When I bought my house, one of the things I really wanted was a clothesline. There's something about air-dried clothes that's pleasing on a number of levels. It's ecological. It's economical. And it's esthetic.

It turned out that the house I bought has a long pulley-driven clothesline connecting the deck with a tree in the yard. The line hangs probably 20 feet above the ground. But I almost never use it.

First, it requires a bit of acrobatics to actually pin clothes to the line. Second, it tends to be awfully humid in the summer. So even on hot days, it would take clothes too much time to dry. And in the winter, of course, there's very little attraction to outdoor acrobatics, no matter how ecological it would be. Third, I tend to do laundry at night, and the lighting on the deck isn't wonderful.

Today, it's dry out. And I have a lot of laundry to do, as I prepare for vacation. I need clean things to bring with me, and I don't need to have several loads of laundry waiting for me when I get home.

Right now, I have one load in the dryer, another in the washer, and a third on the bed, waiting for the washer to empty.

And, there's a load of laundry hanging on the line, drying in the sun and the (dry) breeze.

( see for yourself )

And I ask myself why I don't do this more often.

I just came in from picking lettuce for dinner tonight (and a few green beans to bring my parents tomorrow). I've been picking bush beans, from the few plants that actually came out, for over a week now, and I first noticed blossoms on the plants a week or so before that. Even though the pole beans were planted at the same time as the bush beans and have grown up well over the top of the bean tower, they have resolutely refused to blossom. Until today. There was one full-fledged blossom evident, and a few more buds that look like they'll turn into blossoms instead of leaves. So, the friend who'll be watering for me while I'm on vacation may well be able to pick a few beans along with the cucumbers I rashly promised him on the basis of the number of blossoms and small cukes that have already formed. But, I'm really going to have enough beans to eat in late summer! Mmmm. Fresh, tender green beans, lightly steamed, with butter and herbs.

Mmmm, mmmm good Turkey Kale Soup. (Just what you need when you have a cold and a slight fever)

Make broth with turkey relics (I used a turkey breast that still had some meat on the bone). Cover with water, throw in some salt, rosemary, oregano, and celery. SImmer until the meat mostly comes off the bone and discard as many of the bones as you can fish out of the broth.

Take one big bunch of kale, and pull off the thick stems. Tear up and/or chop the greens, and add to the broth. Let it simmer until the kale is wilted and soft, c. 45 minutes.

Add one big can of chopped tomatoes and let it simmer another 20 minutes or so.

If you're not low-carbing, you could add a can of navy beans or other white bean.

A few years ago, I discovered Penzey's spice catalog. Because of my diabetes, a lot of food avenues are, if not completely off limits, best experienced in very small doses. Spices, on the other hand, are not a problem, so, over the past 5+ years, I've done a lot of experimentation with seasoning. And cheeses, also, but mostly seasoning. So Penzey's catalog is a delight. Not only do they list a lot of spices, but they also have lyrical essays on food and recipes (some of which I can't eat) and descriptions of where the spices come from and how their grandparents used to use them. Of course, it's all designed to sell spices. And, guess what? It works!

So, in my first order, I ordered what seemed to me in advance to be a rather small amount of bay leaves. But I didn't take into account that bay leaves are light! And so, along with my normal sized spice jars of paprika, thyme, powdered ginger, and the like, I ended up with a huge bag of bay leaves. What to do? It was a lifetime supply of bay leaves, for someone far younger than I. I mentioned this dilemma on a mailing list, and two members kindly volunteered to take some of the bay leaves off my hand. One list member was local, so I delivered the bay leaves in person, and accepted a cup of tea in exchange. But Madeleine was not local, so I packed up a baggy of bay leaves. Indeed, worrying about what the post office might think, I double-bagged them and sent them off.

Madeleine died last year. I don't know whether she had any bay leaves left, so in her case, they may well have constituted a lifetime supply.

Chuck roast was on special in Stop and Shop this week, so I started up a pot roast when I came home from work. It's seasoned with a can of tomatoes, some Italian spice mix from Penzeys. And some bay leaves.

I miss Madeleine.

It's 12 degrees F outside, and 61 degrees inside my house. My new cutting board was delivered by UPS, and I have a pot of chili simmering on the stove.

That is all.

My hands smell of basil, yes they do. It was cold enough last night that some basil leaves wilted, so the time had come to use it or lose it. When I got home from work, I picked all of the remaining basil, three large plants' worth, and pulled up the stalks. I ended up with three cups of loosely packed basil leaves. But made into pesto, it's probably about a cup. I have two small half-cup containers (and they aren't full!) of pesto minus the cheese in the freezer and there's about another half cup, this batch with cheese, ready to use this week.

On the menu tonight, cauliflower with pesto.

Tomorrow, perhaps I'll broil some swordfish; swordfish with pesto is one of my favorites.

But, damnitall, those pesto plants should still be outside on the deck, ready for me to snip a leave or two for an omelet or just serving as sentinels of summer.

Next year...

I was so tired when I got home last night from a wonderful houses party in the Catskills that I couldn't find the energy to update. That's not a typo: the party was so big that it was spread over two country houses, a few miles apart. One belongs to chi_editrix's family and the other to brooklynite's.

( fun in the mountains )

I was exploring various LiveJournal features last night, out of sheer boredom, and discovered something pretty cool. In addition to the Friends page, you can generate a page of entries by FOAFs. In the URL for your Friends page, just replace friends with friendsfriends.

The only problem with this is that one of my friends subscribes to an RSS feed called grouphug that generates massive numbers of posts, in spurts.

This was an unusual holiday weekend in that I actually had social plans. One of my colleagues at work has been renting an apartment in a waterfront house outside of New Haven. The woman who owns it inherited it from her husband, who built it in the early 1950s. It's a spectacular house, right on Long Island Sound, but she can't afford the taxes. So, she's finally sold it, which means my colleague needs to find a new place. But, in the meantime, he had a big lawn party on Saturday evening. It was full daylight when we got there, so I was able to get a tour of the house and to explore the grounds a bit. I'd been there before, but didn't do as much exploring. There's a private beach. Really, it's just a tiny cove, but there's sand, and enough space to pull a row-boat on shore. And it's secluded enough that no bathing suits are necessary, if such is your inclination.

When it was fully dark, another party-goer and I walked down to the beach (very carefully!) and watched fireworks from some of the adjacent towns. Then, when we went back to the lawn, we could watch the moon rise, through an opening in the trees. Because it's so close to the full moon, the rising moon was large and golden.

There was plenty of bug goop around, but the bugs were more prevalent. But it was worth it, even if I did have to shower off the goop when I got home.

Then, on Sunday, I went up to visit my sister and brother-in-law. My brother-in-law's sister came also, and we had a quiet barbecue: marinated steak, green beans that my sister picked up first thing in the morning from the farmer's market on their corner, salad made from lettuce that I had picked myself, first thing in the morning, a bottle of hearty Chilean rioja.

After lunch, we decided that the best way to celebrate the 4th would be to go see Farenheit 9/11. Not knowing how crowded it would be, we reserved tickets on-line. It turned out that we didn't need to; the theater was only about half full. But it was well worth going.

( here be possible spoilers )

One of the joys of summer in the suburbs—especially in the absence of midsummer heat—is coming home and leisurely doing chores.

( chores )

I have a one quart jar of capers on my kitchen counter. I have no idea what I'm going to do with a fucking quart of capers. But they were cheap, damnit, cheap. So I bought them.

Costco is what is wrong with America.

This evening when I got home from work, I harvested. It's too chilly to actually work in the garden, but not to pick a few things. Part of my dinner was, as usual, a small salad (I'm so boring and predictable). But the salad was made from: lettuce from the garden, a bit of radish from the garden, some cut up scallion from the garden, and a bit of chopped parsley from the planter on the deck. (There were also some non-garden ingredients, but still...)

I also figured out that one of my window fans would fit in the kitchen window. I don't need it for cooling at this point, but the guys on alt.coffee finally got through to me what they mean by smoke. I had thought that, because the odors from roasting coffee were tolerable and I couldn't actually see billowing clouds of smoke, I wasn't actually roasting enough coffee at a time to produce smoke. But, no. It turns out that what they mean by smoke is invisible. So the fact that I couldn't see it doesn't mean that it isn't there, although, it might not be. (If this is making your brane hert, don't worry about it; there's nothing wrong with your brane.) So having an exhaust fan in the kitchen window means that some of the invisible smoke that might or might not be there is being pulled outside, where it can't accumulate in my carpet and, possibly, eventually discolor my walls. I'll never know, but, damn, freshly roasted coffee is good.

My sister gave me an amazing book for my birthday. It's called Earth From Above: 366 Days, by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. There's an aerial image for every day of the year, including February 29, with pointed ecological commentary. Today's image, for instance, is a crowd scene from Abengourou, Ivory Coast. The commentary talks about modernization and public health issues in Africa. Yesterday's image is trees by a lake in central France. The commentary talks about the effects of development on the flood plain. And so forth. There's a web site with some of his images, and commentary; it uses a lot of Flash, but it's not terribly bloated. Well, maybe it is, but the photographs are spectacular. Alice-Bob sez "check it out".

Many of my net friends know that not only am I not musical, but I don't much get music. In fact, I once considered dropping a mailing list that I dearly love because one occasional participant chose, on one of his occasions, to insist that this failure to get music is some kind of moral failing on my part. (I ultimately decided that that would be cutting off my nose to spite my face.)

But, if I don't get music, why then do I characterize coffee in musical terms? The official coffee-tasting lingo talks about fruity, winey, and or leathery coffees, perhaps with a hint of chocolate. But I can almost never get past fruity; differentiate hints of apricot from hints of blackberry? Uh-uh, not this palate!

But, somehow, what I get out of coffee is a complex combination of bass and treble notes. A good coffee, in my opinion, needs a harmonious combination of both. What I'm learning through roasting my own is that the treble notes come from the beans and the bass notes from the roast. But both are needed.

Well, it's the weekend,
( so why are all my plans going aft agley? )

I really did it!

oddprofessor wanted to see pictures,
( so here they are )

Confidential to oddprofessor: when I got home from meeting the family for lunch, some five hours after roasting, there was a very distinctive roast-aroma in the kitchen, even though I'd left the window open a crack.

Never, ever, ever dash off to check your email while you're reheating soup for supper.
( it's all about the soup )

My new computer came in today at work--a 20" iMac. I spent most of the day rearranging my work space and setting up the computer. Then I have to get all my files off of the old computer, which is being "repurposed" for a specific video application that requires OS9. When this need came up, last week, I will admit to volunteering to donate my work computer to the cause.

And, when I got home, my package from Sweet Marias was sitting on the doorstep: 8 half pound bags of green coffee, some bags with one-way valves for storing roasted coffee, and a book about home roasting. Yes, I know there's lots of information available for free on the net, but sometimes it's just easier to actually read a book! Call me old-fashioned.

I'm not going to roast tonight, though, as ventilation is an issue, and I need to actually experience how much smoke and stuff will be given off. I'm not entirely sure that I want my bedroom to smell of roasting coffee tonight, and I honestly don't know how likely that is. The exhaust fan in my kitchen doesn't vent outside, and there's no easy way to set up a fan. I was hoping it would be warm enough to leave the door to the deck wide open, but not tonight, Josephine!

The White Flower Farm spring/summer catalog came the other day. One item in it caught my eye: saffron crocuses. This started me to thinking.

My brother in law is an agronomist. One of his frequent collaborators is Dean (or is it Provost) of a university in Valencia, Spain, so once or twice a year she comes to Connecticut or he goes to Valencia. Last year, when my sister went along, they brought back a bottle of Spanish olive oil, infused with garlic. Mighty, as they say, fine. This year, my brother in law brought me a small packet of real saffron, the threads. Well, looking at the WFF catalog led me to think about actually using the saffron. One problem: I couldn't find it. It wasn't on my spice shelf. It wasn't in my purse. It wasn't in the pocket of my winter jacket. Why, oh why couldn't I lose something worthless and/or easy to replace?

But, I realized, things something fall out of the pocket of my winter jacket. Several times, I've had to go through interesting contortions to rescue my house key from under the driver's seat in the car. So, when I went out to the car this morning, I looked carefully. And there it was, between the base of the seat and the center pedestal of the car: my little container of saffron. A few contortions later, the saffron was back in my purse.

So, now I have to think of what to make with it, bearing in mind that rice is right out. So I can't do a traditional Spanish paella. I wonder what cauliflower "paella" would be like.