Busy just being

 Today's floral tribute, spiderwort, rudbeckia, daisies

The maranta flower has opened and another bud is at work

Today's sun tea, with a sprig of peppermint

 Here's the garlic prep board, newly sharpened knife at work

The board designation is done by whatever color looks good with the food item. In case you wondered.

And the divine Stacey Abrams has come out with another thriller. Yes, it's the same Stacey Abrams. She's a brilliant thriller writer as well as political mover and shaker. 

I have a six month wait for this at the library.

Meanwhile I'm reading a non-Brunetti Donna Leon

But mostly, the weather out being steaming hot and storms starting up, I'm taking Sandy Boynton's advice for the day

Hummingbird and poptarts

Yesterday was the first sighting this year of a hummingbird. In the butterfly bush next door. My heart literally leaps when I see her, that slight movement that catches my eye, then a few minutes of watching as she feeds here and there around the bush before flying straight up over the roof. No pictures, no chance!  We see few hummers, and only once did I ever see two at one time.

Then, as if that weren't enough, the first monarch butterfly of the year suddenly showed up. This year we've seen very few butterflies so this was a banner day for spotting nature, right from my sofa. The butterfly bush flowers just opened, so they wasted no time.

It was the universe rewarding my finally sharpening the knives. It's the noise of the sharpener that puts me off. But the three main ones are done. Friday is a Misfits box day, so I need them sharp for prepping vegetables.

But I did have what may become a biannual Junk Food Bake. In April 2019 I blogged about making poptarts, the only junk food I've ever been interested in. And yesterday I thought I'd make a batch again.

This is my translation of Jack Monroe's English recipe. She's a wonderful person, activist, humanist, writer, cook who understands poverty, just admirable. She also knows the mental health value of the occasional foray into making junk food amidst healthy eating.

First I had to make the jam, since as you may know, it's a pastry event with jam inside.

Blueberry jam, small quantity, another Jack Monroe idea, small quantity of jam rather than masses, because you might have a small quantity of fruit and sugar.

Then the pastry, cooled for an hour before rolling out

Cut into rectangles using the bench scraper

Then spreading the jam, and closing the sandwich. Pretty artisanal compared to the machine made shop ones.

And sealing the edges. 350°f for 15 minutes.

Pink icing once cooled. And a text to Handsome Son to mention them in case he would like to visit and sample one. Shameless, me.

This will do it for the next couple of years!

Sunday morning plants

It looks as if my maranta, prayer plant, grown from a cutting from my neighbor, is about to flower! I didn't know it was a flowering plant. I guess this means she's happy.

In the background, the indoor potatoes

Ready for their closeup and evidently sprouting. These were just peelings, not the potato, which I ate.

Outdoor potato plants from peelings

The yellowing foliage means there will soon be potatoes to harvest. At that point, the indoor potatoes will take their place in the bigger pot 

Then there are the uninvited. A white oak, planted by squirrels, which I'll dig and move out to its friends

And the indomitable red rose is having a second wind

Something seems to have chewed on the chair. Maybe it's reached the end of its lifespan here.  And the ancient rotted picnic bench next to it.

I do have a chair, the kind that you carry in a bag, to put out in its place. Once I get some helpful person to move this one out. And I have to figure what will replace the bench.

The honesty plant is maturing to where I'll soon be able to take the seeds for planting and add the silver remnants to the collection

So that's Chez Boud on a nice warm cloudy not too hot morning.

I have kitchen plans today, more later. And this afternoon is Misfits ordering day. The mad whirl never stops.. happy Sunday everyone!

Simple pleasures

 I seem to be coming back from my slough of despond, after catching up with my weight training and stair exercises. It's always good to move a bit even when I'd rather do almost anything else. Afterwards I'm glad I did.

I even put them on my calendar so that the alert pushes me into doing them.

And a couple of friendly very early morning  texts from someone newly back from India, helped the mood.  I suspect she's still dealing with jetlag, since they were so early I thought it must be an emergency. Clearly her clock isn't all adjusted yet. Lovely all the same.

And here's an entry for the doh, why didn't I do this years ago file

Cutting boards. Washable. Bendy so you can easily tip the food into the pan, or the trimmings into the backyard. So much easier than my improvising with wooden boards, or my handy Plexi sheet, very unfriendly to your knife blade. Also they skid.

These proud beauties are nonskid, yay, different colors for, they say, different purposes, there are rules. They say.  I say I'll pick the color I feel like using. My kitchen, my rules. Not that anyone's arguing the point.

