Sunday didn’t start off so great. I stepped in hair ball cat puke first thing, heading for the thermastat to see how cold it was, and if I should turn the heat back on. (It was 65° in the house, 35° outside, so heat did go back on, and it’s running now Monday morning while I write). Good thing I still had that mismatched sock in my drawer, so I could throw the dirty one in the laundry and still have warm socks on both feet.
Then I burned my coffee, and I’m still not sure how I did that. I set up my stove top espresso pot, and went about putting dishes away and making rhubarb coffee cake. Maybe I packed in a little too much coffee, because I was trying to use up the last bit that was ground. Maybe I had the heat too low, and it never boiled enough to shoot the steam through. I was getting the spring form pan for the cake down from the high cabinet, and I smelled burned coffee up at that altitude. I checked the pot and only a tiny bit of coffee had come though. I turned up the heat, and more coffee came through, but I think it was already burned. I heated milk and added the coffee and at first thought maybe more milk was the answer, but it still tasted terrible. I dumped that cup of coffee, let the pot cool off, and ground more coffee for a fresh cup. I took the espresso pot apart and it had all the signs of a dry boil. I scrubbed it all shiny and Here’s try two – better.
The dough for my long rise bread was too wet and didn’t rise much.
I don’t think I got enough rhubarb filling into the cake – I used regular puree, the last carton from last year that I thawed, plus the last spoonful of the batch from last Sunday, not the extra thick I normally use in the cake. I only put in about a cup, and I usually use a generous cup to a cup and a third.
Then I went for a walk, slow, because my leg hurt, and took lots of pictures of flowers. It’s been cool (had to turn the heat back on, remember), so the blooming trees are lasting. I like when they’re half bloom, half green leaf, like they are now. And the tulips are really up.
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Since I didn’t put all the puree into the cake, we ate it with extra spooned on top. Pretty good. But I still think it doesn’t have enough filling.
Saturday I had started the process of changing over to not-flannel sheets, doing numerous loads of laundry and removing great mats of cat hair from the dryer lint trap and taking the big comforters to the laundromat. The machines take credit cards now, and I was a little worried about if I had inadvertently left my info there, so the next person got their dryer on my card, and continued to be dismayed when I checked my account and the pending debit to the laundromat was $15, rather than the $8.75 I thought I’d spent. But it had all righted itself by the time I checked again Sunday morning. We’re the house of mismatched sheets, for example, our double bed has Queen fitted and top sheets on it now, topped by a single bed fleece blanket and a single bed quilt, both spread out as much as possible. So Saturday I also spent a bunch of money at Garnet Hill on sheets – and mother-of-the-groom dresses on spec.
Through the process of laundry, I found the other purple sock, but since I wore the singleton purple with the blue one, after I stepped on the cat puke, (above), I now have this, washed on the right, unwashed on the left.
Even though I found the sock, I still can’t find that beige bedspread that’s the weight of this coral one (house of mismatched sheets, remember), and I didn’t wash this coral one, either, because there was always a cat sleeping on it. And I still can’t find my favorite mismatched serving spoon, the one from the thrift shop in Beloit.
