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M'wife and I went up to the city on Thursday, so she could be a focus groupie (being paid to express opinions - can you imagine anything worse? what if they're not the right opinions...?) for a couple of hours, while I mooched around the Ferry Building (foodie heaven) and the farmers' market outside. I may have bought pasta and beans and rice and cheese and tomatoes and such.
All the last while she was working in the city, Karen was telling me about this particular salad that she loved; so when she was done focusing we went to find same, that we might eat of it. Dino kale, with carrots and tomatoes and cucumber and avocado and nuts, in a lemon cumin dressing: now I understand. And yup, I can do that. Indeed I had a first shot at it this lunchtime; she tells me I don't have the dressing right (which may mean that I shouldn't have added the garlic to improve it), but she approved none the less. It's nice to have been able to work that out.
In other news of new things*, I made experimental rye bread yesterday. I don't have the greatest history with rye, and indeed yesterday's loaves didn't so much rise as spread, not so much loaf as bun. But they have good crumb and they taste nice: nice enough, at least, for Mac to chew his way through a ziploc bag to get at one. Bizarrely, it was the very ziploc bag that I had enlisted to keep Mac at bay. Whodathunkit?
And moving on with the new, I have finally taken steps towards keeping a food journal, separate from this. I've been dithering so long over whether I should do it, should it be public or private, yadda yadda. Public has its many and obvious attractions - *waves to all you many and obviously attractive people* - but the world is full of foodbloggers who are better at that visual stuff than I am (indeed, I just get annoyed at having to skim down over a dozen photographs before I get to the recipe, which seems to be the current vogue with foodblogs). So no, for the moment at least I'm just keeping a private daily record of what I'm up to in the kitchen. Some of it will inevitably end up here too, but that's not really the point. I want to keep track, is what it is: so I downloaded and installed some open-source journaling software (RedNotebook, since you ask - version 1.4 actually comes with Ubuntu, but 1.8 is out there, so I just apt-got** that) and am playing with it. Will I keep this up? Unknown: but it keeps track of the days and I can hashtag entries for a makeshift index and it builds a pretty wordcloud in the margin and I can insert pix*** and links and such. We'll see how that goes.
And in more new newses, today I bought a vacuum sealer in a sale. Reckless extravagance, I know, but I'll have use of it for the freezer, and maybe for sous-vide games also; and at the moment it serves as a box for Mac to sit on, so.
Dinner tonight? Is coming from the freezer, largely. I found this "beef and chickpea curry" (keema matar, presumably) of which I have no memory at all; if it defrosts nicely, then that's what we're eating. If not, there's still lamb shanks.
*Is that tautological?
**apt-getted?
***Like this, which is my haul from this morning's farmers' market:
All the last while she was working in the city, Karen was telling me about this particular salad that she loved; so when she was done focusing we went to find same, that we might eat of it. Dino kale, with carrots and tomatoes and cucumber and avocado and nuts, in a lemon cumin dressing: now I understand. And yup, I can do that. Indeed I had a first shot at it this lunchtime; she tells me I don't have the dressing right (which may mean that I shouldn't have added the garlic to improve it), but she approved none the less. It's nice to have been able to work that out.
In other news of new things*, I made experimental rye bread yesterday. I don't have the greatest history with rye, and indeed yesterday's loaves didn't so much rise as spread, not so much loaf as bun. But they have good crumb and they taste nice: nice enough, at least, for Mac to chew his way through a ziploc bag to get at one. Bizarrely, it was the very ziploc bag that I had enlisted to keep Mac at bay. Whodathunkit?
And moving on with the new, I have finally taken steps towards keeping a food journal, separate from this. I've been dithering so long over whether I should do it, should it be public or private, yadda yadda. Public has its many and obvious attractions - *waves to all you many and obviously attractive people* - but the world is full of foodbloggers who are better at that visual stuff than I am (indeed, I just get annoyed at having to skim down over a dozen photographs before I get to the recipe, which seems to be the current vogue with foodblogs). So no, for the moment at least I'm just keeping a private daily record of what I'm up to in the kitchen. Some of it will inevitably end up here too, but that's not really the point. I want to keep track, is what it is: so I downloaded and installed some open-source journaling software (RedNotebook, since you ask - version 1.4 actually comes with Ubuntu, but 1.8 is out there, so I just apt-got** that) and am playing with it. Will I keep this up? Unknown: but it keeps track of the days and I can hashtag entries for a makeshift index and it builds a pretty wordcloud in the margin and I can insert pix*** and links and such. We'll see how that goes.
And in more new newses, today I bought a vacuum sealer in a sale. Reckless extravagance, I know, but I'll have use of it for the freezer, and maybe for sous-vide games also; and at the moment it serves as a box for Mac to sit on, so.
Dinner tonight? Is coming from the freezer, largely. I found this "beef and chickpea curry" (keema matar, presumably) of which I have no memory at all; if it defrosts nicely, then that's what we're eating. If not, there's still lamb shanks.
*Is that tautological?
**apt-getted?
***Like this, which is my haul from this morning's farmers' market: