Lemons, Lemons, Lemons

When the gardeners pruned the lemon tree, I ended up with about eight gallons of lemons. This is a serious number of lemons. Last night I made seven pints of preserved lemons and now I only have about two gallons of lemons left.

It's really easy to make preserved lemons, which are from Morocco and are traditionally used in chicken tangines, or stews. You slice a lemon almost into quarters, leaving the four pieces attached at the stem end. Then you stuff kosher salt into the cuts, about a quarter-inch thick. Drop the lemon into the canning jar and cover it with lemon juice. It took four or five small lemons to make enough juice to cover two salted lemons, using one-pint wide mouth jars.

Then you let the jars sit in a cool place for a month and the preserved lemons are ready to use. You take the lemon out of the salty juice, rinse it off, and chop it fairly finely. Drop the rest of the lemon back into the jar for later. Use this anywhere you need a bright lemon taste. I put it in tuna salad, for example.

Good News and Bad (But Improving) News

First the good news. I made another batch of bean and bacon soup (recipe posted here previously), only this time I spread it out over several days. It's been so hot here that I really didn't want to make it in one session. Well, actually, it started after I soaked the beans and then didn't feel like making soup after all. Still, I was glad to find out that I could spread the process over a few days.

I picked over and soaked the beans about five days ago, freezing them after I rinsed them. Then on Saturday I sliced and fried the bacon and drained it, then put it in the fridge. This afternoon I took care of the onion and garlic, then put the peppercorns, bay leaves, onion and garlic, bacon, and beans (nuked briefly so they wouldn't be a great big bean lump) into the pressure cooker, set it, and sat down to see what was new on Facebook I'm Mary Shafer there, if you want to friend me.

It's finished cooking now and I've tasted it. It tastes pretty good, but it needs salt, of course. It's too hot to whiz with the stick blender; I don't like the idea of flinging really hot soup all over me and the kitchen. I'll add salt while I'm doing that, to be sure to get it evenly mixed. I didn't put enough in the first batch, partly because my cousin was coming and I wasn't sure how much salt she'd like.

Speaking of my cousin, we had a wonderful visit. We were so sad to see her leave. Even Gordo missed her and kept going to the guest room to look for her. He'd give me this pitiful look like "How could you let her go away?" and, of course, there was no explaining it to him. She's the one who introduced me to Starbuck's iced chai latte last year. I'm now a regular customer and it's all her fault. I don't drink coffee, so I hadn't known they sold tea. I got her back, though. I introduced her to the Kindle and loaned my Kindle 2 to her. Both she and her husband have been reading with it and they really like it. I suspect they're going to end up buying one (or, maybe, two). We're a reading family, even the people who marry in, and it passes on to the kids, too.

Now for the bad news. Gordo the Wonder Collie had to have extensive exploratory surgery on Friday. He'd managed to swallow a 3" by 3" piece of rigid plastic, as well as a bunch of smaller pieces of the same plastic and some other stuff, and this was really messing up his digestive system. We took him over to the vet after he vomited five times in the night. Collies have deep chests, which made the surgery more difficult. They cut open his stomach and pulled all the junk out of it, which took both hands, and then examined his intestines carefully for smaller pieces.

He had a small fever over the weekend, but that's gone (this is written on Monday). He's still not eating much, but he's always been a picky eater. We now have great hopes that he'll come home tomorrow, since he actually ate a little kibble today. I think he has to demonstrate that his digestive system works from end to end, as it were, the same way that people who have had surgery on their digestive tracts do.

Gordo's Mother's Day Gift to Me

Gordo is saving his allowance to give me the Amazon Kindle DX for Mother's Day, or so we joke. It's a good joke if you ignore that a) Gordo doesn't get an allowance, b) he has no idea what a Kindle is, c) I'm not his mother, and d) dogs really aren't that good at saving.

Wendy Johnson mentioned that Amazon was rumored to be coming out with a new Kindle this summer but that she wasn't going to wait and had bought a Kindle 2. She really likes it and says many of the same things that I did after I got mine.

