Klosekraft

Go upstate and get your head together

While I have acquaintances for whom 'going upstate' is a euphemism for prison, for me it means a couple of days visiting my parents. There are a couple of things I try to do every time I go up: see a movie at my favorite theater (we saw Scoop, which I liked well enough but didn't love), have breakfast at the best diner in the world (get the Irish Toast! die happy!) and go for a hike with my dad.

Since my parents split up a few years ago, I divide my time equally between them. The day I spent with my mom, we went to the farmer's market in Troy to get lunch fixin's, visited my elderly Uncle Steve at his nursing home (the 'uncle' is an honorific; I'm not sure what the actual relationship between us is—my great-grandfather and his father were brothers). Uncle Steve is what my mom would call a pip and the rest of us would call a pain in the ass. I really like him. He's almost 95, has outlived almost everyone he knows (the fact that I'm one of his closest living relatives should say something), and has no hobbies other than revising his will, giving people gifts and then asking for them back six months later, and telling people unkind truths, like that they've gained weight or look better in photographs. He lived on his own until last year and I was relieved to see that he was still very much himself. I would have been horrified if he had turned into a docile little lamb. Being at the nursing home made me want to have twelve children immediately in hopes that I'll manage to produce at least one who's willing to take me in when I'm elderly. He's at a good facility and gets good care, but every resident I saw was giving off waves of profound loneliness and it was very distressing.

I had told my mom that I needed help with some sewing. My mother sews extremely well. She used to make things for herself like fully lined suits with welted pockets and always matched patterns at the seams and does all of the technical stuff beautifully. She also is very good at figuring out what directions are trying to tell you to do. I had brought the two dresses I'd cut out with me so Mom could help me figure out what I was doing. That whole mishegas deserves, and will get, a post all its own.

Saturday night, Mom and I went to dinner at the fancy-pants restaurant where my brother is sous-chef. I'd been to the bar side before, but never the schmancy side, and it was outstanding. It's the kind of restaurant I tend not to go to, where the platings are works of art—things balance on other things and most of the items are not in their original shapes—and the flavors tend toward experimental. Of course, being the mother and sister of the guy running the kitchen may have rated us slightly better service than the rest of the hoi polloi—I don't think every table gets complimentary champagne, for example—but I would definitely recommend it if you're in the area and feeling spendy (or with someone who is). I had the venison appetizer and the squab entree. I'd never had squab before, which is usually enough of a reason to try something, but my brother recommended it too and said it's his favorite thing on the menu now. It was not unlike duck, but more finely textured and much less oily. And the breasts were wee and adorable. The salad greens came wrapped in rice paper, like a hand roll. I would have taken photos of all of the food, but the owner could see us from where he was and it seemed slightly ... something. There was a green tea sorbet with Asian pears for dessert that was fantastic. Geoff has promised to send me the recipe but gmail has been down for the last couple of days and I haven't been able to check my email to see if he has yet.

Then yesterday, I went on a hike with my dad. We hiked in to Race Brook Falls.

That route is beautiful and a fairly challenging, if short, hike on its own—a lot of it is pretty steep—but it's also an access trail to the Appalachian Trail. We turned onto the AT and hiked up the the top of Mt. Everett. This write-up mentions that you feel like you're on a much higher mountain when you get to the top, and it's true. The vegetation in particular really changes as you approach the top and you go from this:

and this:

That's my dad. (You know, that or His Dadness or Dadder or El Daderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing.)

to this:

and this:

It's hard to tell, but none of those trees are taller than my waist. They really take a lot of weather abuse at the top. We did the 12-mile round trip in under five hours, even with a short lunch break and a lot of water breaks, so we were pretty pleased with ourselves. Everything we'd read said to plan 5-7 hours if you're in decent shape. I miss hiking regularly. I need to figure out how I can fit it in more often.

Quite possibly the most delicious thing on the planet

You know how sometimes you think to yourself, "you know, self, I'd like to make something that uses a ridiculous amount of butter, but I've been eating so much sugar lately that I don't want anything sweet,"? These tartlets are what to make. They're absurdly good, really knock-your-socks-off delicious. They're good hot, cold or room temperature. They're sturdy enough to pick up and eat with your hands. They make me want to go on a picnic, though I'm pretty sure I'm just going to hole up in my room and watch a movie. The recipe is from this book, which always cracks me up because of the line on the cover, "These are the 1,400 recipes that I like to cook." How many do you have to try before you find your 1,400 favorites, I wonder?

