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ritaxis: (hat)
Saturday, May 25th, 2013 06:07 pm
I think this would be a cake if I had added a half cup of flour and another egg (and I may do that next time)

boil enoujgh whole lemons (in this case about 12) for an hour or so to make 3 cups when pureed skin & seeds & all in the blender.

cream a cup of butter (2 standard US sticks) and probably 4 cups of sugar. I did three and then added more when I tasted the batter.

mix in two huge (what are they called? jumbo?) or three medium eggs, the three cups of pureed lemon, and a pound of almond flour

taste and add sufficient sugar to make it not too bitter for your personal taste

mix in a teaspoon each of baking powder, vanilla extract and almond extract, a half teaspoon of cinnamon, and if necessary to cut bitterness, a quarter teaspoon of salt.  I think a teaspoon of orange flower water would be good with this too

I do not know what is the best sort of pan for this. I put it into a 9X14? steam table pan and a 4X9 loaf pan, and the first is about 1 and half inches tall, almost two, and the other is a little taller. I

cook for an hour? at 350 degrees F (unpregeated oven: probably less in a preheated one)

It is very nice warm with whatever you have that's like milk or cream.

On another front:
My knee rehabilitation is to the point that I have decided I have to stop avoiding going downhill or down stairs. I meant to go to the dog park on Frederick Street today and go down the long steep stairs to the yacht harbor and then I recalled that it is Memorial Day Weekend and I don't want to drive around town with all the tourists, but that did not mean that I chickened out altogether! When Truffle announced it was walkies time, we went for a bit longer walk so I could go up Laurel Street (and at speed, thank you, which is something), and down the stairs and up them again at the High School, and down some more stairs, and then down the steep drive to the high school gym. Then we went around the trfack while I did Silly Walks almost the whole way to further exercise the various obscure leg muscles. Silly Walks are amazing little exercises. No equipment, you don't have to go anywhere, and they raise the pulse and work the muscles you choose. I actually can get pretty winded doing SIlly Walks. I did Silly Walks that are like marching, like kicking backwards, like kicking sideways, like crossing the legs in midair, and several that involving waving the arms around in circles of different types. All in all, we were out more than an hour and a half and now my leg muscles are not sure whether to gloat or complain.

Most nights these days my knees don't wake me up even once. It's a long ways from being waked up three to five times a night with pain that rivals childbirth or toothache. But I'm also a long ways from being in top shape.
ritaxis: (hat)
Wednesday, January 30th, 2013 03:00 pm
I cut down the watersprout that was coming from below the graft on the almond tree in time for the gtreencycle pickup, which leaves me free to fill the can again this week, which I definitely ought to do.

I had a lot of sprouted garlic, so even though they say to plant in October, I put them in the window box with the alyssum. Also I planted snap peas, pole beans, and yellow chard, in paper egg cartons and a pierced tofu box respectively/  The kale I planted a few weeks ago is still at the cotyledon stage, but they are tall cotyledons and ought to bedeveloping true leaves any minute. Naturally, the parsley is still thinking about whether or not to sprout -- it looks like three or four have decided to try it out, and the others are waiting to see how it works out. I had a lead on free kale starts, but I have so much kale in the egg cartons and more seeds after that, so I don't think I should follow up on it.  Give the other guy a chance, you know.

Really, six vegetables is pretty optimistic, considering that most of my yard is still suffering under the piles of construction debris. Anyway, my absent-mindedness in years past is serving me well this year, because I have all these seeds to plant. And yes, they all seem to be viable.

