by Sam Tackeff | Sep 25, 2013 | Challenge, Culinary Disaster
Before we talk soup, here’s something nice. I get quite a few press releases sent my way, and usually nothing much happens with them other than me hitting the delete button and grumbling that they don’t just auto-delete themselves. Sorry, PR flack, but so many of these emails are terribly boring, and I don’t have need for your elbow salve/yarns made of the hair of unicorns/metal shaker cups that glow purple and are eco-friendly. Okay, sometimes I forward the best of the best to my friends, and we have a good laugh – such as “a mustache made for cats“. Seriously, that was the best press release ever.
But this video is nice, and I think that Bee Raw’s Save the Bees Fund is pretty rad. Launched earlier this year to help research and combat the global die-off of the honey bees (yeah, press release words verbatim), these guys are doing some cool things. And I think that bees are the bee’s knees. Wait, can they be? Oh my god, can they bee??
If you have 9 minutes, or even just a few, go ahead and give it a look.
Zeke’s Maine Hive Dive from Jason Elon Goodman on Vimeo.
Okay, now that my PSA is out of the way, here’s my dinner: grilled chicken, and some of the sweetest little dry farmed tomatoes I’ve ever had. Mmmm dry farmed tomatoes. Little orbs of summer. Even though it’s fall already. Sigh. (Hint, no soup in the picture.)
So the soup. These tomatoes were actually supposed to go in my salad, and that my vegetable course was going to be a curried zucchini soup, made in my Vitamix blender. There’s this fancy-schmancy “hot soup” setting, where you put in all your ingredients, whirr for several minutes, and it heats up for you. I was skeptical, but decided to just go for it tonight.
And by go for it, I mean… not actually think the process out.
Do you know what happens when you put raw zucchini, raw spices, and water in a blender? Well, even with the soup getting hot (which admittedly, it did completely successfully), I also got myself a blenderful of bland raw soup. Raw. Raw zucchini, raw spices.
Rather than being defeated, I chopped up a few extra tomatoes on our plates, ate dinner, and then simmered my raw soup for half an hour on the stove top until it became the curried zucchini soup I was hoping for. And I’ll just have to eat it tomorrow – which, bonus! will give the flavors real time to develop.
Not everything that comes out of this kitchen is a success, but I do take a great deal of pleasure in trial and error.
by Sam Tackeff | Sep 24, 2013 | Books, Local stores, Meat
The last Tuesday of the month is the day I pick up my meat club allotment at the best butcher shop in town – M.F. Dulock, in Somerville. For $50, I left with a nice sized package of spicy beef sausage, stew meat, stir fry meat, goat chops and pork jowl – enough to last me several weeks. The meat is pasture raised, broken down by the people handing it to me. It makes me a really happy camper.
I wish I had more exciting stories to tell you, but here’s what’s plaguing me today: I have $11.30 in library fines. I swear I’m not a jerk – it was an accident involving eight items that were overdue for three days. And two of those were DVD’s. And apparently, when you have an excess of $5 in fines, they shut off your ability to download digital items, until you head into the library and pay up. And they also disable your ability to the pay the fines online. This makes me grumbly. Let me give you my money! I might even donate a little extra every time I had to pay a fine if I could do it from the comfort of my own home.
Okay, but what does this mean for me exactly?
It means that I can’t download the audio book that I’ve been queuing patiently for for two months.
Let me pay you money, library, and let me download my Wallander audiobook!
Which reminds me. I probably should get around to trying Audible.com. Does anyone use it? Is it worth it? Inquiring minds want to know. I’ve been trying to stick to this free audiobook from the libary thing, but apparently it raises my general stress level to “unacceptable neuroses”.
Okay, that’s enough complaining. I suppose I should mention something about my almost favorite part of the day – dinner! (Second only to Second Lunch.)
My first order of business was to fry up a merguez burger that I was planning on eating on some wilted greens with lemon. After frying the first side for a few minutes, I got a call from Devon letting me know that he needed to be picked up, so I turned off the heat, flipped the burger, and popped the lid on, hoping for the best. When I returned less than 20 minutes later, the burger was browned nicely on both sides, and cooked perfectly through. A meaty-miracle!
I’ll admit though, that somehow in the 20 minutes I forgot all about the wilted greens. By the time we got home I was starving, so the burger became my appetizer. Devon came back hungry, so I decided to put the “red hot beef” sausage from meat club in the pan – which halfway through cooking I determined was too spicy for him (it was so spicy that I nearly was choking on the smoke – just the way I like it). So he got refried beans and eggs cooked in spicy sausage drippings, and I ate a piece of sausage, and no vegetables, and just decided that I’d be okay with it, because sometimes all you want is a piece of meaty goodness, and nothing else. Sometimes, being an adult is *the best*.
by Sam Tackeff | Sep 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
Today I tackled a nagging task – something that has been plaguing me for nearly a year – and I can’t tell you how much better I feel. My actions didn’t completely solve the problem, but even the small steps forward were a huge weight lifted. Maybe you have something holding you back? Something that started off as a small annoyance that you’ve left for a little too long? You don’t need anyone to give you permission to fix it – but I’ll give it to you anyway. Whatever it is, it’ll be okay. Just get yourself moving. Just take the baby step. Do it! Start!
I spent a good deal of my day in limbo – that first baby step turned out to be slightly more complicated than I’d have hoped. While waiting, I visited my mom’s preschool class, and had lunch with the kiddos.
First we had “lunch” in the playground sandpit, where I was surrounded by a group of eager children scooping sand by the spoonful into my bowl. “It’s chili!” I started off. “What are you putting in it?”. The great thing about imaginary chili is that you can spend minutes at a time naming off ingredients for them to add. “Do you like avocados?” (Mixed reviews). “Where’s the cheese?!” I’d ask, as someone eagerly dumped more sand into my bowl. The older ones would start rattling off ingredients of their own. “Chile Peppers!” “Red or Green?”. And then eventually we all broke out giggling when someone threw in a handful of “chocolate chips”. At that point we decided that it was actually imaginary oatmeal, but before we could get really started, it was time to head inside.
Later, at lunch, I had a two year old in a spider man outfit repeatedly lick me, and a four year old ask if I’d like to see his butt. I opened up gogurt, and apple carrot pouches, encouraged a few more bites of sandwich, and then confused several of them when I admitted that I don’t like raisins. Preschoolers are rad, and a good time was had by all. Sometimes I’m pretty sure that I relate better with certain four year olds than I do adults.
After work, my mom and I headed over to the Juicery to grab a pick me up – it’s a local spot owned by the older brother of a kid I went to elementary school with. Technically I went to school with him too, but he was definitely “a big brother”, and I still see him that way. It’s good to see that business is doing well, and that the juice, as always, is delicious.
The Juicery
Juicery.com
51 Hanover St Portsmouth, NH 03801
(603) 431-0693
