Mushrooms: Evil science experiment continues

Here's a pic of the mushroom cake I birthed last week. You'll see now that there are some nice Lilly white fuzzy things on the top. Not sure if this puppy will actually bloom into a birch mushroom, but it's looking better than some of the other cakes that had a green mold attack them.

Tune in next week to see if our little fungi are still kicking.

New Fruit Diet

I read this in a 'Simplify Your Life in 5000 easy steps' book - where is suggested to take one day where you only eat fruit - so I decided to give it a try. I went to the local grocery store, and bought the fruit for the day, which was:

1 cantaloupe
2 peaches
2 cups of cherries
4 plums
2 nectarines

Also had some extras at Mom and Dad's (pineapple, more cantaloupe, blueberries), but I won't really count those.

Although that works out to be 440% and 480% of my daily requirement of Vitamin A and Vitamin C (so I'm seeing better), it is at the bare minimum for fiber (26 grams as opposed to the recommended 25 to 30 grams) and a whopping 194 grams of sugars (70% of my recommended allowance of carbs).

Probably explains why I didn't have any 'explosions' in the bathroom similar to my detox diet of 1992, where I ate 7 carrots, an entire head of broccoli, 3 apples, a cup of lettuce, 3 cups of milk, and 3 cloves of garlic in one day. That last item is still memorable to those around me (I think I drank a bottle of scope that day to no avail). Anyway . . .

Doing the calculations, I realized that not all fruits are created equal (cantaloupe way more loaded with vitamins than the other fruits) and this macro nutrients (e.g. Sugars, Fat, etc) are a load of crap and unhelpful. Why you ask? Because I could basically get the exact same nutritional scores by downing just one little glass of water, 1 cup of sugar, 2 tablespoons of Metamucil, and a multi-vitamin - not appealing at all.

We'll see how it works next Sunday.

It's like Buh-dah

Actually it's just butter - had a Martha Stewart / Home on the Farm moment and made butter this weekend. Honestly, not sure what Frontier women did before the heavy duty KitchenAid mixer.

Like most things food related, making butter is about as simple as feeding Winston and Obie in the morning. I'll post the recipe later, but basically you take heavy whipping cream, and beat the crap out of it. You don't really need to watch it, but if you do . . . over the passing 15 minutes, you'll see it change from cream to whipped cream to curdled cream to the final mixture of half butter and half buttermilk.

You don't need to even time it, because when it's done, it makes this huge ka-chunka ka-chunka sound that can scare dogs and be heard from across a house. After draining out the buttermilk in a sieve, I did go ahead and knead with a dough hook and a little water to make it easier to work with and remove the excess buttermilk - but that was about it. You can salt it for more taste and preservation, but I'm trying the baseline right now.

Since the source of the cream was my local grocery store, I think the next time I do it, I'm going to go upscale and get it straight from a local cow. With 6 cups of cream, I ended up with about 3 cups of buttermilk and 3 cups of butter. I'll try a couple of recipes with it, but last night's buttermilk biscuits were pretty good.

Harry Potter

The seventh and final installment of Harry Potter is out, and I'm 66% done with it. I need to hurry up, since now that Patrick is back from Bradford, he'll be itchy to read it. What am I thinking, he's probably reading it right now, while he's suppose to be sick in bed. Anyway . . .

It's really good so far, no spoilers, of course. Seems like it's also a race against time, since you only have so long before watercooler talk at work or around town will give away the ending.

And no, I was not one of those people who stayed up until 12:01 Friday night to buy the book. Nor did I buy the book and immediately turn to the end to see how the story ends - dude, you've waited years for the whole story - enjoy it a little bit.

There is hope

While reading The Cheese Plate by Max McCalman the other day (Patrick had seen a recommendation for it), I saw this picture on Chapter 3 (or maybe Chapter 4).

After assuming (like most of the cheeses in the book so far) this was a French goat cheese, you can imagine my surprise when the caption told me that it was actually an extremely good artisan American cheese. In fact, it's made in Indiana at a goat farm where I had bought a different cheese just five days earlier at the city market (a nice little goat cheese wrapped in chesnut leaves). Check them out.

Encouraged that maybe the cheese scene in the US wasn't as bad as I first thought, I checked out the Internet with renewed vigor. Seems like there is a little cheese revolution going on in this country with some really excellent examples. The shipping was killer, but stay tuned next week to see the latest order of my new children.

Malabar

This is kind of a fun little plant...Malabar spinach (Basella alba)

It's a nice substitute to spinach and lettuce in the summer, since those don't grow well is our hot climate. And it's a nice climber - although you might see in the pic that it's competing with the cucumbers right now. With the lack of water and mediocre sun exposure, it's taken awhile for this plant to do much - but I think it's going now.

Drought

It's not like our garden is really strong in summer anyway (shade plants tend to like Spring and Fall), but this is ridiculous.

I don't think it has rained in our yard in the past month, and the plants are showing it - even for mostly native plants that are used to this kind of treatment. This is the only thing that I could find in our garden that was actually blooming - everything else is just waiting for a little moisture.

We're focusing our water on the vegetables (cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes) - since we'll actually be able to eat those.

Property Taxes

For those people outside the States, a little background first . . .

ONE of the taxes we pay in Indiana is property tax. It's a hold out from the time when Indiana was mostly farmland, and people didn't really make a regular annual income. Most of the tax revenue goes to schools, but all sorts of things get thrown in - like welfare, new library buildings, police, etc. We basically pay them once every six months.

After a court order said that the calculation for property taxes was unfair, we saw our property taxes essentially double from $1400 to $2800 four years ago. Now we've had another reassessment, and the tax is now up to $5600 for a year. That's a 400% increase in four years.

People were pissed four years ago, and many people lost their homes. This year it's going to be even worse. And oh yes, we get the bill on July 1st and it needs to be paid by the end of July.

Quiet Indianapolis has already had several demonstrations and most likely more to follow. The politicians have shown their total ignorance and irresponsibility once again - the question now is will voters remember all this in 18 months when it comes time for the election. If you figure most people don't even know the name of their representative, I'm taking a 'wait and see' attitude.

So anyway, this is a sign that's in our front yard. Of course, we wouldn't sell the house, but it makes a good political statement.

Mushrooms: Phase II continued

The project continues (and I need to get a better picture) . . .

Last month, I had innoculated the spores into ball jars, and set them aside to fungus away. This weekend, I 'birthed the cakes' - basically openned them up and stuck them in a new home to go fruit. I'm trying two techniques, since online resources can't decide on which one is better - plus I want to see which one yields the most.

The first way is just basically popping the cake out and leaving it in a humid environment - hopefully the aquarium tank with a couple daily sprays of water should be enough. The second way is to put it in a soil mixture in a plastic container with a lid on. Not sure if the second way will be tall enough, if the mushrooms get going - but we'll see.

Cross your fingers, the cakes are doing something - but time will tell if they really fruit out.

Scuba Class

Well, Patrick and my Thursdays are now spoken for the next 7 weeks, so that we can get certified in SCUBA. You may remember we went SCUBA diving for the first time in the Red Sea, and we decided that we would go through the certification process when we got back to the States.

The classes are broken up into half lecture and half pool work. The first class was pretty much about swimming around (I've decided that I really don't like swimming anymore), but the second class we did get to actually do some underwater stuff with tanks.

Turns out certification is not cheap. In addition to the class, we also had to buy fins, snorkel, mask, and boots - and there's also the open water exam which is a little extra - pretty much quadruples the original price of the class. And if we actually really get into it - then we're talking suit, breathing apparatus, etc. Oh well, it's just money.

It also looks like this group plans a lot of diving trips to the Carribean, so we'll probably try to do one next year with them for a whole week.

APICS Certification

The powers that be at work decided that in order to know anything about Supply Chain, you had to be APICS certified. Not sure if it was because people didn't know the difference between a forecast or a demand or what, but basically everyone has taken the courses and exams around here.

Although I had taken two of the five exams before I left for France, I had three remaining. Fortunately, they weren't too horrible, although they each took about 3 weeks of studying. If nothing else it saves time convincing people that you know anything about how a Supply Chain works - now I can just say I'm APICS certified - woo hoo.

Basement: Plumbing is done

Thanks to the advice of Mr. Green, we decided to basically replace all the pipes in our house before finishing off the basement ceiling (it's a lot easier to get rid of those nasty iron pipes when there's not any drywall in the wall - huh). But with most things involving home restoration, it's a little like peeling an onion...

The original plans were to just replace the pipes that were in the half of the basement that we were finishing. But after realizing that would take case of about 70% of the pipes, we figured the other 30% shouldn't be too much more. Turns out it wasn't - total cost $1250, which was about $750 less than the other estimate.

And oh yes, water pressure is much better.

Cycle Counting Wine

Looks like my wine inventory system is working well. In case you missed it, I added all my wine to yourwinecellar.com.

In order to maintain a certain level of accuracy, I need to do periodic cycle counting to make sure everything is still there. Let's just say I'm more accurate than most Lilly plants, right now.