When all else fails, try killing everyone with toxic fumes!

Sooooooooooo…Tuesday morning, I tried to murder everyone in the house with poison gas.

True story.

SEE, what happened was, I had cleared out a bunch of way-too-old jars of food from the old pantry – you know, the home canned kind.

Which meant that I had a ton of those Tattler reusable jar lids and gaskets that needed to be cleaned. And the way I usually do that is to plop them into a saucepan of boiling water for 3-5 minutes.

So on my lunch break Tuesday, I dumped them into a saucepan and put them on the stove and carried on reloading the dishwasher. (You already see where this is going.)

I only had a somewhat tiny window on that deal, because frankly I have been not only in back to back meetings since about mid-September, but back to back intense meetings where I have had to be (ahem) rather vocal about what was being talked about, because there is a lot of Crazy going on lately, and the Mandates™ are coming from places that neither know nor care about how those Mandates™ are going to impact what we do, because what we do is very a-typical of what most applications in Wholesale do, and, well…we’re a round peg, we just don’t fit into square holes.

For bonus points, we’re one of those round pegs that support an awful lot of external structures. If we trip over our own shoelaces, we can potentially pull down nine other applications as we fall, and give literally tens of thousands of users across all those applications skinned knees and bloody noses.

Which, you know: Not on MY watch, dude.

Soooooo, yeah. I’m a bit protective of our little patch, and take a very dim view of people who have no idea what they’re doing tugging on the loom upon which our tangled web is woven all willy-nilly. And not skipping any of those meetings, because that’s always when they try to just casually slip something I’ve already flicked off the table back onto everybody’s plates.

But then as I was wildly shoving dirty plates in the general direction of the dishwasher, I got a text message from one of the kids saying she was ready to be picked up, and, knowing that my next meeting was starting too-shortly thereafter, I naturally immediately dropped everything, grabbed my keys and ran out the door.

Then came skidding back through the door two seconds before the next argument meeting was to start, and jumped straight into that and was fighting with someone within about three seconds flat and then I kinda-sorta completely forgot about the blasted canning lids and gaskets bubbling away on the stove…?

About 30-40 minutes of verbal sparring (“RULES!” “REALITY!” “RULES!” “REALITY!”) later, I hear the husband yelling “WHAT’S BURNING?!” from the other room, and then my brain went, “OH, that reminds me: You’ve got a bunch of plastic boiling on the stove, you might wanna go check on that.”

{face-palm}

Friends…there are no words for just how bad the fumes those hard plastic canning lids put out when they are, you know, on fire.

I’m not just talking about the smell (which for the record was incredibly awful), I’m talking fumes that even in the furthest reaches of the house were setting eyes watering, throats burning, and lungs protesting.

Definitely “get the heck outta the house, now” levels of bad.

Naturally, I did not just immediately vacate the house. hahahahahaha, no, silly, THAT would have been the SENSIBLE thing to do!

Instead I grabbed the now-very-offensive (and also spewing white clouds of toxins) pot and ran it out to the backyard, then ran through the house flipping on all the fans and slamming open all the windows, and then I scuttled out of the house to join my shivering family on the driveway.

…my eyes were watery for hours…

…but then again…it did get me out of meetings for a bit…

…hmmmmmm…

Yeah. At the end of all things?

…Worth it!…

(Not really. I’m still a bit mad at myself about it. But, nobody was actually hurt so I’m sure I’ll get over it. Just, geez, Me, of all the fool things to do, forgetting and letting the water boil away until the plastic was doing the boiling? Not your finest hour, honey…)

Logical reasoning is not always my forte

I like to think of myself as a mostly logical person, who makes decisions based more on math/science than emotion. That I am not easily suckered by things that are clearly trying to play on my feelings to trick me into paying way more than I need to for something that isn’t actually All That Special.

Then something comes along that laughs at that notion and points out that I am not as scientific as I want to believe I am.

Like, say, salt.

We’re not fancy people with highly-refined palates around here, so for most of the things that come out of our kitchen it honestly makes zero difference if you use Plain Old Mass-Produced or Super Fancy Hand-Harvested salt – nobody will turn their nose up at the plain-stuff, or even notice if you switch to the fancy-stuff.

So scientifically speaking, it’s a better deal for me to pick up my salt in 5 or 10 pound bags from Costco than to buy anything “fancy” for us.

Then this happened: A while ago, our weekly veggie delivery folks offered to add a little bag of smoked salt to our basket for an extra $7.

At first I was (predictably) all, “Pfffft, seriously? Smoked. Salt. For seven dollars. Just, wow. You know what? I have a smoker – I could totally make my own damned ‘smoked salt.’ Pffffffft. Whatever, guys.”

But at the same time, I was…intrigued. Just how much flavor would they actually be able to get into salt? What would it be like? Plus of course the smoker is really the husband’s domain, and neither of having any idea what ‘smoked salt’ is supposed to taste like, we’d probably do it all wrong and think we hated it…

So eventually my curiosity got the best of me, and I paid the extra seven bucks to add it to the weekly basket.

It was…amazing. I was smitten with this stuff. At first I just sprinkled it on steaks and such, but then in a moment of wild abandon – and knowing full well that it is meant to be used as a ‘finishing’ salt on things rather than as an ingredient – I used it in some mashed potatoes I was making. #Rebel

Oh. MY. Gahd.

So good. So good. The flavor was not so intense that it made the smashed spuds “weird” on their own, but intense enough that suddenly I had a side dish that didn’t end up as a bland, tasteless side dish for my BBQ roast.

Man, it was on after that. I started using it for all kinds of things. Rubs for meats. Broths for soups. Sprinkled on green beans. Mixed into a ‘basic’ vinaigrette salad dressing.

Pretty soon the little bag was empty, and I was all, “Oh well. It was fun while it lasted…” – but somehow, I found myself circling around the Jacobsen website looking for more of the stuff. Because it is like CRACK, y’all.

Man oh man. They have an awful lot of tempty things. Habanero infused salt. Truffle infused salt. And yes, the cherrywood-smoked salt.

But the tempty nature of their goods wasn’t what got me to take out my credit card and place an order.

What did was watching a couple of their videos about how they go about making their salts.

Dear Scientific Reasoning: You lose.

Dear Jacobsen: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. 

Sigh.

I am a class A-1 sucker for things like this. You show me a guy using a hand tool to scrape the newly-formed salt out of the evaporation bed into a bin to finish drying, and I am hooked. Same thing with candies, if I’m watching somebody laboriously hand-fold the taffy, I’m immediately shoving money at them.

And also making myself sick by shoveling the taffy into my face as fast as I can.

Scientifically speaking, I know that “table salt” is just NaCl – sodium-chloride. Whether it comes from the sea or a mine, whether it is generated by the ounce or the ton, it’s still the same basic chemical compound – what makes one salt taste different from another is actually “impurities,” trace minerals that are hitching a ride with the basic NaCl combination.

So by and large, whether you harvest it by hand from the Pacific Ocean or use an enormous machinated set of pumps and pipes to mine it up from underground deposits, if what you’re making is “plain white salt,” it’s going to be scientifically the same.

And I also know that I could totally make my own “infused” salts. C’mon. Have you MET me? Have you SEEN my pantry, with row after row of Mason jars full of homemade flavored vinegars, vanillas and so forth?!

But emotionally, I am completely enthralled by someplace like Jacobsen, a tiny little company only five years old that goes about getting salt from the Pacific Ocean basically exactly like I did back when I lived a lot closer to it…and had a lot more free time on my hands.

It gets me because I really enjoy that kind of work. Few things are more pleasurable than the feeling of doing something like that for yourself – sure, it’s hard work that nobody seems willing to do anymore, but to me it’s one of the best feelings in the world.

It’s physical. It’s primal. It makes you feel grounded somehow, and super competent at this whole living thing. It makes me feel as though the modern age doesn’t really own me – that I am a part of the same earth my ancestors walked.

And in these days when you look at something in the grocery store and have no idea where it came from, or what’s really in it, being able to say I am 100% certain there is NOTHING SCARY in that, because I made it with these hands is a surprisingly deep comfort.

Everything else may be going to hell, but at least I know that THIS MARINADE was made with 100% Real Things…therefore obviously, EVERYTHING is going to be ooooookayyyy…

Somehow, the idea of my salt being made that slow, labor-intensive way makes me…happy.

Not quite as happy as it would make me to do it my damned self, but, close.

Which makes the higher price tag worth it, even though scientifically speaking, that’s absolute nonsense.

Oh well – I guess it just proves that I’m still, you know, human. That there are things I value more than math, or money…that I’m not in too much danger of becoming a heartless, soulless machine who always does the best-for-my-bottom-line thing even if it isn’t the best thing for the emotional well-being of myself and others.

So I guess I’m OK with my occasional outbursts of irrational, unscientific decision making.

Yup.

Uh-huh.

Soooooooooooo…if Jacobsen could just get that comparatively-insanely-expensive jar of cherrywood-smoked salt here, like, now-ish, that’d be greaaaaaaaaaat…

(Seriously. It is like crack. But, you know, in a good way.)

Keeping my eyes peeled

Soooooooo, it’s apple season and I’m cruising the recipe sites for ways to combine carbs and fats and sugars with apple chunks healthy nutritious snacks for the family, and I run across Chewy Caramel Apple Cookies and I’m reading through the recipe and I see in the ingredients the following:

• 20 caramels, unwrapped

And I went, “…wait…”

And I read it again. Yeah. It actually specifies, unwrapped.

For a blissful moment, I snickered as I imagined someone taking twenty plastic-wrapped caramel candies, dropping them into a saucepan and stirring madly to melt them into a glaze.

“Nice cookies, but the glaze has a weird, I dunno, burnt-plastic-y finish…”

Then I suddenly realized: I would totally be that person. I mean, I would love to poke fun at my imaginary noob pastry chef and pretend that I was just far too clever a cook myself to ever do such a thing, but…

…well…

Not terribly long ago, I made this shrimp-rice thing for dinner. You know, one of those “fancy” recipes with the (relatively) expensive sweet sticky rice and Jasmine-hinted blah blah blah almost-a-risotto deals. I was all like, “Yeahhhhhh, that’s right, I could totally win one of those cooking-as-a-full-body-contact-sport deals, ka-POW!” and totally impressed with my own prowess and all…

…until…

…I realized I had made a teeny-tiny oversight in the preparation, which was because I thought the shrimp I bought were already peeled.

They were not.

For bonus points, I did not notice this until I was trying to plate up dinner. So there I was, trying to pick the shrimps out of the very hot and sticky I might add rice so I could attempt to peel them after cooking them.

Have you ever tried to do this? I thought not. It takes a special level of inattention to detail to end up in this kind of situation. And also a high pain tolerance, because hot-hot-hot-OW-dammit-hot-hot-HOT!

I have to wonder: If the recipe I was(n’t really) following had said, “1/2 pound whole shrimp, peeled” – would it have helped? Would it have triggered me to, you know, check, before tossing them into the pan?

I’m honestly not sure.

I just…really believed that the package I bought had said “peeled” on it, somewhere. With the kind of absolute faith usually reserved for the kind of people who would stand there with an actual-literal alien sludge-beast gnawing on their face going, “There is no such thing as alien sludge-beasts! Because they aren’t in the Bible! Ha! CHECKMATE!”

I checked. It totally did not say that. Not even under the big red “50% OFF” sticker.

And yes, I was that desperate for vindication around my unshakeable conviction that those were “supposed” to be pre-peeled shrimp.

I honestly have no idea what exactly goes on inside my own mind sometimes. “Gosh, maybe I had x-ray vision at the time and the ‘pre-peeled’ label was under this one!”? Really, Me?

The tiny sliver of consolation I have is that it did say “E-Z Peel” on the package, which is practically the same as pre-peeled except for the shrimp being TOTALLY NOT peeled at all, and I’m sure it would have been quite an E-Z job if they hadn’t been like red-hot little bundles of super-heated steel nestled in vast quantities of boiling-oil hot sticky sweet rice and finely diced vegetables at the time.

Sigh…well, at least they were deveined.

So, I had that going for me.

In related news, this morning I caught a bug in a system I have absolutely zero direct connection with because I happened to see an error go by in the log files I was checking for another reason altogether.

Over 200,000 records I was scanning with my eyeballs looking for one specific set of keywords => that error jumped out at me and I was all “whoa-whoa-whoa, what?” {scroll-scroll-scroll back up through the text file} “…huh…that’s…a weird one…” {typity-typity-typity} “…ooooooooh, uh-huh, I see what happened there…” {opens new email} “hey guys, you’ve got the framework set up to think Field57 is an INT, it’s actually a GUID, you should probably update that because yeahhhhh, you kinda got blown out of the water last night and got zero updates in your delta, only the inserts and deletes that don’t use that field in their comparison script, you’re welcome.”

This has got to be some kind of super-power. The “ability to simultaneously be a person who will see ‘operand clash’ go by in a blur of fast-scrolling through a log file while looking for ‘XML’ and/or ‘illegal’, and yet, turn right around and be a person who spends a good twenty-thirty minutes enthusiastically stirring a pot of shrimp and rice without noticing the shrimp still have shells and legs on them” power.

Probably one with a big fancy Latin-sounding name I won’t be able to spell.

Betcha.

Pride and joy

So…over the winter, it was decided by the folks who decide such things that our county fair would be giving 2014 a miss. I can’t pretend I was actually surprised by that news. The fair has been positively bleeding money for quite a while, and the county isn’t exactly made up of nothing but filthy rich bastards who are going to walk around a fair randomly flinging hundred dollar bills at the vendors or anything.

Quite the contrary.

Fortunately, the same person who told me that the fair was going to be taking the year off was also the person who told me that the only part I cared about was still on, just, details TBD at the time.

And she was able to tell me both facts at the same time.

So there was, like, only a split second of panic in re: what about the 4-H auction?!

You know…there are some groups that fold up like a cheap collapsible chair when they hit a headwind. And others that end up racing frantically in circles screaming wildly and hitting each other with clipboards and stuff until eventually everybody goes home to put band-aids on their wounds and snark off about how if it weren’t for that other guy they totally could have triumphed over this adversity.

4-H and FFA? Are not those groups.

They just went, “Ooooookay, so, there’s no fair for our auction to be held within, soooooooo…we’ll just have ourselves an Ag-Fest. Bam. Problem solved.”

A whole lot of hard work later, they are not only putting on an agricultural festival – they are putting on one heck of one.

You know, I have to say, even though I had nothing to do with any of that apart from pledging to show up and support it…I’m so proud. It makes me almost weepy-happy to know that there are still people, still kids, out there who have the ability to just kind of…take things in stride, roll up their sleeves and put sweat equity into what they want like that.

It also shames me a bit; I bitch and moan longer and harder over minor inconveniences every year, and can be way too willing to just throw up my hands and say something is too hard, or too unfair, or too unlikely to succeed.

It’s like I’ve forgotten what it even is to have grit.

And it gives me incredible joy to be shown what it looks like by others. I can be more like these kids – and their parents and benefactors – when I grow up.

Which I totally intend to do someday. Probably.

ANYWAY. The auction is this weekend; my buyer card and information brochure arrived in the mail today. And I went, “SHRIEK!” and promptly showed it to the cats.

They were supremely disinterested.

Because they’re cats, and disinterested real or feigned is kind of how they roll most of the time.

But I am not a cat, so I’m still all excited. Day after tomorrow, I can finally put my money where my mouth is. Kinda literally, come to think of it.

Sweeeeeeeeet!!

Even better, Swingle Meat is back on the processor’s list (last year, they weren’t doing hogs, which was the only ‘larger’ meat I was buying…we still had an awful lot of beef left at the time, and I won’t lie, I was pretty moody about it); I can’t wait to have more of their smoked ham hocks, bacon, and frozen-in-marinade roasts on hand.

It’s going to be a delicious summer. And fall. And winter. And spring.

I can just tell.

Beans and blame

I hate my Crockpot right now.

This morning, I put about two cups of dry black beans, a can of diced tomatoes, a big old smoked ham hock, a couple whacked-up cloves of garlic, a small can of diced jalapenos, some cilantro and cumin in there, added water to cover, and turned it on with the expectation that I could, you know, ignore it until shortly before dinner time, when I’d need to add some caramelized onions from the freezer and chopped up smoked beef steak from the fridge, nudge the spices a bit in the ‘chili’ direction (but not too far, because I don’t want to lose the caramelized onion flavor, because that would be downright criminal)…and maybe make some cornbread, because I’m pretty sure there’s an actual law that says you have to have cornbread with even faux chili.

BUT NO. I can’t ignore it. Because you know what it’s doing right now?

It’s sending this smell through the whole house. This insanely rich, savory smell.

It’s wafting up the stairs. It’s drifting down the halls. It’s curling up on the front porch like a smug, overfed cat.