Deborah Madison's Tomato Tartlets

Galette Dough
2 c. flour (you can use either all-purpose or whole wheat or a combination. this is all unbleached regular)
1/2 t. salt
12 T cold, unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1/3-1/2 c. ice water

Mix flour and salt together (if you're using the dough with a sweet filling, add 1 T. sugar). Cut butter in by hand, leaving some pea-sized pieces. (I *love* to do this. I can't explain why.) Sprinkle the ice water over by the tablespoonful and toss until you can bring the dough together into a ball. Press it into a disc and refrigerate for 15 minutes.

Tartlets
2 T. finely chopped rosemary (I always end up using more.)
1 lb. tomatoes, sliced (forgive me foodies, for I have sinned. I didn't buy heirloom tomatoes from the farmer's market and just used blah plum tomatoes from the greengrocer.)
18 nicoise olives, pitted and halved (I bought pitted kalamatas and didn't count them. it looked like 1/3 c. or so once they were chopped.)
olive oil

Preheat the over to 425 degrees. Divide dough into 6 equal parts and roll unto a circle 1/8" thick (or, you know, whatever). Sprinkle 1/2 t. rosemary over each circle and gently roll into the dough. Overlap 5 or 6 slices of tomato on each round, leaving a 1" border around the edge. (I think closer to 2" is much easier to handle.) Tuck in the olives, sprinkle more rosemary on top and drizzle with olive oil. Fold the edges of the dough over the tomatoes, creasing every inch or so. Brush the tops with olive oil. Bake until crust in golden, 20-25 minutes.

I can't possibly exaggerate how good these are. I love them. Every time I make them, I think about other fillings that would be good in tartlet form (sauteed mushrooms, for example, or bitter greens flavored with a little bit of hot sausage, or potatoes and bacon, or carmelized onions and spinach) but I haven't gotten around to trying any of them. These are just too good.

The bitter muffins of distrust

After I posted at oh-dark-thirty this morning and mentioned muffins, I thought to myself, "Self, you might as well bake some muffins. What the hell else are you going to do with yourself?" So I went through my recipe books to find something I could make with what I had onhand: not as easy as I thought it would be. I decided on the Christmas Morning Muffins from How to Be a Domestic Goddess, substituting some frozen mixed berries for the dried cranberries in the recipe. I was mixing merrily along, headphones in to avoid waking anyone up, when I came to the rather alarming amount of baking powder: 3 teaspoons. For 12 muffins. When there was also a teaspoon of baking soda.

To my shame, I used the amount called for. I figured there had to be some good reason for it. And the muffins taste bitter and metallic, like baking powder, of course. Because that's an insane amount of baking powder for that amount of batter. I'm calling it a lesson in trusting my instincts and moving on.

Nightwatchgirl

Back when I was a wee pup in my early 20s, I used to have brutal insomnia. At least once a month I'd have a night or two when I just wouldn't sleep. I had a couple of years where I only slept a few hours a night and I had trouble both getting to sleep and staying asleep for very long. (I come by it naturally—my dad's the same way.) Luckily, those years coincided with the period of time when I got really into knitting and spinning, so at least I had something to do that didn't disturb the neighbors, and I had some good local bars where I could wander in in my pajamas and play Trivial Pursuit with the bartenders into the wee hours if I got sick of my own company.

I've been on a relatively normal, 6–8 hours-while-it's-dark sleep schedule for a while now, but once in a while I'll have one of these nights where I don't sleep. I figure it's just the way I'm wired and try to enjoy it. I like being up and prowling around when everyone else around is asleep. It makes me feel like I'm looking out for them, for my roommates in particular and the neighborhood and rest of the world in general, and I feel all warm and affectionate and Nothing Is Going To Happen To You On My Watch and earth-mothery, like maybe I'll make a batch of muffins or homemade granola to have ready for breakfast. It's nice here at 4 in the morning. The kids across the street are quiet for once (don't even get me started), there's no traffic right now, nobody yelling outside my window for no particular reason, no kids from the daycare downstairs shrieking outside the back window, the mouse has been captured so I don't have to worry about that...

The Great Mousaccre happened this morning before I got up. I had been really opposed to using glue traps (on grounds that they're mean) and made the roommate on mouse detail promise that he would dispatch it quickly when the time came.  It did, and he did, and I can't begin to describe how grateful I am that I didn't have to do it. I would have done it if I had to, but I can't imagine any scenario that wouldn't have had me sitting on the floor sobbing, followed by some Lady-Macbeth-level handwashing and possibly a stint volunteering for whatever mouse-centric charity groups I could find. I had already agreed to fix some seams in a pair of his jeans today, but added this to the back pocket to mark the occasion. The embroidery floss is a much darker grey than it appears in the picture, almost the same tone as the denim.

Nothing like a little gallows humor to perk a girl up.

I went to a party tonight to celebrate the release of a book my friend Elyssa did with Sandy Black (yes, that Sandy Black). I'm so proud of her. It's a huge accomplishment and the book is beautiful. I couldn't fit my camera into the bag I brought with me (black beaded vintage clutch; lovely but small) so no pictures. It was at the kind of super-swank place that I would never in a million years think about actually going into on my own speed, so that was fun. I got to see a bunch of friends from grad school I haven't seen in a while, heard that a bunch of them read the blog (hi!), managed to get a couple of drinks before the open bar shut down, and did some kickass people-watching (new motto: it's not really a party until there's a guy in a corset). (related: best line to make new friends: "do you know who the guy in the corset is?")

I did end up making pear sorbet yesterday. It's good, subtle but refreshing. And really easy. I'm especially proud of it because I made it up. I'm certainly not taking credit for the idea, but it's the first time using the ice cream maker that I made something without following a recipe and I'm happy with the result.

Pear Sorbet

3 c. pear juice
1/4 c. sugar
juice of two lemons
zest of one lemon
15 oz. can of pears in juice, chopped into pieces about the size of chocolate chips

Heat some of the juice with the sugar until it's dissolved. Mixture with the rest of the juice, the lemon juice and the zest. Chill. Freeze in the ice cream maker and, right before it's done, add the pears.

Also, I had dinner at my friend Erin's over the weekend and one of the things she made (in addition to some tasty chicken and roasted asparagus) was a beautiful, delicious, surprising salad of peaches, fresh mozzarella and basil, with a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I'm making a yummy sound (just watched Young Frankenstein) just thinking about it.

Make a better chocolate ice cream and the world will beat a path to your door.

When Nigella calls something the best, I trust her. Still, I wasn't quite prepared for just HOW good "The World's Best Chocolate Ice Cream" (How to Eat p. 34) is. She writes that Marcella Hazan got the recipe for "Cipriani's dark and smokily voluptuous" [note: swoon] version and included it in Marcella's Italian Kitchen. It's intensely chocolately, but not at all cloying. Because there's no cream, the texture is very clean, almost like sorbet. I haven't liked chocolate sorbets because you (or, at least I) get that rasping effect at the back of the throat from the cocoa. This is just perfect. The milk is creamy enough to hold the cocoa in check without masking it.

The World's Best Chocolate Ice Cream

4 egg yolks
2/3 c. plus 2 T sugar
2 c. milk
3 1/2 oz. semisweet chocolate
1/2 c. unsweetened cocoa, best available (I used Droste and misread the directions, only using 1/4 c. I don't think I'd use more; it was perfect)

Whisk the yolks and 2/3 c. of the sugar in a bowl until thick and creamy. Bring the milk to a boil and add to the beaten yolks, pouring slowly and beating all the while. Melt the chocolate and whisk this, followed by the cocoa, into the eggs and milk. Pour the chocolate mixture into a pan and cook on low, stirring with a wooden spoon, until everything is smooth and amalgamated and beginning to thicken. (She adds that you don't need to cook it until it's really custardlike. I just heated it until it was just under a boil.)

Put 2 T sugar with 2 t water (I forgot the water) into a saucepan and turn the heat to high. Heat until it's dark brown and molten. "Live dangerously here; you are after the taste of burnt sugar." Whisk into the chocolate custard. Cool and chill the mixture, then freeze in the ice cream maker.

