In which these are my go-to pizza sauces!
Since I got into #breadin5, I’ve been making a lot of pizza. Here are my favorite pizza sauce recipes.
Tomato Sauce
14 oz can tomatoes
3 – 4 garlic cloves
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
salt & pepper
red pepper flakes
Blend until smooth. If you don’t have balsamic, sub apple cider vinegar and sugar.
Store in a jar in the fridge or freeze.
Feta Sauce
In a grinder, blend until smooth:
Feta cheese
olive oil
garlic cloves
Use on white pizza.
It’s fantastic on dill pickle pizza (dough, feta sauce, mozzarella, dill pickles, and dill weed).
Bianca
Olive oil, minced garlic clove/s, salt. Warm until fragrant.
In which… yeah, idk. It’s a new year. Arbitrary date. Whatever.
I sleep a lot because what else is there to do! Still scrolling Twitter and Instagram and watching massive amounts of streaming TV. Still not reading or knitting or painting. My mending basket looks exactly the same as it has forever.
I cook, work, and do chores. That’s my entire life. Occasionally I attend a virtual satsang or retreat, which is really nice and I’m super grateful for it but still, it’s just me sitting on my living room floor in front of the TV watching a live YouTube stream.
In the past, oh, six months or so, I’ve had a few days of swollen lymph nodes, but like I’ve said before I think it’s related to a dental infection I haven’t yet had addressed. (Specialist is in Walla Walla, transpo’s a bitch. Normally I’d just catch a ride and while away the extra time in a bar or coffee shop, but there’s a pandemic on.)
Last Wednesday I had that tight lung feeling you get right before you wake up sick with influenza, but it went away without getting worse. It’s the second time that’s happened. I don’t know if it’s an immune response or maybe from chain vaping too much. It makes me wonder, though, if I’m asymptomatic — people come into my shop unmasked all the fucking time, plus all my co-workers have other jobs, school, and families. I’m living in rural Oregon and see fewer people in half a year now than I did in a week back in Minneapolis, but I’m still indirectly exposed to hundreds of people I don’t know, and any one of them could be sick.
Last year I went to the dentist for the first time in years and discovered my root canal had failed, which resulted in three more appointments: one to repair the root canal (a fourth root had to be cleared out), another to fill the crown, and then another to replace the crown when it cracked in half. I’ve been stabbed with needles at least two dozen times, since each appointment required full numbing. So many needles, Christ.
At the crown replacement appointment last week, the nurse sneezed. Twice. She was wearing a mask and a couple feet away from me at the time but I was lying there in the chair thinking, “Well, that moment right there could be me dead.” It’s a weird way to live, with the knowledge in the back of your head that anybody you interact with could potentially kill you.
I read a lot of medical Twitter and it’s fucking awful. Hospitals all around the world are over capacity, which means if you get in a car accident or have a heart attack, you might not get treatment. So even if you avoid COVID-19, it might kill you anyway.
Then there’s acute Covid. Click this and read the thread to get scared shitless:
And Long Covid? Holy shit. Organ failures. Amputations. Strokes, embolisms. Breathlessness. Fatigue. It’s looking like for each of our 350k dead, there are another 16 or so who may be permanently disabled? (That’s 5,600,000 possibly PERMANENTLY DISABLED FROM COVID-19 IN THIS COUNTRY ALONE so far.) And motherfuckers are out there refusing to wear a piece of cloth over their faces?
I can imagine being disappointed, after decades of, say, zealous survival prepping, that your moment of sacrifice isn’t the zombie apocalypse, but merely a call to wash your hands. But holy shit these people are DUMB. AS. FUCK. They deny reality and fight about “the economy” like it’s a law of nature and not just a human construct. And the rampant ableism and willingness to sacrifice human life is truly disgusting: people with asthma and diabetes can live entirely normal lives with some drugs, they don’t deserve to die of a PREVENTABLE DISEASE because something-something “the economy” and “pre-existing conditions.”
Reading the Faces of Covid account should be fucking mandatory. It’s not “just” old people and sick people, it’s hundreds of thousands of people dead that shouldn’t be.
