Even in Kyoto

I might be overly excited about this project.

Porridge 1: 2 parts steel-cut oats, 1 part toasted buckwheat groats, a generous dollop of amaranth seeds. Yesterday evening I put roughly 1.75 C into the Zojirushi rice cooker, added water up to the "1.5 scoops porridge" water line, and set the cooker for 6:50 am completion.

I think I added slightly too much water, and I should make sure to stir everything when I put it together into the rice cooker. I should also only make a single batch instead of a double batch.

The buckwheat groats added some delicious flavor, and I liked the ratio of oats to buckwheat. But now I want to add even more grains.

annikusrex came to town for a mini-conference on Friday, which meant that I got to kidnap her for Friday night and the better part of Saturday, hurrah! An amusing amount of cooking and eating ensued:

-Butternut squash pizza with goat cheese, romano, walnuts, apples, mushrooms, onions, and crispy sage (fried in butter). For the sauce, I roasted up a butternut squash and pureed it in the Cuisinart along with a bit more sage. In case that wasn't enough, it's also artichoke season, and they're actually available for an affordable price around here ($1/each for organic ones). Yum.

-For breakfast, another feast. sytharin has been wanting to have some of our dad's Swedish pancakes, but at some point in her travels her Herman culture perished, and they just don't taste the same without that special little bit of twang from the Herman. I've managed to keep my own Herman going, so on Saturday morning, it was time. Here's our dad's Swedish pancake recipe. Swedish pancakes are like crepes, except slightly thicker:

1 C whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 C soy flour (you can substitute more pastry flour but the soy protein makes these more filling)
4 egs
2 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 C melted butter
2 C milk
1 C Herman (omit if you don't have any, or you can probably use a regular sourdough culture to achieve a similar effect)

Put everything in the blender or whip it together with a whisk or egg beater. Heat your griddle to ~425 degrees F. Use around 1/2 C of batter to make plate-sized Swedish pancakes. Fill with your favorite fruit filling and top with a dollop of freshly whipped cream. In our case, rhubarb compote made from rhubarb freshly harvested from the backyard.

-Then, Scrabble. RAC played a strong game, including a bingo, but then AKW played a bingo which wasn't a real word (MILKINGS) and we failed to challenge it, so she won. RAC hadn't known about the googly eyes on the J until she drew the J.

-After that, AKW and I tried to go to the newly renovated Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, except there was a "Medical Emergency" on BART (I believe that's code for somebody died?), so we hopped on the 72 bus and took the long route there. Fortunately, the weather was pleasantly warm, and the extended walk up University was scenic. We went past this place, which looked intriguing:



The museum itself was fine. A number of the individual pieces on display were striking, such as the artist who created sculptures out of spider silk by alternately giving solitary and social spiders access to a frame for web-building. When I first saw the pieces, I figured they were synthetically made. I liked how the artist was playing around with the solitary/social concept. The social spiders build interestingly engineered webs. Also striking was Portrait of my Father by Stephen Kaltenbach. There was some incredible colorwork in that piece that can really only be appreciated in person, appreciated even further when you realize it was painted in 1978. It has a holographic feel and shifts and moves as you look at it, plus it deals with some complex subjects.

As an exhibition, however, I felt like the curators were trying a little too hard to put in as many different kinds of things as they could to showcase the museum's collections and ties to other strengths of the university. The University of Nebraska's art museum, in contrast, did a better job of reverential presentation of works from its holdings.

Still, I love going to museums with AKW and it was wonderful to have her out for a visit!

-

While she and I were larking about, RAC was otherwise engaged. After Scrabble, she ran off to rent a pickup truck, and proceeded to drive all over hither and yon picking up all of the kinds of things one needs a pickup truck to acquire: two bales of straw, a bunch of bags of mulch, sand, pavers, three 50-pound bags of clay, a bag of pottery plaster, and probably a couple of other things I'm forgetting. I'm highly amused by a similarity in our temperaments - like me, RAC is inclined to charge around working on projects until she drops from exhaustion. There's something comforting and nice about being around this kind of work mode, though. There's something similarly comforting about cooking and sharing food with the household network out here, too. Saturday night, for example, after AKW had left for the airport, I joined RAC and M&M for some tasty stuffed onions and roasted cauliflower. Yum.

-

Sunday morning, I'd promised RAC that I would help with some aspects of the ongoing household projects. In particular, it was time to give the workshop a thorough cleaning and round of organizing.

