My mouth is filled with flavors… yum!
mmmm …. I’ve been cooking decadent goodies for friends’ parties this weekend, since everyone knows you should save those for when OTHER people will be eating most of them :D
I made Pamela’s Brownies (yes, it’s a mix) for the barbecue today, which have to be the best brownies ever invented. I use the version of the recipe with no – yes, that’s no – oil or butter whatsoever. They are also gluten-free and vegetarian (and you can make a vegan version if you want). We originally bought these brownies to make for my sister-in-law, who has a gluten-free diet, and they were so good that it’s basically not worth making any other kind. Especially considering they take about 5 minutes to make and with no fats are actually healthy, and taste incredible.
On the other end of the health spectrum, tonight I made flavored butters for a Waffle Brunch tomorrow that another friend is giving. There’s no way to make butter healthy, but I’ve been wanting to try this idea and everyone puts butter on waffles, right? It just wouldn’t be a waffle party without it :) So, I made four kinds – cinnamon, honey-vanilla, ginger-lime, and blackberry. And tried my best not to taste them too much (but I can tell you in confidence the cinnamon one is divine!).
Then, feeling like I should eat just a bit of real food after making butter :) and a mid-afternoon barbecue, I ate one slice of what has to be the best bread I have eaten in a long time. It’s not something fancy, “just” herb bread, made by Stone Ground Bakery, a local bakery here in Olympia. Just opening the bag releases a wonderful herbal, buttery smell. The bread smells wonderful, has the perfect texture (not too airy, not too dense), and tastes as good as it smells. I’m sitting here just savoring the excellence of this bread. More food should be like this.
In weather news…
Driving to a friend’s party today, I was struck by the headline news on NPR. The first four stories were all about strange weather… followed by the elections in Zimbabwe. Except for the very first item, this wasn’t the weather, it was the news news, if you know what I mean. So here they were:
- Record high temperatures in the Pacific Northwest for this date, including over 100 degrees in Shelton and other areas west of the Cascades (!) Thankfully, it only got up to 87 here. Not incidentally, it’s really much worse for it to be this hot so early in the year, because the days are SO long. Usually this kind of weather doesn’t come until August, when blessed relief in the form of evening arrives sooner :) My garden was really nice this evening, when the house was still too hot.
- President Bush declaring an emergency in California, where yet again, multiple large fires are raging due to lightning strikes – though it’s a bit early in the year, the firefighters and local community resources are already exhausted.
- In stark contrast to the first two items, a levee breaking in Missouri as constant rain continues to bring misery to towns and cities in the Midwest.
- Power outages (and flooding) across central Ohio following windstorms and tornadoes. Do you think of Ohio as a tornado state?
Routine newscasts like this one may finally give a clue to those who go around saying that global warming couldn’t really be happening because (insert dumb idea here…/it’s colder than usual this month/it’s raining a lot lately/everything seems normal today).
The Big Read
Shamelessly stolen from a friend’s website, because I think reading books is important :)
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. Well let’s see.
1 ) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Asterisk the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them ;)
I’ve read 58…
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
**2. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
**4. Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible – various
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. The Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
**19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
**43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – A.S. Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
**84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
**92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Bumper stickers of the week
Seen in Olympia this week…
“Don’t act stupid -we have world leaders for that!”
“Will work for peace.”
And my favorite:
“Two girls, one cupcake”
and no, I have no idea what it means :)
Finding the rhythms of the neighborhood
I’m learning the rhythms of this neighborhood -where the sun falls in the garden at different times of day, when the mail comes, when people come and go on my street… Friday mornings are a bit challenging due to the garbage trucks that rumble in at what for me is an early hour, and then the neighbors who get out and rumble their cans back from the street just as I’m getting back to sleep :)
And then there’s the house itself – getting used to the sound of the furnace, which sounds like distant thunder, finding the places where the floorboards creak, knowing when a car is pulling up to my house or my neighbor’s house, which shares a driveway, figuring out where the cat is meowing from and where she has found as her newest hiding place.
Today, I spent a lot of time in the garden. This morning we looked for the right sunny spots to put the raised beds that came yesterday, which entailed some moving around of patio furniture and rearranging of pathways. Now there are places to sit out of the sun, which is a good thing. Sophie favors the chair under the honeysuckle arbor, or hiding under the couch near the tall grass.
We had our first hot day, so I made use of that same chair, which is the coolest shady spot in the garden. Later I enjoyed the slightly cooler temperatures in the evening, and while I was sitting outside, had a new delivery – my composter. Between the vegetable garden (which doesn’t yet quite exist) and the composting, this should be an interesting year of garden adventures for me – hopefully small enough to be manageable, with more of my food coming from home and less leaving it!
Inherited gardens
It’s interesting to be in possession of a garden not your own, even a small space like mine, that has been carefully tended by someone else. The first year is fun, as you watch to see what comes up and decide what to keep, what to move, what to add.
So far, the things I really like: Lilacs, hydrangea, foxgloves, white bleeding heart, lily of the valley, small forest floor ground cover plant that I’m not sure of, azaleas, the amazing honeysuckle vine that creeps over the arbor, japanese maples and ferns.
Those that may get replaced: Pansies and geraniums in planter boxes (not my style), a couple of clumps of grasses that seem completely out of place, a very large jasmine vine (some like the scent but I find it overpowering), orange daylilies, yellow chain tree out front.
Things to add: clematis, climbing rose, vine maples, salal, raised beds with veggies!!
Tweet!
OK, I’m finally giving in :) and joining Twitter. Just to see… Help make it fun and come on board! The more of you that are on there doing interesting things, the better :) And if you’re already on Twitter, let me know your user name so I can find you … mine is TeresaMichelsen (simple, but descriptive! LOL).
And if you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, check it out at the link above. It’s just a way for us all to let each other know what we’re doing whenever we feel like it, in a sentence or two. Kind of a nice way to keep in touch with people far away. If you’d like a little customizable PC-tool to have it on your desktop instead of visiting the website all the time, you can get that free at Twitteroo or Twhirl.
See you soon!
Eat this fish
The other day, a friend asked me why I said he should not buy farmed salmon… not to mention shellfish from Asia, etc. I had some answers for him, but it’s a complicated subject. If you’re interested in eating sustainably, seafood is becoming a more and more difficult and confusing prospect, even though it’s healthy and low on the food chain, and therefore would generally be a more desirable form of protein.
So, I was really happy to see this guide to sustainable seafood, developed by a reputable source, the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It has local guides for various areas, a searchable database, and explanations for each rating. You can look up any fish or shellfish you like and find out which types are the best choice, which are good alternatives, and which to avoid – and a detailed explanation of why.
So for example, Alaska-caught wild salmon is in the “best choice” category. Washington-caught wild salmon is in the “good alternative” category – and farmed salmon from anywhere in the world, along with Atlantic salmon, are in the avoid category.
In case you’re wondering, farmed salmon are a major problem because:
- When they inevitably escape from their pens, they compete with wild salmon for food and spawning areas, and dilute wild species with inferior genes, producing salmon that are less able to survive in the wild
- Salmon rearing pens generate mounds of fecal waste on the bottom filled with excessive organic material, antibiotics, and pollutants
- Farmed salmon have parasites and diseases (from being raised in such close quarters) that can spread to wild fish
- Antibiotics used to prevent the above diseases are ultimately released to the environment and contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistant diseases
- It takes three pounds of wild fish to feed one pound of farmed salmon. Yes, they grind up fish and feed it to fish that don’t eat much fish. So in other words, for each farmed fish, three wild fish are lost. Not a good trade.
- Farmed salmon are pale and tasteless compared to wild salmon, like so much artificially grown food.
Is it really worth the few dollars you might save?
It’s kind of funny…
but I’m much less annoyed by gigantic SUVs now that i know how much they’re paying for gas…
Done talking about houses!! :)
Well, OK, I may post some more SOMEtime. But most of you know my blogs have been almost entirely about moving, looking for, and buying houses lately – because that’s all I could think about and almost all I had time for! I’ve been itching to get back to other interesting subjects (and to actual life) for some time now. But first, an update for all of you who have patiently followed this journey.
I moved in Wednesday!! Yay! It didn’t even rain, even though it has the rest of the week. I had a GREAT moving crew and a fabulous friend here to help me move in, and by the time we were done, 2/3 of it was already unpacked! Rick was right in his thought that if there were a few rooms totally done, including ones you mainly need to use (kitchen, bedroom, living room), it would feel like a home already. And so it was. He even organized and unpacked the garage (in between fixing little things that needed fixing).
I have been busy setting up the computers, doing a lot of administrative stuff related to the move, and am trying to get around to the grocery store to stock the kitchen. I still have a wireless network to set up today among other things. But I am doing it in my spacious living area, which is the main part of the house, kind of a combination work area, dining room, and living room space, with the kitchen connected. It has high ceilings, skylights, tile and wood floors, a gas free-standing fireplace, and french doors to the deck and enclosed garden.
There’s lots of things to figure out still, like the most efficient way to heat the different parts of the house given the gas stove and the furnace and the odd hours that I work and sleep. I’m planning to grow some food in raised beds, and that’s taking some thought as to how to do it organically and sustainably. But probably the best part so far is just how quiet and peaceful it is.
I have slept so well the last two nights – the only sounds are the birds in the morning (and the rain!). And my cat, who is not happy about being excluded from the bedroom. But, she used to really keep me awake at night and I’ve decided it’s time to take back my sleep. Also there’s no other guest room now for my frequent visitors who are allergic to cats. Soooo poor kitty, she’s sleeping in the living room now. She’ll get over it – she’s got a lot more room to play and explore, and a private garden where no other cats or dogs can bother her :)
My main prayer to the Universe (given that the houses on either side of me are for sale)… may the peace of this neighborhood remain and bless me, my cat, and all the neighbors for years to come.
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