MelissaH

The hard part about a foodblog is catching up with everything that happened after turning the computer off. Yesterday during the afternoon football-watching session, I ate a little bowl of munchymix. Munchymix is our generic term for whatever we eat in front of the TV, if it's not a single ingredient like cashews or candied peanuts or M&Ms. My favorite munchymixes come from Trader Joe's, and they're relatively easy to haul back because they pack nicely. I liked this mix, because I like dried blueberries. (I know I've gone on the record above as saying that I don't like raisins. But I do like most other dried berries (blue, cran, straw), as well as other dried fruits such as cherries, pineapple, apple, papaya, and mango.) And then we headed over next door. Our next door neighbors are both retired: he was an art professor, and she taught music for the Fulton school district, and still conducts the Fulton Community Band. (Disclaimer: I play flute in the community band. We usually have either rehearsal or a concert on Thursday nights, but we take the month of September off after a busy summer season.) It was very much a culinary crowd for dinner last night. Both of us like to cook. As we were arriving, we met another couple coming for dinner, and he used to cook for a hotel here in town that's since become a nursing home. And the other two people were already inside: they're here for school, but he's a CIA graduate and cooked on a cruise ship for a bit. The other guests of the evening were just babies: They're about two months old, and were adopted a week ago. The evening started with rosemary cashews, cheese and crackers, and conversation in the studio. The wedge in back is St.-André. In front is Drunken Goat, and the piece on the left was something unremarkable coated in cocoa. (It was a tasty cheese, but the chocolate flavor didn't come through.) From there, we moved to the dining room for a sweet potato gratin with pecan topping, pork tenderloin with fried sage leaves because the garden's been prolific in its sage production this fall, and a dish of green beans, tomatoes (from the garden), and crispy pancetta with shaved parmesan. To drink: For dessert: I think this is a peach parfait recipe from Fine Cooking earlier this summer. The peaches were peeled and sliced off the pit. The whipped cream was sweetened with honey. And the crumbs were crumbled biscotti. We'll probably see our neighbors at the recital this afternoon. This professor always puts together a nice program, and it doesn't hurt that he's drop-dead gorgeous! MelissaH

Happy Sunday, everyone! When I opened my eyes this morning, I was greeted by a chorus of meows. You don't need to speak Cat to understand what the boys were saying: "FEED ME!" But our boys have been known to lie to us before, so instead of automatically getting dishes and a can from their storage place in my morning-fogged state, I first checked the fridge. And this is what I found: We always put the half-can of food for the boys' dinner in a green-lidded container. I know that if I see a green lid like this one in the fridge, my husband the early bird has already taken care of the boys. Most mornings, he's way ahead of me. But some mornings, I find the container holding the cat food sitting on the counter instead of the fridge. Sometimes when that happens, the lid's not even on the container yet. And once I found the container, uncovered, with all the juice licked off. The cats are not permitted on the kitchen counters, or the dining room table, but the rules only apply when someone's there to enforce them. Ah, the mind of a cat. After satisfying Leo with a rub behind the ears and nearly getting tripped by Lyon weaving through my legs so he could bash his head against my ankles, it was time for a drink. It was chilly last night, so I decided I wanted something hot this morning. Same old electric kettle. I like this one because all the wires are in the base, and you can pick up the water-containing part with no strings attached. And (I tried but couldn't get a decent photo) when you turn it on, there's a cool blue light inside. The tea and teacup both came from our last visit to Belgium. I like that the cup's clear, so you can see how dark your tea is getting without having to lift the lid. The tea we picked up at a shop in Brugge called Javana. Here's a better look at the label: I don't speak much Dutch beyond the basic polite phrases. As far as I can figure out, this is Fruits of the South tea, mixed from hibiscus, rose hips, and dried pineapple, apple, and lemon chunks. The tea brews up to a beautiful reddish color. Some tea you can pour fresh water over the infuser and get a second cup of tea out, but not this. All the goodness has been extracted after the first cup. Today, there are two events on the agenda. First, there's a football game to watch! I grew up in Pittsburgh, and I'm old enough to remember the last of the glory years of the Steel Curtain. You can imagine the horrors I experienced when I moved to the Cleveland area. But at least living there, our TV antenna could pick up the stations from Youngstown, which usually carried the Steeler games rather than the Browns games. Here, the closest team to us is the Buffalo Bills, but you also find a fair number of Jets and Giants fans as well. This week, the Steelers are hosting the Bills, which means that I get to watch my team on TV. But I'll probably only see the first half of the game. This afternoon, we'll be heading onto campus. There's a piano recital! One of our music professors (the same one who plays jazz on Wednesday nights, and who took part in the chamber music concert this last Wednesday) will be performing works by Mendelssohn, Beethoven, J.S. Bach, Liszt, Barber and Gershwin. His recitals are always a treat. MelissaH

I was rudely surprised the first time I ran into a half moon cookie. My family has roots three generations back in NYC, and I've long been a fan of black and whites. When we moved here, I saw a cookie that looked like a black and white, but the nameplate said "half moon cookie" instead. I got one. I still haven't gotten over my disappointment and I still haven't bought another half moon. Can you believe, you can get them with a chocolate cookie? That still seems just as wrong to me as the gooshy icing. The only place I regularly see them in Oswego is Ontario Orchards. Even our grocery stores don't seem to have them. MelissaH

I haven't had Owen's ribs, but I have had the pleasure of eating John-John's. I, too, fail to be impressed by Dinosaur BBQ, and prefer to make my own. I like sauce on my ribs, and usually use =Mark's South Carolina Mustard Barbecue sauce. This is sounding like it may turn into a smackdown at some point. MelissaH

It's been one of those mornings where I should have started oatmeal last night. I was up fairly late, finishing knitting the cabled band for my hat. This morning, I rolled out of bed just as my husband announced that he was going out to deal with the hazmat disposal at the transfer station. This so discombobulated me that I showered, dressed, and stumbled downstairs without eating breakfast. I arranged myself in front of the TV, knitting in hand and instruction book in front of me, to try and graft the ends of my band together. This was at about 8:30 this morning. The next couple of hours involved much nonverbal grumbling. When I used actual words, it came out as even worse language. Fortunately, the only ones around to hear me were Leo and Lyon, and they seemed to not understand English (in this case, Anglo-Saxon? ) this morning. They're cats. Sometimes they understand perfectly. Other times, they don't have a clue what you're saying. I grafted the ends of my band together, only to discover that I'd managed to do the whole thing backwards. So I picked all my stitches out, painstakingly catching each loop back on a knitting needle as it was opened back up, and started again. I had problems again, and picked the stitches out again. Then I got a different book to see if a different set of pictures helped at all. They didn't, the third time through. I started yet again. By now, both the yarn and my nerves were more than a little frazzled. I'm glad that yarn is more forgiving of do-overs than pastry crust. A couple of stitches into Attempt #4, my husband came home from the transfer station. He pulled on a pair of leather work gloves, grabbed the maul from the garage, and headed outside through the sliding door in the family room to split some firewood. He didn't close the door behind him. I kept on going. I goofed. I dropped loops while pulling my stitches out. I managed to pick them up, and got ready to start over. I decided that whatever happened on this fifth attempt, I'd go with it. The junction's going to go in the back of the hat, so it won't be too visible. The yarn I'd been using was starting to untwist, and I was starting to splice stitches. As I turned the pages of the third knitting book to figure out where I was screwing up, I realized that my fingers were cold to the point of being stiff, so I closed the sliding door. And then I did something radical. I'm very left-handed. My father is also very left-handed. His mother was left-handed. I knit right-handed because the whole world knits right-handed, and it's messy to follow patterns if you don't knit right-handed. Knitting right-handed has never been an issue for me, because you need to use both hands. But when I need to seam something together, I hold the needle in my left hand and sew left-handed. And that's what I'd been trying to do: graft left-handed. But my instructions are all for grafting right-handed. And because you're trying to duplicate what the yarn does, it's critical that you put the needle through each loop in the proper direction. So you can see where I might get confused, especially when I add that both my father and I are very bad with right and left, and we both have to think very hard about which way is left if we're driving and someone says "Turn left up ahead." My radical move: I continued to hold the needle in my left hand. But I started to graft at the right end, as if I were right handed. It was awkward, but I managed it. And then I got the idea to start each stitch as if I were working from the right end, but then turn it around to look at what I was doing if I were grafting left-handed. In the end, I managed to generate my own instructions for grafting left-handed. And this is the result: No sense in weaving ends in till the whole hat's knitted. And then, I realized that my stomach was growling, so I ate two bowls of cereal. That should keep me going till dinner tonight, with a bit of gametime munching in front of the TV. MelissaH

Who knew there were so many oatmeal lovers out there? And that's only including those who have come out of the woodwork so far! MelissaH

Dinner tonight: we went to Rudy's! We always walk there, unless the weather's nasty enough that we're getting it to go. Tonight was nice but windy, so we walked. Inside, it looked just the way Rudy's always does. It was still early so people were only stacked one-deep at the counter waiting to place their orders. During the heart of the summer, it will be so crowded that you can barely wiggle your way up. Here's what you order from. I got a guppy plate and an order of zucchini. Casey got smelt and onion pieces. We both got lemonade to drink. When they came out, here's what our dinner looked like. Haddock's a favorite of mine, and Rudy's does it well. This particular batch of zucchini was not as good as what I'd had a few weeks ago. I think the local zucchini run may be over, and this was frozen. At any rate, it was mushier than I'd prefer, although even mushy fried zucchini from Rudy's is still pretty good. Casey had never before gotten their smelt, or their onion pieces. They don't look all that different on the outside, do they? As you might be able to see from the pictures, we chose to eat inside at one of the half-dozen tables. We saw other people taking their food outside, but I was afraid that I'd lose something to the wind. Every time someone opened the door to enter or leave, we had to hold onto our tartar sauce packets and napkins! As we finished, the electrician who worked on our kitchen reno came in, and we chatted while he waited for his order to come up. He was in a good mood. Happy electricians are a good thing. Our meal finished, we walked home. And we saw all kinds of signs that summer is officially ending, like this one on the door of Rudy's: and this one at Bev's: Ordinarily we'd stop at Bev's and eat our ice cream as we walk home. But we have frozen PB&J waiting for us, so we kept on walking. As we walked, we saw more signs of fall, but these were nonverbal. Tomorrow, we're going to the transfer station in the morning because they're having a household hazardous waste drop-off day. We have stuff to get rid of that was in the garage when we bought the house. We'll probably spend the afternoon parked in front of the television watching college football—kickoff for the first game we care about is at noon. And then we've been invited next door for dinner. I hope our neighbors and their other guests don't mind me bringing the camera! MelissaH

Today's lunch was another Creative Use of Leftovers. It involved the goat cheese and caramelized onions that hadn't gotten used on pizza last night. I reheated the onions in the microwave for a minute. While they warmed, I put my nonstick frying pan on the stove. A tortilla went into the pan, and I smeared the warm onions on one side. Over the top of that, I scattered the goat cheese crumbles, and folded the uncovered tortilla half over the top. After a few minutes of cooking, I flipped the whole thing over with my asbestos fingers. When the cheese had melted, I declared lunch cooked. Voilà! An onion and goat cheese quesadilla, alongside a Diet Dr Pepper. I wish I could find the caffeine-free equivalent, but nowhere here seems to carry it. Speaking of beverages, I realized that I didn't show you what we drank with our pizza last night. So here they are, or what's left of them. The bottle on the left contained hard cider. Earlier this summer, we circled Lake Ontario, taking our time to do the trip so we could explore. This cider was one of our finds. Almost directly across the lake from us is Prince Edward County, Ontario. The County is quite agricultural, similar to what we have around here, but they get less snow than we do. There are few commercial examples of hard cider available here so we look for different versions to try. We made a point of visiting County Cider, where we tried everything they had before deciding what to buy. This bottle held their Waupoos Premium Cider, which is pleasantly dry and bubbly. I like bubbles. When we were at the cidery, we purchased a bottle of their ice cider to bring home. Our first experience with ice cider was in Montreal, where ice cider, sometimes called applejack on this side of the border, refers to cider that's been pressed, fermented, and then frozen. When an alcoholic beverage is frozen, the water in that beverage freezes, and can then be removed while it's solid. This increases the alcohol content of the beverage. In effect, it's like distilling the beverage, but without adding heat so you can keep more of the low-boiling compounds. And it would be considered right up there with making moonshine as far as legality goes. County Cidery ice cider is a different beast, closer to ice wine. Despite the lyrics of the Oliver Cromwell song, not all apple varieties fall off the tree when they're ripe. They leave some of their apples on the tree, and harvest them in January when they're frozen solid. Then they press the frozen apples, which yield juice with a higher sugar content because much of the water's frozen. There's so much sugar in the juice that it's tricky to get it properly fermented. But based on what we tasted, the cidery has it figured it out. Casey's inspired to talk with some of our local orchards, to see if he can get permission and cooperation to try using some of their apples this winter. The other bottle is one that we acquired on a wine tour we did with Casey's mother and aunt. Our niece Kali, one week shy of her 11th birthday, was also along. Since I'm really not a drinker, I was designated as the driver. We started our trip with ice cream from Cornell's dairy store, and then headed to the east side of Seneca Lake to start our sampling, eventually working our way to the west side of Cayuga Lake. Kali and I were both pleased to find that many of the wineries are accommodating drivers, children, and other non-drinkers. One place offered Otter Pops, which were wonderful on a hot day. Several had friendly dogs on the premises. Everyone had munchies. And at least three wineries now press some juice, sulfite it immediately to kill any yeasts and prevent all fermentation, and bottle and sell it as grape juice. Each winery uses its own blend of grapes for their juice. This particular bottle was from the Swedish Hill Winery. MelissaH

