We need to put the roof vent in on Monday. They’re forecasting 40 degrees right now. Our weather is nothing if not indecisive.
We made a brief foray to Costco, and decided to come on home—it was very slippery, and there were the usual crazy drivers who hadn’t planned to have to go slower.
We’re also going to mulch the roses Monday. We hope.
We’re not going to get this kitchen finished before January. But we have enough cleared for Christmas trees. We don’t go for stylish: we just have collected so many ‘favorite’ or meaningful ornaments over our lifetimes that we have to have 2 trees. We don’t have room for a really big one, but we can fit two smaller ones in—in the same room.
We’re now mostly in a cleanup stage, getting the drywall dust cleaned up, and so on.
I’ve promised Jane Mandarin Chicken for Christmas, which mostly consists of chicken, salt pepper, clove and cinnamon, plus mandarin oranges, stirfried; and sauced with a reduction of mandarin oranges and cinnamon. Goes well with baked sweet potatoes, and also with cranberry sauce.
Our family recipe for cranberry sauce is: cranberries, raw, sent through a hand grinder (coarse) with seedless orange slices and either walnuts or pecans: it’s not jellied, but kind of a real sauce, and if the oranges don’t supply enough sugar, you do need to add a bit, to taste. Real easy to do and quite good on its own: as a kid, I always used to have a whole bowlful of it just for itself.
On the sweet potatoes – the “Cook’s Illustrated” 2017 annual has a recipe for roast sweet potatoes where you start them in the microwave for 6 to 9 minutes flipping them every 3 minutes (until they hit 200f in the middle and start to soften), then you put them in the oven at 425 for an hour to finish. (There are more details than that, and they have two sauces you can use.)
We just oil whole sweet potatoes, cut a little top slit, put them in a pie plate, and bake them at 350 until they wrinkle.
Then we serve them whole, squish them, and add butter.
With acorn squash, another cold weather favorite, we split it lengthwise, clean it, oil the outside, bake it at 350 until a fork has no resistance, flip it up like a cup, put some brown sugar and a pat of butter in each, bake 10 more minutes and serve.
We are great butter fans.
Butter is underrated 🙂
I had your version of cranberry sauce at one of our staff meetings; the oranges give it a sweetness and tang that is surprising.
Last weekend I made panels for a gingerbread house. I used to make it for the staff party every year, but when I moved jobs, the new staff was, well, underwhelmed, so I decided not to put myself out. This year I’m going to try again. Then there will be date pinwheels, which are like a rich version of fig newtons using dates, pecans, and a shortbread crust.
Tomorrow for the weekly horde I have two pans of kal-bi ribs marinating to be slow roasted, along with rice and slow cooker veggies.
My sister made cranberry sauce once several years ago. I don’t know what the recipe was, but it called for red wine. She didn’t know what variety to use, asked for a recommendation at the store and was sold a bottle of Petite Syrah.
A friend and I make wine (30G of Pinot Noir in jugs–we’re a little “light” this year–and 40+G of Riesling and Niagara.) and I’m in the local wine MAKERS club, but I knew nothing about Petite Syrah. (It’s not at all the same as Syrah, different grape altogether.)
The cranberry sauce was very good. And I drank the wine with dinner. (Not all of it!) It was very good too. As they say, never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink. True enough!
If anybody’s interested, I suppose I could get the recipe from her.
Glad you mentioned baking potatoes, sweet or otherwise. I oven bake Idaho potatoes by rubbing the skins well with olive oil and baking at 360 degrees for 1 hour. I like to eat them as a meal in themselves, cut in half in a soup dish, slashed up with butter, and garnished with any left over veggies or meats I happen to have in the fridge, and a large glop of shredded cheese on top, zotted in the microwave for a minute. In the event of a dearth of left overs, Wolf Brand Chili, chopped fajita meat, drained canned vegetables like peas or carrots, those Green Giant single serving frozen broccoli and cheeze thingies, bacon, or whatever. I eat the whole potato, skin and all. The olive oil makes the skin soft and tasty. Since I load them up with other stuff, I usually choose the smaller potatoes. Thanks for reminding me. I haven’t had them in a while. I should get a couple three when I get groceries Tues.
I just beam a couple of sweets for 5 to 7 minutes until they are fork tender, split them and add salt and butter. For self indulgence time I also crumble in crispy bacon and slice in green onion tops or chives. I soak and scrub them well first so I can eat the whole thing.
The snow? 6″ yesterday—half a foot of really wet, heavy snow…
Regular potatoes? For baking, if not with a roast, I oil them, then roll in coarse salt, then bake with no wrapping after putting a little slit in them to let off steam. Jane and I both have to limit potatoes because of joint pain, which is the legacy of the nightshades, but now and again—yum! Sweet potatoes aren’t. They’re actually related to bindweed and morning glories. So we can have a lot of those, and they’re lower carb than potatoes.
Watch it! This flu kicks butt!
I had the flu shot in October. Thursday evening I was mostly snoozing on the couch, uncommonly most of the evening. About 9PM I felt the need to pee. I careened to the toilet like the worst drunk you can imagine, bouncing off the walls, got some of it in the bowl, and made it out to the doorway when I felt I was going to “lose it” altogether. I sank to knees and elbows, head down, and “holding it together” in that minimal state was all I could do for 15 minutes. Finally I was able to crawl on hands and knees into the living room where I could drag the phone off the table. I couldn’t raise my sister, she was on the phone, so I called 911 (=999 in UK?) and the local fire company with EMT training came. I was flat on the floor! They immediately checked blood pressure and blood sugar, then after an interview trying to ascertain what might have been responsible, helped me sit up, then stand up, still pretty weak. We decided the ambulance to take me to the hospital ER wasn’t necessary. I’d had no symptoms to that point unless you count being drowsy! During the night I woke at 4:30AM feeling the need to pee, which went well, but my PJ’s were sodden. Weighing the next morning I figure I lost 1-2# to sweat. Last night I was sweaty again, I’m thinking that points to the flu–and recent research in the news says men get it worse than women.
Be aware, and do try to avoid it. Try harder!
Yow! That sounds scary. Did you confirm it was the flu? especially since you had the flu shot already. Maybe you got a variant that wasn’t covered.
1) I’ve been getting the shots for about 20 years myself. I’ve never had an abreaction but for soreness at the point of injection for a day or two–the 0.5ml of fluid they’re injecting IM has to rip apart the muscle somewhat to make room for itself. And I’ve luckily had few colds.
2) Do I know it’s the flu? No, considerable uncertainty about that. The feverish night sweats seem to suggest it. But Friday I felt near enough to normal as matters for a 73 year old man. “Man flu” has been in the news, and apparently is real. And I’m over 65. But remarkably few symptoms to pin on it. I’m debating on going to my doctor for tests. Being an Aspie, I’ve tried to fit everything into one of the patterns I know, and otherwise CV may be the standout.
3) About other strains: the H3N2 strain is notoriously mutable and usually changes more or less while the vaccine is in production.
4) Here are a couple of helpful web pages:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2017-2018.htm
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/12/this-years-flu-season-is-upon-us-and-it-looks-bad-heres-what-you-should-know/#h5
Wow, I hope Jane is careful of her back, shoveling that much heavy wet snow!
I second Paul’s warning. This one is worth opening doors with your elbows and not shopping at busy times to avoid.
Over here in northern Europe the flu is hitting a bit harder than expected as well, as a strain that’s not in the flu shots is going around.
I had my flu shots but still got sick in early november, though nothing like Paul: it almost immediately settled into a solid bronchitis, with lots of bad deep coughing hard enough to strain my stomach muscles three times over the two weeks that phase lasted – but no fever at all! Then it shifted upward into a nasty cold that hung around for another three weeks (still no fever, nor sore joints, so I’m not sure it was the “real” influenza flu) – it was way more debilitating than any flu I’ve had since I started getting flu shots 20 years ago, I had no breath or energy at all to do anything)
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Usually, since I get the shots, I get a cold for a week, then it shifts into my lungs for a week, then my lungs feel sore/scraped for a few weeks and get irritated by the slightest hint of smoke or such. This one took the opposite trajectory, starting in the lungs, and was at least 4x as bad as usual, and lasted 5-6 weeks instead of 1-2 before I got to the sore lungs and a few remaining coughs tailing off stage.
we got our flu shots a few weeks ago…not too bad a reaction: we were coughing so much because of construction dust we weren’t sure whether it was that or the flu shots.
Flu is getting bad in the states, but not too bad here.
And right now it’s very pretty outside, a thick meringue-like coating of snow on everything. It snowed again today, no sign of melting. But they still promise 40F on Monday and 43 on Tuesday, so we still have hopes of getting the roof vent in.
I got mine in mid-September, because I wanted it to have full effect before November. (That said, one of the prescriptions they gave me at the start of chemo is a heavy-duty antibiotic, with instructions to use it only if my temperature exceeds 100.5 – that hasn’t happened. So far.)
Paul – your symptoms certainly sound flu-like. I hope you’re feeling better and have replenished the fluids you lost!
The first year that I got the flu shot, I came down with the flu about 4 hours later. Completely debilitated. Fever of 104.5, aching muscles and joints, etc. A friend took me to the doctor, because I knew that I could not drive myself. It turned into bronchitis and then pneumonia (I had crepitation!). I was miserably sick for several months.
The vaccine doesn’t provide 100% protection, and the degree of protection is even less among those who are 65 and older (the vaccination for older folks contains twice the amount of antigen, I believe). Got my flu shot in October, then caught a nasty cold that went straight to the lungs and settled in as bronchitis. The cough has lasted for about 6 weeks. No fun!
My lungs become very unhappy when they’re exposed to smoke and air pollution, so I’m glad that we don’t live in California.
Get Well Soon, everybody. I’m having my usual cotton stripping/ginning season crud. I try to stay indoors out of it as much as I can. Bad enough to have to breathe all the dust,leaf trash and gin trash that this season produces, but all the particulates that get thrown in the air are liberally laced with defoliants and herbicides . . .
Best air-cleaner I know is Oreck’s table model. Amazon. If we’d keep ours clean and functioning we’d have less trouble, which reminds me, now we’ve brought the trees and ornaments from the basement, time to do that: even though they’re artificial and we wrap everything in tissue, allergens pile up from year to year and still get us, the older the trees get.
The trees, eh?
Hang from rod in the shower, spray with showerhead and let drip dry? Warmer water sometimes will restore bent ‘needles’ too.
Working at present on a not-very-Christmassy project. One of our sofas needs the cushions recovered. DH is visiting his mother and some of our friends on another island (we couldn’t see clear to paying for both of us to travel, so) for a couple of days. While he is out, I am laying out fabric and cushions and sewing new slipcovers. I hope to be done by tomorrow.
Folks with kitties, I have a problem. I just discovered our old man kitteh, Junior, has the equivalent of an ingrown nail: one of his claw sheaths didn’t come off and has grown into his pad. I clipped it, but couldn’t pull it loose before he got away, and can’t tell if it’s severed or not. He is not a happy cat! I’m more or less looking for reassurance that despite the growling and attempted bites when I try to remove the claw, he’s better off if I’m firm with him and pull it out.