And then there’s a the vaccine rollout. So fucked up ALREADY that doses are spoiling before being administered, and so slowly that at this rate we won’t have herd immunity for seven more years.
Oh, and only $1,800 stimulus in NINE MONTHS. That’s it. It’s a fucking farce.
And here’s me, snug and safe. I feel weird about how protected I am during all this. I don’t deserve to be, considering I contribute fuck-all to the overall wellbeing of the world, but I have a small job in a small town, and so does my SO. We have plenty of money. We have a really comfortable home. None of this is hurting me directly, and yet somehow I can still have compassion for everybody else.
Uh, I own three tablecloths now. I really like having our own washer & dryer. I mastered falafel in the past year, as well as bread. I have discovered that I love French raclette. I got a raise. I bought some clothes I’ve always wanted (most specifically this, in cocoa!!! expensive as hell, but hand-made and I loooove it). I get three days off per week, like I’m some sort of goddamned royalty. My fountain pen collection is still cool as hell. Christmas was fine. My SO is walking around wearing his black & red bathrobe like a boss.
I don’t know. I guess happy new year and stay safe out there, babies.
In which these are notes to myself.
MASA
stir together
3 cups maseca nixta masa
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp freshly ground cumin
1/2 tsp salt
mix in
6 tbsp vegetable oil
add
6 c water
2 tbsp knorr soup base paste
mix until fluffy, 5 minutes
Instant Pot, high pressure, 20-25 minutes, natural release
SAUCE FOR CHICKEN TAMALES
boil
2 c water
2 chile arbol
6 misc small dried red chiles
1-2 cloves garlic
remove to blender and blend until smooth
heat
1 tsp vegetable oil in a sauce pan
return blended mix to pan, simmer until reduced
add s&p and/or sugar to taste
force through a sieve, cool
mix with shredded chicken for chicken tamales
SALSA DE TOMATE
water
garlic
tomatoes
(chicken) bouillon cube
s&p
oil
onion
bell pepper
In which I’ve put the fall leaves window clings up, and am looking forward to cardigan weather!
Not much to report, really. I’m just blogging because it was on my to do list and I’d rather do this than run the vacuum.
I work, I hang out at home. That’s about it. I stepped into the Mexican restaurant last week to pick up some carry out, and stopped at the corner store a couple times, but other than that I’m only ever in the two buildings. We’ve been ordering carry-out groceries from Walmart for months.
Garden’s nearly over. Didn’t get much produce, which is okay. Three or four cucumbers, which were utterly delicious. Two I made into refrigerator pickles. A few handfuls of cherry tomatoes I’ve just used here and there, and only a couple beefsteak tomatoes so far (but there are three nearly ripe I’m looking forward to). Am planning to add a bunch of mulch to the beds and hopefully turn and mix them thoroughly after I pull out the plants after the first freeze. The soil’s packed and water doesn’t really soak in, and though the plants are reasonably healthy they don’t seem robust.
Work’s still great. The owners are amazing people, the work is fun to me (I genuinely enjoy cutting and packaging cheese, and average about thirty-five pounds a day). The staff these days is a couple of dudes and a couple of high school kids, so I get to tell people to clean up after themselves and do their own dishes before they leave, but it could be worse. People who don’t close rarely think to put their shit away without being told, it’s just how the world works.
Still utterly in love with Inland Empire weather. Proper spring! PROPER FALLL! The days are warm, the nights are cool, leaves are turning slowly, perfect sleeping weather! Minneapolis is a cool city, but my God the weather fucking sucks in comparison. I asked my better half if he’s starting to find the mild weather out here boring, and he replied that he still loves not having to drive in blizzards five months a year. So that’s good! I suppose if he gets missing real winter, we could chain up the Jeep and go drive in the Blues until he gets over it.
