Sculpin

My piscivorous friends, this one you must try: Pelican Packers tuna. Now, I am not generally a great fan of fish, but every so often I like some tuna, and it’s nice to have on hand. I had a SPUD box that was a bit under the line for free delivery, so I thought I’d try a can. What the heck. I was charmed by the small size of the operation, and the fish is troll-caught younger tuna, which tend to be much lower in mercury and higher in omega-3 fatty acids.

Oh. My. God. I think it was even better than the fresh tuna I had in Kiribati. It’s an entirely different critter from supermarket canned tuna, even the relatively decent stuff. Josh and I split a 3.5 oz can. Yeah, it’s expensive, but it’s so excellent that half of one of those little cans is satisfying. Though we were certainly going to get every last bit of it we could:

Cam: <brandishing bread> “I’ve never even been tempted to mop up the last bits from a tuna can with a bit of bread before.”
Josh: <looks jealous, then hangs head> “I licked my plate.”
Cam: <cackling> “Me too!”
Josh: “I mean, I was really going at it. It was shameful.”

No shame. I’m just glad I thought of the bread thing first. (Josh says, “Damn you!”) This stuff is mindblowingly good.

I now understand a lot of tuna recipes that once baffled me. Pasta puttanesca with tuna, for instance, always seemed like a lousy thing to do to a perfectly innocent plate of spaghetti, but now I’m understanding how it could be delicious. Or fagioli al tonno — sounds awful when you consider the usual fishy mush that passes for canned tuna, but with this stuff, I imagine it could be excellent.

I think I’ll order a case tomorrow.

Some safety advice I think I can follow, from Seattle City Light:

“Be careful with ladders! Don’t stand higher than the top two steps…”

Standing higher than the top two steps would be quite a trick.

I made noodles today for the first time in about fifteen years. I’d lost my old recipe and then gotten confused about the kinds of flour one should use — AP? durum semolina? a mix? — after reading a couple of well-regarded texts that disagreed on this point. So for a while I’d just thrown up my hands and said heck with it, and let my pasta machine sit idle.

Well, three eggs to two cups of all-purpose flour works fine for me. Those are the Cook’s Illustrated proportions. Oddly enough, their recipe includes no salt; I’ll toss in a pinch next time. And it’d be nice to add some whole wheat flour to the mix for health reasons.

The noodles are delicious — sort of silky and a little chewy. They were tasty enough with just butter and cheese, but I think I might like them even better in vegetable chow mein, perhaps rolled just one setting thicker on the pasta machine. I have no idea how to make chow mein, but surely it can’t be that hard, right?

So, that’s one thing I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Next up: making my own tortillas.

From a recent conversation:

Cam: “Polar bears are drowning because of global warming.”
Cam’s mom: “Oh, that is very sad. I like polar bears. I was thinking about flying to Churchill to see them.”
Cam: *head explodes*

When my eyeballs returned to their sockets, I mentioned Green Tags. It’s tricky, because I do not want to come across as a sanctimonious eco-bitch. Though, yes, I’ll cop to being one.

And speaking of eco-stuff, I’m happy to say that Josh and I have reduced our natural gas use about 5% compared to this time last year, though the average daily temperature has been colder. Mostly, I think, it’s because we bought a snuggly wool comforter and have been cranking the heat down a good ways at night. It adds up to an almost 25% reduction in natural gas use compared to December 2003. I think we can get it down some more, too, without changing our habits too significantly.

Think good thoughts for me and mine, please. A lifelong friend and mentor, who had grown very thin and weak, went in to the doctor’s office this morning at my mother’s insistence, and never reported back. My mother called me late this afternoon to get the number of the hospital where the office is located. She, too, hasn’t reported back. This isn’t like either of them. I’m concerned. It’s tragedy season, and I find myself preparing for the worst.

ETA: she’s reported back now, but our good friend hasn’t been located. They seemed to have heard of him in the ER; that’s all I know.

ETA some more: the lost has been found. He was whisked into the ER, then transferred to another hospital and will undergo surgery today. This is good. I mean, as good as emergency abdominal surgery is likely to be.

To the best of my knowledge, my mom doesn’t read this journal, so I can talk about this here: I hope this shallot pesto works out. I’ve had a grouchy, grouchy day, full of plastic kitchen chopping appliances that get stuck or refuse to assemble appropriately — how I hate these things. Today was going to be Cook Everything Day, but I decided it was best to do just one thing and then back away from the kitchen slowly before I burned the house down or something. It’s that kind of day.

Finally I managed to get all the horrible little spring-loaded pieces of the minichopper assembled more-or-less correctly and made a roasted shallot pesto: roasted organic shallots, a little garlic from my own garden, salt and pepper, toasted skinned hazelnuts, olive oil, and Washington red wine. I was going to add some fresh thyme, but by the time I was done with the above, I had about had it with the minichop. I think it’s pretty good as is, though a bit funny-looking. I might get some parsley for it tomorrow, if I can stand the markets, which is looking not so likely. Or I might not. What it really needs, I suspect, is a little cream cheese. No, seriously.

I’ll package it up tomorrow in a pretty jar suitable for a Christmas stocking, and will advise my mom to mix it with stock and cream for a quick pasta sauce.

Did you know that you can get locally grown green tea? There’s a farm out in Enumclaw that grows it. Rockridge Orchards — the folks who sell the hard ciders at the University and West Seattle Farmer’s Markets — grow a number of interesting things, including Camellia sinensis. They’ll even have some plants for sale in the spring. “Grows like crazy,” says Wade Bennett, one of the owners. I might plant one if I can figure out where to put it.

If you think about it, it makes sense. Our climate is not so unlike that of Japan, so it’s not so strange that there would be varieties of tea that do well here.

The tea itself is, I think, pretty dang nice, though I’m no tea expert. It’s a good tea for winter — a little bit heartier than you might expect from a green tea. It’d make a great genmaicha. (I sure like genmaicha on a rainy cold day.) Dry, it smells like dried apples; brewed, it has the dried apple scent, and also smells pleasantly like pipe tobacco. (And, of course, it smells like tea. Heh.) For me, it has a major cool factor. Tea. From Enumclaw. Sure!

I let my friend Sue of the Perennial Tearoom know about it, and she seemed pretty intrigued. Maybe someday we’ll be able to get local green tea any day of the week down in Post Alley. For now, though, you have to ask Wade at the farmers markets.

I have the flu, as evidenced by headache, chills, weakness, inappetite, and a whole lot of stupid ideas. I’m at that stage in which I resemble a stoner — the sort of stoner who thinks that it’s really fascinating that sheet music is a way of representing time in two-dimensional space, and then when you play it you convert space into time. Ooooh. It’s like you rotate it into another dimension. Kinda. Wow, dude. Similarly, I found myself thinking, “You know how everybody says of dead people stuff like, ‘She’s still alive in the world while she’s alive in our hearts’? If that were true, then if I were dead and a friend was thinking of me, it would be like I was thinking of her. Oooh.” And then, in a brief moment of lucidity, “What?”

I am hoping for a mild fever tomorrow, because that always makes me bizarrely happy. Everything seems to get brighter, and I sit at the window thinking, “Oh boy! Squirrels! Oh boy! Crows! Yaaaay!”

Josh made a special trip out to the store in the dark and freezing cold to get saltines for his sick, complaining, addle-pated wife. Josh is the best.

Today Josh and I tried Yoga I, moving up from Slow Beginner yoga. This was Josh’s first go at Yoga I, and attentive readers may recall that it’s the second time I’ve given it a go. My first attempt involved a bad time with a steel chair, plus a teacher who liked to push the classroom energy to eleven, which is a problem given that my energy goes to about six on a good day, plus a clumsily offensive assistant. Today was much better.

This teacher, Rebecca Brinkley, is gentle and mellow; I think we could be a good match. I’m not sure I’m up to it now, though. There weren’t any poses that, taken individually, I could not do. (Not even the inversions! My upper body strength is now that of ten noodles, rather than one noodle. I rule.) But the pacing was pretty hard for me — one standing pose after another — and within half an hour my vision had started to blur and go blue. That’s not a good sign. After about forty-five minutes– well, I don’t exactly lose consciousness, but it sort of softens, and I become easily confusable. More so than usual, I mean. I almost fell asleep in adho mukha virasana — oh, blessed blessed seated pose.

I can alter the pacing a little, but… well, I’ve got two more weeks of this and then I’ll decide. But I suspect I’m going to have to take a while, maybe a long while, and build stamina more gently. I have a lot of stamina to build before Beginner I doesn’t seem, well, kind of grim. I’ve done grim. Starting Slow Beginner was grim; I rested 3 days for one class. Now I’d like to be done with grim.

The thing is, I feel that I’ve pretty well mastered Slow Beginner yoga, and yet I’m not really ready for Beginner Yoga I. Most people would probably do fine transitioning from one class to the other, but my body challenges are not those of most people, and today’s sequencing went straight to my physical deficiencies. I’m not seeing how I get from Slow Beginner to Beginner I without taking some time, probably with occasional private lessons, to work out a serious home practice that can help me build stamina without kicking me in the head quite so hard. It may even be that my home practice is it, that I’m always going to have to sequence resting poses between standing poses and will always be kicked in the head by Beginner I. That’d be okay.

And I missed my Slow Beginner teacher, Laura, and all my yoga buddies.

The inversions were fun. I’d like to do more of those. (We did some shoulderstand and handstand preparations against the wall.) And who knows? Maybe next week we’ll have an easier class, with fewer standing poses and more of the kind I prefer: crumpling on the floor in a gracefully tangled heap. Maybe we’ll do backbends.

Josh also wasn’t ready for Beginner I. He sprained a hamstring, which has been a chronic problem for him; now he’s sitting on an icepack downing ibuprofen. No more of that for him. I’m pushing him to do PT with Dan Druckhammer, because that’s worked well for me. Dan knows his stuff, and I was surprised at how quickly I progressed.

And now, to the aspirin and the Epsom salt bath.

Last January, my mom handed me a couple of new boxes of inexpensive Christmas ornaments — you know, the iconic shiny ball type. She’d been to the dollar store and bought too many to use, she said. So I carefully packed the boxes away with the other ornaments in a crushproof bin.

Yesterday I brought them out. And when I handled them for the first time, I knew something was amiss. Their reflectivity was wrong. Their weight was wrong. Their temperature was wrong. The hanging hardware was wrong. They had seams, for crying out loud. Good grief, were they plastic? I brought one out to Josh, who was similarly nonplussed. He tapped it lightly on the side of the kitchen sink, then dropped it on the counter. Pretty soon we were playing handball with the ornament and laughing hysterically, whacking that thing into the kitchen floor as hard as we could. We didn’t even scratch it.

On further examination, the boxes did say that the ornaments were plastic. But there were ribbons tied around the boxes that mostly obscured the word “plastic”. Sneaky.

I’m a creature of habit, all right. To my mind, those ornaments have to be glass. They’re supposed to be fragile. You’re supposed to lose at least one every year or so with that characteristic little “pop!” I put them out on the curb with a FREE sign, because they were too weird for me. I hope that somebody with rambunctious kids or dogs gets some use out of them.

If I were a surrealist filmmaker, I’d definitely include an ornament-handball scene, because that tweaks the brain something hard. So, so wrong.