I had made a batch of this caramel sauce to go with it, thinking they were natural partners because of the burnt sugar in the ice cream, but it really doesn't need anything. The flavors actually fought with each other instead of enhancing each other, which was extremely weird but hard to deny. The sauce itself is good though. And I have a ton of it.

And speaking of things that are in the kitchen (nice segue, Klose!), we have a mouse. I'm assuming we have one mouse. I've only seen one. I'm choosing to believe that he's sort of an explorer and not really a resident. We're making sure to clean up all crumbs and we put traps down yesterday, both the old-school ones and some newfangled plastic things that somehow trap and kill the mouse without you ever having to see the corpse. It all just makes me sad though. I wish it would just go away and not come back. I grew up in the country; I'm well familiar with mice in the house, but there was a sense of order in it then. When it was warm out, the mice lived outside. When it was cold, they came into the house, and who could fault them for that, really? You couldn't let them stay, of course, but you understood. They were just trying to survive. These city mice, though, seem so unwholesome. It's nice out, there's plenty of food out there. What kind of lazy, unnatural mouse needs to be in my kitchen now? Killing it just makes evolutionary sense, really: Darwinian justice.

I had started thinking of it as Ralph, after the Mouse and the Motorcycle, and was afraid that I would have trouble killing it after giving it a name. When I saw it skulking around last night though, my first thought was "ew!," not "oh, there's Ralph," so my emotional scarring should be kept at a minimum.

The word I'm looking for definitely isn't 'ambivalent'...

..but I'm not sure I know what it is. Is there a word for simultaneously feeling both admiration and revulsion for something like, say, a book?

The book tells the story of this woman, Julie, who decides to teach herself to cook by spending a year cooking every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. This is the admiration part. I think that's just brilliant. It's the kind of quirky, insane quest that makes me fall madly in love with the person doing the questing and extremely jealous that I didn't think of doing it myself first.

Except.

Except.

Except that I kind of hated Julie. Every detail that she revealed about herself made me revile her more. Her constant bitching about "Pushing 30" (and, yes, she capitalizes it like that every time) and not especially liking her job. That she calls her blog readers "bleaders." The way she snipes at the husband who, having read the book, I can only describe as long-suffering and possibly also paying for some extraordinary cruelties he committed in a past life. The way she breaks down and starts screaming at people when things don't go perfectly. The fact that she can't seem to mention her apartment or kitchen without the qualifier "outer-borough" in front of it. The way she had to point out every time she mentioned an obscure cooking term that it reminded her of something sexual. (We get it, you still like sex even though you're Pushing 30. You're my hero.)

I tried to paraphrase this passage, but I think it's best reproduced in its entirety:
"...I knew there'd been a bombing of an American civilian compound in Riyadh. See, Eric has an aunt in Saudi Arabia; he couldn't quite remember what city, though... Eric had been glued to the television all evening. but the news was annoyingly saying nothing at all about the bombing. He'd been making calls all evening—to his mom, his brother, his cousins—but disturbingly, no one was picking up. I knew all this, and yet I screamed and sobbed and threw utensils as if Sauce Tartare was the only thing that mattered, as if Sauce Tartare was more important than family, than death, than war."

Screaming and sobbing and throwing utensils over a sauce that's not coming together while her husband waits to see if his aunt has been killed? Who is this person and why hasn't anyone just hauled off and cracked her across the jaw yet? Has it never penetrated her self-centered bubble that there are literally millions of women who are almost or—horrors!—over thirty and have less-than-fulfilling work situations and still manage to get through the day without being complete assholes, even without their high school sweetheart around to do the dishes?

This was one of those books where I found myself talking back to the writer and what I was saying most of the time was oh, boo fucking hoo. While rolling my eyes. And wondering why I didn't just stop reading the book if I pissed me off so much.

I stuck with it for the food writing, which was okay but sort of beside the point what with all the everything else going on. I did sympathize with her trauma over killing lobsters. I've done it and when you get to that point, it's really, really hard to put a living creature into a pot of boiling water, even if you had thought about it a lot ahead of time and steeled yourself. (She made her husband do it.) And I had a good schadenfreude moment toward the end when someone interviews Julia Child and she says something not especially flattering about Julie, who screamed and sobbed about it, of course. Also, I've started and discarded a bunch of books recently—Self-Made Man (annoyed by author's "hey I'm amazed to find that these blue-collar guys aren't total dicks" shtick), The Omnivore's Dilemma (one-week limit at library, spent too much time bogged down in section about laws governing subsidies paid to corn farmers and ran out of time), Assassination Vacation (am heartbroken to discover that even when Sarah Vowell—who I LOVE—is writing about it, I don't really care about the nitty-gritty of presidential assassinations), etc.—and I wanted to actually finish a book I started.