I feel so much better now that things are better organized in there. I mostly had to shuffle around various accumulated piles of abandoned projects to move the table saw back into a corner that would give us all better access to some storage shelves we moved in there when we were renovating the bike garage to accommodate more bicycles. RAC installed plastic sheeting over half of the shelf to ready it for storing ceramics-in-progress:



We also cleared off the worktable and cleared floor space. You can't really tell either of these things from this photo, but before the photo it was getting pretty hard to walk around in the workshop.



RAC was generally on a roll. She managed to apply some copper paint to the kick wheel to protect it from further rust, and she built the last planter box for the front driveway. She also filled it with soil and got tomato plants transplanted, and set the paving stones for the path here:



We are now tomato-ready.

I did manage a couple of other small projects, like painting more trim for my door-window (to tack down the fiberglass screen along the sides):



And transplanting a lavender plant and strawberry plant into pots (both plants are being hugged by a kale plant that's going to seed):



The local plant shop (Berkeley Horticulture) carries five or six different kinds of strawberry plants. I got a Mara des bois because highly flavorful French strawberries sound fantastic. But I might have to get even more varieties in the overall search for strawberry perfection. We shall see. I'm still skeptical about whether it's possible to achieve strawberry perfection outside of Washington, but it seems worth a try.

Other than all that, RAC built up a frame for making a plaster wedging table, did a bunch of weeding, and figured out what was wrong with the irrigation system. We've been enjoying the colors of all the different California irises she's planted in the front yard:



And with that, it's time for the beginning of another full work week.

Squashes are on sale at Open Harvest, what with it being fall and all, so I bought a couple of butternut squashes the other week and then pondered what to do with them. After flipping through the recipe files, I found this recipe for butternut squash bread pudding, which sounded worth a shot. I used milk instead of half-and-half, brown sugar instead of maple syrup (I don't keep maple syrup around), and didn't attempt to remove the baguette crusts (??!!), but the outcome was tasty. If I make it again I will amp up the spices more (especially the cinnamon).

I was also looking for an interesting way to use up cornmeal, and came across this recipe for "Toasted corn bread hash with brussels sprouts". Reading it over, I thought meh to the notion of mixing the cornbread and brussels sprouts, BUT the flavor combination sounded good. The fresh brussels sprouts at Open Harvest were a wee bit outside my budget, so I bought a couple of bags of frozen ones, which I sliced in half, tossed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, salted and peppered, and roasted (at 425 I believe) for a spell. The texture of the frozen ones isn't as great, but overall it worked and I ate those things like candy on Sunday night. I just baked up a batch of cornbread to eat on the side.

But why stop there? This assortment needed some sort of legume accompaniment, so I went back to the good old Cafe Flora Cookbook and made up a batch of these Braised Black Lentils, although with French Green lentils because that's what I could find. Leftovers will be dinner for the week (that's where the last portion of the post title comes from).

1 Tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 shallot or small red onion, minced
1 C lentils - black Beluga lentils, or French green (Le Puy) - a variety that retains its texture
1 bay leaf
1 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves or 1 tsp dried thyme
4 C water
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp fresh black pepper

Saute the garlic and shallot in the olive oil over medium heat until translucent (5-7 minutes). Then add the lentils, bay leaf, and thyme, and give them a stir to coat the lentils with the oily deliciousness. Then add the water, turn up the heat and bring to a boil, and then cover and simmer until the lentils are cooked (20-25 minutes). The original recipe says to drain off the excess liquid, but I say don't bother unless you feel like it.

This whole ensemble was fairly simple to prepare, and any of the dishes would work well for a vegetarian Thanksgiving feast. I love fall cooking that involves turning on the oven and baking and roasting a whole bunch of things. A big tip o' the hat to my mom for teaching me about amazing roasted brussels sprouts. I will also point out that the prepackaged frozen kind were simple to prep, even though I balk at the notion of recommending packaged frozen foods.

Well, the subject line says it all, really.

I signed up for the 90-hour start, with a 6:15 pm start time. I will probably wonder for forever about the 84-hour start, but I'm okay with that.

On my third try, I finally figured out how to make pretty good homemade whole-wheat tortillas:

The basic recipe is below the photo (click the photo for the link). I read good things about coconut oil as another fat source, but for some reason I'm more comfortable with butter as my saturated fat. Midwesterners appear to be satisfied with bready, low-flavor flour circles, but good flour tortillas in Arizona and Texas have spoiled me.

