Rachael

This is not, nor will it EVER be, a food blog, mostly because that would be truly sad for y’all. I consider hard-boiling eggs a particular talent. You get the picture.

But last night, I had a MAJOR triumph. While in Trader Joe’s earlier this week, I picked up a bag of precut yams. Yams. I hate yams, and sweet potatoes, and most squashes, things like that. But I was driven by the desire to actually learn how to cook vegetables, and not just spinach, green beans, or broccoli.

So I bought the yams. Last night I took them out of the bag and got out the How To Cook Everything book. Yeah, nothin’. It basically said that yams suck (and aren’t the same thing as sweet potatoes) and when cooked, are too dry to eat, maybe I should use them in a soup. What?

So I turned to the never-fail Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian. Yams = NOTHING.

I decided to go it alone. This has resulted, in the past, in tears and entire casseroles dumped right into the trash can. But I dropped the yams on a cookie sheet, chopped two cloves of garlic, dumped that on top, added some salt and pepper, poured on a liberal amount of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, tossed it in a 400 degree (F) oven, and baked them for 30 minutes.

They were WONDERFUL. That How To Cook Everything guy has NO idea. I forgot to turn them while cooking, so they were crispy and dark on the bottom, and soft in the middle, sweet and tart from the vinegar.

I was just so PROUD of them, that I made something healthy, out of my own brain. I also made some spinach (sauteed with olive oil and garlic until it wilts, lemon on top) and heated up some lentils and rice (Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe, see above book ref, YUM), and had a perfect dinner.

Good god! I also made muffins (that turned out well) with oat bran and flax seed meal (see last post’s comments for a world of suggestions)! Who am I becoming? What is this?

(yay)

 

I used to be good at making muffins. I no longer am, apparently. I haven’t cared for either of my last two batches, and it’s been ages since I baked. What’s your favorite easy, HEALTHY muffin recipe? Please?

Thank you in advance. I just ate two dried up little blueberry muffins I made yesterday, and I really, really thank you.

We discovered the MOST amazing place yesterday on a dog outing. Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, part of the East Bay Regional Parks, practically just behind where we live (literally on the other side of the hill from the lodge we got married in last year), it’s this huge beautiful space for walkin’ in.

It’s an old volcano, so the geology of the place is fascinating. And were I twelve years old with a fresh, curious mind, I would have been fascinated by the igneous and the whatsamacallneous, but I am old and my brain is full of things like property taxes and flax-seed oil, so I could only walk and marvel at the view and the cute, cute dogs and remark at all these loose rocks that, hey, might be volcanic!

It was all misty and damp, spitting a promise of rain, and the green hills rolled around us. We stood on the county line, looking from Oakland to Orinda. Cows graze up there (and you can still have dogs off-leash! Yay East Bay Regional!), although we didn’t see any. Clara was disappointed.

Only one bad thing happened — we climbed to the highest point to get the best view. We stood next to a barbed wire fence and oohed and ahhed. Then I noticed Clara was on the WRONG SIDE of the barbed wire. She’d gone through a few feet away, where the fence was more open. I called her, thinking she’d come back the same way, but she’s a smart border collie, and came back the most direct route, right THROUGH the fence. Her nose got stabbed, and started bleeding, rather alarmingly. We grabbed her (she didn’t seem to notice anything amiss) and examined her — it was only a puncture wound, but ohmygod, did it bleed.

It bled right into her mouth and then dripped out, onto the her white chin and the ground and made her look absolutely vicious. She ran happily ahead and greeted several people while Lala hollered, "Barbed wire! Nose! She’s fine!" It stopped bleeding within minutes, and today we can’t even find the damage, but it was alarming.

But blood aside, it’s as close to Brigadoon as the East Bay gets. The Redwood Regional Park, Leona Canyon, the Chabot area, those areas are wonderful, but they’re so full of trees that block the view (I guess some people like that sort of thing) and undergrowth that includes a ton of poison oak. Sibley is open, rolling, green, almost poison-oak free. The views are amazing. It’s right behind Montclair. It’s just about perfect.

It is a day off for me, and I have SO much to do. I have an acupuncture appointment (hooray!) and a meeting with the new dog walker (who trained with Cesar Millan — no matter what you think of his methods, that man is so cute), and I’m possibly watching the godkid Dylan, and tonight we’re having dinner with an Unraveled friend who is going to Venice soon and wants the scoop. Lala got new 501’s that she shrunk to fit, so I sent a hot-lookin’ wife off to work and then made muffins, and life is good at the Hehu house.

In my yarn/writing room, my desk sits right in front of the window, which looks out on our street. We live in a culdesac, one street south of MacArthur in East Oakland. MacArthur is a bit rough, but our little street is sweet, with good neighbors and single family houses, and the creek running behind us.

There’s an old brown-shingled salmon-colored house across the street, and behind that, on MacArthur, is a church. Over that, I can see the green hill that rises suddenly above our neighborhood. We walk the dogs up there often, and from that hill, you have the BEST view of all of Oakland, Alameda, the bay and across it, from the San Mateo bridge to the Golden Gate, and all of the San Francisco skyline.

Someday I’ll write about the racial lines of demarcation that the hill represents. It’s mindblowing, really, from where we live in the flats, mostly black and a few hispanic families, to that hill where it goes suddenly and steeply UP for eight or nine blocks. Black families at the bottom, hispanic in the middle, and white at the top. I do not exaggerate. It is freaky and bizarre and scary and sad and astonishing, and is so vastly interesting to me that I’m only touching on it today, and then leaving it behind. Someday I’ll do something with the things I think in my head about it, but this blog post isn’t the time.

What I AM writing about today is what I see out my window. Arnold, our neighbor across the street, has family over. Arnold is older, and walks slowly, but is more active than I’ll ever be. He takes care of the even older couple who live in the shingled house next door to him, and keeps up their lawn. He spends hours every day in his own yard, wearing a blue coverall and a newsboy cap. He has glasses and a small gray beard. He lent us his lawnmower when we moved in when he saw Lala cutting the grass with scissors. Right now he’s sweeping the driveway while his nephew, the WORST parallel parker in the history of the universe, washes his car. Two younger kids have run inside — I’ve never seen them before but I think they’re attached somehow to the nephew.

I’ve watched my calico cat Adah go in and out of every yard on the block, and she’s been trying to get Arnold’s attention now for ten minutes, arching her back prettily and turning her paw toward him in the sun. He’s busy now with a low camellia bush, sweeping leaves from underneath it and pays her no attention. She’ll move on in a moment; she doesn’t have time for those who Don’t Pet.

Inside, I’m propped in my armchair now, still looking out the window, but now over my shoulder. Harriet is sitting next to me, watching Harriet TV out the window. Miss Idaho is sharing the space with my slippered feet on my footstool and she’s wrestling with Clara. There’s a lot of growling and not much action. Both appear lazy. I’m drinking green tea after having finished my muffin. This is my day off, and I plan on doing nothing except perhaps some yard work and a run to the beach with the dogs. Oh, maybe a Trader Joe stop.

Arnold just did the smartest thing: he rolled his green waste can out to the sidewalk where he’d swept up all those leaves, then he laid it on its side, opened the top and swept all the stuff in. I always use the rake and try to lift that stuff into the can, which never, ever works. Nice.

Dogs are killing each other! How fun! Harriet’s going for Clara’s underbelly, since really, that’s all she can reach.

I’m going to drink more tea and enjoy my day off. Running every other day lately has given me the unexpected benefit of feeling like a lazy slob on the days that I don’t have to, and I love feeling like a lazy slob. Oh, yeah.

I just spent all my blogging time writing over here, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you any less.

In fact, it will show you how special you are to me when I admit to you that Cadbury Creme Eggs are back (Dear Reader Cheryl alerted me that they’re in the Big Longs in Oakland, on the endcap; bless her heart, she told me last year, too) and that I have consumed almost three boxes so far.

Ahem.

But this: they are SMALLER THIS YEAR. The cheek! The sheer nerve, thinking we won’t notice.

That only means I can eat more. Yep. And that’s something I won’t mention over that other site. Only to you, my ducks.

Okay, I have a knitting question that I bet you’ve NEVER
read before. Or maybe you have. But I haven’t, so I need a little help here. (Warning:
Poop blog ahead, Rabbitch. Turn away if it makes you weep.)

Harriet, our Queen Bee, master of all she rules, and just
about the cutest dog to roam the world on Very Short Legs, is probably about
fifteen years old. She hasn’t been well for the last year, and we’ve had some
struggles with pancreatitis and a couple of UTIs, but the right meds helped, and right now she seems to feel great. 

She is, however, going a bit senile (yes, seeing the vet
about that, too). Every once in a while she’ll have an accident where she
shouldn’t, where she never would have a year ago. Like the car. When I take them out on walks and to the beach, she’s in the back of the station wagon with Clara, both of them sitting on a sheet I keep
back there to catch beach sand, so it’s no big deal.

But the other day we had a very special brunch outing, and
Harriet was a guest of honor, so we let her up in the main part of the car. She sat on
the back seat and stood up and stuck her head out the window and let her
cheeks flap backwards in the wind. Harriet heaven.

And then the smell. Not only had she had she pooped, but she
had walked in it a bit before we figured out the smell (we’re not as bright as
we like to tell you we are). 

And she was sitting (and walking) on my sock in progress. My
really cute sock, I’ll have you know. I’m fond of that sock. About
three-quarters done, all poopy now.

What the HELL do I do? 

I cleaned the car, but I was barely able to touch the
knitting. I can handle cleaning upholstery, but for some reason, I couldn’t
even imagine cleaning the sock.

Today I took out the needle (because I need it to start
another pair) and I washed it. So I have an unfinished sock, with live stitches
hanging ragged, still dirty. How do I salvage this? 

I could thread yarn through the live stitches and wash it by
hand.

Ew. 

I could wash it by hand sans the live-stitch-save and
prepare for major damage.

Ew. 

Or, I just realized, I could cut my losses and throw the
whole thing out (including 100g ball, which also got dirty) . Damn, that’s probably what I should do. Trouble is, I don’t
remember where I got the yarn or what kind it is, because I lost the ball band. I have this cavalier
attitude about socks. I always finish a pair and put them on, and then people say “Where’d
you get that? What’s the brand?” and I can say, “Oh, I dunno,” because I
already know I’ll never want to knit the same pair of socks twice anyway.

But I loved this sock!

Help! Poop! Poop!