darkoshi

Last night I cooked yellow squash. I finished late, and it was still warm outside so I couldn't open the windows to air out the cooking smells from the house.

Today I opened all the windows to air it out. With the A/C off, the temperature got up to 88 inside, but felt nice to me with the fans on. So I left the windows open all day.

As the windows were open, I washed a load of items with mildew and other stains along with 2 bleach tablets in the washer. (My use of chlorine bleach is seldom enough that liquid bleach usually degrades before I can use the bottle up. Tablets don't have that problem.) The windows being open prevents the bleach smell from bothering me.

As the windows were open, I also baked some things from the freezer in the oven. It seemed a good idea as the heat and baking smells could dissipate out through the windows, without making the A/C use more energy (since it wasn't on).

Coincidentally, part of the reason I wanted to use up some of the things in the freezer is because there's always the slight worry that if the power goes out for a long time, the food will melt and go bad. The strong storm we had on June 25 only made my power flicker a few times (although it ripped some siding off my soffits), but my mom's power was out for 11 hours. Before that, my power was out for 2 hours from a storm on June 14.

This evening, several hours after the baking, my refrigerator started beeping and showing the Too-High-Temperature warning icon. Uh-oh. I hadn't had the door open more than usual, and I hadn't put any hot food inside it. I wasn't sure if it could be due to the house temperature being higher than usual. This isn't the first time I've had the windows open in warm weather, but it's the first time the refrigerator had a problem with it. I closed the windows and turned the A/C back on. I took the grate off the bottom of the fridge and checked the coils. I vacuumed some dust out, but they didn't look too bad. I took the back panel off the fridge to check back there. The fan was still running. The compressor was very hot. The finger I touched it with didn't get burned, but it was hot enough to make me jerk my finger back.

The fridge kept giving the high temp warning for over an hour, but then it finally stopped. That's a relief.

I wonder if that was a sign of the refrigerator being too old to handle a warm house, or if new refrigerators would have the same problem. The fridge is 41 years old. 88 degrees inside really doesn't seem that high to me. I suspect that in the old days, people got refrigerators before they got air conditioners.

An except from daily notes:
I got into my car, annoyed at the waste of my time. I had trouble pulling out the seat belt because even though I felt like I was reacting calmly, the seat belt could tell I was annoyed.

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On some days, there is the feeling that every little thing which can go wrong, is going wrong. (Not big things, just little ones.) But realizing that lets me take the little setbacks more in stride. Oh yes, everything is going to go wrong today, so of course that happened.

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We are doing Christmas Eve on Christmas Day this year. Perhaps for the first time; perhaps not. I'd have to check my notes.

I listened to Christmas music on the radio while baking tonight. I made a package of double chocolate muffins. I also made a veganized version of this recipe; it turned out very good:
Salted Butterscotch Apple Bars

After tasting the "Watkins Original Gourmet Baking Vanilla" which I bought last time as it was a better price than the other vanillas, I realized it is not the same as vanilla extract. I was probably tricked by the label saying "with Pure Vanilla Extract" in bold, but under that it says "with other natural flavors".

I am up way too late again; it's a habit and the "way too late" keeps getting later and later.

I baked chocolate chip cookie bars tonight, yay! With regular flour, and they turned out good. Yum.

Yesterday I tried out a recipe I found for a chocolate mug cake using green plantain flour. It turned out bitter and not sweet. I suppose I'll still eat it, but I hope the other recipes I found mask the bitterness better. I thought I'd read somewhere that plantain flour is bitter when tasted raw, but not after cooking/baking.

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I emailed an organic sugar company to request them to consider selling their product in paper packaging like normal sugar, instead of in plastic bags and plastic jugs.

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Watch this endangered marmot play with a wildlife camera

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In some recipe I browsed, that wording was used and I found it cute.

I've been looking up recipes using green plantain flour or coconut flour, as I have both but haven't known what to do with them. They've been in my fridge for quite some time now. Not as long as the millet and buckwheat flours, which I bought back when I was trying out gluten-free, but I've at least used a part of them.