The idea of an advanced model interested me greatly, so last night I surfed on over to Amazon on my Kindle 2 and discovered that they'd just made the formal announcement. I read the page, decided I really needed the larger screen, and put in a pre-order for the Kindle DX and the leather cover. It will be coming out in the summer, they say, and promise a definite delivery day as soon as they know it. Bigger screen, choice of portrait or landscape mode, more storage (3500 vs 1500 books), better graphics, native PDF display. The screen is 9.4" diagonally, compared to the Kindle 2's 6".

It looks to me as if it has one flaw, though. It doesn't have the page controls on the left side, just on the right side. I like to hold my book in my left hand and, on the Kindle, use my left thumb to change pages. This isn't a huge deal and I'll learn to live with it, but I'm sure I'll miss it sorely at first.

It's kind of funny. A few months ago, I might have looked at the Kindle DX page and thought something vague like "That's nice, I suppose" and now I'm criticizing the control layout based on the images. How I've changed since the end of February.

Update on the pressure cooker. I tried cooking potatoes for five minutes and one potato was just fine but the other one was overdone, although not as badly as the seven-minute batch had been. I had noticed a difference in the texture of the potatoes as I peeled them, so I wasn't totally surprised when they cooked up so differently. I ran over to the store about an hour ago and picked up more potatoes. These look very similar, at least on the outside, so they may cook more uniformly.

The navy bean soup turned out very well. I think it was better after sitting overnight and being reheated. I'm more than halfway through it and really enjoying it. When I bought the beans, the store had them on sale, three one-pound bags for five dollars, so I have more beans to practice with. In addition, it seems to be pretty much impossible to buy a single ham hock. I've got a recipe that uses bacon instead of ham and I picked up some thick-sliced applewood smoked bacon at the service butcher, so I may try that one next. The extra ham hocks will freeze nicely.

I really do like the pressure cooker, although I haven't cooked anything too challenging, just potatoes, beans, and rice. I've cooked a couple of boxed risottos. They're not really cooked like risottos, which requires adding the liquid gradually and stirring constantly for twenty minutes, but they're pretty tasty. They're really quick in the pressure cooker, pretty much requiring just that I react when it chirps.

Trying Again

I dashed out today and got dog food (we were down to the last dishful and Gordo was looking worried), the mail, and more russet potatoes. I'm bound and determined to get this potato cooking thing to work. I mean, really, how hard can it be to cook a potato correctly? I guess I'm going to find out, aren't I?

I also picked up a pair of ham hocks and a pound of navy beans. Years and years ago, back in the early days of the HL-20, when the engineers at Langley were putting it together with little bits of time here and there, I went back there with two test pilots to fly the Differential Motion Simulator with a high-alpha cockpit display.

The reason I know it was in the early days of the HL-20 was that one of my test pilots was Bill Dana, at that time the last lifting-body (and X-15) pilot still flying research aircraft. Well, we ran into one of my friends at LaRC, one of the guys working on the HL-20 simulation, and I, of course, introduced him to Bill and Ed. His eyes got kind of wide, meeting the legendary Bill Dana. We went back to the DMS and I got a call from my friend about twenty minutes later, asking me if there was any chance that Bill might possibly be interested in flying the HL-20 sim, if only for a few minutes and entirely at his convenience, to give them suggestions. Fortunately for the HL-20, the DMS had just developed a small mechanical problem (a small hydraulic leak, I think) and we were just sitting around wondering what to do until the system came back up. So we all joined my friend and his test pilot at the HL-20 simulation and flew it for hours and a good time was had by all. To this day, my friend still thinks I'm a miracle worker, offhandedly producing a renowned lifting body pilot to fly his simulation.

So what does this have to do with ham hocks and navy beans, you ask? They're inextricably linked in my mind. Every Thursday the Langley cafeteria served navy bean soup and we were there on a Thursday and I had the soup and it was wonderful. It was a cool, damp day and the warm, succulent soup, with the grace note of smoky ham, was absolutely perfect. Warm, tasty, comfort food. So I've been making and eating navy bean soup since then. The canned stuff isn't really good enough, if you ask me, but it's quite easy to make. Pressure cookers are supposed to be wonderful for cooking beans, so I'm going to give it a try, right after I take on the potatoes again.

