YES GOOD

Brief update today, since I have decided that I need to do ALL OF MY SCHOOLWORK before I'm allowed to go to sleep tonight. (Which, as those of you who are aware of what is going on this week already know, is absolutely not going to happen -- I probably won't finish it this weekend, even, but I decided that setting this wildly irrational goal was a good idea for some reason.)

BUT! The good things: Another baked potato for lunch, brown rice and onions cooked in my veggie stock for dinner. This rice? Is AWESOME. The stock adds a lot of flavor - the bitterness I mentioned is completely gone, and it's all just delicious vegetable flavors. I'm going to add beans tomorrow, since I didn't think far enough in advance to soak them, but for now this is great.

Picked up the onion, four big potatoes, an avocado, and some peppermint white chocolate coffee creamer (I'm not out yet, I just like to try to have at least two in my fridge at all times because running out makes me so unbearably cranky) for a total of $8.05. The potatoes and the avocado were both on sale, so that was nice. And I'd like to point out that I am always super happy when I notice how much produce I'm buying with full intention of eating it immediately. Yay! I win at healthy food!

Addendum: If you can afford a sieve, buy a sieve. Don't pull this "I'll improvise and make do without one" nonsense. It saves like *all* of the time for rinsing things.

Making stock, making stock, la la la.

I decided last night, when I looked around at my heaps of half-unpacked clothing and pieces of paper strewn across the world and sink full of dishes, that today would be housecleaning day, barring weird joint behavior. This is a strangely-timed housecleaning day, because I have EVERYTHING EVER due next week, but I was getting really frustrated with the difficulty of accessing things I need in my house, so I figured it was best to get everything done.

Before I got started on the cleaning, I started making vegetable stock! (I put off eating for somewhat too long as a result of this, by the way. I felt like I was done with the kitchen.) I had lots of ends and skins and unused bits in my freezer, and I picked up some spices on sale a while ago with this in mind, so it wasn't too difficult and was not costly at all (the only thing I bought specifically to make this stock with was two carrots, which cost me 39 cents total). One thing that was shocking: how absurdly limp celery goes when you've had it in the freezer. Celery, stop being a big baby.

If I had thought to take a picture of the sad celery, it would be right here, with the caption "Stahhhp."

My recipe so far is: put a whole bunch of random stuff into a crockpot full of water, make sure there's carrots, celery, and onion in it, and simmer forever, opening it to sniff it anxiously and stir it around far too often.

I legitimately don't remember precisely how much of each veggie is going to be in this stock. I do know that after the veggie bits, I put some rosemary, the stems of my fresh-then-frozen basil, a bay leaf, salt, pepper, and the remains of my bulb of roasted garlic in the pot. Then I started randomly throwing in cloves of garlic as I half-used them for my lunch (which was lovely, by the way, and consisted of microwaved quesadillas with cheddar, little tiny fresh garlic, and avocado, plus two clementines on the side). So it might be really garlicky. Not that that's a problem!

Back to the cleaning: so far, I've cleared my "done wall" of old post-it notes, cleaned/sanitized most of my bathroom again (the shower remains, but I'm not going to do that til right before I shower), washed my dishes, and made a sadly futile attempt to organize my kitchen counter (although I did wash and sanitize it before I cluttered it all up again, so that's a plus). I have also picked up some of my clothes and put them in the hamper, but that whole project still needs a lot of work. Aaaand now I'm blogging instead of cleaning, primarily because I am way too excited about my stock and can't leave it alone, despite the fact that it won't actually constitute food even when it's finished in like six more hours. So I'm trying to leave it alone by blogging about it.

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Update: Sooo! My friend let me know that actually, my stock was probably done after four hours. I went and tasted it. Here's how it looked:

White bowl with honey-colored liquid and a spoon.

It tasted, at first try, really really sweet (from the carrots and onions, my friends tell me), with a slight bitter undertone (possibly from the garlic or onion skins, or from the celery leaves, as the internet claims) and the other vegetables being sort of subtle. So, having thought about it for a few seconds, I went and dumped more pepper in, in a pretty large quantity. My friend told me to turn it to high for about 30 minutes and then take it out, and I did twenty minutes because I was too excited. The result was good! It tastes really... vegetably, in a balanced sort of way -- neither too sweet nor too savory, and the bitterness is not enough to overwhelm the other flavors. I ended up trying to get every last bit out of the bowl with my spoon, which was silly.

I tried to dump a bunch of it into a bowl with a strainer, before realizing that I needed to use something like a ladle rather than just trying to turn my crockpot stoneware upside down. I then pressed down on the vegetables to try to get the last of the goodness out of them, before throwing them away. (That felt bad until I realized that most of those vegetables except the carrots would have been wasted if I hadn't made the stock, just that they would have been thrown away more gradually.) I did manage to spill what felt like a lot on my counter, my floor, my pants, and my socks, so that was a little bit sad, and I used a really terrible number of dishes in the finishing process, but it's okay because now I've got the process sort of figured out. I put some of it in a tupperware in the fridge to use when cooking my next batch of rice, and I put the rest in zippered bags in the freezer.

Potatoes and other assorted good things

I had a giant baked potato for lunch yesterday! (Note: By the time I posted this, it was the day before yesterday.) Russet potatoes are super cheap, and I was really impressed at how well it turned out. I just washed it, poked it a few times with a fork, then put it on a plate, microwaved it for 5 minutes, turned it over, and microwaved it for 5 more minutes.
Then I cut it in half, with every intention -- sadly foiled (not, please note, tinfoiled -- no tinfoil in the microwave, unless you miss thunderstorms so much you'll resort to creating lightning in your microwave) -- of digging a little hole in each half to stick some butter in. But like I said, that didn't work out. The potato just fell into quarters. But eh, it worked. I just put the butter in between the quarters, dumped a little handful of cheese on and the last of my bacon crumbles, and microwaved it for another minute to melt the butter and cheese.
It was great! The skin actually tasted really good? I didn't see that coming. And that's nice, because potato skins have a lot of nutrients in them.

In other news, I roasted a head of garlic!

You can do that in the crockpot, which is weird. The taste was really good and really interesting, but it turns out that after I mixed it with butter and tried to put it on bread, the texture and I didn't get along very well. I can't quite place the problem -- it might also have been the bread, which was made from dough that had maybe been in the fridge too long and had definitely been overwatered/oiled by me and therefore had its own texture issues. Anyway I may try the garlic again sometime, and then maybe cook it into something so I don't have to deal with the texture and can still get the taste.

And probably best of all, I have now completely cleaned my bathroom for the first time. I swept and mopped the floor, sprayed down the toilet with a bleach dilution and wiped it down, and did the same to the sink and shower. I washed the floor rug and hand towels, and I bought new hand soap and a little candle, and the whole space just looks all nice -- with the academic mess of books and notebooks and pieces of paper strewn about the rest of my house, it's really the nicest space I've got. I am a little concerned that I will come back from my break to find the ant infestation raging again, in which case I will have to have another war with them involving huge quantities of Comet, because I was all focused on packing and failed to properly consider my gramma's recommendation to put Comet out before I left. But I will keep my fingers crossed that they don't keep ignoring the traps, or just stay away.

Gramma and Papa and I took my vacuum, which we're hoping to fix. The belt seems to be missing, and I've been using the hose attachment to vacuum the entire floor, which is somewhat less than ideal.

Rainy days are good for making bread.

Well, the plan, when I woke up enough to have one, was to start bread dough, then go to the laundromat and grocery store while it rose, then have a very productive day. That didn't work out - I started the dough, got dressed, gathered up my laundry, went to the door, and discovered that it was pouring. (I also had a fight with my flour, but that's neither here nor there, and I cleaned it up now.) But yeah, rain... Not exactly conducive to carrying back fluffy, freshly dried, lovely-smelling clothing. So I decided to stay in.

Pictured: FABULOUSNESS.

Seriously, though, this bread is pretty much perfect. Sweet, soft, fluffy, chewy. Even the crust is right - crunchy enough to be yummy on the sides, soft enough to cut easily on the top. The one thing I am slightly disappointed about is that I thought I used way too much garlic and rosemary, and it turns out I didn't use nearly enough - I can barely taste it.

I wish I had measured - I know I added some more sugar and olive oil this time, and used a bit less yeast, plus two cloves of minced garlic and some rosemary, but the rest of the recipe is pretty much gone. But omg, anyway, yum. And I have some more of the dough waiting in the fridge, since I made a bigger batch this time.

