• We are having the lushest rainy season we've had since I returned to California. It reminds me of the PNW, in fact makes me homesick for the Seattle area. I miss my girlfriends up there, too.
• Here is a salad that is good for the end of winter/early spring.
Carrot Râpée
Line two plates with red lettuce or 'spring mix' lettuces.
4 carrots, grated
2 Tablespoons good olive oil
1 Tablespoon wine vinegar (I use white Balsamic vinegar from a bottle that I've filled with crushed cloves of garlic -- if your vinegar isn't Balsamic or seasoned rice wine, you will want to add 1/2 teaspoon sugar)
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
handful of parsley finely chopped (I also added some fresh chervil that's coming up in the garden)
1-2 large cloves of garlic crushed and minced
juice of one half lemon
a little salt and a lot of freshly ground pepper
2 Tablespoons toasted pine nuts.
Toss all of that together and divide between the plates. Totally yummy.
• I think I mentioned that I was getting rid of the farmer's table that I picked off the curb [total disclosure -- we've taken it out of the house and it's down in our landlord's garage until I can bear to let it leave, sob]. Steve built a base with basket drawers for our old semi-round table top -- not esthetically as pleasing to me, but it gets more crap off the tabletop. I am bad.
You will notice, if you click to enlarge the photo on the right, the smooth and litter-free quality of the floor. Bless the vacuum called Photoshop for that. You did not want to see what was there.
• My class is going well. The instructor does not have organizational skills, so we have kind of an Easter Egg hunt to find which lesson in which text goes in which section. One of the students said that they were considering dropping the class as she was also taking an HTML class and those instructions were crystal clear. Ouch. It didn't help that the instructor couldn't get the online whiteboard to work during our in class [online] session and wasted 20 minutes of the hour. Even so, I'm picking up enough info to make the class worth while to me. My project is an hypothetical online shop that sells patchwork linens (the tablecloth above is one of the offerings) called Tinker's Tatters. I've gotten a 97/100 for a first assignment, but of course, I'm not doing this for a grade, I'm doing it to learn. I just keep trying to remind myself of that.
• If you aren't listening to WNYC's RadioLab, you are missing something. This show will help me forget that I'm walking alone or on the exercise bike. One of the letters to them said that the writer, a woodworker, had to give up listening while working as the show was so distracting to be detrimental to the health and safety of his fingers. This one show is fabulous: http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2010/01/12/animal-minds/ particularly the part about the whale.