Then there's a Swedish yellow split pea soup, flavored with marjoram, that I made back when I was in college that I want to try again. I'd subscribed to the Time-Life Foods of the World series when I still lived in the dorm (I like to read about cooking almost as much as I like to cook) and this was one of the recipes that caught my eye. When I moved to an apartment for my senior year, this was one of the first things I cooked. It was better than I thought it would be, too. Obviously this was a while ago, in the late '60s. It was so long ago that cookbooks noted that corn tortillas could be purchased in cans at gourmet stores. This was mind-boggling to me, as I'd lived in the CA Central Valley and in SoCal since 1953 and I thought every store in town sold fresh tortillas, both corn and flour, even the 7-11 stores.

It's late afternoon here, about time for me to go start dinner. I guess I'm hungrier that I thought I was. I only meant to mention that I was ready to try again on the potatoes, but I've digressed to lifting bodies, test pilots, and a lot more about food. Hmmm....

Sad Anniversaries

It will be my mother's birthday on the 24th, the second since she died. Somehow this anniversary makes me sadder than the anniversary of her death. In reaction to this, I find myself swamped in creativity or, maybe, in shopping to support creativity. I've been buying lace weight yarn like crazy. I bought three partial cones of Jaggerspun Zephyr and another three colors of cashmere-silk blend on eBay, four different colorways from Black Bunny Yarn, and two colorways of kettle-dyed yarn from Knit Picks. Then today I got a skein of Lorna's Laces Helen's Lace for the 2009 Year of Lace Spring offering.

The funny thing is, I don't know why I'm suddenly accumulating lace weight yarn. It's not in honor of my mother. I never knit a lace shawl for my mother and she wouldn't have worn it if I had. She rarely wore sweaters or jackets or coats and a lace shawl just wasn't her style at all. An afghan would have suited her, but I'm just now starting to think about knitting afghans, mostly for the new house.

There's some miscellaneous news. We're having a heat wave here. It's been in the '90s, which is unusual in April. Today we're having a lot of convective activity and there's an actual thunderstorm just north of us that has really dropped the temperature. I doubt if we'll see any precipitation, though.

Gordo went to the vet last week and he weighs 75 lbs now. He'll be one year old on May Day. He's doing very well, although he has trouble sleeping in the warm evenings. We've started leaving the slider in the bedroom open and he's doing better. His crate is right by the door and the cool air washes over him, making him more comfortable. He also seems to be eating a little better. I think he's not wild about the lamb and rice kibble, so I'm going to look for a different brand next time. Maybe I'll pick up a small bag of Canidae. My previous pair of collies liked it very much, so I can hope Gordo will, too, and that it won't make him itch.

Some time ago I got a new vacuum cleaner, a Eureka, that claims to pick up dog hair. It does and I'm really pleased. I hadn't realized how much hair Gordo had shed in the bedroom (or how much we'd tracked in) until I saw it whirling around in the vacuum cup. His hair is pretty much invisible on the silver plush, which helped conceal the quantity. The vacuum can also be used on hard floors, having a switch to turn the beater brushes off, which is really nice. My halls and bathrooms are tiled and regular vacuums just spread stuff around on them, rather than sucking it up. This vacuum came from Overstock.com and was quite reasonably priced. I looked at Dysans but couldn't find one with the hard-floor option and thought they were kind of expensive. I've had Eurekas before and liked them, so that's what I got.

At the same time I also picked up a Bissell carpet cleaner from Overstock.com. It's refurbished and has a minimal complement of accessories, but I'ver never found that I use the accessories. I probably should, now that I actually think about it, since the chair I regularly sit in is a bit grubby and could stand to have the arms cleaned, at the very least. We have the carpet cleaners come in about once a year and do everything, but with a dog it's nice to be able to tackle spots when they appear, without doing the entire house. All of my dogs have been very good about not making organic messes, being well-trained, but I swear that they would sometimes clench an entire pawful of mud to track onto the carpet on rainy days. Add in my propensity to spill Caffeine-Free Diet Coke and spot-cleaning gets important.

The third thing in my order was a pressure cooker. I've never had one, but my mom loved hers. She was a working woman for as long as I can remember and the pressure cooker let her put dinner on the table in no time. I'm more interested in keeping the kitchen cool during the summer. I'm trying to add some balance and variety to my diet and I know I'm more likely to eat food I've prepared. For example, I despise cooked bell peppers, yet a lot of companies sneak them into frozen meals, where they taint the entire dish. This is particularly true of baked pasta dishes and Mexican foods, like enchiladas. I also think the pressure cooker will let me cook smaller quantities. There's really no reason to make two big pans of cheese enchiladas or lasagna just because you're going to all that work anyway. The cooker is also touted as making excellent rice and, with special pans, steamed desserts. I'll let you know how this works out.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

I haven't posted anything here recently because I was hoping to have some good news and avoiding some bad news. I still don't have the first, but I've accepted the latter, so I can actually write about it.

It's the Bigfoot Shawl. I had made an error and frogged one pattern repeat and reknitted it at about the eighth pattern repeat, which was a bunch of rows back. I'd managed to miss a yarn over and, therefore, multiple stitches in subsequent rows, so when I reknitted it I didn't really have enough yarn and the entire repeat was tight for six rows. I'd told myself it would come out in the blocking, that no one would notice, that it was OK, but it was preying on my mind and the day before yesterday I frogged 36 rows (averaging 346 stitches). I am not a happy knitter right now.

I must say that the yarn Knit Picks Gloss, has held up beautifully in the face of this abuse. I put a Options Harmony US 4 needle onto the longest cable and picked up the stitches of a purl row after ripping back. The yarn cooperated with this, not running or anything. The live stitches just sat there, ready to slip onto the sharp little needle. The yarn is 70% merino and 30% silk, so this probably isn't too surprising.

The good news I'd hoped to share was the delivery of the modified mini-van. It was supposed to come up early this week, but the wind was so bad we had them hold off. The old van had gotten sand-blasted in the Dryden parking lot about four days after we'd gotten it, so we're kind of jumpy about too much wind and a new vehicle. You may have seen the news stories about the big multi-vehicle, multi-fatality crash on SR-14 here Tuesday, caused by a terrible dust storm. The wind was gusting up to 50 mph here on Tuesday and Wednesday. They were going to bring it up today, which is a beautiful cool, calm day, but the ABS light came on, so they took it to Keys Toyota (Toyota problems get fixed by Toyota, modification problems get fixed by Mobility Works) and it looks as if we'll get it tomorrow afternoon.

I went by Tuesday and rented a 10' x 7.5' storage space and I'm going to get the moving guys in on Monday, 29 Oct. I have a queen hide-a-bed here at my house to go to a local charity. It'll be replaced by the couch and loveseat from my mom's house. The rest of the furniture from her house (a queen bedroom set and some other pieces), plus a whole bunch of boxed stuff, will go to the storage space. There's also a solid rock maple hutch that's stopping at the storage space for a while, before going to live with my friend. Once the house is empty, I'll get the painter in and the house will go onto the market.

I picked up paint chips from Frazee Paint on Monday. They gave me an entire swatch book, too, and there are some beautiful colors in it. I love some of the accent colors, but not for a house I'm trying to sell. I'm inclined to paint the entire interior in Swiss Coffee, which is the color of our Palm Desert house and will be the color of our Lancaster house. It's a very popular warm off-white that I really like. However, I have to see how it looks with the drapes before I decide.

It's actually been a busy week; in addition to all this stuff I had a routine doctor's appointment yesterday and a mammogram today. Then tomorrow I go to the ophthalmologist for my yearly exam. Plus I need to meet with the cleaner and painter for estimates. I'm trying to get the cleaner in at the end of next week.

I also tried out my new six-quart crock pot from Overstock.com. I got a really nice chuck roast at Albertson's and bought it on the spur of the moment. Normally I plan my grocery shopping so that I don't have to run all over the store but not this time. Once I got the roast I had to go back and get the vegetables. It came out really well and I was pleased. Cool-weather food....

I Have An LYS!

Late Saturday afternoon I discovered that there's an actual, local yarn shop in Lancaster. It's really new, not even a month old. I went by on Sunday (it was closed, of course) and peered in the windows; they had Sirdar and Noro patterns in their display, which was a good sign. Then I actually went by on Monday, after finishing for the day at my mom’s house and dropping fourteen boxes of stuff off at the thrift store she volunteered at. We're getting close to being done clearing out the house, which is fortunate because I sold the house last week (before we listed it or otherwise put it on the market; this is the second house I've done that with). The buyers are taking some of the furniture and may buy even more.