I used some of the tortillas to make black bean, rice, and kale burritos for the 400k next Saturday. I'm grateful to have the time to plan out food in advance like this, and I'm also glad to have figured out that burritos work so well as an on-bike food for me. I can eat them while I ride, they don't taste like the garbage from convenience stores, and I can make and carry multiple different kinds of burritos so I don't get tired of eating them. I'd like to be enjoying more meals like the ones described here, but I suspect that will be easier to accomplish in France compared to the U.S. I'm still pondering exactly what I will do for food while on the PBP itself. I know there will be heaps of mashed potatoes and omelettes in there. Maybe I should pack some Cholula for myself, ha! Last time I brought along a squeeze bottle of peanut butter, which was good for adding protein to the multitudinous croissants that we ate (also a squeeze bottle of jelly). Hmm, maybe I should bring along an entire roasted Tofurky, heh heh heh...

We did not go on the cold and rainy 200k brevet on Saturday. I think I could have been mentally and physically equipped to tackle it, but that wasn't the case for scrottie or J. Instead, I cooked. Pancakes for breakfast. Leftover delicious lasagne for lunch. A three-course Ethiopian feast for dinner, featuring Atakilt Wat (to use up one of the three cabbages languishing in the fridge), Yemisir Wat (including some berbere), and Gomen (collard greens from the garden).

A couple of years ago, I tried my hand at making injera, and failed. Injera is the flat, sourdough pancake served under Ethiopian dishes. In the U.S. it's generally made with a blend of wheat and teff flours because teff is harder to get in the U.S. The last time I tried making it, I poked around on the internet and read all the recipes about how to make it the real way, which involves some lengthy fermentations, especially if a person doesn't have sourdough starter already on hand. Then I read all of the various ways people have tried to cheat in the injera-making, in the typical way that people try to cheat on sourdough (beer, vinegar, et cetera). My results all just fell apart.

I cooked a similar Ethiopian feast a couple of weeks ago for the roommates, and learned they'd never had injera before, and that made me decide, then and there, that it was time to try again. I went ahead and bit the bullet and bought some prepackaged San Francisco sourdough starter and got it set up a week and a half ago. Now my weekly loaves of bread are sourdough, yum! After reading through these good and extensive injera-making instructions, I came up with my own shorthand version, and got underway. I have two main comments on the whole process. First, with the way the flour and water and worked in these recipes, it's impossible to get a perfectly smooth batter just by working the flour and water by hand - small lumps will persist. That's what the blender step is for. Pretty straightforward. Second, if you lack a mitad, here's what I wound up doing instead - I used a giant cast-iron frying pan with a pizza pan as a lid (my cast-iron lid is in storage). I guess that a lot of mitads are designed to be nonstick, but the cast-iron frying pan most definitely wasn't. So I resorted to applying a small dab of butter and a small shake of salt before pouring every injera. Also, if your batter is a bit too thick at first, don't hesitate to add a bit more water. And make sure to keep mixing the batter because the teff and flour will settle out to some extent as you cook. Oh, and also also - you might think you're making a humongous batch of injera, but that's necessary, based on how quickly it all got scarfed down.

My shorthand instructions:

1. Add 2 C of sourdough starter to 2 C of teff. Knead extensively. Then start adding water, 1/4 C at a time, until the mixture is thin and watery. Leave on counter overnight.

2. Next morning: blend up starter in the blender until smooth.

3. Mix 3 C of self-starting flour with water (=3 C flour, 3/4 tsp salt, 4.5 tsp baking powder) until you achieve a soupy consistency, then blenderize until smooth like the teff. Add to the blenderized teff and combine thoroughly by hand (checking that the consistency is such that the mixture slides off your hand). Add water if necessary. Cover and leave to sit until it rises, up until it starts to settle back down. When it starts to settle, refrigerate for 45 mins / an hour.*

4. Cook on a hot griddle. Coat the griddle with butter and then salt. Cover the griddle with a lid to steam-cook it. Remove with care, cool, then stack.

*Note: I think my batter was more liquid, because it didn't have enough power to rise. However, I left it to ferment for 8 hours and it seemed to be pretty great.

Yesterday, the kitchen was busy from 7 am until 9 pm. I was woken up, for the second morning in a row, by the five-year-old. This time he came in to announce that two glo-sticks were still glowing from the night before. We will continue working on establishing boundaries, like knocking and asking before coming in, even when I leave the "cat gap" for miss Emma (she yells at me if the door's completely closed, even though she doesn't actually want to leave the room).

So I got up, headed to the kitchen, and made the usual Sunday morning pancakes with whipped cream. Also, yogurt. More lentil-pecan pate happened the day prior. Actually, I guess there was a gap in cooking after that. Then it was J's turn: he made pesto with basil, pesto with sundried tomatoes, grilled cheese sandwiches, and Maque choux with soy-rizo, to use up the week's okra and the final soy-rizo sausage from the abundance earlier in the summer. Oh, and chocolate ice cream. We also reheated the leftover okra croquettes from the night before, and I opened one of the last two containers of green tomato relish to mix up with mayo as tartar sauce to eat with the croquettes. So much okra these days. The spaghetti squash pile also keeps growing faster than we can figure out what to do with them. Spaghetti squashes are mostly a chore and a source of fiber, as best as I can figure it. There are better vehicles for delivering salt, cheese, and butter to my face.

Someone made the suggestion of turning the maque choux into burrito filling, except there was a slight problem: no tortillas. I've learned, over the past month and a half, why my friend J all of a sudden declared a strong and passionate love for corn tortillas: he no longer wants to buy any bleached flour products because the chemicals used to bleach flour are nasty business. This should indicate to you that I am living with someone who has the same kinds of food neuroses that I seem to have developed. So 'twas time to learn how to make homemade, whole-wheat flour tortillas, with this recipe. They were tasty, although a bit tough; I'll need to be more strategic about kneading them next time. I wish I could just buy all this stuff from someone. In the very least there's someone selling good whole-wheat sourdough sandwich bread at the farmer's market.

We also pulled my medium cast-iron skillet and J's cast-iron waffle iron out of their week-long lye bath, scrubbed them down with salt, oil, and a potato, applied a thin coat of flax oil, and baked the pans at 500 degrees for an hour. Layer 1 seasoning complete; only 6 or so more layers to go. The iron of the waffle iron is red and smooth, in places, and the red isn't rust. J thinks that means it may have been overheated at some point, maybe in a fire, and the red spots don't appear to be taking the seasoning quite as well as the rest of the pan. The internet isn't saying much about the phenomenon, so it remains to be seen whether the waffle iron will be sufficiently functional. No harm in re-seasoning it, in the very least. My cast-iron skillet looks fantastic even with just one coat.

I convinced J to put three identically-sized non-cast-iron frying pans into the Goodwill box. They hadn't come out of the cupboard in a very long while.

Tonight I will make more carrot-raisin muffins (link is an .rtf, for...reasons). The five-year-old, like many five-year-olds, prefers to subsist on a diet of cereal and milk, but gobbled up two muffins in rapid succession a few days ago, so they appear to be a good way to get him to ingest carrots.

Let's see here -

Friday night, I made a big ol' batch of vegetarian chili. It's the best method I've found so far for using up excess vegetarian soy-rizo (scrottie and I freegan'd three packs of it from BNF about a month ago). Plus, it's a good vehicle for several of the most-abundant produce items I have lying around: onions, celery, carrots, tomatoes, corn, garlic, and peppers in multiple forms. Oh, and more of the chipotle peppers that S got for the purpose of making chipotle-ranch salad dressing. Thing is, I don't really eat salads at home when he isn't around, so the salad dressing making hasn't happened yet. Soon.

And when there's chili, there should be cornbread, amirite? Almost all of the cornmeal is gone, now, which is good.

So then, Saturday. What with the peach-buying and tomato-buying, it was time to do more cooking. First, some vanilla ice cream custard, so there would be ice cream to go with the peaches. Then, a pair of peach galettes:



I used the Smitten Kitchen nectarine galette filling, with a cornmeal pate brisee. Use up more of that cornmeal, eh, eh? However, I don't think I'll be adding this pate brisee recipe to my recipe collection - the cornmeal is too crunchy for my tastes. Otherwise, the galette is DELICIOUS. And almost all of the almond flour is used up.