Downside of today: I discovered that my soupy vegetably rice thing does not do so well in the fridge. Bleh. But it's still edible, so I'll still eat it.

Crockpot chaos!

I have decided that the more ingredients I use, the more I win at cooking.
...Okay, I haven't actually decided that.
But look at this!

Okay, so this time I used brown rice, navy beans, carrots, onions, celery, garlic, salt, pepper, and a bit of rosemary in two cans of Swanson chicken broth (which I got on sale for 88 cents a can), then added frozen peas at the end (since apparently those get kinda yucky if you try to slow cook them). I presoaked the navy beans last night so that they would be nice and soft. They've been in there for almost three hours, and they are now ready to eat.
My house smells awesome, btw.
So here's how it turned out: It tastes really good. But unfortunately, I just didn't use enough rice. There's too much liquid - which I'm trying to remedy right now by letting it cook on high with the lid off for a while - and the proportion is too much on the vegetable side. And furthermore, some of the beans are not as soft as I want them to be. But okay, so, honestly I think this still counts as a win, because yum, and healthy, and protein, and making use of really inexpensive vegetables. Next time I'll try and err on the side of too much rice.

NOM

Three pieces of bread with melted Parmesan and a basil leaf on a white plate.

This is the One True Way to eat the herb and cheese bread I made.
I cut up some butter and cut wedges of the Parmesan cheese I had in the fridge, melted them on top of my bread in the microwave, and added fresh basil. This is fantastic and I want to eat nothing but it forever. (Sadly, the bread is gone now, as I was unable to restrain myself from eating absolutely all of it...)

Homemade bread!

I made bread!

A pale round speckled bread, cut in two pieces.

Simple white yeast bread recipe (yeast, sugar, water, bread flour, a bit of oil, and salt), with my friend Tyler helping me remember how to put it together, with some oregano, fresh basil, and garlic added in with the flour. The first batch I ate with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, which oddly enough didn't work as well as I expected. For the next one, softened some butter and mixed in one of those parmesan cheese packets you get when you order delivery pizza - I figured, since I had it, I might as well use it on something, and this was a good candidate. That was pretty much amazing. I'm thinking next time I'll try making a garlic butter properly, and see how that works.
The crust is not ideal - as you can see, the color is wrong, and the crust is very soft - but for people who, like me, aren't terribly fussy about Artisanal Breads, don't have an oven, and just want some soft, warm homemade bread, it works fine in the crockpot. Takes 1-2 hours on High. (The internet says that it would help to place the bread under a broiler for a few minutes, for what it's worth.) One thing: the yeast I got was REALLY active, so next time I have to remember to check earlier so the dough isn't four times its previous size when I get around to punching it.

Navy beans

In more trying-new-things news, I picked up a can of navy beans on sale at the grocery store yesterday, in hopes that they would go well with my rice. (The serving suggestion on the can said to make white bean and turkey chili, which A. sounded gross to me but B. tipped me off that these beans work okay with poultry.) So I rinsed them in my strainer, then just tasted one, and when it seemed all right I microwaved a handful of them with my brown rice. They do work well together! I think it would be better if I'd slow-cooked them along with the rice, so they would pick up more of the flavors, but they work just fine as is. I might try dried navy beans next, since I honestly don't mind the whole soaking beforehand thing. The beans are waaaaaaaaaaay less costly than the chicken I was considering adding, and they are healthier too, as far as I know. In combination with the brown rice, they provide low-fat protein, and I get to reduce my meat consumption without changing much else. A win for everybody! Yay!

Persimmons aren't scary!

I was afraid of the persimmon, because people's reactions had been pretty mixed - one friend, Kassiane, absolutely adores them, but a lot of people's reactions had been more wary than anything. But today, I got brave and picked a persimmon off my landpeople's tree. (They don't mind, so I figured, hey, it's free fruit...)

I brought it in and washed it, then consulted the internets. My friends confirmed that it was indeed a persimmon, and cautioned against eating it before squishy. (And then we started talking about pomegranates, which made me want pomegranates.) I looked around, and I found out that persimmons were pretty scary. Apparently, the astringent varieties are so bitter that they will "drawe a mans mouth awrie with much torment" if unripe, which doesn't sound like a fun time to me. Checking around a bit, I reassured myself that this appeared to be a Fuyu persimmon, which is okay at any stage of ripeness. Fortunately, Kassiane was online! I sent her a link to this picture, asking what she thought.