It was even better than I thought it might be. Misti Baby Alpaca, Blue Heron rayon, Rio De La Plata kettle-dyed merino, Noro, Cascade, Sirdar, Gedifra, and so on. Not a lot of the really high-end stuff, but this is Lancaster and, as the owners said, expensive yarn is not what anyone would expect to move well. They can special-order, of course. They had every Clover bamboo needle made and some lovely wooden needles.

I didn’t buy a single thing. I was mightily tempted, but I just couldn’t decide on anything. Too much choice, I guess. I think I’m going to get a couple of skeins of purple Baby Alpaca for a scarf for my sister-in-law. Just touching that yarn made me long to own it, I tell you. I can hardly bear to send the baby alpaca scarves on to their owners, I love it so much.

My good friend Pat’s daughter, in South Dakota, is going to have a baby in the spring and I got four skeins (a mile of yarn) of Knit Picks white fingering-weight merino wool to knit a lace christening shawl (traditionally this gets used for the christening and then gets put away until the kid’s wedding, when the bride wears it). Right now I’m knitting a Forest Canopy lace shawl in lace-weight alpaca and silk yarn, on US 5 needles. Lovely, but slow, slow, slow. I'll be so glad to be knitting fingering weight on US 7s or so.

Speaking of Knit Picks and needles, their new wooden needles are really nifty. They're laminated from layers of dyed birch and then turned; this is a very common way to make fancy pens and other doodads. These needles have the same sharp tip and long taper that the metal ones do. They're quite reasonably priced, just a bit more than the metal version, and I've got the interchangeable points sitting in my shopping cart, but I can't quite bring myself to order them yet. You know, Knit Picks may have very reasonable prices for their yarns, but they sure seem to get a lot of money from me. I'm such a sucker for pretty bright-colored yarn and accessories.

Part of the reason I'm hesitating on the needle order is that I just got a Cuisinart panini and sandwich grill. Cooks Illustrated rated this as the best panini grill a couple of years ago. I got it from Amazon and I just love it. I haven't made anything much more exciting than ham and cheese sandwiches but I have great plans. Let me share one of my few household hints, which I rarely do. When you make a grilled cheese sandwich, put a very thin layer of French's bright yellow mustard on one of the slices of bread. This should be as thin a layer as you can manage. The sandwich won't taste mustardy, but it'll have a little extra tang that will really pick up the flavor.

Hot Cross Knitter

It's really hot here, I'm tired and grumpy, and my latest knitting project is giving me fits. Other than that, everything is going just fine.

My friend and I have been spending weekday mornings over at my mom's house, packing things up, throwing things away, and and sorting everything else. We've cleared out the bathrooms, the linen closet, the video tapes, and about half of the kitchen. I've also made some real inroads into the mass of financial material, most of which belongs to the volunteer organizations for which she was the treasurer.

On the way home yesterday my friend and I went by Costco to buy just one thing, an inflatable queen-sized bed (her daughter and son-in-law are coming from South Dakota in about two weeks). I'd seen the beds there Saturday, when my husband and I went by for more fans, and told her about them. She's not a member, so I had to go with her. We didn't have a written list, because who needs one for just one thing? However, we ended up buying twice as many things as we'd intended. She remembered that she needed compact fluorescent lightbulbs, so she picked up an eight-pack of the sixty-watt equivalents. I had fun teasing her about getting twice as much as she'd intended.

My lace shawl has me perplexed. There's a line in the chart that I can't reconcile at all. I've sent an e-mail message to the designer in the hope that she can straighten me out. Until I hear from her I'm working on my baby blanket. I enjoy knitting this so it's not a hardship.

Last weekend I got some of those big thick boneless pork chops at Costco. I brined them, using the usual salt and sugar, and adding black peppercorns, allspice, and chopped garlic, for about 48 hours. However, I think the standard brine is just a little too strong for chops, so next time I'll use about 75% of the salt and sugar. I think I'll use a little more garlic, too. All the same, they were really good. Very moist and tender. The brining really makes a difference.

