Intersection Logs

If I'd remembered that banana bread needs nearly an hour in the oven, I might have started on it earlier than 9pm. It's been a while since I did any baking, but this is something of a special occasion. Weather permitting, around 10.26 ET tomorrow, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is due to be launched from Kennedy Space Center aboard an Atlas rocket. There's a better than even chance it'll end up slipping another day, but still. We've been waiting for this for years, so one more day doesn't make much difference. We're planning a small breakfast gathering in the conference room, with NASA TV streaming on the big screen, and I seem to have elected myself to bring goodies. If the launch does slip, I may have to do it again tomorrow, in which case I'll have to stop off for more eggs and sugar on the way home.

Oof. Today I picked up groceries, traded in $30 of small change, did a supernumerary load of laundry in the hope (not fulfilled) of unwrinkling some pants that got in a slightly-too-hot dryer last time, cleaned the kitchen -- including the floor -- and parts of the bathroom, vacuumed, dusted and polished the bedroom, cooked dinner, and did a pile of ironing.

I think I won't bother again with catfish still on the bone. I did with it pretty much what I always do with catfish -- baked it in foil with a squirt of lemon and a good sprinkle of ginger and black pepper -- and then scraped it off the bones in the kitchen, but I still got a mouthful or two of spiky ribs.

I'm not clear why the "steam in bag" package of frozen broccoli, carrots and cauliflower was so insistent that it had to be thoroughly cooked. People eat those raw all the time, don't they?

Dessert tonight was a fresh (well, supermarket-fresh) nectarine. It was ripe, juicy, and delicious, and it came with a little sticker proclaiming it to be "organic" and "sugar-free."

I don't know which is more disturbing to contemplate: the notion of genetically-engineered fruit with artificial sweeteners built in; the idea that ordinary produce-section fruit might be injected with sugar-water; or the idea that the American public is gullible enough to fall for a label like that.

EDIT: alternatively, I can't read. On closer inspection, the label says "Sugar Tree".

One of the things I miss about the English festive season is mince pies -- little ones, that is, passed round as a snack, not the full-sized ones that sometimes turn up at Thanksgiving

Last year I didn't think of it until too late, but this year I laid in a jar of mincemeat when it was in the shops at Thanksgiving, along with a pack of piecrusts and some foil mini-muffin trays. (I think I had some proper jam-tart trays, once upon a time, but they didn't come with me across the Atlantic.) Tonight I made a trial run of a dozen, which left me with slightly less than a piecrust over -- half of it having been carefully re-rolled with a cylindrical coffee cup from the scraps; my largest and smallest round cutters turned out to be exactly the right size for the top and bottom pastry rounds, but it was tricky brushing on egg and milk without a brush. I dabbed with a teaspoon, and it more or less worked, and after about 12 minutes in the oven they came out pale gold and apparently cohesive, so I'll call that a success -- and try to pick up some more crust and a pastry brush, if the grocery store has such refinements, tomorrow morning.

The temperature here was in the 90s today, but it does cool down in the evenings now, enough to make it not totally insane to cook up a batch of stew for once and future dinner. It came out very orange-and-red; russet potato, yellow onion, garnet yam, tomato, red pepper, one of each, and a package of stir-fry beef, sauteed with the onions and spices before shoving it all in the oven. Also coriander, paprika, crushed garlic, and possibly slightly too much black pepper, but not unpleasantly so.

The mountains are starting to do that thing they do in winter, when they light up purple-pink after sunset.

And there's a new episode of one of my shows on TV.

I seem to be getting a cold -- at least, I hope it's only a cold. I'm not incapacitated, but definitely not very energetic apart from a sort of mental restlessness. Unfortunately, laundry isn't really optional at this point; even if I don't go to work tomorrow, whether I call it a sick day or working-from-home I really can't be using that time for things like laundry.

(The laundry room is a couple of hundred yards away, and I usually do multiple loads at once, every other weekend. To make it worse, I could only get one machine last time, so I', behind.)

The other thing I'm behind on is writing, having skipped the last couple of days. I have ideas -- including finally realizing, last night, what will motivate the Captain to carry on with his obsessive quest for the lost ship even after he has his long-lost son back. Complicated man, that. The trouble is, the idea of settling down either in the upright chair at the desktop, or with the hot, heavy laptop on my knee, doesn't really appeal right now, and I'm not sure the Palm with its tiny screen would lend itself to the sort of fiddly infill work I need to do.

Oh, and I need to cook a batch of bean-and-pepper stew this evening, as I already soaked the beans. I suppose I can skip the baking adventure part, though. (I was going to try brownies, and take them to work if at all successful.)

The pack of ready-peeled prawns I bought yesterday came with an attached recipe that started, "Peel and devein shrimp: reserve shells." (It also had a ridiculously involved sauce, so I wasn't intending to try it anyway.)

I need to write about a thousand words today to preserve my self-respect. No, I haven't started yet, and I'm much inclined to navel-gaze about why I even bother to try, or have a shot at baking brownies, instead.

My first attempt at beans resulted in rather crunchy beans in yummy sauce. This time, I boiled the soaked beans (two cups, six cups of water) for ten minutes and let them simmer for an hour to give them a chance to soften before I added anything at all. Then I threw in a couple of chopped tomatoes, 1/3 cup molasses, two-thirds of an sauteed red onion, and some spices (1/2 teaspoon each of paprika and oregano, 1/4 teaspoon cumin and a sprinkle of black pepper) and let it simmer a bit longer, resulting in about seven cups of cooked beans that are flavorful and of acceptable texture. (Also a rather messy pan, which I have to clean before I start on the lentils.)

This is the most successful attempt yet; this time I followed the recipe exactly, with actual brown sugar and baking soda, while previously I'd been using baking powder and granulated sugar (the second time around with added molasses). I also had two identical trays, side by side in an oven I'd asked for 275, whereupon it gave me a perfect 350. (The bottom shelf did get a lot hotter than that, with the trays on the top one.) I shaped the dough a bit with my hands (rolled it into balls and patted them slightly flat) rather than just dolloping it onto the tray, which resulted in more regular-shaped cookies. They came out nicely; I've eaten one, frozen nine in bags of three, and reserved the other six in a tin for short-term use. Also, for future reference, 30 sec at full power might be just a hair too long for softening one stick of butter in the microwave, but it did the job. (Considering the length of my hairs, perhaps that isn't the most appropriate expression ...)

Mixed beans (pinto, pink, small red and small white, 1/4 cup each) soaking in three cups of water; the rest of the packages mixed and divided between two containers for storage.

The gingerbread recipe calls for orange zest and chopped nuts, which I don't have at present, unless I start trying to chop up eating-quality pistachios, so that one will have to wait a while. I refuse to go grocery shopping again until next Saturday at the earliest!