Unlike the author of this article, I did eventually produce decent looking sourdough, with best results using Foodgeek’s easy oat sourdough loaf and very little discard or wasted starter. But getting the timing right is hard, and I also bought a lot of “magic gear” that didn’t make it easier, but did make the process more pleasing.
I had whitelisted CNN.com on the Adblock Plus app, but the videos and their unskippable, long pre roll ads refused to play. Had to watch on the CNN app all year, but sometimes it was damned inconvenient.
Tonight, I disabled Adblock Plus, played a video (with ad) on CNN.com, re-enabled ABP, made sure CNN.com was on the whitelist, and now the videos and damn ads play like they should. It just needed an app restart, I guess.
Nutrition Facts Per Serving:
Calories 340; Calories from Fat 150; Total Fat 17g; Cholesterol 70mg; Total Carbohydrates 13g; Protein 29g, Fiber 2g
Since then, it’s been a standby that we make about every 2 weeks or so during the colder weather. I’ve had mixed results – it’s pretty good, but over the years I’ve been scribbling notes about adjusting some of the proportions and adding things.
Tonight, I threw caution to the wind, REALLY changed some proportions, and it’s the best batch we’ve ever made. The only improvement would be if the meat were both tender and nicely seared; I think there was too much oil to get a good sear and it ended up braising rather than browning. Here’s how I currently want to make it from now on:
1 lb sirloin or thin sandwich steak, sliced into 1 inch strips
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon coarse cracked black pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil, divided into 2 1/2 tablespoon portions
1 sweet onion, thin sliced
1 cup mushrooms, sliced
2 heaping tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 cup beef broth
1/2 teaspoon dried tarragon
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
3 or 4 tablespoons tomato paste
3 Tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1-2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/3 cup plain lowfat Greek yogurt (Kroger brand, Chobani, similar
Egg noodles – follow package directions to cook 2 to 4 portions (we prefer the No Yolk Whole Wheat kind).
Directions:
Season sliced beef well with kosher salt and cracked black pepper, set aside. Heat 1/2 tablespoon olive oil in a skillet or Dutch oven over medium-high heat, to about 400F. Add sliced beef and sear until brown crust forms on some sides. Don’t move beef around too much. Once seared, remove to clean bowl, add the other 1/2 tablespoon of oil and saute’ the onion and mushrooms until the onions are translucent and mushrooms begin to release juices. Add flour to the mixture, and continue to cook for two minutes, stirring constantly. Meanwhile combine tarragon, smoked paprika, wine, tomato paste, and beef broth in a 2 cup liquid measuring cup, and pour mixture over the onions and mushrooms, stirring well to combine the flour coating. Reduce the heat to medium, and allow to simmer 10 minutes. Start the egg noodles cooking. When they’re almost done, drain and add to the strogonoff pan – using a Dutch oven makes this less messy. Remove from heat and stir in Dijon mustard and yogurt to taste.
The goal is to get that good brown “fond” from searing the beef in a relatively dry, hot skillet, and then the onions act as their own deglazing and pick up a nice color. If that doesn’t happen, it still tastes great, and the extra Worcestershire and tomato paste still give a good, rich color to the sauce.
Serves 4. or if you’re us, 2. There were no leftovers tonight.
A horrible thing happened Friday night. My iPhone went for an unexpected swim. There was a scream of horror, right after the most awful kerplunk sound ever.
I fished it out and turned it off as quickly as I could, but I wasn’t quick enough. David had pounded upstairs to see what was the matter, and quickly found a container of rice we still had – we stopped cooking rice for dinner quite a while ago. Into the rice it went and I waited, phoneless, for 2 days.
I blame a phone commercial that shows someone dropping their phone in a lake, I’m sure it suggested something to me.
Meanwhile, 2 days later, David brought the phone to me, we powered it up and charged the battery. It seemed to be working, until I tried to use if for the thing you’re supposed to use a cell phone for: making a phone call. I couldn’t seem to connect, or hear if the call was connecting. Turns out, it was.
It took some attempts and texts to discover that my earpiece speaker was fried, and also the speaker for playing music.
Well, shit.