After that, it was just about time to make dinner. It figures that the year I finally manage to plant zucchinis, our CSA is also giving us oodles and oodles of zucchinis and other summer squashes. There is nothing to be done but to pull out all the stops and phone it in and mix all the metaphors with all the zucchini recipes in the arsenal.

I'd been thinking, the week prior, of making some version of Three Sisters Rice, so it was time to put thoughts into action...with some modifications. I went ahead with some un-chicken broth (Better'n Bullion) and toasted wild rice, adding in as much chopped-up zucchini as I could stand to add. In a second pot, I sauteed together carrots, celery, onion, and garlic, and threw in a few chunks of tomato just because they were there and needed to be cooked up (after I chopped off the bad bits). I then added a cup of green lentils, to use them up, some more corn, and three cups of water, and simmered this mess, too. My friend DM says she often winds up making "swamp curry" when trying to cook things Indian-style, and it made me realize that what I wound up with in this case was basically "swamp lentils." They were tasty, filling, and vegan, so I had no complaints. I should have added even more zucchini. Or maybe part of that patty-pan squash. I still don't understand patty-pan squashes.

Tonight, I'll make ratatouille and more lentil-pecan pate. They and the galettes should feed the troop of hungry bicyclists on Monday evening. Plus the two kinds of cheese and some crackers, plus spaghetti to go with the ratatouille. And the ice cream.

Other than all that, I canned tomatoes.

Farmer's market tomatoes from Saturday


Garden tomatoes - this week's harvest (probably peak harvest)


Midway through the canning operation:

I was pleased with myself for coming up with the plan of freezing water in the bottom of the white bowl overnight. That minimized the hassle of the post-boil ice bath. I'm also still pleased with my tomato-chopping system - I work on a small cutting board angled down into a baking dish, which catches the juices as I work and helps prevent excess splatters.

Quart-size jars of tomatoes take 45 minutes in the canner. The only way it could ever be economically worthwhile to can tomatoes would be if there were a huge fire sale on tomatoes and they only cost like $1 a pound. On the other hand, I have a feeling that these tomatoes are going to taste amazing.


N.B. that the jars to the right were from last weekend. The flowers are from the garden.

...by baking a couple of varieties of bread.



I have a bunch of rye flour, and most of a jar of molasses, so I tried out the Boston Brown Bread from the Laurel's Kitchen Cookbook. It involves steaming the bread rather than baking it, and also includes toasted, chopped sunflower seeds, cornmeal, and raisins. A hearty, rich loaf, and a good, non-dessert use for the molasses, as I've been trying to cut down on my sugar consumption recently. Steaming the bread retains its moisture nicely. Some of the ideas from Laurel's Kitchen are outdated (so much margarine!), but it's still fantastic for its emphasis on multigrain, low-sugar cooking.

I also added more of the rye flour plus some spelt flour to a sandwich loaf, and then added flaxseed meal for more fruity, tooty farts. Flaxseed is great...in moderation.

It's butternut squash season around here, so I mixed together roasted butternut squash, goat cheese, farmer's cheese, nutmeg, sage, walnuts, parmesan, salt, and pepper, and used the mixture to fill some calzones. I'll tuck the calzones in the freezer for upcoming days when I don't have the time or energy to cook.

Heading into the weekend is always the time when I start thinking about things on different lists. I've been picking up CSA vegetables on Thursday evenings, which is perfect timing for planning out cooking for the upcoming week: it lets me know what I have on hand before I set out for the grocery store. This was our last week of CSA veggies until the fall, and I know I'll be missing them. I just don't have my act together to produce the same kind of vegetable medley for myself. Sure, I've got eggplants and tomatoes and kale, but when one gardens for oneself there tends to be an abundance of one thing at a time.

Anyhoo. It's okra season, and apparently, butternut squash season, too. I read not too long ago that butternut squashes and other hard winter squashes will store best in a dark place without too much airflow, so those will keep for a while. Plus, I now have abundant freezer space, so I could just roast and puree them and put them next to the other container of butternut squash puree that's already in the freezer. The cherry tomatoes and okra, not so much.

So! Cooking projects for this week:

-Red lentil curry burgers with tomato chutney

and

-Okra croquettes (recipe from a friend):

1.5 c sliced okra
1.5 c cooked rice
1 c chopped tomato
3/4 c chopped onion
1 T sugar
1.5 t salt
1 t baking powder
1/8 t pepper
2 eggs, beaten
1 c cornmeal
1 c flour
vegetable oil, for frying

Combine okra, rice, tomato, onion, sugar, salt, baking powder, and pepper. Stir in beaten eggs. Add cornmeal and flour, mixing well. Drop mixture by tablespoonfuls into deep hot oil (375 degrees). Cook 1 minute or until golden brown, turning as necessary. Drain on paper towels. Serve hot with dill sauce, horseradish sauce, mustard dip, or any sour cream sauce, if desired.

--

I generally don't deep-fry things, so I'll see about panfrying these guys. For once, I have almost everything I need for cooking projects, and only need a couple of miscellanea from the grocery store.

Sometime during the middle of last week, I hatched a plan to invite my friends S and JM over for dinner and a Scrabble game on Friday night (sneaky, huh)? So then there was the matter of figuring out the menu, with the refrigerator emptied out to some degree, as it was the end of the week. The previous weekend, I'd fed S a butternut squash pizza, and had roasted and frozen a bunch of extra butternut squash puree, so I thought, heck, how about a soup? I could make some bread to go with it, S could bring a delicious salad, and if JM could supply a nice beverage and some cheese, we'd be all set.

But then there was the matter of the bread. After the tragic death of the loaf pan, I was starting to want a change of pace. And a creamy soup deserves a crusty bread. So on Friday morning, I decided it was finally time to give a no-knead bread recipe a go. There was just one slight concern - my previous roommate, RH, used to make no-knead bread periodically, but she learned the hard way that the handle on the lid to my enameled cast-iron dutch oven was not heatproof to 500 degrees (she kindly replaced it, thank goodness!). I also have reservations about heating empty enameled cast-iron to that temperature. But it was time to do something about the lack-of-suitable-breadchamber situation.

I rode over to the hardware store in downtown Bryan, and bought a giant, 7-quart cast-iron Dutch oven. While I was in line for the cashier, the woman ahead of me saw what I was holding and declared, "MmmmmmmMMMM! There's no cookin' like cast-iron cookin'!" You know it, lady. This Dutch oven is on the large side, which is what I was looking for. Its lid fits onto my largest cast-iron skillet - a bonus point for double-use. It will also be perfect for all of the stews I've been trying to squeeze into smaller pans.

And it was perfect for holding this whole-wheat version of an almost no-knead bread. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the timing by a bit, so the bread finished after we'd stuffed ourselves. Somehow, miraculously, we all managed to find extra room for it. Also, somewhat unfortunately, I neglected to turn the oven temperature down after plopping the dough in, so the bottom came out burnt. Thankfully, burnt crust is easily removed and composted.

The butternut squash soup was assembled as follows:
Step 0: Slice butternut squash in half, scoop out seeds, lightly oil it, put it facedown in a baking pan and roast at 350 degrees until soft, about 45 minutes to an hour (check with a fork if you're more careful than me). Then, scoop out the innards and add them plus some water to the blender and puree it. After this point, I put it in the freezer and pulled it back out again to thaw and make the soup.
Step 1: Collect up a spring of rosemary a couple of sprigs of thyme, and some sage leaves. Mince them, and mince up a shallot, too.
Remaining steps: Then, heat some butter in your soup pan, and saute the herbs and shallot until the shallot is soft, ~5 minutes. If you want, you could probably add some mushrooms at this point, too. All those nice, earthy flavors. Once that's smelling good, add the butternut squash puree, and perhaps a bit more water or soup stock, as you see fit. I added water and some vegetable stock. Raise the temperature to a near-simmer, then turn off the heat and add in a splashing of cream. Top with a sprinkling of toasty walnuts.

For dessert, we had some raspberry buttermilk cake, accompanied by Butterscotch-Biscotti ice cream. The ice cream base was David Lebovitz's vanilla ice cream. Once it finished churning, I added in chunks of some almond biscotti dough that I'd made a couple of weeks previously, where I'd forgotten to add the sugar. As I spooned it into some plastic yogurt containers to freeze it, I added some butterscotch sauce (nothing like cream with your cream! Also, I used really good brown sugar) in layers, to balance out the non-sweet biscotti dough.

And with some cheese, lovely rolls, pomegranate soda, and a tomato-basil-red leaf lettuce salad, there were the makings of our feast.

I lost the Scrabble game, by a 35-point margin behind JM and a 70-point margin behind S, despite playing a seven-letter word. I blame the neverending vowels that followed the bingo.