I made my own yogurt last night! I am queen of the world!

That is, if being queen of the world means being able to do something that is dead easy and mostly involves waiting around and remembering to set a timer.

I followed the recipe for making yogurt in a crockpot from A Year of Slow Cooking. I wanted to make a nonfat yogurt, as that's what I ( Read more... )

Oh, that was the best minimum-fuss meal I think I've ever had. I slow-cooked a whole chicken in the crockpot all day with some onion, carrots, celery, basil & white wine. When I got home from work, I roasted some tiny baby red potatoes in the oven with olive oil and fresh rosemary, and made gravy from the liquids in the crockpot. The chicken was ( Read more... )

Here at UO, we have a Library Staff Association, which basically just exists to organize fun things for the library staff, and foster goodwill or something. Today is the Spring Sale, one of their handful of annual events; people bring in plants, seedlings, baked goods, handmade stuff, etc. to sell. I'm not actually sure if the money goes to the ( Read more... )

My cold is mostly better. It's been draining for the past week, which is annoying, though it's been so cold and dry that it's hard to tell whether I'm sniffly from that or from a lingering rhinovirus.

A week ago, gaius_de_mare took me out for a celebratory dinner in honor of my new job. He told me we could go wherever I wanted, to which I hemmed and hawed ( Read more... )

I baked a batch of impossible scones this morning. I say impossible, because I had plenty of dry ingredients and things to add flavor, but I've been broke and inventively working through my pantry staples for the past two weeks, which means I've been out of things like milk and butter for a good 10 days now. (Not that I use much butter these days ( Read more... )

( Bloomington Belly Dances )

I had a bunch of veggies that I'd gotten at the farmers' market weekend before last and which needed to be used up. What to do but throw them together into a stirfry? Actually, a lot of other ideas crossed my mind, but stirfry is easy and tasty and I'm a fan of bowl-of-stuff-on-rice, so that's what I did. It came out really really well, so I ( Read more... )

Friday night I played Bach's Cantata 106 ("Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit") in a concert at a local LDS church. It's such a lovely cantata, with two luscious swirly obbligato gamba parts. The concert wasn't bad considering that we had at best maybe 4 hours of rehearsal time, and only ever ran the entire piece once prior to the performance. ( Read more... )

Every night when I feed Schmendrick his dinner, he always stops eating at some point and comes over to thank me. No matter how loud and complainy he's been prior to getting fed, he always stops and comes over to me, purring madly and full of head butts. If I'm sitting down he'll jump up on my lap and snuggle. He generally does this for about 5 ( Read more... )

This past weekend, my big splurge at the farmers' market was to buy a quart of raw cream from one of the local dairies. It's pretty pricey, and they're not allowed to sell raw milk/cream for human consumption, so it was clearly labeled "for pets only." But I've been wanting to make my own butter for a long time now, and I particularly wanted to ( Read more... )