However, all is not lost; David just bought an iPhone 8, and his previous phone could be wiped and reassigned to me. So I’ve bee somewhat frustrated today – using a familiar interface, but a bigger form factor. I’ve been mostly using it as I normally do, but keep running up against missing passwords (most made it over, not all) and signing back in to apps and tools.
Even for posting on this blog, the app I use is causing me problems; I can log in to all my blogs on the iPad version of the app, but I can only log in to 3 blogs on the iPhone. Not a big deal, but it’s frustrating – the WordPress app and the WordPress.com â€jetpack†plugin have these weird behaviors where I have to remember NOT to use the temptingly easy Gmail login, because that leads to duplicate logins that I made inadvertently. And inconsistencies between iPad, iPhone, and desktop “saved passwords†were causing me grief.
Still, at this point I have a working iPhone that I can live with, but I’d rather have my previous one; for one thing, I really like my case, which may be a dumb reason but it matters to me. A repair may be possible, and it’s not paid off yet, which really irks me; how I wish I had not fumbled it into the deep.
Meanwhile, at least I’m still able to keep an eye on the news and on Twitter; and I even texted a friend in Alabama to urge her and her husband to vote tomorrow. Get out the vote, Alabama- vote for Doug Jones and the future. Not for the man who represents the shameful past.
There’s been a lot of it going on. Also a lot of bike riding, getting together with family, working, and getting on with things.
Instead of a long post with words, here’s some pictures.
Going back in time, these are some things I was thinking or doing.
You’ll see lots of memes, bikes, people on bikes, and our cat, Pearl. She’s the cutest!
Goddamit, Google, not again. You’re retiring yet another essential productivity tool!!
Since the launch of Google Photos, we’ve had a lot of questions around what this means for the future of Picasa. After much thought and consideration, we’ve decided to retire Picasa over the coming months in order to focus entirely on a single photo service in Google Photos. We believe we can create a much better experience by focusing on one service that provides more functionality and works across mobile and desktop, rather than divide our efforts across two different products.
I grumble at the way Picasa indexes things, but have based my entire blogging and online creative workflow around how Picasa organizes my images. I use plugins to make batch uploading to Flickr and Facebook easy.
Goddamit, goddamit. Whatever happened to “Don’t Be Evil?”
Goddamit, Google, not again. You’re retiring yet another essential productivity tool!!
Since the launch of Google Photos, we’ve had a lot of questions around what this means for the future of Picasa. After much thought and consideration, we’ve decided to retire Picasa over the coming months in order to focus entirely on a single photo service in Google Photos. We believe we can create a much better experience by focusing on one service that provides more functionality and works across mobile and desktop, rather than divide our efforts across two different products.
I grumble at the way Picasa indexes things, but have based my entire blogging and online creative workflow around how Picasa organizes my images. I use plugins to make batch uploading to Flickr and Facebook easy.
Goddamit, goddamit. Whatever happened to “Don’t Be Evil?”
This is one of several recipe cards Mom wrote up to pass along the secret of her famous Rum Balls, which she developed with her best friend, Veda West. .The story of how this recipe was created involved a big church fundraiser, endless taste-testing, taking doors off hinges, and getting plastered. Also the way I heard it, Mom and Veda had to explain to the church pastor why they were so shickered making Christmas cookies in the church kitchen.
My niece Raeanne has the Christmas card they sent back and forth multiple times in later years, with a story about a cheerful bunny making a batch of liquored-up fruit cake, with disastrous (and hilarious) results. This made them laugh like stink each year; Christmas had well and truly begun when the card had been sent back and forth.
Recipe: Rum Balls Serves : Many Favorite recipe of: Murphyola and Veda
Use 1/2 recipe for less than a mob!
2-1 pound box Vanilla Wafers, crushed evenly
4 cups powdered sugar
5 cups chopped pecans
3 Tablespoons cocoa
1/2 cup light Karo syrup
1 1/4 cup rum
Be sure wafers are crushed well, no lumps, and nuts are finely chopped.
Sift powdered sugar and cocoa together. Blend rum and Karo. Add sugar and cocoa to (vanilla wafer) crumbs, then add in the rum and Karo, thorough blending of all.
Can be packed into Tupperware airtight (containers) – to ‘mellow’ – til ready to make into balls 1″ (press and roll firmly). Rolls in powdered sugar – must be kept air tight or they dry out — make out only what is needed – makes a mess. Would use 1/2 recipe.
That’s pretty much the verbatim transcription. Mom seemed to use a dash or emdash for any kind of punctuation. The card is in a little plastic envelope and is a bit messy, with guck on it from being handled with gooey hands. The older versions of this recipe are with my sister Timmy – she says she has several cards, but still had to adjust the recipe a bit for a reasonably-sized batch. My niece Holly Martin, who’s one of the family foodies, commented on Facebook that this didn’t seem to have enough rum! Well, well see, but I seem to recall these things being pretty powerful, so don’t give them to anyone that should not have alcohol, as they are not cooked in any way.
I remember being delegated to crush vanilla wafers in a paper bag with a rolling pin or a meat tenderizer, as Mom never did get around to buying a full-size food processor, although she had a tiny one that was good for chopping maybe a half-cup of nuts at a time. I also remember chopping pecans and repeatedly being told “no, they’re not fine enough, keep chopping!”
David remembers helping Mom to roll out a batch on his first visit to Salt Lake to meet the family, which was in about 1996? Before we were married.
I’ll be attempting to make rum balls this year – I have a smallish food processor so I’ll be making either a quarter batch or a half batch. I bought Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa, I have Captain Morgans’s Spiced Rum, and a 12 oz. box of Vanilla wafers, so will probably add in some crushed butter cookies to make up the difference.
Will have to run out to the store for the additional cookies though, cause I ated the first box this week for teatime snacks.
Divided by continent, YOU ARE HERE represents one (idealized) orbit of the ISS. This planetary photo tour — surprising, playful, thought-provoking, and visually delightful — is also punctuated with fun, fascinating commentary on life in zero gravity.
It’s been such a long time since I’ve written anything about the goings-on here at Chez Gique.
Why? I’ve been putting stuff off, and avoiding my desktop computer, and not using the laptop because it seems really slow and pokey now, and a whole host of reasons. The backlog of Stuff I Need To Do and the backlog of Stuff I Should Blog About is just… enormous, and the tools at my disposal (newish iPhone, newish iPad mini) are usually being used for important stuff like reading about someone doing something worng on the Internets, or playing Minion Rush.
So anyway, a list, in emotional bombshell order, of stuff that’s on my mind or on my chest that I need to put into words and deal with.
Riley died on August 31. I have a lot of photos on my phone of him, and even more on my desktop, but not many of him from the last couple of months, because his lymphoma just made him so, so skinny. I tried, in a last ditch effort, to get him on a more beefed up drug regimen and it seemed to be helping at first, but he couldn’t hang on to any nutrition no matter what we did.
Finally, the last week it looked pretty dire, as I had time off that week and spent a lot of time holding him and trying to get him to eat. On the Sunday, he stood over his water dish with this befuddled “what do I do now?†attitude and was unable to lap up any water. He was unsteady on his feet and as David and I looked at him, aghast, I thought “Oh, he’s done…. he’s just so tired.†It seemed like the last-ditch, full-bore heroics route would just prolong the inevitable, since he was dehydrated anyway and I could only get him to take a few squirts of water by mouth with a syringe.
I held him as he rested from the effort to try to get him to drink and eat (he pretty much turned away from offered food, and the oral syringe was clearly causing him to stress out). And David and I decided, well, we’d fought hard and Riley had fought hard, and our vet’s office, though closed, had an outgoing message that recommended a nearby 24/7 emergency pet hospital for out-of-hours problems (it was a Sunday, after all). So we packed Riley into his favorite basket (not the usual carrier), and we went over there while I held him on my lap and petted him. He looked around a little, like.. “whu…. whut’s goin’ on?†but he didn’t cry and wasn’t too fussed. And so on and so forth; the vet evaluated him, talked to us about options, and agreed with us that it was time. We stayed with him, petting him and talking to him, through the very end. The vet left us alone with him for as long as we needed.
We left without out our dear friend and companion, but before leaving him alone on the cold steel examining table, I made sure… I just had to make him a cozy kitty one last time, it was this thing I would always do. We were leaving a towel behind, and I wrapped him up in a little nest the way he had liked. It was a very final farewell, because as I handled him it was made crystal clear to me that he was gone. We left, quickly, and went home to clear things away and clean up the area where his bowls and food had been stored. Later that day, we went to a family barbecue and wondered what the hell had happened to us – felt like we’d been blindsided. Little did we know… but the house has been awfully quiet since then.
We miss him and will continue to mourn him for a long time.
As it happens, he had a stash of meds and food that could be donated back to our regular vet to help someone else’s cat, so yesterday I finally made time to head over there with a bagful of high-nutrition kitten food, drugs, supplies, and some other canned stuff that was refundable. Actually, I was in the neighborhood because of the next development in order of emotional bombshellness.
So I walked in to Arlington Cat Clinic and dropped off all the goodies and chatted with Adelle at the front desk, and looked at the current cat-in-residence who’s available for adoption – her name is Gabby and she looked like a sweet girl tabby. Then one of the techs walked to the back with a small cat carrier that was emitting a series of tiny little squeaks.
What was it? a Meezer kitten – a Siamese that had been found in someone’s window well. It required hand feeding because it was so tiny. It was just a week or two old.
When I was growing up, my childhood cat Beebee had several litters of kittens, until my mom finally decided to get her spayed (or as I thought it was pronounced, “spadedâ€). So it had been many years since I’d held a wee Meezer kitty, and it was just big enough to fill one hand. Its eyes were open but its ears were still placed far down on the side of its skull – as the kitty grows, the ears sort of migrate from the sides to the top because the space between them doesn’t increase that much.
So it cried and went “eee! EEE!!†while I held it under my chin while I cried and went “aw… AWWWWWâ€, and the tears started to come. Adelle came up and asked me something about Riley’s stuff that I’d dropped off. So I cuddled it a bit and handed it back for more feeding, knowing that we couldn’t possibly handle another cat for a long while yet. We need to take some time.
But boy, it sure is going to be cute, and there are some siblings and the mom that someone else brought in, so if you want to get your name in, check with Arlington Cat Clinic, they have a lot of other kittens and cats available for adoption that are currrently fostered out. Although they don’t take cats in, they do have their… network of minions that make sure that cats have someplace to stay while waiting to be placed.
Here’s a video that they made, featuring hospital cat and Head of Security, Dr Leon. I didn’t see him on our recent visits, so I hope he’s okay, he was a big help when I had to re-learn how to pill Riley a couple of years ago.
So that brings me to the next thing on my mind.
It’s a wonderful thing that David’s dad Sheldon and his lovely lady Linda live near us, as we can get together with them so easily now, with no hour-long drive to their home. We attended a family barbecue (the day we lost Riley) and then a week later, there was another family barbecue – so easy now to gather the family, we couldn’t be happier for Dad and Linda.
At that second barbecue, we met some new extended family (close family to Linda). It was a very nice time, but there was a lot of hubbub and people milling about, so it was kind of hard to visit with everyone. Some of Linda’s family members were traveling on to the next part of a long-planned vacation, and they were very excited about that. I wish I had spent more time talking with them. REALLY wish.
A few days after the second barbecue, Sheldon texted me to call him, and got shocking news; one of Linda’s family, that we met for the first time that Sunday, had passed away suddenly, and Linda was already on her way to an Eastern city to be with other family members who were left waiting for everyone to get home from the west coast vacation. There’s a lot to leave unsaid, but it was completely unexpected, although the family member did have a chronic illness that ultimately wasn’t the direct cause of death.
It was just. awful and so very sudden. You just can never tell what comes next (or not) in life.
So to make things easier for Shel, I went over several times this week to help him with Linda’s cats, and then he went East for the services. I was happy to do something to help Linda so she wouldn’t have to worry, and I was happy to spend time with cats that I could feed, pet, and say “bye-bye” and head home. Shel and Linda got home earlier today, and her family are gathering themselves together after dealing with the services and all the people wanting to help them – there was an outpouring of love, and it was very inspiring, according to Linda. But still, in the end, the family is left to pick themselves up and go on, so they will.
Aside from the crappy end to the summer, it’s been great… um and now it’s going to be fall soon, as the weather seems to have gone colder and wetter awfully early.
That’s about it for the catch-up, now to see if this draft makes it to the server.
A horrible thing happened Friday night. My iPhone went for an unexpected swim. There was a scream of horror, right after the most awful kerplunk sound ever.
