Let's have a talk.

Here's what is going on with me...

Grand projects spiraling out of control:

- The special issue I steamrolled forward has essentially burst into a million pieces. Why? Well, half of the contributors didn't come through (more than half actually) and at least two of the papers are not getting through (apparently). My paper is one of the ones that didn't get in on time...it still isn't in.

So what happened? Me doing two jobs for 4 months happened. I'm just not as good as I used to be.

- The online project review system. This is the big "light at the end of the tunnel" project for everyone at work. The three ecologists in my office all hate project reviews. They take time, they are tedious, and unfortunately, they are the reason we have jobs. So we got the bright idea of putting together an online system that would automate the majority of this process and simultaneously make the material we're being given more consistent.

And I volunteered to lead this.

Shit. Delays with our internal processes lead to the contractor going to other projects in the meantime, and now it doesn't look like things are going to get going until December. Which puts the critical time for this project right when child number 2 should be emerging screaming from the womb. This is going to be not fun.

- Dam removal is a pain in the ass. For some reason, things are just not moving forward.

Job Hunting:

- Yeah, I guess I'm looking for other positions. Except I feel like two years at my current employer have killed me. I'm tainted by my association with this place. Who's going to look at me, at what my employer does, and think 'This guy must be smart.'

Cooking:

-Hey! Fun stuff. Turns out I can cook pork really well. In two weeks we've had 3 'people over' meals, and I've done pork tenderloin with apricot stuffing, brined porkchops with apple ketchup, and pork 'kinda chili'. Those dishes were all amazing, and everyone thought so. I don't have nearly as much success with any other meat: I'm up and down w/ lamb...I try to do too much with chicken...and bison just isn't interesting. Pork, on the other hand, seems to always turn out great.

- So I've continued to play around with 5 minute a day bread. The first loaf was amazing. The 2nd and 3rd loaves were not great, although they made great stuffing and croutons. The dough can also be used for other stuff. We made calzones and pizzas with great success. I decided I'd give it one more try. So far, so good. The first loaf was slightly undercooked, but that was just my fault. I should have let it get a little more brown on the outside. It did make that wonderful crackle when we pulled it out of the oven.

- The salsa I made with the last of the fresh tomatoes is great. I made 8.5 pints, and I've gone through 1.5 so far. We have a problem in our house of not eating the food we freeze for later. We're always waiting for a 'special occasion'. We need to stop doing that. To start, I've been eating more of the canned foods we've made.

- I also brewed some quick apple cider. Turned out really good, and I might try brewing some other quick hard drinks (orange juice would probably be good).

- Watched another episode of Top Chef tonight (I'm in a hotel room) and a 'reunion' episode. The reunion episode was a stupid bit of nostalgic nonsense. The episode is the one where Mike got sent home, and the guy thought he was much better than he was. (the one with Natalie Portman) At first I was totally bored by the idea of Natalie Portman as a participant, but the twist of bringing them all to a steakhouse and then forcing them to cook vegetarian required a vegetarian to be involved. It seemed to me that everyone's dish was mediocre. I was surprised that Michael was so pissy about losing to Kevin. Kevin's freaking great...if he showed you up by making something simple that was better than your complicated stuff...well....I guess I can understand why you'd be irritated.

- Pull out a college ruled page of notebook paper. See how many lines there are? That's how many dishes I have in my repertoire that I feel I can pull off with success for most crowds (counting things like different types of pizza as 1 'category'). I think 5 years ago that list would have probably had half or a third that many items.

And what else:

- I'm bored with work, de-motivated to do anything new, and tired way more often than I ought to be. So I bought a playstation 3. Because I always said I hated Sony. Oh well, the online service is free. If anyone else plays Call of Duty 4, let me know, we can team up to collect some kills.

- There's absolutely no music better on earth than Matt and Kim. I have a hard time putting into words how awesome I think this music is:

Now we're cooking with cans!

More cooking updates:

This weekend was 38 jars of sand hill plum jam. That's a supremely tart version of the plum that is about the diameter of a quarter. We got them from my wife's family's house, and we got like 15 pounds of them. I wasn't sure how many that would make, but I figured it would be around 40. If you didn't know, jam takes a LOT of sugar. I went through about 13 pounds of sugar. Whoa. However, the whole process hardly took any time at all. Started sometime after 10 and was done by 1 30. I've already tried some, and yes, it is delicious. I did 2 batches of the regular recipe (from SureJell), 1 batch of low sugar, and 1 batch of freezer jam (although I used a sugar free pectin box.

