I keep having this feeling that it’s all slipping away and I’m neglecting my recording responsibilities. I have never journaled; this blog is it. I envy my brother and other friends who have been writing in notebooks for years. I feel like it’s too late to start now. Plus for me so much is the pictures, and they’re easier to include digitally.
Lets see if I can do the random memories of minor milestones thing.
Saturday I defrosted the freezer. I usually do that on Memorial Day weekend but I put it off a week this year. There’s been a bad smell in the corner where the freezer is. I thought maybe an animal was living there, a mouse or a squirrel. But last year when I did the defrost I mopped the floor and it got better. This spring the smell seemed to come back a bit, faintly pissy in the back stairs, stronger by the freezer. I thought it was maybe the tulips, but also worried that maybe there were critters in residence in the walls. When I was wiping out and under the freezer after the defrost I saw something underneath and pulled it out all the way out to find some kind of ancient partial package of meat that had been eaten but was mostly just horrible. I thought some of the debris under the freezer was poop, but I think it was just major dust balls. I sacrificed one of my plastic bowl scrapers to get it off the floor, and then scrubbed and mopped with Mr. Clean and bleach. And threw out the scraper and the mop head. The smell’s gone now. I think it must’ve been a mouse from the size of the chewed part.
Thursday was my first CSA box. Wednesday my first night of writing recipes. So far so good. The only one from this year that I’ve added to my new recipes blog so far is this master recipe for veggie quiche. I will keep adding them to the CSA box category as the summer goes on, though. Oh, looks like I already told you that on Memorial Day.
What did I make with CSA veggies? The first night we had whole wheat and Swiss and mushroom and spinach wraps.
On Friday I made pork chop carnitas – man they’re good – slow cooked meat. I shredded it and we had tacos with salsa that included radishes from the box, and red onion and jarred jalapeños from the store.
At some point, I think Friday, I made pickled rhubarb using green garlic and a couple of stalks of rhubarb, that no one will eat but me. Turns out you have to slice the rhubarb pretty thin or it’s unpleasantly fiber-y. I made some of the drained off vinegar, dyed a pretty color by the rhubarb and seasoned with whole cloves, the green garlic, salt & sugar, into salad dressing and that’s been more popular. I also made rhubarb custard coffee cake on Sunday morning, but the pic I took Sunday isn’t as nice as the one in the recipe so go look there. Finally Monday night I used the last 1/2 pound of rhubarb to make this rhubarb chia seed jam. I think/hope the chia seeds will soften more – they seemed a bit crunchy when I took it off the stove. I think I will put it in Victoria Sponge, maybe this Nigella recipe, or maybe my own, that’s adapted from the Afternoon Tea Book.
What else … let’s look at pictures to try to remember.
Friday banana bites for breakfast
Nigella Lawson’s rocky road bars. An Insta hit.
4-day old cow at Cows on the Concourse. It was grey and a bit rainy so it was miraculously un-crowded for Cows. We went early so I’m sure that helped but it meant they hadn’t started making the grilled cheese sandwiches yet.
Deep dish pizza on Saturday night. Spinach and mushrooms from CSA; sausage from Curious Farmer; canned tomatoes and cheese from the grocery store. King Arthur recipe worked great – the only thing I did differently was they suggest un-molding your pizzas onto a rack, and I thought would make a sauce mess so I used a pizza pan, then flipped it back onto to a cutting board to slice. And I used premixed sausage instead of adding seasoning to plain ground pork as suggested in the recipe – I did add some extra fennel seed and paprika, and intended to sprinkle in some hot pepper fakes and forgot.
Sautéed asparagus Sunday morning
In eggs, also Sunday morning
What else … I got my extra booster/4th shot on Thursday, too. No real noticeable side effects except I’m tired, but I’m always tired because I sleep for shit – wake up every two hours, although earlier in the week – I think Tuesday & Wednesday, both, maybe? – I had some four hour stretches. Thursday was particularly bad; I was awake from 2:00-4:30/5:00ish fretting about work. Or maybe that was the booster.
Friday was a beautiful June day. Of course I was inside most of it, but got out for a short bike ride in the late afternoon before dinner.
We’ve been watching The Essex Serpent, and the last episode we watched, “I Break things”, that I think is the second to last, was pretty violent and some of the images are stuck in my head: Clare Danes’ character smashing stuff; Tom Hiddlston’s character burning things; Frank Dillane’s character getting mugged in a London alley way, and stabbed in the hand. Since he is a portraying a promising young surgeon, that can’t be good.
And oh, yea, speaking of TV, we cancelled Spectrum, kept the Internet, and are streaming things now. It’s all about how you get no benefits for being a long term customer with the cable TV people. We had this high-end package that doesn’t even exist anymore; lots of channels plus a bunch of the premiums like HBO & Showtime, and it has almost doubled in cost since we signed up in 2017. Because I wanted to keep the Internet, I called to cancel instead of doing it online, and I’ve never had a sales experience like it. The person I was talking to was super laid back & friendly but actually hit me with 3 different offers to try to keep me with them – 1) pay $50 less per month, and keep what you have; 2) buy their streaming app instead of YouTube; 3) “if y’alls are going to be streaming, maybe you should upgrade your Internet”. That last one’s a real non starter – it’s an old house and old wires and I could pay them a bunch more money but my Internet still wouldn’t be faster. Towards the end of the conversation I almost said, “Damn you’re good”. I thought Al might be interested – appreciate their skill. I had done the turn off in the morning on the 25th (on their advice), so we wouldn’t get charged a whole extra month at our higher rate, and I called Al while I was walking to work. Note to self: Bad move to call your adult child at like ten to 9:00 on a weekday morning – he thought somebody must’ve died.