East Coast Loner

Sometimes I feel very left out being the only member of my family out on the East Coast while my sister and brother-in-law and two nephews, brother and sister-in-law, parents, youngest brother Christopher, both sets of grandparents, my cousin Matt and his wife Amber and their kids, and my Aunt Susan and Uncle Gary are all living in relatively close proximity in California.

I miss my family!

Cooking for Engineers

I'm posting this link in honor of my brother Jonathan and my recently-acquired sister-in-law Jenn: Cooking for Engineers! It's a pretty cool website, with a few recipes on file and articles on things ranging from curry to freezing meats to heat transfer. The site claims to be for cooks with 'analytical minds,' and while it's not as expansive as Epicurious or Allrecipes, it's still fun to browse a bit.

Fancy-Shmancy

Today FavoriteBoy and I got paid several hundred dollars to play a little Mozart and Kreisler while people mingled and ate at a party. Then we got to eat, too. I had the most amazing salad ever. Mixed greens with toasted pecans, crumbled bleu cheese, a nice vinaigrette, and a ripe plum sliced on top. Yum.

Hey, Muse?

I can't seem to blog lately.

Only partly due to the fact that FavoriteBoy managed to infect his PC and my laptop with nasty viruses...

Also only partly due to the fact that his keyboard doesn't work lately, and unless I type slowly and repeat a lot of keystrokes my tping ooks likeths.

Sigh.

Unexpected

This afternoon a piano student's mother enquired, "You changed your last name when you got married, right?" I replied that I had, and she burst out, "Good for you! You've moved into a cohesive universe, which is more than I can say for myself." She went on to say how people frequently made incorrect assumptions about her name and/or her childrens' names and told me how confusing it can become to have different names within the family. What a surprising response...

Not My Greatest Culinary Achievement

SarahMarie: I'm not sure that parmesan risotto I made is really worth repeating anytime soon; what do you think?
FavoriteBoy: Is that what that nasty rice was called?

So we're in agreement.

Stormy Weather

I've always said the weather in Massachusetts is weird, but today may have been the strangest I've yet witnessed. As I stood in the parking lot of Shaw's the sky to my left was like a storybook depiction of the Second Coming, bright blue with perfectly white clouds. The sky to my right was ominous, gray with bright flashes of lightning piercing the cloud cover several times a minute. The thunder was the loudest I've heard in a long time, and the rain pelted the pavement at my feet.

By the time I bought a few vegetables and returned home the skies had almost cleared and only a few insistent raindrops pattered on my windshield.

Poaching Woes

No, this isn't a post about hunting endangered species.

FavoriteBoy and I made Eggs Benedict on Saturday for a nice, leisurely brunch. Eggs Benedict is a lovely meal - simple to prepare for two - or for a crowd.

HAH! Actually, Eggs Benedict is one of the few meals in the world for which I'd generally rather go out to a restaurant than prepare it myself. It's not just the egg-poaching, the canadian bacon-browning, the muffin-toasting, or even the hollandaise sauce-making. It's actually the dreadful, horrible, tear-your-hair-out saucepan-cleanup that really gets to me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but my poaching pot always becomes polluted and is a positive pain to, um, wash. (Okay, I'm done with the alliteration.) Saturday's pot has been sitting in my sink soaking for several days now, and tonight I finally got it clean - but the soaking, Bar Keeper's Friend, and elbow grease were all to no avail; I finally had to use a Brillo pad on my poor, beautiful stainless steel saucepan.

Seeking an answer to my clean-up dilemma, I did a few google searches. Of course, there are hundreds of sites telling you how to poach an egg (and almost as many different ways to do it), but none that I could find devoted to cleaning up the blasted pan.

In the course of my search, however, I did come across a very humorous site about poached eggs: B3TA: HOW TO POACH AN EGG. Complete with photographs, this site guides you through several attempts using a variety of different methods, including but not limited to "The Vortex Method." (If that's not enough to make you check out the link, what if I tell you that the author of the site is British and uses phrases like "bloody revolting"?) The top-rated method in the end involves wrapping the egg in plastic wrap before submerging it in the water, which I suppose would take care of the clean-up issue altogether - I'm just not sure how I feel about boiling plastic wrap in water and then eating the result.

The Mom Blog

My Mom has written a blog post herself, which I've posted for her over at Sandy's Recovery. It's the final installment that will appear over at that blog, which has chronicled her recovery from a brain aneurysm. Even though Mom's recovery is far from over, she's certainly at a point now where the blog updates on her progress aren't necessary. For those of you who have been following her progress, I know she'd appreciate it if you took the time to read her own words and leave a comment for her.

In Home Depot

FavoriteBoy: Wow, look! A water-surge shock absorber! We should get this!
SarahMarie: What's it for?
FavoriteBoy: It eliminates, you know, that sound the pipes make right after you shut a faucet off.
SarahMarie: Oh. Who cares?
FavoriteBoy: Good point. But it would have been fun to install, you fun-killer!

Barking in the Night

Friday night I couldn't sleep. See, Nathan caught a cold, and naturally, since my immune system is broken, I caught it from him despite daily doses of vitamin C and Airborne. By Friday evening the sore throat and congestion had turned into one of those coughs that made me sound like a barking seal. FavoriteBoy got up in the middle of the night to get me a glass of water, though; isn't that so Sheldon Vanauken of him? And on Saturday morning, when I realized that I had completely lost my voice, FavoriteBoy whispered with me all morning.

He's the best.