Ray's House of Love Vol III

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Maryn

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I'm making quesadillas for the first time tonight. The recipes I've visited note that when you bake them, the bottom tortilla gets soggy. Their solutions sound messy or impossible. Any tips?

Maryn, pretty sure she cannot flip a 12-inch tortilla with fillings
 

Wye Pen

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I've pulled more than a couple of all nighters as of recent times like yesterday and the day before yesterday therefore it is unreasonable to expect coherence in my posts .
 

Wye Pen

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Dear friends I no longer have an ISP. I am highly reliant on a public libraries, shopping centres, internet cafes, my partner's mobile broadband and such. I don’t know how to hack into peoples wi-fis yet.

I feel like the only person in the whole world that has no personal online access.
 

Wye Pen

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Froma Harrop, out of Providence, is one of my favorite columnists syndicated in the Seattle paper. This morning she writes about climate change making the cold northern latitudes better for growing crops. Overall, she says it will be bad, she's no denier, but in spots there may be pluses. What is the sense of hauling carrots 1800 miles from California to Iowa and have all Iowa's excellent farmland devoted to corn and soybeans for industrial feedlot purposes?
Trevor, locavore when in season

The post caught my eye on this neologism and then I thought to myself what Trevor would grow in Iowa which already grows Corn, Hogs, Soybeans, Cattle and Calves and Chicken Eggs (<-- agricultural statistics taken from the Internet)?


I am locavore too and I like neologisms even though the psychologists ascribe them to a mental disorder of some sort.
 
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Wye Pen

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Me, too. The sweetness of cornbread is a nice contrast to the spice of good jambalaya. We made jambalaya just last Saturday, but no corn bread. I should not eat the carbs, alas!

Ever considered making your own bread? It took a few practice loaves, but I can make a decent loaf of white or whole wheat now. No hairs, even!

Maryn, who may make bread tomorrow morning


Maryn I considered making bread and I bought a bread maker and baked a loaf in it according to a user manual and a small brochure of recipes that came with it.

Needless to say I never got the measure of ingredients right and adding water to it was a particular nuisance.

To my disappointment my bread loaves never looked nowhere near as good as those bread pictures looked on flour packages.


What's more just two days after baking loaves mold started to appear on them and I wondered if it was ok to still eat the mildewed bread like the French eat their mouldy cheeses. I did but I wouldn't recommend it others do.


Any hints?
 
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Wye Pen

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That sounds good.

I have some left over brisket, I think I am going to make steak quesadillas with it.

Do you make tortillas from wheat or corn flour or you buy them at the shop?




[Redundant:
As I understand it a tortilla is made by mixing flour and water together in prescribed amounts and then baking it.
No fungi required to get it rising.]




There are four cooking methods available to you: Frying pan, Oven, Grill and Microwave method.

I'd prefer the microwave method because it is the quickest of all. My motto: Just nuke it.
 
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Maryn

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My older daughter makes tortillas on occasion, but I just buy them. As I remember it, there's flour, salt, water, and lard or vegetable shortening involved, and you end up dusting a large area with flour. That's probably the reason I envision the women of Mexico patting them into shape outside, right? They don't like sweeping and scrubbing any more than I do.

The spores that make bread mold are everywhere, and certain conditions encourage growth. Humidity and warmth are great for bread molds. You can slow or stop it by refrigerating your bread once it's baked. Or eating it much faster.

I'm not a fan of bread machines; when I bake bread I do it all by hand. Sassy, don't you have a bread machine? How do you like it?

My bread recipe is here.

My friend Kate doesn't have internet at home, and there are other AW members I see often who are using internet cafes or libraries to get online. If you have a smartphone you can turn it into a wifi hotspot, although it'll drain the battery. You can put it on the charger and leave it, though. We tried this when we first learned about it, and it works.

Maryn, not tech
 

sassandgroove

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Sorry I didn't see your question about quesadillas. I make them on the stove top on a flat cast iron skillet on medium heat. If the heat is too high the tortillas burn before the cheese melts. I call them quesadillas but so that I can make two and do other things while they are cooking I often roll them up like burritos. If I don't roll them I put the tortilla on the skillet, fill one half, then fold it in half then put the other tortilla on the other side, fill it and fold it in half. But the cheese leaks out when it starts to melt so I started rolling them. I put the ingredients in the middle, fold two sides up, then roll it the other way. I use non stick spray on the pan and then spray the tortilla before I turn it over. I don't know how long on each side. I check and if it's browning I turn it over. I have burned a few in my day.

A lot of times I use chicken, or beef, cheese, salsa and a bit of ranch dressing to cut the spice. We buy chipotle chicken lunch meat for my hubby's lunches and I'll tear it up and put it in there.


Also I buy tortillas. My grandpa made them from scratch but I am happy with buying them. I use flour tortillas.
 
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sassandgroove

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Oh I love my bread machine. Espeically right now since my oven is not working, I can still make bread. When it is working, sometimes I'll just use it to make dough. I never had much luck or enjoyed kneading dough so to me it's wonderful. I know some people think it's cheating but I love it. One year I made gift bread raisin or cranberry cinnamon bread with it at christmas, dividing the dough from the machine in two and making two loaves in the oven. I've had mixed luck with the dried fruit. The cranberries must be too acidic for the yeast, so I learned to wait until it rises once to add those.
I've had good results making dough for cinnamon rolls and pizza dough as well.
 

Maryn

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I bet it's great for pizza dough. Bread dough, you don't want to over-knead since it makes the bread kind of tough, but pizza dough you work and work and work. My poor little arms get tired!

