Last night's dinner

 I'm pretty proud of the dinner I fixed last night. My family enjoyed it and expressed appreciation, but by golly, that's not good enough. I need to record it for posterity and put it in public. No pictures, unfortunately.

I baked and broiled chicken breasts with barbecue sauce, and the sauce clung nicely to it in the oven. It ended up having a very good flavor, but was just a bit too tough.

I sautéed red onion and chard stem; then sautéed salted summer squash with soy sauce; then combined all that with sliced chard leave in the skillet with a bit more soy sauce. That was to go with the white rice I cooked.

I some variety of long, mild sweet pepper that my fiend Gregg grew, split them open, seeded them, and boiled them. I stuffed them with a mix of left over taco filling, cream cheese, salsa, and sautéed diced pepper, then baked, topped with shredded cheddar.

It all went together quite well and looked very pretty.

Dinner

The dinner I fixed tonight was more elaborate than any I had fixed in a while.  Orange garlic chicken in the crock pot; bangers and mash with onion gravy; and irish soda bread.  I managed to have it all ready at pretty much the same time, too.

It all came out pretty good.  The bangers and mash were a little bland, but salt helped.  A Guinness would have gone great with it all, but I didn't want to spend money on beer.

Baking

 This dates from 11/26.

My daughters were inspired to do some baking—on their own. Early on Thanksgiving week I helped the younger girl make cream puffs for a school party, and the next day she really wanted to bake some cookies all on her own.  The only things adults did were to get the heavy mixer down for her, and help her get the hot tray out of the oven (and also remind her to clean up after herself).  The cookies did not come out in the shape they were supposed to, but they tasted great.

Immediately after that her older sister wanted to bake some brownies.  She did that all on her own, too, except for occasional requests for advice.  The brownies came out oddly low in quantity, as if there was not enough to cover the pan, even though after review neither my daughter nor I could figure out where there may have been an error.  It seems to me that the recipe was simply wrong.  At any rate, I helped her keep an eye on the brownies in the over, and they actually came out great.  Thin and cookie-like (prompting her to label them “crownies”), but delicious.

I am proud of my bakers!

Pesto

I'm finally making some pesto, the first since last year. Step 1: rinse and let air-dry.
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Produce

The small tomatoes in the first photo are from the Super Sweet 100 bush I planted; the larger ones, which as you can tell from the photo are still petite, not-quite-golf ball sized fruits, are from a volunteer hybrid the came up at the ede of the garden. That plant is growing better than any other tomato in my yard, and putting out lots of fruit. They're pretty good, though too small for a sandwich and too large just to pop in one's mouth whole.

Tonight I cut up some green onions from the garden and a (non-spicy, for some reason) banana pepper that Len gave me. I sauteed them in olive oil, and served it to myself atop noodles, along with some of the sliced up tomatoes. A peach slice and homemade bread are also pictured.

If you are Better Homes & Garden or Chef Today Web Magazine, feel free to link to my blog.

Mailing something to Marengo, Indiana. Marengo always makes me think of lemon meringue pies. And caves.

You might be astonished by how little knitting I’ve accomplished since last week, but if you were, you’d be a freaking fool. I saw knits being knitted, and I saw knitters, and I complimented at least one sweet knitter on her project, but no knits for moi.

I attended my second coin club meeting yesterday. Met Mike, who may be the club’s only collector of world coins. It sounds like we might have a lot of trading we can do. When I told him what I had extras of, he seemed very interested. Collecting world coins is kind of lonely, I guess. When I told the gathering (when forced to stand, as a potential club inductee, and state what it was I collected) that my overriding interest was world coins, the general response was befuddled headshakes and nods toward Mike.

I’ve realized that my favorite thing about coin collecting is the detective work. The process of finding something unidentified, odd, or unexpected, and then figuring out what it is and why it exists and how it fits into some broader cultural context…that’s loads of joy.

When will I have something to post about art?

With David's help, I made pesto yesterday. Drank a Guinness supplied by David, and we all had a two-family standing-up light dinner of pesto, crackers, cheese, and cherry tomatoes.