kochleffel

I hope it didn't catch the disease from my washing machine. I don't think that my washer was the first, but I don't know which appliance, or whose, was the vector.

I saw the title of the thread that has been mentioned here, but somehow knew intuitively that I didn't want to read it. Today I did some early Cyber Monday shopping, on the goal of replacing almost all my pots and pans. Target.com has a discount code that its website applies to all kitchen appliances, but turns out also to work for cookware, and I ordered three pans in all, two for in-store pickup along with food for the Junior Cat, and one to be shipped. The cost of the third one isn't enough for free shipping but because it was part of a larger order, it qualified anyway. After teaching this morning I wanted a nap, although I didn't actually sleep. I needed to go to the supermarket, but by then it was raining hard and I didn't go until it stopped briefly at 5:00. I had (only) two bottles to return, but one machine was out of service and the other was being used by a man with several 30-gallon trash bags of bottles and cans, so I put them back in the car. I finished shopping before he finished feeding them into the machine. I don't know whether he had accumulated that many in the course of ordinary life, or whether he scavenged them from recycling bins -- in my town, quite a lot of people put them out for recycling instead of returning them for the deposits.

Corning, known as the “Crystal City,” has made Country Living’s list of 55 bucket list-worthy Christmas towns — communities the magazine lauded for being filled with Hallmark Christmas movie magic. The Southern Tier city made the list alongside North Pole, Alaska and bustling New York City. Country Living recognized Corning, home of Corning Glass, for glittering — quite literally — during the holiday season. The city starts off a month’s worth of festivities with its Parade of Lights, which lights up the chilly night with floats and vehicles dressed up in twinkling lights. It continues with Sparkle, a festival that features horse-drawn carriage rides, community sing-alongs and visits to Santa in a life-sized snow globe. https://www.newyorkupstate.com/things-to-do/2021/11/hallmark-movie-worthy-city-in-upstate-new-york-named-among-best-christmas-towns-in-nation.html My organization will have a stand at Sparkle, with Hanukkah decorations (although Hanukkah doesn't begin until the 18th), free donut holes and dreidels, etc.

Some have probably begun decorating for Christmas, so I'll share the tree at the Corning Museum of Glass. It's made of 1000 glass ornaments, blown in the Museum's studio. The photo is by John Kucko and since he posted it on social media I think that reposting it here is allowed. I decorate, only a bit, for Hanukkah, but it will be another week before I do, because I'm lending some of the decorations for a street fair on Saturday night.

Pie in the face and Bavarian cream pie seem to go together, but I don't understand what turtles have to do with them. The meal would be OK with me and I wouldn't mind the drink. I would really like the wine, although I don't think it would go with the meal. Yesterday I got up with pain in every joint. I took acetaminophen and went back to bed, although I didn't sleep then. Unfortunately, I forgot to take my blood pressure medicine and didn't notice it until the afternoon. I took it then -- I'll take it late today, earlier tomorrow, and get back to first-thing-in the morning over two or three days -- but needed to limit activity until it took effect. As a result, my sole accomplishment was organizing the spice racks, which is more than it sounds like since bottles of herbs and spices seemed to be everywhere. Dinner was leftovers from Thanksgiving. Lunch today will probably be the sweet potato with black beans and avocado that was posted here several weeks ago. I'm teaching until noon but I baked sweet potatoes last night.

I think I would like the meal better without cilantro, and the drink strikes me as a waste of Laphroaig--plus, I can't drink Clamato. I think I have some Pinot Noir from France on hand (it is the typical grape of Burgundy), but not that one. I haven't been to Vigo and it's not on the itinerary for the Spanish Farewell next year. For breakfast I had squash, which I liked for breakfast, plus multigrain bread with peanut butter. I think that lunch will be fruit; purple carrot, yellow bell pepper and [ordinary green] celery; and schnitzel. If so, dinner will be fish since it also goes with the wine that's open. [Former English teacher here] In English novels, especially from the 19th century, it's important to remember that when they talk about Corn Laws, it has to do with wheat (or grain in general), not the maize that Americans call corn, and also not moonshine ("corn squeezins"). I need to go to TJX (ordinary shopping), Staples (electronics recycling), Kohl's (Amazon return), Lowe's (return), and Petsmart (food for the Junior Cat), but I am certainly not going anywhere near that shopping strip today. The ordinary shopping is part of a long-term plan to replace almost every pan in my kitchen, because most of them won't work on an induction range and I plan to get one eventually. It is painful to replace them because (a) in a kosher kitchen, there are two full sets of everything, and (b) many of them are All-Clad, purchased ca. 1990 with a steep discount through a chef friend who was then an advertising spokesman for the company, and while many are stainless steel, magnets don't stick to some of them.

