Living Room Update

I haven't had time to blog. I barely had time to take photographs this week (and I won't have time to sort the pictures and post them.)

The new furniture arrived this week. It's very comfortable, fills the living room, and creates a cozy atmosphere. I finished painting the walls in the nick of time. Sadly, my flash turns the wall color into a strange pea-green haze.

We've had our fill of snow. It's still snowing. It will continue to snow into next week. We are willing to sell our snow to BC, if they would be so kind as to come pick it up. The Olympics desperately needs it.

I'm much too tired to post an in-depth blog entry. Here are some pictures for the family:

Painting like mad on Superbowl Sunday.
It's wet and rather Kermit the Frog in colour.

The furniture goes in.
(Note the dog toy. Truffle wanted to help decorate.)

Truffle.

The flash has turned the carpet pink and the walls a different shade.

This is much darker, but truer to the actual shade.

Yes, the shades are dark. I love colour. I hate bland. The living room is a deep olive. The hall is a complimentary golden tan. The dining is a stern red. The kitchen is horrid, with apple wallpaper and tacky bead board - we will eventually remedy that. The ceiling is bright white in all the rooms. I have picked a softer off-white colour that will tie things together more smoothly. Of course, I'm in no position to work on ceilings at this point.

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More Snow

Water melting from the upper branches of the maple tree:
it froze during a sudden drop in temperature, making this lovely sculpture.

Deep drifts. We've run out of places to put the snow.
Getting in and out of our drive is difficult.

More deep snow. Note the downstairs windows on the neighbor's brick house.

Deadly icicles! These hang from the gutter above the bathroom window.

Pictures taken 11 Feb 2010.

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Snow Weasels

A glimpse of the snow weasels:

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Back East Ohio Snow | Day One

It is the kind of winter where clear and snowless days are a rarity to be marveled at. The most recent round of snow rolled in hours ago and every last thing outside my windows has been obscured by heavy silver and blue drapery carelessly tossed to the ground by an irresponsible giantess cloth monger.

The conquering flakes have invaded as swiftly and silently as a mythical army; even the tree branches bows towards the earth in humble protest of their combined weight. It is a siege and we are the hapless townsfolk.

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Captured images of my Weather Channel desktop.

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Nutmeg is far too big to be bothered by the light stuff. She runs into trouble around 10:30 PM, when the snow becomes think and difficult to transverse.

These views are important. The first is a glimpse out of the bathroom window. It is the beginning of the siege.

The freshly shoveled driveway

The same view, two hours later.

The snow is almost too deep for the small dogs. They bound around in it, looking like fuzzy snow weasels. Truffle, the Pomeranian, collect snow balls on her underside. She does not like them removed - she saves them for later, and snacks on them as they melt. Piper, the Chihuahua mix, loves the cold.

The bird feeder, groaning under the weight.

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Smelting!

Smelts: sweet and succulent Osmeridae that gaily don their egg-and-flour bathing suits before easing into a Jacuzzi of hot oil; in the hands of a Greek or Southern person, they are utterly orgasmic to the palate.

What is smelt? They are popular little fish found in the Great Lakes region and a staple here.

Of course, they are best when they are served at festivals: This is Piper when she was eight weeks old, in my small camera bag. The smelts are in the container next to her.


Fish does not last long in this house. Jeff (my fearless Better Half) had them dipped, cooked and patted dry in record time tonight; the Fish Prowler of Pembroke, made short work of them. (Okay, not all of them. A huge container beckons to me from the refrigerator but I am ignoring it.)


Getting onto a new (yet smelt-related) tangent:

Jeff and I worked in animal husbandry at the Colorado Ocean Journey Aquarium years ago (before they were taken over and reorganized into the Downtown Aquarium – and before they went wickedly commercial with Landry’s.) Smelts were a staple for the otters.

There is nothing quite like hauling yourself down the back passageways of an aquarium at 4 AM, the heavy smell of fish mixing with Clorox bleach (kitchen cleaning) as you shuffle towards your department. We had a variety of shore and tropical birds, reptiles and amphibians, two tigers and two different species of otter.

Squid and smelts are otter food, as I said. I can not eat a smelt without thinking of Gunny (my favorite northern river otter) and Gracie (the sea otter.) The tigers preferred horse meat, which has a distinctly pungent smell. I always brought in coffee and sipped it throughout the morning, and so I still associate the beverage with horseflesh and Sumatran tigers.

The animals learned to distinguish our polo shirts from those of the tour guides and tourists. We’d stroll down the paths (the aquarium was divided up differently back then) and the animals would see us and surmise that a meal was on the way (which is was not!) They became lively, which pleased the visitors. (They were fed away from public view, using a target method that allowed for routine examination and behavior reinforcement. Small bits of food were placed in their enclosures as enrichment.)

Blah blah, yadda blah. The snow outside had coupled with the smelts, spawning a senseless desire to reminisce.



Meanwhile, this poor woman contemplates the empty plate in front of her. What a pity that she arrived late to dinner. Had she but known that I was ravenous after rearranging my living room (new couches arrive on Monday), she would have come early and avoided the carnage.

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Part II Shaken and Stirred

Previously, on Tofu Trek:

Lendie, my charming vegan chat companion and record-setting tofu gobbler, was comatose due to a lack of legitimate protein in her diet, and she departed consciousness prior to leaving me a recipe. The recipe was essential, given that I had a bowl filled with cubed, brined tofu in the refrigerator.

I really didn’t know what I was going to do with this stuff. It looked respectable enough in its nesting bowl. It even tasted edible. When in doubt, apply heat. I opted to fry a few cubes in a small amount of olive oil.

Experiment One:
My first observation was that the little white squares could quickly become little stuck-on brown blobs if left unattended. These initial bits were scraped from the pan (and eaten! Quite tasty!) Sadly, I could only fry a precious few at a time. Several cookbooks recommended deep frying.

Do we have any oil in this house other than Italian from the Strip or flavored? Yes. Somewhere. It’s Canola. Does oil go rancid? Probably. Luckily for us, this bottle was good.

Experiment Two:
Wheeler’s Laws of Tofudynamics - An object that was once part of a single mass will attempt to return to a single mass state when subjected to hot oil.

Seriously. I’d place the cubes into the hot oil and they would quickly gravitate towards each other like rabid bean curd particles from a bad science experiment.

“What did you make today?” I made a new element: Tofunium.

As I watched those little cubes morphing into a golden version of the T-1000 from Terminator 2 (say it with me now - Tofurminator), I was forcefully reminded of Mrs. M, in Colorado.

Mrs. M was born and raised in Heilongjiang Sheng (the Heilongjiang Province, in China) and a devout Buddhist. She was also my neighbor, briefly, and I (being a starving student) would visit her in the hopes of a free meal.

She was a quirky woman, stepping straight out of the pages of an Amy Tan book. She had a Chinese accent. She would count on her fingers, folding each one down towards the palm of her hand rather than sticking each digit up in the air as an American would. She was nosy and she had a lot of houseplants.

“Tofu cubes sticking. What do? I tell you. What would Asian Jesus do? He’d stir the pot.”

I have no idea why that came to mind, but it did, and so I stirred, fighting to keep the damn things from reforming. I found myself reflecting upon Mrs. M’s two Jesuses. (The Asian one was the right one, in her opinion. The Anglo one was an imposter who wanted to take away all of China’s languages and culture – as well as China’s money and riches. It really didn’t make much sense to me, considering that she was Buddhist, but it was her father’s Opinion and thus was it Valid.)

In the meantime, Better Half has been popping into the kitchen at regular intervals. “They don’t have taste”, he’d proclaim; only it would come out “Pfey don ha fphase” because his mouth was filled with tofu each time.

I finished up the frying (with much less food than I started with), turned the brine into a broth by adding plenty of chicken stock (instant miso soup), and tossed in some chopped green onions.

The experiment was over – the end result was a tofu meal that Better Half actually liked.

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Shaken, Not Stirred

Tofu: tasteless bean milk pressed into blocks.

Have you ever tried to milk a soybean? It’s extremely difficult. Soybeans are rather teensy and have exceptionally minuscule teats for their body mass. They also tend to object to the whole milking process and, having no head, securing them for any length of time is often problematic. I had an entire herd of soybeans rampage in my kitchen just the other night, knocking over the salt cellar and causing the cat to skitter from the room. If you are patient, however, you can manage to milk enough soybeans to make a block of tofu.

It’s lovely when cooked in Japanese restaurants. My kitchen does not resemble such a place in any way and my last attempt at edible tofu yielded a solid round of disgust from the family and the discovery that the Hover Pig (our dog Ginger) loved the stuff.

If I could reincarnate Ginger, I would. She would be the failsafe. You see, lurking in our refrigerator at this very moment is a batch of cubed tofu suspended in sauce.

Lendie, my charming vegan chat companion and record-setting tofu gobbler, was absolutely brimming with handy ideas.

“Aut, did you press the brick?” she asked. She knows me by my screen name, 'Autrice'.

“Did I do what to it?”

“Press it. Auty, you’ve got to press it to get the water out.”

Why in the bloody hell would someone make a product that arrives packaged in liquid that you must spend an hour pressing out? Is it so difficult to make freeze-dried tofu? Pardon me a moment. I have to grab two plates and a New York City phone book and let the whole contraption sit for an hour.

“Aut, at least an hour. More is better.”

Why didn’t someone tell me this before I had all the other food prepped?

“And, I’d marinate it, since you’re not used to it.”

Used to it? Do I want to get used to it? I only bought it because Gorgeous Chick and her boyfriend, the Sex God, were standing in the Healthy Section discussing how lovely it would be to have tofu and sprouts with their Delightful Children.

“Aut!”

“What?!”

“After you’ve covered it in a marinade, for God’s sake, gently shake the bowl like you’re panhandling for gold. Don’t stir it.”

“Why?”

“You’ll have mush.”

I think that it’s fairly obvious to even the most casual observer that tofu is in fact nothing but mush. In my case, it is $3 worth of extra firm mush.

I pressed it for an hour and ten minutes. I dried it off. I cut it into cubes. I covered it with Teriyaki sauce, chicken broth, onion powder and black pepper. I even went so far as to nibble a piece of it after only ten minutes in its bath (and I have to admit, it didn’t taste all that bad raw.)

I don’t know what to do with it at this point. Perhaps I’ll fry it.

Lendie, bereft of any genuine protein in her diet, passed out hours ago and forgot to send me a recipe. At least she had the opportunity to enjoy that cup of cleansing tea beforehand.

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JoAnn Mininni

My cousin, JoAnn Mininni, passed away on Tuesday after a lengthy battle with brain cancer. She will be deeply missed.

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