I've been reading lately, too

This is a book recommended by a writer friend, a southern woman, and I'm into it now.

It's a memoir, stretching back generations, of a black New Orleans family, written by Sarah Broom, a descendant; the Yellow House of the title was a casualty of Katrina.

 It's  brilliantly written, meticulously researched, dialogue rendered so that you quickly get to know and value the people.

  I'm only partway through, got it transferred to my Kindle to save my eyes, so I can't show you a cool printed book, but what I can show are some of the cast of relatives.

They're all stars. I don't want to spoil your journey into this world by saying more. Just start reading. Just do.

And then there's this beauty, referred to me by my library lady who knows me (!)

Just one tiny flaw in this great feast of weaving styles and history and characters, is that the photography is so good that you want immediately to try everything.

And pictures of cool tools, that you need right away. Like this lucet.

I plan to make a lucet just to see if I enjoy making square cord. It's got to be better than kumihimo, which in my hands was more kamikaze, but we won't go there. I don't think I can make it from PVC pipe though. I have to branch out.

This book is like a degree in weaving. You can learn enough about a range of weaving types to know if you want to pursue it further. You can try various skills as you go. It's just a lot of fun. In fact you can enjoy this without ever making anything, just for the ride.

Very different books, very different passions, let me know if you read either or both, and what you think.

Unbiased verdict on the second cornbread

It's: bready rather than caky, buttery, moist and the bottom is brown and a bit crisp, thanks to the cast iron, preheated in the oven as it warmed.  I think if I hadn't used butter and buttermilk, it would have been a different story.

This recipe, with subs, is worth repeating. Buttered cornbread with afternoon tea.

Meanwhile I have my latest library treasure to study, thanks to my librarian treasure who decided I should see it and directed it into my account, total surprise.

It's a physically lovely book, well organized, great photography, and I'm ready to dive in and see what I can learn here.

Happy camper.

Another day, another cornbread

I needed to bake bread, just didn't feel like handling the big recipe, so I thought cornbread, I thought.

Then found I only had 3/4 cup of cm. Soooo I looked around for a recipe that that amount would work in. And found one on the cornbread container. This one needed exactly the amount of cornmeal I had and 1 1/4 cups ap flour.

I thought it was a bit mean, as these things go. Skim milk, vegetable oil.. I did agree with low sugar, since this isn't spozed to be cake.

So I subbed unsalted butter and whole milk butter milk. Made by mixing a spoonful of lemon juice into milk powder, stirred up with warm water.  It seems to work if you sub fat for fat, liquid for liquid, dry for dry. Not as random as it seems.

Cast iron pan in action

 Ready for my closeup, complete with villainous grin

It's smelling good, looking ok. But I won't know till it cools enough to try whether this is worth repeating.  Meanwhile the recipe's cut out and inserted into my big, fat three ring binder of items I've made and liked. If I like this, it stays. If not, it's recycled.

And as you see, I used my trusty cast iron pan. It's wonderful for baking, makes you look like a good baker.

Speaking of PVC piping, here's another invention

Some talk on another blog about PVC pipe, to use as a frame for embroidery got me thinking.

 I love this material because you can build endlessly with it. I've made embroidery frames, a niddy noddy, several tapestry looms, all from the same basic bits and connectors. Since I can easily reassemble them into what I need,they can shape shift at will.

Here I deconstructed parts of a tapestry loom to get the members, and searched my bag of connectors and was able to create a hanger system for cardigans, now installed in the right closet.

I still have a couple of 8ft pipes which I can cut down to complete the base of this gizmo, to make it more stable, and make another for other sweaters.

This came about as I was wondering about buying a rack like the handy pants rack I bought a while ago. But I thought it would be more fun to just assemble one and see how it works. No tools needed.

No lights in the closet where it's set up, so I did the pic where I built it.

Rube Goldberg would be proud.

Honey toast. Comfort food

Between the bitter weather stopping my walking, the endless political disasters, friends in serious medical trouble, inability to get into stitching or spinning, around here comfort food has taken priority.

Here's my patented, very complicated recipe for honey toast for tea.

Slice bread, spread with chunks of cold butter, pour a bit of honey over. Shove in the toaster oven at 425f for three minutes. Serve to needy person.

