This is the beginning of our nineteenth year here. It doesn't feel like two thirds of the time we spent in New York — I'm still learning my way around.
For Dave's birthday, we went to Mi Lindo Acapulco for supper. We both had combination plates. I was supposed to get a taco, a tostada, and a chalupa. I don't know which was the chalupa and which was the tostada. One was ground beef, one was beans. All three had ample fresh vegetables, and the quantity was just right: I felt indulged, but not uncomfortable.
So I looked up "chalupa". It means a kind of boat that's shaped like what you get if you mold a tortilla over something round before you fry it. In its home territory, it means an edible cup of salsa, cheese, and lettuce. Other stuff was added as it wandered away from its point of origin, and by the time it got to the States the chalupa fillings were being served on a tostada.
I managed to plant potatoes today. The ground is still too wet to work, but I ran the Culta-Eze over a row on the west side, raked it, put three seed potatoes on the ground, and put a shovel of sand on each potato. I'll hill them up with better dirt when it's dry enough to dig.
A while back, Dave collected a few surveyor's flags that had been left in our lawn, and I put them on top of the garden cupboard because they wouldn't go in. When I went to take three of them to mark where the potatoes are, they were gone. We figure they fell off the cupboard into the trash bin.
So I had to use heavy wooden stakes.
Yesterday I scrubbed my feet until they were pink and clean. I got a cottonwood stickypod on them before I could get my socks on.
The cottonwoods are leafed out, so there shouldn't be any new pods.
The flower buds on our crabapple tree are the same color as the leaves on our red maple. They are lined up as seen from the sewing-room window, so I'm in a good position to check.
I've learned the difference between a chalupa and a tostada: for a chalupa, you fry fresh masa dough, for a tostada you fry a stale tortilla. But I'm sure both dishes were served on tostadas.
A birthday cake is cooling in the kitchen.
I made half a recipe of brownies cockaigne, but didn't halve the butter, vanilla, or chocolate. I stuffed as many pecans into the batter as would fit, baked it in an 8" square pan, melted two .88 oz. chocolate bars on top, and sprinkled a 2.25 oz. bag of black walnuts on the chocolate. I can hardly wait for it to get cool enough to cut!
This morning I cut it into pieces and wrapped most of them and put them into the freezer.
Then I went off for a bike ride, because we were out of peanuts-in-the-shell, and I wanted a pair of small scissors to put into the snack bag of hand-sewing tools I keep in the arm of the futon. While I was at Carniceria San José, I also bought three tomatillos. I hope I like tomatillos!
The ride was quite nice except for the last stop. I went into Owen's for a carton of eggs and had to come out without them. I did find a package of stew meat which is now in the rice cooker on "keep warm" with two stalks of celery and sufficient vegetable cocktail. I used the Menard's cocktail Dave bought, and decreed too thick to drink — it makes good sauce. I'm thinking of putting chili powder into it in the morning. Or perhaps some cumin and some frozen jalapeños.
When I saw that all the people in line at the checkouts had full carts, I decided to give the self-checkout a third trial. For the third time, it crashed instead of giving me my receipt. When I buy with a debit card, I do like having a receipt.
My next-to-the-last stop was at Fort Wayne and Buffalo, where the Legion was having a Pork Chop Drive-Through Dinner. For eight dollars I got two huge pork chops, a steamed potato, baked beans, and a salad-dressing cup of excellent margarine. (Dave said it was excellent; I didn't eat it.)
For lunch, I ate the bones of both chops, some of the beans, and a bit of potato. Dave also sampled the beans and a chop. At suppertime I cut the potato up and fried it in corn oil flavored with half a slice of pre-cooked bacon, cut into bits, smoked salt, and pepper. We split the remaining beans. Enough chop for a lunch and most of the margarine are left over.
Dave wants to know where they bought the chops — they were delicious. I said I'd go back next spring, & he said that they do this several times a year.
Oops. I managed to ride all over Warsaw without going anywhere near either the fairgrounds or the courthouse. Yesterday was the first day of the farmers' markets.
I made chili out of the stew beef. I over-seasoned it a bit — I'll put in a can of kidney beans when I warm up the left-overs.
The corn bread is good. I had been soaking the overly-coarse cornmeal in milk for days.
The crabapple tree is in full show now. It makes the red maple look brown.
Pork-chop gravy on mashed potatoes for my breakfast: we had left-over potatoes, left-over gravy, and a little piece of pork chop. I ate all of the chop, most of the potatoes, and about half the gravy.
I think I'll have something on left-over cornbread for lunch. Not cream cheese, as I killed that container at snack time last night.
Oooh, I could melt a slice of swiss cheese on it!
There's a huge sheet in the washing machine and a brand-new clothesline in the yard.
Correction: the red maple actually is brown.
The crabapple is leafing out, but still glorious if I walk into the parlor to look at it from the north. The sun is behind it as seen from the sewing room.
I planted the multipliers and a handfull of large onion sets yesterday. I had a yard of furrow left over.
Ack! I've already forgotten whether the left-over multipliers went into the potato row and the sets went into the garlic row or the other way around. Ah! One of the open-air sets had a green sprout on it and I left it sticking out.
⁂
And the green sprout is in the garlic row.
There are crabapple petals on the west side of the house — we must have got some wind in the night.
I'm planning to sew today.
I've got a happy hubby. Dave just learned that the complete run of Classics Illustrated is available on the Web.
I found an old packet of carrot seed and sprinkled it on the last bit of furrow.
I was given a coryopsis plant in church this morning, but forgot it in the library. I remembered before I left the building, but the librarian had gone home and I couldn't get in.
A post from a thread about offensive language on alt.usage.english:
Everyone offends somebody sometime
Everybody messes up somehow
Something in your kick just told me
My sometime is now.
Bill Van
01:36 I couldn't sleep, so I got up. I washed clothes today (Monday), and we re-arranged the garage. We had taken the benches outside, and today Dave installed shelves for the stuff that had piled up on them. Got the stuff more organized as a result. I brought my sole remaining Moore map of Kosciusko County into the house and put it into my pattern trunk. I also found an inferior county map that I'd forgotten about.
Urk. I hear vomiting noises outside the sewing-room door. Perhaps it's just as well that I couldn't sleep. Having to clean up in the middle of the night beats stepping in it in the morning.
I wonder when it was that I made mashed-potato salad? It's been a few days and I'm still having to restrain myself from eating too much. It was weeks ago that I bought three huge potatoes intending, for the very first time, to make salad for just us. Eventually I became afraid that they would sprout and got to work.
I meant to make baked-potato salad, but the microwave was malfunctioning and it took nine minutes to zap a potato instead of six. That meant that each potato was in the toaster at least nine minutes, and the skins were too hard and crisp to cut up into salad. So I cut each potato in half and scraped out the salad base, which pretty much mashed it. We ate some of the skins dipped in sour cream while they were still hot, and I re-heated the rest in the toaster oven for my bedtime snack, and ate them with a yogurt-based dip.
I don't recall what-all went into the dressing. There were onions and mini-sweet peppers, of course, most of a carrot grated skin and all, and the majority of a twelve-ounce bottle of olive-oil mayonnaise.
A bottle is a really-stupid way to package mayonnaise.
Practice pays off.
Something really cool happened last Friday.
Every night, right after feeding the cat, I lie down on the floor and do my back exercises. Al makes sure I don't forget!
Then I practice getting up off the floor, trying different methods on different nights.
Last Friday, while I was helping in the kitchen after the Kiddie Kollege graduation ceremony, someone spilled lemonade on the floor. I grabbed a couple of paper towels and rushed to mop it up before it got tracked around.
I few minutes later, I realized that I had no idea which technique I'd used to get up after mopping — I had done it without thinking.
So I advise all you young folks of sixty or seventy: practice, practice, practice. I suspect that many of the people who have to call for a lift assist simply don't know how to pry themselves off the floor.
It isn't dry enough to dig yet, but I put another shovel of dirt on each potato hill anyway. I pulled the stakes first; the plants are well up.
The garden is mud, but the mulch on the asparagus bed was dry enough to push the Culta-Eze around. The asparagus is doing well and I think that we'll get a harvest next spring. The plants were all leaning to the east, which complicated the cultivating.
Last night's wind made a mess in several places. I saw a tree-size limb on a pick-up truck just off Chestnut street, and a tree and a light pole down on the walkway behind Steve and Martha's house. I think maybe the tree took down the light pole.
I heard only one generator running during my tour. Well, I heard two, but the second one turned out to be a power washer.
We lost the usual limb off the willow tree. Dave dragged it out to the road. I suspect that it will take the town a few days to get around to picking it up.
I heard a crunch while I was on the front porch photographing my sewing, and looked up to see a bucket loader chomping into our brush pile.
There was no truck around; he just drove off with it. That isn't another brush pile the load is behind; it's a very weedy bed of lily-of-the-valley. But that *is* a willow limb in front of his wheel.
Supper turned out to be elegant. I woke up late from my nap and was franticking around in the freezer for something that I could prepare in the time I had left when I remembered that I'd thawed a couple of confit duck legs. So I reconstituted some mashed potatoes and warmed up left-over creamed corn and diced tomatoes, and set out some raw vegetables.
We liked it very much.
While I was wondering how to get the duck out of the bag and warm it up, I realized that the bag was sealed and could be heated in a pot of water — and when I cut the bag open, all the duck fat and jellied broth poured right out into the serving bowl. When I warm up the other pair of duck legs, I won't bother to thaw them first.
I think there is enough duck left for another meal. I gnawed the bones of both legs, so what's left is pure meat and a very rich broth.
This week's e-mail says that Duck Down and above has more confit legs. I hope that's still true when the rain lets up long enough for me to go to Leesburg — which will probably be in August.
At the Memorial Day/birthday party I was thinking that I was overdue for a nap — but I got up from a nap just before going to the party!
When I got home and flopped onto the bed, I realized: I've just stuffed myself like a Christmas goose. My predator ancestors think it's time to go back to the den and lie up for a few days.
We brought left-overs from both today's party and yesterday's. I won't have to plan meals for a while.
Startling news: A car was driven into a train and Warsaw was not cut in half!
More accurately, a fellow on Old 15 lost control of his car and crashed into a train parked on the siding. I'm not sure how one goes about losing control on Old 15, which is dead straight and has good pavement. Twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars of damage was done to the boxcar and the driver was taken to KCH. The automobile wasn't mentioned, nor does the story say whether the driver was admitted or treated and released.
Memorial Day dawned soggy, but turned into a pretty nice day.
I sure hope the blue-green fences all over the park are temporary. "Ugly as a mud fence" was the first clisché to come to mind, but these fences would be improved by a coating of mud.