There are still a whole lotta hours between now and dinner-time, and it is making me continually hungry this afternoon.

And I think the beans are actually probably getting close to done already, too.

It is entirely possible that I will have dinner for afternoon tea.

And then have it again in a few hours.

And when my jeans don’t fit right tomorrow? => I will blame the Crockpot manufacturers, because, uh…well…WELL, CLEARLY, they did not make the lid tight-fitting enough on this thing.

Pictureless instructions for sharing and candy

@PipneyJane: I blame you. I got totally sidetracked into the whole ‘share button’ thing. The easy, sensible way to do it is to go into your Design => Layout, click on the ‘edit’ hyperlink under ‘Blog Posts’, and fourth from the bottom there is “Show Share Buttons.” Which is what I was doing until I noticed that mine was apparently showing what was supposed to be hover-over text. And I couldn’t find the bit in the HTML where it would be doing that, because this sometimes happens when you use “shared, proprietary” code. They hide it from you. On purpose. Because otherwise people like me (who think they know some stuff but hahahaha, don’t), get in there and try to hack it. And suddenly everybody who uses it is all how come it doesn’t work like THAT?! and it just gets to be a real headache for the dev team.

ANYWAY. One journey down the rabbit hole later, I found this post from The Blog Decorator and about five minutes later I had much cuter share-buttons. At five minutes and thirty seconds I had a different set of buttons, because I’ve actually heard of Tumblr. Then at five minutes forty-five seconds I was all, how in the HELL would somebody ‘Tweet’ one of these posts?! and ended up with what I have now. Because sticking with the copy/paste I was given and which worked just fine would be too easy, apparently.

In other news, The Blog Decorator seems to be a fine purveyor of exactly the sort of thing I should stay away from and I hope they never notice a link back from this place to them because they may send me some kind of ‘cease and desist, we only want pretty blogs like the ones we design to link to us’ and then I might cry.

OK, not really. I mean, maybe, but they don’t look like the kind of people who send Nastygrams to people.

Plus, I’m a database developer. We don’t cry just because somebody called our code ugly. Pretty much we just look at you expectantly waiting for the actual content of your observation. Because saying that backend database code is “ugly” is kind of like walking up and saying, “Meetings sure are a pain in the arse.”

This statement is clearly not the core reason you are taking time out of your busy day to take time out of my busy day. That was just an opener. There is more to come.

But I digress.

So – the lemon peel candy. This is not your traditional “candied lemon zest.” It’s a lot thicker and chewier, and definitely not much like that delicate little curlie-queued froodiddery that sometimes tops $6 cupcakes that have, like, lavender essence in them or something.

The end result of this is something with a lot more substance to it; it’s thicker, a bit chewy (but not like Gummy-Bear chewy)…it’s a little hard to describe, actually. I’ve found that most people either really like it, or really don’t. Not a lot of folks in the middle of the road.

This is definitely one of those sorts of things you’ll want to do when you have a weekend mostly free; while the actual hands-on stuff is actually fairly limited, there’s a ton of “then ignore it for x-many hours” that goes on here, including one overnight soaking in syrup, and another overnight drying period.

Oh, and this is pretty much lifted from Canning For A New Generation, which is one of my favorite canning books. I mean, yes, the ‘Complete’ book put out by Ball is the go-to for “hmm, what do I do with THIS, I wonder” but the new-generation book puts together more interesting spices and spins on things, and has a lot of that sort of…Indian-Asian twist going that a lot of the more ’Murican cookbooks tend to avoid. (“How To Make Authentic Indian Curry: Step 1, buy premade curry paste…”). But I digress again.

You’ll need:

• 5 pounds of lemons
• 5 cups of sugar, plus about half a cup or so
• LOTS of water

Steps

1. Scrub and juice the lemons
   1. You want to get rid of the pulp (juicy, membrane-y inner parts)
   2. But don’t worry too much about the pith (the bitter white inner peel most recipes will demand that you pare away) – that’s the payoff of this method, you don’t have to make yourself crazy and/or lose half the skin off your fingers and/or give up gosh knows how many pounds over time of candy cutting away all that pith
2. Cut the peel into fairly large slices
   1. I usually take each half lemon and slice it in half, and then slice that half into thirds for our monster-sized homegrown lemons, or into half for more normal store-bought sized ones
   2. Aside: The best way I’ve found to do this is actually to stack up 2-3 lemon halves and do that whole stack at once.
      1. It’s way faster than doing each one by itself
      2. Plus it makes me feel like a bit more like She-Ra, Goddess of Warfare And Also Kitchen Knives than Esmeralda Frump, Too Cheap To Throw Away Lemon Peels 
3. Put the sliced-up lemon peel into a pot big enough to hold them and enough cold water to cover them by an inch or so
4. Put the lid on the pot and bring to a boil, boil for 10 minutes
5. Drain and do it again, another 10 minutes
   1. Don’t skip this
   2. Trust me
   3. The pith will still manage to be bitter somehow
   4. It is like nature’s little miracle, how elebenty-bazillion tons of sugar cannot overwhelm the bitterness of that pith…but an extra cycle of boiling can
6. Cover with cold water one more time, bring to a boil one more time…then lower the heat and let it simmer for ~ 30 minutes, until the peel is tender
   1. Test this with, like, your thumbnail or a fork
      1. Not by biting into it
      2. It’s not nasty-bitter anymore, but it ain’t candy yet either
7. Drain in a colander
8. In the same pan, put the 5 cups of sugar + 5 cups of water and bring to a boil
9. Stir just until the sugar is all dissolved, then stop
10. Continue not-stirring while it boils and makes you incredibly anxious because shouldn’t I be stirring that? just a little bit? Or something? (No. You should not. Resist.) until it reaches 220 degrees, ~ 15 minutes of nail-biting, no-stirring anxiety
    1. …or is that just me…?
11. Add the peel (carefully, that simple-syrup LOVES to splash up and burn ya), bring back up to a simmer
12. Simmer without stirring again (they’re killing me here) until the peel is translucent, ~ 45 minutes
    1. It isn’t actually see-through translucent, more glassy-looking-lemon-peel than see-through-like-window-glass
13. Remove from the heat and let stand, undisturbed, overnight
14. The next morning, bring to a boil and let cook without stirring what is WRONG with these people?! until it reaches 226 degrees – about 30 minutes
15. Let stand for 2-4 hours
16. Bring back to a boil and again with the no-stirring thing until it gets to 228 degrees – this tends to happen really fast comparatively speaking, maybe 10-15 minutes, so keep an eye on it!
17. …then ignore it for 2-4 hours again…
18. ONE LAST TIME! Bring to a boil, then take it off the heat immediately
19. Wait for it to cool down just enough to not be like handling living, radioactive death-juice with a grudge against you PERSONALLY
    1. You want to, you know, not die if/when it splashes a bit
    2. But you don’t want it to have gotten cool enough to start thickening up on you – that’s a stone drag to deal with
20. Normal Finishing Method:
    1. Fish out with a fork or tongs or chopsticks or whatever floats your canoe and arrange on wire rackets set over baking sheets
       1. No fraternizing! Pieces should not be touching
       2. If they touch, they will never come apar
       3. Hopefully there’s a bunch of lemon simple syrup left over
          1. 1:1:1 lemon juice, simple-syrup, and water usually makes a pretty darned good lemonade – you can also mix up the syrup and the juice and freeze it, and “reconstitute” it with water when you want it.
          2. It’s like a magic trick! Behold! Homemade lemonade on-demand, I AM A WIZARD!! 
    2. Put them into a turned off oven to dry for ~ 24 hours
    3. If you have a pilot light, that’s fantastic, you’re done. Well. With this step, anyway.
    4. Otherwise, you can flip on the oven light for a bit now and again – mine will heat the oven to right around 100-115 degrees-ish, which is a great temperature for slow drying things like this…but it does get a little too hot if I just leave it on 24/7, so, it’s kind of like two hours ON, three hours OFF, which can get a little annoying
    5. The peel will still be distressingly sticky, so give it a toss in ~ ½ cup more sugar
       1. Any leftover sugar is marvelous in tea or on top of scones, just sayin’
    6. Set it back on the racks for 1-2 hours and ohmygah, FINALLY, you’re done
21. Alternative Finishing Method For Crazy People Who Own This Kind Of Stuff:
    1. Fish out as above, put on your dehydrator racks
       1. Use the “non-stick / porous” liners, like you’d use for strawberries, banana chips etc. (not your fruit leather ones)
       2. Least Fiddly Way: Put them on the racks peel side up and don’t even THINK about the whole ‘which side up’ issue again
       3. Unnecessarily Fiddly Way For OCD Types, Part I: Arrange them peel side down
    2. Set dehydrator to ~ 125 degrees and let go for ~ 18 hours
    3. Flip racks halfway through: Top to bottom, back to front, the usual drill
       1. Unnecessarily Fiddly Way For OCD Types, Part II: Flip the slices peel side up when you restage the racks
          1. This makes them a bit less “gooey” at the end, and ends with a nicer ‘glossiness’ to the ‘up’ side of the peel
          2. BUT, it is 100% completely not necessary to end up with good tasting candy, so, it really is a rather silly thing to put yourself through
    4. Toss in ½ cup sugar to keep from sticking; if you like ‘raw’-type sugar, it makes an excellent finishing move here
    5. Bonus for owning the dehydrator, they are not generally still so sticky that they need a second round of drying – unless it is a bit humid out, I’ve generally found I can put them straight into the airtight container at this point

Keeps in an airtight container for ~ 2 months at room temperature, or almost-forever in the freezer if you’ve got it well-sealed. Or so I am told, it doesn’t usually last more than a week or so around here, no matter how much of it I make.

