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Reading. Finished The Rose Field (Pullman)!!! I am Making Arrangements for it to Leave My House. ( Read more... )

ANYWAY. I finished it. It Is Done.

Then read the first few pages of Dead Hand Rule (Gladstone; latest in the Craft Wars) before deciding that actually I need to reread at least the end of Wicked Problems in order to remember what's going on...

Writing. Progress continues both glacial and extant.

Listening. My relisten-while-actually-awake of the first chunk of The Hidden Almanac continues, slowly.

Playing. We have finished an Exploders run on Hard in Inkulinati. I am contemplating, given how smoothly that went, whether I want to have a try at Very Hard...

Cooking. It's not quite "this week's breakfast dal, and a loaf of bread", but it does sort of feel like it was. Partly because for reasons we did not get our usual box of veg on Monday last week, which meant that we were scrabbling around using up Shelf Things and the occasional Supermarket Discount Item...

NO WAIT, I also DID make buckwheat pancakes, and inspired by lnr combined Tinned Pear and Stem Ginger with Vanilla Essence and also Ground Cardamom to go in same. V good. Will repeat.

Eating. My mother acquired for us, as A Special Treat, a variety of Baked Goods from The Fancy Bakery In Eddington: my favourite is still the fig-and-?ricotta, but the blueberry-and-?ricotta is also very good, as is the fougasse. A was extremely pleased with the pain aux raisins. AND my mother made some excellent baba ganoush, eaten with said fougasse.

This week also feat. rainbow bagels (which we got to watch some of the manufacturing process for!) as well as misc other foodstuffs from Shalom Hot Beigels.

A has some coffee and butterscotch cake (leftovers from a test bake!) from Flour Arrangements; alas by the time I got my act together to actually collect Excess Test Cake the apple pie and lemon had both all gone...

Exploring. I got to spend a little time in the City of London Cemetery, which is currently ablaze with (among other things) purple crocuses; we also (on our second attempt) managed to go on A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey (with thanks to aldabra for reminding me that it is That Time Of Year still!). Snowdrops excellent. May or may not get around to sharing some photos. (Our first attempt at A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey Abbey wound up mutating into a poke around the back of Churchill and Astronomy to peer at bulbs and other plants misc, which was also very enjoyable even if I did once again fail to take A to see the Barbara Hepworth.)

Growing. ... I bought a bag of snowdrops In The Green at Anglesey, to go into the ground around the cherry tree at the allotment? The lemongrass seedlings haven't all died?

kaberett

Breakfast dal. This experiment continues to work extremely well.
I have definitely reached the point with the Incomplete White Puzzle where it's speeding up significantly on account of enough pieces are in place to significantly reduce the number of possible combinations that need checking. Today's decision was to start filling in from the bottom edge, where I still had a chunk that was just edge and no middles, because I think that up in the top left (interior) corner I've identified The Missing Piece, and will get annoyed if I wind up with non-contiguous gaps...
Today alternating Locate One Puzzle Piece with Do One Useful Job has been nice and smooth and easy. I have got Several things done. Is pleased.
Really really enjoying my ridiculous washi tape collection. Today I self-indulgently Added More Week Dividers, including replacing some pre-existing ones that I was Not Enjoying, Actually.
( Exercise & embodiment. )

kaberett

I have introduced my mother to this, I have introduced the Child's household to this, I am writing it down because clearly It Is Time for me to do so.

( Read more... )

kaberett

Specifically: I find myself in possession of both a superking duvet cover and a deep fitted double sheet that are mostly Genuinely Nice Cotton... and have both got holes worn through them in one specific place.

I have accepted about myself that I am not a person who will tolerate sleeping on patched bedsheets (because Textures). I am loathe to just hand them over to rag recycling. I am scared of trying to sew anything out of them, but might manage it with some encouragement.

I would greatly appreciate people Being Opinionated on this topic.

kaberett

Yesterday afternoon I'd been discussing auditor traps. Yesterday evening we walked out of the supermarket and were confronted by

three signs across a blocked-off road: DIVERSION pointing right, ROAD CLOSED, DIVERSION pointing left

[description in alt text, better to follow]

kaberett

Reading. A Variety of books with the Child, including One Fish, Two Fish and A Squeeze and a Squash.

For my own purposes I have been continuing with The Rose Field, Philip Pullman, and I do indeed continue unimpressed. Not enough to stop! But.

I also picked up What Is Queer Food? (John Birdsall) from the library when I was having an insomnia; I have made it most of the way through the introduction but I am not yet grabbed.

Writing. Words... increase.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac catch-up! "While doing the laundry" or indeed "weeding" continues to work quite well.

Playing. Puzzle progresses! I am not calculating current %age but Significant Progress.

I think we did a leeeeettle bit more of our current run of Inkulinati? But it is petering out.

Cooking. Pineapple upside-down banana bread! This time with some ground almond in it. Otherwise I think... very little of note.

Eating. I was very excited to get to try a Neuhaus dark chocolate poppy seed praline, which on the one hand was not actually quite as dark as I would like and on the other has given me Ideas.

Growing. I got some broad beans in the ground?

ursamajor

Twenty-plus years of loving each other, cooking together, and building upon our mutual disdain of dealing with crowds and reservations for Valentine's Day means

hyounpark and I made a dinner worth remembering tonight.