I turned 52 last week. Had been mentally planning a big blog post but when the day came realized I didn’t really give a shit. There’s a lot about aging-while-female nobody ever told me, sure, but when it comes down to it even I don’t want to listen to myself bitch about how weird it is to be old. Dry feet, sagging skin, aches, fat that won’t budge. All the weird menopausal atrophy is weird as hell, but other than being briefly distressing it’s just what it is: if you somehow manage not to die young, you get to witness your reproductive system shutting down. Getting uglier every day sucks, and how much stuff just hurts for no good reason other than being old is pretty shocking, but hey, it’s all downhill from here!
Watching tons of TV. Tons. Like, hours and hours every single day. Some nighttime soap garbage called ‘Chicago Fire,’ basically anything on BritBox, crap on Amazon, Netflix, YouTube. The volume of TV I’ve been watching is astonishing, and I keep buying books so I will read instead, but then I don’t read! I have at least ten books piled up, too.
I have a pair of socks and a pair of felted slippers to finish knitting, but they’re just sitting there in the basket. Haven’t touched ’em since, what, June? July?
My phone started failing to connect to wifi and cell at random but frequent intervals, so after a reasonable amount of resetting and basic troubleshooting, I bought a new one. I hate the massive waste that is the entire cell phone industry, but man, I use the shit out of my cell phone. And getting a shiny new one really is a lovely feeling.
I do my best. I recycle, I compost, I mend my clothes. I eat my leftovers. I try to buy stuff in minimal packaging where possible. I make sincere efforts to keep plastic waste to a minimum at work. But I still keep buying new phones every two years… mostly because they stop fucking working after two years, they’re built to fail.
Still in love with this house. It’s perfect, even the weird bits (like the garage built directly over the kitchen window). It’s comfortable, cute, a perfect size, clean, and everything works. The oven hood burns through appliance bulbs, but that’s really the only issue — everything else works perfectly. The kitchen would benefit from another grounded outlet or two, but it’s workable. Love the location, and the neighborhood’s quiet enough; incredibly quiet compared to the Uptown apartment!
I’d intended to have my mother, aunt, and grandmother over for tea this spring, and also to have thrown a housewarming party after we’d finished furnishing the place, but pandemics happen. We’ve been here a year now and have had a grand total of five guests, one of which was my brother’s dog. People keep making noises about gathering together, but I just think it’d be stupid. We’re all bored of not having social lives, and I’d love to hang out with people, but without rapid testing I feel it’s too dangerous. Imagine having tea with your relatives and accidentally killing one of them because you caught fucking Coronavirus from some redneck at work and didn’t know it? No thanks.
Apropos of nothing, here’s an easy and spectacularly delicious egg dish:
Baked Chile Rellenos
adapted from Lazy Chiles Rellenos
Mix together:
5 eggs
2 c. milk
1/2 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne
salt & pepper, to taste
Pour into an 11×9″ casserole.
Stir in:
1/3 lb grated Monterey jack cheese
1 4oz can diced fire roasted green chiles
1 4oz can diced jalapeno peppers
Place casserole onto a cookie sheet and put in an oven preheated to 325F. Pour hot tap water into the cookie sheet until it’s full.
Bake for 40 minutes.
Serve with steamed corn tortillas, rice, and beans, or fold into a burrito.
In which it’s my day off.
He burned another personal day to sleep in, which is his choice, of course, but I’m still aggro about the year he didn’t have any time off left when I wanted us to go on a trip together, so I rolled my eyes at him. Like, he never does anything with his PTO, he just uses it to do absolutely nothing. (Such a weird person, why not save it up for a week away somewhere? We could rent a lake cabin and get drunk somewhere other than our house!)
I made refrigerator pickles because we have several cucumbers from the vine Embo gave me this spring.
Also made a pot of beans, and dough so I could bake bread, and espresso for an iced latte.
Did my nails. Did the remaining dishes after he loaded and ran the dishwasher. Ate some weird leftovers out of the fridge for lunch, just to get rid of them.
Watched the latest episode of Wild Bill on Britbox. Good show.
Smoke has cleared but there’s still a faint wildfire scent, blue skies today, mild and tinged with autum. The apple orchard next door is ready for harvest any day now, likely its last as I’ve heard it’s been sold and will be dug up and put into grapes next year.
Assholes still come into the store every single day without masks on. I’m too burnt out after six months of worry to genuinely feel much anger about it, I just make a point of standing uncomfortably far away until they mask up. Luckily it’s a fairly large shop and there are rarely more than a few people in it, so the social awkwardness of me being twelve feet away (and I back up if they try to come closer) tends to work. Like, I’m friendly as hell, and I love talking about cheese and cheesemaking, but I’m not going to let your dumb ass in my airspace without a mask. Because if you’re not wearing a mask, you’re sure as fuck not distancing and you’ve probably seen hundreds of people in the past two weeks.
Here’s tonight’s dinner:
Basically a riff on this recipe. Made the beans from dried, baked the bread, grew the parsley and cherry tomatoes, and the cheese and rinds were from work (I didn’t make the cheese, but I did some of the affinage and the packaging!).
In which I picked the first fully-ripe beefsteak tomato of the year yesterday, and used it in a sandwich today.
Yum.
In which saving teeth is far from cheap.
The pandemic started and I kept getting money. Not complaining, but it was a bit baffling: the stimulus check, then two aunts and an uncle sent cash, bless them, and then a Minnesota tax refund I’d forgotten about filing for appeared. All told, a few grand.
And then I went to the dentist and figured out what the windfall was for.
I spent about $400 on x-rays, an exam, and n really intense cleaning, then another $1,400 at the periodontist on saving an old root canal, and tomorrow another couple hundred getting the crown fixed.
Next month, another grand at the endodontist saving yet another tooth.
And after that, all my surprise pandemic money will be spent! I’m glad I could afford all this as otherwise I probably would have had two teeth pulled, and I guess having teeth is better than not having them.
In which too many are not, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into, taking this shit seriously.
Half the customers in the cheese shop these past few weeks have been tourists. White people on vacation to wine country, visiting tasting rooms, hotels, restaurants, and my place of work in sleepy little rural Oregon, for the purpose of “stimulating the economy” and getting drunk and, possibly, spreading a killing, maiming disease to a bunch of service workers who have no choice but to show up at work and pull a paycheck to make those ends meet.
Mask-wearing in my shop in general is now over 90%, but I had a customer last week whose mask was, I shit you not, beaded, and made of sheer, lavender gauze. Decorative, but completely useless. An agree-to-comply-but-don’t-comply fuck you to everyone with whom the damn woman comes into contact. Including me.
Fuck her. Seriously. And everyone like her.
I smoked for 31 years. So I’m not eligible for a lung transplant, you ignorant bitch. Enjoy your non-essential impulse buys!
I don’t blame people who go to work sick because they have to, but nobody has to bring six fucking people into a goddamned cheese shop in BFE wearing a useless mask. That’s just being an ignorant, selfish, childish asshole.
Look at this goddamned map; click through and read:
The majority of the nation is in “uncontrolled spread” of Covid-19. Let me state that you do NOT “need” to:
– go to fuckin’ Disney
– go to large parties (sorry about your enormous wedding, but shit happens)
– come to my county as a fucking tourist during a pandemic
– fly somewhere just for fun
– get your hair or nails done
– hang out maskless in any public space (not even you drunk fucks smoking outside the Elks)
– go to games or concerts.
FFS, you need to stay HOME except for essential activities. Groceries, health care, funerals maybe. Essential work. Not vacations and shopping and dining out.
Shut shit down, send the “menial” (but SO essential) low-paid, high-risk service workers home, and give them money to live on. We can afford it. Mail the fucking checks, every month. Meanwhile, institute contact tracing and rapid testing and all the shit we failed, stupidly, to do the first goddamned time.
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FOUR THOUSAND DEAD HUMAN BEINGS in this country, you absolute shitheads. If we put all those dead bodies in coffins and stacked them up, it would be a cube 3.24 miles per side. Imagine a cube more than three miles per side in the center of your city: THOSE ARE OUR COVID DEAD.
My county, Umatilla, has been shut back down to baseline as of tomorrow at noon because we’re at 234.4 cases per 10,000 people:
It’s not just live or die with this virus. Those who live are, evidence is beginning to show, often very fucked up. There are people who may never breathe properly again. I saw several who presented two months after getting over a mild case only to die in the hospital of sudden cardiac arrest. Victims report exhaustion and weakness and fatigue for months and months.
There are people who had mild or asymptomatic versions of this disease in March who are now presenting with lung damage and blood clots. There have already been lung transplants and amputations and heart failure.
This thing’s been here for barely half a year, we know very little about it. It’s not the fucking flu; the flu doesn’t turn your blood to sludge and ruin your heart and lungs like this shit does.
Stay home as much as you can. Wear a mask when you can’t, and wash your FUCKING hands.
I don’t know how to convince you to care about other people.
In which THERE WAS AN EXPENSIVE DENTAL PROCEDURE.
Last week, on a whim, I called the dentist across the street from the one that keeps postphoning my appointments, and they got me in TWO HOURS LATER. This place doesn’t take my insurance, but my insurance doesn’t cover most of what I need anyway, so what the hell.
They took tons of images and then the hygienist went to town on my teeth. (My whole mouth hurt for hours that evening.) The doctor told me my root canal and the tooth below it both have issues, and gave me two referrals to specialists.
Went to an endodontist today and he put a bunch of drills, soldering irons, and glue guns into my mouth over the period of an hour or so.
I got three shots of local, which, of course, felt weird as hell for hours, and then a lot of drilling and weird sensations, noises, and smells. The local made me (I think?) feel really gacked for about 40 minutes. (It could have been anxiety, but I didn’t feel particularly anxious as much as like I’d done a rail of mediocre coke.) The gacked feeling wore off after awhile, and in general there was discomfort but no real pain.
The staff were all excellent and the music was, I was informed, a station called something like “French Cooking.” I was relieved it was anything but a local country station.
The doctor asked me what was up with the roof of my mouth; there’s a big bruise or spot there. Not sure what it’s from, but I think I burned myself eating pizza while drunk last weekend? Who knows; my mouth is a bit of a mess.
I got the root canal originally nine or ten years ago and apparently a root was missed, so today the doctor dug it out and cleared the forth root.
It cost $1,700. (So that’s much of the stimulus and various checks from aunts and uncles I’ve gotten during Covid-19 gone.) I don’t know that I’ve ever paid seventeen hundred dollars for a single thing in my life; thank God I had it available.
I got a prescription for a week’s worth of antibiotics, but just realized now I forgot to go pick them up. Will have to do so tomorrow.
Have to go back to my regular dentist to get the crown finished; right now it’s just rough and weird-feeling. And after THAT I have to get ANOTHER tooth looked at by another specialist as there’s a pocket of infection that needs to come out. I’ve already spent two grand; by the time this is all ship shape I’ll be out four grand, probably.
I’d better live long enough to make keeping these teeth worth it!
In which there’s cheese!
I ordered the gift box from Alemar again. (Their cheese is so good! Plus they treat me right when I order and usually throw in something extra and fun, like curds or toma. Last order had cream cheese, which I used in some yummy pasta!) When it arrived, back in the end of May, neither the brie nor camembert were ready, so I took them to work and left them in the cave to mature.
Brought the camembert home Saturday and just got around to bread baking today, so, here it is!
(Yes, I realize you can do things with camembert other than just eat it with good, crusty bread, but I don’t care about those things.)
Soft, ripe camembert is a DELIGHT and a TREASURE and I ADORE it. Alemar’s camembert is really fantastic, but if you get a wheel that doesn’t give when you gently press the center, do hold it until it’s soft (ideally at a humidity-controlled 50 or so degrees, but a regular fridge will do if you have a few months). It’s absolutely worth the wait!
I keep ordering from Alemar because I love their cheese, they ship to my house, and even though I work in a cheese shop we don’t make bloomy rind cheeses and rarely have them in stock long when I do get to order them. (Embo and I usually end up buying at least half ourselves!)
I’d love to carry local soft rind cheeses, but can’t find any Oregon or Washington creameries that work with our distributor or ship. Few things more lovely than a creamy, glossy brie or camembert. Yum.
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4 random books from my Library!