Today has been somewhat busy. Breakfast was back to cold cereal with milk. I have a little bit of oatmeal left over, but I think I'll include it in my next batch of bread dough. I never have the same amount of oatmeal left over, so it always turns out differently. I'm usually a scientific-type baker, anal about measuring everything, but Leftover Oatmeal Bread is one case where I tend to just wing it. I had some errands to run downtown today, and I brought the camera along. My first stop was at the bookstore, where I dropped off a container of frozen PB&J. (I'm good to them, and they're good to me.) Banna, Jackie, and Bill were all most appreciative, and I'm sure I'll hear their opinions when I next see each of them. I always make a point of looking through the bookstore shelves when I go in, and this time I found something interesting to bring home: I've always been interested in the cuisines of other cultures. Although the suburb where I grew up has a large enough Indian population to support a Hindu temple, I did not grow up eating Indian food. My father is not a curry fan, and to him, Indian = curry. In fact, I didn't eat much Indian food until we moved to Ohio. The former department chair at the school where Casey taught was Bengali, and his wife was a marvelous cook. We were geographically close enough to visit my parents, and on the rare occasions when we were visiting but my father was unavailable for dinner, the two of us and my mom would go to a South Indian vegetarian restaurant near the Hindu temple. Then we moved here, where there's no good Indian to be found, although we had excellent Indian in Scotland and the Czech Republic (of all places) early in the summer. This book has no recipes, but I look forward to learning at least a little about some of the different regional Indian cuisines so I can look at cookbooks with a more educated eye. While I was downtown, I decided to go for a little meander along the river, because it was a beautiful (if windy) day. The city of Oswego has encouraged businesses to adopt clusters of plantings, which means that either they care for the plants or they hire someone to do it for them. This particular grouping, including a crabapple tree and some other kind of tree, has been adopted by one of the local power generation companies. (Gardening's not my strong suit.) As I walked along the river, I saw a few men fishing. Later in the fall when the salmon start their run, people will be packed shoulder-to-shoulder along both sides of the river to fish. The first couple of people I talked to had just gotten started, but this man had been there for quite a while. He'd wheeled his scooter down to the sidewalk, set up his gear within easy reach, and moved back and forth as the fishing required. His catch today included a four-pound bass. He said that most days he came down, he could pretty easily catch his limit. As I watched, one of the other men got a bite. He worked the fish on the line but as I watched, the end of the line went PING! and rocketed back onto the sidewalk behind him. He reeled the empty line in, rebaited his hook, and cast it back into the water. Ah well. Where there are people fishing, there are bait shops. This one's down at the river, practically under the bridge. The door was open, and people were inside. I didn't go in. I crossed under the bridge, and looked across the river at Lock 8. There are seven locks because there's no Lock 4. While we think of the Oswego River as a river, part of it is maintained as the Oswego Canal. This canal provides a way for boaters to get from Lake Ontario (and by extension, the rest of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway) to the Erie Canal. From there, it's possible to get down to New York City via the Hudson River. There's not much commercial traffic, but every year we hear people in town making the circle trip. From there, I headed back up to street level. My next stop was the lakeshore, because it was a nice day. From the west side of town, you can see our lighthouse and also the Marine Museum. The gray boat docked at the museum (the white square building) was the last commercial fishing boat out of Oswego. Now, the only fishing is on people's private boats, or by charter. As I stood at the lakeshore, I noticed that it was still windy. However, this wind is not the normal breeze off the lake—it's a wind from the south. As the afternoon's worn on, it's stayed windier. Our weather forecasts are predicting storms this evening and tonight, and tomorrow's supposed to be a rotten day, only getting to 60 degrees F if we're lucky. It sounds like a good day to stay inside and watch college football! MelissaH

This is as good a time as any to discuss the supermarket situation in Oswego. When I last foodblogged, we had three supermarkets in town (Tops, P&C, and Price Chopper), as well as a smaller grocery store (Mike's Big M), and Ontario Orchards outside of town. And during my last blog, it was officially announced that Tops would be pulling out of CNY, and that Price Chopper would be moving into the Tops store. Their reasoning was that the new store is bigger, and had better parking. Sure enough, that November, they closed the old store at 6 PM one night, and reopened in the new location the next morning. We are not impressed. The new Price Chopper store may be bigger, but the aisles are still so narrow it's hard to get two carts to pass. They may have more shelf space, but it's just more of the same old same old. The produce department still has the same suppliers as always, andd they still run out of cilantro and flat-leaf parsley regularly. The meat counter is staffed with cooperative people, but most of their stuff now comes pre-cut, and they seem to do less of their own butchering. The fish counter reeks of the chlorine bleach they use to clean, and I won't buy fish from them because it tastes like chlorine bleach. The pharmacy got axed in the changeover. Yet, we continue to shop there because it's the best we have. The new location is also much less convenient, not just for me but for a lot of people. The old store was pretty much right downtown. It was a walk away from much of the senior housing. The new store is out east of town, a mile and a half from the old store. It's now in a location that almost nobody can walk to. If you don't drive, your only options are to ride the bus (if you're near a stop), hire a taxi, or get a ride. Our other remaining supermarket, P&C, is generally more expensive for everything. It's in the shopping center next door to the Price Chopper shopping center. We'll go there only rarely, usually when Price Chopper's run out of cilantro. Our next-door neighbor, who does some catering, likes the meat from Big M, the smaller grocery store. Another friend says that the people there steered one of her neighbors to exactly the right cut of beef for his stew recipe. But everyone in town agrees that the produce is horrendous. Nonetheless, Big M is now the only place to get groceries close to downtown, and it's the only grocery store on the west side of the river in Oswego. Ontario Orchards does a nice job with produce. They also have some frozen meat (which we haven't tried), birdseed and pet supplies (but nothing our boys can have), a few baked goods (ehhh, I make better), and other grocery odds and ends. But they aren't open year-round. Once apple season ends, they'll scale back their hours pretty dramatically. After Christmas, they'll only be open on weekends until planting season starts up in March. They're not within a walk of anything and they're five miles from the nearest bus stop, but they're also on the west side of the river. Why the big deal about east and west sides of the river? Because Oswego, like many river towns, has bridges. Here's a link to a Google map of our area; look at the satellite photo for the full story. The two parallel bridges are the two road bridges; the one to the north is the one in the photo below. We also have an old railroad bridge that's been turned into a pedestrian bridge; this is the one at an angle across the river. This isn't a great picture, but it lets you see at least the shadow of the Bridge Street bridge, which is the more-used of the two in town. (For one thing, Bridge Street is NY-104, which you can take east to I-81 and beyond, or west to Buffalo and the Lewiston-Queenston bridge. The Utica Street bridge is not a state route, and Utica Street doesn't go through to anywhere.) The Bridge Street bridge is now 40 years old, and the engineers say that the cracks showing up in the sidewalk mean that there are structural issues with the bridge. So, starting next March, the bridge will be removed and completely replaced from the ground up. The bridge is scheduled to be closed for 8 months. The entire area is shuddering with fear of what's going to happen with the traffic. There are elementary schools and fire stations on both sides of the river. But the hospital, junior high, high school, and university are all on the west side. The predictions for traffic flow say that during peak periods, there could be half-hour delays to get across the remaining bridge on Utica Street. The school district is wondering whether the school buses will be able to finish their routes for the high school and junior high in time to start the routes for the elementary schools. The city is discussing options for dealing with pedestrians—one idea I've heard is a shuttle bus, to take people from one side of the bridge to the other. (While I'm glad they're considering such options, it's only an extra three blocks of walking to use the pedestrian bridge instead. If the traffic issues are as bad as they're prognosticating, it'll take far less time to go around than it would to take a shuttle bus. The people who really will need help are those with mobility issues, and those are the people who are less likely to walk anyway.) We live on the west side of town, very close to the university. And for us, the big deal is that both supermarkets are on the east side, as is the nearest transfer station for rubbish and recyclables. Getting to the Big M won't be fun by car or bicycle, because they're right across the street from the Utica Street Bridge. (On the satellite photo, it's the longish building with a cupola, just to the right of the green arrow.) And Ontario Orchards is not really a viable option for everyday shopping because of the goods they stock and don't stock. What to do? We've already started to explore our options. We've discovered another of the county's transfer stations, in Hannibal. We can get to it on back roads, so we won't need to go near the bridge snarls. We've already checked it out, so we know the traffic patterns there. And we've learned that it's an easy trip from the Hannibal transfer station to the Price Chopper store in Fulton (the next town south), as long as you don't mind driving around with your garbage containers in your car. (We use a rectangular Rubbermaid bin that can hold a 55-gallon plastic liner. When the bin is full, we pull the bag up. When the bag's nearly full, it's time to go to the transfer station.) But the Fulton Price Chopper store has all the same failings of the Oswego Price Chopper. (The Fulton store still has a pharmacy, though.) It, too, was a Tops before the pullout. And while it's nice to know that we can get to a full-service supermarket without having to deal with a bridge nightmare, it's depressing to know that we're driving 20 minutes for something mediocre. Fortunately, there's something else we can do. Once you've driven from Oswego to Fulton, you're halfway to the nearest Wegman's. From Fulton, the rest of the way there is on highway except for the very last bit. And even though this is a smaller and older Wegman's without all the bells and whistles of their newer, bigger, better stores, it's still a Wegman's, with beautiful produce, an unstinky fish counter, and employees who seem happy to talk with you and help you get what you want. It might be a bit more expensive than Price Chopper, but I'm willing to pay a bit of a premium for a more pleasant shopping experience. I foresee that we'll be making more frequent trips to this Wegman's. We'll get what we can at Ontario Orchards, we'll plan our meals better than we do currently, we'll make a point of thinking ahead if we'll need to defrost something from the freezer, and we'll make Wegman's runs when we need to. I have the luxury of being able to go in the middle of a weekday when it's less crowded, but Casey and I have always gone food shopping together because we both cook, we both enjoy the shopping process, and it's more fun to shop together. The bridge closure will certainly present a challenge, but one that will force us to think carefully about how we shop and therefore how we eat. We're fortunate that we are both good cooks. I don't know how badly it will hurt other people, especially the students who live off-campus and those less mobile. MelissaH edited to fix a minor typographical problem that nobody but me would probably notice anyway

