Chicken dinner, cables and Rhinebeck

First order of business yesterday, to roast the chicken, which will be sandwiches, soup addition, salad, and finally, soup.

These little misfits chickens, just a couple of pounds, are so good. I don't do anything fancy with them, just butter and salt, one hour at 400°f.  They're good enough not to need much done.

True of pretty much any good ingredients. It's the struggling ones that need a lot of inventive cooking.  Tough meat, tired veggies, bland and dull squash, all that, need a lot of help. From me they get a wide berth, life being too short. Except butternut squash, which tastes of something. 

Speaking of inventive, I decided to try converting the latest granola into bars. This entailed a butter/ sugar/ molasses addition, and pressing into a pan, to refrigerate. I expect Handsome Son will help sample them.  One of my Minnesota friends used to say that in her world, the word bars instantly conjures up church suppers!

The reason for the molasses is that I don't buy brown sugar, which is needed here. It's just sugar still with its molasses, so I buy one kind of whitish cane sugar and where brown sugar is needed, add in a bit of molasses to convert it back, more or less. Good enough for gummint work, anyway.

Yesterday's knitting group was small and good, and the only projects you haven't seen are these from Sandy

this is a hat in black. As I angled it to catch the pattern, my phone read it as grey, but I thought you should see these very proficient cables.

Her other project is setting up for a Halloween sweater, with dancing skeletons to be worked on a black background.

Sandy fitted us in before dashing off for the weekend to Rhinebeck, to the huge annual sheep and wool festival, where crowds of knitters gather, with famous designers, sheep, yarn and general partying, wearing all kinds of handknits, many created specially for the event. This year the weather's wet and windy, but it won't deter the  faithful from their annual pilgrimage. 

The now indoor marigolds are taking a brave stab at flowering

Happy day, everyone! Enjoy your weekend, whatever the weather, looking at you, Babet in the UK.

Memorial Day in the US

 It's Memorial Day, to remember and honor the people who died in wars. 

One way to honor them is to celebrate the living, and when Handsome Son announced he plans to come over this afternoon, I thought I'd better make a little something.

Yesterday I'd set dried apricots into apple juice overnight thinking maybe a sauce for fish. 

Then Gary came dashing in last evening, i was spinning and winding on, so I couldn't put the spindle down. 

He had been grilling chicken and got a plate out of my kitchen cabinet to leave me some slices for today.

So then I thought ah, apricot sauce and chicken, great. Then when handsome Son planned to come over I rethought.

Made the apricot, juice and cane sugar into preserves this morning

the idea being jam tarts. 

A search for a nice pastry recipe not written in impenetrable British terms was, um, fruitless. So I searched on and remembered making the artisanal apple pie which readers will remember from a while back. That was when I found that artisanal doesn't mean quick. 

But the pastry, buttery and flaky, was worth a try.

I noticed that the preserves set up much more glutinous than expected because I forgot the pectin in apple juice as well as apricots. 

So I had to think yet again. I doubted if it would work to bake the tarts as usual with the preserves in them. Better bake blind (empty) then add the preserves.

I like this way of baking blind which I did ages ago and liked - draped over the other side of the muffin pan

I rerolled the extra pastry to freeze for a future fruit pasty

Cook's privilege bottom left 

See it's lovely and flaky

 

I had to take a guess at baking time, so settled on 15 mins at the normal flaky pastry 400°f. I could have taken them out a minute earlier, noted for next time.

So here are Memorial Day Fruit Tarts. A couple will probably go next door, Gary loves anything to do with jam. And I have extra preserves, maybe to go with the extra pastry.

Yesterday I took a stab at gardening, got the sage tied up searched in vain for Iris rhizomes. I think they may have rotted. 

Found one, which I'll hopefully replant in a better spot. Out front I know there are quite a few under the pachysandra waiting for rescue another day. 

And in honorary family news, most people wave cute baby pictures of grandchildren, or sweet little dancers in tutus. 

Here's my honorary granddaughter with her marathon and 5K friends.

Front row. Banana suit. I rest my case.

Also seen lately, on Freecycle

And let's not forget on Memorial Day, the people now fighting and dying in Ukraine, fighting our proxy war, to secure Europe from a would-be dictator.

Happy day everyone, enjoy being here.

The moon of many names, Misfits and soap

We've had no sightings of the moon for a couple of days,  just rain and clouds, but here's the gen

And yesterday's Misfits box arrived, terrific service, carrier rang the bell, said, wait, too heavy for you, I'll put it inside the door

Usually they just leave it on the step

All present and correct this week, and just in time for today's easter dinner prep.

Look at this tree, disguised as Swiss chard, so beautiful

We're having chicken from the freezer, stuffed with lemon and roasted, scalloped red potatoes, steamed broccoli and carrots, ginger scallion sauce. 

Handsome Son provides cheese and crackers to start, tiny chocolate eggs and jelly beans to finish, and soft drinks.

I partly roasted the chicken, microwaved and poached the potato slices in milk, 

then the milk became the base for the cheese sauce for the potatoes. Tomorrow the chicken and potatoes will finish cooking in the oven as we eat our cheese and crackers.

