Bento-ish lunch

Dog in the dark

It was 80 today! Too hot on our early walk, but very pleasant at 10 p.m.

Tomorrow it's supposed to snow.

Sometimes you just want a sandwich that says Spring

I made three of these yesterday for lunch (they're small): Toasted no-knead bread with cream cheese on one side, hummus on the other, and tomatoes, cucumbers, alfalfa sprouts and watercress in the middle.

Check your work

Whew! The taxes are filed. Much later than I wanted. I thought I had them done more than a week ago. But there were a few little pieces of paper I needed to find. Somehow Friday snuck up on me. I sat down then to really finish.

And discovered I owed $48,000.

Did I just hear you say Holy Shit!? Or is that just my own voice, still echoing?

Well, obviously I'd screwed up somewhere. But it took me until today to figure out how and where. Turbo Tax online is very convenient in some ways, but not entirely transparent in others.

No, I do not owe $48,000. The government owes me.

I'll say it does.

Hummus: so quick and easy

Why pay for expensive hummus (hamos, houmous, hommos, hommus, hummos, hummous or humus) from the grocery store when it's so very easy to make yourself? You don't even need a recipe, since the proportions are all to taste.
The only things missing from this lineup of ingredients are lemon juice (I forgot to pull out a cube for the photo) and salt and pepper.

Mince some garlic, and shallots if you have them, and brown them in a little olive oil. You can use raw if you like that.

Drain the chickpeas, reserving the liquid. Put about a fourth of the liquid with the beans in a food processor (I have a little one that's perfect for jobs like this). Add the garlic and onions, a spoonful or two of tahini, a squeeze of lemon juice, and any other seasonings you might like, such as cumin and coriander. A pinch of salt and pepper. Also a drizzle of olive oil. Process until smooth, adding a little more oil if it's too thick, or some lemon juice. Taste it! Adjust the seasoning as desired.
Garnish it with sprinkled paprika and a sprig of green. Put it on sandwiches or eat it as a dip for pita bread and vegetables.

You can try so many variations of this. Roast some red peppers and toss those in. Toast a huge amount of garlic. Grate some fresh lemon zest. Add a little cayenne or tabasco or sriracha for heat. It's all good!

Braised leeks and fish

Even though spring is here, the snow and chill have me still in braising mode. Those short ribs I made two weeks ago were very satisfying.

This week I wanted something a little lighter but still hearty. Leeks are looking particularly lovely these days, so I turned to Molly Stevens' "All About Braising" for her braised leeks and halibut recipe.

But. And it's a big but, that halibut. The recipe says 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 pounds of thick halibut steaks. People, do you know how much fish that is? More important, do you know how much that costs?!? Take a guess. Go ahead, just off the top of your head, how much would you expect to pay? I'll answer below this photo.

Halibut is $20 a pound. So this recipe calls for $50 worth of fish. Um. No. I like halibut, but I also like cod. Hello, Alaskan cod, my affordable friend.

This is a pound of cod for $12, which will be two nice dinners for me. Still a little on the pricey side for home cooking, but I could have cut this in thirds as well for three meals. These are pretty chunky pieces. Two pounds of fish would have been way too much. So I just used a smaller pot.

(Like halibut, cod is a nice firm white fish that doesn't taste too "fishy," and the Pacific kind is not overfished, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch.)
The fish steaks or thick fillets are salt-and-peppered and set aside. Preheat the oven to 350. You trim your leeks, dice them and rinse them several times in a bowl of water to make sure all the grit's out. Melt about 3 tablespoons butter in an oven-safe pan that has a lid, add several cloves of garlic, minced, and about a tablespoon of fresh thyme.

(Since it's spring, I just bought a thyme plant and snipped off what I needed. I'll put the plant in the ground shortly.)

Add the leeks, stir to coat with butter, then pour in a half-cup of white vermouth or dry white wine, bring it to a boil, then cover the pot with a round of parchment paper and the lid and toss it in the oven for 45 minutes, stirring once in the middle. (This is the pot I used, a 2-quart Descoware bought off eBay.)

Then take the lid and parchment off, put the fish on the leeks, pour a quarter-cup of heavy cream over, and put the pot back in the oven for 15 minutes with just the parchment over it, no lid.

Then you take the fish out of the pot again, debone it if it's a steak and meanwhile put the leeks back on the stove and simmer them for another 10 minutes or so until the sauce is more saucy than soupy. Add a big squeeze of lemon juice (or in my case, a melted cube of juice from those California lemons).

Serve the fish on top of the leeks with a nice green salad on the side.
This was surprisingly easy, despite what may seem like a lot of steps, from stove to oven to stove. It's really not complicated, doesn't call for a lot of prep, and the ingredients are easy to come by. Except, silly me, I used regular red vermouth instead of dry white, so this came out a little on the sweet side. Not overpoweringly so, but I suggest you don't substitute. Happily, the lemon juice added a little zing to balance the sauce.

