hudebnik

Some years ago we planted a dozen or so Fragaria virginiana (wild strawberry) plants in the bed near the front of the house, hoping they would spread and form a ground cover around the rose bushes. Spread they did: they're on a sacred mission to take over the world, and I try to keep them confined to that bed by pulling up the runners that pole-vault into neighboring beds. Anyway, last year we harvested enough strawberries to make a pint or two of wild-strawberry ice cream. (There are species of "wild strawberries" that taste like water. These are not that kind: these taste and smell like strawberries, albeit mostly the size of your pinky fingernail.) And last week I decided to see what the bed had produced. I got at least a cup of pinky-nail-sized strawberries, so we may be able to make ice cream or something again.

Some years ago we also planted a dwarf tart-cherry tree in the sub-lawn between our section of sidewalk and the street. Last year it produced perhaps a pint of cherries, enough for a batch or two of sour-cherry scones or a small pie. Yesterday

shalmestere said the cherries were ripe enough for some of our neighbors (squirrel, bird, and human) to start harvesting them, and asked me to put a net over the tree to keep out at least the non-human consumers. I decided to first harvest some cherries myself: I got at least a pint (about a hundred cherries) before throwing a net over the top, and made a batch of delicious sour-cherry scones last night. Harvested another sixty or so cherries today, and there are probably at least a hundred more that I deemed insufficiently ripe to pick. The ones that haven't gone into scones yet have been pitted and frozen. And I think we still have a zip-loc bag of last year's frozen cherries, so we should be able to make either a full-sized cherry pie or several batches of scones, or something else that gives cherries a starring role.

While I was picking cherries this evening,

shalmestere was picking strawberries. It was dusk, not really enough sunlight to see the tiny strawberries well and decide whether they're red enough to pick, but she got a dozen or so, as well as the first two (2) raspberries from the canes in the back yard.

Following up on this post...

Following the directions from KAF, I made a stiff levain (2:1 flour:water, with a little bit of starter) Thursday evening and left it to rise for 12 hours or so, by which time it had roughly doubled in volume and was noticeably softer -- soft enough to stick to the plastic container a bit, but firm enough that I could pull it out in one piece. Made a loaf of dough on Friday, but just when it was ready for a final rise before baking, we had to leave the house for a Gesualdo concert. (Which was very well done musically; the theatrical aspects may have been well done too but we couldn't see much of them.) So I formed a loaf in a loaf pan, stuck it in a 2-gallon ziploc bag, and left that in the fridge overnight.

Around 2 PM Saturday, I put the loaf pan (in which the loaf had risen significantly) in a soaked Romertopf and put that into a cold oven, turning the thermostat to 450°F and setting a timer for 50 minutes. At that point the top of the loaf looked done, but the bottom and sides didn't, so I turned off the oven and gave it another ten minutes without the Romertopf and the loaf pan. Cut two slices for the "hot out of the oven" experience, then put it back in the still-cooling oven for another 20-30 minutes, as it looked fairly moist in the middle of the freshly-cut surface. Tasty, though.

Last week I decided to give up on my current sourdough starter, which was smelling alarmingly vinegary and not rising much, and order a new one from King Arthur. The new starter arrived Sunday, with a "care and feeding" pamphlet that suggested I didn't need to give up on the old one after all, just feed it better. Anyway, I had already thrown out the old starter, so I've been following the feeding instructions meticulously: at every feeding, discard (or use) 2/3 of the starter, leaving 50 g, and add 50 g of flour and 50 g of water. And it does smell nice, and it's been puffing up nicely in the crock.

Last night's batch of bread wasn't exactly light and fluffy, but less dense than the previous two, and not bad considering I'm still trying to make it high-protein and low-carb (using 2 eggs, 1-1/2 cups of water, 1-1/2 cups of white bread flour, a cup of whole-wheat flour, 3/4 cup of wheat gluten, 1/4 cup of flaxseed meal, and 1/8 cup of quinoa). I had the oven at 150°F for a few hours while the bread rose on the stovetop, then put the bread into a soaked Romertopf in the oven, and set the thermostat to 475°F and the timer to 45 minutes. It came out a little dark, so maybe 450°F for 50 minutes next time. And the recipe in the pamphlet for pain au levain, using only sourdough starter and no commercial yeast, has you amplify the 50 g of starter to a levain for 12 hours before adding anything else, which I haven't been doing. The levain is not at a 1:1:1 ratio of starter:water:flour, but a stiffer 1:2.5:5. Try that next time.

Speaking of "stiffer", one of the bread-baking books I've worked with in the past follows a different model of sourdough, allegedly based on the practice of people traveling to California in covered wagons: rather than growing it semi-liquid in a crock, you make it much stiffer into a baseball, wrapped tightly in two layers of handkerchief, and at each feeding, discard the outer crust and use the soft, spongy inner part. Haven't done that in a number of years.

Of course, the Romertopf approach to baking -- starting with a cold oven, as you'll crack the Romertopf by putting it cold-and-wet into a hot oven -- is inconsistent with the way bread ovens have worked for 98% of human bread-baking history: build a fire in the oven, get the floor and walls good and hot, pull out the fire and ash and put the bread in to bake as the oven gradually cools down. I've done the latter too, both in a modern gas oven and in a wood-fired brick oven, and that's another knob to tweak.

Woke this morning to snow on the ground, and still falling. Around 8:45, put my breakfast on to simmer and went out to shovel. There was about 3" of fine, powdery snow on the ground, easy to shovel, so I did the front steps, the walk to the sidewalk, and our sections of front and back sidewalks, then came inside to eat.

Steel-cut oats, with a dribble of maple syrup in the cooking water, "allayed up with yolkes of eyroun", and a nice red grapefruit half. Yum.

Update, 1:00 PM: there was another 6" of fine, powdery snow everywhere I had shoveled before. Shoveled again.

Update, 2:15 PM: it's no longer snowing, but raining and/or sleeting. Yuck.

Update 5 PM: shoveled another 4-5" of heavier, wetter snow.

Update midnight: there's another two inches or so on the ground; haven't shoveled it yet except for a path from the back door to the back sidewalk, which I hadn't shoveled at all yet. This was annoying because I was sleepy, because I was shoveling the full depth all at once, and because of the slight crust on top.

We had our traditional Christmas-eve dinner of beef Wellington, with creamed spinach and honey-glazed carrots and various kinds of Christmas cookies. Watched the Grinch and Rudolph, then Midnight Mass broadcast live from the National Cathedral, so we weren't out driving or interacting with hundreds of H. sapiens on Christmas eve. Walked the dogs, started the dishwasher, and got to bed only a little after midnight.

I woke around 8 AM, did some exercises, ate "first breakfast", checked the dishwasher, and found on triage that about half of the items therein were clean, while the other half looked as though they had just come off the table after a large meal. So I hand-washed the latter, leaving the drying-rack and the stovetop piled high. I emptied the filter, and can try different combinations of dishwasher powder and drying solution, but there may be a new dishwasher in our near future. Anyway, made some charitable donations in other people's names, then started on poffertje batter.

Eventually

shalmestere woke up and we made and consumed our traditional Christmas-morning brunch of poffertjes, bacon, and blood-orange mimosas, then opened some presents. Of course, the big "present" from us to us arrived a week ago: a Prescott Renaissance C-bass recorder. (Insert photo here.) But other notable prezzies included (from her to me) Kees Boeke's edition of the works (certain and alleged) of Solage, and (from me to her) a well-reviewed novel based on the life of a 13th-century Irishwoman. And chocolate -- lots of chocolate. Happy Jolabokaflod!

Dinner, of course, was latkes.

shalmestere doesn't believe in applesauce, and we didn't have any sour cream in the house, so we topped them with butter and Greek yogurt. And just to make clear that we're not really Jewish, we had (pork-and-beef) kielbasa coins sauteed in butter as the protein source for the meal. Played some Solage together on F-bass and C-bass recorders, watched "A Child's Christmas in Wales", walked the dogs, took out the trash, and went to bed.

Today I'm officially back to work, although not going into the office. Today's holiday rituals include delivering assortments of Christmas cookies to the neighbors and donating more money to worthy causes.

Two friends are coming over tomorrow and/or Saturday to play early music, so we have house-cleaning and pre-cooking to do.

Technically, today is a work day, although it's Monday so I'm WFH by default, and not many other people are in the office this week anyway.

Yesterday afternoon we agreed on menus for part of the next week -- at least Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas Day brunch, Christmas Day/Hanukkah dinner, New Year's Eve dinner, New Year's Day brunch, and New Year's Day dinner -- and I compared them with current supplies to generate a lengthy shopping list. Perhaps

shalmestere will go on a shopping expedition today while I'm working-for-pay.

There's still snow on the ground, still mostly white. The weather forecast says it won't get above freezing today, and we'll get another maybe-an-inch tomorrow morning. Any of it that hasn't melted by Sunday (the 29th) will melt in the rain that day, as temperatures rise into the 50's. Still, a white Christmas of sorts.

Walked the dogs in the park yesterday mid-day, and every time we got to a decision point, Miss B. insisted on the direction away from the house, so it was somewhat over a mile before we got home. Beautiful weather, snow on the ground and the trees, but when we got to a moderately-busy street the sidewalks were salted, and the dogs didn't like that.

Yesterday we made two more batches of Christmas cookies, four so far (magic cookie bars, dried-cherry-and-white-chocolate-chip drop cookies, peanut-butter-chocolate-kiss cookies, and Mexican-hot-chocolate-marshmallow cookies). One or two more to go; we're skipping some of the fiddlier kinds because we have fewer places to give them away this year.

Last Friday night we had tickets to go to a Ceremony of Lessons and Carols at a church in the Village, with music performed by a local medieval group we've heard before. We didn't actually leave the house Friday night --

shalmestere was too tired -- but we heard and watched the ceremony on-line last night. It was a real church service, with real clergy, with the priest giving all the lessons (the Temptation in the Garden of Eden, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Annunciation, the shepherds guarding their flocks by night, and one or two other episodes) in Middle English.

shalmestere had some complaints about his pronunciation, but she's studied Middle English in school and he probably hadn't. Anyway, I could make out most of what he was saying, and I imagine many in the live audience could too. There were the usual audience-response components, some in Latin and the "Our Father" in Middle English (the live audience had a printed script). The music was good, mostly medieval, with one somewhat under-rehearsed piece written by our acquaintance David Yardley in "medieval style". I might have opted for fewer verses of some of the songs, but if they're trying to convey the idea of a less-hurried, less-clock-driven world, doing six to ten verses of a familiar Christmas song is a reasonable approach.

It being only 9 PM by that point, we then watched another of our library of Christmas-special DVD's: "The Year Without a Santa Claus", from 1974, which I'm not sure either of us had watched more than excerpts of before. It's no "Rudolph": animation technology had advanced somewhat in the ten years in between, but it feels as though the studio had suffered budget cuts and was just phoning in the music and writing.

Tuesday afternoon we drove to Brooklyn to pick up our pre-ordered, spatchcocked heritage turkey. This required driving to Brooklyn, which is always a pain. It was nine miles away as the crow flies, and took us almost an hour each way. But the pickup went smoothly, we got home and found room for the bird in the fridge.

Since both of us have been sick on-and-off for the past month, we planned to keep things relatively simple: no guests, no dishes we haven't made before.

Wednesday evening we made carrot slaw, and I made an almond-meal pie crust, filling to follow.

Thursday morning I woke late, almost 9 AM, made cranberry custard, filled the pie crust with it, and baked it. Then sliced a bunch of onions and put them in the oven to roast.

shalmestere woke up an hour later, came downstairs, and (since it was Thursday) fired up the TV to see this week's installment of "Lower Decks". Browned some sausage, chopped up more onions, celery, and peppers, and sauteed all that together for stuffing. Added breadcrumbs and turkey broth and put the stuffing in the oven, taking the onions out.

While the Macy's Parade was playing on the living-room TV, I prepared the turkey and set it to roast on top of a bed of onions, taking the stuffing out, while

shalmestere assembled the giblets, onion skins, and celery leaves and put them on the stove to simmer with turkey broth. Somewhere in there I took a shower, got dressed, fed and walked the dogs. (Kibble with raw turkey juice, yum!)

Every Thanksgiving there is at least one ingredient that we discover we're out of at the last minute. This year it was red wine for the cranberry sauce. Fortunately, the liquor store three blocks away was still open: it tends to have staff who know even less about wine than I do, but the guy behind the counter was able to guide me to the wall that has red wines, and I bought some Merlot for the cranberry sauce and some Cabernet Sauvignon for less-fruity applications.

While the Dog Show was playing on the living-room TV, I made cranberry sauce, then cleaned, stemmed, and sliced Brussels sprouts and set them in a frying pan to brown. Eventually took the bird out of the oven and moved it to a cutting board to rest. Put the stuffing back in the oven to brown on top, and put the pan of Brussels sprouts into the oven for a few minutes, then took them out, added salt, pepper, and Balsamic vinegar, and reduced that on the stovetop while

shalmestere made gravy in the roasting pan.

Dinner was about 5:30, by which time most of the accumulated cruft of the past two months had been moved off the dining room table. Turkey was moist, flavorful, and gorgeously browned. Gravy was luscious and flavorful. Brussels sprouts were tender, tangy, and caramelized. Carrot slaw was bright, tangy, and sharp. Cranberry sauce was tangy, mulled-wine-ishly spicy. Everything worked well.

After an hour or so to let things settle, we each had a slice of cranberry-curd tart, which also worked well. Walked the dogs, fed them again, and had hot chocolate while watching the traditional WKRP Thanksgiving Turkey Drop episode.

Put away leftovers, loaded the dishwasher, had a quiet, laid-back evening.

shalmestere has been pining in recent weeks for black-and-white cookies -- that is, cookies that are basically black with cocoa, studded with white and dark chocolate chips. So last night I went out to the grocery, bought the chocolate chips, assembled the rest of the ingredients, and made a batch. As I dolloped them onto the cookie sheet, I thought "these don't look very black", and "this dough is on the thin-and-sticky side". Indeed, I added a few tablespoonfuls of flour before dolloping the second cookie sheet. I put them in the oven, then started cleaning up the kitchen, putting measuring cups and spoons in the dishwasher, hand-washing mixing bowls... and I found the mixing bowl I had used for the dry ingredients, still full of flour and cocoa. Which would explain why the dough wasn't very black, and wasn't as thick as I expected.

I pulled the cookie sheets out of the oven, where each cookie had spread out into a good-sized pancake with a desegregated pile of chocolate chips in the middle. Since things hadn't cooked for very long yet, I was about to scrape it all back into a mixing bowl and add the flour and cocoa, but

shalmestere said "no, it's already cooked; just throw it away." Then, on second thought, she suggested scraping the stuff into custard cups, baking them in a bain-marie, and pretending they were chocolate custard or flourless chocolate cake. So we did that, giving them about 40 minutes at 350°F in a baking tray with water halfway up the sides of the custard cups. The result was a little too sweet, not the greatest texture, but not bad with vanilla ice cream.

I saved the flour-and-cocoa mixture in a Tupperware container; I guess today I buy more white chocolate chips and try again.

The day will be spent not at the office, nor working from home, but at a music workshop at the home of an acquaintance in the Hudson Valley, led by a well-known medieval-music professional. We've each taken a vacation day.

The raspberry vines behind the house are starting to produce, so we decided it was time to use up the last of the frozen raspberries from last summer. Made a panful of raspberry crumble bars (plus chocolate, because chocolate) to take to the music workshop and share. Unfortunately, I seem to have turned off the oven in the process of turning on the oven timer, so when the timer went off 40 minutes later, the crumble bars were warm, not cooked. So I turned the oven back on and gave them another 35 minutes (including the oven coming up to heat); hope they're done and not overdone.

Meanwhile, yesterday we picked at least another cup of tart cherries from the dwarf tree in front of the house. Not sure what to do with them yet. We still have almost a pint of the yummy tart-cherry-and-goat-cheese ice cream left from last year; perhaps turnovers, or a lattice-faced pie, or soup, or more ice cream....

A few years ago, when we ripped out the quince trees that we had planted too close to the front of the house, we replaced them with four rose bushes of three different varieties, and put in wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana) as a ground cover. Two rose varieties are doing reasonably well, while remaining rose variety and the strawberries are trying to take over the world. Anyway, a week ago we noticed that berries were getting ripe, so we picked about half a cup: they weren't the "violent red" of the best commercial strawberries, but tasty. On Thursday we picked another pint, and yesterday I turned them into ice cream, using a simple, minimalistic recipe: macerate the strawberries in sugar (3/4 cup for a pint of berries) and a tablespoon of vodka for an hour, add heavy cream (equal by mass to the strawberries), blend, chill, then freeze in an ice cream freezer. No boiled simple-syrup, no egg-yolk custard base, no cooking at all. We tasted the results after dinner last night, and it was delicious!

Meanwhile, this happened in the back yard:

Only one ripe so far, but in past years we've gotten 1-2 cups of berries a day at the height of the season. And we still have at least a pint in the freezer from last year, so we'd better get started making things with raspberries.

Meanwhile, I picked one (1) green bean from the struggling bush-bean plants in the front yard. The Thai chili plants are blooming, two of the four holy-basil plants I transplanted from the egg-carton seed-starting incubator seem to have survived the transfer, but none of the six Thai-basil plants I transplanted at the same time survived, so

shalmestere mail-ordered a couple of Thai-basil plants.

Meanwhile, the toad-lilies in the circular bed in the center of the front yard are thriving, to the extent that they've drowned out the climbing vines we had planted in the same bed; need to thin the toad-lilies and see whether anything survives of the climbing vines.

shalmestere planted a few more dahlias last week. The shamrocks are doing well, the five or six colors of violets are trying to take over the world, the clover I've seeded to replace lawn-grass is doing well in some places and not in others....

Baked a loaf of bread Friday evening. It came out a bit underdone in the middle -- I think I set the timer for 45 minutes, should have been 50 or 55 -- and there's a horizontal-plane split that makes the top quarter of each slice inclined to split from the lower three quarters. Tastes pretty good, but not useful for anything resembling a sandwich. Probably ought to make another batch sooner than next weekend.

We've got almost all the held mail from our three-week trip to Spain: there's one package that the Post Office says is "held at customer request", but I went there yesterday with the tracking number and they couldn't find it. But we retrieved a box of dahlia bulbs from the next door neighbor, and a box of violet-adjacent baby plants arrived (and were planted) Friday afternoon. Gardening yesterday was postponed due to rain and wind, so we went to Trader Joe's and Home Depot instead (getting a bunch of potted plants at the latter). Today looks more promising on the weather front: we need to put in the aforementioned dahlias, and the pansies and violet-adjacents that

shalmestere bought yesterday, and the Thai-chili and bush-bean plants that I bought yesterday, and I want to start some basil seeds indoors before moving them to the front lawn. And there are more bean seeds left from last year; might as well put those in too, so they produce a few weeks after the ones I bought yesterday in plant form.

When we returned from Spain, one of the smoke/CO detectors was chirping, not to say "please replace my batteries" but to say "please replace me". So I bought two new detectors (I think the one in the attic has completely given up the ghost, not even chirping) yesterday at Home Depot, and need to install them.

The two large suitcases we took to Spain have been emptied, nested with their smaller siblings, and put away in the attic. There's still a suitcase that

shalmestere took to the living history show a month ago; I'm not sure what needs to be done with that stuff. And there are a few items of clothing that I took to the same living history show; I think they're clean enough that they only need to be put away.

This afternoon we're scheduled to attend the "celebration of life" for Richard Pace, a fixture of the NYC and Amherst early-music scenes. He was a decent amateur musician, specializing in voice and dulcian/bassoon, and a prolific fund-raiser, and he had a wonderful, infectious, boyish grin than I'm sure people will bring up repeatedly at the event. Immediately after that is an album-launch concert by local early-music group Alkemie which we may or may not get to depending on our energy levels.

It would be nice to accomplish some house-cleaning and stuff-triaging today, but I don't know how likely that is. There's Too Much Stuff piled up.

And as mentioned before, the weather is nice today, so we should walk the dogs in the park.

Friday: house-cleaning, grocery shopping, pre-cooking, printing sheet music for music party on Saturday. One of the four people (plus one greyhound) invited reported a COVID exposure, and bailed on the music party.

Saturday: more house-cleaning, more cooking. People started showing up a little before 11:00. Walked dogs in the park (three greyhounds rather than the usual two). Emptied, filled, and ran dishwasher. Served lunch: lentil soup with smoked turkey (the latter of which had been in the freezer for a year, and this was a delicious way to use it up), garlic toast. Got out recorders, viols, lute, and played various Christmas-y music for several hours. Walked dogs again, played a little more Christmas-y music. Served dinner: roast turkey, turducken hand-pies (with turkey left over from Thanksgiving, duck left over from Christmas Day, and chicken to make sure there was enough, seasoned with ginger, dates, and dried cherries), carrot slaw. Set out a plate with ~five each of six or seven different kinds of homemade cookies, and sent guests home with packets of cookies. Emptied, filled, and ran dishwasher. Put away leftovers. Decompressed. Watched animated Christmas specials. Walked dogs again.

Sunday: Buy bubbly for midnight toast and breakfast mimosas. More house-cleaning. Walk dogs in the park. Give away a bunch of money. More cooking -- single-serving Beef Wellingtons with potatoes and either green beans or Brussels sprouts for Sunday dinner, not sure about Monday. Package and deliver boxes of cookies to neighbors. Watch Christmas-y stuff? Play shawms on the front steps at midnight?

Monday: More house-cleaning? Walk dogs in the park? Watch Christmas-y stuff? Watch non-Christmas-y stuff?

Last night I made fried rice, with mixed veggies and Chinese sausage, for dinner. Within a minute or two of starting to eat,

shalmestere said the epithelial cells in her mouth were doing something funny, and her sense of taste was off. I replied "Me too: I'm not noticing taste problems, but it feels like there's something stuck to the insides of my gums, yet when I try to scrape it off, nothing comes off." After a few minutes, including swishing water around in our mouths, the weird gum sensation went away.

Neither of us had any subsequent gastrointestinal distress, so it wasn't the sort of food poisoning that makes you sick for 24 hours.

I imagine it was an additive in the Chinese sausage, which was a different brand than we've bought before. But has anybody else encountered this particular symptom?

Heritage turkey, roasted on a bed of caramelized onions, came out lovely, moist, and flavorful.

shalmestere's ancestral sausage stuffing came out well (although I forgot to put in the parsley, and it baked a little longer than usual as I waited for the turkey to be done).
Green bean casserole (from a NYT recipe in which you cook half the green beans until brown, mix the cooking liquid with roux and cream to make a white sauce, then add the other half of the beans in still-green state and bake) was delicious.
Our traditional "mulled-wine-flavored" cranberry sauce, from Bon Appetit twenty-mumble years ago, was delicious as always.
We hadn't planned on potatoes, but we had a bag of smallish potatoes that were starting to get soft but not yet mushy, so we boiled them and mashed them, skins and all; very tasty, although they got a bit cold waiting for the turkey.
We had planned on roasted carrots, but just plain forgot about them. We'll probably make them over the weekend: they're not much work.

shalmestere always makes the gravy, in the turkey roasting pan as soon as the turkey is out and resting, and that went well; this time, for variety, she added a bit of the potato water as well as giblet broth and cider.
Both pies (the cranberry curd tart and the chocolate-pecan) were delicious.

Brunch today: stuffing waffles. Beat 1-2 eggs per cup of stuffing, mix in the leftover sausage stuffing, and cook in a waffle iron for 2-3 minutes; top with gravy (of course).

Monday:
Mid-day Trader Joe's run, no line to check out. WFH FTW. ✓
Made cranberry sauce Monday night. ✓

Tuesday:
Mid-day grocery run, no line to check out. WFH FTW. ✓
Made cranberry curd tart Tuesday night. ✓

Wednesday:
Acquired heritage turkey. ✓
Bought and installed chest freezer ($200 for a 7-ft³ freezer, top-rated by CR.), which we've wanted for years but which is especially appealing during leftover-generating season. ✓
Made chocolate pecan pie Wednesday night. ✓

Thursday:
Mass slaughter of onions has begun.
Anointing turkey with butter and sage before cooking.
Next up: sausage stuffing, green bean casserole, roasted carrots, gravy.

Went to Trader Joe's on Sunday, but walked out when I realized that the checkout line stretched all the way around the store's perimeter, starting about twenty feet from where it ended. Went back mid-day Monday and the store was busy, but no checkout line at all. WFH FTW. Bought Merlot after dinner and made cranberry sauce last night. Still need to do a regular-grocery-store run before more pre-cooking; maybe do that mid-day today. Picking up spatchcocked heritage turkey mid-day Wednesday.

I am not wise in the ways of Indian cooking: I've probably eaten food from an Indian restaurant a few dozen times in my life. But I like basmati rice, and I generally try to eat less-processed, higher-fiber versions of things when I can. Fortunately, my local grocery stores carry 10-pound bags of brown basmati rice.

So for the past year or two I've been making brown basmati rice in an Instant-Pot, following directions I found on the Web: 1 cup of rice, 1-1/2 cups of water or broth, the "rice" setting followed by 20 minutes of "keep warm" before serving. And it's been OK, but not the fluffy, separate-grains texture I expect of basmati rice from a restaurant.

The latest 10-pound bag came with cooking instructions: rinse 1 cup of rice, soak for 90-120 minutes, drain, add to 2-1/2 cups boiling water, cook uncovered until the water is absorbed, then cover and let sit for a few minutes. And the rice did come out fluffier and more separate, and with a nice aroma ... and WHITE. No hint of brown in sight. Huh? What happened?

I was in a library, and a nebbishy young guy sitting at a table asked me "What's a mode? I keep hearing about them in music; what are they?"

I have taught a two-hour class on the theoretical side of "what's a mode", and taken a week-long hour-a-day hands-on course about what each mode "feels" like and what's distinctive about each one, and I really didn't want to get into that much detail while whispering in a library, not to mention I had my own stuff to do there. But I started on the few-sentence explanation, involving playing only white keys on the piano.

At which point a female friend of the nebbishy guy (slender, probably in her 40's or 50's) walked over and said "And why can't he find any books about sets?"

Umm... there are LOTS of books about sets, and one can spend semesters or years of one's life studying them, but I wasn't about to get into that. So I said "Well, it helps if you text-search" [I mimed typing on a keyboard] "rather than asking aloud, or people will think you're looking for something else." About which there are even more books available.

Probably inspired variously by attending my friend Alec's "medieval music jam" last Thursday, at which he taught a little bit of "what's a mode", and by my visit to the farmers' market yesterday where I asked "What kinds of apples do you have?" and the young guy standing next to me said "There are different kinds of apples? I thought they were all just apples."

When it stopped raining yesterday, we went outside and planted some bulbs. And I edged the front edge of the yard with decorative bricks. And replaced the low fencing around the front sublawn. There are more bulbs to be planted, and there are still some gaps left behind by the front-walk construction, so I think we need to buy a couple of bags of topsoil, and probably some mulch -- I hope we can find some that aren't water-saturated, after the past few days of rain. And I need to bake bread today.

[UPDATE: we planted most of the bulbs yesterday, and bought mulch, and topsoil, and potting soil, and sand (which I used to fill gaps between the brick edging and the sidewalk). The rest of the sand may be used for annealing ferrous-metal clinch nails, or something like that. Baked a loaf of sourdough bread. Picked raspberries, and turned them into a mixed-berry smoothie with yogurt and tofu.]

I want to attach about a hundred loops to the shoulder of the tent roof, and toggles to the top of the walls, to hang the walls from the loops. Ideally, the toggles and loops would be equally spaced (in the 6"-9" range) around the perimeter, so the walls can be attached equally well wherever you start. I'm not sure that'll work, since the tent is oval rather than circular, but even if it were circular, there's another problem: how do you measure the length of a tent edge, and the distance from one toggle to the next, with sufficient accuracy that the latter divides an integer number of times into the former, with no remainder? I can measure them both in such a way that the quotient is whatever I want, and it'll come out pretty close, but the remainder is much more sensitive to measurement error. On the divisor side, the Law of Large Numbers works in my favor: if each one has an error bar of 5%, their mean has an error bar a factor of sqrt(n) (i.e. about ten times) smaller, or 0.5%, so the quotient is fairly predictable. But if the dividend has even a 1% error bar (which is quite optimistic -- it's almost 50 feet of length, measured on a heavy mound of fabric that can't be laid flat), the remainder can be literally anything from zero to the distance between toggles.

Perhaps the answer is to set up several checkpoints along the way, dividing the perimeter a priori into halves or quarters, and reset at each checkpoint. This way each quotient is only about 25 rather than about 100, so I can have as much as a 4% error bar in the dividend before having no control whatsoever over the remainder. And if one of them comes out horribly off, I can fudge that checkpoint a posteriori and try to correct it gradually between that checkpoint and the next.

About Sept. 14 or 15, I noticed a scratchy throat. On the 16th, I started coughing. It's over two weeks later now, and I'm still coughing. Two different kinds of COVID tests both reported negative, and it doesn't feel like flu (no fever, no general body aches, little or no nausea, no "my hair hurts"), but it's lasting longer than a cold usually does. Yuck. I'm due to see the doctor again on Tuesday.

shalmestere called from work saying she wanted mac & cheese for dinner. There were a few ingredients we needed to pick up, so I went to the grocery store. No Dreamfields pasta, and she's been allegedly on a low-FODMAP diet for a few weeks, so I got two kinds of non-wheat pasta, of which the less-weird seemed to be the brown-rice fusilli. Instructions on the box say to boil for 12 minutes, not the 10 minutes typical of wheat rotini, but I was doing the Mollie Katzen recipe in which the pasta cooks in a casserole dish for 45 minutes in the liquids from the rest of the recipe rather than being boiled separately in water, so I just followed the recipe. After 45 minutes I pulled the casserole out of the oven and dolloped some onto plates, but we both concluded the pasta was really underdone, so I dolloped it back into the casserole, added a bit more buttermilk, and put it back in the oven for another 15 minutes. At which point

shalmestere was too hungry to wait any more; the pasta was slightly less underdone, but she ate it anyway. I added some ordinary milk and put it back into the oven for yet another 15 minutes, after which the pasta was adequately done. Still not the best mac-and-cheese I've ever made.

Also baked sourdough bread yesterday. The loaf came out of the oven gorgeous, and after only a few minutes' cooling I cut a slice to eat with butter... at which point I realized I had forgotten to add any salt to the dough, so it wasn't as flavorful as usual. Good texture, though.

Profile

hudebnik

June 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 12th, 2026 07:55 am

Entries tagged with cooking

Produce of Our Estates

baking bread

baking bread

(no subject)

Holiday rituals

Pre-holiday stuff

Thanksgiving: food and cooking and stuff

cooking fail

How does your garden grow? etc.

How does your garden grow?

Da Weekend

Da Weekend

Weird health thingie

Cooking, post mortem

cooking

Begun the pre-cooking has

Cooking brown basmati rice

Dream journal

Da Weekend

culinary wins and losses

Profile

June 2026

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags