Tereza Okava

One of the fun things about having social media nearby is the notion of flash sales. As I have my face in a computer all the time and have a mostly flexible schedule, every so often I'll see a bulletin that has me running out the door without my shoes.
Yesterday my favorite veggie store announced they had a truckload of frozen asparagus with a short expiration date, priced to move. I ran and bought 4kg before someone realized that the price was about ten times lower than it should have been.

It's quick frozen, so it's not the texture of fresh, but my garden puts up maybe a spear or two a week right now (and I need to redo my asparagus bed anyway) so this is the only way I'll be getting asparagus for a bit.
Still, the taste is great. I put half a kg in the air fryer and had it for lunch- it did get crunchy on the outside and flavor was fabulous, but it released a lot of water into the oven itself and I wasn't thrilled about that.
I'm going to make a soup later, and maybe some kind of frittata. If anyone has any other ideas, I'd love to hear them. The spears are individually quick frozen whole, and so inside tends to be soft and stringy. (and i'm the person who usually eats my asparagus raw!!)

Barbara Simoes wrote: I get the NYT online and read the "Daily"....well...daily.  ....  My reward for this is a wonderful recipe and some fun games at the end!  

I had to stop the email alerts, and the NYT often gets me hopping mad, but I keep it because of the games, which are part of my daily workda routine (the wordle and connections after lunch as a treat). I used to pause my subscription when it got me grumpy but now apparently can't do that anymore.... we'll see how long I keep paying.

We had our runoff election here on Sunday and I spent the day digging holes and planting plants and getting my spring plants in. If we want to eat, we need to plant, and I hadn't had a chance up to then.

When the rain got too intense, I came inside and worked on my crocheted blanket while listening to podcasts until the results were in. Normally I would have cooked but I was so upset that I couldn't eat and wasn't up for it.
My husband's method involves watching All The Sports, which is good for him, but I don't watch TV, grew up without it and just cant fathom sitting still and watching a screen for hours.
Which is ironic, since my work involves sitting and watching a screen for hours. But I'm creating, so it is not quite the same.

This week continues crazy busy, but I'm making a point of reaching out to friends of mine to catch up. Talking to the neighbors I don't know so well.
I need to get out of my head space and out into the human space. I'm still working on it.  

That is a great suggestion. I also have done vision exams at a Costco (you don't need to be a member), when I travel to the US I have to do it somewhere and they are always great (usually very organized and easy to schedule). I never have time to do glasses, but I hear it's a good place for that too.

It's good that you have a lifetime of work, management, and also health expertise that will let you test and analyze and potentially plan.
Maybe you can come up with a schedule that might be brutal for two days but give you time to recover. And if you know Monday and Wednesday are your crazy days, for example, you can prepare.

I am finally seeing the end of my craziness. My dear husband is fine, after several weeks of panic, preps, tests and scans.
I figured out if I got up early I could take advantage of my sharp morning brain and I got more done than if I were working normal hours. Shoehorn an extra nap in there and it all worked out. It took some planning, but it allowed me to be where I needed to be while also getting my stuff done. Some things were sacrificed, like Pilates classes- the gym keeps sending me messages asking me if I'm still alive (they're subtle...) but that is not a priority right now.
Maybe you have an option to teach remotely every so often, that would cut out the commute time? Or some other way to tweak work? If anyone can figure it out, I imagine it will be you.

John F Dean wrote:I won’t go into the hours I used to work without breaking a sweat, it is pretty clear I can’t do that now.  

I hear you. Lately my paid work is out of control (which is why I've not been around here much) and a family member had a medical scare where I was needed as a caregiver.
It got very clear that while I can balance some plates, I can't balance all the plates. Some configurations are okay: Work, commute, food. Work, commute, kids. Work, garden, animals. Work, caregiver, animals. Work, animals, food. but Work, caregiver, animals, food, commute and there just are not enough hours in the day (nor enough hours of sleep to recover).
(it's spring, and not a darn thing has been planted yet. the fruit is on a tree in the front yard and not picked. the animals are fed every day and that's about it. Last night I cooked dinner for the first time in ages.)

Work has been really wild lately (after what was up to now a slow year, so yeeha) and the kid hasn't been around much so I'm only cooking when absolutely necessary.
Last night I decided to use up some pork cracklings I had frozen last time I made lard. I heated them up in a frying pan to get rid of any excess lard that might still be in there, then added sesame seeds, a bit of Chinese BBq sauce (the kind that comes in a can, it's basically umami herbs in oil), some white pepper, sesame oil and salt. I smashed the bigger cracklings, mixed it all up, and then spread it all into a rolled-out sheet of yeast dough, this got rolled up and sliced, cinnamon-roll style, and then steamed to make buns.
I didn't get a picture as they were inhaled as soon as my husband walked through the door!
I never really know what to do with cracklings (I was going to make biscuits and gravy but forgot), they're not something I really enjoy eating out of hand, but this was a good application.

if I recall scorpions also glow.

recent events involving eggs (avian flu, but also economic weirdness) have had a lot of recipes floating around involving fewer (or no) eggs.
For 10 years I made amazing baked goods with no eggs (or milk, for that matter). It is absolutely possible to make pretty much anything without eggs, and when the price of eggs gets crazy I pull out those recipes. In most cases you can just leave them out (things like angel food or egg tarts excepted, of course) and don't need anything special to replace them with.

We are staring down the barrel of what looks like a very bad year here (major flooding across the country's ag zone after spring planting, plus political turmoil that promises to get worse no matter who wins next week's election) and I am so glad that I know how to be flexible and use what I have and what I can get easily-- and that the people I feed are good sports and willing to eat most anything. Many of my family members simply don't know what to eat if they don't have a piece of beef to center their meal around and I'm glad I learned how to work around that before it was crunch time.

In news that is more real and closer to home, the whole thing has minimized a bit. One neighbor who also had some cats moved. There is construction going on in the house immediately next to where the remaining cats live and I think they're a bit spooked. Also I caught them on the neighbor's roof and hit them with the coiled serpent-hose mentioned above. We kept the baggies of nasty granules on top of the roof, and while they don't seem to stink anymore it's almost like a good luck measure. It's also been raining so, so much that that might have done it. We are supposed to have two days without rain, so I suspect they'll be back, but for now i'll take it.