Anyway, the last time I cooked a breast of lamb, I’d bought the boneless version and stuffed it with something—ground veal, I think. This time around, I had those bones to contend with, and I really didn’t want to engage in the fuss of playing butcher, though I do possess a boning knife. I figured that if I made use of my handy pressure cooker, I wouldn’t have to worry about bones.

I was right, but I couldn’t actually locate any recipes for breast of lamb that involved the pressure cooker. In fact, most of the recipes I could find really made preparing it out to be entirely too much work. So I pretty much made it up as I went along, and it worked splendidly, so I’m sharing it here.

Start-to-finish time

About 90 minutes

Time actually spent cooking

About 30 minutes

Ingredients

• 1.5-2 lbs bone-in breast of lamb
• 1 Tb olive oil
• 1/2 clove elephant garlic or 2 cloves ordinary garlic, peeled and chopped
• 2 Tb balsamic vinegar
• pinch rosemary
• pinch sage
• salt and pepper

Tools

• Heavy skillet
• Pressure cooker

Heat the 1 Tb olive oil in the heavy skillet over a high flame and brown the meat on all sides along with about half the garlic. (Breast of lamb is a very fatty cut, so you won’t need more than 1 Tb oil and could probably make do with less.) Transfer meat and garlic to pressure cooker.

Add remaining ingredients and approximately 4 cups water to pressure cooker. Seal and bring to pressure. Reduce heat until you are just maintaining pressure and cook for 45 minutes. (If you have an old-fashioned pressure cooker, the weight on the top should rock gently. Otherwise you risk boiling off all the water and burning the lamb and the pot. [If you're an experienced user of pressure cookers, you can talk to me about grandmothers and sucking eggs now.])

Turn off heat and run pressure cooker under cold water to release pressure. Transfer lamb from pressure cooker to a heatproof dish. Carefully remove the bones. By now the meat should be so tender that the bones slide out easily—what you need to be careful about is burning yourself. (Latex exam gloves are good for this.)

If you want to crisp the lamb up, you can pop it under the broiler for about 5 minutes after you’ve removed the bones. If you’re the gravy-making type, you can pour the fat out of the pressure cooker (there will be a lot of it) and make up some gravy while the lamb is crisping. Otherwise just serve it up with your choice of side dishes.

Makes 3-4 four-ounce servings.

Hair, makeup, and most photos by the amazing Kathleena Gorga—taken, alas, with my Nikon P100, which doesn’t do RAW images.

Shortly after relocating from El Cerrito to Oakley—once we’d cleared out some of the sixty-odd boxes we brought with us and put such furniture as we had in place—we made a trip to IKEA and took advantage of their picking service, an absolute necessity for anyone who plans to buy up half their store. And, of course, of their delivery service, ditto.

Two days later, a truck arrived with 1048 kilos of IKEA boxes for us. That’s 2305.6 pounds, or one ton plus my brother. Here’s what they looked like in our living room.

1048 kilos (2305.6 lbs) of IKEA boxes

We had to haul a lot of that stuff upstairs, including Galant desks, a Malm bed, and the mattress. That meant opening the boxes and carrying it piece by piece.

Stefan got to do most of the assembling, starting with the easier things like Lack end  tables and Billy bookcases. Even so, it seemed that every five minutes he was asking me to come help with something, even before we got to the hell of building the bed and the lesser but substantial challenge of the Dömbas wardrobe.

To make it even more fun, his new power drill/screwdriver gave out about halfway through, so we had to rely on mine, which is 10 years old: larger, heavier, and less powerful. But it did the job, so now all we have to do is figure out how to get rid of those over-sized cardboard boxes.

Wedding of Sallie Goetsch and Stefan (Stjepan) Didak, September 13, 2011

Yes, the World’s Longest Engagement is finally over. Stefan and I were married September 13th at approximately 10 AM at the County Clerk’s office in Martinez, California. We had been engaged since April 2, 1995. We started filing paperwork for our fiancé visa in August, 2010. (And now that we’re married, there’s more paperwork to file for the Adjustment of Status, work permit, etc.)

The ceremony was actually rather touching, a secularized version of the familiar vows from the Book of Common Prayer. Stefan attempted to promise “for richer and still richer,” but though we’d all like that, the Deputy Commissioner wasn’t having it.

Our one wedding photo was taken by our one witness, my former housemate, with my Nikon P100. Stefan’s Big Lenses are still in Holland, awaiting his green card and the trip back to retrieve his office.

I  have to admit, I hadn’t heard of Oakley, myself. I wasn’t that familiar with East Contra Costa County. I’d expressed reluctance at the idea of moving out to the suburbs when Stefan first proposed it. It would be hot. It would be isolated. We wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere. It would take forever to drive to anyplace we were accustomed to going.

