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first stir fry in decades
Monday, January 6 2025
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I was so irritated about the tenants in the Brewster Street rental that I stayed up a little too late drinking a little too hard. I couldn't take diphenhydramine since it was so late, so I drank too much before making a conscious decision to stop. Then this morning I awoke with a mild hangover. It didn't really keep me from what I wanted to do, but it did cause me to take a bath fairly early in the day. Later I took the dogs for a walk up the Stick Trail and then over to the Farm Road, though it was so brutally cold outside that my face started to hurt. Neville seemed to enjoy the cold, and even broke into a run at one point after smelling something very interesting in the trail.
I usually cook dinner on Mondays, and tonight Gretchen wondered if maybe I could make a stir fry using the baby bok choy and broccoli she'd bought. I used to make stir fries all the time back in the 1990s, but at some point I decided I didn't know what I was doing (probably after adding too much sesame oil) so I stopped doing it, and haven't made one in at least twenty years. To get myself back on the right foot with stir fries, I talked to my good buddy ChatGPT and asked for a recipe for bok choy, broccoli, and tofu. Very much unlike a long-winded online recipe, it cranked out a nice concise set of instructions for me, which I copied into a text document and consulted on a Chromebook while I worked. Importantly, it gave me the amounts of soy sauce, garlic, sesame oil, and rice vinegar for the amount of stir fry I was making. It also suggested coating the tofu with corn starch before pan searing it, the only thing that didn't seem to work. The key to the stir fry tonight was adding a fair amount of water with vegan bouillon, much of which cooked down to a thick dark brown sauce. The only thing that would've made the stir fry better would've been some mushrooms, which we didn't have. I also cooked up an InstantPot of rice of course. Gretchen seemed pleasantly surprised by the results, and actually went back for thirds.
I went to bed fairly early, as the brutal cold outside was something the minisplits (and woodstove) could not quite fight. All I wanted to do was get under the covers with a snuggly dog or Sylvia the Cat (both of whom like to get under in this weather). By this point in my hangover, my guts were feeling unsettled and crampy.
The wall I'd built last week between the legs of the buttresses near the east end of the Chamomile Wall as it looked today.
Click to enlarge.
The hole giving access to the void behind that wall.
Click to enlarge.
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