Life as a Spectator Sport

I haven't mentioned the soapstone wood stove since bringing it back from Ohio, mostly because progress in putting it into service has been sloooow. A lot of interruptions occurred, some having to do with acquring the necessary components, others the fault of both my schedule and Bill's, and also the weather. Considering how prompt Bill has been when our pipes froze and burst, I can hardly complain when he postpones my stove installation to take care of other people's plumbing.

But by last week, I had managed to pick out the tile for the surround, and the hvac company that was supplying the chimney kit finally coughed it up. They had to special order it, and were supposed to call me when it came in. Eventually I called them, on a day when I was in their town already. "Oh, it's been sitting in the warehouse for a couple of weeks now," the stove department manager said cheerily. Grrr. But at least I didn't have to make a special trip up there--70 miles each way--to pick it up.

So the stove is still sitting on a scrap piece of carpet on top of the brick hearth, with its chimney, except for one piece of black stovepipe that Bill brought in for me to look at, in various boxes. Installing the chimney itself, it turns out, is going to require major reinforcement of the ceiling and roof, which I sincerely hope Bill was doing today, while I was on the way to Richmond for the fourth time in two weeks.

We might actually have a chance to use it once before the warm weather.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Another of those days . . .

when I washed dishes all day long. I want a kitchen that's big enough to shove all the dirty dishes out of the way while I'm working on other things, so I can wash them all at once at the end. I don't know whether the kitchen addition that I'm contemplating will allow that, but in any case, it's still months down the road.

This morning I washed out the Bosch mixer bowl in which I made butter last night, so I could make bread in it today. Should have washed it last night, but I was wiped out after a long day. Then I washed the breakfast dishes and put everything away, and then I made bread. Then I washed the Bosch mixer bowl again, and the scale tray, and the big bowl the flour had been soaking in, and the counters that I messed up in the process of making the bread . . .

And then I made lotion.

I use lotion very seldom, but it is nice to have on hand when the weather is very dry, as it has been lately. Unfortunately, I don't trust even the so-called natural products any more, now that Burt's Bees is owned by Clorox, and Tom's of Maine by Colgate-Palmolive. But in spite of making my own soap, I had never made any kind of cosmetic product, so I wasn't sure what I was going to run into. Some of the directions on the net call for six different kinds of exotic oils and waxes and scents, most of which I didn't have on hand and wasn't going to order just to make a little pot of hand lotion. Finally I found a very simple straightforward recipe on the LearningHerbs.com website, How to Make Lotion with Herbs. It requires some kind of oil (like olive oil), a bit of beeswax, a small amount of distilled water (or the water in which you have soaked some dried herbs), and if you want, a few drops of some essential oil. I had everything except the distilled water, and a brief stop on the way home last night took care of that.

The recipe mentions that the lotion may be a bit greasy if made with olive oil. I didn't think I'd mind that, but I had a mostly full six ounce bottle of jojoba oil, so I used the rest of that, and filled up the cup with olive oil. The lump of beeswax that I bought on impulse a couple of weeks ago turned out to be exactly the right weight, and after melting it in a saucepan with the oils, I dumped the combination in the blender. About that time, it occurred to me that I might find it difficult to clean the blender (and the saucepan) sufficiently well to use them again for foodstuffs. Oops.

Once the oil and wax had cooled a bit, I started the blender on low, added the distilled water a tablespoon at a time, and watched as a mayonnaise-like concoction began to form. Everything would have been fine, except that Clarence chose that moment to bellow from the bedroom. "I've got my hands full!" I yelled back. "Can it wait a minute?"

No! he said, so I resignedly turned off the blender and went to see what he wanted. By the time I finished with him, the emulsion had solidified all over the inside of the blender, on the lid, on the counter where it had splashed, and on the front of the mixer. I scraped most of it down into the still soft lotion in the bottom of the blender, dumped in some jasmine essential oil, mixed it again for a few seconds, and then managed to get most of it into an old Chateau Morrissette mustard jar.

It looks like nothing more than a jar of ordinary mayonnaise, so I probably should label it very clearly. LOTION!! NOT EDIBLE!! Or something like that. But it feels wonderful on my skin, and the jasmine is very pleasant and unobtrusive.

And then I heated the big kettle to boiling and began cleaning all the utensils. I believe that I have gotten all the lotion out of and off of them, but I should probably play it safe next time and use the stick blender that I make soap with instead.

Now I must decde whether to make the marmalade today, or let the oranges go until Wednesday, the next day that I'll be home even part of the day. There's plenty of time to do it now, but I'm ready to take it easy for a while with a glass of wine and a chunk of my homemade bread and butter.

And then I still have to wash the bread pans and Clarence's lunch dishes. Maybe what I need is not a bigger kitchen, but a maid. Dream on.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Pretty oranges

Just a picture today, of six perfect blood oranges. I stopped on the way home from Richmond Tuesday night to pick up some things we would need on Wednesday, and in the organic produce department, found a bin of blood oranges. I haven't seen these for sale in years. They make the most beautiful and tasty marmalade in the world. So I grabbed six, and I may go back there on the way home from Richmond tomorrow and get six more--if someone else hasn't already had the same idea.

Then I get to decide which marmalade recipe to use. Do I want to make just a couple of perfect small jars and leave them in the fridge? The flavor will be much more true and intense if they aren't processed for long term storage. Or am I greedy enough to make a whole canner load and open them one at a time over the next year? (I suspect that I am.) Or maybe a couple of jars with Campari added, and a canner load of a less exotic mixture. I'll have to wait on that decision to see whether I can buy more. But this weekend I'll make some variety of marmalade.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

More cheese

Cheese-making is endlessly fascinating. Every batch is different, even when you use the same recipe. There are always minor variations in ambient temperature, in the exact timing of the various steps, in the composition of the milk from season to season. It's a lot like baking, in fact. You never know exactly what you're going to get, but it's nearly always very good.

Today I made a 2-pound round of leicester, an aged cheese similar to Cheddar. It undergoes the same slicing and drying step as Cheddar, but instead of being submerged in warm water after being sliced, it is set on a draining rack and covered with a warm, moist towel. Since I didn't have a baking pan large enough to accommodate my largest wire rack, I set it on the biggest stainless steel bowl I could find, where it promptly dripped all over the stove. This is only half of it, in fact. The other half was sitting on top of another bowl, dripping on the counter.

Now it's in the cheese press, where it will stay for 24 hours. Then it will air-dry at room temperature for a couple of days before being waxed and joining the other cheeses in the "cheese cave" refrigerator.

Last night I made rennet custard for dessert, something I haven't had since childhood. Milk, sugar, vanilla and a Junket rennet tablet, profoundly simple to make and wonderful to eat.

ETA - I came across an interesting photo sequence of the cheese-making process, Cheddar specifically, at Eddie McGrath's StudioWorks. This is on a far larger scale than my little cheese kitchen, but the steps are the same.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Sneaky, sneaky

Every year I buy the newest version of Microsoft's Streets and Trips, a mapping package that lets me enter the addresses I need to visit, and prints nicely formatted maps. I started out using Mapquest, but Streets and Trips lets me easily display multiple addresses on a single map, and also allows a "portrait" printout that fits better with the way I arrange my trip paperwork.

I've thought that the last version had fewer addresses in it than previous ones, but I couldn't actually find an older copy of it to compare. It just seemed to me that in some of the cities I visit frequently, I was having trouble finding locations that had displayed correctly in previous years.

So yesterday I bought the 2009 version, and yep, it's losing data. It can no longer find my own address, which has been in the database since the 2007 version. Why on earth they would drop information from their database is a mystery, but worse, searches that used to take a second or less now make you wait 15 to 30 seconds. When I'm looking up one address after another, that can really add up. I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew what was causing the pause, so I yanked my internet cable. Sure enough, the next address I searched for popped up a box saying there was no internet connection. Streets and Trips is doing something on the net whenever you enter an address. Is it reporting back to Microsoft on where you're searching? Reporting back to some government-sponsored data collection company? Reporting to Homeland Security? Probably only Microsoft, and if I make a stink about it, they'll probably tell me it's a way for them to determine when a user couldn't find a desired address, so they can add it to the database. No thanks, just keep the ones that were already in there, and I'll be happy.

I'm going to dump it and reinstall an older version. And then I'm going to write a very unhappy email to Microsoft.

UPDATE: After some additional digging, I realize that the reason the software is looking for an internet connection is that it's trying to do a "live search" for the requested address. But I disabled that function and it still takes more than 15 seconds to find most addresses (the ones it can find at all). Microsoft still gets a dissatisfied user letter.

UPDATE AGAIN: I've been made aware that Microsoft doesn't actually control the addresses. They acquire their data from a company called Navteq, recently acquired by Nokia. The product still stinks.

The only good thing about it is that you can download a 60-day trial version. My strong advice is to not buy the full version until you've tried it.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Soak that flour!

In the interest of not aggravating my gut any more than necessary, I broke down and bought a book I've been meaning to get for quite a while, Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions. One of the more intriguing recommendations is to soak one's bread flour for at least 12 hours before making bread with it, to break down the phytic acid in wheat flour. I'll confess that I'd never heard of doing that, but her explanation makes sense. So today I ground 12 cups of flour, the amount I generally use for five loaves, dumped in the recommended amount of water and apple cider vinegar (actually, some kind of cultured milk like buttermilk is recommended, but I didn't have any on hand), and it sat on the counter for most of the minimum twelve hours.

The recipe I used was not one of Fallon's, but one based on her recommendations, from the The Passionate Homemaker. It isn't really well adapted to the way I use my Bosch mixer for bread, so I had to play with it a bit. The ratio of flour to water made the dough seem much too stiff, even after adding the water the yeast was soaked in. But when I actually began to knead it in the mixer, I had to add considerable flour to get to anything like the right consistency. So I may cut back on the amount of soaking water.

One step that was different from my usual procedure was "activating the yeast" by soaking it in a mixture of warm water and honey. I normally just dump it in with the flour and water, and I will probably return to doing that. I turned my back on it for a moment, and it was clearly ready to take over the kitchen.

Purists familiar with NT may note that Fallon isn't enthusiastic about yeast, but I had to either make bread or buy it, and I didn't have time to make a sourdough starter before this week's trip. Next week for that.

The dough rose in the bread pans pretty much as usual, and baked up into typical loaves that look and taste the same as always. I wasn't sure whether the change in procedure would create a change in texture, but evidently not. It's a tiny bit more sweet, as her recipe calls for more honey than the one I'd been using, but that's about all. One thing I did notice is that the raw dough didn't have the characteristic bitter taste of raw flour, so soaking it did make a difference.

So the next step is to make a sourdough starter. Fallon says the sourdough loaves are too heavy to use for sandwiches, which may be a problem for us, as that's the primary way we eat bread. I could substitute other things for my own lunches, and often do, but Clarence wants his toast in the morning and his sandwiches at lunch. I guess we'll just have to see how it turns out.

And now I have to see if I can put three days worth of food in the small cooler, or if we'll have to take the giant one. And get all my paperwork done, and pack three days worth of clothing... The night before an extended trip is always so much fun.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Thank God some people can still laugh

Work has kept me from posting much, that and a totally unexpected diagnosis of colitis. It seems that the "stomach flu" I had a couple of weeks ago was probably the initial flare of colitis. And now that I've been thinking back, I recognize other more subtle symptoms from months ago. There was increasing fatigue that I never recognized as fatigue. I thought I "just didn't feel like doing anything," and put it down to old age and laziness. Then there was the inability to eat fast food without running to the bathroom within an hour. But I eat so little fast food anyway that I thought each episode was an isolated instance. It's hard to make connections between something that happens perhaps once every couple of weeks, until you start looking for clues.

So I went to Petersburg for a day of inspections, punctuated by bouts of agonizing abdominal cramps and blind fear that a restroom wouldn't be available when I needed it. I coped with that one by just not eating or drinking anything, pretty much what I'd been doing for days. When we got back home, I caved in finally and went to the Emergency Room. One store owner had followed me around the whole time I was there, worried that I was going to collapse. If my condition was that obvious, it was clearly time to call in the pros. Long story made short--they wanted to keep me for a couple of days, took one look at Clarence, whom they would have had to keep as well, and decided I didn't really need to stay--I'd be fine with prescriptions and a visit the next day for an ultrasound.

So now with a week of high-powered antibiotics in me and the advice of an herbalist friend, I'm feeling much better, thank you. It hasn't gone away, and from what I've read on the net, it isn't going to. Just something you have to live with. It seems really ironic that someone who has been aggressively careful about what she ate should develop one of the irritable bowel diseases. Stress, and all that, I guess. The various colitis and Crohn's sites (the two are related) say stress doesn't cause it, but I think that's a load of you know what. Stress damages the immune system, and colitis is defined as a chronic auto-immune disease. I don't believe there isn't a strong connection.

So back to the title--a Ravelry friend posted a link to Urban Survival. This is a serious blog, focused on the economic situation, not exactly a funny topic. But once a week, the author posts his weekly update, and somehow manages to find some humor in the situation. Worth reading.

Today I'm making a pot roast, with pastured beef from a local farm, so I can have something fit to eat in sandwiches. No more fast food at all, not that I'll miss it. But eating out of town is going to require that I carry all our food with us, no exceptions. We spent four days in Richmond this week, and because I hadn't allotted enough time to prepare food in advance, I ended up buying grocery store food for nearly all of it. Better than fast food, but not what I need to be eating. So the coming week's trip will be a test of just how much I can reasonably carry with us. Fortunately both Richmond and Tidewater have good natural food stores, so if I find myself short on something, I'll probably be able to pick up what I need.

Clarence has agreed to no more Hardee's burgers, though he still demands three or four large diet cokes every day (shudder). I've given up nagging him about what aspartame and other synthetic sweeteners do to his health. He doesn't want to hear it, so he'll have to find out the hard way.

Monday, February 02, 2009

Finally, a wood cookstove

Just a little one, but I'm glad to have it. Here it is minus its base, visible behind it in the truck. For the moment, it's wrapped up in a tarp waiting for when we can install it inside.

The previous owner was an elderly man who apparently used the stove year round. He needed help with his rent, and the state program that provides rent assistance won't approve a dwelling that uses any kind of wood heating or cooking. So he had to give it up, and according to his family, he wasn't happy about it. I feel bad for him, but at least I know the stove was being used recently, and Bill says it's in good condition. It does need a new coat of paint, but that's minor compared to the refurbishing that would have been required of some of the stoves I've looked at. And the price was astonishingly low. I almost felt like I was taking advantage of the family for paying so little.

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