Congratulations, Joan!
We will have been married 49 years tomorrow (the 17th). I need to remember to get the 2nd Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake I made ahead of my birthday out of the freezer tonight so we can eat it tomorrow.
We're starting to think about what, if anything, we want to do to celebrate our 50th anniversary next year. Most of our friends who were there live in other states, it may be a virtual celebration.
We are suddenly getting a lot of tomatoes. The green beans are still producing. My husband has picked three of the small honeynut squashes (small butternut squashes). We still have a spaghetti squash-pumpkin hybrid on the vine (one we picked when the vine died). Also, a couple of more have started but are unlikely to achieve ripeness before a freeze.
My husband picked some of his carrots. They are very short.
Some bell peppers have turned orange--maybe red is next? We still have a lot of green ones.
I baked my whole wheat sourdough cheese crackers on Wednesday.
In the evening, I baked a streusel blueberry pie in honor of my younger stepson. (He’s the one on the strict blueberry pie and blueberry cobbler diet.) This time I used the convection setting at 375F.
I'm sorry Mike that you are waiting on parts for the freezer and refrigerator. I hope they will arrive quickly.
For dinner on Tuesday, I made the Cook’s Country All-American Potato Salad. (It is so nice to have the right kind of pickles stocked at my house for it!) I also roasted chicken thighs. We also had microwaved fresh green beans from our garden, as the bean plants are still producing.
Well, neither is fixed yet, parts are on order for both plus for the dishwasher, and I still need to go buy a new garbage disposal and have someone install it, but the freezer never stopped working completely, it just isn't getting as cold as it should because the defrost timer isn't working properly. (It is supposed to run for about 20 minutes every 8 hours, I believe.)
I'll have to offload the freezer again when the replacement comes in, not because of where that part goes but because he'll need to run the defrost cycle several times to get rid of the built-up ice in the back. So I'm using this as a time to review what was in the freezer and use or throw out a bunch of things.
I had to empty out the freezer for the service tech, and found some challah that I had sliced for French toast, so we had French toast for supper tonight.
The good news is that the freezer appears to need a defrost timer (it was replaced just 14 months ago, but replacement parts are only under warranty for 12) and the refrigerator needs a new thermostat. Total repair cost, including service calls, is around $750, better than I had feared.
I've got some of the stuff back in the freezer, but it isn't cooling down as fast as I had hoped, so most of what I'd planned to put back is still in a big styrofoam chest with some dry ice. Hopefully I can get more of it back in before tomorrow morning.
I ordered more Black Seeded Simpson and Rouge D'Hiver lettuce pods from Aerogarden, my plan is to start them around the first of October, so that they're producing lots of lettuce by late November. (I'm kind of hoping we do family Christmas in Lincoln this year, as I don't think my wife's shoulder is going to be up for either flying anywhere or for 2 days in the car to drive to Pittsburgh.)
We had takeout chicken.
This afternoon I processed the tomatoes that I picked several days ago, after throwing out quite a few of them, then picked enough that I was able to make 5 full quarts of tomato juice, which are in their water bath now. At the rate my wife is going through tomato juice right now, these will be gone before Thanksgiving.
If the weather holds up, I may be able to process another batch of tomato juice by the weekend or early next week, but that might be the last big picking. (Weekends are kind of busy right now with football season and the usual fall house tasks, I may just wait until next Monday to do anything.) The tomatoes are definitely winding down, and I keep hearing calls for an early frost.
My wife remembers her grandmother's Christmas coffee cake fondly, she even has the recipe for it (it was published in the Nebraska Centennial Cookbook, which her mother edited.)
However, we've made it several times and she says we never came close to the original. How much of that is just nostalgia from 60 years ago is unknown.
Personally, I think one of the factors was that her grandmother had dairy cows and when she used sour cream, it was probably fresh cream that had been allowed to go sour, not the cultured stuff you buy at the store these days. (BTW, how can they make a low fat sour cream??)
One of these days I'm going to try making that recipe either with some cream that I have let go sour or with creme fraiche. (I suspect the way milk and cream are heat-treated before they're packaged might be a factor as well, and while it is possible to buy raw milk in Nebraska direct from the farm, I'm not sure what I'd do with a 5 gallon can of it, which is how it is usually sold.)
I totally agree with you Italiancook. I was just telling my son tonight (I used the crock pot) that it was ridiculous that I could only use it on a day off since the whole idea behind the machine was to set it and forget it.
My husband drove my stepdaughter to the airport in Indianapolis late this morning. Early this evening, my younger stepson drove in from Colorado. I was not sure when he would arrive, so I planned an easy dinner of salmon patties, with sweet corn (still available!), leftover quinoa salad, and multigrain crackers.
I need to make semolina bread soon, just got the last half-loaf out of the freezer. But the baking area of the kitchen is a mess right now, the SubZero repair tech is coming on Tuesday and I have the fridge emptied out and washed it out, plus all the shelves and drawers. (They were threatening to get moldy with the fridge off, and they hadn't been cleaned in a while anyway.) So they're stacked all over the place, and I need to empty the freezer Tuesday morning and take those shelves out as well. We've got a big styrofoam chest that we use when we have to empty the freezer, I may go buy a bag of dry ice Tuesday morning just to keep things plenty cold.
Sous vide cooking has changed a lot of perceptions, because you can cook something to a 130 degree temperature safely even though it might take 6 hours or longer, but for beef, pork and chicken I think it is still the case that as long as the temperature is higher than 140 you're not in the danger zone regardless of the cooking method. Most crock pots will get the liquid to a boil, which means it is well over 212.
I have a little crock pot that doesn't have a temperature control, I use a Lutron light dimmer cord (like you'd use with a table lamp) to adjust it to a temperature that works for hot fudge (no more than 110.)
As it turns out, my stepdaughter's I-phone is a water resistant model. It was in water, in the canoe (on its side) for only seconds. It rested for 24 hours in organic brown rice (sigh, only rice I had), and it is now working well. Whether that continues remains to be seen. She was able to hold up her camera when the canoe tipped on its side, so it stayed dry. All of this was due to trying to pull a can off the bottom of the lake (water was about 3-4 feet deep), clearly not something two people should try to do with their paddles while in a canoe, although I understand the environmental impulse.
For the second time, I made Trisha Yearwood's (Food Network) Slow-Cooker Pork Loin. Recipe says to cook for 4-5 hours. Both times, the pork reached 210* in 3-3/4 hours. Both times, it was too dry. I'm not sure it's safe to crockpot cook for less time, but I'll try this recipe one more time & cook for 3-1/4 hours then check the temperature.
I served it for lunch with roasted potatoes & roasted carrots. It was my first time making roasted carrots, but they were scrumptious, so there will be other times.
I put the liquid from the slow cooker in the fat separator. I'll use it tomorrow to make gravy for mashed potatoes, leftover pork loin, and marinated artichokes.
