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 Although I think it’s a really important work, it’s somewhat out of date by now (written in 1989) and his writing style near the end started to get downright annoying.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?
