July 2006 Archives

So, a little over a year after we moved here (we didn't even note the anniversary), I finally got the grill up and running again. I marinated a top round steak in a quasi- Qdoba marinade, consisting of:

1/2 walla walla onion
6 cloves garlic
1 handful of cilantro leaves and stems
2 sprigs of thyme
1/4c. vegetable oil
3 keylimes, juiced
1/4 c. ancho chile powder
1/4 c. boiling water
1/2 tsp chipotle powder
1 tsp chile powder
1 tsp ground oregano
1 tsp black pepper

This made a thick marinade, so I just submerged the steak and made sure that it was covered completely before refrigerating for 3 to 4 hours (we were hungry). Then I took the steak out and plopped it on a plate to come to room temp while pre-heating the grill -- just the two outer burners. I grilled the steak for about 10 minutes, let it rest for another 10 and diced it for quesadillas.

In other food news, the nectarines I picked up from Gil's when I got the potatoes last week were absolutely astounding. We get lulled into a "good enough" mentality when all that's readily available is supermarket produce. You never get really flavorful, ripe fruit at the supermarket because it has to travel so long/far to get there. These nectarines were juicy and just bursting with perfect flavor. Gotta get some more of those this week :)

I love calling in circuit outages, I really do. I particularly enjoy fighting for your attention over the radio, tv, or movie you have playing in the background. And I just adore when you tell me there's nothing that you have seen there, when I can clearly see the signs of a card failure on the path: 1 dip, then it's good for 16 hours, then if flaps down hard twice. I love when you groan because you'll have to log into all the MUXes along the way to find out where the card is failing :)

Leslie and I went to IKEA yesterday, and it was a pretty fun day. I bought a little more than I should have, but a lot of it was for Richard (new ergonomic pillows for both of us, etc). I also finally experienced the joy of the IKEA cafeteria and the amazingly cheap and delicious swedish meatballs. Damn fine meal and I bought a bag of their frozen ones and gravy to take home. Made that for Richard for dinner along with some fabulous potatoes I bought at Gil's -- just outstanding meals. I did see a table that I wanted, but unfortunately, I remember neither the name nor the price -- only that the piece weighs 101lbs and I knew that Leslie and I would definitely not be picking that up :) Hopefully the lure of the good food at IKEA will get Richard to consent to a trip back next week to get the table, and lots more meatballs for the freezer!

i've been up all day
since i'm not even sure when
but we got up
and showered
and went out for breakfast at 6:30am
so.
i've been up forever.
no nap
i'm cranky
i want to kill people
i want to kill the new people with the gigantic german shepards who have been sitting outside in our triangle for the past 4 hours
with the gigantic dogs
barking
and barking
and barking
i don't want to take a nap, because i'm pretty sure that this is gonna be the night when i sleep all the way through
and get 6 hours at least
and i'm going to wake up and feel good
but for now
my head is throbbing
and i want to kill people
a lot of people.

After a brief and fleeting hope of actually getting to travel somewhere cool, instead of being chained like the slave I am to the current company, I have received word that I will not be accompanying Richard to Amsterdam etc in October. Color me pissed. It's not practical with the cost of my flight, the cost of boarding the animals, etc. But the real reason that I can't go is because we fear there being no company left if God fucking forbid, Richard and I actually go somewhere together that is not our shithole of a house.

Yeah. You can add bitter to that, too.

So, in order to preserve some tiny shred of sanity, I think I'm going to invite my parents to come out at visit while Richard's gone for a bit. They've not been out here, and it would be nice for them to experience something different for a change :) Whether or not I could tolerate them for that long is another story. I have a feeling they'd get bored here, but I don't really know what to do to entertain them, while still maintaining my fabulous slave labor job.

The good news first: I'm finally feeling better and close to normal after 4 days of pretty much hell. I'll spare most of the details, but it's become clear that the lack of health insurance needs to be solved in the near term. Girly parts rebelling on me big time, fear, lots and lots of fear, lack of sleep, panic attacks, and did I mention fear? Definitely not fun. At least most of the symptoms have subsided and I spent yesterday dealing with the panic aftershocks. Still feeling a little weak -- need to start taking a multivitamin to try to get my balance back.

In other news, I think that weather.com is on a little bit of crack, but yesterday afternoon it reported that it was 106 here! While it was, and continues to be, damn hot, in a quick scan of the evening news last night, there was absolutely no mention of it hitting 106 degrees absolutely anywhere in the area. Considering how rare an event like 106 degrees would be for this area, I'm thinking that weather.com's instruments were in the sun. :)

While I've been out of commission, the whole cooking/baking goals have been put on hold. When the heat breaks on Monday, I expect to get back into that.

After sleeping almost all night last night, and post 9am conference call, we made the trek to Costco. Richard's eye appointment was a pain in the ass. My shopping was a pain in the ass. Getting some contacts for him was a pain in the ass. Getting things loaded into the car was a pain in the ass. Getting things unloaded from the car was a pain in the ass. Getting things put away was a pain in the ass.

While I came out with a lot of the things on my list, I still just became exasperated at the layout of the store and the dodging of meandering people. At least at 10am it's theoretically full of business membership folks, but there were still a ton of moms and old people all with no sense of how aisles and carts work. But I survived, yay! I got the important items (stocked up on the vacuum packed chicken breasts, got some overpriced eye of round for those cheese steaks I've been craving, got more freezer bags in both gallon and quart size), picked up some specialty bread items that freeze well, and grabbed a few other things in the frenzy.

Once I clean up on the $1.99 top round from Safeway tomorrow, we'll be set on meat for a very long time.

The good news is that I've been making great progress on some of my former bad habits. I cut the tube-o-pork into 2 large roasts, and 4 packs of two chops each. Froze all but one pack of the chops, and threw in some jerk seasoning with the two saved chops for dinner tomorrow. I also tackled watermelon #1. For now, we'll eat it unadulterated since we haven't had any watermelon since last year.

The spicy chicken thighs turned out well. I just baked them in a roasting pan at 400 degrees for 50 minutes. No broiling required, the sugar in the sauce browned nicely. Not that I really care since I don't eat the skin, but yeah. I ended up giving Richard a caesar salad for dinner, so I ate a bit of the chicken and then de-skinned the rest and tossed it in the fridge. I think it would be a good counterpoint to some cold sesame noodles. I'll have to solve my soy sauce dilemma or I supposed I could just use the ponzu in that as well.

And for the bad habit, I ended up sleeping a lot today. The good news is that because I was able to get some things done in the morning, I didn't feel like I'd completely wasted the day. A lot of the time, it's that guilt or disappointment that ends up feeding into feeling crappy. It also helped that I had food ready to go when we finally did wake up, so there wasn't the usual waiting around.

All in all, not a bad weekend. I'm still tired at an appropriate time, which is a very good thing because we have to be up early tomorrow.

I think I should be banned from shopping pre-7am. I got a decent night's sleep last night, and Richard hadn't slept at all, but he was in the mood for mcgriddles. So, since Larry's was right around the corner, I figured I would make it a two for one trip. It's worth noting that I almost never shop at Larry's. Why? Because Larry's is an awful lot like my old nemesis Wegman's. Lots of specialty departments, lots of really nice prepared foods, lots of unusual and alluring ingredients. All of this means that I go into the store for one or two items and end up spending $150 on things that I don't quite need. I had a $5 off $25 coupon, and Larry's has whole seedless watermelons on sale this week for 9 cents a pound. Yes. 9 cents a pound!

I walk into the store, and it's a lot like my normal shopping at QFC and Safeway around midnight: lots of store employees and no other customers. Except, all the employees are painfully awake. Everyone wishes you a good morning! (with the exclamation point, mind you). And everyone's chatty. The produce manager is on the floor and he's commiserating with another employee about how he ordered too many watermelons. You'd think at 9 cents a pound they'd be flying out of there, but unfortunately, Larry's doesn't get that much business. The produce manager spots me going for a watermelon, and encourages me to take as many as I'd like, please. They come out to about $1.08 each -- good 12 pounders. I think about it for a second, and figure, what the heck. So, I loaded up 3 watermelons into my cart. I mentioned to the produce manager that he should put up a sign with more creative uses for watermelon. Like Watermelon Agua Fresca. Or Watermelon Gazpacho. Or Watermelon Granita. Not to mention watermelon daquiris and watermelon margaritas. He kind of looked at me funny, and I walked off :)

Now, the other item that Larry's had on sale this week was boneless pork loin chops for $1.99/lb. Aka tube pork sliced neatly. The butcher was there putting out other trays of meat, but there were no pork loin chops to be found. So I asked him if he had any more and he said he'd check in back. He didn't have any sliced, and asked me how I'd like them sliced. I asked if he could sell me the whole loin uncut? He said sure, and then we wrestled with wrapping it up and getting it into the cart. So, 3 watermelons, a whole pork loin, and $122 later, I emerged from Larry's. Completely and utterly shopped out, but happy.

When I came home and put everything away, I decided to mix up some spicy Korean BBQ sauce and marinate the chicken thighs I'd thawed the other day. The original recipe is here, but it never really lived up to the deliciousness of the spicy chicken I had at Bento Box. I ended up mixing the following together for a marinade:

1/2 c. Lyle's Golden Syrup
1/2 c. Ponzu sauce (I discovered I didn't have any regular soy sauce)
1/4 c. Sriracha sauce (I might have put in more, possibly closer to 1/2c -- we'll see how spicy it is)
3 cloves of garlic, microplaned
1.5 inches of ginger, microplaned

I'll probably end up combo bake and broiling the thighs tonight -- there's too much sugar in the marinade to do them entirely on the grill.

I've spent the past few days working through sleep disturbances; the older I get, the harder I find it to bounce back from the occasional or the not so occasional late night. Last night was fairly decent -- I was able to add an hour of good quality sleep to my tally from last night-- so I'm making some slow progress. Or at least I was until someone convinced me to go back upstairs and "sleep until 10". Well, it's 3pm now and I'm showered and dressed (as I try to take the very smallest positive point and build on that).

On Thursday, my Amish Country Store order arrived. They did a great job packing everything. The only disappointment in the order was the A-Treat diet birch beer, but that was hardly the Amish Country Store's fault. Unfortunately, the folks at A-Treat have not quite hopped on the bandwagon as far as making GOOD diet beverages goes. It tasted as bad as all diet drinks tasted 10 years ago. In fact, I might even harken back to that abomination of calorie consciousness in the early 70s: Tab. It tasted worse than Tab. Ewww.

The most excellent part of the order was the gigantic quart bottle of King Syrup, which thanks to two less than stellar pie attempts, is now half gone. I'm getting much better at not eating the mistakes. Into the trash and try again. Tomorrow I'll get some more pie crusts and then work out the issues that I think are going on (1.) I'm using King Arthur AP flour which has a high protien count, I should switch to the White Lily which has next to none, 2.) not baking long enough, 3.) it really does need that 1/4 c of molasses kick)

After testing the waters of the wonderful world of freeze dried food last night, Richard and I experienced some rather unpleasant digestive side effects, which would bring a whole other element to the term "Disaster Aftermath". So, let's hope that the survival rations never have to be used, and a note to self: double the TP allotment for the emergency kit.

So, in my exploring canning supply places on the web, I came upon Emergency or Survival Kits. Now, while I theoretically have known in the areas we've lived, that a natural disaster could leave us without water or food for several days, I've always procrastinated about doing anything about it. When we lived in Cali, I still had a bit of innocence about the possiblity of Bad Things happening around me. This was pre-9/11, and most people really just didn't seem to care. I had a few jugs of water in the garage and a supply of canned goods in the pantry, so I was good to go.

We moved to Ashburn, VA in March of 2002, and for the most part, the threat of random, unforecast disasters was removed. Yes, we could have a crippling blizzard, or we could get hit by a hurricane, but you get days to prepare for those. Keep some toilet paper on hand, and run out to the store when you first hear the forecast and you'll be fine.

We moved here to Washington about a year ago, and we left behind the oppressive humidity of VA, as well as a whole host of undesirable weather elements. Humidity isn't much to speak of during the summer, nor are heat wave temperatures. Winters are a bit rainy and dreary, but every inch of rain could be a foot of snow somewhere else. But now, we're back in earthquake country. And then there's the volcano.

So, seeing the 72 hour survival kit made me think. Well, that's not entirely true. It made me want to just spend a small amount of money in one click and be done with the "preparation". I talked with Linda about it, and she sent me to the place she saw on CNN after Katrina hit, Nitro-Pak. I looked around, and while they did not have the handy dandy emergency kit packed in a portable potty unit, they did have the DELUXE EXECUTIVE 72 Hour survival kit. For a mere $149.99 you and three of your closest loved ones could survive for a whole 72 hours with this handy kit. I looked through the site, saw the gigantic reactionary avian flu survival kit (6 weeks of dehydrated meals, basically), and wondered if I was going a little nutty. So I slept on it and bought nothing.

In the morning, I talked to Rob, and said about how silly I was for almost buying this $150 survival kit the night before. He looked at the link and agreed I was crazy on two counts. First, that we didn't already have some sort of survival rations and supplies set aside given where we live, and second for thinking that dumpy kit was at all adequate. Rob was kind enough to go through the list of what was included in the kit, point out the failings of the kit itself, and gave me a list of things I should assemble myself.

And that's where I've been for about a week. I thought about things that we would need in an emergency, like things to take care of the animals. Yet, I was still looking a bit longingly at the Nitro-pak.com site. I saw their Mountain House freeze dried meals. Now, these I knew were overpriced -- I can get them from the sporting goods section at Fred Meyer. I was going to Fred's tonight in search of canning supplies, and because of the Seattle PI article the other week saying how much cheaper Fred Meyer is compared to QFC. I made a beeline over to sporting goods and found the Mountain House freeze dried line all 30% off this week. Bonus! I threw one of everything that was even remotely decent sounding into the cart. With the discount, I paid less than half the price that NitroPak wanted for the same stuff, and I didn't have to wait or pay for shipping.

After we got home, we tested the freeze dried waters with the Mountain House ice cream sandwich. The most remarkable thing about opening the sealed foil pouch was that pretty much a real ice cream sandwich popped out of the bag. It was still in it's white paper wrapper, though that was loose now. I opened it up and broke it in half and shared with Richard. Not bad at all. Certainly a lot better than I'd remembered the nasty "Astronaut Space Ice Cream" from the Smithsonian in the early 80s. But wait! Mountain House has the Neopolitan Space Ice Cream too. We opened that and, meh. About the same as the stuff in the early 80s. I'm convinced if they used a better quality ice cream to begin with, the end product wouldn't suck as bad.

Did we stop there? Yes. For a while at least. But the Chicken Polynesian was calling to me. Feeling a mixture of hunger and curiosity (I admit that it was 99% curiosity), I zipped open the pouch and looked inside. First of all, it smelled really good! It smelled the way sweet and sour chicken should smell. I removed the oxygen killer packet as directed and nuked 2 cups of water. Four anticipation-filled minutes later, the water was hot, and into the pouch it went! I stirred the contents a bit to make sure that there were no dry pockets, and zipped the bag up as directed. Now. The four minutes of water boiling was nothing compared to the 9 minutes I had to wait for the stuff to rehydrate. Finally, my freeze-dried potential lifeline was ready to eat.

I opened the pouch, which was still quite hot, and inside I saw... Sweet and Sour Chicken and Rice... Soup. I stirred it some more, but who cares if it's a little saucy? In a survival situation, I might not have that much water on hand, so might as well have it in the food. I dug in. And it was not bad. It did not suck. The chicken pieces were a tiny bit spongy, the rice had that Minute Rice texture, but all in all, it was a nice meal. And I'm sure in the absence of other options, it will make a damn fine meal.

Later this week, I'll head back to Fred Meyer and pick up a few more pouches while they're on sale.

More like a clear shade of summer than a hazy shade of winter, though. I've been hard at work, and trying to regulate my sleep schedule and be as productive as possible. Richard has a business trip Monday night through Tuesday night, so I'll no doubt be washing the fancy clothes tomorrow in preparation for that.

As far as the farmstand goes, I haven't quite summoned the will to pick up another half flat of strawberries, but I think tomorrow might be the day to check things out. We're almost out of strawberry season, but transitioning into raspberry and blackberry season. I think seedless raspberry freezer jam would be a lovely addition to the larder, so I'm looking forward to picking up a flat of raspberries. Hopefully the processing of those will go a lot smoother, since I won't have to pick off the caps.

In other news, I finally got my Ernest Cline cd "The Geek Wants Out" and it is fucking funny. Beyond the tracks available on the website, there are a few gems on the cd as well.

And, after nearly a dozen years online, I'm finally getting over my shyness at interacting with other people's websites and strangers in general. I'm currently involved in a thread on Shoo-fly pies with Anna Ginsberg of Cookie Madness, and it's only in retrospect that I realize "Oh. MY. GOD! I am talking baking with this year's Pillsbury Bake Off $1,000,000 winner!" I'll skip over the details, but I'm waiting for a package from the Amish Country Store with a big bottle of King Syrup, which is essential for Shoo-fly Pie. Once I get that next week, I'll bust out some of my recipes, and report back to Anna (who has never had a shoo-fly pie the correct way).

Tomorrow, I want to head to Fred Meyers and buy myself a folding table for my little work area so that I can work on some of those Christmas sewing projects that I didn't get to make last year. I'm also hoping that they have a full on canning set for me. I already know that I want to make apple butter in the fall, but if I could get a hold of some good cucumbers, I'd love to make pickles too. And no, I'm not mentioning this to Richard as he'll think I'm nutty :)

The past few weeks have been hellaciously busy on pretty much every front. I didn't make it to Jami's reading -- had a maintenance that needed to be done by the end of the month to turn up new customers. I did manage to stop by Gil's Gardens on Avondale and pick up a flat of strawberries and lots of other fine produce. Made the strawberries into two batches of amazingly wonderful freezer jam. I worked on cleaning the house and doing laundry. Worked with Linda on trying to nail down some more things for our radio show. Got more strawberries today and washed, hulled, and froze most of them (they were even better than the flat I got last week). And did the end of the month job which must not be named that causes extreme feelings of hatred, nausea and all sorts of other negative emotions.

I've also been cooking and freezing things and trying to stay on top of the housewifery component to my life.