Oh dear...

It's Not You, It's Coconut Flour: 19 Times Coconut Flour Destroyed Something Delicious

I made 2 pans of baklava today, half as a birthday gift for someone and half to keep for myself.

For one pan, I used puff pastry, per my old method. I used mainly chopped walnuts for the filling, with cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon. I flavored the syrup with lemon juice.

For the other pan, I used phyllo dough and this method: authentic vegan baklava (the easy way).
This really is easier than most other recipes. You don't brush the sheets with oil or butter. You lay down your layers of phyllo and nuts in the pan, then slice them and pour the oil over the top before baking.
I used mainly chopped pistachios for the filling, with cardamom and cloves (no cinnamon). I flavored the syrup with rose water and vanilla. It turned out very good.

The crunchy flaky texture of the phyllo sheets is better than the puff pastry. I also like the rose flavor better than the lemon.

So from now on: I should use phyllo sheets. I shouldn't use lemon or cinnamon. (or maybe cinnamon without the lemon would be good?)

Update:
This rose-water phyllo baklava tastes like the best one I've ever made. So here are more detailed notes on how I made it:

I defrosted the package of phyllo dough in the refrigerator overnight.
When I started making the baklava, I took it out of the refrigerator to warm up to room temperature.

I made the nut mixture and syrups.

For the nut mixture, I roasted the walnuts in the oven first at ~320 degrees for about 20 minutes, until they started smelling slightly toasty but weren't yet noticeably browned. I did not toast the pistachios or almonds.
For this batch, I used 9 oz of pistachios (about 2 cups), about 3/4 cup walnuts, and about 1/2 cup sliced almonds.
I used a manual food-chopper to chop up the pistachios and walnuts.
I added 2 tsp cardamom and 1/2 tsp ground cloves.

For the syrup, I mixed 2.5 cups sugar, about 3 tablespoons rose water, about 1 tsp vanilla, and slightly under 1 cup of water in a pan.
I heated it to boiling and let it boil about 1.5 minutes (as per the linked recipe). I lowered the temperature. At that point I realized I shouldn't have added the rose water right away; that much of the flavor might have boiled away. So I added another tablespoon of rose water to the syrup, and then let it simmer for a few more minutes. I removed it from the burner and let it cool. After it cooled down, I put it in the fridge to chill.

I oiled a 13x9 glass pan. I layered the phyllo dough and nut mixture into the pan. I used about 5 separate layers of the sheets (several sheets in each layer), with the nut mixture between them. For the top and bottom, I used more sheets (maybe 8 or more) than the middle layers. I didn't count them; but there were a lot more sheets in the package than I expected.

I dabbed a small amount of water around the edge of the top layer of sheets but that was probably unnecessary and made it slightly harder to cut.

I used a sharp knife to cut the baklava into small pieces. I cut all the way through all the layers to the bottom so the oil would be able to soak down.

I slowly poured a cup of olive oil onto the baklava along the lines where I had sliced it.

I baked the baklava at 390 degrees for about 10 minutes, then at 360 for another 45 minutes until it began to get slightly browned.

I poured the chilled syrup over the hot baklava.

After it cooled some, I re-cut it along the slices. I transferred the slices to storage containers and put them in the fridge.

Finally, I have switched over to using the new laptop as my primary one. I am not finished setting up all my programs and settings, but the most important parts are done.

I figured out how to customize the menu colors in my Firefox and Waterfox browsers via my userChrome.css file. I hadn't planned to do that, but for some reason the browsers' menu spacing was less compact on the new laptop than the old one. While researching how to fix that, I also found out how to change the colors:

/* Make menus more compact, and change their color */
menupopup > menuitem, menupopup > menu {
	padding-top: 2px !important;
	padding-bottom: 2px !important;
	color: #00ffb2 !important;
	background: #4d056e !important;
}
menupopup > menuitem:hover, menupopup > menu:hover {
	background: #000000 !important;
}

I had a week of vacation to do it.
Besides the new laptop, I:
- baked brownies and chocolate chip cookie bars
- made cucumber salad
- cooked grits
- sewed a cloth cover on my headphone's headband after cutting off the original one which was sticky with age
- tried out the solid bike tires; returned them.
- watched some TV, including 3 more episodes of "I Don't Want to Be Friends With You".
- miscellaneous other minor things

I am not feeling rested at all. But at least I'm using the new laptop.

Sleep Deprivation

I really need to get my sleep habits in check.

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A dandelion in the yard, with full puffy seed-head.

The temptation to blow on it. Ah, it would be so nice! To see them float gently away in the air!

The responsible voice in my head telling me to pluck it and place it carefully in the trash, before the seeds disperse and grow into a swath of dandelion plants which I'll feel duty-bound to spend time and effort pulling out of the ground later this year or some other.

A compromise. Pluck it and take it inside. Blow on it in the house, where the seeds will eventually get vacuumed up.
Ah, they are like little parachutes falling slowly down to the rug! So cute!

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I discovered that when word-wrap is turned in in Notepad++, the wrapped text keeps the same indentation as the first word in the paragraph! That makes it so much easier to read, compared to Notepad's word-wrap.

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Writing with a pen or pencil on paper, sometimes my hands feel so awkward and clumsy. Sometimes the marks end up so malformed. I wonder if it is due to being so out of practice or due to losing flexibility in my hands.

(I am still having a lot of trouble with my hands and thumbs.)

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I made pretzels yesterday, from a box mix my mom gave me 7 years ago. I'd known it would take a lot of effort to make them, and also that they wouldn't turn out as good as the kind I used to eat in Germany. I was pretty sure this box mix was more like the kind of pretzels you get here in malls. I had made pretzels from scratch once before, long ago, and those weren't as good as German ones either. So the box sat in the cupboard all this time, waiting till I had the will to make them.

Anyway, the packet of yeast in the box showed a best-by date of 2017 and likely wouldn't work well on its own. Luckily, I had a jar of yeast in the back of the fridge which I'd practically forgotten about. Its best-by date was 2011. So I used the yeast packet plus several tablespoons of the yeast from the fridge, which seemed to work just fine.

The pretzels turned out looking just like the image on the box. Success, I guess. The taste... I'm not sure how to describe it; not very good but edible. Sort of salty and yeasty. I plan to make lunches with them, sliced in half and topped with vegan cheese and deli slices.

I didn't buy a Valentine's Day card or treats to give away this year. So instead I baked a batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cupcakes. One might say muffins; they aren't very sweet. I added the full amount of sugar specified by the recipe but used unsweetened peanut butter, not realizing that might make a difference. Still, they are good enough I could eat them all up if I weren't planning to share.

heron61 once posted about making a Shaker lemon pie. It looked and sounded quite good, so I looked up a vegan version of the pie. It sat in my bookmarks for quite some time, eventually being joined by two recipes for lemon tarts.

While grocery shopping a few weeks ago, there were very nice-looking organic lemons, so I bought a small bag of them, thinking I'd finally make that pie and maybe a tart too.

(I could also try making my own Moroccan Preserved Lemons.)

After buying the lemons, I belatedly remembered the pie recipes specify *Meyer* lemons which are less sour than regular ones. But eventually I decided to try them in the recipe anyway.

Today I sliced up 3 of the lemons with a mandolin. After stirring in a cup of sugar, I tasted the lemony liquid in the bowl, expecting it to be sour, but it tasted wonderful. So rather than adding another full cup of sugar, I only added half a cup. I stirred up the sugared lemons well and left them in the fridge to sit (to "macerate"). Hopefully on Sunday I'll get around to making a pie from it. (Darn it, I don't have agar nor arrowroot, only cornstarch. Maybe a shopping trip tomorrow.)

Update, 2022/12/10:
Per the website search results of several local food stores, none of them have agar. That probably explains why I'm out of it. The brands I've used in the past were, I believe, these:
Eden Agar Agar Flakes
Telephone brand Agar-Agar Powder - this is from Thailand.