All those things are true.

So is the fact that we can get a gorgeous 3-bedroom, 2.5-bath house with washer/dryer hookups in the garage for barely more than we had to pay to live in a run-down firetrap of a 2-bed, 1-bath apartment in a four-plex in El Cerrito. I haven’t had a washing machine for ten years. Or a separate office. Or enough room for a dinner party. Or a guest room.

I could live without all the driving, but apart from the construction around Somerville Ave, Highway 4 doesn’t deserve all the complaints it gets. (Have these people never driven in Southern California?) The air conditioning keeps it bearable indoors, and it is nice to see sunshine instead of fog. People are generally friendly, though the neighbors to the rear could be a reality (comedy) TV show.

As for where Oakley is, approximately halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento, on the Delta. Here’s a map. (Not to our house, but we live pretty close to the civic center and the all-important Black Bear Diner.)

Here’s how it happened.

My mother got two adorable kittens in 2009.

Bece and Kiki as kittens. Photo by Dorataya.

Since my housemate and I had lost our cat, Misty, in June 2009, we envied her, though we were imagining adopting an older cat sometime when the grief was not as fresh. I met my mother’s cats in November of 2009, when they were somewhat older than in the photo, but still recognizably kittens. They made a dramatic contrast to my father’s enormous Siamese tomcats.

Not long after that, Mom began an online romance with a man she met on Picasa, and by spring she was on her way to getting married to a really terrific guy…who owns a spaniel that thinks it’s a pit bull. Every time the dog came to visit, it would fling itself at the cats, who naturally sat just out of reach, taunting it.

So Mom had the brilliant idea that Bece and Kiki should go to me. Never mind the fact that she lived in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and I lived in El Cerrito, California. Why let a little thing like 2400 miles get in the way of a good idea? And, as it happened, I was planning to go to Cleveland for my 25^th high school reunion anyway.

Somehow I agreed to this. Somehow even Stefan, who was visiting me at the time, agreed to this. We bought a special Southwest Airlines cat carrier for Bece and Kiki, and a ticket for them, as well. (Southwest charges per carrier, so we stuffed them both into one…with some difficulty.)

The hard part was going through security. At least the turbo-radiation scanners hadn’t been introduced yet, though I would have opted the cats out in any case. You have to take them out of the carrier and walk them through security. We had them in harnesses, but Stefan was having nightmares that they would escape.

Despite squirming a lot, they made it safely back into their yellow carrier, and stayed there quietly for the rest of the two flights—a short hop to Chicago and a longer one to Oakland. I was a bit worried because they were so quiet, until I unpacked my lunch. Suddenly two sets of blue eyes were looking up at me at the smell of chicken.

It turns out that the cats are unflappable. Moving didn’t distress them at all. They spent perhaps 15 minutes hiding under my bed, after which they completely took over the apartment. It was the same when we moved out to Oakley, though they complained for the whole drive. New surroundings, moving boxes, rearranged furniture: it’s all a game devised for their entertainment. As long as they can find the food bowl and the litter box, they’re happy.

Stefan, on the other hand, has still not recovered from the trauma.

It might make more sense to put this on a page covering those years, except then I’d just end up waiting until I finished the site, and at this rate that will be never. I can’t even keep my professional sites up to date, never mind this one.

So I’m going to reprint this article here for people to see what I was up to in 1998. I’ve made the links live and corrected a few of them.

I fell into the Classics Vortex at 14 when I first learned Latin. I went to Brown University meaning to get a degree in psychology and graduated with an AB in Classics. I’d spent 2 years as president of the Classics Club and added Greek to my Latin. I also spent a term at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (known familiarly as the Centro). The teaching wasn’t up to Brown’s standards, but we got to see everything.

That summer I spent 6 weeks in Greece and had the opportunity to see a play (Oedipus Tyrannos , as it happens, done by the Open Theater) in the theater at Epidavros. The moon was just rising over the back of the theatron as the show closed. From that time on I was increasingly interested in ancient theater. I wrote my senior thesis about the character of Klytaimnestra in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Giraudoux, Sartre, and O’Neill.

It was at the University of Michigan, where I was a PhD student, that I began translating and directing ancient plays (I had done a bit of acting in them as an undergrad, and my interest in theater goes back to early childhood). The first was Auricula Meretricula, a simplified Roman comedy written by a couple of classicists to make teaching Latin more fun. I’d first read it when I was 15. It was performed in Latin with a cast who knew no Latin for an audience only half of whom knew Latin—with a budget of $50. It was enough of a success to encourage me to proceed on to tragedy.

