Hi, friends!
Have you been working on any projects lately? Crafts, home repair/renovation, gardening, content creationart-ing (yes, I decided art should have a gerund form), etc?
I’m currently in the midst of oh fuck what do I do with all this stuff from the garden, so most of my projects this month have been food-related. Apple butter. Frozen pesto. Repeated batches of roasted cherry tomatoes that I’ve frozen. Red sauce.
Wait. Maybe all of my projects? No….I did put in that new garden bed.
Anyways, I’m currently attempting to make roasted red pepper spread because hoo boy did I get a fuckton of giant Marconi peppers. Way more than I can eat before they turn, and I’ve got about 15 more ripening as long as the first frost holds off. They’re charring under the broiler so I can skim them. Fingers crossed this turns out good!
I’ve been off this week so trying to get shit done. I finally replaced the igniter in my gas oven yesterday which is a pain to get to. Fourth time in 11 years I have had to do this! I harvested & dried most of my cayenne peppers, dried them, grinded them to use in curry or other dishes. I kegged my fresh hop beer today & got that carbonating. Next it gets tougher, I am going to build a cubby system under my stairs for kitchen gadgets. Ugggg, I have lots of bigger fixes to do but trying not to think about those.
YES. Still decorating for the library’s booths at the Halloween festival. Lifesize Studio Ghibli standees are painted and I need to install frames on the back to hold them up. Four out of five pumpkins are carved. I think I’m going to need to up my game on the Scooby-Doo booth, so gonna do some standees for that. Thank God I’m currently unemployed. I could never get this done as a working stiff.
Filled out all the paperwork for my new job (YES). I quit the one I hated on Monday. Just told them fuck it, I’m leaving now. Actually emailed them since the bosses don’t come in until 11 or so (lazy bastards). Then told the office manager and left. So two weeks of freedom — except they’re shipping me a workstation that I’ve got to a) accept delivery and b) get set up.
Congratulations on the new job, and leaving the sucky one!
Picked the last of the tomatoes over the weekend and made a few quarts of arrabbiata sauce for the freezer. That’s it for the little garden for this year. Now I can relax until it’s time to start making Christmas cookies.
Update, everything has been peeled and pureed and is bubbling on the stove. After it thickens a little more, time to break out the water bath.
Well, this is weird, but you caught me at the one moment when I don’t really have any projects of any kind (that I know of at least). And you know what? It feels fucking AWESOME!
Better Half is going on his first business trip in 19 months so
finally I will have some peace in this houseI will miss him terribly. I will continue my decluttering mission and make a new batch of celebrity recipes that, if any of them work out, I will share.I should really do a throwaway post about celebrity recipes no one, including me, would ever make. I remember reading about Joan Crawford’s French Banana Salad and—
OMG you guys!
https://jezebel.com/we-made-joan-crawfords-nourishing-french-banana-salad-a-1789006250
AND you can read the comments. They weren’t scrubbed. If you’re a Jezebel refugee like I am, this will be a bittersweet trip down memory lane.
Note how this post, innocuous and ridiculous, attracted 324 comments. I looked up 11/15/16. It was a Tuesday. A Tuesday. The last time I checked a Saturday Night Social it was noon on a Sunday (so it had been up for ~ 18 hours). It attracted something under 40 comments, and SNS used to be, by far, their most popular offering. Anything under 1,000 comments was gravely disappointing. Sigh.
Anyway, my brief bachelorhood starts the beginning of next week so wish me and The Faithful Hound well.
Yeah, a few of the latter-day Jezzies of old have flocked to the second incarnation of Groupthink. I’ve mentioned that they may as well do their own Saturday Night Social – or Anti-Social, as we used to have it – since their one or two posts per day already dwarf anything being offered on there of late. Hasn’t really taken, though.
Anyway, feel free to drop in if you’re bored or lonely. I’m sure they’d love to have you for dinner. . . .
We should be doing our own SNS on Ds!!
Should we post a SNS on Saturday and you can invite people from GT and Jez?
In the last SNS post I read half the comments were about how bad kinja had gotten, to the point where if you’re in the grays and you reply to someone in the black, they often won’t know it. If by some miracle it gets through and they star you, you won’t automatically be elevated to the black, so you’re still going to go unknown and unread.
However, I’m 99% sure I saw a Deadsplinterite over there who was in the black. If this invite has any hope of being seen, they should be the one to extend it. It would be helpful if I could remember who it was…
And this might be the time to strike because they’re so fed up. At least two of their nicest and most prolific commenters were banned, for reasons completely unknown, and many, many others have just stopped checking in. It’s widely assumed that Herb has issued a directive to drive as many commenters away as possible, and to accept no new ones, with an eye toward making Jez and all the other Get/Out media sites comment-free.
Was it @TheHolyHandGrenade ?
Maybe, but I can’t be sure. You could issue a general call to arms. “Are you in the black on a Get/Out media site?” I used to haunt the Takeout, too, and was in the black there, and actually interacted with the writers. My graying was entirely my own fault; my hard drive died and of course I didn’t write down my burner key. At first none of this mattered because I’d just comment to a commenter in the black and they’d invariably pull me into the black (I had a lot of pals/acquaintances) but that stopped being possible so I just gave up and read as a lurker.
Re the peppers: are you making a Romesco sauce?
I don’t know what romesco sauce is, off to the googles!
Okay so not really a romesco sauce, but could be considered the base for one?
There’s no olive oil in the sauce I made nor almonds. I don’t have a pressure canner so with water bath canning, oil messes up the food safety situation.
But it’s a 6:1 ratio by weight of roasted red sweet peppers to paste tomatoes, plus a little onion and a little more roasted garlic. Plus red wine vinegar and salt, pepper, and a tbsp of sugar. I didn’t think it had enough flavor, so I added some smoked sweet Spanish paprika and cayenne pepper, too.
im currently on project live of $3 for a week..so far…still have $3
breakfast is a salad sammich tho…lol still fine for dinner courtesy of the freezer..tho its going to be pretty rice and veggi heavy over the weekend
may exhaust my remaining budget on a loaf of bread and a pack of ham for breakfast needs till payday
this project would be a lot more fun if it was optional…may try it again after payday
definitely going to have different shopping habbits from here on
I crocheted a plant hanger a couple weeks ago for the sad, little aloe plant that my dumb cats kept trying to eat. My sister asked me to make her a couple because HER dumb cat kept trying to eat HER plants. I made one, and I’m almost done with the second one. I just need to do the last hanging strap and tuck in the ends (boooo… I hate tucking in ends!)
My biggest project today was making a noodle casserole from random pantry crap because I haven’t shopped in ages. (No, really. I haven’t done much for the last 2-3 days but lie in bed, watching TV and sleeping. Muscle relaxer + pain med = RagdollSmacks. Stupid body. But, I digress.) It was 2 bags of generic Tuna Helper (which is just egg noodles and some meh cheese powder and seasoning), a pack of Kraft mac n cheese powder that was around because I had to throw out the noodles for some reason, a handful each of dried diced carrots and dried onion, a can of corn, half a pack of some crappy surimi I got for free (no tuna on hand, and now I know why it was “free with purchase”), and a couple dashes of smoked paprika and garlic powder. Added 4 cups of milk and 2 cups boiling water, and shoved the whole mess in the oven. It wasn’t bad… exactly… but it was oddly sweet and not as salty as I was expecting it to be. I think the fake crab was on the sweetish side, and the canned corn was “super sweet corn”. On the plus side, the “crab” absorbed some moisture, because it was So. Dry. trying to just snack on it. And there you have the most exciting part of my evening… FrankenCrabCasserole.