This is so much better than toasting then spreading. That's why I patented the recipe.

Pot of English breakfast tea. Mystery novel of your choice.

A few minutes of pleasure ensue.

There are other things in my world than food, but a lot of them are sad and difficult things befalling friends, and today a poignant anniversary for me, so not blog material.

The Valentine's day bark got very good reviews, by the way. So that was a community service in a way.

We shall rise above it all. As soon as the weather warms up!

Soup for a bitter winter's day

Today sunny with a breathtakingly icy wind. great day for soup.

Here's carrot, cashew, sunflower seed, ginger soup. With onions, garlic, plenty of fresh ginger, kosher salt, dash of cayenne. Chicken stock. I expect it would be vegetarian or maybe even vegan if you used water.

This is thick  and warming, very welcome. And, as you see I made a big pot, several meals there.

 And with whole-wheat/oat bread, it was great. Some of this may go to friends, too.

Robert MacFarlane

I just started reading his Landmarks, a book of essays and glossaries about the largely Scottish, and some other UK areas, landscape, and the language used to describe it.

Wood engravings by Jonathan Gibbs.

He has a great love of the exactitude of terms used, and now falling into disuse, to show the details of the features of the countryside. It's a great journey into the importance of language not just in preserving meaning, but in adding to our experience of the natural world.

 He is trying to preserve important meaning in our lives, by having readers be aware that there are, for instance, many words for parts of fields, varying with appearance, history,  and function.

He shows that we don't just act on nature. Nature acts on us, too. The landscape we encountered in early childhood stays with us as the backdrop against which our lives are enacted, even if we're far from it in later years.

And that knowledge saves us from the ignorant take of  describing areas we're not able to perceive, as wasteland, wrecked, barren.  He has great respect for the writers and language experts who continue to preserve this treasure. Nan Shepherd, on the Cairngorms, Anne Campbell and Jon MacLeod, who saved a Shetland island from engineered destruction by using language to educate the authorities in the value of what engineers had dismissed as waste, only useful for digging up.

Language is powerful and we need to preserve it.

My only quibble about this lovely work is that the only form I could get it in is very small type, tiring to read. So I broke down and bought a big magnifier for the whole page, been wanting one for ages.

 It's  only 3x, but that's enough for my need.  Comes with built-in LED lights. This required a trip out for AAA batteries, after my battery-drawer search yielded two. Needed three, sigh.

I also plan to study other things under it. And maybe get pix of plants and flowers which defeat my modest camera phone.

Many uses possible. Do consider reading MacFarlane. What he says matters.

Full disclosure ahead of Valentine's day

That batch of chocolate peppermint bark I made? I kept testing it, a piece here, a piece there. Until I discovered I'd tested it all.

I blame it on the white chocolate which I find I love. I don't like "real" chocolate with the high cacao content that's good for you.

So, today I thought I'd better replace it, this time for other people to eat.

And I had a great time, three layers swirled and marbled, too hard to break by hand, my thumb being a bit out of commission.

 Hence the mallet in the picture. Hitting is fun.

It looks like a stone quarry at the end of a shift. The pale areas are the white chocolate with red food coloring and a bit of the dark mixed in.

This was a consolation for bad weather, wind, rain, falling tree warnings, keeping me away from my knitting group.

And I will be sure to share.

Cornbread seems to have happened

Aka don't ask me, I only work here.

However one thing is clear. Chili and cornbread for dinner tonight.

Chili appears to be happening

I shopped this morning for the items I still needed for chili. Cold, damp day, seemed like a good idea.

I thought I'd make it at the weekend. Around here, future planning is doomed. Whatever the opposite of procrastination is, I have. Doitnowism.

 I suddenly found myself, a hapless prawn of fate, working like a maniac, as if everything depended on getting this done right now.

It's about 40 years since I made it, so you might say I was a bit rusty. I compared all sorts of recipes, and ended up deciding for myself. I just needed the order of appearance set up.

Various members of the troupe, some of whom didn't make the cut, stood around waiting for their cue.

As usual there were substitutions. I don't do beef, so turkey sausage meat, and chicken broth. I fancied more than one bean, so small white as well as kidney.

