Bread, Wine, Salt

These were a riff off of the roasted apples at Remedial Eating .  I roasted mine at 450 instead of 400, used only 1 Tablespoon each of butter and brown sugar and roasted them for 45 minutes instead of 60.  I also skipped the cinnamon and used a full teaspoon of freshly crushed cardamom.  I love cardamom, and just like I think you should grate your own cheese I think you should grind your own cardamom.  In this case I just crushed the seeds on the cutting board with the back of a spoon, no special equipment required.   If you don't want to use them on top of waffles, you could use them on top of ice cream, or just by themselves.  

On the second night of class we sat around the table marking slabs of clay. My slab of clay was not behaving. I kept carving, stamping, rebuilding. We chatted as we worked, getting to know each other. I put down my tools and stared at the clay. It was wrong. “Nope” I folded the slab in half. Sandy, the teacher, gasped in horror. I reslabbed the clay and started over, building where I had carved. It was better. I built my slab into something useful. It was declared “cool.” I kept making things that were not as cool. Objects cracked and broke, dried with waves in places I wanted flat. The carving I put on a box didn't come out at all the way I'd hoped. I achieved far less than I had hoped.  Several objects were crushed into small pieces to be recycled. Weeks later we glazed. The glaze on my useful object dried and I left it on a shelf in the kiln room. I retrieved it this evening, pleased with the results. Sandy told me it has created quite a stir when...

A trip to the grocery store not withstanding I didn't have dip on hand, so this is a mix of buttermilk, sour cream, and a salt-free spice blend.  It's a small step up from making french onion dip from soup mix. There are roasted pumpkin seeds in the bag. All this fiber and vitamin filled goodness is brought to you by the big bowl of Halloween candy in the closet.

I'm pretty sure trying to post something every day will end in tears (mine from stress and yours from boredom), but a solid percentage of the uncool kids are doing it (the cool kids don't need to do it because they already have readers.)  So I shall dip my toe in the water and see what happens. I made a chickpea curry tonight (more on that later) and needed two onions cut in large dice.  My v-slicer is perfect for that task, but I hate (and/or lost) the guard that is supposed to hold the food and protect my hands from being sliced by the many sharp blades.  Fortunately I have watched enough Alton Brown to know that the correct answer is a pair of Kevlar gloves . I bought mine from Amazon in a size Large which are just the right size for my perfectly average sized hands.  (I think they're average.   Nora , do I have meat hands and no one has told me?  And remember, this is for posterity, so be honest.)  They are not perfect.  I managed to ...

It was my day to co-op at my sons' school, and I had a client meeting 25 minutes away in the afternoon. School ends at 11:30 and the meeting was at 1:00. Normally that would have been plenty of time to get the kids home, fed and safely deposited in the loving embrace of the playroom where they could occupy themselves and enjoy the benevolent neglect of their father who was working from home in the next room. But of course nothing is ever simple and I was the only co-oping parent instead of being one of two, and my older son's class let out a bit late due to some flower planting and a trapped possum. I got home much later than I had expected. I did at least have a plan. We had good cheddar and tortillas in the refrigerator, and in the fruit drawer of the pantry there were a couple of good baking apples. My goal was to make these as quickly as possible. I used an apple corer-slicer, but a knife would do just as well, grated my own cheese and had both boy...