17 posts tagged “february”

Here is the  maple-walnut chiffon cake - it was a really light texture, the frosting was a bit too sweet for me, and my apartment smelled like maple for days. I want to do a chocolate-hazelnut one next. What's not to love about that?!

Here are the Nutella ravioli cookies. Basically you make sugar cookie dough, cut out circles, blip in a bit of the yummy, fold, pinch shut, and bake. They weren't bad.

Last weekend I made a chiffon cake that came out pretty damn awesome. I also made Nutella ravioli cookies: take some sugar cookie dough, cut out a disk, put in a bit of Nutella, fold over and bake. Drizzle with chocolate. Eat. Swoon. I took pics but they are still on my camera, so perhaps they'll get up this weekend.

Today for lunch group I took a recipe for couscous with preserved lemons and expanded it to include wheat berries, green lentils, and black lentils. It was YUM.

Last night I cast on some two-at-a-time, toe-up socks. I'm partially improvising and partially using a pattern. I am using yarn that will be stripy (blue & white) so I don't know if I'm going to bother with a stitch pattern. I can only imagine that ripping out two socks at once would be a nightmare, so I'm going to do what I can to avoid that fate! I have one stitch pattern in mind that I can test out pretty well on a small bit of sock, I think. we shall see.

Is it just me, or does it seem like personal blog culture is fading? I read lots of blogs that are focused on personal finance, and cooking, but I don't read personal blogs very much. And thanks to stupid vox's stupid policy to not allow anonymous comments, the few readers I do have don't comment. Which makes this seem a lot like talking to myself! Only less obviously nutty.

Apparently, this is a real sentence: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Even better, I have -for the moment!- wrapped my head around the explanation

This comic is doing a series this week on fiber - the yarn-type of fiber, that is!

I am seeing Coraline tonight and am very excited!

This week for lunch group, I'm revisiting a recipe of my own invention. It consists of mixed grains (last time was quinoa, wheat berries, and barley; this time it's barley, brown rice, and Israeli cous cous), beets (last time roasted, this time boiled), greens (arugula), and cheese (parmesan). You combine the grains & beets and heat them, then stir in arugula, and sprinkle on the cheese. It's beautiful, and needs a name. Here's a picture from the last time I ate it - that time the beets were stored with the grains, resulting in more pinkness than we'll see tomorrow.

As a side note, peeling raw beets? WAY more hand-staining than peeling already-cooked-in-water beets. I'm pretty much back to normal now, thanks.

Two coworkers have 2 Meyer lemon trees in their yard, so I got a heap of them last weekend. I tried to be sane, but:

So, I made salt-preserved lemons:

and candied lemon peel:

and lemon-coconut macaroons (employing my darling KitchenAid mixer)

I'm still in my lunch group, and am deciding what to bring for tomorrow. I thought I'd write up my process, for my enthralled readers' (or is that reader's?) consumption.

I started by thinking about what else we've eaten this week. Monday we had minestrone, Tuesday we had roasted veggie turnovers, today we have baked ziti (oh my yes, we eat well).

This morning I inventoried my cabinets & fridge. Here's what I have that I'd like to use:
can of pumpkin
one frozen chipotle pepper in adobo sauce (the very last one, from a can purchased ... a while ago)
half a block of cheddar cheese (so maybe 4 ounces)
some frozen corn
two frozen tortillas

I made soup the last two weeks: Roasted Beet Soup, followed by Sweet Potato, Corn, Jalapeno bisque. So, this week I think I should get away from soup.

Then I thought about the weather: yeah, we live in California, but it's a shocking mid-50s lately (12.7 Celsius, if I've got any Canadians in the house). So, while the weather doesn't require soup, something warm would not be misplaced.

So, I'm thinking of some sort of casserole/Mexican lasagna thing. In my mind, black beans and pumpkin go quite well together. I searched online and came up with some possible contenders:
Black Bean Lasagna - has guacamole baked right in! nice touch! doesn't include pumpkin though
Pumpkin Lasagna - well.. has goat cheese (yum!) but uses noodles; doesn't have any beans in it
Pumpkin and Black Bean Casserole - now we're getting closer, though it doesn't use any tortillas

So, I think I have enough to get me going. I'll cook the beans with onion, green or red bell pepper, and the chipotle pepper. I can layer the tortillas, beans, pumpkin, corn, and cheese a few times. Perhaps I'll pick up some salsa to mix in; alternatively I can add some canned tomatoes to the black beans. I'll bake the whole shebang for, I dunno, a half hour or so (we'll reheat tomorrow at lunch time). If I can find a ripe avocado, I might bring that to slice on the side. And I may bring oranges to have afterward.

Too bad I can't think of a way to incorporate the mass of Meyer lemons I still have at home! (actually, I'm down to maybe 8)

What a busy weekend! We're in the middle of the SF Bluegrass & Old-Time Music Festival (SFBOT, for short), and I got on the volunteer list this year.. and went a little crazy.

Friday night I went to the opening night square dance which was (as ever!) SUPER FUN. Wow do I love dancing, and square dancing is perfect for me - not TOO hard, randomly pair up, follow directions, and move on to the next dance partner. So far, most people I've asked have had square dancing in gym class in grade school (the two exceptions I've found so far: a Canadian, and someone who grew up in the middle of San Francisco). I always secretly loved it in gym, and was happy to square dance a few times as an adult: Portland has a pretty big square dance/old time music scene, so I went to a couple of dances there, and my good friend Tim had square dancing at his wedding reception, which is just a lovely memory.

So, once more I VOW I will seek out more dancing opportunities. I hear that a local place has regular dances, so I'm going to check it out.

I also volunteered for SFBOT Saturday and Sunday nights. My favorite band so far: Huckleberry Flint - that's the link to their (suprisingly pleasing) MySpace page, but I don't think the music there does justice to their live show. I was just blown away by the lead singer, and they played together SO well.

Anyway, I was reflecting as I watched the opening act (four guys in plaid and trucker hats): it's so nice to see people come together and sing and play music. There's something especially endearing about a bunch of guys doing it - maybe because you don't often see men singing otherwise. My brother will jump out of a plane, has a black belt, and has volunteered to go to Kabul with the Air Force, but I have the feeling he'd rather jump out of the plane minus his parachute rather than get up on a stage and sing.

More volunteering for SFBOT tonight and Friday. Tomorrow I'm volunteering for something else. I admit I got swept up in a wave of civic enthusiasm with the election of President Barack Obama (I have not yet gotten tired of saying that though, I gotta say).

 

I first became aware of this book when I heard an interview on NPR in 2001, after I'd been accepted to library school but before I got a job in a public library. It was one of the first things I added to our collection development list when I got hired, and yet I'd never gotten around to reading it! However when I read that the theme for February's Book a Month Challenge was "Heart" this book came immediately to mind.

(I've got the hard cover edition from my library, and like its art better, but Amazon isn't cooperating.)

The subtitle "Restoring life to a Black Hills ranch" gives a pretty good idea about the content of the book. The author had a ranch in the Black Hills for 20 years before deciding to switch from cow (hard on the environment, expensive to maintain) to buffalo (perfectly suited for the region, much less hands-on work required).

I'm only halfway through the book but I'm really enjoying it. It's fascinating to read about the ecosystem of the Black Hills, and so interesting to learn more about buffalo. It makes sense that a native species works so well with the land, but it's been quite eye-opening to realize how destructive cows really are. In honor of this book, I had a buffalo burger on my way to Yosemite. I think I'm going to order buffalo more often - from this read, it seems like a smart meat choice, if a person is eating meat.

oh yeah... snow!
So, as expected, Yosemite is amazingly beautiful in winter:

I spent last weekend there as part of a group of nine, almost all of us library types of some sort. Friday and Sunday were mostly spent in transit (with stops for memorably good meals each way), and Saturday was Day in the Snow! We had a good mix of snow types: three down hillers, one snowboarder, three cross-country-ers, and two of us went snowshoeing, which was fun yet grueling. I always forget that it's such hard work, and we somehow thought it would be bright to go snowshoeing for a mile or so in SUPER DEEP snow. How deep, you ask? THIS DEEP, I respond:

That's usually a public bathroom. So yeah, we're talking about 6 feet of snow, and no groomed trail (we mostly got to follow in the tracks of some cross-country skiers, but they weren't all that much help). It took us 2 1/2 hours to go 1.3 miles. It was painfully slow, and if either of us had gotten hurt, or been any slower, we'd have been in big trouble. But, since I'm home and it was fine, it's all water snow under the bridge. All in all, it was a fun time.

Flying needles
In other news, still knitting like crazy. I've finished seven scarves, ranging from big ol' woolly things to a very delicate cashmere and silk one. It's really time to work on something a bit harder. I've got a couple of patterns picked out for market bags - you know, a meshy cotton bag used at the farmer's market. I think that'll a) keep me busy b) challenge me AND c) take some time. I've spent quite a bit on this new hobby and I've got to figure out a way to keep this an enjoyable AND reasonably expensive hobby. To give it perspective: since New Year's Day I've watched 4 seasons of Buffy and two seasons of Angel. I just started season three of Angel (and love it.. why did I resist it so long??).

Flying spokes
Still biking. I have to get up early on Saturday so I can drive a half hour and be ready to ride fifty miles starting at 9 am. But it's after a concert the night before, so I don't know how this is going to go. I can get prepped after work, and I might take transit separately so I can leave the show at 11:30 or midnight, as it's a safe bet it won't be over yet.

No rest for the celebratory!
To top it all off, Stretts is having a party on Saturday night. Also, beany is thirty today, so a number of us are going out on Sunday afternoon. And I'm working in the morning - one of the great things about my job is it'll allow me to pick up hours at weird times, so I can take time off later without taking a major hit to my vacation time. So it's super great that I can work in four-hour increments for the next three Sundays, but between that and biking and working... no sleeping in for me! It's enough to make me hope for great buckets of rain some Saturday so I can stay abed.

vacation vacation vacation
Why do I need to save up vacation time? Because I've got lots of stuff coming up this year:

• two days off in March when my parents and one of my college friends are in town.
  
• Two days off in April when I go visit my sister and brother - he'll be moving away later this year, so I wanted to fit in a visit before he moves. I haven't even seen the apartment he's been in for almost two years!
• 6 days off in May/June when I go to NYC and Boston and my college 15-year reunion
• 14 days off in September when I go to the Shakespeare Festival and then visit Portland, and then do Cycle Oregon
• 2 days off in October when I go back to Yosemite
• some number of days for Christmas!
  

Wow, that's on the order of 30 work days off this year. Sweetness!!!!! but you can see why I've gotta bank some time - I had a bit left over from last year, and we get a generous amount, but not quite THAT generous!

so, yeah. I've felt like I'm not blogging so much. Mostly I've been super absorbed at work, or brain dead because of it, and when I'm home I tend not to be knitting with the tv rather than surfing the net.


 

I grew up in a family of people with a good, slightly quirky, sense of humor. When I was about ten or eleven I heard my mom ask my dad, "Did you feed Herman?" I was confused, as we didn't have anyone named Herman in the household. My imagination's always been pretty good so I thought that maybe there was a SECRET PET in the house! They were going to surprise us with a dog!

[As an aside, I should've known this idea was pure folly: my mother always rightly maintained that if we got a dog, she'd be stuck taking care of it, and she wasn't at all interested in doing so. Still, that notion persisted for years. In fact when she and my father gathered me, my older brother, and my younger sister together around in early 1983, and said something was going to happen that we'd always wanted, my first thought was that they were having a baby, but I figured that was a definite no-go, so I went with my second guess and said, "we're getting a dog!" ... but no. In fact, they were having a baby.]

Anyway, it turned out that Herman was not a SECRET PET but was instead some kind of bread starter. It had to be fed periodically, and then you could split it up to keep it going, and use the rest to make a coffee-cake-like bread. Herman was yummy, but long-forgotten until last week, when a coworker brought in something she called "Friendship Bread" along with some bags of starter for our Very Own. I recounted the tale of Herman, and took a starter, and called it good.

But a different coworker brought her version of the Friendship Bread into her band practice, and in the course of conversation recounted my wacky tale of my parents feeding Herman. And, lo, it turns out that in the 1980s, there was a version of what is now called Amish Friendship Bread that was in Germany in the 1980s... and it was called Hermann! You can even read about it - in German!

I love it, a full twenty-five years later, I find out my mom was NOT being quirky in referring to the bread starter thingy as Herman.

I just came across an amazing quote on a decent blog post - the post is good, but the quote really hit me:

“Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” - Mark Twain

That suits me for sure!