Iron chef me (food post: totally optional) well, a little about rain too

[ritaxis]

Because the nice fellow was off work for a week and when he's off work he goes to the grocery store extra times and when he goes to the grocery store he brings home at least a half gallon of orange juice at a time, whether or not he even opened the last container,we have more orange juice than you need to drown a small pig.

So orange juice is the secret Iron Chef ingredient for the week.

Dinner tonight:

jasmine rice cooked in orange juice, with saffron, turmeric, celery and onion

carrots cooked in orange juice with (too much) cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg

thin sliced beef marinated in reduced orange juice and cooked with flour and onion and ginger

pear slices soaked in orange juice and dredged with what was supposed to be streusel of plain flour, almond meal, brown sugar and butter but somehow it came out less chunky than streusel so it all blended with the orange juice to make a sort of pudding thing, I know that seems redundant if you use pudding in the UK fashion but it's not a custard, because there's no eggs, so what is it? -- we ate this last with lemon curd I made the other day when I caramelized a pint and a half of mixed citrus peel and made a lemon cake with lemon curd filling and lemon more or less buttercream and the caramelized citrus peel pulverised and spread like glitter around the edge of the cake.

I try to make small things these days, especially small cakes, but I was still disappointed when the nice fellow and Frank devoured the cake while I was off switching out reagents and testing pH strips for the Coastal Water Commission. And whatever the other organization is in Monterey County that does about the same sort of thing.

On another front, it keeps on raining. And raining and raining and raining. March got only twice as much measured rainfall as it usually does, but it was up there at second place in terms of number of rainy days, and there's no reason to think it's going to stop anytime soon (low pressure systems out across the Pacific on into April and maybe May.

Until now the rain had been coming in canny little well-behaved chunks, and we've had no very bad floods or slides. But there's only so much water the soil can carry even if it's coming in the most demure way possible, and we're starting to get slides and warnings for more slides even though they've built great cement walls along the steepest cuts in the hillsides and planted erosion control vegetation on all the rest. Rumor is that Devil's Slide is closed for the duration -- that's okay by me, I hate that road anyways and I always take 17 to the the City. Highway 1 is beautiful, yes, but I can enjoy it up to Halfmoon Bay if I want, and come on home after.

Oh, and Zara -- salmon season ended up starting on time, but they're saying they might close it really early.

Comments

[blackoakdreams.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree, it has definetely been unreasonably rainy these last couple of years. I hope the American behaves itself, or Sacramento Valley will be underwater. Again. At least I live in an area with excellent drainage system, unlike where my family lives. The rain, rain, rain you and I see is snow, snow, snow, which they aren't being properly appreciative of.