Seven-ish month check-in

When I look back at the Three Month Check-in post I have to kind of laugh at the "At this point, I think we're expecting at least 3-4 more weeks of working from home." sentence as I sit here at FOUR AND A HALF MONTHS after the shut down, still working from home. And there doesn't seem to be much of a chance that will change in the near future since Texas is one of the current coronavirus hot zones right now. The dean of my college at the university sent out an email a couple of weeks ago that basically told us to keep working from home through the fall if we can and since we don't have visitors, star parties, and field trips, I can and will. But I am hoping to go up a couple of afternoons a week to work on the lab classroom that I'm in charge of since this is the best time to finally clean out old equipment and get our demo stuff in order since no one else can use the room.

This continues to feel like some weird time-warp since almost everything I wrote three months ago is still pretty much how things are going. I haven't lost any weight - in fact, I gained a couple of pounds since I'm still not getting enough exercise. Now the weather is too hot instead of too wet and we had a bonus Saharan dust influx, which my lungs can't handle. Although I have been regularly getting in some arm weight exercises! I'm also still keeping up with the Shakespeare 2020 Project and I'm still getting in some more stitching time! I haven't done quite as much stitching in the past few months since I actually did some work on my Tudor History website. (My webhost is moving to new servers and so I had to do some work regardless because things would break if I didn't!)

I've been on a "cooking things from scratch" kick for the past few weeks and have learned to make my own tzatziki after I discovered that my grocery store has gyro meat in the frozen foods section. Not as good as fresh from the Greek deli, but not bad at all! I also made a pot of Boston baked beans a couple of weeks ago to finally break in my Dutch oven that I bought for myself at the holidays. Of course, I picked a day that would get up to 106°F to cook beans in the oven all day... Next up will be some homemade charro beans and the restaurant-style Mexican rice that I like (I've done that one several times now, but not with my new Dutch oven!). And probably some cook-all-day marinara too. I kind of wish this had come over me earlier in the stay-at-home time when it wasn't so damn hot!

That's it for now. I hope anyone who stumbles across this is doing well and staying safe!

A Texas Christmas dinner

Apologies to the vegetarians...

We decided to do Christmas a little different this year... TEXAS STYLE (in my mind I'm hearing LBJ at the BBQ for the Mercury astronauts in the AstroDome in The Right Stuff). We were tired of turkey after the birdzilla from Thanksgiving and we do ham at New Year's, so we decided to do a big BBQ feast instead. I should have put something in the photo for scale, since you can't really get an idea of how large the platters were... that was a lot of food. A lot of yummy, yummy food. :)

(Thanks to Dad for the photo!)

A little food blogging

It's been a while since I've posted anything I've cooked or baked, so I thought I would throw in a photo of the yummy salad I put together for dinner last Sunday. It's a mix of red curly leaf lettuce and romaine, with a slices of a hard-cooked egg (I steam them after seeing it in an Alton Brown cookbook), wedges of vine tomatoes, a sprinkling of shredded Italian cheeses, some cracked black pepper and a low-fat Greek salad dressing. In hindsight, I should have added a little of the prosciutto still in the fridge, but it was still quite tasty without it! Grand total - 340 calories.

Last weekend's bread experiment

I think I actually first saw this recipe in the newspaper, but after seeing the results (and that it was so easy a 4-year-old could do it) on Jaden's Steamy Kitchen, I decided to give it a try. You can find one of her entries on it here, but I also suggest looking at some of the others. Not to mention all the other delicious looking things at the site!

For a first attempt, I'm pretty pleased. I think my yeast might have been a little anemic and I had the pot a little too close to the top elements in the oven (hence the very dark brown parts on the top), but overall I'm happy with it. The flavor was quite good!