Sunday Morning Roundtable

I keep trying to come up with schemes that will get me back to a half dozen things I've let fall by the wayside--this lonely little blog being one of them--but. Yes, but; we can all in fill in the blanks, I imagine.

The biggest issue has been exercise: In early March, I think it was, I had a week or ten days of some kind of outing nearly every night, plus all the stuff at work, and I just stopped working out. Again. For several weeks. I picked it back up again about two weeks ago, and I'm working on not berating myself, because, frankly, that kind of self-talk doesn't get anywhere. Same with the yoga. Am I doing it every day? Nope. I can find time to sit and provide a lap for the cat; I can find time to zone out with a computer game or tv game, but yoga? Not so much, apparently. But, again, I'm trying to get back to it, two sun salutations at a time.

One thing that helps is that I know how much better I feel when I get regular exercise. It's subtle--perhaps because I walk more in my daily life than many people so am not a complete slug all the time?--but I notice it.

Yesterday morning featured an exercise in another type of futility: I bought a DVR from friends, months ago, but I have been completely unable to set it up to record. What with the TV, the HD cable box, and the DVR, there are about 473 wires hanging all over the place, and I still cannot get the fucking thing to work properly--or at all, actually. So I'm going to throw up my hands and spend the extra $10/month and just get the cheap version of Tivo. Fuck it. It's not that I actually want or need to record anything for posterity, in general, I just want to be able to watch, say, the formula 1 races without having to get up at 2 am to do so. And the DVR works just fine as a DVD player, so it's not a total waste. Yes, over the course of the year it's probably more expensive, but it also means I don't have to buy disks, which ain't cheap, and I'm sure it'll be fine.

This morning, however, I've been busily assembling food items. I wanted to make a semolina sesame bread, but one formula didn't use any kind of preferment at all, and another formula used starter, which I don't have, so I settled on a preferment overnight. I used a combination of white whole wheat and semolina flours--about half and half--with about 10% bread flour thrown in. I added some powdered milk, but no fat. I decided to let the dough rise a second time after shaping, which is what it's doing now; we'll see how this all comes out.

I also hacked up onions, carrots, celery, garlic, and a venison roast, and threw in some cloves, fire-roasted tomatos, red wine, and fresh rosemary, along with something from my freezer that I'm pretty sure was oven-roasted tomatos. That's what it looked like, anyway, but I can't tell for sure. That will simmer all day, and I'm going to make some fresh pasta later and ladle some of the stew, along with some quickly sauteed greens (I think I have some beet greens in the freezer) and some grated parmesan or pecorino over top.

Last night, while out for dinner, I had some panna cotta that had cherries that had been macerated in simple syrup and balsamic vinegar, so I threw some of that sauce together, too. If it's too sweet or too sour or something, I also have some citrus simple syrup and some lemon rinds in it, so that will help. And I have some lemon cakes in the freezer that should be used up, so it looks like there will be dessert tonight, too.

Probably won't suck too much, though I suppose it might.

The other nice thing about all of this is that it once again uses up stuff that's been sitting around and needed using; that always makes me feel a little virtuous. Plus? It makes room for more stuff. The CSA share is starting up again in a couple of weeks, so I need to make sure last year's stuff is out of the freezer. (Ideally I'd like to defrost the freezer, but that's probably beyond my capacities at the moment.)

I'll try to post pics, or at least a taste report.