project forty: day 10

[topaz]

One of the really challenging things about this project that I had somehow not forseen is this: I am going to have to keep track of stuff. Holy crap. What the hell was I thinking? Considering what my strengths and my weaknesses are, tasks 1-20 should really all have been variants on "learn to keep track of stuff."

Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound. I'm sure I'll set up a wiki or something at some point to track all of this stuff.

#11: Sell our house. This is going to be occupying a lot of our energy over the next few months, so I am not actually expecting to make a lot of progress on other items right away. keyne did a fantastic job of cleaning up the first floor. I'm working on fixing drywall damage, cleaning out the office, hopefully also trimming down the kitchen clutter.

#19: Cook at least 100 recipes from The New Best Recipe. 4/100! From this week:

• Black Beans with Sofrito. Surely the best black beans I've ever made. Used chopped leftover ham rather than the ham hock they recommended, which would probably have been better, but was marvelous anyway and made something like three quarts of beans. This recipe produced almost no intestinal distress, at least for me. I wonder if it's because we cooked the beans slowly without pre-soaking.
• Chicken Pot Pie. Also wonderful, and takes beautifully to substitutions: we used leftover turkey in place of chicken, asparagus in place of peas, roasted veggies over raw carrots and celery. I am underwhelmed by their buttermilk biscuit crust, however. Must write down omegabeth's criminally fluffy biscuit recipe for future use. Maybe also try again with all-purpose flour instead of white wheat flour.
• Easy Pork Chops with Brandy and Prune Sauce: intriguing but requires close attention to cooking time and internal temp. I was distracted at a crucial moment and they dried out a bit. But worth trying again. I really need an instant-read thermometer.
• Thick and Chewy Double-Chocolate Cookies: truly righteous. Next time with white chocolate chips.

EDIT: I almost forgot! Last night: broiled salmon with a mustard-breadcrumb crust. I used a smaller fillet than the recipe recommended, however, and the book did not make it clear how to adjust the proportions, so it ended up with way too much mustard and breading. Also I broiled it just a moment too long and the top of the crust blackened, but that didn't seem to impact the flavor too much. Uses crushed potato chips in the crust to great effect. So 5/100.

#60. Convince each of the boys to like at least three new vegetables. At Panera, M. got chicken noodle soup in a bread bowl and I got black bean soup in a bread bowl. I persuaded Morgan to try a bit of the black bean soup. He tasted it skeptically, thought for a moment, and then pronounced carefully, "That tastes really good." Later at home he had a whole bowl of the black beans I made earlier in the week. I hereby declare that black beans are a vegetable, at least for the purposes of this assignment. 1/6.

Onward and upward! I really want to try that rock gym, dammit.

Comments

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I must try these black beans. Pre-soaking is alleged to help with gas, but I'm with you in your belief that slow cooking is the real key: crockpot beans almost always seem fine to me.

About that clutter

[harimad.livejournal.com]

You can put clutter in boxes and put the boxes in the garage (or wherever). Use identical boxes, stacked very tidily, to make the box stack look uncluttered.

[opadit.livejournal.com]

Another thing about beans: the more often you eat 'em, the better you're able to digest 'em, too.

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

White Wheat flour may be the problem with the Pot Pie crust, as I've had very good luck with it in the past. make sure to tuck the edges into the pie, rather than discarding them. :)

[keyne.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I thought the biscuit crust (white wheat and all) was awesome.

[ayse.livejournal.com]

My suggestion for keeping track of things: index cards. I like 4x6 cards because there's more room to write, but 3x5 work OK, too.

One thing per card. Rubber band or little box to keep them all together. If you fall a card up, paperclip another one to it. When you finish a thing, you can put a marker line across the top (hitting the upper side) so you can see things getting marked off as done. Or you can just take those cards out of the set.

I use a ridiculous number of index cards.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

keyne introduced me to the Hipster PDA (http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda) last year some time. I like the concept but still find integrating this kind of organization into my life to be a real bear.

For a special-purpose task like this it might in fact work very well though.

[ayse.livejournal.com]

I'm not a HPDA person -- I need to have too much stuff with me for that to work right without two inches of cards. What I have are seven or eight different index-card stacks for different purposes (plants, recipes, books, writing ideas, references to look up, notes on specific projects, exam practise questions, and so on). I don't need to carry those with me all the time, so I don't.

[wolfkitn.livejournal.com]

"criminally fluffy biscuit recipe?" er, how do you feel about sharing recipes? :)