Jag End

I declare that today is the last day of my (latest) cooking jag.  Not because I've decided to

stop eating, although I need to decide to stop eating sweets like a sugar famine is on the horizon (can you say, "weight loss sabotage?"), but because I haven't found any more recipes that I'm burning to make.  Besides, I'm out of grocery money--until tomorrow.  Today's recipe came from "You" magazine which is a monthly or maybe quarterly "women's" (ugh, don't you hate that?) mag put out by our local Gannett newspaper.  It's Lentils & Brown Rice that's loaded and garnished with four cups of sauteed onions.  This is my taster bowl.  I couldn't resist peeling and grating a nice big carrot and putting that in when the rice got stirred in.  I thought it needed more veggies.  Anyway, it's very tasty and may cure the yen for lentils I've had this week.

Instead of sewing or knitting this afternoon I went to see a movie with friends.  I think the last movie I went to see was the last of the Hunger Games series.  We saw "The Post" with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.  It was good but I wanted Katherine Graham to have more of a backbone and not be so wishy-washy.  She probably didn't in real life so Meryl couldn't play her with one but she grew one when it counted.  My friends and I thought they should have run "All the President's Men" as a bonus film.





It was so cold today.  Look at the morning sky.  Pretty, yes, and then look at the birdbath.  The glacier is back better than ever.












Getting dressed this morning I put on a long-sleeved tee and a cotton sweater.  Big mistake.  When I got home from the grocery I stripped off the cotton sweater and put on the Red Marl sweater that's my warmest and put chemical toe warmers in my shoes.  I wasn't going to be distracted from the movie by cold feet.  Oh, the movie was in the comfort seat theater which meant we had leatherette recliners with cup holders to sit in.  Tres luxurious.  So luxurious that the guy next to me started snoring about 2/3 of the way through but his wife elbowed him and he woke up.  My redo of the neck of the Red Marl sweater is a success.  It lays nicely around my neck, doesn't crawl up into my hair, or make me look like I'm being strangled.  *pats self on back*

January 14--Stoplight Parrotfish.  Daria never saw a fish like that before.  It was turquoise, yellow, green, purple, and pink.  No, really, it was a real fish, not a little one either, swimming right below her munching on coral.  She could hear the crunching as it bit off pieces of reef.  Its mouth was like a beak, she figured it had to be a parrotfish.  There were fish I.D. books on the table outside the dive shop across the street where she left her clothes and purse when she went snorkeling.  Yesterday it had rained like crazy just as she got there so she sat looking at the books until the rain stopped.  When she thought about that she realized how silly it was because as soon as the rain stopped she would cross the street, go down the steps to the beach, and get into the ocean to get wet.  Rain water, sea water--what difference did it make?  Either way she'd be wet.

I'm listening to "Driving Miss Norma" about a couple who take his 90 year old mother on a road trip around the country.  Just before I turned it off he was talking about them sampling the signature food of each state they visited.  The guy is from Upper Michigan but it's obvious that the male narrator isn't.  He just called the quintessential UP food "paste-ies" (which are the things strippers paste over their nipples or used to anyway) instead of "past-ies" the Cornish meat pies the miners took for lunch.  Tsk.  That kind of screw up really takes me out of stories.  You?
--Barbara

The Jag is Dwindling

I knew it couldn't go on for much longer.  Yesterday I was distracted by an assistant

demanding stories read and the lion's share of my attention so I didn't do any cooking, only reheated the second half of the Chicken (Turkey) & Rice casserole for supper.   But one of last weekend's writers shared a recipe from a past version of the plan for WW Turkey Breakfast Sausage.  I'd gotten ground turkey for it at the grocery, all the other ingredients we had, so this morning I made it.  It's not bad.  It'll never replace good old fatty pork sausage for taste but it's a darned adequate substitute--and better still, 2 patties are ZERO points.  ("zero" might be my new favorite word)



The outdoor deep freeze is back.  Thursday afternoon we had rain, by 6 o'clock PM it was snowing, it got down below zero in the night, and all that rain and melt water froze.  Ugh.  Happily we had warning that was going to happen so the city workers spent time prepping the roads for it so the main roads were essentially dry yesterday with only the side streets having a bit of ice.  As you can see the glacier is back in the birdbath.  Every morning I do yoga in front of the patio door looking out.  You can see that there won't be any patio yoga for the foreseeable future.  That right there is granite-hard compressed ice with a dusting of snow over the top for extra slickness.






Last night at knitting I finished the neck ribbing of the Black & Blue Shrug and when I got

home I slipped one of the sleeves' held stitches onto the needle, picked up the underarm stitches, and got a couple rows knitted on the first sleeve.  I'm making the sleeves longer than the mid-upper-arm short sleeves the pattern calls for--which means I need to take good notes of how many stitches I have, how many rows, and how many stitches I decrease when because I want to taper the sleeves a bit and I would like the sleeves to match.  Since the weather seems determined to flirt with zero degrees (that definition of "zero" I'm not such a fan of) I'm anxious to have another nice fuzzy woolly shrug/sweater to wear.  I'm wearing the first version of it right now, the green one made with super bulky yarn I bought in Goshen, IN.  I'm happy to say that the sweater's a bit big on me now that I've lost 18 lbs. but it's warm and I'm wearing it.

January 13--Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, Dynamic Suprematism.  Kale lay on the gallery floor and looked up at the painting.  "It looks like a town plan," he said.  His friend Petra lay beside him with her head toward the painting so she was looking at it from a different perspective.  "I think it's the design of a multi-level airport or maybe a space station."  Kale snorted.  "A space station?  Really?  Have you OD'd on Star Wars or turned into a Trekker?"  She looked over at him but all she saw were the two black holes of his nostrils.  "No, not Wars or Trek.  I just think it looks like a place for things to land."  As they lay there, head to feet, discussing the painting a security guard approached and asked them to get up off the floor.  He said that some patrons had said that a pair of bums were sleeping in the Abstract Gallery.

I had to go out to nab a library book on CD that was being held for me and I've gotta say that those few warmish days last week really spoiled me for this frigid stuff.  It's clear and sunny and windy as the dickens and cold cold cold.  Ah, January in Wisconsin.  You gotta love it.  No, you don't, you have to endure it.
--Barbara

Still On The Jag

 


This morning I managed to eat breakfast before I broke out the apron and can opener.  Today's first recipe was Creamy Three Tomato Soup.  Durwood is a mondo-tomato fan plus we had those dried tomatoes we've never known what to do with that needed doing with so I sat with the kitchen shears snipping rings of solidified tomato into pieces while talking with a friend on the phone.  A half-cup of dried tomato snips is a lot.  I assembled all the ingredients, measured things into little bowls (mise en place), and got cooking.  This little bowl is the taste tester's portion.  He requested a second, equal portion to make certain that the soup was edible.  It is.







After lunch of lentil soup (mm, I love lentil soup), sesame crackers, grapes, and a clementine I got busy chopping and measuring to make Chicken & Rice for supper (only I used turkey thighs instead of chicken ones) since Durwood had an appointment this afternoon which would eat into my prep time--if we wanted to eat before 8 o'clock, and we do.  It's in the oven right now baking its little heart out and in about 25 minutes I'll sprinkle on a cup of frozen peas, clap the lid back on, and bake it for 15 more minutes.  By then the turkey will be done and the rice will be fluffy and flavorful.  We do love casseroles and one-pot meals.



Last night after supper and blogging I finished the bottom ribbing of the Black & Blue Shrug.  Tonight I'll pick up the stitches at the neckline and knit the neck ribbing.  After that it'll be on to the sleeves which I hope to make longer than the pattern calls for depending on yarn supply.




Didn't write the prompt last night.  I was extra tired when I went to bed--at almost midnight

like a doofus--so this is all you get.  It's raining.  It's been raining all afternoon and the snow is melting.  See?  As a bonus it's supposed to drop into the teens tonight so the roads should be all shiny and slippery tomorrow.  Oh goodie.  Fingers crossed that the weather-guessers guessed wrong this time.
--Barbara

On A Cooking Jag

 


I am definitely on a cooking jag.  This morning before I even had breakfast I put together the wine-herb butter for tonight's supper.  (more on that in a minute)  The shallots I bought were too big (aw, what a pity) which meant I had half a finely chopped shallot with no place to go.  So once my herb butter was mixed and in the fridge cooling, I whipped up a little scrambled egg sandwich for myself for breakfast.  The big revelation was finding out that 1 1/2 teaspoons of McCormick's Bac'n Pieces only costs 1 point so my breakfast had that lovely, smokey fake bacon flavor we all crave and only added up to 4 points.

Not willing to let a cooking jag rest, after I ate breakfast I decided that I should really fire up the breakfast burrito assembly line for Durwood's breakfasts.  (I feel much better about him eating one of those than having to make do with half a Kwik Trip fake-blueberry donut [ack] or a Eggo waffle with jam on it.) I had all the ingredients on hand, have had them for at least a month and hadn't found or made time to buckle down and get them made.  Today was the day and, as you can see, I still have some of that gorgeous pink Glad Wrap left from cleaning out Mom's kitchen 6 1/2 years ago.  I even went downstairs for a roll of plain plastic wrap figuring that the end would come soon but 14 burritos later there's still some left on the roll.  (I think this stuff is related to "the ham that never ends."  Ask DS and DD about that...)


