4 things make a post: gardening, various thoughts about food, and work
General life update time:
1. I posted some photos and words about my back porch gardening over on Tumblr. Peppers, tomatoes, and miscellaneous other plants.
2. Tomorrow I plan to attempt oven-roasted asparagus. The weird thing is that when I typed into Google "how to roast" the little window auto-suggested a whole bunch of things about asparagus. How the hell did the algorithm know??? There are many other vegetables I might want to roast! Like zucchini! I roast zucchini quite often! And I'm sure I haven't talked about purchasing asparagus anywhere online or on the phone. Is Google stalking my grocery purchases (and if so, how the hell), or is this just a question a lot of people with similar search histories to mine have been asking lately?
Anyway, I like asparagus.
3. On a vaguely related note, I've been reading First Bite: How We Learn To Eat by Bee Wilson, which has made me retroactively even more grateful to/for my parents than I already was. My mom has very firm ideas about meals, which my dad generally agrees with. These are that breakfasts should ideally contain some kind of fruit in addition to a carbohydrate and a protein, and dinners must include 1 protein, 1 carbohydrate, 1 vegetable, and 1 salad. (She's much less particular about lunches.) When Nick and I were little, the dinner salad was often a fruit salad for general "little kids like fruit" reasons. As we got older (and both developed various degrees of allergic reaction to raw fruits -- mine is more severe than Nick's, which is annoying since I liked fruit more to start with) this switched mostly to green leafy salads, but she's been known to allow coleslaw or various other kinds of Midwest church potluck mayonnaise-based salads.
Mom also firmly believes that sugary junk cereals are a dessert, not a breakfast, and refused to have them in the house. Since my parents also didn't believe in television other than PBS, the evening news, and occasional football games or tennis matches, I didn't see any ads for sugary junk food until I was ten years old, by which time it was too late for me to get habituated to sugary junk cereals. In fact, when I rebelliously tried some Froot Loops at summer camp one time, my reaction was along the lines of "this is like gross cardboard that makes my teeth feel weird; why do people like it??? you should just eat toast instead; at least that tastes like actual food."
My parents did believe in clean plates, but they served moderate portions and began letting me and Nick pick our own serving sizes once we were old enough not to spill things, so we didn't get overfed. They had some sweet snacks around the house, but they were strictly for after-dinner desserts, or maybe two cookies apiece in the afternoon, after which they were repackaged and put back in the pantry.
And Nick and I were still pretty young when we won the "I absolutely refuse to eat this particular food because it's DISGUSTING" battle... but Mom and Dad's concession was that okay, we could refuse Food A, but then we had to substitute another food in the same category that we prepared ourselves. So if I refused to eat creamed spinach? (Which I did. I sat at the dinner table for three hours and just flat would not eat it, and I still stand behind that choice because creamed spinach is AWFUL.) Then I just had to fetch myself some carrot sticks, or, once I got older, steam myself some broccoli or green beans. (Which Mom and Dad were perfectly willing to show me how to do safely.) And when I flatly refused to eat coleslaw or mashed potatoes made from box flake mix, that was fine so long as I made myself a green salad or some pasta by way of substitution.
So I grew up thinking vegetables were fine and was never clear why they were supposed to be yucky... or at least, that was true until I encountered school cafeteria approaches to vegetables, which were much more likely to be "boil it into submission" than "steam it lightly so it's chewy and flavorful." *sigh* But I still knew that vegetables ought to be delicious and the problem was bad cooking rather than any inherent negative quality of the vegetables themselves.
Mom and Dad also believe that making alcohol into a big forbidden thing is a great way to create binge drinkers rather than to create a functional relationship to drinking, so they would always let me and Nick sample a teaspoon of their wine or beer if we asked. Mostly we didn't, because a couple tastes were quite enough for us to go "blegh!" at the flavor, but it did mean we never... hmm... fetishized alcohol as a symbol of adulthood, might be the best way to put it. It's just something you drink with meals, or maybe have a single cocktail now and then as a treat.
This got away from me. Anyway. So far, the book is interesting, and I have good parents. (Perfect parents? No. No such creatures exist. But pretty darn good, all things considered.)
4. Work continues continuing. New Hire 4 and I are working our way through the list of apartments to figure out which ones both need new photographs and are currently available to go take pictures. Some we can't photograph at all this year because either the old tenants renewed for 2019-20 or the new tenants have already moved in, and we don't take photos of occupied apartments because that's creepy and wrong. Some we can't photograph right at the moment because either the old tenants haven't moved out yet or the Maintenance department hasn't finished turnover. But we're making pretty good progress, I think. :)
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1. I posted some photos and words about my back porch gardening over on Tumblr. Peppers, tomatoes, and miscellaneous other plants.
2. Tomorrow I plan to attempt oven-roasted asparagus. The weird thing is that when I typed into Google "how to roast" the little window auto-suggested a whole bunch of things about asparagus. How the hell did the algorithm know??? There are many other vegetables I might want to roast! Like zucchini! I roast zucchini quite often! And I'm sure I haven't talked about purchasing asparagus anywhere online or on the phone. Is Google stalking my grocery purchases (and if so, how the hell), or is this just a question a lot of people with similar search histories to mine have been asking lately?
Anyway, I like asparagus.
3. On a vaguely related note, I've been reading First Bite: How We Learn To Eat by Bee Wilson, which has made me retroactively even more grateful to/for my parents than I already was. My mom has very firm ideas about meals, which my dad generally agrees with. These are that breakfasts should ideally contain some kind of fruit in addition to a carbohydrate and a protein, and dinners must include 1 protein, 1 carbohydrate, 1 vegetable, and 1 salad. (She's much less particular about lunches.) When Nick and I were little, the dinner salad was often a fruit salad for general "little kids like fruit" reasons. As we got older (and both developed various degrees of allergic reaction to raw fruits -- mine is more severe than Nick's, which is annoying since I liked fruit more to start with) this switched mostly to green leafy salads, but she's been known to allow coleslaw or various other kinds of Midwest church potluck mayonnaise-based salads.
Mom also firmly believes that sugary junk cereals are a dessert, not a breakfast, and refused to have them in the house. Since my parents also didn't believe in television other than PBS, the evening news, and occasional football games or tennis matches, I didn't see any ads for sugary junk food until I was ten years old, by which time it was too late for me to get habituated to sugary junk cereals. In fact, when I rebelliously tried some Froot Loops at summer camp one time, my reaction was along the lines of "this is like gross cardboard that makes my teeth feel weird; why do people like it??? you should just eat toast instead; at least that tastes like actual food."
My parents did believe in clean plates, but they served moderate portions and began letting me and Nick pick our own serving sizes once we were old enough not to spill things, so we didn't get overfed. They had some sweet snacks around the house, but they were strictly for after-dinner desserts, or maybe two cookies apiece in the afternoon, after which they were repackaged and put back in the pantry.
And Nick and I were still pretty young when we won the "I absolutely refuse to eat this particular food because it's DISGUSTING" battle... but Mom and Dad's concession was that okay, we could refuse Food A, but then we had to substitute another food in the same category that we prepared ourselves. So if I refused to eat creamed spinach? (Which I did. I sat at the dinner table for three hours and just flat would not eat it, and I still stand behind that choice because creamed spinach is AWFUL.) Then I just had to fetch myself some carrot sticks, or, once I got older, steam myself some broccoli or green beans. (Which Mom and Dad were perfectly willing to show me how to do safely.) And when I flatly refused to eat coleslaw or mashed potatoes made from box flake mix, that was fine so long as I made myself a green salad or some pasta by way of substitution.
So I grew up thinking vegetables were fine and was never clear why they were supposed to be yucky... or at least, that was true until I encountered school cafeteria approaches to vegetables, which were much more likely to be "boil it into submission" than "steam it lightly so it's chewy and flavorful." *sigh* But I still knew that vegetables ought to be delicious and the problem was bad cooking rather than any inherent negative quality of the vegetables themselves.
Mom and Dad also believe that making alcohol into a big forbidden thing is a great way to create binge drinkers rather than to create a functional relationship to drinking, so they would always let me and Nick sample a teaspoon of their wine or beer if we asked. Mostly we didn't, because a couple tastes were quite enough for us to go "blegh!" at the flavor, but it did mean we never... hmm... fetishized alcohol as a symbol of adulthood, might be the best way to put it. It's just something you drink with meals, or maybe have a single cocktail now and then as a treat.
This got away from me. Anyway. So far, the book is interesting, and I have good parents. (Perfect parents? No. No such creatures exist. But pretty darn good, all things considered.)
4. Work continues continuing. New Hire 4 and I are working our way through the list of apartments to figure out which ones both need new photographs and are currently available to go take pictures. Some we can't photograph at all this year because either the old tenants renewed for 2019-20 or the new tenants have already moved in, and we don't take photos of occupied apartments because that's creepy and wrong. Some we can't photograph right at the moment because either the old tenants haven't moved out yet or the Maintenance department hasn't finished turnover. But we're making pretty good progress, I think. :)
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)