The ‘Only Happens To Me’ Files, #2,721

I swear, sometimes I really do ask myself why I ever leave the house. It sometimes feels as though every time I go forth amongst my fellow man, if there is even one person who wakes up that day thinking, You know what? I’m feeling EXTREMELY random and am in the mood to SHARE this randomness with someone!, they will be brought into my path in order that I will be left staring after them muttering, …what the @^*&@ just happened THERE?! to myself.

Which is itself prone to making people stare at you.

Anyway, today was apparently clearly you are not knowledgeable about that sort of thing day. Which is to say that not once but twice, someone mistook me for a member of the common buying-plastic-wrapped-baked-goods sects.

I am starting to develop a complex about it. I may have to start dusting myself with flour before I leave the house, in order to make it obvious that I do, too, bake.

Myself.

With ingredients. Such as flour, sugar, water, milk, eggs, yeast…

The first time, it was over muffins.

Yes. Muffins.

When I bake muffins to put in the freezer for breakfasts, I use mini pie pans – like these guys. They’re bigger than a typical made-in-a-muffin-pan muffin, but still smaller than the typical bakery muffin.

This frequently leads to the understandable assumption that I purchased the muffin somewhere “downstairs” – at the Starbucks or one of the neighborhood bakeries or something like that.

Which I would, if I weren’t a) cheap and b) picky.

So this morning I grabbed a muffin out of the freezer and took it with me for breakfast. As I was warming it up at work – at Too Early O’Clock – a lady I’ve never met (possibly because I’m only in the office maybe once a week, and almost never on Mondays but this week is special that way) came into the kitchen, looked at it in the microwave, and remarked that she didn’t know such-and-so place was open that early.

I rejoined that this had come from my freezer, not such-and-so place, ha ha ha.

She looked me in the eye and said, “No it didn’t, they sell those.”

So I looked her in the eye and said, “They may sell muffins, but they don’t sell these, because I made these.”

This is where things get slightly surreal.

“No you didn’t. You probably can’t even say what’s in them.”

{reseats bifocals on nose} Challenge. Accepted.

“Flour, sugar, salt, butter, baking powder, plain yogurt, juice and zest of two lemons, half an average nutmeg, ground, and a sprinkling of raw sugar on top for the crunch.”

And she looked me in the eye again and said, “See, that just proves they came from such-n-so. That’s what it says on their label.”

And then she wandered away, while I stood there thinking up all kinds of snappy comebacks that really shouldn’t be said in an office environment.

But then I shrugged and chalked it up to being Before Coffee o’Clock logic at work and went on with my day.

Now, fast forward several hours. I’m waiting at the ladies room after a meeting because why is it that we ladies so frequently seem to be standing around waiting like this, and these two youngish gals are doing the, “I know, you know?” thing about this and that.

And then one of them started going on and on about you know, that thing, you know, somebody was talking about it earlier and it was that THING, you know, the one with the stuff and the other stuff?

And quite a bit of this later, she finally put together enough keywords for me to go, “Oh. She means a cream puff. Mmmm, cream puffs…”

Shortly after which, they suddenly (and inexplicably) included me in the conversation by abruptly asking, “You know? Those things with the cream and the soft dough stuff and there’s chocolate on top of it or something? Not the round doughnut things, the other ones.”

I said, “Cream puffs.” Mmm. Cream puffs.

“Yeah! Cream puffs! Those things! They’re, like, in croissants or something…but not like a normal croissants, it’s, you know, different croissant dough or something, maybe they deep fry it…”

And I went like this: (o_O)

For a second, I toyed with the idea that maybe she really was talking about the ‘cronut’ thing. But, no, what she was describing was definitely a good old cream puff, not one of them fancy newfangled cronut doohickeys.

For evidence, I submit the following:

Cronut:

Cream puffs (with omg, recipe!)

(Hmm. Source blog appears to be in a state of hibernation at present. This is sad. People who post things like this which make me sit up and go, Ooo…toasted coconut cream puffs, you say?! This sounds like happiness in puffy toothsome choux crust and I must make it IMMEDIATELY-ish…need to continue posting things. Many, many things. I – nay, the WORLD – needs these things. NEEDS. THEM. I have spoken. Make it so. Hail Pharaoh.)

But, partly by way of making SURE I was right so that I could sleep well tonight, and partly because I can’t seem to resist spouting off valuable bits of worthless information sharing knowledge with people, I then explained the difference between croissant dough and choux pastry.

Also known as, the difference between a cronut and and a cream puff.

They looked at me as if I had just proposed that the space station had been built by the snake people from the planet Thsssslphfffbbt and that human kind were being replaced with doughnut-rejecting androids.

The first one said, “Noooooooo, I’m pretty sure it’s exactly the same dough. You must be thinking of something else, because, they’re like, exactly the same. I think maybe they just deep-fry the croissant dough or something.”

And the other one said, “Yeahhhhhh, plus I don’t think there’s any yeast in croissants and definitely not a lot of butter, because they’re really light and I’m sensitive to gluten so if they had yeast it would really bother me.”

And the first one went, “Ohmygahd, me too! I can only eat really light breads, you know? Like baguettes, they’re fine and stuff, but heavy ones, they kill me, because they have a lot more gluten…”

And I went like this.

Because what I wanted to point out was something along these lines:

• Yeast != Gluten
• “Light tasting” bread != “light gluten” bread
• Shoot, depending on what kind of “heavy” bread we’re talking about, serving for serving the “heavy” bread may actually have less gluten than the “light” one
• For example, let’s say I’m making one loaf of typical ‘light’ white sandwich bread, and one loaf of pumpernickel
• French-style white bread will be all plain old bread flour, at about 14% gluten
• Pumpernickel is a roughly 1:2:4 blend of oatmeal, rye and bread flour
• Oatmeal typically has no gluten, except what it may have picked up by being shipped on containers that once held wheat, or being processed on machinery that also processes wheat
• Rye does have some gluten, but it measures in the so little that you literally can’t wash the gluten out
• Yes. Washing gluten from of flour is a thing
• See: Seitan
• Also see: “Proving” the quality / quantity of protein in a flour
• And bread flour is usually between 12 and 14% protein
• Soooooooooo, the “heavier” bread is actually lighter on the gluten-per-se
• Just sayin’

…buuuuuuuuuuut, I had a pretty good idea of how that conversation would go.

Since clearly I can’t speak to Such Things don’t know the difference between a cream puff and a croissant, or that I buy my muffins from a local convenience store, sneak them home, repackage them in Ziploc baggies and hide them in my freezer so that I can later claim to have made them myself even though clearly I didn’t because I also know that they contain flour, sugar, butter, salt, baking powder, plain yogurt, juice and zest of two lemons, half an average nutmeg, and a sprinkling of raw sugar on top for the crunch.

Yeahhhhhh.

I let it go.

And spent the rest of the day craving cream puffs. Mmmm, cream puffs…

Tattler Reusable Canning Lids On Sale in October

For the month of October, Tattler is running a 10% off sale for their reusable canning lids. Great opportunity to try them out if you’ve wanted to but shied away from the price: 2 dozen each of the wide and narrow mouth lids and gaskets are on sale for $35.16, down from the normal price of $43.95. And shipping is free, woo hoo.

If you haven’t wanted to try them because you’re saying to yourself, “I obviously did not read that correctly, because, reusable canning lids?!” – no, you read that right: Tattler makes reusable canning lids. I’ve been using them for, gosh, going on three years now for most of my canning…at this point, they’ve definitely paid for themselves.

Quick product review, what I like about them is:

• I never find myself out of lids when I’ve got 300 pounds of rapidly-decaying tomatoes on my kitchen counter…and allllll the local stores have stopped carrying them in favor of Christmas ornaments
• This has actually happened to me more times than I like to think about
• Yeah, I can mail order…but that doesn’t help the tomatoes already rotting on my countertop…sigh…
• I’m protected from the occasional price-gouging that goes on in Such Times, when there is only one place that still has canning supplies, and they know it, so suddenly that little box of 12 throwaway lids is $6 or some crazy thing
• After you’ve opened a home-canned jar of something, the same lid and gasket (<= the key selling point here!) make resealing that jar and sticking it in the fridge a bit less…leak-prone…thing to do than reusing the same one-use lid for the same purpose
• At least it is around here, because the Denizens are infamous for rummaging through the fridge like starved boars on a forage, knocking things over and not righting them again
• …don’t ask me how many times I’ve found a formerly-almost-full quart jar of some sauce or other lying on its side in a vast puddle of its own innards, quietly dripping all down the back/sides of the thing and making everything in there stick to the shelves as if Gorilla Glue had been applied to their bottoms…
• I no longer have to suffer that twinge of guilt one suffers these days when one casually tosses something onto a landfill-bound pile
• Which means that I no longer suffer the hot flash of anger that I’m made to feel guilty about something like that
• Which further means I am spared the worry that perhaps I need counseling, because show me WHO is saying that you SHOULD feel guilty about this…methinks you are perhaps just a TOUCH defensive/paranoid on this count, my dear…
• This increasingly-indented-cycle-of-psychosis actually goes on for quite a while, so, let’s just stop here, shall we? yes, do let’s… 
• They are Zombpocalypse Compliant. Extremely important right there: We will still be able to can produce, even if WalMart is overrun by zombies.  
• OMG, WAIT, I THINK THAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED!!!!!
• …sorry, couldn’t resist…

What sometimes irritates me about them:

• They have a learning curve! You do things a bit differently when you use these, and at first? The seal-failure rate is dreadful – it gets better with practice, but y’all should know going in that you may have a session or two of redo ALL the jars before you get the hang of it
• They have a higher seal failure rate than the ‘traditional’ throw-away versions – very careful handling / making sure you wipe the lips of the jar with vinegar etc. will get this to reasonable rates, but inattention to detail will be punished more severely with these reusable lids than their throwaway counterparts
• They take up more storage space – the plastic lids are bigger / heavier-duty than the one-use ones
• The gaskets loooooooove to get separated from the lids
• This may be a Den of Chaos thing more than anything else – The Randomizer lives here and takes great delight in moving things to inappropriate spots on me
• I hesitate to give away a jar of something to someone who doesn’t can or who might not return them to me, since they aren’t exactly cheap – kind of like the difference between giving out something in a take-n-toss container versus your good Tupperware, you know?
• Oh yeah, almost forgot: The gaskets also make awesome cat toys, which means that if you have cats, they will be constantly pulling a Mission:Impossible on you to get at them (she said, picking one up off the floor under her desk, a-HEM…)
• Samantha Schilling and Fleur Fatale are insisting this is in the wrong section and should be in the ‘pros’ one
• But, as they lack typing skills, ha ha, I win

Weirdness: It’s what’s for dinner

Lately, I haven’t had a lot of energy in the evenings for making anything particularly interesting for dinner.

Actually, I think that sentence should probably be a lot shorter. it should probably read, “Lately, I haven’t had a lot of the energy in the evenings for making to make anything particularly interesting for dinner.”

Tonight, though, I had just enough left over to indulge a case of The Sillies that hit me and throw together something to keep the Denizens guessing a bit. Which is pretty much my primary goal in life, second only to giving them plenty of things to tell their therapist about in years to come.

I take these sorts of duties very seriously, so! Step One: “Sushi” rice

Now, I’m not an expert and I probably do it all wrong, but, this is how I make rice I intend to use in rice balls or rolled-up-sushi-like-things. Inside this bowl is three cups of CalRose rice (family of six, remember, plus inevitable neighbor-kids whose parents never, ever, feed them, no really, like, NEVER) (unless I’m making something gross for dinner, like palak paneer [spinach with “weird” homemade cheese that is, $DEITY my witness, made only of milk + lemon juice] or curry lentils, in which case their mom is Julia Childs and they just remembered she’s making a twelve-course pizza extravaganza or something like that) (but I digress). This is a readily-available white rice, medium-grain, that cooks up plump and sticky – perfect for molding into things like rice balls, sushi or just flat-out molding because it’s fun in a lunchbox. Why the heck not? I do not see any laws on the books that says lunch has to be ‘serious’ just because you’re an adult. And molding little devils complete with black pepper dyed horns and red pepper flakes for eyes, and possibly a screaming jalapeno-round for a mouth, to go with your 5-Alarm Texas Chili bento seems only natural to me.

But I digress. Again.

This rice needs to be rinsed a few times in cold water before you cook it. I rub it gently between my hands each time under water; the first rinse is usually like real whole milk, the second rinse is like non-fat milk, and the third, while still a bit cloudy, is usually clear enough that you can see the rice in the water.

After rinsing, I just cook it per package instructions. Which in my case consists of “add 1-1/2 cups water for every cup of rice, drop all into rice cooker, and hit ‘white rice’ button.”

Next, I grabbed some hot dogs and some spaghetti and oh yes, I did.

 

I saw this on the internet somewhere and went, “SQUEEEEE!! I have got to try that!!” I will grant you that it is a bit on the ‘fiddly’ side, but it’s not a bit hard and the look on the Denizen faces was totally worth it.

Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. So. One pot of boiling water with several drops of green food dye in it…

…plus a generous handful of angel hair pasta equals…

IT’S SEAWEED, GET IT?! Because of the not-sushi roll thing?

Shredded carrots (which were still in the ground a few hours ago, which makes me feel all cool and self-sufficient and some junk until I remember that these particular carrots are only still there because I sort of forgot about them and then when I was weeding I was all, ohmygosh, hello there, I forgot about you! and they were looking at me like, …geesh…! and so I made a mental note that they were a) there and b) ready to pull and then when I needed carrots I was all, OH YEAH, I TOTALLY HAVE A BUNCH READY RIGHT NOW, DON’T I! which I rather suspect downgrades my coolness-factor a bit but at this point I’ll take whatever I can get and also rambling run-on sentence crown of supremeness: STILL mine, HA!)  and thin-sliced ham.

Totally authentic “sushi” fillings.

As long as you have “sushi” in “quotes.” (<= loophole!!)

The blue thing there is a silicon baking mat, which I find does a great job rolling rice into those long logs for slicing. I used a knife this time because I couldn’t find my preferred tool for things like this (and also cinnamon rolls, this works a treat for cutting up cinnamon roll dough), which would be unflavored, plain, no-wax dental floss (trust me on this, do not get, like, ‘mint’ flavored floss). Position the floss under what you want to slice, cross it over itself on the top and zzzzzzzzzzzip!! Makes lovely, not-squashed-oval little rounds.

But, couldn’t find it. So I used a knife. So the “sushi” wasn’t really round, it was oval. Which made me think of eyes. Which is why I changed the plating at the last second from being ‘double-jointed squids in seaweed fronds gazing soulfully at the two moons of whatever that world the Wolfriders are from’ to ‘You MUST pay the rent!!’ (Bonus geek points for getting that reference.)

Things to tell their therapist about in years to come: Check. I am the frickin’ MOTHER OF THE YEAR, Y’ALL.

Eldest walked in, snickered, snagged a couple slices of rice-roll, and went back to drawing manga. Danger Mouse made herself a bento to take to school tomorrow to show off. Boo Bug rolled her eyes, grinned, told me it was awesome, and ate every bite.

Then Captain Adventure came in, looked at his plate for a moment, then looked at me sidelong with a crooked smile and asked, “Is it a-posed to be an eye-face wif da mooose-tash?”

And then I died from the excessive cuteness of him, the end.

Investments of the indirect kind

I paid too much for the steer at the auction this year, going about $650 over what I’d wanted to pay.

But I’m not the least bit remorseful about it. There was simply no way in HELL that I was going to let the lovely gentleman to my left who was so enthusiastically supporting the Lodi-area kids have this particular steer.

Just…not happening, dude.

This steer was going to be Ashley’s last FFH project. This would be the third and final year that I could have the honor of making her project pay off for her; the last time my grocery money would be going directly into her future college tuition.

Selfishly, I wanted rather badly to share this transition with her. I wanted to take that tenuous, few-moments-once-a-year connection we had all the way to its natural, inevitable end.

It’s such a tiny, tiny part I play here, once a year for just a few moments, when I show up at 7:30 in the morning on a Saturday with my buyer’s card and my checkbook. I sit there with my coffee and circle the kids from my hometown in the auction book, and do my humble best to make sure that none of them end up getting less than market rate for their animals.

Which is why I also paid a little more than I technically had to for a pair of hogs.

Whiiiiich is not exactly the best frugal method, and there’s a part of me that rolls her eyes and sighs heavily every time I do it. (And you should hear the ranting whenever I make that little hand signal to the auctioneer: Bump that bid up a quarter, make it three even…maaaaaan, my inner Frugal Zealot goes bananas whenever I do that…but gee whiz, I can’t stand the thought of one of these kids not making at least the break-even on their market animals…!)

But this is an investment in more than meat. It’s not just about feeding my family, or even just about that local, organic-method gourmet-stuff.

To me, it’s a direct investment in the future. It’s a way for me to tell these kids that what they’ve done matters, that somebody other than their parents (who are, let’s face it, contractually obligated to believe that everything their kids do is “awesome” and “meaningful” and “good job, buddy!”) believes in them, and values what they’ve done, and thinks they did a damn fine job, kiddo, a DAMN fine job.

I don’t think it will come down to being the difference between a “successful” life versus one lived on skid row…but hopefully, it can be another chip tossed into the bucket that says “yes, you do matter, and you can succeed, you don’t suck, you are a winner.”

When the hard times hit, and they will, because, welcome to being human which kinda sucks sometimes, maybe that little extra reinforcement will help them keep their chins up, will help them keep slogging forward.

These kids are the ones who will be making the world whatever it will be for my kids – and my grandchildren, and all the other generations after them.

They’re worth supporting. And while I can’t necessarily claim a direct return on the investment, I still feel so very strongly that it is a good one, and that I do get more out of it than I give.

After the auction, Ashley brought over the paperwork and gave me a hug. I shook hands with her parents, and told them how proud I was to have had this small role in her life, what a fine young lady I thought she was.

She’s already started her college courses. Already left the nest for the dorms.

Already has both feet firmly on the path of Young Adulthood.

Considering that I still have not quite gotten my arms around the concept of Eldest being in kindergarten elementary middle high school, I can imagine that this must be a tremendously unnerving time for her parents.

I paid for my animals at the fair office; it’s always a bit of a shock, handing over a hefty sum all in one go like that. I’m still not used to it, and it still gives me a moment of vertigo.

I tend to become rather compulsive about checking the savings account balance in the days leading up to the auction. Am I QUITE sure I ACTUALLY saved enough? Yeah-yeah, I’ve been putting, like, $600 a month into that savings goal, but still…is it REALLY all there?!

I had A Moment as I was writing the check; a moment when yet again the thought occurred to me that this is so not the “cheapest” way to buy meat.

And then I thought about Ashley…off at college now, with checks of her own that need writing, undoubtedly more of them than she had anticipated because anybody ELSE remember how college was?

The money is going to be whipping out of my checking account regardless – that’s just what money seems to do, really.

And if it’s going to be generating that breeze anyway, well, by Gah…I rather like the idea of it becoming part of the wind beneath somebody else’s wings, instead of vanishing into a nameless, faceless void.

It just feels right, like it’s making the world I dream of for my own kids someday.

Which is worth a whole lot more than the price I’m paying for all this.

Fly strong, kiddos. I believe, from the center of my being out, that you guys will make this world glad you were around to guide it, someday.

Fly strong.

For the record…

…I did actually take a shower before I went to work this morning. Because I know y’all have been on pins and needles, like, ALL DAY about it.

OK, probably not.

And mostly I took a shower because my eyes were practically glued shut and I thought, Maybe…if took shower I with soap of water maybe a…more wakefully alert I could attain?

Yeah, slightly slow start this morning.

IN COMPLETELY UNRELATED NEWS, guess what I had for lunch? (I know. Next, I shall share my plans for reorganizing the pantry, and perhaps also externalize my currently-internal-only debate in re: should I paint my toenails a festive color this weekend, even though I always end up wearing closed-toed shoes because they are more comfortable/practical/and besides, if the Zombpocalypse were to strike while I was at work, well, that’s a LOT of walkin’ to get back home, ya know? Possibly through broken glass. PLUS, if I have to fend off any zombies along the way and I’m wearing open-toed shoes? I’VE LOST A VERY IMPORTANT WEAPON IF I CAN’T KICK THEM OFF ME.)

Anyway! For lunch, I had onigiri. Which are Japanese rice balls. Which I’d never actually had before, which was why I went, “Hey! I’ve never had one of those, and also I love rice and have been wanting to explore more Japanese cuisine in general! I should totally get some of those today instead of continuing to haunt up and down Kearny like some kind of lost soul looking for a body to snatch or something!”

Which was what I was doing because everything I saw for lunch was some combination of meh or blech or $$!!Ouch!!$$ or I can actually feel my arteries hardening, just LOOKING at that.

And then I saw ‘Onigiri’ (which is the name of the restaurant) and then it said ‘gourmet Japanese rice balls’ and finally, my sad, aimless wandering ended.

Now, it might be that the concept of a “rice ball” sounds like yawn but it isn’t yawn because look at these things.

(The one on top is more than half eaten. The salad disappeared about four seconds after this picture was taken. Also, why do I keep forgetting that I like to snack on edamame? And also I had picked some of the fillings out of the other two because this was a brand new world to me and I was like Jack Skellington charging around Christmastown bellow-singing “WHAT’S THIS? WHAT’S THIS?! THERE’S SOMETHING IN THIS RICE! WHAT’S THIS? WHY THAT LOOKS SO UNIQUE!”)

I learned several things about these today.

One thing I learned is that I love the filing, but the seaweed wrapping was a bit…much for me, and I rather wished there were a lot less of it on these. Not only because whoa, SALTY to the point of ‘I can taste NOTHING but salt right now',’ but because of the distinctly fishy overtones.

Alas, I am still not a huge fan of seafood.

Especially if it is unmistakably seafood – you know, fishy-fish. I can handle the ‘almost-tastes-like-chicken’ fish, but the minute it becomes “flavorful” fish, I start making the blech-face.

Which saddens me no end, because I feel as though there is this enormous gaping hole in my love affair with food because of this irrational rejection of this one particular flavor.

I want to like fish. Or at least tolerate it. I do not want to gag because I accidentally got a bite of sea bass, or because somebody added fish sauce to the miso.

So from time to time, I march in and order up something with fish in it, in tones that suggest I totally know what I’m doing. And I will take my fish-product and I will jab my utensil into it with great confidence, firmly telling myself that this is going to be delicious, just look at all the happily chewing people all around me!, and then I pop the first bite into my mouth and ack, I just totally made BLECH face…!!!

And then I weep inside. So much time is being lost here…someday, I just KNOW I will stop despising fish…!

(Which I must do, because someday, I am totally going to visit Japan. And I don’t want to be insulting people everywhere I go because I didn’t know what the heck I was ordering and ended up with chunks of smoked eel in my noodles or something and then I made Blech Face like a proper Ugly American.)

ANYWAY, where was I? Oh, right. I ended up stripping off most than half of the nori, expecting that this would result in fallen-apart rice balls BUT IT DIDN’T, because the rice proved to be perfectly capable of holding itself together, thank-you-very-much.

Which leads me to something learned not by me, but by my coworkers by way of me learning something else entirely.

In case there was any doubt in their minds (…um…I don’t think there was…), my coworkers are now 100% certain that I am certifiably nuts.

Because as my too-small appetite began to run out of steam (and the fishy-salty nori got to be too much for me), I started picking apart the rice balls because…the rice…it was fascinating me.

(In my defense, I came into this with an already rather over-developed liking of rice in all its many forms – from “plain” white rice with a little soy sauce or butter [or even swimming in warmed milk with a little sugar] to the fanciest of grains, from long, slender, jet-black beautiful grown in the wilds of California to short, jolly grains of ambemohar (have you ever tried that stuff? Dog my witness, it almost tastes like mangos). It’s a bit sad, really, that for so many Americans “rice” means “white flavorless stuff, usually paired with chicken as part of a ‘healthier’ diet or some junk like that.” It’s an amazing grain with an expansive family tree, a rainbow of colors and an encyclopedia of flavors.) (IN RELATED NEWS, the Bean Festival [stop laughing!] is this weekend – my annual spasm of stocking up on harder-to-find bean varieties and [hopefully again this year] small, expensive bags of rice varieties I never heard of is upon us! Dear $DEITY, please let them have moccasin beans again because I almost cried last year when they didn’t…)

Anyway, this rice was definitely something different. It was firm, but sticky. It wasn’t mushy at all, or slimy. It looked like brown rice, but wasn’t “just” brown rice. It had a lot of the characteristics of ‘sushi’ rice, buuuuuuut, it had more character, a definite nuttiness and a sort of I am not just a starch here to make you feel full solidness – but not a jumping up and down yelling and doing battle with the sweet pickled radishes (think ‘butter pickle,’ only, with thinly shaved radishes) (which by the way were AWESOME and now I’ve decided I have to grow radishes just so I can attempt to make some myself).

AFTER QUITE A BIT OF EXPLORATORY RESEARCH, I’m pretty sure it was “gen-mai” rice.

And so are my coworkers. Because of course I shared my findings! Team Spirit and all that.

(Shortly afterward, one of them caught me ‘conducting’ the server in a vain attempt to make a bunch of stuff run faster. This passage is supposed to be vivace, you’re not even at allegro! You’re all, like, adagio and some junk! C’mon, HERE we go, and a-one, and a-two…! Which is why I now know for a FACT that my coworkers all think I am 110% nuts.) (But in a Mostly Harmless sort of way, so, that’s totally OK.)

Now. About my plans for the pantry…!

Noble Achievements

Today was Cooking Day – a rather overdue excursion into What should I cook up before it goes bad?

And so it was that two dozen sandwich-shaped burger patties, two loaves of bread, about twenty lunch-sized servings of lamb and lentil soup, two dozen bagels, sixteen BBQ ham turnovers, four dozen each of four different cookies, a coconut meringue pie, a 13x9 pan of coconut bars, six dozen pancakes and four dozen waffles were born, ready to join the other turnovers, muffins, and ‘why did you make those square, aren’t they usually round?’ objects in the freezer. (Well, because. Sandwich bread, I almost always have…hamburger or hotdog buns, not so much.)

I sit here now with my feet and back complaining, fighting an impressive case of The Yawns and trying to remember that hey, all things considered, I did pretty good today.

I always feel like I should have been able to do better. I can find a dozen places where I should have started something else, should have done that first, then this…should have been working on that the day before, instead of this other thing.

It’s very annoying of me.

But at least it isn’t a particularly nasty Interior Critic. Mine is more like a cheerleader, expecting that with a little motivation, greater goals can be achieved. Yay! Go team!

A lot of folks aren’t so lucky. Their Interior Critics are downright vicious, skulking around in the shadowy corners of their minds muttering about ‘uselessness’ and ‘hopeless’ and ‘you stink.’

Mine just has…slightly inflated beliefs around exactly how much can or cannot be done by us within a given period of time. And a tendency to move the bar when I’m not looking, such that if I were to achieve next weekend what she thought I should have been able to do today, well, there will be just one or two more things she feels could have gotten done, if…

Well, I’m sure it’s true. And I’m also sure that I could get just one or two more things done this weekend, before I dive back into another working week full of deadlines and changing requirements, and trying to get things done at work in an environment where everything is broken and nobody can fix it (mostly because of an understandable terror around touching.ANYTHING!...when your whole system is prone to barfing up a hairball and dying for no apparent reason right in the middle of month-close, welllllll, I can totally understand why nobody wants anybody to tinker with things) (even though we could so TOTALLY fix it…all it would take is a little [more] time, a little [more] money, a dollop of trust and maybe a pinch of pixie dust and with a hearty hi-ho-Silver-and-away we could make all those nested transactions stop locking each other [and themselves here and there, for bonus Hilarity Points] into oblivion, can I get an amen?!, BUT…I digress).

I’m sure I could get just a few more things done tonight. Before it’s too late and today becomes yesterday and the deeds are set in the stone of what is past.

But something else I should really get done today? More sleeping. Which tends to be mutually exclusive with getting other things done. Although I suspect I’ve tried. Few other things can fully explain the oddities around the things I find around here the way “I must have been sleep-walking when I did that” can.

TO WHICH END…I am going to bed, so that I can accomplish more sleeping.

WOOOOOO! WAY TO OVERACHIEVE, ME! (<= desperate times call for desperate measures…let us make of sleeping a Noble Cause, and strive for ever more nobility…)

A week of mostly nothing

It has been raining all week. Which is awesome because here in California, we can use all the water we can get, thank you very much…but at the same time, was a little bit meh for me personally because I have an awful lot of gardening I wanted to do this week, since (according to theory) next week I’ll be getting serious about getting a new contract or something.

The reason I have that “according to theory” in there is, well, this just in: The novelty of staying in bed until a ludicrous hour in the morning still hasn’t worn off for me. This morning, I even got up and then went back to bed to wait for my cold medicine to kick in.

Yes. The cold, it is trying to make a comeback. I am furious, because NO, PLEASE, I ALREADY-ED on the whole having-a-cold-thing.

But at the same time, I have to admit: If it weren’t for the headache/body ache/sinus-pain-and-pressure parts? It would be worth it, just for that ability to holler out the bedroom door, “I dink mah cobd ib back…iz goink badh do bebd!”

Luxury: It has many faces.

SPEAKING OF…on my last day at MegaBank, we did indeed go to Art Fibers. And my coworker (just one person!!!) bought me this.


~1,000 yards of Carezza, 30% silk, 30% baby alpaca, 40% extra-fine merino…rather on the pricier-than-I-would-generally-buy side!!

Now, people…this was a ludicrously costly sort of going-away present to buy somebody, and I wasn’t going to let her do it; at the very least, I was going to get just enough for a nice scarf or something.

But…well…you’d have to know this lady. Trying to make her not do something she is dead set on doing is kind of like telling an oak tree not to drop acorns on your lawn anymore. And will go about as well for you. Except you’ll have to make the oak tree rather vocal and fast-moving instead of being, well, a tree.

They mostly just stand there and ignore you. She doesn’t really do that. She just charges ahead and the only way to stop her would be to get extremely vocal and pushy right back.

And I am not an overtly aggressive person.

No.

I am passive aggressive.

Which is why I was already plotting my revenge on the walk back to the office, and it involved some moderately-hot-pink cashmere/merino wool and…a pattern of some sort…revenge, it shall be mine, miiiiiiiine, bwahahaha…

So, since I was thinking, you know, like, “hat and hand-warmers of some sort,” obviously I started with this, which is a shawl/scarf (what? I find this to be a perfectly logical start to a hat + gloves set!) called Flowers on the Edge - a free pattern download via Ravelry.



It’s proving to be a very agreeable knit. The pattern is easy enough to be done while watching a movie, but also interesting enough that I’m not clawing at my face groaning, “When will I be done with this, u-g-h, why did I START this, oooooooo, I hates it…!!!!”

And the yarn is lovely. It’s a Newton Yarn Country score from last year’s Stitches convention, and is positively luscious…it just has an incredible feel to it: soft and warm, and knitting up very light.

And it’s a very pink sort of pink. Which is her favorite color. See? Revenge! Mine! Shall be! Bwahaha!

Meanwhile in other other news…did you know how easy it is to make paneer? (Which is that soft cheese in some Indian dishes, like saag paneer, which is like a sometimes-spicy creamed spinach with a soft cheese in it?)

Eight cups of milk, heated to boiling.



Add lemon juice about a tablespoon at a time until it starts to curdle – it took about half a cup altogether for my eight cups of milk to get to this point, using lemon juice courtesy of our tree (which unlike bottled juice is subject to having more variety in terms of acid content – hence the ‘one tablespoon at a time’ part instead of “dump in half a cup of lemon juice and be done with it”).



Pour the resulting curds and whey through a couple layers of cheesecloth to drain; if you catch the whey, you can use it to make bread (I made some naan with some of the whey from this)…it can also be used as a substitute for buttermilk.


Yeah, I think that looks a bit gross, too…

Add salt to taste, then form it into a square-ish thing that is about 1” thick.


Square-ISH

Now, this is the part that uses some pretty darned fancy kitchen tools, ONLY available for $$$$$$ from high-end kitchen stores. I’m sorry. There’s really no way around it…if you want to press the cheese into a firm block, you’re going to need something like this.