A bright orange, shiny, tomato-shaped fruit sitting in front of my laptop

.

She thought I should eat it immediately.

A Fuyu persimmon cut in half. The flesh is firm and golden orange, and there is an 8-pointed star shape in the middle.

I gave it a shot. The taste was fairly sweet, mild, a little bit odd, and the texture was somewhat apple-y. Kassiane identified the odd flavor as somewhat like cinnamon, and the rest of the internet concurred. I didn't love it - it seemed like the sort of thing I could mix into a salad or another dish, but alone, it wasn't heavenly. (It might not have been fully ripe yet.)

So I did what I do every night, Pinky:  try to take over the world! ...Ahem. I cut it up, mixed it with brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter, and stuck it in the microwave for a minute and a half.

Translucent chunks of orange fruit with some butter and brown sugar in a bowl with a fork.

It was way better cooked. The texture was soft but not mushy in an icky sort of way, and I really liked the way the flavor worked with the brown sugar. Now it is gone.

And that was the end of my very first persimmon.

Good job, rice!

Yay, rice!

Brown rice, in the crockpot, with chicken broth, a clove of garlic, half an onion, a carrot, salt, and pepper. Worked out okay. Was really concerned about the proportion of vegetable to rice, but the veggies cooked down and the rice cooked up and it was all okay in the end. Next time, I'll probably try different broth. This time, the store brand was very very on sale, so I gave that a shot. It was pretty good, but not wonderful. I'm not sure how I feel about the cooked carrot; it's not my favorite, but it's not bad, so for now I'm going to keep including it because it's inexpensive and a vegetable and I'll get used to it. Not sure what other vegetables work with this. I don't like mushrooms, so that's out. I wonder if some sort of legumes would go well with it. Peas probably would. Hmm...

Yesterday was pretty bad, so I'm going to have to be really academically productive for the rest of the night. Boo.

Productive morning - well, kinda?

Well, so far today, I did the laundromat thing, I picked up some groceries, I cleared the leftovers out of my refrigerator, and I took out the garbage. I still have the vacuuming and all of the dishes in the universe to do. You don't even want to know the state of my kitchen, after maybe one day of not doing dishes... Anyway, I'm soaking them now. How are there always so many dishes? Washing out my blender is so annoying that just the annoyance factor alone is making me not want to have a smoothie.

The laundromat wasn't so bad - it turns out that bringing my laptop and hanging out at Starbucks really really improves my morale and makes the time go faster, so from now on, regardless of the fact that my laptop is heavy, I'm just going to do that. I do have to take another load sometime in the next few days, and from now on I need to be more careful about washing my whites; I left two dark red pillowcases in by accident, and I'm really lucky I don't have pink everything now. Plus, this "Drag everything inside and then just leave it there" plan is really not the best plan anyone has ever had.

Haven't actually done any schoolwork or application stuff, which is... bad. Kinda why I'm here. So, first is lunch, then Pliny, then some rereading for my writing sample, then continuing the search for my index card... Gah.

Speaking of lunch, though, this Uncle Ben's microwave rice is really awesome - I didn't like some of them, but the garden vegetable is great. Way easy.

Loving Doctor Who, by the way. Fantastic.


Update: The whole reason I went to the laundromat was to wash the bathroom rug. Guess what I totally didn't bring to the laundromat at all.

Not so much good the past few days

On the bright side, I've been working on some important cleaning, and I'm getting my place back into good shape. I also turned in my rent check today, which is good because it was due today, and my photography is going really well. On the other hand, I'm missing some important things (one in particular: an index card with needed information on it), I've let one of my lists fall by the wayside, I keep falling asleep at inopportune times, and I'm having a lot of trouble focusing on my studies. Frustrating. I'm going to try to get my stuff together tonight and get plenty of sleep, so as to work more effectively tomorrow. Right now, I'm letting some dishes dry and clearing some of the mess from my desk.

I need to remember to pick up cheap rubber bands for my flashcards, and to get some envelopes for mailing things.