Syracuse is a very different restaurant town from Oswego. We have bars a-plenty, but our choice in restaurants is limited. We have three Subways, two McD's, a BK and a Wendy's, and a combined KFC/A&W, if you're looking for junk. The newest addition to that roster is a Ruby Tuesday's. For nicer fare, we have two Italian restaurants, Vona's and Canale's. It seems that just about every family in town goes to one or the other, but since we're relatively new here we have no loyalties. I stay out of discussions about whose red sauce is better. Another nicer restaurant, Avanti Bistro, has gone downhill since they changed hands a couple of years ago, to the point where the cost/benefit ratio is no longer favorable in my mind. It's tough to be a nice non–red sauce Italian restaurant in this town. Another place east of town seemed like they were positioning themseves to make a run for the nicer-dining crowd. But they completely lost me as a potential customer when they started to advertise such specials as a giant steak and five bottles of Labatt's, buckets of crabs and Coronas, and "Cans & Clams" night. Not my thing, and not in our definition of a "nice" restaurant. There's a restaurant right on the river, Patz, but we haven't actually gone there specifically for a meal. Most of the social events associated with the men's hockey team are held there, and that's the only context we've been there. The food we've had is neither superb nor offensive. Casey says that their offerings on tap are among the best in town, and they're reasonably priced. I'll take his word for it. They do Coke rather than Pepsi, which is what I look for. We have a brewpub downtown, but I'm not impressed by their food. I was really surprised to realize that they're actually a brewpub and make their own beer, because they have neon signs for commercial beers in their windows. I guess they feel that they won't survive without offering up the familiar stuff that's available everywhere, and the law here permits brewpubs to sell stuff other than what they make. (The owner of the brewpub, who would know, says this is a Molson town.) I'm not a beer drinker, but my husband says the beer they make ranges from OK to good, and they apparently do a good job keeping their tap lines clean. The best thing about the brewpub is their bar. Or rather, my favorite thing about the bar is the music on Wednesday nights. Several of the music professors, and some students, get together and play jazz at King Arthur's bar every Wednesday night there isn't another music department event. (This last Wednesday, jazz was pre-empted by the chamber music concert.) The only cost is whatever you order, and of course everyone who goes feels obligated to get at least a little something. We've been unimpressed by the menu offerings, but they make their own potato chips. If you can catch them just out of the fryer when they're still hot, they're fantastic. My husband usually gets one of the beers brewed there, and I tend to go with club soda with a big wedge of lime. If you have a suggestion for another non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated beverage that isn't loaded with sugar, doesn't look like a kiddie drink, and doesn't take a whole lot of talent to put together, please let me know! We'll generally stay for the first set and maybe the beginning of the second, since it is a weeknight. And because, dare I say it, we're getting older and don't stay up late as well as we used to. But mainly because it's a weeknight. There are two choices for Mexican, without having to drive 45+ minutes: Azteca and Fajita Grill. Of the two, Azteca's better. They're a sit-down restaurant, and if you order the right things from their menu, you'll get a tasty meal. My big knock against them is the lack of vegetables: it's hard to find them, other than the tomatoes (always canned) in their salsa, and maybe a sprinkle of lettuce if you order something that comes with a sprinkle of lettuce. Fajita Grill is a Chipotle wannabe. We don't care for it, but we'll occasionally go there if there's a fundraiser. A week from next Tuesday, the university's baseball club will get some percent of the night's proceeds, and because a former student who's house- and cat-sat for us a few times is involved with the baseball club and specifically invited us to come, we'll probably go for dinner. If we want serious Mexican, we'll drive to Sodus (about halfway between here and Rochester) and eat at El Rincon if it's Thursday through Sunday and we don't mind a drive, or we'll make it ourselves. (We actually try to plan our trips to Rochester for days that El Rincon is open, so we can have a meal there.) Casey makes killer mole colorado, and since we got a range hood that sucks, we can make it any time of the year without suffocating ourselves on chile fumes. We make large batches, and keep it in our freezer so it's easy to whip up a good and quick Mexican meal when the mood strikes. There are a couple of "Chinese" buffets. We don't like either one. The newer of the two started out decently, but we noticed that every time we went back, the number of vegetables on offer got smaller and smaller, to the point where about the only green stuff you can be sure of finding are green beans. There are other Chinese restaurants, but we can do better at home. Casey has a mongo burner that he uses outside when he brews beer, and it does great things with a wok. One of our favorite places to eat is Thai Garden. I haven't been to Thailand so I can't speak for its authenticity, but the food tastes good to me. I like that they can make the food spicy-hot but still flavorful, something other restaurants here have trouble doing. We like it best for lunch, but dinners are good there also. Another favorite, especially for lunch, is the Port City Cafe. They're right downtown, and they do a very brisk midday business of soups, sandwiches, and salads. They've recently hired the best bread baker in town, and he's getting things set up to bake bread for them right there. I'm expecting something good to get even better once that's up and running. They also have ice cream, coffee and espresso, and pastries. I wind up there about once a week, usually to meet with my knitting mentor Esther so she can solve my technical problems over a beverage and pastry. They don't mind if we stay for a few hours, and they have big windows that let lots of light in. No discussion of Oswego restaurants would be complete without two institutions: Wade's and Rudy's. Wade's is the greasy-spoon diner on the east side of town. If you like raisin toast, theirs is supposed to be great: they slice it thickly, and toast it on the griddle. I'm not a raisin person, so this doesn't float my boat. I'd just as soon go to Port City for breakfast...or make myself a nice bowl of cereal with milk. And Rudy's you can see in my last foodblog. I'm hoping to get there again during this blog, because it's a seasonal restaurant. This summer is their 61st season, and it's coming to an end. I do all kinds of things. When the university finds themselves short a warm body, I'll teach. This semester, they didn't need me, so I'm freelancing, as well as working on a few little things on my own. I'm always looking for projects! MelissaH

