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Showing posts from March, 2020

Birthday Celebration

So it was my brother-in-law's birthday last Friday. We decided to celebrate by getting together - but being mindful of 6 feet separation. So we went to the St. Kate's parking lot and parked our cars 6 feet apart and opened windows and passenger went to backseat behind driver. And then we chatted - had a cupcake - and it worked quite well.  The only thing is that it's not conducive to wine or other alcohol beverage.  And you need to bring your own food. Anyway - just an alternative to the virtual chat.

Cooking from Scratch

I'm trying recipes for an activity during the long, isolated days. Today I thought no-knead bread would be a good place to start learning about baking bread.  I watched two youtube videos. Both went on about using just a teeny amount of yeast--1/4 tsp--and 1 1/2 cups of hot water.  Too cold and the yeast will go dormant. You guessed it, my concept of hot water was not the same as the presenters.  I think I killed the yeast.  Also the dough was not the consistency of those in the video--much thicker.  Which means my 3 cups of flour are not the same as theirs. So I set it to rise and started another batch.  Jim says with flour, the cup is an inadequate measure.  Needs to be weighed and that means grams of flour.  I have a scale but I had to work carefully through weighing the flour, weighing the flour container, multiply by 2 because I weighed flour in batches. Why didn't we go metric in the 60s? I baked the first.  Didn't really rise a...

Herd behavior strikes

Monday, March 16  Today was our first official day of mindfully staying isolated at home and it was very boring until 7 pm when Jack came over to "shop" from our pantry. The grocery stores were cleaned out, he said. Empty shelves.  No milk.  No meat except prime steak. "So sad," I said. "Help yourself; we have plenty." "And now that they're closing the liquor stores..."  "!! The liquor stores!  Why would they do that?!"  Don't know, he said, just look it up online, message from the governor, starting tomorrow. I didn't look it up, jumped in the car and made like a bat out of hell for Total Wine.  We were running low in several categories and I'd been meaning to go.  The store certainly looked like the last day.  Parking lot was packed, lots of people pushing full carts holding grimly to the cart handle with antibacterial tissues.  One guy was talking on his phone, coordinating with his wife at Costco to pick ...