Chicken salad
Saturday, 5 May 2007
I promise; I’ll get this recipe for chicken salad like-you’ve-never-had-it-before posted. Asian. And more. Here, the more includes turkey substituted for chicken.
Later: okay, it’s posted here.
Musings
May Day!
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Celebrating this holiday with our houseguest, my SIL, Amtraking around the US on a business trip….
May we recommend an Alon’s carrot cake!
Scallop salute
Tuesday, 24 April 2007
So soon, these good times must end. We celebrated our last supper together with scallops (hoping they hadn’t been harvested by dredge), simply sauteed.
Simple pleasures
Monday, 23 April 2007
One more reason The Guru and I don’t fit any demographic standard: we used our Xmas $$$ to buy a new (high-end) dish drainer.
And it’s all Nancy’s fault!
And very cool!
Smiley jug
Tuesday, 17 April 2007
Am I ever a cynic! I looked at this whimsy in a milk jug and wondered how calculated the marketing decision-makers were—and decided, no, it was highly deliberate.
Big Day!
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
JCB’s b-day, one of those zero years. I slightly modified the richest of today’s (!) NYTimes brownie recipes as the requested cake substitute.
For reflections, see bloggage by JCB himself, and recollections at NN.com.
Today’s vocabulary:
agitprop
political (originally communist) propaganda, esp. in art or literature, from Russian: a blend of agitatsiya (agitation) and propaganda
Potable water
Thursday, 5 April 2007
Ecologically aware members of the general public in this country tend to do a better job thinking about the implications of their choices about what they ingest than thinking about “downstream” effects. Sometimes we consider problems with fertilizer washing into our waterways, but less so the chemicals we send out our homes’ wastepipes. (Exception: Jay—but you’re not “general public”!!)
Cornelia Dean, in this NYTimes piece, details the problem liquids that typical households deliver to treatment systems that often just pass them on without trying to remove them. I’d heard about hormone problems in water creatures and the presence of antibiotics in streams, but it’s far more than that. So, your new acronym is PPCP, meaning pharmaceutical and personal care products. Find PPCP in a water faucet near you. Notes an environmental scientist, “it is a mistake to consider all of these compounds safe “by default,” and…more must be done to assess their cumulative effects, individually or in combination, even at low doses.”
I had no understanding of buying bottled drinking water until I lived in Oaxaca in 1989 and the tap water was not potable. I have never seriously considered it here in Atlanta (“our water tastes good”), but I may have to reconsider—but not in individual portions, only those large water-cooler sizes (returnable ones, too). Too bad here we don’t have the trucks cruising residential neighborhoods with refills, their drivers yelling “Aaaahhhh-gwaaaaaahhhhhh!”
Here’s a Mexican-Spanish vocabulary word: garrafón—large bottle or carafe, (a perfect size for household use).
Spring ahoy
Wednesday, 21 March 2007
You know spring is on the way when the ground is thawed enough for the Botanist to start turning over the soil. The triple by-pass is behind him, and the seeds are ordered!