Speaking of food writing, an old friend was telling me yesterday about all of the incredible food he ate on his recent honeymoon. He said it almost made him want to learn to hunt so he could catch his own ducks and rabbits and make his own wild game pates and whatever else from scratch. I told him that he should do it and start a blog about it, for the love of our extremely long friendship and anything else he happens to hold dear, because a blog about a smarty-pants English teacher learning to hunt, butcher and cook wild game is something I would really love to read. It'd be like a cross between a less-political Michael Pollan with a Julie Powell I don't want to strangle.

After I finished the book this afternoon, I made myself a batch of crepes to celebrate not being a hysterical freak who says mean things to people who care about me when I screw stuff up. Yay! Crepe batter is pretty simple. Whisk together 1 c. flour, a pinch of salt and 2 1/14 c. milk. Beat in 2 eggs, followed by 2 T melted-but-not-super-hot butter. Use a 1/4 c. measuring cup to mete out the batter for each crepe.

I like this picture because you can see the measuring cup sinking into the batter like a mastodon into a tar pit. Obviously, I don't worry too much about getting rid of all of the tiny flour lumps and you don't notice them in the finished dish. Ditto on whether the crepe is actually, technically round. (and the obsessive hausfrau in me would like to point out the the stove isn't actually filthy, just old and needing to be painted. thank you.)

I always forget to count how many I end up with, but it's enough for two people to eat for brunch with no room for anything else. If you make them for yourself, they'll keep in the fridge for a couple of days. Now, I have very strong feelings about what to fill crepes with. Savory fillings seen weird to me somehow. I'm sure I could be won over if someone made them for me, but I wouldn't do it myself. I don't like crepes with chocolate fillings. When I've been lucky enough to be eating crepes on the street in Paris, I've enjoyed both chestnut and Grand Marnier fillings, but I don't do those at home. There are people who feel very strongly that the best way to eat crepes is with fresh lemon juice and a little sugar. They are wise, these people, because that is extremely delicious, but it's still not quite right. This is the best way to eat crepes.

A very thin smear of sour cream on one side and a very thin smear of jam on the other. There should be little enough filling that you can eat with your hands without any oozing out, if you like. Roll the crepe parallel to the filling so you'll get cream and jam in each bite. If I'm making these for other people, I'll make them all ahead of time. If it's just me, I fill them as I go. If I'm making them for people I want to pamper, impress and/or fatten up for some reason, I'll put all of the filled crepes in a baking dish, pour heavy cream over, sprinkle with cinnamon and warm through in the oven.

Holy batwings, batman!

I've finally gotten to the point where I've divided for the sleeves and body on the black jacket.

The fabric drapes pretty well, so the  sleeves don't jut out like that. They actually hang pretty well already and will be even better once the fabric is washed. My thinking on where the sleeves go from here has been evolving though. My original plan was to just pinch the sleeves together at the armhole, like so:

There's something about this effect that I really like. However, I started thinking about how cool a contrasting hem facing would be. You can see the interior of the sleeve pretty clearly and I wanted to have something there that wasn't just the wrong side of the fabric. I have some shiny, smooth-spun cobalt mohair from Brooks Farm that would be ideal. In that case, the pinched-armhole trick wouldn't really work, because there won't be anywhere to tack the hem facing in that part of the sleeve. So I stopped the sleeves 2" before the length that I want them and will knit down 2" from the division point before doing the hem facing. That way I'll  have room to sew the facing down without being interrupted by the divide with the body, whether or not the facing itself is contrasting. I'm not sure anymore whether I actually want to introduce another color, since that would limit what I could wear this with.

And then I remembered this completely gorgeous sweater that I saw on the Sartorialist a few months ago (I wish homeboy would rig his site so you could link to specific images, but he hasn't) and now I'm thinking that I should do something like this, a modern, elegant take on the gigot sleeve. The proportions on mine would be different and I wouldn't bother with buttons on the cuff, but I think that the effect is just so pretty.

I have time to think about it—I'm not going to worry about the sleeves until I'm done with the body and I'm not interested in working with wool/mohair yarn for more than ten minutes these days. Maybe something else will occur to me in the meantime.

Blackcurrent Sorbet

I'm not making much of anything these days, other than food. Chalk it up to the weather, general no-job-having malaise, reaching some unforeseen saturation point...who knows? It's a good thing I'm still interested in preparing stuff to eat. Otherwise, I don't know what I'd be writing about—how much I don't feel like cleaning the apartment despite being increasingly icked out by it and/or more personal stuff than I'm really interested in having available to the general public, probably.

Taking a break from the all-Nigella-all-the-time party that's it's been around here lately, I made some tasty blackcurrent sorbet yesterday from this recipe. The Looza juices are easy to find around here and relatively cheap and I had some creme de cassis left over from some long-ago kir royales. I forgot to buy corn syrup, but I looked up a bunch of other sorbet recipes and most of them didn't include it. I think it would have made for a more voluptuous texture, the way it changes chocolate sauce into hot fudge, but it's still good (and so pretty!) without it. I try to avoid buying food sweetened with corn syrup (for these sorts of reasons), but I'm okay with using it sparingly in this way. The sorbet tastes—and this is a huge compliment coming from me—exactly like a Welch's grape juice popsicle. I bought some pear juice to try next. I can't really justify eating all the cream and egg yolks in regular ice cream on a daily basis but sorbet is practically fruit. Between Looza at the grocery store and everything at Trader Joe's, I predict that I will be making a lot of sorbet this summer.

Fake Vietnamese Chicken and Glass Noodle Salad

[Note: When I just read this post over before saving it, I realized that it sounds like I'm complaining an awful lot. That's not true. There is definitely some room for improvement the next time I make it, but I really did like it. If I didn't, there wouldn't be a next time.]

I used Nigella Lawson's Vietnamese and Glass Noodle Salad recipe from Feast as the jumping-off point for this, but I played around with it a fair bit. She recommends it as a way to use up leftover turkey, but that's not the kind of thing I tend to have around, say, ever, so I poached a couple of chicken breasts instead. The next time I make this, I'm not sure I'll poach the chicken and will probably just bake it instead. I think it actually made it too tender; after soaking in the lime-heavy marinade, the structure of the meat broke down to be almost like canned tuna. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just a little disconcerting.

Dressing:
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 t. crushed red pepper flakes (she calls for fresh chilis, but the grocery store didn't have red ones. Next time, I'll use a full teaspoon--I wouldn't mind more heat.)
2 T finely minced ginger (I didn't measure, just grated a piece the size of my thumb. It could have used more ginger.)
4 T fish sauce (nam pla)
juice of 1 lime (I zested half of the lime too. I love lime.)
4 T water
2 T sugar (I'll probably use brown sugar next time. That sounds nice.)

Salad
cold chicken (she calls for 8 oz. of leftover turkey; I bought a little over a pound of bone-in, skinless chicken breast and assume I ended up with roughly 8 oz of meat)
6 oz. beanthread or glass noodles
8 oz. snow peas (she calls for 4 oz. of sugar-snap peas, but the store didn't have any. I doubled the amount because I just really like peas.)
1/3 of a head a cabbage, chopped (she calls for 2 c. of bean sprouts, which I hate. They're so watery and pointless. At least with cabbage, there's some flavor and a nutrient or two.) (I actually have no idea about the nutritional profile of bean sprouts. I just don't like them.)
3 scallions, sliced into thin circles
2 t. peanut oil
1 t. sesame oil
(she also calls for 1/2 c. chopped cilantro, but I don't like that either and didn't bother substituting anything for it.)

To make the dressing, mix all ingredients together.

To make the salad, marinate the chicken in enough dressing to soak it. Fix the noodles according to the package, drain and rinse with cold water until cool. I lifted the noodles out of the water with tongs and blanched the peas in the same water, but that's just because I was feeling too lazy to boil more. Mix all ingredients together, dress with the oils and a few tablespoons more dressing and chill. I had some lukewarm last night, but it was really better cold this morning.

Inspiration

How much do I love these socks? Enough to start researching solid color sock yarn, for starters.