I had spent the summer of 1990 living in Nafplion, Greece, and studying the theatrical festival at Epidavros, interviewing as many of the directors as would talk to me. (About half of them, and usually in Modern Greek, which I had squeezed into my undergraduate schedule.) While there I made the translation of Aeschylus’ Eumenides which I directed (and produced, and house-managed, and board-opped, and designed costumes for) in November of 1991. This was enough of a success that even my department began to be interested in production. (My supervisor’s first words on the subject were “I’ve never seen a production of a Greek tragedy from which I learned anything.”)

In 1993 I collaborated with Kate Mendeloff of U-M’s Residential College Drama Program (and holder of an MFA in directing from Yale) on a production of Euripides’ Bacchae. I was then a fellow at the Institute for the Humanities, which helped immeasurably with both funding and publicity. In my off hours I was writing my dissertation, on Eumenides. Bacchae was a commercial as well as critical success. I did a presentation on it at the King’s College London conference on “Tragedy and the Tragic.”

I also spent a lot of time traveling the US to see productions of ancient plays, including Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides. I made contact with a number of scholars in the field (there aren’t that many of us), most especially Oliver Taplin. And when he suggested that there ought to be an electronic newsletter to publicize modern productions of Greek plays, a colleague nominated me.

I didn’t know much about computers at the time beyond word processing and basic e-mail—and the U-M e-mail system was hideously primitive. The WWW didn’t really exist yet. But even in ASCII format for ftp, the Internet was the best way to distribute listings, etc (it was my idea to include reviews and features) to people who were widely scattered across the globe. (There’s a fairly dense concentration of them in Britain, which is part of why I moved here, but otherwise it’s much a matter of one or two in the biggest departments—a couple on each coast of the US, a couple in South Africa, a scattering across Australia and Canada, etc.)

We had published three issues when I moved to Britain. Most of the technical stuff was handled by my co-editors, Ian Worthington and Peter Toohey, who had founded Electronic Antiquity (still an ftp journal) about a year earlier. I had discovered the WWW by then and was definitely interested in moving Did onto it—theatrical production is very hard to discuss without pictures. I got a lot of help from Warwick’s Computing Services department, and our first HTML issue went out in December of 1994.

I began to get more and more ideas for the website, which eventually developed a fairly dense core of information in addition to the published issues—which got to be published less and less often. Like many academics, I had vastly underestimated how much work was involved in running an electronic journal. Though there are no printing and distribution costs (within a university), the labor involved in creating the thing is just as great. I’ve never been paid for my work on Did and my editorial board contributes primarily in the area of refereeing articles. I’m trying to work out ways of delegating markup and other tasks which I don’t really have to do myself—there’s just no one else to do them at the moment. I’ve gotten to the point where I would happily consider a commercial sponsor.

I’ve been amazed at the range of people who use Didaskalia. Despite its faltering condition it is still very popular. I get enquiries from all over the world on quite a variety of subjects. Some of the features I’ve added have been for the benefit of my own students (I have been teaching Ancient Theatre on the Modern Stage and Greek Tragedy in the School of Theatre Studies since 1995/6).

Warwick’s library isn’t all that strong in Classics, and the WWW has been a good way of expanding the research materials available to my students. And to other people’s students. I’ve gotten so much into the habit of doing research on the WWW that I sometimes forget what useful books I own.

Article written by Nemesis Gill.

It feels like a lot more than 11 years have passed since that interview. It was only a few months later that I moved back to the United States. Not long after that, I turned over the job of Man
aging Editor to Hugh Denard, and I’ve had little to do with Didaskalia since then, unless specifically asked for input.

Someone phoned me about a month ago to ask if I could help track down Dorpfeld’s original drawings of the skene. Um, no. After 11 years, even the references I can remember are out of date, though of course Dorpfeld’s drawings pre-date my entry into the field of Classics, never mind my exit from it. My Greek and Latin are a bit rusty, though I still occasionally have a use for my linguistic skills. I don’t see myself heading back to academentia anytime soon.

But yes, I really did have this photo on my bio page as editor. And no, unlike many of the images you’ll see of the current Sallie, it hasn’t been digitally enhanced. It was taken when I was 26, just after the Bacchae production, before I met Stefan and long before I’d heard of Photoshop. I’ve obviously gotten more conservative as I’ve aged, because I hesitate to use a photo of me in an off-the-shoulder dress for professional purposes these days.

The most recent photos as of this posting were taken in July 2009. (Those are the Oakland Cemetery photos where my hair is an exceptionally vivid red.)

Warning: most of these images have passed through Photoshop and been somewhat enhanced. Stefan insists.