What else did we cook this weekend? Not a lot (made a lot of pesto and froze it). The wife made a chicken and rice casserole.

Yesterday, on the other hand, was good times in the kitchen. I made a large pizza for dinner (Turkey pepperoni & garden tomatoes) and I made two more pizza crusts so when I'm on the road the fam will be able to prepare something quickly. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that feta, basil, and oregano (with some olive oil) is the greatest topping possible on an italian style pizza. That combination is just amazing.

I also got 36 eggs from a friend who has chickens. Not sure what I'm going to do with all of them (angel food and lemon curd will probably be involved at some point). I made french toast yesterday, and I pickled hard-boiled eggs last night. The pickled eggs are in a spicy vinegar (which smelled terrible to make actually). I thought if they taste ok, I might use them in a spicy chicken salad recipe.

I also pickled probably the last of the fresh cucumbers from the farmer's market last night. Although the dill pickles have been in a hit in the house (wife and kid seem to like them), bread and butter's have just been even more popular. Although I've got about 8 jars of zucchini bread and butters, I'm down to two or so jars of cucumber bread and butters. After discussing other options with the wife (Thai pickles, yellow pickles, etc), we decided to go with the bread and butters. They are probably the tastiest pickles I've ever made (the recipe, not this particular batch). However, I have a hard time taking credit. The cucumbers themselves look so incredibly delicious. After they've been soaking in salt for a few hours the smell is amazing. In fact, after I drained them, all three of us huddled around the collander to smell the cucumbers, and the boy couldn't resist! He popped one in his mouth and loved it!

I say he couldn't resist. But in reality, he doesn't even know what that means.

Cooking fun

So I've been away from the house for most of the month of September, but from here on, things are going to hopefully get a lot easier. This means I'll be able to spend more time doing one of the few things that really allows me to achieve a zen-like state of happiness:

COOKING!!

Ok, so here's what I made this weekend:

Friday (I took friday off because I'd already worked 44 hours by Thursday evening):

Breakfast was boring, we re-heated pancakes we'd made last weekend and had some juice (the boy loves the orange juice).

The boy and I then ran to the store and just walked around to get a feel for what was out there.

We ended up making squash soup for lunch (previously described here). This was pretty funny because the boy has kind of a hard time with eating soups. He's decided he's no longer going to sit in a high chair, but he's not really tall enough to see what he's eating out of a bowl. So I made the soup a little thicker, and it basically had enough texture to stick to the spoon. Then I 'tempted' him to try it by putting croutons in there. He loves croutons. Well, he was eating the croutons (with bits of soup stuck to them). Then I said "Actually, that's soup. You can eat it like this" and demonstrated. He took a big spoonful, shoved it into his mouth. Looked blank for a second, and then scrunched up his face as if he had just eaten the most disgusting thing in the world. When my wife came home, she underestimated his distaste and gave him a spoonful of her soup (he wasn't paying attention). He promptly spit it back out, into my hand (I was anticipating that).

So then we had chicken nuggets.

For dinner I prepared the pork chili/stew that I've previously written about. Interestingly enough, I hadn't made either of these dishes since about a year ago. The pork chili included pattypan squash (cuz I had some sitting around), so we're sort of on a squash kick. I also bought another acorn squash and a butternut squash and a pumpkin. I think I'm going to make some dumblings. I also made cornbread, which I hadn't made in so long I couldn't even remember how to do it. I had also forgotten how little time it takes...like 10 minutes of prep! And they tasted great!

I think I'm getting better at figuring out how to put meals together.

Anyway, Alton didn't want to eat any of the chili for dinner (he had like a handful of bites), so he had a grilled cheese. I'm slowly learning what he doesn't like (if it ain't green, odds aren't good).

Saturday I was sick. Sunday we had lunch out, but for dinner we had:

BREAKFAST FOR DINNER!

Have you felt that slight chill in the air that means it is autumn? We got that for the first time last week (hence the soups). But what that did, more than anything, is tell me that my pickling days are coming to a close for this year, and my pumpkin days are beginning to emerge. And how does pumpkin work into a breakfast for dinner?