As you see, in today's gallant attempt to catch up with the green veggies in the freezer, the onion cutting board

Soup of the endless leeks, some carrot greens, celery and

The last of the Bad Food hot dogs. This is the hot dog cutting board..

The dogs made a nice addition. I used the newly mixed Bill Veach Curry Powder a shot of Old Bay, kosher salt, added a bit more salt later. Some good chicken stock.

And it did come out a bit too fibrous, mainly because of the celery. So I strained it a bit, and that improved matters a lot.

I saved the pulp, and it's in the freezer. I'm wondering if it will make a good pasty filling, with yellow potatoes and maybe carrots. That baking might make it less chewy. Anyway, anything rather than toss good food.  And it's a new idea to try. And any cooks listening please suggest what you think might be a good way to use it. Other than chucking it out back, that is.

Meanwhile here's lunch with

sprig of Thai basil. 

Doesn't take much to amuse me. I've been so busy winnowing that I haven't paid attention to things I should really get. Like these boards. 

Speaking of knives, ss I was earlier, you know how TV cooks, particularly with restaurant experience, sweep stuff off the cutting surface with the sharp side of the blade, making home cooks scream in horror? Use the back of the blade!!  

Well, I heard one recently explain it doesn't matter in a high end restaurant because they have knife service. Constant resharpening available. So they don't get concerned about the cutting edge. 

I will just have to get to it and sharpen my knives, service only provided by me around here, in honor of the new fancy cutting boards. I wonder when my knife service will show up? When my food stylist does, I expect.

Daily Bread and Daily Respite

 I needed bread, and thought the fastest form, as usual when I don't feel like heating up the kitchen long, is hot biscuits.

So today I  made a batch and thought a different touch might be good.

Usual buttermilk sub made from whole milk and lemon juice, three table spoons Italian olive oil.

Mixture of durum whole wheat and bolted wheat, baking soda and baking powder, salt, with a new addition, a tablespoon each of dried sage, from my plant, and lime zest which needed using, been in the freezer long enough. 425° ten minutes.

It worked okay, could have used more flavoring but I hadn't wanted to overwhelm the taste.

Lunch, leek potato soup with a sprig of fresh sage on top, and a hot biscuit, split and buttered with Irish butter. Pretty good.

When you're not in the mood for cooking but need to eat, a bit of decoration on top of the soup is very cheering.

Speaking of cheering, I continue to get daily cheerful messages from  Clara Parkes Daily Respite, which she started to help us get through the pandemic. 

I signed up for daily emails, and they're great. Sometimes funny video, sometimes amazing ideas, sometimes her own Vimeo of the water's edge and the sound of little waves near her Maine home.

Highly recommended. She's a designer and very creative person, and you can Google her to find out how to sign up. No, she doesn't know I'm saying this! 

Now I'm reading Bess Crawford, dozing and keeping cool. We had rain overnight, just storms, nothing like the flooding further north. The hurricane hasn't arrived yet. 

These were apparently unrelated rains. They provided us with all the humidity we can handle, which is why I walked this morning and am staying in this afternoon.

Happy Friday, dear readers.

Bored and lonely and what comes of it

The weather has kept everyone indoors if they have cool, very brief encounters with neighbors, haven't seen friends for so long anyway except on Zoom. Living alone and petless, it weighs on a person. 

No pets because I can't afford the medical bills. If I could find a cat with a trust fund I'd take them in a hot minute. 

Meanwhile what comes of boredom, especially when it's too hot, even early, to walk, is a stirring of new ideas.

Last night I thought maybe I'd consider supported spinning. This is a spindle spinning form where the tip rests in a bowl and it's different from drop spindling.

The idea came from this lady, a pioneer in handspinning cotton, hemp and those more "difficult" fibers. 

She then weaves her clothes from the fiber she's spun, some from plants she's grown. She also loves dyeing. A kindred spirit to many of us.

Ages ago I was given a bunch of cotton roving, organic, undyed, by an experienced spinner who had tried and failed to get anywhere with it, having been given it in her turn by another good spinner with similar dismal results. 

And this week, on the HGA presentation of Textiles and Tea, Joan explained it in about two minutes! 

The ratio on a wheel used for wool and other animal fibers, is no good for the very short staple of cotton. I know not of wheels and ratios, but next the question came up of drop spindling cotton. She explained it's impossible. 

Staple length (fiber length) way too short, an inch or two, compared to the several inches of animal fiber. So the fiber can't support the weight of even a light drop spindle. She said you have to use a supported spindle. Ah.

You can catch the recording if you Google HGA  and go from there. Not a lot to see, but much wisdom and generosity to share. She loves to teach and has a full schedule still, in her 80s.

