These are some of the babies, who are now half a foot long. Hoping they make it through the winter in good form.
Right now it’s melting as if somebody had taken a giant hair dryer to the town.
Jane is in the kitchen applying copper contact paper to the nice shelves, which we want to keep nice, and I am making a large pot of split pea and ham soup. This is one of those can’t make a mistake kind of recipes, teaspoon black pepper, teaspoon salt, diced ham, two packets of split peas and 16 cups of water, to cook in the Crockpot from noon til supper. It’s impossible to have a seasonal chill with that kind of soup for supper.
Hawaii had a bit of a scare. Thank goodness it was just a scare. Mt St Helens is acting up again, but that’s the normal thing for an active volcano to do.
We’re waiting for a thaw so that Scott can set up his tile saw to work with our backsplash. It needs water to cool it, meaning a hose. We could arrange that, but working while standing in snow, not so much.
We’re also working toward the great garage sale. We have decided after a lifetime of moves (together, moving Jane TO Oklahoma, then moving from one house to another IN OKC, then moving to the third-floor N. Spokane apartment over the cliff and creek, to moving again (on a month’s notice) to another third-floor apartment in Spokane Valley, and finally to here—we have acquired too many things that only fit one residence, only to have it useless in the next, and we have brought along far too many boxes. We are going to shed all sorts of things, from chairs to pots and pans, and the clothes—I just realized my favorite sweatshirt is about 20 years old. I refuse to give it up, but that’s the state of the closet. We are now starting on the dreaded basement, where the ghosts of previous fishtanks vie with weaving projects there’s just no room for in this house.
Perhaps you can sell things as being genuine CJ Cherryh whatever – signed with marker – it might be a way to improve your income.
Jonathan up in thawed for the moment New Hampshire
Lol—but then we’d have to ship them. We figure our readers have their own boxes in the basement and don’t need more.
My boxes are split between storage and my teeny apt – books mostly in storage, knitting yarn in apt. (I have two copies of some cookbooks, because I couldn’t stand not having them handy.)
I keep buying cookbooks but never use them for anything but inspiration. I tend to look up recipes I’m not sure of, and then I’m not the most precise person unless I suspect chemistry is involved—then I level-off as I should.
I’m a cooking non-conformist. When I want a dish I don’t fix very often, I get out my four or five favorite cookbooks and then read all the recipes for that dish. I note times, temperatures, recommended cooking techniques and then “synthesize” a recipe that sounds good, without being too fussy or elaborate. I adjust seasonings based on what I have in the pantry and what readyGuy is hankering for. I concoct glazes from alcohol and jams and any fresh fruit that happened to be calling my name when I last got groceries. I try to write down the most successful recipes and I don’t mess with baked goods recipes other than seasoning or filling. (there’s just so much you can do to a roux or a creme anglais before they are no longer the basics for cooking, but I’ve never yet met a roast or soup that I couldn’t doctor into a unique and tasty dish…(except see below) My all time favorite cookbook is Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking in all its editions. I use this as the basis for dressing/stuffing, sauces, and basic cooking times for different cuts of meat, and the basics of how to cook perfect hard-boiled eggs. I wish more cookbooks provided variants and then said some rules of thumb about how much of which spices go well together. My epic fails have all been when I got the seasoning proportions wrong.
A lot of the ones I have provide variations. I also have cookbooks just for reading (older ones are interesting for what people needed cookbooks *for*).
For those feeling cold, you might enjoy a program currently streaming from SBS TV in Australia. The SBS Viceland channel is currently showing our first really long SlowTV (not counting cricket or golf of course), a 17 hour edited version of a 3000km train journey from Adelaide to Darwin. More details at
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/11791427919/the-ghan-the-full-journey-live-stream
I *love* follies and this is a beauty.
SBS is a unique govt owned multicultural TV service and a national treasure. You may have seen movies where they’ve done the subtitles – one of their specialties.
Back to The Ghan (even the name of the train is a joke).
I knew the ‘Ghan went to Alice, but not that it went through all the way.
The link from The Alice to Darwin was finished in 2004, some 80 years after it was planned. It was in line with the unofficial motto of the train: better late than never.
Well, that was a bit of a wakeup call this morning. About 10 after 8, everyone’s cellphones started going off with an emergency alert: Missiles inbound, get into shelter, this is not a drill. It took the state half an hour to establish that the alert was a mistake and correct the original alert. I, in my guise as librarian, immediately started trying to verify that there was a crisis; when I couldn’t confirm the original alert with more sources in 5 minutes (and everyone should have been trumpeting the alarm if it was fo’reals), I said hacked or accident. Lots of other people were panicking, or at least very anxious. I hope they get precautions in place so this doesn’t happen again.