You guessed it: Pumpkin Pancakes. I mostly followed the recipe on AllRecipes (google it). They turned out great...fantastic actually. The recipe itself was too weird (called for vinegar!) and too thick (more like a dough than a batter). So I added a lot more milk and fiddled with the spices a little. But gosh dang, it turned out great. Everyone like it. I think I do well with pancakes because I have a ton of griddle patience. I am perfectly willing to keep the heat really low, because it seems to allow the most amount of rise in the pancakes. With these pumpkin pancakes, they needed all the rise they could get.

While I had the pancakes going, I also had bacon going. The idea was to have pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs. But then I realized we had three small red potatoes left over from a few weeks ago. So I had my sous chef shred those, and I thought I would make a hash (with the bacon grease). But apparently I don't know what I'm doing with a hash, because it really didn't work out. It just didn't taste right. So then I took all the eggs (egg beaters actually) and poured them into the pan, with some milk, and made a frittata. This was funny because I was using a pan you can't put into the over (the handle wasn't built for that), but I needed to broil the surface. So I had to shove it as far as I could into the toaster over and turn on its broiler. That worked, but if the door is open, the broiler won't work....so I had to rig up a knife to prop 'on' the little trigger that tells the toaster the door is closed.

Which was great because the knife was on the verge of flying across the room the whole time. But it all worked out and the fritter turned out really amazing.

So we had pumpkin pancakes with smart balance butter, turkey bacon, and a hash-brown and cheddar frittata.

It was actually embarassingly good. My wife was like "holy cow, I can't believe how awesome you are", which was nice, but I kinda felt like it all just came together super easy. And we've got 8 or so pumpkin pancakes frozen to use as breakfasts over the next few weeks!

So even though my last month has been hell and I'm sick of everything, cooking is really fun and yes please, I'd like to do more :)

And in case you're wondering, here's what I've pickled this year (i.e., it is considered a pickle or I canned it):

Thai Cucumber Pickles

Quick Dill Pickles

Really Quick Dill Pickles (yes, there is a difference)

Bread and Butter Zucchini Pickles

Bread and Butter Cucumber Pickles

Yellow Cucumber Pickles

Apple Ketchup

Mango Chutney

Lower-East Side Sours (a fermented pickle...that is actually looking pretty weird...not sure if I'm going to eat it or not)

Weekly Report No 3.

We now return to our hero's residence, where he pens a short account of his week's travels and submits it to the internet. Where no-one will read it.

The Minnow Report:

Meow meow meow meow.


The Baby Report:

Fussy this evening. Probably exhausted after a weekend of playing with Grandma and Grandpa on the Lake and Grandma and Grandpa on the Farm. Pretty exciting stuff! Honestly, mom and dad were downright boring tonight.


Wal-Mart:

I'm not sure how to say this. I know I don't dress like a hippy, and I've never smoked weed, and I've never seriously pushed to adopt a communal living lifestyle...But damnit, ideologically, I'm the most left-leaning person I've ever met. And yet, I have to admit that I have been going to Wal-Mart. This is what living in a small town does to you: There are 2 grocery stores.

Here are some of the things that Dillons (Kroger) doesn't stock but that are available at Wal-Mart:
Garam masala
Coconut milk
Acorn Squash
Pie Pumpkins
Pork roasts (!)

And then there are things that are prohibitively expensive at Dillons, but affordable at Wal-Mart:
Wheat Thins (I'm 9/10ths Wheat Thin at this point)
Canning supplies (all of it!)
Organic chips
Vinegar
Olive oils

So what am I supposed to do here? I can't very well cook indian food without garam masala! And why doesn't Dillons have coconut milk? It's frustrating.


Oklahoma City Thundar:

Last week my uncle and I added to the list of NBA teams we've seen play in person. We were on-site for the first ever game of the Oklahoma City Thunder. I've had a long discussion internally about whether I could support this team because of blah blah blah: It was a good time and yay! it is now a relatively short drive to see the NBA!!


Places to Live:

One of the interesting discussions my uncle and I had was: "If you could live in any NBA city, where would it be?"
Oklahoma City was pretty spectacular while we were there. 70 degrees, Chicago style (and quality) italian food, a bar with 212 different beers on tap, a really good brewery. I'd say it probably vaulted into my top 5 just from that trip alone. The other two cities I would like to live in are Portland and Chicago (although Chicago is pretty cold for my soul), and I could envision living in New Orleans or Charlotte. The basic idea is the city has to have fun natural areas nearby, not be so big that I'm intimidated, be a nice climate, and have a 'weird' vibe. I actually can't think of an NBA city that fits all those criteria, but Portland is probably the closest.