But as agar is both expensive and hard to find, I decided to use tapioca powder instead:
The Tricks to Tapioca, the Other Pie Thickener

I may even still have some tapioca starch, but if not I do have tapioca that I could grind up.

Then again, I'm all dressed and ready to go shopping. So maybe I'll stop by an Asian grocery store after all to see if I can find agar and/or more tapioca starch there.

When I make brownies or cookie bars, the edges (naturally) end up harder or crunchier than the interior parts. When cutting them into like-sized pieces as I used to do, many of the pieces would (naturally) end up with at least one hard/crunchy edge. I disliked those parts as they would sometimes hurt* my mouth and gums when I bit on them.

A few years ago when making cookies bars, I started cutting off the hard parts first in a narrow strip along all 4 sides of the pan. That way, the rest of the cookie bars are pleasantly soft and chewy on all sides. As a bonus, I even enjoy eating the harder edges when they are cut this way. In narrow strips, they are easier to eat without hurting my mouth.

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I very much dislike the rough dry fuzzy feeling of peach skins in my mouth. Therefore I peel peaches before eating them. But it seems a shame to throw away presumably healthy and rich-in-fiber peach skins, especially if the peach was reasonably ripe, in which case the skins aren't quite as bad.

So now I've found that I enjoy eating peeled peach skins on their own, as long as I fold each piece so that the fuzzy skin is on the inside and the (thin layer of) peach flesh is on the outside.

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*I have what may be called a "prominent" alveolar ridge. I estimate it extends back at least 1cm behind my upper front teeth before curving up to the top of my palate. Chewing hard crunchy food often makes that area of my mouth sore. As does biting into hard fruit like apples or pears.

Random thought:
Why are all the brownie and blondie recipes I find online only enough for a little 8x8 inch pan?

That only makes 9 reasonably-sized pieces, which can be gone in no time at all. Even quicker, if you share them with anyone else. (And could you imagine living with a family of multiple sweets-enjoying people? Goodness gracious!) I want enough batter to fill up the 9x13 inch pan, and while it's not hard to double the recipe....

WHO are all these people who think it is fine to go through all the trouble of finding the ingredients, measuring, mixing, pouring, baking, cooling, cutting, etc., AND washing all the dishes, to only get 9 little pieces of goodness out of it, of which surely you will eat at least 2 before they even finish cooling off?

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This is an interesting recipe:

7-Ingredient Peanut Butter Chickpea Blondies [Vegan, Gluten-Free, Refined Sugar-Free]

I'd wanted a sweet treat I could share with my mom today.

I was constrained to certain recipes due to being out of my usual egg-replacer.
I didn't have enough maple syrup, so I used mostly brown rice syrup instead.
I used tahini instead of peanut butter, since I have a lot of tahini.
I omitted the strawberries.
I don't have a food processor (maybe I should finally get one), so I used my blender instead, and it turns out that my blender leaks, so maybe I need a new blender too.

One reason I chose this recipe is that it uses buckwheat flour, which I have! I got it when I was eating gluten-free several years ago, and still haven't used it up.

After mixing all the ingredients up, the batter was not very sweet, so I added 3 left-over packets of sugar and some old coconut creamer powder I'm trying to use up. And then I baked it.

It didn't turn out like I had hoped. (I'd been thinking of blondies I had made when I was a kid. Sweet, butterscotch flavor.) It tasted... healthy! (With the main ingredients being chickpeas and tahini, why wouldn't it be healthy?) But after eating two pieces, I wanted more. I continued thinking about them, after going to bed. Today, I'm considering making another batch before heading over to my mom's. I could try the peanut butter in it this time, and could put more sugar in it maybe, and some vanilla.

I also want to try this recipe, as I have chickpea flour too, and using it sounds a lot easier than pureeing a can of chickpeas:
Chickpea Flour Brownies

But it's probably too late for any of that now. Sigh.