Although maybe I'll just drop in at Komnena's for some pizza with goat cheese.

How's the hip today, Miss Sassy-fras? My knee is troublesome, but manageable. We went walking two days in a row, and it's all right where the ground is flat, but any incline, up or down, and ow!

Of course, every day's paper has obits for people younger than me, so I shouldn't complain. But just try to stop me.

Maryn, whiner of the highest order
 

sassandgroove

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My hip isn't to hip today. I already told Maryn this - I'm going to have hip replacement surgery on June 29. on days like this I wish it was sooner but that works best with my schedule so if you could sned good thoughts and prayers that would be great.
It hurts even on the good drugs the surgeon has given me. :(
I'm looking forward to the outcome but no so much the procedure.
 

Maryn

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I had foot surgery a long time ago. IIRC, I wrote up a little something on what helped during the recovery time. I'll see if I can lay hands on it again. It was mostly tips for crutches and what to have in reach, like that. I don't know much about hip replacement--will you have crutches, a walker, or a Harley for getting around the house?

Maryn, who likes the hog
 

sassandgroove

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I think I'm going to have a walker. I talked to the nurse yesterday, she said they will arrange for a therapist to come to my house 2 days a week. I didn't know that. I'm supposed to be up walking the day after surgery, partly to help prevent blood clots.

My parents are coming to help. Hubby is going to take the week I am in the hospital off, plus a few days after. So I asked my parents to come in first week I'm home, so he can go back to work knowing I am taken care of. That will be nice. I haven't seen them in several years. I do wish we could see each other for fun times but I will be glad to have them here while I'm recovering. But now I feel pressured to clean my house before the surgery.
 

Komnena

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I've taken out close to twenty bags of trash from Roomie's quarters. I don't know what I'm going to do with all his computer cords.
Hope the surgerygoes okay, Sass.
 
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Maryn

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Got an ebay account? Some computer and printer cords are hard to come by. You could sell them in lots you will not break up, and people may buy the lot to get the one they need. Photograph the end that connects to the machine so people can see the pin configuration.

I now have four count 'em four daffodils open. Yesterday I dug the grass out of about two-thirds of my little flower bed (which grows grass way better than it grows flowers, alas), but rain has foiled my plans for finishing the job today. Once that's done, I need to purchase umpteen bags of garden soil to raise the bed a little, since one end of it is sometimes in standing water. Our clay soil drains so poorly. Then I can at last put in flower seeds and cross my fingers.

Maryn, poor gardener
 

Komnena

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I would like to have a few flowers this year but theywould need to be shade lovers. Also I'm not sure I would have the time.
 

calieber

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I don't like bread machines. My parents had one years ago and it made weird loaves.

Anyway, I accidentally walked through the WTC memorial Thursday and was very comforted to realize that no matter how my life goes from here on, I will never do anything as tasteless as that.

Though I suppose I can't be sure nothing I'll do would be considered necrotourism.
 

Maryn

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I have a shade garden in front, where much of the planted area gets no sun at all, not ever. Some plants I've put in, some came with the house. Some the deer like, others are slug favorites, although I can deal with both of those.

I've managed to kill irises, pansies, four o'clocks, and lilies of the valley there. In spring, my daffodils do great, and the snowdrops are not plentiful but they're there. I have no flowering plants in summer.

The ones that do best in this deep shade are
  • Hosta, enjoyed by slugs a lot. A ring of sand at the base of each plant stops them cold. Mt hostas come back every year and all I ever do for them is the sand. Some years the deer eat them when they're just coming up, but most years they leave them alone.
  • Zebra Grass, an ornamental which reaches about 4 feet high in shade. Thrives on zero care once I planted it. I cut it back to about 6 inches in spring. Insects and deer ignore it.
  • Ferns die back if there's drought, but they return without help the next year. They're not naturalizing like I'd hoped, though.
My master plan is to add more ferns until I have achieved ground cover, but that seems unlikely to actually happen.

In a month or so, there's a big sale of plants native to the area. I plan to see what they recommend as easy-care and suitable for hard clay soil and shade.

Maryn, not much of a garden person
 

Maryn

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Setting reasonable goals is important!

I have another yard project for the shade. I bought real cheap little wooden birdhouses at JoAnn and there must be eight or ten different styles. I plan to make moss "paint" which should cover them in three weeks or so. (I'll also be painting the vertical part of our corroded concrete front porch, which is how I learned about this thing with moss.) Next I add garden-decor mushrooms among the little houses. It'll be cute. Maybe even cloyingly cute.

Maryn, ordinarily not into cute, but it beats last years's slime mold
 

Trevor Bruhn

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I think we had a round of hosta puns here a couple years back. So no reprises.
Last weekend the grandson, 8, helped me bottle the Song of the West and then he stuck the labels on. That and had a good baseball game later.


Trevor, basking in sunny 70s
 

Wye Pen

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Good memory matters and you still are able to remember what you did as far back in time as 2011 that is four years ago.

Thanks for the recipe of Honey Bread. I copied / pasted it in a Microsoft Word word processor and checked the statistics:


35mgkqt.png



Amazing.


Just reading through the post I have come to believe that it is too complex and laborious to do all the things required for bread making in such a short time period. Therefore bread machines are the easy way out or you can bake it for me for $10 a loaf. No hairs.


On gardens.

Well the balcony gardening comes to mind and growing potted plants. And think vertical is a good advice too.
 
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