nosrednayduj

We've been continuing to harvest our tomatoes in this warm fall, not really getting very many, but enough to keep watering the plants. But then, it got cold a couple of weeks ago, down to 31F. So we dragged a tarp vaguely over the top of the plant to protect it somewhat. The seemed to work, and then it was 75 which is insane, but whatever. We were actually surprised that more tomatoes didn't ripen during the warm spell. Predicted 29 tonight, and 31 last night, and unprotected 29 is much closer to "kill the plant" temperatures. So we got some translucent plastic that we have lying around, and did a better job of sealing against the ground so that it would be better protection. This afternoon I stuck my hand in through a small gap and indeed it was a fair bit warmer inside. (I did not go get the thermometer, bad scientist.) It's going to be 75 again later this week. I don't think we would have done this had that not been predicted.

I made zucchini parmesan today (eggplant parmesan but you substitute zucchini slices, for which I used homegrown eight ball squashes, because they are a better shape). This entails dipping the slices into flour, egg, bread crumbs, and then drizzling spaghetti sauce and parmesan cheese over them and then baking. So when you're done, you have left over flour, egg, and breadcrumbs. Frequently I just chuck it, because they are contaminated with each other and with a little zucchini cooties. But today I decided that I would put in some sugar, a little oil, a touch of milk, and a handful of blueberries, and make little tiny blueberry bread things. At the last minute I thought "this should have leavening" and put in a little baking powder and a little cinnamon for sparkle. They were smashing.

Who knew we needed this? I mean, sometimes the edge pieces are best! Wouldn't it be nice if all of the brownies or whatever were edge pieces?

And it works! I actually made banana bread instead of brownies for its first run, because that's what I wanted to take to a potluck, and we had a bunch of dead bananas in the freezer. Secretly, I also made a regular loaf and I'm going to slice of that and take it, so as not to try to explain this funniness. Although, if I sliced them, it would just be short narrow banana bread, and that would be fairly normal.

Next will be pumpkin squares.

https://bakersedge.com/products/edge-brownie-pan

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First, a couple of weeks ago I was looking for the extra plastic lids to our glass leftover saving containers, because the current plastic lids all have cracks in them, and I asked people in the household if they knew if we still had any, or if I should proceed with the order I had just started online, and someone said "cancel that order and wait until solstice." So, I knew what I was getting...

Second, we got hard-to-find granola bars as a gift by ordering them online. A week after receiving and wrapping them, the intended recipient learned that this particular set of granola bars had been recalled for salmonella. So, that gift was a wash. At least we got our money back.

Thirdly, my gift to Perry was going to be an Instant Pot. I ordered a used one on eBay, because it seemed like a slightly greener thing to do, and Perry might like that. But, it arrived damaged, with an enormous dent in the side. So I had to start a return process there. At first I had thought it was the seller's deception, but careful examination of the box did reveal dents that corresponded pretty well to where the blow probably originated. The box dent then snapped back into box shape, so it wasn't obvious until you looked carefully. So there went my present. Valerie found someone on a Facebook Freecycle type group giving away a smaller version of Instant Pot and snapped it up. So we gave him that. I wasn't really sure which size I should have picked anyway.

Finally, a mile or so into my traditional "bicycle ride to Solstice Way", my derailleur cable snapped, so I had to alternately walk and coast back home. Fortunately, we had a spare and we were able to install it, rather than having an unscheduled trip to the bike store (which would have been open, because the nice thing about celebrating a weird holiday is that of the else's celebrating, so stores are open. But they might not have been able to fix it the same day.) So I got my ride after all!

We lit the fire midafternoon, and it turns out that the trees in our neighbor's yard have been growing over the past 20 years that we've been doing this, and so we ended up doing it inside our porch, and didn't really want to smoke up the house too much, so we delayed making the "2023" shingle until today when we could do it in the morning when the sun was not over the trees. Not sure if that counts as a minor disaster or not.

I took pictures of many things, because this was the first solstice without Jocelyn. She is performing in California for three weeks. So I sent her a text with pictures. She wanted to try lighting the fire from the sun, for which we sent her some supplies earlier, but she was unable to because it was hazy so the sun was insufficiently bright and point-source, and then later it was raining, so the sun was insufficiently available. Kind of fun that in Massachusetts we had bright blue skies and in California it was raining.
( Photo blast )

Late Lake news: last weekend we had a houseguest, and we took him sailing, and we ended the sail at the launch ramp, where we hauled and derigged the sailboat, and put it to bed for the winter. Still have a portion of the dock left to disassemble and also one kayak and one canoe tied up to it. Might get around that this weekend.