Speaking of peas, I have a two-pound bag of shredded iceberg lettuce from Grey Bears, so I have decided to make peas, lettuce and herbs soup, especially after reading that this would be a way to use up the three cups of whey I have after converting my roommate's sour milk into ricotta (I thought I was making yogurt but I let it get too hot so I got actually quite nice ricotta, which is probably better, given that ricotta is more expensive than yogurt anyway). It's quite simple, by the way: I had three cups of sour low-fat milk, to which I added a third of a cup of natural sour cream and two-thirds of a cup of natural whole milk yogurt, and then I let is sit for a while, and then I warmed it up and tried to keep the temperature in the recommended range but it got a little hot and it separated more than yogurt ought to so I warmed it up some more and then I scooped it into a napkin spread on a sieve and squeezed all the whey out. I tried to make "whey ricotta" out of the resulting whey, but there wasn't enough left. I realized afterwards that the whey that the blogs were talking about was from making cheese with whole milk, and not low-fat milk, so not the same thing really.

Am I an insuifferable foodie? Or just bored and poor? I only make jam from free fruit. I only made my own peanut butter (at home, instead of in the machine at the hippie store) because decent peanut butter reached six dollars a pound. (it was not an unqualified success -- the nice inexpensive peanuts from Trader Joe's apparently have a lot less oil in them than regular peanut-butter making peanuts)

When I pruned the plum tree I brought in some budded branches, but they haven't advanced much. The almond tree looks like it's thinking about bursting out any moment. It's not long until other people's plum trees will be blooming, but mine is always last, and so are my plums (they are not ready until August). I had a dream about racking and bottling the wine, and among my stepmother's effects I found a half-drunk bottle of my best year's product, and it tasted pretty good.

Also: Andrew Marvell has been talking to my lemon trees. My, I have a lot of lemons. I have not counted them, but they seem as numerous as my mother in law's used to be, and she used to get a thousand lemons a year. These are not quite ripe, in general, but they have dropped a huge number of nice ones. That's unusual, and I think it is because of people trying to reach the best ones up top and knocking some off. My next door neighbor on the other side has carte blanche to use as many as she wants, and she is short like me and getting frail. Anyway, my kitchen has rather too many lemons in it at the moment, especially considering I still have a lot of marmalade left from last year.

head thing notes: I found a forty-six dollar check from the last time I was on unemployment a year and a half ago. It was good for a year. . .
ritaxis: (Default)
Sunday, September 24th, 2006 08:57 pm
My friend Liz married her daughter off yesterday. Both the bride and groom have the surnamde Gutierrez, which is a convenience since they don't have to decide whether anybody's going to change their name. Both have Mexican fathers and other types of angloish mothers. So the ceremony was rigorously bilingual. They got an aunt of Donaji's and an uncle of Francisco's to officiate -- apparently nowadays you can get anybody made a deputy commissioner of the county for the purpose. I wish that had been the case when we were getting married! The uncle did his part in English and the aunt did her part in Spanish and there was a program which translated each into the other language.
They did sweet little speeches about how cool it was that they were getting married this way, and talked about how wonderful their names were, and they had one teenaged girl reading that piece from Corinthians about how "there's faith, and there's hope, and there's charity, but the greatest of these is love," and that's when I cried because the last time I heard that read ot loud in a public ceremony it was my mother-in-law's funeral. And then another teenaged girl read this entirely sexy bit from an Irish poet. The couple got bound together with a lasso of ti leaves and gardenias draped in a figure eight on them by their respective mothers, and they exchanged rings, and they had to be told to kiss.



There were cute little kids of various hues carrying ring pillows and baskets of rose petals, and there were cute little kids playing very nice Irish music, and a nice supper cooked by the culinary students at the community college (the venue is a nice house-like edifice owned by the college and rented out for stuff like this), and all in all, it was a proper wedding, not too long, not too complicated, with lots of fun details. Donaji is not a prima donna: she told her bridesmaids "get a nice green dress you'll want to wear later -- any color of green." Somehow they all ended up inthe exact same shade of sage green, each in a different and flattering dress.

And then, at the end, there was dancing to oldies, of course, and Donaji's mother and father -- divorced almost her whole life -- danced together and had fun. And that's worth recording!

on another front, I sent a piece about terraforming and too many lemons to Gastronomicon II. Flash fiction is actually kind of fun sometimes and I might write more of it, who knows?

on still another front but somewhat related, I don't quite understand these guidelines, but I have till February to figure them out.