Musings

As the household menu-planner (mostly), I’ve been trying to move us away from red meats and toward fish and non-meat proteins for dinners. This is one of our current favorites….

Posted at 7:50 PM | No Comments »

Oh, and the new coffee maker is a Ninja! I can’t figure out how coffee-making fits with a mercenary warrior, but the device makes lovely coffee.

Posted at 10:08 PM | No Comments »

The morning routine began as normal: measure water into the electric drip coffee maker, measure ground coffee, assemble machine, poke on-button, watch the blue light illuminate, return to morning fog—wince and check a few headlines.

Cock ear toward pot…hmm. No gurgling. Glance. Yup, there’s the blue light. Wha?

Despite off-on restarting, gentle shaking, etc., still no heat.

Hmm. Plan B.

I dug out our souvenir Moka Pot, and remembered that it always takes a long time (to me) to heat and brew. Still, it did so, and I sipped fine hot coffee. Whew.

I invaded the Guru’s fog with the news…and he sipped the substitute coffee, and surfaced…. By noon we had researched electric coffee makers in our preferred price range, (no, not paying $400 plus tax—or more), and fetched the chosen model home. By one, we’d unboxed, done the two water-only brews to clean the new machine, and had actual coffee brewing.

Serendipity followed by mission accomplished.

Posted at 7:28 PM | 1 Comment »

We walked around the corner to a coffee shop and I had an artistic matcha latte…

…sitting in the sunshine by the sidewalk under autumn leaves.

Posted at 8:47 PM | No Comments »

Nothing quite looks like a rambutan…with those aesthetic spinterns in a variety of greenish and rosy hues.

Posted at 10:20 PM | 1 Comment »

We finally got out from under the cloud cover associated with Helene, and had smooth sailing under blue skies…very pleasant. We crested a hill, and Eden was marred by a fog-belt. Turned out it was right over Sturgeon River, and when we cleared the valley, we enjoyed unbroken blue skies again. 😎

We dined this evening on a spring green salad with chunks of smoked whitefish…surely five-star dining for this part of the world. The orchard grasses are browning out, but the trees remain overwhelmingly green, with some brown-orange tinges.

Posted at 7:09 PM | Comments Off on Fish tales

We departed from air fryer cuisine and used the cast iron skillet to sear a slab of tuna, plus “stir fry” some veg. Tasty. BTW, the golden veg is “orange” cauliflower.

Posted at 9:59 PM | Comments Off on Dining yum

I see, at minimum, DQ and St__bux are both already vending pumpkin-flavored beverages. These used to be timed with October, even late October, leveraging Halloween symbolism. No longer.

Here’s another tidbit…in the last two weeks, The Hubby received six (SIX!) anti-Kamala oversized postcards. Me: nothing. We’re both registered voters, both with very gendered first names. I’m going with clear gender bias.

Posted at 9:06 PM | Comments Off on Careful timing

I like mint, spearmint much better than peppermint, and this is spearmint. It’s easy to grow and I have flourishing plants here and in the UP, yet I manage to forget to pick it and use it…in salads and beverages and more….

Posted at 9:24 PM | Comments Off on Pick me up

The other day I came across a discussion of perhaps the most common protein on earth, rubisco, technically styled RuBisCO. Its long version is Ribulose-1,5 bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase. I have no recollection of encountering mention of RuBisCO before.

RuBisCO is an enzyme, and it is critical for plants in extracting CO2 from air as part of the photosynthetic process. One key aspect of RuBisCO is that is extremely slow-acting, for an enzyme.

The utility of RuBisCO for human dietary needs is still under development, although I don’t know what the holdup has been…maybe it’s all chemistry? 🤣 Anyway, it has to be extracted from plant matter, then purified, etc., all without altering its protein properties.

My perspective is merely from trying to manage the onslaught of vegetative summer growth, without consideration of its potential RuBisCO content. Think: mowing, walking, cutting, and the like…. How would these chores be different if I could dump the plant-matter into an extractor…and, pfft, there’s dinner.

Posted at 9:28 PM | Comments Off on Lost in the weeds?