The strange ruggy thing starts to develop, and fitness Boud style. Late: a great man has left us

 I'm glad the bird stories amused you, so much more, but that was enough to pack into one post. My posts sometimes make me think of an overstuffed suitcase with all kinds of unrelated items sticking out. Which is pretty much a description of my mind, come to think of it.

Anyway I've been doing something or other with the Granny square project, which is getting big enough to warm my legs while I work.

I've tried various ways of incorporating the small squares, and keep having better ideas. It will eventually look like something. That's my story anyway. 

I also report that the dodgy hip might be healing finally. I quit the stretches when I suspected that they were irritating the tissue rather than healing, and I've felt better since. I'm still moving, out walking today in an amazingly mild temperature, in the 60s f. 

There were multiple skeins  of Canada geese wheeling about, all making a right angle turn right over me and heading to the next town. They claim this is migration, big fibbers.

Back home I did some walking backwards in the kitchen, beside the counter, nine steps along its length. This is supposed to rebalance your muscles and tendons or something, after the forward motion of walking.  It did help the hip, so maybe there's something in it.

And while I'm waiting for something in the microwave, I do the standing on one foot exercise. I used to do the tree pose, as near as I can get to it, but now I do two in one -- balance on one leg while doing the upper body thing. 

You hold up your hands shoulder high, palms forward, elbows out to the side,  and shoulders pressed back. This is great for unkinking your neck. I do this to reverse the effect of all the forward positions of crochet. You can also do this in a doorway, hands on the frame,then leaning forward. 

Most of my exercise is brief and focused, short attention span, variety required, no surprise there. 

Despite my plans I wasn't feeling like cooking today, maybe tomorrow. I plan on Tofu Masala, for which I have pretty much all the ingredients, from Yeung Man Cooking. 

And a new recipe for little crisp cheese biscuits to try, from Marion's  World. She uploaded it a year ago and I found it today. 

Also I'm making mayo, maybe this time I'll try chickpea mayo, from Yeung Man, just to see what it's like.  Such ambition.

Happy day everyone, when in doubt do everything. Then you have no regrets.

Late addition:

I just heard Jimmy Carter has died. There's someone who always walked the walk. RIP.

White rabbits, Mayday, missed them both 6WS

Pipped at the post again yesterday,  with a dawn's early light white rabbits text, thanks to early bird K, missed out entirely on May Day, the workers' day, or Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, depending on your affiliation, noting the carpenter aspect of his life,  and all that. My late husband, Handsome Partner, was the son of a carpenter who worked in the Glasgow shipyards, and one of his jobs as a young boy was to take out the splinters from his father's hands when he came home from work in the evening.

But I've  been working up a storm on a secret project, pics later when its been safely received. Taking a leaf out of the Mumbler book here...and I'm experimenting with the spoken voice function of my tablet to avoid the keyboard by speaking my emails and this blogpost.  

Some mild drawbacks: it can't understand me very well, and keeps on suggesting wildly wrong words! such as "facebook" when I said "taking a leaf".  So I end up editing a lot in order to make any kind of sense.  

But it does explain the occasional mysterious email I get from people I know are using the voice function of their smartphones, and are not realizing what gibberish they're sending out!

Yesterday saw the last of the cucumber sauce, used as a dressing for baked sweet potato.  That makes a full meal, just the usual microwave for ten minutes, easy last minute decision. 

And I baked bread yesterday having put it off a few days while I rationalized that chocolate cake was a fine stand-in for bread.  This batch is five cups of wholewheat, two of all purpose, half a cup barley flour.  The crust is great, and the texture of the crumb very nice.  Not too crumbly.  My favorite recipe from the Healthy Bread book.  Haven't bought bread in five years, ever since I discovered this great method.

Tomorrow I teach a workshop on paper jewelry so today is devoted to feeling all nervous and worked up about it.  I've been teaching for over forty years and still have not found the magic formula for just doing it and not being all racked up over it.  Which I then rationalize as: high nerves mean high energy for the workshop, which means a fun afternoon for participants.  At least that's the plan.  Pix later, if I live through it.

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen and across the street and all over the place

Today was supposed to be the onset of a nor'easter, one of the days-long storms we specialize in at this time of year, but beyond a bit of rain and cold, not much happened.

I got to the library to stock up on Father Brown DVDs, never having seen them and thinking that would be good for a stormy day. Then I came home, made yogurt, hummus from scratch i.e. involving chickpeas soaked since yesterday then boiled for ages, cut up and froze the bread I baked yesterday, and made chickpea/tomato soup, using the remaining chickpeas.

