I clean

Here are some power cleans I filmed a couple of weeks ago:

Heather Cleans.

It’s still cold

Today I walked to the DMV to renew my license. It’s about two miles from my  house; the walk is mostly along the Willamette river.

Icicles on the carport. Tomorrow it's supposed to warm up to above freezing, rain and snow some, and then get really cold again. Last night it got down to 11 degrees.

My snow boots have pretty good traction.

This is my street--you can see how icy the roads are. Quite a few people are out there trying to drive, and it's a bit nuts.

The bike path along the river was actually plowed, but I only saw three people on bikes, and three other pedestrians the whole time I was out.

I walked there in the late afternoon. Yesterday's snow hasn't melted at all, the river is pretty with snow covered banks.

I saw the sun set over the water...

...and I walked home in the late dusk. Pretty, no?

Snow

The front yard this morning.

Last night it snowed here in Eugene. By morning we had about four inches on the ground, and it’s so cold it’s even stuck. And it looks like it’s going to be here all week too, as it’s going to stay cold. This much snow is no big deal for many places, but when a town has no plows and won’t salt the roads, well, things get messy. I drove to campus today, to go to the post office and the gym, and it’s not real nice on the roads. The cars pack the snow into ice, which then freezes hard, and voila, you’ve got a skating rink.

The current hummingbird rig. The lamps sit about eight inches from the glass bottle of the feeder. The hummingbirds don't seem to be bothered by the lights at all, they've been out there fighting over the feeder all day as usual.

I was up all night writing my OHSU essays; I peeked out the window at four-something to check the hummingbird feeder, and it was frozen solid–and there was a poor hummingbird just sitting there, trying to have some breakfast. I don’t know what he was doing up hours before dawn, but I took the feeder in and thawed it in the microwave.

When Brian got up we found the worklights and rigged up a more permanent solution, since it’ll be so cold all week, and hummingbird juice freezes at around 27 or 28 degrees. Now that I know they’re up so early, I’ll probably just leave the lights on tonight so they can snack when they need to in the morning. They go into such a deep torpor in this kind of weather, I bet breakfast really is the most important meal of the day when you’re trying to wake up from that.

Sumi keeping an eye on the hummingbird battles.

Candy, take 2

My camera is back in my possession, so I continue with the sugar saga…

You can tell this is better brittle just from the color.

Next up I made more peanut brittle. I figured I better get it right before moving on to more difficult and/or expensive confections. And get it right I did. It’s so damp here I have to cook all my sugar to 5-10 degrees hotter than the recipes want. If it’s a hard candy, it has to be cooked very hot–to over 300 degrees–and this means toeing the line on burning the butter in the mixture, since I have to cook it even hotter. The brittle, however, is exactly right. I added more peanuts to the recipe too, because I have no interest in getting a peanut-free bite of brittle. Too bad I only made a half batch.

Cutting and wrapping the chocolate caramels.

Next I tried classic cream caramels. These are easier because there’s a wide range of textures that are acceptable for caramels. I knew these would be good, but I had no conception of how good. The butter flavor is very intense, and the texture is perfect–a bit firm and chewy, but not too sticky. I wrapped them in wax paper twists and stashed them away, out of my line of sight.

Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and made salted buter chocolate caramels. I got this recipe online, as the one in Joy called for a cup and a half of heavy cream, and I only had one cup on hand, but I had plenty of butter. I will confess, I added more chocolate than called for too–which probably is the reason these turned out sooooo tender, despite having cooked them a fair bit hotter than the recipe wanted. I don’t regret it.

Sweets for the sweet

A candy making spree? Why yes, I did say that, didn’t I…

So the holidays have been coming, and I was feeling a bit sad because Brian and I have very limited means this year with which to celebrate or buy gifts for the various people in our lives. I was picking up a few items at the dollar store the other day when I saw these cute metal tins in holiday colors, and I thought, hey, I could make candy, and wrapped up in the tins it could make for nice (and affordable) little gifts. Also, I have a particular fondness for confectionery work–not that I’ve made much candy, and not that I have much of a sweet tooth either–it’s more the technical kitchen chemistry element of it all that appeals. And so it began, with…

Batch number one--the recipe was for a "pulled" brittle, hence the reason it's all stretched out on the counter.

Peanut brittle!

I figured I ought to start with a candy that’s cheap to make, in case I screwed it up.  Which I did.  Like I said, I haven’t made much candy, so I didn’t think too much about the weather. The Joy of Cooking says don’t make hard candies on humid days, and to me it seemed like a perfectly dry, sunny day here in Eugene Oregon. I mean, if it’s not raining, it’s dry, right? Wrong. Peanut brittle doesn’t find 80% humidity dry, even if that’s about the best we get here in the winter. So, despite following the recipe, it turned out undercooked, which makes it technically peanut toffee–and very, very sticky. Eating this stuff just makes me fear for my fillings. I haven’t thrown it out yet, but I think I will. It’s not what I wanted at all.

Umm, truffles...?

Next, I fell back on something familiar–truffles. I ground up some of my peanut toffee in the food processor, and made ganache truffles.  Then I decided to get fancy and dip them in more chocolate. Again, harder that it seemed from the recipe. Tempering the coating chocolate is fussy, and then when I dipped them… well, see the results for yourself. This was not easy. However, they did clean up decently, but I have a newfound respect for chocolatiers–hand dipping chocolates, and making them look all fancy and nice requires considerable technical skill. Which I don’t have.

Putting anything in these little paper cups makes it look better.

So, while there have been further sugar and corn syrup based adventures since, Brian took off to Portland with my camera, so I’ll stop here but there’s more to come–and practice is definitely helping.

A bad blogger

Yes, that’s me. I have been willfully ignoring my blog all these weeks. And it’s not that I haven’t been doing anything. I have sent in ten applications (and thus have written like 30 essays…), I’ve begun a candy making spree, been hiking, and gotten my squat pretty solidly into the advanced category. (And speaking of strength standards, gubernatrix published her own set…yay for strong (and articulate) ladies!) Oh, and I got a job, teaching MCAT prep courses. I’ve finished training, and will get my first classes about a week into the new year. A bit frightening, having to teach physics and organic chemistry, but they tell me I’m qualified…

Heading up Mt. Pisgah in the late afternoon...

The day before yesterday I hiked up Mt. Pisgah. This was a hike that Tirza and I started when she visited, but we never got to the top, as the twenty pound baby she was lugging about was quite intent on NOT being carried up the mountain. It’s not a long way up; it takes a little over half an hour to get to the top when unencumbered by flailing infants. Brian wouldn’t go, as he said his “belly hurt”–which I understand to be the natural outcome of drinking the WHOLE pot of espresso yourself, but anyway…

...and down in the evening.

Home again

I arrived back home again yesterday; my trip back east seemed terribly short.  Stacey’s wedding was lovely; the ceremony was held in a music hall that has an enormous pipe organ the size of the whole front wall of the building.

The pipe organ; it was very impressive, covered with ornate wood carvings.

It was all quite impressive.  The reception was great too; I got to see a lot of old friends and danced the night away.

Mom and Dad on the dance floor. Don't they look snazzy?

Now, home again, I have a lot of work to do.  I applied to 18 schools, so now I have 18 secondary applications to complete.  However, my common application was accepted, processed, and verified, so that means I did it right and it wasn’t rejected.  I was worried about that, because if they didn’t take it I’d have missed a lot of deadlines, seeing as how I sent it in at the last minute.

Last night Brian and I went out to eat at the Outback (thanks Carolyn and Dale!) to celebrate having finished the first step of this application process.  It’s always a treat to have someone else cook for me, as it happens so rarely.

Today I will start with the Harvard application, as it’s due first.  Onwards!

Scaredy cat

Today I am driving myself to Portland; tomorrow morning I get on a plane back to Massachusetts, again.  This time my trip is short, less than a week.

When I was gone for almost a month last time, some good came out of it here at home, in that Brian and Chester finally became friends.  It took me months to befriend Chester while he was still living out in the backyard, and though Brian fed him occasionally, Chester really wanted nothing to do with the big loud scary man.  When we brought Chester inside we immediately appointed Brian the title of “breakfast man,” hoping that Chester’s opinion of him would improve when he noticed that big and scary though he is, he is also the keeper of the wet food.  It was a good idea, but it worked only so well–he’d rub agains Brian’s legs while he was dishing out the food, but the minute Chester had finished wolfing down his breakfast he reverted to scaredy cat.  When I was away, though, Chester had to make a decision.  You see, he actually really does like people, and is a sucker for pets–so when I wasn’t around, he had to either get pets from the scary man or else go without for a month.  Fortunately, he decided Brian isn’t so scary after all…

Dress up

I think it more tasteful to refrain from posting the "before" picture...

Well, Stacey’s wedding is coming up, it’s this Saturday in fact, and I’m flying back east (yet again!) on Thursday.  So, today, in the interest of being able to wear an actual dress for the event, and for the first time in many years, I waxed my legs.  Stac, don’t ever say I never did anything for you!  (Though really, I don’t find it painful–more like annoying, and messy.  If you’ve never experienced it, leg wax is approximately the consistency of pine tree sap, and it has a similar ability to stick itself it any number of unexpected and remote surfaces.  I had to scrub down half the bathroom with “Goo Off” when I was done.)  Interestingly enough, now that my legs are more “girly” in a sense, they look more muscular than they did before…

I haven’t worn a fancy dress for about ten years, so I think it’ll be kind of fun to dress up.  I have also been attempting to apply eye makeup–again, I haven’t tried to do this since I was about ten years old–so that I’ll have some hope of being able to make myself look presentable this weekend.  There is a whole genre of videos on YouTube in which young ladies demonstrate how to apply eye makeup to achieve certain effects. This is very helpful, if, like me, one has a limited understanding of such things.  I watched a tutorial last night on how to create a purple “smokey eye” look, a process that involves about twenty steps, half of which require black eyeliner.

In thinking about it, when I was younger I rejected a number of the trappings of what I saw as “socially acceptable” femininity–makeup, girly shoes, “doing” my hair, and whatnot–many the things girls generally have to do to be seen as attractive in a mainstream way.  I feel like as I get older I care less about how people read my appearance.  Maybe because of that, many of the things I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing/wearing seem more and more like they could be a fun option.  I started wearing nail polish just last year for the first time in maybe a decade, and it occurred to me that I like painting my nails.  (Preferably with a safe and relatively green brand of polish, insofar as those things go…)  For a long time though I didn’t do it because I didn’t want others to read my nails as a sign that I was someone who believed that women have to paint their nails, or wear makeup in general, in order to look good.  It’s taken me a while, but I think I’m figuring out that keeping a couple of pairs of heels in the closet, as an option, doesn’t necessarily make me less of a feminist…

Floof

Floof is fascinated by shadows...

I think I post more photos of Floof here then either of the other cats; Brian and I definitely both take more pictures of her in general.  She’s very photogenic, and particularly silly, so it’s easy to catch her doing strange and adorable things.  Chester doesn’t really like the camera itself, annoying flashy thing that it is, and Sumi is just hard to see in photos because of her dark coat.

Isn’t she cute?

Basket o'Floof

Smart cat.