Once the burritos were in the freezer it was time to get dressed, bolt a cup of delicious lentil

soup (yesterday's cooking and the start of the jag), grab my writing stuff, and take myself to The Attic Books & Cafe to write for a couple hours, waiting for a friend to arrive for a chat.  As you can see I was plugged in to waves and rain sounds on my Kindle (cuts down on my natural tendency to eavesdrop) and had my Alphasmart which had proved to be a whiz bang word generator last weekend.  It worked its magic again today--when I downloaded what I wrote after I got home, I have four pages of Chapter 29.  Not to imply that Chapter 28 is finished.  It needs some tweaking but I'm at the part of the manuscript where I wrote bare bones of the story because I wanted to be able to write "The End" on the last day of November since that's when NaNoWriMo ends so there are many scenes that need to fill in the spaces left by the plot leaps I took.  I hit the high spots then so I'd remember where the story needed to go but quite a few interesting details got left out.  I'm filling in those blanks.

And then it was supper time.  The Gulf shrimp that I thawed yesterday got peeled and deveined, then arranged in a small iron skillet, dotted with half of the cold wine-herb butter that I made this morning, rested in a bit more wine and lemon juice, then roasted in a 475 degree oven until done.  Served with a slice of Italian Semolina bread for sauce-sopping-up and a pile of fresh steamed broccoli and we had a meal both of us are anxious to repeat next week.  Can't let the other half of the butter mixture go to waste, now can we?  (The money we spent on Gulf shrimp from the itinerant shrimp truck was worth every penny and I don't begrudge the 8 remaining packages of shrimp frozen in blocks of ice the freezer room either.)


January 10--Chester Harding, The Artist's Son, Frank S. Harding.  Jamie and Ry were inseparable.  When Jamie was an infant Ry would lay as close to his cradle as possible and not get his paws or his tail rocked on.  If the baby fussed and Mama was busy, Ry nudged the cradle with his nose to soothe Jamie.  Ry lay still as Jamie crawled over him, tugged on his ears or tail, and tried to catch the dog's tongue as he licked food off Jamie's chin.  Once Jamie was walking Ry finally had the playmate he craved.  You never saw one without the other as they ranged all over the town and its surroundings.

I know for a fact that my cooking jag isn't over.  I found a recipe for Cream of Three Tomatoes Soup in Sunday's Parade Magazine that I plan to make for Durwood tomorrow.  All I had to buy for that was half & half, I even have sun-dried tomatoes that we made a couple years ago in the food dehydrator to cut up.  I've got some turkey thighs I got in the Quick Sale cooler at Woodman's before Christmas and I picked out one of our favorite chicken thigh recipes from an older WW cookbook to make for the next two nights' suppers.  Then there's the recipe for WW Turkey Breakfast Sausage that one of last weekend's writers shared with me and didn't I buy the fat-free ground turkey at the store yesterday?  You bet your booties I did.  Yessiree bob, there's a cooking jag going on.  When I said so to Durwood tonight he said, "Do you hear me complaining?"  No, Dear, I do not.
--Barbara

See This Red Coat?

This probably looks like an ordinary red coat to you but it's not.  After I got dressed this morning I went into the bathroom to comb my hair and took a look at myself.  I thought I looked pretty darned good--and a bit thinner.  So after putting on my earrings I went downstairs to my clothing storage, pulled out this one-size-smaller red coat and tried it on.  It fit.  IT FIT.  It even zipped--easily--so it got to come upstairs to hang in the front closet with the big coat and go on errands with me today.  Zipped up against the just over freezing air and everything.  It's been about 3, maybe 4, years since I've been able to wear this coat.  I'm proud of myself and my dedication to eating right and sticking to my guns (she types as she's eating her daily weighed and measured serving of chocolate ice cream) so I ensure that my red coat continues to fit me and might even be a bit baggy next winter.

In service of my desire to keep eating right I woke up thinking about making WW Slow Cooker Lentil Soup.  I knew that I had all the ingredients I needed except Canadian bacon which isn't added until 6 hours into the cooking so since I planned a trip to the grocery this morning that wouldn't be a problem.  Because I am unable to make a recipe exactly as written I added a can of mushrooms when the Canadian bacon went in and I finished it with two tablespoons of lemon juice which DIL1 advises doing because slow cooking tends to muddle flavors and a bit of lemon juice (or vinegar if you're out of lemon juice) perks them back up.


Last month Weight Watchers changed their program--again.  See the first time I was in WW,

Jean Niedich who invented WW was still alive.  It was probably 1974.  I've been in and out of WW a dozen times since then and amassed cookbooks from every iteration of the program.  Yesterday the mailman brought the two latest volumes of recipes using the new Freestyle program.  At first I was quite peeved at the changes because I felt like I had the system down but over the last few weeks I have come to like the new plan and the fact that things like eggs and plain nonfat Greek yogurt and seafood and chicken & turkey breast and corn and peas and beans like pinto and black and garbanzos (my fave) are zero points now.  ZERO.  That lentil soup?  One and a half cups of it only counts 1 point.  ONE.  To be honest I probably won't eat that much for lunch but I'll charge myself a point nevertheless.  I've always loved lentil soup but seldom made it because the lentils "cost" so many points it just wasn't worth it.  Now this seems like a way a person can live her life and eat healthy and tasty food and still lose weight.  Nobody ever starved on WW but it's getting easier and easier to cook the WW way.  Tomorrow night--Roasted Shrimp Scampi out of the new Italian cookbook.  Who loves Italian food?  We do.

This morning a piteousness of mourning doves (yes, I had to look it up) came for breakfast.  And they could also all get a drink because the birdbath glacier was rapidly melting.  By the afternoon it was all open water much to the surprise of a squirrel that jumped up for a drink, put his paws where the ice had been, and was shocked to get wet feet.  Ha!

 


Tonight was the monthly caregivers meeting at the ADRC so my sock got its turn to get knitted on.  It's not going very quickly but it is growing.  I'll be wearing it before spring.  No doubt about it.



January 9--Camille Pissarro, Peasant's House, Eragny.  The hedge was so green that it looked like it would reach out and grab you if you got too near.  Elaine admired the apple, cherry, and pear trees in bloom behind the hedge.  She thought of all the fruit to come and wished she had fruit trees in her garden.  The whitewashed cottage looked so inviting with its pots of geraniums on the stone steps and the smell of baking bread wafting through the open window.  The black dog growling at the gate belied the welcoming air of the place.

Aw man, it's trash night.  That means I get to go around emptying all the trash cans and then maneuver the trash bin out of the garage between the snowblower and the van.  I'll probably end up backing the van out to save the paint job.  Better get on it.  Toodles.
--Barbara

Christmas Has Left The Building

Last night when I was sitting on the couch staring at the unlit Christmas tree and wondering

where I'd put the 3 Kings, their camels, and the camel driver now that Epiphany had come and gone (since there was no room for them on top of the TV armoire) I decided that today I'd put Christmas away for the next 11 1/2 months.  So I did.  I was exceedingly glad that I'd only put about 2/3 of the ornaments on the tree this year since it is a total pain in the keester to take them off and put them in their designated boxes in the red and green Christmas crap tote.  Down came the jingle bell wreath on the door into the garage, the Santa hat with plastic nutcracker and jingle bells on the front door, the palm frond Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer (or Kangaroo, if you're OJ), and the Scrooge "Bah Humbug" plaque from the wall.  I wrapped the garish 3 Kings that Mom made in ceramics a jillion years ago in bubble wrap, making sure to carefully wrap the equally ancient avocado half-burnt candles that she said were perfect in their urn shaped candle holders and are irreplaceable, and unwound the gold foil holly garland from the dinette chandelier.  Oh, and the Charlie Brown Christmas tree that droops next to the kitchen TV, complete with blue flannel Linus blanket for the tree skirt, got crammed back into its "as seen on TV" box from Walgreens.  (omg, I just realized that without the porcelain Nativity set my entire collection of decorations could have come from White Trash R Us)

Just as I finished doing yoga this morning this handsome Cardinal came to the platform feeder for a snack.  I was sure that he'd fly away as soon as I moved to get the camera but he stayed just long enough for me to snap this.  Isn't he beautiful?







I started reading the old-ish Cliff Janeway series of detective novels by John Dunning last

month (by reading you understand that I mean listening to audiobooks so I can knit and read simultaneously) but no one, not even Audible has the third volume, The Bookman's Promise.  No set of 9 CDs from the library that I'd have to copy onto my laptop and then fong into my iPod, no audiobook from Overdrive or RBDigital (formerly One Click Digital) which I can borrow through the library, no audiobook I'd have to buy from Audible.  I finally ended up buying a used real book for ten cents ($4.89 shipping) from a seller on Amazon.  It came today so I'm going to be reading it old school, an actual hardcover book that I have to hold and turn paper pages.  The odd thing is that the first two books and the last two books of the 5-book series are available to borrow as audiobooks.  What's special about book 3?  Maybe I'll figure it out when I've read it.



This evening I got the Black & Blue Shrug knitted down to the bottom ribbing.  It's much blacker in person.  After that I'll go back to the top to add the neck ribbing, then weigh my remaining yarn to see how long I can make the sleeves.  I'm hoping to get to at least elbow length.


January 8--Hans von Stuck, Advertisement for the International Hygiene Exhibition, Dresden.  Min hated the poster that hung in the entry of the building.  It showed a single, huge eye in a firmament of stars.  She thought the lashes looked like spikes and she was convinced that someone always watched through a pinhole in its pupil.  Mon would turn to hide her own eyes when she entered.  If she forgot and made eye contact with the eye, chills ran down her spine and her knees felt weak.

That's all I can think of.  I have to go downstairs and take all last weekend's clothes out of the dryer because tending the fireplace for three days made it smell like a chimney when I unpacked yesterday and I don't want them laying in a heap overnight getting all wrinkled.  Nighty-night.
--Barbara

I Said I'd Come Back and I Did

 




Although we had enough food for at least two more days at The Clearing we all packed up and went home this morning.  It was a banner weekend.  I live the closest to The Clearing but made sure to leave early enough on Thursday morning to have a quick lunch with my friend KS who works in the office and then get over to the campus to claim the bed I like in Room #10 (the one by the window), leave the Italian Semolina Bread, the butter, and the $8 Walmart toaster in the kitchen, get the fireplace started, and sit alone with my knitting in front of the big window overlooking the three pines and the bay of Green Bay for a couple hours before any one else arrived.  Heaven.

Long about 3:30 people started arriving.  Most came in twos, got settled in their rooms, put the food they brought in the kitchen, and come upstairs to get reacquainted and catch up.  Supper Thursday night was vegetarian chili with a dozen kinds of beans and cashews in it.  Delish.  JB, the leader of the pack of writers, gave out the weekend's schedule, and passed around a roundtable sign-up sheet.  I picked the first slot on Friday afternoon partly because I was so excited to finally have something to share at one of these winter weekends but also so I'd have plenty of quiet writing time to think about people's comments.  The sky was clear all weekend and the temperature barely got above 1 degree above zero but it wasn't too windy so it looked like a winter wonderland, plus as the fireplace minder I set up camp next to it and didn't go outside much because I asked people to bring in a log or two when they came in so I didn't have to bundle up every couple hours and go down to the woodshed.  Very smart of me, don't you think?




About a third of the writers are also knitters so evenings were spent knitting and talking and laughing laughing laughing.




On Friday morning I sat by my fireplace post with earbuds funneling the sound of waves and rain into my ears while my fingers danced over the keys of my Alphasmart--and words came out.  Real words.  Words that joined together into sentences and everything.  I'd been struggling since early November with how to write the scene and somehow sitting there on Friday let it leak out my fingers--and it's not half bad.  I need to do some research to add some trouble for my main character but I feel like my wheels are back on track.  Saturday morning's writing time went pretty well too.

It stayed cold and sunny until this morning when we had light snow and the temps got up to 13 degrees.  Balmy.  I have to admit that I kind of like the cold and sunny better than the warmer and snowy.  (It's the "sunny" part that wins my heart.)

January 7--Josephine Trotter, Lemons and Lime.  "If you're making marmalade where are the oranges?" Deb said, hands on hips.  Martha turned from the sink, suds dripping from her reddened hands.  "I'm making lemon marmalade."  She turned back to washing jelly jars and rings.  "I've never heard of lemon marmalade," Deb said.  "Just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it isn't a thing."  Deb leaned over and peered into the bowl of fruit.  "There's a lime in there."  "That's right.  I'm putting in one lime."  Martha dried her hands and crossed to the table.  "I think that will be a nice surprise, don't you?"  Deb crossed her arms.  "I've never heard of lemon marmalade."

I confess that's the only prompt writing I did over the weekend.  My roomie was an early to bed girl and my light bothered her so I'd do my nighttime ankle exercises as quietly as I could, plug in the Kindle and my phone to charge, and turn out the light.  I volunteered to take all the trash down to the dumpster this morning as an excuse to walk down to the workshop and come back to campus on the path just for a little quiet time in the woods.  It was lovely.  I followed deer tracks all the way.  Ahh.  This was a most relaxing weekend.  I wish I could do it more--but then it'd probably become old hat.  Ah well, such is life in the modern age.  I'm glad to be home, kinda.
--Barbara