Experiment

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Frog

The better-half left for Oklahoma on Sunday afternoon. He’s scheduled to be back on Friday. I thought I’d write something every day that he’s gone and then publish on Friday. If you are reading this, then I decided to go on with it, obviously.

Monday started off drizzly and I decided to weed whack and began cutting the grass. I usually cut with the push mower around the house and in certain spots around the yard that need a more delicate hand than the riding mower. I was cutting the area around the porch when I got stung by a yellow jacket. I am not fond of that feeling. I slowly backed away from the nest and then took the lawn mower back to the shed. It started raining and so I quit worrying with that chore. I poured some bleach down the nest hole and covered it up. There were still a lot of yellow jackets hanging around so I went in to shower and take an antihistamine for the bite. I slept for two hours in the middle of the day thanks to that pill. At least the bite on my leg is hardly noticeable. But I suspect itching in my future. I uncovered the nest later in the day so the remaining hornets could come home. Then I dosed the nest again with bleach and covered it back up. I know…all god’s creatures blah, blah, blah. I am going Keyser Söze on them and that’s just the way it is.

I finished cutting the grass on Tuesday morning. I also put the mega-smackdown on the yellow jackets since some survived the night. I covered the nest again and will check on their death progress Wednesday. I can tell you the spot on my leg is red, itchy and hot to the touch. I really hope those damn bees are dead.

I went by the library before I met my mother for lunch. There was a kid event going on and parking was pretty limited. I wonder if when the library was designed if they had any idea it would be so popular because the size of the parking lot makes me think they thought no one was interested in reading. I checked out two books by authors I was interested in, but I didn’t get the books I went in for-does that make sense? I’ve been making a list and the library didn’t have either of the books I wanted so I checked out other titles by the same authors. As an aside, I’m pretty disappointed in their e-book selection. Either they just don’t have much outside of the bodice ripper in their portfolio or I just don’t know how to find what I’m looking for. I did read Alice in Zombieland as an e-book. It was pretty well done considering the subject.

After having lunch with my mother, I bought several cans of spray paint because in addition to painting the porch and refinishing the floor, I decided our table set needed updating. I think we’ve owned that set for 10 years and it had taken on some rust. The chairs look great and my feet are a very dark shade of green. That’s what I get for wearing my pool shoes while painting. I guess it was a better choice than using the “chores” sneakers. At any rate, the table will have to wait until the better-half gets home and can help me pull the table out into the yard for a round of spraying.

Wednesday morning started at 4 am because Jim finally woke up and jumped off the blanket chest in the bedroom. The chest is old and creaky so it’s very obvious when a cat jumps off it. Jim came in Tuesday night around 10:30 and immediately got into his bed. I’m not sure where he went after he jumped off the blanket chest, but I got up and took an antihistamine because the damn bee sting was driving me crazy. So the pill, naturally, made me very dopey at 7am when Jim jumped on the bed and demanded that I get up to let him out. Lucy and Simon were both on the bed and behaving so it was a real shame that someone had demands.

Wednesday morning I googled yellow jacket stings and as I clicked the go find it button I said a little prayer that I wouldn’t see gross sting pictures. Whatever you do, don’t look up spider bites. Consider yourself warned. Anyway, what I found on the intertubes is that basically I’m not going to die (duh) and that my leg should start feeling better a few days after the bite (hello, it’s a full 2 days since the raid on my leg). My delicate constitution is apparently more delicate than I thought because by Wednesday afternoon I was resting a cold pack on the bite. Wha! Make it stop itching and burning. At least the yellow jackets are well and truly dead.

I found Niece 2 a birthday present that I think she’ll like. Can you believe she’s going to be six later this month? Seems like yesterday that I flew her through the airport like a mini-airplane when I first met her.

Just a couple of more random items for Wednesday: the porch ceiling paint job is complete. I threw away the roller without cleaning it. So there. Also, when I let Lucy in from the porch around 9:45pm she immediately went to a corner of the family room and licked the wall. No idea what that was all about, but I decided to fill up the water bowl with fresh water in case she needed to get the taste of dusty baseboard out of her mouth.

Thursday morning I walked into the kitchen and realized all the downstairs windows were fogged up because of how ungodly high the humidity was outside. The news says we’re in a heat wave, but it’s just summer in Virginia. A few nice days sprinkled in and the rest of the season full of just miserable, humid, hot and ozone-warning days.