We visited Cooperstown a few years back, and docsconz is right that it's marvelous. At the time, we hadn't yet been able to sell our house in Ohio and therefore had an aversion to vacations that were more expensive than they absolutely needed to be. I was surprised that we were able to find a campground to take us and our tent for a couple of nights in early October. My main motivation in visiting Cooperstown was to see the Baseball Hall of Fame, but the Fenimore Art Museum was a gem, and the Farmers' Museum turned out to be the real highlight of the trip for me. I grew up in suburbia, and the only thing in the area resembling a farm was a rather industrial dairy. I didn't attend the junior high school in our area, but friends who did always complained vociferously about the aroma at milking time! We need to get back to Cooperstown. I hadn't realized it before our visit to the Farmers' Museum, but before 1900, central New York was a leading hop-growing area. (Production moved to the Pacific Northwest later, because it's dryer and therefore less prone to disease.) The Farmers' Museum still grows hops, so we need to find out when they'll be planting in the spring, and then harvesting in the fall, to watch the process. I suspect most or all of the hops they grow find their way to Brewery Ommegang, another Cooperstown sight worth a tour. Even if you've seen other breweries, this is a Belgian-style brewery so it's a little different. MelissaH

A spoonful of Nutella. A big spoonful. MelissaH

Dessert followed dinner. I actually started prepping the other half of dessert just after I finished chopping pizza toppings. As always, I first gathered my ingredients and equipment: I then put things into the blender container: 180 g peanut butter (the book says to use something emulsified, and I chose one with less sugar because I know the recipes in David Lebovitz's book have a tendency to be over-sweet), 160 g sugar (down 20 g from what the recipe says to use), 2 2/3 cups of half-and-half, a pinch of salt, and a smidge of vanilla extract. The actual prep is really easy: buzz it all together in the blender. Then get it good and cold before freezing in the ice cream maker. After dinner, I got out the ice cream makers. Yes, I have two. They're identical Cuisinart models. We'd gotten the first one at Williams-Sonoma, for a pretty good price considering that it came with two freezer bowls. A year or so later, we were at our local warehouse club and saw the same maker with the extra bowl, and picked it up thinking that we'd have more bowls and a complete set of extra parts if anything happened. All four bowls live in the freezer, so they're always ready. This is the first time I've used both motors at once. First, I grabbed a spoon and tasted the grape sorbet base. It was still pretty tangy, but I really didn't want to add any extra sugar. I put the first machine together, turned it on, and added the sorbet base. Then I put the second maker together, whisked the peanut butter ice cream base together because it had somehow separated into a tan top layer and a white bottom layer, turned on the motor, and added the base. Both machines churned away for a while, during which conversation was difficult due to the noise level. As I watched, the sorbet apparently got some air incorporated, as I kept on seeing a purple mountain rise up and up and up. (I'd had quite a lot of sorbet base, not so much ice cream base.) When the sorbet started to peek up and out of the top, I decided that everything had gone long enough and it was time to eat dessert. I was able to remove the tops and dashers from both ice cream makers without incident, and without dumping any cold goodness on the floor or countertop. My husband doesn't like peanut butter in his ice cream, so he went with just sorbet. The rest of us did a mixture. And oh, what a combination! The grape sorbet was on the tangy-tart side, and the peanut butter ice cream was definitely a little too sweet by itself. But put the two of them together and you have what every school lunch dreams of! I definitely need to come up with an appropriate cookie for an ice cream sandwich base, because this combination is a winner. After we finished dessert, I packed the remaining sorbet and ice cream into their own rubbermaid containers. I pressed a covering of plastic wrap directly onto the surface before putting the lids on the containers. And these leftovers went into the freezer. My plan is to load them into a cooler with some cold packs and bring them downtown to the local bookstore tomorrow when I run errands. The backstory: I ordered the ice cream book, and when I picked it up, one of the employees commented that I'd have to start bringing ice cream in now. (I'll often bring in something that I've baked.) The first time, I brought some pear sorbet. I'm guessing this will blow their socks off! Time to head towards bed. The dishwasher is running, and although Casey did a drainerful of stuff by hand, there's still plenty more waiting for me in the morning. Tomorrow's a school day, but it will be interesting to hear whether people take tomorrow off to make a four-day weekend. Good night! MelissaH

Here's my chance to show you a couple of new features in my kitchen. The first is the knife holders we use. We were on a vacation over the summer and had the opportunity to visit the IKEA in Burlington, ON. (Hi, Kerry!) We think these knife holders must be new, because we didn't remember seeing them when we put the kitchen together last summer. The drawer on the left is my husband's, and the drawer on the right is mine. These holders are much easier than the cardboard sheaths we used to use for everything. And the clock was a gift from my sister. It's over the door leading out to the deck, so you can read it from the living room. It's the only clock readable from the living room. My husband set the table this afternoon. Here's your chance to see the red chairs again! They're really quite red, although they don't look that way in the pictures. The placemats are bright yellow, to match the Lion of Flanders. We're still keeping our eyes open for other Lions of Flanders, or even things the appropriate yellow color. My husband also cooked down some onions this afternoon. Here he is, sniffling and crying as he sliced. The sliced onions went onto the stove, with some olive oil and salt and I don't know what else because I wasn't in the kitchen when he did them. They cooked down to golden lusciousness, and even had time to cool to room temperature before dinner. While the onions cooked down, I sliced and chopped some other pizza toppings. The pineapple just needed to be drained. This knife is my $10 special. Yes, it's cheap. But the handle feels good in my hand, and the blade's holding an edge nicely, especially since we sent it in to be sharpened. I also chopped a little goat cheese, from the Lively Run Goat Dairy. The last bit of prep work was getting the dough warmed up and out of the bags. I try to remember this a couple of hours before we light the grill. To start, I oiled a half-sheet pan, took each dough ball out of its bag, and flattened it into a disk. The oil coating keeps the dough from crusting over, prevents anything from sticking to the grill, and also helps to carry the heat in and make pretty grill marks. When our dinner guests arrived, we all helped to carry things downstairs and outside to the grill. When I grill pizzas, I set the outside two burners on my grill to medium, and the middle burner on low. First, I flatten a dough ball and put it on the grill to cook the first side. Once the underside (facing the burners) is cooked enough to hold its shape, I give it a little twist to get the pretty grill marks, to make sure it isn't sticking to the grate, and to help things cook evenly. When the first side is done enough, I use a spatula and my peel to take it off the grill. I flip it over so the cooked side is up, and then top the pizza away from the heat. Once the pizza is topped, it goes back on the grill. On the second side, after a few minutes I give it a 180 degree turn, to again be sure nothing's sticking and to make sure both ends cook evenly. I leave it on as long as I dare, to get the crust done without burning and to get the cheese melted and as browned as I can. Then the finished pizza gets rushed upstairs and onto either a rack so it doesn't get soggy, or into a warm oven until all the other pies are cooked. One pizza makes a nice dinner for one person. We each had our own pizza for dinner. I topped mine with caramelized onions, goat cheese, and tomato slices. No sauce, but I was the only one not to use sauce. I think everything I prepared went onto at least one pizza. Our guests brought us some corn, which we steamed and ate with butter and salt. And we had salad: romaine and tomatoes. Good food, good company. MelissaH