Pomegranate Jelly And Tradition

My mom was a really good cook and she frequently made jam and jelly. She was renowned for her pomegranate jelly. Pomegranate jelly is beautiful. It's a deep ruby red and it tastes just wonderful. It's almost a bit addictive.

She used to make a couple of batches for me every December, in both the little four-ounce jars and the eight-ounce jars (for the real aficionados), to give to my friends and cow orkers. This custom had started out with about three jars and, over the years, grown to about two dozen. Everyone who had ever tasted it wanted more. When my mom came out to Dryden and I was introducing her to people, about half of them would say something like "Oh, I love your pomegranate jelly and I look forward to Christmas and a jar of it all year". My cousin even mentioned it in his eulogy (and the attendees nodded in agreement).

I'm carrying on the tradition; I just made a batch of pomegranate jelly. As usual, it turned out very well. I don't know that her recipe is foolproof, but it seems to be. In the hope that someone else will start this tradition in their family, here's the recipe.

Katheryn's Pomegranate Jelly (makes around 9 one-cup jars)

4 c pomegranate juice (squeezed from six or eight pomegranates or bought)
¼ c lemon juice (squeezed from two lemons or bought)
1 box pectin (check the date on the box)
7½ c sugar, measured into a separate bowl

Put the juices into a large, deep pan and stir in the pectin. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Add all the sugar at once and stir until it's dissolved. Skim off the froth with a metal spoon. Stirring, bring the mixture to a boil that you can't stir down and let it boil for exactly one minute. Then take it off the heat, skim it some more, and pour it into prepared one-cup (half-pint) jars.

Jar preparation: wash the jars in the dishwasher on the hottest cycle or wash them by hand and sterilize them in boiling water for a couple of minutes. Put them into warm water (hot jelly in cold jars can result in broken jars) before you start cooking. Boil the flat lids for a couple of minutes and leave them in the water. Wash the rings.

Pour the jelly up to about ¼-½ in. from the top, put on a flat lid, and screw on a ring. Don't screw it down tightly, but do get it on firmly. When you have all the jars filled, put them into a large, deep pan and cover the jars with water. Cover and bring the water to a boil. Boil for five minutes. Turn off the heat and lift the jars out and set them on the counter. As they cool, the lids will pop, showing that the vacuum packing worked. If a jar lid doesn't pop, reprocess it or refrigerate it and use right away.

Be careful, because hot sugar syrup is very dangerous.

Eat the jelly with fresh butter on hot biscuits or toasted English muffins or toast. You can substitute cream cheese for the butter, if you'd like.

The Queen Of The Grill Strikes

Last night I grilled. And grilled. And grilled some more. Then I vacuum-packed and froze. No more grilling for a while. It's going to get hot out there, so I'd rather grill and freeze than slave over a hot grill in 100°-plus heat. Or heat up the kitchen for the air conditioning to deal with.

I'd found boneless center-cut pork chops on sale at an excellent price, so I'd gotten a dozen of them. One package (of four) was a bit thinner than the other, so I marinated them in an herb, vinegar, and oil dressing for about half a day and grilled them first. They cooked really quickly and smelled so good, it was all I could do to grill the rest of the meat, rather than diving into these chops. I also slid a pair of stuffed potatoes, from the service deli, onto the warming shelf when I first turned the chops.

Once those chops got done (I go to at least 150° on pork, mostly out of habit), I re-oiled the grill and tossed the other eight chops on the fire. I gave them a little over a minute more on each turn (three turns or, actually, a rotation, a turn, and another rotation to get crossed grid marks on each side). About when they were done, the potatoes were heated through and I pulled them off, too.

Then I tossed the four New York steaks (rump steaks to the British and their other former colonies, I believe) on the grill. These had also been on sale. Getting the meat on sale was why I was grilling; I don't usually pay list price, as it were, for meat, except low-fat hamburger. While they were cooking I tidied up the trash (it takes me about a third of a roll of paper towels to cook this much meat and then there were the trays and plastic from the store, so I had quite a bit) and put the chops, in their covered casseroles, on the bottom shelves of the cart. When the steaks were done, they too went into a casserole and I shut off the gas and zipped the cart into the kitchen.

I should mention that somewhere around when the first chops went onto the grill a bourbon and 7-Up highball magically appeared on my cart, right beside the salt and pepper. It took almost an hour from when I started to when I was done outside, but I wasn't in a hurry and I didn't exactly crowd the grill. The glass was nearly empty, except for a few rather sad, warm pieces of ice, when I came in.

So I mixed another drink, cut one of the steaks in half, added a potato to each plate, dished up a little tossed green salad for each of us, and served dinner. It was really good. Of course, I was absolutely starving after sitting out there by the grill, smelling the meat cook. I love grilled steak and pork chops and I love my gas grill that lets me make them just as well as a restaurant can.

When I finished dinner, I went back out to the kitchen and vacuum-sealed the other three steaks and all of the chops. I put the steaks and eight of the chops in the freezer. We're going to have marinated chops tonight and plain chops tomorrow. Monday is my 60th birthday and we'll probably go out to eat.

I like having this grilled meat in the freezer. It heats pretty well, without much drying out, and the vacuum sealing prevents freezer burn. Putting dinner together can be really quick using it. And it's unusual enough to seem like a little bit of a treat when we do have it.

Then today I worked on getting my stashes of yarn and beads into the closet tidily. Some of the beads just simply have to go. I'll never use them; many of them were hand-me-downs from a friend who got tired of beading a few years ago and weren't really my style. I don't know exactly what my style is, but they aren't it. Between the USPS flat-rate shipping and eBay, these beads should find a home. I'll let someone else find a place to put them.

Photos of the closet will appear tomorrow, once I get most of what I'm keeping put away. For some reason, the closet seems to keep getting smaller and smaller, the more I try to put into it.

Shopping For A Mini-Van

We're currently driving a modified 2000 Olds Silhouette mini-van. It's out of the extended warranty now and it's getting a little old, even though it has less than 60,000 mi on it. The modification computer developed some problems and we had to disconnect the power door. Then the microswitch on the ramp quit working and now it doesn't extend unless dragged out by hand. In addition, the modification systems were drawing a lot of electricity and running down the battery. We hadn't noticed that when it was being driven to work at least three time a week but we sure did notice it after we retired.

So we've been looking around for a new mini-van. We won't actually buy the van; the folks doing the modification do that. They're actually dealers for a wide variety of vehicles. Anyway, we decide what we want, consult with them about the mods, leave a deposit, and wait for them to drop the new mini-van off. They'll even take the old one as a trade-in. If it weren't that it needed work on the mods, we'd probably try to sell it ourselves.

So, anyway, there are three possibilities, Honda, Toyota, and I forget (hey, we're just starting). At the southern end of our development, right on I-10 at Washington, we have an auto mall with both Honda and Toyota dealerships. So I dragged my husband off to look at Hondas. We got a very accommodating salesman who brought the exact model (fortunately in the wrong color) we were considering around and let us sit in it and play with the gadgets. It even had a sunroof, which nearly clinched the sale.

It had really slipped my mind how nice a new car is. I was ready to take that baby home right then, without even looking at the other two possibilities. Fortunately, I'd known I'd feel this way and I was prepared for it, so all we left with was some literature.

Not yet being totally reconciled to a lifetime of driving a mini-van, I also got some S2000 literature. I wouldn't let the salesman bring one of those around to look at because I know exactly how weak my willpower can be. Besides, I'm still thinking red Mustang convertible, have been in high school when the Mustang was introduced (we had a '64½ Mustang convertible for years and years, until we got the Olds Cutlass convertible in '92). Notice, however, that there's no mention at all of visiting a Ford dealer. I know better than that.

Next week it's the Toyota dealership. I need to do a little research on the Web, so I'll know what to expect. I'm pretty sure their mini-van will be just as nice as is the Honda.

I need to go set the pork chops and steaks out on the counter to warm up for dinner. I'm going to grill like crazy this afternoon. I got about ten of those thick boneless center-cut pork chops and four New York steaks. I'll grill them all and then freeze most of them. Then when I don't want to heat the house up on a miserably hot night I can just thaw out a package and nuke something potato-y. I might marinate some of the chops, now that I think about it.