A day is not wasted if a cake is baked

a homemade pineapple upside down cake; photo has a red filter

Sometime in the past year or two Sanguinity saw a large jar of maraschino cherries. Her heart leapt with joy at the thought of having so many, so we bought the jar. Also, we said we could make pineapple upside-down cake at some point. The cherries sat in the top of the cupboard for a long time, but at some point we did also buy a can of pineapple rings to sit there with them.

Sometime in the past week or two Sang made an agar jasmine dessert from a packet– much like the opaque white jello-y dessert that dim sum places have. It was tasty. The picture showed it served with canned fruit cocktail, so we opened the jar of cherries. Once the remaining cherries were in the fridge and vulnerable to snacking, the clock was ticking on the upside-down cake.

Today was cake day! It is so sweet that the cherries are the tart part.

I took a terrible photo with my phone and while I was trying to improve it via LunaPic, which I quite like for my simple photo-editing needs but which does not seem to have a one-button “improve this photo” option, I accidentally saved a filtered-red copy over the original. I did in fact make this cake in an ordinary kitchen and not a photo darkroom.

silver idyll

On our anniversary last Monday, I worked in the daytime and Sang taught in the evening. It was Thursday that we finally got around to walking down the street to the Delta Cafe to celebrate.

I love the Delta’s cocktail menu. This time the lavender-and-vanilla Pink Lady called to me. I ordered it without considering whether it went well with deep-fried catfish bites and okra. It did not. I didn’t care.

The music was 100% Aretha Franklin.

We had a tipsy, romantic walk back to the house. The air was clearing out after several days of wildfire smoke. At home a new episode of Elementary was waiting for us.

Friday Five: Condiments

Oh wait, they’re not all about condiments. Still,

What is your favorite condiment?

Are pickles a condiment? I like pickles. I like pickle relish. On a hot dog I like yellow mustard, ketchup, and pickle relish.

Sour cream is also a great condiment.

What is your favorite spice?

Perhaps cumin, it’s so versatile. Although life without cinnamon is hard to imagine. But “favorite” is different from “hard to imagine life without it.”

I like the incursions smoked paprika has been making.

If herbs count, I’m excited about dill lately and have a dill plant out back in a flowerpot. I don’t know if it will get enough sun though.

What is your favorite cooking oil? (Canola oil, sesame oil, butter, etc)

I like butter. I also appreciate dishes with bacon where the bacon fat is used to cook other stuff in the dish.

What is your favorite starchy food? (Bread, rice, potatoes, noodles, etc)

Noodles! And crackers if those count. Noodles and crackers will get me through a lot.

What is your favorite flavor for candy?

Chocolate and mint together, maybe? I’m thinking Junior Mints. I also like licorice (including salted), pseudo-licorice like Red Vines, and candies involving peanut butter.

rabbit rabbit!

I’m putting the last touches on my 2017 book list– there were too many books for which I jotted down only the titles before they went back to the library. Now I’m adding in dates, noting whatever impressions of them remain in my head, and finding their place in the list. Next year, I mean this year, I’m going to try a spreadsheet so it’s easier to put in order.

The first book I finished reading in 2018 is Mitali Perkins’ You Bring the Distant Near.

The writing is so assured– the characters seem real, like we’re just dipping in as the three generations live their lives. The resolutions do mostly involve romance, in a way that makes me wonder if Perkins is a Jane Austen fan. (Or maybe it’s just that Sanguinity and I watched the 1995 Sense and Sensibility last night while we waited for the new year.)

It’s been a peaceful holiday season. Christmas was with Sanguinity’s parents, which feels traditional now– eating cookies and reading Yuletide fic on the sofa-bed upstairs while televised football filters up from below. My favorite kidlit-fic this Yuletide is “Completion”, by oxfordRoulette (2106 words). It’s about Lirael from Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series; it has domesticity and refuge, two of my favorite themes. It’s post-canon, so I did miss the Dog.

It’s been a season of good food, too– I made fudge, and Sang gave me a tofu cookbook and made ma po tofu for us. The sun has been shining. I think I’m ready for 2018. Best hopes and wishes for us all!

Smells and Words

I wish I could post smells, because this is Pesto-Making Weekend and it’s sooooo fragrant. I supplemented our garden basil with some from Trader Joe’s, but once the garden harvest was in a heap on the kitchen floor I saw it was more than I expected. Pesto will be abundant this winter, hooray! (We freeze it in ice cube trays, sans parmesan.)

Sanguinity made onion gravy last night and that smell was also heavenly. We ate it on fries, poutine without the cheese curds. (The last few times I tried buying cheese curds, they did not squeak when bitten! I was disappointed.) Right now I’m making mashed potatoes for the leftover gravy.

I learned on Tumblr tonight that Merriam-Webster has a Time Traveler feature where you can look up which words and phrases were born (er, first used in print) in a given year. Here are a few the same age I am:

bad hair day
comfort food
granola (!)
labradoodle (!)
wish list

Surprises from my mom’s era: it says poster child and private eye were both new in 1938.

Black Beans

I slacked off on my A words in ASL and got a B instead of an A on my vocabulary notebook. D: Back to the A word mines!

When I got home from school, I walked in to the smell of bacon. Sanguinity was baking potatoes, to be served with bacon and sour cream and cheese, oh wow. They weren’t quite ready yet, so we had leftover black beans with a fried egg on top while we waited.

I don’t know how much of my relationship with this black bean recipe is that it fits our household very well, and how much of it is that we love it so much that we run the household to fit it. But I don’t have my usual inertia about getting out the food processor for it, and there are always three cans of black beans in the cupboard.

Black Beans

Fry up bacon. We use the cast iron skillet and cook three slices plus a little more to eat while cooking.
While the bacon is frying, dice an onion.
Remove the bacon from the pan and chop it up. Cook the onion in the bacon fat with some cumin.
While the onion is cooking, get a chipotle or two out of the freezer. (Chipotles in adobo sauce come in a can. When you open a can, freeze the chiles you don’t use on a cookie sheet, each with a blob of sauce on it, and store them in the freezer in a plastic bag.)
Drain three cans of black beans. Whirl them and the chipotle in the food processor. It’s okay to add a little water if you need it to make it all process smoothly.
Put the bean glop in the pan with the onions, and stir in the bacon. Let it rest over low heat, stirring now and then, until it’s all mixed and warmed through.
Serve with corn tortillas. Cheese, cilantro, sour cream, green taco sauce, and fried eggs are all optional but welcome additions. (I just had Sanguinity proofread this recipe, and she says Tapatio sauce, not green taco sauce!)

I’m pretty sure this came from a Cook’s Illustrated library book, though I didn’t find it on the internet in a cursory search. I know the chipotle tip did, and that book is also why our freezer usually has rolled-up uncooked bacon strips, tablespoon-sized blobs of tomato paste, and whole ginger root in it.

Smoky Salmon and Cranberry Sage

Twenty years after we told the insurance guy we would take care of it soon, our house is no longer covered in battered gray asphalt shingles. Instead it’s this color:

which is called “smoky salmon” and looks a lot more orange and less pink, on the house. Maybe. It changes. The trim is “restoration ivory” and has a touch of spring green in it. All in all, a huge change for our formerly quite scary-looking house. I keep thinking the porch light is on, but it’s just the glowy light-colored paint.

Considering that I did not do the actual work, it’s amazing how stressful I found the re-siding (and painting and rebuilding some of the porch where it was sagging) process. Multiple people right there at the house all the time, and way too many decisions. Sanguinity managed the bulk of it while I hid at the office, and I am very grateful.

To show my appreciation on one of those days, I made her a ridiculous dish from the side of a Triscuit box!

Cranberry & Sage Candied Sweet Potato is made with Cranberry & Sage Triscuits (review), which I bought because they were clearly a leftover holiday item and might never come back. They’re weirdly sweet but tasty. And turns out, when you mash them into crumbs and dump them on top of a baked sweet potato with butter and brown sugar, that is also weirdly sweet but tasty!

Dear person who ordered a blueberry bagel with honey butter this morning,
I discovered when I got to my desk that I had your bagel. It was the only one on the counter when I picked it up, which probably means you had just left with my order, a nine-grain bagel with salmon cream cheese. The two are very different, but turns out I was okay with the bagel fate dealt me. I hope you were too.

serving suggestion

I actually followed the serving suggestion off a Triscuit box. (We have mint growing out back.) box of Reduced Fat Triscuits with picture of cottage cheese, peas, and mint on a triscuit

It was good despite not looking as styled as the photo. Then I finished off the bag of frozen peas by adding them to mac and cheese.

Asali Solomon’s Disgruntled is funny and sad and a coming-of-age novel, but I worry it will fall through the genre cracks because it follows its protagonist, Kenya, from age eight to twenty, and so isn’t sold as YA.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s The Turtle of Oman is slow in a wonderful way. You can get a sense of it from her hilarious-in-parts interview with Roger Sutton. My favorite part was a camping trip in the desert that felt, and feels, eternal.

Intentions

Every year at St. Patrick’s Day, I’m like, “This soda bread is so good! I should make it more than once a year.” And we eat it all up and don’t make it again until a year later when it’s St. Patrick’s Day again.

Now, thanks to buttermilk having been sold out in every size but the half-gallon when we bought our St. Patrick’s Day groceries, I have used some of the leftover to MAKE ANOTHER BATCH of soda bread. It’s in the oven right now!

Conversely, this past Saturday was Canyon Day at Reed, when students and alumni and neighbors get together to pull invasives, plant natives, and improve trails. I was with Sanguinity when I saw the announcement and said, “I should go this year.” She pointed out that I have said that for about 25 years now, @ twice per annum. I don’t think I once said it without expecting I’d go. It’s often written in on my calendar. But I’ve never gone and I didn’t go this time either. I will now stop thinking of myself as someone who goes to Canyon Day.