I actually don't often buy the brand in the tin, because I've had problems with previous tins costing a fortune and being rancid straight out of the tin for the first serving. When I'm in a city with a Trader Joe's, I get their brand in the cardboard cylinder. It's less expensive and they seem to get decent turnover and therefore no rancidity issues. I got this particular container over Labor Day weekend, when we were up close to Sault Ste. Marie, MI. I was thrilled to be able to find good oatmeal at the Soo, but not thrilled at what I had to pay for it. MelissaH

The concert was wonderful. We heard music by Poulenc and Britten, for solo piano; horn and piano; tenor, horn, and piano; mezzo-soprano and piano; and mezzo, tenor, and piano. My favorite of the evening was a song by Poulenc, one of a group of poems by Careme that Poulenc found, put together, and set to music. The mezzo told us about the first of the songs being a mother's lament that her child refused to sleep, and the rest of the songs were her version of Scheherazade. By the end of the last song, you could practically hear her quietly leaving the child's room as he finally slept. The song I particularly liked was the sixth in this set, about the Thursday angels who play Mozart on their harps. The very last song of the evening was somewhat food-related, and very appropriate to these parts at this time of year. Britten took some folk songs, and used the words and tunes to write his own settings. The last of these folk songs was an audience sing-along! The tenor would sing the first part of the verse, and everyone else including the audience added the "Hee haw" part: It was lots of fun. We walked home, and I went back to work because I had sorbet base to prepare! First, though, I changed my clothes because I had grapes to deal with. I also put an apron on, for good measure. First thing was to give the Concord grapes I'd gotten on Tuesday a rinse. Then, the grapes needed to be pulled off the stem, and because Concord grapes have thick skins I needed to at least nick the skin of each grape. There are a lot of grapes in 3.5 pounds! I added 40 g of water to the grapes and set them on the stove. They cooked on medium-low heat, covered. The kitchen smelled like a brand-new jar of grape jam while I cooked them, and I periodically got the pleasure of taking the lid off the pot and sticking my nose in to inhale, when I stirred the grapes. Finally, the grapes were all cooked and soft. I took them off the heat and let them cool a little bit as I assembled my food mill. The food mill is a marvelous invention. I couldn't imagine trying to do push all this through a sieve. But my food mill was just barely large enough to hold all the grapes, and they splashed a little bit as I poured them from pot to mill. Then, as I milled the grapes, they splattered a little more. Before I did anything else, I cleaned the purple splatters off the kitchen before they could set and become permanent purple polkadots. Then I used my spatula to scrape the pulp from the bottom of the food mill disk, took this picture, and cleaned up. The milled grapes were still pretty warm, so the corn syrup (I started by measuring out 1/4 cup as the recipe prescribed, but I only added half of it to the grapes. I tasted the mixture, and it tasted like it needed more so I added the rest) mixed in nicely. I also added a splash of vodka. I didn't want to put such a hot bowl into my refrigerator, so I stayed up a little while longer waiting for it to cool, and finding more purple splatters to clean up. Finally, shortly after midnight, the outside of the bowl was no longer hot, and I put my silicone trivet on the fridge shelf for the bowl. And now you know why I slept in so late this morning! Casey's finished cleaning and re-sealing the floor, and I see he's moved the cardboard barrier so I can go back into the kitchen to rinse out my breakfast glass and start caramelizing onions to go on pizza tonight. MelissaH

Now, back to last night. I had just enough time before the concert to make up my pizza dough. I started by gathering all my ingredients together: flour (King Arthur all-purpose, in the yellow-lidded container), water (yes, that's the kettle I used to weight the cabbage; I keep water in it so I have room-temperature water available), sugar (in the smaller container in the back), olive oil, yeast (SAF instant, in the blue-green jar), and salt (Diamond Crystal kosher, in the clear jar). My scale is a small Ohaus scientific balance, which does both English and metric measurements. I got it before home cooks weighed much, and therefore before home scales became cheap and readily available. The KitchenAid mixer is dark blue because the year my mom asked me if I wanted one for my birthday, the dark blue one was on sale and much less expensive than the others. I don't mind the dark blue, but it does show every grain of flour. The thing on top of my flour container is a dough whisk. I use it to get everything mixed together before I attach the bowl to the mixer. I like to start this way because when I combine ingredients by hand, I get less flour puffling through the kitchen and onto the mixer. Once wet and dry are combined, I can put the bowl into the mixer and use the dough hook to take care of the rest. I also got out an apron, because I knew I wouldn't have time to change into "play clothes" to cook, and get back into my nicer clothes again before the concert. I'm not normally an apron-wearer, but I keep some around for dealing with stuff that stains or for clothing challenges. This particular apron was a gift from my mother-in-law, who is well aware of my proclivities for opening my mouth. This dough was made following the recipe for grilled pizza dough from Peter Reinhard's American Pie. I started by weighing out 1 pound, 6.5 ounces of flour. The cookbook called for 22 1/2 ounces of flour. Does anyone out there actually have a scale that says 22 1/2 ounces of flour, rather than 1 pound 6.5 ounces? The flour is also the only ingredient given by mass, which I find odd. To the flour, I added the rest of the dry ingredients (1 Tbsp sugar, 3 tsp salt, 1 tsp yeast) and gave them a stir with the dough whisk to combine. I then added 1.5 tsp olive oil, and the water. The cookbook called for 1 3/4 cups of water. I put the bowl back on my scale, tared it, and added 14 ounces of water. Everything went back in its place after I added it, except the olive oil. After using the dough whisk to get all the dry stuff wet, I put the bowl onto the mixer, and mixed at low speed for 4 minutes. The dough got a 15-minute rest, during which I ate the leftover cabbage and noodles for dinner, and then the dough went for another 4 minute spin at a slightly higher speed. While the dough finished mixing, I got out and opened six ziplock sandwich bags and a loaf pan. I also took the cap off the oil bottle. From here on out, I had a hard time taking pictures because my hands were gunked with dough, and I didn't want to get the camera messy. But at the end of the second mixing period, the dough windowpaned nicely. I took the bowl off the mixer, set my scale to metric, pulled the dough out of the bowl, put the empty bowl onto the scale and hit the tare button, and then put the dough back into the bowl to get the mass of just the dough. I did all this because I wanted to have a decent shot at dividing the dough into 6 equal pieces. I yelled downstairs to my husband to do the arithmetic, because my hands were dough-gunked, and he yelled back that I'd need each piece to have a mass of 178.33333...... grams. I figured that if I got each of the six pieces to be 180 grams, plus or minus 5 grams, that I'd be close enough for a family dinner. I started by eyeballing the dough and cutting it in half, and then dividing each half in thirds. Each piece then went into the tared bowl on the scale, so I could see which ones were too big and which ones were too small. I made adjustments as necessary. In the end, I got six pieces of dough that were all pretty darn close to the same mass. I rounded them into balls and then things got really messy as I poured a little oil onto my hand, picked up a dough ball and fondled it to give it an oily coating, slid the oily dough ball into its own ziplock, and then put the ziplock in the loaf pan for easy containment. When all six dough balls were bagged and panned, I washed my hands so I could grab the oil bottle without it slithering free, and poured a little oil over each ball in its bag. Then I could put the oil away. Finally, I sealed each bag, pressing out as much air as I could. Although the recipe said to leave the dough at room temperature for half an hour, it was time to leave for the concert. So I just slid the pan into the refrigerator, where it quietly reposes still. I took off my apron, put on a jacket, and we walked to campus for some music. MelissaH