Now to lay the table, throwing the cloth over the current puzzle in progress.

And here's the upshot of yesterday's soap making. Once cooled, it foamed nicely when whipped a bit, 

so I strained it into a handy container 

and set it on the shelf above the washing machine ready for the next laundry day.

Happy day everyone, enjoy your weekend whatever your plans.  Support friends in Tennessee fighting the good fight. A couple of mine are on the front lines.

Chicken, microseasons and the Land of Abeyance

So yesterday the chicken, only two pounds but a lot of meat on a little frame, did me proud.

There's a lot more meat for various plans involving chicken salad, soup, potpie (thanks to Debra). Definitely doing this again. 

Tender, very good quality. I roasted it slowly for juiciness, don't care about crisp skin since I don't eat it anyway. Basted with the butter I'd dotted about. The herbs on top are sage flowers from my sage that tried for world domination during the heatwave last summer. 

Today is marginally warmer but the icy wind kept me down to a couple of recycling and mailbox walks, not the real one I hope for this week.

I noticed I just missed the opening of the Japanese micro 72 season year.

You may remember a while back, I started a microseason log, to try to deal with the upcoming winter.

I used a book I'd made, with, appropriately,  a Japanese stab binding construction, and set up sections for each microseason.

I tapered off when the entries seemed to be too repetitive. It's in abeyance, maybe once the change of season gets under way more evidently, I'll resume it.

Also in abeyance is my Arabic study.

This is the result of the Striking Virus which did a job on my thinking ability, just fog. When I get to where it comes back, I'll be back, too. The spirit is willing but the brain is tottering.

The Land of Abeyance is an old joke dating back to a convo with an artist wondering why our artist group hadn't exhibited or even met recently. I said "I think it's in abeyance." 

Whereupon she said indignantly, straight faced, "Nobody told me they'd planned a trip! Why wasn't I invited? You  seem to know all about it!".  Really upset, total FOMO on display.

I had to explain. 

Speaking of Arabic, when I mentioned my brother Kevin recently, I searched unsuccessfully for a picture, must have given it to Handsome Son, but in this repository of special stuff, literally the only thing I inherited from my parents 

Found this, 

Left, Kev's self teaching of Russian. He must have been a teenager, since he died at 20 in the Fleet Air Arm, ww2.  I wonder if this urge to self teach, especially foreign languages with different alphabets, is in the DNA.

On the right is a bit of fern from sister Rita's wedding bouquet, from 1953.

The book itself was a standby in my house. My mother bought it on weekly payments, because she believed a house needed a dictionary. This was in the 1930s, when the older ones were all in school. She couldn't afford both a vacuum cleaner and the dictionary, so she went for the dictionary.

I think that was heroic, considering her workload with a large family and no appliances, not even a washing machine. Walking the walk.

I read this dictionary cover to cover when I was sick in bed, which probably helped develop a vocabulary out of all expectation from a little kid. My older sisters told me I was reading at three, so by six and seven I guess I was equal to at least going for it.

Anyway if we've recovered from the Great Tiebreak Debate, are you up for a puzzle?

And speaking of little kids and winter

I remember the roast chestnut man coming around in winter, roasting the chestnuts on hot coals in his vehicle thing, selling them in a wrap of paper, gosh they were hot, and so good.

Happy evening everyone, may you manage to pull your chestnuts out of the fire in good time, metaphorically and literally, big dictionary words..

Dinner with Handsome Son Returns, after Hiatus

Between my being under the weather, and Handsome Son's work hours being unaccommodating, it's been weeks since we had a meal together.  So Friday we resumed, and it went over well.

Chicken drumsticks, roasted with thyme, then layered with baby bella mushrooms, sauteed in olive oil and butter, garlic salt and red wine, and a can, sorry, it's the season, no fresh tomatoes yet, of unsalted diced tomatoes.  All layered together,  medium oven.  Brown jasmine rice, cooked with crushed walnuts and golden raisins.  This was a pretty easy meal in some ways and went down well.  Glass of the same red wine used in the mushrooms, nice Italian.  Banana bread with crushed walnuts (noting a theme here?) and big pot of tea. And it leaves enough for a couple of meals for me over the weekend.  

So dinner was good, and after HS had been forced to tour all the new windows, admiring them at length, very patiently, he picked out some of my glass collection for himself.  When I had to reorganize before the windows were done, I put away all my glass collection for safety, and decided after weeks of not seeing it, that I probably only needed to hold onto a few pieces.  So Handsome Son was very happy to take away several nice pieces for his own use.  

This leaves a few I can take to the thriftie on my next trip there.  HS always gets first refusal on anything I find at the thriftie, or anything I'm planning to take there.  He's very good about selecting only what he wants, resisting the collecting temptation pretty well.  Partly this is because his condo is small and fills up easily! 

All my neighbors are resigned to having a tour of the windows if they stop in.  I think I may need to curb my enthusiasm a bit..
More strawberries today, and I got half a dozen nice basil starts, which are now potted up on the patio.  I need rosemary then I'm set.  Other herbs came through the winter fine, oregano, mints, sage, Thai basil, if the squirrel's rampage hasn't stopped it in its tracks.