OK, fine, yes…it’s a cheap Target tea kettle full of water and two equally cheap plastic cutting boards. And yes, the dish rack is pretty much ALWAYS that full. 24/7, 365 days a year.

If that looks a little crooked – it is. That way, the whey being pressed out by the SUPER FANCY AND EXPENSIVE CHEESE WEIGHTING DEVICE (ahem) runs into the sink, rather than pooling up around the cheese.

Wait a couple hours, and then you can either cube it up and toss it into your saag paneer (or whatever) or put it in the fridge to continue firming and even ripening a bit…eaten right away, it’s very mild to the point of having no flavor of its own at all – if it were tofu, you’d think it had “too much” flavor, but if you’re thinking “cheddar,” it’s…not like that at all. More like ricotta (which is exactly what it is, actually…except that pressing it instead of merely draining it, plus using “fresh” milk [that is, not re-using the whey from some other cheese-making exercise, like mozzarella, say] makes it less spread-able and more cube-able).

I threw the cubes into a skillet of hot butter and gave them a quick fry on all sides, removed those from the pan and replaced them with diced onions and garlic, cumin, hot pepper flakes, salt, pepper and some of our home-grown blanched-and-frozen spinach.

And then I put the cheese back into it and called it saag paneer, and ate it with basmati rice and the naan I made with the whey.

Nom.

(The children…ate naan and rice, recoiled in dramatic horror from the spinach-dish, poked suspiciously at some chicken [like, what, they thought I had stuffed it with spinach when they weren’t looking or something?!] and called it a night. Sigh. Someday, they will voluntarily eat real food, right?!)

Blueberry of happiness

This is my dehydrator in action! Blueberries from last season I had dried were rehydrated in boiling water for about half an hour before being folded into muffin batter...which was then topped with a brown sugar struedel before being baked and if you'll excuse me...I have something I really need to get back to right now...

NOM!

They're baaaaaack!

Last night, I mixed up dry ingredients, covered them with a towel, and left them on the counter. And I mixed wet ingredients in a different bowl, snapped the cover on, and left it in the fridge. Then I figured out my delay start function on the oven and went to bed.

This morning, I mixed them together, poured them into my jumbo muffin tins, put them in the oven, started coffee, went upstairs and got dressed and GUESS WHAT?!

It's like a magic trick! There were lemon yogurt muffins for breakfast! Hot, and topped with their light crunchy nutmeg and pecan topping.

Ah, little lemon tree - do you know, CAN YOU KNOW, how much I cherish your fruit...?

(I feel richer than Midas right now, and tremendously clever for having thought to do it this way. What a marvelous scent to finish waking up to this morning!)

The distracting power of the powder

Today, I had the first really tedious day at work in a good long while; the kind of day where I found myself eyeballing the clock a bit and mentally counting up the hours and minutes between right now and quitting time. It was intellectual enough to require that I keep paying attention (dammit!), but at the same time mindless enough that my mind kept wandering.

And then I’d have to pull it back to what I was trying to do. Wait. Did I note ALL the columns, in the joins too? or did I JUST pick out the ones in the SELECT statement…?

It’s like getting to work and then wondering if you’ve left the garage door open…only way to know for sure is to drive back home and check. (Or call a neighbor who happens to be home, I suppose, but that has never worked out for me.)

I was working from home today, which ordinarily is a tremendous help when I’m dealing with things like this. Our office has an open floor plan, no cubicle walls to provide even an imaginary sense of privacy, and a lot of the people right around me spend their whole day on the phone; add one highly distractible database analyst and you’ve got a recipe for never being able to focus on any-oh look, a squirrel!

I spend so much time actively trying to ignore conversations around me, it’s a wonder I ever get anything done.

But today, being home didn’t help that much.

Because I kept thinking about tomato powder.

I know.

That is quite possibly in the top ten most random things I have ever said. What the heck is tomato powder, you are probably asking yourself. And, does this woman need psychiatric help?

#2: Probably.

#1: Tomato powder is, um, well…powdered tomatoes. And as it just so happens, I am starting to have a tomato problem. It’s like, now that the nights are getting no really colder and the days are shortening, the tomato plants suddenly went, “HOLY CRAP, THAT’S RIGHT! We’d better get these babies reproducing, and FAST!!” and now I’m walking out there every other day to find another dozen or so have gone from queasy-looking green to firecracker red.

Or purple with faintly green tops.

black krims…which aren’t actually black but rather a kind of funky pink-purple

Which reminds me: wanna see some funky-lookin’ tomatoes?!

These are called “Costoluto Genovese” tomatoes. They’re an Italian heirloom tomato, and they are IN-tense in flavor. Like, wow. Like, I don’t like them on a salad because they overpower everything else around them so that you’re just sitting there going, Dang. I thought this was a spinach salad, but no! It’s a tomato salad, with extra tomato and tomato dressing and tomato sprinkles on top.

So after having decided that they were a little much as a slicing tomato, I said to myself that they would, however, make an unbelievable sauce tomato.

And then I read about tomato powder (you see how this is coming full circle now?), which is basically making a thick puree, pouring it onto fruit leather trays (or plastic-wrap lined regular trays), drying the heck out of it and then grinding it into a powder using a mortar and pestle (because who doesn’t love repetitive fine-motor activities that just keep going, like, forever?!) or a food processor (for those of us with lives they’d like to get back to).

So having brought in approximately three million pounds of tomatoes (or twenty) (details), and having cored and quartered them (which took about three years), AND having swept all the quarters into my next-biggest stock pot, I had this.

which does NOT look all that appealing, actually, but it smelled amazing…99.5% Costoluto with a couple Black Krims that didn’t duck fast enough and about five Romas that waggled their tongues at me and I do NOT put up with insolence from tomatoes…give them an inch, they’ll take a mile, guys.

And then I put that on the stove for about fifteen minutes – just long enough to heat things up and get the skin loosened a bit from the flesh and the juice ready to come out.

Meanwhile, I did battle with set up the food mill. This little contraption separates the pulp and juice from the seeds and skins. It’s like a magic trick.

pulp and juice in one bowl, skins and seeds in the other

hi, my name is Compost!

And then begins the really long and tedious process of boiling down the juice. What you want is something that looks like…ketchup. What you start out with is something that looks like really cheap tomato juice.

but the flavor of this stuff is like a punch in the face…these are some REALLY tomato-y tomatoes!

{fast forward about five hours (!!!!) of gentle-simmering time}

I have fruit leather trays, so I used those – the puree gets ladled and spread evenly at about 1/8” depth.

and it looks almost exactly like strawberry fruit leather…you can imagine the Denizen Disappointment™ when this bright red substance turned out to be a VEGETABLE thing instead of a FRUIT LEATHER thing…

Then the dehydrator goes on its highest setting and then…well. You wait.

And wait.

And wait.

It takes about fourteen hours to get to the first “flip” – where you gently peel the leather off the tray, turn it over, and put it back on.

Then another fourteen hours of drying.

Then, if it’s still not powderably dry…another flip and yet more drying.

Then, you break it into pieces and give it another four hours or so.

I’ve flipped it twice, and I think it should be done by the time I’m leaving for work tomorrow. From what I’ve read about it, it can be used as a thickener in soups, or in lieu of ‘regular’ canned tomato paste – add 2-3 parts water to each part tomato powder, until you have the consistency you want.

I tried a nibble of the leather that had broken off while I was flipping it, and man…it’s going to be good no matter what I use it in. In general, when you dehydrate things they tend to intensify in flavor; I’ve used dehydrated tomatoes all year from last season’s harvest and they’ve been killer flavor-additions to otherwise boring foods.

Which of course means that I will be spending the whole day tomorrow thinking about what-all I can make using tomato powder. Instead of thinking about what-all columns we're using from which-all sources in wherever-all processes and procedures.

The distracting power of the powder: it is mighty, yo.

It had to be done

Microwave 2-3 minutes...bake at 450 for 13-18 minutes...pan-fry 4-6 minutes...deep-fry at 350 for 3-4 minutes...

...huh...deep-fry the chicken patty...iiiiiiiinteresting...different...

So OBVIOUSLY, I had to try it.

In the name of Science.

Along with some golden potato "wedges" (fried with just a little sea salt) and zucchini (barely shown some heat and drizzled with Balsamic vinegar). And a little jalapeno jelly for the chicken.

The things I do for science...SUCH a burden...

(yeah, they're pretty good deep-fried...crunchy outside, moist inside...and jalapeno jelly ought to be in every cupboard because that sweet-heat goes so marvelously with so many things...)