It should arrive Friday, according to the (helpful) guy there, so they should have it in plenty of time.
* Am back at Grading Zero until tomorrow. (But tomorrow's thing - the soils lab reports - will be fast to grade). This grading was a largely-essay exam and it was...stressful...because there are a couple students in there who either don't give a flip, or have poor study skills and are covering it up with what looks like indifference, and as the kind of person who gives a hard damn about everything, I find that kind of "I'm gonna slide through life easy" attitude wears on me.
But at least it's done.
* I am almost done with the "Chucko's Hat" - a simple bulky weight hat I am making for myself. I worked on it during the exam today because I was so close to done with the sleeve on Augusta I was afraid I wouldn't have enough knitting for the 75 minute period.
cooler weather can come back any time now. We had a heat index of 93 here today.
* I made meatballs:
Photo taken before cooking; I was waiting for the oven to pre-heat. It's a pretty simple recipe and a new one for me out of an old book - it's from that Mickey Mouse and Friends cookbook I've discussed before:
Yup. Lady and the Tramp's spaghetti and meatballs. Whoever planned out this book had a lot of fun with it.
And it is just fun and nice and it makes me happy that I still have the book all these years later. I remember when I got it - it was around 1975. My dad and I were shopping at the BEST store (that big warehouse store place) and I had received the Winnie-the-Pooh cookbook for Christmas the year before and I was liking it and my dad saw this and asked me if I wanted another cookbook of my own, and he bought it for me.
And I love it. Even though it's juvenile, I love it for several reasons:
- it reminds me of the happier parts of my childhood, that my parents understood my interests and respected them and wanted to encourage me (I liked to cook and bake when I was a kid)
- The recipes are simple but they are solid. Very few of them use pre-made things; they are by and large mostly-from-scratch. The cake is a "real" cake, not from a mix. (Well, a few of the desserts use pudding mix and I guess they use pre-made spaghetti sauce in some things, but there is also a recipe on doctoring it up to make it better)
- there are variations: a different addition to the basic cupcake for each of the Seven Dwarfs, different things to add to the "Sherwood Forest Scrambled Eggs" based on what each character might like, and so on. It encouraged creativity in the kids cooking.
- The tone is fun. This recipe gently reminds you to wash your hands first because you shape the meatballs with your hands.
- Most of the recipes I've tried have been pretty good. The brownies aren't as good as the recipe out of Betty Crocker's Cooking for Two (though that might also be because that's the recipe my mom ALWAYS made so it's what I think of as the ur-brownie).
And there's just something comforting about being able to pull out a simple recipe in big type* in a brightly colored book and make food without too much fuss.
(*I probably need to get in and get my eyes checked; I think my close up vision has declined a little more and it may be time for a new prescription)
* Jane Brocket has started blogging again after a long break. It was total serendipity that I stumbled across it; I was checking to see if that link had rotted but NO! New posts!. I am delighted because her blogging was always a comfort to me with its pretty, bright photographs and nice things - rock buns and quilts and socks and enjoyable literature and gentle travel and all those things.
She notes, in her first post back (from July):
blogs and blogging have been through so many cycles and changes that I don't even know if individuals are still blogging for the fun of it and in order to record, organise and share their thoughts, ideas, creations. Although every business and corporate entity now seems to have a dreary blog, I sense a little spark of creativity and individuality returning to the blogging world with people re-realising just how liberating and exciting a personal blog can be.
Blogs are dead! Long live blogs! (I hope. I would love to see personal craft blogs come back more). I get that some people decided it was not for them, and others got bored or busy, and gave it up, and doubtless some people were doing it when "it was the thing to do" and they flitted off to something else when it was no longer the thing to do.
But I guess I am kind of like the Trufflehunter the Badger in Prince Caspian: "I'm a beast, I am, and a Badger what's more. We don't change. We hold on."
And no, I don't change. When I find something I like and that matters to me, I hold on to it.
(And yes, I agree with her on the "dreariness" of some corporate blogs. I have seen some personal blogs transition to "buy my stuff" blogs and....I kind of quit reading them, then. OH, it's one thing to have a link to your shop, but if your every post is going to be a sales post, I lost interest quickly).
So I hope Ms. Brocket has many more lovely ideas to blog about in the coming months; I look forward to making her blog a regular stop again.
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