Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Jet came home from Nashville on Saturday morning. He left for his flight at 5am, and we picked him up at DIA at 8am, and so started a very dense five days.  On Saturday was the graduation of a dear friend of both Jet and myself. Jet met them during high school, I've really gotten to know them better in the last year, as they and I made more of an effort to see each other and really talk and listen to each other, as we're both involved in the restorative justice practices of the Longmont Community Justice Partnership. So it's a natural mix of people who like asking each other open questions and really listening to each other.  They're finishing at PhD, with some really rough spots with an advisor that has not been the most available for them. It gives me a lot of gratitude for Jet's advisor, who is nearly always available to him as he navigates his early years through his program in Bio-Medical Engineering.  Having several young researchers in my gaming group has ex...

It's been a while since I've written anything, really...  I've been gaming instead, and letting that use my hands and mind up enough that I didn't really think about it. There's something that I love about being able to turn my mind off in the middle of a game.  Just exist and do for a while and not have to feel or think. And, even then, I find that I have to create things, so I've been making my YouTube channel work.  But I really miss my accounts of all my travels. We've been traveling a lot lately.  Via my Obsidian notes on my packing lists, we hit eight different cities last year, and this year we've already been to nine with at least two more bigger trips before the end of the year, and possibly another, depending on how schedules go. And I only have pictures in Google and some photo collections on Facebook to remember what it was like. And I'm pretty sure I hate that. I also hate NOT having an account of my real life again with all the bumps a...

I'm writing this because my son needs this particular version of Gumbo Z'Herbes as I actually do it. It was based off a recipe in Epicurious that then went to Chow that then went to Chowhound, that then... anyway... I don't know the exact origins anymore, and I've changed it substantially from them.  Ingredients 3  lb  greens (two bags of Costco Super Greens is great for this) 2/3  c  vegetable oil 2/3  c  all-purpose flour 1   yellow onion chopped 1  bunch  scallion chopped 1   green pepper chopped 4   celery ribs chopped 2  cloves  garlic minced 2  t  kosher salt 2  T  Cajun seasoning (preferably Lucille's) 2 cups vegetable broth or chicken broth if you're not going vegan or water 2  whole  cloves 2  whole  bay leaves 3 whole allspice 1  T fresh herb (I never have marjoram, so it's been cilantro usually or parsley)  Gumbo Z'herbes Directions Have a big bowl of i...

Everything you need, it all gets called out below, too, but if you're like my son, you like a list of everything so you know you have it all. Crust 3/4 cup whole wheat flour 1 3/4 cup AP flour 1 tsp salt 2 Tbsl sugar 6 Tablespoons coconut oil 1 Stick (8 Tablespoons or four ounces) of butter 4-8 Tablespoons ice water Filling 3 Pounds baking apples if you like the peels on 4 if not, mixed types 1 Tablespoon lemon juice 1/2 cup white sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/8 teaspoon allspice if you have it, cloves might work too 1 Tablespoon arrowroot starch if you have it, or just plain AP flour works, too 2 Tablespoons butter something for a glaze, I use buttermilk, milk, half and half, cream, leftoever egg whites from Jet doing cream puffs... You'll need a tablespoon or less Someone asked me for the recipe, so I figured I'd write it up here, so that I can share it as needed.  In a food processor: 3/4 cup whole wheat flour 1 3...

When my son decided to go to Mines, he met a bunch of like minded young people his age, and when he first came home there was this time when he admitted that he and his cohort had decided that they were the ones who were going to have to save the world from Climate Change because all those who had gone before didn't seem to be up to the job. He and his friends were facing that reality with determination. A few months ago, he showed me this video: Kurzgesagt's " We WILL Fix Climate Change! " I watched it and cried, and he told me later that when he watched it, he cried too because the main gist of the video is that humanity, in concert, has brought ourselves back from the brink of self-destruction. The weight of the impending disaster was immense, and to know that we weren't all going to just die of Climate Change was huge. There's a lot more work still to be done, don't get me wrong, but all the Apocalyptic tones of authors screaming for attention and the ...

Strawberry Hill makes povitica for the Kansas City Ukranian and Croatian and Eastern European people in the Midwest. They do an amazing job of it and were highly recommended by John's father's cousins. So we bought an apple cinnamon one and an English walnut one to see what they were really like. We ate the apple cinnamon one, first, and that's what I started my experiments to reproduce. I started with Joy Food Sunshine's Homemade Povitica Bread Recipe , but it was far too light and airy and bread-like for me. It's a very nice loaf of sweet bread with a very light swirl of nuts for flavor and scent. It's a nice thing, but entirely unlike the Strawberry Hill loaf, which was super dense and the swirl of flavors dominated the almost chewy wrapper around the filling. It also had very little cinnamon, something I really missed as the Strawberry Hill apple povitica had a wealth of cinnamon richness. Also in talking to the Arkansas cousins, living in the American Sout...

I've been branching out a bit with my sourdough.  One particular branch had to do with my sore tooth. I couldn't quite handle the usual crust when I was recovering from my crown replacement. In part because I was still using a good deal of rice flour to keep the dough from sticking to the cloth I was using in the loaf pan for the overnight chill/ferment cycle. Rice flour makes for a much harder crust than I like, though it also allows for really pretty patterns because it comes out white.  The loaf to the left is one that had a LOT of rice flour being used to keep the cloth mostly non-stick, and I did it only once because the texture was so hard for me to chew. I read that one could use a 50:50 mix of rice flour and regular flour and that would mitigate the texture problem, but I ended up using the mix for just rubbing directly on the cloth AND using Farmer John's very coarsely ground whole wheat flour directly on the dough to keep it from sticking to the counter and that w...