7 Quick Takes (Vol 161)

Here we are again. Gathered together to marvel at the boring chapters of my life. You know the deal. After you have committed my blatherings to memory you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of the rapidly advancing weed infestation in the lower flower beds, over to Conversion Diary to see what everyone else has been doing.

Let us blather together!

1.
The “tweaking” of iTunes continues here at Chez Knit. Apparently I have no life. Or I am just willing to spend hours upon hours rearranging and playing with and doodling with my iTunes.

The latest “project” is dealing with all of the CDs that HHBL and I have accumulated over the years.

And there are A LOT of CDs. And I thought, wrongly I might add, that they were all in either his iTunes or mine. Somehow, and I am not sure how, I have found a boat load of CDs that are not in my iTunes.

I think that at one point I deleted some music because I was running a tad short of space on the hard drive of the old computer. That is the only explanation that I have. I bought these CDs. Some of them I liked a great deal.

So I am re-loading music that I loaded once before.

I so love repeating work that I have already done.

NOT.

2.
Can you guess what this is?

No, it is not a compost bin, although it sort of looks like one.

This is what Lookleap and I planted in it yesterday…..

Potatoes!!!

Yes, that is our “Potato Tower”. Remember, gardening is all about experimentation and this is one of our experiments for the year.

We had actually thought about having more that one tower but they are a pain to build, especially with pallet lumber, so we are just doing one to see if we like the results.

I didn’t really participate at all in the building of the tower. That was LookLeap and her dad so all the credit goes to them. I just employed my electric drill to screw on some boards.

Thank you LookLeap and Garden Dad for all the hard work!!

3.
And continuing on with the general garden theme.

I am one gigantic mass of aching muscles right now. Between the work at the Community Garden and the work at home at the moment I am living on ibuprophen.

And I am ordering a big mass of mulch today….which I then have to spread.

Oh my aching 52 year old body.

But I just love how everything will look when I am done. And I know that all the hard work now means that I don’t have to work as hard later and can just sit in the back garden in peace and serenity.

But OH my aching back….and wrists…..and hands.

4.
I had fully intended to do an entire post, certainly with better pictures, on making corned beef from scratch. And I may do that the next time I produce this most excellent dish. But this time you just get a picture and me extolling the virtues of home cured corned beef.

Holy Succulent Sandwiches Batman!!!

This was dinner last night. Corned beef and Swiss cheese with homemade Thousand Island Dressing. Technically a Reuben, only without the sauerkraut. HHBL isn’t fond of sauerkraut (I love it) so I just left that off this time.

And I couldn’t find my bottle of sauerkraut in the pantry so I really didn’t have a choice. I cannot figure out where that bottle went. I will probably find it when it explodes on one of the back shelves.

This sandwich was unbelievably good. I can tell you that I am never going to buy Corned Beef in those plastic packages from the store ever again. This really was an easy, if time consuming, thing to do. But really not all that time consuming because most of the time the brisket is just sitting in the brine in the refrigerator. You only have a bit to do at the beginning and the end of the process. Seven days it sits in it’s brine, making magic. And then it is cooked for 3-4 hours. Succulent, just the right level of “corned”. You can really taste the cinnamon that was in the pickling spice (which I also mixed up myself). Just a hint of ginger.

Thank you Michael Ruhlman for lighting the corned beef path for me.

I am having some for breakfast.

5.
Cartoon Girl sent us a package this week. I will give you the full scoop on Monday after HHBL and I have spent the weekend “taste testing”. But this is what arrived on my doorstep yesterday in it’s own little wrapping with cooler packs all around it.

Six containers of totally fresh, made on Wednesday without preservatives, juices from the company that Cartoon Girl works for. HHBL snagged the “Apple Lemon Ginger” one to take to work today.

And I have been told by those in the know that the “Green Leaf” juice tastes like liquid salad.

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

I personally am about to crack open the “Grapefruit” bottle.

6.
In the continuing vein of cleaning out I am going through a bunch of my older and mostly unused cook books, looking at the recipes, deciding which ones I might want to make, scanning said recipe, and then donating the actual book to the library.

I have a lot of cookbooks. Not as many as Mimi or The Chef but still a bunch.

And I love reading cookbooks. But I can tell you that I have found a couple of dated “stinkers” in the collection. I have also come across some really fabulous recipes that I am going to put into “rotation”.

7.
This last Quick Take is probably going to make sense only to knitters who happen to be on Ravelry. If you are on Ravelry come and find me. I am 4Bookworm.

But I digress.

This year is the London Olympics. 15 days filled with competition and sweat and blood and agony, yarn, competition, victory and the agony of defeat.

Did you say “yarn”? I don’t remember anything in the Olympics that has anything to do with yarn.

Why yes I did say yarn.

And knitting.

Yes, it is time for RAVELYMPICS! That biennial event where knitters compete in categories such as “Sock Put” or perhaps “Shawl Relay” or “Cable Steeplechase”. We have our team set up but now is the decision as to what to make. Of course I will be participating in the “Sock Put”, that is a given. But I am also contemplating a hairy, audacious lace project.

What to do. What to do.

Not that I am competitive or anything.