Home of the Wanderer

One of my new favorite meals is leftovers.  I believe that food should be good several times over, and ideally the leftovers turn into something else entirely; they should not come out looking just like they did when they were first served.  If you try to reconstitute the original meal using leftovers, it will almost always be a disappointment.

For example, this afternoon I took some of the braised kale, apples, and cranberries from last night, and threw them in a pan with some of the roasted root veggies.  Stirring frequently over medium-high heat for three or four minutes, I brought the mixture up to temperature, emptied it onto a waiting plate, and then deglazed the pan with juice from half a lemon I had sitting in the fridge (also from last night).  It wasn’t quite enough liquid, so I added a little water from the kettle.  I scraped the pan clean, reduced the liquid to a sauce, poured it over my waiting meal, and added a little salt.  Yum!

I had thought about thickening the sauce with some flour, but decided against it – I don’t need gravy on everything.  Sometimes, a citrus reduction adds the perfect touch.

Simple to make:

• root vegetables, slightly sautéed with salt and pepper, then roasted until falling apart, this time including turnip, rutabaga, carrots, parsnips, two kinds each of onions, beets, and potatoes, and the extra special something: a bulb of fennel.
• kale braised with cranberries, apples, and browned garlic. sautéed with browned garlic until bursting, with apples until falling apart, then – with a shot of apple juice – used to braise a bunch of kale.

Just add volunteers, call lists, and a script, et voila – c’est une phone-bank!

Why yes, I am feeling much better. Thank you.

A friend asked me this morning, via google-chat, whether I had died yet. No, I responded, at least I don’t think so.

I spent all day in bed yesterday, though, despite having a normal temperature. A normal temperature! For a full day! That, friends, is my test to determine whether I’m ready to resume normal life. So here I am, attempting to resume normalcy. And my internal clock is all mixed up. Oh well, at least I’m not shivering at 100ºF. The worst of my symptoms have passed, and I expect that – so long as I stay hydrated – I will continue to recover well.

Regardless of which set of infections I turn out to have had, I should no longer be contagious through social contact, nor through food-prep, and so I’ll be putting something yummy together for my friends tonight. Also, I have a lot of phone calls to make if I’m going to catch up with my planned timeline.

Okay, so I’m still sick.  I spent most of the day in bed, not feeling like doing much, taking my temperature occasionally (still ranging from 100 to 101), and making occasional phone calls.  In one of those calls, a friend suggested that I ought to eat something.  Agreeing, I’ve thrown together a bite of food.

Based on all the “rest and plenty of liquids” advice, I went ahead and started simmering up a mirepoix from scraps I’d saved a few weeks ago, and began poking around in my cabinets for something to go with the broth. Read the rest of this entry »

Not a low fever, exactly, but there I am.  I thought it had broken last night, given that I was down to 98.6 when I woke up this morning.  But here I am now.  And a hot bath!  Mmmm.  Warm water.

This evening, I didn’t prepare any food for our volunteers because, well, I’m still sick. And it’s not nice to get volunteers sick.

So instead, I ordered pizza. Yummy yummy pizza. Next week, I’ll be back to cooking up yumminess for our crew of volunteers. Meanwhile, I hope to enjoy the bath that got canceled last night.

I have a flu, or flu-like symptoms – my muscles ache, the lymph nodes in my neck are swollen (big enough that I can feel them pressing into my neck when I turn my head), my head hurts… and I tried to take a bath tonight only to discover that my water heater had somehow been infiltrated with sediment. All the water from the hot tap was brown. Strangely, the cold water tap was running clear. Read the rest of this entry »

I was poking around this morning on a school district website, when I noticed a couple of links (on the “parents” page) to resources around online safety for kids. On a related page, there were a bunch of links to resources for the kids, and immediately this idea came to me.

What if a person could tell their browser, “yeah, I trust this website to give my kid links to pages he or she can safely visit”? What if you could also tell your browser, “I trust this page to tell me about other pages my kid can trust, too”? This quickly develops into a web-of-trust model, in which individual pages don’t vouch for themselves, but for each other. Read the rest of this entry »

Today (Monday the 17th, actually, but it took me a while to write this up), as I was walking to the produce market, I thought to myself, “I’d like some solid food this week.”

So I picked up a bunch of carrots, some red potatoes, several yams, two heads of broccoli, a stalk of celery, and a loaf of olive bread. I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d do with all of these things, but I figured something tasty – and solid – would come of it. Read the rest of this entry »

Allison writes in this recent post about, among other things, the relationship between Quakerism, Universalism, and Christianity. That brought to mind this article, which my grandmother recently shared with me when I was back east visiting. In it, Samuel Caldwell argues that Quakerism not only marries Christianity to Universalism, but makes of them two sides of the same coin.

It was a refreshing read for me, as it seemed to speak to (and of) my own condition. I suppose I’ll need to make a note of it in my page about my spirituality.