Dinner tonight was a success, so much that I almost wished I had guests. There was, in fact, quite a lot of schnitzel, and while a honeynut squash is only half the size of a butternut, that's still a lot of squash. I'm glad that I baked only one. I was uncertain about the hawaij spice blend, because I didn't really like the aroma of it, but I did like the flavor when the chicken was done. I added typical pumpkin-pie spices to the squash, but no sugar or anything, because it seemed sweeter than butternut squash. The Grüner Veltliner was a kosher one from Austria. I had had no idea that any kosher wine was produced in Austria. We also grow it in this region; Austrian and German grapes, such as Riesling and Lemberger (Blaufränkisch in Austria) tend to grow well here. I think I've drunk a little too much of it. Next week I'll be back to cardboardeaux. There's fruitcake for later, if I want it.

A couple of setbacks in the cooking, one minor and one not so minor. Minor: I managed to find both the nutmeg grater and a nutmeg, but thought that the grater was too dirty to use, so I washed it. Now it has to dry, but there is enough time that the squash can be seasoned right before reheating it. Not so minor: the schnitzel recipe requires marinating the chicken in the egg and spices mixture for several hours, and the chicken is at most half thawed. As soon as I can get the slices apart, I'll lay them out in the shallow casserole that I'll use for the marinating.

The Brussels sprouts are out of the oven, and the squash will bake next, using the same pan.

Happy Thursday to those who don't celebrate U.S. Thanksgiving. I imagine that many people over here can't imagine that anyone, anywhere, doesn't celebrate it, the same way they can't understand that I don't "have" Christmas. (For me, this year, it will be just Sunday, plus the seventh day of Hanukkah.) I had a co-worker ca. 1980 in Oregon who was almost obsessed with D. B. Cooper. I didn't get it, but he was from that region, and I am not. I've been to San Juan aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam, in January 2020. It was a strange port call, because there had been an earthquake that morning and we weren't able to dock until the afternoon. Passengers who had planned on shopping and restaurants were disappointed, because most didn't open -- many had no electricity -- but I was able to do most of the walking tour that I had planned, only in reverse order to be more in the shade in the afternoon instead of the morning.

Here's another report on Thanksgiving side-dish preferences: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/thanksgiving-sides-by-state_l_63769cfce4b0e818be4b2bff. It's based on Instacart purchases, so isn't representative of the larger share of people who shop in person. My native state is just one of six that it reports buying more fresh cranberries than canned cranberry sauce. However, it says that the same state prefers Brussels sprouts over green beans. As I was growing up I never saw a Brussels sprout on any table, and never tasted one until I was in college. The customer ahead of me in the checkout line was buying collard greens and seven boxes of corn muffin mix. I would like corn muffins tomorrow, but won't be having any. As for the false stuffing vs. mashed potatoes controversy, we always had both. (Plus butterflake rolls, to ensure enough carbohydrates to make everyone semi-comatose, which was much preferable to wide awake and quarreling, their usual state.) If the dinner was at my mother's oldest sister's house, there might also be turnips, plus fried crookneck squash since her crazy husband went through a phase when he wouldn't eat any other vegetable. Battering and frying squash at the last minute really, really interferes with the kitchen workflow.

I'm ready for a break from squash, not that I don't like it. As I mentioned before, I'm having squash tomorrow, like the good New Englander that I pretend to be. Tonight's dinner was red Swiss chard, omelette, and baked sweet potato. Chard is probably my favorite green, along with beet greens -- they are the same plant, one grown specifically for foliage, the other for the root (and edible foliage, which you don't always get). I was booked on a cruise in 2021 that would have gone to Kotor, had it taken place at all, but the replacement in 2022 was a different itinerary on a different cruise line, calling at Kusadasi. It seems that most cruises calling at Kotor embark from the Venice region, in other words, Trieste or Ravenna.

An article on, I think, FiveThirtyEight deals with popular side dishes for Thanksgiving, by region -- not the most popular, which might be potatoes in every region, but the one most over-represented in comparison to averages. In the Northeast it's squash, and I will be having squash. In the southern Great Lakes, where I'm from, it's rolls, from my experience hot Pillsbury butterflake rolls from a refrigerated tube. The upper Midwest tends to eat green-bean casserole, a form of "hot dish"; the Southeast has mac and cheese; the south central region (including Texas) has cornbread. The entire West is shown as having salad disproportionately, but I think that shows a lack of granularity in the data: California has so much population that it overwhelms the other states, and I'm not convinced that salad is as popular in, say, Wyoming. When I arranged catered dinners in Los Angeles, I was always remonstrating with the caterers that our group required twice as much salad as they were planning to serve.

