Today’s results: yogurt, Irish potato brown bread, an almost-spanikopita (to be completed tomorrow), and Monterey Jack cheese. We should have made this cheese for our first hard cheese instead of the gouda we made last November. This was easy, if hugely time consuming. There’s a lot of waiting that happens in cheese-making. Bring the milk to temperature, add something, wait, repeat. Cut curds, wait, repeat. Curds and whey. Drained and salted curds. We got 6 quarts and 3 pints of whey out of this. (Local people: want some?) And this is where it’s at right now, pressing at 10 lbs, …
Sometimes the worn things can be patched up and brought back to life. This quilt was made by Ian’s mom, out of old clothes, jeans and shirts circa 1970. But by the time I met it, it’s backing had torn and it had been boxed up as something laced with memories but too much on it’s last leg to stand regular use. When I took it to the fabric store to find coordinating fabric to be the new backing (a challenge given the nearly forty years of shifting definitions of “fashionable”), it still smelled like the cedar chest. I felt …
I try to avoid impulse buys. Usually the stuff around a cashier station is just junk, except for all the chocolate you can pick up in the checkout lanes at the Seward Park PCC. And shopping at my local Lowe’s tends to me make me cranky enough that I refuse to buy extra stuff at the registers as a matter of principle; they made everything I was looking for so hard to find, why should I buy this just because it’s here? But it’s spring. They’ve rearranged things to put the vegetable gardening stuff up front (or at least on …
The mail last Saturday made it official: we know where Caitlyn will go to kindergarten next year. This process has been agonizing for a number of reasons but I think things can be reduced to (a) difficulty finding the answers to our questions and (b) free-floating societal pressure. There’s an absurd amount of pressure regarding school choice and enrollment. The free parenting magazines that periodically show up in the cubby at preschool are packed with ads from schools and camps and programs as well as articles (vague, overly-generalized articles) on how to get the best for/from your kid. There’s a …
I think it was the word “kale” in the title that grabbed my attention. I’d recently added 101 Cookbooks to my Google Reader and while browsing along found Pan-fried Corona Beans and Kale. And suddenly I knew what Tuesday’s dinner would be. We are, after all, still trying to eat the kale in the backyard before the seed potatoes arrive. Ok, so it wasn’t the recipe from 101 Cookbooks, but the similar one in Heidi’s book, Super Natural Cooking (which I bought on the recommendation of an old school friend and which I’ve admired regularly but hadn’t gotten around to …
They were talking about it again this morning, just like yesterday and the day before: the mid-term elections and the odds of the Democrats losing their congressional majorities. The interviews and discussions are sizable, sometimes filling 20 minutes of airtime, and conducted with such breathless urgency a listener might think the elections are next week. But they aren’t. The election is in November, which last time I checked is 8 months from now. That’s a heck of a long time to maintain any level of interest, much less the frantic one the media seems to have whipped up for itself. …