free yeast

A while ago I did a survey for Fleishman's (NO idea how to spell that!) yeast, and they sent me coupons for SIX free packets of yeast. What do I make? Cinnamon rolls? Coffee cake? A new kind of bread? :)

the latest challenge

Since my stomach seems to have given up entirely on the whole don't-give-it-back thing, I am working on what I can eat that at least won't be TERRIBLE to taste again for the next six hours.

Foods so far: Apples, pancakes.

.... though there definitely could be worse menus, this could get dull.

yum yum

I came up with a big pile of sliced tomato, avocado, orange bell pepper and cucumber with a light drizzle of Greek dressing. It was REALLY good!

dying for a good snack!

I am really searching for a snack that I can just munch on, without getting a bunch of empty calories and feeling gross afterward. I don't know if this exists, but I am on the hunt!

on the other hand, I may be cut off from dairy

I have been getting some nasty acid reflux for a few months now, and I just put it together that a lot of times it happens when I have dairy products, like cream cheese or yogurt. I knew that when the baby was born I was going to be off dairy (babies in my family tend not to tolerate cow milk) but I might start sooner, just to get some relief!

heat wave

As soon as this durned heat wave calms down, I am going to make kind of a hybrid chowder. I can't quite face eating clams, so I am going to put in some cooked lobster-ish meat (kind of like krab) instead. Also, instead of corn I'm putting in some peas, so we'll see how that goes.

As far as the heat, though, I am just waiting and waiting for a break! I even thought of the obvious solution of cooking at night so the apartment would be cool, but the temperature isn't going down at ALL! What happened to those nice daily thunderstorms we were getting to clear all the humidity and heat out?

What happened to cod, anyway?

Another thing we did with Alex's family was visit a kind of seaside museum/conservation center a little way up the coast from here.

Among other things, we learned about how cod was this awesome fish that all the colonists just adored... They even made it part of Massachusetts' logo for a while. So they kept fishing it and fishing it, and just loving this tasty fish! There was some concern about overfishing when they started being able to catch less, but they switched to smaller boats and were still catching so darn many that there COULDN'T be a problem!

Fast-forward a couple of centuries and the numbers of cod being caught were still plummeting and the average size was way down.... it's no surprise that the whole cod-fishing racket crashed in the early '90s. The choice was either to let cod disappear from the region entirely, or to impose strict government controls on fishing.... guess which happened.

So the good news is, the cod population is hypothetically making a comeback. The bad news is, cod is no longer the available fish-and-chips of choice.

This relates back to me because I started my life in a Massachusetts fishing town where if your fish didn't come out of the ocean THAT DAY and get cooked into a state of perfect deliciousness, it was an embarrassment and the establishment just ought to be ashamed. I used to get fish and chips about 1/2 the times our family ate out, and that was that. I remember that at a certain point, I stopped liking fish and chips because the fish just stopped tasting so good, and got kind of chewy. I thought it was a series of bad cooks, or because we were at an out-of-town restaurant--if I thought about it at all. I mostly didn't, and just got burgers instead.

Apparently that was the demise of cod and transition to haddock and other white fish as fish-and-chips staples. So now I can (unfortunately) say I have been a first-hand witness to an ecological semi-disaster. Think friendly thoughts about the recovering cod population--I really do think that if people weren't dumb we could have our cod and eat it too!