Doug's photo blog — originally a photo a day, now not so much
We had a minor snowstorm last night. It did not live up to predictions, which was disappointing for me because I set up to take a time-lapse of the snow coming down. The camera took a shot every 90 seconds for 16 hours or so, which I glued together into an AVI. Pretty cool. What I’ve posted here is just 11 frames at a small size; ping me sometime if you want to see the whole thing.
I went up to our storage unit today. We packed away some stuff that we didn’t think we’d need — winter clothes, holiday decorations, spare computer parts, that sort of thing. We had to retrieve our winter clothes a while back, and never did bother fetching holiday decorations. But I stole a cable from my desktop system a couple weeks ago to fix my father-in-law’s computer, and now I need it in order to install tax software. So I went to get the spare from storage.
Stacked cardboard boxes don’t hold up that well under heat & humidity changes, so I also re-stacked things that had fallen over.
With luck our house will sell soon and we’ll be able to empty this out before we need our summer stuff.
Tonight’s picture is of nearly full moon shadows on snow. I actually first took this photo (or one like it) last night just before bed, but Lis made me re-take it today to be within the letter of the rules for this project — which worked out well because the shadows are more interesting.
Recycling is somewhat difficult when one’s house is on the market and must be presentable at all times, though we’ve found ways to make it work. It’s doubly difficult when yesterday’s 3″ of slush has frozen up into 1/2″ of ice over most everything overnight. I hope the last week’s boxes & bottles are happy in their new home.
Weather! What a mess we had this morning. 3″ of slush all over everything. I had to be in the office for some meetings today, so I took the train with Lis. On such days, I often stop at Eatin’ Healthy, a place right across the street from my building, to get some breakfast.
For a few years now, we have been grinding all our own ground meat. This practice allows us to control the cuts and fat content of our burgers, sausages, etc., as well as allowing us to cook our beef burgers as rare as we like them with a reduced chance of contamination. Just-ground meat also tastes fresher. Tonight’s dinner was turkey burgers; here I am grinding turkey breast, which I mix with a pomade of bread and milk for moistness, and cook in a very hot pan.
I gave a training today at work. We are switching to a new software package, and I am the one driving the change.
To encourage my coworkers to not drag their feet about trying out the new software, at the end of the training I gave them a Cookie Challenge: accomplish one of a number of tasks and earn a cookie, an actual physical cookie that I baked myself. Here they are, ready to go to work this morning.
Preheat the oven to 350 F
1 stick butter
1 C granulated sugar
Cream the sugar with the butter in a stand mixer until pale yellow and airy.
2 eggs
1 Tbsp molasses
1 tsp vanilla extract
Add the eggs, one by one, and the molasses & vanilla and beat until thoroughly combined.
1 3/4 C all-purpose flour, sifted
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp table salt
Sift the dry ingredients together.
Add the flour mixture gradually to the butter mixture with the mixer running on low speed until combined.
Proceed by hand, or delicately with the mixer.
2 C rolled oats (quick-cooking or old-fashioned, not instant)
6 oz chocolate chips (1 small bag)
1 C raisins (which I left out)
Add the oatmeal, chocolate chips, and raisins, and mix until just combined. The mixer will tend to crush these ingredients, so be careful.
Drop by spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet and bake each batch 10-12 minutes until just starting to brown. Cool on a rack.
Makes 4 dozen smallish cookies.
We went to a house showing today, an open house in Newton. This is the latest in a long series of house showings we’ve gone to, keeping on top of the market while our own house is taking its sweet time to get sold.
Today’s listing was a nice house, only 7 years old, built on the slab of a tear-down 1950’s ranch. It’s too big for us, and in the extreme southeast corner of Newton not really convenient to much that we care about. But it did have a nice modern, sunny and bright kitchen:
Lis and I went for a walk today in the snow at one of our favorite local wildlife areas, Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Waseeka wildlife sanctuary. While we did not see much in the way of wildlife (besides some deer, who were too shielded by brush for a good picture), we did see evidence of wildlife — parts of the sanctuary have been flooded by beaver activity. Today’s photo is the stump of a tree felled by our industrious rodent friends.
On this, the Friday after New Years Day, I did not do a lot… with Lis at work I ran some errands, got some things done around the house, and did some cooking. Just after Thanksgiving our local Whole Foods had turkey wings on sale for $0.29/lb, which we bought and froze. I also recently read in On Food and Cooking how certain vegetables (potatoes chief among them) can be induced to develop a “persistent firmness” by a low-temperature pre-cooking step (130-140 F for 20-30 minutes). So these things, combined with today’s cold & overcast weather, provided a perfect opportunity to make a turkey stew. And here it is:
