kitchenmage

Cumulus: tears of a cloud

Smell the molecular odorlessness, taste the atomic tastelessness!

from Do the Green Thing, an online community for people who want to mock wasteful drinking be more ecologically aware.

Neal, eat your vegetables!

The tubes of the interwebs have many strange and wonderful things in them. Facebook is both strange and wonderful, largely because people can use it to their own ends and it is always fun to see what they come up with. Case in point: Operation Make Neal Eat Vegetables, which endeavors to get Neal to, well, eat his vegetables.

What is the deal with Neal and his vegetables?

Half-price Aerogarden, today only!

Fresh herbs are an essential ingredient of my cooking, which makes me lucky to have an herb garden of my own. Even here in theOtherCity, where my tenure is anything but permanent, I someoneElse replanted the front swath of an overgrown strawberry bed with herbs. More telling, as the moving van was being loaded,  I someoneElse dug up my favorite dwarf sweet bay tree, which I could not bear to abandon and brought it along in a pot. Then someoneElse I bought another one. (hi, my name is kitchenMage and I am an herbaholic...)

Sadly, not everyone is fortunate enough to have the space or sunlight for any sort of outdoor herb gardening, and the indoor herb growing methods have been limited and expensive. This has left apartment dwellers at the mercy of the market. The one with the five buck clamshells of suboptimal herbs.

The hands of a child

I need to do a quick bit of data collection for the project that shall not be named and hope that some of the parents out there can give me a hand. I need to know the size of kid's hands at various ages/sizes. If you have a few minutes, would you please consider giving me a hand. Well, one of your kid's hands.

Here's what I need to know:

• Length from wrist to middle fingertip
• Width across palm, without thumb
• Age of child
• General size for age (short/average/tall)
• General build/weight

bonus points
I am also trying to get an idea of the volume of a fist. My preferred method for assessing this is pretty accurate and just messy enough to be fun for small people. Fill a deep bowl with water, leaving it in the sink. Have your child make a fist and stick it into the water up to the wrist. (see why it is in the sink?) Remove the fist from the water and refill the bowl with water from a measuring cup. How much water did it take?

Alternatively, with hand in a fist, measure around the widest part and from wrist to wrist (over the top). But really, that's not as much fun as the water.

Comments on kitchenMage are moderated so if you'd like to help out while not publicly divulging this data, just say so and I will note the numbers and delete the comment without it seeing the light of LCD display. If you prefer to drop me a note, it's kitchenMage(at)gmail(dot)com.

Thanks!

Start your day with...bacon!

This may be the answer for people who, like me, hate mornings but adore bacon. The Wake n' Bacon is an alarm clock that wakes some lucky person with a waft of freshly frying bacon. A cute little wooden pig hides a small cooking chamber where a slice of bacon is cooked just in time to wake you up with a hungry smile on your face.

The only downside that I see is that you have to load the bacon before you go to sleep so it spends the night sitting there being a laboratory for bad bugs to grow in - meaning you probably don't want to eat it. Well, you probably want to, but you shouldn't.

Recapturing a food memory

Just last weekend, someone asked me what the first thing I remembered cooking was. I thought for a minute, and then I lied to them, saying, "Pound cakes. I took decorated pound cakes to my teachers every year and I baked them myself!"

In my defense, I truly did think that it was the correct answer when I said it - and I did bake pound cakes for my teachers - but a few days ago, something else came across my desk and made me reconsider what was first.

I was presented with the need to pay tribute to Mimi, my grandmother - the woman who, more than any, shaped the kitchenMage I am today - in a single photograph, and one with odd constraints at that. Remembering that recent conversation, I once again went rummaging through cookbooks and memories for the very first thing I remember making.

Needless to say, it wasn't pound cake.

Spike comes for a visit

One thing that I have really missed in this time away from the fog valley is the critters. Being spoiled by having a local elk herd that tromps through the neighbor's fields makes it hard to move to a place where the local fauna is rare...and small.

Missing my hoofed buds as I do, I have been delighted in the last couple of weeks to have new creatures visiting. Take Spike, for example, who stared appearing in the cool grass under the barn overhang when the thermometer headed towards 90 a couple of weeks back. He has been back daily, emerging from the slope above the barn to lie amongst the clover and nibble. When the sun dips behind the cedars to the west, he wends his way down the path into the woods beyond.

Day before yesterday, a doe came down from the same hill with a tiny spotted fawn who looked like it might be her first trip out into the big world. I've got the camera ready for their return and my worktable has a view. Wish me luck!