Cooking ⁽³²⁾

Brian Bilbrey January 27, 2019

27 January 2019

Because they are, just sayin'... So I'm going to ignore all of that for the moment. Marcia did a bunch of wonderful baking and cooking, so for supper with friends Saturday night we had scratch made: crackers, focaccia (two kinds: rosemary and olive), pasta, and cake. Carb-loading for the gluten gluttons only? Yup. But super-tasty! The house got cleaned, too. Coffee from Kenya got roasted. And I did some intermittent remote work over the weekend, getting stuff done, which is good. Finally, I spent a bit of time playing around in Skyrim. Net result, there: I'm now the Arch Mage…

Brian Bilbrey January 21, 2019

21 January 2019

Not properly cold, not in the ice moon Hoth sense of the word, anyway. But it was 11º Fahrenheit when I walked the dog early this morning, with winds gusting to 40 mph. I think that means a wind chill of minus one billion. As the day went on, it warmed a little bit, and the winds dropped to gentle breezes, which meant I could shed a layer or two for the later walks. It'd have been better if Lexi would simply walk, take care of her business, and be ready to head back in. But her idea of a…

Brian Bilbrey December 30, 2018

30 December 2018

We enjoyed a quiet Christmas at home, mostly binge-watching The Great British Baking Show. In the evening, we watched the Springsteen Broadway special. The dog got a couple of new toys, as did I. Marcia was surprised to get a couple of things, too, since we'd already got her "Christmas presents" a couple of months ago. With Christmas gone and New Year's Eve tomorrow, another year's gone by, and each goes faster than the one preceding. But here at Hovel Bilbrey, we're continuing to do okay. The big changes of the year involved first ramping up our involvement with the…

Brian Bilbrey November 25, 2018

25 November 2018

Turkey coma, that is. We roasted a full bird for the first time in a few years, and it was certainly one of our best. We started with a fresh Butterball, and Marcia dressed it and put it in the roasting pan with a cup of water to keep the humidity up. That trick worked a treat, and the bird was flavorful and moist. The other winner of the evening was also of Marcia's concocting: a wonderful apple pie. Since then, leftovers, including a turkey tetrazzini that I made this evening, using ... the pasta that Marcia made yesterday. So…

Brian Bilbrey September 23, 2018

23 September 2018

More rain. Seriously. And we live close enough to DC that the rain-hole that exists there shadows us a bit - we got just a bit over half of the 22 inches that BWI got in the same time span, and that's less than 30 minutes drive. We're at 15 inches in the last two months. That's four month's worth of annualized rainfall. And I'm tired of it. Oh, yeah... the app on the phone says each one of the next 24 hours has rain due, better than 50% chance. I count Fall as officially started on the first night…