The fish was moist and firm and tasted delicious. This is saying something, since I hated fish when I was growing up (I had issues with the bones). Funny how our tastes change.

Fleeting

Here's what those weeping trees looked like covered with snow, two days ago.
I didn't have to shovel after all, as the pavement was warm enough that it all melted quickly. It took another day for it to disappear from the lawns.
But not all of it is gone! If you compact snow enough, it will last a few days longer as incongruous yard art.

Today was nice enough for a good walk with Sophie, but I don't think it hit 50 as it was supposed to. A good stiff breeze (note that laundry on the line) made me glad for a hat and gloves.

We walked two miles, down to a coffee place and back. I needed to get more coffee to make cold drip. Now Sophie's out cold in her chair and I'm contemplating dinner.

Test drive

I'm really mad that verizon added spam to my post last night. I am sending another pic to see if it happens again. If it does, I'm going to complain.

(Edit: Bastards. They spammed again.)

(Edit 2: I called Customer Service and they said it's a new legal requirement that messages must include notice that they came from a Verizon phone. I registered my complaint and suggested that they limit that notice to the first line only and cut out all the other spammy stuff. If you didn't see the notice earlier, here's what it looks like:

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required. Visit www.apple.com/quicktime/download to download the free player or upgrade your existing QuickTime� Player. Note: During the download process when asked to choose an installation type (Minimum, Recommended or Custom), select Minimum for faster download. )

How annoying.

Drinks at the Satire Lounge

Neon doesn't show up so well on cellphone camera.

Friggin' Verizon decided to add its own spammy message to this, sorry. I've deleted it.

Watch out

Apparently Blogger is finally getting around to setting up a way to create posts in advance that will publish at a specified time in the future.

This is a convenient feature I have coveted (having seen it available on other blogging sites). For example, it's handy if you are going on vacation but want to have a post or two show up in your absence, or if you have a post that's tied to a certain event but you can't be at your computer to post it right at the time you want.

So I'm testing that feature with this post. It's still in beta, so if it works, I'll let you know.

(Edit: Yep! It works! If you want to try it, here's a link to a page that explains how.)

What is it? No. 10

Click on the photo to see the answer!

Cooks are dumb

At least, somebody apparently thinks so.

April showers

I should have taken greater advantage of yesterday's pleasant temps to walk Sophie longer. But I was wrapped up in filing a whole bunch of papers and getting stuff organized, and when that kind of mood strikes, you have to go with it.
What awaited us outside was more lovely spring blooms. Blue things! I am not sure what these are. Squill on the left? Hyacinth on the right? Do you know?

The neighbors have a whole row of these funny dwarf weeping trees. The trees look most interesting in the winter and spring, before they've leafed out. In the summer they're just big green blobs.
I didn't realize until yesterday that they flower, too.
If I lived there, I would have cut off some of the branches yesterday to arrange in vases inside. You'll see why below.
Just as I often have to pause in my walks while Sophie investigates smells, she is used to waiting for me and my distractions. I needed to get my fix of color, since I knew this is what those daffodils would look like today:
Yep, it's comin' down! I'll even have to break out the shovel, but I won't be too thorough. It's all going to melt this weekend.

Flicker set

The flickers have been busy drumming on metal roof vents to broadcast their presence and excavating holes in trees to make nests. They also continue to excavate Sophie's cast-off bones in my yard.
There are still molecules of protein in there, and maybe some ants, too, with our warming weather.
Tomorrow we're supposed to get 5-6 inches of snow in town. I always say we get our last big storm around April 10, and this one's coming in right on schedule.

But it'll be 60 again by Saturday.

What do you think of this one?

You've seen the "mansion home" for sale in my neighborhood, which at least includes a nod to the Craftsman style of bungalows that are common around here. The bulk of the new construction doesn't even have that, being monolithic stucco duplex monstrosities that could be plunked down in mass-produced suburbia anywhere. (I may add a photo of one or two to this post tomorrow.)
So I have mixed feelings about this one, but I'm leaning toward liking it. If you're going to shoot for "different," you might as well go all-out. It also looks like they're putting solar panels on this, which is good. I don't know if it's a custom home or being built on spec.

Certainly you would have a clear idea of how to furnish it. Just as my house pretty much demands Victorian-style furniture, this will require a hefty dose of modern, which could look quite fabulous if done right. There's no ambiguity here.

The houses on either side are obvious scrape-off candidates. I wonder how soon that will happen, given the current market.

Then there's this one, which is newly listed. The sellers aren't even bothering to pretend it won't be scraped; the sign says "Lot for Sale."
Stay tuned.