Granola

Third time's the charm!  Four cups of oats, cashewnuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds and slivered almonds tossed with vegetable oil, honey, brown sugar and vanilla essence and toasted for 20 minutes on two baking sheets; topped with dried cranberries and dates.  It fills the large glass jar and lasts two weeks.  We can't get enough of it.

Kundzed

kundz'd n. v. adj.

Meaning: To be thwarted.

Example: Excited about an antique Jenny Lind bed we found on Craigslist, we bought it, came home and assembled it.  When we put our twin mattress on it, we found out that the bed was a true antique and the mattress fell short by six inches on the width and by three inches on the length.  We got kundzed.

Alternative usage: Kundz happened.

See for yourself.

Back to square one.

Shingara Balu at 70

Photo Courtesy: Kutty Uncle

Happy birthday Appa!

Let's start with a thick slice of bread

Layer on a mini omelette. Top with broccoli rabe sauteed with green onions and crushed red pepper.  Garnish with black olives (these were cured by Charlotte--thank you!).  Lunch.

Soup to nuts

Did not wait a week to make the soup after all.  The recipe for 'Leek and Chervil soup' called for the winter vegetable stock and promised to showcase it.  And that it did!  I added some cooked brown rice instead of flour (to thicken) and parsley instead of chervil--a recommended substitution. It was truly one of the best soups I've had. Thank you Deborah Madison.  Thank you Edward Espe Brown.

Stock first, soup next... maybe

Above: ingredients for a winter vegetable stock on the stove.  The recipe is from "The Greens Cookbook" which I bought recently  (the parsnip soup was a winner except I think I mistakenly used turnips instead--oh well). Anyway, I realized after chopping vegetables for an hour and generating two gallons of parings for compost, that stock isn't supposed to be made this way. Ideally ingredients should be gathered over a week or two, frozen, till you are ready to assemble them into a stock.  Maybe I'll recover by next week and use all that good stock in a soup.  Or maybe not.

Something Attempted, Something Done

My blog title is a line from an old favorite poem "The Village Blacksmith" by H. W. Longfellow. It appears in this verse:

Toiling, --rejoicing, --sorrowing,

Onward through life he goes;

Each morning sees some task begin,

Each evening sees it close;

Something attempted, something done,

Has earned a night's repose.

I wanted to title the blog, "Something Attempted, Nothing Done" but my resolution for the year is to be a little more optimistic.