So last night I was thinking about supported spindles and one thing led to another. I tried a few experiments with what I've got.

This is one of my spindles in top whorl position, my usual.

Then here it is on bottom whorl position, see the little channel at the top to keep the fiber from skidding off.

Trying the movements for supported spindling

And here's the modular one

Comes apart like this

So I tried it.

And it worked. I got twist, wobbly but working. There's nothing to stop the fiber skidding off, which is also true of real supported spindles, and which I found unnerving. 

But it still worked once I got the moving parts and angles organized. My finger is only to hold it for the pic, not part of the technique.

So here's the battlefield I mean experiment area.

The marble eggcup is a nice bowl for the tip of the spindle. I wondered if I could just try the principle by using my lightest spindle low whorl style.

I could not get any twist at all, just unspun roving coming off. So after a few goes, concluded that I couldn't achieve a fast enough spin with this idea. You're supposed to be spinning on a tip, not a screw. But I learned a bit about holding the spindle anyway 

On to the next step. I remembered my modular spindle, where the whorl slides on and off the shaft. Tried that, and found that I got a much better spin, even achieved twist, yay.

But it's still only improv and I need to do better. I priced some beautiful supported spindles, which are not exactly my range, and I still wanted to build rather than buy.

Lady doing bottom whorl drop spindling. It has some things in common with supported spindling. Both have the whorl low down. Otherwise a bit different.

Then on YouTube of course, I studied several terrific spinners including my favorite Spinning Sarah, who said she was working with a spindle stick and whorl.

Soooooo, I have the whorl, so I went and ordered two spindle sticks on Etsy, direct from the maker, and with any luck I'll be able to get more serious about this when they arrive. And the total for two sticks, the shafts for my future spindles, is less than a single supported spindle. Some of them are artworks in themselves, but right now I would like effectiveness. There's an elegance to that itself.

Quite a busy time after all. 

But not exactly meditative. This video is lovely, but it's more aspirational than realistic for a beginner. 

It's like people saying knitting is so relaxing, you should take it up. While glossing over the high anxiety of the learner, trying to keep the same number of stitches, and omg a big hole..

Anyway, enough reading about what I'm doing.  Time for you to bustle around and help me identify this plant which I got years ago from a neighbor. 

I don't like the color, but the goldfinches, our state bird, love the seeds. So I keep it as a kind of civic duty. Anyway, what is it? Your wisdom, as always, appreciated.

Off to have tea and a lemon bar now.

Summer tea and fore-edge painting

Yesterday's visit by Handsome Son, first for a couple of weeks,  included a summer tea

Complete with lemon bars, plum cake, suntea with lemon and spearmint, and a little bunch of flowers from the front yard. Couple of early chrysanthemums, couple of daisies, sprig of creeping Jenny. Note that we're finally sharing the tea and cakes instead of individual Covid style settings.

Not sure if Handsome Son noticed any of this, but it pleased me!

And he was very happy when I presented him with his Dad's Cross pen and pencil set, all in working order. He hadn't known about it so it was quite a surprise. He loves vintage, especially if it's from Handsome Partner. 

And we pored over the latest dox from the condo association to fathom what they wanted this time. Took both of us to unravel the convoluted prose. Evidently the township has changed the Fire regs yet again. It seems we're still in compliance, though.

Back to reading, I noticed in the Inspector Rutledge book  a reference to fore-edge painting, without an explanation, and remembered what it is. 

Thought you might be interested in this very niche artform. As a kid I had no idea this was a thing, and tried drawing on the page edges of closed books. A few years ago I discovered it was a kind of art, going way back.

When the book's open, or on the shelf, spine out, the art's invisible. You can see it only with the book closed. It's fun to try, if you clamp the book closed to keep the pages tight shut so the paint doesn't seep in. 

This isn't a flip book thing which I expect we all did as kids, little drawings on the top right corners to make a kind of animation when you flipped the pages fast. If you haven't done this, it's fun. Also great for little kids to try, just sayin.

Yesterday's Freecycle listing included this entry

I wondered if she was having a dig at the likes of me, then found that apparently there's a magazine called Lady. And there was a missing comma after Lady. Ah. 

I do like this kind of thing, like the weak old chickens advertised in the local paper. And the eight week old doxins, all weened. Perfectly clear if you read it aloud.

And my current horoscope did a feature assigning characters in the Wizard of Oz by sign. Evidently I'm pretty scruffy but mentally alert.

So it could be worse. I keep telling myself this when I'm bored with being kept home isolated because of another heatwave. Big storms last night, saved me from needing to water the plants today. So there's that.

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.