MelissaH

I now have a plum tart in the oven, to be for tonight's dessert. I've even remembered to take pictures so far. First, I did the dishes. I always like to start in a wide-open kitchen, and my kitchen has such limited working space that it's particularly important. Then, I measured my crust ingredients. My guide was a galette recipe from Fine Cooking, available on line. I did half a recipe of crust, because as written it made two crusts and I didn't want to make another crust. First, I put a couple of ice cubes in a cup with a spout, and then I filled the cup with water. I weighed out 5.7 ounces of King Arthur AP flour in a bowl. I added in a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and a bit of salt, and gave the whole thing a stir with a spoon. My last bit of prep: slicing a stick of butter, straight out of the fridge, lengthwise both ways into long skinny logs and then crosswise into bits. When I have a dishwasher, my preferred tool to make crusts is my Cuisinart. However, it's been nearly two years since I had such a luxury in my home, and it's likely to be another year or so. In the absence of a dishwasher, I prefer to use my hands, because they're much easier to clean. Accordingly, I started to toss the bits of butter into the flour, getting each batch of butter bits completely coated before adding the next. Once all the butter was in and coated, I started smushing with my hands, getting the butter all flattened. During the process, it starts to break into smaller pieces, and eventually gets more or less uniform. When I use my hands, I'm not tempted to overdo this part of crust mixing. Then, I weighed out the requisite 2.5 ounces of water from my iced supply in the measuring cup. Following the recipe instructions, I added it all at once. I folded it in with a rubber scraper, and got a wet gooey mass. I thought for sure I'd goofed again (really, I'm a pretty good baker!) and would have nothing but failures to show you this week. But I went ahead and shaped it into a disk, and wrapped the disk in plastic wrap in preparation for an hour in the fridge. The disk of dough was so soft that I put it on a little plate, because I was afraid it wouldn't stay put on its own. But after an hour in the fridge, the dough had firmed up dramatically, and I was starting to believe that not all was lost. I cleared enough of my counter to pull out my wooden pastry board. This was an Ikea purchase a few years ago, when we found it for $20 instead of the $70 or so of the other brands my husband had found. It's been worth far more than that. I turned my oven on to a little more than 400 degrees F to preheat, because it takes a good long while and doesn't tell you when it gets where it's going. I also got out my flour bucket, because I knew I'd need some to roll out the dough. The rolling pin was from my in-laws a few Christmases back upon my request; you can imagine the laughs that provoked from the rest of the family! The dough, much to my surprise, rolled out reasonably nicely. It stayed soft, which meant that I didn't need to beat it into submission. I didn't quite get it round, though. After I rolled it, I folded it into quarters with the help of my big metal scraper, and transferred it off the rolling board to a sheet of parchment. I put the sheet of parchment on a pizza pan with very low sides, draped the same piece of plastic wrap back over the rolled-out dough, and stashed it back in the fridge because it was starting to feel awfully soft. Then I scraped down my pastry board and put it away so I had working space again. It will be nice to eventually get a kitchen with enough working space that I don't necessarily need to put one thing away to do something else! The recipe called for amaretti crumbs. I didn't have any of those, but I did have a bit of white bread. I turned a slice into crumbs in my spice grinder. Next task: deal with the plums. I used the six sugar plums I'd gotten this morning at Ontario Orchards, which collectively weighed a smidge more than 1 pound. Following the instructions, I rinsed and dried the plums. But in the next step, the instructions lied. They said to cut each plum in half and remove the pit. I took the first plum, ran my knife around its prime meridian and International Date Line, and tried to twist it open into halves. All that happened was that the plum mushed around and spilled some juice onto my cutting board. I'm guessing these instructions were written more for supermarket plums that are less ripe and are more freestone than these. So I instead cut the plums into wedges and flicked them off a pit, doing all the cutting over a bowl to preserve my countertop. Now that everything was ready to go, I pulled the crust out of the fridge and unfolded it all the way. I sprinkled the breadcrumbs into the middle of the dough, leaving a couple of inches naked all the way around. My plum wedges weren't neat enough to make nice concentric circles, so I just concentrated on getting all the breadcrumbs covered with a layer of fruit. Then I folded up the rim of dough, making the pleats as pretty as I could and showing off some of the fruit in the center. Finally, I brushed the crust with a little milk, sprinkled it with some pearl sugar, and loaded it into the oven. It took a little longer to bake than the recipe said, but that's not unusual for my oven. The thermostat is a little off on the low side, and it's also got a hot spot in a back corner so you need to rotate whatever you bake halfway through, which loses a tremendous amount of heat. But eventually it looked done enough to come out of the oven. It's now cooling on top of the stove. Will let you know how it tastes after dinner! MelissaH

Just wanted to add a caution here that many margarines on the market are made with dairy components. In these parts, we can only find one brand of margarine that's non-dairy, and we either have to go to the big supermarkets Syracuse (our big city) or to a health-food store. Make sure to read the label. If it's labeled as kosher pareve, you know it will be dairy-free. MelissaH

I went out in the rain, which is finally starting to let up. My first stop was the good old Price Chopper, since we ate enough guacamole that we wouldn't have enough left for dinner tonight. I also needed to get cilantro; while our orchard store has plenty of parsley on hand, for some reason they never do cilantro. On my way back across town, I saw a boat docked in the harbor, with three big yellow cranes on top. Last week there were boats unloading windmill parts. We regularly get concrete and gravel carrying boats. I don't know what this boat was doing. The carnival rides are there in preparation for Harborfest, which starts tomorrow night. I was hoping to make a trip to our farmer's market tomorrow afternoon, but I'm not sure I want to brave the crowds. (The event regularly draws upwards of 100,000 people. We've never managed to be here for it, though.) Fortunately for the organizers, the weather's supposed to clear up by then and stay nice through the weekend. After I finished in town, I headed west out of town. As I've said previously, this is a largely agrarian area, and one of our major crops is onions. These fields are about five miles from my house. You can always tell an onion field, even if it doesn't have onions planted in it like these, because the dirt is black black black. My destination was Ontario Orchards, the store run by the Ouellette family for many many years. It's our favorite place to get vegetables all year round. This time of the year, they're open every day. After Christmas in the dead of winter, they'll only be open weekends until March. Outside the store itself is an area where they keep plants and some growing supplies. There's also a large nursery with bigger plants, shrubs, mulch, and other gardening necessities, but it was so sloppy that I didn't wander back there today. Inside is all sorts of good stuff. It's probably the best place to shop for canning supplies of all sorts. The onions, garlic, and other alliums are all from Oswego County. If you've ever seen New York Bold onions in your grocery store, those are from here! They carry all sorts of fruit in season. Anything they grow is marked as "From Our Farms" but they also bring in fruits from other places. I liked the sign on the peaches, which came across from Pennsylvania. Even this time of year, they have lots of apples, all varieties, mainly homegrown. But I'd rather be eating other fruit this time of the year, and save the apples for fall. In fall, they press their own cider. Last year, we brought a six-gallon carboy and had it filled straight off the press. They use a UV system to kill any nasties that may be in the cider, so there's nothing added that might prevent other good yeasts from doing good work. Last year's batch hardened up rather nicely, and since my husband used a champagne yeast that can tolerate a higher alcohol content, it used up all the sugar present and wound up quite dry. Today they had tomatoes galore: big, little, green, orange, yellow, red. The cucumbers were also tempting; I may need to make a batch of half-sour pickles at some point before cucumber season ends. We get our popcorn from Ontario. They have it in whatever quantity you want, both yellow and white. Behind the counter you can get cheese (mostly from Heluva Good in Sodus, NY, just west along the lakeshore from us, and from River Rat in the Thousand Islands) and ice cream. There's a small bakery with half-moon cookies, bread, and coffee too. In addition to people food, suet blocks that the woodpeckers and nuthatches like, deer corn, dog and cat food, supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeders and the seed to go in them, and hummingbird flower garden seeds. Driving home, I checked out the lakeshore. Plenty of waves today, and no line at Bev's for ice cream although the parking lot at Rudy's was still crowded. Here's what I came home with: sugar and pears. That's yellow pear tomatoes and sugar plums, along with a much nicer head of garlic, all from their farm. I think I'll make a plum galette to go after the Mexican-style dinner we plan to serve tonight, since the temperature is only in the upper 60s and I can turn on the oven. MelissaH edited because I forgot the garlic

My week blogging with you turned out to be so short! In part, because we've been helping Anne move, I haven't been home to do much cooking (other than the Day of the Dead Yeast). I thought about trying to do pizza tonight, to squeeze it into this week, but two things are working against me. First, Anne's mother is coming into town tonight, we've invited both of them for dinner since everything at both her houses is in moderate disarray, and the mom is Atkinsing so it wouldn't be nice to make pizza tonight. And second, the radar from today is showing Oswego underneath a nice blob of green and yellow, which isn't moving quickly. We're visiting friends this weekend, and if the weather cooperates, we may try it there. I'll post results in the Pizza Cookoff thread when it happens. MelissaH

Do you live somewhere that the tap water is not safe to drink without boiling? MelissaH

So, yesterday was another afternoon/evening spent helping Anne move. We made a big difference, getting furniture arranged in the bedrooms so they actually look like bedrooms. We also put felt or plastic "feet" on nearly all the furniture, since the hardwood floors were refinished late last week and now look absolutely beautiful. We arranged the living room as well, moving sofa etc. where they're going to live, and getting the bookcases in their proper locations and the boxes of books nearby. I suspect that as I type this, Anne's probably working on unloading the books into the cases while she waits for the plumber and appliance people to arrive. Lucky her, she's getting a new fridge, stove, and dishwasher! Here's why she's getting a new stove: (The dust is what happens when you sand down hardwood floors somewhere else in the house.) The oven is in the wall to the left of the stove, and it's a whopping 18 inches wide, although it's in pristine condition. The oven couldn't really go any larger because that wall's actually over the stairs leading down to the basement, and to get a larger oven into that spot, you'd either cut into the headroom of the staircase or you'd need to extend beyond the wall on the other side. So she's getting a new dual-fuel range, which is going to go where the old refrigerator sits, which means that the plumber needs to come and install a new gas line so the stove has something to burn. (Yesterday afternoon and evening we removed the old cooktop units from the countertop, leaving two holes. My husband is very handy, and our plan is to cut the two openings into one large opening. There's just enough of the piece of countertop from between the two openings to patch the holes left from removing the control panels of the cooktops if we put an electrical outlet or two in the backsplash. We'll fill the large opening with granite tile to give a usable workspace. We'll also eventually convert the two panels that look like drawer fronts into real drawers that can hold things, to help replace the storage that will be lost to the dishwasher. Happy housewarming!) The new refrigerator will actually go on the other side of the peninsula with the stove, after many long discussions about the best places to put things while not spending a fortune to redo the whole kitchen. And the dishwasher will go into a space now occupied by a cabinet next to the sink. So we also had to clear out as much of the kitchen as we could, to make room for the appliance guys to bring the new stuff in. By the time we were done with all that, we were all tired, sweaty, filthy, and in no mood to cook. It was also thundering and raining, which just made it feel more humid. So we brought hot subs home from our favorite local pizza joint, Cam's NY Pizza. We decided that of all the take-out options (Italian, pizza, Italian, sort-of Chinese, Italian, sub shop, Italian...) that was the best. My favorite is the eggplant sub, which comes smothered in marinara sauce and melted mozzarella. The steak sub, with cheese and green pepper, was also good. But the so-called Buffalo chicken sub just tasted like a fried chicken patty, with no evidence of Buffalo whatsoever. A little dose of Frank's hot sauce helped, but that's the one I wouldn't order again. We ate as we watched bourdain's No Reservations on Tivo. (Since getting our DVR, we've become incredibly intolerant of live television. We don't even watch much PBS live anymore!) I woke up this morning when it started to rain again as the front came through at about 4:15 AM. I thought about getting up, and instead let the purring of the cat on my pillow massage me back to sleep. When I woke up for real because Lyon was smashing his hard little skull into my right ear, it was much later and still raining. I drank my glass-of-chocolate-milk breakfast, checked the refrigerator to see that the boys had in fact gotten their breakfast, noted from the lime squeezer and other paraphernalia that my husband had started the chicken for tonight marinating before he headed on campus, and turned the computer on. My job for this morning: run errands, including yet another trip to Price Chopper, and finally go to Ontario Orchards. MelissaH

No bibs, although they could sometimes use them! They both specialize in head-butts, so we try not to dribble anything on their heads or we'll find it on our ankles later. This particular morning was Friskies Prime Filets with Beef. Mmm! Actually, this one is pretty good, as far as the boys are concerned. Lyon, on the left with the big fluffy tail, licks all the sauce off first, maybe eats a couple of chunks but leaves the rest, unless it's something particularly delicious like Turkey and Cheese. If there's no sauce, Lyon won't go near it. Lyon also adores dry food: the sound of more going into the bowl is the best way to call him out of hiding. Although both we and the vet wish he'd learn to chew a little bit better, so he wouldn't need to get his teeth cleaned every year. We think it dates back to when we first adopted the boys from our local shelter when they were a year old. (The shelter named them, and the boys knew their names. We figured that if a cat knows his own name, you'd better not change it.) Lyon had a congenital problem with the roof of his mouth that's long been surgically repaired, but he apparently has a very long memory. His littermate Leo, on the right as they eat, starts from the outside and works his way in, but he has a hard time if it's a flavor that comes in shreds, like Turkey and Cheese. If it's a yummy flavor, Leo's plate is licked clean when he's done. Leo's also been known to push his brother out of the way to get more, so we often need to keep an eye on them, to be sure nobody's a pig. Usually what happens is that Leo somehow silently communicates to Lyon that it's time to get out of the way, and if Lyon's left on his own (without being pushed out of the way) then we don't give Leo a hard time. We think Leo might have been the runt of the litter, in part because his feet (as big as silver dollars) are absolutely enormous compared to the rest of him and because Leo's generally the one to eat every last scrap of food. It's not uncommon for Leo to eat most of his own food, move over and polish Lyon's plate clean, walk away and wash up, and five minutes later come back over to explore and finish off his own portion. Interestingly, Leo's quite a bit pickier than Lyon: there's one kind of cat treat he'll eat (but he once got his paws on the can, pried the lid off, and ate the whole thing!), and he won't go near much people food. The one thing we need to be very careful about around Leo is dry malt extract. We keep lots of it around the house, since it not only goes into beer, but combines nicely with ice cream. Leo will rip through a thick plastic bag to get at malt. Lyon, on the other hand, will at least try most brands of cat food, and he adores cheese and yogurt, but he doesn't gorge himself on the specific yummies the way his brother does. Since it was so hot until the thunderstorms rolled in last night, they'd both spent most of the week sleeping. Lyon adores the stand over the computer monitor, which was put there explicitly for his pleasure but Leo prefers other locations, such as the top of the tall bookcases downstairs. Last night was the first time since we got home from our trip that it was cool enough for the boys to sleep in our bed, their usual nighttime napping place! MelissaH

I got back from running around in time for lunch: The bread is Siebenfelder, from Price Chopper, BOGO this week. Ingredients on the label: wheat flour, water, rye flakes, oat flakes, flaked wheat, soybeans, sunflower seeds, yeast, spelt flour, barley, flax seeds, salt, sesame seeds, dry sour, malt flour, fennel, cumin, caraway, lecithin, ascorbic acid, dill. Particularly good toasted with peanut butter. For PB sandwiches, with or without J, I really prefer Jif. But the only Jif we have in the house is creamy. I have no use whatsoever for creamy PB. For most savory uses, I find Jif a bit too sweet, and prefer Skippy, which is what I have on hand at the moment and what went into my sandwich. Along with, I tried some of something I found while running around: Mega M&Ms! Tasting notes: (1) Blue food of any sort just doesn't do it for me. (2) These things don't look a whole lot bigger in diameter than the "normal" ones I'm remembering. That's a U.S. dime down front, as a calibration aid. I don't have any normal M&Ms on hand to do the direct comparison. Where I think I notice a size difference is in the depth: these puppies have potbellies! (3) Somehow, these just don't taste right. The crunch of the shell isn't quite as satisfying to me. Maybe it's the difference in surface area:volume ratio. Maybe it's that they're blue. I wouldn't go out of my way to find them again. Probably the most interesting thing I learned today, though, is that this is an endangered species, at least in Oswego. You can read the stories from the local paper and the Syracuse paper on line. The basics: Price Chopper is buying a few Tops stores, including the one in Oswego, and will be transferring operations to the "new" store in September when the deal closes, and subsequently shutting down the old store. The Tops location is certainly bigger than the current PC store, which doesn't really have the room to even make the aisles wide enough for two carts to comfortably pass one another. The local labor leaders are all up in arms, because PC isn't a union shop and I believe Tops is. But I'm really going to miss having a supermarket close to the center of town, and I might just have to give a little more thought to where I shop this fall. I'm grateful that I don't live in a one-supermarket town (yet; the parent of P&C, our third supermarket chain) is not doing so well financially) but I always hate to lose some choice. MelissaH

A strategy, which I've been using for the past seven years of living in small towns with supermarkets not quite what I'd like: make a point of visiting other towns or cities in your area. Find out what they have, explore their offerings...and bring a cooler loaded with ice so you can take home any goodies you might find in the local markets. Sure, it takes a little bit of preparation. But that way you get a break from the ordinary, and you often find nice surprises. MelissaH

It's breakfast time in Oswego, and here's what was served up. For the cats: and for me: I told you it would be something different this morning! I'm off to run around town this morning. It's imperative that I do so as early as possible, since Oswego's Harborfest starts Thursday evening, but we've been warned that the traffic through town's going to start to get bad as early as today. Another reason to hate going to Wal-mart, since it's waaaaay on the east side past everything except the Lowe's! MelissaH

Goldie, I'll think about it a bit more, along with my husband, and we'll look into other resources that may be available. This question seems to come up fairly often, and I don't have a good answer at the ready. MelissaH

Yeah, that's a good one. What I find really amusing is that if you're a beginning reader, as is apparently the little boy in the ad, if you just sound out the ingredients you'll get them nearly all right! (Apparently a lot of schools have gotten away from teaching "sounding it out" though...but that's not a topic for here and now.) MelissaH

Aileen, you're making me hungry and homesick for things I haven't eaten since I moved out of CO 7 years ago! Our local supermarkets will write up signs telling us, for instance, that the corn came from So-and-so's farm in whatever city. We don't generally know a variety, except for apples and pears, even when we know who grew it. Our farmer's market vendors and farmstands in the area, however, will almost always tell us what variety they've grown, and if you ask and show an interest, they'll talk your ear off! MelissaH

Brief dinner update, sans many photos because I got too into a conversation with Anne about floors, moving, etc. to remember to take many: Nothing too exciting at the supermarket. Have any of your supermarkets experimented with TV screens inside? The Price Chopper's put one in the produce, and another in the meat, hanging off the ceiling. The programming's mostly ads, from what I can tell (lots of plugs for epicurious.com, it seems) with a news scroll across the bottom. There are speakers, but I've managed to block them out in the produce, and I can't hear it over the rattle and whir of the meat case fans. I now tend to spend as little time as possible in those areas of the store, though. In the meat section, my husband seized upon a package of brats, so that's what we had for dinner. First, they got boiled in some cheap beer with sliced onions, and then he threw them on the grill. I'm not a big sauerkraut or mustard fan, but both he and Anne had those with their brat. I stuck with the plain old cheap hot dog bun only. Trust me, they looked much better when they came off the grill, nice and brown and with a crispy outside that popped when you bit in. Before the brats, we ate some chips with a package of guacamole that we found in the produce section, tucked next to the bagged salad and baby carrots. The ingredient list wasn't scary to us (although we're chemists, so we can pronounce whatever you throw at us ) and we decided that it was a reasonable shortcut for a lazy day. Along with the brats, I concocted a giant salad from the remainder of the head of iceberg lettuce, sliced thin; about half a green pepper, chunked; a handful of jicama matchsticks; a tomato cut in wedges; an avocado, scored into squares with the tip of my knife and then scooped out of its shell with a spoon; and the green beans from this morning at Wegman's, ends snapped off, tossed into boiling salted water for exactly 4 minutes, shocked in ice water, and then cut into inch-long pieces. I also whipped up a quickie vinaigrette from most of a small shallot, minced and allowed to macerate in a splash of O brand zinfandel vinegar for about ten minutes with a dash of salt and a grind of pepper and a spoonful of Dijon mustard, and all that whizzed up with the stick blender to emulsify with olive oil. Dessert was a bit more ambitious. It's been hot here, so we went cold to end our meal. I took a couple of serving-size bottles of mango nectar, added a syrup made from 3/4 cup water and 3/4 cup sugar heated in the microwave to dissolve, mixed it all up, added a splash of commercial limeade (probably should have just used lime juice) and twirled the works in the Cuisinart ice cream freezer. I think we got a bit too much sugar in, because it took forever to freeze (never really got beyond slushy) and tasted awfully sweet even once it was frozen to slush. However, it was still quite refreshing. I'll post the pictures I took tomorrow, when I'm more awake. Breakfast will be something different! MelissaH edited to post pictures

I freeze it before. ← And I freeze it after. MelissaH

No Alton Brown. Alton's much more of a showman. But some of the Good Eats episodes would make great viewing on days the instructor's not able to be there, and doesn't want to just waste a class period! The course, Chem 209: Chemistry and Society, is one of the courses that students at Oswego can take to fill their General Education degree requirements. The course has always been fairly popular, because it somehow (rightly or wrongly) got a reputation as one of the easier science courses, far easier than the Chem 101: Intro to Chemistry course I've taught. But they're different courses entirely. The department has a policy of trying to give students as much choice as possible. This means that when two or more sections of a given course are available, they make every attempt to have different instructors for the different sections. Chem 209 is a popular enough course that two sections are offered every semester: my husband's and one by another instructor. The other instructor teaches the class with a more traditional textbook, and in a more traditional manner. My husband saw the class as an opportunity to teach some things that wouldn't ordinarily get presented in a typical chemistry class, and to present the concepts in an atypical manner. When the department started teaching 209, the original intent was to teach it from the New York Times science pages that appear every Tuesday. That works well for my husband, because the class is always a Tuesday-Thursday class: he can browse the on-line version Tuesday before class, mention any specific articles he wants them to read before next time, and then discuss the articles on Thursday. But to get into more involved chemistry topics, the newspaper alone isn't enough. Remember, there are no prerequisites for this class. (It's also not a prerequisite for anything else.) Many of the students who take 209 are in majors as far away from science as you can get. (Not as many education majors, though, because they need lab experience and there's no 209 lab; they gravitate towards 101 instead because 101 has an optional lab.) Because the audience is not scientists, my husband thought it would be good to use a book that is not written for a scientist, and is not necessarily about scientific principles that are beyond everyday experience. Ergo, Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, particularly the first edition. As a bonus, McGee is a relatively inexpensive book, which keeps the students happy. The chapters on dairy, alcohol, and flour were particularly useful. But there were still some holes in the content my husband wanted to teach, things not covered by McGee. Again, he wanted a book aimed at a more general audience. He settled on The Same and Not the Same by Roald Hoffman. This was another relatively inexpensive book, with the scientific content presented in a non-threatening manner. I don't think the students needed to do any calculations at all, the whole semester. Both semesters, the class turned out to be quite popular. In fact, during the spring semester, his section was overloaded. And among the Technology Education crowd, he's gotten a great reputation as teaching a class you'll learn from, even if you have to work a bit. My husband taught 209 for the first time last fall, using McGee and Hoffman as his texts. Last spring he used the same books, but it was a different class because the news articles were different, and the students had different interests. This year, though, he's changing books. For one thing, the new edition of McGee draws structures of organic compounds in a way that's not anything an organic chemist would do, and has the potential to be confusing to students. And the new edition is only available in hardcover, and is more expensive to buy. My husband became aware of a newer book, Napoleon's Buttons by Le Cotteur and Burreson, which he's going to use this fall (in addition to the paper). One book is cheaper than two, and this book covers more of the scientific content that he typically includes in a semester of class so there's going to be less need to fill in holes later. It's still a work in progress, and probably always will be! MelissaH

It's Monday, and it's hot and humid. It was warm last night also, which probably explains why I fell asleep last night watching the coverage of Lance et al. that we'd Tivoed in the morning.... Back to yesterday afternoon, when I left off it was lunchtime. Lunch was once again in two parts, chocolate milk and a bit of Manchego cheese. For some reason, premade chocolate milk always tastes better to me than the stuff you make at home with chocolate syrup and milk. I don't know if it's because they use milk that hasn't been completely fat-deprived like I do, or if it's the other additives that make it just that little bit thicker. The organic brand was on sale last week. Look in the top right corner of the picture with the wedge of cheese. You'll get an idea that not all was going well with my dinner plans. However, I didn't have the time to do anything about it then, because our friend Jeff arrived so we could get some work done. Here is the answer to the mystery about all the ice that traveled to our house: Those are two kegs filled with homebrew, ready to be bottled. I'm very happy that Jeff's interested in helping, because I'd have to do it otherwise. In this case, the two kegs are filled with beer made from the same batch of wort (unfermented beer) but with different yeasts added. (Can you tell that we're all scientists?) They've been chilling in the tub with ice for about three days now, trying to get them as cold as possible. The colder the beer (or other liquid), the more gas dissolves in them, and the more carbonated the final product is. At this point, the contents of the kegs are about as cold as they're going to get in July. Before the work of bottling, though, there's some prep work. First, everything that's going to touch the beer needs to be cleaned and sterilized. The orange tub came from the wallpapering aisle of a Home Depot, and works well for soaking all the long tubes in sterilizer. The bucket behind the tub has some bottles soaking also. While all the bottles and other pieces soaked, it was a good time to sit down with a bottle of the Wolaver's brown ale and judging sheets, and then compare to the comments in the Zymurgy calibration beer article. I tasted a little bit, but it wasn't my thing. To me, it tasted like beer. But interestingly enough, neither Jeff nor my husband was able to smell any diacetyl in the beer. (This is not necessarily something you want in a given beer style. If you want to know what diacetyl smells like, go stand in the microwave popcorn aisle of your local grocery store and inhale. Yup, that fake butter aroma comes courtesy of diacetyl.) Jeff didn't taste any either, although my husband noticed a slippery mouthfeel that can also be characteristic of diacetyl. But I stuck my nose in the glass, and I noticed it immediately, albeit buried under a bunch of fruity aromas. I should say a little bit here about what beer judges look for. The Beer Judge Certification Program puts out a style guide, which was just revised last year. The style guide delineates 28 style categories of beer (and mead and cider), with most categories having several styles. (For instance, Category 13 is Stout, containing the six styles Dry Stout, Sweet Stout, Oatmeal Stout, Foreign Extra Stout, American Stout, and Russian Imperial Stout.) When you enter a beer in a competition, you enter it in a specific class. (Depending on the category and the competition, a class may be an entire category, or just one or a few styles within a given category.) And the beer's judged solely on how closely it meets the standards in the style guide. My favorite analogy is a dog show: you might love your mutt and think it's the most beautiful dog ever, but because it's not a pure anything it won't do well at a dog show. You might see the most amazing German shepherd, but it won't show well if you enter it in the collie category. And you might think a breed of dog is not pleasing to the eye, but they can't help it---that's what the standard says they're supposed to look like! In a homebrew competition, you need to be careful to enter your beer in the proper category, or it won't score well. And some beers out there really don't fit into any category very well, so they'll never judge particularly well even though they're wonderfully tasty or refreshing. That part of the work done, the bottling commenced. Because the beer was kegged and carbonated, it was bottled directly from the keg with the counterpressure bottle filler. The filler makes the whole process a lot faster and easier, once you get straight which valves to open and close when. The standing version of the bottle capper makes that part faster and safer too. Before this capper, we used a "wing" capper: sit a boiled cap on top of the bottle, bring the wing capper on top, and push the two handles in to crunch and crimp the cap into place. The problem with wing cappers is that there's not a stop mechanism to let you know when the cap's on far enough. Your hands also wind up very close to the bottle neck. We've both had bottles shatter on us, either from overcrunching or from possible flaws in the bottle that weakened the glass. Fortunately, neither of us got more than minor scratches on our hands when that happened, and now that we have the better capper it's no longer an issue. When all was said and done, we had both batches of beer bottled (some in 12-oz. bottles and some in 22-oz. bombers) and labeled. It was the time of day when I start to think about dinner. But when I went upstairs to the kitchen to check on my pizza dough, this is what I saw: lumps of dough flatter than when I'd left them. Obviously, my yeast hadn't done its job. Chufi wondered about the large bag of yeast, and whether I do a lot of baking. The answer is that I typically do loads of baking. For the last month or so, though, I haven't done much baking because I've either been on vacation or it's been too hot to contemplate turning on the oven. I like to buy my yeast in a form other than the expensive little envelopes, but I don't usually buy quite this much yeast at a time. This particular bag was a gift from my mother. Unfortunately, for reasons not completely clear, this particular bag was also a dud. I took a new spoonful from the bag and tried proofing it, and got...nothing. No bubbles, no signs of life. My dinner plans obviously weren't going to work. (I did, fortunately, pick up a pound brick of SAF Instant yeast in Michigan. I have yet to see a failure with that brand, and it's another thing we don't see here in CNY. Guess it's time to break it open.) Time to move on to Plan B. We walked out to the shore and past Bev's Dairy Treat, our favorite ice-cream stop (these lines are actually short for a hot summer night!) to Rudy's, an Oswego institution. (The signs on the doors are all dire warnings against feeding seagulls, rats with wings.) Inside was a madhouse, as usual for mealtime. There's a long counter, where you stake out a spot and place your order with one of the half-dozen order takers. Then you move back against the wall so other people can squeeze into the counter and place their orders. Eventually your order taker will get to a register and ring up your order so you can pay. As the orders come in, the order takers call out the portion that needs to be cooked ("One blue plate, one napi, one cheeseburger hot, two fries!") and then write it down on a paper plate, which they stick up on the counter separating them from the cooks. And somehow the six or eight cooks keep the orders straight, and get things into and out of the fryers without losing track of anything. Once an order is ready, one of the cooks calls out the name of the order taker, the contents of the order, and the name again. ("Ashley, one blue, one napi, one cheeseburger hot, two fries, Ashley!") Your order, the plate on which the order is written, any cold stuff that goes with, and your drinks get piled into a cardboard tray, and then you can squeeze ketchup on your fries, grab some napkins, and find a place to sit. Although there is some indoor seating (particularly useful when they've first opened for the season in March), the prime seating is all outdoors. There are picnic tables with umbrellas, picnic tables without umbrellas, picnic tables under pavilions, picnic tables across the street. Some people eat in their cars, and some people bring theirs home. The parking lot is typically jammed, and inside is also usually crowded. But because there's so much seating, outside never feels crowded. Here's our dinner: My husband got a red plate (haddock, fries, and cole slaw for his side) with lemonade to drink. I got a guppy plate, which is a smaller version of a red plate, and a lemonade. I prefer macaroni salad to cole slaw, so I chose that as my side. (We rarely need to even think about our orders at Rudy's.) I also spotted a handwritten sign that the zucchini was fresh and local this week, between the handwritten notice that steamed clams were available this weekend and the handwritten ad for crabbie bites (mini crabcakes). So I had to try an order of zucchini logs. We got a picnic table with an umbrella, right by the lake so we could watch the boats. Not the healthiest dinner, certainly, but it tasted really good. The seagulls left us alone. Although the sky looked threatening, we never got rain. After we ate, we walked back home, made a few phone calls, and settled down to watch the Tour for the last time this year. I didn't even make it to the Champs-Elysees before my eyes closed. When I realized what was happening, I headed to bed. My husband joined me eventually, and this morning he told me what I hadn't seen. He also saved the coverage, so I can go back and watch it later. This morning while it was still cool, we dashed to Syracuse (Home Depot, Target, Chase-Pitkin, Toys R Us, Petsmart, and Wegman's because we were there, even though the Wegman's in Clay isn't as nice as the Wegman's in Ithaca). That meant my breakfast had to be quick and portable: We've discovered that the Stonyfield Farms yogurt sticks aren't much more expensive than the Yoplait versions. My husband likes them better because they don't give him heartburn like the commercial ones, and I like that they aren't made with high-fructose corn syrup. We don't know if the two phenomena are related. By the time we got home, I was hungry again, leading to this sterling example of lunch: We'll be doing our regular weekly shopping later today. We'll also be helping our friend Anne put her doors back up, now that the movers have done their job. She'll probably be joining us for dinner. I don't have a clue what that will be (probably no sour cherry soup, though) other than it will probably involve the green beans and arugula we got at Wegman's today, as well as the avocado that should really be used up also. This is the first day since Friday that I haven't drunk at least one big glass of chocolate milk, and I'm feeling symptoms of withdrawal. I can't even mix up a glass myself, because I don't have enough milk to bother! MelissaH

Happy Sunday! During the summer, as you've probably figured out, our days become rather free-form without the structure of a work week. Therefore, it helps me tremendously at the beginning of every day if I remind myself what day of the week it is. We don't typically have this problem during the school year, though. I'd like to start today by rectifying a mistake in yesterday's big long post. I forgot to mention two very important items we found at Wegman's, once again things that we don't find in Oswego: We have no problem finding Hershey's syrup, but every now and again (on the rare occasions I have whole milk in the house) I enjoy an egg cream, and Hershey's just doesn't taste right for that. The Pocky is a flavor that we don't see in Syracuse. We don't see any Pocky at all in Oswego, even at the small Asian store that opened earlier this year. They're Filipino-oriented mainly, so I guess Pocky just isn't popular in the Philippines? My first order of business this morning, even before breakfast: washing dishes. These are the fruits of my labor. Most of these are the dishes we use to give our cats their wet food twice a day. I don't mind washing these, or any of the other normal dishes, too much. The one thing I absolutely hate washing by hand is the Cuisinart. (It's big, it has sharp parts, the nooks and crannies are terrible to try and get clean, and water always pools in it somewhere, no matter which way you set it to dry.) I'd used it the other day for the pesto, and although it was rinsed immediately after use, it didn't make its way into the last load of dishes that got washed. So I got to do it this morning. No blood this time. After that, I started a batch of pizza dough, so it might be ready to use later today. I chose the Grilled Pizza Dough recipe from Peter Reinhart's American Pie, since in this weather that's how I'm most likely to cook pizza. To start, I copied the recipe onto a scrap of paper, so I don't have to bring my precious book into the kitchen. Bonus points if you can read my handwriting. Here are my ingredients, before I did anything with them: water, yeast, sugar, olive oil, salt, and flour (I used King Arthur all-purpose). I weighed the flour first. My balance is an Ohaus cheapo scientific balance, quite a few years old, ordered from the Fisher Scientific catalog for $99. That was before weighing hit the mainstream and electronic balances became readily available for relatively small amounts of money. I like the fact that I can run it from either a battery or an AC adapter. I also like being able to stash the whole thing in a plastic bag when I'm working with messy stuff. Then, everything else went into the mixer bowl, and I stirred it together with the dough whisk my MIL gave me a couple of years ago. I like the dough whisk because it does a better job of quickly mixing everything together than a spoon, and it's easier to get gunky dough out from the wires than from between fork tines. From here, it went to the mixer for a four-minute low-speed mix. You can see from this picture at the beginning that not all the flour was completely combined... ...but by the end, when it was ready to rest for 15 minutes, the dough was nicely uniform. While the dough rested, I fell back into my rut and ate a quick breakfast. Tomorrow morning I'll have to do something different, because this was the end of the Life. When the timer went off, I turned the mixer back on for another four minutes or so. This was actually an action shot of the mixer in motion! At the end of all this, I cajoled the dough onto a cutting board. During this process I managed to gunk both hands, so I didn't want to touch the camera and gunk it as well. I cut the dough into the requisite 6 pieces (I was slightly less anal than usual and didn't weigh the entire batch of dough, divide by 6, and weigh each piece to be sure everything was equal. Having gunked hands and a put-away balance had a lot to do with that.) and rounded each piece into a ball. Here's where I diverged slightly from the recipe instructions. Reinhart instructs his readers to put each dough ball in its own plastic ziplock bag, add a drizzle of olive oil to each, seal, and let rise on the counter for two hours before going into the fridge for three hours or more. However, I have an issue with sacrificing that many plastic bags for short-term storage. Instead, I took a glass baking dish, added a bit of olive oil, and put the dough balls in that. I used the dough balls themselves to help spread the oil around the whole dish, in the process getting them oil-coated. Once all the dough balls were in the dish, I covered the whole thing with plastic wrap. I'll probably leave the dough at room temperature until I'm ready for it this afternoon. For one thing, my water was cooler than the Reinhart-mandated 70 degrees F. For another thing, it's reasonably cool in my kitchen this morning. And I just don't think I'll have the time to give the dough two hours on the counter, three hours in the fridge, and another two hours on the counter before I use it. We'll see how it develops over the course of the day. In the meantime, it's Sunday, which means the grocery store sales changed today. My husband brought the paper in, with the new circulars. Time to see if anything good's on sale this week. MelissaH

My first surprise of the morning was not being rousted out of bed till 8 AM! I'd thought for sure that we'd be hitting the road before dawn in order to be down in Ithaca and the state parks in that area while the light was still good for photos. I'm sure my husband was up in plenty of time for us to do so. However, what I haven't mentioned before in this blog is that since Monday afternoon, he's had his nose buried in the new Harry Potter book in every spare moment. I'm guessing he chose to read instead of drive! Breakfast this morning was a glass of chocolate milk (sorry, no picture because I'd put the camera in the car last night so I didn't have to think about it this morning.) We were on the road by about 8:30, and we made the Geneva Bike Center our first stop. That way, we didn't have to haul a mangled wheel everywhere we went, and we freed up space in the back of the car with other goodies. We got to Geneva about 20 minutes before the shop (and everything else in town) opened at 10. After talking for half an hour about stuff concerned entirely with cycling and not at all with food, we headed to Ithaca. It turned out to be a pleasant hour's drive, through farmland covering the ridge separating Seneca and Cayuga Lakes. We saw many signs for wineries, but bypassed them all this trip. Ithaca is a much bigger and more affluent town than Oswego. We took the opportunity to run a bunch of errands, therefore saving ourselves a separate trip to Syracuse. We went to the Barnes and Noble store and purchased a CD/book set on how to speak Dutch. (There's a good reason for this, but I'll save it for another post, probably the one in which I answer rjwong's very good question.) We also looked for wheeled backpacks in the EMS store, but all the wheeled cases they had lacked backpack straps, and all their backpacks lacked wheels. (There's a good reason for this errand also, closely related to learning at least a little Dutch.) We got some maps at the AAA office. And finally, we fought through the traffic to the farmer's market. The Ithaca farmer's market is much more formal than the Oswego market. They have a pavilion in which all the vendors set up. However, the market itself was disappointing to us, and not as good as we remembered from our previous visit four years ago. Although there are probably twice as many vendors overall, I think there were no more farmers than what we usually get in Oswego, and many more people selling crafts, clothing, cooked food like samosas and soup, and baked goods. I was surprised to see vendors selling meat, since we don't get any of that at our market. And the farmers' produce was twice as expensive than our local market. I'm not sure if that's because everything was some form of organic, or if the fees to vend are that much more. Despite our disappointment, I'm very glad we went to the market. I hadn't expected to see anything really unique, but I once again got a pleasant surprise. The one thing we bought was cheese from the Northland Sheep Dairy in Marathon, NY. They had four of their cheeses available, and we bought wedges of their Folie Bergère and Bleue Bergère. (The two cheeses in the photograph are Pepperino and Tomme Bergère, which we didn't buy.) We were particularly interested by the blue, because in Ft. Collins we'd gotten a wedge of Bingham Hill's Sheepish Blue. The Bleue Bergere is a very different sort of cheese; about the only thing the two have in common is that they're both sheep's milk blue cheeses. We'll be doing a head-to-head tasting at some point, although I'm not sure it will happen before the end of this blog. As we walked past the stalls selling curry and noodles and soups, we realized that it was well past noon and we were both pretty hungry. So for our first real meal of the day, we headed up the hill to Cornell University. My husband was driving, and I'm grateful for that because Ithaca is a city of hills and we got our current car less than a year ago. My husband's been driving stick shifts since he learned to drive, but I hadn't had any experience with a clutch until we got this car! I'm sure that if we lived in Ithaca, we would have never considered anything but an automatic...and I'd probably have fewer gray hairs. On the way out, we passed a small pond loaded with lily pods in bloom. We also found some good-sized tadpoles in the pond, not too far from having legs. Why up the hill? We had the best lunch known to humans, as far as I'm concerned, straight from the Dairy Bar at Cornell: My cone's the one in the foreground: a single scoop of Bavarian Raspberry Fudge (Bavarian crème flavored ice cream with raspberry swirl and chunky fudge pieces). My husband splurged on a double scoop of Espresso Chunky Chip, the closest he's come in eons to Ben & Jerry's Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz, which is (sadly) no longer available, either on its own or mixed with White Russian and sold as To Russia With Buzz. We topped off our lunch with some bits of sharp cheddar from the dairy store, which was both flavorful and moist. Temporarily satiated, we took advantage of the big city atmosphere and headed down the hill for some more shopping. Our target this time: Wegman's. We figured that Ithaca would be cosmopolitan enough that we'd find good stuff there. We were right! We got a good laugh from the various signs painted on the front windows. Our favorite was the one advertising the "Vegetarian Bar." After all, if you sell salad at a salad bar, what do you sell at a vegetarian bar? I've always heard that carnivores are no good to eat! The first thing we saw, just inside the entryway, were some melons, ready to eat and packed for convenience: The rest of the produce was quite spectacular as well, both because it was all stacked beautifully and because they have items that we just don't see elsewhere: This was the Asian produce section. The eggplants on the right are Japanese eggplants. Two items to the left are the Chinese eggplants. Separating the two are lotus roots. Finishing out the top row are galangal root, long beans, lemongrass, daikon, yu choi sum, ong choi, and fresh water chestnuts (which I'd gotten in Ohio and decided tasted just like jicama but with a lot more work, although it's a moot point in Oswego because we don't see either there). We didn't get any of the goodies in this picture, but we did find a nice hunk of ginger root, several serrano peppers that we're hoping have more heat than the wimpy jalapeños we see, and a nice-looking jicama. We also got a bag of limes, since they looked nicer and were less expensive than the limes at our local stores. From the produce, we moved on to our second-favorite section of any Wegman's store to browse: the cheeses. This is the case with the Spanish and Mexican cheeses. There were five other cases of cheeses, including a case with nothing but varieties of blue cheese. And that doesn't even include the case of cheeses which they'll cut to order, or the "ordinary" supermarket bricks of cheese! We found a small wedge of Maytag Blue, which we'll add to our tasting of American blues. We didn't get any, but we did see that they have Piave available in the cut-to-order case. This is a cheese that PennMac introduced us to, when we walked up one day many years ago and said, "What else do you have that's interesting?" Piave is a cow's milk cheese, on the firm side but still soft enough to melt nicely, definitely sharp. We've actually been known to use it in place of Parmigiano Reggiano, with pretty good results. We prefer to purchase our Piave half a wheel at a time, because it seems to store reasonably well if you follow Dear Heart's instructions to wrap it first in waxed paper and then in aluminum foil, and because PennMac charges $5 less per pound than Wegman's does. Zingerman's in Ann Arbor also carries Piave, but they are more expensive than even Wegman's. When we lived in Ohio, we looked everywhere for Piave but didn't find any. We finally got exasperated enough to ask at West Point Market, the best cheese counter in Akron, and they more or less told us that this cheese was not permitted to be sold in the state of Ohio, for reasons they were unable to elucidate. At that point I'd already given up on finding someone to cut my hair, and went back to the wonderful man who kept me neatly shorn all the way through high school and before, so I was making the trip to Pittsburgh every couple of months anyway. From here, though, it's about a 6.5 hour drive, a little too long to be practical. We were back to visit last November, and have a little left from that trip's wedge. We're thinking it's time to restock our supply. Fortunately, my husband has a cousin who lives in Pittsburgh! We also found the butter case (not to be confused with the Butterkäse in the cheese section): The rest of the walk through Wegman's was also a lot of fun for us, because the store had a diversity of food that we just don't see in Oswego. (More than four brands of salsa! HOT salsa on the shelf!) Just before heading to the cashier, we had to check out the beverage selection, looking for still more unusual stuff we don't see in Oswego. And lo and behold, they had a display of Wolaver's organic ales. Ordinarily the word "organic" doesn't excite us too much. (As chemists, we both have a huge problem with people who claim their food is "chemical-free"!) But in this case, the brand rang a bell with my husband. He's an avid homebrewer, a certified beer judge, and a member of AHA. An issue of their magazine Zymurgy from earlier this year had used a Wolaver's beer as a "calibration" beer (they have experts judge it, so you can judge it and see how closely you match the experts) and he'd sent me off to a meeting in San Diego last March in hopes of me having better luck finding it than he had. He couldn't remember which Wolaver's beer it was, though, so we got a six-pack each of the IPA, pale ale, and brown. (The first thing he did when we got home was go to his archive and look up which one. The brown is the one in the article, but the others certainly won't go to waste.) Confession time: I don't like beer. I'm probably the only chemist on the face of the earth who doesn't like beer. In fact, until last summer when we were in Belgium, I'd never ordered a beer for myself. I've finally figured out that the part of beer I really don't like is the hops. The alcohol taste isn't my favorite, either; most of the time, my taste buds run more to Coke. Malt is fine, though! We'd brought a cooler and ice with us. We usually keep a soft-sided collapsible cooler in the car at all times, in case we find something interesting or just if it's a hot day and we want to get ice cream home as a solid, not a liquid. (My parents in western Colorado don't even have to bring their own ice, though: the nearest big supermarket from them is a 45-minute drive, and because so many people drive at least that long to do their shopping, the stores will actually pack your perishables in a bag with a bit of dry ice!) The beer and cheese went into the cooler for the duration, and we headed towards our last stop. My husband had discovered Baker's Acres nursery on our first trip to Ithaca four years ago. They're actually in Lansing, NY, several miles north of Ithaca on our way home. On that trip, we'd brought a bay laurel tree, a rosemary bush, and three different colors of raspberry plants home to Ohio. We killed the bay laurel tree that first winter, but the rosemary did quite well until we moved it to New York and it didn't like something here. The raspberries were bearing lots of delicious fruit but we left them behind, and I still miss them horribly! I hadn't been there when my husband and my friend Marty went there the first time, since my other friend Linda (who's now married to Marty) and I were busy with the important task of painting our toenails. (Linda's a biologist. We scientists tend not to paint our fingernails, since the solvents we use will just take the polish right off. Toenails, however, are safely out of the line of fire.) This was my first sight: rows upon rows of plants, each carefully labeled so you'd know whether to buy it in the first place, and what to do with it once you got it home. And that's just the perennials! There was another section of trees and shrubs, as well as a greenhouse of annuals and another of herbs. We walked through everything else, but the herbs were the most interesting. Each herb also had its own label. In this case, "tender perennial" means that it's technically a perennial, but in these northern climates, if you want it to survive you need to bring it in as a houseplant for the winter. They not only had lots of different herbs, but most herbs came in different varieties. We saw tarragon and sage (the pineapple sage smells really pineappley, but my next door neighbor has enough sage in her garden for at least FOUR households so we didn't get any), and mints galore (this one's catmint; a little catnip is visible on the left side of the picture) as well as more varieties of rosemary than we could count, in both big and small bushes. We left with a good-sized rosemary bush, a spike of lavender, and a tiny bay tree. No catnip, though: one of our boys is exquisitely sensitive to the stuff, and gets stoned from the slightest amount. We also learned in Ohio that catnip is best confined to a pot, or it takes over the garden and causes the cat to cry when you're still 50 yards from the house, and climb up your leg when you come in from picking tomatoes. I got to drive home, because my husband was busy with the last few pages of his book and because there weren't any big horrible hills to cause me and the clutch distress. We got home and half an hour later headed to Anne's to discuss minimal-budget kitchen options. (But that's for another thread, and we think she's got a workable short-term solution.) We got home at 8:30, and were both too hungry to think about doing anything other than leftovers. My husband ate two of the leftover curry beef patties. I ate the third as well as the leftover pasta from yesterday. It all looked really inglamorous, especially since we took it all down to the family room and watched the Tivoed footage from this morning's Tour time trial stage. And that's why I didn't get back upstairs to write this as soon as I wanted. (Is that the modern version of "the dog ate my homework"?) We've now eaten all the leftovers in the house. That means I'll need to cook tomorrow. If I get out for sour cream, I think I'll try a sour cherry soup because I've never had anything of the sort and the idea intrigues me greatly. I also have some pesto still, so if I get up early enough I may make some pizza dough to grill later. Yum! Good night, MelissaH

Hi everyone, Just a quick note to let you know that I'm back at home, and I'll be posting later tonight about the exploits of the day. All I'll say for now is that I got a bunch of surprises, most of them quite pleasant, and I have the best husband in the world. We're off again shortly, to help look at our friend Anne's kitchen. She's just bought a house, and is trying to determine where the new dishwasher (I'm so jealous of that one!), refrigerator, and stove will go before the plumber arrives Monday morning. MelissaH

What mental malfunction would compell anyone to make something so completely unappealing & repulsive? ← This actually sounds a lot like a midwestern delicacy my husband likes occasionally, which his whole family calls "sandwich spread." They make it by grinding pickled ring bologna, which is fairly easy to buy in the supermarket where they live, with pickles. Definitely not my thing...and I've never heard of them serving it with cheeze whiz. MelissaH

Dinner report: Here's what it looked like before I got started: From left to right: two tomatoes from yesterday's market, four yellow squashes from yesterday's market, the nicest head of garlic from Price Chopper's bin today, what was left of the onion that went on yesterday's burger, the pine nuts from my freezer, the enormous bunch of basil from yesterday's market, my bottle of olive oil, half a box of penne rigate, and the wedge of parmigiano reggiano I found in the store today. The knife is a Farberware santoku that we got when our Bed Bath and Beyond opened a few months ago. We figured it was worth $10 plus tax to see if we liked that blade shape, and it turned out to be money well spent. (A "real" santoku is out of the question, because it would be way out of our budget to get a right-handed version for my husband and a left-handed version for me.) First order of business: get the pesto made. I stripped all the leaves off the bunch of basil and put them in the food processor jar. I then took three cloves of garlic, smashed them, peeled them, and cut off the hard nubbin where they attach to the head, and added them. I followed Pam R's directions and blitzed, then added olive oil and pine nuts and blitzed some more. Here's what it looked like when I scraped it into another container: I then floated a little more olive oil on top as goldie suggested and covered the whole thing with plastic wrap touching the surface to help seal off air, before dealing with the rest of dinner. First, I sliced two of the yellow squashes into half-moons. I thought about doing more, but decided I didn't need them. I also sliced the remains of the onion into half-moons, and seeded and diced (but didn't peel) the two tomatoes. Time for the stove. First, I got the onions cooking in a touch of olive oil: And then I put a pot of water on to boil. My kooky stove only has one usable big burner, on the back left. The big burner on the back right is thermostatted, so it's great for simmering but it doesn't put out the heat needed to boil water for pasta. The third big burner is in the back middle, under the cover and a griddle, but it's so close to the other two back burners that even if you open it up, there isn't enough room to work. I decided that it was better to give the frying pan the big burner, and made do with a smaller one for the pasta water. Once the onions were getting nicely softened, I added the squash half-moons and a big pinch of salt. The squash took a little while to start to brown, but once it was also sufficiently cooked, I took the pan off the heat and added the tomatoes. Once the veggies were off the heat, I could move the pasta water to the big burner, where it quickly came to a boil. I added salt and the pasta, set the timer, and gave the whole thing a good stir. Once the pasta was cooked, I put the veggies in a big bowl and added the penne, a couple of big spoonfuls of the pesto, and a showering of grated cheese. After mixing, it looked like this: and nicely served the two of us with leftovers. I thought it tasted pretty good, maybe could have actually used those other two squashes. My husband ate it, but he doesn't like pesto quite as much as I do. However, all is forgiven as I hear him starting to do the dishes in the kitchen. I never did get my spoonful of Nutella yesterday night, instead choosing to head to my pillow and read a little more about New York City food according to Schwartz. Therefore, the Nutella's still there for me tonight, right? Tomorrow morning we're off to Ithaca, Geneva, and other points in the Finger Lakes. My husband is a morning person, and I fear he's going to be hauling me out of bed long before I'd roll out on my own, to get somewhere in time for the good photographic light. I'll post when we get home. MelissaH

Back to this week's food: Shortly before noon, I walked onto campus and retrieved the car, so I could get to our local supermarket. This is where we typically go to shop, for a few reasons. One, they are generally less expensive than the other two supermarkets. Two, the stuff they put on sale is more often than not stuff we'd get even if it weren't on sale. And three, this is the store closest to us. The Oswego River runs through town, and there are two bridges going across. Paralleling the river are the numbered streets: E. 1st, E. 2nd, through E. 13th on the east side, and W. 1st, W. 2nd, through W. 9th on the west side. E. 1st never intersects W. 1st, so it's imperative that you say whether you mean E. or W. when you give directions here! (And as if that isn't bad enough to keep straight, outside the city limits but also roughly parallel to the river are 1st through 6th Aves!) We live on the west side, but all three supermarkets are on the east side. Price Chopper is at about E. 3rd, a couple of miles from home. The P&C and Tops are another 1.5 miles further east than that, through an area that's recently had traffic backups due to some roadwork even further out. We hardly even look at the other stores' ads anymore, other than a cursory glance. I didn't take any pictures inside the store, because it was way more crowded than I would have expected for a Friday at lunch. I picked up the garlic and the parm for the pesto tonight, a couple of lemons, an avocado to add to salad tonight, as well as a few other odds and ends. The garlic looked pretty miserable, and I had to hunt in the bin to find one worth spending $0.59 on. I probably would have had better luck with the garlic at the orchard store, but that would have been just as far from home in the opposite direction, and I didn't feel like going that way today. So we'll see if I can get enough decent cloves out of the head I purchased to make some decent pesto tonight. I dropped the car back on campus, shoved the cheese in the food fridge in my husband's office, went for my swim, came back, picked up the goods, and walked home. Then, I prepared lunch. This was Round 1, or the evidence thereof: and this was Round 2, one of the leftover curry beef patties which you could see heating in the toaster oven. Time to start working on dinner, I think. At least time to start making the pesto. MelissaH

Where in Syracuse do you get this cheese? I haven't spotted it but would love to get some. Also curious to know: have you tried eating at the little Mexican place a bit to the west of you near Sodus. I've heard that it's much better/more authentic than the Mexican offerings in Syracuse. ← At least I think I remember seeing the cheese in Syracuse, probably at the DeWitt Wegman's store...or my memory could be deceiving me. When we lived in NE Ohio we'd periodically make trips to Pittsburgh, where I grew up, to Dear Heart and the other cheese gods at PennMac. That was where we first discovered it. This particular chunk came from the Meijer store in my in-laws' town near Grand Rapids. I've heard about a little Mexican place near Sodus, but we haven't actually been there yet. If you can tell me how to get there, we'll certainly try it out. We're convinced at this point that the best Mexican food in Oswego County is what we make in our kitchen, à la Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy. We've seen a couple of Mexican restaurants go under in just the two years we've lived here. The only current restaurant in town serving something vaguely Mexican is the Fajita Grill, which moved into what is clearly the shell of a defunct Taco Bell. We've been in withdrawal from Chipotle burritos, which in themselves were only a substitute for Big City Burritos (a favorite Ft. Collins, CO lunch spot from grad school). We tried Fajita Grill's burritos, but they just got a lot of little things not quite right, for our tastes. Actually, most of our vacation was in Colorado. But when we started looking into airfares, we realized that if we drove to the Grand Rapids area so we could see the in-laws, the airfares dropped tremendously (like by about half). So we drove the 9 or 10 hours out one day, and flew to Denver the next. We rented a car for a day so we could drive up the hill to Keystone, for the conference my husband attended. Along the way, we stopped in Idaho Springs for pizza at Beau Jo's, and brought the extras along, to eat cold for breakfast the next morning. (Actually, not really. Beau Jo's is too good a pizza, with way too much cheese, to even think of eating cold for breakfast, so we heated it up and enjoyed it for dinner the next night instead. It was good, but not the same as it did sitting in the restaurant, hot, with the giant squeeze bottle of honey for the crust.) Before we returned the car, we did a bit of shopping at the City Market in Dillon, to stock the fridge of the condo we stayed in. Between eating stuff ourselves and inviting friends to join us for meals, we were able to make things come out almost exactly even for the time we had. After the conference, we packed up our stuff on the bike and rode to Leadville. We had a wonderful dinner there at Tennessee Pass restaurant (right there in town, not on top of the hill for those of you familiar with CO geography) and an even better pastry breakfast the next morning at a new coffeehouse there called Provin' Grounds, where the baker's face nearly split in two as he grinned after we told him how much we'd enjoyed our danish and muffin. The next night we spent in Salida, after an easy 60 mile ride downhill. We had lunch at Dakota's Bistro, dinner at Laughing Ladies (where we remembered what spicy food tasted like and had the best chile relleno on the face of the earth: filled with cheesy polenta and lightly pan-fried, in a sauce that was the epitome of anchodom), and the next morning yogurt and bagels provided by our B&B hosts. Here's what we did the next day: 65 miles in all, and after we got off the pass we had another 35 miles into 25 mph headwinds. We drank nearly every drop of water we had, ate nearly every crumb of food we brought, and were two hurtin' units by the end of the night. Dinner in Gunnison was at a new place in town called Bowlz, which reminded us of an expanded-menu version of Teriyaki Wok, another Ft. Collins grad school lunch spot. One teriyaki bowl from there, and you'd be set till at least midnight. After a few days with my parents (including a dinner at the Mexican restaurant in Ouray, far better than anything we've gotten since we moved east), we took the train from Grand Junction to Denver. I'm glad we did it, and it was a beautiful ride, but I'm not ready to do it again. We heard reports that dinner on the train was OK but not great; we had a great meal of PB&J on bread I made at my parents' house, grapes, and natural spring water out of their own faucets. We spent a couple of days visiting in Denver, and made a pilgrimage to Ft. Collins (New Belgium Beer and Bingham Hill Cheese) while we were there. We flew back to Grand Rapids, spent the rest of the week visiting there, made a batch of ice cream with our nieces (ages 9 and 2, who had never seen an ice cream maker before), and finally drove home. We got back home late last Sunday afternoon, after a terrific vacation but definitely time to be back home in my own kitchen. Even if everywhere else we stayed had a dishwasher. MelissaH

Happy Friday, everyone! Mmm, cereal again! Nothing special in the works for today: another lunchtime swim on campus, and while I'm there maybe I'll grab the car to get some garlic before dinner tonight. (I should explain: we share one car. It's actually pretty rare that either of us drives to work, though, since it's a ten-minute walk from home to the chemistry building if you take baby steps. If either of us does drive, it's usually because we have stuff to bring in, or stuff to come home. The last couple of days, the car's been transporting coolers full of ice home, for reasons that will become obvious no later than Monday evening. ) In the meantime, before settling down to work, I'll answer some of the questions that arose overnight. Assuming I can take the car today, I'll be able to show you the biggest of our orchard stores, because that's where I'll get the garlic. Had any been for sale yesterday at the market, I would have gotten it then. How far ahead of time can you make the pesto? Would it lose too much if I blitzed everything early this afternoon, but didn't eat till 7 PM or so? Ooh, I just realized that I don't have much parm left in the house either. Guess that's another item to add to my shopping list...which means I'll also get to show you the grocery store. That's an interesting thought, and something I've never considered. When in the meal would you eat a cold cherry soup? Is it dessert, or for before the main course? My husband is actually the one who got the job. He's tenure-track; I'm the hired gun. When a need arises, I fill in. I've done classes in the chemistry department, and I've subbed in biology. This fall, I'll have some chemistry classes once again, but I'll also have some physics...which is a very weird thing for an organic chemist to say! Before moving here, I'd had my own small company, doing writing, editing, and design work (and some hired-gun teaching too). But once we arrived, I discovered that a bunch of people are already doing that here. It's a tough market to break into (although probably no tougher than any other small town) so when the opportunity to teach arose, I jumped. Although I could do without some aspects of the job (like writing exams, for me the hardest part!) I find that I really enjoy much of it, especially seeing the looks on my students' faces when they "get it" or when I do a demo that creates smoke, flames or noise; figuring out answers to some of the questions they come up with (I don't generally teach science majors because the "real" professors do that), and also knowing that by teaching others, my own brain is not going soft and fluffy. I've certainly brought in food examples in my own teaching. For instance, when we were talking about the difference between pure substances and mixtures, we talked about making Kool-Aid. (The difference: in a pure substance, there's only one kind of "stuff" there. So the sugar you add to the Kool-Aid powder is a pure substance, as is the water (ignoring the mineral content present in the water), but the Kool-Aid powder itself is a mixture with multiple components. Once you've made the drink, you can separate the components, although some are easier to get back as pure substances than others!) But my husband has us all trumped, I think: he taught an entire chemistry course using McGee as his text! This was another non-majors course, but whereas the course I taught was a more "serious" chemistry course, intended to take the place of high-school chemistry and prepare people to go on and take other chemistry courses, either the general chemistry two-semester series or the sexy forensic science courses, his course was titled "Chemistry and Society" and is not the prerequisite for anything else. Therefore, he didn't have a set of material he needed to get through before the end of the semester, and he had the freedom to cover pretty much whatever he wanted. In addition to McGee, he had the students read the science section of the NY Times every Tuesday, and he used another book by Roald Hoffman called The Same and Not The Same. While it seemed to work reasonably well, for this year's edition of the class he's switching to Napoleon's Buttons because it's less expensive for the students to buy one book rather than two. The paper's still free, either on line or at the library. That's a new factoid to me, but I could believe it. I think the zoning here must have been, ummm, unique at one time, because there are bars that look like someone must have started them in their living room. I'll try to show you some examples later this week. From Oswego, it's actually quicker to drive to Boston, Philadelphia, or Montreal than it is to drive to NYC, and Ottawa's closer than any of the above. Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Toronto are about the same drive time. We're in the midst of a bunch of really neat cities, and have lots of options for the long weekends we don't spend enjoying ourselves at home. Trips downstate are always fun (especially since I get to visit my 95-year-old grandfather), and since JetBlue came to Syracuse it's possible to do a day trip for about $100 in airfare! However, I haven't done that yet, since for the most part, Syracuse and Rochester satisfy my "city fix". Time to go to work now. MelissaH