You know what's fun? Waking up an hour before the alarm is due to go off and just sort-of fidgeting about for half an hour before you give up and stagger to the bathroom and while dozing on the toilet you realize the smell is not coming from you but rather from the enormous runny shit some cat took on the shag bathmat so you scrape off as much of it as you can and toss the mat in the wash and then toss every cat you can find outside into the deep dark cold because they are horrible horrible creatures and by then you are wide awake and feeling faintly sick but that is okay because you need to be up in about five minutes anyway and then you remember that today is your day off and you have no need to be awake but you are utterly and completely awake so you write out a week's worth of menus plus grocery list and plan out which pies your are bringing to Thanksgiving plus grocery list and then you realize you can still smell the smell you smelt in the bathroom and you look and you do not find any more but you know it must be there and ...
Come to think of it, none of that was any fun. Well, menu planning was all right as it allowed me to browse the branch's copy of Pillsbury's Good for You! Fast & Healthy Family Favorites (Wiley: 2006) and tick off things on my freezer's content sheet.
Yes, I made a list of all the things in the downstairs freezer. I have a habit of forgetting what's down there and then discovering I own five pounds of frozen peas and a whole lot of mysterious (unlabeled) soup containers. Too many peas aren't a problem as I am quite liberal when I add frozen vegetables into casseroles, soups, and stews and they will get used up -- as long as I continue to remember they exist. The mystery soups are a bit more problematic (I swear I've been labeling all the soups), because I might thaw it expecting Cabbage & Vegetable only to discover it is Mexican Beef & Vegetable. Not a terrible problem, but a trifle irritating.
Another reason for knowing the contents of the freezer, is that I'd like to empty it out. Not particularly soon, really, but it would be good to work toward empty. We are (probably) putting our house up for sale in the spring and we're moving too far away to schlep a freezer full of frozen stuff. Anyway, the basement freezer came with the house and we may just leave it. It works fine, but I don't really want to deal with moving it.
Yes, I know. Fixating on the freezer isn't a useful thing to do. Yet, this is how I cope with change. I break down whatever change is coming into tiny steps (like emptying out the freezer) and by the time I've done a bunch of tiny steps I have gotten on board with whatever it is that has happened/is happening and I can look at The Big Picture without flinching (too much).
Sun Nov 11 08:31:29 2007
I took Monday of last weekend so I could have a three day birthday celebration, but really it works out to almost two weeks of celebration. I thought, when one became a fully fledged adult, one's birthday celebrations became briefer and more paltry affairs. And yet, for me, birthdays seem better now that I am an adult. Less intense, maybe, but better. Rather than one big day with cake and ice cream and presents and too many people it becomes nearly two weeks of cards and mysterious parcels and restaurants and shopping and just a few special people.
The week before my birthday, The Best Friend sent me a parcel from the wilds of N'Hampsha which I did tear open immediately upon returning home from work. The Husband suggests I have no self control. I say, there was no note saying I shouldn't open it. It was full, as always, with all sorts of yummy goodness and practical objects like delicious lavender flax bars and environmentally friendly cleaning stuff. The Husband, exasperated by my lack of restraint (he would have waited for the proper day if it had been his birthday parcel?), also gave me a present.
Five Mo's Bacon Bar by Vosges Haut Chocolat. Ohmygod. Ever since I read about these a few months ago, I have been dying to try them. They are so delicious. The chocolate is smooth and deep. As it melts on my tongue, it releases a slight smoky flavor and then the salt crystals embedded in the chocolate begin to dissolve and, oh my, chocolate and salt is an amazing combination. Finally, when I chew, there is the bacon -- more texture than taste, but still unmistakably crisped cooked bacon. Not Bacos bacon bits, mind you. This is very much real Sunday Breakfast crumbled bacon ...
*Sigh* It is impossible to accurately describe the sheer pleasure this chocolate gives me. You must try it for yourself.
You know what a really great evening is? Guitar Hero III on the Wii, bacon chocolate in your mouth, and a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon at your elbow. I kid you not, an evening like that is a small kind piece of heaven. A heaven I can look forward to most nights as GH3 was one of my other birthday presents (w00t). Not surprisingly, I am pretty terrible at it, but may someday be ... less terrible. And there is always bacon chocolate to console me.
Anyway, enough about the mouth-watering chocolate! The Husband also gave me on really snazzy jewelry box which makes my jewelry collection suddenly look a whole lot smaller (yet more expensive). My parents had bought me a jewelry box at Ames over fifteen years ago and I'd been making do with it, because it's just one of those things I use everyday, but don't really see. Suddenly, I have velvet lined drawers and separators and pockets and crap and I wonder how I got along without them.
We went out for dinner with my parent's to an Italian-esque restaurant The Husband and I had been to only once before and kept meaning to come back to. The food was good, but not as exceptional as I had remembered. The Mexican I ate with The Husband certainly was, however. We tried SolToro, the new Mexican eatery (apparently owned by Michael Jordan) at the Mohegan Sun. The guacamole put The Husband over the moon -- they make the guacamole from scratch at your table and the taste is really quite amazing. Clean and bright. None of the murkiness I associate with guacamole. And the duck carnitas ... they gave the bacon chocolate bars a run for their money as Most Delicious Thing I Have Ever Eaten.
So, a perfect night would be: guacamole with housemade corn chips, duck carnitas, bacon chocolate, and Guitar Hero III. Must start planning.
Fri Nov 02 15:49:50 2007
Lest you think Halloween was all about decoration, I also did a fair amount of cooking and tidying. I trimmed some of the giant burning bush at the edge of our property so you can see our mailbox from down the street, now, and the shrub is not longer growing into the road. I still need to trim the rest of it back, but hacking at it so ruined my hands and wrists that I am in no rush to continue. I also trimmed the wee evergreen behind the mailbox so The Husband can see if the flag is up without leaving the house, but that was easy. The evergreen gets trimmed semi-regularly and has never been that big to begin with. Whereas the burning bush started out big and has since moved on to monstrous.
But shrubs are not that interesting, so on to cooking ...
I made black currant gelatin. Yes, I know, that sounds lame. I followed the recipe for "Fruit Juice Knox Blox" on the back of the Knox Gelatin box. Not a bad first attempt, but the black currant flavor was very much in the background. Weird, as black currant juice has a pretty strong flavor. I don't really eat Jell-o so I'm not sure what inspired me to do this beyond, "because I could."
Which is pretty much the same reason I made apple sauce, come to think of it. At least the apple sauce tasted good -- really good -- and made the house smell fantastic. We'd gone to the farm stand last weekend to pick up more pumpkins and, of course, some apples. The Husband didn't seem to be eating them, because "they smell like pee" (don't ask) and I can't eat that many apples at one and didn't feel like pie so ... slow cooker applesauce to the rescue.
The apple sauce was dead easy to make:
Six cups cored, peeled, and chunked apples in a slow cooker with half a cup water, half a cup sugar and cinnamon and ginger to taste. Cooked on High about five hours and then gave it a good stir until the bigger chunks fell apart. The end product was, yes, a bit darker brown than the applesauce you buy in the store, but it also tasted a damn sight better hot or cold. It tasted a lot like apple pie, actually.
Crap. Now I want pie.
Wed Oct 31 15:49:50 2007
I took today off to carve pumpkins and tart the house out for the trick-or-treators. I'm still new enough to this whole "paid time off" swindle that, well, the idea of getting paid while I gut pumpkins or play Guitar Hero really amuses me.
Mind you, the Young Adult Librarian gets paid to play Guitar Hero and DDR at work ... now she's the one who know how to work the system.
Anyway, thanks to the new patio/sidewalk area, we had plenty of space to display jack-o-lanterns this year without racking them all up on the steps ala ("Flaming Stairs of Death"). I only carved up six pumpkins this year which is one less than last year, but two more than the year before. I stuck with fairly traditional faces -- none of that fancy plastic saw fretwork -- but made sure they leaned more toward friendly than frightening. I arranged a couple on the stairs and then the rest around edge of the patio area and on the air conditioner.
It's quite nice having this new area and garden to decorate. I stuck a bunch of small foam headstones in amongst the new flowers I'd planted and propped a big cracked foam tombstone against the wall between the rose bushes. I sprinkle some of the foam (god bless Styrofoam) bones around them and put a pumpkin or the orange lantern at the foot of the big stone and the whole thing should look appropriately Crypt Keeper-ish and yet should also take all of five minutes to put away. No more running about the yard, trying not to forget someone's feet. No, everything is spread out in one area and, yet, it doesn't look like Halloween Town exploded on my front porch, either. It looks cohesive and ... tasteful.
Bah.
The last pumpkin was quite tiny -- more like an acorn squash in size -- and I was getting tired, so I cut little round holes all the way around it using an apple corer and put it on the mailbox with a plastic skeleton I'd jammed into a sitting position using wooden kitchen skewers. Hopefully, it will function as a glowing orange candy beacon and bring some trick-or-treaters. Today is, obviously, the middle of a school week and, thanks to the government's dickering with the calender, still full light at six o'clock. Who goes candy hunting before full dark? Nobody. Yet, the kidlets have to be in bed fairly early for school on Thursday. There's really only a few short hours they can set aside for trick-or-treating. No matter how tastefully I tart up my house, they may never make it here.
Oh well, more candy for us.
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last updated: Sat 17 Nov 2007 08:19:03 AM EST