Then in the middle of doing some serious stitching on my current artwork, C., Karen's sister, texted to ask me to cross the street if I was interested in yet more freecycling. Cookbooks.  Boxes and boxes of them.  

Sorted many many books, into cook and other, friends summoned to choose what they could use, I put in an email to local libe to see if they'd like some boxes for upcoming sales, these being books in perfect, unopened condition.  Then I freecycled one box of them, and brought home four more, which are now in process.

As you see.  ALL those boxes are full of great cookbooks, longing for a new home.  Even nowadays there are collectors of cookbooks, despite the internet recipe availability.  Which makes me wonder if there are collectors and there are cooks.  Karen, the original owner, rarely cooked but had a worldclass collection of books!

Not bad considering I'm officially on the sicklist, coughing helplessly  and  all congested.  Oddly I feel okay, though, but annoyed by the endless coughing and I hope it doesn't keep me away from my two meetings tomorrow.  

And then again, it might be socially responsible to reconsider whether to go there at all.  I'll see how it goes overnight.  I wonder if I picked up a little cold at my party on Sunday.  Oh, if you want to know more about that, the party, not the cold, go here.

While I was in the freezer looking for soup ingredients I found my frozen lemon slices, which was great, so I made a large amount of lemonade with hot water, great for coughing and congestion. Must remember to take some to bed with me, too, for night application.

Art Happens in the Kitchen, Too! 6WS

I was talking with friends over a cup of tea recently, one of them an artist I've collaborated with in art (rare experience to be able to do that, artists being such hellbent individualists) and in music, the other a friend in music, and the subject of cooking came up.

They both read my blogs, and noticed there's been a lot of attention to food and cooking recently.  They are not very interested in cooking, beyond what they have to do for family and self, it's more of a duty than a pleasure, I think, not an interest in itself, and it made me think about this a bit.

Years ago, when I was married to a picky husband who didn't grasp how much planning and sheer dogwork it takes to put meals on the table daily, I didn't like cooking all that much.  He always loved my curries, but I didn't want to cook Indian every single day, with all those little side dishes, and clarifying the butter and all that, and my other forays were not very well received.

Later in life, when we were together again, never separated for the last ten years of his life, he lost much physical ability, and his mental powers declined, so that food became more interesting to him, and he a much more appreciative audience for my home cooking, to the point of bragging about it to his medical attendants. 

And his years of living single in the meantime, learning the chain of activity needed to get his own food on the table, and teaching himself to cook, were a revelation to him.  

He developed specialties which he loved to feed to me -- we were lifelong friends, married or not, living totally separate lives or not -- and he began to grasp not only the interest of cooking for himself, but the sheer level of planning and searching and shopping and hauling and wiping and chopping and putting away work it takes just to get food into the kitchen in the first place. So all this worked in my favor in the end.

Back together I cooked from scratch all the time partly because of one of his disorders which made it dangerous for him to take on any additives in food of the sort which give it a long shelf life.  So I needed to know what was in the food we ate daily. I'd done this all the time we were married, too, which added to my annoyance when he didn't appreciate every single tiny bite I gave him!

And I developed a great interest in it, in his later years, baking bread from scratch, making really good soup, creating all kinds of new veggie ideas, interesting Italian foods, and finally came to understand the pleasure of working with food.  

There were challenges, too, since he had limited use of his hands, couldn't use a knife at all, and I figured out how to serve food that was grownup, didn't look like babyfood, but was easy to navigate with a fork.  And his sense of taste was very damaged by his medications, so texture was a big deal.  As was appearance.  And the sound of hot croutons hissing as they hit the soup right in the bowl at the table was a great appetizer.  Chefs have known this always -- hence that tableside hissing and crackling and the flaming Christmas pudding and cherries jubilee and hissing meat and all those sound effects.

Since art flourishes on limitations and boundaries, these were in fact a help rather than a pest.

One of the few activities Handsome Partner and I could do together in his last years was to watch cooking shows on PBS and choose recipes I could try in the next few days.  We really enjoyed that, and treasured the sharing across his total disability and my exhaustion, good to find a bond there.

Another artist had said to me years ago when I wasn't interested in her endless and knowledgeable food talk, oh, you're missing out on an artform!  and now I see that the smells and textures of food, quite aside from the pleasure of serving it and eating it, are really a value in my life. 

I don't expect everyone to go along, any more than everyone has to make art, though I do think everyone's entitled to make art of all kinds.  But it's a nice revelation to me to see how life changes are reflected in what goes on in my kitchen.

And good to see that Six Word Saturday has triggered some new thoughts, too, such as the header for this post!