Musings

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?

We social-butterflied again this weekend, hosting dear friends who live nearby. We discussed sequoias, caribou/reindeer, BBQ, and the recipe for maple syrup—and why homemade is incomparably better than the supermarket version.

Posted at 10:06 PM | Comments Off on Wide-ranging discussions

I did salmon again tonight in the air fryer. For the last two minutes, I threw in quartered grape tomatoes and some green onion shreds. The green paste on the fish is a kale pesto mixture that TJ’s sells that tastes pretty much like “regular” pesto. After extricating the salmon and veg from the deep cooker-bin, I put it on spinach that had cycled through the microwave, and added cauliflower steam-fried in a separate pan. I added more pesto and wah-lah.

Posted at 10:03 PM | Comments Off on Tasty, also yum

We are three meals in on our air fryer experiments…two of salmon filets, and one of tofu. We are (I am) trying to incorporate more fish/other meals in our diet, instead of terrestrial critter protein (including dairy).

One advantage of the air fryer, and I don’t understand how this happens, but there’s no fishy odor. Amazing.

Posted at 10:19 PM | Comments Off on Coneflower and menus