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flavorless brown powder
Friday, March 16 2018
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In the iconography of the months, March is often represented with a kite, and I do indeed remember flying kites in March as a kid in Virginia down on the floodplain (the only place free enough of trees for that activity: 38.100087N, 79.130839W). In terms of winds, today felt very Marchlike, so much so that I was a little nervous about the large white pine just north of the house, which swayed ominously within the limits of the cables that keep it from falling on the laboratory, where I spent the vast majority of my days. Those cables (and the anchors on their ends) have survived a lot of winds for years. But when cables break, they do so in an instant, as some bridge builders in Florida discovered today. Today wasn't a bad day for cables in Hurley, but some day will be. In addition to the wind, there was an unseasonable chill to the air that made the outdoors a miserable place and further depleted our dwindling stockpile of firewood.
A little before 7:00pm, Gretchen and I drove to Woodstock to take advantage of a The Garden Café gift certificate for $105 that had been raised (with surprising speed) by my remote workplace colleagues in sympathy for the loss of Janet the Cat. We sat in the corner of the expansion room as far as possible from a table of noisy kids (the mother of whom had a hat lined with real fur). I usually get the same damn thing (the portobello panini) every time I go to The Garden, but today I was in the mood for the shepard [sic] pie special, which contained vegetables, mashed potatoes, and seitan. The vegetables were cooked peas and carrots, which I generally don't like, but they were subsumed enough in everything else to make for quality comfort food (it was served with super-sour cranberry sauce). We also got the lentil soup, though Gretchen was disappointed to find it had been flavored with cumin. Gretchen's thinking on cumin is that it is fine for Indian food, but in any other application it makes food taste like it was made by inattentive hippies. Gretchen loves The Garden and is always super honest in her appraisal of the food in hopes to make it be all that it can be and put the best possible face of vegan cuisine. When she was discussing the cumin problem with our waitress (and it has affected a number of dishes there), I suggested that perhaps the cumin in the kitchen could be replaced with a flavorless brown powder.
On the drive home, we stopped at the Hurley Ridge Hannaford to get some much-needed items (for me, this was mostly Red Rose tea, bacon-flavored tempeh, and a sixpack of IPA, and for Gretchen this was mostly strawberries and Crisco, both needed for a birthday cake for Nancy that she would be baking). It was near closing time, and we had the store almost entirely to ourselves.
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