Please pass the crushed hazelnuts
Thursday February 06th 2025, 10:57 pm
Filed under:
Food
There was a demo tonight to a large and eager group (oh yeah) of women at church tonight about how to make your own chocolate truffles. The guy had printed out the basics, which was very helpful for people like, y’know, me. We were handed one of his as we came in and after the lecture and demo made four of our own: squish it, work it, roll it, dip it, done.
My question, which I did not ask because I had no way to know if he’d already addressed it, was, how do you assume the cream in the ganache is safe when the truffles are left out at room temperature like he said they should be? He was adamant that they not go in the fridge.
From what I was able to find afterwards, the answer is, it has to be at least 50% chocolate, and more is better. Liqueurs help, too. (For those who eat such, I don’t.) It’s the amount of available water that is the problem.
I brought mine home to share in the morning, when the chocolate won’t keep me up all night but mostly because I thought that in all fairness the men should have been invited, too.
I’m living dangerously. Having never gotten sick from eating anyone’s truffles, I’m leaving them on the counter.
So far, anyway.
Update: and then, having written that, I went back to the guy’s instruction page and turned it over. Oh. There it says refrigerate leftover ganache and only roll and coat the truffles you’re going to eat that day.
Okay, then. Common sense and caution wins out after all. Mine went straight in the fridge.
Also see Squball
Wednesday February 05th 2025, 9:09 pm
Filed under:
Family,
Life
Earworms: the music memes of the brain. After being stuck with one long enough, he transferred it to his mouth and then I got stuck with it. I hadn’t heard that one in decades.
Thus the following conversation:
‘Old Screwball was a racehorse,’ he sang.
Stewball. I still heard consonants when I was a kid, that’s a t, I told him.
I always thought it was Screwball, he insisted.
I went and looked it up. Nope. Stew not screw.
He was trying to remember some of the words in a later verse.
It’s, ‘I bet on the silver, I bet on the bay, if I’d a bet on old Stewball, I’d be a free man today.’ I always assumed that meant a slave wishing he’d been able to buy his freedom.
Is THAT what it means?!
I always thought so. (There are reminders of that hellish institution where we grew up, including a blacksmith shop just down Seven Locks Road that was used by George Washington.)
Turns out it’s an old folk ballad about a real race. Peter Paul and Mary recorded the version we knew growing up, but Stewball was an actual racehorse and the song was sung by, among many others, slaves in chain gangs dreaming of freedom. My heart broke a little reading that.
1741. How many horses, I asked him, have been so famous that 300 years later we know what year he was born?
Not many, says he.
He’ll even sing it as Stewball, just for me.
They are not
Tuesday February 04th 2025, 9:28 pm
Filed under:
History
I don’t think I ever met him but I knew both the person who had the conversation with him and the person who’d referred him.
There was a college student who got a job in DC that he thought was really something. Democrats were the enemy, and he got assigned some cloak-and-dagger type excitement on behalf of the President himself. Pretty heady stuff for a kid just starting out.
Until someone asked him at church, Are you honest in your business dealings?
He said yes, because of course he was…but then because he did feel he was honest, he stopped to backtrack a moment, suddenly a lot less sure of himself. He explained what he was doing at work.
He got counseled to quit that job immediately, and he did, and thus rescued his name and future from infamy.
That was the day before the Watergate break-in. He had been doing preparatory groundwork for it, though I’m not sure he knew that.
He would be about 70 now, and he instantly came to mind when I read that the hackers going from Federal department headquarters to Federal department headquarters plugging in their servers and wreaking havoc on the workings of our entire Federal system under an unelected, unvetted billionaire who’s not even a Federal employee and has zero legal authorization to bypass Congress on any of this, while falsely invoking the authority of US Marshalls if the professionals didn’t comply, are all probably thinking they’re doing the country a great favor.
And they are college students. Or just graduated. With not a clue how the world really works nor the impact nor the treason of what they’re doing. The youngest, 19, went to our local high school and I wonder what his parents think of the job they now know he has. I mean, that’s too young to even be fully myelinated and he’s doing this?!
Creating the biggest data breach in the history of mankind and putting every single American’s financial security at risk. And that’s not even starting on the assault on our laws, our democracy, and our system of government. Not just the civil servants but members of Congress were locked out of the building when they showed up to ask questions.
Did those kids stop to think that Elon Musk–a man who came on a student visa but ghosted the college, ie an illegal immigrant–could now empty nearly every bank account in the country? Or let Putin do so? Or sell every piece of data in the Treasury to China, while Musk makes false demands to clear out the entire Civil Service coupled with severance offers of illegally high amounts that will not happen?
But back to the hackers. Every single dime the Federal government sends out or where it collects from is now exposed and at risk. Already there’s been a report of an automatic Social Security payment not going through but labeled Pending, with its intended recipient wondering how on earth they’re supposed to pay rent on time.
Gee, that’s a great story they get to tell their grandkids someday.
It is a crying shame that apparently there was nobody along those very young mens’ paths to ask them this one simple, direct question: Are you honest in your business dealings?
And if that doesn’t work, then, Would you be proud to tell your grandma what you’re doing?
27″
Monday February 03rd 2025, 9:24 pm
Filed under:
Knit
Little by little….
You can’t get a great deal of detail into little fish compared to the ones in my first Ocean afghan what with the limitations of drawing in wide V shapes. But that just means it’s a new way of exploring what my needles can do.
Fellow fruit tree enthusiasts
The folks who bought the house next door a few months ago were thrilled at being offered an apricot tree.
Of the three Anya seedlings I had left, this one was as nearly perfectly balanced as you could ask for, a beautiful specimen. It’s the one that grew only a few inches tall its first year after its growth tips had died while we were out of town (the 4″ vitamin K-uptake-killing coir pot hindering leaf production did not help) but it was still alive so I kept watering it. Last year it hit 53″. It’ll be standing on its tiptoes to wave hi over the fence before you know it.
I explained that I’d chosen a smaller one for my yard for its late leafing-out and its slower growth for my limited space. I’d almost put the big one in anyway just because it’s such a perfect, healthy tree.
Big was fine with them. They knew exactly where they wanted to plant it, and when they told me, I told them that’s where the former owners had kept their garden for years. A very good sunny spot and it’ll have plenty of room. Very cool.
They told me of losing a plum tree to disease at their old house and how hard that had been.
Their big tree on the other side of the house, I told them, is a Santa Rosa plum that was there when the sellers’ parents had moved in about 60 years ago. They will have their plums back.
So now this tree has been dolly’d to its new home. And if by chance either theirs or mine ends up needing a pollinator–and having one always helps anyway–there will be one right on the other side of the fence, same mother tree but already clearly just different enough.
While the adults were talking, their little boy discovered our toy corner and in great excitement with each discovery arranged all our Hot Wheels into a curved-just-so traffic line behind the big yellow Tonka truck leading the way. And life is good.
Rooting for them now
Saturday February 01st 2025, 5:36 pm
Filed under:
Food
Welllll, the package was pretty. The contents were in the what’s not to love department. So I bought it.
Fire-roasted root veggies (sweet potatoes/carrots/parsnips/onions) in a giant Costco freezer bag were a bit daunting after the fact. I knew the fiber content was beyond me as a colectomy patient, and yet there it was.
Unless…(she thought, staring at the bag a couple of weeks later.)
The Cuisinart. Not the blender, I didn’t want puree, although, close. Into the pot. Throw some Trader Joe’s frozen fire-roasted bell papers in the machine, just a couple of twirls of the blade. A little broth, a half hour simmer, let’s just see what we get….
Hey.
There was a whole lot more where those had come from.
The second time, I oven-roasted an entire Costco pack of cherry tomatoes for half an hour and then those I did puree and threw in the pot with the root veggies that were by then looking vaguely like sandpaper grit floating at the top. (The parsnips: like pimples just waiting to be popped. Hey, I’m trying to give you a visual, where are you going?!)
On an oh just try it, I added the leftover third of a cup or so of pumpkin puree in the fridge. And some sausage.
Half an hour more of simmering from there. You can’t quite make out the pumpkin specifically but it really added to it.
I’m writing this down so I remember what I did where I can find it and because I’m actually hoping now that they’re still selling those root veggie bags. There’s a potluck next week and that was really really good.
The only problem is, I am forever now going to think off it as parsnippimplepopper soup.
A penny for your thaws
Friday January 31st 2025, 9:52 pm
Filed under:
Life
Remember that truly brilliant idea someone gave me to freeze a paper cup of water and then put a penny on top, so that if you ever had a power outage happen while you were away you could check to see if your frozen foods had thawed and then refrozen and were unsafe?
I kept thinking the last few months that evaporation was getting to mine and that I really ought to refill that cup, but the penny was frozen onto the top and, eh. It’s cool.
The door on our garage freezer bounced slightly open and was apparently like that overnight–on a night that hit 31F. (Unless we had a very small earthquake that shook it ajar. Dunno.)
There was this moment of horror, followed by the realization that I could actually know something about the effects: check the penny!
It had slipped to the edge of the cup and then slid down the side and was frozen in place upright. The door had not been closed yet but the ice seemed solid. The food seemed solid, even the bag of cranberries on the door right next to that cup. Small things thaw faster, exposed things certainly do, and they weren’t.
Lucked out.
In plane sight
More Anya apricot seeds went out in the mail, with a few left.
It is going to be cold and (finally!) rainy the next five days here, which feels fitting: the skies themselves mourning those lives lost in the air crash in DC.
James Fallows, pilot and reporter, says helicopters are forbidden above 200′ in that airspace. The New York Times says they were at 300′ and a half mile off the course directed by the controller–and that the helicopter pilot had flown that route before and knew those restrictions before they hit that plane.
It took me straight back to my mom’s close friend’s agony waiting to hear whether the father of her children during his commute home had been on the 14th Street bridge that another plane from National (now Reagan Airport) hit 40 years ago after not de-icing. He was not heard from for hours–but he was safe.
All those rescuers on those cold waters, hoping to be able to deliver that same news to other families but seeing only wreckage and worse.
Knitting. I tell you. Six rows again today. Needed to. Bright colors, fishy fish, creation-ing.
That second octopus’s last arm is just going to be too short if I don’t add another strand and put up with weaving its ends in, too. (Appraising look.) Nope. I’ll never be satisfied with it if I don’t. First thing tomorrow.
Remind me to break off a longer piece next time.
She’s not quite wrong
Wednesday January 29th 2025, 9:47 pm
Filed under:
Family
My grand niece is three today. She will tell you that she is not little. (Her dad called today to say they’re expecting in two months; that might have something to do with it, although you know she has no idea how her life’s about to be upended.) She will also say firmly that she is not big.
She is medium.
She runs a tight ship, observed her dad. She will tell you how it is.
Bridge over the floods
Flood the zone, the felon-in-chief’s favored fellow felon advised. Put more out there than the media can deal with at once.
And so 17 Inspectors General, those tasked with rooting out abuse or waste in government, were fired in an illegal manner yesterday, today all Federal grants were suspended in an illegal manner (meaning as part of it not just school lunches but that all Medicaid disbursements were stopped, till a Federal judge stopped the stopping but only for now) while ICE agents raided elementary schools for anybody suspected of being an illegal immigrant even if they were too young to know what that was or that they were born here and are citizens. And even if they weren’t.
Traumatizing the children. Y’know, when you let any disturbed individual buy a thousand rounds of ammunition for their many guns once they’re 18 but not yet fully myelinated, you just might want them to have the happier childhoods their loving parents were planning on instead. Think ahead.
Two million Federal employees were told in an email that they had the choice of emailing back “resign” and getting paid through September or to assume they’ll be fired or at best demoted.
Don’t do it. All of that was in violation of the law, too, including the sums any severance could entail per person. They want you to be the guilty party on losing your job. Air traffic controllers? Who needs them, right?
An old friend reposted his friend’s experience of having multiple ICE agents pull him over and wave guns in his face and yell and threaten him and lie that he had done things just now that he absolutely had not while he called the local police, who came to his aid and told the agents to get the hell out of there and leave the guy alone. And that was in a red state.
And if they’re already doing that to a citizen based on his name or looks…
Are there Republicans who are as outraged as the rest of the world looking on in horror? Are they hearing from their constituents?
We must speak up–like an individual stitch in a sweater, every voice matters.
I know they want us to throw up our hands and not look. I’m making myself look because I owe that to my dad’s memory for his service in WWII. The rule of law. Integrity. Compassion. Democracy. Those are ours and we will not let them be taken from us.
And then I knit four rows of afghan and started some bright new fish. Because that felt wonderful and hopeful, picturing a grandchild’s future delighted face.
Progress report
Monday January 27th 2025, 9:36 pm
Filed under:
Knit
Slowly, slowly getting there.
Rerun
Sunday January 26th 2025, 9:25 pm
Filed under:
Life
Never seen them before.
Old enough to walk. Not old enough to talk. Starting to be fussy.
(Let’s see, I’m overdue to order more but, checking, oh good yes I do.)
Then I saw her brother.
Then her dad walked up with the oldest and they, too, sat down in front of us, along with what were clearly his wife’s parents, given that their ancestry was multi continental. Three kids in five years with one on the way.
The second kid started fussing a little too to match his sister and the meeting hadn’t even started yet. You know I had an answer to that, (oh good I did have three in there) and I reached over the pew and told the mom, Happy Birthday!
The middle kid, half an hour later, did something I’ve never seen any kid do before with one of those finger puppets: he worked out the woven-in end on his ladybug, got it out to a good foot long and yo-yo’d it and then hey, better than that, let’s twirl it around and around and around!
Which was fun. But. His mom intuited how quickly that could escalate on a three-way matchup and put a stop to it. Awhile later he got his ladybug back and obediently did not twirl it. Except once. Because that is what you do when you’re three. You experiment to see if your parent meant it and are relieved to learn that they did and that a rule is a rule to live by. So you could know what to do and not do and what to expect even if you didn’t yet know all the huge WHYYYyyyys behind everything and the world felt a little safer.
When the meeting was over (eternity o’clock by little kid time), she turned to thank me and we introduced ourselves.
I told her she reminded me of me our first year here. I told her they were doing a great job.
We drove home with me remembering time after time when some older person had said that to me, back when my kids were little, and how much I’d held onto that, knowing they were just being their new-to-this-world selves and driving me quite bonkers. I hoped those good folks knew I’d someday be thanking them by passing it on when it came my turn.
They’d made my emotional world feel a lot safer.
Universal
Saturday January 25th 2025, 11:31 pm
Filed under:
Life
It’s late, we’re home, and we got to listen to a Tongan choir tonight.
One thing I like about living here, you get to meet people from all over the world. Sometimes you even get to hear them sing, in a language I do not know nevertheless fully shared in the music and the faces of the choir that was giving of themselves and their time to bring those notes to the rest of us.
A toddler gate for the weather
Friday January 24th 2025, 10:57 pm
Filed under:
Life
It’s been in the low 30s at night and in the morning the family room has been very cold. Jacket required.
Richard got a box that came with much-regretted large pieces of foam and styrofoam padding. Non recyclable. Has to go in what is a very small trash can out there. I could drive it to another city and pay for it to go away, or we could just break off pieces and squish them in there over the course of at least a month if not two because man do those take up space.
I started with the two smallest pieces that didn’t need breaking down.
On impulse Monday night I put one of the big ones against the doorframe to the garage. We’ve never had mice in the house, but that rubber sweeper piece across the bottom of the door surely wouldn’t be enough to stop them if they wanted to badly enough so why not. The block came an inch short of filling the frame so I jammed in a smaller piece sideways at the bottom and what the heck, went and put another big piece on top of the first. Costco-sized un-rice cakes for rodents.
It did not make me the top home decorator of all time but at least it amused me.
I walked in that room the next morning and to my great surprise it was nearly the same temp as the bedrooms.
Huh. We don’t have that problem with the front door. But we do there. I had always thought it was all the window space, but those are double-paned and it’s clearly the door.
I stopped throwing away the foam for the moment while trying to decide: how on earth do you insulate a door for real? The freezer’s right on the other side, so we go through there all the time with our hands full and minds preoccupied; you wouldn’t want a wallhanging swinging in your face and catching on your frozen foods.
Meantime, that foam effect is definitely being real (I was starting to get cold at 8:00 pm and went oh, right) and I set them back up every evening now. So glamorous. Just don’t look.
I gotta do something about this. Somehow.
We could all use that
Thursday January 23rd 2025, 9:24 pm
Filed under:
Life
It was a do you know somebody who knows somebody question, and in fact I did and they were happy to reach out and offer info and I’m hoping that works out.
Meantime, from someone else, did I have this person’s number? I did, and would you help this other person with…? He would.
Next: Would you say a prayer for, and of course I would and did and suddenly had a thought of something I could actually do that sounded really good that hadn’t occurred to me but was so obvious once I did so I did, and I’m hoping that turns out well for person four (or whatever number we’re on at this point.)
A busy day of logistics. A day of people looking out for others, some they knew, some they didn’t, just because they could.
A day of increasing hope.