 Hauled out frozen oregano from last year's garden, chopped it, along with chili bean from freezer, garlic likewise.I like to use a pizza cutter for this kind of mincing.

And in the interest of zero waste, I cut all the onions in the bag in two to freeze.

The skins bagged and frozen for future dyeing. Then I chopped the one I needed here. I freeze halved onions, easier to chop frozen, less tearful. And if they're in soup to be blended, no need to chop at all.

And the tomato paste, new can, scooped out today's need, then put the rest in a Ziploc bag to freeze. Next time I need any, I can just break off the amount called for.

as they say grandly in cookbooks. Note the big screwdriver, a kitchen staple for those pesky cans that won't open all the way round,  This one had two places that just bent instead of cutting. An irritated bang of the sd took care of that.

The water from rinsing out the tomato paste can is now in the freezer, labeled to tell me what it is and how it's to go in soup.
I find it's good to tell myself why I did this, on the label, as well as what it is. Saves puzzling.

As you see, it's not just about cooking in my oh, look, a bird! world. But I do get things done.

In the middle of this circus, I stopped for a bowl of soup, needing to restore my strength, also sit down a minute.

I cooked the garlic and all the spices first in the olive oil, then added the onion then the ground turkey. I like to cook spices first to release the aromatic effects.

In this case it may have had the unintended consequence of heating the chili a notch more than planned. Not dramatically, but hotter than I meant. But it's still good.

Then beans and can of diced tomatoes, tom paste, chicken broth, all that. At that point the counter was empty, so I think everything got in that shoulda.

And here it is

Plenty to share and enjoy and freeze. When I recover, I'm making cornbread to go with it. That's another thing I haven't made in decades. Must find recipe. No, no, not right now..

Downsizing and the staff of life

Today's downsizing, on a raw damp cold no good very bad weather day involved dumping out and dumpstering large old plastic pots from the patio, stacked in case I wanted to plant them, etc

I spared the planted chive pot, which will come back, a container of flowers taken over by lemon balm, and my strawberry pot planted with honesty. Also the sage and lavender. The Thai basil is in the kitchen so it escaped scrutiny.

But other just-in-case containers with exhausted soil and dead undiagnosable foliage, very unscenic, went. The  contents were heaved into the ground cover, the containers to the dumpster.

As usual this was heavier work than expected, since we'd had rain. So then it involved a nap on the sofa before getting to the actual work of the day, bread baking.

Whole-wheat with oats, and fennel and caraway seeds generously flung about. Oatmeal makes a great crust, light but very crunchy. And the combo with the wheat makes a lovely dense crumb. I used two cups of oatmeal to five and a half cups whole-wheat.

I make one giant loaf, which becomes four smaller ones, three now in the freezer.

And for tea, a slice, toasted, buttered, with a boiled egg, like a tea of childhood, except I didn't soft-boil the egg or cut the toast into soldiers for dipping in the yolk.

But I do occasionally like an "egg to my tea". Probably some obscure quotation, forget the origin.

Celery soup

I've been thinking about celery for a while, yes, I know, I should get a life, but it's one of those vegetables that a single person thinks twice about buying.

 It comes in a head, where I shop, and that's a lot. Particularly when said person isn't a fan of it eaten raw. Like fennel, I'd rather have it some other way.

Anyway, the Asian store had a  nice display, so I bought a head, rinsed, chopped into little halfmoons, included the leaves, and froze it a couple of days ago.

This is good, because today when I thought I'd like soup, there it was. I rarely feel like doing the entire prep at one time. I'm my own sous-chef, works well.

So the recipe specified a whole head, and s big spud, which I had. Onions and garlic always in the freezer. Plain yogurt ready, too. Chicken broth.

So here's my first celery soup in quite a while.

In the same old dishes. My food stylist would probably have used different ones, fancy accessories, different table even. But she never showed, so here it is.
And it's really good. I've no doubt it's very good food, but mainly I'm really liking it.

I do like having soup in the freezer. It's my food security. And the freezing didn't affect flavor at all, in fact preserved it. Texture didn't matter because I was going to blend it anyway.

So you may want to try it. Many recipes online. Interestingly, none of my fancy print cookbooks had a recipe for celery soup.

They're all about celeriac, maybe that was the primo thing at the time. It reinforces my willingness to donate cookbooks, other than my own collection in a binder and a couple with sentimental meaning. People love to have them. They're welcome.

Chili, courtesy of good neighbor

The friend who helped lug bookcases about is also a great cook.

Texted me today did I like chili? he'd made a batch.

Showed up later with

Helping of chili and slice of fresh cornbread.  I'm blessed.

We have a food exchange going on, he samples my jams, pestos, breads.

I haven't had cornbread since I used to make it for my birds. They were mad for it. Half for them, half for me.

It was a human recipe, didn't have birdseed or anything in it, I used to explain to friends I offered it to. It's just one of the foods birds will fight you for. That and egg yolk.

Afternoon tea, species specific

One beautiful sunny day, high 50sf, rain forecast p the rest of the week, so  I seized the day, or rather the afternoon, the morning spent hauling large bags of books for the library donation, and hauling bags of dishes to the car ready for a thriftie run. And yet another bookcase out to join his friends at the dumpster, courtesy of kind neighbor..

Where was I, oh yes, great walk around the neighborhood. Walking is great for avoiding  stress problems from lifting and carrying, so I make a point of it.

Halfway around, I spotted a gang of turkey vultures in the street, disposing of a rabbit, which reminded me it would be teatime when I got home (!).

I'm grateful to turkey vultures,and we have a lot, for cleaning up all the roadkill and losers in nature's battles for us. Those guys are enormous on the ground, must be a six foot wingspan.  Couldn't get pix because cars kept scattering them. In the sky they hover and zoom about in big lazy circles, looking much smaller.

So home to tea and banana bread. More downstairs than upstairs, despite the Shelley putting in an appearance.

The giant slice of banana bread and big fork detract from the Downton Abbey effect. Also the milk powder, I never use liquid milk these days. The powdered is all kinds of pure. And it doesn't sour. But I think that Downton Abbey old lady would look at it and ask what IS milk powder?

Tea tastes different from different pots and cups. This was much lighter tasting than from my usual Chinese porcelain pot and mug. Same tea, same proportions. Some mysterious chemistry.  The cup is smaller, so I was kept working hard refilling it..

It's all research. What I do for science, and do they thank me? Do I get Time covers? Nobel Peace prizes?  But I think tea has probably averted more conflicts and assisted in handling more crises than it gets credit for.

Now back to my current Sue Ann Jaffarian, another good antidote to dark times.

Today comes loaded

Today, 02/02/2020, is Palindrome Day, and a lot of fun to type, makes your fingers do what Handsome Partner would call "a wee dance".

It's also Candlemas Day

Candlemas, Candlemas, Candlemas Day!
Throw all your candles and candlesticks away! 

Old saying, a bit premature, still long nights, though getting shorter.

And it's Groundhog Day, where the groundhog looks for his shadow. If he doesn't find one, only six more weeks of winter. If he does find one, only six more weeks of winter.

Our local groundhog dignitary, Punxsatawney Phil, declared an early Spring when he peered about, saw no shadow, and probably went back to bed.

But wait, there's more:

The Flowers of February, my New year's resolution to have fresh flowers at the beginning of each month.

The Shelley teaset revealed

Handsome Son and Across the street Neighbor got three bookcases, including a very big one,

muscled out of the house today. Son brought a couple of folding bookcases down from the third floor, so..

My near the front door but not visible from it shoes, key basket, glove and miscellaneous stuff container is now here, compact, much better.

Upstairs two packed bookcases are now reduced to two shelves. Here

And the little teaset made its debut here

First in the box, nestled in organic cotton roving, soft and lovely and so short a staple that nobody I know can spin it. About an inch. Compared to the several inch staples of spinnable roving. I use it as packing or stuffing.

Then carried downstairs, unwrapped and set out.

It's what collectors call desirable -- complete, and perfect condition. Stocks pattern. So if one shows up cash in hand, they can take it away. I'm just not up for shipping fragile goods these days.

Meanwhile I'll happily play Downton Abbey in the afternoons with my tiny teacups.