Foodie weekend [food]

It has been a Foodie Weekend so far.

After rowing practice on Saturday, S and I biked over to the Troy Farmers Market. I wore almost the perfect layers for the 12-degree (F) weather, including Space Booties, ski mask, and liner gloves inside my ski mittens. The only trouble I had was cold legs after we got home, so I jumped in the shower right away. I can't remember my previous decision rules for when to wear or not wear the ski pants instead of various other layers.

We bumped into a rowing friend at the market, a teammate who hasn't been rowing much recently due to a lack of time. It sounds like we might be able to get her out on the water at least a bit this year.



We could not find any 30-pound bags of carrots, so we had to console ourselves with a 10-pound bag of rolled oats instead:



I actually use a lot of rolled oats, so this won't be a problem. I really appreciate that we have a local grain-grower selling grains at the market. He gave us a pound of flaked rye as a thank-you for buying his oats. I don't know yet what I'll do with the rye, but maybe it will go in my next batch of muesli-nola? I'd like to buy more flour from him, but it's bread flour and I haven't been baking much bread lately because it's just one thing too many.

After we got home I walked over to the local Italian import store and bought 4, 6-pound cans of tomatoes. This is because S and I have been having a ketchup dilemma. Our household preference is for organic, no-sugar-added ketchup, which S will practically eat with a spoon. It's basically tomato soup, after all. However, it is impossible to find ketchup for sale in quantities that will work for our ketchup-eating lifestyle. We've been looking, and dealing with all the little plastic bottles gets tiresome after a point. So it was time to give ketchup-making a try again. The giant tomato cans are $9 each, and I think most of the bottles of organic ketchup we've been getting cost around $4-5 apiece. I'd love to be able to use fresh tomatoes, but we haven't yet identified a tomato dealer out here who can supply us with the volumes we'd want, at the price we'd want. So, cans.

I used this recipe again, and made a triple-batch, using 2 of the 4 giant tomato cans. I have also gotten wiser about my ketchup-making, and did not attempt to make this ketchup in the giant cast-iron Dutch oven. This time. The other ingredients that go into this ketchup aren't particularly expensive, either. It all just takes time for everything to simmer.



This made a decent amount of ketchup, around 184 ounces in total, or almost a gallon and a half:



Now I will say that there are more delicious ketchups that exist, and I probably should have simmered this batch for another hour or so, but it will still make for decent ketchup-eating. And this is a good base recipe to riff off of.

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After all the bicycling, walking around, and ketchup-making, we decided to finally go and pay a visit to a restaurant that S has been eyeing for a while, La Empanada Llama. They apparently recently extended their hours to the evenings, and S had noted that they have a pretty extensive vegetarian menu.

When we walked in, I instantly thought of mallorys_camera because they had retablos everywhere! I didn't get fantastic photos of them, and some were in better shape than others, but just to give you an idea:



(oh, and lots of nice plants and cacti)



Plus other Peruvian items and even some crafts for sale:


I didn't get any photos of this, but above the cash register they also had some gourds with small scenes inside of them. A homey spot, not at all fancy, but as S pointed out, very reminiscent of many of the places we used to frequent in Arizona.

And the empanadas were yummy, so I have a feeling we'll go back.



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This morning's cooking: pancakes, a batch of broccoli-chickpea burritos, and a batch of toasted quinoa with kale and pine nuts, although I swapped in sunflower seeds for the pine nuts and also added cubes of roasted butternut squash because that squash really needed to be cooked up.

And now that there is food for the week, it is time for other weekend projects.

Inventory, continued [finances]

I have grown lax about tracking my spending over the last couple of years, and that needs to change, because last year, this year, and next year have involved / are likely to involve a series of fairly large financial decisions. For instance, what to do with this house during my sabbatical travel this summer and fall.

So I started by fairly carefully going through last year's expenses, trying to figure out how I want to categorize everything, so that I can think about where I'm okay with maintaining the status quo, and where I might want to make some changes. As one does.

In doing this, I have to note that I got very annoyed at an online payment method that adds an additional layer to figuring out who I actually paid for a good or service. And also at the Jungle website for how it incentivizes people to group order items, such that I had to go back through to ungroup according to different expense categories. Harumph. Hopefully now I will do a better job of tracking this going forward.

Unsurprisingly, both rowing and brevets were major expenses in 2023. I am definitely going to dial way back on randonneuring this year, and I will also wind up dialing back on rowing as well. It is time. I do love and enjoy rowing, but it's expensive and I want to leave room for other things.

It was also interesting to note the mixture of reimbursable work expenses, versus things bought for work that aren't reimbursable. The updated office water boiling-system, for example. Not reimbursable. Very important for personal sanity, just, not reimbursable. Also, almost a third of the grant that I got to help pay for the bicycles for the bicycling class wound up going straight to taxes, because the only way I could receive the grant was as taxable income. Sigh.

More than anything, I appreciated the chance to think again, about how to structure my spending. I keep a couple different "list of things to acquire"s but haven't really had good standards in place for myself for what's reasonable and what should or should not be a priority. It worked far better for me to look back over the year's expenses and figure out categories for everything, rather than trying to come up with an anticipated set of categories for upcoming expenses.

Hilariously, when I started to do internet searches on how to establish spending categories, I kept encountering examples with about 20 different aspects of motor vehicle ownership and maintenance. That just helped me to understand that there are a lot of personal lifestyle choices associated with how one structures one's spending.

In any case, helpful to have mapped out my recent behavior. Now to work on making some changes.