Good morning, and happy new year! My breakfast this morning actually started last night. I gathered my ingredients: two cups of water, a pinch of salt, and half a cup of steel-cut oats. The water and salt went on the stove to come to a boil. When that happened, I added the oats (slowly, because if you don't it boils over and you get to clean your stove), stirred everything together well, and then put the lid on the pot and set it aside overnight. (I'm almost ashamed to admit that I learned this method of oatmeal cooking from Martha Stewart, but I'm not a huge fan of quicker-cooking oatmeal, because the texture goes completely to mush. The steel-cut oats retain some texture and chew, but if you don't start them the night before, they need to simmer for something like half an hour in the morning. I don't know about you, but I'm generally too hungry to wait that long, nor am I awake enough to do that much active cooking before breakfast!) In the morning, this is what it looks like: But like any good pet owner, before tending to myself, I fed my animals. Our boys have dry food out all the time. Lyon loves eating dry food. But they also share one can of wet food each day, half a can in the morning and half a can at dinnertime. Their only option nowadays is Friskies Special Diet, with chicken in sauce. Last year, Lyon had a bout of feline lower urinary tract disease, so we've had to put the boys on food that's specifically formulated to keep urine pH low (meaning acidic). Of the flavors that come in Special Diet, the chicken in sauce is the only one they'll eat. We tried all the others. We consider ourselves fortunate that this brand of food is doing the trick, and we don't need to go to a more expensive or less available cat food. I just wish that something existed for both urinary tract health and hairball reduction! With the cats both happily eating (or rather, licking off all the sauce for now, and saving most of the chunks to come back for later), I was able to turn my attention to my breakfast. Once the steel-cut oats have sat overnight, they only need to be heated to be ready. I learned the hard way to do this on fairly low heat, because the oats have absorbed enough of the water to be capable of scorching. I also learned that I need to be extra-careful since we got the new range that goes to 11, or something like that: if a recipe says "medium" I start at medium-low. I like having firepower! I heat the oatmeal till it's boiling, because once that happens I know the starch in the oatmeal has been heated enough to become creamy throughout. Wonderful as this oatmeal is, I like my oatmeal with stuff. Today's "stuff" is maple syrup (grade B) and yogurt, with a seltzer and OJ chaser. (We're out of limeade.) I got this yogurt yesterday at Wegman's. We'd seen it there before, but this is the first time I'd tried it. It's from a nearby farm. I had my choice of plain or vanilla, and decided to go with plain. There was, in fact, a layer of cream on top of the yogurt when I opened it, but I couldn't get a photo that showed it. The yogurt has a nice flavor, not too sour, and a wonderful creamy texture. I'm thinking of all the wonderful things I can do with this yogurt, besides just eating it with fruit, or honey, or maple syrup and oatmeal. Mango lassi, anyone? Frozen yogurt? Yogurt cake? Dolloped onto pie? Eaten with chocolate graham crackers crumbled into it? Breakfast is served! MelissaH

Freezing may also work (another "heat" treatment) ← Nope, sorry. Doesn't work. Freezing is actually a common way to keep enzymes and other proteins good and active. My husband (actually some of his students) did an experiment where they froze pineapple in liquid nitrogen, and then brought it back up to room temperature. It still kept gelatin from setting because the enzyme was still able to chew up the protein. MelissaH

Whew! Today's errands made for a very long day, and it's not over yet. As I left Oswego, it was raining quite hard. By the time I got to Fulton, 10 miles south, the rain was no longer coming down but the road was covered with puddles. By Phoenix (another 7 miles on), I needed to dig out the sunglasses that live in the car. And in Syracuse, it was actually quite warm in the sun! My first stop was at Home Depot. Before I left, I measured my oven rack, because I wanted to get quarry tiles to fit. I had some, but they were sized for the oven-before-the-last, which was tiny. Because I'm still not convinced the weather will cooperate for grilling tomorrow's pizzas, I want to be sure I can cook multiple pizzas at a time, which means I need a full rack's worth of tiles. I would have liked to have gotten the tiles locally, but the Lowe's here doesn't have anything unglazed. I found the tiles, which looked exactly like mine did when they were new and clean. And I discovered that I should be able to fit 4 rows of tiles across, and 2.5 rows of tiles deep, on one rack. Therefore, I needed a total of 10 tiles, two of which needed to be halved. It just so happened that while I was there, the flooring section had one person working and about a dozen groups of people needing her attention. Who knew that a Wednesday morning would be so busy? So instead of scoring and snapping the tiles herself, she sent me to the tool rental area. And the person working there actually got out the tile wetsaw and cut the tiles rather than just snapping them. Total cost, including tax: $3.24. That's hard to beat! Then some rather boring stuff, not at all related to food, and finally, to lunch! I met Owen at Ponchito's Taqueria, which was in a section of Syracuse I'd never visited before. I had a burrito, and he got a taco with chips and guacamole. The chips and guac were excellent. My burrito was waaay better than what I can get in Oswego at Fajita Grill (which people here rave about because they don't have much to compare to), but not up to the standard set by Big City Burrito in Fort Collins, CO. The salsa was nice, I could actually taste things other than black pepper or HOT!, and the burrito was nicely stuffed and rolled, and I liked that they used whole chunks of chicken, which they cut into smaller pieces only when I ordered. But I still miss the texture in the corn salsas that Chipotle and Big City make. If I were in the area, I'd go back there, but I don't know that I'd go out of my way to eat there. Then, I went to the Knitting Connection, another yarn store, because I was in the area and their yarn selection is different from what North Wind typically has. This errand actually became food-related when I looked at their selection of sock yarn: the latest thing is, apparently, a yarn that's made partly from soy and chitin (from shrimp shells!) fibers. It felt nice, but I wasn't in the mood to spend that much on sock yarn that I'm not going to get to for a while because I have too many other projects in the queue. Finally, my last stop was at Wegman's. The store I went to is the Syracuse area flagship store, but it's been under renovation and expansion for a while, and is not expected to be completed till at least mid-November. Things move around every time I visit, which makes it difficult to find what I'm looking for, but the produce is still nice-looking and beautifully displayed, and they (as always) make a point of labeling things that are grown locally. The workers still look happy to be working there. I bother to go there because it's so much nicer than the local supermarkets in Oswego. But more about them later, when I have more time: maybe Friday? I got what I went for, and nothing that wasn't on my list other than a Coke Zero to drink as I drove home. And when I got home, this was the view after I unloaded the car: What a difference a few hours makes! Tonight's a bit crazy: we have concert tickets! Oswego has a vibrant arts scene, largely due to the college but other groups also help. Tonight is a chamber music concert featuring the music of Francis Poulenc and Benjamin Britten, performed by some of our music professors with some guest artists. I'm looking forward to the music. If I have enough time before the concert, I'll try to start prepping some of tomorrow's dinner. The grapes from yesterday need to be made into sorbet base and chilled well, and the pizza dough needs to be made either tonight or first thing tomorrow. I forgot to get half-and-half, but fortunately the peanut butter ice cream base doesn't involve eggs and doesn't get cooked, so that can easily be both blended and chilled tomorrow. Once those are done, all that's left will be a bunch of chopping and slicing, which is pretty easy to handle. MelissaH Casey just got home, and I hear him loading the dishwasher. This means I need to see what's up. I suspect tonight's dinner will be yummy leftovers. Now that I think about it, I realize the pork and gravy from the crockpot will go nicely with the cabbage and noodles from yesterday!