Another thing I hope to get around to this weekend is taking the gas that used to be in the power boat and sticking it in the Prius, which is our one remaining gas guzzling vehicle, other than the power boat. I think there's actually like 3 gallons left, because there really wasn't much waterskiing this fall due to cyanobacteria. Unfortunately, when I went to do this a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that the siphon had junk in it, sticking to the walls of the siphon. What eats or grows on gasoline? Anyway, I tried to use a coffee filter to filter out the junk, but the siphon was difficult to get going (later I noticed a large piece of particulate matter that seemed like it came from the siphon starter mechanism, so maybe that's why it was so hard), and when it did start, it rapidly overwhelmed the coffee filter and some splashed onto the driveway instead of going nicely into the jerry can. So, I decided I needed a new siphon. Which has now arrived, and so maybe I should try this job, directly into the gas tank. Which I'm pretty sure has enough space to accept the gas.

And of course we will have the usual cooking and eating activities tomorrow. We will have a few friends. Jocelyn is going to her boyfriend's in Houston, but Perry is here. We will have 10 people total. I made pies tonight, and Ken pressed apples into fresh cider.

Here, have a blort. I've been thinking I've been boring, but my boring is actually pretty interesting. There's been a bunch of waterskiing; we tried to get up on the knee board at a separate time, but it seemed like I'm missing some body part involving core strength to succeed in that, so I didn't try for very long, not wanting to break some unrelated body part.

Our summer house guest will be leaving on Sunday at oh dark thirty. I decided that I would rather spend money than get up early, and so I made him get Uber on his phone and we have reserved one and paid for it with my credit card. It's been entertaining being fed wild mushrooms – he is a big mushroom hunter – but I don't think I'm going to continue with that plan after he leaves. Also, he's a vegetarian, and I'm a little bit missing meat. I'm not a big meat eater, but there are a couple of dishes that I make with meat that I haven't had in a while.

We are getting ready to go to Germany. (They will feed us meat there.) Ken has a conference, and he is going with Valerie for the weekend before, and then I will join him for the weekend after, and we will go (not making this up) to a square dance convention. We will also randomly take the train to places and be tourists. I have selected the towns of Lorsch where there is an abbey which has at least one brick that still remains from the year 746 (and other tourist trap things) and the other town is Aschaffenburg where there is Johannisburg Palace. It seems like there's kind of a castle desert around Frankfurt, so there weren't that many that were train accessible and moderately close. Probably it will be cool, even though it is of a kind of blocky square design rather than Cinderella kind of castle design, because there will be nifty things inside. Anyway, we will pay our 9 euros and like it!

We think we've figured out how to buy tickets on the train. Ken and Valerie are leaving at oh dark thirty on Thursday for a flight to London, where they will stay overnight, and then make their way to Frankfurt the next day. They have some plan about all day boat ride down the Rhine. Not wanting to be left out, I have a plan about a one-hour boat ride on the Main. I will be leaving the following Thursday, but I'm having an overnight flight, which I mostly hate, but decided not to spend the extra time and many hundreds of dollars going through London. So instead I have arranged that I will be able to check into my hotel in the morning when I arrive and hopefully get some sleep, and then I will mainline penguin caffeine mints when I get up so that I will be perky for square dancing. Ken will join me after the conference ends. The conference is in the town of Mainz, which is an hour away; the square dance is in Frankfurt itself.

Ken and Valerie will be taking a car to the airport, and I'm going to go get it on the train, and then come back via Perry's college, where he is having his last class of summer semester. He has one final, which he will commute to on the train; everything else is projects. So I will pick up him and all of his junk. In the fall he is supposed to have a co-op job; he applied for many but regular jobs were not calling him back.
However, there is apparently some professor at the university who has some projects that kids can work on for their co-op time if they fail to get a job job.

On top of all this, I seem to be sick. I had some very mild upper G.I. symptoms yesterday afternoon and evening, and then I slept really well, and then in the morning I was slightly off but mostly fine, but by 2 PM I was really feeling bad with lower G.I. symptoms. So I took my temperature and I had a fever. Which I thought was weird. I haven't been anywhere. I went to the bank on Saturday morning where I spoke to a teller for a few minutes, and I wore a mask the entire time. Other than that, I have been riding my bicycle places and working from home. So I just have no idea how I could be sick, unless it's something I ate, but nobody else is having issues. And usually you don't have a fever with bad food.

Hopefully I will feel better in the morning. And really hopefully I will feel better by Thursday when I have to go do this airport plan. Also, there's a meeting with the customer tomorrow at 11 AM, so I hope I'm able to take that call.

Yesterday afternoon I tried to make Ukrainian Easter bread, after being inspired by somebody from Valerie's church. The recipe was one that called for original yeast with the whole proofing thing, and also manually needing and rising and so forth. I don't have that much patience. So I tried to adapt it for the bread machine.

This was moderately successful, and the bread came out beautifully in the end. But I ended up with too much liquid because I didn't reduce it enough to compensate for the eggs, I think or the fact that it called for quite a bit more fat than my normal recipes (it called for melted butter, but I substituted vegetable oil), so what ended up happening was that the little paddles spun around uselessly in the liquid without actually mixing the dry ingredients in. But I was alert to it potentially not working, so I was checking periodically, and when I noticed this I started doing some mixing with a fork, trying not to get my fork bashed by the little paddles, which were still going. You can't stop and start the bread maker, you just have to work with what it's doing.

This produced a dough that seemed kind of still too sticky, so I sprinkled in some more flour while it was mixing. This made me concerned about the fact that the bread machine can handle 4 cups of flour, and I had just sprinkled in more like 5, and was it still going to fit (it did).

Fast-forward to kneading time, and now it seems like it's really asymmetric in its kneading, so I got out my trusty fork and pushed things from one side to the other. Since the recipe called for raisins, which the bread machine will beep and tell me when is the right time to add, I did a little fluid dynamics experiments by dropping in a couple of raisins and watching where they went, and it seemed like it was actually being okay, but I still pushed it around a little. I helped a little with the punch down portion as well, because it seemed like maybe it wasn't going to do a good enough job. When it got done kneading and into the last rise, I tried to straighten it all out so it would be an even loaf.

It was perfect. And, I think, a lot less actual work than doing the kneading and rising and all that stuff myself, and a lot less cleanup as well at the end.

Then, this morning I made some hard-boiled eggs and dyed them, because why not.

"Squash Parmesan" (like Eggplant Parm, which we also had in this meal.) I think I started with the Laurel's Kitchen recipe, but I don't really remember anymore. Anyway, it's the bake-only, no-fry version of eggplant parm. Each squash makes 2 stacks, takes about a stack and a half, or a stack and a (smaller) eggplant stack to make a meal.



"Before" photo was in https://nosrednayduj.dreamwidth.org/96639.html

Last year, I had a big birthday bash. This year, obviously that wasn't happening.

I had a pretty good birthday anyway. I made blueberry French toast casserole the night before for Valerie to put in the oven in the morning (since she gets up earlier) so we could have it piping hot for breakfast. Since she was up early anyway, Valerie had borrowed this object, and had plenty of time to inflate it before I got down for breakfast, so I walked into the dining room and there was this ridiculous thing!

Just the previous day, somebody at work had decided we should be having social hour occasionally, so I had said "let's start Wednesday at lunch and wish me happy birthday!" So I got to put the ridiculous thing on video, and that was kind of fun.

In the afternoon, I had an optional errand in Somerville, and I decided to take my motorcycle since it was 52°. I got a little cold, but not bad. There was a lot more traffic than I expected, since I went at 2pm, I expected there really not to be much. Anyway, it took longer than I expected, so the amount of work I got done that day was not very much. But, it was my birthday!

Then, for dinner, I decided that we should have party food. See, for the big birthday bash the previous year, I had purchased a bunch of those frozen hors d'oeuvres, and had not managed to put them out, because there was so much other food. At some point earlier in the year we had party food for dinner, but there was still some left. We still have some of the little hot dogs wrapped in dough, and the first time there is some potluck or party, I will bring them.

And of course, we had cake for dessert. Jocelyn wasn't home to decorate it, but our friend Peg rose to the occasion.

We normally celebrate New Year's Eve at 7 PM, which is midnight GMT. However, this time Jocelyn was going to her boyfriend's house earlier than that (Covid safe? Maybe.), so we decided to celebrate at noon, where it turns out to be midnight in Thailand, among other places. The advantage of noon is that you actually get to see your clock saying 11:59 rather than 6:59…

Jocelyn is bringing "pop rocks bark" to her boyfriend's house. It's like a whole little celebration of fireworks in your mouth! With chocolate! Actually, it works out pretty well, because the chocolate dilutes the pop rocks, and so it's not overwhelming.