Rancid-Tea

Reasons to Wear a Seatbelt

I was reading this article about the bridge collapse this morning and was surprised by the anecdote at the beginning. Two people in this family were severely injured in car accidents, both while not wearing a seatbelt. The parents have been left caring for their daughter for 20 years, after she was ejected from her car and brain injured. The father, years earlier was hurt badly in an accident where he was thrown around inside the car. After that I would have hoped he would insist to his kids that they always wear their seatbelts…

They’re in the article because recently his younger daughter probably fell into the river. I don’t think a seatbelt could save her.

We’re Okay!

For those of you who might check here to see if Ethan and I fell into the river when 35W collapsed a few hours ago, we’re fine. His brother is also okay (not even in the Twin Cities) and so is my friend Christine. I don’t know anything about anyone else right now. Hopefully no one I know was on the bridge.

Bread Attempt #2

We tried making bread again last weekend and were not especially successful. This time, we bought some active dry yeast from the bulk section in Rainbow. I should have known better. When the dough failed to rise, we tried blooming some of the yeast by itself and it did nothing. Not anything at all. It was totally dead. We added some new live yeast to it, and it perked up a bit, but I think by then it was just too much. The dough had been attempting to rise for way too long, and again we had flat, dense (and yeasty!) loaves. They taste good, but you couldn’t make a sandwich with them, which is kind of the point. Ethan wants to try this recipe one more time, and if that fails, we will find a new one.

On a related note, I bought a jar of active dry yeast for approximately $1/oz compared to the little packets which work out to almost $8/oz. That’s a pretty significant savings if you use yeast somewhat regularly and you can’t use the bulk stuff. We may try buying the bulk yeast at a co-op next, but from now on I’ll be blooming yeast before use.

Brain Cloud

Check out the Human Brain Cloud experiment. It’s neat.

Making Your Own Groceries

One of the reasons that most people spend so much money on making their own food is that they DON’T make their own food. My aunt likes to buy italian pasta salad at the grocery store deli. She has made her own (it’s a simple mix of veggies, pasta, italian dressing and pasta, I’ll post it later), but she says the stuff at the store tastes better, because they use Salad Supreme® to add some flavor. Okay… but she doesn’t want to use a bottle of the stuff for every pasta salad because it’s something like $3 – 5 a bottle. Well, you can make your own salad supreme style seasoning for about $0.50. You can even put it in your expensive salad supreme bottle and no one will know you didn’t pay out the nose for it.

My parents have a book called Make Your Own Groceries that has simple things like sloppy joe seasoning and chocolate milk mix. It must be a pretty nice book too, since you can’t even buy it used for less than $35. I would like to have a copy so that I don’t find myself spending money on things that are easy to prepare, but usually overpriced when pre-made.

I have also been struck recently by things that seem like they would be hard to make but actually aren’t.

• Mustard can be made without much trouble, it takes awhile, but most of that is simmering that you don’t have to attend to.
• Mayonnaise is also super easy. It’s also easy to make that vegan and from healthier oils, such as canola or extra virgin olive oil. You can’t buy EVOO mayo in the stores, that’s for sure.
• Just a few weeks ago I was horrified to see the ingredients on the hoisin sauce I’ve used all my life. Of course they use high fructose corn syrup to sweeten it. You can make hoisin sauce pretty easily too, and for a lot less than you pay for store bought stuff.
• I found a recipe for vegan oyster style sauce, which is good because oyster sauce is very expensive and contains oysters, which has always bothered me.

Now I just need to make these things and try them out. Probably next on my list will be salad dressing. I have recently taken disdain over the stuff in the stores. And I’m tired of paying for plastic packaging and a name brand.

On this same vein, does anyone know how to make instant mashed potatoes? I have some recipes for make soup mixes, but one of them calls for mashed potato flakes. I seem to recall that the boxed ones are just dried mashed potatoes, but somehow it still feels weird to buy them.

Stop the Castration!

My stats have let me know that now 6 people have been lead to my site using some form of “chemically castrating husbands” which really worries Ethan, and amuses the hell out of me. Having now looked it up, I learned that chemical castration (usually by heavy injections of birth control or estrogen) leads to a total lack of sex drive, which is probably the point, but why would someone want their husband to be without libido? (I seriously apologize to Ethan’s mom at this point, I hope you’re not blushing). Also, injections have to be given very frequently, 2 – 3 times a week, which would make it difficult to do on the sly. I only mention this because the wording of the search phrases leads me to believe that these people want to castrate their husbands without letting them in on it. I guess I could see it as a funny recourse for adultery… in the short term

Stupid stupid stupid

I made a small change last night that I didn’t think would affect anything, but I was wrong, WRONG! Now my posts are all out of order. Thankfully I can fix it… When I get home tonight. Arrrr. It could be worse, but still sucks anyway. I’ve fixed it now so that the problem won’t get any worse until then.

Edit Everything is fixed now.

Spicy Soup

Lately, we’ve been enjoying Wednesday evenings with Steph, which involves making some new, exciting dish, and talking late into the night. Last night, we made Spicy Tomato Soup and some sharp cheddar and fennel sandwiches. We didn’t have any jalapeño peppers, but we do have a jar of canned habaneros. Those are, by the way, very, very hot orange peppers. I intended that we would only use part of a pepper, but apparently I failed to convey this to Ethan, who chopped up the whole thing (minus the seeds, thankfully) and added it to the soup. The soup is very tasty, and very spicy. I’m eating some right now for lunch and find myself with sweaty eyelids. Woot. I think we will make this again, but probably with a little less spice. It was very nice with the sandwiches though, very low-fat and we easily made it vegan by using vegetable stock instead of chicken stock.

Bread Attempt #1

Sharing my desire for healthy bread, Ethan made some with whole grain flour this weekend. The results were mixed. We did not have wheat gluten on hand, and he chose not to use any, which apparently was not a great choice. The bread only rose to about half the size it should have, and then remained in two small, dense loaves. It is about as dense as cake. It does taste really good though, so if we buy some gluten, it might just be exactly what we want. We could even start adding things like other whole grains, fruits and nuts.