Good morning, everyone! Breakfast: yummy cereal, again. If it stays chilly, that may change tomorrow. We had rather a blustery night last night. At about midnight, we had some thunder and lightning, and it rained on and off throughout the night. And this morning, we're getting some lake effect. No snow, but lake effect rain! (Same idea as lake effect snow: cold wind blowing over the warm lake, then crashing into land and letting go of the moisture.) When I looked at the NWS radar this morning, I saw a beautiful plume of echoes streaming off the lake. The skies here are cloudy and gray, no sun to be found anywhere. It's really this dark and ominous-looking. The 10-minute average wind speed now is 27 mph, and we've had gusts up to 46 mph. This is also not unusual for us, as the wind howls off the lake. I'll be heading down to Syracuse in a little while, to run a bunch of errands and have lunch with Owen. I'll try to remember to get an outdoor shot down there so you can see the difference 50 miles can make. To answer a peripheral question to the one Sandy asked: it's about two hours, or 75 miles, from Ithaca to Oswego, pretty much a straight shot up NY-34. We go to Ithaca only infrequently, and only during the summer. Our main purpose in going there is to eat ice cream from the Cornell dairy. We've occasionally caught the Ithaca farmer's market, but the only vendors of interest to us are the cheesemakers. Everything else, we can get for less $$$ at our own farmer's market. MelissaH

I think you may be doomed, if you must boil the agar in lemon juice. Agar is a polysaccharide: a bunch of sugar molecules hooked together. If you want to chemically break up a polysaccharide, a common way to do so is to boil in an acidic water solution. You might want to do such a thing, on purpose, when you're making caramel: this is why many recipes call for a touch of lemon juice or cream of tartar in with the sugar and water. If you're boiling agar to get it to dissolve, and you have acid in with the rest of the stuff, you're starting to dismantle the structure of the agar. It won't set as well once you've started to chew the molecules apart, and that's where your problem is coming from. You have a better chance at getting this to work if you can wait to add the acid till after the agar has been boiled. MelissaH

Dinner tonight: It started with that giant head of cabbage. The knife is my 8-inch Henckels chef's knife, the first good knife I ever bought myself. Or, rather, half of it because it was so huge. I quartered the head, cored the four quarters, put two of the quarters in a plastic bag and then into the fridge, and sliced the other two quarters into strips. The strips went into a colander, and the colander got set into the sink. I tossed the cabbage with a couple of tablespoons of kosher salt, set a plate on top, and then put my filled kettle on top of the plate to press out as much water as I could in about an hour. After about an hour, I rinsed the salt off, put my largest-diameter pan on the stove, turned the heat on to medium lowish, and added (to me) an unconscionable amount of butter, about half a stick. Once the butter was mostly melted and bubbling, I shook as much water out of the cabbage as I could, and added it to the pan. I gave it a good toss, and it started to crackle and pop from the remaining water. When the crackling died down, the bottom started to brown. At that point, I turned down the heat and let it cook for about another half hour, tossing it every so often. In the meantime, I put a pot of water on to boil, and used the boiling water to cook about half a pound of fusilli. I know that egg noodles would be traditional with cabbage if you're Eastern European, but I don't have any and I like the way the cabbage shreds get tangled into the spring shape. Once the pasta was cooked, I dumped it into the cabbage, and mixed it all together. Dinner is served! Tonight's salad is a couple of the green zebra tomatoes, chunked up, along with some of the yellow pear tomatoes, halved, with some freshly ground black pepper and a drizzle of cheapo balsamic vinegar that I reduced to a syrup, put into an old maple syrup bottle that pours nicely, and store in the fridge. Tomorrow, I go down to the Big City to run still more errands. MelissaH

I'm back from my errands. I'm hungry, so I'm eating a few Trader Joe's 50%-less-salt roasted cashews. These things are good! We'll have to get some more, next time we're at a TJ's. The closest stores to here are all about a six-hour drive away. My first food-related (sort of) stop was the transfer station, which was busier than I would have expected. They're closed on Mondays, so Tuesday mornings are often crazy, but not quite as crazy as Saturday mornings. Things usually quiet down by afternoon on Tuesdays, but I must have timed it just right to be there when a bunch of other people were there. So it took me longer than it should have, because I couldn't park right inside the recycling shed, and I had to make a bunch of trips back and forth to the car to get everything where it needed to be. On the bright side, by the time I was done with the recycling, the crowd had cleared out and I was able to get right into the rubbish area. I didn't take pictures here, because it's not a beautiful place unless you're Oscar the Grouch, and because I didn't want to make people nervous. My next food-related stop was much prettier. Have you ever visited an apple orchard in the fall? The trees are heavily loaded with apples, red orbs against the green foliage, and you sometimes have to wonder at the strength of the branches to hold up under all that apple-weight. Apples on trees are not shiny like apples in stores, because they haven't been waxed. The air smells of cider! I disturbed a few bees in the flax blossoms between rows of trees, but fortunately for me, they didn't mind too much and buzzed off elsewhere. There's not much left to harvest this year, but there are still lots of apples to be picked! These trees are part of Fruit Valley Orchard (Web site still being built), one of our many local orchards but one I particularly like. They're owned by the Torrice family. Those of you who shop the Union Square Greenmarket may have seen them, as they'll travel downstate to sell their produce. They're probably best known around here for having raspberry bushes in greenhouses, so they'll have fresh raspberries available on Valentine's Day. They sell for an outrageous amount of money, but I'm told they're quite tasty, especially when your sweetie gets them for you. In addition to apples, they grow and sell other produce. At the Fruit Valley farmstand, I got: Concord grapes, Green Zebra tomatoes, and Paula Red Apples. The grapes weigh about 3.5 pounds, exactly the amount called for in David Lebovitz's recipe for Grape Sorbet. (Guess I need to add the ingredients for Peanut Butter Ice Cream to my shopping list also!) The tomatoes were the last green zebras they had. They probably won't last long, but they'll look nice in a salad next to the yellow pears and regular old big red tomatoes we have, perhaps with a touch of balsamic vinegar and a sprinkle of cheese. And this kind of apple is a good pie apple for an early season variety. We're lucky to live in an area that still grows many of the old apple varieties. Way back in July, I made my first apple pie of the year, using Yellow Transparent apples. They're a little softer than I generally prefer, but they have a terrific and unique flavor that I only get to enjoy for one or two pies every summer. I like including at least some Northern Spies when I make apple pie, but they won't be harvested for another month or more. Fruit Valley doesn't grow cabbages or onions, but the Ouellette family does. Or at least, they grow cabbages, and they find other area farmers who grow onions that they sell at their orchard store. I showed you pictures inside in my last blog. So I was able to get a giant cabbage and a bag of onions. Can you believe I ran out of onions? In the interest of fair treatment, I should include a picture of the guy who's been keeping me company for most of today. This is Lyon, our other cat and Leo's littermate. They're actually quite easy to tell apart, once you've spent a little time around them. To us, anyway, they look completely different. Lyon spends many hours here, on the stand over my computer monitor, particularly when I'm sitting in front of the computer. Sometimes he's awake, but since he's a cat he'll also spend time dozing. He snores! Fortunately, his snoring is quiet enough to get lost under the hum of the computer fan, and rubbing his head gets him to wake up and move just enough to sleep more quietly. Lyon's not much of a lap kitty—he leaves most of that to Leo—but he does want to be in a room where there are people. So today, when I've been on the computer, he's been on top of the monitor. Better on top of the monitor than pacing back and forth so I can't see the screen! MelissaH