aka Random Isht I didn’t cover in my last post.
I’ve been doing some cooking! Ever since Thanksgiving, I’ve kind of wanted to recreate a turkey-and-stuffing meal. I know it’s fashionable to hate turkey, but I love it, and stuffing even more. I got a slow-cooker turkey breast recipe (that involves a skin-on bone-in full breast) and lined up the ingredients and got some good advice from my friends who know their way around a kitchen.
And then I couldn’t find a breast. (*insert Beavis and Butthead laughing GIF here*). All the local grocery stores had turkey cutlets, ground turkey, and maybe a whole turkey or turkey legs. *sigh* oh well. I can try this later and order one from Fresh Direct, I guess. So I just bought the turkey cutlets, which are pre-marinated and did the thing.
Both the turkey cutlets and the Stove Top stuffing are incredibly easy, so I’ll keep doing that, I think. (yes, stuffing is high-calorie, I know, I know) The carrot soup I made myself, but it didn’t taste very good, probably because the carrots were old. It was edible, but just barely. (I still froze some of it.)
I’ve learned that I have to travel farther afield for fancier ingredients, but I know where those grocery stores are – for instance, the one in the strip mall in East Elmhurst where Bistro Eloise and Cannelle Bakery is. I need to head over there today to pick up a prescription at Walgreens, may take the opportunity to pick up the ingredients for hot and sour soup (like bamboo shoots) that my local place won’t have, and veggie-based fries or tots to have as a side with hot dogs.
I made pasta with meatballs and tomato sauce again last night, this time using chickpea pasta. I don’t think I like it as much as the ‘veggie’ pasta or the lentil one. I’ll keep rotating until I find the one I like best.
So I did start ice skating again. This weather has made any exercise tough (which shouldn’t stop me from doing the Jane Fonda indoors, but somehow does). I went to Bryant Park, which is free, several times, but my out-of-shapeness and the rink itself made it not great. But I got myself over to City Ice (which is indoors) and immediately on the ice felt such skills as I have kick back in. So it’s worth paying the bucks to go to City Ice and World Ice, and to either carve out the time from a quiet workday to go during the adults-only sessions, or brave the public sessions during the weekend. Eventual goal, although unfortunately not at all a priority right now, is to get back to where I was skillwise, and then start getting coaching, far more effective than taking yet another beginner’s class.
(For one glorious moment, I was in an Adult 2 class, which was exactly the level I was at. And then COVID shut it down. And then once we recovered, I signed up for yet another beginner’s class, because that’s what was available, and then the Heartquake happened and I stopped going.)
Oo, I’m taking a trip! I’d wanted to get away the end of March and was considering a cruise, but then realized it might be a great time to do that drive through the Florida Keys I’ve always wanted to do. So that’s what I’m doing, flying into Miami, driving the Keys, and flying back from Key West. I’ll be two nights in Key Largo (I think) and two in Key West, and one in the middle, exactly where TBD. So I’m plotting that all out now. It’s going to be a lot of snorkeling and park-exploring and walking and seafood.
Some sad things. One of my favorite folk singers passed away, I found out. David Mallett was a Maine-based folk singer, best known for the “inch by inch, row by row” Garden Song. I discovered him while record-store surfing on South Street, and bought his album, “Vital Signs”, purely based on his album cover portrait. (My mom, who was with me at the time, was very puzzled.) But it turned out I liked the album, and his voice, a lot.
Funny thing happened once I started buying more of his albums, very educational. So he was a central-casting folk singer, but had gone to Nashville for a while to try to make it down there and “Vital Signs” was clearly produced as kind of a country album. A not very good one (and you can’t get it in digital form now). But later, I heard a different more-folky less-country production of one of the songs from the album, “April”, and found out what a difference production makes for a studio-recorded song like that. (That’s not really a thing for classical music, the music and instrumentation is set, no matter who records it.) Here’s the ‘good’ version.
Anyway, I liked him and his music a lot and he will be missed. I’m still itching to do Arowsic in some cabaret at some point.
Told you this was random stuff. I am currently listening to the audiobook of Robert Heinlein’s Sixth Column. I remembered it as a cracking good story, but figured it would probably be really problematic now. The “Pan Asians” (coyly described as neither Chinese or Japanese) have conquered America at the same time that a cadre of secret scientists have discovered a way to tap into a new spectrum that allows them to, with radiation, kill (for instance) all rats in the vicinity without touching the mice. With some gradation, they can (for instance) make all people of Asian ancestry unconscious while leaving other people alone.
It’s still a great story, but when they get to the point where they set up their fake church so that the pan-asians will be knocked out when they walk through the door, but ‘only Caucasians’ can get in, that’s when I went, oh yeah, I can’t recommend this book to anyone. It wasn’t so much that they were trying to make it ‘white-only’, more that the other flavors of people just weren’t considered at all. OK, it was the 1940’s. But still… it would be an interesting exercise to retell the story and somehow make it not racist. Maybe impossible, but again… good story bones.
Again, country still in free fall. My trans brother is making serious noises about getting out of the country. I get the impulse, but I hope it doesn’t come to that. More on that eventually…
The Toast Point Page 