The better-half turned forty-five today. I left him a voicemail message early my time and he called around 8 EST to talk. He’s in the middle of BFE, Oklahoma and so we mostly talked about how much the food sucks and how he needs to find something nice for dinner because he’s sick of crap. We looked over a BBQ menu and I think that’s the plan for his birthday dinner.

I have plans for his return home dinner and will be working on the okra, hot pepper and corn meal cakes tonight from this book. I’m also going to make the green beans with peaches recipe assuming I can find fresh peaches tomorrow when I go out. Seems like a strange combination but the recipe is more green bean salad than cooked-to-death green bean casserole.

Speaking of green beans, the beans in our garden do not please the better-half. They seem too tough to him so I’m going to let them dry and they’ll go back to being small red beans from whence they came. It’s interesting when you open the pod, there’s a tiny bit of pink at the top of the bean. I suppose, and we’ll see, that the rest of the bean will turn red as they age. The mystery squash in the compost continues to work on its fruit. I watered it yesterday (so weird watering the compost pile) and there are lots of whatever it is on the vine. I hope they survive.

The cornmeal cakes push all of my happy buttons. I hope they’ll reheat well and that the better-half will like them. QA says they are pretty tasty:

And, to wrap up the day–the organization that I volunteered my time to in May has finally gotten back to me. I’ll be working on an online training module and I get to work with two people I know. One person I know personally and the other I know virtually. Is it still virtually if you’ve Skype’d each other and exchanged email? We’ve never met in person is what I’m saying.

This morning (Friday) I woke up with Lucy getting nuts on the bed. I’m a side sleeper so allow me to explain how uncomfortable it is to have Simon stand on my ribs and poke his feet into my bones. Very uncomfortable. Lucy’s stick toy was laying where the better-half should be. By the time I actually got out of bed, Lucy was rolled up like a burrito in the little rug at the foot of the bed. I need breakfast, perhaps a quick stint on the treadmill, and then I’m off to gather ingredients for the welcome home dinner.

Update to Friday: thanks to hella storm the better-half’s plane had to land elsewhere. He’s stranded until the weather clears up and I’m going to go cook the mussels since we have plans tomorrow night. No idea when he’ll get home. Fuxored.

Movies watched:
Hugo
Kick-Ass
Killer Elite
Big Night (the last scene was remarkably shot)
Cowboys & Aliens (big stupid movie but it has Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, M-E-O-W)
Began the series Survivors (BBC production, cancelled after 2 seasons)

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Garden Update

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Frog

I had an idea to update on the status of the garden so I took my cell out onto the porch to head out to the garden spot. I dropped the phone. It went end over end and my quick hands (really) couldn’t save the phone. As soon as it thundered on the floor, I thought about how happy the better-half would be that I killed the phone. Ha! The rubber bumper I have on it saved the day and I’ll just wait until later this year to upgrade. The better-half will, undoubtedly, be sad that I didn’t drop it on concrete or into the pool. He hates both of our phones with the power of a thousand suns. I dislike my phone too and we are patiently waiting for the day we can upgrade. The Droids have been fine, but the things are old and thanks to Verizon not giving a crap about old technology they haven’t updated with any sort of frequency and so the software sucks. But, hey, you can drop it on a porch floor and then take crappy pictures. Bonus.

Well, the garden hasn’t failed spectacularly. At least not yet. Some crows picked our first two tomatoes and the bastards didn’t even finish eating them. I netted the tomatoes and hope that the recent rain, fertilizer and upcoming sunny days will do some botanical magic.

I’m not sure you can see the nets, but there are two around the five plants. The plants are healthy but they need to start producing.

Here’s the overgrown lettuce. We’ve been eating a lot of salad which makes me feel virtuous and very special. Walking to the garden to get food is freaking awesome. I’m sure the lettuce will be done in a few weeks because of the coming heat.

The herbs are beginning to really bust out. I made tabbouleh yesterday and used a mix of parsley, basil and mint (the mint bed is near the porch and is insane as most mint beds are):

This is the row of eggplants and peppers. The peppers are coming along nicely and we’ll be eating Fresnos in a couple of weeks. The eggplants have begun to bloom and with the coming heat I’m sure we’ll be eating a lot of eggplant. Too bad the better-half is not a fan. More for me.

Remember I told you that I thought the beans I transplanted out of the compost were going to be bush beans? Yeah, I lied. I drove in posts and strung up a trellis today. I used one of these things and, let me tell you, I’m pretty impressed that the exercises I’ve been doing for my shoulders and to strengthen my bum elbow have an additional benefit. Bad-assery with driving posts.

We’re having beans for dinner tonight. They were originally a bag of small red beans when they went into the compost. We’ll see how they taste green. I added two cucumbers to the row of beans and they are doing well. One is blooming like crazy and the other got the chat today. The chat of “you’d better start blooming or else I’ll continue to run you down on the internet”.

Black raspberries, heard of them? Smaller and more tart than the regular red raspberry. I kind of dig them:

The blackberries have gone nuts. I think they liked being trimmed because that just made them stronger and nearly as crazy as the mint bed. The good news is that I think we’ll have fruit for another month or so. We have some that are ripe, some that are still green and some that are still blooms. Booya!

Because I took a picture of Simon the last time I talked about the garden, here he is coming over for some love:

And, now the mystery squash. I have no idea what squash we ate over the winter and I tossed into the compost pile. Maybe acorn? I can’t wait to see what happens over the next few weeks:

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Hanging out

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Frog

This month we give up the apartment in the college town. On one hand we are so over paying rent and utilities and on the other we’re really going to miss being able to hang out here.

This weekend we’re hanging out with good friends at the college town and we have no plans for how we are going to spend our time today. In typical fashion, we know where we are having dinner, but beyond that the day’s direction is wide open.

I know we will have a good time and without sounding too sentimental we should embrace this day of “who knows what will happen” because the next time we’re here it’s moving day. Ugh.

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We went to a k.d. lang show last night

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Frog

I was hoping she’d do this one and she did (luckily the drunk man-child behind us was stifled during the middle of this piece):

She also did a kicking version of this:

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Butter, there is no other

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Frog

We’ve been taking a fermentation class online every Tuesday night. Last week we made a fermented ketchup and it’s pretty good. It needs some vinegar and perhaps a little more sweetener to calm down how tomatoey it is. We started with two cups of tomato paste so you can, perhaps, understand why we want to calm down the tomato flavor.

Yesterday we made butter. The common theme so far in making ketchup and butter is that you mix things together and then let them sit for hours at room temperature so that beneficial bacteria will grow and ferment. We’ve used a starter each time since we don’t have a live culture (yet). And, by letting it sit for hours means 4 days for the ketchup and 18 hours for the milk combination. Yes, letting milk sit out for 18 hours was weird. We ended up putting it on top of the refrigerator for the last 8 hours because we figured that was the warmest spot in our kitchen.

Let’s get to the pictures, shall we?

Here’s an action shot. The milk was a little chunky:

In the video for our lesson, the instructor’s milk was much more chunky than ours. We used ultra-pasteurized heavy cream because that is what I could find at the grocery store in the quantity that we needed. Our instructor wants us to source raw milk. Maybe we’ll do that–over the weekend someone told us about a possible lead. I’m not holding my breath.

Stiff peaks formed pretty easily:

And, then the milk started to fly and we had to hold up a towel to stop milk from hurling itself all over the kitchen. This happened because the buttermilk separated from the butter solids and it happened QUICKLY (like OMG we just made butter!):

We drained the buttermilk off because we are wasteful, but honestly I’m not sure what we were going to do with it. We already have a container of commercial buttermilk in the refrigerator that will likely curdle into God knows what.

If you’ve ever made cheese, this step is pretty similar. You have to get the liquid out and so we looped the cheesecloth and squished the liquid out into the sink. Then we dumped it on the counter and saved a quarter of it as unsalted butter and then put sea salt in the remainder. We should have ground up the sea salt more as I bit into a bit of salt this morning while enjoying a piece of toast. Not that it was a bad thing, but a little distracting.

In the above picture, the butter was very soft, naturally. But this morning after a night in the refrigerator it came out of the container like you’d expect butter to behave after spending hours in the chill. We don’t use a lot of whipped butter, but I suppose this has that consistency. So far we’ve only had it spread on toast and it tastes like butter. I’m sure if we used raw milk it would be more grassy but this is pretty much what you’d expect: mild and a little salty.

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I can understand why women used to throw panties

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Frog

Tom Jones still sounds great:

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‘What is the use of a book’, thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Frog

Today I walked into our local library and signed up for a library card. The librarian asked me if I had ever had a library card with them. I said when I was about ten. I don’t think she believed me because she looked me up in the system. And, lo! I wasn’t in there. Yeah, I was ten in 1978. No one has that kind of archive.

The local branch isn’t very big but it is pretty and is laid out nicely. When I used the self-check and saw the return dates come up on the screen, I laughed to myself. I had forgotten what it is like to take out books from a regular library. I mean, it’s been awhile on my part (see the above paragraph). I’m used to taking books out of university libraries when you have either staff or graduate student privileges. In other words, you take them out for practically forever.

I’m most excited about the access to the e-library. I didn’t want to look like I was cruising for my fix so I did check out two physical books. I’ll probably do that on occasion in the future, because, as we all know, physical books are pretty awesome. E-books? Stellar. I didn’t think I’d be like that but it’s like sucking down a Slurpee and getting a brain freeze. It hurts so good and I can’t wait for the next brain freeze. I’ve had my iPad since May 11th and I’ve read four books so far. You can see why I needed to go with a free option. I told the better-half last night that I can’t transfer my $60/week lunch budget of my working life to a book-buying habit. The piddling amount of money I’m making now would not sustain this habit.

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The weekend

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Frog

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It’s not the first dip in the pool, but it is the first beautiful afternoon with a dip in the pool. As most of the east coast knows, we’ve been in a stormy state for the last week. Which basically means we’re wet, humid (two different things) and grumpy because we have to keep changing our shirts and keep applying ever more deodorant.

Today begins a long weekend and I hope to get a few projects taken care of before we have friends and family over for Memorial Day. I went nuts with the hose today and blasted off flaking paint. If nothing else gets done that needs to be taken care of before people show up.

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Really bad photos and a walk around the yard

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Frog

Yep, I took photos with my cell phone in some of the harshest light. Just for you. Because I’m too lazy to take the real camera outside and wait another hour for the sun to become softer.

The garden, appropriately marked:

I actually weeded, fertilized and watered yesterday. Really. Some of those weeds are still attached to their roots and others were severed with the stirrup hoe. They’ll die soon enough.

Our first tomato:

Those beans that I transplanted out of the compost appear to be bush beans and they are flowering:

Let’s look at the fruit, shall we?

Here are the blueberries from the plants that the better-half’s mother bought and had delivered to her house the same week she moved to assisted living. I mention this not to be mean (really), but to show that I’m not crazy when I say she has the ability to drive us insane at times. Anyway, these plants are actually producing fruit this year:

I ate this raspberry:

The blackberries will be here soon. We trimmed the heck out of the bramble this year and you can hardly tell. I think the blackberries liked the haircut:

Here are some baby grapes. I don’t know if these will be white or purple grapes. Last year they didn’t last long enough for us to see them ripen (we have both but I can’t remember which is which). I think if the grapes go south that I might grab some of these leaves for cooking:

As I came around the house, Jim meowed to me. When he realized I had the camera, he declined to show his face:

Simon can only be described as a grumpy old man who loves sitting in the shade of the maple tree:

Posted in Gardening, Generic Thoughts | 1 Comment

I broke the aioli

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Frog

Yesterday for dinner I roasted a chicken and decided it would be a great idea to serve it with some aioli (basically garlic mayo). I had all the ingredients and I’ve made it once before a thousand years ago. I used about 4 1/2 cloves of garlic which was the size of one of our homegrown heads. I say it was 4 1/2 cloves because one clove was pretty small, but Bittman says you can go as high as 8 cloves. The better-half said that’s what I should have done. It’s plenty garlicky as it is and I can truthfully say that I used a whole head of garlic.

I added the egg yolk and mustard to the blender and chopped the garlic. Everything was set and then like a MORON, I let the olive oil into the blender about 5,000 times too quickly and the sauce broke. Actually, I don’t know if it was ever emulsified appropriately to begin with. I remembered that another yolk would fix it and so threw one in. Yeah, the blender is too FREAKIN’ fast for aioli.

I searched the intertubes for an answer and found this. I put a new egg yolk into a bowl and got out a whisk. I slowly poured the broken aioli into the bowl and whisked efficiently. Which basically means that I paid attention this time and damn that sauce came right back together. It was delicious with the chicken last night and I can’t wait to make a sandwich with the leftovers and slather the bread with that aioli. There will be magic in the kitchen.

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