Lemon bars ahoy!

Another heatwave starting today, everyone a bit tired what with one thing and a dozen others. Handsome Son visiting today, first time in weeks, yay. 

I made it to the library before it gets too hot, and my videos start accruing fines, and to the post office to send my Cross pencil back for repair, fingers crossed on that.

So all of the above means everyone needs a treat.

Lemon bars happened. This recipe made a lot, and they're so rich, what with butter and sugar and eggs, that you only need small pieces. At a time. You can keep coming back.

I don't make them often because it's making the shortbread base, baking that, making the lemon stuff, adding that and baking again.

The entire kitchen is sticky, which is why few pictures, not wishing to gum up the phone with lemon filling and sticky fingerprints. If my food stylist had shown up, it would be different,  but she's pretty unreliable.

Here's where I was pressing the dough, it's stiff,  into the dish. All tools failed until I tried a gloved hand. You see the glove there. That worked fine.

Then sprinkled confectioners sugar using the handy sprinkler thing I improvised a while back and bragged about in here

So there's the Cliff notes version.

I'll carry some of them next door, where they will vanish before I'm home again. And maybe a couple of other destinations, too.

Reading Charles Todd, Inspector Rutledge mysteries at the moment. Light enough for heatwave reading. This one's about the mysteries in an east Anglia coastal area, secrets and the murder of an apparently beloved priest. Not universally beloved, it seems.

Rutledge is a police inspector home from ww1, where he served in the trenches and has what they then called shellshock, now PTSD. 

The writers, it's a team, had a terrific idea. They have Rutledge haunted by the voice of a soldier, Hamish Macleod, he sent to his death, acting as a wise alter ego in his brain, taking part in the investigations, working like an extension of a soliloquy. 

It's a great idea for keeping the action moving when a lot of it is about thinking. This is the second I've read and Hamish is a continuing character, though an imaginary one. 

I love expertise and good writing technique, and there's plenty here, when they can restrain themselves from purple passages, overdone chunks of adjective-ridden description. 

If you've ever read Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, a great send up of the Mary Webb type of tragic rural muddy narratives, descended from Hardy and his benighted Wessex, you'll know purple passages. 

She even puts asterisks to make sure they register! The Todd team are a little bit naive on this point, nonetheless a rattlin good read, and I recommend both the Bess Crawford and now the Inspector Rutledge series.

Well, I have to get on and see what Hamish has to say.

Boud abhors a vacuum

Wildly windy day, neighbors busting in all over, very welcome though surprising, one saying I need the ladder from your loft, already halfway up there with his helper to get it for some vital work happening next door.  One bringing lovely spicy food, and announcing her birthday and wanting my blessing for it.  To me that consists of a massive hug and kiss and wishes, and a fervent wish I'd known earlier..

Anyway, on the way upstairs to see if I have any little something she might like, I realized I hadn't watered and trimmed out the upstairs plants, so I did that, and made a bit of leafy debris on the bedroom floor. No problem, I have a trusty vacuum cleaner right there.  Plugged it in, and it sucked up all the leaves then sent them all flying back in my face.  Oh.

Probably a clog.  I unplugged, learned how to take off the footplate, removed the little interior hose, riddled it, nothing in there, no clog, put back the footplate, not without some sweating and cursing.  Tried again, still shooting debris all over the room gracefully landing everywhere.  Oh. And the main part wouldn't hug the floor right.  Oh. Took off the footplate again, getting good at this, took out the small hose, put it back more snugly, hoping this was the answer.  Which is sort of was.

Except that the cleaner was still emitting, not accepting.  Got out the book that came with it many years ago, see there's a reason to keep these things sometimes.  And went through all kinds of studying, having done all the things they suggested at this point.
Hm.  On the point of saying, out with this vacuum, out I say, I noticed the diagram of the fully organized one.  And noticed that the hose which is supposed to take the debris in and keep it there, was detached and had been left in the wrong clamp.  

 See that pipe thing running down there, now correctly plugged in, into the base of the unit, the hose coming out of the top of it?  It and the one on the left had got reversed.  This does not work other than to give debris a quick round trip back onto the floor in a new place.

Ah, put it in the right place, plugged in again, and now it works.  It would have been very good to notice this before all the strenuous taking off and putting back of footplates, but anyway I know how to do that now.  This is a desperate attempt to rationalize things, but doesn't cover my ineptitude.  Actually I think I just qualified for a cabinet position in DC.

And I realize that this abhorred vacuum caper was the aftermath of another exciting appliance adventure earlier in the week.  That was when two friends helped with my broken down clothes dryer, which we all concluded was clogged (my week for clogs, should learn clog dancing, really) on account of hammering on the roof having dislodged a mass of lint back down the hose into the machine. 

They were a little at odds, one wanting to dismantle the entire thing to see it better, one insisting we should check first in case it was simply clogged with damp lint.  Guess which was the male friend...
So, by the time we'd blown through the back and sucked through the front, and both friends and the landing were liberally decorated with dryer lint, the vacuum had seen good service. One of the friends reassembled the various bits she'd used, and that's when the hose got out of commission.

No pix, enough hot air from the dryer and the friends without adding in unflattering pix of them valiantly trying to deal with each other and the dryer, which is now working a treat.  They're back on speaking terms, too.  Throughout this activity, we had an interesting discussion on how we would run the country better than anyone who is on the point of trying to.  Actually, since two of us are GOP and one a Dem, we were a model of civility about the whole thing.

It's been quite a nervy week, what with the national scene, about which let's not talk just for a moment, and the roofing drama, and the dryer breaking down, and the neighbors breaking down over their struggles to get their houses ready for roofing and then the vacuum.  Art cannot exist in a vacuum.

So though nature may abhor a vacuum, she's nothing compared to Boud at the moment.  Fortunately I didn't call in any friend for help and look even sillier than I do now, when they would have taken one look and reorganized the hose...

However, all is not dark.  Remember that nice little table I found at the dumpster?  turns out it was handmade by my contractor/artist neighbor years ago, no room for it in the runup to the roofing cleaning, and though he had noted how fast it vanished, didn't know I had it.  I emailed him with a pic of it in situ, and everyone's happy about this.
 
My cats are bookending me in a friendly way, explaining that the various breakdowns weren't their doing, and I'm going to have a teatime with lemon bars any minute now.  The bars have been going down very well!  Handsome Son polished off a few, and birthday neighbor had several the other day and texted three times with her reactions. 

And now I remember I was on the way to check out the stash of completed stitchery to see if there's anything she might like.  I wonder if I dare try again. You never know what challenge I might find. It's dangerous going upstairs in search of a little present.

Cooking finally returns again with prep for Friday night dinner

I made a bigly pot of pumpkin soup, some of which will appear on the table tomorrow evening, and there will be fish cakes made with fresh flounder and various spices, with green peas and roast potatoes.

And then I thought idly, since a friend made noises about coming over for a cup of tea in the next day or two, she having been way under the weather, in the hospital, and struggling to get back, I should make a little something to serve her with a cup of tea.  It won't be a whole meal, like my usual afternoon tea invitations, she's not up for that, but a nice little something is good.  And I need a dessert for tomorrow evening.

Leafed through Martha Stewart in search of simple, quick cookies.  Found quite a few, and bookmarked them studiously, before being totally led off the straight and narrow by finding a recipe for lemon bars...far from simple and quick, but oh well, it's been a hard week and they're so good.  So this happened.

I will be freezing a lot of them, partly so that I don't plow right through them, and partly so that a visitor will in fact get something edible with a cup of tea.  Some will cross the street to friends, too.

There was a tense moment when the dish, with the pastry crust in it, was in the freezer for a few minutes, and then had to go right into the hot oven.  I was fervently hoping the glass would stand up to this, though it claimed it would, and to my amazement, it did.

At this point I think I have had the last of builders trotting about inside the house fixing this and that for me, and though I plan on replacing all my windows at some point when the HOA gets some contractors lined up, that will be another noisy dusty passage, still, just for the moment, I have the place to myself.

Except for neighbors dropping in, four in one day this week, a landspeed record, it's what the renovation does. Breaks down barriers..but they all needed to talk, so I guess that's okay.  It's been a tense few days, and the roof noise hasn't helped with anyone's calm and accepting spirit. Not to mention the problems the roofers have uncovered in various houses, largely relating to wiring and squirrels, a bad mixture.  I was lucky in that nothing in my roof was written up and declared a danger to civilization.

So, Sayers' Clouds of Witness going in audiobook this evening, all's well, and another bunch of handwarmers under way, too. Several local friends are thinking of wearing the safety pin, now that they've seen me with one and asked what on earth I was up to.  

One was worried that I would be a target, and I said, well, already been criticized about it, by someone who was determined to be mad at me, never mind.  Important to stand up even in this quiet tiny way, or the bullies will have won.