By default, when we have pork belly around in the winter, we usually braise it in apple cider, along with a chopped onion, garlic, a little soy sauce, fish sauce, and fivespice. But we didn't have apple cider in the fridge, so I thought about what else we could use for a braising liquid, and while pondering, found a recipe on the McCormick website for a Thai Tea-Spiced Pork Belly with Condensed Milk Sauce, and my eyes lit up, because I knew we had Thai tea packets on hand.

We riffed heavily off that recipe, mostly treating it as taste profile suggestions. I started steeping a liter of Thai tea while H chopped an onion, then I sauteed the onions with garlic and ginger paste (an incredible convenience courtesy the Indian grocery store in our neighborhood), and then added some fivespice powder. H crosshatched the pork belly skin, then cut it into small enough slabs to fit in our Instant Pot. I added a few tablespoons of soy sauce and fish sauce to the stuff in the skillet, then dumped that in the bottom of the Instant Pot; laid the pork belly slabs on top of the rack in the IP, and poured the tea over everything, and then closed it up and let it go on high for 20 minutes.

While that went, H tried to turn our rice into the suggested rice cakes, but we should've used sushi rice instead of brown rice which was what we had ready. Even using the musubi mold didn't get it to stick together enough, alas. Everything still tasted delicious in the end, though, so no fuss.

Meanwhile, I made the condensed milk sauce in the recipe - we had condensed coconut milk on hand, I subbed in peanut butter for the tahini and chile crisp for the sambal - and then turned my attention to the salad. What did we have in the fridge? Half a head of butter lettuce, some shiso leaves, scallions; enough for at least a little greenery on the plate. Chopped the leafy greens and scallion up, and then, inspired, ran an apple through the mandolin. Whisked together a dressing of peanut oil, lime juice, fish sauce, a little galangal and garlic. Topped it off with peanuts.

The IP finished releasing pressure just as we finished the rest of the plating; we each pulled out a small slab of pork belly, drizzled the condensed milk sauce over it, and utterly freaking devoured our dinner. Everything just came together, building on decades of experience and familiarity with each others' taste, and we will absolutely do this again.

And it's not Valentine's for us without chocolate, so I pulled a log of our favorite chocolate toffee cookies out of the freezer, sliced and baked and ate. (Along with the last crumbs of the gargantuan king cake slice

ladyjax bestowed upon me yesterday! Many thanks to her A for the baking thereof :) )

Somehow we will both get up in the morning and go for a digestive run and continue appreciating how we grow together, even as things around us are so very different from how we imagined when we began.

Current Mood: loved
Current Music: i know that's a strange way to tell you that i know we belong

kaberett

One (1) duplicate letter from the DWP, which I had actually requested, because the council is apparently incapable of giving me the concessionary rate on the basis of disability without me providing one letter per year from the DWP telling them I'm still disabled, despite the fact that for anything that is not the allotment rent they can work this out from all the other information available to them without needing me to have Special Executive function;

three (3) rolls of washi tape from Sweden, one of which I have been Tempted By for probably actual years at this point and the other two of which are relevant for this year's notebook set-up and I was sad and wanted a treat;

and one (1) book, Citrus: A History, because it was £4.56, on a topic I have previously been interested in, and Interest Has Been Expressed in me yelling about it. (When will I get to it? Unclear, because once I've finished reading The Rose Field I should probably do some more pain reading, but. Eventually.)

(And why have I been sad? I genuinely do not know; my brain has just been having a Sustained Patch of Uncooperative. I would like it to stop. In addition to post, today's efforts in that direction have included a batch of pineapple upside-down banana bread, this time with some of the flour replaced with almond meal.)

kaberett

Before getting myself onto the mat: all is woe, everything is too much and takes too long, I Cannot Face Cooking, we shall be forced to Resort to Sad Pasta

Ten minutes after getting myself onto the mat and starting moving: ... actually, you know what, stir-frying the purple sprouting broccoli with Stuff sounds both achievable and Vastly More Appealing, scratch the Sad Supermarket plan

It was just warm-up! I hadn't even got the endorphins going yet!

ursamajor

I have plenty of half-drafted posts on tap, but right now, all I can think is DAWSON'S DEAD?!

It's as if invoking Dawson's Creek in my last post for the first time in forever caused it, sigh. Definitely feeling my age today since he was only nine months older than me.

(Cancer, apparently; I don't tend to keep up with celebrity news, but I found out because

phamos818 posted about it on FB. And apparently he's, like, only nine months older than me and has six kids.)

Current Music: the years pass by and now he has granddaughters

kaberett

a shelf fungus at the base of a tree, shading from brown in the centre via rich orange to pale yellow at the edge

a clump of purple crocuses, nestled between tree roots

a clump of snowdrops, with the green tips of the inner petals clearly visible

(Which last I took in part because A only discovered last week that many snowdrops have decorative green bits on their frilly inner noses, courtesy of a waist-high planter outside one of our local pubs!)

kaberett

I actually made this as a protein to go with Meera Sodha's winter pilau, after An End Of Breakfast Dal went really well and for the purposes of using up the chaat masala I made for The Ongoing Cook All The Book Project, freely adapted from a number of recipes (which were The First Few Search Results when I prodded the internet). A is sufficiently convinced that I provide notes herewith in service of being able to repeat it in future.

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Transcripts for Everyone!

vital functions

some good things

[food] the kale thing

what does one do with Sad Bedsheets?

particularly timely

vital functions

i know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls that brought me here

today the post brought Many Things

[movement] amusement

i want to know right now, what will it be?

[picspam] from yesterday's trudge in the rain

[food] chickpea chaat

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