stoutfellow

A considerable part of my diet consists of sandwiches, either PB&J or meat-and-cheese, usually with mayo. I cycle through a variety of meats and cheeses, so as not to grow jaded. (Turkey and mozzarella, despite both being rather bland, turns out to be a good combination.)

I had not previously noticed how much havarti and thin-sliced chicken tend to slide on mayo. They very nearly escaped from my lunchtime sandwich today. I nibbled them back in, but part of the point of a sandwich is to eat the bread and the fixings *together*.

I have quite a bit of havarti and chicken left. I shall have to think about prevention techniques. I have no toothpicks, but I might pick some up tomorrow.

Every so often, I buy a Healthy Choice frozen dinner of General Tso's chicken.

I do this only when I have forgotten the last time I bought it.

It's tasty, but it does a number on my GI tract.

Someday I'll learn.

Last night I discovered, and today confirmed, that, when making instant cocoa, a fork is a much better stirring device than a spoon - it breaks up the clumps much better.

A tiny thing, but it does reduce one of life's small frustrations.

I was going to buy the Thanksgiving-week fixings yesterday; Saturday is my usual day for big grocery runs. Alas, it was raining most of the day, and windy (as in Wind Advisory) until after sundown, by which time the temperature was dropping rapidly. I took a pass.

Today, the high is supposed to be 41F, but it won't come close to that point until mid-afternoon, and I'm desperately short of staples as well as holiday goodies. I'm waiting for it to reach 35F, in another hour or so.

:sits back, with visions of pad thai and cheesecake dancing in his head:

With October winding down, I'm starting to think about this year's Thanksgiving-week dinners. It's been a while since I made pad thai, so I think I'll center them around that. A salad of some kind - maybe with that home-made lemon-based dressing I tried a few years back. Cheesecake for dessert, maybe one of the recipes someone (can't remember who, and my e-mails from that year aren't on this computer!) sent me a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, the recipes are on my laptop, which needs repair - apparently I burned out the internal fan. One of the reasons I bought the laptop was so that I could download recipes and bring them into the kitchen without printing them out (no printer at the moment!) or writing them down, so all of my recipe downloads are there (and not here). :makes note on to-do list:

I love pad thai.

In leafing through my cookbooks for recipes to try, I frequently find myself put off by ingredients that I don't recognize, or which just sound ooky to me. There are a couple of recipes I've avoided because they call for edamame - general reaction, "edawhat?"

Today, being lazy, I nuked a Healthy Choice dish, boringly called Pineapple Chicken. I'm quite fond of it, mainly for textural reasons: it has water chestnuts and some kind of crunchy legume, looking like giant peas or something.

Of course, looking up the ingredients, I have discovered that the unknown legumes are edamame.

Recipes to try ho!

I have not had coffee in something like two and a half months. I ran out of beans in mid-March, and between the weather and my teaching schedule, I haven't had a chance to get over to Goshen since then. I've been getting my caffeine fix from tea.

Until today. With the semester over and spring (hah! more like summer) weather having arrived, I was finally able to take the trip over. (It was actually nice enough to walk, but I bought a monthly bus pass for May and haven't gotten my money's worth yet.) I bought one bag each of my usual Ethiopian and Sumatran single-source, and one bag each of the two Secret Stashes - one from Java, one from Ethiopia (a different blend).

I am now sipping a very nice cup of Sumatran coffee. Bliss....

After posting grades last Monday, I spent the rest of the week loafing. (Well, I had to reply to a few students asking why they got the grades they got....) No cooking - just frozen dinners, sandwiches, and cereal. No trips to campus - I did connect to my office computer a couple of times, mainly to look up the grade spreadsheets. It was too rainy, most of the week, to walk the dogs.

However, loaf time is over. I may not be teaching this summer, but I do have a lot of things to do. I have to get a new passport; as of midyear, TSA won't be accepting Illinois state IDs. I have to put the finishing touches on Taxonomy I and submit it, and begin writing TII and outlining TIII (and maybe TIV). There's lots of housework that needs doing. I'm recording my library on the latest version of my library DB (and there's been a story or two I should tell, in that connection). I'm contemplating revamping my finances database yet again. I should also prep for my fall classes; two of them are courses I haven't taught in a while.

There is a big pot of arroz con queso cooking away, for this week's dinners. I want to start using my new stock pot, and to try out some more Indian and Middle Eastern recipes. The dogs need grooming (this week!) and visits to the vet, preparatory to their badly-needed dental work.

I've drawn up a (still incomplete) To Do List. I've done that before. The trick now will be carrying it out.

This week, I decided to make what the cookbook called "vegetable curry". To be honest, I wasn't sure it deserved the name "curry"; the only spices were cumin seed and garlic powder, and a real curry (IMO) needs more than that.

It looked tasty, in any case: potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, bell pepper, onion, and green peas (added after the rest had cooked), and I decided to throw in some mushrooms left over from last week's beef noodle dish. The first bowlful, on Sunday, though, was disheartening; the flavor was about two degrees south of "meh". Fortunately, a night in the fridge worked wonders, and the three bowls I've eaten since have been delicious.

I really should go for a real curry sometime. I'll look over that Indian cookbook, see what looks good....

1. A couple of weeks ago, my thermostat started misbehaving. I had it replaced last Thursday - just in time; we've been having subfreezing temperatures overnight the last few days, and NWS says that will continue for at least the next few.

2. For Thanksgiving dinner this year, I'm making a chicken curry. Haven't made curry in a long time.... I'm also going to try my hand at cheesecake, using a simple recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook. (coalboy, I'll try some of the recipes you sent me later, but for my first try I want as few complexities as possible.) I'm considering home-made bread (haven't made that in a long time either) as well, and I'll definitely go with salad-in-a-bag. (I've been using that to garnish my meat-and-cheese sandwiches lately, too.)

3. The new library database project is proceeding well; I have discovered the wonders of bound forms! For some reason I had an antipathy to them in my earlier projects, but they seemed necessary for a couple of the forms I needed for this one, and I've realized just how much they simplify things.

4. I still haven't finished the Taxonomy paper. There's not much I need to do, but I haven't had the oomph. Must get it done before the onrushing end of the semester!