Sculpin

I’m pretty sure that staying up late with a cup of Theraflu and reading Disturbing Auctions is not the wisest thing I’ve ever done. Some of these things are serious nightmare material. I mean, agh! And gah!

I may still depend on Theraflu to help me stop coughing long enough to get to sleep, but as of today I’m finally back in the land of the living. Why, today I left the house! And had fun! Thanks to Karl and Sue for having Josh and me up to their place to watch the Royal Rumble.

Not too long ago I said, “Don’t make me break out the onion soup, virus. I will kick your tiny, multitudinous ass.” Well, I broke out the onion soup after all. Grrr. Die, virus, die.

This would be French onion soup, but I don’t use beef stock and if I’m sick I don’t put a cheesy crouton on top. Okay, once in a blue moon I’ll toss in some boughten demi-glace, but I haven’t found a canned beef broth that isn’t icky and I can’t be bothered to make my own, so chicken or vegetable stock it is.

It was a pleasure to use my newly sharpened chef’s knife to make this simple:

Onion Soup

butter
olive oil
salt
2 red onions, thinly sliced; I prefer half-moons
2 cups chicken stock
about 1/4 cup red wine
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
fresh thyme
pepper

Throw a pinch of salt over the onions and caramelize them in a little butter and olive oil. This can take about 45 minutes to an hour depending on the onions, the heat of the stove, etc.

(NB: if you’re going to put in an hour or so caramelizing onions, you might as well caramelize a few more and stash them in the freezer at this point. They freeze well, in my experience.)

Tie the thyme in a bundle or put it in a big tea infuser. Add it to the onions with all the other ingredients and simmer about 10 or 15 minutes until the flavors are blended. Be sure to scrape up the tasty bits of fond from the bottom of the pot, of course.

Makes one enormous bowl, which you can eat slowly, cursing cold viruses and/or your fate.

I’m in Day 4 or 5 of a nasty cold, with fever and coughing and weakness and all those things. I’m just well enough to be out of bed, which has its good points and its bad points. When I’m asleep, I can’t do anything stupid. When I’m awake and slightly mobile, though — I swear, raise my temperature a little and my judgment is the first thing to go. I start getting random bad ideas, and it is only my restricted ability to carry out these ideas that has kept me from, say, burning my house down. As the fever seems to wiggle the contrast and brightness knobs of the universe, I get a wee bit over-enthusiastic. I think of this as the “best squirrel ever” effect.

I am, I think, catching on to this a little. For instance, I did not spoon Vick’s Vapo-Rub into my bath today to find out if it’d be a good bath oil. And though trying to flambé the tomatoes might have been a fine idea, this was not the day for it.

The “More Powerful Than France” rule reflects a pet peeve of a lot of people who play Illuminati: New World Order. Lately I’ve been reading up on the history of leprosy, and I think I now have a similar comparison-rule for my own life: if reading about medieval leprosy would be preferable to whatever activity I am undertaking, I should take a good long look at whether that activity is worth doing.

I must preen a bit more, because I’m still proud of some of the stuff I’ve been doing in Werdle lately, especially highlights of the Aeneid in words of one syllable and my very first try at the Anguish Languish. I’m loving the return of Werdle to my life. Thanks to everybody who’s playing!

Pretty soon I’ll get back to Cinderella without the letter e. The really virtuosic performance in that category is undeniably Grouchy Chris’s e without e.

Anguish completely fried my language centers for a few minutes. After spending a while tearing my hair out over those four cheatin’ little lines, I went to ask Josh something and my question came out sounding as if I were talking in some crazy variant of eggy-peggy. Near-total gibberish. Awesome.

You know eggy-peggy? Like this: “Eggi pleggedge eggalleggegeggiance teggo thegge fleggag…” Okay, that might be an unusually unwieldy example.

If language is a virus, Anguish is a prion.

I’m still pretty sore from yoga yesterday. We did a series of standing poses: trikonasana, then trikonasana against the wall (concentrating on the back leg), then a preparation for utthita parsvakonasana (my current yoga nemesis), then prep for virabhradrasana I. By the time I was done with that, I was so tired that, when savasana time came around, it took a few seconds before I was able to figure out how to put my socks on. I wasn’t quite sure what they were, though I knew they had something to do with cold feet. I just looked at them and thought, “They are floppy tubes. One end is shut. Mrr?”

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A crack team of City Light tree trimmers is here at last. They have to take out a good half of each conifer that was planted under the powerlines just on our neighbor’s side of the property line. (Only an idiot would have planted those trees there.) I’m delighted to see them; we’ve lost telephone service a few times because of those stupid trees. They’ve been growing right into the telephone boxes. If they were my trees, they would have gotten the chainsaw cure a long time ago and been replaced by trees of reasonable size.

The tree guys are charming. They are fans of Señor Wences. I keep hearing, “S’aright?” “S’aright!” They also enjoy talking like pirates. Yarr! Ahoy, there! Aye, me matey, arrrrrrr. It isn’t Talk Like A Pirate Day already, is it? Or is every day Talk Like A Pirate Day? Or does it mean they’ve found a crows’ nest?

They’ve certainly got a nice day for it. No wonder they’re giddy. It’s sunny and 62 degrees Fahrenheit, which is plain bizarre. I have all the windows open so the house can air out.

The other day we saw what I think was a merlin hanging out in the plum tree out back. It was a very wet day, and the merlin didn’t look happy at all.

I hope the photos come out.

update: Josh has some photos up in his gallery. That is one wet bird.

I made a simple vegetable soup the other day, and I’ll make it again. I sweated a mirepoix of a small onion, a little carrot, and one rib of celery (all finely diced), then added a bit less than a pint of chicken broth, a 15-oz can of tomatoes and juice (crushing the tomatoes in my hands), some good organic green beans, a handful of frozen spinach, two tablespoons of alphabet pasta, a little pepper, lots of thyme, and a splash of balsamic vinegar.

I like the spinach in this, but Mr. Sculpin doesn’t. Yes, okay, it’s a little bitter. But it’s good for you, and this way I’ll actually eat it.

I can’t believe it took me this long to learn to cut an onion efficiently. My knives are too dull, and I too ham-handed, to dice them the usual way. So instead of cutting the onion in half, I cut it in quarters, slice each quarter lengthwise, turn 90 degrees, slice lengthwise again, slice crosswise. Easy. (We’re finally getting our knives sharpened this week, which is perhaps more exciting to me than it ought to be.)

Just testing this wordpress -> LJ thing and getting used to wordpress. Please don’t mind me. I’ll be fiddling around for a while.

I am way proud of some of the things I’ve done in Werdle. Though I do of course see a couple of ways they could be improved. (Join us!)