When I woke up, it was a frigid 6°F outside. There was no way I was going outside today. To get some exercise, I spent 45 minutes on an exercycle in the workout room. It’s Sausage Saturday, but we’re missing the main ingredients: sausages and ice cream. Instead of sausage, I’ll make chicken pot pie using chicken from the freezer. And instead of ice cream, Dwight baked apple crumble, which is cooling now.
Category: Home Living
Summer of Declutter
Posted Summer of Declutter. (Click through for link.) With Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up, I thought this would be timely.
Summer of Declutter
Back in the summer of 2017 we found ourselves with a tight two-month deadline to declutter our home. We’d listed our house for sale and anticipated a quick sale, leaving us little time to downsize into a rental apartment with half the square footage. We knew we’d be living in that apartment for about 15…… Continue reading Summer of Declutter
Wot No Turkey?
Spent most of the afternoon making veggie moussaka as the main dish for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. Porcini mushrooms, lentils and chickpeas nicely fill the meat space. The dish required red wine (3 cups); the cook required some too, but a much lesser amount.
Zen and the Art of Vacuum Cleaner Maintenance
The Dyson was making random unfamiliar sounds, so today I partially disassembled it and gave it a clean. A YouTube video advised me to clean a fine-mesh filter with an air blaster outside. I decided this was good advice as I stood upwind while releasing a toxic cloud of fine dust. While I was at it I also cleaned the canister vacuum.
Book and Biscotti
While Dwight baked these almond biscotti, I stretched out on the couch with a novel I’d checked out from the library on my Kindle, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. The Remains of the Day is still my favorite, but none of his novels has disappointed. Early samples of the biscotti didn’t disappoint either.
Comfort Food Foundation
Made a 24-hour chicken bone broth which I filtered four ways this morning. Now it’s setting up in the fridge, waiting for me to skim off the fat. I’ll freeze it in smaller portions to use in dishes where I want the flavor and smoothness to shine. On Friday, I picked up chicken parts from an Asian market; of course, I couldn’t resist grabbing some Japanese KitKats while I was there.
From Ug to Yum
Picked up ingredients for a braise, including one each of these gnarly beauties: a rutabaga and a celeriac.
How We Live
Movie night tonight! The blockbuster anime “The Boy and the Heron” is finally available for rent at a reasonable price. Today, I’ve been skimming the 1937 Japanese coming-of-age novel “How Do You Live?” (in translation, of course), which apparently provides some of the philosophical underpinnings of the movie but not the plot. Interestingly, the novel also makes an appearance within the film itself. The author’s backstory is a lesson for our times as we slide towards authoritarianism.
Scratching for Dollars
Finally got around to scratching my birthday gift from my sister-in-law. The first card revealed I’d won $2. In the end, my total winnings were $7.