Summer lunch

I grilled a steak for lunch today with caper sauce and a lettuce salad. It felt so luxurious, but was so simple and delicious. In principle I don't eat a lot of meat, but a good rare steak is better than almost anything.

The best cooking trick I ever learned is how to check if meat is done without cutting into it. The trick is to learn how to judge the meat be feel, by gently pressing it with your finger or a utensil. If it's raw, it's squishy, and if it's medium-well done, it feels like pushing on a mattress. Rare meat has a feel somewhere in-between. Another way to think of the texture is to compare it to the fleshy bit between your thumb and first finger. When your hand is held loosely, that spot is soft, like raw meat. In a loose fist, your hand will feel like rare-medium, and a tight fist will show you what well done meat feels like. I've had good luck with this technique with every kind of meat, from chicken breasts to pork roasts and steaks.

The caper sauce is easy as anything. Saute a quarter or half an onion, chopped, in butter and olive oil until it is lightly browned. Add a few spoons of capers (I like lots) and a big splash of red wine and let it putter for a few minutes. I also added fresh thyme from my garden. The sauce is fast, but make sure to start chopping the onions and getting your ingredients out before you put the steak on the grill, since it won't take very long to cook, if you like it rare. You can also pan-fry the steak, just let the onions cook for a minute or two and then put the steak in with them. Extra steak flavour in the sauce is always good.

mums and dads

On Saturday I went with my dad to a barbecue at our family friend's house. Their daughter was turning thirty. She is just a few years older than me and when I was around 11 we spent the summers together, as she babysat me quite often. We haven't seen each other since I started high school. It was so exciting to meet again, and to find out that she grew up into the nicest person I think I've ever met. 

Our families have known each other for longer than anything. In fact, my parents met because our mums were co-workers, and our dads good friends. So I have to credit them with the fact that I am alive, really! It's quite an odd and nice feeling to be able to trace your existence back to such a specific occurence. I learned this weekend that my mum used to get in trouble for going to work in bare feet.  Hippie mum, she makes me proud.

seeds

 

After a marigold blossom starts to die back, I cut it off and let it dry out for a day or two. Then I can open it up and take out the seeds inside, which look like small black-and-white needles, and plant more, or save them for next spring. Some people don't like marigolds because of their smell, but I think they are beautiful, with their orange and red and gold ruffles, and they help protect the other plants from being eaten by insects. They're one of my favourite flowers!

a real weekend, for once

It's sort of hard to believe that I don't have any work to do this weekend. I keep looking anxiously over at my desk, thinking I should be hunched over it, but in fact I have two whole free days. I plan to do nothing but:

• lay around in bed
• watch football
• grill
• start reading part two of 1Q84
• take a serious nap.

 And check on my garden, of course! 


Översättning: Nu att jag har två lediga dagar ska jag göra precis ingenting, förutom kolla på fotboll och ta en rejält tupplur, förstås!

One down, one to go

I spent every waking moment today (well, almost) at my desk finishing a paper at the eleventh hour. It was exhausting, but I did it! My coursework is done, now I just have to write my thesis and I'm done this degree. Thrilled!

In other good news, I got a new motherboard put in my beloved laptop and we are back together. I love a computer story with a happy ending.

Sorry that I am too tired to write anything else today!

My old friend, you came back!

Well, this is embarrassing. I started this blog a while back because well, you see, during a period of computer upheaval and general business, I honest-to-goodness lost track of my old blog. How does one lose a blog, you ask? It can easily happen if you can easily forget your blog address, lose all the links in your browser, and forget which e-mail account is associated with it, all while taking a long blogging break (partly enforced by lack of access to said blog).  Apparently I am prone to doing all of these things. The happy news is that after many weeks of on-and-off searching, I cleverly remembered that I had listed the address on my flickr and found it again!

The even better news is that this video, which I posted before and which temporarily disappeared from youtube, is back up again:

I think it's the most beautiful thing in the world. The song is wonderful and the video reminds me of the shows I used to watch as a child.

Now that I have two blogs, I have to decide what to do. Should I leave the old one be? Should I move this blog to the old spot, or the new one over here? If I had any readers, this might be an easier choice!

Fast food at the beach

During the week I had to run errands in Burlington and so I stopped at Hutch's for lunch. It's a kind-of-famous super popular place on the shore of the lake, with a good fifties feeling and masses of french fries and hamburgers and ice cream and booths with small jukeboxes that you can listen to while you eat.

 (If you want to follow me on Instagram I'm dawnanthony)