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soy curls and an Instant Pot
Sunday, June 10 2018
This morning while Neville was distracted, Gretchen got the rabbit corpse away from him and put it on top of the dog house, away from Neville. While the dogs were off with Gretchen in the woods, I buried that rabbit (along with a frozen squirrel that has spent months in our freezer) deep under the garden. But then I noticed the rabbit wasn't a rabbit at all; it was a deer fawn, complete with spots. This doesn't mean that Neville killed it, but it might've. Many predators don't really know what to do with fawns, since they don't run away or do any of the things that trigger a predator response.
While Gretchen and Neville were working at the bookstore, I wasn't feeling up to doing anything at all. The weather had returned to being cool and cloudy and my aching left hip was acting up again. So I took a nice long nap with Clarence, eventually joined by Diane the Kitten and Ramona the Dog.
Later in the afternoon, I cut up a bunch of half inch plywood (from scraps leftover from the sheathing) and used this to block access from above into the two-inch-wide space between the porch's east roof girder. The plan now was to attach the eastern screened wall to the outside of that girder, and without this blocking, things bird-sized creatures would have access to the porch. Since there was no space to swing a hammer or work a screw gun, I attached all this blocking with Gorilla Glue. It's an amazing material that is also great for fixing problematic wood such as splintery splits or the shattered results of poorly-targeted screws (I did some such repairs later this evening).
Throughout the day, I listened to a lot of Jessica Lea Mayfield, the young musician from a bluegrass family in Ohio. I've raved about her before, but today I wallowed in it all a bit deeper, taking in her new album along with my favorites. (I'm especially fond of the new song "Meadow." Her music is hard to characterize, but if one had to, you could do worse than calling it country goth, perhaps in the tradition of Neko Case.
Tonight at around 6:00pm, I spontaneously decided to make dinner. To do so, I used two products I had never used before: a foodstuff called soy curls I'd bought online after it became a fad in my remote workplace and a multifunction kitchen cooker called an Instant Pot, which plugs into a wall outlet and can serve as a rice cooker, pressure cooker, and several other devices. As for the soy curls, they're super easy. You soak them in water for ten minutes and then treat them like disease-free meat. I added onions, mushrooms, and soy sauce and fried them with some oil in a pan. As for the Instant Pot, there's much more to know than I wanted to. All I wanted it for was to cook some rice, and all I could find was a cup and a half of dried brown rice. After skimming over the directions, I used the pressure cooker feature for four minutes or so, but since the water couldn't boil away, it was still there. And the rice was still a bit crunchy. So then I ran it with the valve open so I could drive off the water. This time it over-cooked the rice, leaving some fun crunch stuff on the bottom. But at least it didn't burn the rice, which is always bad. When Gretchen came home, she was delighted to find that I'd cooked a meal. She thought the soy curls were excellent just with my simple preparation, though she added some hoisin sauce for heat.
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