Perhaps not everyone knows that Portland, Oregon, is a seaport, even though it's pretty far inland and not used by cruise ships -- the Columbia River and the Willamette as it approaches the Columbia are navigable by oceangoing vessels, and Portland handles a lot of freight. In the days of wooden sailing ships, captains liked to dock at Portland, because the fresh water killed the barnacles.

I'm not prone to freckles, but a restaurant near me is offering family-recipe cranberry relish for the benefit of charity: they keep $1 for the jar and donate the rest. A west-coast cruise to Mexico is probably not in my future, but you never know. The meal suggestion would be OK and I have honeynut squashes coming from Misfits today, the cocktail less so, but I would really like some raisin toast right now.

Meanwhile, I've been waiting for a small package that was shipped from California by UPS Air. The UPS hub for air parcels is Louisville, and it traveled happily from Oakland to Louisville. From there it went by air to Philadelphia, which is not a normal routing for air parcels to this area (it is for those coming from the west coast by train), from which it was promptly put back on the plane and returned to Louisville. From there it went by plane to Buffalo, where it remains. Apparently they got it to the Buffalo airport but can't get trucks out of the airport. It would have been more efficient, once it was in Philadelphia, to send it by truck to Syracuse, which wasn't snowed in, and then to here, but the shipper paid for air....

After last week, I'm in no hurry to do any more baking, but I would never turn down cardboardeaux.

The blood donation went OK. They gave me a SaraLee apple pie, which I wasn't expecting--a holiday promotion.

Some weeks I seem to have more odd socks than matched one. I would try the butternut squash curry but might pass on the drink, and I don't really enjoy Malbec. Have not been to Longyearbyen but would like to visit. I have an appointment today to donate blood. I am a terrible blood donor and sometimes they advise me not to donate again (difficult to get any blood and I'm prone to vaso-vagal syncope, which an ER doctor here once described as "fainting goat syndrome"), but my blood is Type O and CMV-negative, so inevitably they recruit me again. I've skipped my HCTZ today and I'm drinking water as often as I can, but the inexperience of the technicians they send here is also a factor. It's at the Presbyterian church almost around the corner.

I would probably like both the meal suggestion and the cocktail. I really prefer Pinot Noir from Oregon, but what I have now is cardboardeaux from California, and if I buy a bottle it will probably be local (Finger Lakes). I haven't visited New Zealand. Dinner tonight will be grilled salmon with what's left of the roast Brussels sprouts and carrots. This afternoon my synagogue hosted a community interfaith Thanksgiving service: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Unitarian Universalist, and Native American. A Hindu monk from the ashram up the street attended but didn't have a role in the program. With one exception (the singer in the video is the composer), all of the music was Christian (Protestant), which was unfortunate, but two people from the mosque chanted in Arabic. My only part in it was to go there early and turn up the thermostat so that it would be warmer than 60° F. It started to snow just at the time people would have been leaving to come to it, which hurt the attendance a bit, then stopped, then started again just before the end.

Do they work in the Vista-class ships (Oosterdam)?

I was without a washer for several weeks, and without a dryer for part of that time. No wonder everything here is so mixed up.

I think I would like the mushroom and muenster sliders, but I could only eat a little, because of both of the major ingredients. I would definitely like a rye Old Fashioned, and would have ordered one Thursday evening if any of my dinner companions had been willing to have a drink. I haven't been to Fairbanks. Roy's alternative would be OK with me but I would order something other than ice cream. Remember all the baking for Thursday evening? The in-person attendance was lower than expected, maybe because of an unfavorable, but wrong, weather forecast although Zoom was higher, and everyone baked more than needed, so we have dozens of cookies left over, now frozen for other occasions. Breakfast Friday morning, however, had all but one who were expected (knee injury, couldn't drive). This morning I skipped the synagogue because of needing sleep, but got there in time for a class at noon. I'm taken aback by the amount of snow in the Buffalo area. Buffalo is only little more than 100 miles from here, as the crow files, but much farther by road, and the heaviest snow fell in the southern suburbs, which are in our Congressional district. No snow at all here. Dinner tonight is strips of red bell pepper, scrambled, eggs, and roasted Brussels sprouts and carrots. For Thanksgiving I plan to make chicken schnitzel from a Michael Solomonov recipe that adds hawaij spices to the eggs, and have a Grüner Veltliner with it. I was told about this by one of the best cooks whom I know, whose recipes always require some hard-to-find ingredient, although hawaij is a blend of common-enough spices. By that time I might have roasted some squash, and more Brussels sprouts (roasting is the only way I like them).

Well, someone else dropped off four loaves of zucchini bread, which we neither needed nor wanted. The kitchen manager told me that it was very hard to slice and doesn't taste very good. The baker will not be present; may watch over Zoom but the reception won't be Zoomed.