An almost-total Lunar Eclipse tonight!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80uMSAWogjo

The partial eclipse starts in a few minutes, and the maximum will be at 4:03am EST.

https://www.timeanddate.com/live/eclipse-lunar-2021-november-19
...today’s eclipse lasts 6 hours and 2 minutes. For a lunar eclipse that isn’t a total eclipse—in other words, it only has penumbral and partial phases—that’s very long. In fact, this eclipse is the longest of the 841 partial lunar eclipses between the years 1600 and 2599.

Why is it so long? One reason is that today’s Full Moon is a Micromoon: the Moon is near apogee, its farthest point from Earth. When the Moon is farther away, it orbits more slowly and takes longer to move through Earth’s shadow.

Update, 2:22am:
Yes! I see the shadow!!! (I can tell this is going to be another late nighter for me, yet again. (But I'm on vacation, so it's not so bad!))

Update, 2:29am:
I know! I'll bake these chocolate chip cookies while I'm waiting for the moon to almost-fully eclipse!
... Oh good grief. "Place pucks on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper." As if everyone has parchment paper. Are they implying I should grease the pan? Or is the parchment paper just to keep the pan from getting dirty? Grease it is I guess.
... Dang, I bet the pan I used is too small. Those cookie pucks are larger than I expected. I'm going to dork up the easy-peasy ready-to-bake cookies, aren't I?

Update, 2:47am:
The moon's already half-eaten up by the shadow!
I'll never understand how my camera manages to turn even a half-eaten-up moon into a completely round whitish blob, even with it set to the shortest exposure time. Let's see, maybe if I hold some sunglasses in front of the lens to reduce the brightness...

Update, 2:58am:
The sunglasses work; the photos show the right shape of the moon now. But there's still not much detail.
And yep, the cookies are running into each other. Oh well. Hopefully I won't over-bake them.

3:18am:
The cookies are almost certainly over-baked for my preferences. But they'll be fully-eaten, I'm sure.

4:20am:
:)))))))))))))
Good night, moon!

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It sure is nice having that website with eclipse-related tweets and posts from around the world, and that YouTube livestream video with chat comments turned on, to feel part of something exciting that bunches of other people are excited about too, rather than just being excited about it alone like it would otherwise feel.

My allergies started acting up again lately. Yesterday while mowing leaves in the yard, I wore a face mask. My nose didn't get runny! It did require finesse, though, to situate my safety glasses to where they wouldn't fog up.

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I used this method for cooking some very old kidney beans:
Food Storage Friday - Cooking Old Beans

How old? I have no idea!*. As they were so old, I used twice as much baking soda and let them soak in the baking soda water overnight. Then I did it again today with fresh water and baking soda and a 4-hour soak. Then I finally cooked them in a pressure cooker.

It worked! They got soft.

*I'd stored the beans in a neat Korean glass jar, which is vaguely familiar to me, but which is also so old that I don't remember where it came from. The label on the jar is for hot chili paste, which I'm sure I didn't buy nor eat.

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Vegan Ready-to-bake Cinnamon Rolls! From Kroger, Simple Truth Organics brand. Tastes pretty good. I mostly got them for the nostalgia factor.

I also have fond memories of ready-to-bake biscuits. The kind with all the flaky layers that you could peel off one at a time. Maybe I'll find vegan ones like that someday. But then again, I have them still in my memory, so I don't really need to.

Vegan Ready-to-bake Chocolate Chip Cookie dough! From Kroger, Simple Truth brand. I'd seen them before, but this time the price was actually reasonable. I haven't baked them yet.

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I feel accomplished in a doing-fun-things for a holiday weekend way. Much more so than for my so-called-vacation the other week.

Yesterday I finished reading a pink and sparkly (comic) book, Phoebe and Her Unicorn. The last book I finished reading before that was in Feb 2020. (Then I had started reading "Good Omens" on my Kindle, but shortly thereafter the office was closed and my Kindle was stuck in the office for over a year, and I haven't gotten back to reading it yet.)

I set up the FireTV stick and added apps, and now have watched 3 episodes of that IDWTBFWY show.
I browsed, added and listened to more college radio stations in the Audials app.

I baked chocolate chip cookie bars!

I have plans to maybe bake peanut butter cookies too.

Not doing so good at getting to bed at a good time.

At the end of this recipe, a "cookie slam" is mentioned:
https://vedgedout.com/2017/09/29/the-best-vegan-chocolate-chip-skillet-cookie-pretty-much-ever/

One commenter asked what that meant, and the reply surprised me.
So I had to look up a video of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk0RXzLH1pQ

I'm not sure how I'd like the texture of cookie slammed cookies compared to non-slammed cookies, but I like the sound of the term. Cookie slam! Let's have a cookie slam! A jammin' slammin' good time!

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This is the recipe I'm using today - the cookies in this photo look much yummier to me than the above skillet one:
https://vedgedout.com/2015/03/26/the-best-vegan-chocolate-chip-cookies/

This recipe uses chickpea brine/water/aquafaba, which I haven't used for baking before. But I'm making twice the recipe, to make bar cookies. If a can of chickpeas doesn't contain 6 tbsp worth of brine in it, I'll use something else for the rest of the leavener. [updated: My regular-sized can had just shy of 2/3s cup!]

Oh, now I see the recipe uses baking powder and baking soda in addition to the chickpea aquafaba. Hmmm.

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Sudden realization, after seeing a recipe for peanut butter cookies, which I haven't done in forever: If one can make chocolate chip bar cookies, there's no reason one can't make peanut butter bar cookies too!

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The only alcohol that tastes good to me is almond extract. Have I tried amaretto? I don't remember; I wonder if it tastes better or worse to me. I should try some.

It'd been so long since I made baklava that I'd forgotten where my recipe was, or what it looked like. The recipe (unless I had another one too... did I have some cutouts from a Greek cookbook?) is actually titled "Kadaifi", from "The Compassionate Gourmet" cookbook. I usually substitute puff pastry sheets for the kadaifi pastry. (In the beginning, I'd made it a few times the semi-traditional way using phyllo dough sheets brushed with margarine, but that's much more tedious, and ends up drier anyway, I feel, compared to the much easier puff pastry sheets).

This recipe doesn't even mention rose water or orange blossom water, which makes me suspect I had another recipe too. I always put one or the other or both in the syrup. This recipe includes cinnamon and lemon, which is also very good, but the cinnamon tends to overpower the other flavors. I should use less cinnamon, or none, next time.

For the nut filling, normally I use walnuts and/or pecans. This time I used pistachios, cashews, and pecans, toasted.

Even double the amount of syrup from the recipe, seems a fairly small amount to me. But actually, after pouring it over the pan it does look quite adequate.

Update: It turned out very sweet. I think now that less syrup would have been fine... As long as there are plenty of slits cut into the top layer of pastry, so that the syrup can soak into the filling.

I found some Archway Cashew Nougat cookies at Big Lots. I've had them before, and they are *so* good. They are also vegan, as far as I can tell from the ingredients.

This post is mainly a reminder for myself, so that I will remember what they are called in the future.

Dang, they are going for $10 a package on Amazon! They did cost $2.50 each at Big Lots. I'm going back anyway to return the unopened packages of inside-only hooks I had bought, so I will see if they have any more of the cookies left when I am there. Maybe other grocery stores carry them during the holiday season too; I'll have to look.

This Christmas Nougat cookie recipe supposedly tastes similar to the Archway cookies.

Interesting article: What's the Difference Between Dutch Process and Natural Cocoa Powder?
Natural cocoa is acidic, and the acidity of your ingredients affects the leavening you should use.

Even more enlightening: Baking Basics: Baking Powder vs Baking Soda

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/691500.html

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/673624.html

I made a batch of "Pistachio and Rosewater Cupcakes" (sans frosting) today, but forgot to add in the pistachios. They taste great anyway.

Pink magnolias abloom: