30 Jun, 2007
Plagioclase’s mother has boxes of index cards with recipes on them. I have a lab notebook about 1/4 full of recipes that we’ve had since we started cooking for ourselves. I think we thought that since the pages don’t fall out, we could keep them forever, and then index them…
Well, it turns out that I have at least twice as many recipes written out, printed out or cut out and stuffed into the notebook. And as I was looking for my granola recipe (printed out, then written all over to make it better), I thought that maybe I should just transcribe them all into the notebook.
Better yet, I thought, maybe I should just put them all online, or at the very least, put them in some sort of database or something.
But then I realized that I can’t do with a “database or something” what I can do with these little bits of paper — remember how and when I got the recipe in the first place. Writing down “Plagioclase’s mother, 1989″ on a digital representation of a recipe is not the same as holding that 1″ strip of paper and remembering that Plagioclase wrote down that nutball recipe when he called his mom that year we weren’t going to make it home for christmas.
A copy of a thing is not the same thing as the thing. And while I risk losing those scraps of paper out of my notebook, I think I prefer that the recipes stay just the way they are.
Besides, I’m a messy cook. Can you imagine the crap I’d be having to clean off of a “kitchen” computer?!
28 Jun, 2007
Teen queen of the tractor pulls
She wears peachy rouge on her cheeks. She prefers bright purple or flamingo pink fingernail polish.
Why isn’t it enough that she’s 17 and pretty good at running a jet-powered tractor?
28 Jun, 2007
I’m still trying to recover my iTunes library by reimporting our CDs. (I do a stack every few days, and then sometimes I take looong breaks. But remember, I had something over 10k song files before The Crash, all save a few ripped from our CDs.)
Can you believe that I’m still futzing about with the artwork?! It’s amazing to me how many albums don’t have iTunes/CDDB artwork — and when they do, they’re often of reissues (she says with a sneer in her voice), totally wrong.
Now that I’m going to Amazon so frequently to find decent artwork (discogs and wikipedia are also surprisingly good sources), I’m learning that I have a pretty boss CD collection. I mean, when I look stuff up, used copies are selling for $5 to $40, not $0.01. Not that I could sell these and keep the files, ’cause that would be illegal. And, after all, what would I do when my drive goes belly-up again?
But it’s pretty nice to know that our taste (Plagioclase is the majority CD buyer, in case you were wondering) is cool (obscure?) enough to command some decent moolah.
20 Jun, 2007
Based on a recipe I found in an old cookbook (The Modern Priscilla), but of course heavily modified.
- 1½ cups stale breadcrumbs
- 3 cups milk (I used 1 cup cream + 2 cups 2%)
Scald milk, mix with breadcrumbs until the crumbs get soft.
- 2 ounces chocolate (I used unsweet + bittersweet), melted
- ½ cup brown sugar
Mix the sugar into the chocolate, let cool a bit.
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- ¼ teaspoon cinnamon
- ¼ teaspoon nutmeg
- dash salt
Lightly beat the eggs, and stir in the vanilla, salt and spices.
Blend eggs into the milk + crumbs mixture, then stir in the chocolate/sugar mixture (I used a whisk).
Pour into well-buttered 2 quart casserole and bake at 325°F for 45 minutes.
Serve warm.
Result: Yum! I might put more spices in next time, but it was quite tasty.