This happened when I was a kid in the Cold War—sirens after midnight, under clear skies, near Fort Sill. If it wasn’t a tornado, it was Armageddon, and it’s the kind of wakeup you don’t forget. To this day, I hate the sound of those particular sirens.
We have tornado sirens that test every Wednesday at noon (Ohio.) My poor friend from the UK has lived here for 10+ years and the “air raid” sirens still cause her a panic attack most weeks.
Good for you. Like the time the DEW Line picked up radar bouncing off the moon, one of TPTB there looked at the political situation and decided it was a false alarm, so it went no farther.
Most people don’t understand that the main reason they keep things beyond their usefulness is because of the memories attached to them. What they don’t realize is, you can get rid of the thing and still keep the memories.
Once each of those things you’re selling was just what you needed in a particular place and time. You are giving those things a second chance to be just what someone else needed in that place and time — and you get money for doing it! Double win.
There are many things I keep because they evoke memories; my grandmother’s needle work and my father’s coat. Many of them at like the coat and are used currently, but I still keep them because of the memories, I simply try to keep things I will find a use for.
Oh, and WOL makes the sign of the tiger over the pond to confer protection on the little fishes from things that want to eat them. Maybe you need to paint 老虎 or perhaps 虎 on the side of the bridge over the pond. . . . every little bit helps
The kanji we do have above the pond is ‘tan bo mon’…’dragonfly gate’, referring to the mountain pass with the bridge in the painting, and the dragonflies that populate the pond in summer. But ‘tiger bridge’ might be appropriate, since protection (breaking up the eagle’s run) was a driving motive in building it…[our private name for the bridge is ‘sobriety test’, because we didn’t add rails.]
Split-pea soup is one of the staples* of Dutch winter cooking, and most families have their own recipes.
Almost always these contain a finely chopped celeriac tuber, often a finely chopped large winter carrot and celery leaves, sometimes some chopped potatoes, leeks, a stem of celery; maybe a laurel leaf or something else for seasoning; finely chopped bacon and some kind of meat that can be cooked to shreds that stick in your teeth (I dislike that, but it’s more usual than not) – anything from a pork chop to ham hocks; and almost universally some sliced smoked sausage is cooked and added to the pot later.
It’s supposed to be “thick enough so your spoon can stand upright in it” (if not initially then once you’ve shredded a slice of brown bread into your bowl).
It’s usual to eat a big bowl of it with some brown bread (often crumbled into the bowl to get nice and soggy, but if you’re eating with really neat people then don’t be the first to do so – some people eat their bread on the side, with or without cheese) for an easy to prepare ahead winter dinner, as the soup gets better (and thicker and more puree-like) with reheating.
It’s often eaten on present-opening night (December 5th) and Saint Maarten when the kids take their lanterns to sing at people’s doors (November 11th), as well as whenever there’s natural ice and everybody goes skating outdoors.
If the ice lasts long enough so people set up little warm-up beverages stands, these traditionally serve hot chocolate and coffee and splitpea-soup to the skaters – then it gets called “snert” instead of “erwtensoep” (which just means pea-soup in Dutch, as erwt=pea; for BCS: the w is silent, so it sounds like airt’nsoup).
* The other staple is “stamppot” (mashed pot), i.e. mashed potatoes with some other vegetable mixed in. The most usual are sauerkraut (“zuurkool”, a literal translation of the German sour kale), “boerenkool” (farmer’s kale = green curly kale),both eaten with smoked sausage; “hutspot” (finely chopped large winter carrots and onions), “hete bliksem” (hot lightning, with apples – not named that for no reason, as it stays very hot for longer than usual so take care not to burn your mouth on the first bites), “rauwe andijvie” (raw chopped endive, one of my favorites), or a combination of string beans and broad (or white) beans that goes by the folkname of “blote billetjes in het gras” (naked butts in the grass) – these are all simple but solid old country cooking, often eaten with a sausage or meatball or chop and gravy, but historically, when most of the Netherlands were poor farmers, a little bit of bacon fried and chopped into the pot was often all the meat you’d get with it.
The recipes can be fancied up a bit here and there, adding raisins to the hot lightning or sauerkraut, putting chopped fried bacon in, using sour cream or butter to get the mashed potatoes creamy instead of a bit of milk; but basically they’re still unimaginative simple solid winter fare, and one reason why putting on a bit of weight over the winter is not uncommon.
Nobody ever said Dutch cooking was fancy or imaginative, and you can see why, if split-pea soup, mashed potatoes & veg, and large plate-sized (thinnish, 1-2 mm) pancakes eaten for dinner or lunch with lots of different fillings (anything from sugar, syrup, apple slices or apple sauce, fruit with or without cream, to bacon with or without syrup, ham and cheese, or just cheese with or without paprika, and for the grownups rum-soaked raisins with apple slices and powdered sugar, or flambéed cherries), are the old Dutch staples.
Going to a restaurant in the Netherlands, it’s either a specific pancake-restaurant (all of which cater to kids and the lunch-crowd as well as early dinner-times, and are relatively cheap), a specific exotic taste (Indonesean-Chinese is ubiquitous and not costly, both for take-away and dining; Italian is the next most common; Greek, Japanese, Turkish or Morokkan, Thai or something like that can be found in most cities), or a generic French style of cooking.
Though nowadays we do have the largest selection of different things you can eat on bread (just starting with at least 6 different kinds of chocolate sprinkles), from what I’ve seen. 🙂
Cold weather is rare in Hawaii, so there’s no real tradition of fare for when the temperature drops. Most of it has been imported and adulterated from the originating countries, like chicken long rice, Portuguese bean soup, or oxtail soup (with a clear base, and star anise, peanuts and ginger). Until the whalers came with their huge cast iron pots, the Hawaiians didn’t really have any large containers to cook in. There were a few big wooden bowls, but those were mainly for the production of poi, and you couldn’t truly cook in them without ruining them.
The closest you could probably get to ‘stew’ would be chicken or squid luau, chopped chicken or squid cooked with taro leaves and coconut milk.
Love this thread on food traditions: it’s making me hungry! I wish my spouse liked Pea Soup because I want to make some after reading these entries, but it’s not a dish one makes for a single, personal-sized serving.
It’s gotten cold in New England (after being in the high 50s/low 60s Friday and raining away all our lovely snow). This was the Arisia science fiction convention weekend in Boston. I’m home now after going in to it each day (an extra-fine Art Show, by the way) and for me it always marks the final end of the Holiday Season. I should bustle about taking down the few Yule decorations I managed to get up this year… But now I am trying to figure out what tasty soup I could make instead. I’ve got half a leek….
True, peasoup is something you only make one whole big pot at a time, but it does freeze well, so if you’ve got enough freezer-space to freeze it in separate portions and your other half doesn’t hate the smell, it’s not entirely impossible.
Maybe, if they have a favorite food you don’t like you could do the same with that, and just occasionally thaw two different single portions for dinner or lunch.
All those potato-mashups freeze well too, and they’re very cheap to make so if you don’t mind potatoes or carbohydrates/ starchy foods it’s a great way to stretch a food budget while getting enough nutrition and veggies, without being too terribly unhealthy (mostly depending on how much salt you add, and whether you eat a lot of fatty sausage or meatballs or fried bacon and/or gravy with it – I know it’s traditional but I don’t, I’d rather add something lighter like pineapple chunks and juice for liquid during the mashing than pouring on gravy on my plate).
Leeks and soup reminds me of a British recipe I’ve only encountered in books; Cock-a-leeky soup (I think it was traditionally Scottish, or maybe Welsh), a chicken-and-leeks soup from the name.
A lot of traditional British recipes have such lovely strange names, you can never guess what’s in them if all you know is that someone in a book loves to eat it; like Toad-in-a-hole, Welsh rarebit (I used to think it was something with rabbit, maybe a ragout, before I found out it was like a cheese toasty) , or Bubble-and-squeak, or Hasty pudding, or mincemeat (I always thought that was the stuff from which you make meatballs, and took a completely different mental taste sensation from the idea of mincemeat pies – like spiced sausage in flaky pastry rolls). I tend to just imagine something I’d like, and not interrupt my reading by looking up the recipes, but that does lead to some misconceptions.
Our navy has a breakfast dish called “train smash” which is mainly tomatoes, eggs (powdered), & onions. Very popular.
Cockaleekie Soup is indeed delicious… And I haven’t made it for years. It is essentially chicken soup made with a tough, old cock instead of a tender hen (which should much more profitably be laying eggs) and leeks instead of onions. Oh yes, and it is served with several prunes in each bowl!
I too once thought Welsh Rarebit was some type of rabbit, but in 5th grade (when I was ten or so), the school did a “Worlds Fair.” I chose to do a display on Wales. The day of the Fair, I went home at lunch time (as I lived some ten minutes away) and made Welsh Rarebit from the Fannie Farmer Boston School of Cooking cookbook which was (and remains) my family’s go-to cookbook. The dish called for beer, so I added some, brought back the bubbling cheese sauce and served it — I presume but memory fails here— on toast. It really was quite beery. The big, school bully kept coming back to my table for more. I think it was the only time he ever said nice things to me.
Add cream at the last and call it pea chowder? The recipe for corn chowder should work well, especially the crumbled bacon on the top.
I also like what I call ‘peasant bake’. On the bottom of your covered casserole dish, put the vegetables that absorb flavors best, usually potatos here, but turnips, jicama or rutabegas do well too. Then layer in your other vegetables, what ever I have that needs cooked usually. Finally split sausage lengthwise and put it on the top, cut side down. I usually cook it in the oven at 215F/100C for about four hours. but higher heat will cook it faster. Note that one can layer in other meats than sausage, such as thick slabs of ham, but if you are using fish, the vegetables should be about 3/4 cooked before you add it. Also, Jicama stays crisp.
Our family mac n cheese.LARGE elbow macaroni, cooked, oven at 325. Also needed, Colby cheese (or cheddar), milk, and sometimes sausage. Cut cheese into 1″ squares, pour macaroni into casserole dish, add a little salt, stir cheese into hot macaroni, add half a cup of milk drizzled over everything, toss a few cubes of cheese atop, (3-4), bake until cheese on top is melted and browned.
You get the milk and macaroni interspersed with nuggets of cheesy macaroni, and the brown top crusty ones. Occasionally Mum would add pimento, just for variety.
We were not a family that liked ‘smooth’ mac and cheese.
I got some supermarket ready-to-reheat lasagna last weekend, and it had a fairly solid layer of cheese baked on top. (As in, it really needed a knife to get through. Not my mother’s lasagna style.)
My favorite lasagna is not at all Italian, but very easy and full of vegetables.
1 bottle (750 ml) of (organic) passata de pomodori = fairly liquid tomato puree with nothing but a little salt added for preservation.
Add in 700 grams of chopped fresh soup vegetables = 2 packets from the supermarket, with leeks, carrots, celery leaf, red paprika and a bit of cauliflour – no onions because my tummy doesn’t like them. You can change the vegetables depending on what you like and what you’ve got lying around needing to be used.
Put in a pot together to boil while you make the cheese sauce – it doesn’t need extra salt because that’s already in the tomato puree, and I like the pure taste of the tomatoes and veggies. If you like you can add some dried oregano for the Italian scent.
Make a simple bechamel cheesesauce: melt a lump of butter, add a heaped spoonful of flour, make sure all the flour is coated in butter and then start adding milk while stirring. I use about 250 ml goat’s milk because my tummy reacts badly to cowmilk. When it’s become a sauce, add in about 100- 125 grams (1 packet) of (not too finely) ground or flaked cheese, let it melt while stirring. I usually add a bit of ground pepper at this point, but no salt as the cheese already contains salt as a preservative.
I always make this in 4 individual ovenproof rectangular shallow (1 inch – 3cms high) bowls, for easier freezing of the 3 I’m not going to eat now.
Put a thick layer of vegetable sauce in the bottom, a sheet of (precooked, dry) lasagna on top, layer of cheese sauce, sheet of lasagna, another thick layer of vegetable sauce, if you want you can put half a sheet of lasagna on top to finish the half-package, and pour the remaining cheese sauce over that.
Any leftover extra tomato sauce is just as good with spaghetti (and some ground cheese on top).
Bake in the oven for 30 minutes (temperature is on the package of no-precooking-needed lasagna sheets).
It’s one of the few dishes in which I manage to get the full recommended 200-250 grams of vegetables a day into one meal.
It’s a flexible recipe. For non-vegetarians the original recipe called for 250-300 grams browned ground beef or pork to be part of the tomato sauce, and a bit less vegetables (but still at least 500 grams IIRC), and instead of the organic passata de pomodori we used to use 2 cans of peeled pomodori tomatoes squished into pieces while stirring the sauce (those needed more time to cook down, else the sauce would be too watery), or a tin of peeled tomato pieces and a jar or box of herbed tomato/pasta sauce, till the garlic in that became a no-no for me.
Made in a big casserole dish (cook for 45 minutes instead of 30) it can feed 4 to 7 people (depending on how much they eat and how much they like vegetables; you can always add a salad and/or apple compote as a cool and fresh counterpoint if feeding more).
As the sauce, and even the whole casserole dish, can be prepared ahead and kept in the fridge until baking time, and you can put this in the oven and leave it while you chat, it’s a favorite to make for family birthdays.