As The World Turns

First I didn’t post because there wasn’t much happening — just going to work, walking the dog, and making slow progress on my reading and cooking projects.  THEN I didn’t post because there was too MUCH happening and I didn’t have time! 

The big change is, I now have a housemate.  I’ll call her K (but it’s not the same K who was going to lease the fields from me when I first moved here — that plan fell flat almost immediately when K acquired a herd of goats and no longer had time for any other projects — her time was filled by a series of one “goatastrophe” after the other).

No, this K is a friend of one of my employers, and we met at a potluck a few years ago.  She recently moved here to work for the employer/friend, at least through spring, and her original housing plan didn’t work out, so I offered her a room here.  She’s very nice, with two great dogs that are getting along fine not only with my dog but also with my cat, about whom I’d been a bit worried.  She cooks and gardens, and will help me learn in both arenas.  She doesn’t know much about computers and if she wants I will help her learn about that.

Today we had a nice relaxing Thanksgiving.  We went for our usual dog walk but extended it into a longer hike up the hill behind the house where there is some spectacular scenery.  I dug one row of potatoes from the garden and boiled them up for some really yummy mashed potatoes with sour cream-horseradish dressing.  K made gravy (and I watched and learned).  We made stuffing from a box, opened cans of cranberries and mandarin oranges, steamed some fresh broccoli and celery.  I cooked half a local pumpkin, intending to make pumpkin pie, but it took so long to cook (on the woodstove on a not-so-cold day when the stove was only puttering along) that I postponed the pie-making until tomorrow.

We talked all day while we were hiking and cooking and doing other chores.  Then we ate dinner and watched “Strangers In Good Company”, a delightful movie that had just enough display of “survival skills” to fit my movie genre criteria :)

So, things are a little different for me these days.  I have lots of reasons why I prefer to live alone if I’m not living with a life partner; but there are also lots of benefits to sharing a house, and this time I decided it was the right thing to do.  So far (it’s been nearly a week) it’s working out wonderfully.

More Soup ‘n’ Biscuits, Plus A Book Update

Last weekend I made a lentil and tomato soup that turned out pretty darn good.  Not without some mistakes and things I’ll do differently next time, but still — pretty good.  I just had some of it tonight for the third night in a row, and it was even better tonight than it was before.  I also made biscuits again, and it was rather a fiasco (let’s just say that I thought I was being so clever to only make half the recipe this time, until the process of converting butter quantities (in the recipe) to oil quantities (what I actually used) distracted me and I put the whole recipe’s amount of oil in.  So then I had to double all the dry ingredients and end up with a full batch again anyway).  Then that still turned out way too moist, for unknown reasons, and I added at least another cup of flour to get it to kneadable/rollable texture.  It was kind of a comedy of errors of biscuit baking, if you can imagine that.  But the good news is, they didn’t turn out any *worse* than the first batch.  I’m still eating them a few days later.

In other news, I *finally* finished Bill McKibben’s “End of Nature.”  Although I think it’s a really important work, it’s somewhat out of date by now (written in 1989) and his writing style near the end started to get downright annoying.  I know McKibben is spearheading the 350 project, which I think is great, so I’m sure his current writings are much more appropriate now anyway.  On Friday the book I’d been waiting for arrived, Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Sixty Degrees and Counting“, which is the third in the trilogy.  I’m nearly halfway through and enjoying it greatly.  I do get nervous, though, when reading about bitter cold as I’m trying to warm this house with the woodstove.  Wondering how I’d fare if we had a couple weeks of fifty below zero, as happened in the second book of the trilogy.  While waiting for the latest book to arrive ILL (inter-library loan) from the library, I also read “Bucking the Sun” by Ivan Doig.  A fascinating story about a family working on the building of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana during the Great Depression.  Any book that combines the Great Depression, severe winters, and hydrology has to be interesting to me! :p  I still have several books on request at the library, but now I’m half hoping they don’t show up for a while, or else how am I ever going to have time to read seventeen more books off my own shelf this winter?

A Start

The other night I made some soup using mostly garden veggies — potatoes, beets, and chard, plus some other stuff.  As usual for my off-the-cuff soupmaking, it didn’t turn out very well.  But it was edible, and in the course of two dinners I ate it all, composting none of it.  That’s a big improvment for me — usually when I try something that doesn’t work well, it’s too unpleasant to eat, and usually I’ve made a huge pot of it as well.  This time I got smart and made a smaller pot of it.

I’m embarrassed to even list the various things I threw in there, but I will anyway.  In addition to the garden veggies, there was an onion (not sauteed first — does that really make a difference?).  I think I salted it a little.  Then I wanted something to make the broth more hearty, creamy.  So I decided to try some coconut milk.  As bizarre as it sounds, I think the coconut milk is what made the soup edible — even though I couldn’t taste the coconut at all, it gave it a bit of ’solid’ feeling.  I guess a soup needs a little fat in it to make it feel filling.  But then it was still really bland, so I shook in a couple dashes of cayenne sauce.  Euw, I’m sure you’re saying, what an awful combination!  Well, truly, it didn’t combine badly at all, as odd as it sounds.  But on the other hand, it didn’t work, either — the soup was a little too cayenne-hot for my taste, but it didn’t seem to season the soup — it was just a bland soup with some spicy cayenne taste.  I still need to learn the trick of having the broth of a soup taste good — favorful.  Somehow I managed to get both bland and spicy and once, but not flavorful.

In addition to the soup, I made biscuits.  I found a very simple recipe in one of my favorite cookbooks, Kitchen Wisdom: Harrowsmith’s Sourcebook for Cooks.  They turned out a little better than the soup — not bad, but still not great.  There are a variety of things that might not have worked well.  First, I used hard red whole wheat flour — maybe I should use soft flour and/or white flour for biscuits?  Second, I substituted soymilk for milk and coconut milk for yogurt — I don’t think that should have been a problem though.  Third, I’m not sure I “cut in” the butter in the right fashion.  The ony other problem is that I made too many.  I ate some with the soup, and ate a few more for breakfast the next day, but haven’t had any since and there are still a few left.  They will probably be composted.  I think biscuits are one of those things that should be made in one-meal batches.  Next time I try the biscuits I’ll make half or even a third of the recipe.  Biscuits is one of the things I’m most excited about adding to my “do it by heart” cooking list, so I’m pleased that my first batch came out as good as they did.