Daylight savings:

This is stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.


Culinary Fun:

Did I mention I've been making a really easy squash soup? Half an onion, a slice of bacon, a smallish squash (softened with skin removed), and chicken stock. Cook the onion and bacon first, then add the squash and stock. Cook longer. Puree in food processor. Add a little pepper (Alton Brown would probably use white pepper). The original recipe called for sage, of which I have none, so whatever. The whole thing takes about thirty minutes to make. Delicious. 2 slices of bacon is too much.

Let's see, I also made chicken satay, cookies, lasanga, a tator tot casserole, cabbage soup (cream, canned tomatoes, and cabbage...w/ a little basil, that's it), tacos, and yogurt cheese spread. The yogurt cheese spread is actually really cool too. Just take some plain non-fat yogurt, wrap in a cheesecloth or tea towel and allow it to drain. Then chop up chives and onion (not too much) and set aside (or hell, use whatever spice you want...garlic can be a bit much). After the yogurt has drained for ~ 2-3 hours (longer = better), mix the spices and the yogurt (which could be considered 'greek yogurt' or yogurt cheese depending on the consistency), apply to Wheat Thins and enjoy.


Final thought:

"I wonder if making lasanga every other week is too much"
- Wife and I discussing our weekly cooking strategy. I made lasanga last week, but wasn't around to really eat it. On the other hand, she had it for 4 meals. Maybe every third week.

Kitchen Tour

New house, new kitchen, means I have been cooking like a fiend. Here's the stove area (note the Alton Brown cookbooks and Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking"). This is more space than we had in the last apartment already.

And this pretty much doubles it (there's another cabinet to the right and a pantry and fridge to the left). I know its kind of a disaster in this picture, but I was in the middle of making a savory cheesecake and lasagna.

Did I mention this is a zucchini cheesecake? We've been getting random batches of zucchini, squash and cucumbers for the last few weeks. What the hell was I supposed to do with it? We made bread, chocolate cake, this, pickles, stir fry...the list goes on.

The final product on the cheesecake. This will be lunches for the week. Ended up tasting a little more like a quiche than a cheesecake.

Then there's this beast, the boiling water canner I bought from Wal-Mart for 10 bucks. And no, there was no where else I could have purchased it from (I've only got one store in town, and they don't sell this stuff at Target, etc. which is an hour away anyway). I've been slaving over this thing off and on for the last two weeks.

But check it out! Pickles! A version of Alton Brown's "Kinda Sorta Sours". This involve more vinegar, and thicker slices, but damn, they taste good already (they'll taste bettern in 4-6 weeks). I can't even explain how weird it is that I made something that will still be edible in 12 months. I also made piccilli (my recipe is different than what's on Wikipedia), which is a sorta cucumber, etc. relish. Then I went crazy.

Ah, fresh cherries. Why did I buy fresh cherries? A) I hope my wife will make a cherry cobbler (even though she's not a cherry person), B) I wanted to try "Brandied Cherries". Of course, since we're talking about me here, this turned into:

Vodka'ed cherries. They aren't even supposed to be good until 8 weeks.
They are really easy to make though. That was last night. Today/tonight, I went really crazy:

Yeah, I bought a case of peaches. As in, 25 pounds. That's around 1/3rd of the total there. Again, I'm hoping for cobblers from my wife, but in the meantime, I turned off the AC and started heating up the kitchen to can some peaches.

That's a canner, a pot with boiling sugar syrup and peaches, some heated mason jars, and a big vat (~1 gallon) of peaches soaking in "anti-browning" solution. The temperature in this room was easily 15 degrees higher than the rest of the house.

And after 3 hours, 15 pounds (or so) of peaches have been canned and are ready for deliciousness in the middle of december.

Of course, I had to 'brandy" some as well. Needless to say, I'm both thrilled and exhausted.

And now for something completely identical to everything that has already happened.

Yes, I think that's funny.

On a more outstanding note:

- Canning. Yeah, canning. Or pickling, in my case, because i don't yet have a canner. But still, canning. I have now, on two occasions, produced food that I could theoretically eat in a year and still be fine. Wow. The concept boggles my mind.

- Spent the day at home with the little monster. He played, I cooked and cleaned. I like to cook. I like to stay home with the kid. I asked my wife's boss if she could get a 300% raise so I could just quit work and be a stay at home dad. I would probably get bored eventually.

- Remember people, we've gotta stay positive: