Paneer Adventures

My default playtime in the kitchen is with cheese.  Dating all the way back to being a little kid, when we'd all get a tiny bottle of milk from our moms, and walk to school, everyone walked, shaking the little bottle until ta-daaaah! at school or rather after several lesson periods, during which teachers demanded that we Put Away Those Bottles, we had cheese!  one problem was getting it out of the little bottle, but we didn't care.  We had made cheese!

Till now, when I'm doing it a slightly more grownup way, using actual pans and thermometers (not strictly necessary, I just thought I should for once do what the book said) and so on.  Great fun.

And here you see two kinds of paneer, which is an Indian cream cheese:  one on the left made with salt, processed by draining through cheesecloth, one on the right with no salt, processed by draining through a piece of linen.  Both different in texture, oddly enough, since they came from the same batch of whole milk. But both very good.

And here's a book by Claudia Lucero, with all kinds of cheese ideas, and tons of pictures and encouragement and reminders that cheese is an artform, so yours might be different, might even be better. And since this is a lightning swift kind of operation, you can't make it and take pix at once, you can see more or less what happened in the pix from her book.

However, as always, I had to improvise a bit.  The first lot didn't make a lot of curds, but I processed it anyway, and added in salt as it drained, just to make it less bland.  Then I thought, hey, there's still a lot of good stuff in this pot, it's more than just the whey, I'll reheat and rejuice it with lemon juice and see what happens.  

It was just great.  Fabulous curdling, easy to collect curds, great whey left behind.  Good thing I had a second cloth and a second strainer, since they were both straining at once, and being pressed.
The whey is now in the freezer until I use it for soup, which won't be long, because of all the pumpkin in there.

And the second batch has a much firmer texture.  So now I know that it doesn't hurt to reheat and make another batch, as long as there's milk solids still in the pot.

And it's very good to make this in time for afternoon tea, spread, one kind per piece, on homebaked bread, with a spoonful of homemade apple jam on top.  Pot of tea.  Magazine.  Feet propped up on two cats.

Further Adventures in Waging Peace and What Can Happen

I went to hike on the Preserve, in pursuit of my Waging Peace effort for November 11, and after a lovely hike, bit tired, day turned beautiful and warm, I decided to sit and admire the lake from the bench outside the Audubon building.  I noticed a gang of people on the steps, evidently a meeting or symposium or something, they have them a lot for people interested in the natural world, didn't take much notice.

Then a nice guy came over and sat with me, as I was looking through my binoculars just in case I could see anything moving, and asked what I'd seen today.  I mentioned the yellow rumped warblers on the trail, and commented that it was a bit early in the day to see much activity. Whereupon he introduced himself:  Pete Dunne. If you want to know why this was exciting, go here

So we had a nice chat and he said he'd seen me sitting in the sun on the bench and decided "there's a person who knows how to use a day like this."  And ducked out of the meeting. So we talked about the season and I indicated I'd been down to Cape May quite a bit, and he stunned me by saying, yes, I know, on the hawkwatch platform, remind me of your name again. I guess when you watch birds as much as he has, you note people, too!  wondered what my field marks were..

Then he had to return to his meeting which turned out to be the statewide Audubon staff meeting, and the reason he was there, rather than up on the Kittatinny Ridge between NJ and Pa watching hawks and the fall colors.  He's well liked and I can see why.

Then home again, and friend and artist Mike E. showed up with a couple of blades he had promised me for art, possibly weaving, purposes. These are blunt and not high enough quality for him to get them set again and sharpened, so he gave them to me for peaceful uses!  My version of beating swords into plowshares. Blades into Looms!

So  I got a couple of huge immediate rewards for my efforts today.

Waging Peace. All Together Now!

There's a certain obligation when you blog, to note significant days and not look as if you didn't notice them.  So November 11 is one of those days.  But, as on Memorial Day, I'm very careful about any kind of observance that risks glorifying war and making it look exciting and dramatic.  Anyone who has lived through one, either in or out of combat, knows better.

So this year I decided to honor the men and women who have gone through terrible hardship on behalf of us all, by waging peace.  

Starting with a hike on the Preserve, to bring back peaceful nature pix for us all, as a healing thing to do.  And by continuing to take care of the people and animals around me every day.  And, in another post, I'll tell of the adventures that happened today partly as a result of these decisions.

See the dark areas in that bank above?  those are the lairs of our native red fox.  Real foxholes.

And here is a whole universe of mosses and lichen, with its own history of coexistence and conflict and resolution.

 

Apres Halloween...the pumpkins bite the dust

What with my own pumpkin, now that the frosts have started, needing to come indoors and with next door's carved pumpkin, likewise, this morning was a madhouse of cutting and carving up and seeding and chopping and dicing and steaming and need I go on...two solid hours.

 But a huge yield of pumpkin steamed and ready to use instantly when needed.  Soup, stirfry, bread, muffins, pancakes, no end to the possibilities.

In the freezer already five bags of steamed pumpkin dice, and here's the last hurrah, heartfelt, I may say.

I think I'm getting people trained with my aversion to food waste -- neighbor said he was planning to toss their Halloween pumpkin now Halloween was past, but suddenly thought he'd ask me.  

I said, that's not trash, that's FOOD!  and he burst out laughing and said that's exactly what I thought you'd say!  I did promise to give him the seeds from my pumpkin, since he loves them toasted, and I'm not fond.

I still have winter squash to do something about but maybe not today.  Their need is not as urgent as the pumpkin. 

I saw "Dive" last evening, a documentary made by young filmmakers in LA about dumpster diving for food, largely but not only, at Trader Joe's, and it was amazing how much perfectly good food they found, still with days to go on their sell-by date, even. High end foods.  Gah!  they were sharing with family, friends and the local SA shelter.  Then a lot of the stores began to padlock their dumpsters.  I'm guessing fear of liability.  And rats.

Then the group began, having got nowhere with the top brass at a number of food corps., to deal directly with local managers, some of whom gave them a window at the end of the day in which they could take away food for any purpose they wanted -- some shelters are taking advantage of this opportunity, too -- before the food hit the dumpsters.  And they all discovered, as people in the field have long known, that salvaging and re-serving food is very heavy and demanding and timebound work.  A small version of which I did this morning.

They were not so much interested in feeding themselves, though they were happy to do that, as making a point in the hope that we can collectively do a much better job at food conservation and sharing than we've been doing up to now.  And they give ideas on what any of us can do next.

Food waste is endemic in a lot of supposedly civilized countries, very sad state of affairs, when hunger exists there, too.  Anyway, I recommend it as a sobering insight, or a confirmation of what we knew, depending on where you're coming from on this issue.

And, since Thanksgiving in the US will be here soon, I always remember that people aren't just hungry then.  It's all year round. Food banks need our help all the time.

 

Three New Friends. Cast Iron Ones 6WS

Finally, I found cast iron pans which are 1. handled long enough for me to get two hands on, so as to lift the thing, 2. small enough for all the above to apply, and wheee 3. in a set.

So here they are.  I've done the oiling and baking thing to season them, even though they claimed to be pre seasoned.  A likely story. I tried a test omelette and some of it came up, some of it stuck.  So after getting the rest of the egg off, I did the seasoning thing.

I believe you have to develop a relationship with these things.  Also to patiently get the seasoning up to par before it's really working. All this I have taken into account.  Before I ceremonially dumped my old rocky nonstick skillet that was the right size for a lot of things but didn't have much else to recommend it.

Anyone with experience of these things, especially about foods that do particularly well in them, please chime in.  In six words, would be a bonus!



 

Behind the Scenes Chez Liz, Kitchen, that Iz

First full day at home, and it's cold and rainy, so since I'm out of bread and yogurt and fully stocked with vegetables, it seemed inevitable that, between bouts of stitching, see Art the Beautiful for that update, I would make soup and bread and yogurt.

The bread is what you might call artisanal, or peasant, or something I just call it bread.  The flours are white wholewheat, homeground split pea flour and homeground oat flour.  Very sturdy!

The yogurt, which you see well, you don't, since it's in this mysterious wrapping, the aluminum coat thing, and it's held in place by the handle of my hand mixer. 

Inside there is a saucepan, lidded, with about a quart of milk, scalded, cooled, yogurt starter added, and which will sit quietly fermenting for seven hours before it's ready to fridge and leave to go cold before eating.  And I'll make another batch of yogurt cheese.  The starter was the very last of the yogurt cheese of last week.

The soup is cabbage, acorn squash and zucchini,  with basil pesto, several curry leaves, turmeric, salt, black pepper and the liquid, aside from what was already there in the vegetables, is yogurt whey, from a previous making of yogurt cheese.  It does terrific things for flavor in vegetable soups.  It's currently in the freezer.

And here is the treasure chest of frozen goods, pesto in bags on the right, soup in bowls all over the place, and in bags slipped down on the left along with spaghetti sauce and tomato paste, various spices and garlic and breadcrumbs in the door, loads of frozen vegetables ready for maintaining me over the winter.  This is after I took out several bags of vegetables for the soup!

There's another lot next door in a friend's freezer, too, but I'm too lazy to go out in the rain and organize that area in order to open it and show you.  However the state of my freezer shows you the situation which gives rise to the occasional avalanche.

Off for a healthy walk in the rain in a little while, can't stay in the house for long without needing to move a bit.

And The Farmer Is The One Who Feeds Us All!

Final harvest home from the farmshare for 2014.  Great year of produce, with apples being the best ever.

 

Seen here in November afternoon light in my kitchen, winter squash, frying peppers, bell peppers, several species of apples, Asian pears, broccoli.   

Typing awkwardly, because of kitchen injury, slicing into bell peppers to make lovely rings, finger got involved there, oh.  No blood on the food, though, in case that's an issue!

 

From now till May my Tuesday afternoons will be an oasis of quiet, no frenzy of chopping, dicing, slicing, mincing, bagging, freezing, cooking.  

What on earth will I do with the time.  Yeah, it's sure to be all empty, yeah, that's right...just like taking a bowl of water from a bathtub and expecting the rest of the water to stay put..

Meanwhile, great props to the Stults family of Cranbury for their multi generational family farm, whose centenary comes up next year.  Can't wait to see what they'll do to celebrate it! 

Go here to find out more about them.

Zucchini Sticks Bake for a cold windy day

Today was a good time to make a baked item, warming the house as well as the food, still with the bitter high winds and low temps, so it was a zucchini stick bake.

Sauteed shallots, along with some clipped dried kombu, that's a seaweed type of vegetable, with fresh ground allspice, turmeric, pinch of kosher salt, till all nicely browned, then added in a batch of zucchini sticks from the freezer (nuked them a couple of minutes first).

While this was going on, I beat up an egg with a few ounces of one per cent milk and a few chunks of sharp cheddar.

At 385F  I baked this, the veggies in a glass dish, the egg mix poured over, for about 20 minutes.  Two meals for me. 

Dessert was the last of the apple crumble with a topping of yogurt cheese, eaten too fast for pix, sorry!

Daytrip to Winterthur, come with us electronically....

To go with us on yesterday's day trip, and for a link to learn more about Winterthur, go here


Enjoy your trip!  our weather was bright but there were high winds, icy, too, brrrrr.  Better to be indoors. Great kudos to our driver, one of our members, who had to navigate very high winds on a high bridge between Pa. and De., with traffic being shoved back and forth lane to lane by the crosswinds, but got us there and home safely.

Rainy old day, red soup and hot biscuits

Rainy cool day, and there's one more bowl of tomato/cabbage/squash soup in the freezer.  

So the work of a moment, well, ten minutes, to make a batch of hot biscuits, using half oat flour half white wholewheat, and a bunch of sunflower seeds.  The oat flour accounts for the nice shapes.  All wheat flour makes a more crumbly texture.  I like either.

And this shape will be good for a teatime snack, with apple jam..not that I'm thinking ahead or anything.

Still Reading Him, Though, in Hopes 6WS

Aside from the fact that it comes around faster and faster, November's not my favorite month, really, full of memories and anniversaries and birthdays of people long gone.  But the advantage of having the years go faster and faster is that each part of them also goes faster!  don't like winter?  it'll be gone soon...except for last winter, which went on and on.

I'm told that, except for last winter, it's not the time moving faster, it's me, moving slower. Which could certainly be true.  Time is weird stuff.  It seems the more I have to do, the more time there is to do it in. And days when there are not many obligations or commitments seem to fly by.

In the interests of not letting any more time rush by me, I've been catching up on some reading that I've been thinking for years I should at least dip into.  Kahlil Gibran.  Thomas a Kempis, which I downloaded onto my Kindle, now that would astonish him. Not a lot there for me, though. 

One is pretty superficial, perhaps he's overquoted, and the other is so male oriented -- curb your arrogance, don't speak up,  ignore this world in favor of preparing for the next etc., advice for the young headstrong males in the religious life  that he was writing for, that I can't yet see a good fit. And he was writing in the age when the body was considered a clumsy package for the soul, not worth attending to in its own right. 

Still reading him, though, in hopes.

This Month's Bite Club Test Drive

This month's Bite Club, the cookbook book club, is looking at America's Test Kitchen, and I hauled home my loan copy of their Big Cookbook, weighs a ton, and is really an encyclopedia, and decided to try their Corn Fritters as my sample to bring in.

They want heavy cream, which I don't use, so I subbed good homemade plain yogurt,  the corn was very fresh when I froze it, complete with its milk, that sticky stuff that tastes good but sticks your hands together when you're processing the ears, ew, and the minced shallot was freshly minced, good cornflour, good ap flour, large egg (for once, usually I use medium).  Even had cayenne pepper in the house, amazingly.

So I'm trying it out on Handsome Son when he comes to visit this evening, and had to do a test drive of one fritter, seen here drying on a paper towel, to see how it went.  Pretty good, if I say so myself.  We'll see what his verdict is when he tries them. And it will be a test of how well the batter sits in the fridge for a few hours.  If there are any leftovers, I'll try freezing them, a further test.

So this month I hope to have some actual food to bring in and share.  I'm also going to bring in my back copies of the Test Kitchen magazine, and a few Marthas with recipes, to give to anyone who would like them to keep.

The Kitchen as Therapy Center

This evening is the monthly Board meeting of my embroidery guild, and we're really up against our demographics.  What with our aging membership, though we have received joyfully a couple of younger members, most people are either not able to drive at night, or are not very well themselves, or are caregiving a spouse.

All this really cuts into their ability to take part, even with the best will in the world, and they definitely have that.  Currently our doughty Nominating Committee, founder members of the group, in fact, are trying to assemble a slate of incoming officers to replace the terms ending in December.  My term as president is one of them.  And other people are struggling with their tasks, for the reasons I said above, and might not be able to succeed themselves for another term. Sooooo, what will be will be.  

We are still wonderfully productive -- trip to Winterthur on Sunday in place of the usual general meeting, Holiday Party in December, special exhibit open in a private home for us in January, your humble blogwriter teaching paper jewelry in February and on and on, exhibit of all our work in August, all set up.  And we've done great outreach, teaching classes to kids, public stitch ins, all that.

But fewer people available to fill the needs, so everyone's stretched thinner, so we'll see what happens.  

Meanwhile I've been staving off sad thoughts by a massive burst of activity in the kitchen.  I made yogurt last evening, and owing to a lack of planning on my part, had to stay up till midnight before I could put it in the fridge, didn't add seven hours to the equation, doh, then this morning made about half of it into yogurt cheese, currently draining in the fridge, and the rest in individual containers just to eat.  The texture is really lovely, using one per cent milk.  

And I use yogurt in many places where heavy cream might be used, and the cheese where cream cheese might come in.  It's tangy and very good.  And the whey that comes off the cheese making goes into squash and other golden colored soups, sparks them up lovely.

Tomorrow night Handsome Son is coming over to do various good things for me in the house, and I'll feed him a very nice menu.  He doesn't read much in here, so I won't spoil the surprise if I say he's getting a bowl of squash/cabbage/tomato soup which had yogurt whey added and is great, beautiful reddish gold color,  then corn fritters, adding in some finely chopped sweet pepper, using my lovely farm corn and peppers from the freezer, no pic yet, I'll make them tomorrow night, and then a helping of the oat apple crumble, which I talk about below.  I think he'll go home happy.

And this morning I made toasted almond flour, from a box of slivered almonds I toasted five minutes at 350F, then once all cool, reduced to flour, or to ground almonds, in my coffee mill.  Useful for anywhere a nice almond flour is required.  Pancakes.  Cake. Desserts.

Also made Martha's really good oat apple crumble, which took all my this week's supply of apples, and some of my homeground oat flour, now here's one I don't mind referring you to the recipe for, since it's really good.  It looks like this:

and if you fancy making it, go here 

So food is good in many ways, for your spirit as well as your general health!  I like very much making basic things such as yogurt and flour and soup, all that sort of thing.  Too bad I don't have a setup for making wine..

Near the end of the farmshare season

Fall food came home today, along with ornamental gourds to decorate with for Thanksgiving, which is a few weeks ahead.

Wonderful season of food, completely ruins a person for shopping in stores.

Happy as a Clam Fritter

Or croquette, as the posh folks put it.  Last evening wondering what to have for supper, wandering about hopelessly, wanted a change from veggies, I found a can of baby clams waiting for just such an evening.  

Drained them (the juice now in the freezer ready to add the next time I make clam chowder) and since they were already small, didn't mince them further, just mixed with an egg, a big spoonful of homeground lentil flour, little bit of garlic, little dab of mixed mustard, sauted in olive oil.  Done.  Bit of ketchup, and those little yellow shreds are lemon zest, from my little collection in the freezer.  Little glass of white wine, seafood you know.  As if I had choices of wine in the house, heh.  

My food designer seems to have put this in upside down, but she claims that's what a visitor would see, as opposed to the diner. Well, considering I don't pay her anyway, I can't threaten to stop her check.

And another lot for this evening, perhaps with the addition of my Indian spicy crumb things.

I'll be interested in a nonveggie supper again, after an afternoon of farmshare chopping and dicing.  Only one more week of the farmshare, and my freezer is about ready to stop.  Me too.

Autumn walk on the Preserve, lovely time in sun with cool wind, no birds

Wonderful hike on the Preserve yesterday in a bright sun but very windy day.  No birds around, since they don't like the wind, it blows their feathers about.  But a lot of other walkers, happy people after days of rain, glad to get out and enjoy the colors and the shapes and the lake ruffled by the breeze. Text insists on being blue, no matter what I ask it to do! never mind

Glorious catchup!

Okay, since you all bore with my whining about the camera situation the other day, I thought you'd like an update.  A victorious update.  Handsome Son suggested that another possibility was that with the constant plugging and unplugging into my computer, and this camera has had a lot of that, I might have worn out the USB port.  That's the plugger in, for them as doesn't do this stuff.

Whining to my next door neighbor, he said, he being more of a hardware guy, Mike being a software guy, that if that were the case, I could just use a cardreaders in my computer USB slot and access the pix that way!  

I nipped out and bought one, a lot cheaper than the new camera, which I have now cancelled, and plugged it in simplicity itself, screen asked me if I wanted to transfer pix from the card to the software I use, clicked on yep, and it worked a treat.  This is great.

So now you have Had It. I am doing catchup!

Okay, here are the Diwali items you heard about but didn't see, starting and ending with food:

Lord Ganesha features on the box of treats another friend brought over, which also included, true ecumenism here, Greek baklava!

Then Dreads Dolliver and her shy friend made apple jam

As you see in stages, ending with a nice supper of homebaked bread, apple jam and yogurt cheese with a glass of Chablis, not homemade.

All caught up, I'm so thrilled that I'm back in action with minimum fuss and bother, too.

 

Camera kaput? Try the Mind's Eye 6WS

The lack of a camera makes me feel a bit like someone who talks with her hands and now her arms are in slings!  however, there are other things to pursue, anyway.

Such as all the books I'm constantly in the middle of, usually several at a time.  Can't show you a pic of the covers, which makes it easier to find the books, but nemmind.

I really recommend  How to Speak Money by John Lanchester, a terrific exploration of the terms used in money and what they actually mean, which is rarely what they seem to mean.  Very enlightening and interesting reading, and makes a lot of sense of the terminology being batted around all the time.  So tired of hearing politicians who don't know the difference between the debt and the deficit, then voting on their combined ignorance, gah.  If they took a look at page 104 they'd get it.  Or at least if they get an aide to read it to them, oops, cynical comment there.

And he gets into terms I never heard of which are very intriguing, such as Who is Chocfinger? Anyway, it's all written in actual English prose, some of it very funny, and made clearer than I ever knew exactly why we have inequal distribution of our resources and what purpose it serves. It actually serves a purpose in the neoliberal scheme, and here was I thinking it was an unfortunate side effect. 

He also had the interesting, and real, side effect on my monkey brain of bringing to mind, though he never mentions it, a term which has been hovering just out of reach in my mind for months and driving me batty.  That's it: vigorish.  Look it up on Google and marvel. Especially at its origins.

I promptly wrote it down and looked it up and discovered why I couldn't find it on any financial website or article I'd searched just in case I came across it to set my mind at rest and stop searching for it.  It's because it's a term of bookies and, um, loansharks!  Oh dear, bankers and economists and financial writers not going to admit any correlation there...and if you study credit default swaps, see page 101, you'll notice with the same flash of lightning, major lightbulb, that burst on me, that the vig. is a kind of credit default swap conducted by people in baseball caps in dark alleys, rather than bankers in Armani suits...check em both out and see if you think I'm right.  Just sayin'.

If your brain's a bit tired by this point, and longing for pictures, go and see The Bloomsbury Cookbook, Recipes for Life, Love and Art, by Jans Ondaatje Rolls.  Lovely social history of the Bloomsbury set in their period, Virginia Woolf, sister Vanessa Bell, Leonard Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, economist John Maynard Keynes, all that mob, very interesting stuff.  High powered talent with positions and connections in society which freed them to live as they wanted. Hot and cold running servants in the background, always, but never alluded to! They worked very hard, though, in pursuit of their various arts and each other.

You don't have to like to cook to enjoy this so-called cookbook, because it's also packed with wonderful illustrations of postImpressionist art, a lot of Vanessa Bell's marvelous work (seen also in the movie The Hours, if you noticed the interiors) and many little drawings by Carrington, and other painters.  And the book comes with a built in fancy red bookmark, just like a prayer book, which amused me hugely considering what they were all up to.  One little sidelight which cracked me up: at one point they all went out sledding on teatrays, and, get this, Keynes' briefcase!

So your mind's eye can work quite well, even without an electronic lens.

Apple Jam, with the assistance of Dolliver Dreads and her little friend

Having a farmshare, only two more weeks to go, twenty six weeks of great produce, definitely pushes you to new levels of vegetable and fruit prep and eating.  The apple crop this year is amazing, at least three different varieties, all huge and perfect fruit, literally handpicked.  The farm family are proud of their new bit of equipment allowing their picker to get the fruit a bit faster, but it's still one individual working up in the trees.

So, all the squash being roasted, stirfried, made into soup, made into bread, baked, made into french fries, that was the squash scene.  And a ton of green vegetables, which will make great stir fries and soup and bread eventually. And the apples have been: applesauce, apple salad tossed with a bit of mayonnaise, no need to get all carried away,  various forms of crumble, and now I made apple jam. Not jelly, jam.

Caramel apple jam,to be exact, with the assistance of Dreads Dolliver and her little friend, who wouldn't tell me her name.  The pix are still firmly stuck in my camera, and you should have heard their screams of rage, after all their work, slaving over a hot jam pot, before they flounced off back to their shelf, but I hope to reveal the pix and their hard work when a new camera comes into my life soon...

Meanwhile, this week's apple share made exactly six cups of cubed apple, just what the recipe ordered, and we'll see how it goes. Very sweet, I'm guessing, judging from all the brown sugar. And it used up the last of this year's pectin supply.  So I hope it works.

Other experiments: I made yogurt cheese from my homemade yogurt and it's really good.  I got about a cup of whey off it, so that's in the freezer for next time I make a squash/sweet potato/pumpkin soup, whichever happens first.

I tried out the cheese, just a bit spread on, on top of a helping of crumble from the freezer.  I must say that time and freezing improved that anonymous crumble considerably.  The y. cheese was good on top, cut the sweetness.

So that's your low tech blogger sighing and sadly waving goodbye to my loyal old Coolpix cameras, faithful to the end, not their fault their software got old and unsupported.  Don't we all....

Diwali, the Hindu Feast of Lights is here aka camera kaput, words must step in

It seems that suddenly my old camera is not on speaking terms with Windows since the upgrade the other day. Why it waited till yesterday to have the fight is not clear, but anyway, I think it's been left behind by the march of upgrades.  I was on borrowed time for a few months, having downloaded against all advice from the mfr who wanted me to buy a new camera, a sort of upgrade, which wasn't supposed to work higher than Windows 7, and I have 8, so I guess I can't complain.

But I plan to anyway, can't talk without me pix!

So here's the text, and if I can get the pix I took out of a different camera, I will catch you up with them.  This is the modular approach to blogwriting.


My neighborhood has a lot of Indian families -- great place to get old, because they're so caring and friendly to older women, wonderful friends -- so the feast of lights, Diwali, which also celebrates Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, brings on all kinds of partying and food and decorated houses and art.

I texted good wishes to a few Indian friends today -- they're not all Hindu, but they tell me that doesn't stop anyone from celebrating a fun time -- and one of them stopped by with a warm plate of Diwali homemade snacks! 

Her house has a lot of strings of red lights, husband loves red, I know, and I bet he picked them, since he has to hang them. I have no idea what I'm eating, except that it's very very good.  The little square ones are sweet, I think, probably nuts and milk base, and the triangle crackers are hot and spicy probably cumin, who knows.  

Down the street  two little girls were out today making their sand art stencils for the festival, and I admired their work, but didn't take pix, because I worry about pix of kids showing up.  So I snook down this evening and took pix of their artworks, and the lights around their house.

At the other end of the block is neighbor Lakshmi, whose festival it probably is, and who decorates her house extravagantly with flowers in season and now with lights.

Great fun, even if you're not Indian.  Looking down my little street, I can count ten houses all decked out in lights for the festival.  As one friend says, I put them up for Diwali, then leave them for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, why not!

A trip down memory lane!

This blogger. a writer and hillwalker, lives almost exactly where I did as a little kid, and in recent correspondence I mentioned that I climbed Roseberry Topping, local sort of mountain there, when I was three, with a lot of help. He promptly put it on his list of hillwalks to do soon, and here it is:

http://becausetheyrethere.com/2014/10/22/a-cooks-tour-of-the-cleveland-hills/

So take the tour.  That sweep of fields across to the hills with the Monument always in view, is permanently embedded in my memory, shows up all the time in my art even when I didn't plan it, and I have a watercolor of a similar scene, one I painted many years ago from memory, one of the earliest pieces I exhibited, at my teacher's urging.

I just ran up to take a quick pic of it, awkwardly from the side to avoid glare, and because it's halfway up my stairwell, can't step back from it, and here's a view, for once without the Monument!

Anonymous Apple Crumble

I made this this afternoon partly because I was in the mood for a bit of dessert, and partly because I had four huge apples still here and the farmshare coming up tomorrow, as well as bags of apple slices and chunks in two freezers -- one next door, and one here!  

And I'd already used a big bag of apple chunks in today's soup.  Which was very good -- buttercup squash, that is not a typo, no, I'd never heard of it before, either, apples, corn, used the water from steaming the squash, which was hard skinned, as the soup liquid.  And still had all these apples to go..

Sooooo, I leafed through my personal recipe book, where all sorts of cuttings and little cards and mysterious notes show up, and found this recipe I couldn't remember saving.  

I wondered a bit, since the oven temp they recommended seemed a bit low, even for a glass pan, and the time of baking seemed a bit short, and the amount of apples seemed inordinately large for the size of glass pan they recommended.  But anyway, who am I to judge, I wonder if the Pope does a good apple crumble, and I went ahead.

And found exactly what you might think.  Enough apple mixture (I had Granny Smiths and I think Cortlands, they were nice) of granulated sugar, lemon juice, to fill TWO dishes. 

The glass one in the foreground being the one they wanted filled.  And not quite enough crumble topping, good oatmeal, ap flour, butter, brown sugar,  to spread over two dishes.  But anyway I soldiered on, all good ingredients, you know.  And that was one reason I went ahead -- the recipe was specifying very good ingredients, which I happened to have on hand.

And I ended up baking for about 20 minutes longer than they said, and pushed up the oven temp, before it started to smell good.  It did taste fine.  But it didn't really get all lovely and brown and bubbly.  It's edible, not wonderful. 

Next time I'll go back to Martha's recipe for a similar item, which went down a treat a few weeks back.  And this anonymous one, cut from some magazine,  I noticed that there was no name on it, no origin, nada, now I know why, will be ceremonially removed from the book and recycled.  You'll notice I'm not giving the recipe, didn't want you to tumble down the same rabbit hole.  A pox on "recipe" writers who don't test the recipe.  Or proof it before going to print.

Meanwhile I now have a big anonymous crumble thing in the freezer and another one in operation in the fridge.  It can be a breakfast item, since it's not too sweet, one point in its favor. 

But, as they say, it's not a dessert you'd actually invite anyone to.  Not that this is a tragedy.  Says she bravely, lip quivering, after all that peeling and cutting and chopping and mixing and baking and rebaking and finally struggling to shove the second dish into the overloaded freezer under an avalanche of little odd shaped frozen packages.  And all the labor of tasting, too.  And having to have a second helping, to see whether it was better the second time..

When in Doubt, Just Do Everything 6WS

For better or worse, this is how I've always been, though I'm being forced to narrow things down a bit as time goes on.  But there are so few things in life that are irrevocable, that it seems a pity to close off opportunities without even trying them.  

This means I've made some big mistakes, but in the end I've still been glad that even if the experience turned out to be negative, at least I knew how it turned out. Better than wondering what if. Some of the threads in the shawl of life are rough and bumpy.

A job I had long ago involved a lot of work with midlife women at crossroads in their personal and work lives, and they would be very surprised at the suggestion that they could just try several paths, instead of having to analyze and plan and get just the exactly right next step.  This is not what the books tell you.  But most of the books are written by academics who have little to no experience outside of academia.

You don't have to have all your ducks in a row!  they can be waddling all over the farmyard and it will still be okay. I often come across adult art students who want to know ahead of time how a process will come out, and they're a bit disappointed when I say, I don't know, just try it and find out!  And if it's different from their expectations, to deal with that and see what's good about it rather than lamenting the imagined work that didn't happen.

Years later people I worked with on job issues would come and tell me they'd actually followed my advice, to my amazement,  especially the bit about how you can't tell if you'll like a particular line of work until you've been in it a while. 

And they'd say, gosh that was great, I found I liked jobs I never thought I would.  Or they'd say well, I'm glad I had a Plan B, because that job I thought I'd love I just didn't.  But I knew it was okay and I could just try something else instead, no harm done.

Since we're the CEOs of our lives, it's a Good Thing TM Martha, now there's a person who's made mistakes and gone on, to have an exit strategy for any new venture, which might include a different adventure to get onto...my dear late Handsome Partner, a lifelong research chemist, used to ask me what I was going to be when I grew up. 

He'd seen me change direction completely in my work every few years, and always ready to change once I needed to move on. He imagined I was always in search of a lifelong job.  I explained that I was already grown up.  That this was how I was.  Life too short to just do one thing. It was fine.  And when he saw how I never lacked employment, which created new opportunities as I went,  in my whole life, he realized that this flexibility was actually a strength, not a lack of resolve!

Life's a banquet!

Chop wood, carry water, make mac et cheese avec un bon coup de broccoli

One of the nicest things about a residential workshop is that it's so restful!  you follow instructions all day, accept ready-organized materials, listen to your teacher, figure out how to do what the project needs, go and be fed when a bell rings,  all we had to do at mealtimes was choose and pick up our food.  The stitching we were doing was demanding, but when it's all you have to think of, it's a lot easier.

Years ago, when I was still able to play violin, I went away for a couple of years in succession to a week-long string players' sort of camp.  Every day was organized into rehearsals, sectionals, private lesson time, meals at set hours, concerts in the evening.  Not a single decision to make, outside of how best to play your part of the music and how not to play on the rests in an inadvertent solo. From eight a.m. to eleven p.m. all hours accounted for.

Just to give you the flavor of this kind of specialized event, one day I got a bit lost trying to find the room where my sectional was scheduled to rehearse, and asked a passing teacher.  Oh yes, well, go past where they're playing Pachelbel's Canon, make a right as soon as you hear the Verdi overture, and then straight on till just before the Vivaldi chamber group.  Yes. My people.

My son commented that it sounded awful, like school but more so, and was amazed when I said, nooooooo, it's restful.  So nice not to be in charge of anything but myself for a few days!  no running program, no teaching and organizing materials for workshops, no deciding on what to cook, nothing but take orders, it was lovely.

My couple of days' stitching workshop was equally great, for all the same reasons.  And now I'm home, and suddenly realized this evening I had to think about dinner.  Cooking it.  Thinking about what to cook then cooking it. Oh.

So I thought, well, I had a great mac and cheese while I was away, and why not do that, change from veggie stirfries and roasting etc. But I did put a handful of farm broccoli in with the macaroni.

So it's mac et cheese, avec le bon broccoli, chez Liz. No particular recipe here, just make a roux, whisk in the hot milk, stir in a bunch of sharp cheese and some mustard along with the kosher salt and the freshground white pepper, not black, it looks as if you dropped it on the floor if you grind black into it, and boil the brocc. in with the pasta. Into buttered dish, pour sauce over. Then 385F for about half an hour.  Bit of cheese grated over the top. Done.

Oh, and last evening right after I got home, a new rug arrived. So I spent the evening, instead of resting quietly after my stitching exertions, moving furniture in order to move the old green rug to the dining area, to make space for the new one in the living area where the old green one had been.

This entailed moving the table and chairs and the various stuff on the table, slide the old rug under all this and put back the furniture, and then unroll the new rug, this was exciting, it was fighting back, very big and unwieldy, and needed me to move the living area furniture and plants to accommodate it. 

All this was complicated by the insistence of the two cats in assisting, since they hadn't seen me for a couple of days and maybe I would run away again if they didn't keep an eye on me.

This rug, a bargain, in fact, at $50, good for a one person light traffic house, has been on my to do list for a couple of years until I got the spare $$ available.  I really like this, and it's good to have a rug under the dining table to rest my feet on.  The cats strongly disapprove of the new rug.  It's Different, and Smells Funny, and it's Here, in Our Living Room, it Should Go Away.

Fall sights and adventures

For the latest adventure with my stitching friends, go here.

Since it's harder for me to drive to Cape May the way I used to, to watch birds and walk and see the ocean, because of the distance and the wildness of the traffic nowadays, it occurs to me that this place might be my new getaway.Only and hour and a bit away.

You can arrange quite simply to go stay a couple of days, not expensive for full room and board, and complete with wonderful building, animals, labyrinth, friendly people, very safe and welcoming for a single woman, resident cat and dog, well, this might fill the bill.  And the chief nun in charge of hospitality already said, oh, just call me, we'll fix it up any time you want to come, always room for you.

I've been looking for a place of this kind, for a couple of days now and then, low stress to get to, affordable, and friendly. People to talk to when you want to, but they'll leave you alone when you need to, because so do they.  So this discovery might be yet another great thing my embroidery guild has done for me.

And for funny and nice sights nearer home, take a look:

Gary's Last Rose of Summer, next door on the truck waiting to be planted. Possibly waiting for me to get back from my adventures to help with the planting.  He assures me this is positively the last shrub he's buying.  Yeah. 

And marigolds in the front yard of neighbor and keen gardener Lakhshmi, with and without monarch butterfly, first monarch I've seen this year.  

Very few butterflies about this year, but many amphibians.  Go figure. Happy to see this one, though.