spend endless years, decades, our entire lives trying to figure out. What’s more important, why does our answer to this enigma determine where we’ll fit in, the friends we’ll make, the relationships we’ll form?

I’ve ‘wanted’ to be (in no particular order) a composer, a physicist, a landlord, a chemist, an environmental activist, a pianist, and a professor. But here I am now, having been none of the above, but more sure of my direction than I’ve ever been.

For those of you who know me, it’s pretty obvious that I love languages. I tried at various points in my adolescent years to learn Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Spanish. Back in grade school I made a greeting card in Russian, complete with sickle and hammer, to place in a box of donated coloring books, crayons, and colored pencils that my 4th grade class shipped to an orphanage somewhere outside Moscow. I only learned years later that the Soviet Union had already dissolved 6 years prior to drawing the communist flag on the greeting card.

Nowadays, I find myself more politically aware, but my passion has stuck with me. I’ve usually got my computer, phone, or iPod set to German – to resounding annoyance of everyone but myself -, I read the german news nearly daily, and I try to have regular Skype sessions with my exchange student from Kassel.

I want to become an interpreter, a polyglot. A linguistic dignitary, I suppose. Stick with me along my journey and visit my website to learn about the ins and outs of pursuing my dreams.

I encourage anyone who wants to know a little more about interpreting to check out the video that got me fired up about becoming an interpreter and working with language.